Saturday, 15 October 2005
Gap Provides An Lesson In How To Lose Customers »
I can’t be bothered with a screenshot of the Gap site.
We’re sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using.
Our site works best with the following browsers:
You know what? Gap have fucked the back button too! Gap are assholes. Do you get the impression that I think the webdesigners for Gap are incompetent masturbators with the IQ of spirochetes? Perhaps there’s a gap between us.
Well, when there’s a noticeable gap in their profits, they might realise that they lost a customer. (Via Matt.)
What’s to support? You don’t support browsers, decently written code works in them all. Macs rock. Gap drools.
These 87 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:44pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 16 October 2005
That Other Modern Bogeyman »
As a blogger, I tend to focus on the ramblings output of columnists in the media (or “MSM” — dread word! — if you will). Columnists, as I understand it, are supposed to provide a sort of narrative — make sense of history in the making, which like history in the made, is just one thing after another but without the irrelevant bits having been filtered out. Or that would be their job in a sensible world. Commentary on, for example, Iraq would be by smart writers who’ve been to Iraq, who knew some background, and have a source of information which may make auguries less random than say, writing portents by examining the cat litter.
What seems to happen is the columnists get hired to repeat their narrow certainties to an audience which bursts blood vessels at political deviation. It’s called, so I’m told, being controversial.
I’d like to read the mail the Telegraph gets in response to Vicki Woods’ Why is paedophilia the blackest crime? A somewhat lengthy extract is necessary to set the scene.
So I was just driving over to the next village for the papers on Wednesday, and listening to Radio 2. It was Wogan’s prog. He was struggling to read a funny e-mail, but it rendered him speechless, so he segued into the next song without introduction. I remembered it from 30 years ago and was merrily humming along when I started listening to the words.
Young girl, get out of my mind,/ My love for you is way out of line,/ Better run, girl!/ You’re MUCH TOO YOUNG, girl.
It was sung in a throbbing, lustful tenor (one of those full-throated sex-bomb voices like Tom Jones’s) and the lyric is quite eye-poppingly overt: man wants sex with obviously under-age girl who (in his view) is gagging for it. “Under your make-up and perfume,/ You’re just a baby in disguise,/ Though you know it’s wrong to be,/ Alone with me,/ That come-on look is in your eyes.” Blimey!
I had to pull in outside Wyn the Shop until it finished, because I wanted to see what Wogan had to say about it. The song ended with a call for the nymphette to go home to her mama “before we go too far … Oh-oh-oh!” Terry said mildly: “That was Gary Puckett and the Union Gap,” and picked up another giggly e-mail to corpse over. Extraordinary.
What were we all doing in the 1970s? Why weren’t we hounding Mr Puckett out of the charts? (Young Girl was at No. 1 for four weeks in 1968, being re-released six years later.) Where was the outrage? Why wasn’t the News of the Screws naming and shaming him as a Terror-Beast Paedo?
What were we doing in the 70s? This might be a good time to remind the reader that in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the multiple award winning thinly veiled critique of communism, Jack Nicholson’s conviction of statutory rape represented guilt to an oppressive, unfeeling state, concerned with regulation and control, but innocence to a sympathetic audience — she was 15, led him on, come on it’s Jack … You won’t get many movies about the innocent crime of sex with minors these days. Barry Norman, IIRC, then also of the Daily Mail, but best known as a developing national institution in Film 75 or 76 (I forget which year it was released in this country), liked it.
Ms Woods mentions (no link which would upset Harry’s Place, who’d take it as a slight) tehgrauniad’s When I was at school … which is “seven prominent former public schoolboys … spill[ing] their dormitory secrets.” Of those seven, Al Alvarez wrote a book on suicide (very good, not that I recall much of it), and Oliver James has always seemed to have more demented other-worldliness than one expects even of public schoolboys or looney doctors. This article, as it happens, was provoked by the revelation that John Peel had been raped at school, though either the Graun failed to ask his contemporaries (most of the “known” ones went on to Private Eye), or they refused to respond. Which may mean something, but we’re not told.
Ms Woods makes one splendid point:
And there seemed to be a distinction made then between low-level molestation ("fiddling") on the one hand and vicious sex crimes against children (rape and/or murder) on the other. There was also a distinction between “incest” and non-domestic sex crimes. Now everything is “paedophilia”, the blackest crime on the books, and any canny schoolchild can call a teacher out for putting an arm round him.
We often read that we’re in a liberal age, but “paedophilia” is the current thought crime (the BNP would hang all of them, well their members do spend more time in prison than those of any other political party so this may be their one area of expertise, but I doubt it) along with David Cameron’s drugs experience.
There are many reasons I rate Ms Woods as a columnist, and this is a good example of them. Unlike many commentators who write short — one, two, three paragraph — moans about current affairs, she usually writes essays which actually flow. This one starts with a song on Wogan and picks up a theme, taking that through the Peel story and the Guardian, and rounds off with
Shelley White, the (now) 25-year-old former geography teacher in a Yorkshire school, who has been charged on three counts of “abusing a position of trust by engaging in sexual activity with a child”. She was 23 at the time; he was 15.
Now, Ms Woods displays her two greatest assets. One is concern for the little person (in this cases Shelley White) and I’ll let you work the other out.
We don’t yet know if Miss White will be found innocent or guilty. Either way, she will undergo punishment, just for being tried. I don’t see her ending up as Dame Shelley White, heading up one of Tony’s city academies.
If she is found guilty, she will be automatically placed on the sex offenders’ register. I very much hope she gets off. We only have 1,000 spaces left in Britain’s prisons. And Charles Clarke needs them for that other modern bogeyman, the Islamist Terror Suspect.
These 582 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:34am GMT Permanent link.
American Football »
Roy Edroso appreciates Harold Pinter. Apparently the favourite poem of those who don’t like Pinter (is there anyone more philistine than a prissy librarian who names himself after an Evelyn Waugh character and can’t write swearwords? Lord, what would they say/Should their Catullus walk that way?) is American Football.
Hallelullah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!
Hallelullah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.
We did it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.
And Pinter’s own account of its publication.
So I sent it to the Guardian and the then literary editor came on the telephone to me and said, ‘Oh dear.’ He said, “Harold, this is really … You’ve really given me a very bad headache with this one.’ He said, ‘I’m entirely behind you myself, speaking personally.’ This is my memory of the telephone conversation. ‘But,’ he said, you know I don’t think … Oooh, I think we’re in for real trouble if we try to publish it in the Guardian.’ Really, I asked innocently, why is that?
He said, ‘Well, you know, Harold, we are a family newspaper.’ Those words were actually said. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I was under the impression you were a serious newspaper.’ And he said, ‘Well, yes, we’re also a serious newspaper, of course. Nevertheless things have changed a bit in the Guardian over the last few years.’
I suggested he talk to some of his colleagues and come back to me in a couple of days. Because, I said, ‘I do believe the Guardian has a responsibility to publish serious work, seriously considered work, which I believe this to be. Although it is very hot, I also think it is steely. Hot steel…’ He called me in two days and said, ‘Harold, I’m terribly sorry, I can’t publish it.’ He more or less said, It’s more than my job’s worth. So that was the Guardian. I then sent it to the Observer.The Observer was the most complex and fascinating web that I actually ran into. I sent the poem not to the literary editor, but to the editor himself. A couple of days later, he called me and said that he thought it should be published. He thought it was very testing. Probably going to be quite a lot of flack, he said. But he thought it should be published, not on the literary pages, but on the leader page. It was a truly political poem, he said. So I was delighted to hear that. He’d send me a proof, which he did.
The next Sunday nothing happened. And then the following Sunday nothing happened. So I called the editor. He said, ‘Oh dear, Harold, I’m afraid that I’ve run into one or two problems with your poem.’ I asked what they were. ‘In short, my colleagues don’t want me to publish it.’ Why not? He said, ‘They’re telling me we are going to lose lots of readers.’ I asked, Do you really believe that? Anyway, we had a quite amiable chat. He said, ‘I want to publish it but I seem to be more or less alone.’ I then said, Look, the Observer, as a serious newspaper, has in fact published quite recently an account of what the US tanks actually did in the desert. The tanks had bulldozers, and during the ground attack they were used as sweepers. They buried, as far as we know, an untold number of Iraqis alive. This was reported by your newspaper as a fact and it was a horrific and obscene fact. My poem actually says, ‘They suffocated in their own shit.’ It is obscene, but it is referring to obscene facts.
He said, ‘Absolutely right. Look, I want to publish the poem. But I’m running into all sorts of resistance. The trouble is the language, it’s the obscene language. People get very offended by this and that’s why they think we are going to lose readers.’ I then sent the editor of the Observer a short fax, in which I quoted myself when I was at the US Embassy in Ankara in March I985 with Arthur Miller. I had a chat with the ambassador about torture in Turkish prisons. He told me that I didn’t appreciate the realities of the situation vis-a-vis the Communist threat, the military reality, the diplomatic reality, the strategic reality, and so on.
I said the reality I was referring to was that of electric current on your genitals. Whereupon the ambassador said, ‘Sir, you are a guest in my house,’ and turned away. I left the house.
The point I was making to the editor of the Observer was that the ambassador found great offence in the word genitals. But the reality of the situation, the actual reality of electric current on your genitals, was a matter of no concern to him. It was the use of the word that was offensive, but not the act. I said I was drawing an analogy between that little exchange, and what we were now talking about. This poem uses obscene words to describe obscene acts and obscene attitudes.
I stand by my earlier appreciation of Pinter: The Best Words In The Best Order.
To my knowledge, noone has yet praised those 31 words for doing their job so well. He was asked to write to Bush, not to give an account of his personal philosophical or moral journey, and he was asked to do so to sell newspapers and cause discussion. He succeeded.
There are a lot of bastards out to get Pinter. Hitchens is, of course, one. But then, besides his politics (notable for lack of brown-nosing the likes of Donald Rumsfeld), Pinter is, horror, working class. Would Hitchens call anyone so low as to have a tailor for a father, “angel"? Shorter Hitchens (as if that’s possible), you can have all the revolutions you like, so long as no proles run the country. If they do, he’s off to the States, where a President can trace his ancestry back for generations. (Clinton couldn’t. But the Dupe hated him. Common as muck, you know.)
These 176 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:43am GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 17 October 2005
I Don't Know How He Does It »
Nick Cohen’s latest (NickCohen.net; Observer) manages his too-frequent trick of making an essentially sound point after an incredibly irritating opening.
A week ago, at a reception in one of London’s dowdier hotels, Maryam Namazie received a cheque and a certificate stating that she was Secularist of the Year 2005. The audience from the National Secular Society cheered, but no one else noticed.
This story was of course reported on the NSS site, Maryam Namazie Named “Secularist of The Year" which has the benefits of greater exactitude — and photographs.
The happy crowd who arrived at the Montcalm Hotel on Saturday were also joined by Honorary Associates Dr Evan Harris MP, Joan Smith, Martin Rowson and Jonathan Meades. The hilarious entertainment was provided by top notch comedian Stewart Lee, who is co-author of Jerry Springer — The Opera. His joke about what happens if you lick a lollipop with the face of the pope on it doesn’t bear repeating in a family e-letter.
That would be the Montcalm which may, for all I know, be the dowdiest 4-star hotel in the world.
Not quite no one else, Nick. It’s true that readers of tehgrauniad group newspapers, wouldn’t. Here’s the tehgrauniad’s site search for Maryam Namazie. Clearly, apart from Nick’s article, her only way to get into the paper is to write letters to the editor. Nick’s worked there how long, and he’s mentioned her how often?
For all that, Maryam Namazie’s obscurity remains baffling. She ought to be a liberal poster girl. Her life has been that of a feminist militant who fights the oppression of women wherever she finds it.
I’m baffled Nick and the monstrous legion of his colleagues haven’t mentioned her.
Others have noticed her before. Ophelia Benson (there’s a Butterflies and Wheels email every Monday if you’re interested) — Google found 46 references to Ms Namazie (some may be duplicates). The press didn’t cover it all, with the exception of Reuters.The NSS links to the limited coverage elsewhere, which manages to get everything wrong: here and here.
Coda: The one reaction everyone, including Nick, has missed is the one on Islamophobia Watch. (IW has a prominent copyright notice, which says in part, “All material remains copyright of original author and publisher, as cited in documents. Copyright material is posted on this website for the purposes of criticism or review.” I’ll note here that I’m posting their copyright material “for the purposes of criticism.")
This would be the same Mayam Namazie who offered the following thoughtful comment on the issue of the hijab: “I suppose if it were to be compared with anyone’s clothing it would be comparable to the Star of David pinned on Jews by the Nazis to segregate, control, repress and to commit genocide.” So perhaps it’s just as well they didn’t get her started on Islamophobia.
This is entirely argument by innuendo. Her point is entirely reasonable. (I think there’s a difference between, say, a BNP candidate saying that, and someone who’s lived in a Muslim country saying it. The difference isn’t in the words themselves, but the speaker’s purpose and his/her views on women.)
Cross-posted on Aaronovitch Watch.
Update: I mentioned Islamophobia Watch, and should have guessed that they’d post on our boy.
The Ontario proposal [for “right to faith-based civil arbitration"] provoked a racist backlash throughout Canada against Muslims and their supposed barbaric religious practices, which it was claimed had no place in a civilised Western society. And it was another WPI central committee member, Homa Arjomand, who played a leading role in encouraging this upsurge of Islamophobia. For her trouble, she became the “poster girl” of the most hardline right-wingers, receiving plaudits from the likes of Front Page Magazine.
It can’t be long before Cohen and the WPI go the whole hog and join their friends in GALHA — with whom they have co-operated closely in the anti-Qaradawi campaign — in promoting an anti-Muslim agenda that is indistinguishable from the vile propaganda of the racist Right.
Nick doesn’t need me to defend him here, but I will anyway. I don’t think he’s anti-Muslim in any sense which he isn’t also anti-Jew (he is militantly secular, so he is anti-Muslim in a sense). I do think that his intention ("agenda” is such a loaded word) is distinguishable from the straightforward racists. Just as taking sound bites from George Orwell can make his anti-Communism sound indistinguishable from old-style Tories who stood for many things he hated, of course, Cohen and Namazie’s writings can be cherry-picked. If Nick agrees with FrontPage, it may be because, like a stopped clock, FrontPage is right every so often. (I could have put this in so many other ways, almost all of them better, including citing Goebbels on propaganda having to contain truth, but this will have to do.)
Update 2: I’ve had an email which says that the Guardian search above doesn’t work. It did for me, but I found four articles, one was the Nick Cohen piece under discussion and these: 2004; 2003; 2002. Ms Namazie was also mentioned by name by Kenan Malik in January this year. It’s still not much a platform to attack Woman’s Hour from.
These 310 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:30pm GMT Permanent link.
Unfair To Amateurs »
Telegraph: Space experts plan Venus mission. Why is it always experts, so-called “experts” I might add, who get to plan space missions? I’m a space amateur and no one’s ever asked me what I think about this. Mutter, mutter.
I was going to say that the phrase “the environment of the two planets [Earth and Venus] could not be further apart” isn’t very scientific, but this must be a gross factual error:
The surface itself is a barren desert of extensive plains, rolling uplands and mountains, dotted with impact craters.
Look at the moon. It’s covered with craters, yet the earth has a much stronger gravitational field. Any rocks — like asteroids, or bits other planets blown into space by volcanoes — are more likely to hit us than the moon. But most burn up in the atmosphere. The craters we do have are subject to erosion (rain, rivers, even glaciers and lava flow) and being torn up by continental drift and earthquakes. Venus is shielded by a very thick atmosphere (as the article says, ground-level pressure is up to 90 x that on earth) has more or less constant vulcanism, and an active crust. It should have fewer craters than this planet. Which is what it says on nineplanets.org.
These 192 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:26pm GMT Permanent link.
Cameron Can »
Were I enough of a betting man to have placed some of the actual hard-earned on David Cameron winning the Tory Leadership (as I said in Matthew Turner’s comments that I thought the odds last week were “stupid” — 1.7/1 on a certainty), my stomach would have performed some interesting acrobatics over the weekend. There’s a theme in this morning’s Telegraph, and it’s “back Cameron.”
I regard the Telegraph as ‘sensible’ Toryism, not quite my thing (so rather like smoking in that regard) but not certifiable, and the Daily Mail as Toryism which is fixated on prurience, violence, and decay to an extent which would be most kindly described as “sanity-challenged.” The publications do share some freelancers, like Quentin Letts, whose eyes swivel with the best of them, but generally, the Telegraph is reasonable.
Rachel Sylvester has opened an interesting front between the two papers, and between factions of the Tory party:
A similar thing has been happening in recent weeks. Edward Leigh, spokesman for the Right-wing Cornerstone group of MPs, wants Mr Cameron to “come clean” about his experiences of drugs, because he would like to see his candidacy — and therefore his ideas for changing the party — killed off. The Daily Mail, similarly, is not really interested in Mr Cameron’s views on drugs policy: it dislikes his wider proposals for reform.
We are rational, she seems to say, and speak what we feel, the paleo-cons (the comparison seems roughly correct) however, can’t actually articulate their case against Cameron (or Portillo, or anyone who might actually change something), so they resort to ad hominems.
David Davis tried to exploit the issue last week when he said that “recent” drug use should disqualify a candidate from becoming leader. Privately, his supporters have been stirring the drugs pot for some time: his conference speech call for the Tories to follow Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment — “Never speak ill of a fellow conservative” — does not seem to have sunk into some of the more brutish members of the shadow home secretary’s campaign team.
This is Tory political assassination as high art. Ms Sylvester does not call Mr Davis a hypocrite as such, she merely hints that Mr Davis’s “Do what I say” is one thing what he and his followers do may be something else.
The choice of tomorrow’s Tory leader is on the mind of the writer of today’s leaders. (Sorry.)
We are meant to be choosing a potential prime minister, for Heaven’s sake, a man who might one day kiss the Queen’s hands and take on the task of sorting out the mess left behind by this Government. There are questions of great moment to be put to the candidates. How would they check the relentless growth of state spending? How would they tackle social breakdown? How would they restore honour to our democratic process?
Instead, we are asking about drugs.
And finally, even Sam Leith weighs in.
And so to David Cameron’s cocaine problem — the problem being not with the drug so much as with the notion that he might have taken it. This is a generational thing. Chemical drugs really became general not in the 1960s, but in the middle of the 1980s. Cameron is just on the cusp of the generation, now arriving at the top level of politics, who came after that. Drug use is neither to be admired nor congratulated, but the convention that it’s political cyanide to admit to it is surely doomed — if only under weight of numbers.
I think this is exactly right. Admitting that the 80s rather than the 60s saw the real drugs boom will prove impossible for conservatives who like to keep their decades straight: 60s — long hair, debauchery; 80s — big hair, Thatcherism, Reaganomics.
He tries perhaps the riskiest joke in the paper’s history.
For my own curiosity, I tried making a list of substances I’ve used that I shouldn’t have, and arrived at: speed, dope, acid, ecstasy, MDMA, ketamine, amyl nitrate, cocaine, nitrous oxide, magic mushrooms, temazepam, valium, salvia divinorum and khat. (Also, Rohypnol, though that was by accident. How did I know she was going to swap our drinks?)
If you don’t know: Rohypnol. I think this is hilarious, because it’s so obviously untrue. Expect sense of humour failures across the land, however.
As part of this post has been about the division in the Tory party, and all of it has been about the columns in today’s Torygraph, I’ll add a link to Alec Russell’s Americans are not unblinkingly Right-wing, which may interest Gary Farber (now posting again!) and my fellow Aaronovitch-watchers. For Gary:
So she [Harriet Miers] is a crony, dreary and a woolly thinker, and all this is before the Democrats have entered the lists. Most Telegraph readers would probably disagree with the Right-wing critique of her conservative credentials. She is after all an evangelical Christian, hardly the mark of a closet liberal. But even if you strip ideology from the argument it is clear that her CV is thin for a post on America’s top court. Her principal prop is the “trust me, I know her” defence of Mr Bush and, given his political woes, that endorsement is hardly what it once was.
And for the AWs:
As the Democrats were reminded last week in a sombre piece of research by two respected analysts, it is the centre that still counts — and they are still struggling to reach out beyond the “merlot Democrat” base, the new catchphrase for the supposedly wine-drinking secularists who make up the party’s core support.
Shiraz here, merlot over the pond? I’m starting to think us little old wine drinkers are persecuted. But … Merlot?
Miles Raymond: No, if anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!
These 412 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:08pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 18 October 2005
The Horror, The Horror »
There’s a sort of (very civilised, for the interwebs) barney about the compulsory wearing of hijabs or twojabs or something over on Aaro Watch. I’ve got a reply in the magazine waiting for the trigger finger, but it’s me at my unstable best/worst (there are people who believe that moral attributes exist and are observer independent: I’m not one), so best to sit on it until morning. And then delete it.
My occasional correspondent Gary Farber once told me that he could have gone to the same school as 1979 Nobel Laureates Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg (that’s right; out of three physics laureates, two went to school together — and they didn’t collaborate). Not that that means much. Tony Blair went to Fettes (pronounced Fet-tees, roughly, though don’t overdo the second syllable). As did James Bond. And TB didn’t become a fictional secret agent. I went to the same school as Ronnie Barker’s erstwhile partner Ronnie Corbett. Doesn’t mean I’m funny and 5’1. I’d have to lose a foot, I mean 12 inches. Oh, very funny.
As Kevin Williamson reminds me (not intentionally, and not in so many words), I went to school with the younger brother of one of the Fire Engines, and I was at college with the ex-drummer of the Scars (in Kevin’s post, he was the one against the Coke bottle), and I saw TV21 too often (and interviewed them when I should have been following the IRA for regular readers). All the members of those bands were older than me then. And they should be older than me now.
This talk of hijabs reminded me of a picture in the NME from a performance by Paul McCartney, Wings, and his Rockestra. Like a normal orchestra, they all wore tuxedos. This is the best pic I can find. Macca’s band are all wearing white jackets, — apart from the slack-jawed deaf guy at the front. He wore a suit — his own and not matching anyone else’s — in the photo I remember.
He was born in 1945, so he’d have been 34 then.* And because I went to a school where you had to wear a uniform, I think of that picture. If you’re going to make a clothing choice, make it one which offends every other fucker. (And whoever the new boss is, remind them that they’re …)
*I should mention that when I saw his beat combo in 1980, they only got together and rocked in an encore and that was “Twist and Shout.” I still think Macca’s a wanker, though. And they looked hellaciously ancient.
These 455 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:31am GMT Permanent link.
Bad News For Brown-eyed Girls And Bald-headed Women »
But maybe not so bad for some. (As Smokey Robinson had it, “Every silver lining has a cloud.")
BBC: ID cards scheme dubbed ‘a farce’.
Plans for a national ID card scheme have been branded “farcical” after suggestions it might misidentify people with brown eyes or men who go bald.
You know, I’m not bald yet (I’ve been balding since my mid-20s; it’s just not getting anywhere). But I could be. In a Philip K. Dick novel (I forget which one) ID cards (he was big on ID cards) came with voice recognition: it was “How now, Brown cow.” (He wasn’t big on logic.) But suppose I go bald, and I have to identify myself. Well, first, I’d try “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” But I don’t suppose that would work. I could say that “I’ve run 12 marathons, you know” (which I have, or maybe 13, I lost count), but then I haven’t won any, and if I had, they wouldn’t be against the Academy’s finest. (And does the Academy recruit anybody else? And come to think of it, … saved for the end for those slow on the uptake.*)
I could try, “Make it so.” (Is it me, or it there too much of the Patrick O’Brians in that?)
Ah, yes, ID cards. When faced with a tall hatchet-faced slaphead, our boys in blue will have to draw the only conclusion possible. I’ll pull my clothes (why do they never fit right? come to think of it my clothes never do) into order, sit back. This is important, you think it’s a pause, a Pinteresque pause, but it’s thinking. Deep breath. Sit back. Pull.
Engage.
*Nah, it won’t save me from the coming police state, any more than old Locutus could have beaten a Vulcan (higher gravity, thinner atmosphere, weren’t you paying attention?) in a marathon. And they’re smarter, and vegetarian. Bet they never bothered with ID cards. That fighting-with-spades is cool though. So is “This is Locutus of Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” Hold on, that’s wrong. “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS. I AM CAP …”
These 326 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:24am GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 21 October 2005
Look Who's Talking »
I drove to the supermarket tonight. (Cat food gets heavy when you cycle, although Gordon is going through a turning-his-nose-up-at-tins phase, even though I tell him that being in minority is just asking for trouble. If it’s good enough for 8 out of 10, it’s good enough for him.) I slowed coming up to the one tricky corner (tricky because cars are parked so close that you have to nudge out dangerously to see oncoming traffic; there is a safer, longer way round, but I never remember to take it) just as a guy heaved into view, looking like he intended to cross the road. Normally, I stop for pedestrians (I’m one myself a lot of the time, and I cycle, which gives you a certain caution) — anyway, you’re supposed to. But this was close, I’d have to brake hard to stop before he reached the kerb, and then there was a risk of all the after you, no after you, no no after you stuff, so sometimes just ignoring the possibility of politeness makes everything run more smoothly.
So I stopped at the white lines, essentially, as some idiot had parked too close to the corner, making his path less straightforward than it ought to have been. I weighed up the distances in milliseconds or less, as you do — articulating it takes a lot longer. And I thought, if he been a woman, or old, I’d have stopped, and lost whatever time I’d have lost philosophically. Not if this hypothetical person had been smoking or texting: there are temptations beyond the veneer of civilisation. But he was wearing full Muslim rig, the tunic thing looked ethnically rough, as if were sown by partially sighted, crippled prisoners, and made for piaculative discomfort, and the beard incredibly Klingon. So, in the split-second to decide between “after you” and “sod you” I thought, what a narrow-minded, bigoted bastard.
When I found the junction to be cross-traffic free and drove off, having barely inconvenienced him. I thought, and look who’s talking.
Coda: of course, the second thing that came into my head was writing about it.
Those columnists chappies, writing drivel about mundane events on their way to the office. I could feel sympathy, it’s not easy, I’ve found. Maybe after several drafts, the grain of grit may become a grain coated with oyster unmentionable (this is because Gordo has curled in my lap, and I can’t reach the dictionary), but I doubt it. Anyway, I’ve just admitted being a narrow-minded, bigoted bastard, so, no. I don’t feel sympathy at all.
These 430 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:10pm GMT Permanent link.
Attack On Jack The Hack Who Hates The Mac »
Or bias in the media. tehgrauniad’s Jack Schofield on Pro-Mac bias in mainstream media reporting. Curse that librul media! It’s just like the prejudice of so-called journalists against Kim Il Sung, as if democracy, like had to mean, you know, freedom, voting, rights, and things. If the Dear Leader says North Korea is a Democratic Republic, it’s a Democratic Republic.
Ssshorter Jack: Missster Gatesss, O Massster, what isss your bidding?
These 70 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 22 October 2005
Pledgebank »
I’ve been giving Thom Gunn a lot of thought. And I’ve stolen more from Ian Hamilton than anyone else ever.* God, I hope no one else signs, I hate these things.
*Well, perhaps not. I read F.H. Bradley’s Apprearance and Reality because of some poet. Tried Greek and Latin too. Drew the line at Sanskrit though.
These 78 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:37am GMT Permanent link.
Bloodsuckers, Leeches, Paul Mccartneys »
I HATE cybersquatters. Like another company here.
Update: rest was a rant.
These 7 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:29am GMT Permanent link.
Got 20p For A Cup Of Tea, Mate? »
Bummer.
My blog is worth $47,421.36.
How much is your blog worth?
These 17 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Behe Hee »
I wonder if tehgrauniad’s John Sutherland is following court antics of Michael Behe since he compared him to Galileo (perhaps he was thinking of “I see a little silhouetto of a man/Scaramouch, scaramouch will you do the fandango/Thunderbolt and lightning—very very frightening me/Gallileo, Gallileo, Gallileo, Gallileo, Gallileo Figaro—magnifico” — though Behe is not magnifico).
This is too delightful for words: New Scientist: Astrology is scientific theory, courtroom told.
Astrology would be considered a scientific theory if judged by the same criteria used by a well-known advocate of Intelligent Design to justify his claim that ID is science, a landmark US trial heard on Tuesday.
…
Because ID has been rejected by virtually every scientist and science organisation, and has never once passed the muster of a peer-reviewed journal paper, Behe admitted that the controversial theory would not be included in the NAS definition. “I can’t point to an external community that would agree that this was well substantiated,” he said.
Behe said he had come up with his own “broader” definition of a theory, claiming that this more accurately describes the way theories are actually used by scientists. “The word is used a lot more loosely than the NAS defined it,” he says.
Poor Behe (boohoo Behe), can’t read peer reviews, and can’t read any philosophy of science either. (Try Feyerabend, and try to remember that he was largely taking the piss.)
Rothschild suggested that Behe’s definition was so loose that astrology would come under this definition as well. He also pointed out that Behe’s definition of theory was almost identical to the NAS’s definition of a hypothesis. Behe agreed with both assertions.
The exchange prompted laughter from the court, which was packed with local members of the public and the school board.
Behe maintains that ID is science: “Under my definition, scientific theory is a proposed explanation which points to physical data and logical inferences.”
“You’ve got to admire the guy. It’s Daniel in the lion’s den,” says Robert Slade, a local retiree who has been attending the trial because he is interested in science. “But I can’t believe he teaches a college biology class.”
Nor can I. And I may never buy tehgrauniad again.
These 107 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:21pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 23 October 2005
HARMAN: MY HIZB HELL »
Lazy Sunday Cohen Watch, Got no time for worries, Chris Brooke does his scholarly thing on St Augustine and staying in hotels. Nick’s Observer piece, When Harriet met Hizb, isn’t up on his blog yet, so no link.
FWIW, I think Nick’s piece is dreadfully written, as if he’s trying to drop into Tabloid, but his education gets in the way.
A few weeks ago, Harriet Harman was holding a surgery for her Peckham constituents. As always, it was an open house, and every variety of south Londoner was coming to her office. She had dealt with the usual run of complaints and appeals when the door opened and for the first time in her life Harman confronted authentic anti-democrats.
An opening with the deep sonority of one hand waving. “As always, it was an open house” seems to convey Ms Harman’s special gift for hospitality, though “every variety of south Londoner” and Peckham make me think of Del Boy and Rodney dressed as Batman and Robin. Politicians’ surgeries are open houses. That was true of Enoch Powell as well. It’s cruel of me, but my reaction to “for the first time in her life Harman confronted authentic anti-democrats” was, “She’s never met the crustier members of the Conservative Party?” (Sorry, Tory readers. The FCS, now…) Nick is describing a scene which he clearly wasn’t present at, in terms I doubt Harriet Harman used (if she told him the story at all). That should be worth several points on Nick’s journalistic licence.
Oh yes, can’t we have a points system where journalists are banned from publication for, say, six months, for using “separation of church and state"? Nick is all for it, I’m all for it, but it happens not to be the case in Dear Old Blighty. Hizb ut-Tahrir may be agin it, but so are the Queen and Norman St-John Stevas.
Yet here were totalitarians and misogynists going to a woman democratic politician and begging her to persuade Tony Blair not to take authoritarian measures against their authoritarian sect. The scene could have been bettered only if Harman had been a Jewish lesbian.
Nick has, as he often does, a good point here. It’s just that, he’s chosen to describe what happened with the same authorial talent that William McGonagle would have brought to the tragedy of Hamlet. How does he know Ms Harman was “startled” or “despairing"?
I defer to Chris Brooke’s knowledge of Augustine, but I suspect that St A’s response to authoritarian measures would have been, shall be say, stoical. There is something rather pathetic about Hizb ut-Tahrir, with their iron edicts and flexible principles.
Nick can still write the funny lines.
On the opendemocracy.net website Huda Jawad writes of being badgered by young men at her university.
So sadly can most young women. Young men are like that, but it helps with the preservation of the species, in the end.
What is he thinking of here?
Shiv Malik of the New Statesman found a Hizb recruiter who described how he followed the tactics of a Moonie or Scientologist when seducing a convert. ‘Say for example that you’re having a marriage breakdown. I’ll use that: “Your wife is leaving you because of problems that stem from the fact that Islam isn’t present in the world today”. ’
All of which seems to show that Hizb is an uncomplicated promoter of extremism.
No, it seems to show that Hizb are cultish promoters of wingnuttery. I don’t pretend to be a student of Islamic extremism: all I know is what I see on “Spooks.” But I can’t grasp how:
The Islamists regarded it as sinful to stand in elections or even vote.
Can be true at the same time as:
[Hizb’s] draft constitution imagines a caliphate in which only Muslims can elect the caliph …
I’d love to know how they manage to do that without someone standing in an election and others voting.
(Cross-posted earlier today at Aaro/Cohen Watch, but blogger is acting strangely.)
These 449 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:42pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday Demolition Blogging »
Since Chris has progressed from taking pictures of injured kittens to taking pictures of factories due for demolition, I realise that I should have taken some snaps of the ruins of the Avana bakery near me, before the site is turned into student flats. I found a few photos earlier in the demolition on this Grangetown site.
Student flats aren’t what they were, apparently. Ensuite bathrooms seem to be mandatory, so I imagine they’ll look like the Yuppie flats across the road from the stadium (and now visible from Pendyris Street).
This car was quite a long way from Grangetown, on the banks of the Taff between Western Avenue and Llandaff bridge.
There’s also a car parked near me with “FAT GAYLORD WANKER” written in the dirt on the bonnet, but the recent rain has washed the legend to near illegibility and none of the photos I took were particularly distinct. Pity. (If someone wrote that on my car, I’d clean it.)
These 165 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:29pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 25 October 2005
I Wanna Be A Crony »
Media stories report that Tony Blair is to elevate several millionaires to the House of Lords. Each of these men have made substantial donations to the Labour Party:
http://tinyurl.com/9jqhq
Now, such rarified air has not been for the lungs of such mere voters as the likes of you and me.
Until now.
For the easily affordable price of ten pounds, you too could soon be napping in the House of Lords.
Money buys power and influence, so let us buy some of our own.
Upon reaching the magic figure of £500,000, a lottery will be held of the names of all those who pledged. The winner will then take a cheque for £500,000 to New Labour headquarters and exhange it for a peerage. That person will agree to be all the other pledgers’ representative in the House of Lords.
For the small sum of ten pounds, you will have bought yourself a say in how this country is run.
Should the pledge succeed, and should I win the lottery, I will hold the cheque for one night while I got out and get as drunk as, the phrase among commoners has it, a lord, and I shall say to everyone I meet “I am considerably richer than you.” Just to get in the swing. As they pay you for attendance in the Upper House, I suppose I ought to also promise to repay the donations on an installment plan. But that’s not very New Labour is it?
These 110 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:19pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 27 October 2005
Why Is Smoking Fun? »
Norm approves of tehgrauniad editorial on smoking. I think it’s waffly. And I object to
Yet it is disingenuous to pretend that there is not a question of individual liberty at stake here.
Isn’t it always disingenuous to pretend? And who does pretend this? Patricia Hewitt seems to think that there are greater issues than minor liberties. Mostly, the bills’ supporters have ignored the problem, which is different, if perhaps unwise. But the interesting sentence is
People who smoke mostly enjoy smoking …
Now there are a couple of good letters to the Telegraph on this subject, Prof Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine writes:
Most smokers want to quit, and their inability to smoke in their favourite pub is often just the stimulus that they need.
Now do “[m]ost smokers want to quit” or do they “mostly enjoy smoking"? Professor McKee seems to believe that the government would be helping smokers. This isn’t the government’s ostensible reason (which was creating smoke-free environments), but it may be a good reason to support the ban, just as we invaded Iraq over WMD, but supporting the war in the cause of democracy is not, in itself, a bad reason.
The letter which follows the professor’s from Paul Chesters of Wallasey is also behind the ban, for much weaker reasons, IMO.
Sir - Smokers should be referred to at all times as nicotine addicts, since that is precisely what they are. Nicotine is a very addictive and dangerous substance.
It was only after the realisation some 20 years ago that I was an addict with a 60 cigarettes-a-day habit that I was moved to give it up. That was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. My conversion to the anti-smoking lobby was twofold. At a conference, a psychologist specialising in drug addiction and rehabilitation said that he could pretty much get a “smackhead”, who wanted to, off heroin in a month. Turning to me, merrily puffing on my 10th cigarette of the session, he stated that it would take years for me to be free of cigarettes - if ever. How true that was. Returning home, my seven-year-old son asked why I smoked, and said he didn’t want me to die.
Smoking tobacco in enclosed public places should be banned outright now.
This is an inexact parallel, but Spooks is on in a minute, so it’ll have do. Just because George Best is on his third liver (or is it still his second?) doesn’t mean that your fricking aunt can’t have a small glass of sherry at Christmas. Of course, 60-a-day will kill you. You’ve hardly got a moment for a lungful of oxygen in your waking hours if you smoke that much. It doesn’t help to frame the debate as between total abstinence and excess.
Matthew Turner calls the Harry’s Place debate “reasonable.” If so, it’s only because most allegiances have been torn up. I feel tremendous sympathy for Harry here, he’s clearly very unhappy that a Labour government is doing this to him. The logic of many of the comments comes down to who one chooses to view as the “working class” in any putative scenario. Some see it as bourgeoise bossiness ("In my experience the huge majority of anti-smoking busybodies are women.") and others see it as protecting the health of workers and therefore in the interests of the proletariat as a whole.
Harry believes secondary smoking to be a “myth” — it’s not. It killed Roy Castle. However, in the years he was playing trumpet, clubs had poorer ventilation, more people smoked and cigarettes were stronger. You also have to inhale a lot to play the trumpet and the stage is higher than the audience and so on. You can’t compare his unfortunate case with staff in a reasonably ventilated pub (and if they serve food, they’re subject to health inspections) where smoking isn’t permitted at the bar, and not that many people smoke anyway.
I think people who smoke do enjoy it, and do want to give up. No one wants to do something that kills them, so if you asked a smoker if it’s healthy, they’ll say no. They just don’t want to give up very much. Everyone knows at least one person who’s stopped smoking. It’s not like it’s impossible without government help.
As for the Labour manifesto (I knew keeping a copy would be useful), it says:
The killer diseases of the heart and the many forms of cancer are often the product of poor diet, lack of exercise and above all smoking. By 2010 we aim to reduce deaths from coronary heart disease and strokes by 40 per cent from 1997. And we want death rates from cancer to be cut by 20 per cent.
(Page 65.) Dear me, you have to die from something, and if your ticker doesn’t give out, it’s usually cancer or violence.
We recognise that many people want smoke-free environments and need regulation to help them get this. We therefore intend to shift the balance significantly in their favour. We will legislate to ensure that all enclosed public places and workplaces other than licensed premises will be smoke-free. The legislation will ensure that all restaurants will be smoke-free; all pubs and bars preparing and serving food will be smoke-free; and other pubs and bars will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. In membership clubs the members will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. However, whatever the general status, to protect employees, smoking in the bar area will be prohibited everywhere.
(Page 66.) So I suppose the Patricia Hewitt approach is supported by the manifesto. It’s just that the logic doesn’t work. That “many people want smoke-free environments” doesn’t mean you have to ban smoking everywhere. You could licence pubs for smoking, for instance, and raise more money for Gordon.
The aims may be commendable, the methods are not.
These 609 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:19pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 29 October 2005
Cry »
Another drunken post. John Band may have liked it. No one else would
These 13 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36am GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 30 October 2005
Spot The Missing Country »
Douglas Adams didn’t invent the “memoranda of understanding” — but he should have. Via Talk Politics. (He’s concerned about the record of Baroness Symons, which I’ll come back to.) BBC:
Memoranda of understanding have already been signed with Libya and Jordan.
The UK is still seeking agreements with other countries, which are known to include Algeria.
Others are thought to include Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates.
I don’t believe that Jordan will give up tabloid appearances, though I suppose anything is worth a try. I’m sure an agreement with Libya, whose own diplomats are so trustworthy one of them shot Yvonne Evans, a British policewoman (she’ have been 46 this year) is totally binding. However, we seem to be missing certain countries. Iran is notably hostile, so I can’t see us co-operating in the near future. Kuwait owes us for Gulf War I and should do whatever we say for the foreseeable, but that’s never the way it works. And isn’t there a friendly Arab country missing?
Hmmmm.
Saudi Arabia can’t be hostile; until recently American troops were stationed there (only the non-Jewish ones, of course, the Saudis have their religious sensibilities). Saudi Arabia is one of the most Westernized, tolerant countries, with a well-developed concept of rights — compared to, say, the Nazis or the Mongol hordes. Perhaps the Baroness believes that they don’t practice torture — which of course they don’t. Or perhaps, someone told her that unlike poor Middle Eastern countries, it doesn’t breed terrorism.
All in all, no reason to deal with Saudi Arabia. No reason at all.
OK, I see my sarcasm has tied itself in a knot. I seem to have argued that we shouldn’t deal with Libya and we should deal with Saudi for much the same reason, which is clearly stupid. I have no faith in this sort of diplomacy; we can’t properly influence what happens inside another government’s borders, and we should just take it as read that they can’t be trusted. We won’t extradite to the US if we suspect they may apply the death penalty, and we get on with them a hell of a lot better than we do with any Middle Eastern nations. But why is there this great blind spot about Saudi Arabia? It’s as anti-Semitic (and hence anti-Israel) as anywhere. Quick! name an Arab terrorist! It was Osama wasn’t it? Saudi. Mohammed Atta? Saudi too. And the removal of troops from Saudi Arabia was one of al Qaeda’s demands. Which the US complied with.
These 383 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:52am GMT Permanent link.
Why Do These People Write So Much? »
I ignore blogs for a couple of days, and I find that there are are 874 unread posts in the “Yanks” category of RSS feeds (and that’s not counting Brad Delong who by mistake is in my default “Blogs” (ie UK) category, and has a further 44 posts, and Gary Farber who recent frenetic output I of course read first). But the Explananda collective have 9 new posts, while Unf, Ogged, and co have notched up 20. Even James Wolcott who posts erratically somehow knocked out a further 6 posts. And John Cole has 52!
Who told these people they have anything to say? If you find out, tell them to stop. I can’t keep up.
These 116 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:20pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 31 October 2005
Be A Smarty »
Don’t be stupid,
Be a smarty
Come and join the Nazi Party
The Producers
Torygraph: Madonna: Nazi party less controversial than Kabbalah.
Madonna has defended her devotion to the mystical Jewish teachings of Kabbalah, saying it would be less controversial “if I joined the Nazi Party”.
If she joined the Nazi Party, she’d never work in Hollywood again, but her film career has seen to that anyway.
The 47-year-old said she could relate to Tom Cruise, who has been ridiculed for being a Scientologist.
“If it makes Tom Cruise happy, I don’t care if he prays to turtles,” Madonna told the New York Daily News. “And I don’t think anybody else should.”
Well, the very young wife, his apparently mad behaviour, the whole Thetan nonsense, the thing with the wotsit boxes, the brainwashing, the expensive courses, the breaking up of families and all the rest, I kind of care about that. He can pray to turtles in his own time, but Scientologists harass people in the street, so yes, they’re fair game. And Travolta makes movies about it, too.
Madonna said it made her particularly angry when the religion was portrayed by the media as a cult.
“We’re all in a cult,” she said. “In this cult we’re not encouraged to ask questions. And if we do ask questions, we aren’t going to get a straight answer. The world’s in the cult of celebrity.”
Sure we are, and your husband would be hailed as a genius if it were not for the whispering campaign from the government.
It recently emerged that the Kabbalah guru credited with persuading Madonna to make a pilgrimage to Israel last year was arrested for allegedly extorting a cancer-stricken woman out of some £28,000.
Shaul Youdkevitch was accused of convincing a Tel Aviv couple the woman would be healed if they donated large sums of money to the Kabbalah Centre.
What a dick, he could extort at least 100 times that from Madge and she’d never notice.
These 136 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:03pm GMT Permanent link.