banter

As I sit, on my arse, eating a sausage sandwich, the semi-rhetorical question occurs: Why do we have to have nutmeg in everything? It’s everywhere. Sausages. Cake. Fucking nutmeg. I hate nutmeg. I know it’s in a lot of Italian food. Yeah, I know it has traditionally been in some sausages. What do I mean WE? I include everyone who dislikes nutmeg and those unwilling to tolerate it elsewhere. It’d be unfair to include those who don’t like, or are not keen, on nutmeg but tolerate it anyway. And people who like nutmeg. Fuck it.

I’ve had major problems writing anything, partly distractions, and a particularly bad back, but have kept snippets that I’ve rejected for being flawed or a bit stupid. I’ll stick them up with this caveat so I don’t get angry comments or feel my discomfort is unacknowledged. With rejection notes.

Superior smug internet atheist

I’m an atheist but I’m a self loathing, apathetic, (but wholly convinced) atheist [1]. In social situations I rarely bring up that I’m an atheist [2]. Not because I get problems from religious people, but because it often elicits a stream of boring shit about how stupid religious people are [3], and, further, how wonderful canonical atheist figures are. I don’t care about religion. I only care about it when it gets in the way of rational decision making, in government, or science, or other areas where rational decision making is generally to be encouraged [4].

But religious people? In my experience it’s not as black and white as ‘them and us’. [5] There are religious people in the middle ground between faith and reason [6]. I think it suits those who would like to divide people into neat compartments that religion is seen as all or nothing, or that someone being religious, or an atheist, precludes them from being an arsehole [7]. To wit we, all, every race, every human on the planet, are united by arseholes [8].

I’m not suggesting all judgemental people are cunts [9]. They are.

Rejection notes

[1] Who gives a fuck?
[2] Implies that it comes up often. It doesn’t. I’m more interested in nerd stuff like digital photo sensors or synthesizers than faith issues.
[3] Occasionally. Often enough that it’s annoying, but by no means a general case, don’t want to give religious twats ammunition against atheists.
[4] Implies that I think decisions based on faith are acceptable without drawing the distinction that adults can do what they want. I don’t care.
[5] It is, obviously, matter of atheists and religious people.
[6] Do I mean middle ground or not arseholes? Middle ground is a weasel term.
[7] I’d like to teach the world to sing … twattery.
[8] True that.
[9] I am.

Bash away, like an impotent wank, see what comes out; try to spit paragraphs. Wanky, pretentious as fuck, periphrasis, all wordy, and circular. Round. Firstly – you and I are are sentient, sitting on a chair, in front of a screen, with a mouse in hand. Or not. Maybe, using a mobile device. Or laptop. Warming your lap. (insert cattop joke). Whatever, we’re looking at a screen. We have that in common.

Secondly, you could be a search engine robot. Which would mean the entire last paragraph would be wasted. Crawling web pages; extracting links; weighted contextual databases, and you, along with Tesco, with your plans. I’ve got more self awareness than you (the robots, not you, the meaty reader, obviously, that would be overly presumptuous). Apologies (not to the robots) for calling out the robots on their lack of self awareness. It’s just in case.

Thirdly, there is no third paragraph, so go fuck yourself. I’m knackered.

Kind of stuck on the fourth.

Nope. It’s not irony if you say so.

The word cusp is an anagram of cups and I like cups, because, like all Englishmen, I like tea. I think I have become partially immune to bollocks. The internet is a sea of information, awash with bollocks. Swimming in it virtually guarantees exposure to bollocks in the form of stupid health information, get rich quick schemes, dubious claims, and self appointed experts. The internet has made being sceptical a sensible default position.

When politicians, or companies, or anyone, makes a statement of an important nature, I am sufficiently handy enough with a search engine that I can gain a superficial overview of the subject. Enough to find it far more complicated than headlines would suggest. Furthermore, as the cape wearing Dr Ben Goldacre has pointed out in the past, often there are subject experts, online, blogging in their own time.

Then there’s opinion. This is opinion. Could be bollocks. It’s the internet. Opinion is available everywhere, for free. So when I see opinion pieces on the television or in newspapers it seems no better or worse than a lot of the opinions on the internet. When I read Jeremy Clarkson I often think to myself, “go on Clarkson, say something stupid”, as if watching an amusing troll annoy people on a forum.

I started out, three paragraphs ago, thinking about some five or six paragraphs followed by some point, but I don’t think there is one. I don’t know if the internet will lead to more sceptical people. Probably across the world there are

• People shoving acai berries up their arse in the hope of getting slim
• People joining free lottos
• People sending money to the sons of kings
• People buying into extraterrestrial UFOs
• People defending Glenn Beck
• People being spiritual
• People being truthers
• Etc. (it’d be a long and boring list)

The fact is everything is about ten times more complicated than we usually think, there are countless stupid or ignorant or batshit insane people. But, fundamentally speaking (the kind that involves believing in evolution etc), we’re on a planet that probably occurred by chance, there is no god, we’re all going to die, including the universe (albeit on a different timescale).

By fuck I love Sugar Puffs!!!

There is a very silly American show called Deadliest Warrior.  It compares historical fighters by exploring what their weapons are capable of and  fighting technique.  It’s fun stuff.  Blowing stuff up, chopping stuff up, and testing weapons.  A recent episode explored a fictional Shaka Zulu vs William Wallace scenario.  It culminates with a computer model battle to decide the outcome.  It’s got a veneer of scienciness and a narrator who probably smokes to keep husky.

Problems: There seems to be little no reference to environment.  The first thing I thought when I saw the title of the show was “in what environment?”.   It’s important. Styles of combat are as much affected by geography and logistics as many human endeavours.

How long would William Wallace be able to wield a claymore in South African heat?  How long would someone in traditional Zulu dress cope with Scottish weather? Further to that how are a given warrior’s tactics adjusted to the environment they live in?  What did the warrior do the day before?  Could have marched miles because of inferior strategy.

Superior weapons are a huge part of it.  But to assume inferiority solely on the basis of inferior weapons seems a bit, well, retarded.  Most successful armies, and warriors, have great logistics.  But logistics is boring.  Then there’s strategy and tactics.  Less boring, but complicated.  There’s so many factors involved that would determine something seemingly simple like a one-on-one fight.

Deadliest Warrior is a late night conversation between drunk stereotypical beer advert blokes.  “In a highly unlikely, ideal environment for both sets of combatants, fighting fit, in a one-on-one fight, who would win between He-Man and Lion-O?” without the caveats or references to cartoons.  Essentially comparing deadly warriors (in their environment) in a fictional environment.  It’s like Japanese bug fights.

I still kind of like Deadliest Warrior but then I like a lot of nonsense.  I don’t begrudge the show.  Just people who view it as anything other than entertainment.

I’m watching a mind-fuck via the BBC called “Blood, Sweat, and Takeaways” (it’s on iPlayer). It’s the televisual equivalent of slumming it. Six typical young people are taken to work in developing countries – to work in factories and occupations that sell to the west. First problem is the typical people chosen as the subjects for the show, are naïve, loud, and rude. I’m all for that. Provided it’s funny. It’s not. They’re English Borats. Maybe it’d be funny if I wasn’t English.

I somewhat hope they’ll be mugged. But whatever I hope has no bearing on the subject. To think otherwise is magic thinking, and you’ll go to hell for magic thinking. I know, in theory, the show is good: giving people that don’t read, and have no imagination, an idea of what global consumerism means for people. But in reality it’s just another reality show.

About a bunch of typical people, that apply for a show, are pre-screened, pre-approved, in a fish out of water scenario, acting like twats.

My back hurts, I’m not in an objective and happy place, but feel compelled to write. I was reading Charlie Skelton’s reports from the Bilderberg Conference, near Athens, Greece. I’ve watched and read Jon Ronson’s reporting of the same subject, which was excellent, and set the bar high when it came to objective reporting of the subject. I read Skelton’s pieces with prejudice, and, to be frank, thought they were mildly amusing. The levity with which he covered the subject felt a bit insincere and affected. Until he got arrested.

I’ll declare here that I sort-of agree with the internationalist agenda. I don’t think Bilderberg are inherently evil or a threat to world democracy. I don’t think it’s at all straight-forward. There’s lots of competing centres of powers in the world. The world is as complicated as people, and because of that, conspiracies have a habit of not working, or being a kind of paraeidolia.

However many powerful and/or influential people attend Bilderberg Conferences. I can see why there needs to be privacy. Many of the people attending are, rightly, scrutinised by a partisan and intrusive press. There needs to be outlets where important things can be discussed without press and public scrutiny. Taking decisions behind closed doors is wrong and distinct from discussions behind closed doors. I don’t believe Bilderberg Conferences are about decisions.

Charlie Skelton sounds quite sheltered. He doesn’t strike me as particularly political person, or the kind of person that is particularly streetwise. He’s a stereotypical (I don’t mean this as an insult) middle class humorist reporter. Seems polite, fairly deferential to authority, not overtly or covertly political, isn’t an activist, seems temperate, and not much of a threat.  Maybe, just maybe, a threat to cups of tea, and biscuits, and weeds in his garden.

So, hearing and reading about him getting arrested (three times), put under overt surveillance, and generally harassed by authorities guarding the event, it strikes me as an incredibly twatty and, totally, utterly, pointless, thing. Maybe I’m wrong and The Guardian sent him to angrily micturate, all beered up, at passing limousines, and have him seagull passing dignitaries on the golf course. But I think that is very unlikely.

Instead, the Bilderberg Conference via the Greek police have given ammunition to every conspiracy theory on the internet. Well done Bilderberg. Well done.

Y’know – there’s the inevitable ‘Swine Flu is all media hype’, and a dozens of other seriously stupid opinions doing the rounds (including the obverse we’re all going to die). The BBC is even asking the general public, people like me, the question: ‘How can we avoid a Swine Flu pandemic?‘*. In this regard I am proud of my ignorance. Specifically I’m proud to be aware that I know I am ignorant enough of epidemiology and public health that I don’t know. That’s why I haven’t commented on it. I don’t know.

I’m fairly neurotic. I know the minimum about my own human leukocyte antigens, roughly, so when I heard about all this a couple of weeks ago, I checked to see what response my body’s cells produce when exposed to H1N1, but gave up because it’s extremely technical, and the exercise confirmed my pre-existing prejudice that sometimes a bit of knowledge is a very stupid thing. After all, people spend years studying that sort of thing, and a mere Athens log-in is no substitute. In the absence of people who know their stuff, a little knowledge means, precisely, fuck all.

Swine Flu has been added to an ever growing list of things I’ll wait and see about.

I do wish nobody had died though. The tragedy of even one death makes it difficult, in the short term, to make jokes about pig fucking. Which I think I could do better than a lot of so-called experts, and the World Health Organisation.

Ben Goldacre, A-list (in my opinion) public intellectual, and holder of the best haircut from the field of modern science, manages to get a few puns out of it and makes some serious points about media coverage of risk in this piece titled Parmageddon.  See also this for some links to some good eggs covering the subject.

This blog post is vaguely a me-too of Richard Herring’s Warming Up posts of the last few days, without the joyful news that Andrew Collings may soon have the shits from too much Vitamin C.

* Mos Eisley spaceport: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

Excluded names because of search engines.  For a couple of banal and incredibly stupid reasons my ribs are fucked.  It’s only temporary, but it hurts like fuck to do the following:

• Breath
• Move quickly
• Be cuddled
• Lie down
• Move my arms
• Stand up
• Laugh

I laughed quite a bit at this.  Thank-you Richard Herring.

Tonight I had a chance to watch Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle on BBC 2. It was good.   I don’t like watching old bands doing their old stuff. I don’t know why. I think it could be the people I associate with attending the concerts of old bands doing their old stuff. I’m not opposed to old bands. Or, to an extent, old stuff. But, when a band becomes, in essence, a tribute act, to itself, and gigs are attended by people mindlessly shouting for the band’s radio hits, it’s dull. The best artists put a new spin on their art, to avoid going mad. Or give it a new context.

The same goes for comedians. Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle probably did interesting things and, until tonight, I missed it. Out of the prejudice that people who watched it are like Genesis fans post Phil Collins singing.  Or people shouting things suspiciously like ‘blahblah-blahblah-blah’  to the first ten or so bars of  Bound 4 Da Reload  by Oxide & Neutrino, at an ironic millennium revival party, in Surrey. Dressed like people from the year 2000.  Because they are, and are so mind-numbingly stupid, they need to be reminded of it at fixed intervals.

It’s on iPlayer.  No doubt bittorrent(s) too.

There’s a collection of his previous work (with – here – Richard Herring) here (that will work in the rest of the world). I can’t say I watched him when he was funny, because he’s still funny. I was going to say that he’s never been funny. But couldn’t lie. On the other-hand, as a species, we’re often twats. And with the previous line I hedge my bets.

When I’m in front of the modern day idiot (savant) box, reading the papers, I often have a YouTube video opened in another tab, playing music. While I appreciate the benefits of modern consumerism and globalisation leading to mutual dependence (touch wood*, a bit less war than usual), and wholeheartedly believe in advertising (you get adverts as good as the gits watching them), when a flash animated advert takes up 90% of CPU time it really fucks up music. I now associate certain brands with stuttering music. And newspapers.

You know who you are. In that regard, in my experience, The Guardian is less likely to have browser crippling adverts than other newspaper websites. I’m desperately trying to stretch this out. The this in question being: ’slow flash adverts are annoying’. Everything you’ve read prior to that is irrelevant fluff. You’d think it’d be easy talking bollocks. It isn’t. You have to make a concious effort. I’ve steadily built up an admiration for Jeremy Clarkson. He could stretch slow flash adverts are annoying to at least three A4 pages.

Seriously, I’m just going to look around the room and start typing. German for orange juice is orangen saft. Can’t go much further with that. See. Clarkson’s a fucking genius at talking bollocks. He could get ten A4 pages talking about himself.  A book even. Genius.

Fuck-a-diddly-dee.

I was about to post the above, but then thought, well, Jeremy Clarkson is an easy target. Kind of like standing naked in front of a mirror pointing at your knob and saying something akin to ‘knob lol’. It’s not (that) big and it’s not clever (damn you sentence order). Talking bollocks is an art. Not quite up there with Tacita Dean or (insert ironic, yet apt, choice here). They (Tacita Dean, ironic choice) don’t talk bollocks, they (insert relevant descriptions).

When I met (insert fluff namedrop here) last (insert date) we (tangential anecdote). (Clichéd witticism). (Serious point).

(Stupid fucking concluding paragraph that badly sums up those preceding it, followed by a product or media plug).

At least Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t do that. (Insert bit where I add that he’s still a twat).

* This is a phrase. It’s an appeal to a supernatural force that don’t exist. I am also, bad back bored belligerent,  trolling.

In the future it will be a criminal offence for journalists, bloggers, and others, spunking out their words, to write anything centred around a question with the form of: Is/Are N the new X? Where N and X are things reasonably considered to exist. Anyway, it only ever applies to the self-obvious, usually the wrong-headed output of a twat. N is never the new X unless they’re identical. It should be: is/are N anything like X?

The above is a lot of bollocks. The above is a cliché about clichés. Possibly cliché’. Maybe this line is cliché”.

On the Observer website, front page, to the left (no pun intended), is David Mitchell’s face, along with a sub heading that says “I’ll tell you what really offends me”. It got my blood boiling, a bit, because I was thinking: pray tell, what is this ironic thing you have decided to be upset* about for entertainment purposes. It’s something about his face. Given I’ve decided to be upset about something for entertainment purposes it may as well be his curmudgeonly** face.

But, as is often the case, he actually said something interesting; not that I’m implying that he doesn’t say interesting things, he does. He’s just got one of those faces. The face of an angry village gardener. He’s one of those people who, when they’ve totally lost their rag, and are angrily berating, could only elicit laughter. Evolution is efficient. There must be a reason for it. Other than everyone being accidental occupants of 1 in 100 billion planets, in an ever expanding universe, we’re all going to die eventually, and there is no god.

He’s annoyed with Hazel Blears. For those of you who aren’t in the UK she’s a kind of news troll, who craves attention in a very sad way, and is pulled out of the sack as often as Polly Toynbee, every time her party, New Labour, fucks up. Her intellectual news repertoire can be defined as such:

• The Tories are worse.
• I agree with the tabloids, but the Tories are worse.
• In my constituency people don’t care.
• We never do anything wrong.
• I’m a common person just like you, I’ll pretend to be as ignorant.
• Tora! Tora! Tora!
• Bloggers are all cynical about politics. (lol)

She’s Polly Toynbee for truly thick people.

Anyway, she had a go at Russell Brand and that knob-end Jonathan Ross, again, by suggesting that they pay a fine the BBC received for that stupid phone call that generated a few headlines. The one with that doddering Manuel bloke (¿¿ qué he hecho yo para merecer esto ??).

Aside from the utter stupidity and bandwagon jumping***, any amount of government expenditure, be it social, or hospitals, or porn, dwarfs in comparison to the government debt generated in the last 9 months. When it comes to this government giving anyone financial advice, or lecturing anyone about waste, or anything of that nature, they are the biggest hypocrites.

I heartily approve of Russell Brand’s Twitter stream, it’s a little bit like his radio show****, without the censorship imposed by a political class that have disappeared up their own arses. It could do with Matt Morgan interjecting occasionally.

And, before I leave you, for some toast, the Tories are a bunch of cocks too. People say that a crippling bad back affects your temperament. They can go fuck themselves.

* Yeah, I know, everything below this point I’m only mildly upset about in real life, and I am actually quite mild and pleasant.
** Thank-you Richard Herring.
*** This blog post could be.  I’m not an impartial judge.
**** If radio wasn’t invented and we had to rely on telegraphs, we’d have something like Twitter.

I’ve been reading about the whole Samantha Ronson/Lindsay Lohan split drama. It amazes me that things can get so out of hand. A separation is one thing. It is complex.  Let me explain, for those of you that haven’t kept up with it: In the days leading up to 8th April 2009 it became clear that the Lo-Ro relationship was over. In subsequent days Lo-Ro, respectively, consulted with officials before decamping to opposite sides of LA.

For a while tensions were low. A détente; children played, shops were open, people visited each other, and went about their business. But in secret, taking advantage of the lull, both sides began importing New Forest ponies from the United Kingdom.  At first it seemed innocent.  Pony rides for disadvantaged children, that sort of thing.  Parallel to this they covertly built  training camps in the hills of LA.  Indoctrinating the ponies, re-establishing Emperor worship, beating them half to death, forcing them to fight each other -  so-called beastings, in preparation.

Perez Hilton blamed Lo-Ro’s background in evolutionary biology. We should be careful not to regard this as anything other than speculation. This, we know, on 10th April 2009, approximately seven thousand New Forest ponies, wild eyed, under the influence, fought to the death.

Armed only with broken chair legs strapped to their heads, in what has been called the single most stupid conflict of the 21st Century. According to eyewitnesses West Sunset Boulevard resembled a bad continental abattoir. Several hundred paparazzi escaped unharmed.

Edit:

Since I wrote that Lindsay Lohan has been found guilty of the murder of Simon Cowell, whom she inserted an umbrella into and opened with fatal force. Defense attorneys in the case argued that consent was given. Samantha Ronson has since become a British Airways captain and celebrated baker.

George Osborne/serious changes to the British banking system over at Robert Peston’s blog. I quite like George Osborne. Like a lot of the better Tories* he seems to have gone from an idealist to a pragmatist. Because it’s easy in opposition. People who like politicians to have a firm message and not to flip flop, are simple. If you want bold charismatic politics and politicians you get the likes of Tony Blair and George Bush. They did wonders for … something. I can’t think what. All short term gain and fuck all insight into the future.  Faith.  Lol.

* I don’t want to you to think I show any particular bias towards political parties. Politics is the decoration on cakes for morons. A memory filter for the ignorant. What matters is reality. Most politicians know this – know that what they say is dependent on whatever realities are presented to then on the day they take office – but have to spout a load of bollocks so that twats like you, reading your twatty partisan pseudo pamphlets, will vote for them. If you’re not a twat, regard the last line as a comment on search engines.

From The Rollo New Era, March 06, 1897

Makes penis related spam seem a bit tame. I bet the book wasn’t free. Lol.

All my cool photo friends are shooting medium and large format (film). I think I’m now reasonably competent with 35mm SLRs (sorry for not scanning pictures – I can’t be arsed), manual metering etc. – so – on an impulse (it seemed appropriate to bold that) I put a bid on a medium format camera on eBay. The canonical medium format camera (see note 1). Problem was/is that I can’t afford it without cutting back on food, bills, and other things that are generally considered necessary for life. I thought “what the hell! Fuck it, I’ll eat lentils for six months, food and social bollocks are overrated” (e.g. even more of a skinny, back pain ridden, asocial recluse).

The problem was that with eBay you enter the maximum you are prepared to bid. I looked up second hand prices etc. worked out the price somewhere in the lower quartile, and then did something really fucking stupid. I didn’t check the price before I bid. I missed a decimal place. I usually bid with a decimal like seven pence – meaning anyone going for the same price rounded loses. You cannot lower your maximum bid.

My bowels rumbled like the shockwave from a sonic boom, because it would mean borrowing money, from relatives, or banks, and I hate that. Or retracting the bid – which I didn’t want to do because it was still a reasonable price, and retracting a bid seemed a bit silly. Getting loans from banks these days is like getting an income tax rebate. That you have to pay back. With interest. (see note 2)

Luckily it seems medium format camera owners are right up there (down there?) with Leica owners, and someone outbid me. Remember no matter how much of a cunt you feel, there are always bigger cunts than you. That’s, after all, how babies are made. If I was outbid by Ken Rockwell, or people who I think are good, notable, or nice, I renounce the cunt bit.

So I put off getting a medium format camera until I can afford a cheap but reasonable one. I will eat.

Note 1: If any medium format camera manufacturers, or PR companies on their behalf, such as Mamiya, Hasselblad, Pentax, Alpa, Contax, or other, are willing to gift me a camera, we can come to some kind of arrangement. I’ll wear a t-shirt or something. Maybe have the company name tattooed on my knob, and do some tasteful self-shot artistic nudes (in black and white or sepia, and get a nose ring, so it’s art). This doesn’t apply to Seagull or Lomo cameras. Seagull are not awful, but Lomo users are the bizzaro world Leica owners.

Note 2: If any city fat cats want to feel less guilty about being partially responsible for the biggest financial crisis since the fall of communism (which didn’t affect us), and want to do something about your bad karma, see note 1 – minus the t-shirt, tattoo and the nudes. You’ve probably got a Hasselbad in the loft with loads of lenses, going unused – an unwanted stocking filler, or novelty item in banker’s Christmas crackers. Contact me, between bathing in poor peoples tears and eating ocelot.

While typing in stutters, peering through a fog of an Albert Steptoe bad back, as if hit with a cricket bat, and appreciating sleep through its absence, I feel compelled to look forward to little things. Today’s little thing could be good, could be bad, but, at the least, will be interesting. Which is something. At 9pm PST The Path is released. Brought into the world by Tale of Tales, creators of The Graveyard – a game that consists of walking a geriatric old dear to a bench, listening to ambience on the way, sitting her down, listening to a contemplative song, and then walking her out. Sometimes she dies, and you have to press Alt-F4 to exit. Lol.

How-to video here.  Don’t forget the marshmallows.

Seeing is believing.  I think there’s going to be a bit of a Horne & Corden backlash – as reported by Andrew Johnson in today’s Independent.  I think that people should make up their own mind.   Maybe I’m being snobby and elitist (although such accusations are tacit admissions that the show is simple). Maybe I’m some kind of prude.  Maybe I’m jealous.

I really think people should make up their own mind.

So, with no further ado, here’s the show on iPlayer, and for all of you without UK proxies, here’s ‘ Two new fragrances by Fag Le Jay Jean-Peterson‘ (I am not making this up – not my words, not internet irony, not the words of the Westboro Baptist Church,  but the words of BBC 3* ).

On the internet you can slag a television show off merely by telling people to watch it.

* ‘… Tim Goodall, a gay TV journalist, who’s more interested in sipping Pina Colada and discussing how fit the soldiers are in Basra than delivering breaking news …’ – translation: lol, gay – not my words, but the words of BBC 3’s press department.

Possibly.  You have to burn the rope.

At there’s a few US shows that I quite like:  Ghost Hunters International, UFO Hunters, and Hell’s Kitchen.  In Ghost Hunters International a team of everypeople go around the world investigating supposedly haunted places with lots of dubious equipment – like a camera with its IR filter taken out – which they keep referring to as ‘full spectrum’ (it’s not), and, of course, the requisites of any latter day ghost hunt – handicams, closed circuit rigs, digital voice recorders, that sort of thing.

In UFO Hunters three presenters (Bill Burnes – Alien UFO Believer – wears dark glasses indoors, Pat Uskert – UFO believer, Ted Acworth – scientist/sceptic/MythBusters effect beneficiary)  investigate UFO sightings, past and present. Speaking to witnesses, official documents, looking at out of focus videos shot by idiots, and checking for evidence. In Hell’s Kitchen a load of people line up to be sodomised (metaphorically) by Gordon Ramsay in the hopes of winning a job in a restaurant.  And they cook a bit too.

What’s interesting about all three isn’t the content or the subject.  The content and subject of the programmes are delivery mechanisms for the production.  With Ghost Hunters International, and UFO Hunters, the investigations results are usually ambiguous,  a bitch if you want exciting an engaging.  So, almost inevitably, they have exquisitely crafted soundtracks, and suspenseful narration.  Hell’s Kitchen no doubt has its share of in real life drama, but what’s clever is the way that the narrative is formed.

If they didn’t story board it I’d be amazed.   Not because drama didn’t happen, in that sense it’s real, but because they’ve got to convey things concisely as part of an overall narrative.

All three shows have  gone one-step further than old school reality television because the soundtrack is crafted to each situation, which influences the general mood of the content to the point that the content is no longer king.  It’s like selecting paragraphs from a book,  and controlling their new context with an additional narrative driven by the music.  The jarring sound effects on Ghost Hunters International are great, as are the riffs on Hell’s Kitchen.

There’s plenty of other reality shows that are driven by the production, particularly American reality shows, but, Ghost Hunters International and UFO Hunters pretend they’re not  – everything is made to look authentic in an existential sense  – and Hell’s Kitchen is the opposite – it’s very hard to see it as anything other than production driven entertainment, it is so in your face, right down to substantial and dramatic recaps at the start of the show.

All three shows are bollocks.   But that’s not the point.

• Got muddy boots
  Yeah?
• Ate chili
  Yeah?
• Typed some words
  Yeah?

There’s never those boot scrapers outside of shops these days, on account of no horse shit – in general – I’m sure most adults would acknowledge there’s always horse shit. In places like Surrey, although, not necessarily Surrey – maybe one or more home counties – or, somewhere like a home county. But generally not in streets. In national parks, polo clubs and the like. Greener places than a Mekon’s arsehole. Some countries still have horses in streets. I like those boot scrapers. They’re good for getting bubble-gum off my boots. And mud.

The thing with a lot of chilis is that ratio of onion to meat is out. Too much onion and it lends too much sweetness, too little onion not enough sweetness. 100 years from now there is going to be a book of food ratios. Table after table of taste combinations, accompanied by little box plots of palate demographics, by nationality, and social status. The chili beef/onion ratios page will be something like the 40th page because it’s under C for chili. Memory drives with embedded web servers will input sales data from millions of restaurants world-wide, into a live recurrence relation, with a mind to predicting food trends, and subverting individual liberties. In the name of Jesus, or Heston Blumenthal, or something.

There are going to be word-processors that determine the effort and sincerity of the typist. Saying things like “thats great! Keep typing!” or “You’re a cunt. Stop typing. Abort! Abort!”. There is going to be a program that takes various nouns and mixes them up into various subject, object, verb, combinations with connective sequences, big on letters, and less so on meaning. Progress is like that. Word processors that call you a cunt and press-me word spunkers. It’s all ultimately meaningless isn’t it?

When you finish your words, and realise that Yeah? could be inserted between every paragraph, it is the title of the post.

• S.C.U.M. Erection; I’m pretty sure I’m not doing my gender any favours by getting a persistent erection while sitting through an adaptation of the S.C.U.M. manifesto.
• The token good bits: I have a theory that broadsheet newspapers are stupider and more dishonest than tabloids, but con readers by including token columns by smart people. Tabloids are broadsheets without pretensions of being clever. See Rosie Mortimer on the front page of today’s Telegraph.  Grieving.  Sexily. FFS.
• Katy Perry; I very much irrationally dislike Katy Perry the product. There was a whole paragraph of explanation here, but if you’re reading this, and you don’t dislike Katy Perry, do me a huge favour and fuck off.

On your BBC.  It’s not like there’s anything else going on.  A good use of the license fee.  Everyone is affected by knife-crime.  So let’s wheel out grieving relatives of knife crime victims and ask them what they think should be done nationally.

Sure to be as objective as past media treatments, see 5cc here for selected highlights.

I was just about to post the following, with something along the lines of “oh, FFS”:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7836941.stm

The most depressing day of the year my bollocks.

Y’know reporting this sort of shit in the absence of reporting some very bad news regarding share prices of certain things, and what that actually means, may make it the most depressing news day of the year. There are things going on in the financial world that will likely affect you more than the weather and the time of the year. It’s either self-censorship, like I’m doing, or that they’ve decided the morons in front of screens are bored of it.

So bollocks. I’m off away from blogging, back to my grim existential crisis brought on by how completely mental the world is. That and eat some toast.

Today Barrack Obama painted a wall blue in a homeless shelter. There is hope. That or I’m being sarcastic.

I like Christmas.  I even like the churches and the singing and that sort of thing. Generally speaking, at an exceedingly high percentage of the time, people don’t ram their religion down my throat, and I feel the same way about others.  Believe in God?  I don’t.  I also – genuinely, with some gusto – don’t give a flying Dawkins what you chose to believe.  It’s up to you.  It’s not my business.  I have a problem with belief trumping evidence, not personal belief.  I have problems with human faith and politics getting in the way of objectivity.  And  tribalism.  People being dicks transcends religion and ethnicity. We’re all dicks. I hope science and freedom of speech are the best reactions to how rubbish we are at being objective about things.  The problem is not religion.  It’s people.

Merry Christmas.

That said, it’s only recently that it has become OK, in public life, for people to openly admit their atheism without being viewed with suspicion.  Friends who live in America tell me that if you hold any publicly accountable position it is still very difficult to publicly admit to being an atheist. My views are borne out of a society in which it has become OK to admit to alternative religious beliefs.   We owe some seriously annoying people for that.   Where, for the most part, we’re reasonably tolerant of each other. It doesn’t mean all views are equal.   I thought Mary gave birth to Santa until I was six.

Without a public dialogue with all views represented; religious, secular, idiotic, clever, we’re falling into the traps of the past.

Which is why I quite approve of this.

Particularly Ben Goldacre, Richard Herring, Simon Singh, Ricky Gervais, Stuart Lee, and some of the others.  Some of the rest can go fuck themselves.

Ho ho ho.

I like roast shallots -  a fact you didn’t need to know, and I didn’t need to relate to you.  There are few things communicated day-to-day that are essential to day-to-day life.  Other than psychologically.   In the desert, Jesus spoke to the devil. On desert islands, there are coconuts.

I just ate six roast shallots and crackers. Drank a can of Dr Pepper.  Farted.  Thought about yesterday.  Came up with a camera white-balance setting trick that I think is rather neat.  Drank another can of Dr Pepper.  Popped some pills.  Typed this.

Welcome to the 21st Century my early morning coconuts.

Then, having typed it, and feeling somewhat sated, I decided I didn’t like it, but been  too mean to throw words away, crossed it out. I do like Dr Pepper*, shallots and crackers, though, so – please – don’t get the wrong idea about those.  They’re great.

* Ice cold - I’m not an animal.

I’m having problems keeping this blog updated. Partly a bad back, and partly paranoia brought on by watching things like the X-Factor. Some people are rubbish, and horribly, they’re totally unaware of it. What they hear and see is different. Consequently it’s possible that anything I blog could be rubbish, and I wouldn’t (couldn’t?) be aware of it.  A feeling that given the same cultural input as loads of other people, everything I’ve got to say is a cliché, even before I’ve said it. And therefore the best thing most people, myself included, can do is not input data into the internet because we’re not individuals, just clichés. Pollution for search engines. The verbal equivalent of a high sulphur coal power station.

(transition: gets away from the keyboard, eats, pops some pain pills)

On the other hand I’m hardly auditioning to be pope, and the above is filled with more self obsession than your average Morrisey fan.  So fuck it.

Best video games of 2008

Mass Effect (PC version)

An RPG meets feature film. A good time killer. Cheaper than a feature film, lasts longer.

Far Cry 2 (PC version)

A first person shooter set in a fictional war torn African state in which you hunt down an arms dealer, and complete sub quests. Great graphics if your computer is up to it.

Fallout 3 (PC version)

Didn’t dig the voice acting, combat is kind of repetitive, but then it wasn’t much different in the first two. Bethesda manage to keep the look and feel of Fallout 1 & 2 despite using a totally different engine. It’s called Fallout 3 and rightly so.

Tank Universal (PC)

Great independent game. Very cheap, runs on modest computers, and it’s got Tron inspired tanks.

Worst video game of 2008

Spore (PC version)

A load of bollocks. For me it crashed too often, was too repetitive, and the appeal of designing creatures wore off pretty quickly. Excellent design interface. It’s not evolution though.

Take those reviews. Fact is, I haven’t played every computer game of 2008, so  it’s a just list of the best games of 2008 selected from a set of games I’ve played, ordered on their merits according to me. So it could be a load of bollocks. I wouldn’t know. Thing is; I reckon every single “best of X” list is exactly the same.

I’ve never watched X Factor until recently. Naturally, I’ve seen clips via Screenwipe, TV Burp, YouTube etc.   During bad auditions I think it is justified along the same lines as sending first year students on useless errands and treating them like shit, because  you went through the same.  Justifying it as character building.   Because everyone knows that the entertainment industry is brutal, that looks are paramount, that if you’re ugly, and don’t have talent to compensate, you’re fucked.  All of the established celebs involved with talent shows have been through that brutal process (like the perfectly unscathed Britney Spears), and they’re stopping people wasting their lives on improbable dreams.  So they’re doing them a favour.  It’s character building.

After enrolling thousands of participants, it’s OK to put the worst on camera, rather than turn them away, and OK to criticise them on prime time television.   The television experience of a viewer made participant is enough to prepare them for actual television.  It’s not exploitative at all.

Along those lines I think there should be a television show called Broken Dreams.  In which a friendly approachable host takes deluded people on trips to see experts who will brutally shatter their dreams.  They could start off with people of very low intelligence, and work up from delusions to people with diagnoses – and, even better – work their way through every shade of ugly.  I’m sure it would sell well. If they could work their way around to a John Merrick-alike singing Boyzone it’d be wicked cool.

The UK public, being deeply moral, would enjoy watching that, and wouldn’t have to sit through a load of cookie cutter singers to get to the good bits. In ten years time X-Factor will be featured on crap nostalgia clip shows as an example of past crap television. Simon Cowell will be wheeled out of his gold plated nursing home, and he’ll comment in-between clips, as a bemused viewer wonders who he is.

(transition: gets away from the keyboard, eats, comes back to the keyboard)

On the other hand I’m not sure.  To an extent excluding poor, deluded fools from entering X-Factor, is a bit nannyish and patronising.  It could be a genuine wake-up call to stick to the day job.  So, I don’t know.  Maybe Simon Cowell is just being funny and Dermot O’Leary isn’t the anti-Christ.  It all comes down to what bad auditionees think.  And I’m not going to speak for them.  Some of them are nuts.

At least it gets them out of the house.

1. Every now and then, when looking at evolution and geological history, you’d have to be a bit unimaginative not to be struck by the relative blip humans, hominids even, are, compared to a fuck load of other stuff. It’s vertiginous. Like looking at stars. It’s bleak put in terms of all of the things that nearly made it.  It’s also a fucking cliché.  Grow up.
2. I think, if you’ve thought in any depth about Victorian England, and haven’t pictured the paradoxical nature of progress, and imagined doxies and what became hooligans in their big boots, and how the workhouse – and meaningless prison labour – was never a deterrent, or a disincentive, you’d be struck that by how much in the latter years of the century, the press kicked-off. And how much abject poverty and squalor existed prior to the involvement of the state. The Scouting movement was not enough.
3. There is very little food smelling of rotten fish that tastes good. When eating a Thai dish, which I can’t recall the name of, I was struggling to get over the smell, but did pretty quickly, and thoroughly enjoyed it. But is it a corollary that there must be British food that smells odd to Thai people? Etc. Etc. Etc.
4. When unable to think of anything to write, but bored enough to do so, it’s best to write about any old stuff, until something vaguely worth typing appears on the screen. In the absence, of course, of doing anything useful. It could aptly be described as an aggregation of wanky banter, or a gestalt(en) of puerile paragraphs (-en in the case of presuming a gestalt of shitty words), a word-space emulsion, a fuck-a-doodle-do sediment. Or blog.
5. When I was a teenager I loved the quaintness of rural Normandy; the fierceness of the sea, villages frozen in time, brioche and coffee – town squares, scattered golden leaves – and the availability of hardcore pornographic playing cards. I’ve been to France quite a few times since and, as an adult, have never sought out pornographic cards. For me, French pornographic playing cards are forever associated with rustic France. I guess, these days, pornography is all Wi-Fi and Internet. Somehow, the magic of French pornographic playing cards is forever lost.

Recently I had a casual conversation with someone about Simon Amstell’s Never Mind The Buzzcocks, which led to a broader discussion about contemporary comedy. I’m of the opinion that Simon Amstell is very funny, and they were of the opinion that Simon Amstell is nasty and picks on people. It’s indicative of a wide gap between the internet generation (it’s not an age thing – it’s an information thing) and everybody else. I have some opinions on ‘modern’ humour. Just like I possess an anus.

Sex and morality – still a big issue for many, there are a whole generation of people that openly discuss issues that were taboo. In part through things like sex education in schools, in part changing attitudes, and in part because of the internet. There are plenty of subjects that people do not consider shock-worthy. Superficially it seems callous, but in my opinion, honesty does not equal not caring.  Humour based on things that were taboo does not cheapen debate, but signifies willingness to talk openly about issues that were considered in bad taste. It’s the inverse of Victorian double standards. People don’t look the other way. In the previous paragraph I placed modern in quote marks because I believe people like Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, later Samuel Butler, countless others, did the same thing (some would say they did it better, and the comparison is disproportionate – I agree  – but the point is about precedents). It’s not new.

Take the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross ruckus – moral decline? In some ways I am glad to live in a country that is still shocked by bad behaviour – the exact opposite of moral decline – on the other-hand I think some of the more vitriolic responses to the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross ruckus were driven by people who are unwilling to talk about sex because they think it’s immoral outside of marriage, which is a shame, because it happens. It happened in the past too . When people point to things like teenage pregnancy rates in the UK as a sign of moral decline, it’s worth noting that among the industrialised nations Japan, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and France, have far lower rates of teenage pregnancy, with attitudes towards sex that are far more open than ours. A willingness to talk about sex does not equal immorality, any more than Victorians not talking about sex equalled morality. Nor does it equal ‘the answer’ – I won’t pretend that I think an unwillingness to talk about sex is the reason for the UK and America’s high teenage pregnancy rates. I have no doubt at all that it’s more complicated than that, and requires impartial inquiry, free of the shackles of mere opinion such as this.

If people were campaigning against Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross because they invaded the privacy of Georgina Baillie (whom seems reasonable and intelligent) I think they’ve got a fair point – but they weren’t – they were complaining about it been ‘grossly offensive’. Not a gross invasion of privacy, or good old fashioned bad manners, but an issue of taste, decency, and morality. Combined with a general sense of anger towards the BBC.

I don’t know many people on my side of the debate who thinks what Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross did was edgy, or anything other than mildly amusing (at best – many people thought it was rubbish – they can both be far funnier), but the reactions to it exposed a divide and a mutual misunderstanding from both sides. As BBC license fee payers those who found the broadcast offensive were absolutely within their rights to complain. But in the rush for judgement many people feel as if their views were ignored because they were not suitably incensed or represented. I felt quite angry about that at the time, and was as rabid, or worse, than the people I criticised. I was wrong and I regret that. Retrospect is a fine thing. Emotions running high do not lead to a quality debate or bode well for free speech.

Honesty being mistaken for nastiness – Simon Amstell’s humour is based on honesty. His stand up and his presenting. When he is picking on some celebrity he doesn’t do so with anything other than the truth. This is no more apparent when a celebrity on Never Mind The Buzzcocks (available on iPlayer here) says something along the lines of ‘yeah – so what’ and the audience applauds. I think this is a natural Twenty First Century reaction to Twentieth Century celebrity. PR, image making, to an extent the machinery of media production, is no longer transparent to the audience, and people like Simon Amstell are a reaction to that. The divide in the opinions of Never Mind The Buzzcocks viewers after the exit of Mark Lamarr exactly mirrors the cultural divide. One could almost get Hegelian about this sort of thing,

Disability and the use of politically incorrect language in satire – there was a bit of a fuss as a result of Simple Jack in the film Tropic Thunder, over the use of the word retarded. Again, I think many people missed the point; in Tropic Thunder Simple Jack was presented as a film that starred Tugg Speedman as a cognitively impaired lad who could talk to animals. It it was presented as a film that bombed (failed miserably at the box-office). The point was that it bombed because Tugg Speedman played ‘the full retard’ – as Kirk Lazarus, method actor extraordinaire, pointed out. People do not want to see people who are greatly cognitively impaired in films, they prefer people like Rain Man or Forest Gump, idealised, sanitised versions of disability. The film was as much a satire of cinema audiences as movies and actors. Everyone picked up on the use of the word retard and a blacked-up Robert Downey Jr (Kirk Lazarus was a satire of stereotypes in method acting), but not what was spelt out by Kirk Lazarus about movie depictions of the cognitively impaired. People were too busy being offended to notice. Tropic Thunder was a great satire. & Tom Cruise was brilliant in it (click here for a tasty morsel, or even better, buy the DVD).

There is less and less difference between what appears in newspapers and blogs. Due, I think, to the prevalence of mere opinion. It’s distinct from ‘not opinion’ columns and blogs  by the likes of the excellent Ben Goldacre, and others, because opinion is like casual, and occasionally fuckwitted, chat overheard in a high-street pub. Or an internet discussion group. It doesn’t necessarily have any weight behind it, and is for entertainment, rather than reaching a wide audience. So, I’m going to pick on former pot smoker David Mitchell’s “My drugs hell? No one offered me any” column published in today’s Observer*.

Because he got paid for it, and I’m a little jealous, plus, I’m putting-off sorting out some kind of Sunday food (bad back/hang-over), plus, I think he’s trying to make some kind of point. I’ll get my cast-iron, bona-fide, complaint out of the way:

Public Service Announcement: I’m talking about normal cannabis here rather than skunk which, I’m reliably informed, both is, and can get you into, serious shit.

Bollocks. Transform and others have gone out of their way to dispel the myth of hyper strong weed and links to mental illness for a long time. I believe what they’re saying because they have produced carefully referenced arguments with a basis in actual evidence. The government’s scientists backed this up – they were ignored, presumably various super-duper-skunk platitudes are widespread, because of media coverage of drugs issues. I think with something as important as drugs policy evidence is paramount. Otherwise it’s a waste of time.

There is no Pepé Le Pew in a cape.

Furthermore, and I’m going to emulate a newspaper opinion column journalist’s standard of evidence – I’ve been reliably informed by several somewhat hip ageing middle-class hippies that cannabis oil, Thai-sticks, and ‘red leb’ resin, were mind-blowingly strong compared to most skunk – and highly sought out in the early 1970s.

It may seem a trivial point; but public misconceptions about drugs can lead to policies being enacted that lead to people being locked up.  Which will likely more negatively impact their life than their skunk smoking habits.  Anecdote can be dangerous.  I once saw someone go mad after eating a sausage roll.

Now I’m going to go into full newspaper opinion column (or ‘blog’) mode, but not before carefully, and conscientiously, alienating  people, by telling my imaginary reader, to their face, figuratively speaking – obviously – to fuck off. Fuck off. If you’re reading this you should have better things to do, like preparing some food, or cleaning up a bit. Or something useful.

I’m going to wank a little about David Mitchell’s bit about cool:  Not a cast-iron complaint, not bona fide, but nonetheless worth typing. It annoys me when people who could reasonably be called cool talk about the general principles of cool. It’s like saying “I’m not racist, but” with cool instead of racist. It’s like telling everyone who thinks you’re cool to fuck off, with examples of the Marlborough Man or some cock of a stereotype of cool.  While simultaneously being cool.  “Ooh look at me – people say I’m cool – but I’m not – I can reflect on it – I’m a square peg in a cool round hole”.  Etc.

Now I’m off  to do something useful.

* Which is worth reading weekly because it’s funny. I think David Mitchell is alright – although for all I know he may kick small animals – for fun. The fact that this blog piece is itself opinion makes me lol at my own hypocrisy – I’ve spelt that out for the thickies in this footnote.

My back is killing me but I’ve got to say something.  I’m angry.  This isn’t a matter of left or right.   It isn’t a matter of past bad behaviour by the Tory party. Old things like Official Secrets Act prosecutions for documents leaked in the public interest or industrial action by unions -  wrongs do not justify other wrongs.  This is about now. If you don’t defend the rights of people you disagree with ultimately you’re weakening your own position, because, chances are, there are, or will be, people who disagree with you.  Damian Green has been part of a series of embarrassing leaks on government immigration issues.  As an MP it is his job to hold government to account.

In my opinion his leaks have encouraged casual racism, and aided those who have remarketed themselves as an anti-immigration party.  But – regardless of whether I agree with him, I think the police actions, presumable MPSB, were extremely heavy handed, and signify the steady aggregation of laws that could be used to stifle democracy and freedom of speech. From the police arresting teenagers for holding signs with the world ‘cult’ on them, to routinely detaining protesters under anti-terror legislation, to local councils spying on residents because of secret allegations,  to casual photographers being told they can’t photograph freely,  to prohibition of protest within areas that may cause offence to elected officials, to detention without charge, to the constant drip-drip of scare stories telling us how afraid we should be, to identity cards ripe for official abuse and spying, to hassling journalists at protests,  to proposed databases of your web browsing and email history.

FOR EXAMPLE.

At what point do people of all political stripes speak up?  Is it really OK for those who are left leaning to justify this because it’s a Tory?

Apparently Boris Johnson and Michael Martin knew about this before the Home Secretary.

Amazing…

I’m left leaning/apolitical/probably a wimpy lib-dem voter – but I think I’d like to be someone who speaks out rather than stays quiet.  I sodding hate politics; but I keep getting forced into saying something, because, morally speaking, I think it is right to do so.  You’re welcome to deal with your own conscience.

I’ve intermittently wanked on about the credit crunch for quite some time, in many ways it’s been like watching a railway crash, in that there’s been a fixed trajectory, and from a great distance things don’t appear to be moving that fast. I have a couple of comments; firstly, none of the underlying problems with the affected economies have been solved *, and secondly, there aren’t half some head cases that comment on Robert Peston’s blog. I haven’t blogged about anything financial or economic because it depresses the living fuck out of me (plus typing fucks my back). I have kept up with the situation, and, as a part of that, I’ve read RP’s blog. It’s good. I think RP is a credit to the BBC.  As for Robert Peston having a political bias – bollocks – he’s pissed people off of all stripes, which is an indicator of how good he is.

There are a lot of people who are sane enough to type their mad ideas (how would I know if I was one of them?), and it appears they’re attracted to Robert Peston’s blog like nutters to church. If you’ve got a few minutes you must have a chuckle at the comments on this post. Some of them go from fat-cats to socialist apocalypse faster than Hackney carriage drivers.

* I think there’s a 50/50 chance this will turn into an aggregate cluster fuck rather than a mere cluster fuck. Oh yeah – and nobody has mentioned the affect St Barack’s election in the US has had on British government tax policy, and/or speculated about what that indicates with upcoming US fiscal policy. I suspect the broad direction of fiscal policy was informally discussed well in advance at a well publicised visit to the UK. Lol.

Put a bet on John McCain.  Not because you think he’ll win, but if the unthinkable happens, at least you’ll be a little better off.

I wasn’t going to comment on the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross/Andrew Sachs thing, lest I add to press sentiment that ‘prank call’ story is newsworthy.  But I’m going to comment.  The whole thing is ridiculous, and has brought all kinds of unpleasant people out of the woodwork.  Essentially it is a fuss about someone making a joke about fucking someone, you know – that thing lots of adults do for fun  –  but has played out as if Jonathan Ross has somehow tarred Manuel’s adult granddaughter by outing the fact that Russell Brand shagged her at one of his hot tub parties. As if sex is somehow dirty and a taboo.  The headline should be “Man shags woman, tells grumpy elderly relative, incensed newspaper readers foam at the mouth”

Listen for yourself on YouTube here.  Be sure to check out all of the comments from the new puritans, rabid anti BBC-types, armchair moralists, old people of questionable intelligence, and general fuckwits.

I heard the radio show a couple of weeks ago, the morning after it aired. It was mildly amusing.  When Jonathan Ross shouted out “he fwucked your gwanddaughter” I thought – “So?  Who gives a shit – big deal”.  It wasn’t the funniest Russell Brand show.  It wasn’t particularly notable. The show is much funnier when Russell Brand has a foil such as Matt Morgan (or Simon Amstell).  It was broadcast at night, after 9pm.  The telephone call was arranged in advance, Manuel didn’t pick up the phone.  The programme apologised a few days later.

Thing is – it’s funny now.  It wasn’t that funny to begin with but the shitstorm of indignation from the illiterate opinionated twats of Great Britain has made it lolworthy.  It’s been getting funnier by the morally outraged minute.

All of those people that are morally outraged have been trolled hard, and can go fuck themselves.  If that’s the type of people Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross have offended – good.

I’d pay double the license fee if they could annoy idiot newspaper readers twice a month.

Well done BBC – but it’s stupid to suspend people for pissing off an elderly guest of the show.

People really want a right not to be offended but don’t realise the consequences. They’re too stupid.

I love political drama in the UK press because things play out like a soap opera or third-rate thriller. Commentated by people of questionable rationality. Unlike me. If I were in charge of a BBC television channel I would commission a show in which political correspondents commentate on apes. Like A Life of Grime but with apes and Nick Robinson as John Peel. “Hey, if the good ship ape-house were the titanic, and this was a bad metaphor – Julius, alpha chimp, of the political jungle – his body language is telling – he wants to urinate, or stimulate an erection, AND (inhales), the ramifications for the king are spectacular. Look out for ice-bergs! Over to you Sophie”

All apes ever get credit for is fiddling with themselves, lobbing shit at people, picking fleas off each other, and hanging around. I think that is very unfair and my idea for a television programme would solve the issue.

Lol.  My new favourite sitcom character.  Didn’t he break-into the Watergate?

Sometimes it is necessary to be simplistic.

£400,000,000,000

400 billion pounds is a conservative estimate of UK government money going to help troubled financial institutions.

$690,565,489,736.23

At $1.72641 per pound. The current exchange rate. Roughly $690 billion.

60,943,912

Population of the United Kingdom from the CIA World Factbook (July 2008 estimate).

£6563.41

Price per man, woman, and child, in the UK

$11331.14

Price per man, woman, and child, in the UK at $1.72641.

$700,000,000,000

A figure put forward by the US Federal Reserve in a package to rescue troubled financial organisations.

£405,465,677,330

That figure in the Great British Pound.

303,824,640

Population of the United States of America from the CIA World Factbook (July 2008 estimate).

$2304

Price per man, woman, and child, in the United States.

£1334.54

Price per man, woman, and child in the United States in the Great British Pound.

There’s a sketch from the Fast Show that comprises of Chris Jackson, the crafty cockney, trying to convince naïve people that he’s a thief. But often they don’t believe him because he’s a cheeky, amiable, chap. At a stretch you could pull a metaphor out of your arse with Chris Jackson as certain parts of the financial world and the naïve people as regulators. Here’s an example sketch where he is believed, but told “you can’t do this”.

Robert Peston’s Super Rich: The Greed Game is a much better exploration of the recent turmoil in the financial sector. If you’re in the UK it’s on BBC iPlayer – watch it here. If you’re not in the UK – watch it here.  The Damien Hirst reference in the title is a reference to Robert Peston’s Damien Hirst reference.  Essential viewing.

I’d really like to be able to hate this for being reliant on catchphrases,  a kind of modern-day CU Jimmy/Russ Abbot nightmare (which also attracted millions of viewers), but I can’t because it’s funny.  Here’s a clip of Phyliss and Mr Doggy from Little Britain USA.  Soon to be on US television.  David Walliams is an excellent actor.

This makes me angry.   The BBC has some really good people, including Robert Peston, so when they talk complete bollocks re: oil prices they’ve got no excuse. Here’s what the BBC has to say about today’s spike in oil prices (believe it or not the biggest spike took place in the space of five minutes!) Keep in mind all commodities are up, not just oil:

Record one-day jump in oil price

The price of oil has jumped by more than $16 to $120.92 a barrel, the biggest one-day gain on record.

The increase in the price of US light, sweet crude was driven by concerns about supply.

Production in the Gulf of Mexico is still affected by Hurricane Ike and Saudi Arabia is cutting production.

Oil traders also believe that the US government’s bank bail-out plan will help the economy and therefore demand for oil.

Last week oil traded as low as $91 a barrel. It had fallen from its peak of $147 a barrel that it reached in July.

The volatility in the price has been exacerbated by the fact that the contract for the supply of oil in October expires on Monday.

From here (I’ve cut and pasted for the purposes of discussion and that the BBC has a tendency to edit articles days later).  In my opinion what they have written is unmitigated bullshit.

Here’s what Bloomberg had to say (I’ve cut and pasted for the purposes of discussion and commentary):

Oil Posts Biggest Gain as Traders Caught in End-Month Squeeze

By Mark Shenk

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil climbed more than $25 a barrel, the biggest gain ever, as traders scrambled to unwind positions on the October contract’s last day of trading. The more-active November contract rose $6.62.

“This looks like a squeeze play,” said Phil Flynn, senior trader at Alaron Trading Corp. in Chicago. “All of the contracts are up, but nothing like October. This is the last day of trading and someone is scrambling to guarantee supply.”

Crude oil for October delivery rose $16.37, or 17 percent, to settle at $120.92 a barrel at 2:46 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was the highest settlement price since Aug. 21. Futures for November delivery rose 6.4 percent to settle at $109.37 a barrel.

Prices climbed today as traders who sold the October contract last week, when oil dipped close to $90, had to buy the futures back. In a squeeze a trader has gone short by selling contracts hoping the price will decline. In the last days before the contract expires the trader must buy back the same number of futures or be forced to deliver the underlying oil.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that’s the indication of a huge squeeze,” said Craig Pirrong, director of energy markets for the University of Houston’s Global Energy Management Institute. “It’s just stunning this could happen” given the recent scrutiny in Congress and among U.S. regulators concerning the crude oil markets, he said.

`Yawning Gap’

“It’s a very small pool playing in this market right now, and that’s why you’re seeing those massive differentials” between the October and November contracts, said David Kirsch, an energy markets analyst at PFC Energy in Washington. “Somebody did place a wrong bet and is trying to cover that position.”

“The overarching factor is that the October futures contract expires today,” said Ryan Oatman, an analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey in Houston. “This is a classic short squeeze. What lead up to it was a strong euro, up on concerns U.S. government actions will ultimately result in a greater budget deficit, higher inflation and a weaker dollar.”

Investors looking to hedge against the dollar’s decline earlier this year have helped lead oil, gold, corn and gasoline to records. Oil rose as high as $130 a barrel, up from $104.55 on Sept. 19, as the dollar dropped on concern that a U.S. proposal to buy $700 billion of troubled assets from financial firms will deepen the budget deficit.

The dollar declined 2.4 percent to $1.4817 per euro, from $1.4466 on Sept. 19. It touched $1.4818, the weakest level since Aug. 22.

Hard Assets

“Gold, silver, oil, copper, just about any hard asset, is looking good at this point,” said Michael Fitzpatrick, vice president for energy risk management at MF Global Ltd. in New York. “With the dollar down and stocks getting hit, commodities look like a safe play.”

Oil has risen 33 percent since Sept. 16 as lawmakers pledged fast consideration of the Treasury’s plan to buy devalued mortgage-related securities.

“There’s a flight to quality and the energy markets are benefiting,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Massachusetts. “The dollar is down again and investors are fleeing to commodities. We are back to the cycle that pushed prices to records earlier this year.”

Hedge-fund managers and other large speculators increased their net-long position in New York crude-oil futures in the week ended Sept. 16, according to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data.

Speculative long positions, or bets prices will rise, outnumbered short positions by 19,379 contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the Washington-based commission said in its Commitments of Traders report.

Gasoline

Gasoline for October delivery increased 10.41 cents, or 4 percent, to settle at $2.7038 a gallon in New York. Heating oil rose 14.52 cents, or 5 percent, to settle at $3.043, the biggest single-session gain since June 6.

Regular gasoline, averaged nationwide, declined 1.8 cents to $3.739 a gallon, AAA, the nation’s largest motorist organization, said today on its Web site. Pump prices reached a record $4.114 a gallon on July 17.

Crude oil prices are “too high” because the global economic slowdown may spread and cut consumption, the International Energy Agency’s deputy executive director said.

“The economic slowdown in the U.S., Europe hasn’t gotten into China, India much, but at some point you have to presume it will,” William Ramsay said in an interview in Bangkok today.

The Paris-based IEA, which advises 27 developed nations on energy policy, was set up in 1974 in response to the Arab oil embargo.

Brent crude oil for November settlement rose $6.43, or 6.5 percent, to settle at $106.04 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures Europe exchange.

From here.

Who do you think gives a better idea of what happened today?  The BBC or Bloomberg?

This could be bollocks.  I’m no expert.

The price of oil has jumped today and will continue to rise.  If you remember a while back this year lots of people were talking about how supply and demand was responsible for rising oil prices.  It’s not difficult to find them.  Do a Google search.  There were serious editorials about peak oil, how little had been invested in infrastructure, Chinese demand etc. etc.   The oil demand situation between last Friday and today has not changed.  Yet prices are going up and will continue to do so.  Demand is going to go down.  All commodities are going to go up.  They are going to go up because the Dollar is going to go down and equities are volatile. It will affect inflation as much as a devalued Dollar.

Take a look at the following chart here (via Index Explorer) market cap on loan percentage is an indicator of how much short selling is going on.  People have noticed, here’s FT.com’s Alphaville, and, with all of that in mind, why not browse today’s front pages here?

There are very few people asking if there will be any unintended (or blindingly obvious *cough* inflation) consequences from all this.

I’m no fan of the Labour Party.  I’ve gone into why in the past and won’t bore you.

The present problems with certain UK banks are not the fault of the UK government.  The reasons are quite abstract, but can be summarised by a loss of trust in the US banking system, precipitated by the problems with complex repackaging and selling of debt in the last 9 years.  (It started under Clinton, so it’s not entirely a Bush problem – although the unchecked free market policies of his government have played a large part).  The failure of Northern Rock would not have happened, despite widespread over-lending in the mortgage market, without the backdrop of the so-called ‘credit-crunch’.   UK government policy, and Gordon Brown, are not to blame.

Likewise short sellers are not responsible for the situation.  Short selling has been better explained by the likes of Robert Peston, but it’s essentially borrowing an asset, selling it at market price, buying it back at a lower price, and giving it back to whoever you borrowed it from.  That way you profit from falls in the stock market.  Of course, if the price goes up, you end up losing money.  It’s not risk free – by any means.  Short sellers can only profit when prices are falling.  The only potential abuse is traders breaking the law and spreading false rumours.  That isn’t happening.  Short sellers are an easy scapegoat. Alastair Darling (chancellor of the exchequer), Alex Salmond (Scottish nationalist leader), and Vincent Cable (an irrelevance) have attributed blame to short sellers.   They’re talking out of their arses.

The only thing they’re right in saying is that short sellers make the situation worse.  But they’re a symptom, rather than a cause, despite what politicians say.  This armchair economist is somewhat in favour of some kind of rules to limit short selling in these kinds of situations.  It’ll be difficult to do though because it’s international.   It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Masterchef: The Professionals is brilliant.  I’m no foodie – but I do like good food, and appreciate good restaurants (in the sense that I don’t give a shit about the associated pomp – rather the food).  And Masterchef: The Professionals is all about the food.  Unlike many television shows all of the contestants are already reasonable chefs, and many of the contestants are not just competent; they border on brilliance.  If the up and coming chefs on the show are representative of David Cameron’s Broken Britain, it’s another reason he should go inflate himself with a bicycle pump every time he utters the platitude.   Many of the featured chefs are the future of the UK restaurant scene.

It’s the best food show on television at the moment.  Bar none.  It’s better than Top Chef.  There is zero excessive drama worked in by producers. So well done BBC.  Michel Roux Jnr is a bit scary though.  He reminds me of my old French teacher, who was ex-military, and had a stare that was odd.  But Michel Roux Jnr, and Gregg Wallace, are very good presenters for the show.  Because they know their onions (it’s a good one to note that BBC – front shows with people who know, in-depth, about the subject they’re presenting – seems obvious that one).  They’re also personable.

Great stuff – it’s on iPlayer, but if you can’t get iPlayer where you are you have my permission (as a license fee payer) to pirate it for the benefit of mankind.  It’s a shame it’s on 18:30 on BBC 2 because many people aren’t home to watch it on their actual telly-boxes.  Thanks to iPlayer that’s less of a problem than it was, but I think placing Masterchef: The Professionals in that slot is as bigger crime as the slot the first series of The Mighty Boosh had.

Ghosts, the paranormal, and the associated arse frippery (psychics), are bollocks.   But there’s quite a few shows on television about it.  Taking a hard nosed, cynical, amoral position, for the purposes of this, it makes financial sense to make television programmes trading on people who like that sort of thing.  Because there’s a demand for it.

Thing is, I (kind-of) like the shows, because it’s people walking around dark places, and walking around dark places is scary.  Once I got lost in a forest, at night, while a bit drunk, and got into a panic.  It’s not that I believe in ghosts; it’s just that something primal kicks-in when you’re in the dark, alone, in the middle of nowhere.  After a bit I thought, to the best of my recollection, “fuck-it”, and fell asleep by a tree.  Luckily it was summer, luckily it wasn’t raining, and I wasn’t paralytic. So no hypothermia, exposure, or choking on my own vomit.  I got woken up by a fat dog-walker (golden retriever) at about 05:30, aching to the point that it hurt to walk, and with a mammoth hang-over. Seriously stupid.

Watching programmes like Most Haunted Live can send a little bit of a chill down your spine, if you’re in a exhausted, stupefied, frame of mind (not shouting things like “you feel cold because you’re panicking you fuckwit” at the screen). They can induce a pleasant form of mild hysteria.  I like that.  But – they don’t do it as well as the BBC’s prescient, and fictional, Ghostwatch.  Ghostwatch was Most Haunted/Ghost Hunters before they existed.  Without the grating dramatic sound effects of modern ‘reality’ paranormal shows.  Can’t recommend Ghostwatch enough.  It’s a little dated but it’s still very clever indeed (the style of the programme was identical to BBC live shows in the early 1990s, and featured real BBC presenters, presenting).

You can watch Ghostwatch here.

Most Haunted/Ghost Hunters and the spin-offs are kind of horror/drama lite – the very mildest of  shocks and drama.

Such shows have become like certification bodies for (supposedly) haunted places; imagine the visitor boost for any locations that have been featured on a show.  I think it is human nature that people, some say sensible people, will cheat, mess with the television people that make the shows, because having them say “this place is definitely haunted” is an incentive in itself.   It wouldn’t be difficult to do, if you spend more than a second thinking about it.

But back to Ghostwatch…

What I like best about Ghostwatch (the fictional and better than the ‘real’ shows drama) was that it fucked with the viewer.  Split second flashes of apparitions reflected on patio doors, 50/50 evidence, etc. – great stuff.  If there was a fictional modern Ghostwatch-alike, that kept to the spirit (ha-ha) of playing with the viewer, and the attention to detail (OK – the girls’ accents were a bit wonky, but the locations/costume/equipment used/carpets even were spot-on), it could be quite good.  Ghostwatch, until the last bit, was indistinguishable from real BBC live shows it dramatised.   Decent drama that provides a similar ’spooky’ fix could, in the absence of viewers getting a fucking clue-stick and shunning the paranormal, drain viewers from programmes like Most Haunted/Ghost Hunters.

Notice I didn’t mention Paranormal State.  A man has limits.  If Most Haunted/Ghost Hunters are retarded – Paranormal State is down with potatoes.

Promise rings are worn as a symbol of commitment to remain chaste until marriage. A pop band wearing them, and therefore promoting them, is no different from a comedian using them as material. Why? Because in both cases they’re examples of people expressing an opinion about sex. My opinion about promise rings is that they’re often worn and promoted by people who disprove of people who do not live as Christians. Given a chance some would enforce their brand of Christianity on others. Preventing teaching of things like evolution, acting against gay rights, and and anything that contradicts scripture. I am not against people making a choice to live as Christians and follow scripture but I’m against anyone dictating what other people can and can’t say. The unfortunate political baggage that comes with promise rings has made such things hot-button topics of the so-called “culture wars”. The culture wars have caused much self-censorship in the US media.

At the 2008 MTV VMAs Russell Brand mocked the Jonas Brothers, and their vow of chastity. In free societies people can choose to wear promise rings, but in a free society people should be able to mock public figures that wear them, in the same way that Jordin Sparks what free to make the telling comment that “It’s not bad to wear a promise ring because not everybody, guy or girl, wants to be a slut.”

Similarly Russell Brand’s political comments were hot-button topics of the culture wars. I think they were funny. Using the word retarded is quite different than making fun of people who are disabled. It walks a fine line because all kinds of words with cultural baggage could be justified along similar lines. Intention is not an excuse in itself. So I’ll elaborate a bit because I think it’s an issue of specificity, context, and current usage. Retardation is one of those horrible medical terms of old that was applied to a whole host of things that would be given clear diagnosis today. It’s not a specific medical condition. The context of joke was about world leaders and potential world leaders – aimed at people in a position of power. The current usage of retarded is not primarily used as a phrase to mock disabled people. That’s a good test of politically incorrect phrases: What’s the specificity? What’s the context? What’s the current usage?

What I find particularly funny is that Russell Brand was trolling – pure and simple. The act ticked every box of the so-called culture wars. People are discussing it days later, the ratings were up in key demographics, all the parties involved get more attention (Jordin Sparks’ media profile has increased significantly, the Jonas Brothers got some headlines, so did Russell Brand), and this is the power of trolling. It’s a demonstration that the self-censorship in the US media of the last 7 years may not sell as well, or give as bigger buzz, as having diverse opinions represented in popular media outlets.  In publicity alone the MTV VMAs 2008 are a win.

The up-in-arms comments against Russell Brand on Internet forums have been retarded: So why pander to these people?  They want to tell you what to do – including what you can and can’t say.

On a lesser note some Twilight fans are completely mental.

Sagan cited Dumb and Dumber as an example of dumbing down, Richard Dawkins is grating*, albeit unwittingly, and many books criticising pseudo-science are risible in their preaching to the choir smugness. Ben Goldacre is funny, can write for laymen without treating us like morons, and is a serious fuck-off academic ninja**. Buy Ben Goldacre’s book on Amazon here, you’ll enjoy the book.

* Although I agree up to a point.
** Or, also accurately, a junior doctor in London, and a shameless geek.

Photo of Ben nicked to make this post look bigger.  He looks like he’s sheepishly owning up to stealing his own book.

Watch for yourself here.

You know that when a television programme contains Britain in the title it’s attempting to cash-in on a collective sense of identity.  In most cases it’s a bit lazy.  In the case of Britain’s Really Disgusting Foods its symptomatic of the laziness, vacuity, and attempt to cash in on essentialist presumptions about food.   If I were to go down the essentialist route also I could sum-up the show up in a single sentence: The programme has cherry-picked the cheapest foods available to caterers in order to create a straw-man argument, cherry picked experts with vested interests against things like mechanically recovered meat, and created a cloud of brainless confusion aimed at a teenage audience on BBC 3.

The presenter, who’s mildly funny, like dandruff, starts the programmes by saying “I reckon there’s certain things that need answering once and for all, so I’ve composed an email to the meat hygiene service looking for some answers”.  He asks them if ears, eyes, eyelids, noses, brains, lips, nipples, bumholes (rather than anus – the programme is aimed at the youth, man, and they all say bumhole), tail,  testicles, penis, bones, and ballbag, are allowed in sausages.  Testicles appear twice.  Presumably for comedic purposes.  Ha ha.  Twenty minutes later we find out that none of those things are allowed in sausages.  There is, however, a loop hole that means that if you don’t call your meat products sausages they’re allowed 5% meat.  Which I’ll return to.

The programme goes on to discuss the cheapest chicken breasts available to caterers.  Which, surprisingly, or not, as the case may be, are injected with water, salt, and stabilisers.  Partly because they’re frozen.  According to the programme this is disgusting.  A great opportunity to inform the audience is missed  at every opportunity.  Salt, and the associated problems of over consumption are well known, but the chief point the programme makes about the chicken breasts is that they’re disgusting.   Without any qualification of the health ramifications of added salt – or that if consumed sensibly there’s really no problem.  But according to the programme they are disgusting simply because they’ve undergone processing.  Animal welfare can go fuck itself.  It’s not touched upon at all.

Then, at a food trade fair, to demonstrate how disgusting the cheapest, nastiest, cherry-picked faux-sausages are, they give a demonstration of how to make the cheapest, nastiest, faux-sausages. Raising the spectre of mechanically recovered meat.  In order to do this they get Richard Guy – the Real Meat Company founder, who has no conflict of interest at all, an entirely neutral contributor (like fuck)  to give a demonstration of mechanically recovered meat.  Holding up a chicken carcass that had the breast, leg, and other good bits of meat, removed.  Which is exactly what I use to make an excellent chicken soup, using the leftovers from a Sunday roast. He then goes on to explain how the meat – the straggly bits sinew etc. -  is removed in a factory to produce a paste.  They mention the use of ingredients like sodium metabisulfite, and they state, unequivocally, that it “isn’t there to make you live longer, be happier or anything else, it’s there to make a heap of disgusting meat stick together”.

Sodium metabisulfite is familiar to all home brewers.  It is used to sterilise equipment.  It is also a preservative.  It has been used to a very long time, and it has zero side-effects.  You piss it out.  It has absolutely nothing to do with sticking meat together.  It extends the shelf-life of products, and helps prevent food poisoning.  BBC 3 viewers should take what BBC 3 tells them with a pinch of salt.

Shortly after the that programme cuts to a chalk board with “The search for the Worlds Worst Sausage”  the apostrophe is missing from World presumably on purpose, for comedic purposes.  The problem with the board is that technically it’s false advertising.  The cheapest, nastiest, faux sausages they are making are not legally allowed to be called sausages.  No mention is made of the fat-content or salt content.  The two chief problems with the cheapest nastiest food you can cherry pick.  It’s referenced – they mention that fat goes in. But not how much or how much salt goes in.

The programme then consults a nutritionist, who tells us, with minimal elaboration, what we already know about the cheapest nastiest food you can cherry pick.  Nutritionally they’re not very good. Surprise surprise.

They later mention hydrogenated fats.  Hydrogenated fats are bad.  They state that hydrogenated fat “Increases risk of coronary heart disease/contains no nutritional value”.  They do increase the risk of coronary heart disease.  Similar to butter or other natural products that contain saturated fats.  However – they’re wrong about hydrogenated fats containing no nutritional value.  It’s the trans-fats which are a by-product of hydrogenated fats that have no nutritional value.  No mention is made of the problems with saturated fats.  Presumably because telling people their expensive supermarket best sausages can also be bad for their health doesn’t fit their straw-man argument.

They pick on the use of waxy starch in apple pie filling.   Which is no different from using cornflour to thicken things.  But that wouldn’t support the argument.

The programme’s attitude towards E-Numbers is similarly stupid.  At one point the host compares E-Numbers to excrement.  They mention that an E-Number colouring is derived from coal tar.  Like paracetamol used to be, and a whole host of other things utilising organic chemistry.  The idea that anything good can be derived from coal tar is ignored.  To support the argument that the E-number colouring in question is bad they mention that it’s banned in two countries.  I don’t know how many countries it is not banned in, but that doesn’t support the argument, so it’s omitted.

They talk about how marketing people give a false impression of food.  The next time I get a shag out of wearing Lynx deodorant I’ll celebrate by eating a trans-fat laden cake in a park where it’s always sunny and there’s no dog shit.  Marketing gives a misleading idea of what product is/does.  Well I never.  If the argument about misleading advertising were backed up by a coherent argument about unhealthy or disgusting food the programme may have had a point.  Instead it’s an opinion piece of the worst kind.

BBC 3 and Britain’s Most Disgusting Foods are shit.  It’s a broadly misleading programme, aimed at teenagers, that adds nothing to the argument about healthy food, and potentially increases the ignorance of its viewers.  The programme contains nothing about how much salt, saturated fat, and sugar it is healthy to consume.

Last ever post on the subject.  Barring anything newsworthy.

Here’s NATO’s article five:

Article 5

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

One of the things that is being said about NATO membership is that a military attack on a NATO country guarantees a military response. This is totally wrong.  A misunderstanding that suits propaganda from anti-Western types in Russia (who oppose NATO generally), and hawks in the West (who want to restore NATO as a deterrent). But it ain’t so. If Georgia were a member of NATO today, because NATO operates by consensus, it’s quite possible, probable even, that the same situation would exist. Except as a whole the NATO would look substantially weaker and even more divided.  As a deterrent NATO only works if the collective will is there.  The will exists but not in all circumstances.  “Such action as it[NATO] deems necessary” is deliberately vague.  Like when Germany, France, and Belgium used their veto in 2003 over the Iraq War.

Robert Gates said yesterday:

“The United States spent 45 years working very hard to avoid a military confrontation with Russia, I see no reason to change that approach today”

Thank fuck for that.

Watch the video of the Dewitt County, Texas Chupacabra (goat sucker) sighting.  Click here to see for yourself.

Why not browse the fine news coverage of the sighting.  Click here to behold the amazing news.

And to finish off your tour of the strange why not consider a hog hunting holiday near Dewitt County, Texas?

The situation in Georgia is a nightmare. I haven’t kept up with the region for a long time but here’s what I recall, which may not be entirely correct (this is aided by some notes I took): South Ossetia was originally colonised by Ossetians from across the caucus in the 17th/18th Century. The Imperialist Russians first invaded Georgia in 1801 but didn’t really conquer it until 1864. Because of fights with the Turks. With all of the stuff that went down in 1918 Georgia briefly achieved independence until 1921 when the Bolsheviks regained control. They made Abkhazia and Adjaria autonomous republics. South Ossetia was an oblast – which is different.

In 1988 the Ossetian Popular Front got annoyed that the Georgian Government intended Georgian to be the only official language. Some may say rightly, given about a third of Georgia is not ethnic Georgian, and multiple languages were in use. The OPF wanted South Ossetia to merge with the distinctly Russian North Ossetia, and in 1989~1990 declared an independent Soviet Republic. At which point the Georgian government stripped South Ossetia of its autonomy. The shit hit the fan – by which I mean violence – the Russians sent in troops and thanks to Yeltsin and Shevardnadze in 1992 both sides established peacekeeping forces.

Georgia is important to the West disproportionately to its size. Why? Central Asia. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Caspian Sea, and Turkmenistan have vast oil, gas, and mineral resources. Without a long detour, or reliance on Russia, Georgia is an extremely important strategic point. Georgia cannot win against Russia. The attack on South Ossetia was like kicking a bear up the arse. Why they did it is difficult to fathom. I don’t see that it serves anyone’s purposes. Both Russia and the US/UK have hundreds of ‘military trainers’ (often drawn from elite units – who train/advise/arm), there is a huge vested interest in having Georgia in NATO (incedently you can’t join NATO if your country has outstanding border disputes), and as a result this could be the first Cold War style proxy war of the 21st Century.

Both sides are right, both sides have legitimate claims on South Ossetia, and as a result, nothing good can come of this. A good compromise leaves both sides unhappy, and that isn’t going to happen. It’s like a flashback to the early 20th Century. Not good. One hopes world leaders are sane, but evidence suggests otherwise. Hopefully it won’t spread.

FFS x 10.

The New Zealand Chiropractors Association is threatening to sue the New Zealand Medical Journal over an article that was critical of chiropractors written by David Colquhoun.  I’ve picked up on this via Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog.  It’s a stupid situation that highlights a few important things.  Firstly the problem with lawyers being used to silence free speech.  In this case the New Zealand Medical Journal is likely equipped to protect itself. But there have been many examples of less well equipped entities caving in to legal threats because of the costs involved with fighting spurious litigation.  I think it’s typical of many groups and individuals with commercial interests attempting to shut down dissent on the Internet.  You don’t need secret police to shut people up – just a good lawyer.

Secondly, in my opinion, this kind of attitude towards critics is endemic among proponents of alternative medicine.  Academics, real academics, in my experience, are an argumentative bunch.  I’ve sat in a room where debates have nearly come to blows.  But that’s acceptable.  Criticism – moreover the ability to rebut criticism – is considered a good thing.  Ph.Ds are tough.  I suspect the reason why many alternative medicine proponents are disproportionately sensitive to criticism is the lack of a solid evidence base.  Without evidence all there is is rhetoric, and opinion. Leading to frustration when confronted with evidence.  If a child could sue their parents for smashing their belief in Santa Claus they probably would.

Thirdly, and this, genuinely, has fuck-all to do with chiropractors in New Zealand, Flight of The Conchords is very good.  Particularly Murray.  Other than lamb, rugby, and penguins Flight of The Conhords is forever linked with New Zealand in my mind.  G’day mates*.  I forgive you for Zane Lowe.

Watch this video to see Murray being cheered up.

* That’s a joke, in case you’re a bit dim.

Television.  Light entertainment.  Cooking.  One of the things I hate about celebrity chefs is that  for the purposes of entertainment they intervene in lives, and make recommendations about diets.    I’ll refer to such programmes as “intervention television”.  Of course, intervention television exists in many forms, notable examples are “I’m a cretin that subsists on chips – help me BBC 3”, “Fuck-a-doodle-do  I’m fat – come gawk at me like I’m a freak” on Channel 4, and “poor kids shouted at by 1950s pedo teachers” on Channel 5.  I’ll stick to food though, because celebrity chefs deliver petitions to Number 10 Downing Street, and, furthermore, they think they’re the shit (they are in a sense).

An episode of the F-Word particularly annoyed me.  Gordon Ramsay, in full on intervention mode, met some 20-something NORPs that live on takeaway curry, one of whom wants to run a marathon.  Gordon, in his infinite wisdom, recommended a curry recipe; the logic being that someone that lives on curry would want to cook it for themselves.  My problem is that if people can’t do basic food right, there’s fuck all point in teaching them things like making a curry.  As soon as the celebrity chef has gone the rice will be overcooked, the food will be under-seasoned, and worse the fuckers will force their new found gastronomic confidence on guests.

Often people who, basically, can’t cook, buy the latest Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay cookbook.  It’s not that the recipes are bad, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay are better chefs than the majority of people, it’s just that the pretentious fuckers buying their books often can’t cook a decent soup, let alone many of the recipes.  That’s why I think Marco Pierre White, and Delia Smith *, aside from being mental as rabid badgers, in their own way, are doing better things for British food than walking cocks like Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsay. They are teaching delicious basics.  That’s what many people in the UK need.  Not over-complication and pretentious fuckwittery.  For example – basic soup.

Anyone can cook a decent, ubergruppenhealthy **, soup.  All of what follows is approximate, and flexible:

The core of the recipe: One sliced medium onion, two peeled chopped carrots (or more if you like carrots), a bay leaf,  a few handfuls of of chopped potatoes, a couple of sticks of chopped celery, a peeled whole clove of garlic (more if you want), and some skinned chicken.  Put it all in a big saucepan cover with water  (plus a couple of stock cubes – although some are cuboids strictly speaking) or stock, put in some dried black peppercorns to taste (five or six is fine).  Optional herbs include thyme,  parsley,  tarragon (be careful – it’s a dominating herb –  a small pinch at most) etc.  That’s a basic soup.  Optional other stuff includes chopped ham, mushrooms, cabbage, leftover vegetables, a small handful of pearl barley, a handful of rice,  – nettles even, swedes, turnips, celeriac etc. etc.  It’s simple.

Cover. Bring to the boil simmer for an hour or more, taste, season, remove any bones, skim any excess fat, and voilà – acceptable, very healthy, soup.  A cheap pack of 12 chicken thighs will be enough for about 8 people with large soup portions – more people can be served if there’s some bread.  Alternatively a left-over roast chicken carcass is just fine also but it will need to be simmered longer.  A kid with minimal supervision and a blunt butter knife can make soup.  You can experiment, and find the perfect combinations/ratios for you.  Don’t get me started about dumplings and suet dumplings. A well trained dog could probably make them.  Bit of white pepper in the dumplings – lovely.

Total cost less than £8 – the main cost is the meat.  Dried herbs are fine. If it’s left overs the total cost is less than £5.  Hate chicken?  Use cheap cuts of lamb (cheap is betters suited to simmering) or rabbit (drop the tarragon in both cases IMHO), simmer until the meat is tender, and flavours defuse.

Celebrity chefs are teaching people stuff they aren’t equipped to do well.  MPW and DS excluded. I’d rather have a decent soup or other healthy basic recipe than some faddish nightmare cooked badly from a recipe book.  Serious.   Marco Pierre White is right.

* Years ago, at some ill-defind point in the past, I watched Delia Smith in an altered state of mind, and it took me weeks to get over it. In fact just thinking about it makes a little nervous.
** Which is, after all, what Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsay has in mind for us.  For us all to be ubergruppenhealthy.

When newspapers, and many others, use the phrase scientist or scientists, it is usually to assert that something has some kind of innate authority.  It’s silly.   We are all guilty of turning off our brain sometimes when an expert says something, because they’re an expert; we are conditioned somewhat to listen to experts, because, within the scope of their expertise, they’re probably right.  But it’s not clever to accept anything without examination.  It’s not the fault of experts per-se.  It’s a universally accepted truth that some people are arseholes or a bit bonkers.  Even experts. Most people aren’t.

On to Dr Edgar Mitchell – scientist: I don’t think Edgar Mitchell is an arsehole.  I also think what he has to say is somewhat newsworthy because of who he is.

I don’t think he’s a liar (people who believe stuff aren’t).  I don’t think he’s harmful.  Unlike the overwhelming majority of people he has been to the moon.   In a recent Kerrang Radio interview he unequivocally stated that extraterrestrial life exists.  But, from what I’ve read, unless life is very rare, there is likely to be life on planets capable of supporting it.  I’m not closed minded about it.  Belief in extraterrestrial life is not that controversial, it may turn out to be wrong, and I’d accept that.  I think he’s wrong to be so definite about it.

Unfortunately he then goes on to say that extraterrestrials have visited earth.  I think this is highly unlikely because of the stellar distances involved.  Space is very big.  The nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centuri, is 4.2 light years away; at light speed that’s 4.2 years travel.  39.69 trillion km away.  39,690,000,000,000 km.  Fast-as and faster than light travel are probably impossible.  It’d be great if it were possible, imagine a computer that received messages before it sent them.   Life could be much farther away than 4.2 light years.  There may not be life near Proxima Centuri.  Technologically advanced life may be significantly rarer than life.

For such reasons it is highly unlikely any extraterrestrial would visit earth without spaceships that could travel at speeds that make long distance travel practical well within their life-span.  I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion.

Edgar Mitchell elaborates, according to him, not only have aliens visited earth, but they’ve also been in contact with governments.   If aliens were visiting earth, contacting governments superficially makes sense.  They administer a lot of things, and they’re supposed to be representative.  But I question why any advanced beings would want to get involved.   There are several problems.  Firstly, any exchanges of technology or knowledge would give whichever geographic grouping of primitives a huge advantage over the other primitives.  So it would have to be done selectively or globally.  Even selectively as soon as the others found out there’s potential for trouble.

Secondly, assuming that extraterrestrial visitors have paid attention to the last couple of centuries, in which millions of people have died in various conflicts, I would think the transfer of technology to us as a species could be a bit of a risk.  Unless the aliens retained a bigger stick.  We have not behaved rationally towards each other.

But…

What really annoys me about Edgar Mitchell, and disclosure UFO people in general, is that it rests on foundations that are made of anecdotes.  It’s always something that has been heard ‘in intelligence circles’ or something on the grapevine.  Some expert clique.  If they want to be taken seriously by sane people they need Who, Where, When, and Why  – but they conveniently hide behind the same secrecy they claim to be against.

“Who told you?”

“Can’t say – it’s secret”

Yesterday evening I went o a boot fair (also called a car boot sale, if you’re wrong, like Wikipedia).  I have this vague dream that I will one day come across a Leica M6 + Noctilux and someone who doesn’t have any idea of the value of either.  Which I’d sell to someone who likes that sort of thing *, via eBay, and put it towards my (currently non-existent and fantastical) EOS 1Ds Mk III fund.  Instead I came away with thirty packets of pork scratchings (£1 per ten pack) and twenty packets of Pom Bear (“”) – a teddy bear shaped snack, and the following on DVD, for £5 in total:  A History of Violence, A Scanner Darkly, and series one of Rising Damp.  The Rising Damp DVD is a major win at that price, because I don’t think it’s available new anywhere now.

I was kind of reticent about going because it’s the first day in about a month that my hip has not had any problems. The worst thing is that it hurt to cough or sneeze.  Seriously hurt, like a flat-head screwdriver inserted in the hip joints, and harshly twisted.  The sneezing bit is a problem when you have hay fever, and live near hay.  I found that if I leaned forwards prior to a cough or sneeze, and grabbed my knees it mitigated the pain somewhat.  I don’t believe in jinxes so I’ll say now that hopefully yesterday’s quick burst of energy won’t lead to another severe flare up of the hip.  It doesn’t feel too bad.  But it didn’t feel too bad the night before the last major hip flare up started.

But enough pathetic raspberry-ripple whining **.

There was a really attractive woman on one of the stalls.  So staggeringly attractive that I was quite prepared to override my natural shyness, and try to strike up a conversation.  However, something got in the way – a tiny yappy dog.  I fucking hate tiny yappy dogs.  I’m not one of those people that thinks a dog has to have a specific utility (a gun dog, or guard dog etc.) but there is something so stereotypical about yapsters it makes my head hurt.  Then I saw the Daily Express  in her Range-Rover and thought (somewhat ironically) fuck-that, and lost my semi-erection faster than stumbling across gore on the Internet.

* Leica are very nice but I’d prefer a 1Ds Mk III.  A Nikon D3 would be OK also.
** Thought of the day: Apparently it is healthy to talk about that sort of thing.  I think it is fucking pathetic, and boring.

Time Gentlemen Please is a sitcom that is coarse, has a laugh track, was broadcast on a satellite channel, and was critically underrated because of snobbishness.  It’s actually very good.   It’s primarily written by Al Murray, and Richard Herring. The cast are good – Phil Daniels stands out, playing the flatulent pervert Terry Brook.   Many Terry Brook lines are cheesy but he says them so grubbily they’re funny (something Richard Herring also does well in other programmes/stand-up).  The programmes recurring characters are all memorable and developed throughout the series, and there’s a lot of back-references.  Watch episode two here.  If Guv’nor were on the Internet he would appear on spEak You’re Branes as a result of comments on BBC Have Your Say.  DVDs are available.

Earlier this week I said something about a row of trees or bushes in dim silhouette. Read it, it’s like, short. About the Northampton Paranormal Group/English Civil War/Battle of Naseby ‘ghost photo’.  Well, the fine journalists of BBC Look East, counted among the finest journalists in the world,  have covered the story for regional news, and you can view where, exactly, the photo was taken.  In turn their report was picked up by the BBC News Online website, who want the clicks:

Watch here.

Trees and bushes in silhouette taken at night with a digital compact camera with a small CCD and low signal to noise ratio (SNR) by default at night.   It’s just as well the BBC employs so much critical thinking, and doesn’t lend credibility to bollocks.   Worst thing is that if the BBC have the story it will soon be picked up internationally.  So look forward to it being the funny story at the end of your favourite news programmes.

The news works like that.

I had a chance to watch the above programme.  I’m going to try to be polite because I suspect Marco Pierre White would not take kindly to being called odd (particularly the kind of odd I mean).  Though I mean it in the Great British Eccentric sense.  Not necessarily liver and fava beans.  It’s a wonderful programme and Marco Pierre White is great in it. Wonderful cooking. So I’ll point to Tony Naylor’s review, here, because I think it hits the nail on the head, and does it without calling MPW mental.

Plus I think the comments some of the comments on Tony Naylor’s piece are a national treasure.

One of the nice things about digital cameras, from the humble camera phone, to DSLRs, is EXIF data.   Photos taken often contain a record of the ISO speed, focal length, and exposure settings.  They’re not entirely reliable because they can be edited.   But often it would be obvious because it would contradict the properties of the picture.

www.northamptonparanormal.org.uk

In the case of paranormal photos, like the above, as featured in The Telegraph:

English Civil War ‘ghost’ captured on film by paranormal enthusiasts

It would be very interesting to see the settings with which the photo was taken.  Even  on automatic mode settings are recorded.

In the case of the Northampton Paranormal Group photo I have a few hunches about the camera settings.  In my opinion:

• The camera was operating at ISO-400 or above equivalent film speed.  In my experience digital compacts, and to a lesser extent DSLRs, choose high ISO speeds with flash photography outdoors (when on automatic).  High ISO speeds are generally noisy.  Luminance and colour noise.
• The photo has manually had its saturation increased, colour curves altered, or some kind of adjustment of colour levels.  As a rule of thumb underexposed  areas are subtly noisy  with digital cameras (varies between cameras – DSLRs are generally better, but not immune – try setting camera exposure compensation down two or three steps then readjust in Photoshop – voila noise has appeared).  Luminance and colour noise.  High ISO speeds exacerbate things further.    So anything that reflects light or dimly emits light, in the dark areas, will show up in very odd hues and indistinct shapes if the saturation of the photo is increased.
• I think it is likely that a combination of high-ISO settings, a short flash, and manually increasing the photos saturation in an image editing photo has led to a man shaped pattern.

I would like to see the EXIF data from the original file.  I suspect a row of trees/undergrowth in a really dim silhouette.

Someone has gone to the trouble of uploading episodes of “Man About The House” (a nightmare 1970s sitcom that makes Two Pints look like a logical progression) to the tubes but nobody has uploaded any episodes of “Rising Damp”. It’s criminal.

I really like hardboiled eggs but they really smell of eggs.

This speaks for itself.  My only comment is that often civil servants, government and people who are removed from business, get screwed over because they fail to realise that business is amoral, and functions for profit.  I don’t mean that in a “business is bad” way.  I think business is good.  I mean that in a “people removed from business often get walked all over by business because they are naive in the extreme” way.  If business can exploit government for a profit it will, even if government ends up with a very bad deal, and the public ends up underwriting  any losses the business invokes.  Giving said businesses no incentive at all to do a good job.  Removing any sense of pride or social status that comes with working for the government (why?  because people are employed by businesses rather than the government, and businesses are run for profit, not for “the country”).

And a cashcow called Blairism came along – employing market fundamentalism.  Here’s a scenario – you’re a business – your company provides consulting services – it currently has six major contracts – two of which are with government and are underwritten in the case of failure – so, for perfectly sane reasons, you care more about the other four projects…  They are the priority.  The two government contract can overrun a bit, or fail, because it could be that you end up with more money that way anyway.  During the initial negotiations you told the government that nobody would take on that risk in the private sector without being underwritten.  Which is bullshit, of the semi-deniable form, but your job is to make a profit.

In the event of failure it will  be renegotiated through a long winded and exploitable government procurement process, run by people who have worked in the civil service since graduating, and are more than a bit green when it comes to what business tells them.

Cashcows.  Blairite/Brownite market fundamentalism is exploitable and will be exploited.   The old Tories, for their sins, at least understood that business was amoral and operated in its own interests.  Don’t trust government market fundamentalists, Tory, Labour, whatever.  They get fucked over by business.

Trailer Park Boys is very clever sitcom for the following reasons:

• Character development:  It is impossible to get a grip on a Trailer Park Boys character through any one episode.  The characters and their lives are complex.   Ricky, for instance, becomes explicable throughout the series/seasons by exploring his relationship with his father,  which in turn explains his attitudes towards his family.
• Dialogue:  Trailer Park Boys has the cleverest dialogue of any current sitcom.  Each character has their own unique grammar and real thought has gone into everything from their malapropisms to their reserve.
• Acting: Jim Lahey is the best sitcom comedy drunk.  He is a believable drunk. The acting skills of all involved are good, but particularly Robb Wells and John Dunsworth.  They’re as good as the majority of celebrated character actors.
• Plot arc:  Each series has a underlying plot arc beautifully intertwined with each episode.   Each series is like a great album, where each song works well alone, but in sequence makes a thing of beauty.
• Attention to detail:  The set design and costume design is awesome. There is as much background detail as real life.
• Direction:  I suspect a polarising filter, but may be wrong, and it’s such a minor niggle (on a technical point about glare reduction causing increased colour saturation) that I’m a bit of a twat to mention it.  The direction is brilliant.  It’s a faux reality television format, but at no point interferes with the plot or distracts the viewer.

Watch this.  Pay attention to each character’s grammar, background detail, and references to the series plot arc. It’s one of my favourite episodes, called “The Delusions of Officer Jim Lahey”, but bear in mind that one episode of Trailer Park Boys will make less sense in isolation, because of the richness of the plot and characters.    So, if you want some quality entertainment, buy the DVDs, or borrow it on the Internet.  At first glance it looks like a collection of stereotypes, thus proving first glances are bullshit.

I’m trying to think of a classic sitcom that doesn’t have a least one character “like someone we (collectively) know”.  Someone we say things like “I know someone who is just like …” about.  Of course, it’s an illusion, because real life people don’t have attributes that are recognised in an audience to the extent of a good sitcom character.  Good sitcom writers create funny, multifaceted stereotypes from stereotypes that already exist. Compound stereotypes.  Aggregates. Multifaceted because the interpretation of a characters will vary between viewers, and the quality of the writing.

I should think any new sitcom character that is recognised as “someone who is just like …”  by a broad audience, is half-way to becoming the next Alan Partridge or George Costanza or Hyacinth Bucket.  That half-way mark is probably very difficult to transcend because character recognition is nothing without good writing, acting, and directing.

A couple of years ago I had a chat with someone about Hollywood.  Specifically the way it works financially.  Money is tangible.  From what I heard, creatively speaking, it sounds like a nightmare.  Because first week takings for a film are everything.   The money that goes into promoting a film is spectacular.  Let alone the cost of filming it and talent.  Star power is a huge deal.  A star can turn a mediocre (but not awful) film into something that is profitable.  So the onus on big Hollywood film studios is to be risk averse.  Apparently they are more risk averse than ever.

Careers are on a knife-edge with every film.

I reckon it’s possible that Hollywood will permanently split. Into riskier low budget studios (many as subsidiaries of larger studios), and big budget studios that produce genre films with everyman/everywoman lead characters, played by big name stars, and directed by good (but mostly not brilliant) directors.  A high risk margin/low risk margin dichotomy.  I think it’s already happened a bit. The big studios will still produce films that are Oscar winning brilliance, but mostly they won’t, because taking the chance is too risky. The future is capitalised Hollywood, and it’s cooler uncapitalised younger sibling hollywood. hollywood surfs the net grandad (to paraphrase Richard Herring).

Independent film making will corporatise and be assimilated. Not necessarily a bad thing because it may mean substantially more independent films with significantly better distribution, and competition between smaller studios.   There are a lot of really great independent films no-one gets to see because they’re limited to wanky art-house cinemas, and those of us that walk the line on the internet.  Internet distribution and corporate distribution will positively change that.

See this.  He’s one of the few people writing about a market and considering incentives in their broader context.  Rather than the pathetic form of supply/demand pareidolia and ad-hoc fallacy that defines most mainstream media coverage of oil prices. These guys are OK though.

Remember:  Generally speaking it’s more fucked up than you think.  If ‘fucked up’ is used a profane shorthand for complexity.

I am aching – bad – hence slow blogging/sitcoms.

PS – Journalists:  Why not fly out to the gulf states and see for youself if there’s any problem keeping up with demand by examining shipping in-depth.   You may or may not be surprised.  I don’t know.  It’s not my job. If I were a journalist I probably be a lazy bastard who spent time lunching with people whose companies have huge vested interest in rising commodity prices, staggering out at about 16:30, and bashing out copy before playing online games.  But that’s just me.

GPGPUs are interesting and they’re coming.  There’s an interesting bit about Nvidia and AMD’s new chips here at The Inquirer. This slideshow made by Mike Houston of Stanford University does a better job of explaining why GPGPUs than Wikipedia’s page.  For anyone who is IT illiterate a graphic processing unit (GPU) is the core of the part of your computer that renders graphics, and its floating point (the way a computer represents real numbers – decimals etc.) operation speed is often significantly faster (depending on the type of calculation) than the computer’s CPU.

See this.  I thought that would be the case.

Is it worth getting upset about retarded moon landing conspiracy theories? I think it is. They depress me. I watch them because I think it is good to watch things you disagree with (within reason). The primary problems with conspiracy theories are that they use common sense as a rhetorical device, and cornerstone of an argument. They promote the idea that common sense is an acceptable way to view the world, and they malign history. Common sense is often wrong because it is based on evidence known to the person(s) applying it. It’s like examining a stock market without reference to all of the incentives at play. It is a stab in the dark, borne out of ignorance, and it is good for nothing other than the most simple of situations.

For instance, when moon landing conspiracy theorists talk about film being too brittle to work in out of space – which is common sense – they overlook (or are ignorant of) the efforts NASA put into making film work in space. Etc. Conspiracy theories thrive on ignorance. And the lengths some people will go in order to disregard evidence that clashes with their theory is astonishing. No-one likes being wrong.  Especially when it’s pointed out, but, being able to hold onto a belief regardless of the counter evidence, requires conviction. And having strong convictions is good, right?

Static electricity was described by Thales of Miletus on observing that if you rub amber it attracts minute particles. The word electron is Greek for amber (ήλεκτρον).  Jeremy Clarkson will never make such an observation, and is a twat. And so is Richard Hammond.  James May is probably OK.  Although, for all I know, he could be into badger baiting.  He probably isn’t.

Amber is cool.

I has a suspicion that this would be the case. Just a gut feeling based on high-streets I’ve been to in the last couple of months. People are still spending. The interesting bit is where they spent their money (I suspect Lidl, Matalan, Aldi, Netto, TK Max, Tesco etc. – given the Sainsbury’s figures). See here – the textiles, shoes and clothing bump is interesting. If there hasn’t been a shift to stores that offer better value and this represents public insouciance, it’s a bad thing, because it makes higher interest rates a possibility, and more importantly means that there is less likely to be a controlled slowdown.

Edit: Yep (totally disagree with the Lidl comments from the Dragon’s Den twat though – Lidl is the best new store in the UK for ages – a pile it high sell it cheap attitude that appeals to me).

I have previously stated that blogs about ailment X bore the living fuck out of me. But Suffering as part of slapstick is funny. My lower back is currently hurting so badly that I’m nearly in tears and I’m typing this to distract myself. It’s OK if people have a slapstick bad-back.

Our hero is resting in his bed, while downstairs his enemy, the meddling local hag, cuts a hole in his front door – in which to feed – cats. Thousands of them. He is awoken by the noise of cats fighting and staggers, bleary eyed, attempting to clear the house, hissing like a snake. But he is overwhelmed: Cats hang from light shades, from bannisters, from coat hangers, there are kittens in his shoes; his house has been redecorated, with cats.

He rushes to his bedroom to find his trusty golf club with which he hopes to reclaim ceilings by prodding. But the cats are smart. They begin leaping at him. Not scratching or biting, these are inherently polite and docile cats, but attaching themselves like thistles, like snowflakes, like limescale, until he is a heavy, writhing cone of mammalian purr. Unable to see, he staggers, attempting, panicking, to brush away the cats, unable to feel through layers of warm cat. But he feels the edge of the top step on the arch of his foot before falling.

As he falls, backwards, the cats leap to safety, and gravity takes him violently down the stairs. His back was fucked, but with the aid of the trusty golf club, and a water pistol, his house was eventually cleared of cats. And everyone lived happily ever after.

I have no clothes awareness. By clothes awareness I do not mean taste or fashion, rather thinks like putting T-shirts on the wrong way around, and not noticing throughout the day. Or forgetting to wear underwear. When I put my mind to it I’ve got a fairly good memory, so it’s not a question of senility, or mad cow disease, or other awful thing. I just put T-shirts on the wrong way around, – occasionally forget to wear underpants – , and inadvertently put socks on that don’t match. It’s like my brain is elsewhere when I’m dressing, and once dressed I’m usually thinking about things, so don’t notice the mistakes. People have confused it with making some kind of statement. It’s not. My back is often so bad I have trouble sleeping, thus I am often awful in the morning. The morning is when I dress.

I ordered some clothes today. I need new kit. I’m beginning to look like Catweazle had he adopted the apparel of the modern bachelor. So I’m going to shave the goatee and maybe get a proper hair-cut. “The squarest haircut you have good man/woman!” is how I’ll greet my hairdresser. Although if they take that seriously I could end up looking like I have a rectangular head. A Muppet gone wrong. Then end up having to shave it and look like a footie hooligan. Or a shaven bollock pulled taut, adorned with a Mr Potato Head DIY kit. A bad back doesn’t affect your temperament. This post is a testament to that.

PS

World: Fuck you!

I often disagree with the BBC’s Robert Peston, but his blog and television/radio reporting are shit-hot, and his blog is worth bookmarking. Read yesterday’s “… open letter to the governor of the Bank of England and to the chancellor of the exchequer from Mr Two-Point-Two, a thirty-four-year old school teacher from Anytown, UK.” Inflation is a nightmare and there’s a whole rather cosseted generation of people that haven’t experienced it as as adults. Or falling house prices. Or major lay-offs.

It’s going to be an interesting time in the next few weeks on the stock markets. I have previously found The Times (feat. the wonderful Anatole Kaletsky), Bloomberg, the avuncular business reporter on Sky News (Michael Wilson?), and Robert Peston to have the most reliable financial reports. But I’m no expert, and I frequently disagree with people, so this isn’t a blanket endorsement. Just a self-important explanation of where I get my news by the way of nothing.

Edit: Sky News do a good job on their blog also.

Reporters seem to be able to report without the constraints of television, via their blogs, which is self evident.

The Sun is more pro-freedom than The Guardian. It used to be the other way around. No doubt we can look forward to articles by those on the left defending Labour because “they’re to the left of the Conservatives” – but Labour aren’t to the left of the Conservatives – they’re left in the sense of Soviet Authoritarianism. I am on the left – next general election I’m voting lib-dem – but I will never vote Labour again. Arresting teenagers over placards was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I think The Guardian are apologists for the Labour party and their lack of criticism is part of the reason Labour will lose heavily at the next election.

The public debate about civil liberties is often portrayed as a done deal by Labour. That people are generally in favour of anti-terrorism law and in some ways that is true. But it depends, largely, on how the question is framed. I think one of the terrible things about the present government is that it has shifted all debates away from evidence and into the territory of rhetoric and fear. David Davis needs to shift the debate back to evidence – the fact that the police haven’t needed 28 days yet – the fact that previous laws the government have introduced for one reason have patently being used for others. It doesn’t take long to find evidence of that. Here’s some ideas for headlines with which to attack Davis’ opponents:

From the RIPA act being used against people by local councils, often because of malicious complaints (check the figures), to Section 5 of the Public Order Act being used to target protesters/people wearing T-shirts with “bollocks to Blair” written on them. Or evangelical Christians getting hassled by the police in predominantly Muslim areas (what has that got to do with the police? Do we want nannies?) Or the way the Countryside Alliance was treated by the police (just ask some people who were there). Or the way that a whole act was possibly passed because Tony Blair found Brian Haw distasteful. Or the way that anti-Scientology protesters have been arrested for calling Scientology a cult, and had the police hassle/intimidate television crews. This is something Labour people will defend to the hilt. With the “politics of fear”.

David Davis could become a prison martyr by wearing a “bollocks to Brown” T-shirt. Under laws introduced by Labour he could be arrested for that.

The public needs the following points driven home:

• That “nothing to fear/nothing to hide” assumes that laws only target the guilty when the laws have already frequently been used against innocent people. There are easy to find examples suitable for tabloid exposure.
• The laws target ordinary people (there are many examples) and that you could be next if a neighbour makes a malicious complaint about you.
• That Labour talks “the politics of fear” attempting to emotionally bully the public into complying with laws aimed at controlling the public.
• What matters is evidence – that the Tory party will support any law providing there is evidence that it is needed – Gordon Brown has shown by his policies are not based on evidence.
• The Tories are tougher than Labour because they follow the evidence and don’t flail in the wind/waste their time with laws targetting members of the public.
• Question the motivations of people who defend the repugnant use of such laws.

And those points need to be driven home relentlessly. Essentially David Davis has already won – the public mood is right – but if he wants to really hurt Labour he needs to stridently make the case. Everyone that supports his goals should pick a bullet point and ram it home to someone. Also, send him some cash, as much as possible:

http://www.daviddavisforfreedom.com/

Even if, like me, you think he’s wrong to support the death penalty, and disagree with him on many other things. Even £50 makes a difference. But someone should send a few cars worth of cash for a lol at Labour.

I’m still voting lib-dem though.

There’s plenty on television but nothing that grabs me. Which got me thinking…

What would I like to watch?

Which is a question everybody should ask and write blog posts about. It’s a difficult question because it’s hard to go beyond simple statements like “a good comedy” or “a decent documentary”. Good and decent are not qualities that are universally appreciable – they’re relative to me/you. There’s plenty of things that are good that other people think are shit and vice-versa. So, maybe the question should be revised to:

What would I like to watch that other people would like to watch?

The difference between “What would I like to watch?” and “What would I like to watch that other people would like to watch?” is something that is often overlooked . Homer Simpson was not aware of the distinction between such questions when he designed his car. On the other-hand it’s a bit self important to make presumptions about what other people want to watch – but surely it would be more self-important to say what I’d like to watch without reference to other people? Or is that worse? Why bother to talk about it at all if I’m going to feel bad about it?

There comes a time, in every bloggers life, maybe during a flicker of remorse for wasted minutes bashing at a keyboard, that you start off with something, and talk yourself out of writing about it. Because it’s rubbish. Less lazy, more committed bloggers wouldn’t even bother to post this. What a loss to the world that would be.

TBC

• When in Rome do not do as the Romans do. The traffic is appalling.
• The sky was really blue today. There was a lot of atmosphere.
• What do we do with the drunken sailor? Lock him up overnight, caution him for drunk and disorderly, and, if he’s a recidivist, issue him with an ASBO banning him from the harbour.
• A horse, a goat, and a chicken, walk into the bar, and are chased out by barristers.

Red onions are particularly good on pizza and other situations where they are fairly well exposed to cooking heat. I had red onions on my supper pizza. I also have a headache. The two events are unrelated. Although I did eat late. And prior to eating had a stomach that felt as if it was salivating over itself in anticipation of a meal. It’s probably playing havok with my digestion.

Please watch this first – it’s a potent demonstration of why the David Davis meme has resonance. Next people will be arrested for being “offensive” about the Labour party. People are being arrested for less. Nice teenagers from middle-England.

David Davis has taken an issue that politicians care a great deal about but few voters. It’s not top of the list of things to worry about. Despite polls containing questions with the “in exceptional circumstances” caveat. People will support any old rubbish in exceptional circumstances. I think the polls have unintentionally magnified public concerns about terrorism. Being obsessed with Islamic terrorism is something grubby people do on the Internet. Real people, who type with their index fingers, and are crap at Googling, are more worried about the basics – crime, health, and money.

The balance is about to change. People are going to become more concerned about money, and the economy. So when, in July, Davis has his by-election it is possible that the government will face attack on two-fronts: Civil-liberties issues from David Davis, and The Economy from the mainstream Conservative party. If the Conservative party plays it wisely. If they do David Davis can be used as a stalking-horse to attract voters previously lost to the Conservative party. Furthermore he’s almost deniable. He’s acting on his own principle – not on behalf of the Conservative party.

That could be used to deflect almost everything from Cameron. But looking at today’s papers it looks as if instead the Conservative party has put its collective palm to its face. Doing Gordon Brown – a man that possibly favours arresting teenagers for holding placards – a huge favour.

Where the Tory press sees disarray, and futility I see opportunity. A credible attack on two fronts – much like Martin Bell and New Labour. The way the Tory press is responding is self-destructive. If David Cameron stays neutral, pops David Davis into a pretentious white suit, he could on to marketing gold dust. Without actually being held accountable if it backfires.

However, that’s me – I’m not a Conservative, I’m not Labour, and I’ll probably vote Lib-Dem. I think David Davis’ support for the death penalty is wrong, and he’s a little to the right of Alan B’Stard. But I think he is right about civil liberties, and hope that his passion is used to its fullest.

If the economy further falters, inflation hits, and the housing market hits the lows some are predicting, issues surrounding the threat of terrorism will be quite far down the list of worries among voters. In the early nineties people were more worried about losing their house than the IRA – despite innocent people frequently being hurt or killed. Right now it’s as if there’s major economic issues affecting the UK, and Gordon Brown is saying “quick, look over there, swarthy terrorists! Lettres de cachet will sort it out! DON’T DISCUSS HOUSING or INFLATION or HBOS/B&B/GRANITE”. That’s probably an average Gordon Brown cabinet meeting. And David Davis has resigned. If, as I do, you think that the political mood among voters is changing rapidly, he’s made a very smart move, and, his position will become stronger as the economy worsens. People are less likely to be bought off by Gordon Brown playing King of France in the next few months. The next election will be about The Economy – not who is the toughest or is prepared to wipe their arse on the Magna Carta.

• Buy a kilo of peaches, an aluminium baseball bat (or cricket bat), retreat to the country, find a field, and see how far you can knock peaches.
• Take a cat on a train*.
• Count how many planes and helicopters you hear on Saturdays and note the times. After a few months make some excellent graphs.
• Spend six or seven hours virtually going up and down the coast of the UK using the satellite images on Google Earth. With all of the layers turned on.
• Calculate the CPI and evaluate whether index components are given due weight by comparing them with current estimates of household expenditure.
• Follow a goat. Just to see what it does all day. Beware: By interacting with the goat you are effecting the outcome of the experiment.
• See if you can eat only food products of a single colour all weekend. Including the colour of drinks. Food dye is not acceptable in this context.
• Walk into a sweetshop and point at the jars full of sweets behind the shopkeeper, and say “I’ll take the lot”. A couple of hundred quid later , one childhood dream fulfilled, bring sweets with you everywhere you go, for about a year. A car will be needed because that’s a lot of sweets.
• Buy a camera, chuck a big lump of fish up a tree, and wait to photograph cats. If they fight over the fish you are morally obliged to break up the fights by hissing.

* ‘Confused as a cat on a train‘ should be a saying.

It occurs to me that people who have never been wrong are either lying to themselves, arrogant pricks, or exceptionally boring people. I’ve been wrong loads of times. I pride myself on knowing that – because if you can acknowledge your own stupidity you have gone some way to rectify it (apart from the unknown unknown stupidity). Some of the things I did as a teenager, retrospectively, shock me*, and I’m pretty sure that applies to lots of people (I have a collection of funny anecdotes about various people that I’m saving for later to smuggle out in the form of fiction). My attitude towards things like youth crime and bad behaviour are borne out of the knowledge that people can change. Rather than people being lost causes – immutably good, or bad, or clever, or stupid. I believe in non-religious redemption. And I think the ideal society enables people to redeem themselves and, within reason, forgives.

And there’s an important caveat: I was lucky enough to have a good family network, to have gotten well paid jobs, to have been born with a bit of smarts and good memory, with people constantly pushing me back into education, and a host of little things many just don’t have. So don’t mistake this for an argument that given the will it’s easy for people to make something of themselves. A kind of “I did it, so I don’t see why anyone else can’t” argument. Such arguments are right-wing bullshit. Oft spouted by self-made men who forget they’re not normal. If idiot kids don’t have the support networks that are available to many people by default, then it’s a shame if they live in a society that offers poor alternatives.

* Can’t say I was ever a danger to anyone other than myself though. Other than the occasional punch-up.

Let’s shoot the shit Internet public. If it’s the case that:

• The behaviour of children is mostly influenced by their upbringing – which, for most people, is provided by their parents.
• Said parents were children in the past.

It seems very strange to call for a return to the past in order to deal with moral panics bad behaviour among young people.  Maybe I’m saying is way out there illogical because you rarely hear it used as a defense against fucked up rose-tinted diversionary over-simplistic actively harmful nostalgia “things were better in the past”.  The good old days.

Cause there is no moral vacuum, people are generally less fucked up than the past (less: racism, wife-beating, children-beating, abject poverty, bad health, ignorance, and a lot of other negative shit, man),  and people that tell you otherwise should be birched.   The future, upcoming recession aside, is bright and I’m pretty optimistic.  Optimistic is not equal to complacent.

Just for the record Brown talks a great deal of bollocks too.

I pulled up to the house About seven or eight I eat dinner. At about 9pm, suitably fed, I get a brief attack of tiredness brought on by digestion. That annoys me.  Because if I have a brief nap I won’t sleep until tomorrow. Either – by way of thinking I won’t sleep and therefore don’t, or a nap refreshes me enough that I don’t need a night’s sleep. I haven’t worked out which. So, like, blogging is a fair dinkum way of stopping myself from napping.  The preceding 90 words are meaningless other than their dictionary definitions, the history of the alphabet, punctuation, non-random appliction, and zero proper nouns.  Take that world.

I’ve just watched Hilary Clinton concede. But this is not specifically about her. To get that far in politics politicians must really want the job. With a burning passion. I think that is no more apparent when you see a politician spouting platitudes and clichés in order to win votes. Because, working with the assumption that most politicians are good people, with noble intentions, and intelligent, they must know how predictable and boring much of what they have to say is; the soundbites, staged impromptu style visits on demographically correct representations of voters, day after day. Promising to listen, to restore some aspect of a mythological past, or the promise of change. Thing is, they may very well mean it, and if they’re tolerating the bollocks machine to get elected, I don’t envy them in the slightest. That’s a hard world. Man.

When you’ve been awake for quite some time, and the world is a bit weird, and your eyes are heavy, and you’re falling asleep, then waking, in quick jerks, like an insomniac baby, the last thing you want to do is blog. Sentences get out of hand. So I’m going to dedicate roughly, by which I mean exactly, one paragraph to blog posts I thought about writing but can’t be arsed. Although (in retrospect it’s easy) 2 is a bit more than one paragraph.

1. I’m prejudiced. Generally, when British talent goes to America, and achieves some kind of success, they become boring. But Russell Brand is an exception. Rather than go down the route of “I’m famous now, so I’ll play it safe”, he’s gone down the route of “I’m famous now, so I can say what I want”. In other words, he’s managed to stay funny in the face of success. Listen here. It’s very funny. Rather than ratcheting down he’s ratcheting up.
2. It annoys me when people knock vegetarians. I’m not a vegetarian. But I can understand it. The idea that there isn’t good vegetarian and vegan food is bullshit (for example see here and a lot of the world’s cuisine). I can buy the arguments about the efficiency of producing meat and its impact on the environment. It’s inefficient. But in terms of environmental impact – it’s not a uniquely meat problem, and it applies as much to produce in general. Moral objection to killing animals is reasonable. The health thing is debateable.
   But there are some smug vegetarians. I met one recently.
   They were also very smug about their bicycle. Their poop smells probably smells worse than mine. I expect they get less constipation because of the high fibre associated with a vegetarian diet. I bet they feel smug about that too. So I hope they inexplicably get hemorrhoids. And the road is really bumpy when they’re out cycling.
   If they’re reading this, they probably realise, deep down, that their smuggery last week didn’t impress me.
3. I’ve got fuck-loads of lithium batteries in my bedroom. BP-511(s) (which all weigh around 80 grammes) , EN-EL3e(s) (inexplicably I didn’t weigh these) and some laptop ones (which I did weigh but I am too tired to remember the weight), If, after a day or two awake, you weigh batteries to make sure they weigh the same, you’ve gone wrong.
4. Minicab offices are fucked up. This would not be a paragraph if it wasn’t for this sentence and the next couple, in which I say why. They’re like doctor’s waiting rooms used to dealing with the best and worst of people, and everything in-between, like doctors, but without the medical training, and a propensity to smoke. There was a slot machine.

The last episode of Battlestar Galactica  (S4E8) was, to put it bluntly, fucked.  It’s still better than a lot of programmes, and it’s maybe a result of the writers strike, but if the next few episodes are similarly disjointed it’s possible “the cat was dead” will become synonymous with “jumped the shark” (watch the source of the phrase here).  I recorded the dead cat episode on Sky Plus and shall watch it again.  Maybe my opinion of the episode will improve.  But the dead cat sub-plot was, to my mind, unintentionally funny.   If you’re in the US, where episode 8 isn’t out for a little while, sorry for blowing any plot details.  But, it’s such a pointless distraction from the main plot that you’ll lose nothing by me telling you about it.

Hey – you – in front of the screen – READ THIS FIRST.

“It’d be a brave analyst who said that the market has peaked,” said Julian Lee, a senior energy analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London. “Clearly, there are downward pressures on demand in the U.S. and Europe, but we don’t see much evidence of a slowdown in Asia.”

Gas prices in America are going to go up further. There’s a lag between crude prices and pump costs (it’s not a linear relationship anyway). The US is the world’s largest consumer of oil. Significantly more than China. Way more. Not just a bit. Think of something big and double it. Consumption will slump as $4.50 is hit.

Do people really think everyone in China is going to want a car before food? (Here’s a tip: They want food before cars – funny that). And, more importantly, the short-term and (to a certain extent) medium-term concerns about supply are bullshit. Politically convenient bullshit.

Better to blame oil for the state of the world economy than …

Better to blame consumption for the price of oil than global instability, a weak dollar (which is why commodities have been so popular), big investors speculating, and stupid decisions. I wonder what happens if big investors begin to pull out?

Pop.

Caveat: I am a mere arm-chair economist. I may be wrong. I can live with that. Nothing changes if I’m wrong.

If you’re in the UK you have/had 21 hours left to watch Jon Ronson’s Reverend Death documentary on the Channel 4 website. Click here to watch it. It’s interesting and scary.

I’ve had a chance to watch Jon Ronson’s Reverend Death. Reverend George Exoo is terrifying. He helps people end their life. People who are not terminally ill. He believes they are going to heaven. Even people who have topped themselves (contrary to nearly every religion). I think, regardless of religious belief, the vast majority of people in the world, would agree that he is not an ideal choice to be a a kind of suicide invigilator. The suicidal are not going to get a neutral evaluation of their options or the differences of opinion that are out there.

Many of the suicidal featured in the documentary look as if they could benefit from therapy or help from their local community. They are not terminally ill. No-doubt their pain is real, but unlike the terminally ill, they stand a realistic chance of improvement.

I’ve always found the idea of assisted suicide uncomfortable. I suffer occasionally from very bad bouts of acute back pain, and I know, from personal experience, that pain or preoccupation with pain, severely affects the decision making process. I’ve never felt suicidal, it’s not something I’d do, but I can see how someone who is extremely depressed and in pain could consider it. Then be spurred on by cheerleaders.

The Reverend George Exoos of the world are a separate debate from the terminally ill topping themselves and Ronson was right to document it.

I keep wanting to write about things that don’t matter. But through indignation at the stupidity of other people I keep writing about serious stuff that affects people. Blogging isn’t about writing about serious stuff that affects people. So I’m going to intersperse this post with anecdotes. I’ll let the wider media do their job, because, after all, entirely seriously, without any sense of irony (admitting irony to an audience would mean it isn’t), they’ve been doing somewhat better than apes such a good job.

I jotted this down yesterday night, it is 100% true:

Earlier today I handled a fuck-load of chilli peppers and washed my hands thoroughly afterwards. Obviously not thoroughly enough because a little while later, in the middle of a public place, I rubbed my eyes and cried. It was pure liquid fire. Thus, through streams of tears, I made my way to a bench and sat there, with my eyes closed and tears streaming down my cheeks. Like I was having a public breakdown. And, in a way, this is a sign of a healthy society; a couple asked me if I was OK, and a little crowd formed. Which meant having to explain that I’d gotten chilli juice on my hands and had rubbed my eyes. And that I’d washed my hands. The very worst thing was that they had looks on their faces that suggested they didn’t believe me. It’s not like you can tell some stranger to lick your finger or rub their eyes.

Boris has scrapped the oil deal with Venezuela, here’s the PA wire:

Mayor ends oil deal with Venezuela

Tory London Mayor Boris Johnson has axed a controversial tie-up with Venezuela, spelling the end to half price bus and tram travel for some of the capital’s least well off.
Predecessor Ken Livingstone signed a deal with the south American nation’s state-owned oil company last year to cut 20% of the fuel bill for buses in return for transport advice. The savings were used to offer discount fares to around 250,000 people on income support.
At the launch of his successful campaign to oust the two-term Labour Mayor, Mr Johnson dubbed the deal with Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez as “completely Caracas”. And in a statement he confirmed that it would not be renewed when it concluded in August and said work had already begun to shut down a £67,000 a year office operation in Caracas.

The big question, that, thus far nobody has asked is that what with the fucktarded bubble political opportunism/don’t blame the rush for commodities oil market, oil may be about to substantially increase in cost. Which, and I know this is a great intellectual stretch for some, may quickly mean that the paltry £67,000 saving may be wiped out entirely. Especially with potentially (FFS the number of actual claimants is likely lower than those who could claim) 250,000 people getting half price tickets. Which are going to be continued for six months. They should get half-price tickets. For starters low wages have been unofficially subsidised through things like travel discounts. But it’s going to cost more as fuel increases for reasons of greed.

But with the great economist, Boris Johnson, we’ve pulled the plug on something that has increased in value significantly since all of the mental baseless politically driven speculation concerns about oil supply. I know Venezuela isn’t really in a position to offer other countries oil discounts given its internal poverty, and I know Chavez isn’t some kind of saint, but my attitude is that if people want to offer stupid discounts for political reasons then it’s their problem and we should take it. We could always fuck him over down the line. A 20% discount on fuel that is potentially going to go through the roof is not something to play politics with.

A few weeks back a pub landlord told me off for using their toilets when I wasn’t a customer. So I told them to fuck off and walked out. I’m probably barred. It was a shit pub with dirty toilets anyway.

So, I suppose my question is: Is a £67,000 saving, and smugness that we’re not dealing with Chavez, really worth ditching a 20% discount in a time like this, what with the international situation? Does is make financial sense or are we losing significantly more than £67,000 per annum with the loss of the discount? Frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck, but it seems like the pertinent question. Sounds to me like someone is pointing a gun at their foot and pulling the trigger.

Alexander Kwiatkowski and Grant Smith on $135pb oil.

The English countryside has not been in full-on production mode for decades. Farmers have been bummed by supermarkets and international competition is intense. Wholesale prices had gotten so cheap. However, if I had a spare couple of hundred grand, I would be speculatively buying arable farming land. I strongly suspect farming is going to become profitable again. In line with world consumption of meat and livestock products. There are less barriers to buying farming land than many other land types provided the intended usage of the land is made explicit. There’s likely people who want to sell too. Do you know what percentage of grain in, for instance, the United States, goes to feed livestock? It’s more than half. Way more than half. Animals require a fuck-load of feeding. In the next decade more people than ever are going to be able to buy meat.

So, blah blah, meat – value of arable land already bottomed – hard up farmers: buy-outs, mega farms, profit, blah blah blah, mega profit during droughts elsewhere, England uniquely exploitable for profit. Etc.

I’m in a mood where I can’t think of anything to write.  Nothing.  Every thought leads to a dead end.  Every full stop a pause, whereby I document, with accuracy, what I’m saying. A regimented churning of words, and nothing of substance.  To justify it I’ll engage in unjustified special pleading; nobody  has thought as little about what they have written as I have thought as little about what I have written.  I’ll write nothing about nothing!  For no reason!

Then eat a sandwich.  With condiments.

• Oil prices are rising because of speculation. The current supply, believe it or not (I don’t care), exceeds demand, even taking into account China. The speculation is a result of uncertainty and people moving into commodities (rather than equities).
• The rise in wheat prices are partially the result of increased demand for meat in China. Not a ‘western style diet’. More meat requires more food for livestock. But it’s not the principle factor. Last year there were several droughts. Not least in Australia. Similar things happened to major rice producing countries last year. Blaming China is wrong and misleading.
• There is not a linear relationship between inflation in China and the prices of Chinese exports. That would be overly simplistic in the extreme. China is going to suffer from inflation, but as a side effect of increased prosperity and modernisation. Rather than a simplistic relationship between food and oil prices.
• There is a weak causal relationship between biofuels and the price of food.
• Chinese imports are one of the factors that has helped control inflation in the UK. A minor factor given the percentage of Chinese goods as proportions of inflation indices.
• The Government measures of inflation are reliant on indices. So to say prices “on average have risen 3%” is an unwarranted generalisation based on an index. Real inflation may differ. A better phrase would be that prices tracked by X index have risen. Anything else is lazy.

With that in mind please watch the following:

What keeps inflation rising?

And ask yourself whether it did a good job. I think it is misleading and does a poor job of explaining things. One gets the impression that Richard Scott thinks the increased wheat prices are because of Chinese people eating vast quantities of toast.

The situation with the BBC is not wholly of its own making. The corporation has been pressured to be popular, and, simultaneously, a public service broadcaster. And many people moaned when it was a public service broadcaster, during the patriarchal age of broadcasting. Now people are moaning that things have gone too far the other way. Quite correctly. My argument against popularity at the expense of quality is fairly simple: If the BBC makes programmes in popular formats, that are of the same quality as those available on commercial channels (or worse), there is nothing to distinguish it from the commercial channels. Making questions about the license fee inevitable. That is the situation today.

The assumption about an audience, needed to arrive at a conclusion of inaccessibility, is worrying. Accessibility is totally wrong. The most patriarchal thing since Abraham is that broadcasting needs to be accessible. I don’t necessarily think there’s an assumption people are stupid, but suspect there’s an assumption people are not interested in complexity. So, as a result, controversial issues turn into tabloid, bite size chunks, which alarm people irresponsibly, or presentation heavy documentaries, light on detail and low in accuracy. Maybe people being turned off by politics, science, the arts, and current affairs, is, in part, because they associate it with ‘accessible’ broadcasting. People sense that they’re being spoken down-to.

There should be an assumption that the majority of people are not stupid, and that complex subjects should be presented to inform. That is a different assumption from accessibility, because it assumes the viewers are intelligent and capable of learning. That not everything in a documentary needs to be so dumbed down it is accessible to the majority of viewers. People are capable of looking things up that interest them. The BBC used to produce decent fact sheets. As such there is zero replay value in many BBC current affairs programmes, and documentaries, because the information within them is so light very few people would have a problem with remembering their contents. Unless distracted by the special effects, and music track.

The BBC needs to compete to survive and in order to compete, with the other channels, many of whom are now producing documentaries of acceptable quality, the BBC needs to produce documentaries that are better. They desperately need to take a step-backwards. Until the late nineties BBC documentaries were the envy of the world. The BBC is the broadcaster best placed to attract the next David Attenborough(s) and needs to do that right away if it is to survive.

And the BBC could. Because the talent tucked away in places like BBC 4, a channel that receives a tiny fraction of the license fee and speaks for itself. Likewise Radio 4. Accessibility should be regarded as a failed experiment.

It virtually goes without saying that producing reality television, from talent shows to DIY, when everyone is doing it, makes the BBC less distinguishable from the commercial channels. Sacrificing long-term survival for short-term popularity. BBC 3 is, to my mind, schizophrenic, veering between sub-Channel 4 youth television, and, occasionally, decent drama/comedy. Half of what is on BBC 3 is done on commercial channels, and often better. I don’t think there is a dearth of talent – the talent is out there – the BBC needs to aggressively seek it out.

Someone needs a big brush to sweep away accessability and replace it with talent. Talent should reflect the subjects they’re involved in. There should be no more broadcasters covering subjects that leave them so out of their depth they look stupid.

Much of the above applies to the rest of the media but I don’t care about them as much as the BBC. I would like to be able to mock foreign friends about how much better BBC documentaries are than theirs. I felt smug when I could do that.

Tonight’s local election coverage on BBC News 24 is, aside from David Dimbleby, completely crap.  I am currently watching Jeremy Vine do a really shit American accent, dressed as a cowboy, reading out truly woefully described statistics about the Liberal Democrats.   It’s really difficult to watch.  It’s as if someone has decided that local election coverage needs to be fun.  Fun in the sense of   BBC Children’s Television fun.  My eyes feel soiled.  I hope someone puts the Jeremy Vine clip on YouTube because I did not make this up but doubt anyone will believe me.

Reality television, and derivatives, are mostly crap because they attract attention whores and drama-enhancing producers.  It rarely documents.

I think I’m on safe ground saying shows about people with ugly and/or embarrassing medical conditions, are a modern freak-show.  Especially reality television that deals with disfigurement. Such programmes often have fuck-all to do with the people they purport to document – I’m not being callous – it’s just that disfigured people are cheaper than actors and the make-up is better.  Quite often they get paid peanuts in the process. The documenting comes second to the sights and sounds. But…

If people can be desensitised to disfigurement, is it a good thing for disfigured people?  If viewers become desensitised to disfigurement, in real-life they will stare less, and, maybe, be less afraid.  Which would be a good thing.  However, given the tenuous and complex links between violent television and violent behaviour, it’s probably difficult to say that desentisation will lead to better treatment of disfigured people.  In the same way that it can’t be said violent television is ever the primary factor contributing to violence. I don’t think freak-shows, aside from supplying an income to the performers, improved the lot of disfigured people.  Still, I’m an optimist, I hope that there are positive side-effects to the modern freak-show.

A seriously negative side-effect of this, could be that in order to maintain viewers, medical reality TV will perpetually search for more extreme medical conditions.   In order to maintain shock value.  Like soap operas adding an explosion or violence.  Reality TV will  have to go to poor countries to find people shocking enough. Poor people with extreme medical conditions, on our screen, for titillation. Which, if it generates awareness of medical conditions in poor countries, isn’t such a bad thing.  The next thing is people may empathise. Tourist destinations may be shamed into action.  But..

It could still just be about titillation. I don’t, for a second, think that the majority of medical reality television is made for any altruistic reason at all.  I don’t think it’s immoral and I’m not even sure it’s all that harmful, but I do think it amoral, in that it boils-down to viewing figures, and best commercial practice.   Change will be in response to a changing audience.  I hope people become so desensitised to disfigurement John Merrick could walk down the street naked and people would be more shocked by his penis than his elephantiasis. 

The food sections of broadsheet newspapers are annoying. The featured reciples are cooked by no-one but the authors, such people play boules and feel smug about it, and other such habits. And, worst of all, have witty, yet somehow tasteful, jumpers for informal situations. They are supernaturally smug toss-pots. The other bits of the food section are made up of critics – who think they’re interesting – and a smorgasbord, a panoply, of wanky narrative so refined it would make Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen swoon.

Give me recipes that are good but don’t require fucking around. When I say fucking around I mean by my standards of fucking around. Not some jumped up chef or foodie who hunts down fucking apples from farms that are, naturally (what else would they be?), rustic and genial. Or bits where it says the timing of something is essential. If I want to cook or buy things where the timing is essential I’ll go to a bit more effort than following a recipe from some broadsheet which is essentially toilet roll with print. Like buy a cook-book or get some training.

So. Down with the old media! Surf the net! Never click adverts! Stick it to Hugh Fernley-Wittingstall. Come on! The man’s a cock. Except buy the Guardian on Saturdays, because Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column is in it. Also buy it when Charlie Brooker, (sometimes) Polly Toynbee, or Jon Ronson have articles.

Alternatively, just be grown up, and buy loads of newspapers all of the time and don’t read the annoying bits.

Leave the food bit and life-style section on the train. A foodie may pick it up, cook a recipe from it and choke on a bone, with hilarious consequences. Like they immediately cough up the bone, trip on a roller-skate, do all their own stunts and appear in Phantom of The Opera. Then get killed by a amorous moose while searching for maple fucking syrup.

At the start of the popularisation of the Internet there were a lot of people with dubious Tank-Girl haircuts, William Gibson novel in hand, making wild predictions about Virtual Reality and the like.  Even William Shatner got in on the act with TekWar.   The days of the two Williams.  With the abundance of Internet mania it’s gotten a bit clichéd to go on about how the Internet is going to change things.

Adam Hart-Davis, if you can get over being spoken to like a 5 year old nephew, and his avuncular mien, made quite good documentary called “The Thinkynge Revolution” as part of his “What the Tudors Did For Us” series.  You can watch it here.  Although, of course, future historians may refer to the Internet Revolution as the Pornography Revolution and say things like “imagine if Caxton had done smut”.

I think there should be a general rule of blogging that when you’re depressed you shouldn’t blog.  Almost universally it comes across as self-indulgent shit.  Earlier today I posted a post that in retrospect was so mental it was potentially funny.  In a laughing at a mental tramp bothering people outside of Boots kind of way.  To give you a vague idea of what the post was like, at the end I compared the Conservative party and New Labour to a saggy pox afflicted arse.  I had a mental picture of diseased cheeks belonging to the same arse.   Thing is: I hate people that try to convince people of stuff. It’s not that I object to people expressing their opinions it’s just I think it’s possible that vehemence is a mask for ill-thought out ideas.  With stuff I’m sure about if people agree that’s fine and if they don’t they don’t.  I’m still right. If I’m being vehement it is a sign of not being sure I’m right.  So the long-winded psychiatrists wet dream of a post had to go.

I visited someone in hospital a couple of days ago, on a post-operative ward filled with people plumbed with tubes pumping poo and wee, and I think I’ve picked up the famous shitting lurgies. Whereby you don’t feel all that unwell but have got a bit of a sore throat and occasionally have cramps that precipitate running. So I will not be in London tomorrow. I intend to walk somewhere where there are nearby toilets or wooded cover. I’ll keep a bog-roll in my camera bag. The idea of shitting myself in central London terrifies me.

This is a shit post.  Sometimes I think there’s a collusion between all of the atoms in the universe to smite me, like Job (the proto-Jesus), in the good book.  Fnord.

I would never poach a quail egg. Quail eggs are OK. Nothing special. Small eggs. You eat them and think “hmm. That’s OK”. I won’t eat hem unless someone else is buying them and someone else is cooking it. This isn’t an issue of snobbery. I feel the same way about black pudding. And beer. And newspapers. You don’t have to prepare beer unless you are opening a can or pouring it yourself. That’s preparation of a sort.

You can prepare newspapers by finding discarded newspapers on the train, scrunching the pages into loose balls, and putting them in a big pile in your back garden. Then joyfully spunk methanol all over them (from a spare lens cleaning kit), and set fire to them. Shouting “I’m burning the media, man – and I didn’t even pay for it”. (I have no respect for people who burn flags because, often, they’ve bought the flag. It’s mental). Then read the websites of the newspapers you have burnt without ever, ever, clicking on the advertising links.

Even if they’ve got a potentially good deal on a camera advertised or a featured book written by the sub-editor’s wife’s nephew. Then, much later, when the awful realisation dawns on you that you’ve made a Jeremy Clarkson/K Foundation-like statement (I suspect they’re one and the same). Hang your head in shame and drink Ribena. To wash down a fish-finger sandwich. And have a good hard think.

There are qualities that exist in all great film-drama characters that are hard to pin down. It is too simplistic to say that the characters have depth or complexity because some great film characters aren’t complex and don’t have depth. An element may be that while a part of a narrative, at some point in the film, (or even all of it) a great character’s motivations are not obvious to the viewer. So elements of the character are open to interpretation and the character is interesting as a result. Another factor may be the freshness of a role. As defined by the script and/or director and/or acting skills. A memorable character – because they’re novel and a benchmark by which others will be judged. And, I suppose, the pathos or revulsion the character can elicit from an audience.

All in varying proportions. Of course. One day a twat will paid peanuts to put together a shoddy equation for the benefit of a cinema chain. Who’ll pump out press releases on the unsuspecting public like bukkake. Mopped up by the news.

This post is defunct. The video in question has been removed. It was a Rolling Stones Cover so bad that comedy could not be derived from it. Deleting it was the right thing to do. I quite like Tay Zonday and all, he’s self aware – it’s a good act, but that was too much. He should stick to his own stuff, which is funnier, and tolerable to well adjusted ear drums. This post is not defunt. FFS x 100.

What follows this paragraph is yet another [1] reason [2] that copyright should be extended on music here in the UK. So pensioners like The Rolling Stones and The Who and Cliff Richard can maintain their royalties for stuff they did when they didn’t have bits of their bodies wearing out. Apparently they’ve “poured money into the British economy and enriched people’s lives” and “They are not asking for a handout, just a fair reward for their creative endeavours” according to Roger Daltrey. He has good hair. For an old guy. So he must be right. Plus, I like fishing.

One of the most excellent things were music copyright laws to be extended would be that bands like the Rolling Stones or their representatives or whoever handles that sort of thing can authorise things like this:

Tay Zonday does Start Me Up

I think we can all agree that extending musical copyright is a good thing. Like fuck.

[1] Bullshit.
[2] Cos there are no reasons. What reasons do you need? Oh Oh Oh Oh.

Check this link out. Then check out the prices below.

I heard an impassioned debate about those lens in a shop today. I don’t quite get it.

Last few weeks I’ve been doing some reading about photography and have had the pleasure of consulting a few experts. Pro-photographers, by and large, have a few requirements that casual(ish) photographers don’t have: specifically lens build quality, auto-focus speed/accuracy, and lens speed. If they miss a shot it costs them money and they operate in environments like sports venues, or hanging around waiting for some female celebrity’s tit to pop out. Ergo there is sound economic value in professionals spending upwards of £1000 on a lens.

In the world of home audio there are a group of people commonly referred to as audiophiles. Some audiophiles think things like $7250 audio cables produce higher quality audio than cables costing a fraction of the price. Even though it is highly improbable they do. Lenses can’t be directly compared to that situation, but there’s a point to be made nonetheless. With lenses things can be measured (see here). However, the real-world differences, on a standard sized photographic print, or even on a standard LCD monitor, may be difficult to distinguish unless the viewer is a photographer or familiar with the lens. Unless it’s a truly terrible lens.

For instance certain types of lens tend to have greater variance across price brackets. Often, but not always, the differences among zoom lenses are more apparent than fixed focal length lenses. Although that is a bit misleading: as ever the biggest factor in any photograph is what you are photographing. An interesting photograph taken with a mediocre lens is still interesting, while a boring photograph taken with an excellent lens is still boring. Fixed length lenses are interesting in terms of cost/performance.

Case in point 50mm prime (=fixed focal length) lens for Canon and Nikon digital SLRs (DSLRs). As looked at in the forum post linked above. Here’s the Canon prices:

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 MK II < £75
Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM ~ £250
Canon EF 50mm f/1L USM ~ £1000

Here’s the Nikon prices:

Nikon AF 50mm f/1.8D ~ £80
Nikon AF 50mm f/1.4D ~ £250

The build quality between the cheap lenses and more expensive lenses is quite pronounced. Particularly with Canon’s F/1 from their top of the line L range. I question how many casual DSLR users require that sort of build quality. Ardent casual photographers may benefit from the lenses in the £250 bracket. But I question whether that is clear cut. If, at a guestimate, the cheaper lenses break twice as often as the ~£250 lenses, and presuming it happens outside of warranty (making lenses that often break down during the warranty period makes no sense) , buying another cheap lens (or even having a spare or two) works out cheaper than the original cost of buying the ~£250 lens. That’s a scenario, quite frankly, pulled out of my arse, but a big question is how often the cheaper lenses break down under the usage of an average DSLR owner. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t place a bet either way whether the cumulative life of three cheap lenses (costing less in total) would outlast the ~£250 lenses or vice versa. MTBF info and the like is difficult to find.

There is a stop difference between the ~£250 lenses and the cheap lenses. In some situations that could be the difference between a sharp shot and blurred shots in low light conditions. On the other-hand it’s an issue somewhat mitigated by camera burst mode and acceptable ISO-300+ exposures on DSLRs. The +3 stop images stabilization of newer Canon (IS) and Nikon (VR) shake reduction is an indication of what is considered significant in terms of gaining stops in the age of DSLR/sensor based photography.

So I guess it’s nice if you’ve got the spare cash, but to hear the argument I overheard today you’d think a lens was the only factor in taking a photo. I’m no expert, or even a serious amateur, or even that good a photographer, I’m a hobby master, but I’ve listened to enough people to know that lens quality beyond ‘acceptable’ isn’t the most important thing about taking a picture. And that some pointless arguments go on in camera shops and that there’s a lot of unnecessary snobbery and lusting after lenses among amateur photographers. Check out this comparison with a $5000 vs. a $150 camera.

I like this classic because it sets up the next sentence, thus saving me words.   This can’t be distinguished from parody.   FFS.

I’m sitting, alone, in a cold room, in underpants, eating a microwave curry.   A fairly posh one, lamb something or-other with apricots and a hot sauce.  With whole seeds.  The first problem only applies to this curry and cannot be generalised to all curries:  Apricots.   Apricots are foul.  They add nothing to the world.  Apricots could dissapear and people would move on pretty quickly.  Elton John would not play at their funeral.  Conspiracy theories would not be fomented.  The second problem applies to all supermarket curries and can be generalised:  Too much sauce.  There are very few curries that benefit from too much sauce.  Dansak benefits from an excess of sauce.

What I end up doing with a lot of supermarket curries is eating a third of the sauce with the meat and/or vegetables and tossing the rest in the bin.  Which is wasteful.  I think supermarkets put loads of sauce in their curries not because they think the public wants sauce but because it means less meat and/or vegetables.   It’s akin to serving steak and chips with a big pile of chips and a piddly little steak next to it.   Or a single asparagus in a bucket of sauce.  The ratio is fucked.  I feel like I’m being punished for being a lazy bastard, for not cooking, by supermarkets that have adverts that make projectile vomiting look pleasant.  Less sauce please: Asda, Morrision’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose.  Don’t be cunts.

I don’t give a flying fuck about David Cameron flaunting the rules of the road on a bicycle. The thing with Cameron is; he started off OK, but got pulled in all kinds of directions by the interests surrounding him, and when elected he’ll swing further to the right and will tolerate/exploit stuff he knows to be wrong. He’ll excuse it by deferring to ‘people being concerned about N‘ and he’ll ride them like a donkey rather than tell anybody they’re wrong, like a grown-up, with a grown-up face. See Broken Britain. In The Sun. As PM he”ll paint his bike black, get mudguards , and go out hunting peasants with his fox-gun. Probably.

If I were David Cameron post-bike scoop I’d market myself as a maverick prepared to bend the rules to get the job done. Dr House MD, on a bicycle. Minus the Vicodin. With legs that work. David Cameron with a Vicodin habit would break Broken Britain’s broken back. The Vicodin straw. The kids look up to Cameron – the street youth. Hipsters, fidget godivas, and Vicodin, all being David Cameron’s fault. Prompting apocalyptic headlines in The Daily Mail, Armageddon in The Sun, and wanky, serious discussion, with mostly idiots, in The Broadsheets. Fuck them! What does David Cameron want with them anyway? Dr House MD wouldn’t give a fuck. Oh, and The Mirror are a bunch of twats too. Just to be even handed and all. The newspapers are crap by-and-large because a great deal of the people that read them are idiots.

Certain Nasdaq tech stocks have, in my opinion, been unfairly tarnished by the fuckwitted problems in the financial sector. They are bargains and had I the cash between one and two years time I’d be laughing. During the dot-com bust it was horrible to watch loads of companies that were fundamentally sound dragged down with idiotic companies. The stock for companies that survived could have been picked up dirt cheap. Had I the foresight to invest, which is easy in retrospect.

The market hasn’t bottomed by any means, but here’s my theory, pulled out of my arse: 1) The tech sector is going to reach a bottom faster than other sectors, not quite as fast as Eliot Spitzer reaching a bottom via an escort service, but within two months. 2) The exact time a bottom is going to be reached is difficult to predict, but less so in the tech sector (there’s unlikely to be bad news to come) than other sectors. But a short loss is worth swallowing for the long term gains. 3) The risk in much of the tech sector is different from other sectors because of transnational assets and sales. It’s diverse rather than localised risk.

With regards of everything other than tech – it’s not bottomed yet because there’s more bad news to come. Anyone that thinks that isn’t the case is being naïve. The Fed does not make moves of the magnitude made over the weekend without reason. History will tell. What I hope is that rationality wins the day, everyone calms down, stops thinking in the short term, and most markets bottom in the next few weeks. But what I hope, indeed, what I say, is pulled from my arse, and is a poor excuse for a blog entry. And could be bollocks.

Here’s what I’d buy, in my imaginary bet:

Intel (Nasdaq symbol INTC) – $20 is not a fuckload off it’s 8 year low and is a bargain. Intel is going to dominate the chip market for the imminent future. Hasn’t been hit by stocking up on a twit load of flash memory.

Nvidia (Nasdaq symbol NVDA) – $20 is nowhere near Nvidia’s lows, but Nvidia has shown surprising resilience in the face of competition from AMD (inc. ATI) and Intel, in both the on-board graphics/motherboard market at the graphics card market. Huge global sales/assets.

Sun (Nasdaq symbol JAVA) – $16 – post acquisition of the ubiquitous MySQL, is a bargain. There will be more webservers and more MySQL. Doesn’t matter which Linux distribution a webhost runs, they still need MySQL.

In two years time I’ll find out if I’m right or not.

Early Sunday morning I was listening to Russell Brand’s radio show and he mentioned one of his and Matt Morgan’s YouTube videos (The Weatherclerks) and how it’d only gotten a thousand hits. That is quite a pathetic amount of hits for a video that had been on YouTube six months. The problem is the way the videos were released. The first set of his unseen old-school (sort of old-school, post drugs) videos were disseminated via ‘Warren Kelp’ (an obvious sockpuppet) with some bullshit about the videos being found in a skip. That was all well and good, but the only people that would come across the videos were people specifically searching for Russell Brand. The largest proportion of his fans are ordinary people and are not going to do that. I saw the videos soon after their internet debut and featured them on this blog, but I, and people that come here (hello!) are elite internet ninjas. Many of whom have seen or heard of Russell Brand prior to the last couple of years (like me; he was funny out of his head on smack, back in the day in dingy Islington pubs, and he’s still funny minus the smack in front of audiences of hundreds. That’s a hell of a transition). Releasing the videos to the baying hordes, even with a celebrity name attached, is no good without doing internet basics like building up an internet audience (which is totally different from a telly/stand-up audience, and will become increasingly important in the next few years).

I think YouTube is proof that people will watch things that aren’t normally featured on television or the screen. Every celebrity should own a basic HD camera, such as the Canon HV30 (see note, it’s important), which produces good quality video without much technical complexity, or cost, or barriers to just switching on and filming. Buying a more expensive camera means more fucking around than is necessary, and nobody busy wants to fuck around. Buy a camera that doesn’t require training to use (the HV30 is excellent and produces excellent video). Film mundane stuff (people are interested in the mundane of any celebrity), stick it up on YouTube, build up some e-fame (which is like real fame, but with significantly less money) and profit. Videos a minute or two long. Below ten minutes of your life a week. Stick to basic editing, using the software that came with the camera, upload it to YouTube. It’s not difficult. Why more celebrities don’t do this is beyond me. Especially if they realise what the Internet is going to do to TV – like Tay Zonday does here. The time and money invested is minimal for hedging your bets on the Internet vs. TV question.

Then, the next time something like The Weatherclerks is released, far more people will watch it.

Note:

Canon: this is technically a plug I will sell my soul for a EOS 1Ds and a few professional lenses. I’ll even take the Nikon D3 off my shopping list for this year. In fact every photo I’ll produce this year with the EOS 1Ds will have “this was not produced by a Nikon D3” as an unobtrusive watermark. If, on the other-hand Nikon are reading this – quick – send me a Nikon D3 with several pro lenses – get there before the competition. It’s the first rule of business. There’s not many things I’d whore myself for, but for either one of those cameras I would cave in, contrary to the advice in this Bobby Conn video.

I think part of the problem with the media coverage of the financial world is that it is unable to see things in shades of grey. The term recession, for instance, is often used as if it’s equivocal with a depression. It’s not. It’s quite possible to be in a recession and, aside from certain parts of an economy, not have a substantial impact on the fundamental things that affect people. The current situation in the US is bad, but nothing on the recessions of the 1980s or 1990s. It’s going to be bad for upwards of six months, particularly in the financial sector (I reckon there’s a great deal of bending the truth regarding liquidity, to keep baying morons from panic selling), but everything else will recover quickly, which will, in turn help the financial sector. And I hate to agree with George W Bush, the fundamentals of the US economy, even in its current state, are better than people think and shouldn’t be underestimated.

Consumer spending has not been affected terribly by the problems of last year. There is a lag, but it could be that many people who are now in trouble with their mortgages were not big consumers because the percentage of their income was eaten by their mortgage was already high. So the knock-on effect to the economy of defaults and loans may have been severely over estimated. And, I suspect, this is reflected in today’s US inflation data. Prices were kept low because people weren’t prepared, or able, to pay more. Oil and grain prices are to be watched as components of the CPI, and the wider international situation. There’s a fuck load of people in West China who have yet to start consuming with the rest of us. I done-gone-think there’s going to be linear growth in world consumers over the next decade as the 700 million odd people in rural China increase demand.

I think the major problem with the last four years of US economic policy is that the fed severely underestimated the stupidity of the market and how it’s often led by mood rather than rationality. If people panic it will get much worse, if people listen to Bush, and they should, because he’s right in this instance, the recession will be a bit of a pain but nothing like being kicked in the balls. Bloomberg’s coverages has been better than the competition in terms of neutrality and the rationality of its correspondents. As an armchair economist I hope to get my hands on some raw data in the next few weeks and see if I’m talking bollocks.

I’m an atheist.  I don’t believe in god, a spirit, or the supernatural.  I think we die and that is it.  Life is immensely precious. 

I think Scientology is a religion.  In terms of what is a religion and what isn’t a religion, I can’t distinguish one set of nonsense from another. I’d define a religion as any collective belief system that involves a supernatural belief in the spirit.  Scientology may charge huge sums of money.  But there’s people that believe in it.  The money they charge doesn’t invalidate it as a belief system.  Imagine taking the potential earnings of Jesuit monks. There’s some very clever Jesuits.  Scientology is no more stupid than any other religion.  But it still deserves criticism.

The ways ‘they’ (I’ll get back to they) have pursued people with litigation, and their attitude towards critics have not given Scientology a good track record.  I say ‘they’ because, I imagine, your average Scientologist has as much to do with litigation, smear campaigns and the like, as your average Catholic has to do with sodomising choir boys, or your average Muslim has to do with suicide bombing.  I.e. Nothing at all.  It is unrealistic to think of Scientology as an homogeneous organisation.  It no doubt it has its sects and its bad apples.

With regards of ‘fair-game’: I would not like to clash with certain sects from any religion.  If anyone takes their religious book seriously, you’re in a fuck load of trouble if you cross them. One thinks of the Amalekites, or extreme Islamic sects that regard outsiders as Kafir, or interpretations of the Bible in the Middle Ages, or the way Christians regarded Jews.  Many of those things are in the past for mainstream religions.  But, like Scientology,  mainstream faiths should not be thought of as homogeneous organisations.  There are sects and individuals from widely recognised religions that have views that are utterly vile.  Mel Gibson’s father is a good example of Catholicism gone wrong.

So, are people right to protest Scientology?  Absolutely. The record of litigation against opponents of Scientology is something they should be ashamed of.  In purely practical, amoral terms, it doesn’t seem to have worked.  If anything it has made the situation worse.  And the money they charge is a valid thing to criticise.  Their attitude towards the media, specifically removing clips of Tom Cruise, was anti-free speech, and should be criticised.  Abuse of things like the DMCA and asymmetrical litigation through attrition are problems of our age.  People with loads of money, suing people with little money, until they give up.

The bad things that have happened within Scientology are an emotionally charged issue.  I cannot rationally say that any of the things that have happened within Scientology (notably the Lisa McPherson case) are any better or worse than things that have happened within mainstream religions.  Even limiting the scope of inquiry to the Twentieth Century.  In mainstream religions there have been deaths, suicides, exorcisms, child abuse, extremism, racism, financial irregularities and more. 

So lets not, for a second, think that mainstream religions are any better. But two wrongs do not make a right.  The behaviour of other religions doesn’t justify the things Scientology stands accused of.

Fundamentally speaking, I’m a wimp.  I can’t bring myself to be anti-religious – people have a right to make up their own mind.  My belief is that all religion is wrong.  That’s my choice.  Other people have theirs.  It’s not my place to be evangelical about my beliefs or to tell others what they can and can’t believe.  The thing that pisses me off about religion is when it steps outside of its domain.  Interfering with politics, science, and law. That is as bad as atheists expecting a say in theology or giving advice on the ’spirit’ (whatever the fuck that is). 

I don’t think anonymous is anti-religious either. 

People have as much right to criticise religion as religion has to criticise atheism.  Free speech is the way it should be.  I think we live in a better world if there is critical dialogue between people who disagree.

The best thing that Scientology can do in response to anonymous is to prove everyone wrong by not attacking well meaning people in masks.  If they attack ‘anonymous’ they are proving all of their critics right. Scientologists have a right to practice their faith and people have a right to peacefully protest.

I am going to take pictures and to lurk.  In real life anonymous is new shit and therefore interesting. If anyone wants to meet up, or is going, or wants to go, drop me an email.   I’ll be lurking around all day. 

Links:

London Lulz.

There is a video doing the rounds on the internet of a US soldier tossing a puppy off a cliff (click here to watch it). It purports to be shot in Iraq. It looks and sounds real. Cruelty to animals is wrong. But I think it has to be placed in context. Caveats apply:

If you’ve ever been to a country that has a problem with feral dogs, you’ll know that dealing with wild dogs can be a total pain in the arse because they’re unpredictable. They’re mostly scared of people, because, as scavengers, they’re chased away with sticks and shouts. Other times, with children, or if they feel threatened, they’ll bite, and in packs they can attack. They can carry rabies and present a public health issue. Under Saddam Hussein the infrastructure in Iraq was held together with bubblegum, duct tape, and tyranny. After the invasion, the coalition political leaders, those so keen on war, had no decent plan, at all, to deal with the aftermath. Rather depressingly, it’s been repeated by politicians calling for a pull-out of Iraq; with no detailed plans to deal with what happens next.

During the invasion, and its aftermath, all of the pest control, public services, and public service infrastructure, were destroyed, looted, or both, here’s what Donald Rumsfeld had to say at the time:

“Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things … stuff happens”

The destruction of public services was allowed to happen. Simple things like pest control were looted out of existence – and worse was to come. The people who dealt with practical things, the people running ministries, what was left of them, emigrated to neighbouring states like Jordan and Syria, or were fired in the de-Baathification of the Iraqi state. As a result wild dogs are a bigger problem in Iraq today, than they were prior to the invasion. And they were a problem prior to the invasion. Tossing a puppy off a cliff isn’t the best form of pest control, but placed in context, it’s different from someone buying a puppy in a pet-shop specifically to toss it off a cliff. It’s still cruel and it’s still wrong, but given the situation soldiers are in, dealing with the arse-end of geopolitics, it is, to my mind, forgivable. Many people seem to be more incensed at a soldier tossing a dog off a cliff than they are about the situation soldiers have been left to clean up.

I have a bad back. At the moment I go to bed at night thinking, by fuck I’ve got a bad back, and I wake up thinking, by fuck, my bad back has returned. I know the cure to this ailment. It’s a form of distraction therapy pioneered in the treatment of many rock stars. For £50,000, of someone else’s money (essential), a morning, I could be woken up by nude models throwing money at me. It wouldn’t, strictly speaking, cure the bad back, but mornings would at least be tolerable. It doesn’t work with piddly amounts of money because fifty pence pieces and pound coins hurt.

Manuals are often written with a lack of humour so acute they’re funny.  I’m not expecting “so … three men walked into a bar and … eleemosynary arse burp, bumped their head on it”  between paragraphs in a D80’s manual.  The tiger tank had a funny manual which was distinctly unfunny in context (1).  

What objects warrant manuals?   I think, much like many a wanky wankster, had they the balls,  that for every ontological entity there is a manual that is real or potentially real.  Manuals for everything.  The previous three word  sentence is same as the sum of the sentences that preceded it which is something I done-gone-did to make a point about semiology (2).

I am tired and typing, and typing when tired, is something you can read,  a great deal, on blogs. One day it will be up there with clichéd dialogues started with the phrase “bloody awful weather, how’s the wife?”.   Fuckers.  People in general, that is. If we didn’t procreate it’d be a pretty short-lived species.   We’ve not even reached the record of the trilobites (3).

Tripping over a freshly killed rat in the dark is jarring. My cat brought a huge dead rat into the house. I tripped over it in the hall. It was squishy and still warm. Rigor-mortis had not yet set in. It had no pulse. It must have been six inches long and looked kind of peaceful. I tripped over it in the hall. Cats are bastards. The rat is in the kitchen bin.

Thought of the day

Ultimately cats are animals.

I don’t like arbitrary celebrations such as New Year’s Eve.  As far as I can make out, New Year’s Eve is a celebrations of the Gregorian calendar - a cycle of roughly 365 days.  Which doesn’t make a great deal of sense.  Every day is New Year’s Eve  if you count from 364 days ago.  Aside from that, the Gregorian calendar, it’s history, is fucked.  The ultimate celebration of roughly 365 days is your birthday.  I think we should ditch New Year’s Eve and have better birthdays.   I think it would save money.  In about 300 years time, after another Enlightenment, there’s going to be a metric time system/calendar based on subdivisions of a solar year.  As such squares would fuck up metric time because of all their watches and shit picture calendars.

Waitrose and Marks and Spencer’s definitely make the nicest crisps.  I say make, but  they probably delegate the making of the crisps, the preparation of the potatoes, the whole gamut.   All kinds of flavours too.  I think that when people talk about crisps in the context of crackers they confuse foreigners.  The crisps I just ate were made in Denmark on behalf of Marks and Spencer’s.  They were slightly orange.  There are orange kangaroos.  Is there an orange kangaroo in Denmark?  This blog has been taken over by one of those spam bot things that puts together messages that look vaguely like they mean something but don’t.

Prestige replicas
 
Most popular watches

Rolex Datejusts | Cartier | Hublot |Panerai
 
Most popular TIFFANY & CO. JEWERLY

Tiffany & CO Earings
 
Most popular PENS

Mont Blanc Rollerball | Gucci Roller | St Dupont Ballpoint
 

There’s a guy on MySpace that collects the polythene wrappers from promotional toys.  He catalogues them.  He like Radiohead and The Killers, and has an Andy Warhol themed MySpace page.  He has 600 Scandinavian MySpace friends.  It’s great the MySpace brings like minded people together.  It’s a wonder and a blessing of our age.  There’s another guy who only speaks via his mobile phone, using text speak, and, according to MySpace (at least), is friends with Sting.  MySpace friends with Sting.  I heard a funny story over Christmas about lady from Michigan who set up a MySpace page for her dog.

Shockingly she started getting stalked, which peaked with her house been broken into, leading to the arrest of a 24 year old sociology post-grad student from Cardiff (UK).  Upon arrest he confessed his romantic intentions towards the dog and was placed in the custody of state mental health services.  It was barely reported in the press.  People should stress MySpace can be dangerous.  It has edge.

I was sitting eating cheese with my friend Megan when lightening struck and their was a power cut.  I woke up. To find there was a thunderstorm outside and there had been a power cut.  And that I wasn’t friends with Megan and I’d run out of cheese.  Life’s like that.  One time, hiding behind a mud bank, while a farmer paced beyond with a shotgun, in a cold, grey Suffolk winter, having been chased by pigs, I can remember thinking “by God.  I’ve got cold feet.  And they’re wet”.  Porcine pursuit is scarier.  Being chased by angry future bacon  is disturbing.  Farmers get bored.  And shotgun shot isn’t lethal from a distance.  A pig will chew your bollocks off.

Although the porcine pursuit may have been motivated by curiosity rather than anger.  What kind of idiot hangs around to find out?   I was over the fence faster than George Blake. That night, lying on an insulating mat, on a slab of stone, in a very flat field, in Norfolk, I looked up at the sky and thought “there’s more black stuff than stars.  It must be better”.  And fell asleep for a bit, only to be woken a short time later by a coach load of UFO hunters from Birmingham, who I amused with drunken tales of being abducted by UFOs, which they bought wholesale, until I brought UB40 and the Second World War into it. Talking colons while lecturing about the bombing of Coventry was over egging the story.