03May07 — 16

Vote!

I love voting. So should you. If you don’t like the choice on offer to you then you should stand for election yourself or go along to your polling centre and spoil your ballot paper—spoilt papers have to be counted. If you can’t be bothered to do any of these things then the rest of us can’t be bothered to listen to you complain about the outcome.

02May07 — 0

WedPhotBlog Update

Despite my general slackness, the Wedding Photography Blog is now in the UK top ten for the search terms “photography blog“. Thank you to everyone who helped to put it where it is.

People are therefore now offering me stuff (including hard cash) in return for my linking to them, but I am, for the time being at least, going to keep my no paid-for recommendations policy. I am also going to try to post there more often. Today I collect five tips for anyone off to a wedding with a digital point-and-shoot.

02May07 — 4

Join The Revolution

If you are a fed up with Windows and/or would like to try out Linux, one of the best and most popular free and open alternatives, then now is a better time than ever. Yesterday Dell confirmed that they would be pre-installing Ubuntu, one of the friendliest forms of the operating system, on some of their consumer PCs and laptops. This means you don’t have to deal with the most difficult part of switching to Linux: installing it.

I first used Linux in the mid 90s, before version 1.0—not because I was trying to be an elite geek, but because my supervisor (who was and is an elite geek) told me to. Of course, being a senior member of staff, he didn’t have to do his own systems administration; someone else installed Linux for him. As a student, I had to get my hands dirty. [Hovis ad music] Ee, back then installing Linux were reet hard work. Now it isn’t. Generally you just drop in a CD, follow the instructions and then tweak the final result until it’s the way you want it to be.

One of my machines is running SuSE Linux, which I think is one of the best commercial Linuxes; another is running the recently released latest version of Kubuntu, a variant of the free-as-in-“free speech” as well free-as-in-“free beer” Ubuntu. All the remote machines that host my own Websites and those I have built for clients are some form of Linux box. My Kubuntu machine at home has been running a whole variety of demanding programs, including various multimedia things, on a hodge-podge of old and new hardware that I put together myself for five days continuously now, without my having to reset or restart it.

I’m giving away a free Kubuntu installation DVD to the first four people to email me in response to this post.

01May07 — 2

Size Matters

I used to work for a Professor whose academic homepage listed among his interests “sperm production”. If you want evidence that female animals can be as promiscuous as male animals you should have a browse through the literature on sperm competition.

In the case of ducks, that promiscuity is not necessarily the females’ choice, so they discriminate between mates by other means. One result of this is that male ducks have extraordinarily long bits. Sadly, no one believes a man when he talks about penis size, so here’s to a link to an article about woman who’s an expert on duck phalluses [requires free New York Times registration]. Some of them really are longer than the whole of the rest of the duck.

01May07 — 3

Guest Post By John Hack, The Voice Of The Media

Five more Muslims are gaoled, pathetic fantasists whose fundamental freedoms have been curtailed solely on the basis of their alleged intention to avenge Britain’s ongoing crusade against their deeply-held beliefs in Iraq. Yet, as we know only too well, only a matter of months ago real militants escaped the new, intrusive powers of this country’s increasingly oppressive “security” services to massively disrupt our already-harrowing journeys into work (the journeys of those of us not concealed from the unemployment figures by living on disability benefits that is, or deprived of our rightful access to those benefits by Blair’s Nazi-like medical inspectors). Those understandably desperate freedom fighters went on to escape justice too.

The failure of our crumbling NHS to reassemble their fragmented flesh so that they could be brought before our once-proud judicial system is standing indictment of the failure of Blair’s public service “reforms”. But this is nothing against the catastrophic failures of MI5. Surely the time has now come for an inquiry into their failed inquiries and, if that inquiry should prove—as so many have in the past—to be a whitewash of Blair’s cronies and their shameful incompetence and Stalinist ruthlessness then there must be an inquiry into the inquiry into the inquiries so to satisfy the rights of us, the ordinary, law-abiding public to have someone—someone in the government—to blame for the failures that led to it.

30Apr07 — 0

Attack Of The Man-Eating Stick Insects

It seems my former employers have funded research into an amazing new drug:

Scientists are developing a pill which could boost women’s libido and reduce their appetite.

The hormone-releasing pill has so far only been given to female monkeys and shrews who displayed more mating behaviour and ate less.

The team from the Medical Research Council’s Human Reproduction Unit in Edinburgh believe a human version could be available within a decade.

A member of the group also reassured the public that they were doing everything they could to prevent their discovery from falling into the hands of Kate Moss.

29Apr07 — 3

Blog Bait

Please tell me this article is a parody, aimed at luring bloggers into making mocking fools of themselves. The suspiciously named “Sebastian Cresswell-Turner” complains at length that his middle-class peers aren’t as rich as members of their parents’ generation and have to do shocking things like live in Battersea or send their children to state schools.

When I was a boy, almost everyone we knew lived in a large house in the country or in the better parts of London. I am not claiming for a moment that we were especially grand—just perfectly well-off. But back then Battersea and Clapham were entirely off our radar, Stockwell another country, and Brixton, Peckham and Streatham simply unheard of. Now, with a few exceptions among those who are notably rich or successful, the next generation of the same families I grew up with is living in just these areas.

Then take private education. The number of people in my parents’ circle who sent their children to state schools could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and were regarded as unfortunate, odd or even subversive. A generation later, however, a considerable proportion of my friends have opted for state schools for their children, in almost all cases for financial reasons.

If this is not downward mobility on a broad scale, then what is?

I particularly enjoyed this bit:

My father, a respected country-based architect, somehow managed to put his four sons through private education. One is now a partner in a venture capital firm; another is co-founder of Lombok, a furniture retailer with a turnover of about £15m a year; another is a highly skilled Shropshire-based cabinet maker; and as for myself, the oldest son, “wordsmith” seems best to describe the translating, writing and language teaching that have occupied me in Paris, Rome and London over the past decade or so.

Perhaps Sebastian is “poor” because he’s a “wordsmith” who, despite the money spent on his education, can’t write English.

27Apr07 — 8

Let Them Eat Cake

Earlier this week, I was walking down the road with a couple of bags of Labour Party leaflets when a woman from a drugs project approached me with a clipboard. She asked me lots of questions about drug-related crime and drug-related violence and drug crime policing; she even asked me if I had a drink or drugs problem. Then she collected all the usual data about age and ethnicity and favourite sexual position. Most of my answers were “don’t know” because I didn’t know.

What was most surprising to me was that, when she ended by asking me what possible solution I would suggest to drug-related problems, I shocked her.
“License drugs,” I said.
She, a woman half my age, responded with a horrified (and non-scripted) “What? All of them?!”
“Yes,” I said, “especially the hard ones.”
Then I pointed out that almost all of her questions had had nothing at all to do with the effects of drugs themselves, but with the illegal activities of drug users and dealers, and that the only negative effects I had experienced had been the result of drunk people trying to pick a fight with me on their way from being kicked out of places serving booze, and that most of the drugs we had been talking about did not promote aggression in those who consumed them.

I should add that I don’t believe that the licensing of drugs would “solve our drugs problems”. I just think that its a possible solution to the worst of them. I also believe that the supervised legalisation of drugs would be, in one sense, regressive: the burden of such a change in the law would fall on the poorest and most disadvantaged—as it usually does before a mood-altering substance is prohibited. That is, those of us who are better off would have less of a problem with drugs; those of us who are worse off would have more of a problem with drugs. My instinct however is that the total problem would get smaller.

It’s not a policy that’s going to appear on a Labour Party leaflet any time soon though, and it’ll never appear on a Conservative one.

25Apr07 — 4

Scissored Sisters

The official name for the place where I live is “Brighton & Hove”. A friend of mine was recently asked at interview to characterize the difference between Brighton and her non-identical Siamese twin town and came up with something along the lines of Hove being a respectable older aunt and Brighton a wayward younger sister.

The Argus, the local newspaper, neatly summed it up yesterday by displaying the following headlines on opposite sides of the same street display:

Hove:
Hove celebrates St George
Brighton:
The Ladyboys of Bangkok

24Apr07 — 10

Unrepresentative Sampling

Not owning a television receiver, being an off-peak gym member, and having friends and relatives with small children, I consume TV in odd ways. I rarely watch the box on purpose, and when I do it’s usually breakfast, daytime, and/or children’s TV.

Yesterday morning, as I stretched on a mat, I read the caption on Jeremy Kyle and saw that he was interviewing a woman (girl?) who claimed not to care who the father of her child was, but felt that it was in her daughter’s interest that she should know the result of a DNA test. This isn’t odd—for The Jeremy Kyle Show that is, a programme that might better be titled “Chav Wars“. As I passed the newsagents on the way home and noted from the front of one of the tabloids that, like her mother, Elizabeth Windsor is an Arsenal supporter, I wondered what Jeremy Kyle captions would be like if the participants were middle class*:

“He dumped me because my mum chewed gum and I said ‘toilet’.”

“Son Hugh wants to turn down his place to read French at Cambridge to do European Studies at Cardiff.”

“Our neighbours hate us because we like privet.”

“My ex-wife lied to the authorities to get Lucy into Thomas Telford School.”

“We don’t make our own soup.”

“My husband thinks opera is silly.”

And as for national children’s television: watching it, most newcomers to this country would come to the conclusion that Britain’s population is about 40 percent non-white. They’d be hugely wrong to do so, and that’s not the only reason why I’m not sure if this is a good thing.

Thanks to Amazon’s DVD rental by post system, I do however get to watch lots of excellent TV series and films—as you might have guessed from all the parodies of old films here and my hatred of spoilers. But this doesn’t mean I don’t deliberately sit down in front of rubbish. I choose much of what I order on the basis of friends’ recommendations. Rome was outstandingly good. Green Wing is excellent. But I thought the first series of 24 started well and sometime around noon began, hour by hour, to suck. In The Thick Of It disappointed for a different reason: being partly the creation of Armando Unfunnucci I wanted it to be bad, but it wasn’t. (I did laugh out loud when he talked in the DVD commentary about “lazy lazy journalists”. Anyone who has ever read his column at the back of The Observer would probably have done the same.)

But I wanted to talk about rubbish. Last week, based on my previous rentals, Amazon recommended the movie DOA—Dead Or Alive to me. I think the All Knowing Brain did this because (out of the kind of insane curiosity that tempts you when you have lots of free DVD slots to fill) I once added the shockingly bad B.E.I.N.G. to my rental list. For those of you who know Bowfinger, Steve Martin’s satire on low-budget Hollywood movie-making, B.E.I.N.G. is the mythical feature “Chubby Rain” made real. My theory was supported by one review that describes DOA—Dead Or Alive as “possibly one of the most gloriously stupid things I’ve ever seen”. Here’s more:

This one is apparently based on a videogame where a bunch of hot girls fight each other in small outfits. The story for this film is that a bunch of hot girls fight each other in small outfits, so I’m going to assume this is an accurate adaptation.

*[Having just read this back, it sounds as though I am using “chav” to mean a member of the British underclasses. I use the word “chav” to refer to a subset of people whose behaviour is irresponsible or illegal. There are rich chavs out there.]

24Apr07 — 4

Stabbity-Stab

YESTERDAY EVENING: I’m outside the House of Commons with Bloggers4Labour supremo Andrew Regan, his sister, and another friend. We’re on our way to Andrew’s [very successful as it happened] Labour blogging meeting in one of the Commons committee rooms. As you’d expect in these Times Of Terror, every visitor gets scanned and searched. Naturally, I am about to embarrass my companions.

My rucksack comes out of the X-ray machine and I remember that I left my Swiss Army knife in there, a tool no snapper or geek should be without—except when passing through airport security.

HOUSE OF COMMONS SECURITY GUARD: Is that a knife in your bag, sir?

POOTERGEEK’S BRAINCELL: Oh shit.

POOTERGEEK: Er, yeah it is. Sorry about that. [hopefully] It’s a Swiss Army knife.

POOTERGEEK’S BRAINCELL: Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word “army”?

SECURITY GUARD: Would you mind removing it from your bag, please?

POOTERGEEK: [scrambling through main section of rucksack and depositing various strange items on the desk next to the scanner] I can’t seem to find it. Which part was it in?

SECURITY GUARD: [to colleague controlling display] Could you bring the one with the knife back up please?

POOTERGEEK: [looking at screen] Oh yeah. Thanks. It’s in the front compartment.

[POOTERGEEK removes knife and hands it to the SECURITY GUARD.]

[SECURITY GUARD returns knife to POOTERGEEK.]

POOTERGEEK: Don’t you want to keep it?

SECURITY GUARD: No. That’s fine. In you go.

14Apr07 — 11

Collaborators And Fighters

Internet old-timers are not necessarily more polite than newcomers. They do, however, tend to know the rules, sometimes as a result of having been slapped down more than once by even-older-timers. Beginners in online communication often don’t even realise there are any rules at all.

Hardcore open source geeks, for example, that is people who collaborate globally to write software, software you are using right now, but you don’t realise you are using because it just works, do have flame wars—indeed, they invented the term—but they tend to start them for good reasons. The sort of people who scrawl on Comment Is Free are abusive because they can be. Toddlers want to throw their tantrums in front of the largest audience available.

For those who remember when access cost dear (except perhaps Bill Gates), one of the gravest online crimes is wasting bandwidth. For those who climb corporate hierarchies (both public and private), one of the greatest virtues is being seen to be doing things. Inevitably, clueless white-collar managers love sending email messages burdened with flabby Microsoft attachments to hundreds of users. Geeks hate them. They hate them not just because they are an ugly way to use a beautiful thing (the Net), but because they do not work.

In the eyes of the true geek, doing things that you know are not going to work and from which you will learn nothing is an even greater crime than being generally wasteful or simply being a jerk. Many people behave badly when they are behind the wheel of a car; almost as many of us change for the worse when we discuss things via bulletin boards, or blogs, or email. Ironically, some of the best geeks are in fact jerks in real life, but they make useful stuff online. To succeed in open source, being conspicuously active is not enough, you must get things done. In the corporate world, by contrast, those who talk about “delivery” have rarely delivered anything of any value at all in their lives, those who call themselves “executives” rarely execute.

This is a prelude to my suggesting that you follow the links over at Never Trust a Hippy on the subject of clever collaborative technologies and the stupid things people do with them. There’s some sensible, concise advice at the foot of the main article he links to, but before that, as if by way of warning, there’s a link to an unpretty, counter-productive Microsoft Powerpoint slideshow.

13Apr07 — 4

Kissin’ in The Back Row

[Black screen. The members of a US “indie” band attempt vainly to hide their highly practised musicianship as they perform a song about balloons called “A Song About Balloons“.]

MOVIE TRAILER VOICEOVER: You’ve had a hard week at work. All you want is to do is slump in front of a DVD in which Bruce Willis smirks and explodes helicopters. But earlier on you agreed to go out to the art house cinema with your girlfriend this evening. And your date has a graduate degree in the humanities. Yes, you’re going to watch William Hurt grow a beard.

[Fade to office of New York shrink. William Hurt is on the couch. He has a beard.]

HURT: Is that what blocked writers do? Have sex with their students in the hope of reawakening their creativity and prompting a crisis in their sadly becalmed relationship with their wives?

SHRINK: [off screen, as she remains for the rest of the movie] Yes. Maggie Gyllenhaal is available.

HURT: Okay. Can you pencil me in for an initially spiky encounter with her that presages a short-lived but passionate tryst in act two?

SHRINK: Of course. But first you have to encounter The Other Major Star Who Isn’t Your Wife. He’ll be playing a minor role, but be crucial to your ultimate emotional breakthrough. He won’t be looking for an Oscar™, but he’ll be winking at the Academy so that they remember he’s Supporting Actor in the bigger budget My Granddaughter Is A Lesbian With Asperger’s as the male lead’s homophobic best friend.

[HURT returns home to his wife, SIGOURNEY WEAVER. He walks into the kitchen and stands on a box so that her eyes are level with his beard.]

HURT: Where’s Laura Linney?

WEAVER: Huh?

HURT: Isn’t she always in this sort of thing?

WEAVER: She couldn’t make it. The agency sent Judy Greer instead.

[Bruce Willis crashes through the window, hanging from a rope and wrestling with a NINJA.]

HURT: What the fuck?!

WILLIS: Hold it! Hold it!

[WILLIS and the NINJA untangle their limbs and WILLIS turns to HURT and WEAVER.]

WILLIS: Shit, did she get to choose the movie again?

WEAVER: I’m afraid so, Bruce.

WILLIS: [shouting to the crew outside] Sorry, guys! Girlfriend’s got a graduate degree in the humanities!

[There are muffled and distant cries of “Aww fuck!” and “Jeez, not again!”
WILLIS and the NINJA dust themselves down and walk off set.]

NINJA: [to WILLIS] Could be worse; could be Meet The Underwater Smoking Tanngoliabees.

WILLIS: Hell, yeah. This one’s got some kind of plot at least.

Bill’s beard’s looking good. I know there’s not much up on top, but d’ya think I could get, like, a goatee or something?

[to JUDY GREER] Hey, Judy! Whassup? Looks like you’re on tonight.

MOVIE TRAILER VOICEOVER: William Hurt Grows A Beard: at a theatre close to you soon, next to the organic smoothies.

11Apr07 — 5

This Space Intentionally Blank

I read a report in the Telegraph that provoked me to write something that was, by my standards, a steaming rant. Then I decided to check the details with the BBC Website’s version of events. This gave the story a completely different tilt so I spiked my blog post.

I’m too busy to write a replacement. Here’s Carole Hersee and a scary clown.

BBC TV test card

09Apr07 — 9

Love Over Gold

Somewhere in a box I have a copy of Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold on cassette. I bought it when I was a kid and listened to it on the Sony boombox that I won when I was thirteen in a competition to come up with a new advertising slogan for Pot Noodle™.

Dire Straits’ fourth, and possibly second best, album was one of several tapes I irritated the rest of my family with by singing along with in my room. Poor Mark Knopfler became too popular with the sort of characters Steve Coogan and Harry Enfield do, the sort of people the music press love to laugh at. No amount of songwriting talent or instrumental virtuosity can redeem you in their eyes if you have uncool fans. Love Over Gold came out the same year as the Clash’s Combat Rock. You know which one will be name-checked more frequently by middle-aged bores in magazine interviews. I know which one is better.

I heard some Dire Straits on the radio the other day and thought I’d like to listen to Love Over Gold again. I could have hooked up my old cassette deck, which is also in a box somewhere. If there had been a way to download the music for a reasonable price in a lossless format with no “copy protection” and burn it onto a CD legally then I would have paid for it again. There wasn’t. There isn’t. There probably won’t be for years. So I didn’t. I just got it from a file-sharing site.

Yes, I “stole” it, but I stole something I already “owned”. As if it needed saying again, in doing so I didn’t deprive anyone of the music in the same way that that tedious, fatuous ad at the beginning of every DVD I legally rent tells me that someone stealing a handbag deprives its owner of wallet and keys and mobile phone. And, contradicting the implication of that same ad, I didn’t donate the money I’d saved to Al-Qaeda, and I didn’t dress up in bondage gear and plunge a branding iron into a pile of red-hot coal. I just slapped it on my CD player and sang along to it again—without playing Tim-Nice-But-Dim tennis-racket guitar. [For a less flippant and more informed fisking of the usual copyright fallacies, see Lessig on a related question.]

I could only get hold of the remastered version of the album though, so the recording I remember has been slathered with (analogue) compression and equalization. The sound is too in-your-face and bright for my tastes, even on my polite loudspeakers, but I suppose I’m comparing it to the orignal softened sound of tape. My hearing’s not as good as it was when I was fourteen, but I don’t need a rack of “aural enhancers” between me and the original mix, thanks, so I’d have preferred it if it had been left alone.

How much would it cost us to pay the journalists and the record companies just to piss off and let us enjoy the music? Oh, yeah, I remember. We’d pay the ransom if they’d let us, but I think we’ll just let them go extinct instead.

08Apr07 — 1

Citizen Ghale

My dad has long been associated, as a member and officer, with the largest UK teaching union, the NAS/UWT. Indeed, in classic working-class northerner style, he first had a heart attack as he arrived at a union conference. Equally typically, after it was initially misdiagnosed by a junior doctor as a digestive problem, he just carried on with business as usual. Presumably if he’d been a factory worker like his dad he’d have lost consciousness later the same day and wound up under some heavy machinery.

The NAS/UWT hasn’t always been the largest teaching union in the UK. Every year, at the conference of its rival, the NUT, at least one speech or happening illustrates why so many of their members have defected to the NAS over the years. This time the union’s “first ethnic minority president” Baljeet Ghale did her bit for the numbers. According to her, “ministers fuel racism by ordering schools to teach British values”.

Apparently Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, had described the “values we hold very dear in Britain” as “free speech, tolerance, respect for the rule of law”. I’m not Johnson’s biggest fan, but, given that Britain is more-than-slightly well known around the World for its role in the Enlightenment, the development of parliamentary democracy, and for its relative civil stability and security—God knows the only reason we’re the fifth biggest economy is that enough of the World’s occupants think their money’s safe with us—he’s got a point. As far as I can see, her perception that Johnson believes these attributes are somehow racial is the only thing that’s “racist” here. She asked:

Well, in what way, I’d like to know, are these values that are not held by the peoples of other countries?

Putting aside the false exclusion—if Johnson had expressed his pride in the quality of British beer would this have implied that Belgian breweries are crap?—it’s worth noting that Ms Ghale is from Kenya, a country whose human rights record is not by any means the worst in the populous continent of Africa. (Africa is large land mass on the planet Earth and widely believed to have been the birthplace of the human race.)

Here’s how Amnesty would answer her question. The Kenyan government holds free speech so dear that it arrests the editor of the Kenya Times for the curious offence of “publishing alarming information”, by writing an article criticising the President, and the President’s wife can turn up at a studio with her bodyguards to assault a cameraman and have the Attorney General terminate the private prosecution brought against her as a result of the incident. In Kenya, the police torture and kill citizens with near “impunity” and women and girls face “widespread violence and discrimination”. Other than that, when it comes to respect for the rule of law, it’s just like Blighty. To suggest otherwise, not that anybody did, would of course encourage “racism”. Even as a self-described “global citizen” (puh-lease), Ghale is already a practised thrower of the comfortable Western pseudo-progressive’s favourite slur.

You might argue that the people of Kenya have more affection for human rights than their government so, in that sense, there is a truth behind Ghale’s non sequitur, a truth that might have been so clear to her parent(s)/guardian(s) that they left Kenya to live in the UK. But who am I to say? They might have come here for the beer.

I suspect that Gary Eason, who wrote the BBC report, had become a little weary after days of sitting listening to NUT moonbattery because he (or his sub) mischievously headed the last section of the report, outlining Ghale’s wider attack on UK government education policy, “Cuba”. Why? Ghale favourably compared school class sizes in Cuba with those of the UK. That’s Cuba, people. You know: the country you should visit before the Castro currently in charge dies and globalization “spoils” the place.

[Plural Identities had some more interesting things to say about this speech. And here’s footage of something English that’ll probably upset at least one NUT member.]

07Apr07 — 0

Hands Across The Ocean

Hi, Knut. Jerry here.

Yeah, I’m afraid it is kinda bad news again. Look, I gotta be honest with you: Pixar have nixed the whole project. No, it wasn’t your fee—though I gotta say they thought the spec you were demanding for your Winnebago was, er, “unusual”.

You really wanna know? Hey, don’t take this the wrong way, but the words they used were: “Polar bears are kinda five minutes ago.”

Yeah, it was the otters again.

Hey, Knut, Knut. Take it easy. They’re just having their fifteen of fame. You’re an enduring icon. What can I say? They had a good pitch: “PAWS: A Sea Otter Story“.

No, I don’t know if they’re gay. I think they’re different sexes.

Hell, yeah, I guess it would be an angle if they were.

Yeah, like the penguins.

I’m telling you, man, there’s no “pink mafia”. Knut, I’m Jewish. You think I’d not notice if there was another minority group running Hollywood?

Yeah, Coke’s still interested, but they were wondering if you’d consider working with another bear.

Yeah, you’ll have to split the fee. Try to roll with it, my friend. Things move on.

Yeah, there’ll be hugging.

No, you don’t have to blow anyone!

They’re going for a kind of male bonding vibe: “relaxing with a cool drink after a hard day’s hunting” kinda thing.

Well, yeah, it’s funny you should say that. They do wanna use the theme from Brokeback Mountain—but in an ironic way…

Knut?

Knut?!

[He puts the phone down.]

Jeez. Bear, can’t take a little joke. Maybe he’s got a sore head.

“Bear with a sore head”! Whaddya think of that, Rhona? I kill myself sometimes.

05Apr07 — 7

Snapshots From My Glamorous Life

Last week, I noticed a registered Brighton & Hove taxi parked outside the Muslim community centre. Prominent on the dashboard was a hardback copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. A couple of days later I saw the car (and the book) again. This time the vehicle was being attended to by two of B&H’s terrifyingly efficient traffic wardens. They were finishing up as I jogged past, and the older male warden said to his younger female colleague: “I think it’s about time for a chocolate digestive.”

As the singlest man in Britain, I was pleased to notice earlier this week that the local Co-op is selling Hovis Granary™ half-loaves. I was less pleased to notice that they are selling them Buy-One-Get-One-Free.

I have a friend from university who, having three degrees in mathematics, can be a little other-worldly. Her partner once told me that he had referred to Franz Ferdinand in her presence and she had neither heard of the unfairly popular band nor the assassinated Archduke. As an undergraduate, she invited a mixed race former schoolmate of hers to stay. When we were introduced I said to her, in my gay-trousered way, “I like your hair. How do you get it straightened?” My friend was amazed. She’d always thought that her mate’s hair was naturally that way.

I was reminded of this yesterday, during a telephone conversation with a former flatmate of mine—also PhD’d. She was discussing her gay friend’s chest hair problem with me.

POOTERGEEK: That’s one advantage of not being white, I suppose: a rug-free upper body.
FRIEND: Huh?
POOTERGEEK: When was the last time you saw a black man with a hairy chest?
FRIEND: Well, er. I always thought that was from waxing.

Huge, untapped African market ahoy! Buy Immac!

04Apr07 — 2

I’m Typing This At Three O’Clock In The Morning…

…because I stupidly fried my archiving PC on Sunday evening: melted plastic, smoke, the works. I’m boring about these things so I lost no data, but I did lose too many hours to re-building and re-configuring hardware and software and restoring files. And now I’ve just rounded the tedium off by fishing the last couple of weeks of spam out of the Euston Manifesto signatories list.

Bed time.

29Mar07 — 1

Shady Character

Having enjoyed “Guido Fawkes’s” (dis)appearance yesterday evening on Newsnight over my lunch today, there’s only one thing I’d change about my post on political blogging from last week: I’d call it “Squeaky Man”.

I recommend this Google Blogsearch as well. In particular, whilst ranting about Tories, “Hamer Shawcross”, another anonymous watcher-of-parliament, captures something of Fawkes’s blog’s contribution to contemporary debate and “notsaussure” tells us the English for Schadenfreude.

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