04Aug05 — 8

Why Carl Hiaasen’s Imagination Doesn’t Have To Work Too Hard

Currently these are the top five most popular stories on Florida’s Local6 news Website:

  • Giant ‘Blue Bird’ On Roof Upsets Neighborhood
  • Killer Bees Found In Louisiana
  • Cops: Man Fabricated Hitchhiker’s Death To Make Wife Leave
  • Giant ‘Bra Fence’ Sparks Controversy
  • Woman Allegedly Sells Sexual Favors To Elderly For $4

[LUNCHTIME UPDATE:] Noteworthy headlines in the “Spotlight” section, down on the left of the Local6 index page:

  • Electrocuted Squirrel Blamed For Outage
  • Kids’ Lemonade Stand Shut Down After Competitor Complains
  • 11-Year-Old Girl Who Threw Rock To Be Tried For Felony
  • Naked Swordsman Pleads Guilty To Assault
  • Family Finds Python Under Dishwasher
  • Child Damages 16th-Century Statue Of Neptune
  • Court Strikes Down Hawaiians-Only Admissions Policy
  • Cyclist Ticketed After Falling
03Aug05 — 0

Separated At Birth

To minimize the inevitable public disapproval it is crucial when creating a cloned mammal in your laboratory to make as little mention as possible of your previous failed attempts to do so, and to give your successful clone a cute name: “Dolly” the sheep, “Ralph” the rat, and now “Snuppy”, the Afghan puppy who thinks he’s a Labrador:

S Korea unveils first dog clone

Scientists in South Korea have produced the first dog clones, they report in Nature magazine this week.

One of the puppies died soon after birth but the other, an Afghan hound named Snuppy, is still doing well after 16 weeks, the researchers say.

Tricky process

Snuppy, whose name stands for Seoul National University puppy, was made from a cell taken from the ear of a three-year-old male Afghan hound.

Scientists took the genetic material from the ear cell and placed it into an empty egg cell. This egg was then stimulated to start dividing and develop into an embryo.

Once growing, it was transferred to Snuppy’s surrogate mother, a yellow labrador. The Afghan pup was born by caesarean section after a full 60 days of pregnancy.

Although many other animals have been successfully cloned, dogs are notoriously difficult: the South Korean team only obtained three pregnancies from more than 1,000 embryo transfers into 123 recipients.

Two of the pregnancies are accounted for, but the article completely omits any reference to “Snupzilla”, the 30-storey killer Afghan hound currently terrorising downtown Seoul. Let’s hope that the University of East London’s work on “Tyson-Ra”, their giant cloned Pit Bull Terrier, is completed in time to save the rest of the country from destruction.

03Aug05 — 2

Thank You, UK Taxpayers

I’m still feeling rough so, even if there were a laboratory for me to go to (which there isn’t because it’s been shut down), I wouldn’t be there anyway. You lot are paying my wages until September though. So, if any of you have recently sequenced a gene and would like me to predict the structure of its product, just email it to me in FASTA format and I’ll try to get back to you within the week with the co-ordinates.

On a related note, this made me laugh.

03Aug05 — 11

A Lie

BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme five minutes ago in its report on the 60th anniversary of the dropping of The Bomb:

“In the United States there was a steely determination to triumph [in the war] in the Far East by whatever means, at whatever cost.”

02Aug05 — 0

Deferred Gratification

When I was a boy and my written German was quite good, I used to have a pen-pal in East Berlin, a young soldier. We would scribble symbols over the seals of our letters to each other, hoping that we’d be able to tell if the authorities had opened our correspondence. Today I was completely unable to concentrate on the content of this interview at Clive Davis’s place. After reading the introduction, all I could think was: “There’s a Starbucks at Checkpoint Charlie?! Fuck yeah!“

02Aug05 — 8

Unknown Talent

I’ve been ill lately—a cold and upset stomach which, if I had a wife, I would tell her was “gastric ‘flu”. Being ill is boring. Yesterday evening I crawled out of bed about nine to entertain myself by surfing the Web for some free music to download. There’s a site where people using a particular piece of music-making software share their compositions with other users. Not only do they make available MP3s of their work, but they release the files containing the scores of their tracks so that others can remix and reuse their material.

After browsing the “Electronica” section and listening to some pleasant sub-Jean-Michel Jarre efforts, I decide to risk downloading a track from the site’s “Urban” category, where I fully expect the content to be marred by the usual lousy amateurish vocals. The difference between good popular music recordings and bad ones—whether the performers are signed or unsigned—is almost always the same: the quality of the singing and the quality of the songwriting. I put on my headphones and my weary music-critic ears, expecting to hear the formulaic efforts of another cack-handed bedroom synthesizer bore with his girlfriend on vocals wandering forlorn somewhere in the vicinity of the tune. Instead I am treated to an amazing display of pitch-perfect R&B crooning and flawless close-mike technique. The production is a bit dated, but who is this guy and why isn’t he signed?

He’s Babyface. He’s sold 100 million records, his hometown named a road after him, and it’s an illegal copy of his 1996 single Every Time I Close My Eyes.

Ah well. I haven’t discovered the next Luther Vandross, but at least I can tell when the Emperor is fully clothed.

02Aug05 — 2

Life And Death In Daily Mail World

Okay, so this post links to an article in the Telegraph, but work with me here. Celebrity newsreader and reality TV ballroom dancer Natasha Kaplinsky has had some difficulty selling her house. This fact opens a piece about other nice middle-class people [British definition] trying to flog their own or their parents’ respective gaffs in a falling property market. This quote from one of the latter category of “sufferers” was drawn to my attention by the Motley Fool and tells non-Brits a lot about the way the English relate to the country’s number one obsession:

“In May, I reduced the price again, this time to £325,000. I have had four or five people come to view the house since then, but I am not sure how serious they were. One American couple just stood there and said ‘how quaint’. The market just seems dead at the moment. There has been a lot of property in the village lurking around on the market for several months, several for over a year. From the point of view of selling her house, my mother died at just the wrong time.“

Why do I use the phrase “Daily Mail World”? Well the Mail is (like its readers, I suspect) fixated on house prices. For example, Paul Nixon found this cutting from the Mail in Private Eye:

“And they point out that global warming could have positive effects which [sic] are generally ignored. In Britain, these include rises in house prices which ‘tend to be higher in regions with preferred climates'”

On a related note, contributors to the Fool respond to a link to this story

Newly-built flats go up in flames

Some flats at a new housing development in Somerset may have to be demolished after a major fire on Monday morning.

with the following joke:

Three old men were sipping cocktails by the beach in Florida one sunny Floridian afternoon, when one turns to the other and asks, “So how did you make enough money to retire down here?”, in an effort to make small-talk. The other turned towards him with a very sombre face and says “Oh, it was very tragic; I used to have a textiles factory, but one day it caught fire and burnt to the ground-there was literally nothing left. Luckily I was insured, so seeing as my wife and I are getting on in years, we thought we’d retire somewhere warm and sunny on the coast, and here we are; how ’bout you?”

The other replied “Well that’s an amazing coincidence, I too had a garment factory, but one day it burnt down leaving me with nothing, but luckily the Lord was smiling down on me that day and my insurance paid out, and here I am sipping cocktails with you.”

At this point they both turned to the third old man and asked him how he came to be there. He replied, “Well, I used to work as a self-employed fabric salesman, selling cloth out of a warehouse in Mississippi, but one day there was an almighty flood, and all of my stock was ruined, and that was almost the end of me, but by a great stroke of good fortune I had taken out flood insurance the year before and I was able to retire to Florida on the proceeds.” The two old men who had asked him the question in the first place now began to look very puzzled, and after a few minutes has passed in silence, the first man could not contain his curiosity any longer, and blurted out,

“But how do you start a flood?”

01Aug05 — 15

Nice Distinctions

British elites have been inventive and subtle in preserving their advantages. Their most important achievement has been to tilt Britain towards meritocracy and then restrict access to the means by which citizens can prove their “merit”. Those amongst the rich and connected who fancy themselves as progressives have played into the hands of the most reactionary of their peers. Partly this has been because these so-called progressives are still preoccupied with Marx’s completely outdated idea of what class is. Partly, I think, they know subconsciously that the advent of a real meritocracy would undermine their position of comfort. It’s no accident that the most anti-Semitic people I’ve met in Britain come from the upper classes. They are the ones who have felt most threatened by educationally and economically high-achieving Jews.

One of the cleverest tricks of the British establishment, though, has been to disguise its privilege with the nifty use of vocabulary. I lost count of the number of fellow Oxford undergraduates who cast themselves as “state-educated”, when in fact they had attended fee-charging grammar schools or had government subsidised private education. In the 80s and 90s the word “yuppie” had a completely different meaning in Britain from that used in the States, though in both countries it flagged disapproval. Britain’s yuppies were not “professionals”; the term was most frequently applied to City traders from ordinary backgrounds, the proverbial “barrow-boys made good”. Later the word became further degraded to a tabloid term of abuse for people with more money than the journalist writing about them. Britain’s yuppies were easy to hate: occupationally loud conspicuous consumers. They were an effective distraction, targets the proles could throw rotten fruit at while missing those who lived more secure and quietly enriching lives in the higher branches of the jungle. This idea of inherited security as being the real meaning of class advantage has become almost conventional to those who study social status academically, but has yet to diffuse into everyday discussion. There are still plenty of people who are blind to the real lines in British society.

A few weeks back Hot Wheels Helena was complaining to me about a wussie song that was playing everywhere on the radio: some sensitive singer-songwriter bloke whining about how he’d never get to be with some pretty girl he’d seen. The singer-songwriter is James Blunt and he’s now number one in the UK single charts with the song You’re Beautiful. Various reports are describing Blunt as a “former squaddie“, as though he used to be a working-class grunt with a buzz cut, necking lager in Colchester town centre. Describing someone who used to be an officer in the Household Cavalry (“the Guards”) and who carried the Queen Mother’s coffin as a “former squaddie” is like describing a ex-assistant to the architect Richard Rogers as a “former navvie“.

Once, as I walked into the main entrance of Balliol, a tour guide told the audience following him around Oxford:

“The three most important old-boy networks in Britain are Eton, Balliol, and the Guards.”

So, any visitors to this site thinking of getting a bit bolshie in the comments, just remember who you’re dealing with. I have friends in high places.

31Jul05 — 5

Just Kill Me Now

It’s half-past one in the morning and opposite my bedroom there’s a house full of drunk Mediterranean language students with MTV accents singing Oasis’s Wonderwall out of tune.

26Jul05 — 2

Clarifications

My last post was provoked by the continuing gloatiness of Australia’s cricket fans and it linked to a normblog post that looked suspiciously like an example of such behaviour. Truth was he was just being sarky so I’ve changed the link. My apologies to Norm, who isn’t a bad loser—though I very much hope that some kind of England recovery will turn him into one.

More importantly, over the weekend, I also posted about people’s possible misperception of the appearance of the recent victim of the Stockwell police shooting and of one of the “failed” suicide bombers. That post wasn’t intended as a judgement. I have posted before about my my own and others’ difficulties in accurately reading the world around them—and not done so disapprovingly. What interested me in particular about the widely-published security photo is that, even though, on the evidence of the photo itself, the sweatshirt says “New You”, my being told repeatedly that it said “New York” made me see it as saying “New York”. Funny thing is—and this might be the last time I ever link to the words of dsquared—it probably does.

Do you remember a superb Guardian(?) television advertisement in which a skinhead appeared at first to be mugging a city gent with a briefcase, but, as the camera pulled away, we saw that he was actually pushing his “victim” out of the way of a falling pallet of bricks? Strange that it should take a “recently arrived” “American” “obsessive” to point out that The Guardian is employing a new kind of ultra-Right-wing youth. I remember, at the height of the fashion for skinhead politics, fashion, and music in the Midlands, one of my dad’s former teaching colleagues (who later went on to be headmaster of a private school in Pakistan) ironically commenting that he had to feel sorry for the Asian skinheads in his classes. There are quite a few metaphorical “Asian skinheads” living in Britain now and I don’t feel sorry for them at all.

24Jul05 — 0

All-Purpose Apology

Lately I have promised various people various things, including a hugely superfluous full-length post on PooterGeek about the recent British bombings. I must apologise to those I have so far disappointed. Tony Blair in particular keeps phoning me, hoping that I will be able to provide him with some choice phrases. Sorry, Tone. I have been too busy to finish these tasks, but I have not forgotten them—and soon (not having a proper job any more) I will have a great deal of time to complete them. Right now, however, things are frantic.

Sorry also to people whose comments spent longer than usual in purgatory today. I was flitting about on London Transport (metaphorically giving the finger to mass murderers) so I couldn’t monitor the PooterGeek approval system as closely as usual. Sadly there’s no wi-fi underground.

24Jul05 — 25

Bad Poetry Celebrity Deathmatch

You thought Harry “Haystacks” Pinter was unbeatable, but now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Michael “The Bomber” Rosen.

[via Voslunga]

UPDATE: I thought I’d have a go myself. (Anyone is welcome to join in in the comments.)

War is bad
When Americans do it.
Blowing up civilians is understandable
As long as you’re really, really unhappy about something
Like poverty
Or democracy
Or women driving cars
Or homosexuals breathing
Or Jews existing.

Actually, it’s not as easy as it looks.

22Jul05 — 2

Spoiler Alert

If, like me, you have found that reading Harry Potter leaves you unmoved, but you feel the need to keep up with the plots so you can discuss the phenomenon with the Pottd People around you, you’ll be pleased to know that Leasey has been reading the latest volume on behalf of PooterGeekers. Apparently, the central character who dies in this one is Harry Potter himself. She also told me that the next in the series, Harry Potter’s Surviving Friends And The Half-Dead Franchise, is available to pre-order from Amazon, itself now a wholly owned subsidiary of Bloomsbury.

19Jul05 — 0

OK!

Oliver Kamm has been back for a while and has been on fine form since his return. PooterGeek’s Paris correspondent should check out his latest about the Socialist Workers’ Party and the PKK. Immediately after the recent atrocity in Turkey Claire memorably asked in an email, “What do you promise [a Marxist-Leninist suicide bomber]? 72 collective farms in Paradise?”

One thing about Kamm’s ‘Blog’s new look I have to comment on: his portrait looks exactly like an “After” photo from an advert for a baldness treatment. Not that I ever pay any attention to adverts for baldness treatments, mind.

19Jul05 — 5

Intelligence, Race, And Genetics

I’ve been immersed in a (popular) science book—not dipping in and out for research or reference, but swimming from one end to the other. It is an edited interrogation of the original Jensenist, Arthur R. Jensen, by Frank Miele, former senior editor of the American Skeptic magazine (not to be confused with the British The Skeptic magazine or the Australian The Skeptic journal) called Intelligence, Race, And Genetics. I recommend it. It is written for intelligent lay readers. There are clear explanations of the important technical concepts and a minimum of what one of my former biologist co-workers refers to as “dead-hard sums”. It helps that both participants in the dialogue write clear, precise English.

Jensen is a clever, determined scientist who has been vilified for advancing a politically incorrect—and I believe flawed—thesis. He argues that general intelligence is measurable, meaningful, largely inherited, and correlates with “race”. In particular he believes that black Americans score consistently less well than white Americans (15 points on the IQ scale) in tests of general mental ability and do so mainly for genetic reasons. I disagree with him, but I sympathise with him because, on the whole, he has shown greater scientific rigour and personal integrity than many of his critics. Anyone who is depicted in a Nazi uniform by the right sort of cartoonist is usually worth a moment’s hearing. (It doesn’t help that, on the strength of his photograph, Jensen would easily win an audition for the part of an escaped war criminal.)

So reading the book has been a bracing swim for the same reason that writing PooterGeek can be: there’s nothing more educational than disagreeing with smart, honourable people—especially when they are wrong.

17Jul05 — 0

Music and Language Roundup

I noticed this story a little while back and it made me smile. It’s like John Major sacking one of his cabinet members for screwing around (or the Independent having a go at the Guardian for printing the views of an extremist): Oasis fire Pete Doherty for lack of work ethic. Those “working class” Gallagher lads could have conquered America, honest. They just had to pop down to IKEA to get some stuff for the new gaff, then er, well after a Sunday roast you wanna nap, don’t yer? Then, the next time they tried, they, er, had a bit of a mash-up on the road, like.

One compensation for the pain of watching distinctions in English decay is that new kinds of poetic ambiguity become possible. K T Tunstall should be singing about someone being on the other side of the world from her, instead she sings “You’re the Other Side Of The World [To Me]” and gains another possible interpretation. By contrast, The Economist this week carries a piece about the threat of Islamist terrorist attacks in Italy. Its headline is:

“The next target?”

Underneath this is the grammatically sound subheading:

“Terrorism is ‘knocking at Italy’s door’, says the interior minister. Most Italians need no persuading”

This is one of those occasions where the not-so-correct

“Most Italians need no convincing“

would have left the reader with a less ambiguous impression, or one closer to the author’s intent at least.

Another piece of chart song wordplay that pleases me currently is the refrain of Rooster‘s latest:

“You still walked away leaving me in this mess
My love for you is deep and meaningless”

Sadly the song Deep And Meaningless sounds eerily like an easy-to-play clone of an Aerosmith power ballad, as if the boys had been down to the local music shop and bought “Tyler and Perry in A Day” back to the studio with them. Still. Can’t complain. At least it’s not a cut from the imminent Crazy Frog album.

In related news, lately Bono has been singing this lyric:

“Oh you look so beautiful tonight
In the city of blinding lights”

In other words:

“Oi can’t see feck all roight now, Alison, but yer gorgeous.”

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