Via Panchromatica comes this lovely little tale of the reach of the Web. As he says, you have to read through the comments of this flickr picture for the delightful coincidence(s).
11May05 — 1
11May05 — 10
My Son The Midfielder
Further to my discovering that the last Pope was Jewish, were you aware that Wikipedia helpfully furnishes its users with both a list of partial Jews and a list of Jewish superheroes? Bill and Hillary, David Beckham, Elvis, Muriel Gray, The Thing, we hardly knew you.
Jewish sportstar (allegedly)
11May05 — 1
Hero Of The Revolution
I’m surprised that The Independent didn’t suggest one hundred thousand cheering Georgians had mistaken George Bush for George Galloway:
“Addressing a 100,000-strong crowd in Freedom Square in Tbilisi yesterday, Mr Bush said the November 2003 uprising that toppled the country’s former leader Eduard Shevardnadze had been an example for Ukraine, Iraq, Lebanon and other countries that were seeking democracy.”
Joking aside, whodathunkit? This is George “isolationism in 2000” Bush we’re reading about.
The Independent‘s line on Genghis Khan is more what you’d expect though:
“He may be an unlikely choice for a national hero and is hardly a marketing guru’s ideal choice of brand but modern-day Mongolia cannot be too choosy.”
11May05 — 1
Democracy, Whiskey, Busty
You can thank Judith for this shocking example of US cultural insensitivity:
“the almost unthinkable personification of everything the people we’re fighting hate: hot blond Christian white girls, not too smart and seductively dressed, ready to dispense justice and the American spirit while leading a sexy attack, thus confusing the enemy into masturbating instead of defending themselves”
[Safe for work.]
10May05 — 2
Fallen Comrade
Stephen K of God Save The Queen seems to think that his acquiring a life is some kind of excuse for retiring from ‘Blogging. Congratulations on getting married, yer bastard.
Ah well, Scott’s back at The Daily Ablution, though he still hasn’t put a link to PooterGeek on his site, despite my (admittedly rude) email to him demanding one. Git.
10May05 — 6
A Few Words Of Advice
If you want him to marry you before you have children and he won’t do it, bin him. If you don’t want to have children and she won’t take contraception seriously, bin her. An affair may be entered into lightly; parenthood should not. Whatever the tabloid arithmetic of relationships claims, there are some things more important than the Hollywood ideal of “love”. Among these things are children. They last longer. They are more precious. Life conquers all. Love doesn’t.
10May05 — 7
I’m Mr Pootatohead
George Szirtes has commented at PooterGeek a couple of times, not always to agree with me. I was going to write an enthusiastic review of his collection An English Apocalypse here, but I’ve lost the copy of it I got from Amazon only a fortnight ago.
Just order a copy. What I’d read of it was excellent. I’ll write about it in more detail here when I find it again and can quote from it.
09May05 — 1
Don’t Fence Me In
Further to my iPod-bothering post about content freedom, read about Friday’s US Federal appeals court ruling against media industry requirements for built-in hardware anti-piracy technology and marvel at this rant today against the iPod’s DRM (Digital Rights Management) from Hilary Rosen, a woman who took the music industry dollar for years.
09May05 — 18
Freedom Is Messy
I have an iRiver. It’s fugly. Even its name is an aesthetically displeasing admission that the sole reason for its existence is to divert market share from the mighty iPod family.
You buy an iPod from a smiley, smart-casual white person in an authorized Mac dealership where the shelves are cleaner and brighter than those in most labs I’ve worked in. You buy an iRiver from a sulky, gawky Asian kid in a shop modelled after a market stall in Bladerunner. You haggle. His fingers perform a ritual dance on an oversized electronic calculator. When you’ve bought it and finally prised it out of its box, the iRiver’s strange, pinstripe-patterned surface comes covered in hard-to-peel-off stickers. Its accessories are fresh from being fished out of vats of lumpy, black molten plastic by stoop-backed Chinese political prisoners with electrodes clamped to their nipples. The manual boasts of the iRiver’s “extraordinarily sleek design”. It is as sleek as a yak.
a yak
I have complained (to outrage from the iPoderati) about the problems I had using iTunes, the computer software that comes with iPods, but must admit that the software that comes on iPods—so that you can actually operate the things—almost lives up to the almighty hype surrounding its usability.
I would never say the same of the iRiver operating system, yet another dimension of iRiver fugliness. The interface is hellish. The colours are garish. The documentation is in Engrish:
“Images and Text are OK!”
“Using Browser, you can perform the work connecting to external devices such as digital camera etc.”
“Skip the set period of time while playback.”
But I can play exactly what I like on it: MP3s, WAVs, WMAs, Ogg files; I can view images, watch video, browse documents, store data. I can connect it to just about any modern computer with a USB port, and to a number of different digital cameras. I buy my music. I rip it from CD. I put on my iRiver. I make as many copies as I like. Unlike an iPod (or, indeed, my old MiniDisc player) there is no frustrating and pointless “Digital Rights Management” extending skeletal corporate fingers into my life, slapping my wrist with rolled-up licence agreements. It’s my music. I paid for it. I’ll do what I like with it, thank you very much—including making copies for my friends to listen to—and Apple and Sony and Microsoft can go screw themselves.
A neat example of the iRiver ethos is that the ugliness of the interface to all this free and flexible activity can be fixed by its users. Indeed, iRiver encourages its customers to create, share, and install their own “skins” to change the look of the machine’s display to suit their own sensibilities. So much as glance at an iPod in a non-Apple-approved way and their attack lawyers will subpoena your mother, your hamster, and your three most recent sexual contacts.
I can even use my iRiver with the Devil’s own operating system: Linux. This means that I can apply a patchwork of rebel code to convert Apple’s locked-down music format to MP3s (or, indeed WAVs or WMAs) and listen to iTunes tracks without having to install iTunes. If I wanted to use my iRiver with a Windows machine I wouldn’t have to install iTunes or indeed any other kind of digital cruft to do so. Even upgrading the iRiver’s own built-in operating system is simply a case of downloading a file, unzipping it, plugging in my iRiver and dropping the file onto the machine. After I navigate through some menus and choose “Yes” from the last one the new software installs itself and switches the iRiver off. When I turn the machine back on it’s gone from version 1.07 to version 1.28.
One of the most telling criticisms Mac cult leader Steve Jobs ever made of Microsoft was that its products were “tasteless”. Even now, many technological generations after that verdict, Windows looks like Frankenstein’s monster next to the Apple’s Annalee Call of an operating system. But Windows won. It stole the essence of the Apple desktop. That it did this ineptly was less important than that it was prepared to offer this clumsiness to any hardware manufacturer interested in conforming to IBM standards. Apple stayed beautiful and aloof. Microsoft was anybody’s.
My iRiver is a shamelessly promiscuous, eager-to-please, shaggy mongrel of a machine. It rocks in a way the Ice Queen, best-in-show iPod—as pretty as it is—never will.
an ill-bred dog with a stick
And, most importantly for a digital jukebox, it sounds superb.
08May05 — 2
Grumpy Old Mancunians
One day I must buy my dad and Norm a couple of Test match tickets, drop them off at the entrance to Old Trafford, and leave them to spend the day swapping this kind of gripe.
[I know you didn’t mention it dad, but yes, I did notice that I had used “licence” as a verb. I’m so used to correcting the American spelling of the noun that it’s interfering with my English.]
08May05 — 3
Worse Than I Thought
I knew that in Turkey Mein Kampf is a bestseller. I didn’t know that the theory of evolution was widely rejected there. Thanks to Mick Hartley and this in The Panda’s Thumb I have another reason to fear for civilization:
“As a result of the BAV campaign and other efforts to denounce evolution, he adds, most members of Turkey’s parliament today not only discount evolution but consider it a hoax. ‘Now creationism is in [high school] biology books,’ Sayin says. ‘Evolution is presented [by BAV] as a conspiracy of the Jewish and American imperialists to promote new world order and fascist motives … and the majority of the people believe it.'”
This is Europe in the 21st century.
07May05 — 7
Microsoft Taxes Our Schools
I have been banging on about the advantages of open source software for schools for years, giving talks, writing green ink letters to civil servants, even (thanks to Patricia Hewitt) meeting some senior mandarins. Sadly, most politicians’ and bureaucrats’ understanding of information technology barely extends to email. This last fact, incidentally, might have something to do with the complete inability of government departments to bring in any IT project successfully on time or within budget—or, indeed, at all. [As if you needed reminding, it’s billions of pounds your money paying some gonk consultants to play Minesweeper while Windows XP “Professional” Service Pack 2 installs on a roomful of over-burdened server PCs.]
One of my allies in this futile struggle to infest British classrooms with communist software was a guy at Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology Association). He resigned in frustration at the clueless resistance from his colleagues and superiors to work for one of the biggest private sector open source software companies. I gave up plodding around government departments.
Now, according to The Times Educational Supplement Becta is either starting to get a clue
“Primary schools could cut their computer costs by nearly half if they stopped buying, operating and supporting products from the world’s largest software company, government research has found.
“Secondaries could also slash their information technology overheads by a quarter if they moved away from Microsoft and other commercial programs, according to an analysis carried out by the British Educational Communications and Technology Association, the Government’s ICT agency.”
or is pretending to do so in order to get a better deal from Microsoft in the government’s next round of negotiations to licence the giant’s horrible software. My well-worn money is on the latter.
This post, like all PooterGeek posts, was brought to you entirely by open source software. Viva la revolucion!
07May05 — 0
On A Lighter Note
Jeremy from Who Knew? emailed me with a Che-Guevarication of my younger self the other day. In return I shared with him one of the best subverted Ches I have seen recently, the Che-rie Blair,
available to buy on a T-shirt from the Football365 shop.
06May05 — 11
A Dark Day
Dimbleby has just called Galloway in the lead in Bethnal Green and Bow. I can’t bear to watch any more.
05May05 — 5
Sadly, Not A Boring Election
It’s looking grim already. I’m off to bed.
Quote of the evening so far on the Beeb from David Dimbleby, describing Gordon Brown:
“There he is arriving at his Kircaldy count with his wife Sarah, the man who came out at this election hand-in-hand with Tony Blair”
If not for my fear of libel lawyers I’d be tempted to say that half of the politicians in the studio with Dimbleby are already drunk as Lords.
04May05 — 13
(Swear) Word On The Streets
I am back from some more letterbox stuffing. The best house sign I read this evening was:
“The velociraptors housed behind this door have only been trained to disembowel callers wearing blue rosettes“
Despite this kind of heartening sight, the activists here are nervy. Doing my rounds, I bumped into two—both County Council candidates—and I spoke to one of the most dedicated local Labour Party members on the phone earlier today. The candidates both thought it would be close, but that Anne Campbell, Cambridge’s Labour MP these past thirteen years, would hang on to just enough of her majority of 8 000 to win—I think it will be cut to three figures. My friend on the phone was more pessimistic, but he has been talking to a lot of middle-class, Iraq-obsessed soon-to-be-LibDem voters lately, as he has trudged around the ward in which we both live. The real workers around here couldn’t care less.
It’s fair to say I don’t see eye-to-eye with Anne Campbell about many things: Iraq, tuition fees, Israel; but I do respect and admire her hugely. She is an outstandingly good MP. This, I hope, will be her salvation from Cambridge’s latest wave of drabby, gentrifying, wholemeal-trousered, pureed organic mung bean-eating Bens and Hannahs—with their recycling boxes and their baby tandems and their handwoven Nepalese “Not In Our Name” welcome mats. While they practise Pontius Pilates (a system of handwashing exercises imported from Hollywood) it’s the duty of the rest of us to elect the good guys. To paraphrase Bob Geldof: “Don’t go down the pub. Go to your polling station first and give us your fucking votes!”
04May05 — 8
Lines
Hart! I want to see you in my office. Now!
Yes, Mr Counsell.
Did you devote even a second’s thought to the construction of this ‘analogy’ of yours?
“Giving more power to those parents who lack responsibility is like putting an alcoholic in charge of a bar.”
No, Mr Counsell. I just thought it would make a good soundbite, sir.
Hart, Do irresponsible parents consume education to excess?
No, Mr Counsell.
Would such a parent placed in charge of a school educate his or her children until they were unconscious?
No, Mr Counsell.
Is there a state-run chain of bars in England and Wales set up so that drinkers can only drink at the bar nearest to their home (unless it’s a good one of course) and have no choice about what drinks they buy and how they are mixed unless they are part of a minority of the population lucky enough to be able to afford a house near a good bar or the membership fees of an extremely expensive private drinking club?
No, Mr Counsell.
Go away and write out a thousand times:
“An ideologically-driven system of state schooling unsupported by rigorous scientific research and sponsored by an educational establishment wilfully indifferent to statistical evidence has deprived generations of learning.
If it continues to be more concerned with political correctness than with the development of intellectual potential—let alone the promotion of literacy, numeracy, and elementary critical thinking—yet more millions of minds will be wasted.
How can we expect parents and children to respect the demands of scholarship when ‘educationalists’ do not?”
Mr Counsell?
Yes, Hart?
Can I have my £90 000 salary now, please?
Get out, Hart!
03May05 — 2
The Bottom Line
Under the headline “Mythical monsters”, the Lex column in today’s Financial Times deals with xenophobia the best way: not by appeal to warm-and-fuzzy multiculturalism, but by running the numbers.
I liked it so much that I am typing this out from a photocopy of the article I made in the Campus library. The original piece is not accessible online to non-subscribers. It opens robustly:
“More even than Iraq, or hospital superbugs, the issue in the UK election most obscured by political rhetoric is immigration. Some of the myths deserve to be exploded.
The world as a whole would be better off if there were no limits to migration – a free global market in labour would match the supply of workers to demand, and allow those with special skills to go where they were most needed.”
And it ends bluntly:
“Per person, immigrants contributed £7 203 to government coffers last year, £342 more than each UK-born person, while costing £7 277 compared to £7 753.
While there are more immigrants now than four years ago, their share in income tax revenue is higher than their share of population (both including and excluding their UK-born dependent children) and their share in income. They have higher average earnings than the UK-born population, and are disproportionately situated at the upper end of the income spectrum.
The popular view that immigrants are lowly paid and a drain on finances is not borne out by the facts.”
It’s clearly time to send the natives back to Scandinavia and France where they belong, before they bleed people like me dry.
03May05 — 5
Snark Comes Back At You
Just over a week ago, I pointed out (again) that, amongst others, Bob Dylan was overrated. My observation provoked this response from a Professor Geras of Manchester, a long-time admirer of the recordings of Mr Dylan:
Sock it to ’em, Damian. Next it’ll be that Bradman, Sobers and Warne are overrated as cricketers and J.S. Bach couldn’t hack it as a composer. Why, that Shakespeare guy? What a loser!
…on a trip to Iraq in 1994, [George Galloway] told Saddam: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know we are with you until victory, until Jerusalem.”
Armed with this quotation, last Friday the professor wondered aloud if Harold Pinter’s explicit endorsement of George Galloway further implied that Pinter endorsed Saddam Hussein.
For some reason these comments popped into my head again when I finally got round to reading this in the online version of Prof. Geras’s Daily Newspaper of Choice:
George Galloway has counted some controversial figures among his close acquaintances, but he doesn’t dare meet his hero: Bob Dylan. “I honestly think that Dylan is as good as Shakespeare,” says the Dundee-born leader of the Respect Party
Dylan? Overrated? Pshaw!
See you after the referendum on Iraq, Normski.
02May05 — 3
Centre For Competitiveness And Innovation
I’m not sure, but I think that my grandad worked in the original Leyland Truck factory in the town of Leyland, Lancashire. [My dad will correct me soon if I’ve got that wrong.] Today, Tim Worstall links to a study of the long slow decline of the endlessly government-subsidised Rover/British Leyland/BMC vehicle manufacturing group. The report [PDF] was written by Matthias Holweg and Nick Oliver of the CMI Centre for Competitiveness and Innovation at The Judge Institute of Management.
The Judge is the home of the Cambridge University Master’s in Business Administration, which has declined from 22nd in the Financial Times MBA World rankings when it started in 2002, to 30th in 2003, to 34th in 2004, to 42nd in 2005.
In 1999, the UK government—specifically the Treasury—promised to fund the Cambridge-MIT Institute (the CMI) directly with £65.1 million of your money over five years. I hope all my British tax-paying readers enjoyed their share of the fruits of Gordon’s generosity (total: £68m).
02May05 — 9
As Hip As A High Court Judge
The Economist‘s bold, white-on-red poster campaign has run for years. It started, if I remember rightly, by playing on readers’ insecurity—its message was that digesting The Economist was the best way to avoid dinner party embarrassment—a subscription would ensure that you were always informed of Important Matters.
Currently their approach must be based on flattery. I saw one at Stevenage(?) train station yesterday evening that said something like:
“When someone mentions Jordan, you immediately think of a Middle Eastern country with a 2.5% growth rate.
The Economist”
Should I feel smug or out-of-touch that I had to ponder for five minutes before I could think of what other Jordan the ad could possibly be referring to?
02May05 — 0
Why It’s Been So Quiet Around Here
I am just back from Auriol‘s wonderful wedding in Wales and have a stinking cold so there probably won’t be anything new to read at PooterGeek until this evening at least. If any of the people involved in the celebrations or in getting me home afterwards are reading this, thank you!
02May05 — 0
Good Sport
Ms Taylor obviously has a sense of humour. She might have been rude to ‘Bloggers en masse 😉 , but she was very polite to this one in particular. She would like to point out that she is neither middle-aged, nor confused by her iPod.
Thank you again for your nice email about my post spoofing you on Friday, Ros.
29Apr05 — 5
Get With The Programme, Blogers!
[Guest post by Ros Taylor of The Guardian]
So what has the British Blogoball to say about our revelations? Nothing much. Imagine how American blugs like Instapunto would have responded to the news that the fall of the Iraqi government in 2003 was the result, not of an Israeli black-ops mission as many have argued, but a direct consequence of a combined attack by US and British forces, launching massive military action without the authorisation of the United Nations. (I can also reveal here on the Guardian‘s own bloog that there may even have been involvement by other nations’ troops, including Poles and Australians.) The Americans would have been all over it like a Gary Younge over a collection of tired stereotypes of Texans.
Has the erudite Oliver Kamm picked apart the language of our leaked text of the secret cabinet meetings held to decide Britain’s involvement without the consent of the British people? Has Stephen Pollard reviewed the restaurant in which, we exclusively reported, Saddam Hussein was believed to be eating when a US bomb struck—in a direct attempt to assassinate the leader of a sovereign state? Following our report on the subsequent secret capture and detention of the Iraqi President, what have the libertarians at Samizdata to say about the implications of imprisoning him for months without charge or shaving equipment? Or, indeed, the alleged seizure of his assets?
Some of the blegs I don’t read very often have at least had a go: Anthony Wells at Polling Report tries to analyse the effect our shocking stories will have on the electorate. Otherwise there appears to be little of any consequence that I could find in five minutes of half-arsed surfing over a cup of Fair Trade latte. Some of you are even carrying on with your lives and going on holiday—as though our scoops were warmed over rubbish from months ago. If you don’t pull your collective socks up, chaps and chapesses, we’ll just have to carry on writing articles aimed at our broadsheet colleagues about things that don’t matter to anyone outside half-a-dozen central London boroughs, and ignore you. That’ll teach you.
29Apr05 — 0
Darth Pooter
Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith now has his own ‘Blog, “The Darth Side: Memoirs Of A Monster“. The tone of the thing is perfect, a whole new galaxy of bathos:
15Apr05
“It is not the sort of thing people think about, but I do not get many opportunities to see any living world at the level of the street. I see worlds from balconies, from shuttles, through the reinforced windows of Imperial garrisons…
“Sometimes it just feels good to get a little warm sun on my helmet.”
13Apr05
“Later, I will find the man responsible for dispatching the repair droids and crush his trachea with my mind. I also have tentative lunch plans with General Krelcon and his people, possibly in the Corellian quarter.”
As usual when I recommend one of these spoof ‘Blogs, I should point out that it has nothing to do with me.
[via Slashdot]
29Apr05 — 2
Howard. Again.
Michael Howard 18Jul04:
“If I knew then what I know now, that would have caused a difficulty…I couldn’t have voted for that resolution…If you look at the terms of the actual motion put to the House of Commons on March 18 (2003), it placed very heavy emphasis on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…So I think it is difficult for someone, knowing everything we know now, to have voted for that particular resolution.”
Michael Howard 28Apr05:
“I would have supported the war because I think it was the right thing to do.
“Saddam Hussein had been in breach of many UN resolutions. I think he was a threat to the peace in the region and the wider world but I think it was possible to go to war and tell the truth and I don’t think Mr Blair did that and I think it was possible to go to war with a plan.”
“I’m afraid I have to be straight with about this even though it is politically inconvenient.“
28Apr05 — 1
Colour Me Surprised
Twistblog makes an interesting observation about the location of Kilroy’s secret headquarters.
27Apr05 — 1
Another One Joins The Club
Stumbling and Mumbling makes the ‘Roll. There’ve been some excellent posts there lately. I liked this, this, this and this. I believe in free trade as much the next bug-eyed ‘Blogging loon; I just think that globalization’s boosters aren’t honest about its inevitable downside or the requirement that, for the full benefits to be spread as widely as possible, free movement of goods must be matched by the free movement of people. A lot of Right-wingers are a lot less enthusiastic about the latter than they are about the former for some strange reason.
27Apr05 — 0
Highbrow Cinema
It’s my mum’s birthday in a few weeks and I am thinking of buying her (and my dad) a handheld DVD player. She won’t watch films on it, but it will be perfect for her and dad to browse through (CDs of) family photos I make for them without their having to heft albums about or boot up their respective PCs.
Scan is an excellent online computer hardware shop oop north. It used to be run by a bunch of Asians under the slogan “You’ve tried the cowboys—now try the Indians!”
Looking for a DVD player on Scan’s site today I couldn’t help noticing that this model has an “Intellectual Upgrade Function”. There’s a lot more storage space on those discs than I thought.
26Apr05 — 11
Staying In Touch With Your Inner Electorate
Even Tony Blair’s biggest enemies have got to admire his willingness to sit in a studio full of publicity-hungry voters and patiently engage with their rants. My head would explode with frustration after five minutes of listening to inarticulate, ignorant, and illogical challenges, but he keeps on doing it. The bigger a fight he has on his hands the more willing he is to stand on a stage and invite passers-by to take a swing at his jaw. Yesterday on BBC Radio 1, with the courage of the King of Pop on his way to give a concert, he even exposed himself to Britain’s young people.
The questions from the punters were not quite as stupid as I had expected, but one of the young female presenter’s squeaky interjections was crass beyond belief. Addressing a girl whose accent sounded to my ears more Asian than Arab (not that that matters much), she said:
“You’re Muslim. How did the Iraq war make you feel?”
Cambridgeshire radio stations have recently been running an advertising campaign to get listeners interested in the County Council elections (which will take place on the same day as the General Election this year). The slogan at the end of each ad slot says “It’s not about politics; it’s about you“. The question I quote above was the ideal way to introduce the issue of Iraq because, after all, most of the debate about it hasn’t been about the lives of Iraqis, the morality of military intervention, and the future of the Middle East and the wider world; it’s been about how people living in the rich, secure West feel.
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