05Jan04 — 0

Own Worst Critic

On the basis of an article I’d written, I was asked to contribute to a book today. This sounds impressive until I add that I had never heard of the publisher. Checking out their list, I followed up the name of one of their authors who had written some computational biology stuff for them. He had edited a book out under a different imprint. Bizarrely, he had reviewed it negatively on Amazon and given his own work no stars.

04Jan04 — 0

I Believe

Last week Michael Howard laid out his philosophy as Tory leader in a public declaration of 16 beliefs. I dislike and disagree with him, but he came in for a thoroughly undeserved kicking for his statement. Cambridge’s very own Chris Lightfoot half-defended him from the press, now I’ll half-defend Howard too.

The Conservative leader’s credo at least sets out some principles. This made a refreshing change from the shallow, vote-grabbing, anti-liberal poses he has taken up since ascending to lead Her Majesty’s Opposition: opposing top-up fees to defend subsidies for the offspring of the rich; “supporting” the war against Saddam, but carping about its justification and conduct at every opportunity; and desperately trying to out-Nazi the government over immigration, despite his own history.

04Jan04 — 0

In Other News

The latest message from the Osama Bin Laden Soundalike Society was top of the BBC’s headlines in all the evening news bulletins. Meanwhile, Claire alerted me to yet another horrifying development in Afghanistan.

As I always say, it’s in the interests of both sides of the War on Terror to live in the parallel dimension where MC Osama’s still burning up the mic, and I realize I don’t pay a licence fee, but it would be nice if the BBC reported on the real world rather than an imaginary one.

04Jan04 — 0

Baby/Doll

Yesterday ‘Blogging superstar Glenn Reynolds was reviewing girls’ boy-dolls on his Instapundit Weblog. His point was that a “Flava” doll called “Liam” is selling poorly because it’s too girly, but he is positive about the male Bratz—apparently his own daughter is a fan. (And I have to say that I think the music loops on the Bratz Website are superb; they’re certainly better than anything most of the boy/girl bands have out at the moment and funkier than the desperate attempts at “street” sounds the Flavas’ Webpage has to offer.)

Browsing Amazon’s range of Bratz, I couldn’t help noticing that one of them is called “Eitan”. Judith, is this the shape of things to come for your little Eitanie? The pose is certainly familiar.

I predict that Eitan will have a similar experience to mine: he will start out believing himself the only boy in the area with his name, only to grow up to be an adult surrounded by little Eitans. Whenever he is in the supermarket, young mothers will distract him by calling to their tots—children named after the dolls their mothers played with years before.

While we’re in a tweenager state-of-mind. Here‘s the Damian Counsell PowerPuff “Girl”. Why not create your own?

04Jan04 — 0

A Little Miracle

As I have ranted about before, Radio 1 is a post-apocalyptic media wasteland, where Smashie and Nicey rule, albeit reincarnated as a single DJ, the intellectually challenged pub bore Chris Moyles. In the late 80s the S’n’N satirical duo characterized Radio 1 as an out-of-touch musical outlet, trapped in a loop of mid-Atlantic soft rock. Now the real Radio 1 torments listeners by rotating through the same three genres: tweenie pop, drab indie, and the very worst of contemporary black music.

But last week R1 had me dancing in the shower with a funky piece of properly crafted pop-R’n’B. Miss Independent is a real song with a real story delivered by a real singer, who I discovered to my horror was Kelly Clarkson, the winner of American Idol, the U.S. clone of Britain’s evil karaoke show Pop Idol. Still, I liked the track so much I’ve ordered the CD single, despite the whole thing being available free online via Real Player here. [Brace yourself for Ms Clarkson’s scary Photoshopped-white teeth.]

30Dec03 — 0

Bashing The Bishops

Yesterday “Dr” David Hope, the Bishop of York, and “Dr” Tom Wright, the bishop of Durham, “contributed” to the debate about whether Tony Blair was right to go to war against Saddam’s regime. At the same time they contributed evidence to my case for the teaching of reasoning skills at British universities. PooterGeekers who know a sound argument when they read it (and there are and were sound arguments against our going to war in Iraq) can identify the following classic fallacies in the bishops’ drivel:

  • the faulty analogy fallacy of unwarranted assumption,
  • the genetic fallacy of irrelevance, and
  • the red herring fallacy of diversion.

Wright’s racist and ignorant comment to the increasingly desperate Independent:

For Bush and Blair to go into Iraq together was like a bunch of white vigilantes going into Brixton to stop drug-dealing

was just icing on a very stale cake indeed. Has he even visited Brixton recently? (He might be a “white non drug dealer”, but he certainly couldn’t afford to live there.)

I never based my pro-war stance on the WMD issue, but, to paraphrase one wag, there’s certainly more evidence for Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles than there is for Hope’s “higher authority before whom one day we all have to give an account”.

It is fortunate that, in this country at least, we are not governed by old men who take instructions from disembodied voices or from reading badly transcribed collections of folklore; we don’t live in the Middle East. The chronically superstitious still retain some unearned prominence in British life, however. The war in Iraq has been a great moral test for all of our public figures. This kind of infantile gibbering suggests that the Church of England’s representatives have failed it. If this was an item on Oliver Kamm’s ‘Blog there’d probably be generous and urbane comment about the bishops “suffering from intellectual incoherence”, but it’s not: they’re just idiots.

29Dec03 — 1

“Mum, I’m Stuck!”

Marvin voice: Brain the size of a planet and all the readers want from me is pictures of pandas. No, Leasey, there is nothing “feminine” about my finding the badly-designed bears appealing. And as for Maoi, you can’t have a panda for your birthday, but you can have some panda wallpaper for your desktop. This is my favourite as it shows Mei Sheng’s older half-sister demonstrating that pandas are as bad at climbing trees as sloths.

28Dec03 — 0

Book Review Round-Up

Newton’s Swing is a lean, but consistently interesting, New York thriller. To summarize it in the style of SavaPoint: A man is upset when his beautiful wife is shot dead in their apartment while their son is in bed. It has two faults: the author occasionally crosses the line between striking description and writerly fussiness (a failing made more prominent by the economy of the bulk of his prose).

Demian is a portentous (deliberately) adolescent tale of what a Californian might call “spiritual growth” and New Yorker Lou Reed memorably dismissed as “mystic shit“. Despite my dislike of this kind of thing, somehow I found it gripping and intriguing. Partly this is because it is elegantly written (translated?) and partly it is because I’m not quite stupid enough to take first person accounts like this at face value. I might have to check out some of Hesse’s other work before I pass judgement.

Now I have a pile of Christmas gifts (thank you, all!) and a review copy of a computer book to get through.

27Dec03 — 0

A Gift For Précis

Savapoint is a source for cheap software and hardware. Even before the savings on sales prices, the Savapoint Website provides completely free entertainment for visitors. Some of the perfunctory descriptions they offer of the movies they sell on DVD are a scream:

The Hours: “A story of three women living in different time periods of the Twentieth Century”

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: “George Clooney and Drew Barrymore star in this very clever movie”

Shrek: “Shrek is a big ogre who lives alone in the woods.”

Cliffhanger: “A group of hikers caught in a blizzard.”

A Christmas Carol: “In this timeless Charles Dickens story, Ebenezer Scrooge.” [er, that’s it]

27Dec03 — 0

Worse

The numbers of dead and injured as a result of the earthquake in Iran are now looking even more terrible than before. It’s this kind of thing—rather than, say, a lousy program on ITV—that people should refer to as “appalling”.

26Dec03 — 0

Balls

Ah, the Midlands. On the long drive from my sister’s today—thank you for your hospitality Clare and Steve; and for your snot, Maisie—I listened to a strange football commentary. The game was a local derby between the football team of the spiteful little town I grew up in, Tamworth, and that of Burton-on-Trent, just up the road. This completely insignificant kickaround had somehow made it onto BBC local radio and, freakily, the main commentator was an Australian. All that way to cover such sorry crap.

Play came live from the Eton Park ground, where they take great pride in their faggots, and I had an amusing few minutes listening until the signal faded: I could compare the local detail with my memories of both places. Another Australian, working behind a bar in Tamworth had commented back in the eighties to a friend of mine that Tamworth was the place in Britain where he had been beaten up the most times for being an Aussie. That’s how they treat white people in Tam’rth.

It doesn’t sound like much has changed since I escaped: the Aussie commentator mentioned that Tamworth had the second highest number of bookings in their league (45 this season alone so far). The height of the players in the Tamworth squad averaged over six feet. Despite dominating most of the segment of the game I heard, this must have scared the resolve out of former league-leaders Burton Albion because Tamworth won 0-1 in the end.

24Dec03 — 0

Focus Group Results

As a result of extensive user consultation the PooterGeek Steering Committee has settled on this new executive blue look. Apparently the purple was pretty hard on the eyes. (It also had the effect of making visitors think their monitor was on the blink.)

Don’t you just hate the way the word “executive” is used as a supposed label of elevated quality/exclusivity? I may have to write a rant about that some time.

23Dec03 — 1

Better Off There

Courtesy of Maoi I have been reading Twisted 6, a collection of newspaper articles by Filipina newspaper columnist Jessica Zafra. Maoi has annotated the text in her beautiful handwriting so that I can understand Zafra’s native references and lingo despite my ignorant Anglo background. (For example, I’m not sure if the adjective from “Philippines” has one or two ‘p’s. UPDATE: I’m doubly wrong: it has one ‘l’ and one ‘p’ (in the middle). Now, Maoi, given that this is a Spanish thing, does the adjective “Filipino” have to agree with the gender of its noun—as I’ve tried to make it?)

Zafra is sharp, funny and ironic, but has a weakness for cliché that interferes with my enjoyment of her work. There is huge comedy potential in Filipino life and culture so I’m holding her to high standards.

In one of the book’s pieces, Better Off Here, Zafra compares occasional banana republic-style happenings in the Philippines with some of the awful things going on elsewhere in the world. Her source is Fielding’s World’s Most Dangerous Places.

The article was written in May 2000. Since then, thanks to those dangerous imperialists George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and despite bleating from certain quarters, four of the places mentioned in Zafra’s piece—Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan and Iraq—are , in important parts, much less dangerous than they were. They work quickly, those neo-cons. As opposed to the trusted, multilaterals of the UN.

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