The Joys of Blogging

I've enjoyed writing this blog so far and I'm grateful to be given the opportunity to revive my writing career, develop my skill, scratch my itch, or do my thing. There was a period when I wrote letters to pen-pals; that was after winning a competition in Disco 45 in the 70s. I realised later that regularly writing builds the muscle.

I started the blog without feeling I had a lot to write about and I still don't feel there are loads of stories / posts inside me waiting to get out, but I find that if you start writing about anything, it can develop into something. The only time I've felt there were a bunch of things waiting to be said was when I came up with the idea of a theme - "Think The World's Bad Now". I've been doing it for three months now, so there's some momentum and I can get some purchase from updating old posts. Like I said, I've enjoyed it so far and I'm still waiting to see what happens.

CNet says a survey about blogging revealed that most people think the same rules should apply to bloggers as to traditional journalists, but also that most people don't trust blogs as much as traditional media.

Xbox and Wii Madness Road Painter

Waaah! Everybody is getting XBox 360s! Oh, and Wii madness is about to hit. This will change the way people use these games; I think they're very keen to get all sorts of new audiences involved (hence the range of different players in those videos). Apparently since the launch of the wii in Britain "Nintendo wii" has overtaken iPod as the most searched for toy. There's a review of the Wii here on the Register site with comments from readers (one has invented a new word - here comes the wiikend!).
Update: Looks like the wii is beating the Sony Playstation 3 in early sales in Japan. Another clip on the Daily Feed says that the Wii has sold 3.19 million consoles, half the total sales of Xbox 360s so far.
This is either the work of a sublimely indifferent road painter, or a Bhuddist road-painter (could they be the same person?)

Robot How Flickr Started Overheard

Back after a week in Wales. Here's one I did earlier: Someone has built a robot that can solve the Rubik's Cube! The story of how Flickr started Snippets of conversations Overheard in New York

Shoe Bomber

An article about the daily life of Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber" in a maximum security prison in the US. The Open Document Format is announced; see the Wired article. I posted a link previously to a lovely picture of a snowflake and now I've found some more at a website dedicated to snow crystal photography and research. There's also a "snow crystal primer" with interesting points about snow formation.

Pretexting

"Pretexting" is variously defined as impersonation of someone in order to obtain proivate information, or in a wider definition, creating a fictional scenario in order to persuade someone to do something they otherwise would not do. Earlier this year, the Chair of Hewlett Packard's board left after accusations that private detectives had impersonated members of the HP board in order to obtain their phone records (this was in pursuit of a leaker on the board). There was also a Congressional investigation at which HP management testified (and refused to testify). Because many authorities are quite slack in the way they implement security, often asking only for date of birth, mother's maiden name etc., pretexting is likely to continue. In the US California legislators introduced a bill aimed at stopping the practice, but Wired News claims it was killed by the Motion Picture industry, who claimed they used it as a method of tracking file-sharers.

Make a Paper Snowflake Map Game

Instructions on How to make a paper snowflake at WikiHow. Map game - see how many countries you can place.

Spend Some Dialog Time; Abuse by Proxy

You could spend a lot of time with this dialog! There have been a number of cases in the US where someone impersonating a policeman has called a restaurant (usually a fast food restaurant) and told the manager to detain a member of staff or customer. Because the manager believes the caller, they do as they are told. The caller then instructs the manager to put the victim through all sorts of humiliation and abuse, including rape. It's quite shocking what people will do when they believe in the authority of the person telling them what to do. I knew about this affect because I've heard of the psychlogical experiments, but I hadn't heard of this kind of abuse by proxy over the phone before.

10 Minute Email Address

Here's a cool idea. You go to this site and click on the link to automatically create a new email address. The address will work for 10 minutes and messages will appear on the page you bookmark. Any messages appearing there you can read and reply to, but when I tried attachments didn't work (there's a warning on the site saying attachments may not work but that they will be fixed soon). You get a countdown on the page and you can click on another link to allow yourself another ten minutes. I emailed the address from a yahoo account and it was fine.

Will You Upgrade to Windows Vista?

Scott Granneman at The Register thinks Microsoft is trying to pull a fast one in the EULA (license agreement) for Vista.

Gothic Posters, Be Careful When You Sell Your PC

Morbid, gothic posters by Franciszek Starowieyski, a Polish poster artist. Oh. My. Goodness. A story from Scott Granneman on The Register about the perils of being careless with your data when you sell your computer. Phew.

TWBN #8: Thatcher Years

Margaret Thatcher has been the dominant politician of the last thirty years. She was Prime Minister from 1979-1990. In 1979 (the first election I voted in), 1983 and 1987 she won the General Election against my wishes; I've felt out of step ever since. The Thatcher years changed a lot of things. Here are some of the things I believed that have been overtaken (some of them may need explaining later):

Council houses are a good thing
Buying your own house is for rich people
If you're rich you own a house and you pay rates
The Government should run utility (power, telephone, post) companies; how else can you get the same service all over the country?

The wiki page for her portrays a more liberal politician in the early years than I remember later; maybe she grew out of it, but she supported David Steel's Abortion Bill and Leo Abse's bill to decriminalise homosexuality. On the other hand she supported capital punishment and supported the reintroduction of the birch.

These are some of the highlights of the Thatcher Years:
Falklands War 1982
Miners' Strike 1985
Section 28 1987

I thought she and her pals were awful and I was very glad when she was defeated, except that she was replaced by John Major, another Tory, who then proceded to win another election against Neil Kinnock's Labour Party. What a nightmare.

TWBN#7: Bhopal, Chernobyl

I vaguely remember Chernobyl. It happened on 26 April 1986 and it was the worst nuclear power plant disaster so far. Since then nuclear power production has greatly reduced (or at least western nations are not building new ones) and more safety procedures have been introduced in existing nuclear plants. An informative article at the BBC H2G2 site says there was never any danger of a nuclear explosion; this is a misunderstanding that many people have about nuclear power plants; reactor fuel is not explosive like nuclear weapons. It is very dirty though and surrounding countryside (and some surrounding countries) were affected and continue to be affected for years.

Strangely I remembered Bhopal as being more recent, but in fact it happened in 1984. It was also a much more serious accident than Chernobyl in its immediate effects on the surrounding population. A poisonous gas was released from a Union Carbide pesticide plant and spread to the nearby city of Bhopal, exposing half a million people. There is much more serious disagreement about the handling of the accident and what happened later than in the case of Chernobyl. Union Carbide claim that the accident must have been the result of sabotage, since they had safety procedures in place, whereas The Bhopal Medical Appeal gives a more believeable account from the victims' points of view, including eyewitness accounts. Union Carbide passed on responsibility for the plant to the local government in Madhya Pradesh. The Union Carbide site reads like an effort to wriggle out of any responsibility.

Police Shootings

I think the US should outlaw gun ownership for most people. That stuff about "Right to Bear Arms" is crap; it was written in other times for a totally different environment and wasn't meant to encourage (I guess) an armed populace. There's an article on the Agitator about police shootings in America, and the poster in an associated comment says: "The solution seems simple; stop invading people's homes for non-violent offences". I disagree. Surely the answer is to get rid of the guns in homes and make it much more difficult to get hold of them. The number of mistaken shootings would decrease in proportion to the perception of the police that they are likely to be met by a gun-toting maniac every time they break into a house.

Clever Guy, Very Cool Job

Google do Tech Talks and publish them on Google Video. I found a very interesting talk called (video link) "Human Computation" about how they are going about the task of tagging / labelling images so that image searches can retrieve accurate results. The clip is over 50 minutes long, so I'll give a summary, but if you're interested it is quality stuff, definitely worth watching the whole thing. The solution they've come up with is to get people playing games that use image tagging as part of the game. Ingenious idea, well actually there are several creative solutions to problems in this talk. Clever guy Luis von Ahn, but they still spell his name wrong (Louise!?) in the subtitles.

In the video Luis talks about "captchas", which are those images of text that you have to read and copy in some web forms in order to prove that you're not a software agent trying to hack the form. He says that spam hackers have found a way to hack the forms, which is they pass the image of the text back to a porn website and interrupt users with a message saying "you must copy this text before you can continue watching". When the user enters the text it can be passed back to the form. So that's a hacker solution that gets humans cooperating with computers, albeit unawares. Luis uses games to involve people in the task.

So anyway, Luis and his team have built a game where an image is displayed on the screen. Two players are teamed together by the system and they get points when they both tag the image with the same word - thus tagging the image. The only communication between players is when they win a round because then they know the other player used the same tag. Several tags can be useful for one image, so Luis and co. have started to make some tags "taboo" for each image after it has been labelled with the same tag several times.

Luis says that the game has been very popular and a lot of images have been tagged. His team can now also use tagged image as a second level check that players are genuine. In theory a group of sabateurs could join the game together and respond with the same tag to every image. That would damage the accuracy of the tags if it was successful, so the team have started to include test pictures; images that most people label with the same tag; if players gets all these wrong, their tags may be treated as suspect.

There are several other cool solutions to sub-problems of this general area in the clip. That is one clever guy.

Michael J Fox

Michael J Fox appears on tv, but this time is different. Apparently he has Parkinson's Disease. I don't know much about Parkinson's, but the clip made me feel respect for Michael J Fox. He looks like he's been pretty badly hit by the disease; I didn't know he had Parkinson's and at the very start of the interview you're thinking "What's going on?" because the interviewer doesn't say anything and mjf is trembling a bit. It looks pretty humiliating to let the public see you like that, but he's trying to stand up to it. The interviewer mentions a cheap shot from Rush Limbaugh because Fox was doing pro-Democrat commercials; Limbaugh said he thought maybe Fox had not taken his medication in order to be more obviously suffering on the ads, so that he would get more public sympathy. Sounds like you just don't get an easy ride from everybody no matter what.

Cost of Ink, non-attack advert, Female Circumcision

Have you got an HP printer? I've got a 960c and the cartridges cost a bomb. There's a graph here which compares prices. That made me laugh. This is a clever political advert. Not seen that trick before. It's good to see a political advert that isn't a personal attack on an opponent.

A conference about Female Circumcision in Egypt; not a common subject in the news. The conference included some muslims who spoke against the practise.

Update: Since I wrote the above, there have been developments.
Scholars at the conference agreed that Female Genital Mutilation (also called "Female Circumcision") was un-islamic and should be treated as abuse. Sweet progress.

The Yorkshire Ripper

Between 1975 and 1981 Peter Sutcliffe killed thirteen women and severely injured seven others in horrific attacks in Northern England. The attacks betrayed Sutcliffe's real nature as a deeply disturbed man, a nature hidden to his wife and both of their families.

Sutcliffe's attacks actually began early in 1975 when he attacked women on two separate occasions with a hammer, but the police didn't link them to the other attacks until years later. It was later in the year and then in January 1976 when two women were killed in very similar circumstances that the police knew they were chasing someone who had already killed twice in very disturbing ways.

The first woman he killed was drunk after a night out in Leeds. He then killed several prostitutes, so the prostitutes in the area started to go around in couples and make notes of clients' car registration numbers. Cooperation between prostitutes and police was not good though, and general public awareness of the crimes remained low until June 1977, when the newspapers reported that an "innocent" young woman had been viciously killed. In fact four other women had been killed between the first and this latest one. The press and public had not shown much sympathy for the victims of the killings so far because the victims were thought to be all prostitutes. They had not yet linked these murders to the first two attacks, which were not on prostitutes.

Once the news of the latest murder got out, the police were drowned in information.

Some of Sutciffe's victims survived, though they were often disabled for life or suffered depression following the attack. One woman attacked in Bradford in 1977 had major surgery and six weeks in hospital before she was able to go home. The following year she appeared in court charged with stealing from shops because she couldn't make ends meet.

The police were thrown off course by some anonymous letters and later a tape from Sunderland which claimed to be from the killer. The speaker on the tape had a geordie accent and police later issued instructions to their forces that they should be looking for someone with a geordie accent.

I remember hearing about the Yorkshire Ripper at the end of the 70s and 1980-81. In November 1980 Sutcliffe killed a woman who was studying at Leeds University. Around this time I was at university in London and I remember women marching at night in "Reclaim the Night" protests.

Sutcliffe wasn't very careful to hide his tracks when committing the murders and over the years left several clues which detectives followed up, but they never got anything that would single him out and they were not good enough at handling the information (computers were in their very infancy) to piece together the bits that they had. They were also distracted by the hoax letters and tape. Sutcliffe had given the police alibis that were backed up by his wife. A friend that visited red light districts with Sutcliffe had written to the police and got no response. In the end it was just luck that he was stopped in a car with a prostitute and the policeman who stopped him radioed in the registration number of Sutcliffe's car. It was still lucky that one officer was sharp enough to go back to the scene where Sutcliffe had been picked up, because that officer found a ball-pin hammer and a knife, weapons that Sutcliffe used in the attacks.

Extensive article about The Yorkshire Ripper at the Crime Lab

Autistic Savant Global Orgasm

The strange things kids write is a cliche, but these suppposed real high school essay quotes made me laugh out loud, so who am I to complain? Numbers 23 and 24 were really making me shake and "The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while" is short enough for me to remember. I remember a television programme about Stephen Wiltshire some years ago. He's an autistic savant. He has a particular skill, which is that he can look at a real scene for a few minutes and later draw it in great detail. This programme puts him through a (video link) huge test - they take him in a helicopter for a ride over Rome, then he draws a huge panorama of Rome from memory. The programme-makers check the details and he is amazingly accurate. Oliver Sacks wrote about the guy in his book "An Anthropologist on Mars". Here's an article in the Guardian about Daniel Tammet, another autistic savant who can also do extraordinary things, but he's unusual in that he can describe what goes on in his head when he does it (check out the descriptions of handling large numbers and remembering pi to a record number of places). If you feel a little rumble on December 22, it may be because of a worldwide campaign to add enough positive energy into the energy field of the Earth to reduce the worldwide levels of violence and agression. It is hoped that this energy will register on the monitor system of the Global Conciousness Project. Perhaps the impression will be a huge phallus (nsfw) - my first nsfw link, though you have to click on the picture to see... the... enlarged version ;-)

Use of Tasers by US Police / Security

There have been a couple incidents recently in USA where police and security guards have used tasers to subdue people. This 17 year old kid in Jerseyville sounds a bit crazy, a bit of a nuisance, but nothing serious. He was tasered by police and later died. This argumentative bugger got the shock of his life when security guards at his university library wouldn't accept "No, I don't have my id card" for an answer. Interesting piece in the Register (looks like they're following this issue) about this. Later I found this clip from The Daily Nooz of some guys from the management at Taser International allowing themselves to be tasered; kind of sick.

Breathtaking ski-gliding, Interface Design

Whoooa! (video link) Breathtaking video of ski-gliding down the Eiger. This site called Joel on Software is cool. He wrote an article arguing about the "Off" button in Windows Vista. It's a good design argument.

TWBN#6: Novelty Records in the Charts

This may not be a great comparison because the nature of the charts has changed in the past few years; a lot of songs are downloaded rather than bought from record shops. Also I don't watch Top of The Pops as I used to, but there were lots of songs that were basically just jokes "sung" by crap groups or one-off gimmick records that sold on the basis of celebrity or I don't know what.

The Goodies "Do the Funky Gibbon"
The Wurzells "I've got a Brand New Combine Harvester"
Black Lace "Agadoo"
Rolf Harris "Two Little Boys"
Clive Dunn "Grandad"
Telly Savalas "If"

Groan groan. I used to watch the Goodies tv show and it was funny, sometimes hilarious, though I only remember one sketch that they would regularly repeat: A young boy was doing an advert or a piece to camera and fluffing it. The producer would let him get away with it a few times and then swat him round the head and shout "Get it right!". Not hugely funny in retrospect, you had to be there. I can't remember what episode this song came from (I think it came from a sketch), but there's an article here which purports to be from Bill Oddie, talking about listening at the time to Parliament (unbelieveably he means George Clinton's Parliament Funcadelic, or P-Funk and not this. I can't believe Bill Oddie was into that stuff!), Sly Stone and Miles Davis! Wha?

"I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester" was a hit by the Worzels. It was a dreadful rewrite / ripoff of the earlier and much better "I've Got a Brand New Pair of Rollerskates" by Melanie Safka. Actually her song was called "Brand New Key", but most people remember it by the first line I think.

Aaaaarghgadoo (my spelling) was unleashed on the nation by Black Lace. It was deliberately targetted at unwitting club and party goers, wholly innocent of the group's desire to take control of them by the means of making them learn a ridiculous dance, perform it in groups on the dance floor, in the process turning their minds to mush. Here is a link (follow with care) to a demo of the dance done by a pineapple no less, on the Black Lace website. Luckily their plan for World Domination via the drunken minds of UK youth failed.

Rolf Harris' "Two Little Boys" was just mush. Just enjoy your life and don't try to find it. Take my advice.

Clive Dunn was an actor in the popular comedy series "Dad's Army". His character, Corporal Jones, was a popular part of that show and he obviously capitalised on that when he released the shocker that became number one "Grandad". This one made me feel particularly queasy because it was basically a bunch of kids singing "Grandad, Grandad, we love you". On Top of The Pops they had him in a rocking chair surrounded by adoring schoolkids. He later went on to make a children's programme also called "Grandad".

Telly Savalas was the big bald cop in the American tv series "Kojak". He was known for sucking lollipops and saying "Who loves ya baby?" a lot. I guess someone told him he had a nice voice, so he spoke the words of that "if a picture paints a thousand words" thing. It was kind of like a car crash at number one. There's a picture of one of his records (called simply "Telly") here, and several fans defend the great man!

There's a sub-genre of revolting novelty for football records. Many people have moaned about this before, so I'll just briefly mention that my Dad once bought me "Blue is the Colour" by Chelsea Football Team. I think it's healthy if you face up to the difficult issues in your life.

TWBN#5: Bad British Food

We have a reputation in the UK for producing bad food and expecting people to eat it. Our rep is particularly bad with our european neighbour, France. Our food tends to be functional, as in "fill 'er up mate", and french people are more often brought up to treat food more seriously. Well all I can say is it's a bit better than it used to be! (Does that sound too enthusiastic?). Nowadays you can usually at least get a half decent meal in most places. The worst locations for food in the UK used to be motorway service stations and schools. Our own cheeky chirper Jamie Oliver has recently got stuck into school meals - I mean trying to help make them better - and good on him for having a go, even if some freedom fighters disagree. The Government are also talking about reintroducing cooking at school, which should also help, but I've heard that the current equivalent is more about planning a menu for people with special dietary requirements than learning how to cook something nice.

TWBN#4: The Berlin Wall and Other East European Monsters

I was lucky enough to visit Berlin before the Wall came down, so I got to see how strange it was to have that city (West Berlin) in the middle of East Germany, surrounded by a huge wall. Apparently the East German Government explained when they erected it that they had to protect East Berlin against the massive influx of West Germans that would happen when the wessies saw how well their neighbours were getting on. Nonetheless plenty of people tried to escape the other way (with often fatal consequences). There's a well-written book by an Australian woman about living in the East and some that tried to escape, called "Stasiland". Here's a link to an extract on the Guardian website. My partner lived in West Berlin for some time as an au pair when she was a teenager. When I first went there with her in 1987 (I think) to visit the family she had stayed with I thought it was fascinating, but now I think The Wall was desperate and quite ridiculous. The Wall allowed the close juxtaposition of these two opposed cultures and exacerbated their differences, which made for a great tourist attraction. I was struck by the playful response to it by people on the Western side See this site by Chris DeWitt for lots of pictures of the Wall and another for some more. A lot of it looks brutal and quite shocking. So a spectacle worth seeing, but a repressive experience for people in the East, I think, so I was very glad to see it come down; that was amazing to watch (that link goes to a story on the BBC site with testimonies from eye-witnesses).

The Fall of the Berlin Wall was part of a wider, very exciting breakdown of Soviet control over other Eastern European countries, starting in early 1989 with Poland, where the massive "Solidarnosc" (Solidarity) trade union, led by Lech Walesa, was able to defy General Jaruzelski and force free elections. That was a stunning victory and seemed to inspire people in other countries in the region to stand up to their governments. Previous protests had been crushed, but now somehow people seemed more powerful than the armies. The most memorable of that year were the Czech "Velvet Revolution", remarkable for the election of a Frank Zappa - loving playwright as president and the Romanian more violent one.

Brief Introduction to the Berlin Wall in English and German

Unique Surface Pattern of Paper

Sounds like an interesting discovery and it came about by accident. The scientist was trying to scan microchips with a laser beam and one fell off so that his laser scanner hit the paper below. He was surprised to see that his equipment gave a reading, so he did a bit of testing and found that all sorts of surfaces could be read for unique surface patterns at microscopic scale. He converts the pattern into a set of numbers that can be used as an id for that specific surface. They article says the reading survives damage to the surface, but I don't understand something - wouldn't you have a problem with registration? Wouldn't you have to be sure of scanning exactly the same part of the surface in order to get the same reading?

TWBN#3: Racism at Home and Away

There will be few people in future years who defend the South African State and its Apartheid laws of 1948-1990. The UN describes these laws as "Racist beliefs enshrined in law". Racist arguments in the UK have always focussed around immigration. I wasn't aware at the time (1968) of Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, but it was certainly quoted often enough in the 70s and 80s as I grew up. I remember particularly the abuse that some people got as "niggers" or "pakis", though in my little rural town there were not many people of different ethnic origins around, so most of the abuse was in the press or at football matches. There was one particular television programme that makes me wince when I think about it - it was called "Love Thy Neighbour". I wonder whether black people complained about this programme when it was aired; perhaps this was in the days when complaints weren't taken so seriously. "Love Thy Neighbour" was written by a team with a record of ridiculing bigots, and the main white character in this was certainly a racist bigot, but the black characters suffered a lot of outrageous abuse in the name of ridiculing the bigot. It was apparently immensely popular though. Around that time I'm sure you would have heard a lot more racism in pubs and clubs; I think Bernard Manning's and Jim Davidson's heydays were back then. Davidson's act included a character called "Chalkie", which was basically a chance to take the piss out of West Indians. People complain about political correctness, but I think it's good that (video link) idiots don't get away with racist stuff so easily these days; I can't imagine many black people feeling comfortable going to see Manning or Davidson in the 70s


The Story of Apartheid in South Africa at the BBC World Service.
The UN web page about Apartheid with pictures
Informative article at InfoPlease

TWBN#2: The IRA Bombing Campaign Part 2

I wrote earlier about my memories of the IRA Bombing Campaign in the 80's. I also want to say something about how I think it affected people and the Government at the time, though as I said in the earlier post I accept that I'm not an expert, just someone who was around at the time. I'm surprised actually that people aren't talking about this more, because there are some obvious parallels with the current "War on Terror".

There was a lot of pressure on the Police and this led I think to Police mistreatment of irish people, particularly men. Irish people were already somewhat stereotyped and the bombings (particularly the ones in the 70's I think, but also later) made it more likely that you would be stopped, searched and possibly harassed if you were Irish.

The mistreatment went further in the cases of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, two groups of men who suffered appalling injustice at the hands of the Police and the justice system. I don't know enough detail to allow a comparison between the justice system then and now, but what seems obvious is that when the police are under great pressure they are more likely to cut corners and not pay enough attention to the rights and needs of their more vulnerable suspects (I think these cases happened before there was a lot of awareness of how seriously psychological pressure could affect the testimony of people).

It's apparent that stereotypes that were around at the time and had been around for a long time contributed to a dehumanising effect which was part of the environment in which it was seen as OK to mistreat Irish suspects by those in authority. Other aspects of this environment may have been lack of professional control and a general hysteria at certain times, reflected (or encouraged) by the press. You would hope that there should be more awareness of this nowadays, but Abu Ghraib still happens.

The other parallel that I see is that governments enact laws aimed at putting pressure on the terrorists, but the actual effect is to put further pressure on the wider group (i.e. Irish people in the UK, or Muslims in the UK). In 1971 Internment (indefinite detention without trial) was introduced in Northern Ireland. It was ended in 1975. In later years this policy was seen as a great recruiter for the IRA. We might see this as a parallel with the recent repeated demands for longer periods of detention without trial of terrorist suspects.

Animatee Fights Back Paranoia

The guy who does the animations of a stick character that fights the animator has put up (animated film) another one - great fun. Aaargh no, paranoia! There are (video link) secret pictures of the Twin Towers before and after the attack on the $5 and $20 notes and the word "Osama" even appears (well not actually, or even remotely).

pipes, aircraft carrier, dice, storms

Great picture of some pipes. This is an aircraft carrier in a pond in China. The World is revealed through Google Maps! Apparently "Dice Stacking" is a skill that requires some dexterity. Looks pretty difficult! Flickr gallery of storm shots. Very dramatic

TWBN#1: The IRA Bombing Campaign

This is the first in what might be a series of "Think the World is Bad Now?" (TWBN) posts, which I warned you about in an earlier post. People seem to think everything is worse than it used to be, but a lot of things that are going wrong now are not unprecedented and some things have actually got better. I'll start with a terrorist campaign that was "provoked", instigated and nurtured, then was relaxed, revived and finally (?) abandoned, all within the UK (although many would say it would never have got far without serious financial support from Irish Americans).

I only want to talk about what I remember of this with just a bit of prompting / help from other sources. I think it can teach us a lot about living with a terrorist threat and what mistakes it can push the Government into. I don't remember much about the first period in the early seventies, I don't think I paid much attention to the news in general at that point, but I did sort of know that some people were letting off car bombs and sending letter bombs. The main attacks in the early seventies were the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings. The ones I remember are these (I had to look up the dates):

Car bomb kills Airey Neave (1979)
Hyde Park Bandstand Bombing (1982)
Harrods bomb (1983)
Grand Hotel Brighton blown up during the Conservative Party Conference (1984)
Manchester Arndale Centre (1996)
Mortars in Whitehall (1991)
Canary Wharf (1996)
Bus bomb near Waterloo Bridge (1996)

When Airey Neave was killed it was a big shock because it was a car bomb that went off in the House of Commons car park. The Hyde Park bandstand bombing stands out because the press made a big fuss about the horses that were killed and injured. I remember that being on the front pages. The Harrod's bomb apparently made some of my family worry for me because I lived in London at that point. This attack was apparently the model for a similar one in Doris Lessing's "The Good Terrorist" (good book by the way).

The biggest attack of the 80's was the Grand Hotel in Brighton which was blown up during the Conservative Party Conference. The Tories at that time were at the height of their powers, Thatcher particularly. I hated the Government and its policies at that time, but this attack was pretty shocking and the pictures made me queasy. The stand-out image was of Norman Tebbit (he was once paraphrased as telling unemployed people to "get on your bikes" to look for work) being lifted from the ruins in his pyjamas I think (the bomb went off in the middle of the night).

The Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996 is the one I remembered out of order. It actually came after Canary Wharf. I just read on the BBC site about this one that it went off while bomb disposal people were trying defuse it (or were about to) and that those injured were mostly outside the police cordon (hit by flying glass). Apparently the Centre has been rebuilt and is much better than it used to be.

The mortars that went off in Whitehall were fired from the back of a van. One exploded in the Garden of 10 Downing Street but no one was hurt.

Canary Wharf was hit by a large bomb in 1996. This marked the breaking of a ceasefire that had lasted over a year. The bomb that went off prematurely in Aldwych near the Strand killed a young man called Edawrd O'Brien, the bomber. This one brought home to me that the IRA frequently chose volunteers who were able to blend into their surroundings and seemed unremarkable.

In 1997 the IRA declared a new ceasefire that has remained in place since then, though there have been further attacks by splinter groups, notably the Real IRA.

Sources
Wikipedia
20th Century London
BBC News

Cat's Tongue Who Wants to be a Millionaire

Amazing picture of a cat's tongue. Slashdot programmers' slip-up which meant you couldn't post comments for a while. A contestant on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" uses his Phd "Cognitive and Neuro-Science" (or Psychology) skills to help him win the $1 Million prize. Great invention but I don't want to talk about it!

Think the World's Bad Now? (TWBN)

Sometimes people seem to think things have never been worse; Iraq, Afghanistan, Climate Change, alright there's bad stuff around, but there was bad stuff before also:
The IRA Bombing Campaign
British Forces "Shoot to Kill Policy" in Northern Ireland
Single Party Dictatorships in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania...
The Berlin Wall
Apartheid South Africa
British Food Was Bad (no, really bad)
Joke Records in the Charts
Nuclear Arms Race
Chernobyl
Margaret Thatcher & Co.
Ronald Reagan & Co. (they put a dummy in charge of the World's greatest superpower!)

Perhaps I'll do a series; plenty of material.

Parallel Trousers and Bags

Clothes were never very important to me, but there was a time when I very much wanted to get specific styles in clothes. I was at school and must have been thirteen or so. Suddenly certain clothes were very attractive; I think it was all about being part of a gang. It started with parallel trousers and platform shoes. I don't know all the cultural history of these trousers, but a few of my mates wore them and they seemed the biz. This was around the time Slade were wearing their outlandish garb of high heeled boots and trousers that came just above their ankles. The best of the trousers were made of a shot cotton material that looked different colours in different lights. There's a good page here about 70s clothes, this guy seems to know his stuff - I remember Scratch 'n' Sniff t-shirts! We also liked shirts with round collars; nice deep colours they were. I think the shirts were called Brutus; they looked very good. I think a bit before that Ben Shermans were supposed to be very cool (worn a lot by skinheads; did mods wear them as well?) Later the trousers got wider and were called Bags or Oxford Bags and the shoes got fatter with less of a heel. That was round about when the Bay City Rollers took the nation's female youth by storm - 1974 apparently, though that seems very close now to the start of Punk; well I guess things were moving faster then. Anyway, the Rollers wore their bags high with tartan trim. I remember we asked each other a lot how wide each others bags were (! Idiots). Anyway I don't remember it lasting long, so that was my brief flirtation with fashion then.

Sculpture, Photoshop, Real Beauty

Cool (or not!) sculpture by the beach. This is a sculpture of a tree made from a book. Photoshop tutorial that goes through age-reducing techniques (not excercise and healthy eating!). That reminded me of this Flash Movie from the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty that I'd seen before but not bothered to share for some reason

Singing Drive Thru'

Funny set of pictures that are not what they seem. Some guys decide to do a special kind of order at a McDonalds drive thru. The Story of the Mac (Apple Mac) with accompanying posters

"Guns Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond

I picked up Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" a few years ago because I liked the title and the cover and then I got interested in the blurb. It's basically about why advanced civilisations developed in certain areas of the world and not in others. I don't have the book with me now because I lent it to someone and they lent it on, but I've often thought about it since I read it and I think it's a great book.

The basic thesis of the book I think is that there were specific circumstances which led to advances which people were able to build on and which created the environment for future opportunities. One crucial point that I remember was the development of hunter-gatherer societies into farming societies. Once that has happened a society has a chance of producing a surplus food supply and will be able to devote time to other needs. A hunter-gatherer society is more fragile (more likely to suffer shortages, less likely to be able to store food to tide them over lean times).

Diamond proposes (as I remember) that the necessary conditions for the development of wide scale farming were domesticated crops and animals that could be used for farming (i.e. for work and for food). Horses and cows lived in Africa, Europe and Asia, but not America. Another very interesting point he makes is that the general orientation of continental land masses made it more possible to transfer crops and animals across Europe, Middle East and Asia (because they exist at similar latitudes and therefore have somewhat similar climates) than from North to South America and vice versa, so that the number of crops and animals domesticated in one part of Middle East - Europe - Asia and transferred to another is much higher than what could be transferred up / down the American continent. Another crucial difference arose from the domestication of animals, because close contact with those animals exposed the people from Europe and Asia to new diseases to which they developed some immunity. When these diseases were transported to new countries by the people and animals, the indiginous people of the new countries were suddenly exposed to the diseases with dire effects.

I think Diamond sees the main purpose of his book as being to counter the racist argument that the reason for the disparity in development between the Eurasian-originating peoples and the African and American - originating peoples is genetic; that you can account for the differences using IQ comparisons. Diamond says there are other reasons for the disparities, which he describes in his book.

Mash It Up

"Mashups" are a new development on the web where some of the major sites (e.g. Yahoo, Google, Flickr) have opened up the api (application programming interface) of their own applications, like Google Maps, so that people can create combinations that make something new. Developers get to use the ready-made tool and the api supplier gets to harness a lot of creativity and energy to do new stuff they might never have thought of. Google / Yahoo Maps can be combined with all sorts of things to make information regionalised, so you can combine Google Maps with restaurant reviews and get a site which can recommend a good restaurant wherever you are. This is a site which records what mashups have been built and there are already 1148 that it knows about. You can of course get some strange ideas, like this site that tracks school shootings. I thought it was just the US, but then I saw the title was "Recent World Wide School Shootings" and panned out. The great majority are of course in America. Kind of ghoulish though. This site would be more interesting to go back to; it's a Google Maps mashup blog.

King Of Comedy

This is a Martin Scorcese film that I really enjoyed when it came out. Here's a link on IMDB. Scorcese's films have sometimes been violent, in fact some of his best ones (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas) have been very violent, but this one was more of a black farce and I thought it was great. I've seen it again since and I wasn't so impressed, I think because it was very much of its time and it struck a chord with me at the time. It has a very obvious point - the corrupting influence of media and celebrity; but I thought it was hilarious that the Robert De Niro character (Rupert Pupkin) kidnaps Jerry Lewis and holds him hostage, the ransom being a spot on Lewis's show. He gets sent to prison, but when he gets out he's famous and people love him. So it's not very subtle. Sandra Bernhardt plays a wonderfully hysterical fan obsessed with Jerry Lewis. Every time I think about it I want to see it again, but the last time I did I just didn't think it was as good as I had remembered. Probably that inditement of celebrity and fame is not shocking to me now. You don't often see something so unrestrained though, just in some of the other best Scorcese films.

Budgie Rage IPod Compensation Unfair but Funny

Try this 20 Questions site, it's fun. I tried a budgie and the site got it in 18, even when I gave some (apparently) wrong answers. Green Rage is coming. The Seven Stages of Owning an IPod are explained in cartoon form here. If you're an Apple fan, here's a compensatory (video link) Apple ad on YouTube. But then I want to just add this other (video link) anti-Mac rant. This guy's funny.

Victorian Google Discovery

Review of an interesting - sounding book by Steven Johnson about two men trying to piece together information about the spread of cholera through part of London in Victorian times. This Steven Johnson looks an interesting guy. Here's a fascinating idea about how to gather meaning from word groupings in Google Page Ranks. The authors call it "Automatic Meaning Discovery".

My First Visit to New York

The first time I went to New York, in 1985, I had to get a visa from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London. I turned up in Manhattan without anywhere to stay and walked around a bit and found a little place that rented rooms in Chelsea (that's around where the Empire State Building and the Chelsea Hotel are). The owner was a middle-aged guy called Art who was a bit eccentric (sorry Art). He was involved in a local cable television channel, and I did see a bit of one programme that was a discussion, but I don't remember what it was about, and I don't remember watching anything else. He had a set-top decoder that allowed him to receive loads of channels, but when I tried to look at some of the programmes he got mad because I left it set wrong. Art let me do a couple of odd jobs in return for free rent. I painted his shopfront and rearranged a big load of books for him, but I'm sure I didn't do a very good job. Art had a good heart, but he was a little paranoid - he thought people in a garage next door were trying to get rid of him in order to expand their property; he said he's found a gas cannister on his roof and he took this as a threat or a sign that they could blow him up. They had offered him money for his house at some point but he'd refused and now he thought they wanted to get rid of him by other means. He put a sign up in his window with some kind of demand or accusation that I'm sure no one would understand (probably not even the people in the garage). His place was decrepit and the rooms were tiny, but I stayed there for several weeks and walked around Manhattan (my idea of New York was Manhattan). I walked south to the World Trade Centre and Battery Park and Fort Tryon Park in the north. I saw free dance at the Lincoln Centre and I walked around the Metropolitan Museum several times, not forgetting the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection and the Guggenheim Museum. At the Met I thought the Persian miniatures were lovely and I was blown away by the tribal carvings of the pre-Columbian section, particularly the fertility totems and canoes with wonderful carvings on the prows. I don't remember what I saw at the Guggenheim, the building itself is what makes the impression. The Frick Collection is a smaller gallery based on a private collection of old masters. It had some masterpieces that floored me.

Colbert resigns and traffic lights abandoned

Steve Colbert resigns in (video link) disgusted response to the American Public's appalling desertion of the Republican party. Then he gets into his car and is inspired by his driver to get back into the fight "The Democrats have only been in power for a few minutes and they've already got us stuck in this unwinnable war!" Here's another contribution to an argument I've heard before, which is basically that if you make motorists feel more vulnerable they will drive more carefully. There's a dutch traffic planner who says that getting rid of traffic lights has made his town safer. An older Wired article about this here.

Storm Beautiful Advertisements

Amazing storm chaser pictures Beautiful shot of a snowflake Story of Friendster, the social networking site that was overtaken by MySpace. Creative Advertisements from different countries.

Music Players Through the Years in my Family

Writing about "the family stereogram" earlier started me thinking about the different things we played music on in our family. We weren't musicians, except for the obligatory recorders soon given up on and my sister's piano similarly foresaken, but we certainly loved music, well I did anyway; I won't speak for the others except to say Dad had a Roger Whittaker cassette with RW singing, playing his flute (he did play a flute didn't he?) and whistling. By the way, don't click on the link for Roger's fan site if you don't like his music, you'll get an earful (I suppose you could turn your speakers down) and Mum only really listened to music when she did the ironing - she liked Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz. No, I mean the music machines we used, as in:

The first I remember was a light blue transistor radio with an extendable aerial. It had a plastic case with holes and my memory of it now is as a dinky little thing, like something you'd see in the Design Museum. I had a quick look for some pictures but I don't see anything like it and having looked I think our radio must have been mid-sixties, because the early sixties models look much bigger and older. I remember hearing "She's Got a Ticket to Ride" on this one. That link goes to an interesting story about how John Lennon got the idea for the song, but I'm not sure I believe it (also, check out the small gold heads of the Fab Foursome in the top left gif). So I guess the design of transistor radios went through quite a revolution in the first half of the sixties, Japanese designers at the top of their game I guess.

We also had an old record player. It was the property of one of my parents, can't remember which, and I can't reliably remember when my brother and I started playing records on it. My parents had some old 45s, including Tommy Steele's "Little White Bull". The player was red and cream and had a stacker pole where you could pile several records and lift an arm across the top of them to hold them in place. If you piled up too many though, they would start to skate and slip.

The next thing I remember was called a "stereogram". It was a kind of sideboard record player that you could also keep records in and I think ours was a kind of teak colour. No idea what we played on that, perhaps Dad upgraded the player to the stereogram and my brother and I got the old player.

There was a small radio that I got for Christmas because I wanted to listen to pop music. I think it was a Ferguson. My memories of it are of lying in bed listening to John Peel's Radio One show.

Dad replaced the stereogram with a Sony music centre. I think that was the start of his love affair with Sony, because since then he's always regarded their stuff as likely to be good quality. I listened to my Christmas present for 1973 ("Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd) on that.

But the best thing I ever had to play music on (after the radio) was a turntable, amp and speakers that Dad bought me for my eighteenth and yes it was a Sony machine. I loved that thing.

Remember Remember the Fifth of November

I remember this rhyme from my youth:

Remember Remember
The Fifth of November
Gunpowder Treason and Plot

But I can't remember the next bit! I searched and I found this (watch out for the annoying animated ads in the left sidebar; the mosquito one is particularly irritating), so I can now remember the rest of the rhyme:

I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

We used to have great Bonfire Nights round us ("are you comin round us?", I just remembered is what we said, not even "Are you comin round to our house?"). I thought the bonfire in our back garden was really big, but our back garden wasn't that big, so it can't have been so massive. Just a big pile of wood probably made a big impression on the young me. Dad got some fireworks and Mum baked and cooked (sausage rolls, baked potatoes, wellington squares, soup in mugs). I don't think we did much in the way of a guy, that was supposed to be the kids' thing, make a figure using newspaper and tights and an old coat and a painted face (ten or fifteen years later when I was just out of college we made a "Maggie" guy), rather we found the wood and rubbish and Dad built the bonfire out of it. Fireworks are a lot louder and flashier now, I think the bonfire was more of a deal then. The extended family would come round and join in; my favourite cousin / uncle was called Michael, he was a cool guy and he was into Art and rock music. Yeah it was good.

I don't remember anyone I knew getting hurt from using fireworks then, but since then I have heard of some, mostly from being drunk and messing around. The fireworks we had were pretty much the same as today; rockets, roman candles, catherine wheels, bangers and sparklers. Everybody said "Oooooh" when the rockets went up. Our bonfire was quite an event in our little bit of the estate.

"At Least Dogs Are Not Pigs Like Cats Are"

One night in the pub discussing the old question "Cats or Dogs", my friend Heather came up with this priceless gem. Actually now she has a cat. But what is this dog thinking?

Blimey haha hmm eh?

Very confident (video link) guy gets his dad on the phone for the million dollar question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Hilarious (audio link) prank played on a telemarketing cold caller. Article about the history of the PC market and the struggle between Microsoft and its competitors. This woman says she doesn't know who Bob Dylan is.

The first single I bought was Telegram Sam

I started buying records when I was about 10 in 1971. I got 50 pence pocket money and that was enough for a single. Singles were more important than they are now and being able to buy one per week was great. I don't remember the first one I bought, I think I might be romanticising to say it was "Telegram Sam" by T-Rex, but that was probably the coolest thing I bought around that time; brilliant song, very slick and sexy (probably as much to do with Tony Visconti's production as Marc Bolan's lyrics and looks). Heh, I just found a lyrics website with Telegram Sam on it. Reminds me of Disco 45, this raggedy mag I used to get around the time I'm talking about. I wrote about it here. So Telegram Sam was ace. I also remember something by Chicory Tip called "Son Of My Father" - here's a site with all the UK number ones (they claim) since it started. That's enough lyrics sites. Like I say, it's probably romanticising to say the first was "Telegram Sam", because I also bought lots of rubbish.

The group I really got into at that point was Slade. Noddy, Dave, Don and Jim had a lot of energy and made a lot of noise but the only song of their's I still like much is "Goodbye to Jane". There's a blog by Fury Animal called Musicnews with a piece about Slade featuring the cover of "Slayed", an album of their's I bought later. I did buy Jean Genie by David Bowie but I can't remember much else.

As for albums, the first one I bought was "A Nod's as Good as a Wink to a Blind Horse" by The Faces, who later became Rod Stewart and the Faces. I still play this, usually just for one track called "That's All You Need", as much for Ron Wood's guitar as Rod's voice. When I bought it there was a poster inside and this site has a copy of it. The album cost £2.50 and I still love it for "That's All You Need", though at the time I probably bought it on the strength of "Stay With Me", a classic v. sexist Rod Stewart rocker. I bought other albums as well, but I haven't played "Slayed" or Gary Glitter's album for ages now. The only other album I bought around that time that is still worth playing is "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" by Bowie. It's even possible that I didn't get that until later, when I was at Secondary School (the equivalent in those days of high school). I do remember getting "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd one Christmas and playing it on the family stereogram.

I used to love Jesus

I was once a Christian; I believed in God and I believed that God had sent his son Jesus as a sacrifice to pay for the sins of the whole of humanity. I was exposed to Christian teaching at school and my mother was a Christian, so she took us to Church with her most Sundays. The teaching didn't mean much to me until I was about fifteen and going to the Church Youth Club. I remember talking ("testifying") about it later as a step of faith - I stepped towards God and He took me in - but now I think it was a more gradual process and actually more to do with the fellowship I found with other people at the Church; my steps were towards my peers who were already Christians.

It was when I started university in London that I found myself in an environment that didn't encourage my faith as much as the rural town I'd grown up in; I was expected to think independently on my course (an Art degree with plenty of time to philosophise for myself) and my Christian faith didn't stand up so well once I started to analyse it from a different point of view. My faith had not been tested much before then and in retrospect there was a good chance that it might not stand up under pressure. I met other Christians at university and went to and enjoyed church with them; I particularly remember a black Pentecostal church that was lively and featured impassioned sermons by snappily dressed preachers. I said I think what drew me originally was the fellowship. That wasn't backed up by a deep faith, or at least under serious examination it didn't last very long, perhaps indeed because I hadn't seriously examined it before.

I came to understand that I didn't know what my faith was based on, and that's when it fell apart. Modern Christianity puts a lot of emphasis on the believer's personal faith; this is, I imagine very different from hundreds of years ago when people believed what they were told, or even today among those the Bible calls "the meek". I felt a responsibility to have my own experience of Jesus and when I realised I didn't feel that, there was nothing to fall back on. I asked myself what my faith was grounded in and couldn't come up with anything concrete. I asked my friends and the answers seemed to be circular, based on nothing fixed. It may be that I was applying the wrong kind of tests to my faith; believers don't expect to convince non-believers using reasoned argument, so why should they lose their faith after a bit of the same? However, I didn't have any other means of investigation and once I'd stepped outside, I didn't think about going back in.

I must admit I haven't often since had the same exhilirating sense of trust and affection that I got from my fellow Christians; it can be very uplifting to submerse yourself in a group as supportive as they were. I remember feeling free to be very open with them and feeling able to encourage them in turn, so being without faith can be a cold kind of freedom, but I believe in it.

Links

Hilarious sacking; BBSpot reports Yahoo categoriser loses his job for coding when he should have been categorising porn.
A doctor writes: "Blogging may be somewhat like golf -- it only becomes interesting when you start doing it yourself". Yes! That's what I think!
Great french ad (video link)

Losing a Finger

I was twelve (about that anyway) when I lost part of my right hand middle finger. A friend had just got home from hospital and I was going out with a bag of bananas to visit her. My parents' house had a big heavy front door at that time and if you left the back door and the middle door open, you created a through draft that could blow a door shut. I had the bag of bananas in one hand, so I pulled the door shut by putting my hand around the end and pulling. That's OK, you just pull your hand out before the door shuts, right? Well not in this case, because the other doors were open, so the door slammed shut, just catching the tip of my finger and leaving a piece on the inside. I don't remember making a lot of noise, though I guess I did, anyway, I ran down the road to my mother, who was chatting to a neighbour, and waved my hand in front of her, shouting "Look!"

The next thing I remember is sitting in our next door neighbour's car with my hand in a handkercief and it felt very cold. My brother had been in the house and heard the door slam, so he went to the door and found the tip of my finger on the inside, so he brought it out to Mum and me. I've never asked him to describe exactly what it was like (note to self).

I don't remember much else of that day, except that when the nurse stitched me up it really hurt. They told me there was a one in two chance that it would be OK, but nothing else.

I had to wear a sling for a bit and I was off school for a couple of weeks. During that time I practised writing left-handed, but I must be very right-handed because I was useless. The bandage smelled a bit funny and when I went back they told me it had infected further down my finger, so they had to cut off just below the top knuckle. That was the one time I've been in hospital overnight (except when my daughter was born; I mean I stayed by my partner's bed and that's another story). I remember just before the operation a nurse telling me I had nice eyelashes, afterwards a pakistani doctor came to see me and wasn't very impressed with my french and there was a teenager in a private room who had crashed his motorcycle. He had some music, Led Zeppelin I think, must have been on a tape recorder. I thought he was very cool.

Most people don't notice that I'm missing part of a middle finger and it doesn't affect me much. Occasionally I find that I can't lift as much as I should be able to because there's a bit of leverage missing and a few years ago it used to hurt in the Winter, even slightly opening up and my index finger has leant over slightly into the gap where my middle finger would have been. Later when I worked in a print shop several people assumed I'd got injured at work.

Games and a joke

Create your own comic strip here, try your archery skills here, and try this set of puzzles from Click Drag Type - the way they lead you into the puzzle is fab. This is a science lesson from Calvin's Dad (Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes)

Wish you didn't have so many web usernames and passwords?

I'll be away for two weeks so I may not be able to update the blog, although so far I think I'm the only one here (that means if you leave a comment you will probably be the first! Go ahead!).

Have you heard of The Long Bet? Setup to encourage long-term thinking, it challenges people to make predictions about major trends in the future, like the one that says that by 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing Test. Anyone else can then challenge that prediction and then a bet can be formulated. The Turing Test bet is $20,000 between Ray Kurzweil, inventor of optical character recognition and voice sysnthesis technologies and Mitchell Kapor he developed Lotus 123. The Turing Test was proposed by Alan Turing as a way to find whether a computer could think. The tester would interview two subjects, one of which would be a computer. If the tester could not tell which was the computer, the computer would pass the test.

I thought of a long bet - by the end of this decade more than 70% of secure websites will accept 3rd party authentication, so that the user will not have to sign up to many different secure sites, all with different usernames and passwords. But this bet is not much of a risk, especially after what I read this morning about BBAuth, a new web service from Yahoo.

Yahoo have come up with a method of allowing web applications to pass authentication to Yahoo's site. The apps don't see the username or password but they get a hashed username back that identifies the user. This means if a web app implements BBAuth, you will be able to sign up to the app using your Yahoo id, but the app doesn't see your username and password. You can already do this with Flickr but we may see lots of other implementations coming soon. Google released something similar called Authsub a while ago, but it didn't get the same buzz.

Cute kids' prayers and a woman with lightning coming out of her bum

Kids do better prayers than grown-ups. I ran into this on Slibe. Then here's a story about a woman in Australia who was hit by lightning in her mouth, the bolt travelled through her body and apparently exited via her backside Ouch. Here's a (video link) song by a guy who runs the dead troll website. Here's a link to his site which bypasses the wierd Flash intro you get if you feel you must check out the home page. If you go that way you need Flash 6.

Remembering Punk and My First Spam

I was 15 in 1976 when my rural North West town started to hear about Punk Rock. In fact I don't remember it as Punk Rock, but New Wave (was that later?). The first record that seemed different as I remember it was "Do Anything You Wanna Do" by Eddie and the Hot Rods. It had energy anyway. The first nw record I bought was a double A-side by the Stranglers called "London Lady / Get a Grip on Yourself". The stuff I listened to was The Jam, The Ramones, The Clash, Elvis Costello and The Damned. I wasn't really an angry punk, more a fun punk, but I thought The Clash were great - they talked about making their own clothes and they had a reggae track on their album. I listened to a lot of this stuff on John Peel's show some time around midnight, in bed with a transistor radio next to my ear so my brother in the top bunk wouldn't hear. Peel played that kind of music mixed with Ivor Cutler's stories called "Scenes From a Scottish Living Room". I remember one about a bird called Fremsley (if you've never heard Ivor Cutler, give the linked site above a go, it's worth a listen). The Peel Show was a strange and wonderful mixture.

It was sometime around then that I picked up a Disco 45. I'd not looked at one for a long time since I used to get them when I was around 10 (I wrote about that here. Disco 45 was an awful magazine, consisting of the lyrics of top 40 hits. I bought it every week). I'm not usually good at remembering dates, but I remember I did a project at school which consisted of copying the lyrics of songs from Disco 45. I don't know what the project was supposed to be - poetry? I was shocked when Mr. Brown thought my efforts were not that great! I did concede to myself that the the T-Rex hit "Deborah" was perhaps not the right choice - it went something like:

Dug and redug redug, dug and redug redug
naah naah naah naah naah naah naah
Deborah, you look like a Zeborah
naah naah naah naah naah naah naah
Dug and redug redug, dug and redug redug

...and so on. I wrote down the whole thing concientiously and Mr Brown must have wondered if I was on drugs (he wasn't very hip man). Perhaps I could have chosen a better example by Marc Bolan (he and Micky Finn, who played the bongoes, were T-Rex), but anyway, that was when I loved Disco 45. The time I'm talking about now was about 5 years later, so I think I would have been slightly embarassed by it - it was very uncool. I don't know how I came across it but I was interested in the competition inside. Disco 45 was probably one of the opposites of Punk (there were several opposites of Punk and pappy Top 40 pop songs as a bunch were one). The editor said he wanted people to write in on a postcard what they thought about Punk and the winner would get an album (see how things have changed? I was excited at the prospect of winning an album!) I sent a letter and a few weeks later he phoned our house and asked to talk to me. He said I'd won and would it be OK for him to put my address in the magazine so that people could write to me (heh, see how things have changed? Put my address in a magazine?!)

So I started getting letters from girls who found my address in the next Disco 45. I never wondered why I didn't get any letters from boys, but then I did get one from a boy / man / bloke, I never worked out his age, but his letter certainly stood out and I've still got it. It was my first spam, before email was invented. I can't scan it because it's faded now, and I don't want to write it all down (as you'll see). Difficult to know what to leave out here, but all the square brackets and *** are mine (as if my skinhead penpal would use square brackets). Anyway, knock yourselves out:

TO THE F***** IDIOTIC C***, [my name] WHAT A SHIT NAME.
NOW LISTEN ERE MOUSH I
REALLY HATE PUNK ROCK
WE GO PUNK BASHING UP LONDON EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT AND IF
YOU COME DOWN TO THE ROXY AT COVENT GARDEN WHICH IS A
SPUNK POCKERS CLUB I'LL
[offers to modify my looks] LIKE WE
DONE LAST FRIDAY TO A
C*** WITH GREEN HAIR. WE
WEST HAM SKINHEADS AND
WE'RE F***** RULE EVERYONE
MATE ESPICIALLY PUNK
ROCKERS WHO WE REALLY
HATE. YOU ARE DIRTY, SMELLY
F****** C**** AND IT'S A
WELL KNOWN FACK THAT ALL
PUNK ROCKERS ARE QUEERS
AND YOU MUST BE WITH A
NAME LIKE THAT YOU F*****
SNOB C***. I'M GONNA DRIVE
UP TO [my home town] ONE DAY
AND WAIT FOR YOU AND
[various graphic details] THEN
WHEN YOUR DEAD I'LL PISS
ON YOU AND KICK SHIT
OUT OF YOU AND ANY OTHER
PUNK THAT WE SEE
SKINS RULE AND DON'T
YOU FORGET IT C***
I'LL DO 10 PUNKS TOMMOROW
REALLY BAD AND
I'LL BE THING OF YOU. BY THE
WAY ALL PUNK GIRLS ARE
F***** OLD SLAGS AS WELL.
6 OF US [you don't want to read this bit]
COS SHE WAS A PUNK SLUT
ANYWAY ONE DAY I'M
COMING UP YOUR PLACE
WITH THE BOYS. SO START
SHITTING YOURSELF MATE,
AND REMEMBER
SKINHEADS RULE OK
AND KILL ALL PUNKS
PAKIS AND TEDS
WEST HAM
YOU CAN'T HELP IT
IF YOU YOU SMELL

Two Good looking photo sites

I recently found these and they have consistently good images. Bluejake is based in New York and daily dose of imagery is in Toronto. I think they both have a warmth that you don't always see, they're always (the ones I've seen) in colour and they are both interested in daily life. That's good enough for me!

Pay as You Drive and Pay as You Throw

I heard on the radio (Moneybox) about a new type of insurance policy called "Pay as You Drive". Insurance companies say you are more likely to have an accident if you drive between 11pm and 4am, so they will give you discounts if you don't drive in that period, but they propose to check this using a gps tracking system in your car. You pay for the device to be installed and then you pay per mile you drive - more if you drive at rush hour or in the wee small hours. They interviewed a woman that is already using it and she read out the information that the device reports - time, distance travelled, area. The insurance company interviewed said they would hand over the information to the Police if requested as part of a serious inquiry, but not in order to catch speeders. Here's an article on the BBC news site

That reminded me of something that came up while I was watching the tv program about local councils and waste disposal this week. Some councils have installed little recorder devices on rubbish bins so that they can report on what weight of rubbish has been collected from that bin and when. This will allow them to charge separately for waste collection based on the weight of your waste. I think they already do this in Ireland, which has a much better recycling record than the UK. Another BBC link about the devices
I'm sure there will be more uses found for this kind of technology, but personally it doesn't worry me much yet... maybe when database technology starts to get sophisticated enough so that "they" can put the disparate elements together. What was that film where the hero's walking down a futuristic thouroughfare and all the billboards are talking to him personally?

Simpsons Quiz, brill robot, way cool animation and a drawing

Simpsons Quiz - I'm not that big a fan, I only got to £1000 before I had to start repeating. Amazing Animation of cell activity; the studio were briefed by science professors aiming to find a different method of teaching students. Way cool robot (video link) - it moves so strangely! Pavement chalk drawing - wow!

Comics I read when I was young

When I was little I remember going to my nanna's house on Saturday mornings. She bought us comics and I was thinking about them today. The first I think she ever got me must have been Look and Learn; it makes me cringe now. Apart from the cringeing (aargh, so wholesome! It looks like a Watchtower!), I remember the smell. It had a similar kind of smell (must have been the paper / ink) to Jackie, which was also more appealing because it was a way into the world of girls, but come to think of it, I didn't see Jackie until a few years later when girls had it at school. My sister was too small to get Jackie when I had Look and Learn, I think she got Bunty instead. My brother got Victor, which was more of a strip comic. Victor had some good characters though; I remember "Alf Tupper, The Tough of The Track" Later I must have given up on Look and Learn because I started getting Shoot, a football comic (in that picture of a Shoot cover I think Martin Chivvers of Spurs is about to be taken out by Tommy Smith of Liverpool, the team I supported). At that point my brother was getting Beano or Whizzer I think. Later again I got Disco 45, a collection of the lyrics of pop songs at the time. I'll tell you about that another time.

landfills Filling up

I saw an interesting piece on tv the other night about new arrangements in some councils for waste collection, in response to stricter European Union regulations about how much of its total waste the UK should recycle. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, this country recycles only 18% of its waste, compared to Ireland 31%, Germany 58% and Holland 65%. http://www.ippr.org.uk/pressreleases/?id=2283 Local councils are saying they will have to charge for waste removal if they are going to avoid being fined by the EU http://www.lga.gov.uk/PressRelease.asp?id=-A783C9F1 Some councils are starting to take radical action, (e.g. collecting the rubbish once every 2 weeks instead of every week), but that is making people verrry mad, because they're starting to get rats, maggots and the stink of rotting rubbish. To be fair, the councils are under a lot of pressure to reduce the amount of waste they dump and they are collecting recycled waste every other week. In Ireland people are charged by weight for their rubbish and their record is much better, but there's a lot more fly tipping. The report said there's an estimated 9 years worth of space left in UK landfill sites.

Searching for "landfill" at the BBC site I found this wierd story about a fire that was burning underneath a landfill. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/guernsey/4851028.stm

Funny Clips

George Bush is not a favourite of mine. I know there are a lot of cheap shots around, but sometimes a little fun at the expense of the Man can lighten the heart. This is a funny clip from the Daily Show with Little Richard as "translator" for GW. (video link) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-rBc9jxG1U

Here's a funny Thai tv ad (video link) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4479130566581116930 Wonder how that coup's going?...
...apparently the most peaceful military coup in Thai history (well, according to the Thai Tourist Authority!) http://www.thailandhotdeal.com/issue_detail20/ It was strange hearing about that coup - we'd only been there on holiday a couple of years ago.

I Like Hearing Myself Talk

That's from an Oscar Wilde quote - "I like hearing myself talk. It's one of my greatest pleasures". Let's see whether I like what I write. I'm starting this thing more out of curiosity than confidence - let's see what happens. I work in computers, I live in London, I have a partner and a daughter. I like reading, listening to music and watching tv and films and browsing the web. I've always voted Labour but I'm disappointed with Tony's adventures in Iraq.