AntBadger

Sell More Subscriptions or You Get Beaten Up!

2007-03-24T15:38:00.000Z

Young people are being recruited in America to sell magazine subscriptions on the street. According to this New York Times story, the business is very dubious.

Picture of a sandstorm approaching in Iraq and Carbon Offsetting

2007-03-10T16:15:00.000Z

This is a Featured Picture in Wikipedia. "Cheatneutral" is a funny piss-take of carbon-offsetting. You pay via them for someone to "not cheat" in order to offset your cheating. Offset your guilt!

Flying People Photos

2007-03-05T00:57:00.000Z

The World Press Photo Contest has some cool pictures of people flying through the air - it's dance!

Edit photos online

2007-03-01T21:31:00.000Z

This is a cool idea; you can edit your images online at this website. You don't need photo-editing software and you can work with your flikr pictures. It's only in beta so far and it's only got basic controls, but it looks cool. Mac / PC ads are all around now, but I found a Japanese one that looks cool - Domo

Animated film

2007-02-28T22:31:00.000Z

A nicely animated film about a fantasy explorer.

Vista Security hole... I know but this is also funny

2007-02-26T23:09:00.000Z

Apparently if a wav file is downloaded and played at sufficient volume and quality on a machine running Vista where speakers and microphone are enabled, the machine may respond to commands issued in the wav file. There's also a technet article about it. Funny stuff!

Development

2007-02-25T00:08:00.000Z

This video on YouTube is of a fascinating lecture about development across the world (as in economic / social development, not computer development) presented as data on charts. Presented by Hans Rosling

Funny ads from IKEA

2007-02-23T23:12:00.000Z

A sense of humour is good when advertising your products. IKEA furniture isn't great, but it's cheap and anybody can enjoy these ads (all videos) - woman has lost something in her untidy house. Visit from the girlfriend. Little Boy finds a new toy

Isaac Asimov Story

2007-02-22T23:37:00.000Z

An amusing story from Isaac Asimov

New Word Processor (Joking...)

2007-02-21T21:30:00.000Z

You can have some fun with (Flash gimmick) this.

Drug Patent Politics

2007-02-20T22:44:00.000Z

This sounds pretty awful. Novartis, the Swiss drugs company, is challenging the patent law in India and if they are successful, the price of some drugs could skyrocket. A woman who reported a rape was arrested and refused a morning-after pill in Florida.

You Are What You Eat Revisited

2007-02-16T00:36:00.000Z

An interesting (and substantial) article in the New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan about the rise of "Nutritionism" and decline of nutrition in the American diet. Before and After retouching shots of models from (Flash Movie) Christiane Beaulieu

Pictures of New York People

2007-02-15T00:45:00.000Z

These pictures are very New York

"Isotope 2" Online Drawing Game

2007-02-13T22:52:00.000Z

You set the parameters for the machine to draw and set it off

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

2007-02-12T20:10:00.000Z

I've just finished a book by Jonathan Safran Foer called "Extermely Loud and Incredibly Close", which I found very moving. I was on the tube as I got to the end of the book and I could feel tears coming. Reviewers have criticised the book for its whimsicality and there are elements of that, but overall I thought it was a great read.

I'd read Safran Foer's previous book "Everything is Illuminated" and found it interesting but mixed - he tells the story in several different voices, not all of which are so easy to read. The main voice is a very entertaining one though, a young, naive "translator" (that's what he calls himself) called Alex.

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" uses some of the same devices as the earlier book - various voices, some of which are heavier going than others and a foreground character who this time is a clever young boy with apparently autistic tendencies. In the first book Safran Foer dealt with Holocaust survival and in this one his main character's father dies in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Oskar (the young boy) describes his grief as "heavy boots" and he thinks up inventions in order to stop himself thinking of bad things. At one point he has the idea that there should be a channel under everybody's pillow to drain their tears to the reservoir in Central Park. Each morning a special report would tell everyone the emotional state of the city and occasionally, on the worst days, everybody would be called upon to bring sandbags to shore up the banks of the reservoir and stop it from overflowing. If you think that kind of metaphor is silly or cloying, don't read this book. I found it lovely.

In "Everything is Illuminated", the author himself appears, looking for the person who saved his father from the Nazis. There is a parallel in the later novel (perhaps there being so many close similarities is a weakness, well, let's see if the next one is the same); Oskar goes on an impossible quest in search of the lock which fits a key he finds in his father's closet. He has many wonderful adventures which in the end seem to have become therapy for Oskar and when he comes to the end, he realises that the search made him feel closer to his father than reaching its conclusion.

Dealing with the trauma of the aftermath of 9/11 is obviously very hard for a novelist and I guess it's inevitable that writers will do it obliquely (for instance by using the voice of an autistic child). One scene that I thought benefited from this was where Oskar gives a talk at school about the experience of people in a Japanese city hit by an atomic bomb. His schoolmates are grossed out by the horrible details while Oskar enthuses over technicalities. We see Oskar's isolation from his schoolmates and in the process a question occurs; how do we feel about 9/11? Because there were no survivors and hardly any remains, there are no similarly gruesome stories for 9/11, just the haunting phone messages and the images of falling bodies. Oskar has his own reactions to both these motifs.

Many people will find this book too trite to handle its subject, and the author crass for turning 9/11 into entertainment, but as I say I found parts of it very moving. Oskar is sent home from school on the fateful day and plays five messages from his dad on the answerphone. He replaces the answerphone with an identical one so that he can protect his mum from the messages, but feels compelled to keep playing them. Later we hear that the fifth message was his father repeating "Are you there?" eleven times. Oskar was in the house and heard his father leaving this message, but was unable to answer the phone. he carries a burden of guilt for that. You finish the book wondering whether he would shed that burden.

Problems with the Vista User Interface

2007-02-11T21:23:00.000Z

Steve Wiseman over at IntelliAdmin laments Vista's problems in this piece called "The 5 Sins of Vista"

Fortune Cookie Website

2007-02-11T00:33:00.000Z

Blogthings will tell you all sorts of things about yourself and all free. It's like a fortune cookie machine that will spout on various subjects, such as What American City You Are, and Are You a Drama Queen or King?. It does also have a Fortune Cookie Generator, which told me "A man can keep his youth by giving her money, furs and diamonds".

I made a password generator in Excel, maybe I could do something like this with it. I remember David Bowie used to create the lyrics for his songs by chopping up lines of text and juxtaposing them.

Driving With a Shattered Steering Column

2007-02-09T20:13:00.000Z

I was talking in an earlier post about how problems with your house can seem mysterious, obscure and hard to solve. As often happens when I make such a statement, I then recalled a case that suggested the same could happen with cars. I remembered a problem we once had with a car, that could also have been much more dangerous in retrospect. There were just two of us (my partner and I) at that point and we had a yellow Mini. Our previous car was also a Mini but had been wrecked by a BMW driving slowly into the back of the car behind us in a traffic queue. The Beamer driver was just bending down to pick something up with his brakes off. His car pushed the car behind us into our mini's boot and his insurance didn't match the quality of his car. To fix the dented boot would have cost more than the car was worth, so we gave it to a scrap metal merchant for twenty quid.

So the next car (another Mini) we got was a bit nicer and more reliable, except after a while you could feel it pulling the steering wheel a bit to the left as you drove. You could keep pulling it back and it didn't seem like a bad problem because the car still ran alright, but we took it to the garage several times trying to get it fixed. The garage tried wheel tracking and replaced the bearings and said it would be OK, but it wasn't. We must have been driving it for six months or so after first noticing the problem when we took it back in again and said the things they had tried so far had not worked. They looked again and this time said they had found that the head of the steering column was shattered. After we'd let it sink in we felt relieved that we'd kept trying to get it fixed!

Plumbers and Builders

2007-02-06T23:33:00.000Z

I've had a bad relationship with plumbers and builders. I'm trying to think of the word that means a relationship isn't working very well, (is it disfunctional?) This probably stems from the fact that I'm not a confident handyman, not well-endowed (steady...) in the arts of manipulating resistant materials. "Resistant Materials" is what woodwork, metalwork, and plastics are now called at school, instead of just woodwork and metalwork (see, we didn't make anything except model airplanes with plastic when I was at school). I wasn't good at making them do things at school and didn't develop much in the way of DIY post-education. When we moved into our current house, I met our next door neighbour, nice guy, and the first thing he said to me was "Are you 'andy?" So I thought he'd misheard my name, but he meant was I good with tools.

I was about to say that this lack of ability with hammers nails and saws has led us to pay for some bad work, but actually we've probably been lucky, because most of the work we've had done seems to have been good. So why the dissatisfied feeling? Well, it is often difficult to get them to come round to do a quotation and then sometimes they're just too busy to do the work, though I must admit to once having got a plumber out to fit a washer on a bathroom tap that I had broken by trying to fix it myself, on a Bank Holiday. He did come out and fix it, but it was expensive. I know not to try to fix plumbing on Bank Holidays now. Or, it could be that half the time we don't know what the problem is, so we try various fixes for the same problem that don't seem to fix it, for instance damp walls are a mysterious phenomenom that can apparently be caused by all sorts of things, and if only we could know the spefically relevant thing we'd be happy. Fixing car problems has been less difficult, why should that be; are cars more insulated from Nature? Or just always newer and subjected to that endless cycle (spiral?) of renewal, ditching your old car and buying the newer model with all its improvements; better brakes, side-impact bars, better fuel consumption, whereas fixing our house is like keeping a rusty old Ford Cortina on the road. And perhaps that I don't feel at all guilty about not being any good at fixing cars.

Actually what prompted this post - become whinge was a story over on the Velo-Gubbed Legs blog about nmj's boiler engineer being very young. She talks about standing over his shoulder while he worked and that reminded me (obscurely) of my daughter when she was small, standing behind a plumber that we had got to work on our heating. The plumber was recommended to us by friends. He was middle-aged and had a family (he was the guy that came out on a Bank Holiday; at that time I asked him about his family but he wasn't too bothered. I know I'd hate to work on a Bank Holiday, but he seemed happy enough to get away). So my daughter was following this guy round watching what he was doing, she was fascinated (twelve years later she's a lot more self-concious), but I'm not sure what the fascination was, probably just curiosity; I think she was too young to be concerned that he was doing a good job. I must ask her whether she remembers that plumber - she did have a bit of a thing for older men (I mean when she was four), she loved meeting a Father Christmas at my sister's house. She followed him around until he gave her a kiss, then went back for a couple more.

Flash Game Fun

2007-02-05T20:47:00.000Z

Try this Flash game - it's fun.

Guantanamo: Set Them Free

2007-02-03T23:59:00.000Z

Guantanamo Bay is an illegal detention centre run by the US Government. They run it in a different country in order to avoid judicial regulations in their own country. Amnesty International is campaigning for the closure of Guantanamo or the fair trial of its prisoners, but the camp continues and the suffering continues. Join the (Flash movie) Amnesty Flotilla and call for the closure of the prison.

More Best old Music

2007-02-03T01:55:00.000Z

Thinking back over what were my favourite things in music, these songs stick out from the seventies and eighties. Here's a bunch of YouTube links:

Golden Earring "Radar Love" (What a cool groove. I never owned this single but it was always one of my favourites - and check out the skin-tight jumpsuits on those guys!)
Elvis Costello "Watching the Detectives" (for skanky rhythm and lyrics sharp as a stick)
P.P. Arnold "The First Cut is the Deepest" (for as much soul you could get from a little piece of vinyl. I thought that song was written by Steve Winwood or Jim Capaldi, but apparently not - Cat Stevens wrote it!)
Chaka Khan "Ain't Nobody" (Great disco shakes. Mmmm what a fabulous bass line. Sorry I couldn't find a better quality clip.)
Evelyne Champagne King "Shame" (Brill riff, sparkling and fizzy)
Parliament Funcadelic "One Nation Under a Groove" (For the funkiest funk ever)

All these are still great songs, I get a rush just thinking about each one; it's just a pity I couldn't find good links for them all. I did find several great links on TheBurnleyBoy YouTube channel

Give a Water Buffalo

2007-02-01T19:44:00.000Z

You know those gifts for poor families that you can by proxy, like where you pay for a goat for a family in an African village or something like that? Well apparently sometimes nobody actually gets a goat; the money goes into a development pool. So if you thought you were sending a direct gift, well not actually. There's a guy called Robert Thompson who lives in Yunan province in China. He's American and he went there with his Chinese partner to get married. He's also a violinist and he's doing a tour over there. Anyway he saw a story on Philip Greenspun's blog about this guy who bought a water buffalo and then realised nobody actually got a water buffalo. You can see the comment from Bob Thompson under the blog post and then you can see the resulting video (pretty professional) on Thompson's site. I came across this on Jason Kottke's site.

I've Forgotten my Password

2007-01-31T22:29:00.000Z

Did you forget your password over the Christmas holidays? Daily Dose of Imagery has a nice picture of BCE Place in Toronto. Sam Javanrouh, who takes the pictures, also mentions how it was stitched together using this "panorama tool"

John Coltrane

2007-01-30T20:20:00.000Z

John Coltrane (1926-1967) is one of my favourite jazz musicians and has been for a long time. I think him and Miles Davis were the Kings of Jazz for a while and when I first heard their music at college I thought it was the best thing ever. The Official John Coltrane site has (Flash movie, with no controls - you have to close the browser to stop it) a cool set you can listen to while reading up about his life (though his life was really just the music). There's not so much to say about Coltrane except that he was a great musician who produced some fabulous music (particularly A Love Supreme), not always appreciated in his time. His wife, Alice Coltrane, also a jazz musician, recently died.

Cheeky Boys Help Dad With Painting the House

2007-01-28T19:59:00.000Z

If you're a parent you've been there (well not always that far!). Satellite Navigation is becoming popular and apparently people are trusting it too implicitly. There have been crashes reported in Germany and the UK and people making unsafe turns, because "the satnav told me to".

Picasso's Great Masterpiece Was Created a 100 Years Ago

2007-01-26T22:46:00.000Z

Many people say Les Demoiselles D'Avignon is the greatest masterpiece of the twentieth century. It was created in 1907 by the young Picasso and started a revolution in the Visual Arts. Even now the picture looks violent and shocking, but at the time it must have been quite an experience to see it. The painting is so radically different from what went before and was so important to what came after that more than any other work it can be seen as pivotal in the development of Modern Art.

You don't look at this picture and think "How beautiful". It seems determined to be ugly, in fact by standards of the time it must have seemed slapdash, though apparently Picasso made around 800 studies for it. The figures are unrealistic and the whole space of the picture looks broken. The painting seems to have gone through several stages and the way some figures are painted is very different from others. Famously, some of the figures are inspired by Iberian sculptures, but the more brutally painted ones resemble African masks. It looks as if it was painted in a reckless manner, even after so long; Picasso obviously disregarded any requirement for the painting to be attractive and instead created a breakthrough painting, one that broke up the imaginary picture plane that most other painters used. The picture was only later understood to be crucial in the development of Modern Art, and when you look at it, it is a very forceful and compelling painting, both because it has an immediacy and because of how Picasso's art and the History of Art changed after this painting.

There's an interesting article on the Financial Times site which reminds us a little of the context of the Demoiselles. The writer, Jakie Wullschlager, says that other artists were also searching to reinvent the old outmoded methods of representation and they were also looking to art from other cultures to inspire them, as Picasso had looked to iberian and african art. The same article mentions the El Greco painting "The Opening of The Fifth Seal (The Vision of St. John)" as a major influence on Picasso at this point. I wasn't entirely convinced by that, but it's an interesting idea.

"Hold Your Wee For a Wii" Contest Ends in Death

2007-01-25T22:29:00.000Z

A competition at a radio station in Sacramento USA ended with the death of a woman who had been competing. The contestants were given water to drink, but to win they had to hold it until everyone else had given up and relieved themselves. The woman died of "Water Intoxication". The prize? A Nintendo wii.

Book Review: "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith

2007-01-24T20:46:00.000Z

I recently read this and enjoyed it a lot. The main thing I liked is that the characters are engaging and believable. It's about two families, one mixed race and one black, the fathers / husbands of which are both college professors. These two guys are at opposite ends of the political and critical (they are both art historians) spectrum and are involved in some kind of arguement, but the best bits of the book are not about them or their squabble; the best bits (and most of the book) are about the family of the white guy his mixed race family and a young rapper they come into contact with.

The book is about middle class black families living and working in a university town, and probably some people will find their lives a little easy. These people don't have real problems like some of the people they meet; they are protected from trouble by their wealth, but I still found Kiki, Zora, Levi, Jerome and Howard (the father) compelling, even when I was wincing at the things they put themselves through. Howard in particular, even though he's obviously a very intelligent guy, does some very stupid things, apparently designed to hurt those he loves and by proxy himself. Howard blunders around the book like a big bear, taking whatever is close by. There's a scene where the family are at a funeral and Howard decides he can't take it anymore, so he leaves the church and goes to visit his father, who he has not seen for several years. The two men can't communicate and in a very well observed scene Howard soon loses patience and walks out on his dad.

Zora and Levi are the two younger children and a lot of the book is about them and how they struggle with their contradictory lives. Levi wants to be a cool bro'. He meets some young haitians selling pirate dvds on the streets and soon he wants to bury himself in their cause, but he can't admit to them where he's from and pretends he's from the poorer part of town. Zora wants to be respected for her equality politics but her father is the professor. She campaigns for a young local black rapper to be allowed to attend the same poetry course as her, but she herself has been allowed on the course by means of political machination.

What makes all this such a great read is the understanding with which it's written. I felt these people could really exist and Zadie Smith had been living with them for months at a time, sharing their private thoughts and even when they made their stupid mistakes I could feel with them.

For the first few pages I wondered whether I was just going to find the book a flat farce about ridiculous people at university (it vaguely remined me of the Wilt books), but it soon got going and proved to be a lot better than that. We could have had more sympathetic treatment of Professor Kipps, Howard's reactionary nemesis, and his attractive daughter Victoria, but the one I would like to have heard more from was Jerome, Howard's christian son, who has gone to live and work with Professor Kipps and fallen in love with Victoria (thus a double betrayal of his father). Perhaps it's the false tone of the emails at the start of the book that let the book down to begin with, but I never got to feel for Jerome in the way that I did for the others; a pity, since the tension setup by his "betrayals" sets up the first great scene, where Howard shows up at the Kipps residence in an effort to sort the sorry business out. I get the feeling Zadie Smith doesn't empathise with christians very much, perhaps her talent led her to conjure up Jerome too easily - a stronger Jerome would have given the Belsy family more depth I feel. This is only a slight criticism of a very good book, which made me want to go back and read her others as soon as I can.

Nerdy Cartoon Nice Design Work

2007-01-23T20:43:00.000Z

xkcd is a cartoon website that occasionally comes up with gems like this one. Lovely. Nice design work on Misprinted Typ e

Favourite Tracks from 2006

2007-01-22T20:31:00.000Z

We (me, my partner and daughter) generally do a "best tracks of the year" excercise and this year came up with these:

Kanye West - Spaceship
Sufjan Stevens - Decatur
Trivium - Rain
Head Automatica - Please Please Please (Young Hollywood)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Date With The Night
Manu Chao - Clandestino
Orchestre de la Pailotte - Kadia Blues
Novalima - Malato
Evanescence - Going Under
Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra - Ya Fama
Lost Prophets - A Town Called Hypocrisy

Actually some of these have been around for a while, but I guess some years we just don't discover a lot of new music. Last Christmas I got given Kanye West's "Late Registration" and this year I thought I'd buy the first one for my daughter but she doesn't like it much, so I'm listening to it. The Sufjan Stevens album "(Come on Feel the) Illinoise" was my favourite music last year and this Christmas I got another one by him. Trivium and Head Automatica are both my daughter's choices; Trivium in particular is a bit heavy for me. I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs though, me and sprog can agree on that. We've been into Manu Chao for a while and learnt Clandestino together in the car driving around Wales this Christmas. Orchestre de la Pailotte and Novalima are my partner's choices, Novalima is great stuff, we've been playing that all year. Evanescence is another of the young lass's - that's the name that most people have recognised, I've been going round saying "Oh, this year is quite mixed, our tastes have diverged a bit", thinking the daughter's heavy stuff might be a bit over the top for most people, but Evanescence is the one everyone said they knew and liked. Toumani Diabate is a great african musician playing lovely music. We went to see him in Brighton this year and had a great time.

Giorgio de Chirico

2007-01-21T20:26:00.000Z

One of the greatest Surrealist painters, de Chirico produced eerie masterpieces like these (strangely hosted at the Maths and Computer Science Department of California State University; somebody there knows a good thing) and these at the de Chirico Foundation. de Chirico was actually making these paintings before the First World War, whereas the Surrealists got together in the 1920s. He later painted much more traditional pictures, not very well.

Trying out Linux

2007-01-21T00:57:00.000Z

I've just installed Ubuntu Linux and I'm starting to learn how it works and what I can do with it. So far I've been impressed, except the installation took several attempts. I have a 700mhz cpu, 256 MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive, so the server copy of Ubuntu that my boss gave me wasn't going to work. I had started to download the free version of RedHat Linux called CentOS, but I had only downloaded 1 out of 4 cds and I saw lots of stuff about Ubuntu and it was only one cd, so I decided to switch to that. I've a feeling that I'm not getting the best out of it yet though; there are some issues with the media player, but actually I've been pleasantly surprised at the applications and the ease of use. I had to try the installation several times, but I didn't get any difficult questions and most of what I need has worked without me having to make any changes. I've been able to play cds on the media player (called Sound Juicer), browse the Web with Firefox (which means the Operating System auto-configured my broadband router), play games... haven't done much work yet though – having too much fun. My printer installed without a problem and Ubuntu saw my usb stick itself.

Hopefully I'll be able to improve the performance a bit with some tweaking; the Word Processor is a bit slow to start, but it's quite easy to use and some of the most common shortcuts work fine. Surprisingly the dictionary doesn't include Firefox or shortcut (what are those several dictionaries?).

Adult wii news

2007-01-19T21:44:00.000Z

There's an interesting story on the Opposable Thumbs site about how a porn site has added a "wii-friendly interface". It would be cool to have other ways of working with a website than a keyboard and mouse. You need a lot more room with a wii though. Here's a nice article on neatorama called "13 Photographs that Changed the World".

Breaking Taboos in Drag

2007-01-18T21:56:00.000Z

I saw this story linked on Reddit. It's about Salim Ali, a drag artist in Pakistan who presents a television show. There's also a selection of clips from her shows on YouTube, e.g. this one. It reminded me of a South African comedian called Pieter-Dirk Uys, who lampooned the Apartheid Government as the socialite Evita Bezuidenhout. I also found an article at the BBC about a Zimbabwean drag artist called Kudah Samuriwo. Perhaps drag is particularly effective in macho countries, but these artists are obviously pretty brave with it; imagine the intimidation they get from their countrymen! The African girls seem more radical and have now shifted their fight as much against HIV/AIDS as their governments, whereas Salim Ali is more mainstream. She is able to do this by virtue of the ambiguity of being a man dressed as a woman; women would not be allowed to do the same thing, yet she can take on this role and flirt with her guests in a way that would otherwise be unacceptable.

Microsoft Digital Rights Management

2007-01-17T21:46:00.000Z

Charlie Dimerjian at the Inquirer says Windows Vista is not an option because of the heavy-handed way it protects content. Karel Donk says maybe piracy is a better choice. In 2004 Cory Doctorow gave a talk about DRM to Microsoft in which he pleaded that they "turn the wheel on the old Buick". Peter Gutmann wrote an article about the performance overhead incurred by adding in DRM to the Operating System. So is this storm going to grow into a tempest for Vista?

Church Bloopers and Richard Dawkins

2007-01-16T23:09:00.000Z

The Daily Nooz blog has posted some old "church bloopers" that were circulated by email years ago. My favourite is this one: The Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 P.M. Please use the back door. Made me laugh. This made me cheer (quietly) though. Richard Dawkins has been named "man of the year" by this blog.

Velcro Photo

2007-01-15T19:33:00.000Z

Here's an amazing picture of velcro being pulled apart, magnified hugely. Wikipedia have a map showing countries that have the Death Penalty and those that don't.

Teaching method

2007-01-15T00:04:00.000Z

I found this article about a method that an American professor used in his lectures in order to get the students to pay attention. Authorities in America have found that gift token cards (in the US they seem to be called gift cards) are being used as money-laundering devices, partly because they are not counted as legal tender when it comes to border crossing, so you can carry as much as you like in gift tokens across US borders.

Disease and Invasion in the Multiplayer Online World

2007-01-14T00:34:00.000Z

Second Life and Word Of Warcraft are "virtual worlds" created by developers and open to anyone who wants to play. Players sign up and create avatars and then interact with the virtual world and other players. According to the Wikipedia page about Second Life, its use has exploded in the last few months, going from 1,000,000 users in October to double that in mid-December 2006. World of Warcraft is a little different from Second Life, because it comes from a tradition of "Role Playing Games" (RPGs), starting with Dungeons and Dragons. World of Warcraft is massive at 7,500,000 players. Another difference between the two games is the extent to which the game has objectives. In WOW the player can gain money, skill and experience through winning fights against other players, whereas in SL there are no such developments; you develop your own goals much like in real life. What I find interesting is the particular kind of digital problems that have affected these virtual worlds. Blizzard, the developers of WOW, created a virtual disease called "Corrupted Blood" in part of their world. The disease got out of hand, because malicious players, or "griefers" intentionally spread it and laid waste to large parts of the world until Blizzard restricted its effects more decisively. Second Life has its own particular problems. Since it allows free accounts and doesn't monitor processor usage by players and you can run scripts, hackers can get away with a lot; in particular they create objects that self-replicate continuously and overload servers. Because Second Life mimics real life (RL) - for instance the money earned can be exchanged for RL money - some people have started to take it more seriously, to treat it in a similar way to RL, whereas the greifers refuse to allow that to happen unchallenged. They disrupt events by invading with multiple phalluses and swastikas, grey goo and rings.

Update 15 January: The number of WoW players has just been reported as 8 million!

Temple Grandin

2007-01-12T23:52:00.000Z

Horizon did a (video link) programme about Temple Grandin, an autistic American lady who gained an awareness about her condition and realised she had an affinity with animals. She's now very respected in the US meat industry because of the work she's done to reduce animal suffering, all because she can kind of understand how animals (she mostly works with cattle) experience the world. The programme suggests a metaphor for understanding how autism makes you different from non-autistic people - the parts of your brain don't have such good connections and this inhibits intuition about some very complex processes, e.g. social interaction. Temple describes her emotional life as very simple and consisting of just a few emotions, principally fear. She says a lot of her energy throughout her life has gone into avoiding situations that she would find difficult, but that other people would not think twice about. It's her insight that this is similar to the way animals live that has helped her to be so successful in her work with animals. I wrote earlier about the British autistic guy Stephen Wiltshire.

Saatchi Gallery

2007-01-11T23:32:00.000Z

We went to the Saatchi Gallery in the 80s when it was in St. John's Wood. A few years ago it moved to the old GLC (Greater London Council) building and now it's in Chelsea. They have setup a virtual tour on their new website "Stuart" (sounds like a bit of a phoney name; Stu[dent]+Art??). The website's a sort of MySpace for artists. I like Julie Bennett's paintings

Photos Hangovers

2007-01-10T22:12:00.000Z

Some nice photos of South Africa from a helicopter and a nice close-up of an insect (don't know what though). A good explanation of hangovers and hangover cures from the How Stuff Works website. They say the medical term for hangover, veisalgia, derives from the Norwegian word kveis, which means "uneasiness following debauchery", and algia, which is Greek for pain.

Psychopathy

2007-01-09T22:34:00.000Z

I wrote here about the English psychopathic killer Peter Sutcliffe. Psychopathy is still little understood but there's an interesting article in Science News which looks at the work of Dr. Joseph Newman who views psychopathy as the product of attention deficiency.

Pat Robertson predicts major terrorist attack in late 2007

2007-01-08T20:52:00.000Z

I've been checking No Se Nada at Science Blogs occasionally and saw this post about a prediction by Pat Robertson, the conservative christian. Mr. Robertson says God told him during a prayer meeting that there would be a major attack in America that would mean mass killings. He says this will happen in the later part of the year. He really provides a lot of good copy - the Wikipedia entry has a larger section on "Controversies and Criticisms" than the part that deals with his life and views. This guy ran for President in 1988! From reading the scurrilous Wikipedia entry you'd think this man's life was dominated by hilarious self-promotion, attacks on fellow christians, muslims and hindus and vague but bullying threats aimed at whole groups of people. Oh, and scandalous corruption. My favourite is the "Age-Defying Shake", which is not a convulsion brought on by a visit of the Holy Spirit, but a recipe for a refreshing drink that Pat uses, enabling him to leg-press 2000 pounds!

Inveneo Snowflake Bentley

2007-01-07T12:50:00.000Z

Inveneo looks like an interesting organisation - They help developing communities access the Internet with open source solutions. I've posted about snowflakes before (they make cool pictures) and I just found this site about the man who first found that they were each unique - "Snowflake Bentley". I found that on my new favourite blog "The new shelton wet/dry"

American Paranoia Sheesh

2007-01-06T03:47:00.000Z

Sheesh, there are apparently a lot of people in the Land Of The Free who think that their government cynically manufactured 9/11 (or stood by and watched it) so they could start a war in the Middle East. I don't believe it and I think it's amazing that so many Americans believe it. There is a video called "Loose Change" on Google that goes through some of the arguments, the main one being that the hole in the Pentagon looks too small for a large passenger jet to have crashed into it; it looks more like the hole a cruise missile might have made! OK the hole looks small, but the jump from there to the cruise missile theory is a bit of a leap. Here's a (video link of course!) copy of the same video with added comments from a disbeliever.

Chinese Police Shame Parade Backfired

2007-01-04T21:26:00.000Z

Chinese police paraded prostitutes and their clients in an effort to shame them out of their behaviour. Here are some pictures of the event This is a tactic often used in China since the Cultural Revolution, but this time it backfired, because lots of citizens complained about the abuse of the privacy of the people involved. Lots of people stood up for the rights of these prostitutes and their clients!

Iranian Holocaust Denial

2007-01-03T21:07:00.000Z

Iran has been organising a conference to investigate the truth behind The Holocaust. They said it would be a "scientific" investigation and unbiased because they were not involved in the issue, however President Ahmadinejad recently said that the Holocaust was a myth, or that if it were true, then Western nations were responsible and should pay the price. He has been saying this for some time. Here's another article by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian again (the Guardian is hardly the champion of Israel). On Al-Jazeera there's a report that links a statement from the Iranian Foreign Ministry saying that Israel's crimes are worse than what jews suffered in the Second World War to the furore about the Danish cartoons and "Freedom of Speech" debate, so maybe this conference can be seen as a demonstration by Iran of the West's hypocrisy over freedom of speech. Iran made a similar move in August 2006 with an exhibition in Tehran of "Holocaust Cartoons". More discussion of the conference on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" site. The Guardian also has this story from just after the liberation of Buchenwald about a young boy from Lodz who escaped from Auschwitz after witnessing the gas chambers in action.
Update Christmas 2006: Frances Harrison reports for the BBC on the Conference.

Tired Car, I Hate Websites That...

2007-01-01T23:12:00.000Z

English Russia has a funny picture of a desperate car being taken in for insurance. I hate websites that are "jazzed up" by a little music. I'm playing my Yeah Yeah Yeahs cd and browsing at the same time. I click on this link and yeeuch. Photographs of the NYPD at work in the late 1970s by Leonard Freed (recently deceased). Another article in the New York Times about Freed with a small picture of his that I remember from a great exhibition of American Photography I went to see at the Barbican Art Gallery in the 80s.

The Joys of Blogging

2006-12-31T19:02:00.000Z

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

2006-12-30T18:32:00.000Z

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

2006-12-29T21:58:00.000Z

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

2006-12-21T21:52:00.000Z

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

2006-12-19T22:22:00.000Z

"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

2006-12-19T13:18:00.000Z

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

2006-12-18T13:53:00.000Z

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

2006-12-15T19:19:00.000Z

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?

2006-12-13T21:01:00.000Z

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

2006-12-12T20:31:00.000Z

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

2006-12-11T21:04:00.000Z

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

2006-12-10T19:00:00.000Z

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

2006-12-09T14:59:00.000Z

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

2006-12-07T11:25:00.000Z

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

2006-12-06T19:56:00.000Z

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

2006-12-05T22:16:00.000Z

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

2006-12-04T09:27:00.000Z

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

2006-12-03T17:18:00.000Z

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

2006-11-30T22:39:00.000Z

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

2006-11-29T19:52:00.000Z

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

2006-11-28T20:03:00.000Z

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

2006-11-27T21:37:00.000Z

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

2006-11-26T21:35:00.000Z

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

2006-11-25T23:47:00.000Z

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

2006-11-24T23:10:00.000Z

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

2006-11-23T23:03:00.000Z

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

2006-11-22T20:18:00.000Z

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

2006-11-21T22:33:00.000Z

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

2006-11-21T00:21:00.000Z

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

2006-11-20T00:14:00.000Z

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)

2006-11-18T21:56:00.000Z

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

2006-11-17T22:06:00.000Z

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

2006-11-16T21:28:00.000Z

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'

2006-11-15T21:32:00.000Z

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

2006-11-14T23:23:00.000Z

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

2006-11-13T21:59:00.000Z

"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

2006-11-12T18:37:00.000Z

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

2006-11-11T23:06:00.000Z

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

2006-11-10T22:44:00.000Z

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

2006-11-10T00:13:00.000Z

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

2006-11-08T22:55:00.000Z

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

2006-11-07T22:52:00.000Z

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

2006-11-06T23:42:00.000Z

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

2006-11-05T00:31:00.000Z

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"

2006-11-03T20:44:00.000Z

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?

2006-11-02T22:27:00.000Z

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

2006-11-01T22:32:00.000Z

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

2006-10-31T21:39:00.000Z

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

2006-10-30T20:30:00.000Z

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

2006-10-29T21:09:00.000Z

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.