Phew. I’ve just finished a big project that’s been a weight around my neck for far too long. This was, of course, entirely my own fault. I’ll check it over tomorrow then send it off. Amusingly, I spent Friday afternoon, most of yesterday, and this morning working on the first draft. I then went for a walk to clear my head, read it over and swiftly realised much of it was utter toss. So I scrapped 75% of it and started again. Four hours of manic typing later I’m happy with the end result. Gotta hope it’ll still seem ok in the morning…

It’s been surprisingly pleasant to work on something difficult. Most of the computer problems I’ve looked at recently have been of the nonsensical change-things-until-it-starts-working variety, which is more frustrating than anything else. It’s been too long since I was last ‘in the zone’, which is a shame - I like being there.

It’s 0830 on a Sunday morning and my downstairs neighbours start one of their occasional heated discussions. These generally take the form of two hour conversations involving a minimum of three people, the volume of which rises and falls, sometimes rising to a peak with an “I’m sorry, but”, after which there’s a blessed silence for a minute or so. I lay in bed for an hour, hoping they’d go out to church or something, then had to get up.

Another neighbour recently bought an exercise bike, and for the last few weeks I’ve been hearing it squeaking in the late evening. It’s pretty quiet and not annoying like the arguments - you notice it for a few seconds and then filter it out. A couple of days ago, though, my brain connected this fact with the new man I’d noticed her walking around with. I don’t think it’s an exercise bike

The Aristocrats has the tagline “No nudity. No violence. Unspeakable obscenity.” Having just watched it, I can testify to this. It’s a documentary looking at a joke with the punchline “the aristocrats!” which is only really told by comedians, to other comedians, and has been around for at least sixty years. The idea is to be as obscene as possible. Some people’s interpretations had me squirming, which is quite the feat We’re talking fecal matter, we’re taking sexual acts you’ve never thought possible, we’re talking bestiality, incest, necrophilia and bloodletting. Yet, somehow, it’s still funny. It sounds terribly puerile, and in a way it is, but the joke does actually provide an insight into the nature of comedy. The film’s far more interesting than you might expect.

I’m not going to print the joke here, since it really works better out loud. Also, although my website is actually banned in libraries already (really!), I think it would seal the door forever.

I can think of maybe one person I would be comfortable watching this film with, but I’d say it’s worth checking out, if only to see how long it takes for your own personal boundaries to be crossed. Just be sure to keep the sound low. Btw, if you see the DVD, check out the ‘Behind the green room door’ special feature, which has various comedians just telling straight jokes.

I collected DC comics for a few years, and with every new batch of writers there would be some who, in my view, lacked a sense of proportion. I remember an issue of the Justice League of America in which a robot turned up that combined all of the group’s superpowers, so was stronger than any of them. They found some way to defeat it, in the end, but the whole thing just felt manipulative, and made the universe seem less real. If you could make a robot as strong as Superman, why weren’t people doing it every day? It’s like if a Star Trek episode had the Federation go to war with the Klingons, fight a low-budget battle, then Picard patch it all up and it’s forgotten by the next week. Or, outside of sci-fi, if Peggy from Eastenders got shot, had to have her heart restarted in the ambulance, then recovered and was back behind the bar by the end of the episode. Within the context of the universe, the story is too big and important to be just just another throwaway plot. This also doesn’t work as a narrative structure, because when you do want something big and dramatic to happen, there are no reserves you can reach into, and as such the viewer/reader just doesn’t care so much. The universe is cheapened by massive concepts.

Much as I’m enjoying Doctor Who, when you have the Tardis *die* at the beginning of an episode, and the Doctor claim that it’s gone for good, you expect it to matter. Then when the Doctor fixes it five minutes later via a deus ex machina, it feels hacky and disappointing. Why go so large? Weren’t there any other plot devices to get into a parallel universe? I had the same feeling when a group of schoolchildren were being programmed to break an equation, the result of which would allow complete control over all reality. If such a thing exists in that universe, why doesn’t it matter more? I know it’s not a serious programme, but this niggles when everything else is so good.

I’ve only just watched last week’s Doctor Who - The Girl in the Fireplace. Wow. Steven Moffat’s episodes last series impressed me greatly, and again I think he really captured something. Break for spoilers…

Continue reading ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’

I like this list of words used by book reviewers, and their real meanings. For example:

Imaginative: fiction reviewers use this to describe a book that they wish they had written; nonfiction reviewers use it to describe a book they do not believe.

Wears its scholarship lightly: author is not a real scholar. But I am.

I would add:

breathtaking: nothing happens in this book.

Via norm.

ITV are taking the hard decisions. What they’re doing is “painful, but utterly necessary”. It’s their “clause IV moment”. They’re revamping for a brave new world. They’re twisting the knife and scrapping the schedules. It has to be done.

Yes, in a move that has shocked the nation, they’ve cancelled Rosemary and Thyme.

Sorry. It’s just funny. From the words of their director you’d think they were getting rid of Coronation Street or something. Also scrapped are “Today with Des and Mel” and “Celebrity Fit Club”.

The BBC’s Question Time last night had the public quizzing ministers on terrorism vs. security, Labour’s environmental record, and whether the private lives of MPs should be private; ITV’s only current affairs programme spoke in shocked tones this evening of the stunning revelation that sat-nav devices don’t always get it right.

While the BBC arguably got off to a slow start, they’re rapidly becoming market leaders in new waves of podcasting, on-demand-tv and the ‘web 2.0′ revolution; ITV still think I want to enter an SMS competition that costs “£1 plus seven standard rate messages”.

The BBC website is the largest in Europe, with award-winning news coverage; ITV’s site tells me that “Bettany [is] too Buff for his Mrs!”.

Channel 4 are buying the best of US tv, and broadcasting it at prime time (The West Wing nonwithstanding), while generating the best new comedy in the UK (along, arguably, with BBC3); ITV generate show after show revolving around rude people yelling at each other.

Channel 4 have been the BBC’s only real competition since ITV decided to become a cheap cable channel. Truth be told it would be nice to see ITV regain some of its lost dignity.

My dreams are shattered. How will I ever go on?

I still don’t see the resemblance, but if DT ever needs me to stand in for an evening out with Sophia Myles, I could probably cope.

I’ve been blogging for around 2.5 years, and have reached the stage where I start composing posts without even realising. Whenever anything even slightly interesting happens (I think it’s interesting, anyway) I’ll find that sentences are popping into my head before it’s even over. I quite like this. The disadvantage to this habit are that some things are unbloggable. There’s very little I’m unwilling to share - I realised a while back that being completely open is the only way that works for me - but there’s the occasional thing¹ that I’m not quite ready to talk about, and thoughts or events regarding other people can also be problematic. The part of my brain that is always thinking of the next post, however, doesn’t talk to the part of my brain that makes judgement calls, so I can sometimes end up with fully-formed posts floating about my head, never to be released. This is surprisingly frustrating Do any other bloggers get this?

1. I’m balking every time I type ‘thing’, but it’s the best word I can think of right now… [↩]

BoingBoing reports that Coventry university is now offering a degree-level course in Parapsychology. From the BBC News article:

The 15 post-graduate students starting the first course this autumn will look at the paranormal using several scientific methods.

For instance, some will investigate haunted houses, looking at statistics on which parts of buildings provide the most sightings.

Extra-sensory perception - where two people seem to communicate without using sound, vision, touch or smell - will also be looked at.

The skeptic side of my brain is suggesting that this is a big waste of time, but even accepting that…

Dr Lawrence said: “We’ve got to look at what people are experiencing.

“No one has bothered to look, so people’s view of the world has been divided into two components: the secular and humanist, and the religious.

That’s manifestly untrue. Of course people have bothered to look. There have been claims of ghosts and ESP since the scientific method was first suggested, and who wouldn’t want to properly investigate ghosts? It’s just that every single time anybody has looked, nothing has been found. Plenty of scientists have looked at both ghosts and ESP, and concluded that the existing evidence is flawed, and nothing supports the claims. The normal response is that mainstream science simply ignores the evidence, but given the sheer number of people convinced of the existence of both phenomena you might have expected a practitioner to seek fame and fortune by providing said evidence on the Internet, for example. Show that ESP exists and that’s a guaranteed nobel prize, an easy $1,000,000, plus nigh-on eternal fame. But nobody has. Of course this doesn’t mean that there’s definitely nothing there, but it does suggest it very strongly, and it’s very different from “no one has bothered to look”.

The psychology of parapsychology is far more interesting to me. To take just one tributary, the best so-called practictioners of ESP are actually experts, whether they know it or not, in cold reading, which often involves picking up on very subtle clues in body language and speech. It turns out that humans are actually very, very bad at hiding their true feelings, for good evolutionary reasons involving the eradication of ‘cheats’ who would fake emotion for their own personal gain. In fact, the Facial Action Coding System details the meanings of involuntary facial muscle reflexes, and trained users can invariably determine when people are lying. This is all wonderful to me. I’d be as happy as anybody if ESP was proven to be real, but with no reason to suspect it beyond hearsay I’m more than happy to follow the evidence.

In regard to Bristol apologising for its role in the slave trade, Marcel Berlins says:

Can you apologise for something you didn’t do? (We are dealing here with events that took place long before anyone alive today can remember, let alone have taken part in. Different arguments apply when dealing with the outrages of more recent times.) It is one thing, as a government or other authority, to be very sorry, to express regret that something unpleasant happened a long time ago, and to sympathise. That is not the same as apologising, which incorporates an admission of guilt, or at least an acceptance of responsibility.

…

There’s an argument, flimsy at best, that the current representatives of those families could be, respectively, the offerers and accepters of apologies. But that’s not what’s being demanded. It’s the whole city of Bristol, with a population immensely more populous than it was when slavery flourished, full of non-native Bristolians, a city in which no one now alive has profited from the slave trade (except perhaps those connected with the museum on the subject) that is to be held responsible and required to make an apology. But it’s when you try to analyse who is to be the recipient of the apology that the whole exercise becomes absurd.

Norm says:

Without making any judgement about the particular question of Bristol, I would say that in the way he frames and discusses this issue Berlins misses a central dimension of it. Even if there’s no one alive who can be blamed for a grave crime of the past, collective entities like states, nations and, at least arguably, cities may be thought of as having responsibilities which their formal representatives and officers have to fulfil. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why these can’t include making an apology for a wrong done by the collectivity they represent - even if no one living can be held culpable for it. There is a continuity to such collectivities across generations.

I’m with Marcel on this one. It certainly makes no logical sense to demand an apology from a group that is continuous only in name, but furthermore I doubt that the concept of a continuous collective entity does anybody any good. If a city has a responsibility to apologise for events completely unrelated to anybody still alive, why shouldn’t it have to pay recomponse? If you follow this logic you end up holding entities responsible for everything ‘they’ have ever done, no matter what changes have taken place in the meantime. Would you ask a school headteacher to apologise for caning that took place in the same building seventy-five years ago? Of course not. That the inhabitants of Bristol all now abhor slavery is of far greater import than a meaningless apology. You see this attitude all the time in the ridiculous machinations of international politics, where the beliefs of the people in charge of a country 100 years ago are deemed to have some relevance today. While an apology may be symbolic (to some people), it’s below the logical standards we should be setting ourselves.

I’ve ended up with a voucher for 2 months free DVD rental from Lovefilm.com. Afaik you have to enter your credit card details, but they won’t start charging until the two months are up. I used them for quite a while and they seemed pretty good. The offer’s for their 2-DVDs-at-a-time £12.99 service, or the £16.99 two-DVDs-or-games package. Comment / email me if you want the code - I’ll update this post if it goes.

(I hope Lovefilm don’t mind this)

Like most people, I harbour a fervent hope that space tourism will advance to the point where I can take a trip into orbit during my lifetime. The moon would be cool too, but that’s probably pushing it. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to happen. You see, my religious beliefs require that I make demands of the space programme. You see, I simply must perform my personal religion’s boogie-woogie dance, naked and with flaming torches, for eight hours at precisely midday. Before now, I thought this proviso would result in my application being rejected. Happily, this isn’t the case!

Malaysia’s National Space Agency is trying to determine how its astronaut candidates will practice Islam in space. Three of its four astronaut candidates are Muslim, and two will be selected for a future Russian space flight.

What are their demands?

Once in their orbiting spacecraft, they will circle the Earth once every 90 minutes. Traditionally, Muslims pray five times per day, at times connected to the position of the Sun in the sky. This will make prayer observance a challenge if they accept a “day” as being just 90 minutes long. … “Any legal scholar advising these astronauts would have to simply pick various times that would roughly correspond to their morning, noon, afternoon, sunset and night prayers,” says Alan Godlas[!], a professor of religion at the University of Georgia, US.

Clearly, we must try our hardest to accommodate pointless ritual. It’s a belief, you see.

Additionally, Muslims turn toward Mecca when they pray. Zooming around the Earth at 28,000 kilometres per hour might make pinpointing the exact location of Mecca pretty tricky. Godlas says that orienting oneself toward Earth might be good enough. “There are instances where the prophet indicated a wide swathe; kind of a general direction,” Godlas says.

You’d better hope it is good enough, or you’ll get to heaven (or whatever, I forget which fairyland is which) and get your ass kicked back down to hell for messing up. However, Butterflies and Wheels reveals that, should this orientation toward Earth be deemed satisfactory, Muslims are still going to burn in agony for eternity as it turns out:

Islam prohibits facing the Qiblah [essentially a mosque in Mecca - Andrew] while defecating.

They’re so screwed. Furthermore:

The Prophet said “if you go to defecate, do not face the Qiblah nor turn your back toward it. Instead, you should turn to your left side or your right side”…[I]t is something forbidden in both open and enclosed areas and it is best to refrain from doing so as much as possible out of respect for the Qiblah.

Aside from the fact that this is clearly a deity with some major cleanliness issues, how would that even work?

Muslims have a cleansing ritual, known as ablutions, before prayer. But water is used sparingly in space. Godlas says astronauts could force water between their two hands and then moisten the body during a minor ablution.

On Earth, it is ideal to have water running along the arms from the faucet, but water does not flow downward in microgravity. Godlas says that when water is not available, scholars have determined a pure rock could be used to wipe the hands. The hands could then clean the forearms, face and feet.

*puts hand up* I have a suggestion. Could there not be some kind of criteria by which, if you demand to waste time, energy and resources on something with no point, you don’t get to go into space?

Much of the article isn’t actually too surprising. Given the institutional bending-over-backwards for religion, this kind of thing is to be expected. I did have one moment of complete incredulity, though.

People have found ways to celebrate other religions above Earth. Israel’s first astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died in the shuttle Columbia accident, was not a religious Jew, but he ate some Kosher food aboard the shuttle and…

…wait for it…

observed the Jewish Sabbath.

Are you telling me that NASA sent somebody into space who refused to do any work for arbitrary amounts of time? There is in fact a list of forbidden activities on the sabbath day. These include ’selecting’, ‘writing more than two letters’ and ‘extinguishing a fire’(!) - Wikipedia says:

many religious scholars have pointed out that these labors have something in common — they prohibit any activity that is “creative,” or that exercises control or dominion over one’s environment.

Because in space, the last thing you want to do is exercise control over your environment (incidentally, Wikipedia’s section on workarounds is good for a laugh).

If I gave any other reason than ‘it’s my belief’ I’d be kicked out of the space programme without a moment’s hesitation. Shouldn’t the space programme, of all people, be able to take a stand against this kind of nonsense?

Rant inspired by this.

FYI the new version of MSN Messenger, Messenger Live, has been taken out of invite-only beta. It’s still not the final version, and is XP-only, but anybody can download and try it out here. The interface has been substantially upgraded since the previous beta, and it’s far neater:

Also, somebody’s finally realised that the tabs suck, and made it easier to remove them in the options menu. It also claims to be able to handle 640 x 480 video chats, with lip-synched audio, although I haven’t tried this out yet. Finally, the little blue system tray man is now a little green system tray man.

Update: There are some new sounds, too, and the new-contact-online chime makes me think I’m in Blackpool. That’s just gotta go.

I wish I could have been in London to see this:

It walked around Whitehall!

It was apparently a piece of street theatre by “Royal de Luxe”, who travel around major cities performing this act. Skuds was there, and has a good write up. There’s a great flickr set here, which works well as a slideshow, a collective photo pool here, video of the elephant here - check out the ears! - and the remarkable puppet girl here.

I love that this exists.