This may not come as a big surprise: Piers Morgan was being particularly cretinous yesterday. I heard him on the radio and later saw him on BBC1, both times laying into celebrities who complain about the paparazzi while demanding attention at film premieres. It’s the most common argumentative strategy in the world: cry hypocrisy and claim moral equivalence, as if this addresses the original question in any way.

There’s clearly a good reason behind wanting and giving attention to celebrities at film premieres / whatever they have to promote. Even celebrities who are simply famous-for-being-famous are in a win-win situation with the tabloids - they get exposure, the tabloids sell papers. Why hound them when they don’t want to be hounded? Because it’s clearly advantageous to the papers, not because of ad hoc rationalisations - even if some celebrities are being hypocritical, you still need to justify hiding in their gardens. Nobody would pay any attention to a stalker of Angelina Jolie if he said ’she wants my attention when promoting her films, it’s hypocritical to say I can’t follow her around in a creepy fashion’. Shopkeepers don’t regularly follow me home, knock on the door and try to sell me kettles just because I want their attention sometimes. Like I said: cretin.

At the other end of the spectrum is Charlie Brooker, who gives every impression of being an entirely decent human being in this column. Addressing Heat magazine’s making fun of Jordan’s disabled child, he says:

This might seem a bit rich coming from someone (ie me) who regularly says cruel things about public figures for comic effect. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I scrawled some fairly abusive things about Jordan myself in this weekend’s Screen Burn column in the Guide, for instance. Isn’t Heat effectively doing the same thing, only with more gusto, not to mention photos?

Good question. Thanks for asking. My defence, in as much as I’ve worked it out, runs like this: people on TV aren’t real people. They’re flickering, two-dimensional representations of people, behaving unnaturally and often edited to the point of caricature. They’re fictional characters and it’s easy to hate them. Everybody hates someone on TV. But you never really hate them the way you’d hate, say, a rapist. Because they’re not really there, and with one or two exceptions (TV psychics, say), they’re ultimately harmless. Put Vernon Kay on my screen and I’ll gleefully spit venom at him. Sit me next to him at a dinner party and I’ll probably find him quite charming, unless he does something appalling. That’s not hypocritical, it’s rational.

[tries to resist making sarcastic comment about rational abilities of the average critic]

[T]here’s surely a world of difference between tipping cartoon buckets of shit over someone’s TV persona, and paying a paparazzo to hide behind a bush to take photos of their arse as they stroll down the beach in real life, so you can make your readers feel momentarily better about themselves because ha ha her bumcheeks are flabby and ho ho he’s bald and tee hee she’s sobbing. And even if you accept that degree of intrusion, on the basis that these people rely on the media and yadda yadda yadda, how insanely superior and removed from reality do you have to be to invite your readers to laugh at a photograph of a small disabled boy whose only “crime” is a) being disabled and b) having a famous mum with “SAGGY BOOBS”?

I like Charlie Brooker.

Just found this while searching for today’s advent calendar image:

Love it. Apparently it’s the front of Science Fiction magazine from December 1954.

Spoilers ahead…

Not bad. In all the commotion I didn’t predict Nathan saving the day, and Claire + Peter + Matt continued to be very watchable. And Shaft was in it! The Petrelli/Sylar fight was a bit of an anti-climax, mind - he couldn’t do better than punch him? I didn’t know how it was all going to get resolved, though, and I liked the hints of a larger supervillain.

It’s a weird show. There’s a decent story there, but for me it gets smudged by silly plot points. I’ve no problem with suspending disbelief for things like massive discrepancies in voting numbers, or using the human genome project to track people - it’s the inconsistent smaller details I don’t like. It’s been the same all season, but to take just the two finale episodes - why would Sylar just allow himself to be stabbed? “You shoot me, she dies”? How come Peter happens not to be able to control this particular power? Why does Hiro run away from archers? Didn’t the explosion originally happen during the day? Why would Nicky/Jessica get involved in the fight? Why didn’t Claire attempt to shoot Peter in the back of the head? Why doesn’t he just fly off, rather than taking out the entire city? I can forgive the pseudo-evolutionary babble and the occasional dodgy actor, but it’s the little things that get me - it would only take a moment to fix them, and it’s so frustrating!

I don’t know. Maybe all shows have similar problems and it’s just that Heroes never properly clicked with me. Still, it’s kept me interested for six months, which is pretty good going. Hopefully season two will improve. I hope Parkman isn’t dead, I liked him. Sylar too.

You know what’s back soon? Torchwood

Stephen Law is having an interesting discussion with the head of a UK Islamic school. Prof. Law quoted the head as saying “[t]he essential purpose of the Islamia school as with all Islamic schools is to inculcate profound religious belief in the children.” and suggested this was an intolerable system of education. The head’s response includes:

It is slightly absurd to imagine what approach we should have taken to teaching about Islam to these Muslim children if the objection is to us telling them that Islam is true. The reason we offer to Muslim children for accepting the truth of Islam is that this is what Allah wants us to believe, what he has written in the Qur’an, and also what the prophet Muhammad wants us to believe – him being the messenger of Allah. Are we really supposed to then say, “But you shouldn’t believe that just because we say so; you should make your own minds up”? That is not what Islam teaches. In Islam, there is no question about the existence of god, the validity of the Qur’an or the veracity of the prophet. Nor, given that, is there a sensible choice about being Muslim. It would be self-contradictory to teach Islam to children as a matter of choice based on personal opinion.

Isn’t that interesting? None of the slippery avoidances you find in Christian responses, it’s just straight out: our Holy Whatever says we are not to question it, so we won’t. Aside from the obvious objections, I wonder if he finds it coincidental that what he’d consider the most important concept in history just so happens to demand unquestioning acceptance. Why would the most important concept in history need to declare itself above the marketplace of ideas? It’s a ridiculous, desperate strategy, but one that unfortunately seems to be psychologically effective. The objections to The Golden Compass show the same lack of perspective, and I like the way this columnist puts it (via Pharyngula):

If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit.

Exactly. I’ve said it before, but it’s always worth repeating: The War for Children’s Minds is a bloody brilliant book. It doesn’t bash religion, it bashes teaching what to think instead of how to think. This problem seems to go hand-in-hand with religious education, but needn’t.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that Critical Thinking classes for secondary (junior?) school students would be the best education initiative in decades.

This morning’s to-do list contained ’set up podcast of university lectures’. It didn’t sound very difficult. A classmate uses a rather cool Olympus gadget to record each week’s talk, and I knew it should be easy enough to get these online. Of course, I also knew that ‘easy’ jobs always turn out to be way more complex than is reasonable. Except, not this time. In fact, it was worryingly easy.

1. The original files were in WMA format, and I wanted MP3 to ensure maximum compatibility. Lame, the daddy of all MP3 encoders, just spat noise - possibly in disgust - so I used WinFF. It probably would have been possible to convert them straight to MP3, but I needed to edit first without losing quality so converted them to wave.
2. Audacity handled the 600mb wave files without a problem, so I trimmed the lectures and stripped two 30min film excerpts, then re-saved as another wave.
3. I like Lame, so I used its (undocumented) ‘voice’ preset to encode the wave files into roughly 56kbps MP3 files, which shrunk the 1gb .wav down to 30mb. That’s just silly. I couldn’t detect any quality difference, albeit only using computer speakers. Old stalwart Winamp handled appropriate ID3 tags.
4. I knew little about setting up podcasts, but an easy solution presented itself when I remembered that Wordpress can handle all the feed technicalities. I shoved a basic install onto an old domain name idling on a kind friend’s bandwidth-friendly server and created a post for each podcast, linking to the MP3 file in each. Wordpress figures out from this that you’d like the file added as a media enclosure, and creates a podcatcher-compatible XML feed. In theory this was all I needed to do.
5. Just to be sure, though, I dropped the feed into the I-can-do-anything-with-feeds FeedBurner, which cheerily provided browser interfaces etc., download numbers, etc.. I was able to subscribe in iTunes thirty seconds later - it worked first time!

It sounds more complicated than it was. The only problem was with the WMA conversion, but it took all of a minute’s googling to find WinFF. All the above is completely legal - rare, when working with video/audio encoding tools - and, apart from the web-hosting, free. I’ll have to watch the bandwidth - I reckon the 20 students in my class should be ok, but if the 60 full-timers find it I could be in trouble.

Finally launching this year’s wongaBlog Advent Calendar. Like last time I’ll pick my favourite festive pics from Flickr, always linking to the original. As it’s a bit late the first picture is one of mine, taken in nearby Sheep Street.

I’m late in getting the calendar running due to only just getting back home after a very busy few days, hence the lack of posts of any kind. I spent much of the weekend taking photos for a project due in mid-December - I was determined not to leave everything until the last minute this time - as well as a birthday party and plenty of driving around. Good fun though. Currently copying 160 shots to the computer, and I’ve two black/white films to develop at some point.