Every Friday B4L blogfather Norm profiles a blogger, and today it’s me. It’s a great regular feature, and I’m quite honored to be included. Thanks, Norm!

This is The Super Dictionary:

It was published in 1978. It provides key vocabulary in a manner appealing to children. I like it a lot. Here’s a smattering of its dictionary goodness:

I…I don’t know what to say. But that’s exactly what ‘goodness’ means.

Green Arrow is crap at sweet nothings.

El Dragon is pretty super. He is totally the right man for this definition.

Continue reading ‘Cuttings from The Super Dictionary’

The only thing that stops me wanting to be a horse is the fear of dressage. Otherwise life rocks: there’s nothing uncool about being a horse. You’re inherently noble, and little - other than ritualised humiliation somehow being an olympic sport - can stop that. Want proof? Check out these über-coiffured guys. There aren’t many animals could pull that off and look not only happy but dignified.

Last time I gave blood I couldn’t stop and made someone faint. Today they had to give up as I was leaking too slowly. Plenty of prodding with the needle would speed up the flow, but then it’d slow down and almost stop. I’ve had this before, but they’ve always managed to eke out enough in the past. Damn. Still, statistically speaking next time should be perfect.

…after I saw a (fairly) local newspaper advertising for a ‘trainee photographer’. This really appeals to me, and I emailed to ask whether I could apply, given that I’d need one day per week for uni. They said ‘it might be’. They required a CV, which I didn’t have, so I quickly put one together and discovered that my qualifications are rubbish, photography-wise. Computer stuff? No problem. But photographically I’ve an A-level, some TV rostrum work, and one year of a degree. The best I could do was give more detail of outside-work projects in a covering letter. Unfortunately they’ll only get in touch if they like me, and I don’t know how long they’ll take to process the applications. We’ll see.

Over the summer I read Christopher Hitchens’ Letters to a Young Contrarian, twice. Its message is: bloody well stand up for what you believe in. It’s an ode to rationality and fierce decency in a world where - it says - harmful behaviour is too often defended by well-meaning apologists. In a series of letters to a young student, it says that ‘left-wing’ does not have to mean ‘relativist’, and does not mean always trying to reach a compromise: sometimes it means putting your foot down and saying ’stop’¹. It says that authority - of all kinds - should always be closely watched, and details the traps and pitfalls into which they will try to sucker you. It’s not, though, a teenage paen to being generically anti-authority, or rebelling for the sake of it - it just says we shoudn’t be ashamed to make moral judgments, regardless of who we end up allying with (but if you do end up with someone awful, don’t be afraid to call them out). It’s a sentiment plenty call bombastic or naive, to which plenty reply ‘that’s exactly the problem’. I don’t agree with everything, and I am far, far from a natural rebel² but I finished it wanting to fix the world and not caring who I annoy in the process.

Letters also gives the lie to popular commentary regarding Mr Hitchens. It was published in 2001, pre-9/11, yet his opinions then are almost entirely consistent with his opinions now. He’s appalled by governments who refuse to make a moral stand against evil dictatorships, he’s appalled by the cowtowing to fundamentalist Islam, he’s appalled by the denigration of reason in the name of faith. Add 9/11 into the mix and it’s obvious that his current stances are (at most) logical continuations, and often no different. This is far from the beloved ‘he drove to the right after 9/11′ trope so beloved of commenters. I’d properly bought into this, and it was quite the surprise to find I was wrong.

And, not for nothing, he also has a ridiculously impressive writing style. Here’s something from his week, on the US election:

On “the issues” in these closing weeks, there really isn’t a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their “debates” have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week’s so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.

Regardless of the content, just look at the way your eyes glide over his sentences. They’re not short or lacking complexity, yet there are no cognitive breakpoints - it’s all effortless. How does he do that?

Letters is a short book, and I highly recommend it. And even if you disagree with everything he says, his writing is a thing to behold.

1. I am, admittedly, a sucker for this kind of thing - I love the S3 West Wing scene where Oliver Babish explains to Abbey Bartlet why she will not settle her court case, but will instead stand up and take the bastards down. Bloody brilliant, that man. [↩]
2. this weekend I was about to change my Facebook strapline to ‘put a ribbon round my neck and call me a libertine’, just because I like the poetry, until I realised I fit no definition of ‘libertine’. [↩]

I’m just back from the Mop Fair - a funfair that takes over the streets of Stratford once a year. I love funfairs, but missed last year’s due to uni, which induced major grumpage. This year I made it to the second night, though, and much fun was had. We went on every major ride, but by far the most dramatic was the reverse bungee:

You’re very firmly strapped into a cage, which is in turn attached to the ground with a large magnet. Two lengths of elastic pull themselves taut with the top of the ten-storey towers, then the magnet releases.

Quite honestly, I don’t remember much after the initial release. The g-forces are pretty extreme, and by the first tumbling freefall my brain had rebooted into Safe Mode. Unfortunately the ride operators neglected to mention that we should push down quite firmly on the footbar, so we both had legs come free and slam into metal struts. The subsequent bounces were a mixture of exhilaration and, frankly, large amounts of pain. I expect there’ll be quite the bruise in the morning. Still, it was worth it

Everything seemed tame after that. But we did these too:

We also went on the carousel. My friend had a beautifully carved horse with inlays and ringlets and ornaments crafted from solid gold. I had a goddamn chicken. Srsly. It was a beautiful carousel, well-lit and full of the traditional horses and musical pipes, except some of the horses were chickens.

Sadly I didn’t have my camera with me at that point. It’s always difficult managing a large camera when I want to go on the rides, so I decided to concentrate on the latter this year. I nipped down later and got a couple of shots of them packing away, though:

and this morning I spotted this dude:

Who was, frankly, not putting in the required effort: he wandered about with the sign, but didn’t actively annoy anyone.

The wonderful Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog is finally available on the UK iTunes store. All three parts of Joss Whedon’s supervillain musical total to £4, which is more than reasonable imho. I’ve been singing ‘freeze ray’ for months, now…

This is the final image from last night:

I’ve totally lost all perspective; I’ll see how it goes down in class.

Our theory module, meanwhile, is called ‘Technologies and the Self’. Here’s an excerpt from the first week’s required reading material:

Martin Heidegger has shown how modern science and technology are essentially defined by this mathematical character, and how this decision to decide things in advance of their appearance according to a pre-established criterion differentiates the modern scientific attitude from any scientific attitude which preceded it. Modern science is not simply mathematical in the sense of the application of numbers to nature - the Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians had already done so much earlier; it is also, and more profoundly, mathematical in its decision to regard nature as essentially numerical in character, and to subject the very appearance of things to numerical conditions. Galileo, speaking of the book of nature, says, for example, that ‘…[it] is written in the mathematical language,’ and in this respect what counts and matters about things is no longer how we sense them and make sense of them but how they accord with the web of mathematical relations we have already established for them.

Mustn’t pre-judge. Mustn’t pre-judge.

Screw it, I’m going to pre-judge. To the extent that I have any clue what the above means, it seems to get the scientific method backwards. Which, based on last year’s theory modules, is pretty typical.

In a few weeks, Lacan! He of the famous the-square-root-of-minus-one-equals-the-erectile-organ gibberish. Maybe he’s more sensible in other fields, though. Mustn’t pre-judge.

The BBC has video of monkeys helping serve customers in a Japanese restaurant. This is is excellent in many ways, but it’s still…not nice, really.

We started the flash photography course last Friday, and so far it’s fantastic. It’s pretty much Strobism, but with über-credentialed lighting experts right there and available for questioning. The first half is on digital SLR - finally - and after that it’s onto medium-format transparency film, which is quite frankly evil, as transparencies give you zero room for error: if your multiple-flashgun exposures are even slightly out, they’ll look awful. But they make up for evilness by being beautiful¹: medium format film is 5 inches wide, and as transparencies are positive images - think slides, but three times bigger - you get wonderful little high-definition images without printing anything. I’ve never tried anything medium format before, so I’m looking forward to this.

Our homework for this week is to take one photo using direct / bounce flash, but to make it good. This is also vindictive in the extreme. Sure, one photo sounds easy, but in practice nothing’s ever quite right. The very fact that it’s not much work means it’s a lot of work, if you see what I mean.

My traditional reaction to these projects is to start off planning something wildly ambitious, then realise it’s unworkable and so come up with something waaayy simple, then decide it’s too boring and quickly figure out something inbetween as the deadline approaches. I had an idea this evening that seemed about right, and it ended up taking two hours of crawling around in loft insulation. I now itch like hell. I’ve also lost all perspective on the resulting image - hopefully it’ll seem ok in the morning…if it does, I’ll blog it and see what other people think.

1. can’t see anything wrong with this philosophy [↩]

So there’s this priest who thinks gay men should have “sodomy can seriously damage your health” tattooed on their backsides. Having written this charming statement on his blog, he’s now claiming it was ’satire’. I am at a loss as to what he’s satirising, though, and can only assume it’s himself. However, it’s nice to see the Church of England condemning him for being obviously out of his mind. Because God in fact likes gay people, he’s just very homophobic and doesn’t want them near him in heaven. Or whatever. I forget. Anyhow, everyone’s pointing and laughing at the old crazy dude, and that’s a good thing.

This kind of comment is barely surprising, to be honest - old bonkers homophobes in the CoE, who’d have thought - but the dude’s clarifying remarks have a new line of bigotry that’s worth noting:

I certainly have nothing against homosexuals. Many of my dear friends have been and are of that persuasion.

Have been. It’s a choice, you see. Also: points for the brazen non sequitur.

What I have got against them…

See, in my mind this is incompatible with ‘I certainly have nothing against homosexuals’, but that’s me.

What I have got against them is the militant preaching of homosexuality

And thus we witness the death of the word ‘militant’.

To be fair, it was on the way out already. ’Militant religious fundamentalists’ blow up abortion clinics, while ‘militant atheists’ write books. I would suggest this is not very equivalent, but the entire media would seem to disagree. This is because it lets them off the hook. They really want to report on ‘religion vs. atheism’, but really really don’t want to write about the issues. So they use the standard relativist trick of crying hypocrisy: look, these militant atheists are just as bad as those they’re criticising, isn’t it ironic. It’s the perfect solution: you get to sit in judgment without actually judging anything.

But the Reverend Peter Mullen has gone further and stripped the word of all sense. I’m intigued as to what ‘militant preaching of homosexuality’ would involve, actually, but even excusing the scything of the English language: what the hell is he even talking about? Preaching of homosexuality? That’s happening? Having redefined ‘militant’, maybe he’s doing the same for ‘preaching’ - perhaps it now means ‘anything that brings homosexuality to my attention’. Because I really can’t see any other explanation.

I’m off for some militant sleepytimes now. And before that, some militant toast.

We all need a bit of Panda occasionally. Flickr’s on it.

The Sony Reader was recently released in the UK, and there’s consequently been lots of talk about eBooks and eReading, most of it really frustrating. This is because the media insist on building enormous straw men at which to fire grumpy people.

For whatever reason, it’s been decided that the appropriate frame for this discussion is ‘eBooks vs. Books’. eBooks are the future and will replace Books, you see. Is this a good thing? Do we want this? Why not ask the nearest curmudgeon for their informed opinion. The One Show had some muppet saying how great Books are and how much eBooks pale in comparison, then a little questioning by Adrian Chiles revealed she’d failed to connect the Sony Reader to her computer. This is representative of everything I’ve seen, and it’s all a jangly bag of moof.

Of course Books don’t need batteries. Of course the second-hand Book market is important. I’ll even acknowledge somewhat bonkers arguments about eBooks lacking ’soul’. But it all misses the point: nobody wants to replace Books with eBooks. That’s just silly. I really don’t see why people get so hostile - the two can happily live in harmony.

Look, if it’s not a totally redundant thing to say: I love Books. And not just for what’s in them, I love them as objects too. I’ll pay more for nicely printed books: I could wait for the paperback of The Graveyard Book, but I really want the hardcover because it’s a quality item. I suspect most people are the same. But I don’t feel terribly threatened by eBooks, because I can see exactly how they’d be useful.

For example, there are two books I’d particularly like to get in eBook form. The first is my current read: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. It’s bloody enormous, and just too big to easily carry anywhere. My university bag is packed tight, and while I can generally squeeze in a standard paperback, this one takes up badly-needed space. And if I do squeeze it in, it’s still a pain. I always grab a sandwich for the train home, but I can’t eat with one hand and hold Cryptonomicon with the other - it’s too heavy. Both of these problems would be solved with an eBook version.

The other advantage to a digital version of this particular tome is searchability. Neal Stephenson says something interesting every other sentence, but the chances of finding half-remembered wonderments in Cryptonomicon are pretty small. 

Obviously there’d be disadvantages. It’s yet another gadget to increase my already-quite-high muggability; it could run out of power; etc.. But none of these are deal-breakers¹.

The second book is one I think I’ve mentioned before. My favourite poet is Byron, and ages ago I threw a ‘Complete Works’ into a slightly-below-free-delivery-threshold Amazon basket. The poetry is lovely, but the book sucks.

The paper is very low quality, so the letters aren’t sharp. This is made worse by the godawful font, and it’s printed very small (it’s an A5 book, and the picture shows about half the page). They’ve also - understandably - halved the necessary paper by printing in two columns. So it’s just crowded. But the columns are too small for half the lines, so lots are just one word (I’m prepared to be told this is some weird poetry format, but I don’t think so), which makes a mess. It’s not difficult to read, but it’s far from appealing. And I’ve rarely bothered, to be honest.

All these failures are understandable in a Book. Byron just wrote too damn much. But it’s perfect for the eBook format. An eBook doesn’t care how much data there is. An eBook can use my choice of font. An eBook can enlarge the text so I don’t get eyestrain after ten minutes. An eBook doesn’t need to cram as much text as possible into the page, so I can read it in one column, without truncated lines. Byron himself would prefer an eBook version (well, he’d use it as a distraction while he chats up your girlfriend, anyway).

I can think of plenty more uses. I’m not fond of reading large amounts on a computer screen, for example, and I tend to print off long articles. This is pretty wasteful at times, and I’d far rather use an eBook reader. I also have to haul a load of art theory books on the train from uni every week, and I’d prefer shove them onto a usb stick then read them on a Kindle on the sofa. I’d also like an electronic version of the Guardian for the breakfast table, so I can read only the first 6 pages without feeling guilty about the astonishing waste of paper.

Of course I don’t want to replace all my books. But I’d like electronic copies of them all, please.

1. The other problem with Cryptonomicon is that I started reading it just as uni began and I now have large amounts of dubious art theory to wade through. The Sony Reader can’t help with this, sadly. [↩]

Just a heads up that Buy A Friend A Book Week started today:

you can’t buy your friend a book because it’s their birthday or they just graduated or got engaged or had a baby or anything else. You have to give them a book for no good reason. In fact, this present out of the blue from you should shock the pants off of whomever you decide to give it to. And it’ll make them happy.

I like.