Skip introduction & navigation

Web Design | Views & Rants | Reviews | Contact | Links | About

Welcome to the weblog, which gets updated whenever I have time to do it.

Friday 24th May

I suppose it isn’t surprising that the USA should offer a reward for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of Usama Bin Laden. The lucky person who hands him over gets $25,000,000. Note, though, the weasel word “directly" which provides a nice get-out-of-jail-free card to save the USA from actually coughing up. (As if they would.…)

Political parties and humour. Humour and political parties. They never really go together, not intentionally at any rate. Well, not when the politicians are the people intending to be funny. Few things are more cringe-making than a politician gearing themselves up to crack a joke — especially when, as in the case of Margaret Thatcher, they don’t understand why the lines given them by their speechwriters are supposed to be funny in the first place. The reasons why they aren’t funny are simple: the jokes are intended to convey some political message — you have to be very skilled at humour to be funny and deliver a party line soundbite — and they are not supposed to offend.

Occasionally, of course, politicians’ jokes do offend. I was once present at a Burns Supper where the Address to the Lasses was given by a local politician. He was nervous beforehand — little did we know with what good cause. For some reason he had thought it a good idea to season (that’s season as in “I made a cake by adding flour to the pepper") his speech with “radical feminist” jokes. Here are two examples:

What’s the difference between a radical feminist and an elephant in dungarees? — Don’t be silly, there’s no difference!

What’s the difference between a radical feminist and a bin bag? — A bin bag gets taken out.

This was not in front of an all-male, rugby-club-type audience. There were a lot of women there, including some prominent female politicians. You could have heard a pin drop, not that the speaker noticed. He ploughed on, and on.

For some reason, this has not particularly damaged his career (he’s now an MSP). Private Eye did pick up the story, but over a year after it happened (and seemed to assume the events took place a year later than they in fact had). Still, this has always seemed to me the best examples of stupidity masquerading as humour in politics. But at least he didn’t mock his constituency.

That is precisely what a branch of Plaid Cymru did, putting jokes about a local housing estate on their web site (which has had the offending stuff removed). Besides that, the picture of Yoda dressed up as the Queen Mum and a call to “stuff the jubilee” seem almost sensible:

But perhaps most surprising of all is a section entitled the Gurnos Estate Olympic Bid. The spoof article lampoons the people of the deprived community, portraying them as drunks and criminals.

Olympic Games? The BBC explains:

The South Merthyr and Rhymney branch posted jokes about the Gurnos estate, Merthyr Tydfil, claiming it would trade on its violent reputation to bid for the Olympic Games.

Nice one. Watch out for the SNP calling Scots tight-fisted bastards and Labour calling the working class scroungers and benefit fraudsters. (Oh, wait, they do that, don’t they?)

Lately I’ve been thinking that politicians may be beacons of intellectual ability compared with the people who run the music industry. They killed Napster, of course, because it was the greatest threat ever to their the recording artists’ livelihoods. Bollocks. Napster was actually one of the best things for recording artists, especially new ones. It gave surfers an opportunity to hear new bands, check out stuff they would never otherwise hear. Stuff they might then want to buy. But that would never occur to the pointy-haired idiots who run the music business — for them, recording = piracy and sharing over the Net = piracy.

It isn’t as though music companies are providing what the public want at a reasonable price. They are screwing as much as they can out of the buyers of CDs (and if you think that all that profit goes to the bands and singers and songwriters, would you like to see pictures of me with my alien pals on our last trip to Mars?). One company is making the extent of the rip-off very clear:

At FightCloud.com, the price is right. Scalfani sells CDs for free. That is, if you don’t count the $4.95 “shipping” charge. Of course, that would be a mistake. Buried in the shipping charge is the secret ingredient: a modest profit. Less costs of $2.31, the company nets $2.64 on each “free” disc, half of which goes to the artist.

So far, they have only shipped about a thousand discs. But, providing people want to hear the music, there is not reason why they shouldn’t make a pile on this. If you can’t grasp how this can be profitable, the article explains the CD scam:

In 2000, the average suggested list price of a CD was $14.02, according to the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA). The CD itself costs about 32 cents in a large production run, according to Michael Pardo, V.P. of sales for CD duplicator Greenwood Solutions. Add packaging and the price goes to 54 cents. Add the cut for a new artist, somewhere between 10 and 50 cents, and your cost nears a buck. Add $28 million to cancel your estimated $80 to $100 million contract with Mariah Carey, as EMI recently did, and adjust your costs accordingly.

Scalfani recalls how, in the early 1980s, the music industry promised to lower prices after the CD format caught on. “Everybody remembers that,” he says ruefully. “The federal government said they weren’t going to tax us anymore after World War II. Yeah, right. It’s all just empty promises.”

FightCloud looks like a company to watch.

Sticking with dumb megacorps., it’s not exactly news that Microsoft have been required to “unbundle” its browser, email clients and instant messaging software from the OS. Now M$ has come up with a 40Mb update to XP which will convince the computer that it no longer has this software installed, so it will run competitors’ software instead.

I still think I’d rather use a decent OS.

How not to get trainers down from an electricity line. And yet, the mother says, Nobody knows what really happened.

Along with almost everyone else I know who’s online, I’ve received the Nigerian 419 scam spam. The first time I saw it, in a fairly abbreviated form, I thought that one would have to be a congenital idiot to fall for it. There must be a lot of congenital idiots out there because some people in the USA have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Good news. Six people have been arrested over this.

Wednesday 22nd May

It’s been a packed month, which is why there have been no updates for a while. For one thing, I was up in the Highlands recently for a wodening-cum-road trip. If you don’t know what a wodening is, it’s a wedding or handfasting conducted according to the Odinic faith. I’d never seen one before. It was superb — the priestess wore a stunning headdress (the priest, although impressively attired, wore nothing so spectacular), the ceremony was held at Clava Cairns, and at the end of the ceremony a large horn of mead was circulated. I admit to drinking the last of this.

Then it was off to the reception site 75 miles away, near Dornie, where a Beltane fire was lit, there was much drinking, and a couple of us spent a while lying on a hill looking at the stars, which were truly splendid (not a single cloud obscured the view). In addition to the awesome spread of the constellations (or God’s talcum powder, as one ill-conceived phrase had it) I saw two or three shooting stars, a couple of satellites pass overhead — there is a strange majesty in their steady progression straight across the sky — and at the horizon, just after sunset, four planets: Saturn, Mars, Venus and Mercury. This configuration of the planets was also photographed that night from Stonehenge.

The other time-consuming factor has been the making of changes to my setup here, which should see me moving in the near future to penguin-powered computing.

Talking of planets, when I was young Jupiter had twelve moons according to every book I opened — now it’s been confirmed that Jupiter has eleven more moons than even the higher total accepted in recent years, bringing the number of the planet’s satellites to 39. As far as we know at the moment.

All 11 new moons are considered irregular satellites. They all have retrograde orbits, meaning they go around Jupiter in the opposite direction to the planet’s rotation.

They have long, elliptical orbits, which suggest they were captured by Jupiter when the big planet was young, perhaps in the first million years of the solar system’s existence.

They are all quite small, with diameters between 1.2 miles and 2.5 miles. Nothing is known about what they are made of, how dense they are or what their surfaces are like, but scientists presume they are asteroid-like space rocks.

Yet another M$ security patch for Internet Exploder Explorer, this time to fix six recently discovered security defects involving the browser. I wonder what the total number of security holes in IE is. As always, some of these holes are potentially serious — small wonder some people recommend ditching Internet Explorer (at least for use in hostile environments such as the internet).

It gets better, of course: the patch doesn’t fix one of the bugs it’s supposed to and it doesn’t do anything for a dozen other reported bugs. Nice to see M$ is maintaining its standards.

Bad news on the way for M$: AOL seems to be preparing to drop its use of IE for the Mac, switching to Netscape (which AOL owns, of course).

But let’s talk about a decent browser: Mozilla. Mozilla, for those who haven’t heard (where have you been?) is the project to develop the perfect open source browser (and one which runs on Linux, MacOS as well as that Microsoft OS). It’s been under way for about four years now, and now the browser has reached version 1.0, release candidate 2.

Anyone who has used Netscape 6 will find much that is similar in Mozilla, because Netscape 6 is based upon it. Mozilla, though, is a much more pleasant browser to use than Netscape 6, offering tabbed browsing (one of those features you don’t know you need until you have it, as Robin MIller puts it) for one thing (and not installing AOL Instant Messenger for another).

It is a big programme and needs a reasonably powerful machine — by that I mean at least a 300Mhz processor, which isn’t asking much these days. A review of RC1 at ZDnet found its speed more than acceptable:

In our informal beta tests, Mozilla 1.0 displays Web pages almost as quickly as IE 6, and it seems faster than Netscape 6.2.2. The Quick Launch feature … preloads parts of Mozilla during Windows start-up so that the browser loads faster.

I’m using RC2 myself as my standard browser now — previously I was using 0.9.4 (or 0.9.5, I can’t remember which) — and it is very pleasant to use, so much so that using any other browser quickly gets irritating. Yes, Opera and iCab both have excellent features, but also quite irritating ones. I like the way Mozilla lets you get on with the business of surfing the Web (and checking email, if you want it to). It isn’t perfect, but it does give the impression that one day it just might be.

As I write this, I learn that the first preview release of Netscape 7 — wow, that should make M$ green (that was sarcasm, but it occurs to me you never know what will get Bill Gates’s goat) — is available. I’m not sure exactly what release of Mozilla it is based on, but it does offer tabbed browsing (believe me, that is a very useful feature). On the other hand, the reaction on MetaFilter suggests that even if you choose only to install the browseryou still get a load of marketing shite for AOL and other companies — for Windows users, even in your Start menu! I’ve used both Netscape 6 and Mozilla, and it sounds as though what I’ve said before remains true with Netscape 7: all that’s good in Netscape comes from Mozilla, everything bad from Netscape. Use Mozilla. [More…]

Empire good, rebels (and Republic) bad? This is a different take on Star Wars; I can’t decide whether or not it’s a piss-take. It may be — and some comments make me think, even hope, it is. For example:

[U]nlike the divine-right Jedi, the Empire is a meritocracy. The Empire runs academies throughout the galaxy … and those who show promise are promoted, often rapidly. In "The Empire Strikes Back" Captain Piett is quickly promoted to admiral when his predecessor "falls down on the job."

is obviously tongue-in-cheek; but

In Episode IV, Imperial stormtroopers kill Luke’s aunt and uncle and Grand Moff Tarkin orders the destruction of an entire planet, Alderaan. But viewed in context, these acts are less brutal than they initially appear. Poor Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen reach a grisly end, but only after they aid the rebellion by hiding Luke and harboring two fugitive droids. They aren’t given due process, but they are traitors.

is less clear. Apart, of course, from the fact that Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen don’t actually do this — the droids, remember, are bought in good faith — the comment that the acts are less brutal than they seem is risible but unsettling, a feeling which increases as Mr. Last goes on to explain that because Leia is from Alderaan and Leia lies to Tarkin it is reasonable for the Empire to assume Alderaan is a rebel stronghold. And so it is OK to destroy a planet.

Hmm. Maybe this is an American foray into satire. Or, possibly, he’s serious.… Oh, dear. Here’s the killer quote, the one that really makes you want it to be satire:

Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator—but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet.

If you want a decent and definitely not tongue-in-cheek analysis of the dodgy philosophy underlying Star Wars, you can’t do better than to check out what David Brin had to say a couple of years ago.

The idea that an asteroidal impact on the Earth delivered the coup de grace to the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period, paving the way the for the rise of large mammals (including H. sapiens), has become widely accepted. Now scientists have found evidence that a similar impact may have allowed the large dinosaurs to evolve in the first place — an iridium layer has been found at the end of the Triassic; it is, though, substantially smaller than the iridium deposition at the end of the Cretaceous, so some remain unconvinced.

Sticking with objects falling from the sky, a meteorite has been analysed and is now thought to have originally been part of Mercury.

Seriously weird. Religious statuary, iconography and symbolism I have no problems with — but I have always felt bemused, to put it mildly, by the crappy plastic tat called “religious statues” by some people; well, I’m talking Catholics, really. But most of the stuff I’ve seen and thought tasteless is reverent and inspiring by comparison with these bizarre items: Jesus inspirational sports statues. I wish this site were a joke.

On the other hand, this site is definitely a piss-take, and if you know anything about the Protestant culture in Northern Ireland you’ll see the humour. For an exceptionally subtle example, the site claims to be selling street decoration:

Decorate your area with these Union Flegs made specially for Prodshopping.com. Our flegs are water and weather proof and will last from one 12th to the next. Order 100 flegs and get a free ladder.

Beneath this is a small picture of a man raising the Union flag — beneath which in small print is the legend, manufactured in RoI.

I have just received an email with a link to a BBC story about Adam Ant’s court appearance. The text of the email says:

Oh my god Adam Ant’s turned into Benny Hill!

That’s not a reference to anything in the text of the article, but to the photograph which heads it. I see what she means — a bit unsettling, that.