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According to the old Celtic calendar, so I’m told, Samhuinn marked the New Year — so happy new year to all you Celts out there!

Thursday 7th November

The return of copy-protected “CDs”: BMG, a year after having to back down on copy protection after the row which erupted when the Natalie Imbruglia “CD” was released with Cactus Data Shield protection to prevent it being played on a PC’s CD-ROM drive, is apparently intent on applying it to all the CDs they produce. They are still using the CD logo which Philips has stated should not be used on copy-protected “CDs”.

As an earlier entry noted, the obsession with copy protection arises out of a belief that most people who copy CDs are pirates and that only a small minority do it for legitimate reasons of personal use. This is a fantasy. BMG insist that “downloading and burning erodes music sales” (my emphasis):

World music sales for the year 2001 fell by 5% in value and by 6,5% in units. Europe fell slightly by 0,8% in value and saw a drop in units sold of 2,2%. In the world’s major markets — including the US and many parts of Western Europe — this decline is attributed to … unauthorised CD-R copying. Two years ago, on a worldwide basis, one digital copy was made for every three music CDs sold. Last year, that ratio had shrunk dramatically to one-to-two. In 2001, for every CD album sold, one copy was burned. That amounts to around 2.5 billion CDs a year. At these levels of massive copying and piracy, huge damage is being done to legitimate recorded music sales.

The statement that a decline in sales is “attributed” to unauthorised copying is no more than an assertion. The quoted figures certainly don’t prove it.

1. Where do they get the figures for the number of CDs burned? This cannot be directly extrapolated from the amount of music downloaded.
2. Is the change in ratio due to a rise in the number of CDs burned (assuming this guesswork is correct) or a decline in the number of CDs sold or a combination of the two? The pricing of CDs is widely — and correctly, I believe — seen as excessive; couldn’t that be a disincentive? What about the effect of DVDs on the market? Most people do not have unlimited funds, so money spent on DVDs is money which cannot be spent on CDs.
3. Not for the first time: what evidence is there that the personal downloading and copying of music has any negative impact on sales?
4. A point they overlook: no matter what copy protection they use, if I were so minded, which I’m not, it would be bloody easy to produce a good quality copy of a CD no matter what protection it has simply by making an analogue copy and burning copies of that. The quality wouldn’t be quite as good as a pure digital copy, but it would be pretty close.

If I buy a CD — a disc with the Philips Compact Disc logo on it and its packaging — I should be able to play it on any suitable player, i.e. a CD player or a CD-ROM drive, which also carries that logo. Full stop.

Some HP wireless keyboards seem to have a slight security flaw.

Making a crisis into a catastrophe: no, we’re not talking about IDS, the Tory leader who makes John Major look competent, we’re talking about the Glasgow Underground. (No, not the record label.)

Glasgow’s Subway was the world’s third underground rail system (if system isn’t too much of an exaggeration). It was opened in 1896, consisting of two 10.4km tracks running in a circular route linking the West End, the City Centre and part of the South Side. This seems, no doubt, tiny; but Glasgow’s population has traditionally been very concentrated in a small area, so a circuit like this was actually of great benefit to many people within the city.

Originally the system was powered by cable traction, and the stations still have the inclined track to help slow the trains on entering stations and aid acceleration on leaving. In 1935 the Subway was electrified, however some at least of the original running stock remained in use on the electrified system until it was closed for renovation in 1977. Until that time, the staff uniforms on the Subway still had a black mourning band for the passing of Queen Victoria.

The renovated system opened in 1980 (the closure seemed longer), the colour of the new trains in Strathclyde Passenger Transport’s livery earning it the new nickname of “the clockwork orange.”

An unofficial strike by train drivers shut the Subway on Wednesday. I’m not clear about why the drivers took this action: it appears to have something to do with the training of new drivers in the use of CCTV monitors, something an SPT spokesman said was part of their job descriptions. Out of a total of 42 drivers, 32 went on strike.

On Wednesday afternoon, SPT sacked 17 of the striking drivers, and later in the day sacked the remaining 15.

In a statement, SPT’s director of operations, Douglas Ferguson, said: “SPT will not tolerate such militant behaviour, bringing one of Glasgow’s vital public transport modes to a standstill.

“As a result we have today taken action to dismiss those who have taken part in this illegal action.

“We are now calling on other drivers to return to work as normal.”

But what other drivers? Thirty-two went on strike and have now been fired. Ten were on a rest day, off sick or on holiday. Granted, I can see no good reason for the strike; granted, it was illegal; but firing the drivers completely removes any possibility of negotiating an end to the strike, and the system can’t possibly get back to normal until new drivers are hired and trained, even if the latest report of talks with the union are true. On the radio this morning, an SPT spokesman said there was no chance of a reinstatement of the sacked workers.

The acquittal of the plane-spotters in Greece has reminded me of a site I meant to post a long time ago. Plane-spotting is by no means the saddest of hobbies. There’s trainspotting for a start, not to mention bus-spotting. Nothing, though, is so weird as pylon-spotting. Here’s the Pylon of the Month site, which sadly seems not to have been updated for a while: text on the home page says, “Unfortunately January 2001’s update is delayed indefinitely due to illness.”

Tuesday 5th November

The Commons vote I mentioned yesterday went as anyone with a brain would have predicted, with eight Tory MPs, including former leadership candidates Kenneth Clarke and Michael Portillo and John Bercow, who resigned from the Shadow Cabinet yesterday, voting with the Government to give a majority of 199 for allowing adoption by unmarried couples, overturning the opposition of the Lords to this. Many more Tories abstained.

The Tories are in deep trouble, and Iain Duncan Smith has no one to blame but himself. There was no necessity to impose a three-line whip on this in the first place, but having done so to say that MPs could vote against the party line if they wished simply made IDS look foolish — which may, on this showing, be the truth.

Of course, although he has made this crisis out of nothing, IDS is trying to shift the blame, claiming that a “small group of parliamentary colleagues have decided consciously to undermine” his leadership, and that

For a few, last night’s vote was not about adoption but an attempt to challenge my mandate to lead this party.

He has told the Tories the party must unite or die. Kenneth Clarke responded scathingly:

It would be very much easier to unite as a party if Iain Duncan Smith would refrain from imposing three line whips on subjects which have always been left to the judgement of individual MPs.

Clarke, by the way, seems in full vigour, so maybe I was premature yesterday to say his time seems to have been and gone. If I were a Tory, I would want him as leader; but, then, if I were a Tory I’d probably be so dim I wouldn’t understand the writing on the wall even if it were read out to me.

The main target of IDS’s ire, though, would appear to be Michael Portillo, who delivered a pointed speech in the Commons yesterday, demanding to know why the vote hade been made a three-line whip for the Tories. Despite his adamant statements yesterday that he would not stand for the leadership party, Portillo is clearly seen by IDS as the plotter-in-chief. Portillo is unimpressed by the party leader’s statement today: he describes it as an “unwarranted misinterpretation of the motives” of the MPs who did not support the party, and noted that it was the first time he had voted against a three-line whip.

IDS, by the way, voted against his party’s position more than 40 times when the Tories were in government.

February 15th, 1988: sounds a long time ago, surprisingly so when you consider that’s when the first episode of Red Dwarf was broadcast. At last, series one of the comedy series featuring Lister, the last human, the last survivor of the Felis sapiens race descended from Lister’s cat, a genius computer gone senile and the most irritating hologram ever is coming to DVD. And the good news is… it is the original, not the CGI remastered version released on VHS a while back:

Fans will no doubt be interested to learn that the episodes will be released in their original, unremastered versions. "Two discs per series. Six episodes, with commentaries, on disc one — keep the bit-rate high, keep the quality good — and the bonus disc, on a season by season basis, could [have] anything up to 120 minutes of extras."

Sounds good, and it’s available now.

Also in the pipeline, possibly coming in the winter of 2003, is a Red Dwarf movie.

By the way, when I was describing Red Dwarf there I didn’t miss anyone out. Kryten, the domesticated robot with panic mode and fully functional groinal socket, didn’t make his first appearance until series two — and the Kryten we all know and love, as played by Robert Llewellyn, didn’t appear until season three. OK, you goits?

Another death: Jonathan Harris, whose portrayal of Dr. Zachary Smith was (with the Robot which formed a perfect double act with him) the only thing which made Lost in Space always watchable, has died. (There is a Jonathan Harris fan site, but every time I tried to look at it, it crashed the browser. There’s a link from the BBC report if you want to try.)

What really is striking about the BBC report is, if you’ll excuse the Private Eye speak, the pisspoor illustration of it. I will say nothing, merely present these two shots from the page to show what I mean:

Monday 4th November

I suppose we have to go back to the subject of the last entry: Have I Got News For You. The question of who replaces Angus Deayton remains wide open. In the short term, the approach seems to be a different host each week; last Friday Paul Merton hosted the programme. Unsurprisingly, the show attracted a large audience. Merton did his best — which was not bad at all once he had settled into the role — but he doesn’t really seem comfortable reading from an autocue. Of course, the worst aspect of his hosting the programme is that he is no longer captaining a team — losing his inspired flights of surreal lunacy in favour of the more restrained role of host would hardly benefit the programme. Having said that, I’d rather that than have Ann Robinson, who will be filling in this week.

The problem with all this is that Angus Deayton was the perfect host for the programme. If occasionally his private life became the subject of the jokes, that only added spice to the mixture. A notable event in the coverage of this, as one friend commented last week, is that Max Clifford has been talking sense:

It’s a ridiculous own goal because he in his current predicament added to the humour of the programme.

This seems to be the general opinion of the viewers. An online poll into whether or not the BBC should have sacked Deayton is currently running at:

The HIGNFY site makes its views pretty clear in an editorial; you can get an impression of how the author feels from the page name: stinks.htm. Over the past few days the name I’ve been thinking of more and more as the best available replacement is Clive Anderson, and it seems the HIGNFY site agrees; but they are quite right in pointing out that the best candidate for the job is Angus Deayton.

A report on the BBC site yesterday quotes the Mail on Sunday as reporting Michael Portillo wanting a hundred Conservative MPs to ask him to take charge before he would consider challenging Iain Duncan Smith for the leadership. However, on the radio today I heard Portillo absolutely and categorically state that he would in no circumstances run for leadership of the party again.

The interviewer was astonished, but I think this is entirely understandable. The Tories seem determined to self-destruct in a way that even Labour in the Eighties never did. They would seem to be a party which has become impossible to lead — even if the leader were not someone foolish enough to impose an unnecessary three-line whip which results in the resignation of a member of the shadow cabinet.

I suspect that Portillo is bright enough to realise that taking the leadership in the foreseeable future is a mug’s game: whoever leads the party, they are not going to win the next election, and whoever leads the party to defeat at the next election is finished. After that, the position is not necessarily better: if two crushing defeats aren’t enough to convince the Tories they have to change, will a third get the message home?

There is only one person who stands a remote chance of dragging the Tories back to electability: the consummate political thug, Kenneth Clarke. But his chance seems to have been and gone…

The best hope for democracy, in England anyway, is that the Liberal Democrats seize the day and oust the Tories as the official Opposition.

Skiffle legend Lonnie Donegan is dead. I recall seeing him in pantomime, Aladdin (possibly at the Pavilion, but I’m not sure), when I was a kid and My Old Man’s a Dustman was one of my favourite records.

It is difficult, I imagine, for anyone who wasn’t alive at the time to grasp what a star he was, particularly when seeing the titles of some of his hits: Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight), My Old Man’s A Dustman, the The Battle of New Orleans. He certainly made humour-filled records — even the mundanely titled Cumberland Gap includes the lines:

Two old ladies sittin’ in the sand
each one wishin’ that the other was a man

and

I’ve got a girl six feet tall
Sleeps in the kitchen with her head in the hall

He was, though, a real musician and one of the most successful recording artists before the Beatles came along. He worked with Ken Colyer, Chris Barber, Van Morrison and Mark Knopfler, and influenced some of Britain’s most famous musicians. The BBC report of his death notes:

Elvis recorded one of his songs, I’m Never Gonna Fall in Love Again, and in 1978 Sir Paul McCartney was the driving force behind a tribute album featuring appearances by Sir Elton John and Brian May.

Not bad for a boy from Glasgow.