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Tuesday 10th September

I know, I know, another big gap. I’d explain the story, which involves pain and collapsing furniture, but let’s not go there…

On the other hand, why don’t you come here — in 2005 anyway, for the 63rd. World Science Fiction Convention. At the 2002 WorldCon, ConJosé, the 2005 site selection vote saw the Glasgow bid win on the first ballot. The 2005 WorldCon is Interaction, and the GoH lineup is: Greg Pickersgill, Christopher Priest, Robert Sheckley, Lars-Olov Strandberg and Jane Yolen. Note that however much Dave Langford attempts to describe it as a Scottish WorldCon, the Committee is rightly pitching it as a European WorldCon.

Due to a combination of ill health and impecuniosity, I wasn’t able to go to the 1995 Glasgow WorldCon, Intersection, but I was aware of one of the problems: inappropriate press reporting. STV News and the Evening Times in particular gave the impression that the Con was for kids, which it isn’t. There is some programming for younger people, but the bulk of activities are aimed squarely at adults. This led to some biddies turning up at the Con with their weans then coming out distinctly less than gruntled to the waiting TV cameras, to which they complained that it was a “rip-off” because you had to pay to get in and then there was nothing to do but buy stuff. Well, you have to pay to get in because it costs a lot to run a WorldCon; there is a lot of stuff on sale because, here’s a surprise, SF fans like buying SF stuff — particularly but not exclusively books; the dealers’ room is by no means all there is to the Con, though. However, it wasn’t really the parents’ fault: the people to blame were the media who misrepresented the Con. I hope this time they get it right.

Here’s a true story which makes you wonder if all those Irish jokes were just jokes:

Irish police are being handicapped in a search for a stolen van, because they cannot issue a description. It’s a special branch vehicle, and they don’t want the public to know what it looks like.

That cutting from The Guardian is one of the many which have been used on Radio 4’s News Quiz, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. This week’s Archive Hour looked at the story of The News Quiz from its beginings with Barry Norman in the chair and only journalists allowed on the panel to the programme of today, chaired by Simon Hoggart and featuring comedians on the panel. The News Quiz is a continuing delight, long may it continue. Here’s another cutting:

Commenting on a complaint from a Mr.Arthur Purdey about a large gas bill, a spokesman for North West gas said “We agree it was rather high for the time of year. It’s possible Mr.Purdey has been charged for the gas used up during the explosion that blew his house to pieces.”

Earlier I mentioned STV, which of course stands for Scottish Television, the local bit of ITV. STV uses the URL www.scottishtv.co.uk — which is fair enough, I suppose. But it is amusing what happens if you want to find a URL for their news programming and you do a Google search using “scottish television news”…

The top story in the Evening Times as I write is the court appearance of Ian Huntley, accused of murdering Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. I am pleased to see that someone has been arrested during the disturbances surrounding his court appearance. The tendency for people to gravitate towards court appearances by the accused in emotive cases in order to create a disturbance is deeply worrying. There doesn’t need to be a law about this: behaviour of this kind surely falls under the heading of public order offences; if the police were aggressive in arresting some people for breach of the peace, it might make some of those who are inclined to form a mob (feel free to insert the word lynch) think twice.

Sticking with SMG, owners of both STV and The Evening Times (as well as The Herald and Sunday Herald), The Scotsman reports that SMG is selling its publishing division (which also produces magazines and the crappy “S1” websites, e.g. s1play). This is so that SMG can focus on “faster growing media sectors” (methinks that may be code for “we need the cash”):

Chief executive Andrew Flanagan said, “…In an increasingly consolidated newspaper and magazines sector, it is clear that the ongoing success of these businesses is best assured as part of a larger publishing network

"Initiating the sale of these valuable newspapers now will ensure that SMG has the flexibility to capitalise on the opportunities presented by the Communications Act next year.”

Strangely, I can see no mention of this in The Herald.

Talking of The Herald, and harking back to the Ian Huntley story: it seems that recently one of the paper’s regular columnists, John MacLeod, kicked up a right stushie recently when he commented on the deaths of the two girls. Now, before we go any further it’s probably a good idea to explain who John MacLeod is — or rather, what he is. According to The Guardian, he “has been described as a Presbyterian fundamentalist”, which is one way of putting it. Another is how The Scotsman puts it: “MacLeod … has never made any secret of his Western Isles religious values.”

Yes, we’re talking Wee Frees. To be absolutely accurate, MacLeod isn’t a Wee Free (i.e. a member of the Free Church) , he’s a minister in the Free Presbyterian Church, which makes him a Wee Wee Free (I’m not joking) — but no one outside these churches can tell them apart. Thinking of them as Christian Fundamentalists is true, but not helpful; images of Jerry “watch me put my foot in my mouth” Falwell are wide of the mark. The Wee Frees and their ilk hark back to the sort of Christian worldview which was the norm, in Protestant countries at least, three to four hundred years ago; yet these churches remain a force in the North of Scotland and the Western Isles now, at the beginning of the 21st Century. If you want to get the flavour of the Wee Wee Frees, this Scotsman article captures it well:

Dancing, drinking, cutting hair, wearing trousers and attending the funerals of Catholics — all have, in their time, incurred the wrath of the small group of religious hardliners known as the Wee Wee Frees.

Those familiar with the ways of the Free Presbyterian Church tell a joke which, they claim, says everything anyone needs to know about this strict grouping. Why, they ask, do Wee Wee Frees never have sex standing up? Because they wouldn’t want anyone to think they were dancing.

The reality is that the Church has done little to counter such stereotypes.

That’s putting it mildly.

Members of the Church take a hardline stance on a range of issues, insisting women should not cut or style their hair or wear trousers.

Husbands have authority over their wives and parents over their children.

Television, theatre and cinema are all regarded as sinful, as is reading newspapers on Sunday. There is no place for drinking, smoking, dancing or gambling.

Strict observance of the Sabbath is obligatory and Wee Wee Frees will go to great lengths to ensure they do no work, to the extent of preparing their meals the day before.…

In 1997, the Church reaffirmed its belief that dancing was sinful. It labelled those who indulged in dance as “the frivolous, the empty-headed, the vain, the silly, the dissipated and the dissolute”, and described dancing as an act “for mere sensual enjoyment”. An article in the Church’s magazine called on Christians to give up dancing or to give up their faith.

Another article describes how the Wee Wee Frees shut their website down on Sunday — well, that is to say they replace the site with a notice “explaining that the closure is in line with the church’s belief that no work should be done by anyone — or anything — on the Lord’s Day.” I can’t help thinking that if they were being completely logical they would delete every file on the server at, oh, five to midnight on Saturday and reinstate the files just after midnight on Sunday, because let’s face it if work is being done serving files then work is still being done if that file is a notice explaining why you aren’t serving files; if work is being done reading a site, work is being done reading the notice. If having a website available on Sunday is wrong, having a notice available is equally wrong; but at this end of the theological spectrum, logic is something of a rarity:

The Rev John MacLeod, the church’s synod clerk, refused to discuss the website with Scotland on Sunday. He said: “We do not give interviews to the Sunday newspapers as a point of principle, and I am holding true to that principle.”

Holding true to principles sounds noble, except that there’s no reluctance to be interviewed by Monday newspapers — or, indeed, to write a column for the Monday edition of a newspaper — as a certain John MacLeod, until recently, did.

Monday papers, of course, are prepared and printed on Sunday.

Anyway, back to the point. MacLeod wrote his usual column for (I think) the August 26th edition of the paper. He referred to the killing of the two girls in Soham and made the observation that

“Had the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman kept the Lord’s day, their daughters would still be alive,

“They would have spent the day at rest or the private and public worship of God, and not been wandering the countryside, prey for whatever evil finally befell upon them.”

Now, it’s important to bear in mind that MacLeod had no editorial role on the Herald. The duty editor approved the column, obnoxious as it was, and featured it prominently.

A furious response from the paper’s readers led to MacLeod being sacked. The Guardian reports the response of his fellow journalists:

Journalists have rallied round an award-winning Scottish newspaper columnist who was sacked after writing that murder victims Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman would still be alive if their parents had observed the Sabbath.

While making it clear that they found his comments ‘disgraceful’ and ‘crass’, employees of the Glasgow-based Herald newspapers are outraged that he was fired, despite the fact that the piece was approved for use in last Monday’s edition.

I think the idea of him winning awards is the most shocking thing I’ve read in relation to this. As a moderately regular Herald reader, I know John MacLeod’s column well as a repository of blinkered, narrow-minded, bigoted, misogynistic, self-righteous bollocks. (There are those who would simply have said “shite.”) I have often wondered why he should have a column in a national newspaper at all, but the thought of him winning an award… I am speechless.

I can’t say I was surprised that he wrote such a column, but I am surprised the Herald printed it. The Scotsman, of course, is loving every minute:

The case of columnist John MacLeod, writing in the Herald about the murders of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman is a perfect example of how to get it dramatically wrong. …

Of course, it is the job of a columnist to provoke and make outlandish statements in an attempt to convince readers of an opposite point of view. They hold privileged positions where, very often, they argue against the newspaper’s own leader column. As long as it is clear that it is their personal view, this is an acceptable and common practice.

What they should never do, however, is push their view past the point where taste and decency are compromised. That is where the editor should be wise enough, and experienced enough, to know that the newspaper’s credibility will be on the line.

Alas, the Herald thought it knew better.

Despite the slightly pompous display of Schadenfreude, the Scotsman’s questioning of whether it was right for the Herald to fire MacLeod when the column was “clearly endorsed and then aggravated by highlighting it on page one” remains a good one. The point that MacLeod should have been asked to file another column is also a good one, if made from the safety of 20-20 hindsight. (I’m not sure how many, if any, in the Herald’s editorial staff share MacLeod’s theological views; I would not be at all surprised if it was passed because it looked like the usual bonkers stuff from the resident loonie fundamentalist.)

There’s not a lot of sympathy for MacLeod anywhere, and he certainly won’t find much here; I’ve no idea what the Wee Wee Frees think, but the Wee Frees have put the boot in:

In the midst of writing this column I have become aware of a really sad commentary on this whole situation. Doubtless by now most of you will be aware of the FP minister who apparently declared that if the parents of Jessica and Holly had kept the Sabbath then their children would not have been killed. A statement repeated by a fine Christian columnist in a national Scottish newspaper. A statement which in turn has been defended by some on our Message Board as brave Christian comment. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. This statement is not just cruel and insensitive to a quite breathtaking degree. But it also identifies the Christian gospel with a crude (and unbiblical) cause and effect theology. Does anyone really believe that it is either appropriate or right to state that if only the girls parents had kept the Sabbath and not allowed their children out then they would not have been murdered? Would God have protected them on Monday? Should the parents have that added burden of guilt imposed upon them? Does the ‘fact’ that if the girls parents had kept the girls at home reading the bible then their daughters would not have died, have any more relevance than the ‘fact’ that if they had taken them on holiday that day to Disneyworld they would not have died? What point was the minister trying to make . that God will allow your children to be killed if they go for a walk to the shops on a Sunday? Surely not.

I suspect that this is both the first and the last time I shall consider anything said by a Wee Free to be sane and sensible, let alone humane. (I know, I know, I’ll go and lie down for a bit when I’ve finished typing this. Thanks for your concern.)

I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand, I don’t think anyone should be censored for exrpessing their beliefs. On the other, what the hell was a guy like that doing writing a column for a national paper in the first place? Frankly, if he was writing a column then proponents of other extreme religious positions should have been doing the same; yet I see no rush to give, say, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad his own column. However, it seems to me that if a writer provides a piece which is legally acceptable (and this was) and that piece is accepted then any action resulting from a backlash of public opinion should be directed against the editor(s) responsible, not the writer. I suspect the reason MacLeod was a columnist was simply that he is so out of tune with the modern world that his writing would be bound to stimulate debate — if that’s so, then firing him because his views are so off the screen they are offensive to almost everyone is unreasonable, bordering on hypocritical.

Oh, and of course the article is not on The Herald’s site; nor can I find anything referring to this because the site search (which always sucked) is not working.

The Washington Post reports that the diplomatic gap is widening between the USA and its allies. It opens by quoting Colin Powell, describing President Bush’s approach to negotiating foreign policy: “He tries to persuade others why that is the correct position. When it does not work, then we will take the position we believe is correct.” This, remember, is negotiation with allies.

It is hardly surprising that

A brief flurry of support for the United States after last September’s attacks has evaporated because of what foreign officials consider a dismissive U.S. attitude toward international treaties and coalitions, a tendency to view problems through the distorted lens of the war on terrorism, and confusing and inconsistent messages sent by a foreign policy team that often seems at war with itself, according to diplomats and officials overseas. Problems that are considered important to the rest of the world — such as the threat of global warming, the costs of globalization and the spread of infectious diseases — appear to receive little if any attention from the administration, foreign officials complain.

European officials say they feel adrift and increasingly estranged from U.S. policy, especially on the Middle East and the environment. Latin Americans say they have been ignored despite the region’s growing financial woes. Officials in Japan and South Korea say they aren’t sure whether they matter much to the United States anymore. U.S. relations with China and Russia have improved but appear to have reached an uncomfortable impasse. Arabs express despair that U.S. policy in the Middle East has swung sharply in favor of Israel. Indeed, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon may be one of the few around the world confident that it sees eye to eye with the administration.

You can tell a lot about people from their friends.

I’ve mentioned advertising before. I’ve said, “The failure of advertising on the Web is surely not that everyone is completely advertising intolerant, it’s that advertising is done in an offensive manner.” I’ve come across nothing which might persuade me that I am wrong. An article in Wired News puts it well:

As they confront continued sluggishness in the online advertising market, publishers are increasingly veering toward the obnoxious. Providers of ad-blocking software say this trend has inspired a backlash from the Web-surfing public.

“A few pop-up ads at the beginning were just fine with most people. But now it’s everywhere,” said Matina Fresenius, CEO of Panicware, a Seattle firm that makes software for blocking intrusive Web ads.

Small wonder that Fresenius says downloads of Panicware’s main blocking product have shot up — about five million downloads in the past years. As I believe I may have mentioned, my browser of preference is Mozilla — it isn’t perfect, but it’s closer to perfection than any other browser I have tried — and Mozilla has an effective preferences option to kill pop-ups. It’s not the only browser which can do this, and, as the article mentions, more than one company produces utilities for browsers which don’t do the job of killing browsers themselves. Anyone without software protection like this, though, gets thoroughly bombarded:

In the first seven months of 2002, advertisers purchased and launched more than 11.3 billion pop-up and pop-under ads, according to a report released Wednesday by Nielsen//NetRatings. Although the company did not have comparable data for last year, researchers said month-to-month statistics indicate that the volume of pop-ups is growing at a moderate pace.

A single company — the maligned X10 Wireless Technology — provided nearly one-tenth of all pop-up and pop-under ads, making it by far the heaviest user of the format.

However, the advertising industry does not grasp why pop-ups and (even more so) pop-unders are loathed:

On the other hand, defenders of pop-ups worry that a small group of aggressive advertisers is giving interstitials a bad name.

“Pop-up is sort of getting blamed as this maligned format, but I’m not sure it’s so much the format as the abuse of over-inundating people,” said Molly Hislop, vice president of research services at Dynamic Logic, which conducted a survey last fall measuring public perception of interstitials.

… In order to avoid alienating visitors, Hislop says online publishers must limit the frequency at which pop-ups appear on their site. Dynamic Logic’s survey indicated that on average, users will tolerate about three pop-up windows per hour in exchange for viewing content for free.

“Interstitials” is used here, apparently, as a synonym for pop-under, which is confusing as I have previously seen the term applied to advertising pages which appear instead of the requested page when following a hyperlink, carrying a further hyperlink to take you to the page you actually wanted to go to in the first place — one of the few advertising techniques which are actually more obnoxious than pop-unders/pop-ups. Here’s a screenshot of an example of such an interstitial, from Yahoo Groups:

By the way, I haven’t clipped out the ad, either to save on the size of the image or to avoid giving these obnoxious gits more publicity — this is the way I actually see it in Mozilla with BannerBlind installed.

Anyway, back to the actual topic. Ms Hislop and her ilk are missing the point. The point is that pop-ups are obnoxious. Pop-ups (and pop-unders) are obnoxious for the following reasons (some of which also apply to interstitials in the original sense):

• They get in the user’s way. A user going to a web site wants to read, look at or make use of that site, not the pop-up ad, but the pop-up appears over the page so the user has no choice but to pay attention to it. Even so, the chances are high the user will never see the ad, since the most common behaviour is almost certainly to kill the window before it has loaded, but this still means that time has been wasted before attention can be given to the site which is what the user actually wants to look at.
• They use bandwidth. Instead of downloading a web page, the user is suddenly (and with no choice in the matter) downloading a web page and some other material, which may be another web page, a graphic, or perhaps a bit of Flash. Whatever it is, this extra stuff slows down the loading of the web page, and if the user is accessing the Net via a dial-up account which is paid for by the minute, then the user is paying to have the ad downloaded. If you can’t see that that sucks, then you work in advertising and you are scum.
• They use system resources. Pop-ups and pop-unders involve the opening of a new window. This is not a trivial matter if, say, you are multitasking with a couple of big programs running. You may be able to surf the Net without problem with one browser window open as well as the other software; that does not mean that opening a new browser window is going to be problem free. You may well find yourself with a very unstable system due to memory problems. Or suppose you are using a browser which becomes unstable once more than three or four windows are opened: you surf with four windows and everything works fine, until some bastard advertising swine opens a fifth window and crashes your browser — possibly taking the OS with it, depending on what you are running. (If you can’t see that that sucks… ) It should be up to the user to decide what windows get open, because no one else knows what resources are available.

Now Wired News reports that the advertisers are going to fight back:

As more Internet users adopt ad-blocking software, advertisers are now looking for ways to get around it….

The makers of one application engineered for this purpose, AntiAdBuster, claim their script will detect if a person is using ad-blocking software. Once it detects the ad-blocking software, it sends a message asking the person to turn it off and check out the ad.

I know what my response would be.

Blake Ross writes:

The most severe problem hindering the use of personal computers today is that they are so task-oriented. To type a document, I open Microsoft Word. To talk with friends, I open AOL Instant Messenger. To play a game, I open Starcraft. For the average consumer, this is abstruse and strenuous.

Um, yes — it is so abstruse, isn’t it, not to say exceedingly strenuous, that one has to use a television to watch television programmes, or a cooker to cook some food, to say nothing of the drudgery of having to use a fridge to keep things cool. I regularly hear people grumble that bookshelves are so poor at storing socks while drawers are really inadequate for the keeping of books. It is amazing that we manage to muddle through the day.