Surveillance Society - What Me Worry?

The Open Right Group is proceeding to a massive mosaic illustrating Britain's steady slide in to a database state. Do your bit. Link.

New Metaphor for a New Century

I am proud to announce, in these formative years of the oughties, a new, fresh, appropriate metaphor for the new millennium. A metaphor brought to you by my very own genus Rattus. Ladies and gentlemen may I present to you 'rarer than rat vomit'. 

What's wrong with the traditional rocking horse shit/hens teeth metaphor? I hear you cry.

Well that's just so 20th century is my swift response.

What's so rare about rat vomit? Surely they eat all sort of crap, ergo they must vomit.

Not so. See here. They regurgitate but that's not the same. It does not achieve the projectile nature of the vomit and is mechanically quite different. Regurgitation is a vomit manque, a mere shadow of your projectile hurl. 

So, my rodent millennial metaphor - I thank you.

World May End with a Toot Rather than a Bang or a Whimper

Latest doomsday scenario comes to us via the Grauniad where we are told that some scientists believe that an expellation of methane from the Siberian seabed - a sort of global fart if you like. Now methane is 21 times more potent as a heat trap than carbon dioxide so the end result, if you'll pardon the phrase, could be a rapid early onset of extreme global warming. Methane released from the seabed is, according to the article, mostly consumed by micro-organisms but a major trump could make it into the atmosphere where it could precipitate a rapid acceleration of atmospheric warming. As apocalyptic visions go this is one of the best. The idea that this noble endeavour we call a planet could terminate with one gloriously all-enveloping fart just goes to prove my suspicion that the Supreme Being has a truly galactic sense of humour.

As a footnote it also proves that the West Virginian police who charged an individual for farting with extreme prejudice were so obviously ahead of the curve on this one.

As a verruca-note (below footnote) that charged has been er... dropped on instructions from the assistant prosecutor. Probably for lack of tangible evidence.

Ya couldn't make it up!

New Labour(Conservative Lite) Introducing Orwell for the Rest of Us

Cory Doctrow over on Boing Boing has written a scary piece on how he, as a non-British resident will have to carry one of the new biometric ID cards. Remember folks, this brave new world is being brought to you by the Association of Chief Police Officers centre-fold pin-up lickspittle Jaqui Smith our beloved Home Secretary. ACPO says, 'Jump!' Jaqui says 'How high?'

George Orwell would have been proud of her dedication to making the people of Britain into the most spied upon, most tracked, most databased population on the planet. But hey, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear. Tell that to Jean Charles De Menezes or Stefan Kizko or any of the numerous other victims of the miscarriage of justice in this fine and pleasant land.

To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, we are being treated to the spectacle of a Labour Government, a Labour Government, scuttling round slicing huge raw lumps off our liberties in the name of security. Seems that they only have to scare us shitless to gain themselves carte blanche to massacre the very society hundreds of our dedicated forbears worked so hard to achieve.

That these abominations should be foisted on us by a governmet purporting to be left-wing is all the more ironic.

Good Job No One Told 'Em About Bangers

I dunno, one incident and the whole of North America goes batshit crazy. Post 11 September (no I wont call it that!) the law enforcement bods in the good old US of A seem to have developed what can only be described as pre-emptive trigger finger syndrome (PTF). This manifests itself in a ludicrously over the top reaction to mudane occurrences. Clocked this on Digg and wondered what would have happened if a cockney had called this in reporting a package of 'bangers' lost and alone in Philly. True there was some duct tape in evidence and as we all know duct tape is dangerous stuff but to overcook these delicacies with an explosion, however controlled, must rank as slightly OTT. Link.

Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative and...Fish!

I love this triumph of the human spirit in the face of disaster. No, not famine, flood or pestilence but the sad loss of one of lifes little gems - an iPhone. Having accidentally dropped his iPhone into a river this guy has turned his bricked phone into fishing lures in an attempt to hook another species on the Jesus phone. Nice one. Link.

Laugh and the World Laughs With You, Fart.....

This small hiatus via Boing Boing shows that flatulence will get you charged and I don't mean in a good way.
If odour is to be regarded as the use of deadly force then there are certain individuas of my acquaintance who should be locked up now to prevent deeds of extreme violence roaming our streets. It's not just your gat that you keep under your arm.

Milk of Human Kind

Publicity whores PETA are suggesting that Ben & Jerrys, ice cream makers to the stars, should use only human milk in their confections. WTF? People complain when mothers breast feed in public. If we can't even let people feed their own children their own milk what chance has Ben & Jerrys got feeding it to the masses?

Reaction so far has pointed out that there will be drug pollution and possible disease issues if this radical policy is pursued. What, they think cows milk is free from such risks? Link

There's One Born Every Minute - No.956

I make no comment, no judgement. Just read this.

This person could be teaching your kids or flying your plane. I don't know which of these two scenarios is the more frightening.

What A Difference a Few Thousand Miles Make

UK/USA - CEO screws up and bank/investment house/hedge fund, looses millions/goes titsup/melts down. CEO 'leaves' with £millions golden handshake/parachute, a fond farewell and a wry smile.
India, Uttar Pradesh - CEO screws up industrial relations, sacks employees and 125 of them break in and beat him to death with iron bars (via The Register).

Perhaps the FSA could convene a focus group in Uttar Pradesh and learn a few things? Might concentrate the minds of the money boys a bit.

Something Rotten in the Milk Churn

This just in via the Guardian's Media Monkey. Squire of all that's punk and scourge of mini-Welsh popstrelle Duffy and the Queen (not necessarily in that order), John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, is to appear in an advertisment for Diary Crest Country Life Butter. How punk is that? Never mind Flogging a Dead Horse how about the solidified juice of a live cow?

Tasteless Comments Section the First

I see that The Zombies will be doing a commemorative tour in 2009 signalling the 40th anniversary of their now recognised album Odessey & Oracle which BTW is fantastic. Unfortunately one of the original group, Paul Atkinson, has departed and gone to that great gig in the sky. So, should he appear on stage during this tour you'll know where they got their name from.

LHC Leaking Helium and Dodgy Transformers

According to news recently the Large Hadron Collider has been shut down by a helium leak and a transformer glitch. I can't help it but I get this enduring image of Optimus Prime with the voice of Minnie Mouse exclaiming 'Smack my glitch up!' 
Help me! My reference points are melting!

How Fast Are Your Reflexes?

I notice today that our esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer has ruled out a kneejerk response to the regulation of the piggies whose greed has been a major contributing factor to the current financial chaos. Kneejerk? If my reflexes were as slow as the FSAs responses I'd be six feet under. They make tectonic plates look positively frenetic.

Home On the Range

I know who Paris Hilton is. I wish I could say I didn't but I do because she's all over the news every time you open a paper. Now it seems that two of her dogs have been eaten by coyotes. Her mutts are left outside at night, an open invitation, evidently, for the boys in the 'hood to mosey on over and get down. Given that they are presumably handbagged sized canines they make great coyote canapes for the Hollywood Dog Pack mob. What her 'pack' needs is a large empty enclosed space and I'd like to propose the one between her ears. 

But perhaps I'm being unkind.

Spit and Polish or Maybe Vice Versa

Exciting news from Dorset where the Cerne Abbas giant, currently a shadow of his former self, is to get a makeover to spruce up his image. Volunteers will re-chalk his well-endowed outline to afford sightseers with a view of his, er, gigantic majesty. No doubt there will be much sniggering on the hillside as this ancient monument gets his outline polished. Ooo err missus.

Post script: a famed Dorset biscuit is known as the Dorset Knob. Can't think where the name came from. 

Oh do stoppit, now!

Serious Narcotic Dandruff Situation

This just in via BBC. Two women from Derby have been arrested in Jamaica whilst trying to board a plane heading for London. Police suspect that they were trying to smuggle cocaine with a street value of £170k under their wigs or they have a really serious case of dandruff.
Now there's a thought maybe with a little judicious genetic engineering we could develop a narcotic dandruff and slash our drug-miles down to the short trip from head to nose. How green is that?

Literacy Proves Your Nefarious Purpose

File under 'World Gone Mad'. A 10-year old was suspended from school in NY, USA for bring the blade (3/4" x 1/4") from his broken pencil sharpener to school. The school principal involved the local police who had to write and file a report on the incident. 
One of the comments was probably the most sensible thing to come out of this whole mess when Maussist posted "I worry about the day grade school educators realise that the pen is mightier than the sword.
Literacy will become evidence of being skilled with a deadly weapon". 

In the words of one V Meldrew "I don't believe it!" Via Boing Boing

Baraknophobia - How to Engender Fear & Loathing in the American Electorate

TV conditioning is paying off for the GOP in the presidential brouhaha across the pond. Just the faintest suggestion that Obama has cast a sexist slur at the Palin person has been enough to provoke howls of faux anguish from Republicans across America. The five minute attention span of most voters means the far-right spin machine has only to make the accusation and the chattering classes heave themselves upright briefly on their nationwide sofas and bray their disgust on cue. It matters little that McCain himself used this attack in a blatantly sexist way against Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin started the ball rolling by paraphrasing this old joke in a speech of her own or that Obama was not, in fact, referring to Palin at all, the mere suspicion of a sexist remark towards their new pin up has a significant percentage of the American right breaking out the sheets and the sisal and heading for the nearest tall tree. Ho hum we've got weeks of this shit to come and if it weren't so scary it'd be laughable. The merest hint that this wrinkled old scrotum and his bat-shit mad running mate might be occupying the White House is enough to make me want to find my own beam and perform my own rope trick.

Typo or Freudian Slip

A constant typo of the last few days has been the Large Hardon Collider which immediately raises images of upstanding members engaged in a sort of fleshy fencing tourney. But perhaps that's just me.

Die Another Day

As I travelled to work yesterday, listening to the breathless hyperbole of Andrew Marr on the firing up of the CERN death-ray, er Large Hadron Collider, I realised that the world was going to end as I was going to work and I was going to miss all the fun but then I reminded myself that I could always watch it again when I got home on the BBC iPlayer. Ain't technology brilliant!

Double Standards - Part the First

A constant and repeating pattern of criticism of the alternative/complementery/natural medicine field from the like of Edzard Ernst et al. is that it's largely based on anectdotal evidence and poor science. Leaving aside the fact the empiricism is, of itself, a valid theoretical model and that much of Ernst's work is based on anaylsis of the research of others( so-called meta-anylsis), not original work, have we not just spent upwards of $3 billion and 15-20 years to build the largest detector of a theorectical particle, the Higgs boson? Interestingly, even if they fail to find said miniscule item this will be considered money well spent. Absence of evidence is, as they say, not evidence of absence.

World Ends Wednesday. Put It In Your Diary

Isn't science brilliant! The finest brains of the human race never tire of smashing things up. Pulling them apart to see what happens. 

Pull the wings off flies in the classroom and you're sent to bed without your tea, do it in a laboratory and your liable to be lined up for a Nobel Prize or two. No wonder we're confused.

Tomorrow they fire up the Large Hadron Collider with the aim of discovering fundamental particles foremost of which is the Higgs boson. Some doom merchants are convinced that this will destroy the world as we know it and some cynics may say this would be no bad thing - bring it on.
See you tomorrow - maybe.

Arachnophobia Cure

Based on a psychological technique called flooding you could conceivably cure your fear of spiders here. Alternatively you could flee screaming into the night. Chose one.

Tough but not Exactly Cuddly

Tardigrades (stage name water bears) have been sent into space where they seem to have survived cosmic radiation, the vacuum conditions of deep space, starvation, extremes of temperature and everything that the versatile scientific minds studying them can dream up - and all without even wearing a vest.
I swear I've seen some of these guys staggering home from the pub in Newcastle. Link.

Who Knew?

So a Brit invented the iPod or rather the digital music player. Apparently Kane Kramer came up with the idea of a digital music player in 1979 but in typical British fashion let the patents slip through his fingers because of a lack of funding. His 'prior art' however has just been acknowledged and used by Apple to defend itself against a patent suit by Burst.com and it seems as if he might get a payout on his idea after all. Nice old Apple, though I'm sure it's enlightened self-interest I'm equally sure Mr Kramer doesn't care.

This is not the first time a Brit has rained on an American parade. The windsurfer patent was successfully challenged in the UK  thus breaking the patent in Europe and incidentally opening the way for a major amount of innovative development of the sailboard. Peter Chilvers, a 12-year old Chichester schoolboy was responsible for this spoiler as he'd fixed a sail to a board years before the American company Windsurfing International had filed its patents.

Britain, pissing on American bonfires since 1984

Island Life and Insanity

Living on the Isle of Purbeck is a Dorset idyll and for ten months of the year it's utter bliss. In July and August, however, Mr World + dog descends on this picturesque peninsula (not an island despite its title) and the peninsula wars begin. Like any war there are a series of battles. 

The Battle of Parking in which the year-long residents struggle to find a spot to rest their wheels. Personally I take to two wheels (motorised, I'm not a complete idiot) to avoid the nightmare of finding a parking space. 

The Battle for the Streets. For some reason holiday makers seem to thing that a) they are indestructible and b) the normal traffic regulations have been suspended for the duration of their visit. Since all these visits overlap in the high season months the towns in Purbeck seem to become pedestrianised by democratic vote at this time and the normal pavement-street delineation is put on hold. 

The Battle of the Beach where interesting territorial tribal rites take place and strange behaviour abounds. At what stage in our evolution did someone think 'Hey, here's a stretch of sand with people, some of them quite small people, sitting/lying/standing shoulder to shoulder, let's play football/frisbee/any activity involving hurling projectiles long distances to inept catchers'.

So the towns are invaded by people on foot and the countryside is invaded by people on bikes and people on foot and people in cars all with the view that Purbeck is a great big playground, and so it is. Much of the area's economy depends on this annual influx and its attendant cash deluge but things seem to be changing and not for the better. People are ruder, more aggressive, demand more consideration but offer less in return. What was once a minor but acceptable irritation is rapidly becoming unbearable. All this seem to be a function of an increasing population density in every sense of the word. Too many people to the square mile and too many thick people.

It's been know for some time that if you cram rats into smaller and smaller cages they eventually start to eat their own young and all sort of aberrant behaviour is initiated by overcrowding. My own young are too big to eat but some of the younger, tenderer offspring on the beach are beginning to look extremely appetising.

How Long Will It Take?

Oh boy. Nationwide Building Society has just been merged with two smaller building societies. How log will it be, I wonder, before there are calls for Nationwide to become a 'bank'. It's been tried before but, thankfully, resisted (one of the reasons I still have an account with the Nationwide). But the pressure will be on for all those funds to be accessible.

Blessed are the greedy for they shall remain insatiable.

iPhone, I Has One

I finally succumbed. I have put off my iPhone purchase and with an immense effort of will resisted buying the original version. Waited impatiently for the 3G version and snapped one up as soon as they hit the UK. 

I've been an Apple fan since 1987 when a magazine designer friend introduced me to a little ol' Macintosh SE and changed my computing experience for ever. Damn but they do just work. I've never wanted to tinker under the bonnet (hood) but I just wanted an easy access point to all that processing power and Apple has delivered that consistently for the last twenty years. (I left my new SE with my nine year-old daughter for twenty minutes and when I returned she was better with the GUI than I was. Today with eight self penned albums under her belt she's a confirmed Mac addict and all of her writing and most of her recording and production had been done on Macintosh computers. So neither of us needs much convincing when a new Apple product hits the streets.)

I'd toyed with the old iPhone in my local O2 store, loved the interface but put off and put off the purchase waiting for the 3G. I swore I wouldn't indulge in the kind of hysterical enthusiasm that greeted the original iteration in the US. No, I'm British, aloof, above all that early adopter stuff. Eventually when it arrived I could resist no longer. Now, a month and a half down the iPhone route and I couldn't be more pleased. Apple just seem to be able to make technology sexy. It's a beautifully simple interface which just does what you need it to do and then goes the extra distance to make the user experience a pleasure rather than a chore. The Apps Store is brilliant delivering apps to the phone quickly and automatically installing them and a good percentage of them are free. The phone connects and syncs with my desktop Mac seamlessly and without a hitch. The only issue I have at the moment is the battery life which only just lasts a day and I'm by no means a heavy user. But, hey, I'm an Apple fan and I can forgive the meagre battery life. For me the laid back user interface more than makes up for any shortcomings.

The only fly in my ointment is that Steve Jobs. He just too cool the bastard. He's about my age. He has squillions. He always looks relaxed (even if he isn't). He's been responsible for some of the most desirable techno products on the planet and to cap it all he has a more exotic illness than me. I'm just glad he lives on a different continent. I'd never get a shag.

Gadd Fly Not

The forlorn sight of Gary Glitter meandering round international airports in the Far East with his carrier bag, was a sad sight. It was all so unnecessary too if Jacqui Smith had resisted the temptation to shoot her mouth off to appease the press with a suitable soundbite. I don't blame Me Gadd for not wanting to set foot in a country whose Home Secretary has publicly announced that he would be effectively imprisoned again if and when he returned to the UK. Her statement that he wouldn't be allowed to leave the country if he returned was yet one more example of her pandering to the media. There are others, like the re-re-classification of cannabis, which seem to be designed more to appease the media than the electorate or the teams of experts she has to advise her.

Both statesmanship and humanity seem sadly lacking in New Labours new Britain.

Decluttering

I find myself increasingly selective about what I read on my newsfeeds. Using NetNewsWire makes subscribing to multiple feeds just so damn easy that I recently found I was trying to keep up with hundreds of feeds every day and was spending most of my time doing it. Apart from the fact that many articles are duplicated on multiple feeds some of the stuff is such unutterable crap that I suddenly wondered why I was letting it clog up my brain and take up my time. So I've been pruning it radically recently. Pairing the feeds to some essentials (news & current affairs), some technology & science and some whimsy. First to go, I have to say, was Digital Spy which seems so preoccupied with the vacuous garbage that is Big Brother that over 50% of its posts seem to have been devoted to regurgitating the minuitiae of a dozen brain dead publicity seekers competing for their fame filled 15 minutes. Why I even subscribed is anybody's guess. I suppose some brief flare of interest was aroused by the Winehouse train wreck that seems to have weekly epsiodes in their posts. I suddenly realised, as I tutt-tutted over her latest skeletal photo that I and others like me were part of her problem and that my absence was required and now.

Since then I've been slowly paring down my intake of 'news' and so, I hope, prolonging my dementia-free years by a few months since my brain is not filling up with useless trivia at nearly the same rate as it was.

I was struck some years ago by the Alexi Sayle theory of finite memory capacity which states that once that capacity is reached, one is in danger of forgetting some thing really important like how to breath or walk since this knowledge will be pushed out of memory by the latest FTSE index drop or the knowledge of a traffic jam on the M6. Since I'm approaching my sixth decade that overflow point must be close. I have no wish to rush to a dribbling dotage and the purge continues.

Synchronicity and Its Perils

Listening to Terry Pratchett tonight, an author incidentally who is as visionary as he is humorous and who has given me huge enjoyment, I heard him expressing the disquiet he felt when the plot of a story that he had written seemed to echo the tidal wave that had just engulfed vast areas of the world and admitting that he had held off from publishing the story in case it was seen as opportunism. My daughter is a singer-songwriter who, I believe, is immensely talented and had written a beautiful song called December in New York but the misfortune of her timing was that it appeared just before the awful events of the Twin Towers. Although her team wanted her to release it as a single she felt, at that time,  that it would have been entirely inappropriate and the song remains a beautiful, but unknown track, on one of her albums. This led me wonder how many other artists have had this problem.

BTW expect to hear more thoughts from me on the music industry, it's current shortcomings and the shifting paradigm brought about by the web thingy. They (my thoughts) wont be all that complimentary.

Extolling the Virtues of Your Own B(l)og

Have you ever been a house guest for the weekend and found it absolutely impossible to use the lavatory with any degree of relaxation. I don't mean number ones obviously, the attendant pitfalls of unwanted and thunderous gaseous noises don't accompany number ones. No, it's number twos that are the problem. The consequent sound effects of the bowel evacuation procedure are just too embarrassing even with the closest of friends and so you end up holding it in until you get home whereupon you have what Vic Reeves' straight man once referred to as 'a nice relaxing poo'. It must be some kind of territorial imperative. I suppose I wouldn't be nearly as coy if I were a grizzly bear and I might be smearing my faeces as high as I could reach up the bathroom wall. Probably wouldn't be asked back. Hmm, now there's a thought.

I only mention it now because this seems to be what's happening now in my own blog. Using other people's blogs isn't the same and I seem to be suffering from the relaxing poo syndrome and it seems to be pouring out of me, so to speak. 

Yes and so far it's shit, I hear you cry. 

But I hope it'll improve. 

So do we!

Write here, write now

Oh how derivative!

What?

Your title.

How so?

It's been done before.

So?

Don't you have any original thoughts?

Original in what way.

Well, stuff that hasn't been done before, new stuff, untouched by human mind.

But everything's been used before.

How so?

See those letters you just used in your querulous response to my title?

Yes.

Well they've all been used before numerous times.

Oh don't be so disingenuous, of course the letters have been used before but it's the order they're used in to form words and the arrangement of the words to form sentences and the order of the sentences etc. - you catch my drift?

Oh I catch your drift all right. Plagiarising other people's use of letters is OK, adaptation of four words is not. Stealing the combined letter utterings of generations of writers, scribes and men and women of letters is OK, but if I adapt four single syllable words it's not.

You're being deliberately obtuse.

Of course - it's what I do.

I'm beginning this blog which will be of indeterminate length with this minor internal dialogue to explain why I don't do blogs. It just takes too much time. By the time my multiple personalities have argued themselves to a writers block I'm just too exhausted to do anything other than languish on the sofa with a glass of wine and not watch Big Brother. Hence the indeterminate nature of this blog.

I may be back....or not.