Our local park is bisected by a river. This river is quite picturesque on most days of the year, to the extent that some local wag periodically feels compelled to temper its pastoral loveliness by sticking a shopping trolley in it.
Christmas heralded one such attempt to redecorate. In a fit of public spiritedness, I decided to pull the trolley out, weeds, reeds, dead fish and all. Then what to do with it? Clearly if I left it there, it would inevitably go straight back in, so I walked it out of the park and chucked it in a local skip.
Now you'd think that people would recognise that I was merely demonstrating a bit of civic responsibility, but no. The impression was evidently that I was a card carrying loon who'd just been shopping for riverborne detritus and hit the motherload, to the extent that a woman actually dragged her child to one side then marched it across the boggy grass area to the parallel path to get away from me.
There are two possible conclusions here. First is that as a society, we're so hopelessly jaded and cynical that when we see a bloke with a shopping trolley outside the context of a supermarket, our first assumption is that he's there to murder our children. The second is that I need to get a new wardrobe and shave a bit more often.
Westboro Baptist Church, the Tramadol Nights of religious cults, is once again going out of its way to be hated with this jaunty little ditty about Santa-based idolatry. They even manage to wedge in a child-abuse scenario as they jauntily remix 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town'. It's about all you can expect from the sect that celebrates the deaths of US soldiers in combat by going to their funerals with placards.
I really wouldn't bother recommending this, other than to say it's marginally less shocking and just a touch funnier than Frankie Boyle's latest offering.
George Monbiot, Guardian scribbler and poster boy for the foaming-at-the-mouth evangelical climate change brigade, has just written a piece explaining how the much colder winters we are currently experiencing are due to, errr, anthropogenic (manmade) global warming.
It's not very scientific and George knows it. His usual bombast is noticeably absent as he almost apologetically makes his case. And then he gets a rather splendid shoeing in the comments below, in what appears to be a most unGuardian-like mob attack of reactionary thinking.
I think this chap, euangray captures the mood perfectly.
"I don't think this will do at all. The basic thesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming is that higher latitudes will warm markedly and the tropics not very much ... But it will simply not do to aver, when the reality does not match the thesis, that the *opposite* of the predicted effect is caused by the same effect.
"For AGW to be science, it must be falsifiable. If hot, dry summers and milder winters are a result of AGW, but at the same time cool, wet summers and cold winters are also a result of AGW ...What are the falsification criteria for AGW?"
If I was a tabloid sub, I'd be making a gag about 'snow balls' right now.
Today's John Humphrys put Wikileaks founder Julian Assange through the wringer yesterday. A Today interview is intimidating at the best of times, but this was like the bit in a David Attenborough natural history doc when he says: "The young, frail fawns have been lucky up until now on the wild savannah, but for one of them, their luck is about to run out..."
Whichever side of the debate you're on, it was a fascinating and deft performance from the old stager, as he subtlely laid one ambush after another, bagging Assange on, amongst other things, personal accountability.
"But, surely you can see how very, very damaging, at the very least, it is to somebody like you, somebody who has spent a large part of his life saying: 'People are accountable' ... And here you are ... possibly facing, very, very serious charges indeed, double rape even ... and you are saying: 'I will not go back to the country where those offences are alleged to have been carried out to face the music.'"
And the right to privacy.
JA: "I have always tried in this case and in my other dealings to be a private person and to not speak about matters that are private."
JH: "This is now public. So I'm asking you the question. Did you have sex with those women?"
And who has the right to leak information.
"Can't you see that it's a bit rum for you to be sitting there ...You, Julian Assange, the Wikileaks man, who's become terribly famous, as has your organisation, for leaking material that other people didn't want to see published and here you are saying: 'They've leaked something about me.'"
Etc.
There's even an audible snort when Assange refers to himself as a 'journalist'. The only bit where Humphrys comes unstuck is when he accuses Wikileakers of hacking, which they clearly didn't. Their most damaging leaks have all (allegedly) come from one misguided fool with a CD burner who was too stupid to keep his yap shut. (Zen 560: Wikileaks stiffs the guy who gave them all the leaks [LINK])
The coup de grace, after much stalking, was Humphrys getting Assange to say that he sees himself as a messianic figure. The title quote here 'Everyone would like to be a messianic figure without dying' pretty much captures the moment, in a manner the typical Assange condom apparently doesn't.
Assange's tendency to conflate his own view with that of 'everyone' is persistent and revealing. He's also pretty vengeful when 'everyone' fails to fall into line with 'everyone's' ... sorry, his view of events. He's already fallen out with The Guardian, The New York Times, Wired and a bunch of other media outlets that have handled the allegations against him. He's even stopped talking to Boing Boing. I can understand him cutting off Cory Doctorow because he's basically a dick, but Boing Boing? That shows a lack of proportion.
He should've, but he didn't. Except he did. Horribly. No really, he's fine. Except for being dead. I kid. He's OK. Despite the hideous mutilations...etc.
Gratuitously shouty and abusive follow up to the very excellent Fosters Ashes spoof ad (Zen 562: Fosters Ashes advert [LINK]) by Anthony Richardson. This is about the only good thing to come out of the Perth Test. This and the fact that Ponting once again scored fewer runs that I could have done batting with a rolling pin.
This post is the product of a pretty surreal conversation with Anthony himself (see below). Having been to his website and checked out some of his stuff, you can see why it might have happened.Worth the visit for the hard water gag alone.
********************************************
On 19 Dec 2010, at 15:45, Anthony Richardson wrote:
Dear Otter Zen,
Lovely, odd, endearing, racist website.
Cheers for linking to my Fosters Ashes Advert. I've done a sequel, in which I ring up Karl Kennedy off of Neighbours and threaten Harold Bishop with indecent assault. - http://bit.ly/fjrw2t
If it's your cup of tea, then feel free to link to it - I will greatly appreciate it
Anthony
********************************************
On 12/20/10, Otter Zen wrote:
Why racist?
********************************************
From: Anthony Richardson
Date: 20 December 2010 08:06:19 GMT To: Otter Zen
Subject:Re: Fosters Ashes Advert - The Sequel
There's absolutely nothing racist about your blog at all, not even a subtle undertone. I don't know why I said it. It seemed to flow nicely as a sentence, but in hindsight I realise it was a bit misleading.
Having decided to put my brain through a blender made of Bombardier and Laphroaig last night instead of staying in and watching the final of The Apprentice, I was hoping to make it through to home time without finding out the result so I could maintain the element of surprise when I watch it back on iPlayer.
I love being hyperconnected to the universe, but it does mean finding out the result FIVE TIMES when all I was trying to do was see if the trains are running.
And are the trains running? For those of you who don't want to know the result, look away now...
Thing One is very much into his drawing at the moment. Christmas presents a bonanza of illustration opportunities for the industrious six year old, and as such the house is now bedecked with hundreds of Christmas cards, sketches of Christmas trees piled under with presents and the occasional work of art that harks back to the worthier, less pagan aspects of the season.
One such drawing is a 'trad' manger scene, complete with Mary, Joseph, Star of Bethlehem, donkeys, Adoring Magi, some angels and the wee babby Jesus. It's a tour-de-force of nativity iconography - a shining testament to the permanence of tradition and a warming connection back to a hundred generations of Christmas childhoods.
But what's this, peeking in on the bucolic panorama, his face just visible as he clings noiselessly to the stable roof?
So says Warrant Officer Karl Ley, who has just been awarded the George Medal for defusing 139 improvised explosive devices during a six month tour of Helmand, Afghanistan. That's reputedly more IEDs to his name than anyone else, alive or dead.
"We don't see it as particularly dangerous when we're doing it," says Ley. His citation gives a slightly differently different take on things.
It reads: "Ley has worked tirelessly in the most hazardous of conditions, enduring both mental and physical fatigue. He has sadly lost seven of his colleagues, including three close friends, within the Counter-IED Task Force but he has continued undaunted. For this unwavering dedication, conspicuous gallantry and poise in the face of substantial danger and of the enemy, over a sustained period, he is unreservedly recommended for high public recognition."
The George Medal is the highest award for bravery 'not in the face of the enemy'. Bearing in mind that on many of the occasions he was defusing roadside bombs, he and his team were being shot at and mortared, I'd like to see the Army's exact definition of what 'in the face of the enemy' is.
Ley is typically self-effacing about his achievemements.
"I think if Staff Sergeant Schmid, a good mate of mine, had remained alive he'd have gone way past the mark that I did, but unfortunately he died half way through his tour ... To say I've done more, it's nice but it's not particularly important in the great scheme of things.
"We get rid of the bombs that are put in front of us to be fair."
"He'll appreciate the Pearly Gate - a nice original feature."
This is for Craig Christ, who is currently experiencing the horror of trying to get an estate agent to do anything once they think their commission is in the bag. Don't let the bastards get you down.
Blake Edwards has died aged 88. His filmic achievements were many, but I have just one particular scene to thank him for.
When I was 16, I watched Skin Deep, a Blake Edwards comedy derided for being puerile and shallow. Whatever, the critics' view, I nearly haemorrhaged watching the flourescent penis scene. Up to that point, I didn't know there was anything that funny on God's green Earth.
No doubt if I watched it now, I'd think it was puerile. Shallow even. But that's not the point. This is about then, not now. So thanks Blake, you did a great job.
According to Metro, the BBC is apparently considering legal action against an Argentinean rip-off of Strictly Come Dancing in which the ...errr... 'stars' have a habit of rutting and poledancing on stage. As far as I understand it, the BBC has no intention of doing any such thing, but the Metro needed a censorious hook on which to hang a really old but slightly grubby story and Auntie is always a soft touch for a bit of fingerwagging, real or imagined.
Judge for yourself from the first comment ('this very good, i masturbate'), but I'm saying NSFW. Even if it is, apparently, suitable for prime time TV in Argentina.
I did not know this. A planet is any body in a solar system that has sufficient mass to become round.
Apparently not everything in space becomes round. A dumb rock just stays a dumb rock, no matter how much spinning or revolving it does. But if the dumb rock is big enough, it will spin itself round under the force of its own gravity. Then it becomes something altogether more interesting.
We have eight planets, which, after the Sun, are the largest bodies in our solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus.
Anything that's too small to be a 'dominant body' like one of the big eight, but is big enough to be roundish is classed a 'dwarf planet' - a recent and slightly cobbled together designation that is the source if some ongoing debate.
Pluto recently stopped being dominant and became a dwarf. This us because it isn't even the largest big round non-proper-planet rock orbiting the Sun. The largest is actually Eris, followed by Pluto and the three others - Makemake, Haumea and Ceres - that together make up the five dwarf planets.
Point of order. Can journalists please stop referring to the people who have been participating in distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, etc as hackers?
A hacker is someone who uses their programming skills to take over a computer that doesn't belong to them. 'Proper' hackers are just in it for the challenge. Naughty hackers are in it to appropriate your data, zombify your PC, steal your money, watch you undress seductively infront of your webcam while you think no one is looking and otherwise vandalise or abuse your digital world. These people are properly termed Worthless Fuckbags.
What a DDOS attack does is swamp a website with so many requests it can't process them all and consequently grinds to a juddering halt. It requires no hacking skills whatsoever. In fact, it has more in common with pitching up and dumping 80 tons of horseshit in the foyer than it does with hacking.
But it's OK because his wife is a willing participant. I mean, she's not actually running away. Because she has to hold that pane of bulletproof glass in front of her face. Otherwise he'll shoot her in the head.
Now why would America's leading documentary maker and polemicist get involved with Julian Assange? I looked around the Interweb for an informed analysis and I found this one, which I think pretty well covers it.
"I can tell you why – because he is an asshole who wants to be a part of the wikileaks story instead of being in the news for being a giant fat fuck."
This was put together by an intern at Facebook. I'm guessing he'll probably get invited back on a more permanent basis. It's quite clever how he did it - lots of stuff about Euclidian distance and great circle arcs - if you're into that sort of thing: Visualizing Friendships [LINK].
As Julian Assange goes to court today, his rather embarrassing OK Cupid dating site profile has been, errrr, leaked. It's quite revealing.
Mr Assange clearly has a fair ego on him. "Warning! Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving." He boldly claims he has "unusual presense", presumably to go with his unusual spelling.
He likes women from countries that have "sustained political turmoil". He has "asian teengirl stalkers". He seeks "innate perceptiveness and spunk". He has no pets.
Even the profile name he chooses - 'Harry Harrison' - is quite informative. HH is a sci fi writer who created a character called the Stainless Steel Rat.
The Rat, according to Wikipedia, "is a futuristic con man, thief and all-round rascal. He is charming and quick-witted, a master of disguise and martial arts, an accomplished bank robber, an expert on breaking and entering, and (perhaps most usefully) a skilled liar."
Judging from Julian's profile, he strongly identifies with said ferrous rodent, the only difference being that the Stainless Steel Rat was always too smart to get caught.
Saracen's director of rugby Brendan Venter gave a marvellously stupid post-match interview following his side's loss to French club Racing Metro at the weekend. Having been fined heavily for inappropriate comments following defeat to Leinster last October, Venter clearly decided to totally dead-bat the interviewer in an exchange that has to count as one of the most surreal ever.
Predictably, the sports press have been up in arms about it, wringing their hands and variously calling him immature, arrogant, petulant, misguided, foolish and deranged. Truth is that most post-match interviews are so formulaic, unrevealing and skull-implodingly dull that any deviation is a welcome relief. The fact that this one is now a YouChoob hit says it all really. I quite liked it.
When I heard that the latest comic book hero to get the big screen treatment was going to be Thor, my heart sank.
The Thor we're talking about here is the Marvel comics version. It holds a special place in my affections. As a kid I loved its seemingly endless parade of massive and gory battles that invariably erupted in which Thor, the God of Thunder (and War) always triumphed by smiting just about everyone with his huge hammer, Mjolnir. He was pretty dark as heroes went, and quite often did things that Superman really wouldn't have approved of. But that was OK because he wasn't any old superhero. He was a god.
In fact, the Marvel universe was so good - especially went he went on extended leave from the Avengers - that when I read up on the proper Norse legends, I had to conclude that they had significantly improved with the retelling. Thor handing it to the Celestials, the Abomination and Man-Beast had the edge over that tired old Loki thing every time.
Hollywood is generally crap at doing superheroes justice. OK, I'll admit the source material is usually pretty thin and it's an utterly impossible task to capture the childhood magic of comics for an adult audience, but as a general rule of thumb you can't make up for lack of plot, pace and characterisation by just blowing up more stuff. Unless, of course, you're making something for the Jackass franchise.
I was encouraged when I found out Kenneth Branagh, British uber-luvvy and theatre impressario/actor extraordinaire, was directing. Maybe there'd be nuance, wit, dark waters. But I've just seen the trailer and I am downhearted again. Asgard looks like a pimp's bedroom. Thor is some over-muscled, gym bunny kung-fu expert with badly bleached beard. Natalie Portman confirms that she only has one facial expression. Even from the short snippets available here, the producers have clearly decided to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of cliche.
Fingers crossed for a radical recut before next May, but odds are on it's going to be balls.
The roof of the Metrodome in Minneapolis, home to the Minnesota Vikings NFL team, fell in this week as 16 inches of snow settled on it in a matter of hours. This once happened to my brassica shelter down at the allotment when I used the wrong type of netting for the top. If only the Vikings had paid more attention to obscure British blogs, this expensive calamity may never have happened.
This is great footage and the noise is weirdly exactly what you'd expect the collapsing roof of a stadium to sound like.
Britain awakes to a brave new dawn today following another historic victory for someone in X Factor. The individual in question is historically almost certainly a bloke with a personality honed to a degree of middle of the road blandness never before thought possible. He will have an historic complicated wax hairdo and will sing tedious karaoke versions of other people's historic songs while wearing a variety of facial expressions, ranging from anguished constipation to bunny-in-an-abattoir. Historically. Like a Co-op sparkler, his career will burn historically brightly for about 15 seconds before being chucked in the bin. He will endure a number of small scale but humiliating and historic tabloid revelations about his personal life, which is otherwise a towering monument to averageness, brightened briefly by the historic X Factor win that ultimately blighted his life and doomed him to an eternity of supermarket openings and public humiliation on reality TV formats that will only appear on minor satellite channels in the early hours of the morning. In 20 years, he'll be broke, a bit paunchy and quite bald, but will be able to look back with pride and say that he once won a rigged talent show and made some other bloke a lot of money. Merry Christmas number one everybody!
Seen yesterday during the demonstrations to protest the raising of university fees: a student carrying a coffin bearing the legend 'Education is dead'. Made out of a brand new Mac Book Pro box. Your heart just bleeds...
In case you didn't know, Dirk Gently is Douglas Adams' other book. It's about an holistic detective agency. I read it when I was a kid and can only remember three things about it:
1) I loved it. 2) There's a sofa stuck on a stairwell that couldn't possibly have got there. 3) Due to the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, anything in the universe can tell you the answer to a mystery, you just need to ask it the right question. That's what an holistic detective does.
Here's the trailer for the new BBC Four series. Looks at least adequate, which is encouraging.
Bradley Manning, the US defence analyst who's about to go away for forever for giving Wikileaks the Apache video and 250,000 diplomatic cables, has yet to receive the money pledged to his defence by Assange and chums.
Wikileaks has responded by saying it was an oversight and they're sending $20k asap. Trouble is they apparently promised him $50,000, and this after the site said it raised $150,000 in donations after Apache and is reckoned to have raised a cool million during the whole episode.
For poor old Bradley, who was allegedly dim enough to brag about his exploits online, it doesn't really make any difference. For him there is no hole deep enough, but Wikileaks should nonetheless try and live up to the high moral standards it demands from others.
Motives and politics aside, the ongoing Wikileaks web war (WWW for short) is really fascinating. Let me number the ways:
1. It's a formidable test of the concentrated power of the state versus the distributed power of the web. But try as they might, the US can't shut Pandora's Box. For every attempt to disable Wikileaks or block access to the documents, there's someone putting up a mirror site. There are more than a thousand already. Web 1, State nil.
2. It doesn't matter how virtual you are, if you've pissed off the biggest kid in the playground, he's going to find the physical bit of you and beat it shitless. Julian Assange is in the process of discovering this. It will, consequently, be harder for anyone to 'do a Wikileaks' in future, whether you're the leaker or the recipient. Web 1, State 1.
3. The WWW witnesses the advent of a really clever bit of online activism. DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks have just taken down parts of MasterCard, Visa and Paypal. This sort of attack used to be the preserve of pro hackers. Not anymore. The LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) is a pushbutton application that allows anyone to take part, and anonymously too. Websites can deal with DDOS attacks, but it takes time and can be hideously expensive. This is guerrilla warfare, not the atom bomb, but it's probably the first time we've seen the weapons of online war truly democratised.
4. It's a test of the commitment of major web players to the idea of the web as an egalitarian medium with no place for censorship. The fact that Wikileaks doesn't trend on Twitter suggests some web players know which side their bread is buttered. Google took on China and didn't prosper. Looks like the others might have watched and learned from their experience.
Celebrity cause-whore Annie Lennox is always good for lashings of sanctimonious pontificating, usually about how she touches countless charitable institutions with her munificent grace because the world is an inexplicably terrible sphere of awful and relentless suffering, especially for her personally because she's female and a bit older than she used to be and no one wants to buy her godawful, mawkish records anymore.
Hailing resolutely from the Bono school of Messiah-complex do-gooding, she reserves a special and enduring contempt for the horrors of Western capitalism - the same Western capitalism that has made her a millionaire and consequently given her the platform to be the dismal, humourless old trout that she is today.
In a recent interview she turned her porridgy and muddled intellect to the vexed question of female pop stars taking their clothes off.
"I don’t know what it takes to be a pop star today. Do they have to pose naked in men’s magazines or else their records don’t sell? Is that what they are told?"
This from the woman who used to perform in her underwear and on one notable occasion at least got her tits out on stage. The same woman whose Eurythmics record covers depicted her ostensibly naked standing next to a nattily and fully dressed Dave Stewart.
In mitigation, she'd no doubt say that her motive was to make a worthy political point, not to provide idle titillation. But at the end of the day, Annie old chum, you're still getting your kit off to sell records.
Mystery Guitar Man is always good, but I can't put everything he does on here. This is his rendition of the song that destroyed Bobby McFerrin's reputation as a serious jazz musician, cheerfully recreated by one man using multiple split screen magic. Or tiny clones of himself. You decide.
...or maybe the boxer dog on the trampoline. This is 'Dogs are Awesome. Too', a sort of canine follow up to 'People are Awesome' (Zen 468: People are awesome [LINK]).
What this proves is that dogs look happy even when they are doing the stupidest shit in the world.
I've just watched this TED interview with Julian Assange (below), the man who created Wikileaks. I was interested to see what the guy behind the fuss looked and sounded like. I wanted an insight into the way he thought, because my personal jury was definitely out on whether or not he and/or Wikileaks are positive or negative things. It's good to get eyeball to eyeball when you want to measure someone up.
I was struck by a number of things, but especially by how incoherent his rationale for Wikileaks is. He refers to what he does as "journalism" and calls his leaks "stories" while applying few (if any) of the skills that make good journalists good journalists - namely seek out all the evidence, ruthlessly verify sources, interrogate all viewpoints and draw out conclusions based on hard-earned knowledge and experience. That said, he does seem to have a lot in common with bad journalists.
A case in point was his explanation of the decision to leak the now infamous video of an Apache helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqis.
"There were between 18 and 26 people killed all together," says Assange, "I guess people can see the gross disparity in force - you have a guy walking in a relaxed way down the street and then an Apache helicopter sitting up at one kilometre firing 30mm cannon shells on everyone, looking for any excuse ... and there were two journalists involved who clearly weren't insurgents because that's their full time job."
This is demonstrably bollocks from start to finish. US forces in the area had been subject to repeated and deadly insurgent attacks from groups of men who minutes before were casually hanging around in back streets, just like the group that was killed. The crew of the two Apaches (not one) followed all the correct protocols, seeking permission to fire after monitoring the situation for a significant period of time. They had no way of telling what the full time jobs of the people on the ground were and while they may possibly have been able to distinguish between a rocket launcher and a shoulder mounted camera from that distance, they clearly didn't on this occasion. Do you honestly think they would have fired if they'd had a sniff that they were possibly killing journalists? And the toll of those killed in the incident is believed to be 12, not 18 or 26. Still a terrible and avoidable loss of life, but one mitigated by its occurrence in a hot war zone where deadly mistakes are made. Sure, one of the crew laughed, but he's been trained to kill bad guys and thinks that's what he just did.
So not only does Assange leak something that is made inflammatory by its complete lack of context, but then he spins it on the spot to look worse than it already appears. What's telling here is how bad he is at hiding his personal agenda, even in front of a live (if utterly partisan) audience. So what is he? An activist, a journalist or just the messenger? I think the answer is that he wants the rebel cachet of the activist, the professional respect for a (good) journalist and the immunity from being shot that the messenger traditionally enjoys. Trouble is, you can't have all three and your credibility.
Assange is also remarkably inconsistent. He claims in the interview that he doesn't know who his sources are, and in the next breath says that he only deals with "whistleblowers who are well-motivated". How does he know? Then he says he's only interested in leaks that he can verify, before doing some peculiar grandstanding about publishing a letter that he couldn't verify in the hope that this would lead to it being verified. He says he only publishes data that "can reform ... do some good" without explaining what qualifies him as the final arbiter of truth in these matters.
The other interesting thing to come out of the conversation was the fact that he reveals the probable source of the diplomatic cable leaks - namely Bradley Manning, the defence analyst alleged to have leaked the Apache footage. Asked directly if Manning also handed over 280,000 diplomatic cables, Assange denies it point blank. Then four months later, approximately 250,000 diplomatic cables are published by Wikileaks. Coincidence? Bet it isn't.
The summary? I'd prefer it if he just came out and said he was a professional troublemaker who desperately wants to give America and all those other rotten bastard capitalists a bloody nose. Because that's basically what he is, and that's basically what he's trying to do. His attempt to dress his activities up behind some sort of higher moral purpose is unconvincing, disingenuous and unhelpful, and I think his profile suffers because the public sense at some fundamental level that they aren't dealing with an honest broker.
Wikileaks plus higher moral purpose is a great idea, but Julian Assange is clearly not the man to run it. You need someone who doesn't mix up his opinions and his ego with the source material. Someone like Ian Hislop would be perfect, but rumour has it he's busy.
Christmas mashups, innit, by a festive DJ collective called Santastic. Or summink.
Features a multitude of unlikely pairings, including Blink 182 and a Siberian orchestra, JZ and Vince Guaraldi, and John Lennon making the Jackson 5 sound all melancholic. Here's my favourite:
So North and Hussey were dug in and looking comfortable. Stuart Broad had just been ruled out of the remainder of the series. All to play for on the last day. Then Finn snaffled Hussey just after his 50 and the Aussies started to creak. No panic, Bruce, you've still got North and Haddin. Or maybe you haven't. Anderson summarily despatches Haddin with a thick edge before smashing through Harris's meager defences to get the poor sod out lbw for a King Pair - only the second by an Aussie ever. The other one, surprisingly, was Adam Gilchrist. Anything seamers do, Swann can do better, and almost immediately down goes the last batsman of any note when he claims North, also lbw. Siddle and Doherty are left with the impossible task of playing the Aussies through the entire day to save the test. Siddle actually backheels the ball onto his own stumps, but miraculously the bails stay on. Not to worry, Swann has Doherty clean bowled a few minutes later. Nine down, one to go. Siddle and Bollinger - how apt (if you're English) - are looking like the proverbial bunnies in the glowing luminscence of an onrushing Yute. Jerusalem rings out repeatedly around the ground and that's really got to piss off anyone with corks on his hat. News just in that Simon Katich looks likely to be ruled out of the remainder of the series with an Achilles injury. It's all gone wrong for Oz. Swann clean bowls Siddle. England win by an innings and 71 runs.
Just watched Blade. What a fantastically dumb movie. But so well done. Bombastic, stupid, grotesque, gratuitous, misogynistic, incoherent, two-dimensional, derivative and frankly ridiculous. But nonetheless so well done. That's got to be one of the best bad films I've seen in a while.
A new study just published in the journal Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology tested students with highly caffeinated Red Bull 7 against lower caffeine alternatives and a decaffeinated control that had the same flavour as Red Bull. They then performed a standard computerised Go/No Go test to assess the reaction times of each group.
The Red Bull drinkers reported feeling sharper and more alert, but when the test results came back they were actually slower than the other participants.
"Several aspects of cognitive performance that show improvement under the influence of caffeine are attention, reaction time, visual search, psychomotor speed, memory, vigilance and verbal reasoning," said Professor Cecile A Marczinski of Northern Kentucky University, one of the authors of the study.
But the message here is that less is more. A small quantity of caffeine does the trick, but a heap of it burns you out, so if you're on the Bull for whatever reason, the answer appears to be little and often.
1) Everyone loves it when a posh radio presenter inadvertently says something filthy on air 2) James Naughtie delivers it with such crisp, venomous precision - it's almost like he meant to do it 3) The unapologetic corpsing in the seconds following
After much chat about Kevin Pietersen's dodgy temperament, lack of form coming into the Ashes and failure to live up to his potential, he's just delivered a score of 227 with the bat to give England a commanding lead, then got a dangerous-looking Michael Clarke out with the last ball of day four in Adelaide.
Never mind that he could probably have notched up a ton batting with a rolling pin against that attack, or that his delivery to Clarke was a pretty average offbreak. The point is that, like Freddie, he has a happy knack of performing at the right time, rather than all the time.
One day and six wickets to go for a 1-0 lead. Fingers crossed eh?
I was intrigued to discover that it isn't the vertical movement of the stylus that produces the sound on vinyl records, as I'd previously assumed. The depth of the groove is constant.
Instead the groove wobbles from side to side, exactly replicating the sound wave of the original recording. You can't see the wobbles - to the naked eye the groove appears to be a perfect and undeviating spiral to the centre of the disc - unless you bang it under an electron microscope, as per the picture.
If you think about it, this is the only way it could work, with waveform representing waveform.
I shared this information with some mates on Saturday, in the spirit of 'I never knew...' and was roundly derided as an idiot.
To the gentlemen in question, I say IN YOUR FACE! If you need a mental picture to go with this sentiment, imagine I'm doing that rodeo-ass-slapping dance beloved of American footballers and gangsta rappers. You like that? Yeah baby.
Everyone's sick and everything's broken, including our home network and the sodding kitchen sink. Acres of black mould and inadequate network adapters as far as the eye can see. No time for blogging I'm afraid.
2022 goes to Qatar. Nice idea to build kit-form stadia and distribute them to Third World countries after the tournament. Everyone is apparently 'astonished'.
And here's the full poster porn gallery, 'specially for Obi Ben Kenobi of the Shining Path. Get your rocks off to these bad boys...err...girls? Whatever.
The Angry Mob blog is currently running a nice piece called 'Beware the 'Fluffy' story'. Using the example of a cute animal story from the Daily Mail (an organ quite rightly despised by the blog's author), it shows how the news has become a willing dupe in the planting of ever-more canny PR pieces.
It tells the story of Cinders the pig. Cinders is apparently afraid of mud. Cinders is (pictured) wearing wellies. It's a spectacular non-story, but it gets some airtime because it's cute and funny(ish).
Only in real life Cinders doesn't wear wellies and isn't afraid of mud and in all probability was only called Cinders for the benefit of the story. It's a tissue of lies from start to finish, dreamed up by the Intelligent Profile PR agency in a bid to get some profile for its clients, Debbie and Andrew Keeble, who manufacture sausages.
And it worked. Their sausages saw a 30% rise in sales. Hurrah. But that's OK isn't it? No-one got hurt. The public enjoyed the story. Everyone else made money.
Well, no. No it isn't OK. It's a travesty. It's symptomatic of the laziness at the heart of journalism that allows shitheads to feed us lies. It's a source of shame for an industry that is supposed to be populated by relentless seekers after truth, not a retirement home for lazy fucks are are too indolent and sclerotic to get off their arses and check the goddam facts.
So it's only a bogus and ridiculous story about a mysophobia porker, but think of it like this. If the press can't spot a blatant fabrication in a piece of tat headed for the funny pages, it is any small wonder that when it comes to the really big stuff, they put about about as much resistance as an Essex hen party?
At least the sodding pig had the common decency to look embarrassed.
