Who am I to refuse the universe?

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:31:21 GMT

I appear to have no hair. This wasn't exactly the haircut I was looking for.

Oh well, I'll just have to find something else to hide behind.

ETA: Maybe I should try getting it dyed, if I could manage that in a way that would work on dark hair, and wouldn't eventually need to be grown out and cut. That, or a piercing somewhere.

Heading West

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 15:10:03 GMT

I've just noticed the main section headings at the top of the Guardian website:

    * UK
    * World
    * United States
    ...

yes, the US gets its own section rather than being crammed in with the rest of the 'world'. There's no separate top-level section for Europe.

I wonder if it's because they get a lot of USian readers online, or because nobody has yet managed to get the British interested in Europe.

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:47:00 GMT

"Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism."(source)

Also: "Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided"

Unrelatedly, Jenny Holzer is on twitter - perhaps the one celebrity who should be. [don't know who Jenny Holzer is? Read her inflammatory essays]. Now we just need to get Abdal-Hakim Murad on there too, and the thing starts to have a purpose.

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:15:09 GMT

I've spent Far Too Long (TM) following today's protests in Georgia. Don't laugh, it's a longstanding obsession, caused largely by the fact that Georgia is small enough that it is possible to follow most of the english-language news there, but with a tendency towards the utterly batshit insane which could make even a hardened diplomat giggle, Plus, it's somewhere I'd love to live, if I thought I had any chance of learning the language (I don't. It makes Hungarian look simple).

Anyway, this has helped me finally get a handle on Twitter (where I am perspectivelute. Blame Rudolf II). Once I started thinking of it as an inferior version of irc, it started to make sense. I still don't like it, but I can't really criticise twitter and still bemoan the lack of twitter irc channes, can I? If anybody knows a decent political IRC channel, let me know. Please. Or maybe I should create one...

For those of you not paying attention: in the past few days, Moldova has had massive protests. Some of the protesters (who are mostly young and pro-western, with all that implies) have been communicating via twitter. This is immensely exciting to a certain kind of pundit, who turned this into the main feature of the protests. The Georgian government noticed this, and very slickly started up their own twitter account yesterday. [The Georgian government are unbelievably slick when it comes to playing up to the Western media. I guess it's because they're all very young, and educated in the US. Still, compared to any other government on the planet, they're stunning]. A couple of Georgians and a slightly larger handful of interested outsiders pile on, and we more-or-less manage to pick over the news. i.e. exacly what would happen in irc, but with a hideous interface.

Anyway, upshot of the protests: ~50,000 people, no violence, no passers-by beaten before dying, no likelihood of the government toppling, come back tomorrow for the smaller, angrier version.

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:20:10 GMT

Travel now fixed: I'll be back in the UK again May 13-18. Other than sashagoblin's birthday on the Friday, my plans are pretty empty (Bifest is on the Saturday, which I am considering). As always, suggestions gratefully received.

I'll then be spending 2 days in Dublin, largely because the flights ended up cheaper that way.

In other news, it's perhaps a little unfair that the police are being called murderers for shoving Ian Tomlinson around just before he died - but in the context of police being apparently pretty rough with protesters, who can be surprised that somebody ends up seriously hurt.

Meanwhile there's a big protest in Moldova, which is some confusing overlay of youth/age, pro/anti-Romania, and internationalist/nationalist, plus poverty, anger at a fair(ish) election won by an obnoxious government, and a decent dollop of geopolitics. In Georgia, the opposition are about to try and bring down the government, with a decent chance of success. And in France, universities are two months into a strike (longest since '68), but nobody seems to have noticed. Interesting times.

LOL Georgians

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:24:25 GMT

Last year, your brother ran for president. He lost. Do you:
a) get over it
b) run for office yourself
c) Lock yourself in a cell, watched 24/7 by TV cameras. From here, host a daily talk show. Refuse to leave until the president steps down. [No, really]

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:20:05 GMT

This is pretty horrific. Not just judges taking bribes, but judges taking bribes from private prisons to give children jail sentences there. In other words, people were being locked up as a side-effect of a scheme for prisons to drum up more business:

Hillary Transue, 17, who appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom in 2007 and spent a month in a wilderness camp for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal, was elated that her record would be expunged.
....
Youths were routinely brought before Ciavarella without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent to detention for offenses as minor as stealing change from cars and writing prank notes.

there's seditious libel, too

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 09:51:49 GMT

Apparently in addition to civil defamation laws (libel and slander), Britain has something called 'criminal defamation'. This is a Bad Thing:

Proof of truth is a full defence to a civil defamation claim. The reason for this is fairly obvious: one should not be able to protect a reputation one does not deserve. Absurdly, those charged with criminal defamation must not only prove the truth of their statements, but also that publication was for the public benefit.

The law isn't used much, and doesn't get much attention. But according to Richard Ingrams, himself once charged with criminal defamation, it is "quite frequently used to prosecute people who wrote defamatory letters to the police, though such cases seldom received any publicity."
Besides, rarely-used bad laws are in some respects worse than always-used bad laws, in that they give the authorities more powers to attack people they don't like.

Now Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat MP, is trying to abolish the law, via an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which will be voted on on Monday. Given the minimal coverage (just Ingrams and a letter in The Times), and the fct that it's being pushed by a single backbencher, I wouldn't have held much hope for it getting anywhere. Except, Evan Harris was instrumental in getting rid of Blasphemous Libel last year.

Unfortunately, I can't think of much I can do to support Harris' amendment, given that the vote is on Monday and I live in the wrong country. Hence, writing about it here, in the vague hope that one of you will know more about me than the law (not a high bar), or have some idea what to do about it.

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:56:44 GMT

Here is a nice, if oddly-titled, list of likely consequences of the recession:

5: Glory days for evangelicals. Bad times are boon times for evangelical churches. Economist David Beckworth of Texas State University has crunched U.S. church attendance numbers and found that congregation growth at evangelical churches jumped 50 percent during each recession between 1968 and 2004.

[which I suppose means that the evangelical churches are always growing, recession or not :( Maybe if the atheists sang more...]

Also, the weather seems to be marking the alleged start of Spring tomorrow, by carefully looking warmer than it is. I keep on opening the window, regretting it, then doing the same two hours later. I'll never learn.

oh, and New Mexico has just abolished the death penalty:)

Lazyweb: printing

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:42:01 GMT

I don't own a printer, nor do I want to. On the rare occasions when I need something on paper, I pop into a net cafe, or cajole a friend into printing it for me. This gets a bit pricy/cheeky when it involves more than a few pages. Also, it takes far too much time and faff.

Somewhere, there must exist a company that will accept documents by email, print them, and post me the results. But I've not been able to find any. The print shops I can find are geared either towards making glossy full-colour brochures, or to printing lots of copies of the same document.

Does this kind of print-and-post service exist? Where?

Trivia

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 10:53:40 GMT

If we are wired to like salt, and salt gets added to most processed food to improve the taste - why does salt-water taste so unpleasant?

Or is it just sea-water that tastes foul? Would water with slightly less salt, or with less other gunk, taste nicer? Should I experiment?

Obsessions of the year

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:47:50 GMT

I'm not writing a summary of what I did this year - it'd be dismally short, if not just plain dismal. Instead, I want to record some of the little things I spent a couple of days getting excited over, but mostly didn't write much about here.

January: I honestly don't think anything excited me in January; as far as I can tell, I spent the entire month moping around feeling sorry for myself.
February: Crusties. Ginsberg. Jared Diamond. Penny Red
March: Art. China: Wang Hui and other writers, and hours spent reading Chinese websites with google translate and a character dictionary. Jorn Barger, uncomfortably.
April: Edith Sitwell. The soul of man under Socialism. An intense and inexplicable obsession with bananas in art.
May: Naomi Klein. Naomi Wolf. Virginia Woolf. Cosma Shalizi (well, I'm always obsessed by Cosma. But this month in particular).
June: Tax havens. Economic history. Art history.
July: Marionnettes. Neukölln. Erik Davis.
August: Manga. Work-spaces.
September: electronic music. Mental health. Grant Morrison (again; always)
October: Situationism. Chinese foreign policy. Berlin.
November: Couchsurfing
December: Cooking. German grammar. Who knows what else - there's almost a week left.

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:31:53 GMT

Next year's dubious employment scheme for backbackers: impersonating oil executives at Chinese trade fairs:

The 2008 China International Petroleum Equipment and Technology Exhibition concluded last Friday in the eastern city of Dongying. 3000 guests from over 40 countries attended and everything appeared to run smoothly. Yet the majority of the foreign delegates were hired just to make the event look "international".

[via Marginal Revolution]

Independent Minds

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:50:06 GMT

The Independent have moved their blogs to LJ today. Livejournal may be creaky, ancient, and possibly steam-powered, but compared to what the other UK newspapers are using it's space-age technology. It has threaded comments, for a start, which might give us a chance in hell of ignoring the inevitable flamewars.

Still, they managed to thoroughly botch the launch: bits not working, nothing to help their old readers adjust to LJ, and - most impressively - a near-total absence of new content today. It's hardly inspiring when only a couple of the journos can cough up a post for that first day - when, for once, somebody might be reading.

Presumably, it'll improve over time. Meanwhile, has anybody found anything genuinely interesting on the Independent blogs?

Postmetropolitan

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:41:48 GMT

Warren Ellis fans: what should I read by him? I loved Transmetropolitan, but I've been pretty disappointed by every other Ellis I've looked at. Freakangels seems to have nothing unexpected in it; Global Frequency was cardboard characters rushing through repeated "race against time, then a big gunfight" plots. Crooked Little Vein: I plannd to buy it, but standing in the bookshop, flicking through pages of wooden, cliched text, I abandoned the idea.

Has Ellis done anything as good as Transmetropolitan? Or, while I'm at it, are there other comics so blisteringly fantastic that I should dump Ellis and go read them instead?

Also, guys: witch-hunts are bad, mmkay?

spiritual thirst

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:37:23 GMT

Today I'm being unashamedly cheerful about Obama; fuck the begrudgers.

Not-quite-relatedly, palmer1984, < lj user="aldabra"> and others, have long been muttering about how nobody on the left has anything constructive to say about the economic crisis. I mostly agree - but perhaps the folks who've spent every mayday shouting about Precarity might have been barking up exactly the right tree, after all.

Meanwhile, I'm planning to spend the evening translating an article about things being untranslatable. With luck, the paradox will lead to a moment of zen enlightenment, rather than just hours of head-scratching and dictionary-flipping.

Words

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:04:48 GMT

Mini-announcement: I've started writing occasional bits about Berlin on this group blog. It's pretty dead over there, but I figured getting involved might be a way of goading myself into getting out more. Also, there's surprisingly little online in English about Berlin, despite ever-growing hordes of expats, so even shitty little semi-posts can pretend they're worthwhile.

Also, and unrelatedly, I'm increasingly impressed by these translations and reviews of the European press.

manga

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:32:37 GMT

I mentioned I was translating an article on manga; it's now online. Essentially it's an eminent French academic - and manga fanboy - explaining why manga is so popular in France

I'd be fascinated by what people make of it; not just emmav and the rest of the manga fans, but also the larger crowd who love Transmetropolitan &c. Because a good chunk of the argument is precisely what Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore have spent decades grumbling about, and fighting against: the fact that a lot of Western superhero comics are really, really bad - slow-paced, unimaginative, unable to imagine readers who aren't boys or nostalgic men. And I'm not convinced that's true any more: manga may be more inventive than mainstream comics, but is it really more inventive than all the fringe stuff that's popped up since the 80s?

Books

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 19:49:22 GMT

Not done one of these for a while...

AJP Taylor, The course of German History. This began as a handout for the British army in the Second World War - but was rejected, by a government in wartime, as being too anti-German. You can see why: Taylor's fundamental argument, which he hammers in unrelentingly through the entire book, is that Hitler was an inevitable outcome of German history. So at every moment the German people must be shown as passive, easily manipulated, willing to follow any demagogue, and without the slightest interest in democracy. It's sometimes convincing, but more often Taylor seems faintly ridiculous in his attempts not to allow any counter-example.

It's a pretty informative read, despite all that. It's delightfully concise, although sometimes too dense to take in (as with the chapter on Bismark, on whom Taylor had written a book). Taylor also has a fascinating tic of omitting the definite article at the start of sentences; it works much better than you might expect.

David Eggers, A heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It's not Eggers' fault that I'm easily bored by books full of self-analysis. Maybe it's livejournal's fault: I can read articulate self-criticism whenever I want, with the added benefit of it involving people I know and love, and the satisfaction of watching them change over time. Anyway, this isn't all bad. Eggers has a knack for finding common but never-mentioned trains of thought, and convincingly conveys self-dramatisation, and the stupid-but-inescapable feeling that your present emotional state is eternal. Still, I would have been better off not reading this.

Kieran O'Hara, After Blair: David Cameron and the Conservative tradition. An attempt to theorise and argue for conservatism in the limited sense of not wanting change. Interesting enough on its own terms, but bears only the slightest relation to the mish-mash of nostalgia, self-interest and prejudice that is the Tory party.

Time for a party

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:14:41 GMT

My phone is a decrepit hand-me-down from my sister. Deep in its addled brain are a few dozen appointments and reminders she inserted years ago, which it now regurgitates more or less at random.

It has just told me that today is my 21st birthday.

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:42:17 GMT

Yesterday was apparently the 25th anniversary of a Soviet officer breaking the rules by not starting a nuclear war. I hadn't heard this before; the even closer shave on a nuclear submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis was frightening enough.

Both those incidents have only come to light in the last decade; I wonder how many others there have been.

hieroglyphics

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:54:07 GMT

Where can I find (online or on paper) a dictionary of all the strange little symbols that cover electrical equipment and the like?

flag-burning

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:40:16 GMT

palmer1984 just posted a meme that touches on flag-burning. I've always been bewildered by the (mainly American?) objection to burning flags. But if you accept that flag-burning is Bad and Wrong...

How do True Patriots care for their ageing flags? Are they stored indefinitely? Given heroic burial (cremation presumably isn't an option)? Is there a patch of desert somewhere, where old flags fly until they disintegrate completely?

The military are big on flags and big on rules; they must have some baroque procedure for getting rid of the old ones.

Also: I've only come across the obsession with flag-burning in an American context. Are there equally small-minded patriots in the UK and elsewhere?

Quick question

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:20:58 GMT

What is it with you people and fucking everything in the ear?

Books

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:08:51 GMT

Today's been a write-off in terms of getting anything useful done; now I'm retreating to book reviews

Peter Watson, The Modern Mind, 'an intellectual history of the 20th century'. Utterly brilliant: clearly written, and covers a lot of ground while switching topics quickly enough to avoid getting bogged down. I'm surprised it hasn't made more of a splash; judging by its Amazon rank and the lack of reviews online, I'm about the only reader.

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal. My views on the later Pratchetts are skewed - I use them as an emergency emotional pick-me-up, only read them when I'm in a really gloomy mood, and so get a mainly negative perspective. Anyway, it's a discworld book, you know what you're gettign.

Douglas Coupland, Microserfs. Much, much, much better than Shampoo planet. Agree with just about everything sashagoblin says, on how it is totally about people rather than computers, and surprisingly optimistic.

Frederic Beigbeder, Vacances dans le coma. My sister recommended Beigbeder. Based on this book (the only one she hasn't read) I'm struggling to see why. It's the story of a fairly dire night on the town, peppered with petty, defensive humour. Makes Houllebecq look like he has deep insight into the human condition. Admittedly it might be funnier if I got any of the in-jokes about Parisian nightlife

Octavia Butler, Patternmaster. I don't know what I was expecting from Octavia Butler, but it wasn't this. A grim, violent, hierarchical world, soulless characters, no hint that the heroes are any different from their enemies. Too senselessly bleak for my taste.