Wednesday, November 26, 2014
celebrity lookeylikey of the day
Just to lighten the tone a bit, here's Treetog from Tree Fu Tom and the Oracle from the Matrix movies - well strictly from the first two movies, since Gloria Foster (who is pictured here) died before the filming of the third and was replaced with a different actor (with the appropriate retconning, easier in a reality-bending science-fiction universe than in, say, Dallas). Same penchant for predominantly green clothing, same sort of role as a chuckly matriarchal ethnic type with secret super-powers doling out advice to our impetuous young male hero.
thank you for talkin' to me africa
That last post was getting a bit long, and it was bedtime, but the thing I wanted to go on to do was draw a parallel between the furore over #ShirtGate and the rumblings of discontent over the re-re-re-recording and release of the Band Aid single. That might seem like a bit of a stretch, but stay with me.
I was put in mind of the similarity by the astonishingly charmless performance of music promoter and general mover and shaker Harvey Goldsmith on the Today programme on Radio 4 last week. When faced with someone from the area in question (in this case Liberian academic Robtel Pailey) telling you that actually quite a few Africans find this stuff problematic, at least try and listen, even if you disagree. It wouldn't have been that difficult to say: yes, I understand what you're saying, but resurrecting this hoary old chestnut, problematic lyrics and all, is the best way in the short term to raise the big spike of cash that the crisis demands. Instead Goldsmith chose to go with the WELL I SUPPOSE WE SHOULD JUST DO NOTHING AND LET EVERYONE DIE IN A BIG LAKE OF POO THEN SINCE THAT'S WHAT YOU CLEARLY WANT line, which wasn't very helpful.
Saint Bob himself was similarly dismissive, in his inimitable way, of the numerous other criticisms directed at the single and the underlying charity campaign. This interview with Ian Birrell (journalist and co-founder - with Damon Albarn - of Africa Express) sets out a few of them - basically, this is a simplistic solution to a complex problem, it perpetuates a paternalistic "them" (i.e. black Africans) and "us" (i.e. white westerners) mindset, the implication that Africa is some single monolithic entity all currently riddled with Ebola is wildly inaccurate and unhelpful, the past record of charity money getting routed to the right places is not uniformly glorious, charity money of this sort can be counter-intuitively harmful by allowing governments to ignore the underlying chronic systemic problems that allow these crises to happen in the first place, and there's an uncomfortable tension between the spectacle of super-rich music stars tearfully exhorting us to give our hard-earned (after tax) pounds to charity while frantically doing all they can to avoid paying millions of pounds of tax in the first place. Geldof conveniently avoided all these questions (while still getting the publicity he was after) with a bit of calculated sweariness. Have a look at the half-smirk as he drops the bollock-bombs; he clearly knows exactly what he's doing.
And that's before we even get to the lyrics. The original Band Aid single in 1984 was knocked together in a matter of days, a pretty remarkable organisational feat in those days before mobile phones and the internet, and while the lyrics were a bit crass and clunky in places people were prepared to overlook that, since there just hadn't been time to come up with anything more crafted. The trouble is, that excuse has long since evaporated in the 30 years since, but paradoxically the periodic resurrections of the idea are hamstrung by having to do something that sounds mostly the same as the original song, since the perception is that that's what'll sell in the greatest numbers. So a bit of tinkering here and there is the best that can be done.
As it happens I think the Ebola crisis might be one that's more amenable to being treated with a one-off cash injection than the original Ethiopian famine was, and I'm certainly not saying No More Band Aid Ever, just that it wouldn't hurt to acknowledge that this is actually a complex problem and while the overall balance of good vs. harm might well come out in favour of the single and its accompanying charity campaign there are nonetheless people who are hurt and frustrated by it.
The parallels with the comet/shirt debacle are, well, firstly that if you're in the privileged group it behooves you to listen to what those in the non-privileged group are telling you, since it may be about problems that you are completely oblivious to, and secondly that the whole attitude of HOW DARE YOU BOTHER GREAT MEN WHILE THEY ARE DOING GREAT THINGS WITH YOUR PIDDLING OBJECTIONS AND SO-CALLED "FEELINGS" is not very helpful or healthy, since for one thing it implicitly makes the assumption that people can't hold more than one thought in their heads at the same time. Like: Ebola is clearly a humanitarian crisis requiring swift action BUT here are some issues with the way it's being done here. Or: it is clearly unutterably awesome that the ESA Rosetta team has landed a probe on a comet BUT we could have done without the sexist bullshit. Call me a crazy old optimist but I actually think people are more than capable of grasping this.
I was put in mind of the similarity by the astonishingly charmless performance of music promoter and general mover and shaker Harvey Goldsmith on the Today programme on Radio 4 last week. When faced with someone from the area in question (in this case Liberian academic Robtel Pailey) telling you that actually quite a few Africans find this stuff problematic, at least try and listen, even if you disagree. It wouldn't have been that difficult to say: yes, I understand what you're saying, but resurrecting this hoary old chestnut, problematic lyrics and all, is the best way in the short term to raise the big spike of cash that the crisis demands. Instead Goldsmith chose to go with the WELL I SUPPOSE WE SHOULD JUST DO NOTHING AND LET EVERYONE DIE IN A BIG LAKE OF POO THEN SINCE THAT'S WHAT YOU CLEARLY WANT line, which wasn't very helpful.
And that's before we even get to the lyrics. The original Band Aid single in 1984 was knocked together in a matter of days, a pretty remarkable organisational feat in those days before mobile phones and the internet, and while the lyrics were a bit crass and clunky in places people were prepared to overlook that, since there just hadn't been time to come up with anything more crafted. The trouble is, that excuse has long since evaporated in the 30 years since, but paradoxically the periodic resurrections of the idea are hamstrung by having to do something that sounds mostly the same as the original song, since the perception is that that's what'll sell in the greatest numbers. So a bit of tinkering here and there is the best that can be done.
As it happens I think the Ebola crisis might be one that's more amenable to being treated with a one-off cash injection than the original Ethiopian famine was, and I'm certainly not saying No More Band Aid Ever, just that it wouldn't hurt to acknowledge that this is actually a complex problem and while the overall balance of good vs. harm might well come out in favour of the single and its accompanying charity campaign there are nonetheless people who are hurt and frustrated by it.
The parallels with the comet/shirt debacle are, well, firstly that if you're in the privileged group it behooves you to listen to what those in the non-privileged group are telling you, since it may be about problems that you are completely oblivious to, and secondly that the whole attitude of HOW DARE YOU BOTHER GREAT MEN WHILE THEY ARE DOING GREAT THINGS WITH YOUR PIDDLING OBJECTIONS AND SO-CALLED "FEELINGS" is not very helpful or healthy, since for one thing it implicitly makes the assumption that people can't hold more than one thought in their heads at the same time. Like: Ebola is clearly a humanitarian crisis requiring swift action BUT here are some issues with the way it's being done here. Or: it is clearly unutterably awesome that the ESA Rosetta team has landed a probe on a comet BUT we could have done without the sexist bullshit. Call me a crazy old optimist but I actually think people are more than capable of grasping this.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
why not pop down to your local comet
Let's kick off with a bit of light-hearted smut: here's the BBC News article featuring some high-resolution images of the Philae probe's landing site on comet 67P (more formally: 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko). Note the wording of the headline:
I have a suspicion, particularly after looking at the section sub-headings within the article, that this was a deliberate (and clearly successful) attempt to slip something past the BBC website editors. How snigger-worthy you find it will depend on how keen you are on the puerile comedy trope of hearing someone say a sentence with a NOUN in it and responding by saying "what - your HAIRY NOUN?" The word "landing" is clearly eligible for this treatment owing to its similarity in meaning to "corridor" (what, your HAIRY corridor, etc.) and the reasonably well-known phrase "landing strip" (that Urban Dictionary link is work-safe, a Google image search probably less so).
Speaking of comets, and of things which are chuckleworthy among a group of your close friends, perhaps with some alcohol consumption involved, but which would be massively inappropriate at work, the other thing to make the headlines in relation to the comet landing - apart from the basic fact of humanity landing a SPACECRAFT on A FREAKIN' COMET, which everyone agrees is awesome - was British project scientist Dr. Matt Taylor's somewhat disastrous choice of shirt and words for the post-touchdown press interview.
There's been a lot of clueless outrage about the criticism on Twitter, as well as in various other publications who should know better. Most of it can be distilled down to this 6-second This Is Spinal Tap clip, but here's a slightly expanded summary:
I have a suspicion, particularly after looking at the section sub-headings within the article, that this was a deliberate (and clearly successful) attempt to slip something past the BBC website editors. How snigger-worthy you find it will depend on how keen you are on the puerile comedy trope of hearing someone say a sentence with a NOUN in it and responding by saying "what - your HAIRY NOUN?" The word "landing" is clearly eligible for this treatment owing to its similarity in meaning to "corridor" (what, your HAIRY corridor, etc.) and the reasonably well-known phrase "landing strip" (that Urban Dictionary link is work-safe, a Google image search probably less so).
Speaking of comets, and of things which are chuckleworthy among a group of your close friends, perhaps with some alcohol consumption involved, but which would be massively inappropriate at work, the other thing to make the headlines in relation to the comet landing - apart from the basic fact of humanity landing a SPACECRAFT on A FREAKIN' COMET, which everyone agrees is awesome - was British project scientist Dr. Matt Taylor's somewhat disastrous choice of shirt and words for the post-touchdown press interview.
There's been a lot of clueless outrage about the criticism on Twitter, as well as in various other publications who should know better. Most of it can be distilled down to this 6-second This Is Spinal Tap clip, but here's a slightly expanded summary:
- if you're going with the "chill out, it's just a shirt" angle, it would benefit you enormously to read up on concepts like microaggressions, chilly climate and (most importantly of all) privilege. None of this is necessarily "obvious" or accessible via "common sense", nor would anyone be expected to know about it by default, especially if your daily focus was elsewhere, like, say landing a probe on a comet.
- it's also worth noting that three of the world's major astronomy organisations, in America, Australia and Britain, have issued statements echoing the view that it was inappropriate - the American Astronomical Society one went further and made the point that wearing such a garment at work would in many places be a violation of workplace anti-harassment policies. No word as yet from the Astronomical Society of America, though: splitters!
- by what ought to be a fairly simple process of moral triangulation, if in any sort of discussion about social justice or gender politics you find yourself on the same side as Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Federalist, Spiked and Boris Johnson you might want to reflect on whether you're actually one of the bad guys.
- if you find yourself using the words "feminist" and "bully" in the same sentence, you might want to reflect on your ignorance about power gradients; see also "privilege" as above. Otherwise you might as well accuse Rosa Parks of "bullying" some white guy into a different seat on the bus in 1955.
- anyway, once the message filtered through to Matt Taylor he issued (during a subsequent Google hangout session) a slightly stumbly but seemingly heartfelt and genuine apology. In response to which pretty much all of the original critics said, well, fair play, that can't have been easy, good man for doing the right thing, let's move on and revel in landing a SPACECRAFT on a FERREAKIN' COMET.
- inevitably, in a sort of echo of Lewis' Law ("Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism") the backlash against those people flagging up the problem with the shirt (and the words) outweighed many-fold the volume and vehemence of the original complaints, and, despite it being by no means exclusively women who were complaining, it was inevitably women who copped most of the abuse.
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
taking myself up the twitter
At some point either yesterday or today something of great significance happened, a shifting, if you will, of the tectonic plates underlying my very online existence, a crossing of a sort of cyber-Rubicon after which nothing, literally NOTHING, will ever be the same again.
Here's a screenshot from my blog post administration page:
And here's one from my Twitter front page:
So you'll see instantly that there was a point where my total number of tweets overtook my total number of blog posts, probably during a futile and unrewarding exchange with an idiot, like this one. Not altogether surprising, you might say, and no doubt you'd be right, but I think I'd envisaged it taking a bit longer than the thirteen months that it has taken.
I suppose, as I near my tweetular sesquicentenary, what this reflects is that I've taken to Twitter more enthusiastically than I thought I might (that number averages out at a bit over three tweets a day), rather than giving up on the blogging project, which I certainly still consider to be my "main" platform for saying stuff, however inane.
Here's a screenshot from my blog post administration page:
And here's one from my Twitter front page:
So you'll see instantly that there was a point where my total number of tweets overtook my total number of blog posts, probably during a futile and unrewarding exchange with an idiot, like this one. Not altogether surprising, you might say, and no doubt you'd be right, but I think I'd envisaged it taking a bit longer than the thirteen months that it has taken.
I suppose, as I near my tweetular sesquicentenary, what this reflects is that I've taken to Twitter more enthusiastically than I thought I might (that number averages out at a bit over three tweets a day), rather than giving up on the blogging project, which I certainly still consider to be my "main" platform for saying stuff, however inane.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
the last book I read
Catrine Evans is 13, and her American mother has recently died, so her Welsh father has brought them back to Britain and enrolled her at Monstead, the boarding school he went to as a boy. Cue lots of spiffing japes involving midnight feasts, raids on the tuck shop, hockey practice and hiding from Matron in the sanatorium, right? Weeeeeell, sort of.
Catrine is a spiky, self-possessed and intelligent girl, but with a few challenging events to deal with in her recent past, including the death of her mother, obviously, but also an incident before that involving her American friend Isabelle where they rolled an old car tyre they found in the woods down a hill towards a busy road and knocked a motorcyclist off his bike into the grass verge. Did they kill him? Is she a fugitive from justice? Who knows?
Catrine makes some friends at school, some wisely-chosen, some not: glue-sniffing delinquent Brickie, arsonist Aurora (soon to be expelled for burning down the cricket pavilion) and future head boy material Owen Wharton. She also gets to know some of the teachers, most notably awkward Mr. Betts the English teacher and the more obviously friendly and welcoming Mr. Gilbert the chemistry teacher who also does a bit of art tuition on the side.
Catrine and Mr. Gilbert soon strike up a friendship that extends beyond the normal pupil-teacher relationship, and soon extends into areas that might legitimately be cause for some concern - she poses for a painting, the description rather coyly not specifying exactly what (if anything) she's wearing for the session, and at the end of the book Mr. Gilbert organises an art tuition trip with some amateur pupils which he arranges for Catrine to attend as well, thus getting them both away from the school environment with its stifling notions of appropriate pupil-teacher relations. At this point stuffy old Mr. Betts comes up trumps by turning up to rescue her and whisk her away back to her father.
At least, that's what appears to happen, but it's hard to be sure since the book is written in an intense stream-of-consciousness style that doesn't offer the reader much context for what's going on at any point, and provides a viewpoint that can't necessarily always be trusted. The style makes it more of a challenge to read, as well, and it's interesting to speculate whether the book would have been any better if it had been written in a more orthodox way. Schooling was Heather McGowan's first novel (published in 2001) and there's a suspicion of a bit of stylistic throwing of the kitchen sink at it to make it memorable, whereas perhaps just telling the story in a more linear way would have resulted in a more satisfying, though less ambitious, book. The decision to frame the last chapter (15 pages or so) as a single-paragraph wall of text seems to deliberately invite comparisons to James Joyce's Ulysses, the canonical stream-of-consciousness novel, comparisons which, for all Schooling's merits, can't really end well. My conscience dictates that I should point out here that I have a Penguin copy of Ulysses on my shelves which I have yet to get round to reading.
The subject matter has a queasy fascination to anyone who's read Lolita; another strange parallel is that my Faber & Faber paperback carries a cover image of Thérèse by Balthus from 1938, while the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Lolita carries an image of the same artist's Girl With Cat from 1937. Both are slightly disturbingly sexualised images of clearly underage girls in poses of varying degrees of upskirtiness. Interestingly some of the other editions of Schooling zoom in on the image to reduce it to an area of jailbait-y thigh and knee; I'm not sure whether this makes it better or worse.
Some trainspottery facts for you: Heather McGowan is the second Heather to appear in this list after Heather Lewis in August 2011, and Schooling is the 42nd of the 194 books in this list to have a one-word title.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
[cetacean needed]
Looks like we've got another potential exploding whale on our hands. This one is stinking up a beach in the Camargue National Park in the south of France. According to this Independent article, authorities are considering various options including "one option of using dynamite to blow it up". WILL THESE PEOPLE NEVER LEARN?I should imagine that what'll actually happen, much like in the case of the Newfoundland whale back in May, is that eventually the bloated carcass will spring a slow leak and gradually deflate in a disappointingly un-explodey manner. Honestly, those Camargue beaches are pretty remote; this one could almost be left to explode and all that would happen is a few of those white Camargue horses might get a bit spattered.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
daddy loves mummy very much so he sticks his manhood in her modesty
I should start this post by saying: you'll notice there's an increasing level of cross-pollination between blog posts and tweets, usually where things start out as either an individual tweet or a series of related tweets and then I think of more to say on the subject. Those of you who are foolish enough both to follow me on Twitter and read the blog might find this slightly frustrating, though I would hope the whole point is that the blog bits expand the tweets without just being tediously repetitious. Or, to put it another way: this shit is happening. Deal with it.
Anyway, I happened across this article on the Daily Mail website a day or two ago, featuring American actress Maitland Ward, of whom I confess I'd never heard before (and no wonder, if her Wikipedia filmography is accurate, since it's blank since 2007). My interest was piqued not so much by that story of sadly unfulfilled early promise, but by the language the Mail used to describe the story, a fairly flimsy one relating to some provocative photos intended to promote the new film Descent Into The Maelstrom, which may or may not be based on the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. Here's the headline:
And here's my original tweet on the subject:
Anyway, here's a bit of a collage for your amusement:
These snippets were harvested from articles about (in addition to Maitland Ward as featured above) Ashley James, Sam Faiers, Chantelle Houghton, Jennifer Hawkins, Daisy Lowe, Naya Rivera, Kate Upton, Kelly Brook and Mariah Carey. "Assets" is occasionally used in a more general sense (and sometimes in the singular) to refer to other things, generally arses, as in these articles about Doutzen Kroes and Coco Austin.
As for my other claims about Daily Mail usage, here are a few citations for "modesty" meaning "fanny"; again, it is sometimes used in a more general sense as well:
The other classic Daily Mail phrase used to accompany a bit of gratuitous leering is to describe a woman in a tight dress as having "poured her curves" into it; "curves" in this context meaning tits and arse, obviously. As it happens I don't need to do any research for this one as there is a whole tumblr blog already dedicated to it. It hasn't been updated for a couple of years, so you can imagine the amount of potential material that must have built up since then.
Anyway, I happened across this article on the Daily Mail website a day or two ago, featuring American actress Maitland Ward, of whom I confess I'd never heard before (and no wonder, if her Wikipedia filmography is accurate, since it's blank since 2007). My interest was piqued not so much by that story of sadly unfulfilled early promise, but by the language the Mail used to describe the story, a fairly flimsy one relating to some provocative photos intended to promote the new film Descent Into The Maelstrom, which may or may not be based on the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. Here's the headline:
And here's my original tweet on the subject:
quick crash course in #dailymail language for you: "assets" = tits, "modesty" = fanny. see also: "manhood" = cock. pic.twitter.com/WLOQQ9MmGm
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) November 11, 2014
It occurred to me afterwards that it would be interesting to do a bit of simple Googling to see how many other examples I could find. It turns to be pretty easy. So my crackpot theory for today is that the phrase "flaunting her assets" is the most Daily Mail phrase ever, even more quintessentially Daily Mail (or more accurately, Mail Online) than any amount of bullshit about immigrants or false rape claims (they love a false rape claim story at the Mail, but that's a subject for a whole separate blog post). It's got the perfect blend of prurience and concentrated essence of 1950s, the decade in which the Mail dwells, morality-wise. There's also a liberal dose of Carry-On style attitudes to female sexuality, which basically comprise 1 part phwwooarrrr to 99 parts stark terror. It's also one of those phrases which gradually drains of meaning the more you say it. Flaunted her assets? Flaunted her assets? Flaunted her assets? I mean, what?Anyway, here's a bit of a collage for your amusement:
These snippets were harvested from articles about (in addition to Maitland Ward as featured above) Ashley James, Sam Faiers, Chantelle Houghton, Jennifer Hawkins, Daisy Lowe, Naya Rivera, Kate Upton, Kelly Brook and Mariah Carey. "Assets" is occasionally used in a more general sense (and sometimes in the singular) to refer to other things, generally arses, as in these articles about Doutzen Kroes and Coco Austin.
As for my other claims about Daily Mail usage, here are a few citations for "modesty" meaning "fanny"; again, it is sometimes used in a more general sense as well:
- Lindsay Lohan protects her modesty
- [Maitland Ward] her modesty was very nearly revealed
- [Selena Gomez] could barely contain her modesty in the tiny pale blue skirt
- Britney tries to cover her modesty
Finally, here are some citations for "manhood" meaning "cock":
- Shia LaBeouf 'wanted to wear camera on his manhood'
- Robert Downey Jr. talks about his manhood at Cambridge Union
- Rod Stewart reveals addiction to steroids shrunk his manhood
- Mick Jagger 'used bees to enlarge his manhood'
- 'He tried to cut off his manhood with craft scissors'
- Skinny dipper bitten on manhood by deadly New Zealand spider
Saturday, November 08, 2014
loafing around
When you're a busy professional person and parent, you don't get a lot of free time to just wander off and go for a walk. When you're wanting to go for walks with other people who are also busy professional persons and parents, opportunities are few and far between and must be siezed upon when they present themselves. So when I and my fellow NCT alumni Huw and Alex found ourselves with an available Saturday (i.e. today) we decided to go out for a walk and to hell with the direness of the weather forecast.
We didn't have a whole day as Huw had to be somewhere else later, so we had to devise a decent walk featuring a satisfying summit somewhere, but which wasn't going to take more than, say, four hours to get round. So we decided to drive up to Abergavenny and tackle the Sugar Loaf.
I'd been up the Sugar Loaf once before, with my parents, back in the summer of 2010. I can't at this point remember the exact route we took, but I think we took a pretty direct approach by parking at the small car park here. This time we decided to make a bit more of a walk of it by parking in town and walking up the Deri ridge, bagging the summit and then walking back down the Rholben ridge to our starting point.
I think the Sugar Loaf is the most pleasing of all the hills around Abergavenny; not only is it the highest but it is a very definite little mini-Matterhorn peak with a little summit plateau which falls away on all sides. The Blorenge, by contrast, is only 100 feet or so lower but is a great bulky lump which, when you get to the top, reveals itself to be just the end of a great long plateau stretching off over towards Blaenavon, and where if you start from that side you can drive to within about 150 vertical feet of the summit.
Sugar Loaf is also one of the Seven Hills Of Abergavenny - not only that but Deri and Rholben are on that list as well, so we knocked off three at once today. That leaves Mynydd Llanwenarth as the only one I haven't conquered, but since this is just another subsidiary ridge of the Sugar Loaf it isn't the sort of thing you'd make the focus of a day out. Next time I climb the Sugar Loaf I'll go up that way and that'll take care of it.
Here's the GPS-captured track info (click for a bigger version) - a modest 8.3 miles apparently, but it turned out to be about right in terms of distance and duration. Although we were in general quite lucky with the weather (it was clear while we were at the summit, for instance) we did get rained on quite extensively as well or we might have got finished a bit quicker. Four hours for the round trip turned out to be pretty nearly spot on.
A couple of other graphical thingies that may be of interest, firstly essentially the same map but with some colour-coding added to show the changes in altitude (of course you could get essentially the same information by careful reading of the contour lines on the OS map); secondly the altitude profile. Both of these are courtesy of GPS Visualiser.
It was too wet for much photography, and my proper camera is currently on the fritz anyway, but a small number of pictures, including the obligatory summit shot, can be found here.
We didn't have a whole day as Huw had to be somewhere else later, so we had to devise a decent walk featuring a satisfying summit somewhere, but which wasn't going to take more than, say, four hours to get round. So we decided to drive up to Abergavenny and tackle the Sugar Loaf.
I'd been up the Sugar Loaf once before, with my parents, back in the summer of 2010. I can't at this point remember the exact route we took, but I think we took a pretty direct approach by parking at the small car park here. This time we decided to make a bit more of a walk of it by parking in town and walking up the Deri ridge, bagging the summit and then walking back down the Rholben ridge to our starting point.
I think the Sugar Loaf is the most pleasing of all the hills around Abergavenny; not only is it the highest but it is a very definite little mini-Matterhorn peak with a little summit plateau which falls away on all sides. The Blorenge, by contrast, is only 100 feet or so lower but is a great bulky lump which, when you get to the top, reveals itself to be just the end of a great long plateau stretching off over towards Blaenavon, and where if you start from that side you can drive to within about 150 vertical feet of the summit.
Sugar Loaf is also one of the Seven Hills Of Abergavenny - not only that but Deri and Rholben are on that list as well, so we knocked off three at once today. That leaves Mynydd Llanwenarth as the only one I haven't conquered, but since this is just another subsidiary ridge of the Sugar Loaf it isn't the sort of thing you'd make the focus of a day out. Next time I climb the Sugar Loaf I'll go up that way and that'll take care of it.
Here's the GPS-captured track info (click for a bigger version) - a modest 8.3 miles apparently, but it turned out to be about right in terms of distance and duration. Although we were in general quite lucky with the weather (it was clear while we were at the summit, for instance) we did get rained on quite extensively as well or we might have got finished a bit quicker. Four hours for the round trip turned out to be pretty nearly spot on.
A couple of other graphical thingies that may be of interest, firstly essentially the same map but with some colour-coding added to show the changes in altitude (of course you could get essentially the same information by careful reading of the contour lines on the OS map); secondly the altitude profile. Both of these are courtesy of GPS Visualiser.
It was too wet for much photography, and my proper camera is currently on the fritz anyway, but a small number of pictures, including the obligatory summit shot, can be found here.
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
headline of the day
It's a touching and poignant story of parental love across two generations, but I think the headline writers could probably have done a bit better than this if they'd stopped to think about it for a minute or two:
Before we get all Attack Of The Zombie Mothers here and start running for the hills it's probably worth realising that not all the "she"s here refer to the same person.
Before we get all Attack Of The Zombie Mothers here and start running for the hills it's probably worth realising that not all the "she"s here refer to the same person.
Sunday, November 02, 2014
dave gorman and alice roberts having a nude roadside picnic in joanna lumley's plastic anus
I'm not an obsessive porer over my blog stats, but it is sometimes interesting to have a browse around and see what's going on. What you often find is that some old long-forgotten post is suddenly attracting loads of traffic for no discernible reason for a week or so, and then going quiet again. For instance, this week this brief and unremarkable four-and-a-half-year-old post is comfortably the most-visited one (with 40-odd pageviews), presumably because people are Googling Dave Gorman for some reason.
Extend the scope to the last month and the comfortable winner (with just over 250 pageviews) is this post about my spare room CD shelving from May 2012 - strangely, this one is actually the third-most-visited post of all time on this blog with just over 2000 total pageviews. I presume this must be because it includes a reference to the IKEA Lerberg CD racks that I installed (and which have now apparently been discontinued) - I suppose I can now test this theory by seeing if this post attracts a similar volume of traffic. The next two posts are the book reviews of The Heather Blazing from 2007 and Roadside Picnic from 2012 with 150-odd visits each. Roadside Picnic has been attracting quite a lot of traffic for a few months now (just short of 500 overall) and I've really no idea why.
Overall, the winner by a huge margin is the Alice Roberts post from August 2010, which has attracted a startling 6286 visitors in the four years it's been up, almost certainly all from people looking for scurrilous nudey pictures. The second-placed post with 2871 views is this post from November 2008, whose popularity is probably explained by its being the fifth result in a Google search for "Joanna Lumley plastic anus" - again, reasons which do nobody any credit, least of all me.
Another odd result that I'm at a loss to explain is that last month, October 2014, is the month that's seen the most visitors to this blog, by a considerable margin. October's total of 9762 pageviews is something like half as many again as the previous record-holder, October 2008 with 6532, and that was back when I was blogging a lot more regularly than I am now.
I have no idea why that's happened - it doesn't, for instance, seem to be that any of October's blog posts attracted a huge number of visitors, so if the figures are trustworthy it must be, as it were, back catalogue sales that's doing it. It could of course be something as mundane as Google re-tuning their stats-gathering algorithms and not any real-world change in visitor numbers at all.
Extend the scope to the last month and the comfortable winner (with just over 250 pageviews) is this post about my spare room CD shelving from May 2012 - strangely, this one is actually the third-most-visited post of all time on this blog with just over 2000 total pageviews. I presume this must be because it includes a reference to the IKEA Lerberg CD racks that I installed (and which have now apparently been discontinued) - I suppose I can now test this theory by seeing if this post attracts a similar volume of traffic. The next two posts are the book reviews of The Heather Blazing from 2007 and Roadside Picnic from 2012 with 150-odd visits each. Roadside Picnic has been attracting quite a lot of traffic for a few months now (just short of 500 overall) and I've really no idea why.
Overall, the winner by a huge margin is the Alice Roberts post from August 2010, which has attracted a startling 6286 visitors in the four years it's been up, almost certainly all from people looking for scurrilous nudey pictures. The second-placed post with 2871 views is this post from November 2008, whose popularity is probably explained by its being the fifth result in a Google search for "Joanna Lumley plastic anus" - again, reasons which do nobody any credit, least of all me.
Another odd result that I'm at a loss to explain is that last month, October 2014, is the month that's seen the most visitors to this blog, by a considerable margin. October's total of 9762 pageviews is something like half as many again as the previous record-holder, October 2008 with 6532, and that was back when I was blogging a lot more regularly than I am now.
hot patootie, it's choclafoutis!
I thought I'd just document this, as much for my future reference as anything else, but also because it's simple and pretty delicious and THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW, dammit.
Anyway, you'll remember my original post about the damson clafoutis which I made with the by-products of the 2010-vintage damson gin. Your canonical clafoutis is made with cherries, so I was already diverging somewhat from orthodoxy, but further divergence is possible, not to mention delicious. I have in the past made clafoutis with various kinds of leftover fruit, the one with the apricots being particularly good, but if you ditch the idea of fruit altogether then all sorts of interesting results are possible. On one occasion we had one of those Jamaican ginger cakes left over from some family do or other, so I decided to make use of the standard clafoutis batter recipe and make a sort of ginger cake-y posh bread and butter pudding. Slice the cake up into half-inch-thick slices, layer them in a dish, batter on, oven, bish bosh, sorted.
So when we were required to bring along a dessert to a dinner party with some friends on Saturday, I remembered the couple of packs of Aldi pains au chocolat that we'd had cluttering up the freezer for a while, and decided to batter some sense into them. I amended the recipe slightly as I needed to bulk up the quantity of batter to match the extra bulk (not to mention height) of the bread, so I've put the amended version, as closely as I can remember it, below.
Anyway, you'll remember my original post about the damson clafoutis which I made with the by-products of the 2010-vintage damson gin. Your canonical clafoutis is made with cherries, so I was already diverging somewhat from orthodoxy, but further divergence is possible, not to mention delicious. I have in the past made clafoutis with various kinds of leftover fruit, the one with the apricots being particularly good, but if you ditch the idea of fruit altogether then all sorts of interesting results are possible. On one occasion we had one of those Jamaican ginger cakes left over from some family do or other, so I decided to make use of the standard clafoutis batter recipe and make a sort of ginger cake-y posh bread and butter pudding. Slice the cake up into half-inch-thick slices, layer them in a dish, batter on, oven, bish bosh, sorted.
So when we were required to bring along a dessert to a dinner party with some friends on Saturday, I remembered the couple of packs of Aldi pains au chocolat that we'd had cluttering up the freezer for a while, and decided to batter some sense into them. I amended the recipe slightly as I needed to bulk up the quantity of batter to match the extra bulk (not to mention height) of the bread, so I've put the amended version, as closely as I can remember it, below.
- 12 pains au chocolat
- 80g plain flour
- 140g caster sugar (note that I've reduced the relative amount of sugar compared with the damson recipe, for the hopefully obvious reason that damsons need more sweetening)
- 5 eggs
- a pinch of salt
- 750ml of milk, i.e. not quite a pint and a half
- a dessertspoonful of decent cocoa powder
Friday, October 31, 2014
no introduction necessary
As you know, I'm all about the Twitters these days, so when I had a thought in the wake of listening to Badge while writing the Jack Bruce bit, I decided to crowdsource its ass and put it out there to see if the Twitterati could make anything of it:
Anyway, after a few valuable contributions from various people we ended up with what I think is a pretty good list covering a wide range of musical genres. There were a whole host of otherwise excellent and interesting suggestions that fell foul of one or other quibbly rule I pulled out of my arse, though.
These are the ones I thought of:
today's Twitter survey: can you name some famous tunes whose opening riff is mostly if not exclusively played on the bass guitar?
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 28, 2014
I can think of two by Queen: Another One Bites The Dust and Under Pressure. Only other one that springs to mind is Badge by Cream. Others?
— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 28, 2014
As with all questions of that sort, it's not as simple as it might sound - are there allowed to be any other instruments playing? Does the bass have to be the first thing you hear? How long does the bass-driven bit have to be? As always the lines that get drawn here are pretty arbitrary, but having posed the question I felt entitled to be the one to draw them.Anyway, after a few valuable contributions from various people we ended up with what I think is a pretty good list covering a wide range of musical genres. There were a whole host of otherwise excellent and interesting suggestions that fell foul of one or other quibbly rule I pulled out of my arse, though.
These are the ones I thought of:
- Another One Bites The Dust by Queen
- Under Pressure by Queen & David Bowie
- Badge by Cream
- Lucretia My Reflection by The Sisters Of Mercy
- Time Is Running Out by Muse
- White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane
- Summer Nights from the Grease soundtrack
- Come Together by The Beatles
- Feel Good Hit Of The Summer by Queens Of The Stone Age
- How Many More Times by Led Zeppelin
@electrichalibut Bass intros: I Wanna Be Adored, Stone Roses. Dazed & Confused, Zeppelin. Bullet In The Head, Rage Against The Machine.
— Joe Ivory (@joeivory) October 28, 2014
@electrichalibut how much bass do you need? Dazed & Confused starts with the bass, but not for long. Similarly Would? by Alice in Chains.
— Andrew Gosling (@andrew_gosling) October 28, 2014
@electrichalibut Keep the Faith - Bon Jovi.
— Angela Phillips (@AngelaMPhillips) October 28, 2014
@electrichalibut would mine pass the rules? Ace how long... animals we've gotta get out of...
if not best you hush.
Or indeed hush hush.
— The Black Rabbit (@DougMackDodds) October 29, 2014
From all the suggestions these are the ones I deem acceptable:- Orion by Metallica
- Higher Ground by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers
- Would? by Alice In Chains
- Dazed And Confused by Led Zeppelin
- Bullet In The Head by Rage Against The Machine
- We Gotta Get Out Of This Place by The Animals
- How Long by Ace
- I Wanna Be Adored by The Stone Roses - 40-odd seconds of ambient noise before the bass kicks in
- Twisterella by Ride - intro too short to be meaningful
- Street Tuff by The Rebel MC & Double Trouble - brief spoken intro
- Groove Is In The Heart by Deee-Lite - slightly less brief spoken intro
- Steady As She Goes by The Raconteurs - a few bars of drumming before the bass bit
- One Of These Days by Pink Floyd - some swirly atmospheric noise first
- Money by Pink Floyd - all that business with the cash registers first
- Keep The Faith by Bon Jovi - few bars of guitar drone first
- Too Shy by Kajagoogoo - few bars of synth and drums first
- Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes - actually a regular guitar fed through an effects box
- Ace Of Spades by Motorhead - genuinely a bass but so trebly it doesn't really sound like one
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
celebrity lookeylikey of the day
Comedian and ubiquitous quizcom panellist Sean Lock, and film director Danny Boyle. I like Sean Lock, but I think he's one person who is actually at his best when he's got people to bounce off on panel shows, rather than in the more traditional stand-up setting. As for Danny Boyle, everyone likes Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and everyone agrees A Life Less Ordinary was a bit shit. Where I perhaps diverge from most people is in that I was distinctly unimpressed by Slumdog Millionaire, and in that I really enjoyed Sunshine, indeed it was the link to the Sunshine clip that I included in the earlier post that set the train of thought off that eventually ended up here.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
ace of bass
Just a quick and slightly belated (since he died on Saturday) RIP for Jack Bruce, singer, songwriter and musician of many hats over the years but most famously singer and bass player (and joint frontman with Eric Clapton) of legendary late-1960s power trio Cream.
As I've said before, the compilation album Best Of Cream (the one with all the vegetables on the front, as pictured above), issued in the immediate aftermath of the group's break-up in 1969, is one of the definitive musical soundtracks of my childhood, probably rivalled only by the 1972 Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits compilation and Book of Dreams by the Steve Miller Band for sheer relentless number of plays over the years.
That particular compilation isn't available any more, but there have been a gazillion others over the years, the ones I own being the 1983 compilation Strange Brew, which duplicates the vegetable album's track listing except for the two extra tracks Politician and Anyone For Tennis (and also has the full version of White Room rather than the single edit), and the more extensive 2005 compilation I Feel Free - Ultimate Cream, which is probably the one to go for. That Wikipedia link suggests there was a second disc of live material with that one, but the version I've got doesn't have it. That's OK, as it happens, since for all their formidable reputation as blues-jazz-rock improvisers in a live setting I think it's the tight little psychedelic nuggets they produced as singles that hold up best: Badge, Tales Of Brave Ulysses and SWLABR are probably my favourites, Bruce's bass-playing on Badge being particularly memorable.
As I've said before, the compilation album Best Of Cream (the one with all the vegetables on the front, as pictured above), issued in the immediate aftermath of the group's break-up in 1969, is one of the definitive musical soundtracks of my childhood, probably rivalled only by the 1972 Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits compilation and Book of Dreams by the Steve Miller Band for sheer relentless number of plays over the years.
That particular compilation isn't available any more, but there have been a gazillion others over the years, the ones I own being the 1983 compilation Strange Brew, which duplicates the vegetable album's track listing except for the two extra tracks Politician and Anyone For Tennis (and also has the full version of White Room rather than the single edit), and the more extensive 2005 compilation I Feel Free - Ultimate Cream, which is probably the one to go for. That Wikipedia link suggests there was a second disc of live material with that one, but the version I've got doesn't have it. That's OK, as it happens, since for all their formidable reputation as blues-jazz-rock improvisers in a live setting I think it's the tight little psychedelic nuggets they produced as singles that hold up best: Badge, Tales Of Brave Ulysses and SWLABR are probably my favourites, Bruce's bass-playing on Badge being particularly memorable.
lupin the loop
Couple of brief follow-up notes regarding previous posts, one recent, one not so recent.
Firstly, it was unforgivably remiss of me to neglect to mention that as a result of the explodey demise of bulbs 5, 7, 10 and 12 I can now declare myself the winner of Kitchen Light Bulb Connect Four! Yeah, eat my randomly coincidental linearly-connected bulb filament self-immolation pattern, losers.
Secondly, you might remember my amusedly baffled WTFery at being presented with Wagamama's list of possible food allergies. To be honest, after getting a link to a Monty Python sketch and a couple of cheap fart gags out of it I thought no more about it, until today when I was presented with a list of allergy information from Chef & Brewer's website (a Chef & Brewer establishment being the likely venue for the office Christmas lunch some time in December). And what do I see listed? Lupins!
A bit of internet research reveals that the lupin bean is actually quite widely-used as a foodstuff, particularly in Latin America and the Mediterranean, and crops up (in dried and ground-up form) increasingly frequently as a gluten-free substitute for wheat flour in various culinary applications. Anyone planning, on learning this, to pop straight out to the garden and dig up some lupins for dinner should be warned that unless carefully prepared the lupin bean can contain toxic quantities of certain alkaloids, and you don't want to get lupin poisoning. And that's if you're not allergic to it.
That's all very well, you'll be saying, but I DEMAND to know which of Chef & Brewer's delicious generic pub grub options have potentially dangerous lupin products in them, lest I start tucking into a portion of cod and chips only to unexpectedly have my liver turn inside-out with alkaloid poisoning. Well, you'll be relieved to hear that the answer appears to be: none of them. Not a single one. Still, it's nice that they at least allowed for the possibility.
Secondly, you might remember my amusedly baffled WTFery at being presented with Wagamama's list of possible food allergies. To be honest, after getting a link to a Monty Python sketch and a couple of cheap fart gags out of it I thought no more about it, until today when I was presented with a list of allergy information from Chef & Brewer's website (a Chef & Brewer establishment being the likely venue for the office Christmas lunch some time in December). And what do I see listed? Lupins!
That's all very well, you'll be saying, but I DEMAND to know which of Chef & Brewer's delicious generic pub grub options have potentially dangerous lupin products in them, lest I start tucking into a portion of cod and chips only to unexpectedly have my liver turn inside-out with alkaloid poisoning. Well, you'll be relieved to hear that the answer appears to be: none of them. Not a single one. Still, it's nice that they at least allowed for the possibility.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
the light stuff
It's been a while, hasn't it? And great things have been afoot, so listen up.
Following the last round-up, I decided that it was time to re-populate the ceiling with some new bulbs, as we were down to five and it was getting a bit dark. This was on September 21st; I know this because I tweeted about it at the time:
As luck would have it, I had exactly seven incandescent bulbs left (all bog-standard 40W ones from B&Q), so I was able to exactly fill all the slots and briefly have the full complement of a dozen bulbs blazing down. Needless to say it didn't last.
By September 23rd we'd already lost one, number 4. By September 30th we'd lost number 5 as well, and by October 8th we'd also lost numbers 7, 10 and 12. We're HAEMORRHAGING FILAMENT HERE, PEOPLE.
There is a pattern to the way they've expired, though. The original batch expired in the following order: 2, 3, 10, 4, 5, 12, 7, 1, 11, 9. I replaced 2 and 3 with IKEA LED bulbs, thus effectively taking them out of the equation. The new ones have expired as follows: 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, i.e. the same 5 as last time (different order, admittedly). At this point the only bulbs to remain intact from the batch installed in April are numbers 6 and 8.
So at the weekend I'll install the 5 IKEA LED bulbs I've got in the cupboard (again, spookily, just the right number) and the whole cycle will begin again, although hopefully periodic exploding activity will be confined to the remaining bulbs which are not either long-life or LED, i.e. bulbs 1, 6, 9 and 11. Once these all buy the farm and are replaced with LEDs this particular topic will hopefully be replaced by a yearly bulletin saying NOTHING TO REPORT. We'll see.
Following the last round-up, I decided that it was time to re-populate the ceiling with some new bulbs, as we were down to five and it was getting a bit dark. This was on September 21st; I know this because I tweeted about it at the time:
As luck would have it, I had exactly seven incandescent bulbs left (all bog-standard 40W ones from B&Q), so I was able to exactly fill all the slots and briefly have the full complement of a dozen bulbs blazing down. Needless to say it didn't last.
By September 23rd we'd already lost one, number 4. By September 30th we'd lost number 5 as well, and by October 8th we'd also lost numbers 7, 10 and 12. We're HAEMORRHAGING FILAMENT HERE, PEOPLE.
There is a pattern to the way they've expired, though. The original batch expired in the following order: 2, 3, 10, 4, 5, 12, 7, 1, 11, 9. I replaced 2 and 3 with IKEA LED bulbs, thus effectively taking them out of the equation. The new ones have expired as follows: 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, i.e. the same 5 as last time (different order, admittedly). At this point the only bulbs to remain intact from the batch installed in April are numbers 6 and 8.
So at the weekend I'll install the 5 IKEA LED bulbs I've got in the cupboard (again, spookily, just the right number) and the whole cycle will begin again, although hopefully periodic exploding activity will be confined to the remaining bulbs which are not either long-life or LED, i.e. bulbs 1, 6, 9 and 11. Once these all buy the farm and are replaced with LEDs this particular topic will hopefully be replaced by a yearly bulletin saying NOTHING TO REPORT. We'll see.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
that's the storify of my life
Here's the brief post-Swanage round-up. A bit of a mixed bag this year in terms of weather, but to be fair both the golf games were conducted in the dry (in the sunshine, even, on Saturday) and it was really only on Sunday that we got properly rained on.
If I were to fill in the last line in the big table I included in the previous post, it would look something like this:
Photos can be found here. As promised we did also live-tweet a bit of pub-crawl action on the Saturday, and various other inconsequential stuff at other times. Twitter's hashtag-viewing facility obviously has some weird algorithm in it that excludes tweets (even from the "All" view) based on some impenetrable set of criteria, so only a small handful of the full set of tweets are now available via the standard hashtag link.
This simply will not do, so what I've done instead is use Storify to create a (hopefully) permanent record of our inane witterings and drunken blurry gurnings; have a look at this. It's ordered with the most recent tweets first, so drop down to the bottom and work up if you want them in chronological order. [STOP PRESS: I found the button that orders them the other way, so you shouldn't need to do this now.] It is also alleged that one can embed the Storify timeline in a web page, so let's have a go:
If I were to fill in the last line in the big table I included in the previous post, it would look something like this:
| Year | Dates | Transport and Pubs | General Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 10-13 Oct | Andy's Landy The Crow's Nest The Bull and Boat The Square and Compass The King's Head |
In-car Stella pouches. High five! Harry wins the golf?! Corben! Corben? Wet and windy walk to Worth. Y-shaped dog turds. Pumpkins. Chickens. The tiny island of Estonia. The world's worst game of darts. Continue along Cockrod for 1.3 miles. |
Photos can be found here. As promised we did also live-tweet a bit of pub-crawl action on the Saturday, and various other inconsequential stuff at other times. Twitter's hashtag-viewing facility obviously has some weird algorithm in it that excludes tweets (even from the "All" view) based on some impenetrable set of criteria, so only a small handful of the full set of tweets are now available via the standard hashtag link.
This simply will not do, so what I've done instead is use Storify to create a (hopefully) permanent record of our inane witterings and drunken blurry gurnings; have a look at this. It's ordered with the most recent tweets first, so drop down to the bottom and work up if you want them in chronological order. [STOP PRESS: I found the button that orders them the other way, so you shouldn't need to do this now.] It is also alleged that one can embed the Storify timeline in a web page, so let's have a go:
Monday, October 20, 2014
the last book I read
Fremder Gorn is having a bit of a peculiar day. When we meet him, he's floating though space without spacesuit or helmet, the freighter Clever Daughter that he was on a few seconds before having spontaneously dematerialised from around him. By chance he gets rescued by another passing ship, and needless to say the authorities are keen to know what happened, and how he escaped.
Fremder is a flickerhead, someone fitted with a cranial implant that enables him to be the conduit for a sort of hyperspace drive that allows ships to traverse huge interstellar distances in next to no time. While accidents do occasionally happen they don't usually leave any survivors, so Fremder is a source of considerable interest, not least to giant supercomputer Pythia, who conducts an interrogation to find out what Fremder has been up to, particularly the stuff he doesn't even know about himself.
Fremder is also of interest because of his ancestry: son of Helen Gorn, the inventor of the flicker drive, along with her brother Isodor. Both of them died by their own hands in mysterious circumstances, in Helen's case a couple of months before Fremder was born (some sort of incubator being presumably involved for the remaining time).
It turns out that not only is the thing implanted in Fremder's head not quite the bog-standard flicker implant (it's got some special properties), but also that Pythia isn't the giant supercomputer he thought she was - the truth is somewhat more weird, and explains why at the end of the book Fremder finds himself on board Clever Daughter II heading for the same co-ordinates as before. Can he escape again?
This is the fourth Hoban in this list, which equals the record jointly held by Iain Banks (with and without the M), Lawrence Durrell and William Boyd. It's quite "hard" sci-fi in places, in contrast to Riddley Walker which was post-apocalyptic, and Kleinzeit and Come Dance With Me which are set in recognisable versions of contemporary London, but it's still as quirky and charming as any of the others. It's somewhat more oblique in its approach to its subject matter, and a lot of the sciencey stuff is hand-waved away, but it still packs a lot of density into 184 pages. It's probably not as good as Riddley Walker, but that's a pretty high bar.
For all the trademark Hoban idiosyncrasies there are some common themes here: most science fiction works that require people to travel between star systems (rather than just orbiting their own planet) are obliged to cook up some form of hyperspace drive just to compensate for everything being interstellar distances apart and the trips taking many thousands of years otherwise. So you've got the warp drive in Star Trek, the Millennium Falcon making the jump to light speed, the ill-fated gravity drive from Event Horizon, and the flicker drive here. Similarly, there is a long history of fictional teleportation systems, and what happens when they go wrong, from Stephen King's short story The Jaunt to The Fly.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
making plans for nigel
I have a confession to make, and it's a slightly shameful one. Here it is: there is one thing about Nigel Farage that I find admirable. Phew: there, I've said it. It's good to get these things off your chest.
I'll tell you what it is, if you like. There is a long and generally excruciatingly embarrassing history of politicians doing photo-opportunities in pubs, and on these occasions, pretty much without exception, they try to bolster their down-to-earth, man-of-the-people credentials by supping on a pint. It's almost without exception a pint of ale, as befits someone committed to great British traditions, and pretty much without exception you can almost hear the slight wincing gagging noises being made as Joe Politician raises the glass to his lips and has a tentative sip. That's George Osborne there on the right in a particularly fine example.
I honestly don't know why people do this, as the public know that the political classes in general are from a social stratum that would much prefer a nice gin and tonic or a glass of a nicely chambreed Chateau Lafite Rothschild to something as proletarian as a pint. But, like the furious tonguing of the wife after the conference speech, it's a tradition that no-one wants to be the first to try and shake off.
So it's quite refreshing to see that when Nigel does a photo-op holding a pint and grinning (and most of Nigel's photo-ops involve him holding a pint and grinning) it's because he really fancies a pint. And when he's drunk it, he might very possibly go and get another one. I should make honourable mention of Barack Obama here, too, who when presented with a pint of Guinness on a trip to Ireland, downed it with obvious relish.
Note that none of this absolves Nigel Farage of being a colossal gurning nitwit and an unpleasant right-wing opportunist, just to be clear. Nor should this post be taken as an endorsement of drinking during working hours, however much Farage and Boris Johnson (and William Hague back in the day) might think it's a terrific idea.
Note that none of this absolves Nigel Farage of being a colossal gurning nitwit and an unpleasant right-wing opportunist, just to be clear. Nor should this post be taken as an endorsement of drinking during working hours, however much Farage and Boris Johnson (and William Hague back in the day) might think it's a terrific idea.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
pale, male and stale
It was, of course, inevitable that in the wake of the mainstream media interest in the atheist community's sexism problems there would be a backlash from that most oppressed and put-upon group, Angry Blokes.
Basically this gist of this bone-headed article is: hey, dude, look up "atheist" in a dictionary! It just says "lack of belief in gods", right? Nothing about racism or feminism or any of that shit, right? CHECKMATE, etc., etc. Or, to rephrase the complaint a bit: "nobody told me that when I started being an atheist I had to stop being an arsehole".
Well, firstly, nobody is telling you that you have to stop being an arsehole, just that it would be nice if you did, and, furthermore, that we reserve the right to tell you when you are being one.
The depressing thing is, this is actually quite simple. Putting the dictionary aside, anyone who bothers to be an "out" atheist and tell people about it, as opposed to an "out" a-unicornist, say, is effectively already making a political statement, one which says: I'm bothering to mention this because (by contrast to the unicorn stuff) there are real-world consequences of people believing this stuff, most generally hostility to reasoned enquiry and dissent, the tendency to kill each other for believing in slightly differing flavours of nonsense, and the brutal oppression of women. Furthermore, you're making the (hopefully fairly obvious) statement: I think these things are bad, and that the world would be a better place if they stopped, as far as is possible.
To come at it from another directiom, I maintain that atheism does imply and entail a concern for feminist issues, because in large part the social structures which maintain patriarchy have been established and enforced by religions. So if you hold to the idea that, say, brutal Islamic oppression of women is bad (which it undoubtedly is) then you can't really go on to say that you're fine with, say, Sam Harris' lazy trotting out of sexist tropes. Or, at least, not unless you're a) engaging in some extreme denial about the existence of institutionalised sexism in western societies or b) pulling a Dear Muslima and suggesting that because one is "worse" than the other (by some imaginary metric) that we can safely not care about the one involving the rich white dudes whose books we like.
Among the things that involves ignoring, though, are things like the terrorist threat made against Utah State University TODAY for having the temerity to invite computer games writer and activist Anita Sarkeesian to speak. This isn't the first death threat that's been made against Sarkeesian, and the authorities are taking it extremely seriously, not least because the guy mentioned admiringly in the e-mail, Marc Lépine, was very real and killed 14 people (injuring 14 more) at the École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, supposedly because of a similarly virulent anti-feminist agenda. And let's not forget that this is all happening because Sarkeesian dared to put out some videos making the (fairly self-evident and uncontroversial, you'd think) case that the video game industry has a problem with how its products portray women.
The barely believable follow-up to that is that the talk has been cancelled, not by USU but by Sarkeesian herself, over concerns for her own safety once it became apparent that Utah's barking gun laws would permit attendees to carry concealed weapons into the venue even after a threat such as this one had been issued.
Back to the original article - one of the more chucklesome elements is the juxtaposition of the pooh-poohing of "liberal issues" and "social justice" and the photo-montage the author (or an editor) saw fit to illustrate the piece with. Take a look:
It may be instructive to list the people illustrated here:
Basically this gist of this bone-headed article is: hey, dude, look up "atheist" in a dictionary! It just says "lack of belief in gods", right? Nothing about racism or feminism or any of that shit, right? CHECKMATE, etc., etc. Or, to rephrase the complaint a bit: "nobody told me that when I started being an atheist I had to stop being an arsehole".Well, firstly, nobody is telling you that you have to stop being an arsehole, just that it would be nice if you did, and, furthermore, that we reserve the right to tell you when you are being one.
The depressing thing is, this is actually quite simple. Putting the dictionary aside, anyone who bothers to be an "out" atheist and tell people about it, as opposed to an "out" a-unicornist, say, is effectively already making a political statement, one which says: I'm bothering to mention this because (by contrast to the unicorn stuff) there are real-world consequences of people believing this stuff, most generally hostility to reasoned enquiry and dissent, the tendency to kill each other for believing in slightly differing flavours of nonsense, and the brutal oppression of women. Furthermore, you're making the (hopefully fairly obvious) statement: I think these things are bad, and that the world would be a better place if they stopped, as far as is possible.
To come at it from another directiom, I maintain that atheism does imply and entail a concern for feminist issues, because in large part the social structures which maintain patriarchy have been established and enforced by religions. So if you hold to the idea that, say, brutal Islamic oppression of women is bad (which it undoubtedly is) then you can't really go on to say that you're fine with, say, Sam Harris' lazy trotting out of sexist tropes. Or, at least, not unless you're a) engaging in some extreme denial about the existence of institutionalised sexism in western societies or b) pulling a Dear Muslima and suggesting that because one is "worse" than the other (by some imaginary metric) that we can safely not care about the one involving the rich white dudes whose books we like.
Among the things that involves ignoring, though, are things like the terrorist threat made against Utah State University TODAY for having the temerity to invite computer games writer and activist Anita Sarkeesian to speak. This isn't the first death threat that's been made against Sarkeesian, and the authorities are taking it extremely seriously, not least because the guy mentioned admiringly in the e-mail, Marc Lépine, was very real and killed 14 people (injuring 14 more) at the École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, supposedly because of a similarly virulent anti-feminist agenda. And let's not forget that this is all happening because Sarkeesian dared to put out some videos making the (fairly self-evident and uncontroversial, you'd think) case that the video game industry has a problem with how its products portray women.
The barely believable follow-up to that is that the talk has been cancelled, not by USU but by Sarkeesian herself, over concerns for her own safety once it became apparent that Utah's barking gun laws would permit attendees to carry concealed weapons into the venue even after a threat such as this one had been issued.
Back to the original article - one of the more chucklesome elements is the juxtaposition of the pooh-poohing of "liberal issues" and "social justice" and the photo-montage the author (or an editor) saw fit to illustrate the piece with. Take a look:
It may be instructive to list the people illustrated here:
- Penn Jillette, 59, white, magician, comedian, tedious hectoring loudmouth, likes calling women cunts;
- Neil DeGrasse Tyson, 56, person of colour, astrophysicist, occasional inaccurate quote-rememberer, generally pretty good on recognising social justice issues, BUT a man who, crucially, does not self-identify as an atheist, for what I think are weaselly bullshit reasons, but nonetheless that's not a label that he accepts;
- Bill Maher, 58, white, comedian, talk show host, pseudoscience advocate, likes calling women cunts;
- Lawrence Krauss, 60, white, physicist, unfortunate choice of friends, rumours of inappropriate conference behaviour;
- Christopher Hitchens, 62, deceased, white, journalist, casual dismisser of women;
- Sam Harris, 47, white, writer, neuroscientist, careless perpetuator of sexist tropes and taker of great umbrage when called out on it;
- Daniel Dennett, 72, white, philosopher, cognitive scientist, no known form on the subject that I know of;
- Richard Dawkins, 73, white, evolutionary biologist, tweeter without due care and attention;
- Ricky Gervais, 53, comedian, purveyor of thoughtless ableism, likes calling people cunts;
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 44, person of colour, writer, activist, regrettable neo-conservative wingnut.
Just to summarise, of these ten people, only 9 of whom actually self-identify as atheists in the first place, eight are white, nine are male, and all but two (of the nine who are still alive) are over 50, with the youngest being 44. If the list had been specifically chosen to satirise and undermine the article it was attached to, and perfectly illustrate the point being made by the people it was dismissing, then I'd say they'd done a pretty good job.
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