June 2004 Archives

I work too close to Forbidden Planet (and even closer to Gosh! Comics). I've started spending one lunchtime a week browsing in comic shops and buying stuff.

I've been buying the Essential X-Men books. These are reprints of X-Men comics that I was reading in the late 70s and early 80s. It's been a lot of fun re-reading stories that I last read over twenty years ago. And now I've just started buying Astonishing X-Men which is the new X-Men comic written by Joss Whedon. This is also fun, but it's a bit strange as there's about twenty years of continuity that I'm missing out on. Emma Frost now seems to be good. Xavier is nowhere to be seen. And Jean Grey seems to have died (again!)

And there are many other X-Men comics to buy. It's hard to know what's important[1] to read. I even see that Alpha Flight and The New Mutants have recently reappeared after having their comics cancelled back when I was still reading them. This has potential to get rather expensive.

I've also starting browsing (tho' not yet buying) Avengers comics. I always liked the Avengers almost as much as I liked the X-Men.

But catching up after twenty years exposes one problem in the Marvel (and, I suppose, DC) universe. People don't age at the correct rate. Kitty Pryde (for example) was 13 when she joined the X-Men in 1981. She should now be 36. But she seems to be in her mid-twenties. If you assume that the original X-Men were about 17 when their comic first launched in 1963 then they should be almost sixty now. And there's no way that the Scott Summers in Astonishing X-Men is any more than early thirties.

I guess it's all about suspension of disbelief.

[1] Ok. Granted, none of this is really important.

Advertisers choose their words carefully in order to seem to say far more than they are actually saying. Here's a good example from a poster I've seen on the street recently. It's for some kind of weight loss cream. The poster has a woman holding the waistband of a pair of jeans that are obviously too large for her. The tagline says

[product] helps you lose up to a dress size

The italics are mine and point out the "weasel words" in the ad. Let's take them in reverse order.

Firstly, you can lose "up to" a dress size. That's obviously meaningless. You might lose nothing at all. That's certainly "up to a dress size". The advertisers aren't actually making any claims about their product's effects at all.

Then there's that "helps you". You won't lose any weight by using this product on its own. You need to do other things in conjunction with this product in order for it to be effective. The ad doesn't explain what else you might need to do, but I'd guess that something like eating less or taking more exercise might well be on the list.

If anyone is fooled by ads like this then they deserve to waste their money.

It looks like the "Move America Forward" people weren't very successful in their campaign to keep theatres from showing Fahrenheit 9/11.

The film opened in the US on Friday and weekend estimates show it as number one at the box office over the last few days. It has currently made $21,958,000 and is the first documentary to ever top the weekend ratings. That $22m was made in 868 theatres. Other films that it has beaten were in over 2,500 theatres.

This film is going to be huge.

I really want to believe the football fans when they say that the English flags which have covered the country over the last couple of weeks have nothing to do with far right and racist political groups. But sometimes it can be hard.

The BBC news this morning carried a story about police in both Jersey and Norfolk having to deal with situations where a large group of fans attacked bars that was owned by a Portuguese family (the English team having been knocked out of the European Championship by Portugual last night). It's like they see it as a war and that anyone with a connection to the opposing side is fair game to be abused.

I'm sure that it wasn't always like this. I definitely remember the Football World Cup in 1990 being a much lower key affair. The games were still all shown on TV, but there much less of this rabid jingoism. The first time I remember noticing the jingoism was during the European Championships in 1996. And it's got worse with every major international tournament since.

I, of course, blame the redtop tabloids. They are the cheerleaders for this fanaticism. Every day their front pages talk up our brave English lads whilst making offensive jibes at Johnny Foreigner. They don't seem to be at all worried about the effects that these headlines are having. If questioned on it, they'd probably say that they are simply reflecting a mood rather than influencing it.

I love living in the UK. I just wish I didn't have to share it with so many dickheads.

A Microsoft employee happened to mention on his blog that he'll be going to work on the team building the next version of IE.

The comments then became a good place for web designers to list the things that they are looking for in the next IE (still not due for at least a year). My favourite suggestion was "just bundle Firefox with Windows, make Windows update work with it, and dump IE altogether" - although there were more on the same lines.

Over the last couple of days I've read thru the archives of the mailing list for Move American Forward - the organisation behind the campaign to persuade US cinemas not to show Fahrenheit 9/11. I've never come across such an incredible amount of bigotry and intolerance in one place. It's full of people with the most closed minds I've ever seen. The most offensive racist and homophobic language goes completely unchallenged.

These people claim to be moving America forward, but it seems to me that they want to take it back to a past where no-one stepped outside of a restrictive definition of normal behavior that was set by the church. I really hope that they represent the death-throes of a particularly unpleasant type of dinosaur.

Seems there are a lot of idiots around recently.

In this article from my local paper, Martin Linton (who is my MP) explains why he supports identity cards. He does, however, say that he is canvassing opinions from his constituents. I'll give him some bloody opinions!

Earlier in the year I mentioned Fox News correspondent John Gibson and his My Word segments that presented an astonishing view of the whole Andrew Gilligan and David Kelly affair.

Well he's on about it again. Earlier this week Ofcom reported their findings on his reports and they say that he had breached broadcast guidelines. Here is his typically "balanced" response.

To celebrate the 100th annivesary of Bloomsday, the BBC publishes an abridged version of Ulysses.

I bought all of James Joyce's books after my first trip to Dublin in 1992. I've still only read Dubliners tho'.

10 things the UKIP don't want you to know about them

That Jeffrey Titford seems like a nasty piece of work. He used to be a local councillor in my family's home town and his family are the local funeral directors.

Remembering Reagan.

99% of the time I love living in the UK and, particularly, living in London. However this weekend the country did three things that have royally pissed me off.

1/ The Weather
It was too damn hot all weekend. I know that most people complain that the UK is too cold and too wet, but I like it like that. Any place where the the temperature consistantly gets higher than 25°C is just too hot.

2/ Sport
We've just launched into another pointless summer of sporting patriotism. England played a football match last night and the country (or, at least, the parts that I saw) were covered in St George's Flags. Even though I wasn't watching the match I knew when England scored a goal as there were huge cheers from houses all around me. And I'm predicting that England will get knocked out of the European Cup at just the right time for everyone to transfer their patriotic fevour to Tim Henman's annual dash to the quarter finals at Wimbledon.

3/ UKIP
We just had elections to the European Parliament. And in the UK the third biggest vote (16%) went to the UK Independence Party. A party who's single policy is to pull the UK out of the EU. At times like this I start to think that there should be an intelligence test before allowing people to vote.

Of course I still can't think of anywhere where I'd rather live so I'll just have accept sharing the country with a bunch of morons. See, this is why I can never get patriotic.

Let's make some notes about what I saw at NotCon before I forget everything.

On arrival I took a wrong turn and ended up missing Danny O'Brien's Life Hacks talk which I really wanted to see. Instead I ended up in the geolocation session. The most interesting talks for me were Earle talking about OpenGuides and the mad urban explorers from Project Z.

After that I got my bearings a bit better and caught the very end of Danny's talk before learning how to tell the time using a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich. I'm not really sure why I stayed for the rest of the hardware session (I'm not really a hardware chap) but some of it was very interesting. I particularly liked the ideas of programming a VCR by sending and email and using a camera phone as a "mouse".

After lunch I was back upstairs for the MP3 session. This consisted of a panel discussion about the copyright problems inherent in creating MP3 mashups followed by a discussion of AudioScobbler. I've signed up for AudioScrobbler, so there will be another entry on that soon.

I stayed upstairs for the bizarrely entitled session on social software. Not that social software is a bizarre subject for a session, but none of the talks were really about social software. Simon Cozens talked about how he build an Orkut clone using his new Perl web framework Maypole but his talk may have been too much about actually writing Perl code for most of the audience. Another outstanding talk in this session was Alex McLean making music by writing Perl code in real time.

Then a slight cock-up on the scheduling front. I was looking forward to seeing Tom Nolan's Shit I'm A Manager, but somehow I'd missed the announcement that it was going on simulateously with the social software session in the other room. By legging it, I managed to catch the last few minutes.

The sessions on Blogging with a Point and Politics on the Web followed. Tim Ireland suggested that we all set up a blog which cyber-stalked our MP and Tom Loosemore and Stef Magdalinski introduced They Work For You which is fab.

Then the day finished with Yoz Graham and Sean Solle trying not to give away too much information about the forthcoming h2H2G2 film.

All in all, an excellent day. Sure the organisation and the time-keeping was a bit random at times. But that really didn't matter. And I'm sure the organisers will use this experience to make the next one better. There bloody well better be a next one1

Manchester Online has a story about Morrisey commenting on the death of Ronald Reagan at a gig in Dublin. Apparently this got a large cheer from the audience and when he went on to wish that George Bush would die too he got an even larger cheer.

Pretty standard stuff from a once -contraversial figure who is trying to rebuilt his reputation after being out of the spotlight for some time. But somehow this local story got reported in the US. And the web site allows visitors to comment on stories. So a little-known Manchester-based web site has become a centre of raging American indignation. People who have never heard of Morrisey (or even, in some cases I suspect, Manchester or Dublin) suddenly think that what he says is important enough to be worth arguing against vehemently.

And then, of course, there are a small minority of people who agree with him.

Today's Guardian had a St George's flag wrapped around it. But to ensure that Guardian readers were flying the flag for the right reasons, it came complete with small print.

By flying this flag I would like to show my support for the England team but:

1/ Wholeheartedley reject any connotations of xenophobic nationalism
2/ Dissassociate myself from anyone who removes his shirt in public
3/ Salute the rich contribution made by my Celtic cousins to British life
4/ Reaffirm my commitment to the European Social Chapter

Whilst poking around the web seeing if I can legitimately buy MP3s of the Faithless album I came across Virgin's download service. I have no idea if there's anything useful available there as I was blocked at the front page for having the wrong operating system. A useful little pop-up window informs me:

So to give you the widest choice of music possible we would recommend that you upgrade your operating system to one which will support more modern DRMs (i.e. to Windows 98, 2000, ME or XP)

I've just failed to buy a copy of the new Faithless album because they (or, more likely, their record company) have chosen not to make it available in CD format. There's a foramt that looks like a CD and will probably play in most CD players, but it had a sticker on it saying that it was "copy protected". This generally means that they have buggered around with the CD format in non-standard ways to prevent people from making MP3 (or, on my case, Ogg Vorbis) copies of the tracks.

Now I rip all of my CDs so that I can listen to them at my computer (which is, after all, where I spend most of my time) without having the actual CD present. If I can't rip the CD then it's useless to me and I won't buy it.

So that's a sale that they've lost. I bought CDs by The Streets and The Beta Band instead.

I'll write more about NotCon 04 when I have more time. but it's worth pointing out TheyWorkForYou.com which is a record of all UK parliamentary debates since 2001. A lot of great work has already gone into this and I'm sure there will more interesting features added in the coming months.

If you've ever tried to make sense of Hansard then you'll appreciate the effort that has gone into making it more accessible.

Choose how to cast your vote based on important information.

What software do the candidates use.

A survey published yesterday says that British teenagers are amongst the "worst" in the world. According to the survey.

• 40% of 15 year old girls have had sex
• 56% of 15 year old boys drink (alcohol I assume) every week
• 37% of 15 year old girls drink spirits
• 22% of 15 year olds have tried cannabis and 8% use it regularly

The only worrying statistic is the one that says 71% of the girls who are having sex aren't using condoms. This ties in with other recent reports that teenagers are generally unaware of the dangers of AIDS and HIV. But then they haven't seen the major government information campaign that we were being subjected to at about the time they were born.

The Guardian gave them three stars. But I thought they were much better than that.

Update: As Chris points out, the Guardian printed a correction changing their rating to five stars.