March 2007 Archives

This was never going to go down well with the Daily Mail crowd

South Park, the cartoon series that has pushed the bounds of taste for a decade, has perhaps produced its most spectacularly offensive episode yet.

Certainly Her Majesty is unlikely to be amused by a programme that shows her blowing her brains out.

The scene begins with a clearly alarmed Queen receiving a call on her mobile telling her that an evil British plot to conquer America has gone awry.

She then reaches for a handgun, places it in her mouth and shoots herself. She can be seen tumbling from her throne and in the final image her bloody corpse is depicted lying prostrate on the palace floor.

It's only just been published on their site as I write this and currently there's only one comment (which, surprisingly, is in favour of the programme), but I suspect that the comments on this story will be apoplectic before too long.

It's worth pointing out that South Park is currently shown on an obscure cable channel in the Uk. If it wasn't for the Mail running this story, the vast majority of its readers (indeed the vast majority of the UK population) would have been unaware of this programme.

Doesn't anyone bother to read what they're writing any more?

According to the front page of today's Daily Express, aspirin can cut your chance of dying by 25%. Who knew it was so easy to live forever?

(thanks to Kev The Rev for pointing it out)

Please read Kathy Sierra's post where she explains why she isn't giving her planned talks at O'Reilly's ETech conference this week. She has received a number of death threats from anonymous commentors on various blogs and has therefore decided to cancel all speaking engagements and stay at home. And who can blame her for that.

I'm disgusted by what I read on Kathy's blog. It's appalling that people think that this is an acceptable way to behave.

But, to be honest, I'm not surprised by it. When you take the casual misogyny that is still common in our society and add it to the anonymity that blogging can give people, then it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

That doesn't, of course, mean that we can just accept it. Something has to be done. And, in my opinion, the best approach is to promote a policy of zero tolerance for sexism and misogyny. Too many of us turn a blind eye to it. I know I've been guilty of this in the past. When you hear someone in the office making a lewd comment about a woman walking past, it's far easier to close your eyes and groan inwardly than to call him out for being the neanderthal fuckwit that he is. Here's a recent example that makes me shudder with embarassment when I think of it.

Last summer I was invited for a drink with my agent and some of the other contractors from the bank. We were in an All Bar One. We had an attractive woman giving us table service. At one point she took our order but realised that they had run out of what I had ordered. She came back to the table and asked me to change my order, which I did. The contractor sitting next to me didn't hear our conversation but was obviously a little jealous that I had received some individual attention so he asked me what had happened. I told him. He then smiled and said:

Did she ask you to fuck her up the arse as well?

I was dumbstruck. I couldn't believe what I had heard. I know what I should have done. I should have given him a swift lesson in sexual politics and explained in no uncertain terms why what he had just said was totally unacceptable.

I didn't though. To my eternal shame I just muttered something nondescript and turned back to my conversation. Before too long I was too uncomfortable to stay there and went home.

That's an extreme example, but something like that happens to most of us quite often. And ignoring it is not the right approach. Ignoring it is tantamount to condoning it.

Ignoring it leads to confident, intelligent women like Kathy Sierra barricaded at home fearing for their lives.

This must stop.

Update: More on this from the BBC and the Guardian technology blog.

Over the last year, Balham has gone into a frenzy of restaurant opening. I thought that some of you might be interested in hearing my opinions of some of these restaurants.

Hop & Spice
New Sri Lankan restaurant on Bedford Hill. We accidently went there on their opening night. In fact I think we were their first paying customers. On that night the food was pretty good although the staff were a bit over-attentive (due to first night nerves). We went back a few weeks later and the food wasn't anywhere near as nice. It'll be a while before we go back again.

Sadya
This isn't that new, but it's currently the restaurant that we normally pop into when we want a quick meal and can't be bothered to cook. It's southern Indian food and we love it. We eat there most weeks. Try their roasted cashew nuts and treat yourself to a passion fruit lassi.

The Indian Room
The only downside of this place is that it has taken over the premises of our favourite pizza delivery restaurant and we haven't yet found a decent replacement. It's a worthwhile sacrifice though as the Indian Room is a fabulous little Indian. It's only been open a couple of months but we're going there almost as often as we go to Sadya. They do home deliveries too.

LY Bar
We tried this for the first time last night. It was a slightly weird experience to be honest. The food was great - well cooked and very well presented. It was a little more expensive than most other restaurants in Balham but well worth it. However the experience was rather spoilt by the staff and the decor. There were a lot of staff, but they weren't very well trained and they seemed to spend most of their time standing around trying to avoid work. I'm sure they'll get better with practice. But the decor needs some serious work. The walls are all black and the lighting is rather dim. Together will the music, which was slightly too loud, it was all a bit like having a nice meal in the middle of a nightclub. Oh, and they don't have a licence yet, so you have to bring your own drinks.

Paddyfield
The Paddyfield certainly isn't new, but for some reason we didn't discover it until a few months ago. It's a great cheap Thai restaurant tucked away at the unfashionable end of Bedford Hill. In fact, thinking about it, forget that I mentioned it. It's far too small and always busy. It doesn't need any more customers taking up tables when I'm trying to get in.

I've been dabbling in web sites for some time now and over the years I've had my fair share of projects that either never got started or started well but eventually withered and died[1]. Most of these projects had an associated domain name.

Previously, once I've decided that a project is moribund, I've just let the domain name lapse. But now I wonder if that's the best approach. Maybe it would make sense to sell them. Some domain names can be worth quite a lot of money. Obviously I don't think I've got anything as valuable as business.com but perhaps I can make a couple of quid selling these domains.

Currently I'm considering selling these:

• standup.co.uk - this is one of the first domains I registered. Many years ago I was running a UK standup comedy news site there. I even used it to blag press passes for the Edinburgh Fringe one year. But I ran out of ideas for it almost four years ago.
• wishlistwatch.com - this is far more recent. Last year I saw a good talk about Amazon Web Services and this was the site where I was going to experiment with the API. It was going to be a site where you'd register your wish list and you'd get notifications (email, RSS feeds - all that kind of stuff) if anything on your wish list went down in price. I still think it's a good idea, but so does someone else and now I've lost all enthusiasm for implementing it.

So now I have a couple of problems. Firstly I have no idea how to value a domain name. And whilst there are plenty of people on the web who will do that for you, all of the decent ones (or, at least, the ones who look decent) charge for the service. And secondly I need to find somewhere to advertise and sell the domains. I've got no idea which of those (many, many) sites I can trust.

So while I ponder these issues I've just bunged Google Ads and a "this domain for sale" sign on them. Perhaps I'd be better off parking them with Sedo or someone like that.

This is all new ground to me and I'd be grateful for any advice from anyone who has done this before.

[1] I've had successful projects too. Don't want to make it sound like everything I do is doomed to failure. It's just that successful projects aren't the subject of this post.

The eminently sensible Sexual Orientation Regulations will be debated in the House of Lords today. I strongly suspect that the bill will be passed but the homophobes and bigots are apparently organising a last-minute protest.

Let's get one thing perfectly clear here. Any christian who says that they object to this law on religious grounds is either lying or badly misinformed. The christian church doesn't take its morals from the bible. Rather, it decides which things it wants to get moral about and then finds biblical passages to back up its bigotry. It's true that there are passages in the bible that are pretty clear on what they thing about homosexuality. Here's one, Leviticus 18:22:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

Leviticus 20:13 repeats and expands upon the point:

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.

Both of those are pretty clear. But these passages are both in Leviticus. The previous chapter is all about how to carry out your sacrifice correctly and the following one has all manner of picky little rules that no-one follows any more.

There are plenty of other places in the bible (particularly in the old testament and even more particularly in Leviticus and Deuteronomy) where rules are laid down that most people (including most christians) don't follow today. All that stuff about keeping slaves or not working on the sabbath or wearing a beard (if you're a man). Plenty of implicit sexism and racism. All rules that modern christians are quite happy to ignore.

But when there's something that they want the bible's support on - something that they've decided they don't like - then suddenly Leviticus becomes all-important and they absolutely have to force its rules onto society.

So, by all means protest against the SORs if you want. But be honest about why you're doing it. You're doing it because you're a homophobe and a bigot. Or because you're a member of a church that is run by homophobes and bigots. There is no religious basis for your bigotry. Unless, of course, you're following all of the rules in Leviticus.

p.s. Yes, I know that Paul wrote stuff about homosexuality too. But what did Paul know? Surely he was just writing down what he thought the members of the early church wanted to hear?

The BBC are reporting that schools will be entitled to ban the wearing of full-face veils under new new guidelines issued by education ministers

Schools allowed to ban face veils

Schools will be able to ban pupils from wearing full-face veils on security, safety or learning grounds under new uniforms guidance issued by ministers.

Note the words "allowed to" and "will be able".

The Sun has a different interpretation

Face veils stop girls learning

VEILS will be banned in schools to help pupils learn and to keep them safe, Education Secretary Alan Johnson has ruled.

His decision will affect thousands of Muslim girls who wear clothing like the full niqab.

Note the words "will be banned" and "will effect".

I know whose interpretation of the story I'm more inclined to trust. Why do people read the Sun?

Update: I've now seen the front page of today's Sun and I think I know what happened. The Sun's headline today said that the government would announce a ban on veils today. And, as we now know, the government didn't do that but, instead, announced that schools would be given powers to ban the veil. The Sun is incapable of admiting that it makes mistakes so they have chosen to continue pushing their existing story in the hope (fully justified, to be honest) that most of their readers won't see the real story elsewhere or that if they do they will be too stupid to see the difference.

It's interesting to watch how quickly (or otherwise) internet memes get to the mainstream media. It's three weeks since a number of bloggers started writing about Conservapedia and today the freebie London paper Metro ran a story on it.

And they seem to rather miss the point of it. Their headline is "Weird, wild wiki on which anything goes" and that' really not what Conservapedia is about. It's not "anything goes", but rather "only one particularly bizarre kind of misinformation goes".

Also they seem to have missed that one of Conservapedia's main aims is the elimination of "foreign spelling of words" The Metro article points out that Conservapedia spells "paedophilia" as "pedophilia". But that's just a consequence of Conservapedia's policy of using US spellings. It doesn't indicate any lack of intelligence on the part of Conservapedia's editors (though, of course, there's plenty of evidence of that elsewhere).

I suppose it was a quiet news day in the Metro office and they just pulled something interesting from the front of the "weird and wacky" file. Shame they couldn't have come up with something worth reading like, for example, Bobby Johnson's piece in the Guardian.

Most of the time telethons like the BBC's Children in Need and Comic Relief are enough to have me frantically punching at the remote control to find something less scary to watch.

Oh, I know that it's all for charidee and that they raise lots of money which is spent on good causes. It's just that most of the entertainment they show is so... well... unentertaining. And I hate all those films of comics surrounded by smiling African children.

So I usually send some money whilst carefully avoiding all the "fun".

But if you want an excuse to give a bit of money to this year's Comic Relief, you could consider buying a copy of Shaggy Blog Stories - a collection of amusing tales from UK bloggers. It has been assembled in just one week and is being sold through lulu.com (who have kindly agreed to donate all their profits on this book to Comic Relief).

So there's a good way to contribute to Comic Relief without having to site through tonight's dreadful show.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my post about job hunting. I'm happy to report that I got two firm job offers out of it and I've now accepted one of those offers. In a couple of weeks I'll be going to work at the UK's biggest broadcaster (again).

Dell are looking at increasing their support for Linux running on their hardware. As part of this initiative they have set up a survey where you can tell them what areas you would like them to concentrate on and which distribution of Linux you would rather see preinstalled on your next Dell.

So if you have any interest in Linux support from major hardware suppliers, please take a few minutes to fill in the survey.

I watched Jesus Camp yesterday. What a frightening film that is. It's like watching child abuse. No, I take that back. It is watching child abuse.

You should all watch it. It will open your eyes to some of the atrocities carried out by the evangelical christians in the US.

A slight piece of exaggeration from the Croydon Guardian. They are talking about the success of Levi Roots' Reggae Reggae Sauce (as seen on Dragon's Den). They claim that

The sauce was literally flying off the shelves in the Balham branch of Sainsbury's on Thursday night

Well I've been in the Balham Sainbury's a couple of time in the last few days and I certainly haven't seen any evidence of flying sauce.

"Literally" has a very specific meaning. I think that the word the journalist was looking for is "figuratively".

This story was in yesterday's londonpaper.

Writers earn just third of average

UK authors earn 33 per cent less than the national average wage, a survey revealed today.

I'm not misreading it am I? The headline says something completely different to the text.

Of course, it's just maths. So it's really not important.

The shortlists for this years British Book Awards have been announced.

Richard Dawkins is included on the Author of the Year list and The God Delusion is on the Book of the Year list.

Don't forget to vote.

Update: The results were announced yesterday and Richard Dawkins is Author of the year.

Your good deeds for the day. Please read this and sign this. And then pass it on.

My current contract finishes at the end of this month so I'm looking for something new and interesting to do starting in early April.

So if you think you could use the skills of someone who knows a bit about Perl, Unix, databases and the web then please get in touch. If you need more convincing then my CV is online.

Martin makes some very good points about the unpleasantness of current airport security procedures. And, of course, once you get past security spending any amount of time in a plane is no fun at all.

I'm seriously considering cutting back on the amount of flying that I do. Not because of global warming, and not because I'm scared of terrorism, but because flying is just such a deeply nasty way to spend time.

We're booked on flights to New Zealand in August, but apart from that I really can't see myself wanting to spend more than a couple of hours in a plane. Cruising is definitely the way to go. And only cruises that leave from Harwich :-)

Scientists really need to get cracking on developing teleportation.

This could lead to hours of fun.

GodTube utilizes Web based technology to connect Christians for the purpose of encouraging and advancing the Gospel worldwide.

The brief poke around that I've had would seem to indicate that they aren't just christians, but raving mad creationist christians - with titles like Four Problems with Evolution and How Old is the Earth?.

Enjoy!

(hat tip to Bloggerheads)

Update: Pharyngula has a pop at them too. And suggests that their slogan should be "Reinforcing the stereotype that Christians are morons since 2007".

This is the kind of thing that we need more of on the web. The Old Gaffer is the recollections of a man who was born in 1928 who is using the blog format to document his life.

I was drawn to the site because of his description of the Balham tube station bomb (photos here). But it looks like there's lots of other good stuff here.

(via ChrisH on Vox)

Charlie Brooker speaks much truth on the subject of mobile phones. He's talking about a Samsung E900, but I think the same thing applies to most phones I've seen in the last couple of years.

The menu system is a confusing mangle of branching dead ends. It has touch-sensitive buttons that either refuse to work, or leap into action if you breathe on them. One such button also terminates calls, so it is easy to cut people off merely by holding the phone against your ear to hear them. It has no apparent "silent" mode, and when you set it to vibrate, it buzzes like a hornet in a matchbox.

It is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary "features" aimed at idiots, including a mode that scans each text message and turns some of the words into tiny ani- mations, so if someone texts to say they have just run over your child in their car, the word "car" is replaced by a wacky cartoon vehicle putt-putting onto the screen. There is also a crap built-in game in which you play a rabbit ("Step into the role of Bobby Carrot - the new star of cute, mind-cracking carrot action!").

I'm in the market for a new phone in the not too distant future. Or rather, I'm finally giving up on Orange and am planning to move to another mobile provider. This will almost certainly entail getting a new phone, but if I can't find anything better (for free!) then I'll just stick the new SIM into my Nokia N91.

I don't think I've ever agreed with Michael Portillo before. But he was certainly talking some sense in the Sunday Times last weekend.

After Tony Blair’s 10 years in Downing Street I am worried. At first I assumed that his attendance at church was simply a way of signalling to the world that he was a man of moral fibre who would bring an ethical dimension to governing Britain. That idea worked quite well for a while. When Blair told Britain that he was a pretty straight kind of guy the country was inclined to believe him. Now we know that going to church has no connection with telling the truth.

For Blair, worship in church was always more than a political tool or a lifestyle issue. He is apparently serious about religion. Reportedly he takes on holiday 12th-century theological texts for poolside reading. A year ago he told us that he had prayed to God about his decision to join the American invasion of Iraq and that, since he is a believer, it is how God will judge his actions that most concerns him.

I worry because men of power who take instruction from unseen forces are essentially fanatics. Blair is filled with a self-confidence and self-satisfaction that are dangerous. They were evident last week as he refused to take responsibility for anything that has happened in Iraq since America and Britain occupied it. Those who look for judgment not from the electorate or parliament or a free press but from God release themselves from the constraints of democracy.

He spoils it a bit later.

I do not regard myself as a militant secularist. For example, I see no need (as the government does) to drive Catholic adoption agencies out of business because they will not place children with same-sex couples. I recognise that teaching religious belief may be a good way, perhaps the best way, to impart a sense of right and wrong to children and it is fundamental to our society’s survival that most people should distinguish good from bad.

Many fine things are done by people because of their faith. As an MP I saw a number of examples. And as we mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade we are reminded that William Wilberforce, who brought it about, was a man driven by religious conviction who eschewed political ambition.

Of course, by campaigning to abolish slavery, Wilberforce was acting directly contrary to the biblical instruction to keep slaves[1].

He recovers and ends on a good note though.

My guess is that historians will look back on the early 21st century in puzzlement. How was it possible, they will ask, that man had such deep scientific understanding but clung so tenaciously to his gods? Why did western politicians think that doing God (even a tiny bit) was an electoral or strategic asset?

I can't disagree with that at all.

[1] Leviticus 25:44 (NIV) "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves". Oh, maybe the problem with the slave trade was that Africa isn't a nation around us. Perhaps it's ok if we only get slaves from Scotland and France.