The FUDmeister Speaks

David Blunkett: Those who pontificate about 'big brother Britain' miss the point

On the one hand, I suppose Mr. Blunkett should be given credit for having the front to write this piece in the first place. But what a bland and self-affirming load of twaddle it is, worthy of linking to only because it should be seen to be disbelieved.

Surely the highlight is this sentence;

"There is a misconception that the database for biometric passports and ID cards might be misused."

followed by precisely no qualification or argument of any kind? It's just a misconception, get it? Plain as the noses on our faces, really. Silly, silly us!

"The world has changed and those who threaten us are often ahead of the game."

They're still out there, you see; those who threaten us. The global WeH8UK brotherhood still holds monthly meetings in their secret volcano headquarters, stroking cats and feeding democracy campaigners to the pirhanas. It's a universal conspiracy against our way of life, not just a couple of nutters with hooks for hands. We're under constant attack; watched, tracked and hated by evil powers that we don't begin to comprehend. Never forget, brave citizens. Be afraid. BE VERY AFRAID.

I Can't Call Them ALL "Dave"!

I wonder if anyone has ever written a poem about cardboard boxes. I'll ask Google...

http://snipurl.com/cgaek

Hmmm, a few, but strictly amateur stuff and mostly... um... idiosyncratic, I think I'll say. Not that I'm particularly moved to verse by the things, it's just that there are an awful, awful lot of them in my life at present.

There's something about them that can seem comforting or depressing, depending on one's mood, I suspect. That brutal, efficient reduction of a well-rounded life into a matrix of stubbornly square holes; is it liberating, or suffocating? I suppose - to those to whom tidiness and order are ways of life, rather than abstract concepts - mostly the former. I'm trying to see it that way, and partially succeeding.

I suppose I just want it on record that it's an effort, okay?

Back in Jack

Hmm, yes... there were supposed to be house-related updates. Bum.

Okay, so here's the gen. Hev's place is sold, gone, and we move into the new place, in Uplands, together, in the first week of March. All who merit a personal update will get one by some means or other. My place didn't sell, still trying, will probably have to rent.

So a ten-year residence in Cardiff draws to a close, though I'll only be down the road, really. The chance to be nearer to people that I care about is really exciting. There will even be parks to go for walks in, and stuff.

As you can tell I'm not too comfortable with this mundanity-bulletin stuff. I'll try to find something actually interesting to write soon.

In Case You Missed The One Thousand Words...

TASCHEN Books: Photo Icons I

I picked up both volumes of this neat little tome for £3 each, from a popular high-street retailer with a canine audiophile for a logo.

I can't recommend them highly enough. Just about every photo you'd think of, plus loads more besides. But the byline is "The Story Behind The Pictures", and boy do they deliver. Instead of just a few paragraphs of anodyne editorial, each photographer gets a whole essay, packed with enough references to keep you Googling for weeks.

Brain-food of Michelin Star quality, at Middlesborough Spar prices. So cheap you can even buy an extra copy and cut out the pictures... if so inclined.

Everybody Lives!

Plane downed by birds in NY's Hudson river, all safe | U.S. | Reuters

Steven Moffat doesn't write plane crashes.

But if he did, he'd probably write the best plane crashes in the world.

You Saved 1968...

Fair enough of the beeb to mark the 40th anniversary of Bill Anders' Earthrise photographs. The most well-known one is one of two NASA images that I would argue belong in any "Best of the 20th Century" collection; Armstrong's snap of Aldrin being the other.

It was a tough Christmas for many, after a tough year. It was also my first. This moment made a lot of it worthwhile, so I urge you to make it a part of your Christmas iconography, if it isn't there already.

Vatican't

Message for the celebration of the World Day of Peace 2009

His Arse-Holiness is at it again.

This year's euphemism for universal bigotry is "Human Ecology". Put simply, where I put my dick is - according to Benny - just as important as where I put my old newspapers.

It appears that, when it comes to literal interpretation of scripture, the rules are still fuzzy. Leviticus is still a touchstone for Herr Kommandant, but "Goodwill To All Men" is more of a guideline, it seems.

Prick.

3,262,827 to 1 against, and falling...

And as the Technicolor pharmacological cocktail that was my weekend fades to a faintly fuzzy Christmas Week, it's time to reflect on jobs well done.

It still looks as if the house sale will actually go through. I feel a bit like Scarlett Johansson, winning the lottery and going away to live on The Island (Michael Bay movies make a reasonable substitute for sleep while in a hospital bed); the Internet got the Christmas shopping done, with minimal coaxing, even managing to engage genuinely helpful humans in the process; and the foreign body to which I was playing host has been neutralized and removed, without recourse to anything resembling a "John Hurt Moment".

So far at least, nothing is becoming 2008 so much as the leaving of it.

Christmas on the Slab

Just about to leave for University Hospital, Wales; aka Stradling's Retreat. Got a date with a long prehensile instrument, rather like that thing that menaces Ann Robinson (no, the other one) in War of the Worlds. Fortunately for Ann, she didn't posess the undignified means of entry that mine will be using; thus completing my personal score-card of intimate invasions in the process, you'll be enchanted to learn.

If successful, I will be lighter by one small mineral body. Small it may be, but it's been punching way above its weight. Time to part company. Then it's a few days in Painkiller Oz, in which I currently plan to spiritually attend three birthday parties, and counting.

In other news;

SOLD THE HOUSE!!!

That is, accepted an offer yesterday and legal gnomes have commenced scampering. All jolly exciting. Small matter of having no-where to live until Hev repeats the feat not yet dampening my spirits...

Okay nurse, I'm ready...

...and I feel fine!

Gallery: The Best Fictional Doomsday Devices

Great idea, questionable execution.

No DOD?

No Solarbonite?

No Vogon Constructor Fleet??

No Illudium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator???!!!

Some might question whether the boys @ Wired are truly committed to this all - life - in - the - universe - stopping - instantaneously - and - all - the - molecules - in - your - body - exploding - at - the - speed - of - light schtick.

Oops... there goes another one. Feel free to join in!

Caveat Elector

As the champagne flattens, some sobering thoughts on "Obamania":

• Let's hope this is the beginning of the end of Race as a political issue in the West; because it certainly isn't the end. A black president is a big deal - but this mustn't be seen as somehow getting Redneck culture "off the hook", or as fulfilling some notional "quota" (i.e. "Black has had its turn"). History has been made, for sure - but the true end will only have come when there's no history left to be made.
  

• As I alluded to previously, Americans are entitled to ask if we in Europe could elect a black man. We probably couldn't. But then, I think we stand a far better - though still rather slim - chance of promoting a homosexual, a bachelor, or an atheist to supreme executive power. We've already put women there. The truth is, we've all still got a long way to go.

• Quietly, in California on Tuesday, throngs of black voters were marking the occasion - by overwhelmingly voting against Gay Marriage. This blogger needfully notes that plenty of non-blacks did too; but omits that, even by his own figures, no other ethnic group supported "Proposition 8" so emphatically. It is hard to imagine a more bitter irony.

"Change" may be blossoming in the garden of democracy, but no-one has quite come out smelling of roses.

Funny Old World

It was easy, in recent weeks, to be cynical about the prospects for real "change" in the USA. Even if Obama won, it seemed, there were plenty of precedents for a seemingly revolutionary change to quickly fade into something not too unrecognizable from the status quo.

Those precedents may remain, but on the night, it was a lot harder to be so churlish. After John McCain's masterclass in defeat with dignity, Obama's studied and sober victory speech seemed to me to be his best yet. Even if my secular blood ran just a little cold at the catechism of "Yes We Can", nonetheless it became harder with each sentence to keep from nodding along.

Hard also to escape a sense of irony, that even Republicans are now able to look over at us in the Old World and say, "Could you do that?" Tonight, people all over the UK will be lighting fires and firing rockets in our own annual pyrotechnic celebration. How typically British - and how much more incongruous now - that we choose to celebrate the failure of a revolution. However disturbing and alien a place the USA has seemed recently, last night showed us the positive flipside of that alien nature - the willingness to embrace seismic change. I sincerely doubt that we could do that.

Even if the change we think we see, ultimately proves to be a naive dream - for today, at least, I envy Americans the chance to dream it.

Top Spots

Wildlife Photographer of the Year - Online gallery

How's this for some top snappage? Positively heroic, I'd say.

I'm not known as a great animal lover, but I think I know good lenswork when I see it. Explore the winners' gallery to see some truly amazing work. It's enough to make you yearn for the outdoors... maybe. A bit.

That Cold Exterior...

Cheney's heart returns to normal

Apparently there was a minor molten episode while watching "Bambi" with his grandchildren, but thankfully Dickie's ticker re-calcified after treatment.

Doner Card

BBC NEWS | Kebabs made as corpse lay nearby

Yes, yes... but what was in the kebabs? Surely someone must have at least asked?

There's you plot for the CSI: Wolverhampton pilot, right there.

15 nanoseconds

The BBC magazine liked Wednesday's effort;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7659954.stm

but sitting where it is (scroll down to #50!), it's not obvious that I used Mr. Shea's favourite words, which was kind of the whole point. Still, any publicity etc. Cheers, Auntie.

I wonder if I'll get on spEak You're bRanes with that one?

Lexicographagy

BBC NEWS | Magazine | The man who reads dictionaries

I'm disposed to immediately feel dyspathy with a secretary like Shea, but after goving at his story for a while, I begin to hansardize. There's no point in being philodoxical just because an apparently mundane subject deeply happifies another. I may stroke my naiform chin skeptically at Shea's cachinnations, but if such things truly make him tripudiate, then who am I to find them pejorical?

Artypants

H and I paid a visit to the exhibition of Winifred Coombe Tennant 's art collection at the National Museum. Okay, that was obviously her idea, but I was less bored than I expected. I didn't even sneak off for a gaze at Monet's lilies, like I usually do.

Speaking of the great myopic frog, however, there was this little thing; a view of the inside of Rouen cathedral, whose exterior the lad done brilliant with. This is by some obscure French hack that Tennant took a shine too, and was commissioned to show the Madonna & Child (tiny smudge bottom right) that she had donated to the church. Nice to see what it looked like inside, though. Without having to go to Rouen, I mean.

Tennant's sister-in-law, Evelyn Myers, turns out to have been a decent photographer, and one portrait, of Adelaide Passingham (who she?), is particularly lovely. Sadly, my phone camera doesn't have a polarising filter, but you can see it slightly better here.

And then we went back to Swansea and got our arses kicked in the pub quiz. Despite having been there, I didn't know that Havana was in the West Indies. I thought that name applied only to the Lesser Antilles? But then, I though Jamaica was a Lesser Antilly, so basically it's back to Geography 101 for me.

I did know what year "Dr. No" was released, though... so hurrah!

EULA Hoops

Burned by Chrome | The Register

Just a heads-up that might make you think twice about uninstalling Firefox just yet...

I must admit, 24 hours in, Chrome was hardly oscillating my orbit anyways; looks like it'll stay that way for the foreseeable. Ho hum...

Do Not Collect £200

I don't just 'blog the bad stuff:

BBC NEWS | Man convicted over Shia flogging:

"He denied his actions were wrong, saying: 'This is a part of our religion.'"

If they need a volunteer to swallow the key, I'm there; on the strict condition that his cell is wallpapered with the works of Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie, and his cellmate is a jewish homosexual.

The only blot on an otherwise cheering tale, is that the CPS still felt the need to protest that this case "was not an attack upon the practices or ceremonies of Shia Muslims". Oh, quite right - I mean, who'd want to attack the practice of forcing children to wound themselves?

Apparently, western Shia community leaders do discourage the practice of zanjeer matam, particularly where children are involved. Taking the "mourning" to the stage of self-harm appears to have its origins in Pakistan. So long as every cleric proscribes it, then fine; but its pratice remains a legitimate and appropriate target for police "attack".