Monthly Archives: May 2007

It’s all in the game

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A job in any sci-fi movie or tv series is a job for life.

Actors get constantly recycled within the genre. Think of the self-effacing officer from the original Star Trek turning up as the sinister Bester in Babylon 5. Officer Sun and the captain from Starscape becoming SG1 crew members. Quark from Deep Space Nine in Buffy. The Doctor from Voyager in almost everything. Even the Quantum Leap man became the captain of Enterprise (did I mention it doesn’t have to be good sci-fi?) And so on.

The same applies to tv cop shows. (There is a certain amount of cop/sci-fi crossover but I guess that probably just constitutes an acting career rather than a pattern. E.g. The blonde woman out of last year’s series with the fishy aliens is in more cop & medical shows than she was in fish episodes.)

I am now going to make a mockery of my pure and true love of the Wire by sharing my personal TV trivia game.

(Don’t judge me too harshly, here. I’m just following HBO’s lead. They offer downloads of “Naimond’s” choice of classic hip-hop, or such.)

The original game consisted of trying to spot the entire cast of the Wire in old LawnOrder episodes. Anything from the LawnOrder stable counted (classic Law and Order, Special Victims or Criminal Intent. Or even the new spinoff, with lawyers, that’s set slightly outside the format, that I haven’t really got into. In fact even old episodes of Homicide might count, if I am feeling pushed for successes.

So far, I can only really claim Avon Barksdale, Omar and the female cop for definite, because I only recently realised the gameplay was up to a really extended scoring system. Bit I think I’ve seen Stringer Bell in one. And I’m sure I started squealing with joy because Marlow was spotted in an episode.

Then I thought, even with the most intense TV watching, it wouldn’t be possible to match the whole cast to Law and Order spinoffs or precursors.

So the new challenge is to match every speaking part actor in the Wire to EITHER a Law and Order character – 1 point each episode – OR the most comically different role in any visual medium – 5 points, but it’s got to be REALLY funny.

This lets me score points for McNulty in the 500 and Bodie in the Cosby Show. Omar scores 10 in anything, for being so extreme. Naimond’s mom would score 10 as well, but I’ve never seen her in anything else.

My ambition is to find the whole Barksdale crew. Contributions welcome. All the same, it only counts if I actually see it. Shortcuts like searching IMDB cost 10 conceptual penalty points for nerdiness above and beyond the call of duty.

My alternative ongoing games include:

  • “spot the musicians turned actors” by music genre –
  • e.g. Method Man and IceT – LawnOrder and the Wire –
  • Spandau Ballet – now TV/movie villains in a crasser version of the “Ray Winstone loveable
    Cockney villian” archetypes
  • Phil Collins, ditto,
  • One of the bros out of Bros.. ditto..
  • I just refuse to count Will Smith and Kylie as I think they took the reverse direction. And in any case, people only count if they are either respected and/or unspeakably naff in either genre.

Rules are meant to be broken

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Spam us and you won’t usually get read, let alone answered.

In fact, a good few legitimate emails get thrown out accidentally in the rsi-inducing marathon of spam deletion that follows opening the email client. (Sorry to everyone whose mails get flushed)

All the same, this blog link, which came from a promotional semi-spam to the blog is actually very interesting. The blog name and blurb are:

Off the Page – Current Affairs Books, Comment & Debate
Source of content and opinion from some of the UK’s best published writers on a range of diverse topics, from the war on terror to the trouble with Tesco

We are of course holding you to ransom for a reciprocal link, seeing as you are such fans of the blog, as you mention in your email :-p ….

(Don’t take this a cue to comment-spam or spam us, though, all you cialis vendors and Nigerians who have unaccountably discovered how trustworthy we are and want to give us free dollars, you know who you are. This blog’s comments are protected by the magical shield of Akismet, not to mention the Power of Greyskull.)

Life before the Internet?

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How do you get broadband if you don’t have an Internet connection?

Answer: You phone someone with a net connection to do it for you.

Explanation: TW is currently offline due to having to move to a place in which only the most intrepid ISPs will offer the most minimal services. Thanks to the world-class silliness of Virgin media tech support service, I have also very recently spent another two weeks offline. I will spare you from the uber-dull details, solved eventually again by the Cafe-Nero-style lad who seems to be Virgin’s only competent techy. It was hellish, in a very mild sense of the word “hellish”, true, but, nonetheless, you wouldn’t choose to do it.

In fact, how does anyone live now without being plugged into the matrix of the Net?

Even given the willful Luddism that stops me from doing Internet banking or shopping, I genuinely can’t imagine how we lived before the Internet, let alone before PCs. It’s not that I wasn’t alive, then, either.

But, to be honest, I can barely conceive of there not being an Internet. If ever anything felt like historical inevitability, it’s the world wide web.

How did we get information? Despite dumping industrial quantities of used books on charity shops every time I move, this house is still a book depository. But, it never has a book with the right information when I need it.

Which is always ten minutes ago, because of the “instant information gratification” expectation that has come along with the Internet. So the library won’t do either.

In fact the local library, which was limited enough (with romantic novels, improving multicultural children’s books and fishing hobbyist books filling about 70% of its shelves) has been more or less replaced by a caffeine-beverages-free Internet cafe. The incommoding books got sold off for pennies, even adding a few volumes to the aforementioned book depository.

I seem to remember it was possible to write letters, take photos, contact people, do calculations, play games, draw pictures, play music and so on. It seems unlikely that we did them much, though, given how bloody hard it is to do any of these things without a computer and a net connection.

Pencil and paper are OK. At least they are portable. But, have you tried using a manual typewriter? A calculator? Well, you just wouldn’t, would you? You might as well get out the slate and abacus.

Have you tried even using your PC without the Internet, recently? It’s OK for playing music and doing 3d rendering. After that it’s like playing frisbee with a dog with its back legs cutoff.

No such thing as free newspaper

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This part of the blog is a sucker for free newspapers. (Mainly because of a bizarre reading obsession that can be fed by repeatedly reading the words “Hot” and “Cold” on the bath taps, if absolutely necessary.)

But the previously unspotted City News that dropped through the door last evening was a free newspaper too far. It looked slick. In fact it looked like a tabloid version of the community news magazines that the local council persists in seeing as not being a waste of taxpapayer’s money.

The front page shows a full page colour shot of a man – looking like an Armani perfume model gazing moodily into the middle distance, brow slightly furrowed in Deep Thought. And there ias a mini-inset picture of Madonna. The heading splashed across this picture in about 60 point sans-serif is “Can envy harm you?”

(Hmm, I’m starting to get a mite suspicious now. )

On page 3, the continuation of the lead story revealed that the chap in question (now pensively holding his chin in his hand, while gazing into the middle distance) and his sister had suffered leprosy and worse since a childhood visit to Cape Verde – the result of witchcraft practised by a jealous relative. (That’s the “envy” and “harm” bit, by the way) Luckily, after he had spent thousands on doctors and witchdoctors and got no relief, prayer from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God Help Centre put paid to that.

(I kid you not.)

No surpises that this free newspaper turns out to be a publication from an organisation called UCKG – a registered charity, no less.

The rest of the paper is basically full of tales of people whose illnesses – especially depression and suicidal thoughts – and problems were all cured by UCKG. Having an exploding mind; getting engaged 3 times to men who cheated on her; having a father who beat him senseless; baby who stopped breathing every ten minutes ; etc. Whatever the human tragedy… they were all sorted by UCKG.

Blimey, put that in your pipe and smoke it, atheist blogroll.

This UCKG certainly know their target – really unhappy people – and are going straight for it without passing Go but clearly collecting their £200 (at least) on the way.

I had to Google these miracle workers. (That’s not a real link I put in .extrawords. to stop it being a link, with the happy accident of making it say http://www.extrawords.uckg.org/.) It is a church headed by a self-anointed Bishop Renato Cardoso, founded in Rio thirty years ago, according to its website. It even offers a song-book but, disappointingly to those of us with a really sick sense of humour, this only shows the words, not the music.

Now, the over-used ROFL word is not going to appear here, except in passing. (Because obviously it is a funny publication. The relenetless accumulation of sob stories reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s remarks on Little Nell’s death in the Old Curiosity Shop.

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing”

)

However, a dip into this world actually ends up quite disturbing. The idea that unsceptical people’s deep misery is being exploited to get adherents is blatantly sick. At the same time, you wonder how the rest of us can ignore the fact that there are thousands of people without any hope except the pseudo hope provided by this sort of thing.

Tell me it’s not true?

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Quintessential Rambling posted yesterday to say that he/she? thinks war with Iran is about to happen on the basis of an order for massive upping of missile cones, as seen before the last two rounds of global “Risk”.

This post has the horrible ring of truth. So I am just saying to the full pantheon of all deities, spaghetti-monsters, tooth fairies and all “Please, let this be too paranoid a conclusion”

The Armageddon-meisters on any of the constantly shifting sides in WWIII tend to be quietly confident that:
(a) they won’t actually have to do any killing or dying themselves. Lots of young men and women in the armed forces and millions of civilians who happen to been unfortunate in where they chose to be born will do that for them.
(b) they will be rewarded after death anyway when the big magic man rewards them for doing his righteous smiting.

I don’t suppose they care, but some of us are quite pleased to be alive on this planet. We’re not remotely convinced that we’ll be anything except wormfood when we’re not here anymore.
Basically, only having one shot at this life, some of us may value life a bit more than those people who think they’re going to a better one.

More on Alice Shannon

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I have mentioned this in the past, but reading the excellent Planet Atheism feed today highlighted a new take on it.

A post titled “Not all news is bad” Sacred Slut revists some of the issues and points out the Clarion was “tricked” by who ever posted the hate screed letter – obviously “Alice” doesn’t live in the Clarion’s catchment area…

Continue reading →

Wifi Dangers

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I dont have much time online, so I have pick and choose my ranting carefully now… The Will of Toutatis seems to have decreed that while I am mostly offline, the news is full of things which almost make my blood boil over. Bah. Humbug.

There is a long list of things which are stupid beyond belief in the media this week. I picked the post headline based on the furore from the BBC’s Panorama program which claims Wifi is three times more “dangerous” than mobile phone masts.  I didn’t watch the program myself, so my comments about it are based on the (mostly radio) news which picked it up.

For years there have been minor scare stories about mobile phone masts (cellphones for you colonials) causing all maner of problems to the people who live in their footprints. There has even been a considerable amount of rigourous scientific investigation into this. Sadly, for both the frightened and the media causing the scares, there is little to support the claims. Now, call me old fashioned but if you have 99 studies which show no ill effects and 1 which does, it probably means there are no ill effects.

Why in Odin’s Name do people focus on the outlier and demand that be considered as the “real evidence?” It is insane. It really is madness, and the BBC radio news about it was a cringeworthy example of it. There were “concerned citizens” calling on the Government to carry out an “inquiry” (as is the case today, if a dog craps on the pavement there needs to be a government inquiry into how and why it happened) and, predictably, there were “scientists” who wanted 15 mins of fame, demanding the same. All based on the same lack of evidence.

When I see things like this, I like to remember a pop-science programme I saw on television a few years ago (it was something like Brainiac but it wasnt brainiac), in which a group of “electrosensitives” were put in a house for two weeks. Outside was a broadcast tower. The subjects were told the tower would be on for the first week and off for the second week.

All subjects reported the “electrosensitivity” problems during the first week, which miraculously cleared up in the second. As they predicted. The kicker of it all was, the experiment was reversed. The tower was off when they thought it was on, and on when they thought it was off.

Now, I am not for one second saying that is the sort of thing which should be published in the Journal of EM Woo or whatever, but it goes a long way to showing how people convince themselves about something – and once they do it manifests itself in other effects.

This recent nonsense about WiFi is prime example, but pure comedy value can be gained from the “three times as dangerous” phrase. Radio towers are not dangerous, so what is three times zero.

I think I can agree with that.

Petitions work then?

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That magical tiny number of people who can change government policy (see the post about the government bowing to “pressure” to allow the creation of human-animal hybrids) obviously didn’t sign the road-pricing petition. Millions of people took the time and effort to sign it but they weren’t the right people, obviously.

The government just ignored the whole thing, except for adding insult to injury by sending everyone emails with Blair’s name on it to say in effect “Thanks for participating but f*** off. Now I will tell you why you were wrong…” (Well, that’s what the anti-ID petition got)

On a personal note, I would never have signed the no road-pricing petition. I don’t have a vehicle. I am against cars. Well, against cars as much as anyone can reasonably be who sometimes gladly takes advantage of riding in other people’s and who takes the occasional taxi. I do object to breathing in secondhand vehicle emissions all day. I don’t like fearing death from some metallic monster every time I go out of the house. I don’t like living in a world so dependent on oil that any amount of evil seems OK, if it will secure it. And so on.

BUT, I am not so divorced from reality as to think that car journeys are the luxury jaunts of the privileged. Even ignoring the fact that people who live outside a few city centres have basically no alternative but to use a car to earn a living, get food or get their kids to school, I don’t think road pricing will cut urban car journeys by more than a miniscule amount. Bloody hell, people spend hours every day on the M25. Would anyone choose to do that if they had an alternative?

The UK has a rubbish public transport system. I live in a city. It normally takes me about eight times as long to get to work (2 buses) as it does when I have been lucky enough to get a lift. (It takes me an hour and a half to walk, on the days when I can still face the walk after a day’s work. The bus journey takes an hour a best – two at worst.) I could replace part of one bus journey with a train but this wouldn’t cut the time by more than a minute or two and would cost more.

My recent experiences of travelling by train have involved unbelievable expense with appalling service standards. It is cheaper to buy a used car and throw it away than to pay the train fare for 3 or 4 people to get to London from the North of England. (And you could breathe in less germs, have the certainty of getting a seat, smoke if you choose, stop when you choose and not have to listen to incomprehensible welcoming speeches every few minutes nor use toilets that would be considered below par in a hurricane refugees’ camp.)

With regards to the quality of service, last year, I made at least two train journeys that were a net loss to the train company. I.e. the service was so bad that they had to pay for me to use it. Both arrived hours after any possible connections were running and, on each occasion, I had to be taken by taxi for close to 50 miles. And was given a refund 🙂

Basically, there are currently no feasible alternatives to using a car for most journeys.

So this road pricing idea is just going to be another tax. Unlike direct taxation, the ability to pay will be irrelevant. What will affect how much you pay will be how close you live to workplaces, public services, schools and shops. So, also unlike direct taxation, there will be an impact on a wide range of apparently unrelated things like house prices.

So, the rich will be able to carry on driving at will, just getting irritated by the attendant bureaucracy of it. Other people will just get more and more stressed trying to stretch their wages far enough to cover the cost of the journey to earning them.

We all know the alternatives, if there really were any serious concern to cut the number of cars on the road:

  • An efficient and cheap public transport system
  • Encourage working from home
  • Planning decisions to stop cities and services from sprawling out endlessly
  • Stop closing down locally based services like post offices and schools

Too much trouble, hey? Don’t bother then, just get another source of revenue from drivers.

Last refuge of the scoundrel

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Margaret Hodge, the government’s Industry Minister, not random nutter, has been trying to snatch votes from the BNP – i.e. voters who are blatantly three courses short of a 2 course meal – by coming out with anti-immigrant nonsense.

Shoe made some cursory efforts to distinguish her call for housing to be kept for British people from the far-right ranting of the BNP by phrasing it in supposedly inclusive terms:

She said white, black and Asian British families on low incomes, who had lived in an area for several generations, could not get their own homes and all felt there was an “essential unfairness” in the system

Getting votes by adopting the policies of parties that exist only through pandering to racism by stealing their policies does nothing to challenge these parties. Her whole argument is particularly insidious because she has taken on the whole principle of “Seek power by blaming some weak and visibly different group for all social ills” and just shifted it towards blaming Eastern Europeans and “asylum seekers” – the 1930s German Jews de nos jours.

This is unlikely to fool the black and Asian families who’ve lived here for generations and have therefore probably developed a healthy fear of the whole principle. Or is the BNP also trying to attract these people now?

I suspect that would certainly alienate their core constituency, but, hey, rabid racism is nothing if not inclusive – they can happily add Eastern Europeans to their mental rolls of hate figures. It’s not very good at shrinking though, so I dont hold out much hope of the BNP welcoming their previous core enemies into the fold so they can happily gang up on the Eastern Europeans.

Social housing, especially in the South East, is so close to non-existent now that the idea that it is getting handed out freely to immigrants and asylum seekers is laughable. Is there a shred of evidence of this?

There is no easier and more shameful way to get political power than by picking out a group of people to scapegoat. The fact that Margaret Hodge – former the 70’s anti-Thatcher London council leftwinger 🙂 – is driven to using this strategy tells us a lot about how deep principle runs in the average politician (granted, no surprise there.) It also draws attention to the horrifying fact that the BNP are becoming a viable political force.

Yes, these people are basically morons and rogues. They are still dangerous. That must be more of an issue than whether a Barking MP (you can obviously read that with or without the capital) is so afraid that her constituents are being seduced by racism that her major response is to try and keep her seat in Parliament by adopting their policies.

Sci-fi cliches

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This is further to the post about Dr Who’s references to other sci-fi and some very knowledgeable comments, one of which pointed out that sci-fi movies owe a fair bit to Dr Who.

Spotting the refences and cliches makes up a good part of the enjoyment of sci-fi. There’s an inclusive list on cthreepio among other sites. Here are a few of my own favourites:

All alien races speak English. This is very convenient, of course. (Although, unusually, Klingons do have their own language.)

The most advanced computer can be completely confused into breaking, by being asked to process a contradictory statement.

Any high spec computer will become sentient. And homicidal. It can then only be defeated by making use of the surprising design fault listed above.

Non-humans usually look exactly like humans or exactly like humans with insect heads or with some wierd ear, nose, eye or forehead attribute.

About 70% of all non-earth civilisations are identical to those of medieval Europe. A further 20% are basically the same as Ancient Egypt.

The crew of any spaceship will happily mate with non-humans but there is less than 1% chance of crew members of different earth “races” ever getting involved with each other. Which is odd, given that space travel is only achieved when the earth becomes one big happy international family.

The holodeck is always broken in such a way that game characters will come to life and threaten the life of the crew, while the crew will never be able to end the game. Nevertheless, the holosuite is never dismantled. The crew will still go blithely into it. They will always choose Nazi Germany or an interplanetary war or some other blatantly dangerous setting.

Any Stargate crew member that you’ve never seen before who speaks a few lines at the beginning of an episode is doomed to die in the next few minutes. Being assigned to SG6 is a death sentence

Religion and cults

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The difference between a religion and a cult is that a cult just persecutes its own members while a religion goes after everybody else.

I read this in a letter to the free bus paper (the Metro) and I had to steal it to quote here. I threw the paper so I can’t attribute it sorry.

Thanks and sorry

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Infinite thanks to the people who’ve taken the trouble to comment on the downward spiral that is this blog’s theme. It has been a great help.

And an apology is for the fact that the redesign is interfering with there actally being any readable content.

On a “while the cat’s away” basis I’ve done some theme hacks that will bring down the wrath of TW for being deprecated and/or non-compliant (negative margins, for instance. I’ve havent cracked and used tables yet.)

I think that it works in ie6 at 100% and doesnt degrade too badly when you shrink the window.

Havent even broached ff yet so it may get rebuilt in the next few minutes and I am pretty fearful of what will happen on mobiles.

Over to me

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Thanks to Chuck S (See comment on last but one post) for pointing out that the new style breaks in Internet Explorer 6, at 1024 by 768 if you don’t view it full-screen.

Sorry to everyone. It will be fixed up in the next 24 hours. Or replaced with an inexact replica.

Don’yt you just long for the days when tables were OK to use for layout?

Offline

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This is a short post to let people know that Admin and myself will be off line now for a couple of weeks. Hopefully it wont be long before a functioning ISP / Net connection is re-established (will it be Sky? Will it be Pipex? Who knows but it bloody wont be Virgin Media!).

In the interim Heather will try to keep ranting about idiocy, bad science, bad philosophy and the like.

Bye bye for now…

New Style

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As you may see from the site, we have taken the plunge and gone for a whole new style here. This has been designed for us by Compuskills and as far as I am aware it will be made available for free download from the compuskills blog site in the very near future.

This theme has also been tweaked a little to try and address some of the issues this blog has been having lately. Hopefully you should now find the site faster and more responsive. If you have any questions or issues with this theme please let us know. We are genuinely interested if you have any problems with the navigation or find the style is broken in anyway.

Thank you for your patience.

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