Author Archives: Polly Unsaturate

About Polly Unsaturate

A lady of leisure. Working interferes with my hobbies, so I dont do it.

Sunday morning tv

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Only a person who forgot to do anything appropriately debauched on a Saturday night would be awake and watching tv at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning. Bah, that would be me then.

Lo and behold, a show that cost about 50p to make, focussing on the topics that are guaranteed to bring froth to the mouth of a Daily mail reader. Is Sunday Morning Live the future of public service religious broadcasting under financial heavy manners?

The format: A studio discussion of ethical/religious issues. Webcam contributions from the public. A bottom of the screen rolling feed of quotes from viewers’ emails. Meaningless text message yes/no polls. Etc.

The wisdom of crowds. On the cheap.

As it says on the show’s page, today’s issues were:

This Sunday we’re back on air and we’ll be asking:
Should prostitution be socially acceptable?
Are we soft on Islam?
Should we allow gay marriage in church?
You can debate live with Susanna, our studio guests, and other callers

“Are we soft on Islam” turned out to be a photo-opportunity for Stephen Green of “Christian Voice.” A chance to reel out a load of untruths about how Christians are persecuted in the UK – sacked for waeraing crosses) and Muslims get all manner of advantages. (I think he mentioned providing a few women-only swimming sessions at some public baths as the evidence for this.)

Yes, it’s that Stephen Green unwilling star of a Channel 4 Dispatches exposé that I can’t find on tinterwebs or there’d be a link here.

His organisation is wonderful at getting the media to misrepresent its extremist views as a mainstream Christian viewpoint, despite the fact that he represents a tiny minority of Christians. He was described as a “disgrace” by the moderator of the United Reform Church.

He complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the atheist bus ads. He failed to make this complaint stick but, by the grace of the all-powerful god Irony, the ASA banned his advert that claimed that the cervical cancer vaccine caused infertility.

He’s a chap with an appetite for the law but a distinct unwillingness to pay the costs involved in using it. He prosecuted the BBC for showing Gerry Springer the Opera, then demanded that the BBC pay his costs when he lost :-D.

And now, here he is popping up on the BBC – even getting an appearance fee, I fear – presenting his noxious views. Truly the man is an Irony bishop.

Viz comic gave him a well deserved award in 2006.

New outrage scale needed

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Turn the dial to 11. These news items show the inadequacy of any existing conceptual scale to the task of measuring your daily justified-outrage level.

(1) The pastor and congregation of the Dove World Outreach Center have engaged in an Al Qaeda recruitment campaign. I doubt that they know enough French to translate the phrase agent provacateur but they seem to understand the concept well enough to to play this role. Albeit, well out of reach of the actions they plan to provoke.

Charitably, I will assume it is just a bid to put Dove World Outreach Center in every standard dictionary, whenever there’s a need for an instant definition of “unbelievable stupidity”, “religious bigotry”, or “armchair warrior”. (Plus a few other words and phrases that wouldn’t make it into a school dictionary. )

Maybe they think their god is too slow in hastening Armageddon and needs a helping hand.

The guardian had a ludicrous anti-Dawkins piece the other day, with the writer claiming that:

He has become the mirror image of the theological dogmatists he despises.

There’s nothing like the Dave World Outreach Center to show that – if anything – Dawkins has been pulling his punches.

(You don’t need a link from me. This story is everywhere as they clearly planned.)

(2) And this story that seems equally designed to boost the membership of fundamentalist armies by a factor of several thousand. The Guardian headlines:

US soldiers ‘killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies’
Soldiers face charges over secret ‘kill team’ which allegedly murdered at random and collected fingers as trophies of war

Dare I hope there’s a holdall somewhere with the names of these soldiers and the Gainesville pastor on it?

They never learn

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The Team directly responsible for the Iraq War / selling off UK public services to private companies / destroying civil liberties / turning at least a blind eye to torture losing the last election really haven’t got the message have they?

Mandelson and Blair are telling Labour party members – through the privileged medium of the public press – who to vote for in the upcoming election. Well, who not to vote for, anyway. And that is a category that seems to include everyone except David Miliband….. They both regard a potential win by Ed Miliband as a potential electoral disaster.

But then they are such popular chaps, these two – Blair and Mandelson….

Any remarks by Blair will be a mixed blessing for David Miliband: Blair has not been forgiven by many Labour activists for the Iraq war and the involvement of the private sector in public services. From the Guardian

Indeed, all the candidates united in publicly expressing distaste for Mandelson only two months ago.

Former foreign secretary David Miliband, who is believed to be Mandelson’s preferred candidate for the party leadership, described the memoirs as “destructive and self-destructive”.
He compared Mandelson’s appearance in a TV advert for the book to that of Bond villain Enst Blofeld, saying all the former minister, nicknamed the Prince of Darkness, needed was a white cat to stroke.

And he’s Mandelson’s chosen candidate….

I can detect only minimal difference between Millidum and Millidee. A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that Blair & Mandelson’s support for Milliband_A was just a cunning ruse designed to leverage (;-) the mass force of Party members’ anti-Blair&Mandelson revulsion to ensure that Miliband_B was elected.

.. Mandelson said anyone who tried to take Labour back to the era before Blair’s election as leader in 1994 would wreck the party’s chances of a swift return to power. (from the Guardian)

(I didn’t even know that any of the candidates had a time machine. )

This implies that the Labour party that is just power-seeking machine. What is supposed to be the point of seeking power? Pre-Blair Labour supporters might have said something about social justice. The Blairite camp would just snigger at your naivete for even posing the question.
In a video on the Guardian’s website, Diane Abbott talked about the massive contrast in campaign funding between her campaign (a couple of volunteers and a £1000 in the bank) and Miliband_A’s. He, on the other hand, has received over £200,000. Plus the poisoned-chalice free support of the New Labour big guns, of course.

Spot the odd one out: Candidate’s voting records…..
Diane Abbott
David Milliband
Ed Milliband
Ed Balls
Andy Burnham

Mmm. Only one of these candidates hasn’t spent the past few years kissing leadership butt and supporting the sort of policies that have brought the Labour Party into such disrepute among its natural supporters.

There’s one candidate with clean hands. And (simulated surprise) she doesn’t have big money from big business.

As Andy Hamilton said on Have I Got News For You last year (from memory)…

“I can’t be doing with these new metric politicians like the Millibands. I much preferred the old imperial ones like Michael Foot..”

Product stop press

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This blog having temporarily started acting like Which Magazine’s Provisional Wing, I have to draw your attention to another amazing wonder-product….:-) It costs more in a their real-world shops, but you can apparently make a saving if you buy Boots Hot Weather Cooling Spray online. Only £3.89 for 125ml (plus £2.90 delivery charge for delivery in 4 days, though free if you pick it up from your local shop.)

£31.11 per litre. (Not counting delivery costs.)

What’s the magic cooling ingredient?

Hmm, water. Well , “Aqua.” Not even bloody drinking water. Just water in a spray can.

As a random comparison of the cost of fluids, you can buy a 70cl bottle of 10 year-old Isle of Jura single malt whisky from Waitrose for £27.59.

OK, it wouldn’t cool you down much (indeed, it could make you smell pretty rough if you sprayed it on your face on a hot day) but it would be the product of centuries of brewing and distilling skills. It would have had to sit round using up caskspace for a decade. It’s lavishly bottled and packaged. And it manages to pay a huge cut to the revenue and still appear on Waitrose’s online shop for less than the cost of a litre of spray-on water.

Quite apart from the bottles of Evian and Highland Spring, Boots sells expensive water in many more forms. In the homeopathic department, anyway.

Water converted into pill form even. Or “pillules”, “pills” and “tablets.” (The distinction may be technical.)

Their homeopathic remedies actually contain water so expensive that it makes the cooling spray seem relatively cheap. Because they are pills (sorry, pillules) so they are dry, containing only the memory of the water that was used in making them. But that water itself only contains the memory of the active ingredient that was used to make it, many dilutions in its past

But, as the the water’s magical healing powers get stronger with each dilution, doesn’t it follow that you could increase its potency by another order of magnitude by dropping one of these dry pillules in a bath full of water.

The bathwater would then be imbued with the memory of the memory of the memories of the first water, but made even more memorable after conversion into and out of dry water-memory states in the middle stage. And so, these remedies could be strong enough to wipe out all disease on the planet….

New business plan – to take homeopathic remedies and sneakily intensify them by this method, then sell them as being EVEN more effective than the ones you can buy from a high street chemist, if that were indeed possible.

Genius, huh?

Enviro-product savings

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Review of the products featured on the Guardian’s eco-store today

Green Product Even more astonishingly green alternative Rating out of 5
Dyson Air multiplier An electric fan that looks like an i-phone, if Henry Moore had designed one in a fan format.
Cost: £199		 A folded piece of paper waved about in front of your face with a fanning motion.
Cost £0		 A minus number too huge to compute
Intellipanel A remote control device for switching off things connected to your tv so you don’t leave them on standby.
Cost: £29.95		 Get up and switch off at the set and/or the wall
Cost £0		 minus 3
This would be lower-rated than the elegant fan, except for the fact that it’s so much cheaper. At least the fan serves a purpose.
Organic beetroot juice Liquidised beetroot juice and a bit of apple
Cost:£3:09 per 740 ml bottle or £17.38 a case		 Grow organic beetroots and apples. Stick them in a blender Cost: a couple of pounds per case equivalent.
(Or, even buy beetroots and apples and liquidise them. That might push the case cost up to a fiver.)		 3
Shipping (unreturnable?) glass bottles all over the country marks it down. But at least it’s food and it’s organically grown and so it’s not really adding to the world sum of useless consumer goods that will be landfill in a year.
2 Recycled Grolsch bottles (turned upside down and with their ends cut off)
Cost: £12.95		 No, I can’t imagine why you’d want one, either – let alone two – but, it’s easy enough to work out how to do it. Turn a Grolsch bottle upside down. Wrap a hot wire round the base and watch the bottom fall off. Sand it down a bit if you don’t want to cut yourself.
Cost: The cost of 2 bottles of Grolsch, plus you get to drink the beer first. A 20pack of Grolsch costs £20.99 from Drinksdirect. So, that’s under £3 for 2 full bottles of beer.
Or indeed Free, if you already have empty Grolsch bottles. Or any other bottles, as far as I can make out. 		1
At least it aims to reuse an existing product. I’d mark it up if standard glass recycling didn’t already exist. But then I’d have to mark it down again for the fact that it implies that the outcome of recycling beer packaging costs the consumer 6 times the cost of the beer in its original container.
Pants to poverty men’s underpants
Cost:£15		 Buy normal underpants at about £1 and give ten pounds straight to a development charity if you need to feel that your underwear purchase is doing some global good.
Cost: £11		 3
I don’t like the way that “charity” seems to involve paying massively over the odds for things, when it is unlikely that much of the cost ends up where you thought it was going. So, we all pay to feel better about world problems rather than to solve them.
Owl Wireless Energy Monitor (or – as they used to be called – an electric meter.) This shows you how much electricity you are using, so you will see how much it costs and use less (Replacing the traditional electric bill then?)
Cost: £29.95		 Switch things off without getting a digital readout first. (Or if you really want to see numbers while you do it, look at your old-fashioned meter occasionally. or look at a digital watch display occasionally and remind yourself that digits mean “Switch something off”)
Cost: £0		 1
Glow in the dark brick Stores up solar power in the day to light up an acrylic green brick.
Cost: £13		 Can’t think of a way to make this at home. The only obvious alternative is just not to have one. That seems to be working out quite well so far for most of us.
Cost: £0		 0.5
I am quite taken by the idea of having a glowing green brick. But despite the sop to my conscience provided by its use of solar energy, I’m still going to have to ruthlessly decide that I will try to manage without one.

Greenwash, don’t you just love it?

Making up numbers

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Nothing provides more authority to a policy than supporting it with made-up numbers, it seems. Here is a shameless example:

The communities department estimates that it costs each taxpayer £35 a week to keep people in affordable homes, and it is argued the tenancy for life is an inefficient use of scarce resources. from the Guardian

I don’t know how much income tax you pay but I’ve just worked out – very roughly, based on the allowances and basic rates on the HMRC site – that a single person earning £20k a year pays £52.03 per week in tax. So, the Prime Minister is saying that 67% of this tax goes to “affordable housing”?

And £20k isn’t a great wage. (It’s slightly below the median wage but easier to calculate from.) But it’s much higher than minimum wage.

Millions of people earn minimum wage. A yearly minimum wage is £12,234.40 (from October 2010 anyway, when it rises to £5.93 an hour) So a single person on minimum wage will pay £22.53 tax a week. The magical £35 a week is 1 and a half times their entire income tax bill.

This doesn’t just defy credibility. It spits in its face with a mocking sneer.

These numbers seem to be targeted directly at that section of Middle England which expresses views of the kind that can be seen at their most typical on the brilliant Speak You’re Branes site. (Ie., people dumber than a box of nails. )

The imade-up numbers may be used to obscure the fact that Cameron’s plan actually implies evicting tenants if they have an empty bedroom or if they earn wages.

Cameron did’nt even bother to explain how this is supposed to cut down on the imaginary costs. In fact, he gave a pretend-egalitarian, justification for this mad policy: that there are millions of needy people on waiting lists. .. who would presumably then move into the vacated houses and … start eating up their own share of the taxpayers’ £35 a week.

This makes no sense at all as a deficit-reduction plan – even if the numbers were real. And even if the social consequences wouldn’t be predictably horrific.

Cuts in housing benefit – to a level lower than the “affordable” rents charged by many social and private landlords – already threaten to put thousands of unemployed and disabled people into serious arrears and to drive many into homelessness. When these people are joined by workers earning a bit more than minimum wage and older people whose children have left home or whose partners have died – i.e. the people Cameron is presenting as stealing taxpayers money – it looks as if tent cities will have to start springing up all over the country. We might then get to see what a truly “broken Britain” looks like.

Numbers of the beasts

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Quite fascinated to find that every post that I read on on Rapture Forms had 225 recommendations. Strange – nay, almost uncanny – coincidence, maybe? Nothing orchestrated about that, clearly,

More numbers: There are 500 “religious organisations” on Facebook. For the first few pages, these religious organisations don’t even have names, just combinations of dots and dashes. (Must be some esoteric form of morse code that only gods understand).

But blow me down with a celestial feather. They all have lots of Friends.

Even if the group name is a dot-dash combo, the picture is a question mark and their entire content is a spam-for-christ by something called st andrews bookshop* (which is a precise description of a few dozen) they still attract Friends numbered in into double or triple figures. It’s hard to find a named group has less than 150.

For example, a site that announces its name as //, has a description that’s just a cuss word repeated and a couple of posts about mobile phone tariffs being shite has 348 members. (Ok, that one possibly isn’t really a religious organisation.)

I am forced to concede that the one about voting for Motorhead to be Pope isn’t really a religious group either. Though I might have got the “Lemmy for Pope” idea slightly wrong. (Yes, I’ve found out that “popolo” does mean “people”…) A babelfish translation of its intro produced this, which appears to make as much sense as most normal religious announcements:

It tires of the political usual? It tires of politics of moralisti feints and who sermon and marazzola well badly? L’ only alternative is the popo of the Motorhead. you have been always not class? You have always had March or Die? You have always dreammed of aprirti a whorehouse blues?

176 people joined this. Maybe it makes perfect sense in Italian.

Downhearted by the uselessness of babelfish and fearing a door-bursting visit by the security services, I didn’t look at any of the islamic groups. Nor any of the many Indonesian or Eastern European ones. If babelfish makes a worse dog’s breakfast of translating Italian than I could do by guesswork, I don’t want to let it loose on a non-European language.

So I stick mostly to reading the groups written in English, which sort of biases the sample. But it seems that any religious group on Facebook – real or spoof – gets close to 200 friends. I start to feel relatively very unpopular.

I see a group called “All Christians take back America” (You might assume that’s the lead in to “….and demand a refund”) 189 Facefriends. This turns out not to to be full of plans to take over America, so much as requests for prayers for various unfortunates. So it’s depressing rather than funny/frightening.

Momentary diversion in the form of a post link (from the not-at-all-stereotypically-named Lula May something-or-other**) to www.baghdadprayerpatrol.com but that turns out not to exist.

Find this on another post there, made by Cathy J some-surname**:

Satin is really working hard to bring me down. He knows I have God in my heart and he is trying so hard to break me down. …….Please pray that Satin does not win

I am personally praying for Silk to sweep the board. But Cotton is very durable. So, I guess that I also hope that Satin doesn’t win.

It seems that the demonic fabric is making headway in Italy, (but in Italian they misspell it, using an A where the word clearly has an I) so that the 181-member group FACCIAMO CHIUDERE IL GRUPPO “SATANISMO RAZIONALE” has been set up to counter it (Bloody babelfish translation again:)

WE MAKE TO CLOSE THE GROUP ” SATANISMO RAZIONALE”
we make to close this orribile group that idolatra the evil, therefore is against every religion… participated numerous, makes to close it

Satin may be so unpopular that it only attracts a hate group but several other everyday items have their own worship groups, each with nearly 200 members: Alcohol; Kinder eggs; White milk (Yes, there is such a thing and, no, I don’t know how it differs from regular milk, which was indeed white when I last looked.. Well I do know, now, it’s the colour of the cap. And 189 people joined this group.)

I haven’t found any Atheist “religious organisations” yet. Oh yes, contradiction in terms. D’oh. Face palm even.

*Standrewsbookshop seems to have cornered the market in Face-spamming-for-jesus. The only other spams that appear often enough to be noticeable are for an airline that I’ve never heard of.
** See how I am scrupulously half-protecting their identities. Even though they’ve blithely put their full names and photos on Facebook…..

Reading Rapture Forums so you don’t have to

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On Rapture Forums, David Reagan argues against competitors for access to the wealth souls of the differently-mentalled.

Even fundamentalist type groups have gotten caught up in cultic doctrines

“Even” indeed. By definition, surely.

“What is a cult? The typical dictionary definition is so vague and general that the term could be applied to any religious group”

Indeed.

Recognising that this might leave some understandable confusion in the minds of Rapture followers, he proceeds to define a cult. It seems that he is talking about defining cults as millenarian cults, but that bald definition might pose something of a problem, (What with them being the very essence of a millenarian sect.)

So there’s a list of attributes that define “cults” then a list of those religions that qualify and some that are “borderline” sects. The distinction rests on whether they have “an orthodox view of Jesus as God in the flesh.” The list of sects has:

..among others, the non-instrumental Churches of Christ, the United Pentecostals, and Catholics.

Cults always have some weird doctrines that are not Biblically based.

Hmm, nothing at all weird about these things selected at random from Rapture Forums:
then. The Ages as viewed from different standpoints , Scripture Numerics, the Tribulation 101 Science facts and foreknowledge from the Bible

These drawings and words seem to have been generated from a mindset oriented about 45 degrees from standard human thinking.

So, what do you call an organisation that has “weird doctrines that are Biblically based”?

Hmm, tough one. Maybe, it’s a “Rapture Forum”?

Numberwang on the web

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The Guardian has a Data Blog with the subtitle Facts are sacred..

Tempting as it is to wander round the epistemological byways here (What’s a “fact,” for a start?) I’ll spare you that. Instead I’ll express bafflement about the factualness of some specific facts on government websites posted yesterday.

A decorative graphic has blobs to represent the costs of UK government websites. There’s a clickthrough button to get the data from Manyeyes.

The data is shocking, on first view. For instance, it seems to have cost the UK taxpayer £154 for every visit to the Cabinet Office site. Cue horror. Except that these appear to be made-up numbers, with the calculations done on a solar powered calculator sitting at the bottom of a deep well.

Here are a few columns that I took from the data, applied simple maths to and lo! most sites cost a few pence per visit.

I’ve left the original numbers so you can work out costs per visit yourself. I’ve shown my calculations on a blue background.

Details from the govt webcosts spreadsheet

Details from the govt webcosts spreadsheet

I fear I’m doing the post a disservice when I scroll down and find a link to Google docs that offers the full data. Download the full list as spreadsheet doesn’t work for me but, when I look at the data on this sheet, it makes a lot more sense. Costs per visit are down to pence rather than tens of pounds. Not that I can replicate this either. But I get a lot closer.
UK govt web costs, as held in google docs

Ah ha: At the end of the Guardian post there’s a caveat:

UPDATE: an error in the cost per visitor column has now been corrected

Sorry, not when I looked at it it. Which, surely must be after it’s been corrected, or else I wouldn’t be able to see the correction note.

In any case, the original costs are dubious. Some of these sites must be new and have not got a full year’s data. The basis on which any given department has costed its sites might be wholly individual. I am forced to conclude that these are pretty well just made up numbers from start to finish. Although that doesn’t excuse the failure for anyone to notice that a simple division has been borked.

Any reader would gasp at the idea of sites that squander 3 week’s unemployment benefit on each visitor. That “information” sticks in the mind. Few readers would be finicky enough to look at the detail.

It says Facts are Sacred in bold letters at the head of the post. You could be forgiven for absent-mindedly taking it that someone had made sure that these were sacred facts.

A paranoid person might easily assume that the release of such spurious data was part of a propaganda offensive to convince UK voters that the public sector is so bloated and wasteful that the planned public sector cuts will not affect anything important. They’ll just involve stopping stupid and wasteful spending….

Like the imaginary huge (6-year-salary!) redundancy payments to inherently idle public sector workers that another Guardian blogger treats as a representative of the true position. Then characterises the head of a public sector union as a rabid militant for opposing the destruction of his member’s jobs and employment conditions.

I initially, and charitably, assumed this was a random Comment is Free post, maybe by a freelancing Daily Mail journalist.

But it appears that the writer is a senior figure in the Guardian. He was the Guardian’s political editor for 16 years. From his profile:

Michael White is assistant editor and has been writing for the Guardian for over 30 years

I see I have been spending £300 every ten minutes on buying the Guardian and it’s only ever worth it on the increasingly-rare days when Charlie Brooker is side-splittingly funny and Marina Hyde isn’t engaged in electoral enthusiasms for former presenters of shows about amusing vegetables. I begin to think a 40% cut in my Guardian spending is long overdue.

Every cloud

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You wait months for a post then two come along at once.
This post is meant to give a tiny bit of cheer to all those of us in the UK who are bewailing the recent election results.

(The word “Hallelujah!” even escaped a work colleague when I showed him this link.)

So, every cloud may indeed have a silver lining…. From the Register:

Biometric passport 2.0 scrapped alongside ID cards, NIR
Second-generation biometric passports will be scrapped alongside ID cards and the National Identity Register by the new Tory-LibDem government, probably as part of a merger between the LibDem Freedom Bill, and the Great Repeal Bill advocated by some sections of the Tory party.

******Breaking news*********
Oh, and this:

The new government plans to ban the controversial practice in schools of taking children’s fingerprints without their permission.

The decision is likely to mean a change in the law. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), as it stands the Data Protection Act allows schools to take pupil fingerprints without permission, prompting outrage from parents’ groups.

Shilling for free

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I did warn you that there might be a bit of an unlikely folk dancing theme developing here. So I am proud to act as a temporary (unpaid) shill for a film about morris dancing. Here’s most of the press release:

Despite rumours circulating earlier in the year, Morris Dancing (yes Morris Dancing), is very much alive with thousands of participants across the UK and is the subject of the hilarious film Morris: A Life with Bells On, premiering exclusively on Blighty (Sky channel 534, Virgin Media 206) on 29th May at 8pm.

A film that will have even the most cynical viewer reaching for their white handkerchiefs, Morris: A Life with Bells On is directed by Lucy Akhurst and stars Charles Thomas Oldham (who also wrote the screenplay) as Derecq Twist, along with Sir Derek Jacobi (The Golden Compass), Naomie Harris (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End), Ian Hart (A Cock and Bull Story), Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen), Sophie Thompson (Eastenders) Harriet Walter (The Young Victoria), Aidan McArdle (The Duchess), and Greg Wise (Sense and Sensibility).

Described as This is Spinal Tap meets Calendar Girls, the film follows the fortunes of an avant-garde Morris team in their struggle to push the boundaries of the venerable, ancient dance. Set around the country pub The Travellers Staff, the docu-style comedy proves that Morris is not just an innocent pub pastime involving hanky-waving and bearded men with staffs, but also that it has its politics-laden, ultra-competitive side too.

The Millsham Morris men and their leader Derecq Twist are determined to achieve Morris perfection. But Derecq is also preparing to set the Morris world alight by performing the ultimate dance within the Morris firmament, the legendary Threeple Hammer Damson. As if this is not enough, he is in addition pioneering an innovative, daringly freeform brand of the dance dubbed “Extreme Morris,” drawing the anger of traditionalist elements within the Morris community. When Millsham unveil their creation in competition, the Morris Circle – the governing body of Morris in the UK – bans Derecq from future competition. Totally devastated by the decision, Derecq embarks on a global odyssey through tragedy and triumph, which gravely tests his passion for Morris.

I am impressed beyond words by the concept of extreme morris.

They embedded some clips with the press release. I’m not sure how well they’ll work here.


It looks as if it will be funny. (Don’t blame me if it isn’t. I haven’t seen it yet.)

The other clips are basically “DVD outtakes”, of which I’m not the world’s greatest admirer, so I’ve skipped them. If there’s any demand I’ll post them. I’ll have to put one of the publicity pictures, though, because it looks as if it came straight from the school of Zoolander Morris….

a publicity show for the film

I think this is Dereqk..

Taking security seriously

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Authorities in Doncaster airport – aka Robin Hood Airport – have been acting in a way that might have given even the Sheriff of Nottingham pause. Or, at least, shown him how wonderfully easy controlling the peasants would have been if he’d just had the sense to wage The War on Outlawry.

An mildly jokey throw-away tweet line by a frustrated traveller has earned him a criminal record and cost him his job and just under a thousand pounds.

The offending tweet said:

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!

Note that this was just a tweet, presumably meant to be read by people with enough knowledge of the English language to recognise the normal conversational use of figure of speech. It wasn’t a “threat” delivered to the airport. Obviously the tweeter never imagined that anyone connected with Robin Hood Airport would read it. Nor, guessed that EVEN THOUGH everyone involved on the airport side says they knew full well it wasn’t really a threat, that he would still end up destroyed by it.

Or have terrorists now got into the habit of casually tweeting their intentions?

In that case, the ruination of one ordinary man’s life is a small price to pay for winning the War on Terror. Or the War on Twitter.

Or the War on Photography, even. As, it seems the “potential terrorists” are still up to their old dastardly tricks of taking photographs of well known landmarks. So, it’s a great comfort to us all that the police are still on the ball and stopping professional photographers from getting shots of London buildings.

How thoughtful of the City of London police to keep us safe. Carrying on with the good work of Robin Hood airport. (When you find this post through a google search, Mr Hood, you’ll see how impressed we are with your vigilance. And clearly, you won’t detect any irony, as you don’t recognise figures of speech.)

If imaginary figures can turn in their graves, there’s a man wearing a green hoodie rotating at mach 1 somewhere in the residual bit of Sherwood Forest.

Give the public what they want

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Nothing brings visitors here like a reference to Morris dancing. Which is borderline weird given (a) that I get mercilessly mocked (even by other blog contributors) for loving Morris dancing and (b) that I know very little about it and rarely get a chance to even see any.

One thing I do know about Morris dancing is that the old idea that it came from Morocco and/ or Spain (i.e “Moorish”) is widely agreed to be a fiction.

I’ve never been wholly convinced by the “fiction” viewpoint. Ok, the past is always fictionalised. But, people always moved around the accessible world, so any concepts of ancient cultural forms being somehow distinct is absurd.

So, I’m – partly just for the sake of argument – going to dispute the “not at all moorish” idea, here.

There’s plenty of archaeological evidence of trade with the Mediterranean before the Roman invasion. I can easily imagine pre-Roman Brits – let alone medieval villagers – being so impressed by the marvellous otherness of Phoenician traders that they recreated what they remembered, in their own idiom. After the crusades, there must have been many ex-soldiers who had absorbed a fair bit of North African culture in their travels.

Flowing white clothes, streaming coloured ribbons, male-only dancing, the ways in which percussion sounds are generated – it all seems pretty damn “North African” to me. Credit where it’s due, I think.

(Plus in your faces, BNP, with your ludicrous attempts to co-opt traditional English cultural forms into your racist project, as if English culture was somehow NOT formed through constant migrations and invasions.)

Here are some you-tube clips of North African men dancing in a way that could go on as Morris dancing without rehearsal.

Iraqi men dancing

Kurdish man dancing

And here’s an American Morris group, acquitting themselves well enough at the art to show that nationality doesn’t matter anyway.

Great minds thinking alike

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This may be a unique event, this blog and the Archbishop of Canterbury (oh, all right then, and millions of other people) speak with one voice. The idea that UK Christians are being persecuted is silly.

Rowan Williams (C of E Archbishop) expressed this so well that it bears repeating:

.. told a congregation at Canterbury Cathedral that “wooden-headed bureaucratic silliness” combined with a “well-meaning and completely misplaced anxiety about giving offence to non-Christians” should not be mistaken for persecution. (in the Guardian)(

Easter persecution show

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“Are Christians Being Persecuted?” on BBC1 tonight posed that ludicrous question. The description on the BBC site started with a contentious intro:

For years now, some town halls have been renaming their Christmas Lights as Winter Lights festivals. More and more Christians are ending up in court, defending themselves against what they see as victimisation for not being allowed to wear a cross to work or to pray for a patient.

It’s doubtful if “Winter Lights Festivals” are anything except an urban myth. But, anything is possible. Rebranding things on a random basis has somehow become compulsory in Britain. (For instance, the Department for Trade and Industry is on its third renaming in as many years. No one suggests that this means that Business is being persecuted.)

Ah ha, the programme has actually found a council that called its Christmas decorations “Winter Lights” one year (not “some town halls” and not “for years” then.) The council has now again rebranded the light switching-on procedure, as “Christmas in Autumn” or something.

Wny is the name given to street lights even remotely newsworthy?

Because of the media that feels no shame in trying to stir up controversy about nothing, maybe.

Or because of the activities of a tiny fringe group of extremists who are being quite successful in rebranding “Christianity” – redefining their religion in terms of items of jewelry and acts of bigotry. (At the same time, bringing into the UK fundy beliefs – like Intelligent Design – that mainstream UK Christians still laugh at.)

This was a truly annoying programme. It gave yet more credibility to the extreme wing of Christians, accepting their self-definition, so confusing the boundaries between them and the mainstream churches.

Although no member of the mainstream churches seems to have got into any dispute over wearing crosses, etc., any act of overzealous-personnel-management-madness directed against these people now gets seen as representing an attack on Christianity as a whole.

If you could bear to sit through the whole dull 60 minutes, the programme finally concluded that UK Christians aren’t actually being persecuted …… well, at least not compared to Christians in the Sudan. That almost defines “damning with faint praise.”