| My noughties 1: Two zeroes, defaced to look like tits |
[12 Nov 2009|09:24am] |
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Momus doesn't think much of the blog The Noughties Were Shit, seeing it as symptomatic of 'English self-deprecation' and its attendant arrogance. After a quick scan of the blog, I reckon he's being a bit unfair. It's no secret that Momus would rather we all looked to places like Berlin for our culture and marvelled at low-rent, sub-Fluxus art made by moneyed American dropouts in jewfros. But when he lists the 10 albums that shifted most units in Britain in the 00s (every one an competently-marketed slab of flavourless musical tofu), he's expressing the same frustration with suffocating blandness and the invasion of corporate values into every last area of life as the writers of the Noughties blog. Momus' argument seems to be that, by forever criticising history, we are doomed to repeat it. However, I reckon pointing out why James Blunt or "Twilight" are so awful is as important as explaining why [the obscure thing that you like] is good. It's contrast, innit? Ignoring the crap isn't an option when it's impossible to move without being exposed to it. We can learn from criticism even when it's snarky, and it allows for a certain amount of catharsis and even bonding (hence the first four words in the title "Is it Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?" Ironically, being negative can have its positives.
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| Going Postal |
[29 Oct 2009|08:44pm] |
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It's a bit weird that the LRB seems to be the only publication allowing the posties' to give their side of the story (letter is a follow-up to this).
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| Indeed. |
[27 Oct 2009|07:36pm] |
"I've seen Roy Rodgers movies more nuanced than the official narrative of the goings-on in Yugoslavia."
I'm just posting this here as a note to myself.
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| Tw*tter |
[17 Aug 2009|01:52pm] |
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Wizened, sock-in-mouth meeja relic Janet Street-Porter sez Twitter users are "twats". Which is about as funny and original as saying, "that Janet Street Porter has weird teeth and a silly voice". Seeming to genuinely imagine she's the only person who's realised there's an insult word that sounds like 'tweet', JSP then gives some crap reasons as to why Twitter is rubbish. First she tells us that Twitter is a "middle-class badge of honour" ("middle class" as pejorative - POW!) and cherry-picks three example users - David Miniblair, Demi Moore and Stephen Fry. This ignores the fact that (and I'm limiting this to famous people) Vinnie Jones, Danny Dyer, Kerry Katona and Frankie Boyle all Twitter - or, for that matter, that the Queen and minor aristocrat Rankin' Dave Cameron have accounts too - "Twitter is so upper class". She starts the next paragraph the same way, by using "middle class" as a term of abuse, alongside "middle-aged" (Street-Porter is 62) and "work-weary wannabe trendies". JSP, of course, certainly isn't a "wannabe trendy" even though she namedrops column-inch-generating, middlebrow, faux-folk blowhard Bonnie Prince Billy in the next sentence. She doesn't think Twitter would be good place to read a review of his latest wax cylinder, y'see. Which is a strawman argument - people don't look to Twitter for record reviews any more than they would go shopping for a new sofa in Greggs. However, JSP is making the point that the 140-character limit leads to a "bastard lingo that's the ugly love-child of texting and abbreviations." This dig at text-speak would be the kind of unremarkable 'kids today, cuh' stuff she's probably paid by the word to produce on "Grumpy Old Women", except that her next, somewhat self-contradicting, argument is 'Twitter is rubbish because the kids aren't into it'. JSP quotes figures stating, "a whopping 64 per cent [of Twitter users] are between 25 and 54" (she doesn't mention that over 80% of users are still younger than her). However, the nature of Twitter, its increasing spam quotient, and the number of inactive accounts, make the picture slightly more complicated than that. What tends to happen with all social networking sties is that young people are early adopters who move on elsewhere quicker. Basically, JSP herself didn't get into Twitter early enough to be cool, so she's decided it's all rubbish. If she'd been on board back when you got email updates from the improbably-named 'Biz Stone', she'd be defending the likes of this vintage tweet as the vital, irrepressible spirit of 21st century Britain.
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| On folk heroes |
[11 Aug 2009|01:05pm] |
Does anyone think there would be the same public sympathy for thief and accessory to manslaughter Ronnie Biggs' if:
(a) he had been a sex offender, rather than a violent robber.
(b) he had been, say, black, or Pakistani.
"I think it's terrible the way they keep Mohammed Zaidi Sheikh locked up - that rape was 40-odd years ago now".
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| Kite marked |
[31 Jul 2009|10:46am] |
Another thing that's reminded me of how much I hate humanity:
When I saw this story ("Palestinian children turned out in big numbers on a beach in the northern Gaza Strip in an attempt to break the world record for kite flying") my FIRST thought was 'this will be used by pro-Israel bloggers as "proof" that Palestinians aren't oppressed'.
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| I haven't done a "if it wisnae for the union" post in a while... |
[28 Jul 2009|03:24pm] |
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So let's have a look at this BBC News article.
"Nearly half of 2,700 agency workers surveyed for the study got less holiday entitlement than permanent staff." Given that all agency staff receive the fewest paid holidays allowed by law, this translates as "over half of the places employing agency staff give their workers the statutory minimum holiday entitlement". If you work full-time, it's basically 20 days a year including bank holidays. "One in three said they earned less than directly employed staff for doing the same work" I once spent 6 months doing an £8.30 an hour job for £6 an hour. The UK is the only country in the EU15 where this is legal. "A spokesman for the Department for Business Innovation & Skills warned that the improved rights for temporary staff must not jeopardise the flexibility seen in the UK labour market." It's that "flexibility" to treat you like shit that gives Britain the longest working hours in the developed world combined with one of the lowest per-head productivity rates - right, commuters?
Of course, talking about employment rights is as fashionable as diarrhoea mascara, so I'll end by pointing out that £6 an hour can still buy you small amounts of whatever iShite the kids are into these days.
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| Degrees proof |
[21 Jul 2009|04:41pm] |
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If you've ever entertained the idea that proof reading might be fun - that it might involve lounging in an easy chair, engrossed in tasty slabs of hot new literary fiction, taking the occasional sip of tea and bite of custard cream without tearing your eyes away from the page, now and then sliding your large and geeky, but ultimately very sexy, glasses back up the bridge of your nose - you'll be disappointed to learn it isn't fun at all. Not unless you get warm and tingly adding the odd hyphen to stuff like this:
To assess the role of inputs of high-quality labile carbon associated with specific topographical features in fuelling high rates of benthic particle reworking and solute transport, promoting microbial mediated remineralisation and increased rates of benthic recycling of inorganic nutrients. There were pages and pages of this stuff. Honestly, I paid a fortune for that bloody laser eye surgery and I can feel it wearing off...
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| Everyone else is doing this |
[07 Jul 2009|01:18pm] |
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(1) Turn on your music player or computer
(2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode,
(3) Write down the first 30 songs that come up--song title and artist--NO editing/cheating, please. ... 1. The Shamen - Progen 91
2. Peaches - Stuff Me Up
3. Pram - Narwhal
4. Saint Etienne - People Get Real
5. Depeche Mode - Blasphemous Rumours
6. Rush - Limelight
7. Sparklehorse - Saturday
8. Kaiser Chiefs - What Did I Ever Give You
9. The Yummy Fur - Deathclub
10. The Smiths - The Headmaster Ritual
11. Kraftwerk - The Man Machine
12. The Shamen - Possible Worlds (!)
13. Long Fin Killie - How I Blew It With Houdini
14. The Auteurs - Future Generation
15. Nick Drake - The Thoughts Of Mary Jane
16. Burial - U Hurt Me
17. REM - Drive
18. Japan - Despair
19. The Shamen - Lightspan Soundwave (what!)
20. Long Fin Killie - Gold Swinger
21. The Korgis - Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime
22. The Stranglers - Cruel Garden
23. Captain Beefheart - Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles
24. Comus - Bitten
25. Aphex Twin - Come On You Slags
26. 808 State - Spanish Heart
27. Bizarre Inc - Playing With Knives
28. Momus - Last Of The Window Cleaners
29. Brian Eno & David Byrne - The Carrier
30. Craig Pulsar - The Things We Do I always have my mp3 player on random - I swear The Shamen hadn't come up at all for months. Ah well, at least it wasn't anything from "In Gorbachev We Trust". And no Fall, despite my having about 30 Fall albums on there. Overall, though, that selection isn't bad. There's more variety there than usual; it can go a whole day serving up nothing but Ladytron and Devo.
Other people are welcome to have a go. I'll be impressed to find out that you sometimes listen to Pere Ubu immediately followed by Freiheit.
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| Obligatory |
[26 Jun 2009|11:44am] |
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I think Michael Jackson was a fantastic singer (and dancer) and had some amazing songs. Obviously, he had serious mental health problems, which his position as a massive cash cow meant were undiagnosed and untreated. He jumped the shark majorly in the 90s ("what about the elephants?" indeed) and he became a weird recluse, a situation perhaps partially of his own making. Most pop legends become rubbish later; it's the nature of these things. You could argue that the news coverage of his death was excessive, but that's an argument against rolling news channels, not a reason to diss Jacko himself. Just a few days ago, the BBC gave an enormous amount of airtime to the election of a new speaker in the house of Commons, an event that, on that whole, won't make a huge difference to a lot of people (the Daily Mash summed up Bercow's election as "MAN YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF IS NOW THING YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT"). I presume the people making an enormous show out of being as dismissive and blasé as possible about it, taking great care to let everyone know that they don't care ("singer dies, so what?") and posting multiple blog entries or tweets just so everyone knows how not bovvered they are, have no more sophisticated motive than trying to look big and clever. How sad - affected shoulder shrugging makes you look like a bellend when you're 14; you've really no excuse as an adult. Ironically, in some cases, these are the same people who flooded the web with "oh noes!!!" on hearing that Steven Wells had died. Swells was a talented and inimitable writer, but hardly a household name (some people didn't spend their teens obsessing over indie bands, you know). Jackson, on the other hand, was one of the most famous people in the World, and his death was completely unexpected, so it's not that unreasonable to expect there to be a fair bit of coverage in the media. Related: Famous bender Uri Geller was interviewed last night about Jackson, and this led to some people informing the world that Geller is apparently some kind of illusionist and doesn't actually have ESP. To quote from an earlier post on this blog: "Professional skeptic James Randi has spent years telling the world that Uri Geller doesn't have psychic powers. WE KNOW, YOU TOOL. Do you think we're stupid? Any other mind-blowing revelations, you pompous old sack of shit? Are those not Bernie Clifton's real legs?" I'll be listening to some MJ later on today and I'll raise a glass to him - because I'm not a joyless, uncharitable arsehole.
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| Markets & Morals |
[14 Jun 2009|05:47pm] |
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This guy might be on to something: "Looking back over three decades of market triumphalism, the most fateful change was not an increase in the incidence of greed. It was the expansion of markets and of market values into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms."
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| What a bunch of 30Cs |
[28 May 2009|12:40pm] |
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I have no interest in homeopathy and other forms of alternative medicine. If people believe jars of water or inert oily stuff lessens the symptoms of their illness, good for them. Whatever works for you. As far as I understand it, alternative medicine works by the placebo effect, a well-established scientific phenomenon for which bags of evidence exists. The Guardian, in a bit of ill-conceived comment-whorage, decided to have a Q&A with London-based yoghurt-weaving herbalists Neil's Yard. NY were perhaps a little daft to agree to it, but they presumably thought that at least some of the questions would be about their commitment to recycling, ethical sourcing, etc. Instead, a smugswarm of Badscience-reader types descended immediately, decrying the herbal healers by posting staggering insights along the lines of 'homeopathic remedies aren't much use in cases of blunt trauma'. Take that, apothecary! Up the Enlightenment! After scrolling down the first page of comments, I actually found myself siding with Neil's Yard. In the same way that the Dawkins-fanboys are "culturally Christian" C of E atheists with no desire to create a genuinely godless system of morality, motivated solely by the prospect of point-scoring online and sticking it to some beardies, the Ben Goldacre dittoheads are generally scientifically illiterate smartarses motivated solely by the prospect of point-scoring online and sticking it to some beardies. While I've no time for crystal healing fetishists or 'smell to get well' types, there's nothing more likely to earn them my sympathy than reams of self-congratulatory high-fiving from uppity little berks who bang on about "control groups", "empirical evidence" and "peer review" despite having never so much as seen a scientific paper in their life, much less read one. Just as the Dawkinsians ignore the damage done by the universally-believed (but non-theist) religion of "the free market", preferring the easy target of God-botherers, the Science Nerds have little to say about the dodgy stuff done by Big Pharma (pathologising ordinary human behaviour for profit, or manipulating the results of those precious peer-reviewed studies), preferring the easy target of essential oil hawkers. There's nothing so depressing as seeing people imagining they're speaking truth to power as they nobly stand up for the establishment against the totalitarian tyranny of... a few harmless loons. Maybe I have a natural tendency to side with the underdog, or I'm just a born contrarian, but - bloody hell. The first page of comments included Mr Logic-esque gems like "sounds like classic regression to the mean" (italics in original) and "ah, the post hoc ergo propter hoc argument from anecdote." Can you imagine someone coming out with noxious I-think-you'll-find-ery like that in the pub? I'd want to slam a fire door shut on their head repeatedly. I'm reminded of the time The Lancet published a study by Johns Hopkins University (peer reviewed and all the rest of it), estimating the casualties produced by the invasion of Iraq at 650000, ten times what the ultra-conservative figures produced by the likes of Iraq Body Count were giving at that point. Supporters of the war, faced with having to defend civilian deaths an order of magnitude higher than they'd previously thought, suddenly became experts on epidemiology, and bawbags who'd always imagined those Tefal adverts were an accurate portrayal of scientists were suddenly crowing about "flawed methodology" and "main street bias". The shitstorm in a test tube culminated in the invention of the phrase "rhetorical inflation" and the assertion that The Lancet was an agent of Islamofascism. In other words, the rule seems to be - science is great when you can use it to piss hippies off, but it's totally rubbish when it discovers we killed loads of brown people.
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