Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2005

  • Beautiful Boxer

    Fascinating article in the Guardian today about Parinya Charoenphol. Her life story has been made into a film: Beautiful Boxer. While I personally find boxing and kickboxing loathsome sports, I do want to see the film. It documents Charoenphol’s journey from being a poor village boy overcoming his timidity to become a famous kickboxer – but only so that he could earn enough money for a sex change. Life is often stranger than fiction.

  • The Big Gay Read – Part 2

    OK, as promised, I went and checked the library. Further suggestions include:
     
    Pagan’s Father – Michael Arditti
    Easter – Michael Arditti
    Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall – Neil Bartlett
    Six of One – Rita Mae Brown
    Rubyfruit Jungle – Rita Mae Brown
    Father of Frankenstein – Christopher Bram
    Flesh and Blood – Michael Cunningham
    The Abomination – Paul Golding
    While England Sleeps – David Leavitt
    Brothers – Ted van Lieshout
    Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll – Paul Monette
    How Long Has This Been Going On? – Ethan Mordden
    Like People in History – Felice Picano
    Franny the Queen of Princetown – John Preston
    On Glory’s Course – James Purdy
    A Better Class of Blond – David Rees
    In the Eyes of Mr. Fury – Philip Ridley
    Aelred’s Sin – Lawrence Scott
    Time and Place – Alan Sheridan
    Drifters – Tom Wakefield
     
    Any others you’d like to suggest?
     
    Update: There’s going to be the inevitable web site for The Big Gay Read
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

  • Artifacts That Last

    My irony meter went into the red zone when I read this. However, I don’t think it applies to all examples of the genre. My collector editions of Physique Pictorial* are unlikely to last to the next (non-humanoid?) civilisation.
     
    * As Kenneth Horne used to claim: I bought it for the gardening section.

  • Skin Graft Farms?

    An interesting story in the Guardian today about a new experimental technique for treating burns. It uses skin that has been grown from an aborted foetus. If that strikes you as a gruesome idea, then go and read the full story. It makes a lot of sense, and if the technique pans out, may bring a new way of treating burn victims.
     
    It reminds me of the story behind HeLa cells, used in cancer research. They are cancer cells originally taken from a cancerous cervix in 1951 and cultured in vitro ever since. The resulting biomass of cells far exceeds the body mass of the woman from whom the biopsy was taken. HeLa stands for Henrietta Lacks, the woman in question. There’s a bittersweet article about Henrietta, her family, and the chain of events that led to HeLa cells. Well worth reading.

  • EU Newspeak

    Pick up a carton of eggs at your local shop or supermarket, and if you see the words "free-range", you might think that the hens who laid them were merrily scratching around in pasture.
     
    Wrong.
     
    A spokesperson for the European Commission said yesterday that hens in closed coops could also have their eggs labelled as "organic" and "free-range".
     
    The reason is that because of the fears of bird flu, the Netherlands has decreed that hens can no longer be let outside, but must be kept inside sheds at all times. And there just happens to be a get-out clause in the rules governing the labelling of eggs that allows for the egg producers to carry on labelling their eggs as free range as though nothing had changed if the veterinary authorities decree that hens must be kept indoors.
     
    Black = white
    Battery = Free-range
     
    Ain’t newspeak wonderful?

  • Catch-22

    Ophelia, over at ButterfliesAndWheels, puts her finger on why it’s really rather a good idea to keep the state separate from religion.

  • The Big Gay Read

    In 2003, the BBC launched a competition called The Big Read to find Britain’s favourite book. The result (no doubt influenced by Peter Jackson’s film, which was current at the time) was that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy won.
     
    Now, librarians in Manchester have had the bright idea of launching The Big Gay Read. The initial list of contenders has twenty books as hopeful contenders. Glancing down the list, I see that I’ve only managed to read seven*, but I also think I could propose a few more books to be added to the list. Watch this space – I’ll go and check the library. 
     
    * read so far:
    A Home at the End of the World Michael Cunningham
    Hallucinating Foucault Patricia Duncker
    Rough Music Patrick Gale
    The Line of Beauty Alan Hollingworth
    Tales of the City Armistead Maupin
    At Swim, Two Boys Jamie O’Neill
    Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Jeannette Winterson

  • Strank And Fisher

    It sounds somewhat like the name of a legal firm, but Ron Strank and Roger Fisher are two rather ordinary blokes who have been together for 45 years. Read their story here.

  • Naked Mole Rats

    Articles on naked mole rats remind me of London buses – you wait for ages without anything happening, and then a whole convoy turns up at once.
     
    First it was Afarensis, who referred to a story in Science Daily about naked mole rats. He returned to the subject the following day with a particularly scary picture of the beast in question.
     
    And now Carl Zimmer, over at the Loom, has weighed in with a typically fascinating post about the possible parallels between their evolution and our own.

  • The Sky at Night

    When I was growing up and started getting interested in Astronomy, I always tried to watch The Sky At Night – the BBC’s TV programme devoted to Astronomy. The monthly programme began in 1957 and has been going ever since, and it has always been presented by one of Britain’s great eccentrics: Sir Patrick Moore. I suspect that he’s going to pop his clogs before he will retire.
     
    I’ve just discovered that you can watch some of the Sky At Night programmes online. Terrific. Excuse me while I snuggle down in a comfy armchair with a cup of cocoa and choccy biccies just like I used to do as a boy when I watched it.
     
    Update: There’s a rumour that Sir Patrick has indeed announced his retirement…

  • Ambiguous Icons

    Duck and Cover lives – the US Department of Homeland Security has created another set of pointless icons. Luckily, we have a professor of semiotics on hand to decode their true meaning.
     
    (hat tip to Echidne)

  • Crossing The Line

    The BBC has got into the realms of online interactive fiction with Jamie Kane. The eponymous popstar – supposedly killed in a helicopter crash – is a fictional creation aimed at the same demographic as empty-headed pop fanzines: 14 to 18 year old girls. And while I think it’s a crime for the brains of 14 to 18 year old girls to be washed in this way, that’s a rant for another time.
     
    No, what’s triggered today’s rant is that I think that the BBC has overstepped the mark in creating the world of this fictitious popstar. Don’t get me wrong, I think these online interactive fictions can be a lot of fun – I remember the first time I came across the viral marketing for Speilberg’s A.I., which, from a seemingly innocuous web page for Dr. Jeanine Salla, turned into a hunt for the killers of Evan Chan via clues on web pages, emails, and even real locations. 
     
    So what has the BBC done? Well, in setting up the game story, they, or a company working on the game, have apparently created a page on Jamie Kane in Wikipedia. And that, I think, is going too far. As Boing-Boing reader Chris says:
    I’m a big fan of the BBC and public broadcasting in general, but I think they’ve crossed a line here. This is a Wikipedia entry for a made-up pop star that’s being used as part of some kind of viral marketing for one of their "new media opportunities". It pisses me off that an organisation paid for by the British public and supposedly working to a charter to provide quality entertainment feels justified in spamming up a genuinely useful internet resource in the name of PR.
    To which I can only say: "Hear, hear". What really sticks in my craw is the response to Chris apparently from a marketing droid freely admitting to using Wikipedia in this way:
    I can’t say who I am, but I do work at a company that uses Wikipedia as a key part of online marketing strategies. That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or "leaks" embedded in entries to test diffusion of information. Wikipedia is just a more transparent version of Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it (evil laugh).
    On the other side, I love it from an academia/sociological standpoint, and I don’t necessarily have a problem with it used as a viral marketing tool. After all, marketing is a form of information, with just a different end point in mind (consuming rather than learning).
    If that is indeed a genuine comment, then all I can say is: you utter bastard – I hope that you’re first up against the wall, come the revolution.
     
    Funny, really, the furore over the Beeb broadcasting Jerry Springer – The Opera  left me cold – I viewed it as a rant by religionists who lacked the wit to understand what the show was about. But this abuse of the principles of Wikipedia for me is something else entirely. It’s like spitting in the face of knowledge and learning, and that really gets to me.

  • Perseid Watching

    Well, I had some luck in attempting to watch the Perseid meteor shower last night. There was some cloud (see pictures) but fortunately it was interspersed with clear spells. There trouble is that, as you can see from the pictures, light pollution here in the Randstad is pretty awful, so it’s difficult to see any but the brightest stars. I had great difficulty in seeing the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye.
     
    I was attempting to photograph meteors, but despite taking over 100 shots, for every single one, the camera was pointing in the wrong place.
     
    There were metors every few minutes – one was quite spectacular, streaking across a quarter of the sky, and leaving a trail that was visible for a few seconds. There were also a few non-Perseid meteors, as well as the usual collection of planes and satellites. Mars, rising in the East, was also very prominent.
     
    So, all in all, not bad; but I would have liked to have captured a Perseid on film. 
     

    050812-2330-14

     

    050812-2334-57

     

  • The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

    It’s Friday, it’s movie night at home, so I decided I would put TCTTHWAHL on the DVD player. When I saw the disc in our local DVD shop, I thought, yes, it’s like drowning in rose-coloured acid, but at some point I want to see this film again.
     
    I remember when Martin and I first saw it in a small Art Cinema in Amsterdam. After the film ended, the lights came up, but at first, no-one moved. Finally, our row staggered to its feet, but even then there came no movement to exit the row. We stood there stupified for a few seconds until a quavering voice came from the end of the row: "sorry about this, but we can’t leave because the woman at the end of the row has fainted…" We all knew what she had just gone through and immediately sympathised.
     
    It is, as the Dutch version says on the cover: "een gruewelijk mooie film" – a gruesomely beautiful film. Visually, the colour palettes are extraordinary, and the actors magnificent. Whether it’s Michael Gambon spewing obscenties or the unbearable monologue of Helen Mirren on discovering her lover has been killed – the film is a brilliant work of high art.
     
     

  • A Eulogy for Robin Cook

  • MSN Weather

    Microsoft has released a rather nifty little add-on to their MSN Toolbar for Internet Explorer that shows you the weather for places of your choice.
     
    Mind you, like most weather forecasting, I’ve learned to take it with a pinch of salt. For example, according to the add-on, today we will be having a little light rain in Gouda, with current conditions being "mostly cloudy".
     
    Er, actually we’re currently sitting in the middle of a huge fucking thunderstorm that extends from horizon to horizon; the garden and the road outside are all but flooded, and the idea of being able to watch the Perseids tonight is further away than ever.

  • Europe Feels the Heat?

    Once again, I think I’m living in some parallel universe to the rest of the world. I keep on coming across news stories that talk about "Heatwaves" and "Droughts" in Europe. Here’s another one. As I write this, it’s pissing with rain outside my window (as it has been for most of the summer), and temperatures, apart from four days in June, have been more akin to winter than summer. Perhaps there’s a Netherlands somewhere else where everybody is sheltering from the noonday heat. It certainly ain’t where I am at the moment.

  • Egg Babies

    Perhaps it’s just me, but I find these things somewhat disturbing. I realise I’m supposed to go "oh, how cute, how simply adorable…" but try as I might, the closest I can come is eewww, take it away!
     
    Still it’s obviously a good business, one of these objects has just been sold for $338 on eBay.
     
    (hat tip to the Green Fairy)

  • Perseid Meteors Peak Tonight

    For some people, the "Glorious Twelfth" signifies the start of the season when they can blast the shit out of grouse with their shotguns. For me, however, it signifies the peak of the Perseids meteor shower. While we’ve been having abysmal weather recently, I can but hope that the cloud cover will not be 100% tonight as it has been for the past n months. If the night is clear, then I’ll be out there, watching the skies… 

  • Sir Tim Berners-Lee

    There’s a good profile of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the Guardian today. The profile fleshes out, and gives life to the man, rather than being just a dry recounting of facts like the Wikipedia entry.
     
    Sir Tim is of course the father of the World Wide Web. While the Internet itself has been around for 35 years, for 25 of those years it existed as a communications network hosting a number of different applications. Berners-Lee’s contribution was twofold:
    • to invent two killer ideas – the language that describes a web page (HTML) and the transfer protocol (HTTP) to allow access to the web page over the Internet.
    • to make these specifications freely available for anyone to use.

    It’s probably that last point that is the key to the incredible rise of the Web since the first page was put up on 6th August 1991. The specifications (HTML and HTTP) are "good enough" – in other words, they could have been better engineered. Indeed, Clay Shirky called HTTP and HTML "the Whoopee Cushion and the Joy Buzzer of the Internet". For example, there is nothing in the transfer protocol to help test for, and repair, broken links to web pages. How many times have you clicked on a link, only to find the page has disappeared?

    So the form of Hypertext that we have ended up with is by no means perfect, just good enough. There was an idea for a form of Hypertext that preceded the Web: Project Xanadu, proposed by Ted Nelson back in 1960. However, Xanadu has turned out to be the equivalent of the superior Betamax video format losing out in the market to the "good enough" VHS.