Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2006

  • Kingston Pigeon Cull

    The town of Kingston Upon Thames is troubled by the number of pigeons it has. The council proposed a cull of the pigeons, and this was duly reported in the local paper. The newspaper also has a web site, where readers can leave reactions to the stories. Many people reacted to this particular story in ways that become increasingly surreal. Go and read it for yourself.
     
    (hat tip to Alun, over at Archaeoastronomy for the link)

  • Terminus In Sight

    How will you react upon seeing your death come into view? It’s a question I’m often asking myself these days. I hope that I will be able to approach it with a similar reaction to Coboró’s father.

  • Solving The Cube

    Michel Gondry apparently solves the Rubik Cube using only his feet. Apparently? Well, Gondry is a film director, and there’s the clue of how this was done…

  • Garden Totem

    A tradition that we’ve had for at least the past ten years is to host a dinner party for friends in December. Last night, we had the first such Christmas dinner party in our new home. To mark the occasion, one of our friends presented us with a ceramic totem pole for the garden. Gerda Grashuis is a potter, and she makes these totems herself. Ours is personalised, with drawings and sentences etched into the clay, giving a flavour of our journey through life to reach this point in time and space.
     
    This morning, we selected the spot in the garden where we thought the totem should live, and Gerda and her partner Harich installed it for us.
     
    061217-1118-33 
     
    061217-1121-42 
     
    061217-1123-31 
     
    061217-1124-25 
     
    Gerda, thank you! We both think this is wonderful. We can sit at our breakfast table, look across the garden and see the totem in the wood, just peeping through the trees at us…
     

  • Table Scraps

    I’ve hung up a bird feeder and bags of nuts on the tree outside my study window. They’ve proved a great success with the local bird population, particularly the Coal Tits and Blue Tits. The Tits are also pretty messy feeders, scattering seed in all directions. This has proved a boon for other visitors to the garden, including this pheasant.
     
    061215-0928-28 

  • Grow Your Own Cowboy

    I’m sorry, I think my brain has just melted. Grow your own what? I’ve fallen through that rabbithole again…

  • Mind Your Language

    The current events in Ipswich are depressing enough, but what makes me want to fling a boot through the TV screen at the moment is the way it is being reported.
     
    Somebody in the BBC TV News department has had the slimy idea of having the TV News anchorman do his broadcast from outside the police headquarters every night. He’s backed up by TV news journalist Richard Bilton doing his best Uriah Heep impersonation giving reports that reek of false emotion in order to pump up the story.
     
    And the language that everyone uses… It degrades the women ("girls"), whilst simultaneously pumping up the perpetrator(s) into mythic proportions ("the ripper"). A couple of examples: "Prayers will be said at the weekend for the prostitutes and their familes" and the chief investigating officer who refers to the murdered women as "girls", but to the perpetrator(s) as "person or persons unknown". Italics mine. He also "pointed out that due to their transient lifestyles he could not be sure what most of them were wearing on the nights they vanished". That’s simply gratuitous. If I lived alone, and vanished one night, it would be unlikely that the police would be able to state with confidence what I was wearing on the night I vanished either, but I certainly don’t live a "transient lifestyle".
     
    Luckily, I’m not the only one who has noticed the use of language. Twisty, as usual, has her finger on the patriarchy’s pulse.

  • Political Fireworks

    Lovely Rita is up to her usual tricks, being at the centre of a political storm once again. I hope she resigns soon, but I fear that the malaise runs deeper than just her. She acts as a lightning rod for something dark and nasty in Dutch society.

  • The Five Rules of Blogging

    Jan Pronk states the five rules of blogging. He’s absolutely right. I don’t always live up to his excellent example. But then, I’m not in the situation that he is. I don’t have the courage or the ability.

  • Tired and Emotional

    I have to admit that I found much to smile about in this story. We are all human after all. I’m laughing with the Bishop, not at him. After all, who could resist this quote:
    "I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do."  
    Priceless.

  • Bah, Humbug!

    I am getting increasingly irritated about the so-called "War on Christmas". Luckily, the sainted Oliver Burkeman is on hand to dispense a dash of cold water against the fevered brows of zealots.
     
    I am reminded about a conversation I had recently with a friend in London. The children (6 year-old twins) of an ex-lover of his, Mohammed, treat my friend as their favourite uncle. They have been excitedly telling him about their forthcoming roles in the school’s nativity play. These are children of Muslim parents being educated in a mixed school where they acknowledge Ramadan, Diwali, and Christmas. That sort of education is to me much more preferable than what I see as the growing cancer of “Faith-based” schools, which seem to divide communities rather than integrate them. 

  • Living A Lie

    Following on from Ted Haggard’s fall from grace last month, it now emerges that another evangelical pastor in Denver has quit after revealing that he is gay. And while I confess to feeling a slight tinge of schadenfreude in the case of Haggard because of his virulent anti-gay rhetoric, the overwhelming feeling I have after reading the report on Reverend Barnes is sadness.
     
    • Sadness that this man has punished himself throughout his life for feelings that he cannot accept:
    "I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy… I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away".
    • Sadness over the pain that this non-acceptance has now brought about to his wife and family. 
    • Sadness that some of the nails in his self-imposed coffin were hammered in by his father:
    ‘In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a "fag" approached him. Barnes thought, "’Is that how you’d feel about me?’ It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed."’
    • Sadness that he remains trapped in a self-made cage, and one whose bars are continuing to be made afresh by his beliefs and the beliefs of the community in which he lives, and has, until recently, served:
    ‘Barnes described struggling with what he believes is the biblical teaching that homosexuality is an abomination. Over the years, he grew to accept that "this is my thorn in the flesh."’  
    I can’t help but feel that the sum total of human happiness would be a lot greater if people didn’t obsess over who sticks what in where. People are more than their genitals. Speaking of which, the Intelligent Designer wasn’t showing too much intelligence when s/he decided to put the entertainment complex in the middle of the sewage works…

  • Perfect Panto – Part Two

    I had an email from someone, who though he is half-British, says he remains bewildered by Panto.
     
    As I said in my previous entry, I’ve adored traditional pantomime since I was a child. I’m sure that part of that was implanted and heightened by the theatrical experience, and in my case, by the experience of the theatre itself. I grew up in a town that has one of the few surviving Victorian theatres that were designed by the architect Frank Matcham. The Gaiety Theatre in Douglas remains a marvel, and a beautiful example of Matcham’s art.
     
    Part of my childhood Christmas memories was going to the Gaiety to see a panto. While in those years, the Gaiety was ageing and looking shabby, I never seemed to notice that; to me it was simply magical, and sitting in the stalls or the balcony, yelling out "He’s behind you!" was wonderful, in the true sense of the word.
     
    I’m pleased to say that the Gaiety Theatre has been restored to its former glory. This web site dedicated to the theatre and its history is well worth visiting. Did you know, for example, that the theatre is probably the only theatre left in the world with a fully functioning Corsican Trap (watch the video!)? And the site also mentions the terrific book on the theatre written by Roy McMillan: A Full Circle. I have a copy of this in the library, and I can recommend it as a fine example of a book that celebrates the life and times of the Gaiety Theatre.

  • SETI@home

    SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). I’ve been running the SETI@home client on one of my computers at home for some years now. The team behind the experiment are on a fund-rasing drive at the moment. This morning, I received an email signed by Dan Werthimer (the Chief Scientist of SETI@home) and Arthur C. Clarke. An extract:
    SETI@home needs your help. The SETI@home team has accomplished much in the past 6 months. We have successfully deployed the "enhanced" version of SETI@home. The new seven beam data recorder has been installed at Arecibo (the world’s largest radio telescope) and is recording the data that will be analyzed in the next phase of SETI@home.
     
    But there is still far more to be done. We would like to be able to sift through the results returned by your computers in order to identify candidates more rapidly so we can re-observe them. This rapid response validation system would also give you the ability to see the results your computers have/has returned in more detail. To keep SETI@home operating for the next year, and to provide these new capabilities, will require approximately $540,000. Currently SETI@home is entirely funded by donations from people like you.  
    If you’d like to help (either by running the client on your own computer to help analyse the data, or by donating), then go to the SETI@home  site to learn more. 

  • Perfect Panto

    To anyone who doesn’t hail from Britain, pantomime must seem as a peculiar artform. A stage show where the leading man is always played by a woman with legs up to her armpits, who is much given to slapping her thighs, to the pantomime dame – always played by a man who at some point in the show simply has to reveal that s/he is wearing about twenty set of undergarments.
     
    I simply loved going to pantos as a small child, and even now adore the atmosphere of a good traditional panto. Simon Callow writes a great piece in today’s Guardian that celebrates the artform. Long may it continue.

  • A Well-Deserved Fisking

    J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts, delivers a well-deserved fisking to an opinion piece written by Ziauddin Sardar. I read the piece by Sardar in the Guardian, and thought it was bizarre. The byline to the article was, I kid you not, "Amis, Rushdie and McEwan are using their celebrity status to push a neocon agenda", which instantly made me think that I had fallen down some sort of intellectual rabbithole.
     
    Luckily, J. Carter Wood is at hand to helpfully point out that it’s not me. Sardar’s article is even more bizarre than I realised.
     
    And the really depressing thing? The Guardian states, at the end of Sardar’s article, that "Ziauddin Sardar has been appointed a commissioner of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights". Gawd help us. I have fallen down that rabbithole after all.

  • Living In The Unknown

    And talking once again about the Beyond Belief conference, here’s the snippet that perfectly illustrates for me the reason why I want to "live in the unknown". Ann Druyan’s response to Darren Schreiber is quiet, measured and moving.

  • Continuing the Discussion

    Following on from the Beyond Belief conference last month, it looks as some some of the participants have been continuing their discussion over at the Edge site. Worth stopping by and reading the contributions, I’d say. The sparring between Sam Harris and Scott Atran looks particularly good. I’ve now got a copy of Atran’s In Gods We Trust, but it’s currently sitting on an ever mounting pile of books to be read, I’m afraid. 

  • Eeeeuuuwwww!

    The French. Doncha just love them? They’ve given us paté de foie gras. They’ve given us Debussy, Ravel, Berlioz and Bizet. They’ve even given us the guillotine. And now they’ve given us the SpermCube. OK, now I’ve drawn the line.

  • Something Went Wrong…

    The results of this internet quiz are clearly not correct…