I have to confess that I have never heard of him before Sir Sebastian Coe claimed that Morpogu was “the nation’s most popular children’s storyteller”. Er, really? Anyway, Mr. Morpogu has his own website, and I have to say that he sounds rather engaging.
Still, Wenlock and Mandeville? I think it’s going to be an uphill struggle – rather like the London Olympics themselves. The comments on the Guardian’s story do rather spell it out:
Obby:
I think I speak for everyone when I say: Jesus Fucking Christ
PaulBowen:
Because nothing says "Britain" like a creepy bipedal showerhead/penis thing with lobster claws.
DataHoover:
I have to get this off my chest: Doesn’t the new Olympic logo look like Lisa Simpson performing a sex act?
BBC TV is running a series of dramas under the theme of "Back to the 80s" at the moment. Last night, we had Abi Morgan’s Royal Wedding, a play set in a Welsh village on the day of Charles and Di’s wedding in 1981. It was superbly observed – even the colours were those of 1980s TV; too warm and sickly. The events at the village street party were intercut with footage from the actual TV coverage of the royal wedding with toe-curling results. Clearly, Charles was an idiot even back then and he hasn’t improved with age. Presiding over it all, like the ghost at the banquet, was the spirit of Thatcher, setting in motion the changes that would change British society forever.
A good post from Steve Zara. While I have qualms about why women should choose to wear the burqa, the answer is not to ban it. The answer is to make it as ludicrous as a codpiece, and that must emerge from the women themselves.
Damn. I’ve just found out that Antony Grey died on April 30th. He was a lifelong campaigner for gay rights – and was one of the major forces for law reform in the UK during the 1960s, leading to the 1967 act of Parliament.
He had been ill with leukemia for a long while but that didn’t stop him from commenting on current issues in his blog, Anticant’s Arena, which he wrote until his illness overtook him.
A bit of bad news from the UK elections: I see that Dr. Evan Harris has lost his seat in Oxford West and Abingdon to the Conservative Nicola Blackwood. It was close – he lost by 176 votes, but it still means that a voice of sanity has been lost from the UK Parliament. The Daily Mail will no doubt be pleased.
It looks as though the UK elections have not produced a decisive win for any party. Although the Conservatives made gains, it doesn’t seem to have been sufficient to give them a decisive majority. Those gains have all been in England. In Scotland, as far as I’m aware, they haven’t made any headway at all. I heard one of the TV pundits say this morning that when he asked Scots why they hadn’t voted Conservative, the majority of them said that they remembered what Margaret Thatcher had done to their country. Ah, the sensible Scots – would that the rest of the UK remembered their history.
Johann Hari gives us a soul-destroying view from the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham as to what it might be like to live in urban areas where the Conservatives control the local councils. If you’re rich, it won’t bother you, but for the rest of us it’s an awful warning, if you live in Britain.
Today, May 4th, is Remembrance Day in The Netherlands. Throughout the country, ceremonies are held to remember the dead of World War II and other conflicts. Chief amongst these is the ceremony that is held in Dam Square in Amsterdam, in the presence of the Dutch Royal Family, politicians and veterans.
Today’s affair was a telling example of how crowd hysteria can suddenly take hold. Of course, many people would probably be on edge following the incident in Apeldoorn in 2009 on the Queen’s Birthday.
The Remembrance ceremony revolves around the two-minute silence held at 8pm, when throughout the Netherlands, people stop. Today, in Dam Square, in the presence of the Dutch Royal Family, politicians, veterans and thousands of people, another incident occurred. Just before the end of the two-minute silence, the stillness in the Square was broken by the sound of a man shouting. People started to panic, and a stampede began:
It appears as though an Orthodox Jew had suddenly started declaiming into the silence; as a result another man nearby, dropped his suitcase (er, his suitcase?) at this, and the crowd panics. The Royal Family are whisked away, and chaos ensues.
To give the organisers credit, order is soon restored as it becomes clear that it was a false alarm. But it just goes to show how easily shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre can lead to panic.
At the impromptu press conference held a couple of hours later with the Amsterdam Mayor and Chief of Police, a journalist asked whether it was a good idea to let people carrying suitcases into the Square. And so it goes – let’s all get frightened over phantoms. Fortunately, the Police Chief had the good sense to defuse the question. Hopefully, sanity will continue to prevail.
Update: It seems as though the man who caused the panic is a 39 year-old Amsterdammer who is well known to the police because of his record of theft, possession and dealing of drugs and threatening violence. He wore a hat, long black coat and has a full beard and long sideburns – that’s why many took him to be an Orthodox Jew. An eyewitness said that he was talking to himself during the silence, and when he was asked to be quiet by bystanders, he suddenly threw his head back and screamed. A man nearby dropped the case he was carrying, and panic ensues in which 63 people were hurt. The Dutch word "koffer" was used to described the case, but this is literally a portmanteau word that can describe anything from a handbag up to a suitcase, which is why I thought it was the latter. But now I suspect, given the fact that the police described the contents as being personal documents, that the man was probably carrying a briefcase.
Gary Younge perfectly sums up my feelings about why I hate Tories:
I don’t have a phobia about Tories. That would suggest an irrational response. I hate them for a reason. For lots of reasons, actually. For the miners, apartheid, Bobby Sands, Greenham Common, selling council houses, Section 28, lining the pockets of the rich and hammering the poor – to name but a few. I hate them because they hate people I care about. As a young man Cameron looked out on the social carnage of pit closures and mass unemployment, looked at Margaret Thatcher’s government and thought, these are my people. When all the debating is done, that is really all I need to know.
Unfortunately, the Labour Party of today is not the Labour Party that Gary and I grew up with. Nu Labour is now the Labour pot calling the Tory kettle black. I suppose it’s inevitable that Cameron will be the next Prime Minister come the end of the week, but I could almost pray for a miracle, damn my atheistic soul… Give the Lib Dems a chance. They couldn’t be any worse than Nu Labour or the Tories, could they?
Charlie Brooker considers the personas of the three party leaders in advance of next week’s UK election. I particularly enjoyed his goring of David Cameron:
Cameron is 100% something. He isn’t even a man; more a texture-mapped character model. There’s a different kind of software at work here, some advanced alien technology projecting a passable simulation of affability; a straight-to-DVD retread of the Blair ascendancy re-enacted by androids. Like an ostensibly realistic human character in a state-of-the-art CGI cartoon, he’s almost convincing – assuming you can ignore the shrieking, cavernous lack of anything approaching a soul. Which you can’t.
The Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant, has a page in its weekly magazine devoted to photographs sent in by readers on a theme that is given in the previous week’s issue. Last week, the theme was “the view from your webcam”.
I thought I’d do an update on Steiner’s joke. So here is “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog – unless you use a webcam”
It didn’t get published… Oh well, there’s always another day…
I am not good at art. Therefore it is humbling to see how an artist creates an image that resonates. Here’s Derren Brown’s time-lapse portrait of Dame Judy Dench. Personally, I think it’s a stunning piece – almost, but not quite, a caricature.
Yet another opportunity for a Victor Meldrew moment today with the news that:
Wildlife documentary makers are infringing animals’ rights to privacy by filming their most private and intimate moments, according to a new study.
Footage of animals giving birth in their burrows or mating crosses an ethical line that film-makers should respect, according to Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies at the University of East Anglia.
Now, of course, this could be just the news media spinning what Dr. Mills has actually said. On the other hand, it would appear that he has form in making comments that make me want to bang my head against the wall…
Sometimes, I think that we just don’t see the power of the hidden persuaders. Here, for example, is a brilliant advert for John Lewis (a UK department store). It’s a great example of its type – pushing all sorts of emotional buttons – all designed to make us buy more stuff. Nobody is immune – even those who push our buttons to make us buy religious stuff. When push comes to shove, just stop and think about what you are doing…
2 responses to “A Warm Cuddly Feeling of Niceness”
As I say, it knows how to push those buttons. I still remember years ago seeing a similar sort of ‘aging’ advert that was very dark and which pushed all the fear emotions quite brilliantly. It was of a young couple who started out with a good life and a nice house, but over the years slipped down the financial and housing ladders and ended up as an elderly couple in a tent in a park on a dark and stormy night. It was an ad from a Dutch insurance company. That gave me goosebumps as well, but not in a good way.
As you know, it doesn’t take much to get me going on a Victor Meldrew rant. One thing that is practically guaranteed to do it is to hear someone speak with a rising inflection at the end, or even during, their sentences when it is not appropriate. I was brought up to learn that the rising inflection (or High Rising Terminal) is reserved exclusively for signalling the asking of a question or to mark uncertainty in speech, and to hear it used any other way is akin to the reaction I have to fingernails being scraped down a blackboard…
And when the rising inflection is coupled with adjectives such as "cool" or "awesome", then I have a tendency to become apopleptic. So, I present to you Dharmesh Mehta, Director of the Windows Live Team talking about the features on the upcoming version of Windows Live Messenger. The video is found on this page – it’s the one entitled Preview of the New Windows Live Messenger. I could hardly take in the meaning of what he was saying for the sound of my screaming. Watch out also for the excruciating banter between him and his colleague, who also drops the "Whatever" bomb…
4 responses to “Damn The Rising Inflection”
Kelly Holsten
Indeed. I could not agree more… It’s beyond painful. And my current preferred college radio station has a plethora of DJs that are all seemingly taught to use a rising inflection every four words or so, resulting in my will to throw self off 3rd floor balcony. I actually cant think of anything more painful when it’s accompanied by equally vapid subject matter. Sadly, a mention to the offending party brings nothing more than twice the Horror. Sadness pt II is that once you key in on this attribute it’s an order of magnitude more troubling. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if there will be a cure any time soon. It’s the 35 and under preferred method of oral communication when under the Hipster Spell.
Spare a thought Geoff, I predominately spend my days filming and editing Lawyers and accountants from City of London firms and they increasingly suffer from freaking RI – it DOES MY BLOODY HEAD IN. But can I say anything? can I hell – they’re my clients, my bread and butter, my mortgage repayment, my wife’s collection of shoes.
Damn, Guy Kewney has died. Only a couple of years older than me. His columns on the developments in IT and computing, particularly in the early days of the 1980s were the ones I trusted and enjoyed the most.
We wade through a sea of advertising these days. Waves of the stuff crash in via post, newspapers, email, TV and many other channels. Most of it is not targeted at us as individuals, but the percentage of advertising that has been created specifically because of our past purchasing history is rising all the time. Amazon, for example have done this for years.
So it’s something of a jolt when a company sends out what you think would be a perfect opportunity for targeted advertising and gets it massively wrong.
Yesterday, for example, I got an email from Geni, an online genealogy service that I happen to be a member of:
"This Mother’s Day, give that special mom in your life a truly unique gift: a beautiful, framed poster of her family tree.
Because your family tree is already on Geni, sending a poster is a snap. Personalize her poster with your choice of designs and colors. Each includes up to five generations of relatives, and can be shipped directly to her".
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
Leave a comment