Tim Minchin has a way with words. Brilliant stuff.
(hat tip to PZ Myers)
Update: Oh, and the verses are here.
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Subprimes Explained in PowerPoint
Following on from the John Bird/John Fortune explanation of the Credit Crunch, here’s an excellent explanation of Subprimes.(hat tip to Andy for the link)Leave a comment
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The Brothers Grimm
One of the things I like about Christmas is that there’s usually a veritable feast of films on the telly. Sometimes you can pluck out a plum, but it has to be said that many are simply turkeys.
Last night, the BBC gave us Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm. A definite plum as far as I was concerned. I’d not seen it before so I’m pleased to have rectified the omission. I have to say that I wasn’t instantly won over to the very American double act of Heath Ledger and Matt Damon as the eponymous Brothers, but as the story, and more to the point, the visuals unfolded, the more I was entranced. Gilliam has a remarkable talent for visuals, both striking and grotesquely funny. The scene of Red Riding Hood in the forest with the camera tracking was not only striking but magisterial. And scenes such as in the Duke’s torture chamber allow Gilliam to indulge his sense of the grotesque to the full.
But it’s when Gilliam pulls off one of his heart-stopping sequences that I see quite how brilliant he can be at his best. The sequence that begins with the raven drowning in the well and leading to the mud-child/gingerbread man absorbing Sasha, the young child in the village, was quite one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. Probably because it did push all the buttons that were implanted by the original tales that I read as a child. I’m certainly glad I didn’t see the film sequence when I was young – I’d probably have been really scarred for life.
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Save the World: Be Heterosexual
That seems to be the gist of the Pope’s Christmas message. On the one hand, I can understand that he is what he is, an old fool who has little understanding of what it is to be human, because his rational mind has been undone by his upbringing. But on the other hand, he is, for better or worse, the spiritual leader of millions, and his idiocy will be the cause of yet more totally needless angst.
By coincidence, one of the Christmas cards we received this season was from a family in which the mother was a former pupil in Martin’s ballet school. In the letter that accompanied it, she writes of the experience that the family is going through because one of her children is unsure of whether he is a boy or she is a girl. The family are doing what they can to support the child, and help him/her come to the best outcome.
The last thing that family needs is ill-considered hypocritical nonsense from an old fart who wears white dresses, red Prada shoes and expensive rings. If there is an abomination around here, it is him.
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The Credit Crunch Explained
John Bird and John Fortune with the best explanation of the Credit Crunch I’ve yet heard.Leave a comment
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Shouldn’t Happen To A Dog…
No comment – other than the fact that it speaks volumes about the owner.Leave a comment
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RIP, Adrian
Adrian Mitchell has died. Here he embodies one of his best-known poems – updated for modern times: To Whom It May Concern…And here’s Michael Rosen remembering the man.Leave a comment
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Human Homecare
Here in the Netherlands, there’s an annual award for the best TV commercial, which is voted for by the public. Usually, the winner is a commercial with humour, but this year, the winner was the commercial produced by the Dutch Socialist Party for its campaign for better homecare for the elderly. The commercial is startlingly simple, and probably quite shocking to many people. It also probably could not get screened in many countries.
It is exceedingly effective. Go and watch it here.
I am reminded about something that happened earlier this week. I had gone to Amsterdam by train to visit the bookshops. On the train from Arnhem to Utrecht, I overheard an elderly lady telling her friend the following story.
My brother is 80, and together with his wife, he lives in an old people’s home in The Hague. His wife is somewhat senile, so they have separate rooms. Recently, I went to visit him, and when I got to his room, I found the door shut and locked. That’s unusual, because his door is usually open, but I thought that perhaps he was visiting his wife. However, when I went to her room, I found her alone. I went back to his room, and as there was a cleaner in the corridor, I asked her where Mr. Hooft might be. “Mr Hooft?”, she replied, “He doesn’t live here anymore”.
Well, I was astonished, and went to the office. I asked the person there where Mr. Hooft was. “Mr. Hooft?”, she replied, “He doesn’t live here anymore”. “But, how is that possible?” I said, “What do you mean?” She reacted sharply to me: “And who might you be, madame?” “I’m his sister”, I replied, “What is going on here?”
Well, she then told me that he had had a fall, and been sent to hospital. While he was there, the home’s administrators decided that it would be better that he didn’t return there, and arranged for him to be put into another home in Voorburg. They didn’t tell anyone else in the family, not me, not my other brother who is supposed to be our contact point, they just went ahead and did it. So there I found him, stuck in another home in Voorburg, separated from his wife, and no-one knew or cared…
As Bette Davis once said: “Old Age is no place for sissies”. Your dignity is likely to be the first casualty.
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Feet of Clay
Well, it didn’t take long for the euphoria over Barack Obama to evaporate. His choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration is a slap in the face for many people. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…Leave a comment
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Parasites on the Brain
A couple more heart-warming stories from this wonderful world of Nature that we find ourselves in. First, the Puppet Master’s Medicine Chest and then, complete with video, a story about a tapeworm in a woman’s brain. Verily, the evolutionary landscape is wondrous to behold.Leave a comment
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Windows Live Wave 3
I see that the latest versions of the standalone applications (including Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Writer) have now been released. This download page is still currently describing the applications as “beta”, but the applications themselves seem to have dropped that moniker from their titles.
I’m pleased to see that at least one bug in Windows Live Photo Gallery that I reported to Microsoft over a year ago has finally been corrected.
I’m using Windows Live Writer to create this post, and one thing that I want to check is how it handles image metadata. While it’s very easy to use WLW to insert images into your blog, the previous version seemed to be stripping out image metadata, and therefore creating orphan works, which I think is a very bad idea. So, here’s a test image, which in the original has my copyright information and IPTC Coreinformation as metadata embedded in the file.
Once an image is published in my blog, it can be downloaded from there as well. Let’s see what has happened to the metadata…
Yep, all the metadata has been stripped out – copyright, creator, keywords – everything. That’s not good, in my opinion.
2 responses to “Windows Live Wave 3”
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I am one of the developers of Windows Live Writer. You are correct we don’t support this right now.Thank you for the feedback though!Also, keep in mind that if you publish a photo album using the new version of WLW it will save the metadata when it uploads the pictures that are part of the album.I’ll keep your feature request in mind as we move into planning for our next release.
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Brandon, thank you for your comment. I hope that you will support preservation of metadata in future releases. After all, WLPG does it – and for all resolutions, too – so similar behaviour from WLW would be more than welcome.
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Postcards Home
One of the careers that my father had was as a ship’s engineer. He began with the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company on the ships that crisscrossed the Irish Sea. The Island at that time (the 1920s) was a popular holiday destination, which meant that during the summer months, far more ships would be sailing than in the winter. At the end of the season, the junior engineers would work on the overhaul of the laid-up vessels. When the overhaul on a ship was completed, the men were paid off, and as my father wrote:
We walked round the town until the next vessel had her overhaul. This happened every year, and meant that over 100 men could be out of work for between 12 and 16 weeks. This did not appeal to me – I had seen too much of it, and I applied for a seagoing job with the Ellerman Line. I received a letter offering me a post as 4th Engineer on the City of Wellington from the Ellerman Line and this is what I really wanted because I would then begin to get my 18 months sailing time in before I could sit for my 2nd Class Marine Engineer’s Certificate.
I left Douglas on the 11th November 1925 and joined the City of Wellington on her maiden voyage round the world. Our first port of call was St. Johns, Nova Scotia, where during the war a munitions ship had blown up and destroyed the town.
From there, the ship (and dad) visited Boston, New York, Newport, Panama, Honolulu, Yokohama, Kobe, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Suez, Gibraltar and Rotterdam. Dad bought postcards when he had the chance. Some he would send home – usually to his younger brother, Doug – but others he kept for himself, to remind him of where he had been on this, and subsequent voyages. After his voyaging days were over, he put them in an album where they’ve been ever since. They are a wonderful record of places and peoples that in many cases have changed beyond recognition or even vanished completely.
Dad wrote of Yokohama:
The massive destruction of the town by the earthquake in 1923 was there to be seen, and I will always remember the forts at the entrance to the harbour and the large blocks of concrete tossed higgledy-piggledy about.
I love the fact that the publisher of this postcard has pasted in, not very convincingly, some ships in the foreground…
This is just a small selection of about 250 postcards. I think I’ll post a few more illustrating the places he visited in other voyages another time.
3 responses to “Postcards Home”
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Geoff, what a find! Thank you for sharing these – I look forward to seeing more. I’m also curious, what postcards he has that match up with places you’ve visited (and/or photographed) – a sort of "then and now" montage – is there much overlap?
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Mike – that’s a thought. But while there are a few places we’ve both visited (Boston, New York, Gibraltar, Tokyo, Malaysia, Rotterdam), there are only a couple of places that overlap with photographs, and unlikely to be any with actual locations that overlap. Still, I’ll take another look. I can, of course, take new photos in Rotterdam at the actual locations, and that’s a project I’ll definitely do next year. And if I ever win the lottery, I would definitely like to re-visit Japan, and track down the locations in his series of postcards from there.
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[…] got a pile of postcards and old photos that I inherited from my father. Many of the postcards he collected from places that he visited around the world, when he was a merchant seaman in the 1920s and 1930s. There are also lots of postcards of places […]
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What Makes Altruism Good?
A very interesting and thought-provoking post by the Barefoot Bum. Go read.Leave a comment
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A Sense of Perspective
As an atheist, I could imagine myself as a deist, but by no stretch of the imagination could I possibly imagine myself as a theist; certainly not with any of the mainstream flavours currently on offer. In a comment to a posting on Pharyngula about the latest example of religious brain rot, Emmet Caufield makes the following comment:What non-literal Christianity asks you to believe is that Yahweh sat on his hands and did fuck all for ~13.3 billion years, piddling about on the margins of physics to ensure the development of a bald ape with a big brain on an insignificant rock, orbiting a piddly star in an unremarkable galaxy, then 197,000 years later suddenly revealed himself to a small group of semi-literate desert goatherds in an obscure part of the Middle East, behaved like a complete prick for about a thousand years, then decided that he would incarnate himself as one of the bald apes and have himself tortured and nailed to a tree in order to appease himself for his own displeasure at the, entirely fictitious, landmark event of two particular apes using their genitals for their entirely natural evolved purpose. You believe this shit? It’s beneath ridiculous, a transparently preposterous concoction of primitive codswallop that any person claiming to be rational should be ashamed to believe.Christian theology is intellectual masturbation, the product of perverse attempts by weak-minded fools to continuously reshape the silly myth of ancient desert aborigines into something palatable to the modern moral zeitgeist, rather than throwing the whole mess of contemptible nonsense down the nearest toilet, where it belongs.Allegorical my hole. It’s asinine. The whole damn lot of it.I can appreciate the exasperation. Mythology can be high art, and useful as allegory, in the same way as fables and fairytales. Believing that it’s literally true is basically refusing to use that brain that you’ve ended up with through the process of evolution.Leave a comment
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Spoing!!!
That’s the sound of my irony meter exploding. I did warn you here and here that irony was at dangerous levels. However, the latest pronouncements by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor have pushed it beyond breaking point. Where to start? Well, as usual, Ophelia flenses his bollocks with her usual efficiency, so I’d advise you to go and read her answer to his statements.
Just to be clear, I’m perfectly happy for the Cardinal to carry on making his pronouncements. But he shouldn’t be surprised or “hurt” when we react in this way to his words. We’re not being unfriendly, we’re just calling them out for the self-serving, lying nonsense that they are.
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Advent Calendars and Nightmares
Over at Obscene Desserts, John Carter-Wood muses on the pleasures of Advent calendars, and, in particular, on the unfolding story that is contained within one that he purchased at his local supermarket. Do go and read about the adventures of Otto, who clearly is up to no good, and who, one suspects, is going to come to a sticky end.
John draws the parallel between these modern day toys-with-stories and with the Germanic tradition of the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter (in English translation known as Shockheaded Peter). I had both books as a child, and Struwwelpeter in particular scared the living bejeesus out of me.
When in 1999, I saw the junk opera Shockheaded Peter at a performance in Amsterdam, all the old feelings of being simultaneously both scared and exhilarated came flooding back. It’s a great shame that a video recording of the production was never made, it was a terrific production (in all senses).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOVSp-fYUQc
At least the music from the production is available on CD. Aurally, it’s just as strange and scary as the opera was visually…
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Irony Still At Dangerous Levels
Following on from recent pronouncements from Catholic abbots, I find that my irony meter is still on the borderline of exploding into millions of tiny fragments with this. I think it’s the claim that Islam is the "religion of peace, tolerance and compassion, that sanctifies the human soul, and whose universal message is one of mutual peaceful coexistence among all the peoples of the world, regardless of their ethnicities, race, religions or languages, and which calls for kind reasoning and dialogue with all their fellow human beings" that tips me and my irony meter over into a parallel universe…Leave a comment
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Swearing in Sign Language
If you remove one means of expression, the human brain will find another. Funnily enough, I find this uplifting.Leave a comment
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Body Swapping
Neurophilosophy has a terrific post on the research work being done on the sense that one’s body belongs to one’s self. It seems surprisingly easy to trick your senses into believing otherwise.Leave a comment
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