Damian Thompson is in a somewhat despairing mood at the moment. Can’t say I blame him.
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Poor Max
Max Gogarty is 19. Just about to start a gap year, and he’s off to India to discover himself. He’s also landed a job blogging about it in The Guardian. Fun, huh? Let Mr. Eugenides take up the story. Poor Max. I feel a smidgen of sympathy for him. Only a smidgen, though.Leave a comment
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Cretin
When I saw and heard President Bush justifying the use of torture and citing the families of the London 7/7 bombings as a rationale, I wondered how long it would be before Rachel responded. As I expected, she is not impressed. Bush is beyond contempt.Leave a comment
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Watch the Skies
Just a heads up to say that this week sees a lunar eclipse on Wednesday night. I’m hoping that the sky will be clear enough to see it. I’m also reading up on what I need to know in order to try and photograph it.Leave a comment
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A Vignette
It’s almost 14 years to the day since Derek Jarman died. His friend Howard Sooley pens a touching vignette of Jarman and his garden at Prospect Cottage in today’s Observer. Worth reading.Leave a comment
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Geek Toys
I’ve been somewhat distracted of late and neglecting my blogging. Nothing untoward. Part of it has been because of building work here at the farmhouse, part of it is because the garden is waking up unseasonably early from its winter sleep. But part of it is because I have acquired a new toy.
I’ve been longing to get a Tablet PC for some time now. Ever since I had the chance to play with the first Tablet PC that HP brought to the market back in 2003. Needless to say, that first model had limitations, but now with the latest generation of models I feel we are at the point where it’s worth my investing in a tablet for myself.
I’ve gone for the latest HP Tablet for the consumer market: the HP TX2000. This entry is being blogged on it using the handwriting recognition capabilities of windows Vista – which I have to say are quite scarily impressive, even with my appalling handwriting.
Thanks to its wireless capabilities I can now use the Tablet in the house and garden, and even listen to music that is being streamed from my music collection held on my Windows Home Server. At the moment I’m being serenaded by Cecilia Bartoli giving her all to Vivaldi. Bliss.
One response to “Geek Toys”
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[…] date, I’ve had an HP TX2000 convertible, a Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2, and currently I have a Lenovo ThinkPad 10 and a Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro […]
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Theatrical Experiences
Alastair Appleton writes of his visit to see the National Theatre’s production of the hour we knew nothing of each other. He thought it was wonderful, and his enthusiasm makes me sad that I no longer live in London with those cultural experiences just outside my door. But only for a moment. I can now take a different kind of pleasure from a walk in the countryside. It’s just outside my door.Leave a comment
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The Apocalypse Bus Tour
The Beeb’s been showing a series of quirky documentaries, each highlighting a slightly off-beat look at people: the Wonderland series. They’ve all been rather good, but last night’s episode: The End of the World Bus Tour was a particularly fine example. The documentary crew joined a group of nearly 50 Christian fundamentalists who were touring the Holy Land in a coach, clearly relishing the forthcoming apocalypse, and the fact that they would be whisked off to heaven by the Rapture. There’s a good review of the programme here.The filmmakers did not sneer at these deluded folk, but let them speak for themselves. And indeed, it was easy to feel compassion for some of them, who had clearly been damaged by life’s vicissitudes, and who had turned to a simple faith to bear them up. Not all of them though. I won’t readily forget the dead-eyed Hannah, a teenage student who seemed to take some pleasure in avowing to the film director that "we are all born evil", and that while she would be going to heaven, "you will burn in hell for all eternity". Hannah is apparently taking a number of courses of study, including photography, textile design and, astoundingly, critical thinking. The irony is, I feel sure, totally lost on her.3 responses to “The Apocalypse Bus Tour”
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Hi Geoff,
Saw this one too. It left me with a similar sort of impression I got from a documentary re the Westboro Baptist Church by Louis Theroux: you could even imagine liking some of these people on a personal level despite their crackpot ideas.
Cheers,
Jim -
Hi Jim, yes, I saw the Theroux programme as well. While some of the younger tribe might be approachable, Shirley scared the shirt out of me. Not someone who I ever could imagine warming to in the slightest degree.
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I second that.
Cheers,
Jim
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Below The Horizon
I’ve complained about the falling standards of Horizon before. It appears that what was once the Beeb’s proud flagship of its science reporting has in recent years been dumbed down to a level more suited to the audience of the Teletubbies, if that wasn’t an insult to babies everywhere. I did entertain some faint hopes that the programme seemed to have improved somewhat in the latest series. The programme fronted by physicist Dr. Brian Cox was interesting and thought-provoking. Probably because it let him do the talking.So I admit I had been lulled into a false sense of security when I started watching last night’s Horizon: How To Make Better Decisions. It began with the voiceover smugly stating: "You thought that deciding to watch this programme was a rational, logical decision made with free will" … "Congratulations about watching this programme, it might be the best decision you’ve ever made." On hearing this, my heart sank. This sounded like an ominous warning that the programme would prove to be a clunker. And so it came to pass; we were introduced to some irritating twit called Garth Sundem who fills pages with abstruse mathematical formulae in an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes about the decision-making process. I lasted about five minutes before I took a rational, logical decision of my own free will to turn the channel to something else. From Thomas Sutcliffe’s review of the programme in today’s Independent, I’d say that was the best decision I made last night. Tellingly, Sutcliffe ends his review with the damning observation that:There was a time when you couldn’t check up on Horizon’s contributors on Google in this way. There was also a time when you didn’t need to.Quite. Oh, and what did I end up watching in place of Horizon? Well it was the first episode of Phoo Action. Totally bizarre, but at least it didn’t take itself seriously, and had nice caricatures of the royal princes. It reminded me of an update for the Noughties of the old Sixties Batman TV series, and was none the worse for that.One response to “Below The Horizon”
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[…] here, my argument would not be because the programmes are reverential, but because they are bad. I’ve said in the past that Horizon has been simultaneously both dumbed-down and jazzed up by the programme makers to an […]
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The Turn of a Card
Diamond Geezer writes of his experience with business cards. It’s very like my own experience in the days when the organisation I worked for kept on reinventing itself (for no good reason that I could discern).Leave a comment
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Definition of an IDiot
I haven’t come across Rabbi Boteach before, but on this evidence he is not the sharpest pencil in the box.Leave a comment
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Petition
I signed a petition today. I find the very idea that Tony Blair might become President of Europe obscene in the extreme.Leave a comment
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Tatchell on Qaradawi
Peter Tatchell has an excellent opinion piece on the UK government’s decision to ban Muslim extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi from entering Britain. Tatchell sees it as "illiberal, unwarranted and unmerciful". I agree. We also both agree that Qaradawi is an intolerant hypocrite, but what better way to show up his true nature than to allow him to enter Britain for needed medical treatment? As Tatchell says,"Let’s hope his surgeon is a gay Israeli Jew – and that he performs a successful operation, so that Qaradawi is forced to acknowledge that he owes his life to a Jewish sodomite".Leave a comment
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Open Mouth…
…Change feet. It appears as though Dr. Williams is on a roll at the moment. I hope he comes to his senses soon.Update: I think Andrew Brown’s comment in The Guardian pretty much nails it:"Only if Islamic law can be reduced to a game played between consenting adults can it be acceptably enforced in this country; and that’s not, I think, how it is understood by its practitioners."Update 2: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown also has her doubts: What he wishes on us is an abomination. I can’t help but feel that she’s right.Leave a comment
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Ballard Interview
Over at Ballardian is a transcription of a recent interview of J. G. Ballard. Excellent stuff, which gives some fresh insights into what makes Ballard tick.Leave a comment
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Space Psychiatry
Vaughan, over at Mind Hacks, has an interesting piece on space psychiatry. The topic dates back to 1959, when a special issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry was devoted to it. Given the time, it was not surprising that one article:…discusses the possibilities of using psychological selection techniques for space crew and notes that it should exclude "the person with a history of constantly fighting and rebelling both against peers and authority figures, as well as those with pressing homosexual or other major neurotic conflicts."Thankfully, times change. Go and read the piece. It contains references to Stanislaw Lem (a favourite author of mine) and to another related piece in Wired.3 responses to “Space Psychiatry”
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You know your trouble? You’re just a bloody neurotic. Want a fight?
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Erm, no. And that’s the point 🙂
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Um, yes. indeed so….
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Offended?
I see that the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned an advert produced by a Christian group, The Christian Congress for Traditional Values (CCTV). The advert shows a photo of a traditional family – man, woman and two children, with the slogan: "Gay aim: abolish the family".The ASA said that the advert broke advertising rules on social responsibility, decency, matters of opinion and truthfulness, adding that "We concluded that the poster was likely to cause serious or widespread offence and might lead to anti-social behaviour." Oh dear, I’m not sure I want to be lumped in with the ever-growing group of people who take offense at the slightest thing. Frankly, the advert is pathetic, and a clear reflection of the stupidness of the organisation that produced it, but I don’t feel offended by it. I am more struck by the time-warped attitudes of the people who produced it. Clearly a bunch of god-bothering wankers.I note that the group "defended the poster, citing gay organisations’ manifesto documents from the 1970s which described the traditional family unit as working against homosexuality." From the 1970s?! Clearly they are stuck in a time warp. They are getting exercised over the old Gay Liberation Front manifesto produced in 1971, which was indeed a child of its time. But we’ve all grown up since then – or at least, some of us have. Earth to the CCTV: families come in all shapes and sizes. Get over it.2 responses to “Offended?”
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I’ve never been sure exactly how its meant to destroy or threaten ‘traditional’ families anyway, for what surely is a very obvious reason. Or maybe they still think, like the majority of Americans I meet online, that being gay is a choice – rather like taking up scuba diving or voting conservative, and that anyone – once give the option, will suddenly develop a hitherto unnoticed desire for their own sex and a penchant for being slandered and occasionally beaten up on the weekends. They also ignore the massive rate of divorce, domestic violence and single parent families that seem to be on the rise even without help from those not remotely interested in them in the first place.
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Gelert, rational thinking is never a strong point of folks such as the CCTV. I look at a gay male couple, who are friends of Martin, that have recently been awarded a Dutch honour similar to the UK Queen’s OBE for their 25 years of raising seven foster children, and then I look at people such as CCTV, and I think I *know* who is the poorer example of a good human being.
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Count Your Blessings
As I’ve said before, I feel very fortunate to be able to live in a society where I don’t have to live in fear because of who I am. Others are not so lucky. GayUganda has two posts up about a situation that is developing in Senegal. Read his first post, At Home, and then his second. Depressing.Update: 7 Feb 2008: the BBC reports that the Sengalese men have been freed. I hope that this is good news, but I also note the last sentence of the Beeb’s report:Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country and gay men and women remain socially marginalised.Not good.Leave a comment
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The Pearce Sisters
The Pearce sisters live a lonely life by the sea. Strange, scary, and oddly touching.One response to “The Pearce Sisters”
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Yes. Very strange. What a great site for animation films though. excellent.
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Geoff Coupe's Blog 
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