Eastbourne.  Saturday, August 18th, 2007 about 5pm.

Picture this: grey skies, grey and miserable sea, yet thousands of people are standing on Eastbourne sea front, glued to the spot staring skyward.  The Typhoon is flying a demonstration just out to sea for the Airbourne air show, and the things it is doing defy the imagination.  Tail stands; genuine 90 degree ballistic climbs; horizontal spins.  Jaw-dropping stuff, although I shouldn't actually be looking, as I'm driving, but it is impossible not to look.  I have seen the Eurofighter with my own eyes, and I'm still gob-smacked just thinking about it.

One question - why is it the push to destruction that produces the most beautiful technology?  I can't figure it out.

Tagged: Airbourne, Typhoon, Eurofighter

I am a Blueyonder internet customer.  That is to say, I was a Blueyonder internet customer, until Telewest was amalgamated with NTL to become NTL:Telewest, and then renamed Virgin Media.  They weren't perfect - one major deficiency being their refusal to allow me to self-install a modem in spite of the fact the cable has been laid in over 12 years ago, and their insistance that they can't install without their chimpanzee having a copy of Windows to sit in front of - but until the last week I thought their service was acceptable, at least.  Better than BT, who are a bunch of crooks.  I'd smugly sat here hearing the horror stories about NTL customer service in comparison, and felt reasonably happy with my choice.  Not any more.

Last Wednesday my 'phone lines died - completely dead; no dial tone; no crackle; no nothing.  Of course, I had no alternative but to call them up from another line - specifically a mobile.  "I must inform you, sir, that you are being charged 10 pence a minute, plus your standard connection charge for this call."  Since when did a faulty service become a profit centre?  17 minutes later (of largely waiting on hold, after jumping through silly hoops to satisfy the requirements of the chimp's script, in spite of the fact that it was quite clearly NOT my telephone equipment at fault, given that both lines had dies simultaneously) and "I'm sorry sir, I cannot fix this fault - it will have to be escalated to the engineering team".  No shit, Sherlock!  That, strangely enough was why I was calling to report the fault.  Three minutes later the lines were both working again, but not before I'd had to spend 5 quid plus talking to a monkey.

Today my unmetered dial-up service isn't working.  4632 packets transmitted, 17 received.  I'd say that's pretty much fucked.  But can I report it?  Can I bollocks.  Trying to 150 to talk to someone and simply report the fault, and every path I follow ends up with a recorded message or "please phone our technical help line on 0906 blah blah for only 50p a minute".  Yet again, they try to skin their customers to turn a service fault into a profit centre.  Whatever happened to customer service, and talking to someone to simply report a service fault?

In spite of my difficulties with BT, I may end up having to bite the bullet and go back, just so as I can rely on having a service, even if they are too shady for words.

Tagged: Virgin Media, Telewest, NTL, customer service, BT

I made a discovery this weekend.  Father Christmas is a myth.  No really, I mean it.

It seems Russian Christmas tradition is far closer to reality than the ours.  Somewhat to my surprise I am not at all uncommon in my disdain for most things Christmas (particularly the religious or overly commercial aspects).  Amongst most of the men I have encountered, either at the rock club, or just generally bumped into (quite literally) in the Christmas fray are pretty much "bah, humbug" about the whole thing, except where it provides a suitable excuse for a little more alcohol consumption or as fun for the children.  Save for the certainty that omitting to obtain a card and present for the wife/girlfriend is a sure route to World War 3 they generally couldn't care less.

The womenfolk, on the other hand, seem to be very largely in love with the whole shebang.  Decorations, and all things sparkly and pretty are a must.  Presents galore are a total necessity.

The conclusion is clear - Father Christmas is a complete fabrication.  Without his own family, or wife to consider he'd just sit back in the chair and let the seasonal carnage slip by from afar without a second thought.  Mother Christmas, on the other hand, would be running around skirts flapping, trying to get 16 dozen things done to make it all bright and cheerful.  So there you are - step aside Nick, Babushka coming through...

Tagged: Father Christmas, Babushka, men, humbug

eBay - that bastion of quality and value, and not at all the modern spiritual home snake oil salesmen and purveyors of over-priced junk - has shown its true colours, and the real reason behind its purchase in 2002 of the online payment "service" PayPal.  (Sneer quotes intentional - see sites such as paypalsucks.com for exactly why.) In an announcement today from eBay.ie terms for vendors pre-listing Sony PlayStation 3 units in Europe.  Amongst the terms - on threat of punitive action against the sellers in case of non-compliance - are that payment must only be made through the aforementioned PayPal.  The implication is that it is for the protection of the buyer, but this overlooks the very simple fact that credit card companies tend to offer purchase protection anyway, and that surely if the purchaser wants to take the risk upon themselves and use another payment method - well that's their right isn't it?

It's fairly typical business cynicism that eBay and PayPal should want to scalp the scalpers, in what is clearly going to be a short-term high-revenue market. It should not be at all surprising to anyone who remembers eBay's exploitation of a VAT ruling in Europe as a smoke-screen for increasing their own net fee revenue.  That eBay should be so blatant about the exploitation of this particular opportunity to drive business to PayPal is, however, a little disturbing.  That eBay are abusing their dominant market position (much as my favourite bane Micro$oft have in the past), to bolster another revenue source under their control should surely be attracting the scrutiny of monopoly control organisations throughout Europe.  As yet - although, granted, the announcement is only hours old - not a dicky bird from any of them.  If the pair get away with this, it will only encourage them to do it again, next time with broader reach.  Can anyone tell me, does Ireland have an equivalent of the British Monopolies Commission?

Tagged: eBay, PayPal, PS3, commercial cynicism

Joy!  It's the day before All Saints Day (or All Hallows' Day, and hence the eve of All Hallows, or as it is best known to us, Hallowe'en.)  It seems strange that in current times more attention is paid to the day before the Day, than to the festival itself.  But then that's modern times for you.  For some people it is to all intents and purposes Happy Pagan Day, although frankly most modern pagans only seem to exist as a deliberate antithesis to the Christian church, rather than as something they can point to as a specific philosophy.  Ask 10 different pagans what it means to them and you'll get 10 different answers, mostly revolving around rants against the church.  They'll come out with common principles such as "while it hurt none, do what thou whilst", but that basic philosphy can be found all over the place (not least in Jesus's "do as you would be done by").  I have nothing against pagans - indeed my own girlfriend is one - but paganism itself seems to be somewhat nebulous and ill-defined.

Of course, that's not too surprising if there are those who want to proclaim Hallowe'en.  The church learnt the lesson of its forbear, the Roman Empire, that a people are more easily subjugated if their culture and lifestyle are assimilated rather than oppressed.  So they gave the Celtic and Saxon people the pastorally sanctoned feast of All Saints, in replacement for their traditions of Samhain and the Festival of the Dead.  After gently explaining that all this communing with the dead was no less than conjuring with dark forces and fraternising with the servants of Satan himself.  It was nothing of the sort, in Celtic and Saxon tradition, but they were handed them the Saints to pray to as an alternative, nevertheless.  "It's alright", they said, "you can carry on feasting and making merry, just as long as you do it in the name of Christianity."  Now the wheel is turning full circle, and whilst the church's traditional power is waning in this modern day the day it decried is being hailed once more, almost in mockery.

It is, of course, the Christian idea that Hallowe'en is bedevilled (literally) by mischievous and vexatious imps and demons that directly gives rise to the American tradition of Trick or Treat.  For anyone who doesn't know, the principle behind the tradition is that a caller in seasonal disguise (originally as one of Satans minions, but these days pretty much anything which passes as fancy dress), and therefore nominally afforded the protection of anonimity, calls at the door claiming goodies.  Should the caller be refused the householder is at peril of some malicious prank (egging the front door; rubbish bins overturned; that sort of thing) in emulation of the wicked spirits.  In truth it is nothing short of demanding goods with menaces, but somehow this gets overlooked.  It's little wonder that this tradition should have arisen in America where, it seems from the outside, the general social philosophy is "everyone for themself and grab what you can".

Seeing the notice I have up on my front door warning Trick or Treaters this not being America, my neighbour asked "where's your holiday spirit?"  She has, of course, missed the point.  It is a sad comment on British society that the practice has become commonly accepted here in the last 10 years or so.  I remember going to Hallowe'en parties, when I was a child, where the indulgence was in fun social games and pastimes of our own making.  We had our own traditional Hallowe'en foods and decorations.  Now it seems that the retail industry has cottoned onto this blooming market and, not content with already having commercialised Christmas almost beyond recognition of its roots, is busily pushing the acceptance of the more material Hallowe'en ways of our Atlantic cousins.  Black and orange streamers and decorations are a must.  Completely inedible Indian corn hangings, imported thousands of miles purely for show, are quite normal.  And of course barrels and barrels of sweets to hand to the pint-size blackmailers calling at the front door.  It seems Hallowe'en these days is almost as important as Christmas in the stores, with aisles and aisles of stock just for this so-called "holiday".  (That's another Americanism - to them it marks the beginning of the "holiday season" because they have in fairly quick succession Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.  Of course in literal terms Hallowe'en isn't a holiday - holy day - but quite the opposite.  It's the day following which is holy - at least according to the church.)

Tagged: halloween, samhain, trick or treat, commercialism

Fresh in from the BBC: "A senior executive at Microsoft says that its new operating system, Vista, will be its most secure yet."

Given the (lack of) security and integrity inherent in all previous Windoze products, that's not actually saying a whole heck of a lot.

Tagged: news, Microsoft, security, comedy

Only in America would an art teacher be suspended until the end of her teaching contract for exposing the pupils in her charge to art.  Or at least you'd hope so.  The trouble here is the nature of modern democracy, and the need for voter appeal.

In a nutshell what happened was this - teacher takes children on a field trip to an established art museum (with active parental consent) to expose them to some realart works; child catches sight of a naked statue; parent (who gave consent for child to visit museum) writes to complain; school board hearing the complaint rules in favour of parent leading to suspension of the teacher.  Just where is the logic, when a teacher doing their job is disciplined for it, particularly when the parent in question must have given permission in the first place?  And furthermore, where is the problem anyway, with naked statuary?  It's not like the teacher took the kids to some seedy club to watch cavorting naked dancing girls.  Are we not just a little bit past the point of finding the human form, and especially the idealised version usually seen in art, offensive?  The irony is that this has taken place in the city of San Francisco - famed world over for its laid back attitude, particularly to sex and sexuality.

The trouble with democracy is that people who run things are always having to walk the path of least offence, which may not be the route to the greatest benefit.  Sadly, being a successful poitician is not about driving progress and competent practical social management it's about not getting sullied with issues that may offend pivotal minorities - the ones with enough of an agenda to create a noise and skew the voting population.  In order to maintain their petty fiefdom and get re-elected to the education board the semi-politicians who wield the authority have to pander to the repression of this ultra-conservative parent (and others like them) in order not to alienate the votes of the politicians and others in the chain of election that leads to their job security.  Democracy may be the best we have, but it sure as hell ain't perfect...

Tagged: news, politics, art, education

You Are Somewhat Machiavellian

You're not going to mow over everyone to get ahead... But you're also powerful enough to make things happen for yourself. You understand how the world works, even when it's an ugly place. You just don't get ugly yourself - unless you have to!

Tagged: blogthings, Machiavelli

Michael Schumacher is on the war-path, apparently issuing threats again.  With his past history, who can regard his statement that 'Ferrari are "charged up" and intent on helping him regain the Formula One title' as reported by the BBC as much more than a veiled threat of a "no holds barred" assault?

I loathe the man.  The guy makes my skin crawl.  He's utterly ruthless.  On track he has little or no regard for anything but his own success (an assertion borne out by the simple fact that even his own younger brother, Ralf, is not immune to bare-knuckle tactics if he happens cross his senior's path).  Call me a cynic if you like (you'd be right, after all), but I find his position on race safety to be utterly hollow.  The man has extraordinary driving precision, and always has had, and on that basis alone there is no-one in the field to touch him.  But on that basis it is also hard to see any of his major controversies as accidents, either.  He's just too good a driver to make the sort of mistakes he claims at such miraculously convenient times over the years.

In my view Schumacher is no sportsman.  He's a menace.  He's an arrogant shit, and there isn't an ounce of honour or grace within him.  He's a multi-millionaire arrogant shit, certainly, but success does not excuse behaviour.  All I can hope is that he gets his come-uppance, and soon.  Whilst I would never wish a person permanent harm, I would dearly love to see him spin off-track, and take his career permanently with him.  It would be no more than he deserves.  I saw promise in Juan Pablo Montoya in his early days, when he showed determination and focus sufficent to challenge Shumacher even in his very first race, and hints of untapped ability, but sadly his potential was never consistently realised.  And of course, if Montoya had had the ruthlessness to deal in the same shennanigans as Schumacher, it would have just been reducing the sport as a whole to that level, so perhaps it's just as well he never did.

Tagged: Formula 1, sportsmanship, Michael Schumacher

I bought a bag of carrots over the weekend.  Not particularly adventurous, you might say, and you'd be right.  I'm not for one moment claiming originality of thought here, but what's significant is what this bag of carrots reveals about our modern society.  You see they were cheap budget carrots, they have to hang their heads in shame.  They were bought from a supermarket, and they've been clearly marked as "Class II".  And why do these benighted carrots deserve such ignominy?  Because they look like carrots, that's why.  They look just like the illustrations of carrots you got in your toddlers' A-Z reading books.  They're pointy with green sprouty tops.  And their biggest crime of all?  To be different sizes, and shapes - even bent.  They just didn't match up to the uniformly chunky orange cylinders that boast the vaunted status as "Class I" vegetables.

In this mad-cap industrialised society we are now so used to the regularity that mechanical manufacturing processes provide that even the products of nature are expected to conform to definite standards of regularity.  Who on Earth dictates that only carrots suitable as a penis substitute can be deemed first class produce?  A carrot's a damned carrot for heaven's sake.  They don't grow uniformly, and we have no need for them to do so.  The irony is these supposedly second class vegetables are probably the best tasting carrots I've bought from a supermarket for some time.

It may seem strange to be obsessing about a bag of carrots, and I suppose it is, but this fixation with uniformity and regularity as an indicator of quality extends into every facet of our lives these days.  Magazine photographs are air-brushed, because - hell - we can't have people looking like flawed and irregular human beings.  We're so conditioned to expect perfection in the form of uniformity that we're not even allowed to be satisfied with ourselves any more, unless we conform to the perfect model (which doesn't, in reality, exist).  It's positively absurd.  In striving to achieve perfection we're industrialising the true beauty - that of non-conformity, of individuality, imperfection even, right out of life.

Tagged: society, industrialisation, uniformity

A Lesson in Living

For Beverley Williams, 1960-2006

Yesterday is no longer ours to explore.
Tomorrow may not be ours to see.
But today... today is the adventure at hand.

Tagged: death, loss, tribute

I finally bought an Oyster card the other day.  (Actually, to be strictly accurate, you don't buy you pay a 3 quid deposit for the card, but to all intents and purposes I bought it.)  I don't like the damned things in principal.  In spite of assurances that the cards only store information for the purposes of determining fare charges, they are being used to track individual movements through the transport system (as admitted by the police on news media articles some months ago).  This to me is yet another step down the route of instating all of the infrastructure that could all so easily be abused by a corrupt government to run a police state and suppress disention instead of the nominal democracy we still have.  (Think I'm being paranoid?  Think what state Zimbabwe is in.  Then think how much worse it would be if since the formation of a democracy about 25 years ago the government had had the resources to slowy put in place all the surveillance we now endure as a normal part of our daily lives.  There'd be no opposition whatsoever, never mind the meagre dissent that manages to struggle through at present.  Now think how fast and loose our own "democratic" government has played it with the truth and how often they've tried to suppress inconvenient truths by force of civil suit or criminal law in the last few years, then tell me hand on heart you honestly think I'm just paranoid.)  Still - I digress, and that's quite possibly the basis for another article, another day.

Back to where I was.  I now have in my keeping an Oyster card.  An RF chip embedded in a standard credit sized plastic card.  Supposedly it's a convenient way to pre-pay for travel in the London area, and to never pay more than the minimum daily fare to cover your travel requirements without having to plan beforehand.  You hand your money over, the card is "credited" with the equivalent fare value, and credit is deducted as you travel.  You get on a bus, you pay a discounted single fare.  Another bus, another discounted single fare.  A third and you pay the difference between what has already been deducted and a discounted bus travel pass, because that's cheaper than three individual singles in total.  All subsequent bus journeys on the same day are free.  You get the picture.  It's supposed to apply to travel in the whole of London.  (To put it another way the transport companies get their mitts on more of your money long before you even think about setting foot on public transport often enough to need to spend it, but again I digress.)

Against my better judgement, I finally plumped for one of these horrid blue and white slivers of plastic, with convenience in mind.  Figuring that today would be a day for lots of errands, I might or might not have the chance to take a trip up to the West End, but using the Oyster would be convenient because if I did, I could avoid having to commit myelf to a daily travel pass before hand, using the card, save myself some time, and allow myself the flexibility to choose on the fly.  I couldn't have been more wrong.  What they don't make clear is that whilst you can buy a paper Travelcard which gives free reign to use any and all trains, buses or tube trains in Greater London, Oyster only works (pre-pay) on the buses and tubes.  If you want to take a trip into the centre from suburbia, you still have to buy a paper ticket to cover those journeys.  What's more - if you buy a return ticket (which only provides for a single train journey in each direction, not the unlimited use of a Travelcard) the combined cost with the deductions for tube and bus use will almost certainly come to more than the cost of the Travelcard.  Either that, or you fight your way on buses and tubes to make a journey which would take half as long on the train.  So - yet again, Uncle Ken has impelemented a policy which benefits everyone in the central region (relying only on bus and tube), whilst those of us living in the outer reaches get pissed on from a great height, and still have to pay for the privelege.  It makes me sick.  Almost as sick as rotten shell-fish.

So - it's American Independence Day (or, allowing for time zones it will be in another 5 hours or so).  The day when the USA celebrates their breakaway from an overbearing, politically meddlesome foreign regime intent on gathering their economic and material resources for its own benefit.

Just one question - when does the world get to celebrate independence from overbearing, politically meddlesome America?

Tagged: politics, America

I've been on MySpace (in a different guise altogether) for some time now, and I've come to the conclusion it has one very major flaw.  It is an ideal medium for hoaxers and time wasters to get their material circulated.  Even more than with their own private e-mail, people will cut, paste, and repost bulletins without very much thought for the consequences.  Chain letters get circulated as bulletins between friends and spread like wildfire.  Like chain letters only worse.  Recently a couple of bulletins have done the rounds flying the hysterical "animal rights" flag, and really stirred up emotions, but the observations about their distribution are as applicable to e-mail chain letters and other modes of distribution as they are to MySpace.

Ok, so yes there's a very nasty video going around.  I've had the bulletin, but I haven't actually seen the offending article, because I don't have the movie plugin activated.  But I've seen enough reactions to know exactly what's there - and guess what - I'm not too sorry I've missed out.  Why would I want to see it?

I notice that it's rather cynically being circulated "in support of the ASPCA" just to give it that extra bit of justification.  All well and good, except that there's bugger all the ASPCA can do about it.  Me being me, I just had to dig a little deeper into the source.

Every time someone watches the video, it doesn't come with the bulletin on MySpace, it has to be downloaded from an outside web site.  (Which happens to be true of any bulletin with a picture or sound or video embedded in it.)  And guess what - if you trace this video back to where it comes from, it's a porn site.

I don't have any problems with porn, per se - if people want to make it, and other people want to consume it it's not for me to stand in their way.  But all you people who've been merrily downloading this thing, before passing it along to upset all your pals, you've probably been giving a porn site the opportunity to harvest things like your e-mail address and identity from your browser, and quite possibly install pop-up exploits too.  I do have problems - big time - with the amount of waste being consumed by spammers and junk mailers 90% of whom seem to be porn merchants of one variety or another, and guess where they gather their e-mail data from...?  It's not rocket science.

As I said in my blog of April 6th - on MySpace, not here in MoaMM - (like anybody actually reads it), "If you really cared about anything you'd get off your arses and do something for real, instead of cutting and pasting worthless shit for your own self-satisfaction." Cutting and pasting ain't going to achieve Jack Shit, and sometimes it does more harm than good.

For your own good don't open, and out of consideration for the people you supposedly consider friends, don't pass this junk - or anything like it, that comes along in future - along.

It's St. George's day, England's patron saint.  I'm English, and i's my national day.  I'd much prefer that we had a secular national day, partly because I am not at all religious, but rather more because in these cosmopolitan times a significant proportion of the populace are not only not Catholic, but not christian of any denomination.  Many are active participants in other faiths altogether, and it puts religious and national identity at odds with one another.  It is unfortunate, but hardly surprising, that certain segments of the population live almost in cultural enclaves, where though born and living in England consider themselves some other identity than English.  Nevertheless, St. George's Day is what passes as my national day, and this is my national flag - St. George Cross.

Many people these days are reticent to fly the flag because it has been misappropriated, in England, by the right-wing so-called nationalist movements as a symbol of white supremacy and of racism.  Ordinary people fear that by displaying their national pride they could be interpreted as offering support to extremist interests.  I say they are putting the cart before the horse.  By abstaining they are allowing the misanthropic minority free reign to corrupt that symbol of nationality and claim sole ownership.  The only way to deny them that freedom is to dilute their power of suggestion by continuing to use the flag in its proper context.

I'm half Indian by blood, and I make no apologies for it.  It is a part of my heritage, and one that I am glad to have.  But I am also half English by blood.  I was born in England.  I am part of English society.  By any rational measure I am English through and through.  I am proud to be English.  For all its faults, I love this country.  Granted, historically speaking, the English don't have a marvellous track record given their sometimes oppressive colonial past.  We also have an undeserved reputation around the world for being curmudgeonly.  But the English can be charming and welcoming too, although we are generally not quite as quaintly eccentric as Hollywood would have you believe.  We're a multi-faceted bunch.  So yes, I am proud to be English.  And two fingers to anyone who would use national pride as the spearhead of racism.

Tagged: nationality, pride, racism, flags

I'm bored.  (I apologise for the crap HTML, but I cut and pasted, and didn't get too heavily into fixing the garbage that Blogthings generates.)

Your Fortune Is

Support bacteria -- it's the only culture some people have!

I'm a cynic.  It shouldn't come as anything of a surprise, or be for up discussion, particularly if one researches who the cynics were, and what they believed (another subject, for another time).  However, I've come to a conclusion that I find stretches even my cynical outlook.  In the general scheme of things it comes to very little, and is based on wholly subjective foundations.

One of the topics hot in the media for the last few years has been health, and how our life-style contributes over time to our own individual well-being.  Obvious concerns in recent decades have been, smoking, sugar intake, monosodium-glutamate, colourants, fat consumption.  Most recently salt levels in our food, and their link to coronary disease have been the topic of the day.  Lately, I have noticed - as I say, entirely subjectively - that salt levels in one particular supermarket chain's own-brand snacks seems to actually have risen, almost to unpalatable levels, and I can&spos;t help but wonder why in light of the current public concerns.  The answer came to me last night, in a flash of inspiration, and I find myself wondering at my own cynicism as a result: a few months down the line Sainsbury's (the chain in question) will drop the salt back to normal levels whilst trumpeting to the world, in a big marketing campaign exploiting the current bandwaggon, how they have reduced salt levels in their products by a whopping X per-cent.

For me it's a win/win conclusion.  If I'm right, clever me.  If I'm wrong I can take comfort in winding back a little on the cynicism.  But either way right now there is still too much salt in Sainsbury's own-brand snacks, although I only know this because I have been munching my way through far too many of them.  Time to get back to healthy eating.  There we are - another plus.

Woo Hoo!  The Crobar opened on a Sunday afternoon for the first time this afternoon.  Combine that with a precursor visit to the Devonshire Arms, and the Intrpeid Fox, and need I say more?  I don't go out drinking often but if I'm in the West End or Camden, they are the places I'm most comfortable.  Given that Sunday is the day I'm most often up in town, I can't help but be pleased.

A bit of silliness:

or How to wipe out three years worth of articles

Oh well.  You'd think I'd learn to take backups.  One of those jobs I always meant to "get around to" was create a backup cycle for the web pages, and in particluar Musings...

It's too late now, at least for the articles.  You'd think I'd learn not to tinker at 3 in the morning, too.  One overlooked missed keystroke, and I just wiped out every single article.  Some I just managed to retrieve from various alternate sources, but most are gone forever, unless I rewrite them - which in some cases would be impossible anyway, as I can't remember what I've written about.

When freedom of expression meets cultural mores

The Islamic interpretation of the commandment not to worship graven images means that they take a very strict line on what is acceptable.  Unlike most religious temples, any depictions of anything living (plant, animal, human or divine) are forbidden, in case they are mistaken for idols of worship.  But the prohibition goes beyond that.  Any depiction of either Allah or Mohammed is considered unacceptable irrespective of the circumstances, and a muslim is taught to find offence in such things.  Which is just what happened when a Danish newspaper commissioned and published a series of satirical cartoons a few months back.

I don't have a problem with that.  The right to choose to be offended is merely a facet of the right to free expression.  But it is a choice, and even were one to argue that point, how one responds to the offence most definitely is a matter of choice.

What does give me problems is the attempt by this ever increasing mob to impose their own mores on the rest of the world, especially when many of those same people feel perfectly at liberty to cause as much offence as they choose particularly in their derision of Jews and Christians, and their contempt for the non-muslim world.  Over the course of several months what began as a political issue of free speech in Denmark has escalated to international demonstrations, and physical attacks on one Danish embassy at the hands of agitants in the muslim world are deliberately spreading falsehoods and offering up counterfeit images, stirring up unrest for their own purposes.  What troubles me further still are the calls from the demonstrators in my own country to respond to offence with mortal violence.  But worst of all, the real thorn, is that Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, has criticised as irresponsible and inflammtory our own supposedly free media for republishing some of the cartoons in their coverage of the story.  That disgusts me.  Should I choose, I have every right - in a democratic society - to see what lies at the heart of this international uproar, and it is the purpose of the news media to inform.  I am dismayed that a figurehead of the government representing me is claiming that in order not to offend people who have a very restricted sense of freedom my own freedom to remain informed should be curtailed.  That just isn't on.  If anyone is being irresponsible it is politicians who would, like Straw, bend to threats of violence.  Incitement to hatred (racial, religious, whatever), to violence - and in particular, to murder - is quite clearly unacceptable.  The right to satirise, to explore and question, however is most definitely a cornerstone of freedom.  The two cannot be equated.  And yet here he is, a government minister pouring scorn on the press whilst placating the hoodlums who march the streets with their placards shout for blood to be spillt.  Something's truly arse about face.

Buskers - what the heck good are they?

If I were to plonk down an old ghetto blaster in the middle of a busy public subway, and start pumping out and singing along to some of my favourite music (such as Static X, American Headcharge, Korn, or Iron Butterfly) I'd be treated, quite rightly, with contempt and carted off by the local constabulary for creating a nuisance.  How come, then - and I ask this quite sincerely - when some drunkard sets up his mini Marshall-and starts his fiddle squealing, or some bint starts warbling away to the strains of Carmen on a tinny CD I'm supposed to walk by, smile sweetly, and donate a few coins for the privilege of having my eardrums assaulted?

Don't get me wrong - my musical tastes are far more wide-ranging than any of the examples given above, and my CD collection encompasses all of it and more.  I'm quite eclectic in my tastes.  I have nothing against Carmen.  I'm quite fond of Irish fiddle music.  But I want to hear them at a time of my choosing, when I'm in the appropriate mood.  I don't want to be confronted with someone else's insistent performance to a captive audience when all I'm trying to do is get from A to B with the least disruption or discomfort for myself or anyone else around me.  There's enough hustle and bustle in city life to keep us occupied, without having unwanted "entertainment" shoved down our lug-holes.

London Underground have a policy of overtly discouraging begging and donating to beggars, yet at the same time they collaborate with Carling brand lager to sponsor "licenced" buskers.  I simply cannot grasp the logic.  To be perfectly frank, provided they don't offer menaces, I find beggars to be far less of a nuisance or intrusion on a peaceful journey than buskers ever are.  At least beggars are honest.  At least they're not deluding themselves into believing that they're offering commuters some kind of "service" when all they're doing is, in truth, making the journey more uncomfortable for the majority.  And by and large they have the courtesy to say "please" and "thank you", and not to assault us with unavoidable noise in an enclosed space.

If I had to be confronted by someone, though, I'd prefer it to be an accredited Big Issue vendor.  Those guys I have nothing but sympathy for.

Ah, joy!  The unions are up to their shennanigans again, holding London Underground and travelling Londoners to ransom.  Having negotiated an agreement after striking over new working practices twelve months ago, they're now back in dispute, over the very same changes they agreed to back then.  Union talking heads on the media claim that the strike is about safety concerns over the implementation of the new rosters, and nothing whatsoever to do with job security or pay scales.

Question: If it's about safety, how come the practices were safe to agree to 12 months ago, but not now?  If (for instance) the events of July 7th last year are colouring their thinking, how come it has taken the unions this long to do something about raising the issue?  How come it had to wait until the New Year weekend for industrial action?  Call me a cynic if you like, but it's pretty obvious to me that the whole aim of the process was to inconvenience the public, screw yet more job concessions from management, whilst getting themselves a New Year off into the bargain.

Freedom of Expression - except where it counts

I don't know how I came to miss it, but I've only just read of the woman who was convicted on December 7th, under the provisions of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 for peacefully reading out the names of British servicemen killed in the latest Iraq conflict.  In that act, section 132 makes it an arrestable offence to stage a public demonstration within half a mile of the palace of Westminster without first seeking police permission.  It just so happens that the Cenotaph, where this "demonstration" was held, is within half a mile of Westminster.

There are just so many things wrong with this whole idea that I'm flabbergasted that that the thing ever got into law.  The Lords can happily spend years umming and ahhing over the topic of fox hunting, but when it comes to encroachment on the popular right to democratic expression of their views, where are the checks and balances then?  Where in the country is our right to demonstration most sacred if not in the faces of the politicians who make decisions in our name, supposedly for the benefit of all?  We don't live in a police state, although with the measures that they have been seeking of late, and David Blunkett was championing blindly (pun intended) the journey down that road may not be far off.  In the meantime, why on earth does the constabulary get to have a say in whose views may be expressed and whose not?

The whole absurdity of the situation is highlighted by the fact that section 132 was enacted to remove from sight a demonstrator camped on Parliament Square green since the Iraq war, providing severe embarrassment to the government.  As such it singularly failed, since the courts ruled (in simple terms) that as the demonstration pre-dated the Act its provisions do not apply, and the camp remains.  The government recoils with egg on their collective faces, and instead the Act is used to prosecute two individuals performing a performing a simple peaceful ceremony a short distance away.  And the daftest thing of all - this all came to light for me because organisers of a simple carol service, who intend to sing outside parliament as a demonstration of communal support and tolerance are warning those who choose to attend that they may risk arrest and prosecution.

What price democracy and freedom, now, when a public demonstration of one's principles is now defined in law as a Serious Crime?

One of my favourite e-comics, as listed on my main home page is Order of the Stick.  Recently there has been a running gag in a series of pages (starting with panel number 247) in which one of the characters has started speaking cryptographically following a traumatic experience.  The joke is that it actually is a genuine cipher, and not just random garbage, and to get the full impact of the humour, it needs to be decrypted.  It's a simple enough substitution cipher, but not everyone is able or can be bothered to crack these things.  For those people I present the substitution table for the first panel below.

You will note that there are 4 letters with no substitutions.  Unsurprisingly, the letters not yet represnted (because as yet, they have not yet appeared in the dialogue) are "j", "q", "x", and "z".  Statistically, these are the letters least likely to appear in any (English) text.

Epilogue

It turns out that the cryptogram is different for each panel.  You're on your own for the rest...

Having largely exhausted the sales potential of preying on women's insecurities about their appearance, the same cosmetic company has started aggressively targetting men.

Sure.  I'd react.  I'd boot the superficial cow out.  Life is difficult enough without pandering to some shallow bint's vanity-by-proxy.  I sure as hell wouldn't be wasting money on phony self-assurance products.  End of story.

Does this kind of crap, really sell things?  Is the buying public really that gullible?  I guess if this were someone else speaking, tt's at this point I'd be reminding them that the most commonly read newspaper in the UK is The Sun and that it really does seem to wield a fair amount of influence, so yeah, it's pretty much a given that they are.

For the second time, I find myself finishing an article with the phrase "worrying isn't it?".

A well known cosmetics company's tag line for their adverts is "because you're worth it".  Of course, what they mean is "because you feel inadequate without it", which is quite the reverse.  The whole point of cosmetics, and in particular those aimed specifically at hiding the outward evidence of the natural process of getting older, is hiding the self that one is embarrased to be (to some extent even from oneself).

Everyone has their flaws.  Everyone gets older.  Pretending otherwise (and it is only a pretence) is being dishonest both to oneself, and to everyone else.  Surely, then, anyone who truly has a sense of self worth (and is thus "worth it") has too much good sense to be worried about grey hair, or the the wrinkles that naturally go with age.

Earlier in the year I wrote (in the article "Challenging Stupidity") about my frustration with the increasing number of idiots who implement challenge/response e-mail filtering to mitigate the junk e-mail problem in their own (or their users') in-box(es). Of course that is only a recent development in the fight to treat the symptoms of junk mail whilst letting the spammers get away scot free to keep on peddling their services, and profiting from their immoral abuse of the infrastructure we all underwrite.

For reasons I simply cannot fathom, there seems to be an over-arching antipathy toward actually combatting the cause - the spammers themselves. When it all started in a decade ago 1995 in with sleazy American immigration lawyers posting an ad for their services to "enhance" the chances of success in that year's Green Card lottery, most people claimed it as a one-off, suggesting that the few who kicked up a fuss were making a mountain out of a mole-hill, advising them to move on. The majority simply didn't see the need to deal with the issue. The lawyers got rapped knuckles from their ISP, promised never to do it again. Then (sticking in very lawyerly fashion to the letter of their promise) promptly wrote a book about "Internet marketing" encouraging others to do it instead. Many did. So much for a one-off.

Then some bright spark hit on the idea of harvesting e-mail addresses from the newsgroups (which in those days were still largely accurate), and sending their junk in bulk e-mail runs. Again it was only a minority who complained at first. The popular response was that it was only an occasional junk mail, and "you do have a delete key, you know". What did it matter if there was a tiny fraction of junk mail around.

No matter how many sensible and honourable people there are, human nature dictates that there will be some who will exploit any advantage, and the cheapness of junk e-mail was just such an advantage. Those attitudes allowed spammers and their junk e-mail to flourish. As we all know, junk e-mail accounts for a staggering 90-odd per cent of all contemporary e-mail traffic. Belatedly, there have been frantic efforts to alleviate the problem. Filtering systems were created that first blindly, then intelligently, recognised the common aspects of junk mail consigning it to the virtual dustbin. The trouble is that such systems cannot afford to generate false positive detections which result in legitimate e-mail being discarded, and consequently have to be very specific in their detection. This was a chink that the spammers could exploit, once again, ultimately causing the problem to grow as the spammers introduced more and more extraneous junk into their e-mails in order to get their payload past the filters. The end result has been the vicious circle of "better mouse trap, smarter mouse".

With the partial failure of filtering other methods have been adopted. Of those the most aggravating - sorry, the second most aggravating (challenge/response filtering being the most aggravating) of these strategies is the blanket black-listing of pools of internet addresses. The assumption goes something like this: if you are using ISP X's service to connect through then you should be routing your outgoing e-mail through ISP X's outgoing mail relay; if you are using ISP Y's connection service then you should be routing mail through ISP Y's outgoing relay. That is all very well when you only use the services of one ISP, but what about those of us who use multiple ISPs and cannot be re-configuring their mail services every time they call up a different one? It used to be that e-mail transport operated in such a way that the sender started a message directly on it's way to the recipient. There is elegant (and efficient) simplicity in that, and without spammers there would have been no need to change it.

Surely the time has come to stop burying heads in the sand and to deal directly with the problem of spammers themselves. Every time an attempt is made to deal with the symptom, the spammers find a way around it. It is time to do what should have been done at the get go. Eradicate the problem at source. The spammers need to be cut off at the knees (figuratively speaking). Back-trace the spam to its source. Shut it down. Isolate the offending server. If an ISP chooses to continue supporting a spammer or provides them with a new home (turn "black hat" in the vernacular of spam hunters), isolate them entirely. The very nature of the Internet means that it isn't easy, and it requires broad agreement amongst the responsible ISPs to achieve a complete and total block, but it can be done. There is a risk of fragmenting the Internet into digital ghettos of the sleazy, but that has to be better than laying the inconvenience on the shoulders of the innocent victims. Deal with the miscreants directly, then legitimate users like me can get on with using the 'Net the way it was intended - with ease.

Well that was bass-ackwards!  I've just had to jump through hoops to get the Technorati claim to work.  The claim mechanism failed completely, until I backed up the first article, edited it, and put the claim code in there.  I'll lay odds the damned thing still won't work properly.  I have a hunch that it expects the whole article to be in the RSS feed, which is completely and utterly WRONG!  The description field should be just that - a description of the material the RSS listing points to.  What they should do is use the RSS feed to get an indication of the newest article and download that in its entirety for checking.  After all their instructions explicitly say to put the claim code in the body of a new article.

The URL registration is screwed, too.  There should be a trailing "/" on the pulication URL for this stream, but no matter how often I delete and re-enter the correction the claim the process insists on removing it, which means I now have to change the web server config to put it back again!  I do hate it when programmers (of which I am one myself) see fit to force their assumptions on users.

Oh, and Technorati have cocked up one last thing - the published title is actually "Musings of a Madman" - which they'd have right if they took it from the RSS feed, but no, they had to take it from the title of the first article instead.  I had to go through the whole claim rigamarole again, including yet another claim code and temporarily changing the title to get it right.  At least give the users the option to over-ride the deafult downloaded title, just in case you have got it wrong.  I guess that being the biggest in their field, just like Microsoft they don't actually have to get it right...

And the bugs keep mounting up...  No matter what you set the primary language for your blog to be, the value returns to default when you return to the configuration page.

Although Technorati appears to download all the individual articles in the blog, it only seems to index the terms in the RSS feed.  Try searching by terms only in the body of the article, and you get zip.

Looking on the bright side.  It only took me 6 days to work around Technorati's cluelessness...  It's all grist to the mill, and now I can feel smug about having beaten them.

This chilli doesn't come with with rice (unless it's the sushi)

Dateline:  22:00, Saturday, November 5th, 2005 - satellite town, middle England.

I'm not a cocktail person.  I'm very much a beer and whisk(e)y man.  (Or gin.  Or brandy.)  But we like chilli.  Chilli is good.  Not just good, but good.  (The emphasis here is all important.  Dónal knows all about emphasis.  He's also that rare animal - an Irishman who doesn't drink, so his appearance in an article concerning cocktails is hardly aposite.  He's also a computer bod who doesn't drink coffee.   That's just downright weird.   But he does know about emphasis.)   Anyhow, chilli is good.  So when a cocktail requires it it as an ingredient, it can't be altogether bad.  It has to be tried when you're stuck in a cocktail bar and floundering for something to drink.   So I tried one.   And I continued trying them.   After all, it would be irresponsible not to be sure.   They were good.   That was some months ago, at Henry Africa's in Bristol.

Come this weekend and a combined wedding anniversary/fireworks/cocktail party (and no, I'm not about to explain the conjunction) and it seems reasonable - nay, obligatory - to re-visit the experience.   Only one problem - we know the constituents, but not the formula.   Time to experiment.   Hey ho, it's a hard life, drinking in the name of progress.

What follows is the recipe for the perfect Voodoo Chile (no doubt named by some wag after the Jimi Hendrix song of the same name), garnered from extensive sacrifice in the name of research.  Actually I lie - it only took two attempts to get it dead on, but hey - there's no harm in milking the joke.

The Cocktail

Pre-requisites

• Bourbon whisky (Jack Daniels is the norm, although I reckon Jim Beam to be better).
• Triple Sec
• Ginger beer
• Angostura bitters
• Tabasco (hot)
• Cocktail shaker
• Crushed ice
• A glass (originally served in a martini glass, but we don't stand on ceremony here)

Shake, rattle and pour

1. Chill the glass with adequate crushed ice - do this first so it chills whilst mixing
2. Place one measure bourbon, half a measure of triple sec, and three or four drops of bitters in the shaker.
3. Add Tabasco according to preference, but even if your taste is stronger three drops is the limit, otherwise it will simply smother everything else.
4. Add crushed ice, close and shake
5. Open, add a generous double measure of ginger beer.
6. Empty the glass, and strain the drink into it.

Voilá!  The Voodoo Chile awaits you...  Enjoy.