Glob-a-log

Now this is what I call an nicely old-fashioned, lazy Sunday afternoon news story. As traditional, in its way, as the old Sunday roast, with all the trimmings:

When an alligator was reported loose on the streets of Bristol, police and the RSPCA snapped into action. Roads were sealed off as they staked out the creature, which appeared to be lying in garden bushes with the remains of a bird in its jaws. After a tense 30-minute stand-off, emergency workers used a camera to zoom in on the reptile – and discovered that it was a stuffed toy. RSPCA chief inspector Richard Masling said:

“We thought it would be a captive caiman which had escaped or been abandoned, then killed and eaten a wild bird and was laying on the grass digesting it. Caiman are part of the alligator family and have very sharp teeth, so it was very important that the police and RSPCA took all the necessary safety precautions to protect ourselves and the public.

Well, RSPCA chief inspector Richard Masling is really doing his best to put some nice brave-faced spin on it but he and the rest of the authorities still come out looking like the sweetest collection of prats this side of Gordon Brown’s government.

Just look at the post-action photograph, for God’s sake…

Should it really take a 30-minute stand-off to realize that this famously sharp-toothed animal wasn’t big enough to swallow a bloody Barbie doll?

Never mind having to wait half an hour before one of the RSPCA crowd stopped trembling long enough to point the camera (on his mobile, no doubt) at the miniature monster in order to ascertain what it was made of.

I mean, who cares if the animal’s skin was fluffy toy material instead of the more natural future handbag variety? The poor beastie was still small enough to go splat the moment one of the those RSPCA clowns’ flat feet had decided to come down on it with the full force and vengeance of Her Majesty’s animal police.

Ah well, it’s nice to know that both Bristol’s police force and its RSPCA are always willing to take ‘all the necessary safety precautions to protect themselves and the public’ and that they are willing to take their bloody time too.

They may look extremely silly afterwards but if this had been London the caiman would undoubtedly have ended up with five bullets in the back of its head, like a certain Brazilian electrician did, some time ago.

So, maybe they are not such big prats after all, down there in Bristol.

(Jean Charles de Menezes)

First, let me digress a bit. It seems that the last few years, most all of the computer stories that made the international headlines were about (mostly British) government agencies losing sensitive data in increasingly silly ways.

One of the most famous IT mantras is ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ You could add another one to the list: ‘New Labour in, all laptops gone.’

Still, in the hands of even the marginally competent, computer technology can be an amazing and quite efficient instrument – as the following Brazilian story shows:

Middle-class families in Mexico are having tiny transmitters implanted under their skin so that satellites can track them if they are kidnapped. The crystal-encased chip, which is the size and shape of a grain of rice, is injected into clients’ bodies with a syringe. A transmitter in the chip sends radio signals to a device, carried by the client, with a global positioning system in it.

There seems to be a slight snag to this – unless the journalist writing the piece got his facts wrong: According to the article the chip sends the signal to something the potential kidnap victim must carry with him (or her.)

That seems a bit strange. What would stop any kidnappers who read the papers from stripping their victim, before moving said vic to a safe house? In that case the satellite would only be able to locate the place where the kidnap took place but not where the victim was taken.

Again, maybe the article wasn’t accurate. Maybe the satellite can keep track of the victim’s implant as well. I mean, if it couldn’t, why even bother with such an implant?

Anyway, enough about that.

(Jacqui “Throw away the key and the data” Smith)

Back to the more regular computer story – one about incompetence, arrogance and cronyism. So, yes, yet another company, commissioned by New Labour, fucks up – and then gets rewarded for it, of course, with another big, expensive and no doubt doomed project:

A firm which lost secret records on 84,000 prisoners has won £240million of Government contracts — including Labour’s ID card scheme. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith faced scathing criticism as the full scale of PA Consulting’s role in Whitehall was laid bare. The firm sparked a furore this week after losing a computer memory stick holding details of all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales. Confidential records on 43,000 of Britain’s most prolific criminals also vanished.

In other words, in Brazil they use computer chips to keep track of kidnap victims, while in England they lose computer sticks, losing track of the data of 84,000 prisoners. As they say, ‘It’s a different world, baby!’

This latest New Labour cuckoo cloud does come with a silver lining, though. Because as long as the Gordon Gang will be in charge, one can paraphrase Mark twain and state that rumours of Big Brother’s omnipotence have been greatly exaggerated.

(The usual Big Brother Balls-up)

It’s not true, of course, that politicians are too stupid to breathe – “And more’s the pity,” I can hear some saying already. Still, some of them are quite clever. Clever enough anway to realize that politicians, as a species, are desperately unpopular and, in fact, actively loathed and hated by probably more people than bother to vote in the elections.

Some of these politicians actually try to do something about this credibility gap, the likability canyon and lack-of-principle abyss.

Being politicians and, for the most, utterly useless and clueless prats, they tend to go about this in exactly the wrong way, only succeeding in making themselves even more despised in the process.

Dr Allison Fraser, of Sandwell Council, is a perfect case in point:

A council chief executive is attending a £5,000 self-awareness training course in Germany and Florida to learn to become “more likeable and able to like herself”. Dr Allison Fraser, who is in charge of Sandwell Council, signed up to attend the Avatar Professional Course. Avatar was established by Harry Palmer, a former missionary in the Church of Scientology. Dr Fraser has already taken a £2,400 course in Germany and is due to fly out to Florida in October for the remaining £2,500 worth of training.

She will be staying at the International Drive resort in Orlando, described in the brochure as one of the most “dynamic vacation destinations” in the world. Sandwell Council leader Bill Thomas says it represents “good value for money. It is certainly very important that she has access to these training courses,” he said. “This is considered to be one of the best course around.”

Normally, I would suggest that the last thing any politician needs is a course that will turn him or her into an even more insufferable, self-satisfied dick or dickette but, in this case, I do sincerely hope for Dr Fraser that her £5,000 self-awareness training course in Germany and Florida did succeed in teaching her how to like herself.

Because I can assure her that it certainly did not make the rest of us like her any better.

If you are a Royal, there are two things that you don’t want to see when you go visit a village fair or the opening of a new supermarket.

One is a number of madly grinning yokels putting finishing touches to a guillotine.

The other is a flock of madly grinning, kamikaze pigeons.

There’s not much you can do about guillotines and other Republican gadgets but modern medicine may have an answer to the pigeon problem:

Pigeons should be put on the pill to cut down the number of aerial bombardments blighting a town due to be visited by members of the Royal family, according to a councillor. His plan involves placing pellets laced with the chemical OvoControl P in rooftop feeders dotted around the town. OvoControl P interferes with egg development, and Mr Walden believes the use of the drug could halve the local pigeon population.

I’m not sure prince Charles would approve of pill popping pigeons, though. He isn’t much into any newfangled solutions to age-old problems.

It used to be that he just went after architects. I remember one very funny moment when he said, speaking to a gathering of architects, that Hitler merely destroyed parts of London – this in contrast to modern architects who tore down many of the city’s fine, old buildings in order to erect all these Godawful, high soaring, eyesoring, post-war buildings.

These days, the prince is fighting various GM windmills – which must come as a mighty relief to the architect guild. So, while you probably couldn’t call a pigeon on the Pill a properly genetically manipulated bird, I’m still pretty sure the prince would not look kindly on this procedure.

No reason to despair though. The councillor should just forget about modern contraceptive techniques and go for a more traditional form of bird control. Like they do – or used to do – in Canada; in Quebec’s Thetford, to be precise.

Just picture a pigeon instead of chicken, then lie back, close your eyes, ignore the howling of PETA protesters and think of (a pigeon poop free) England:

A controversial chicken slaughter betting game in Quebec has been cancelled, after an animal rights group contacted police. The “Thetford Chicken Massacre” organizer, Dr. Gaston Dorval, announced he won’t hold the event this year, after PETA publicly criticized the annual tradition. The Labour Day weekend event involves a game in which people bet on squares in a white grid drawn on the lawn. Chickens and turkeys are beheaded and set free on the grid. The square they die on wins the bet. The chickens are then barbecued.

(Jemima Kiss)

There are many reasons why I love online newspapers:

- They’re free
- They’re less unruly to handle while reading than their paper cousins
- You don’t have to go out and buy them (or wait for some lazy arse paperboy to deliver them)
- You can read the Washington Post in Outer Mongolia as easily as you can browse through the Prague Post in Quebec

What’s more, digital newspapers can give you (links to) content that their poor paper brothers & sisters could never dream of offering their readers.

One article in an online newspaper can link to other articles on the same subject, or to information about experts in that particular field, to encyclopedias, specialist dictionaries, maps, graphs & statistics, and God knows what else.

Online papers can also offer you links to millions of specialist sites, and to blogs, and to an innumerable amount of audio & video clips. In fact, some online papers even feature blogs that exclusively deal with all the various goodies that the internet has on offer.

One of those blogs – and one I really like – appears in the online Guardian. It’s by Jemima Kiss, and it has the rather prosaic name, ‘pda: the digital content blog’.

In today’s column Jemima asks “what’s hot in Viral Video world this week?” You can find her answer here – but I will leave you with the clip that she described as probably being her favourite Youtube animation to date: a Plasticine zombie movie called Chainsaw Maid.

Here it is. Enjoy:

(James McAvoy in ‘Gnomeo & Juliet’?)

I like James McAvoy. I have to admit that I haven’t seen him yet in either ‘Wanted’ or ‘Narnia’ but I was a big fan of the TV series ‘Shameless’, in which he was quite brilliant.

I have to say though that I will give his next movie a miss. I can’t think of anything more dreadful than a Shakespeare spoof, called Gnomeo and Juliet, set to Elton John songs – which is what McAvoy’s next project will be, if the Hollywood Reporter is right:

He reinvented himself as a buffed up action hero in Wanted. But James McAvoy clearly isn’t scared to return to the sort of territory he inhabited in a much earlier big screen role: Narnia’s Mr Tumnus the Faun. The Scottish actor is in talks to play a gnome in the Shakespeare spoof Gnomeo and Juliet, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film will be an all-CGI production, in which the former star of Shameless may play opposite Emily Blunt, in negotiations to co-star as Juliet. The movie looks set to be a vehicle for the songs of Elton John, whose Rocket Pictures has signed a deal with Miramax to collaborate on the project.

I find it truly hard to imagine anything more terrible that the sight of a gnome wooing some (pre)pubescent girl to the sound of one of Sir Elton’s bloody dirges – or it must be the sight of Ann Coulter giving John McCain a golden shower at the coming GOP convention, to Supertramp’s ‘It’s raining again’.

(Ann Coulter: Walking with dinosaur)

(Prague 1968)

Bear with me, while I open with a quite obscure bit of modern history:

On 25 August 1968, eight people met on Red Square in the center of Moscow, the capital of the former Soviet Union. In the heart of the Soviet monolith power, a few steps from the Kremlin, these people dared to criticize the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that took place four days earlier. Eventually, the demonstrators were beaten up and transferred to a police station.

“I realized that the price I would have to pay for these five minutes of freedom on Red Square will be a few years in prison,” poet Vadim Delaunay said in October 1968 during his final speech at court.

Yes, that was forty years ago, when the Soviet leaders and their tanks still ruled. Such a long time ago, yes? – and right now, of course, the world is only interested in Olympic stories; stories about medals, and about doping – and the rest of the world’s news will have to wait till all the athletes and all the cameras have left the Olympic village.

A new famine in Ethiopia, a plane crash in Spain? Well, they do get a mention, of course but then it’s back to Beijing, and to the triple jump, or the swimming pool, or whatever other sport that’s played by less than a millionth of a percent of the world’s population is on.

So, what about all those other news stories – for instance: Are those Russian tanks still in Georgia…? Well, yes, they are – but CNN is now doing some breaking news story about a horse that’s been tested positive. In other words, Russia timed its brutal invasion well.

Better than they did in 1968, perhaps, when their troops invaded Czechoslovakia and the West’s (be it impotent) lamentations rang loudly. This time, the world’s protests’ are slightly more muted – and the world’s press can’t be bothered much to report on it, since the invasion didn’t come with a finish line, a presentation of medals, or an interview with the proud new champion.

Still, the Russian leaders shouldn’t feel too smug about the success of their dirty little campaign. The attention span of the world’s press may be pathetically short but most people who’ve seen foreign tanks roll through their streets have much longer memories. As the following story in one of yesterday’s Czech papers show:

A majority of Czechs or 64 percent believe that it is not possible to forgive Russia its occupation of then Czechoslovakia 40 years ago, on August 21, 1968, according to a poll conducted last Tuesday. The remaining 36 percent of the polled said they would forgive Russia.

So, yes, right now Russia’s rulers might feel smug about this Georgian adventure and they may feel that they have shown the West that Russia still is a force to be reckoned with – but at what cost? For there might come a time that Russia will need the goodwill of at least some if its neighbours – and then its leaders may wish that the memory of invading tanks wasn’t as toxic or as long-lasting as Chernobyl’s nuclear ghost dust.

One can only hope for any future Russian government that really would need something from its neighbours, that enough people then not only remember the Russian tanks but also that one Russian poet, Vadim Delaunay, who told a Soviet court that going to jail was a price worth paying to protest the 1968 invasion.

And isn’t it strange, how some poems will still be read, long after any outrage they remember, long after each and everyone of those invading tanks will have rusted away:

A sudden silence in the midst of play

When I was seven years’ old,
I overheard my parents talking of the tanks;
the broken promises of spring,
the utter misery of things.
I didn’t understand of course;

I didn’t understand at all.

But I knew of death already.
Death was my favourite aunt,
who couldn’t come to birthdays anymore.
Death was a sudden silence in the midst of play.
This Prague thing was a sudden silence

in the midst of play.

Now I watch the children of this city
in the midst of play:
the seven years’ old who do not know,
that once Prague was
a sudden silence in the midst of play.

So good to see.

(Vadim Delaunay)

This just in from the scientific front:

Because of the way owners have selected smarter and more empathic dogs down the generations, these pets now appear to have a limited “theory of mind”, the capacity that enables us to understand the desires, motivations and intentions of others, New Scientist reports today.

I suppose it’s only logical that, when you’ve spent around 15.000 years with a person, you pick up some of the other’s idiosyncrasies. So, if the one doesn’t actually take up barking, the other might still develop a bit of an ‘I think, therefore I am‘ attitude.

It probably does tell us something about the relative learning potential of our two species that dogs seem to have learnt more from us than we did from them.

Which doesn’t mean that humans aren’t very clever, little monkeys – as the following story that appeared in today’s papers shows:

Small robots working in swarms have finally moved out of the laboratory and into the real world. That was the most significant feature of the Ministry of Defence’s Grand Challenge competition, held over the weekend. It’s an idea that is also being pursued by the US military. The advantages of a decentralised swarm have long been apparent to researchers. After all, it’s a strategy that has proven effective for ants, bees and other social insects for millions of years. However, until now, robot swarms have been experimental rather than practical.

The problem with our type of cleverness is, of course, that it so often translates into ever more ingenious ways of killing other humans.

I’m pretty sure that if dogs would spend yet another 15,000 years in our company, they still wouldn’t feel the urge to develop, let’s say, cluster bombs in the shape of juicy-looking bones. They’re much too intelligent for that kind of foolishness.

It is a pity, really, that in all the time we spent with our canine companions, not more of their practical and mostly decent attitudes rubbed off on us.

As it stands, we can only hope, that when our robots truly become intelligent, they will not also inherit our innate and very human viciousness.

Of course, I love the internet but, at times, it drives me absolutely crazy. So, I’m a big reader and I also want to know what my favourite writers are up to.

For instance, two writers, whose work I really love, are Dan Simmons and Neil Gaiman – and both of them are truly very generous with their time and really do try to keep in touch with their fans.

Dan Simmons has this website that I really like. There’s a forum where his fans can talk about all kinds of stuff and Simmons takes part in these discussions too. He has also written several essays on the craft of writing and he sends his fans regular, long ‘messages’, in which he discusses his work, parts of his (working) life and the world at large.

Neil Gaiman has this journal – and he writes in it on an almost daily basis. He also shares bits of his life with his readers and provides links to whatever catches his fancy.

All of that is great fun but… Yes, as I said, on occasion it drives me more than a little bit crazy.

In the old days, before the internet, it was almost impossible to keep up with (the lives of) your favourite authors. Occasionally, you would read an interview with them in a magazine – and you would only hear about new books when they came out, through the reviews. Or you would simply have to trust that your bookstore would get any new book by writers you admired.

Now, we can all know far in advance when a new book will come out – and, at times, that’s not good. In fact, it can be pretty damn bad. So, I have known for about a year now that the next book by Dan Simmons will be a historical novel about a short time in the life of Charles Dickens. That book won’t actually hit the shelves before January, 2009.

WHICH IS HIGHLY FRUSTRATING!

Same with the next Neil Gaiman projects. His fans have known for months now about his upcoming ‘The Graveyard Book’ – and the waiting has been very painful. Even worse, we’ve also known for a loooong time that there will be a Coraline movie, directed by the guy who gave us ‘The nightmare before Christmas’, Henry Selick.

For that movie we will have to wait too…

… till bloody February, 2009!

Thanks to the internet, the life of a fan can be very annoying indeed. Of, course, I love to spread the misery around a bit, so here’s the link to the Rotten Tomatoes site, which has five short Coraline clips that will make you drool and gnash your teeth in can’t-fucking-wait frustration.