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Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The CBI's Plan For Scottish Industry - On Your Knees And Beg, Peasants
- Johnnie Walker whisky has been produced in Kilmarnock since 1820, and the factory employs seven hundred people in the town. It's consistently produced a healthy profit. This used to be come under the general umbrella term "industry".
- That's not good enough for Diageo though, who intend to close the factory and build luxury flats on the site, or "maximise their earning potential". They'll employ four hundred more people in Fife, but I'll wager they'll demand twice the graft for two thirds of the pay. This is called "increasing productivity".
- Diageo have agreed to hold off on this until they've looked at a government-backed plan to save the site. Basically, if the plan involves the taxpayer paying Diageo several million pounds, they'll be willing to reconsider. This is called "extortion", and it mirrors similar phenomena in America where firms regularly demand payoffs to stop them shipping jobs to China. The jobs are going to China sooner or later, but a megabucks payoff ensures it's later, i.e. after the politicians who agree the deal have left office.
I can't think of a better metaphor for the last thirty years of UK fuckyounomic policy than Diageo sinking their vampire fangs into the town of Kilmarnock, sucking every penny out of the place and then spitting thick wads of hard cash into the bank accounts of people who haven't lifted a finger to earn it. This is what I like to call "a massive transfer of wealth from low-income families to the very, very wealthy", or "cutting-edge business practice".
Now, I can deal with this kind of vicious economic gangsterism, since it's been the norm my entire life. What I can't deal with is the kind of obfuscatory nu-speak bullshit above.
See, if every Prime Minister since Thatcher had been elected on a platform of promises to put a massive percentage of the populace in direct competition for employment with Chinese slaves, I'd respect their democratic right to do so.
I could get with the program if Tom Friedman's leg-humping, panegyric tomes were titled You Just Paid Me To Lie To Your Face! and You're Fucked Because My Wife Needs Another Learjet.
And I could just about cope if the Centre for British Industry restricted itself to calling the people of Kilmarnock and Glasgow peasants, then ordering them to shut their insolent mouths, get on their knees and beg their mighty overlords for leniency. That would be infinitely preferable to their habit of issuing press releases warning threatened workers to keep quiet and take their imminent redundancy like men, lest they scare off the ever-skittish collossi of international investment.
Hell, I came into this world as clueless as I'm going to leave it, and I hold out no hope for the likes of Diageo's execs being whipped through the streets. I'd settle for a little more honesty and just a little less self-serving gibberish designed to disguise vice as virtue.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The Baddest Dog on Telly Turns 52
So overused a term is "genius" that, in this era of literary cliche, it should cause the reader to flinch at the inevitability of "troubled" popping up next to it, as if it had sprung from a very, very reliable toaster, probably German-made.
Yet it's near impossible to conjure a less hackneyed phrase that so neatly summarises the life and work of children's entertainer Sweep, although many have tried...
"Sweep (is) ...an artistic giant, blessed with an almost effortless, magisterial brilliance, but tragically cursed with a Herculean appetite for bones, drugs and pussy," was co-star Matthew Corbett's attempt.
"A televisual collossus with one paw upon the Olympian peak of light-entertainment nirvana and another plunged in the fetid sewers of his own personal Hades," was Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson's verdict. Writing in her 1998 work Sweep - The Lost Years, 1984-89, pseudonymous writer "A. Panda" was blunter, referring to the canine thespian as a "...goddamned sexual Tyrannosaurus".
Such glowing tributes offer little more than a glimpse into Sweep's long career in slapstick, sexual gymnastics and stolen sausages. They say little of his symbiotic connection with co-star Sooty; a relationship of intense, almost erotic friendship spotted with periodic fistfights and stained by several attempted mutilations.
Little could the public suspect that, only minutes before filming the now-legendary Sweep forgets where he buried his bone sketch - a heart-warming scene ending with the actor buried upside down with only his iconic red wellingtons waggling in the air - the vodka-crazed canine had flown in about his fellow performer with a knife between his teeth and murder in his heart.
And who can explain why even that infamous 1969 incident, in which Sweep was forced to publicly explain why his car was found in a deep river near his family retreat with a very beautiful and very dead stuffed elephant in the back seat, failed to tarnish his reputation?
It says much for the high esteem in which he is held by the public that, after long decades of drama, decadence and dishonour, Sweep is entrusted with the education and entertainment of the nation's children. As did their fathers and their grandfathers, so will a fresh generation grow up to the trill of Sweep's signature squeak.
No, even as he enters his fifty second year at the top of the children's TV tree, it seems that Sweep shall remain an enigma... A complex and vulnerable artist separated from his public by the twin ironies that have bedevilled his career - the fact that only Matthew can understand him, and that he is a glove-puppet.
Sir, I salute you.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Everyone In The Blogroll Excepted, Of Course
It may be difficult to tell now, but this was a comedy blog when it started - a fine idea thwarted by the fact that while entertaining, witty writing is hard work, complaining about things is easy... Appropriately, a no-brainer.
Which would pretty well summarise my thoughts on blogging in general, after a few years' experience. In terms of public acclaim, it seems to rank somewhere between pigeon-fancying and stealing women's underwear for sexual gratification; the kind of activity that logic dictates should be pursued solely by lurking, sexless freaks and pallid shut-ins with abnormal genitalia.
The form has its upside, allowing snarky, semi-literate smartarses like myself to put buckets on our heads and make like we're miniature Hunter Thompsons until the wife gets home and kicks off mental about the unwashed dishes. At its best, it's a knockabout club for sharp people with a talent for argument. At it's worst, it's a Comment Is Free pissfight about Israel-Palestine - about as edifying as a flock of half-spazzed, one-legged pigeons pecking each other to death over a pile of sick.
This is why stories along the lines of Newspapers in terminal decline tend to fill me with horror. The idea that blogs might become one of the world's primary news sources was popular when I started my own, and the prospect fills me with the same mind-numbing, gibbering dread now as it did then.
Make no mistake - the day that blogs become the primary news source for a plurality of the populace will be a cataclysm at the species level, like Spanish Flu or the Black Death.
If I believed what I read just on British blogs, I'd genuinely believe that the country was simultaneously powerless before a ravening horde of scimitar-wielding foreign invaders and seconds away from marching all minorities into death camps. I'd believe that democracy itself - an electorate voting in favour of public services and the necessary taxation to cover them - is a psychotic tyranny akin to Nazi Germany. I'd never set foot over my door for fear that I'd be instantly raped in the face by a gang of feral crackheads.
Some readers might point to intelligent, well-written blogs run by reasonable individuals, but frankly, pish and tush. British blogs run at roughly 5% sober budget analysis to 95% face-raping crackheads.
Never mind blogs as a primary news source, I'm struggling to think of a handful of bloggers who would merit even the fabled fifteen minutes of fame. That's particularly ironic, since the vast majority of them certainly deserve chemical castration, and that's being charitable.
Iain Dale's running his annual Blog Awards wankathon as we speak - I defy any reader to deny that the world would be a richer, more rewarding and more just place if each of the top ten writers on his final list had been ripped to pieces by enraged mako sharks three seconds after they logged in to their first Blogger accounts.
Paulie Hippie was asking the other day what lefty blogging can achieve, notably to no response. That's because the incoming Cameron administration could have the lot of us flown into the middle of the North Sea in helicopters and flung out at thirty thousand feet, and only our pets would notice. In truth, they too would remain oblivious but for the empty food bowls.
No, good old British blogs are a menace to humanity itself - a playground of vicious, barely-restrained hatred and emboldened, snickering ignorance. You might argue that it's incredibly unlikely that any blog could rival the clout of a daily newspaper, but that's why we should adopt Dick Cheney's one percent doctrine on unlikely threats, and volunteer en masse to be shot into the heart of the sun on rocket ships packed with nuclear warheads. I'd direct operations from Earth, just in case anyone got cold feet at the last minute.
It would be just and fitting, since anything fired into the sun returns to Earth as radiation eight minutes later, casting far more light in a split second than our interminable, rambling diatribes ever did.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Post 701 - Three Years Of Solid Gold Bullshit
Is there nothing these charlatans won't try to pin on the Prime Minister?
And on the BBC, of all places! I'll remember this the next time they try to tell us the Beeb has a left-wing bias, the fiends.
Email Conversation, Yesterday
FR: Sure I know he's ill. I've got most of their albums.
ePal: Well, yes, but did you hear that he's really, actually ill? Like, really very ill indeed.
FR: Yes, I know how ill he is. I told you, I like the Beastie Boys.
ePal: No dude. They've found cancer in one of his saliva glands.
FR: (Long Pause) Did they Check His Head?
ePal: You and I can't be friends any more.
(Cheers - Seth C.)
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
By Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias
Gentlemen, I really must object to your behaviour in the strongest possible terms.
Some might say that it is impolite to rouse a man from his slumber at such an ungodly hour; others, that enticing him and his family into a chilly basement on false pretences is simple bad manners.
While the Empress consort may have had cause of late to chide the Emperor for his stuffy and old fashioned ways, one feels that one is quite within one's rights to state that your execution of one's servants and one's personal doctor with revolvers is, frankly, downright rude.
I can see that you are somewhat excited. I appreciate that you are acting upon the orders of your superiors, and that any decision on your part to forgo the immediate perforation of the royal party with bullets and bayonets may cause you significant inconvenience.
Nonetheless, we are all gentlemen here. As men of reason, surely we can resolve our differences without anyone's daughters getting stabbed or shot.
Oh - ah, I see. Well, the majority of them, in that case.
Perhaps I can appeal to your better natures. As Emperor of All the Russias, one has on occasion been presented with difficult choices, and one has always attempted to follow the urgings of one's conscience towards leniency and mercy, especially as regards the ever-thorny issue of firing large quantities of hot lead into the offspring of one's political enemies. Why, I recall addressing this very matter with Guchkov of the Oktobrists of the Third Duma -
By God... My good man, I can assure you that there is no need for - well, really.
Why, bless me - it appears that the Grand Duchess's pendant - an especially sturdy and grandiose accoutrement, although I might say somewhat gaudy - has somehow contrived to deflect the murderous projectile, thus saving -
You gentlemen really are a most objectionably impulsive rabble, if you don't mind my saying so...
Sunday, July 19, 2009
FlyingRodent Applauds As Martin Amis Shocks The Literary World Once More With His Highly Controversial "Amin Was a Bastard" Polemic
Idi Amin Was a Right Bastard, by Martin Amis, 306pp, Jonathan Cape, £19.99
"...And though a thousand years may pass like the somnambulant meanderings of the Katonga river, never again shall the suncinerated plain of Afric' suffer the horrorism of another bastard like that proper nasty fucker, Idi Amin".
So ends the introduction to Idi Amin Was a Right Bastard, the latest assault on a little-known and seldom criticised historical figure by the pugnacious Martin Amis. As we might expect from so much of his recent output - Stalin Was a Right Bastard; Saddam Hussein Was a Right Bastard; Mohammed Atta Was a Right Bastard; The Gulag Was a Right Bastard and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Right Bastard - Amis takes aim at an obscure yet much deserving target, then eviscerates him before the scandalised eye of the bien-pensant liberal literati.
Stylistically, Bastard Vol. V differs little from its predecessors, in that Amis has clearly read other writers' work on his subject and then regurgitated it in an emetic torrent of florid 19th century prose, splattered heavily with forced neologisms and masturbatory torture-porn. Indeed, some passages are redolent of a hobnailed, Gestapo Wordsworth shoving a perfumed thesaurus up a puppy's arse then kicking it yelping up and down a burning stairwell, with great effect and mortifying impact.
Yet to focus solely upon the obvious relish with which Amis approaches his material is to do great violence to the delicacy and precision of his attack on the Ugandan dictator - "A great big fat ugly genossassin and an arsehole to boot" - in this work. I fear that Amis's bravery in tackling so beloved a figure as Idi Amin will gain him few friends and likely cost him many more.
Witness the countless thousands who, provoked to incandescent, spluttering rage by Bastard Vols. I-IV, marched in the streets with placards declaring Saddam Hussein Was Just Misunderstood and Once You Get Past The Murders, Stalin Was Merely a Little Ill-Tempered.
Once again Amis has dragged the well-flogged corpse of a bloodsoaked past into the light of day and now sits poking it with a stick and mumbling like a piss-streaked tramp on the Special Brew. Amin Was a Right Bastard is evidence, if evidence were needed, that Amis remains one of the UK's most vibrant, relevant and serious authors.
Minimalism Is The New Rock 'N' Roll
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The Horror, The Horror
People told me I was crazy; that Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing like Vietnam. Vietnam is mostly tropical jungle and rice paddies, they'd say. Iraq and Afhanistan are more your kind of arid desert/mountain kind of deal. This time, bombing and invading countries whose people and politics we don't understand without the slightest clue what victory is going look like will totally work, you'll see
Well I've been proven right at last, because Trisha Goddard - scum-baiting purveyor of Aldi-flavoured scandal to housewives, students and the unemployed - has just said the V-word on the BBC's flagship current affairs debate show, Question Time. And I don't mean Vagina.
No word as yet on whether she favours counterinsurgency or mere overwatch, but I think it's clear from her facial expression that Trisha is acutely aware of the inherent dangers of search-and-destroy missions in canopy jungle. You can tell that hard-bitten pop-cultural gossip merchant knows the face of war from the glint in her eye and the steel in her jaw.
Next week, Fearne Cotton inveighs against the risks of using unsustainable public debt as a reflationary gambit while George Osbourne MP swings a steam iron from his pendulous clackersack and trumpets Colonel Bogey into a bucket.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Doing My Bit To Help The Planet By Recycling Old Jokes
Is she a villain? It rather depends, doesn't it?
Thus does passive-aggressive society girl Megan McArdle construct an analogy for the current financial disaster, reaching the happy conclusion that, since everyone is to blame for the latest bubble and the most recent crash, no-one is to blame.*
This is in response to accusations that some of Wall Street's most prestigious firms may have deliberately manipulated the crisis to their own advantage and everyone else's great detriment. As noted previously, this implies that the notion of the planet's leading financial whizzkids actually knowing what they are doing is a hilarious, ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Coming as it does on the day that Goldman Sachs announced a $3.44bn net profit for April to June, it's tempting to observe that perhaps they do in fact understand this economic system based upon self-interest stuff rather well. This means that average staff windfall for Goldman employees is $384,000 for the first half of the year, in the middle of the worst recession of our lifetimes.
Still, this Financial-Crisis-As-Horrific-Car-Accident excuse should conjure a rich bounty of automotive imagery, from the financial genius under the car selling the brake fluid for short-term gain, to a metaphorical raft of Clinton-era deregulations that allowed manufacturers to build motors without airbags or seatbelts.
The analogy that should be seared onto our brains for the rest of our lives, however, is this - that seconds before the smash, a multi-billion dollar industry of politicians, pundits, bankers, experts and trustafarian bloggers were crammed into the back seat, commanding the driver to stamp on the accelerator while joyfully screaming, Go right! Go right!
Or I could be wrong - perhaps those self-interest advocates like McArdle, who walked away from the crash without so much as a career-threatening scratch, are merely trying to help those still being cut out of their cars. I'll leave you with this thought, from the same article...
Once you have tens of thousands . . . or tens of millions . . . of people in the dock, you don't have villains. You have a system that has gone badly wrong.
Reader, I put it to you that blaming the system has not aided the hundreds of thousands of drug addicts in America's prisons, but then, it might all be so very different if those same drug addicts were drafting the laws.
*On this "We are all to blame because we were all greedy and stupid" theme - I owe the bank around £600 for a loan I took to buy a new TV when my old one bust; have a £200 overdraft, and I still have four grand to pay off on my student loans after three years of making repayments. Can I be counted out, or is that evidence of the very vices that broke the banks?
Friday, July 10, 2009
In Which The Author Drinks Seven Beers Then Makes Strategic Proposals For Concluding The War In Afghanistan
Britain could have stationed aircraft carriers offshore in order to suport operations in Jugoslavia...
Britain could've stationed Mecha-Godzilla offshore in order to support operations in Yugoslavia, to roughly the same effect, i.e. none whatsoever.
So went the chat at the cheerful Hey, Let's Stage a Complete Renewal Of Progressive Politics Right Here In The Church Hall! website Liberal Conspiracy this week, on the subject of multi-million pound military hardware and its utility in modern warfare.
It's an urgent issue, given the casualties British forces are taking in Afghanistan right now. Newspaper articles I've seen today have called for more helicopters and better armour, especially troop transports.
Well, British squaddies have been getting killed in Afghanistan for seven years now without any noticeable progress or the government taking any serious flak about it, so I think it might be time to make a suggestion of my own.
It's a question of What Could Be Done In Theory versus What Can Actually Be Done In Reality. Why spend a fortune on armoured vehicles when we could use the Earth's natural resources?
Check this out, for example...
From what I can tell, this has been the standard order of battle for British forces in Afghanistan for at least five years, i.e. being airdropped onto a Helmand plain or the side of a mountain to provide the Taliban with something to shoot at.
Well, the problem we have here looks to me like the famous - and probably apocryphal - story of how the Americans tried to solve the problem of writing in space. Remember, pens can only write because gravity pulls ink downwards, and there's no gravity in a vacuum. The urban myth I heard says that the Americans spent a million dollars on a pen that would force ink downwards artificially - the Russians, on the other hand, were alleged to have said Fuck it, we'll use pencils.
We have the same story here. There's a form of armour that would offer British soldiers 100% bullet and blast-proof cover that military strategists have overlooked. I call it "The Curvature Of The Earth," and the secret to protecting our boys is to make sure that there's at least a thousand miles of rock between British soldiers and the enemy. We could do this by staging a tactical withdrawal to, say, Aldershot - very popular with squaddies, in my experience.
By way of demonstration...
Readers might think this is inappropriate and flippant stuff to be posting in a time of war, but I would argue that my idea a) will work and b) will not cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
On that basis, I commend it to the MoD.
Note: This proposal is conditional on several factors, the most important being that I'll go back to the drawing board and start from scratch if the Powers That Be have, at long last, come up with some kind of detailed proposal or set of commands for achieving victory that doesn't involve dropping squaddies into the middle of nowhere and letting the Taliban take potshots at them. I'm no expert, but I believe military strategists call it a "plan".
Note2: The Soviet-Afghan war produced the Russian version of Full Metal Jacket - it's a very dodgy film on several levels, in my opinion, but it provides a primer for taking on potentially-unwinnable conflicts. Let's not talk about The Beast Of War.
Note3: Anybody else notice how the word Vietnam stopped cropping up in the press since President Obama got elected?
Thursday, July 09, 2009
by Bill Fuffkass, Ordinary Hard-Working Blog Commenter
There was a time when the nightly news used to frighten and intimidate me. Every day, I'd sit down in my favourite chair to catch up with domestic and world affairs, only to be presented with an incomprehensible babble of impenetrable jargon, rampant criminality and bloodcurdling atrocity.
None of it made sense - wars, famine, death, plague... It felt like the world was a terrifying vortex of unaccountable power, random chance and purposeless violence. It's only been since I started being as cuntish as possible about absolutely everything that I've realised how simple politics really is.
Take poverty, for instance. It's a hellishly complex issue affected by international and local economics, education, social conditions... any number of factors, in fact, enough to fill a lifetime's painstaking study. Your average person, confronted by an online discussion of the issue, might think hard before pronouncing their opinion on the matter.
If you're a smug, self-satisfied arsehole like me, however, it's a no-brainer - poverty is the inevitable result of benefit dependency created by the socialist nanny state and the feckless indolence of today's bone idle youth. After all, I work hard, and I'm not poor. See?
Or try crime. Some joker at Leftopia.typepad.com was asking what, if any, effect does alcohol and drug dependency have on rates of criminal recidivism? Why, absolutely none whatsoever! There'd be no crime at all if we brought back flogging, castration and hanging, and I bloody well said so.
Of course, they said they had evidence that indicated low correlation between the death penalty and crime rates in first world countries. Well, they would say that - it's touchy-feely do-gooding liberals like them that have turned this once-great country into a Gestapo toilet filled to the brim with filth and horror with their so-called "evidence" and their PC "human rights" and their government-funded Playstations for paedophiles.
Oh, they wanted me to read and respond to their points, of course. Fuck you, I'm right! How's that for a response, dickheads?
And don't get me started on immigration. Trust me, if you were an incurious, self-righteous bigoted cunt like me, you'd find that my kind of inflammatory, racist propaganda practically writes itself!
The police force? Deskbound idiots more concerned with fiddling the murder stats than stopping the blacks from stabbing your kids. Doctors? Blundering incompetents on the make. Social workers? PC stormtroopers, more like! Judges, criminal-coddling scum! Teachers, a bunch of timid woofters too scared to get a real job! "Experts"? Fuck 'em!
Everything's so much simpler when you stop worrying about right-on, modern follies like "reason" or "proportion" and just let the contents of your paranoid id run rampage in a reeking spew of ignorant bile.
Yes, I have to say that being as cuntish as possible about absolutely everything has made me the man I am today, and I'm not afraid to leave an anonymous comment on your web page telling you so.
You make me sick.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
By Diageo Plc.
Hey there, friend. What you up to?
Just distilling a bit of whisky, eh? Johnnie Walker, nice blend, nice little earner.1
Say, this sure is a nice workforce you got here. Highly trained, well paid, productive... Full maternity and sickness pay, I imagine?
Yes, this is some nice, sweet workforce you've got. It'd be such a shame if something happened to it.
What? Oh no, I don't mean nothing by it. It's just, you know, sometimes employees get so tied up spending their high wages, taking advantage of a generous annual leave package, that kind of thing. They forget what their interests are. Forget who their friends are, you know.
Why, one carelessly-worded salary negotiation later, a workforce like this could find themselves booted onto the dole queue, quicker than you can say "knife". Could find some nice luxury flats where your factory once was, eh? Turn 'em into a bit of extra pocket change. 2,3
Well, I'm not saying anything... But you know how it is. Fifers'll be happy to work for three-quarters of the price. 4 Your average Chinese prison slave, now, he'd work day and night for a bowl of rice and a kick up the arse. 5
What's that? You got the government to pay Diageo Plc off £2.6m for "refurbishments" already? 6 Well, sort of. That was just fire and theft, really, cover you for little accidents. Stubbed toes and such. Nice workforce like this needs comprehensive coverage.
Now, don't running your mouth about the government - we've got an arrangement with them. 7 It's a globalised market now, son. A workforce needs to look after itself, or something nasty might happen.
"Fair?" Of course it's not fair, mate, but "fair" never wet anyone's beak now, did it? 8
You're sure? Think about what you're saying here. Diageo Plc will fuck you like Dirk Diggler on a coke and Viagra binge, mark my words.
Right, son. You'll be hearing from us soon enough, and you'll rue the fucking day you crossed Diageo Plc (LSE: DGE; NYSE: DEO). 9
1. The Johnnie Walker brand makes Diageo £1bn per year.
2. Diageo is showing its gratitude by sacking 900 Johnnie Walker workers in Kilmarnock and Glasgow.
3. The Daily Record reports that Diageo has secretly applied for permission to knock down its Kilmarnock factory, then build luxury flats on the site. So far as I know, this wouldn't have become public knowledge unless the Record had reported it.
4. Diageo claims it will hire up to 400 workers in Fife. No news on salaries and conditions for new hires yet, but Diageo chief executive Paul Walsh was paid £3.6m per year for his expertise (Guardian, 2008). If it pays its new workers the same as it pays the ones its sacked, I'll eat this laptop.
5. I've got a tenner here says a major Scotch whisky label will shift production to the People's Republic of China within ten years.
6. The Daily Mail reports today (not online) that the Scottish Executive paid Diageo £2.6m in 2000 for "refurbishments" at its Kilmarnock and Leven facilities. To date, Diageo has not paid any of this money back.
7. The Grauniad reported in 2008 that Diageo pays £43m per annum in corporate taxation - a mere 2% of its profits. (Update - John B in comments reckons this is utter bollocks. Cheers, Guardian writers).
8. Diageo estimates that its downsizing move will save it £120m. Diageo's annual turnover exceeds £7bn.
9. This is what the boss class means by "flexible labour" - it means "Bend over while we convert the jobs you've held for decades into a few grand unearned income for our wealthy investors". The next time you hear some blue-blood ideologue complaining about "wealth redistribution", remember that the last thirty years have been one long redistribution project - just not the kind of redistribution that boils Tory blood.
Medical Breakthrough Promises Infertility Cure, Extinction of Humanity
Well, this is the straw that broke the camel's back. Making sperm is pretty much the only productive activity I'm good at, and a load of dinosaurs battering about eating cars and chasing children around kitchens is not going to make the job any easier.
Whatever will these eggheads think of next? Glow in the dark bollocks? A swarm of psychotic beavers that build nuclear weapons out of logs and shoot napalm out of their arses?
Honestly, I don't know. One minute we're sending men to the moon, and the next thing you know there's a pack of Velociraptors feeding on your entrails. It's madness, I tell you.
Monday, July 06, 2009
The More Things Explode, The More They Stay Blown Up And On Fire
A Visitor to Hanoi Inspects Damage Laid to U.S. Raids
President Johnson's announced policy that American targets in North Vietnam are steel and concrete rather than human lives seems to have little connection with the reality of attacks carried out by U.S. planes.
Salisbury ended up publishing twenty-two pieces on the subject that winter. He reported eighty-nine civilian deaths in one town, forty in a second, twenty-four in a third - and that, in this "brushfire war," more bombs had been dropped on Vietnam since 1966 than the entire tonnage dropped on Japan during World War II. In Nam Dinh, North Vietnam's third-largest city, he wrote of "block after block of utter desolation." He said the targeting of civilians was going on "deliberately".
The Pentagon claimed what civilian casualties there were came from the Communists' deliberate emplacement of surface-to-air missiles in populated areas. Or from the necessity of jettisoning bombs when attacked by MiGs. And that the eighty-nine deaths were evidence of "rather precise" bombing. Spokesman Arthur Sylvester - he called Salisbury's paper the "New Hanoi Times" - said if Salisbury doubted them, he should take a gander at the anti-aircraft guns up the street of Nam Dinh, right by the railroad tracks. Salisbury, who'd been covering bombings since the London Blitz, said he'd already been there and had found only a destroyed textile factory.
Lying about Vietnam: it had become a Washington way of life..."
(Nixonland, Perlstein, Simon and Schuster, p.169)
In tribute to Robert McNamara, 1916-2009.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Nazi Sympathies - Ur Doin It Rong
Bernie obviously hasn't got the message - in Britain, famous people who give props to fascists and white supremacists get pages and pages of denunciation as every joker with a newspaper column lines up to put the boot into them for their idiocy.
The way to do it is to be an average nobody like the rest of us, and then vote for the still-living fascists and white supremacists of the BNP. That way, every joker with a newspaper column will line up to stroke their chins, sympathise and justify your idiocy by bleating about multiculturalism.
See, anyone can call Bernie Ecclestone a twat and a dunce, and be lauded for recommending that the public laugh at his stupid opinions. Mind, if there was a mild political benefit to be gained by urging the government to listen to Ecclestone's Very Real Concerns About Immigration And Integration, half the papers in the country would be doing so.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Green Ink Word Salad (Updated)
That was prompted by my certainty that, the longer you arse about online, the higher the chance of stumbling across some joker asserting something like I know it's not politically correct to say you'd like to herd gypsies into camps and gas them like badgers, but...
Well, that one struck me as an exploding, spring-loaded man-trap of a question1, so let's resurrect it in a different form - what's the most obviously true statement you've ever seen dismissed as conspiracy theory?
Bear with me here, because the story begins with Matt Taibbi's long, involved article cursing Goldman Sachs in this month's Rolling Stone. (Link to an unreadable format here - Rolling Stone doesn't like the internet).
Taibbi's thesis is that Goldman deliberately inflates market bubbles, profiteers during crashes, and uses its political influence to insulate itself from the consequences of its misdeeds; that the the planet-fucking, Wall Street banking behemoth is, in short, a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.
To my amateur's eye, it looks like a well-researched, well-argued indictment of cutting-edge high finance, but I'm nobody's economist. Goldman's response?
"[Taibbi's] story is an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories... Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in John F. Kennedy's assassination] and faking the first lunar landing."
To be clear - Goldman are saying that the suggestion that the world's leading financial whizzkids may actually have known what they were doing when they turned every financial disaster of the last decade into their own non-stop cash bonanza is a conspiracy theory on a par with faking the moonshot.
Well, fine. If you buy that, I think you actually have to buy the idea that every piece of fiscal fuckery from the Dotcom collapse, through Enron and Worldcom then up to the current financial horror movie, were all amazing, unforseeable, once-in-a-lifetime events... A completely unpredictable and barely conceivable bug that just seems to recur every couple of years, rather than an intrinsic feature of the system.
So what else is a wild, unbelievable conspiracy theory?
I notice that anyone who suggests that the CIA or MI6 might have any involvement in recent events in Iran is instantly regarded as a loony. In fairness, the only people I've seen say so are anonymous commenters who sound like they'd blame Mossad lizardmen if they contracted a dose of the squirts, but still - what do people think spies actually do?
Iran is a barking theocracy run by religious throwbacks who have repeatedly threatened to do all kinds of harm to the UK. We've had military bases camped right next door to them for most of the last decade. If MI6 aren't devoting serious time, money and effort to fucking with the Mullahs, then I for one want to know exactly what they're doing to earn their salaries.
David Aaronovitch notably didn't include the Iraq invasion WMD scam in his conspiracy theory study Voodoo Histories2, but he clearly thinks that the Blair lied thesis is one. Plenty would agree. Perhaps there's something I'm missing, but Government launches creative advertising campaign to sell unpopular policy to sceptical public doesn't sound like the wackiest piece of conjecture ever concocted.3
Neo-liberal economics
I've always thought that Reaganomics and Thatcherism were hilariously obvious scams designed solely to enrich their proponents and their friends. After all, Advocates for an economic system based on self-interest may tell lies if they believe it is in their interest to do so doesn't strike me as a ridiculous proposition, yet try telling people who work in finance that and they'll look at you like a stonking great pair of gonads just bulged out of your eye-sockets.
And what's this? Why, it's an op-ed in the Financial Times about how almost all of the benefits of a neo-liberal economic system flow to the super-wealthy, while almost everyone else stays where they are or has to spend themselves into crippling debt to keep up. Capitalism's Dirty Little Secret, the author calls it, as if he were revealing some deep insider information.
All of which brings me back to the original question - what's the most obviously true statement you've ever seen dismissed as conspiracy theory?
Note - 9/11 was already a conspiracy, and doesn't need to be loaded up with invisible missiles and thermite explosions to make it more exciting. I'm thinking more polite lies that grease the wheels of profit and policy than I am OJ made Capricorn One to expose NASA's lies.
1. I decided against putting up the political correctness post after a certain pro-war website asked what racist names the horrible leftists that live in their skulls would call President Obama, should he continue his predecessor's idiotic policy of trying to blast, shoot and torture some respect into random foreigners. Cue a gaggle of middle-aged wingnuts throwing gangsta-hands and calling each other "Nigga". Chilling.
2. The Aarowatchers have Moar here, here and here.
3. While we're talking about Decent Dave, let's note the reaction to Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares. It's still never been screened in the US, as far as I'm aware, and has been attacked over there as an anti-American hatefest that implies that George Bush is more evil than Osama Bin Laden.
Curtis made lots of good points, but one of the main ones was that Al-Qaeda isn't SPECTRE. It's a group of headbangers in a cave in Pakistan that has links to a lot of extremists in other countries. It's definitely not a planet-crushing secret cabal with multi-million pound mountain-bases filled with supercomputers, tank-killing lasers and Islamic ninjas. I think time has shown that his analysis was bang on the money.
Note - at no point during the film did Curtis say or imply that Al-Qaeda did not exist, or that they didn't pose any kind of threat.
But fuck me, what's this? Why, it's David Aaronovitch blasting Adam Curtis for saying and implying that Al-Qaeda is a non-existent, imaginary threat - blasting Curtis for being a conspiracy theorist, as it happens.
Curtis's is a one-stop conspiracy theory to stand alongside those fingering the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group and (vide the Da Vinci Code) Opus Dei.
A conspiracy, and one involving the fingering of the Illuminati at that. Lordy, them tinfoil-hatters is everywhere once you start looking.


text:
The University of Mary Washington will look to continue its dominance of the Capital Athletic Conference Men's and Women's Swimming Championships this weekend (Feb. 15-17) when the 18th-annual championship meet is held in the Aquatics Center at The Athletic and Recreation Center at St. Mary's College in St. Mary's City, Md.
The UMW women's program has won all 17 previous conference titles and has four returning All-Americans in the lineup as Matt Sellman looks to extend that streak in his first hear as head coach. On the men's side, the Eagles have won seven-straight team crowns and have a strong freshman class to support and outstanding group of upperclassmen who aim to defend their title.
Each swimmer from UMW and the six competitors trying to take away the crown will be trying to advance to the NCAA Championship, which will be held at Miami (Ohio) University in Oxford, Ohio. The women's national championship meet is scheduled for March 13-15 while the men's meet will be held the following weekend (March 20-22).
The three-day CAC Championship meet will have two sessions per day. The morning session will include trials, beginning at 10 a.m. The evening session will include the consolation and championship races, beginning at 6 p.m. Additionally, prior to Sunday evening's championship session, the seniors from each team will be honored in a ceremony that begins at 5:30 p.m.
Fans can purchase a three-day ticket for $15 at any time during the weekend. Single session ($5) or single day passes ($8), as well as heat sheets ($1), may be purchased at the facility, beginning Friday (2/15) prior to the morning session.
Here is a look at the top competitors for each of the 14 teams:
The YORK women's team heads into the 2008 CAC Championships looking to improve on last year's seventh place finish. The Spartans have eight swimmers who finished in the top 12 of the championships last season. Laura McCray, Allison Blaszky, Bridget Miller, Kaitlin Crean, and Molly Wasik have been the Spartans' top performers this year. York finished the regular season with a mark of 6-7.
The York College men's swim team enters the 2008 CAC Swim Championships looking to build on their success of last season and a 9-2 dual meet record this year. The Spartans finished second last year as head coach Gina McHenry was named the CAC Coach of the Year. The Spartans return all but one of their All-CAC performers, headlined by senior Steven Fulcher. Fulcher teamed with Matt Jennings, Clark Arnold, and Garrett Higgins to win the 200 free relay while the foursome also combined to win the 400 free relay. Jennings (100 free and 100 backstroke) and Stephen Doemland (500 free) also earned first-place finishes at the championships.
Since early September, approximately 25 GALLAUDET men and women have been training in the pool, swimming at least several miles per day, including dry-land exercises, all in anticipation of the 2007-08 Aqua-Bison season. The women's team is anchored by co-captains, senior Kandace Morris and junior Marissa Larson.
The men have co-captains in senior David Torres and third-year swimmer Ryan Kobylarz, who is fresh off his World Deaf Championship performance with Morris, Kris Lauderbaugh and freshman Carlisle Robinson. Jimmy McGowan of Florida is another incoming freshman who is expected to make big waves this season.
The HOOD women will look to two senior captains as the Blazers compete in their second CAC meet. Katie Hitchens is Hood's sprinting specialist who owns the team's top six times of the season in both the 50 and 100 freestyle. Amy Kaufman has been a steady cog in the Blazer lineup in the 200, 500 and 1,000 freestyle. Kaufman placed fifth in the 500 and 1,650 freestyles at the 2007 conference meet.
The Hood men's swim team will be competing in its second CAC meet and will rely on veterans Jason Kinder and Matt Haynes to set the pace. Kinder and Haynes both scored at the CAC meet last year and have combined to set 13 school records. Kinder will be used primarily in the distance free and backstroke events and Haynes is a sprinter who has earned first place finished in eight different events in dual meet action.
The MARY WASHINGTON women, winners of all 17 previous CAC Championships, will look to All-Americans Lorena de la Garza, Kristen LaCoe, Mallory Cruise, Michelle Sawyer, as well as top freshman Sarah Crockett. First year head coach Matt Sellman has led UMW to an 8-2 overall mark, including a 6-0 mark against CAC competition.
The UMW men's swimming team will aim for its eighth straight CAC title this weekend. The Eagles enter the championships unbeaten against CAC competition, and 8-2 overall. Freshmen Stephen Clendenin, Michael Dickerson, and Brad Dunn bolster a strong group of veterans.
MARYMOUNT placed second in the women's 800 free relay last year and return three of the four swimmers. Look for Amanda Shanks, who second in both the 500 free and the 1,650 free two years ago, to compete in the distance events. Ashley Smith should vie in the breaststroke events as should Angelyn Tinsman in the IM and backstroke.
The Saints return three All Conference men's swimmers from 2007 - Greg Murtha who will defend his 100 butterfly title; Bobby Barrett who will defend his 200 butterfly title and Chris Watson who will defend his 200 freestyle title. Look for J.P. Goshco to contend in the backstroke events.
The SALISBURY women's swimming team will enter the CAC championships with a 6-5 record as the maroon and gold have won five of their past six meets. The young Sea Gulls will rely on Raienne South and freshman Becky Akers to lead the way. South has come on strong, as of late, in the various freestyle events and in the IM. Akers is the Sea Gulls' long distance swimmer that has set several school records in her rookie season. The SU relay teams will look to grab some valuable points as well.
The Salisbury men's team will bring a 7-4 record into this year's CAC championships. The Sea Gulls have won five consecutive meets. The maroon and gold are led by senior sprinters Cole Mangum and Ross Spangler. Sophomore Mike Ferrari will look to continue his success in the breaststroke events while freshman Drew Robichaud has dominated in the backstroke. The SU 400 free relay team will look to repeat with another All-CAC performance this year.
The ST. MARY'S women finished third at the 2007 CAC Championships and the Seahawks return three of their five CAC all-stars, including last year's CAC Women's Swimmer-of-the-Year, Brie McDowell. The other two returning all-stars are Eleanor Koerner and Rachel Hotchko. McDowell is the defending champion in the 200 IM, the 100 back, and the 200 back events. The Seahawks come into the championships ranked fourth in Division III in the 400 medley, the 200 free, and the 400 free relays and sixth in the 200 medley relay.
On the men's side, Joey Quase returns to defend his 2007 CAC Champion in the 1,650 freestyle. Michael Preston earned All-CAC honors with his third place finish in the 200 free last year.
(Release courtesy of the Capital Atheltic Conference Office)

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Jul 2, 2014
Ceremony and reception at Epcot's Canada Pavilion, dessert party
at Viking's Landing
Plan your ideal Disney wedding, honeymoon or anniversary with insider tips, money-saving tricks, and creative ideas from the author of
"Carrie Hayward's Fairytale Weddings Guide." This weekly show also features vendor spotlights and interviews with real Disney brides and grooms.
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European Commission - Press release
European Parliament supports stronger legislation against child sexual abuse
Brussels, 27 October 2011 – The European Parliament today approved the European Commission's proposal for a Directive on combating sexual abuse, sexual exploitation of children and child pornography.
"The Commission made it clear one year ago that the EU will not tolerate children being used as objects to satisfy the sexual desire of criminals, or traded as commodities. I am extremely pleased that the European Parliament and the Council have lent their support to this proposal," said Cecilia Malmström, European Commissioner responsible for Home Affairs. "With this directive we can make a difference. We are making it easier to prosecute and prevent crimes against children, and we are strengthening the protection of victims. I am confident that this new EU legislation will make a real difference in protecting children from these horrible crimes."
The Directive, including a number of amendments adopted in the Parliament today, closely reflects the Commission's proposal.
It notably includes provisions not only on the prosecution of offenders, but also on the prevention of offences and protection of child victims. It provides for the right of employers to ask for information on criminal records, and for awareness raising campaigns and the training of professionals as preventive measures. The directive also introduces the obligation for Member States to remove child pornography pages hosted on the Internet in their territory and to take action to have them removed if hosted abroad.
The EU Member States in the Council are now expected to formalise the political agreement and adopt the Directive shortly.
The terms 'sexual exploitation' and 'sexual abuse of children' refer to different forms of acts, such as sexual relations with a child under a certain age or under coercion, child prostitution or child pornography. These are particularly serious crimes against children, who need special protection and care, and ones that produce long-lasting and serious harm to child victims. Yet fighting these crimes is very difficult. Children are vulnerable, ashamed and often afraid to report what has happened to them.
In March 2010, the Commission tabled a proposal for a Directive (see IP/10/379 and MEMO/10/107) to substantially upgrade EU Legislation, namely Framework Decision (2004/68/JHA), which ensured a minimum approximation of national legislation but had considerable shortcomings. The proposal has been discussed with the Council and the European Parliament, and a political agreement was reached on a compromise text in June 2011.
The new Directive will make it easier to fight crimes against children by acting on different fronts:
Fore more information
Homepage of Cecilia Malmström, Commissioner for Home Affairs
Homepage DG Home Affairs:
Side Bar


text:
The game was 1-1 after one period and 5-3 Lethbridge after two. Regina's goals came from Dyson Stevenson (2), Matt Marantz and Martin Marincin. Leading scorer Jordan Weal chipped in with one assist. The game-winning goal came from the Canes' Jaimen Yakubowski at 19:54 on the second period.
Regina was 1/5 on the powerplay while Lethbridge was 4/7. Matt Hewitt got the loss in goal (20 saves) while Damien Ketlo got the win (24 saves).
The Pats (30-23-6) visit the Kootenay Ice Saturday night at 8:00 pm Sask time on 620 CKRM (Press Box Sports Bar Pregame Show at 7:35 pm).


text:
See also: IRC log
-> http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2013/01/17-agenda
-> http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2012/11/01-minutes
No regrets
Jim: I'm finding Thursday challenging.
Norm: Time of day is to suit west
coast USA and Europe.
... I don't like Monday's for meetings. I could do Tue, Wed, or, reluctantly, Friday.
Jim: Maybe Cornelia would be able to make it if we moved the meeting time?
Alex: Henry has a complicated schedule too.
<scribe> ACTION: Norm to send email polling for a different/better meeting time. [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2013/01/17-xproc-minutes.html#action01]
Norm: Alex, Henry, Norm, please report on your actions in email; suggest which ones are overtaken by events.
<jfuller_> zip and unzip ... still draft
<jfuller_> http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/docs/xproc-zip_unzip.html
Alex: What's the status on the Processing Model document?
Norm: The status is we're in Last Call and have comments from reviewers that we haven't addressed.
Henry summarizes.
Alex: Does it make sense to try to bring this to closure as fast as possible, even if other stuff is more interesting.
Norm: Yes, that's the case.
-> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-processing-model-comments/2012Jan/0000.html
Alex: I'll try to look at this after the call today.
<scribe> ACTION: Norm to make XML Processor Profiles document an explicit agenda item [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2013/01/17-xproc-minutes.html#action02]
<jfuller_> http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/docs/requirements-v2-jim.xml
Norm: Jim, I think you said you'd take a stab at it.
Jim: I worked on the zip/unzip
step instead. I did do some work, but it's not uploaded
... The link above has notes from our f2f meeting. I'll try to get a revised document online by Tuesday for next week.
Norm: I think we were talking about Vojtech's inheritence proposal.
Vojtech: The main idea was that
maybe we could get rid of parameters altogether by inventing
some sort of inheritence mechanism.
... Because we don't want to lose the "magical" behavior that they inherit from the pipeline.
... So options could possibly inherit from the calling context or maybe the other way around.
... This option "propagates down" if it's used. From a nested scope, for example.
<jfuller_> initial Norm link on fixing parameters - http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-processing-model-wg/2012Sep/0014.html
Vojtech: It would be different to
our current parameters but it would allow for things like
having an XSLT step that has an option called parameters that's
declared that it inherits from above. And by some kind of
naming convention you could actually still use this magic that
you're used to.
... The main idea would be to get rid of parameters concept alltogether and replace it with options.
... And with maps, the "parameters" option could be a map and those key/values could be inherited.
Alex: Presumably we'd still need the with-param kind of construct.
<jfuller_> last meeting minute param discussion - http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/2012/11/01-minutes.html#item04
Vojtech: That's a question. Or some way to extend or override the map options.
Alex: I think you could make that
work in a number of ways. With-param could just be on the XSLT
... You could have a default parameter option and with-param could just modify the map associated with the default parameter option. We could support an option name.
Vojtech: We'd have to be really
careful with with-param and with-option and the order that we
evaluate these things in. You could have with-option
dynamically building the map and with-param updating it.
... That whole inheritence mechanism is simpler but also introduces some complexity, some side-effects that could be surprising if you don't really know what you're doing.
Alex: Are you imagining the inheritence goes by the data-flow or by the structure?
Vojtech: On the declare-option
you'd say inherit=true and then when you use the XSLT step, if
the parameters option is not set, it would look in the
upper-contexts to find an option or variable with the same name
and use that value.
... You could also do it the other way around, on a pipeline you can declare an option called parameters and inherit=true and it could propogate down.
Norm: That's the same functionality, it's just a case of where you put the label, right?
Vojtech: Well, yes, perhaps, but I think it's safer in some sense to propogate down because the author has more control. The other way around, using the steps could introduce surprises.
Alex: Minus a whole bunch of
details, I like this idea. I never liked the distinction
between options and parameters. I didn't want to do it, but we
didn't have an alternative.
... So I like this approach, but we need to make sure we get the details right.
Vojtech: In my idea, it's all
based on the option names.
... Any option name could be inherited.
Alex: We need to decide if inheritence is a special thing that you turn on, or it's the default and you have a way to turn it off.
Jim: I'd go for always inherited.
Vojtech: If it's always turned on, it could help with unbound optional options.
Alex: I think I'm in favor of always inheriting too.
Norm: It only applies to steps inside compound steps so it's not too dangerous, I guess.
Vojtech: If you really want something to be unbound, you should be able to make it explicit.
Norm: But we don't have a syntax for that.
Alex: But we'd need one, I
... We need to look at the details.
Vojtech: I'm willing to dive a little deeper.
Norm: I think that would be great.
Henry: I'd like to see the same examples, if at all possible.
Vojtech: The same?
Henry: The same ones that Norm used in his proposal.
Vojtech: Ok.
Henry: I'm confident that either one of these or almost anything else would be an improvement.
Norm attempts to summarize.
Henry: We had this in the old
markup pipeline engine, and the motivation in that case was
output type. You could allow internal XSLT steps to set output
type HTML and have that actually work at the end of the
pipeline because it got passed along with the metadata.
... The bad news is that you have to think through the semantics about what kind of steps preserve this and what kind don't. It's not at all obvious, for example, that an XSLT step preserves the metadata. It may not make sense for the metadata to propagate.
... That may just be too hard a question to answer.
Alex: It may also be the case that the pipeline author wants control over that.
Henry: But we don't want them to have to think about that if they don't want to.
Alex: But like inheritence, it
might be the case that there needs to be a default and a way to
specify the alternative.
... Output content type is a good example.
... I'm a little confused, because we had at least two proposals and then the f2f, and I'm not sure where we've gotten to.
Norm attempts to explain again: we started with Vojtech's proposal for binary which required passing along the MIME type and we generalized that to document metadata.
Alex: Right, but my proposal didn't require that.
The chair expresses some confusion about the state of the binary proposals.
<scribe> ACTION: Norm to put review of the binary proposals on the agenda for next week [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2013/01/17-xproc-minutes.html#action03]
Alex: Two things in my proposal are that XML is the only thing that flows through the pipeline. The binary is identified by reference. Everything is treated uniformly. It doesn't matter if the resource manager has a magic URI or if you point off into the ether of the universe
Norm: Ok, my bad.
Alex: I'd like to see some good use cases for document metadata.
Norm: Fair enough.
Henry: The other one that I recall that we recall that we used this for is preserving the character encoding. Which I can't remember if you can get from the infoset or not.
Alex: There's a whole bunch of things that can be grouped into: how I got the original data vs. parameters needed for serialization. There's a whole bunch of metadata in there that's related. People might want to preserve how they read the data in how they write it and metadata is a good way to transport that form one place to another.
Henry: The reason we did this for character encoding is that we invented an encoding that allowed us to preserve entity references.
Vojtech: I have a question: all the metadata values or attributes that you mentioned look like magic metadata fields. But applications can also set things, like timestamps and labels, yes?
Henry: Oh, absolutely, pipeline authors could come up with their own metadata.
Jim: For non-XML it allows us to add metadata without changing the documents. It's like implementing a state machine without having the state in the documents.
<scribe> ACTION: Norm to make sure document metadata stays on the agenda [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2013/01/17-xproc-minutes.html#action04]
Alex: Who's going to XML Prague
Jim: Everyone but Henry
<scribe> ACTION: Jim/WG to discuss XProcathon at next telcon [recorded in http://www.w3.org/2013/01/17-xproc-minutes.html#action05]


text:
Freshman Katie Sheehan
NORTH DARTMOUTH, MA- Two members of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth cross country team have been honored by the Little East Conference.
Freshmen Katie Sheehan (Scituate, MA/Scituate HS) and Eric Karstunen (Pembroke, MA/Pembroke HS) have been named the final LEC Rookie Runners of the Week for the 2011 season.
Sheehan led the UMass Dartmouth women at last Saturday's NCAA Division III Northeast Regional Championships at Bowdoin, finishing 61st overall with a time of 23:07 for the 6000 meter race. Eric Karstunen (Pembroke, MA/Pembroke HS) paced the Corsair men, finishing 150th overall in 27:39 for the 10,000 meter course.
"In probably the biggest race of her life, she produced what arguably was the best race of her career," said UMass Dartmouth Head Coach Jon Hird. "That backs up her race in the Alliance Championship two weeks ago, when she ran just about as well. She's been a leader for us, and for someone with the relaxed cross country background that she had in high school, she's done a great job."
"Eric also back up the kind of race he ran at the conference meet with another fine race at the NCAA Regionals," said Hird. "He came up with his best race of the year at just the right time. We didn't have our number one runner, and he really took over that role. His races have been getting better through the year, but his race on Saturday was by far his best effort. Eric just puts his head down and keeps running hard, there's nothing fancy about what he does, and that's sort of emblematic of how our team has run. When you run your best at the end of the season, that's good."
The regional competition was the final action of the season for the Corsairs.


text:
'…Honor Is All We Know' comes out on October 27
Rancid are streaming their new album, '…Honor Is All We Know', in full ahead of its official release on Monday (October 27).
The punk icons are streaming the record via YouTube, and you can listen by clicking here.
It follows 2009's 'Let the Dominoes Fall'. It was produced by Bad Religion's Brett Gurewitz, who is also the CEO of the label on which the record is being released, Epitaph.
The '…Honor Is All We Know' tracklisting is:
'Back Where I Belong'
'Raise Your Fist'
'Collision Course'
'Evil's My Friend'
'Honor Is All We Know'
'A Power Inside'
'In The Streets'
'Face Up'
'Already Dead'
'Now We're Through With You'
'Everybody's Sufferin"
'Grave Digger'


text:
Ya ya ya
Oh la la la
Yeah, ahem
[Verse 1: G-Eazy]
Okay you know it's whiskey straight no chases
Yeah I've been a few places
From Montana to Indiana these girls know what my pace is
First night with your girlfriend we ran a couple of bases
We made it home I dug her out then I made her one of my aces
Marijuana fragrance this tree here is outrageous
Want me to play in your city send an email to my agents
I'm working in the studio I tell my fans have patience
Because once I drop this new shit then it's on I'm off to them races
Yeah lanky as a mother fucker rap game Jack Skellington
I will surely blow up soon that's what I've been telling them
Most the time I'm lurkin in New Orleans like a pelican
Walking in the party dapper looking like Duke Ellington
Yeah always wear a latex when I skeet
Got Balenciagas on I got your paycheck on my feet
Rappers hit me up for tracks I need your paycheck for a beat
At my stay at home job wearing gray sweats in my suite
Man this shit ain't got no concept I just felt like rappin
Started writing lyrics and then I just felt like snappin
See I'm trekking past the stars I swear I just felt like captain
Man I smoked a blunt then smoked two more then I just felt like nappin
When given my druthers I'm mixing downers with uppers
Shouts goes out to Splurgeboys I only rap over thumpers
First I got with this babe and then I moved on to her mother
I just came through and fucked her afterwards she cooked me supper
You can hate me all you want to but my rents paid
Off of writing rap songs I got my ends made
I get bitches plus I even get my friends laid
You see the girl I'm with you probably wish you can trade
Ok I'm killing y'all on this music shit
Sophisticated flows went to school and shit
You should really know who you're fooling with
I'm too legit I do this shit
We don't drink vodka I'm drinkin that brown
Lotta rappers out now jackin my sound
Drop a new song shut the internet down
And I would keep going but thats all for now
Named after the character in Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, G-Eazy connects with Jack Skellington in his tall, skinny appearance. The production from Splurgeboys samples "Main Titles / Terrorist Attack" by Danny Elfman, who did the singing voice of Jack Skellington in the movie.
This track dropped shortly after the release of G-Eazy's sophomore album Must Be Nice. This song has no hooks and no playing around. G even joined us to break down some punchlines.


text:
A while back I was digging in my mine, near the bottom level of my map, and I found something odd-- clay! So, I cooked the four blocks I found and it gave me some bricks. Awesome!
I've never seen clay again. I consulted the Minecraft wiki and it stated that clay is more rare than diamonds but slightly easier to find since it often appears on the surface near sand.
I haven't done a ton of looking but so far I haven't found any clay on the surface. So, why would such a useful block be so rare? Is this a bug or by design?


text:
The Genius of Aubrey Beardsley
In September 1893 there appeared a new art periodical called The Studio; and, to the scandal of all established art lovers, the principal section was devoted to the drawings of an unknown boy of twenty-one named Aubrey Beardsley. The scandal was not due simply to the fact, regrettable enough in that age of solid reputations, that he was young and unknown, but to the character of the drawings themselves. Aestheticism had already shown its head. Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience was more than ten years old; but nothing, not even The Picture of Dorian Gray, which had been published in the preceding year, had been so openly and defiantly fin de siècle as these four drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.
Unhealthy, the word most often used, was not without justification. As Pater, the father of English aestheticism, said of a famous passage in Coleridge, "What a distemper of the eye and mind! What an almost bodily distemper there is in that!" That is not true of one of the drawings in The Studio, called Les Revenants de Musique, a good deal the mildest of the four, because the whisper of temptation is extremely faint. But Beardsley's other drawings not only lacked the manlier virtues; they positively suggested vice as a more interesting alternative; and they did so with an adolescent intensity which communicated itself through every fold and tightly drawn outline of an ostensibly austere style. No wonder Beardsley's drawings became a kind of catmint to adolescents, and continued to be so for almost thirty years.
I was one of the adolescents thus bewitched. Sixty years ago I was producing pastiches of Beardsley with an excitement which I have seldom felt since. I remember my housemaster discovering one of them in my desk, and saying, "It's erotic and neurotic, and I won't have it in my house." My housemaster's comment, although correct as far as it went, was incomplete; and I like to think that my interest was not only sexual but that I had already recognized Beardsley's extraordinary powers of design.
It was, of course, his original talent that accounted for Beardsley's influence on the pioneers of modern art, on Munch, Klee, Kandinsky, Diaghilev, and Picasso himself, to say nothing of such minor artists as Félix Vallotton; all owe a demonstrable debt to Beardsley. It is a formidable list, and I think justifies us in taking a fresh look at an artist who, if he is remembered at all, is remembered for somewhat questionable reasons.
The facts about his early life have recently been collected in a scholarly manner by Brigid Brophy.1 He was born in Brighton in August 1872. His father was a consumptive, with a small private income, "not out of the top drawer"; his mother was a Miss Pitt, a local charmer, known on account of her extreme slenderness as the bottomless Pitt; and Beardsley's famous drawing of Mrs. Patrick Campbell is done with such love, and is so unlike its ostensible subject, that I incline…
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Please post questions about the course or the material (or something out of curiosity) here using the "Add Comment" button below. Prof. Rice will answer your questions ... also in this space. Feel free to comment or follow up on others questions.
I noticed that on the Exam 1 Equations snapshot there were no equations for half life. We should still expect half life problems or problems that incorporate half life though, right?
Hi Hannah, all the half life equations can be easily derived from the integrated rate laws. Honestly, the only one we really use is the 1st order version (the others were mostly for comparison). So you can either quickly derive the 1st order half life equation or memorize it.
Hi Prof. Rice, I was wondering how to do problem 85 from the chapter 14 exercises section. I don't understand how to manipulate the Arrhenius equation to find the difference in the activation energies. Thanks! Hannah
You can derive this version of the Arrhenius equation... let me know is this doesn't make sense!
Hi Prof. Rice - can you post the solutions for the "hard" kinetics problems? Thanks!
Sorry... they're there now.
Hi, I had a question from our class notes on organic acids. Do resonance structures generally make molecules more or less acidic? Thanks!
Hi Alessandra,
When molecules have the capacity to form resonance structures it tends to give electrons "more places to hide". So, for example, a delocalized Pi system like benzene, when attached to a carboxylic acid (benzoic acid), would act as an electron withdrawing group and make the acid stronger. If an amine was attached to benzene (aniline), it would make the lone pair less basic. The other application of resonance we talked about was for conjugate bases... One of the reasons a carboxylic acid molecule (like acetic acid, CH3COOH) is acidic where an alcohol (like ethanol, CH3CH2OH) is not is because the carboxylate anion has resonance structures that can distribute the 'extra' electrons around and make the anion more stable than it otherwise would have been. I hope this helps!
Hi Prof. Rice,
How do you do 17.45 in the textbook? I am trying to use H-H for b-e, but c-f are not working because I can't take the log of a negative number... I wanted to convert the A/HA values into moles instead of concentration so that I could just subtract the added NaOH from the HA portion, and add the NaOH to the A portion of my fraction. Thanks!
Hi Hannah, I don't have my book at home, but I'll get back to you on this tomorrow morning.
You can ONLY use the H.H. equation (and thus the initial conc. = eq. conc. assumption) for part (b). All the other parts are outside the 'buffer zone'.
So, would you find the difference of what the buffer can't neutralize and take the pOH of the [OH-], then do 14-pOH = pH?
(I tried that, but I got the wrong answer...)
If you're dealing with a weak acid, no. You have to use the ICE table and the equilibrium constant expression.
If you're dealing with a weak acid, no. You have to use the ICE table and the equilibrium constant expression.
Hi, I had a question from the chapter 20 homework. The question is:
A concentration cell is constructed from two hydrogen electrodes, both with PH2=1.00. One electrode is immersed in pure H20, and the other in 6.0M hydrochloric acid. What is the emf generated by the cell and what is the identity of the electrode that is immersed in hydrochloric acid (either cathode or anode)?
I tried to use the equation relating E cell to K (standard state because pressure of H2 is 1.00), but I was not getting one of the answers given.
Hi Alessandra, that's the wrong equation actually. What is being described to you is outside the standard state. 6M HCl is 6M H+, which you'd plug in the Nernst Eq.
On the exam, you noted how there will be an equation sheet. However, are there any equations that the ACS expects us to know? For example, we were expected to know the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation for Exam 2. Are we expected to memorize equations such as these for the ACS one?
Hi Brian,
The ACS exam includes a list of equations and constants that's similar in scope to what I've given you.


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President Announces Hiring Of New Executive Assistant
SOCORRO, N.M. June 11, 2009 -- New Mexico Tech President Dr. Daniel H. Lopez announced Thursday that Lala Trujillo-Garcia has been hired as his new executive assistant.
Lucy Chavez is retiring after 43 years of service at New Mexico Tech. Former President Dr. Stirling Colgate hired Chavez in 1966. She worked as the executive assistant to four full-time presidents and two interim presidents.
"Lucy will truly be missed on campus," Dr. Lopez said. "She has always been an exemplary executive assistant. She has efficiently and effectively served New Mexico Tech presidents and I am honored to have worked with her for the past 16 years."
Chavez was honored with a special award at the President's Club banquet in May. She was also recognized during commencement.
Trujillo-Garcia worked as operations manager for the Department of Workforce Solutions for nearly 17 years, reporting directly to the cabinet secretary. In addition to her duties within the department, she also served as the Department's legislative liaison to the Legislative Finance Committee, the Governor's office and the Department of Finance and Administration.
Lopez said Trujillo-Garcia has a stellar background for stepping into the new job.
"Lala's experience in government will help her make the transition to higher education," he said. "In addition to her professional skills, she also has the temperament and demeanor to fit in well at New Mexico Tech."
Lopez said the university received 10 applications for the job. Trujillo-Garcia was tops among four finalists.
She begins work Monday, June 15, and will work with Chavez through her last day, Tuesday, June 30.
By Thomas Guengerich


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BOSTON, Mass.—UMass Boston men's hockey capped off the end of the year award season with two more awards, as Rob Florentino (West Roxbury, Mass.) and Travis Daniel (North Brunswick, N.J.) each were recognized by D3Hockey.com, on the website's first annual All-American and All-Region squads.
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Daniel picks up his third regional honor of the spring, after being named a Joe Concannon Award Finalist and a New England Hockey Writers Association All-Star. The first-line winger from North Brunswick, N.J. paced the Beacons with 28 assists and 40 points, while becoming the first UMB player in 16 seasons to reach the 40-point plateau.
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All News Releases By Date
VI Government in Agreement to Clean Up Handling of Hazardous Waste
Release Date: 05/08/2008
Contact Information: Beth Totman (212) 637-3662, firstname.lastname@example.com
(New York, N.Y.)-- In a settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands has agreed to bring itself into compliance with hazardous waste regulations and to set up facilities to which members of the public can bring their household hazardous waste. EPA had cited the Virgin Islands for improperly handling used lead-containing computers and spent mercury-containing fluorescent light bulbs at many different facilities throughout its three Islands.
"Not only will the Virgin Islands government clean up its own act, but it will provide the public with drop-off centers to which the public can bring household hazardous waste," said Regional Administrator Alan J. Steinberg. "Now island residents will have choices about where they dispose of their spent household light bulbs, electronic waste, batteries, and paint waste."
On April 13, 2005, EPA conducted inspections at two locations in the Virgin Islands and found a number of potential violations of the federal hazardous waste law, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). After the inspections, EPA requested that the VI government provide a description and documentation of its practices at other Virgin Island's facilities where different types of light bulbs and computer components were put into the trash. This information indicated widespread violations of hazardous waste requirements. Prior to April 13, 2005, the VI government discarded its fluorescent and other light bulbs and computer waste with regular trash without determining whether these wastes were hazardous and without taking steps to minimize or prevent releases of hazardous constituents, such as mercury and lead.
The Virgin Islands was fined $37,195 and agreed to spend at least an additional $150,000 to develop, fund and implement a campaign to foster the public's awareness of proper household waste management and disposal practices. Under this Supplemental Environmental Project (SEP), the VI government will construct and operate several hazardous waste collection centers, hire full-time staff to operate the new centers, purchase two collection trucks and four storage sheds to transport and store collected household hazardous waste, and advertise the new program to encourage people to use the centers. The government will operate and maintain the collection centers for at least two years and arrange for appropriate off-island disposal or treatment of the collected hazardous waste.
For more information about proper handling of hazardous waste, visit https://www.epa.gov/region02/waste/. For further reading on the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, go to: https://www.epa.gov/region02/rcra/index.html.
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The Office of the Child and Youth Advocate (OCYA) is an independent office of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, mandated to work with vulnerable young people.
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ReleasesBack to
McCoy Tyner
Fulfilling the potential promised on his Blue Note debut, Night Dreamer, Wayne Shorter's Ju Ju was the first really great showcase for both his performance and compositional gifts. Early in his career as a leader Shorter was criticized as a mere acolyte of John Coltrane, and his use of Coltrane's rhythm section on his first two Blue Note albums only bolstered that criticism. The truth is, though, that Elvin Jones, Reggie Workman, and McCoy Tyner were the perfect musicians to back Shorter. Jones' playing at the time was almost otherworldly. He seemed to channel the music through him when improvising and emit the perfect structure to hold it together. Workman too seemed to almost instinctively understand how to embellish Shorter's compositions. McCoy Tyner's role as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time was played here as well, and his light touch and beautiful, joyful improvisations would make him a much better match for Shorter than Herbie Hancock would later prove to be.
JuJu rests in the uphill portion of Shorter's creative peak. While the sidemen may have been an even better match for him than the ensembles he would put together for later albums, he was just beginning to find his footing as a leader. His performances were already showing evidence of great originality -- yes, they were influenced by Coltrane, but only in the way that they broke apart the structures of the bop sound to create a sound that had all of the variety and flexibility of the human voice. On later albums like Speak No Evil and The Soothsayer, however, Shorter would rise to an even higher level as a performer with more powerful, confident playing that reached farther afield in its exploration of melodic textures.
What really shines on JuJu is the songwriting. From the African-influenced title track (with its short, hypnotic, repetitive phrases) to the mesmerizing interplay between Tyner and Shorter on "Mahjong," the album (which is all originals) blooms with ideas, pulling in a world of influences and releasing them again as a series of stunning, complete visions. ~ Stacia Proefrock


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