If only they had burned album covers...

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Queen's birthday honours
Salman Rushdie, who spent years in hiding after a fatwa was issued against him, has been given a knighthood for services to literature. Rushdie's latest novel, Shalimar The Clown, was long-listed for the Booker, but Midnight's Children is still widely regarded as his greatest work.
His literary career began inauspiciously in advertising, where he came up with the cream cakes slogan "naughty but nice". The Glastonbury mastermind Mike Eavis was also honoured. The 71-year-old Methodist dairy farmer, who established the music festival in 1970, has always shunned establishment values. But now the anti-nuclear campaigner has been created a CBE for services to music.

Rushdie gets a knighthood while Eavis just gets a bloody CBE. Go figure.



If These Old Walls

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Red Hot and Country


As well as transferring lots of old compilation audio tapes I've also got a few VHS tapes that need to be digitised. I dug the old VCR out of the cupboard but despite our best efforts it doesn't seem to want to play ball so I've had to order one from Ebay.

The first tape I'm going to transfer is Red Hot and Country, a recording of the wonderful country music AIDS benefit concert at The Ryman in 1994 with great names including John Hiatt, Waylon Jennings, Earl Scruggs Levon Helm, Carl Perkins, Vasar Clemens and Duane Eddy.

And this lovely version of the Jimmy Webb classic 'If These Old Wall's' sung by Nanci Griffith (with Jimmy Webb).

Beautiful!




'Corpsite 2.0' ?

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Web Strategy by Jeremiah: How to evolve your irrelevant corporate website

Jeremiah Owyang, has some interesting things to say about web marketing and the irrelevance of corporate sites.  Much of what he is saying could be applied to political websites. Unless you understand, incorporate and adapt to what is happening everywhere else on the web the chances are that your website, whether it's a faux 'personal' politicians 'blog' or the website of a political party will, at least to some extent, be behind the curve if not completely out on a limb.







Fill her up

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Pentagon as Global Gas-Guzzler
Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That's greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million -- and yet it's a gross underestimate of the Pentagon's wartime consumption.



Any time, any place, anywhere (not)... ...it's Martino

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 Vatican cardinal calls on Catholics to stop funding Amnesty
A senior Vatican cardinal said yesterday that Catholics should stop donating to human rights group Amnesty International because of its new policy advocating abortion rights for women if they had been raped, were a victim of incest or faced health risks. (emphasis mine)  Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, accused Amnesty of turning its back on its mission to defend human rights. (sic)
Boy, how I loathe the catholic church. I think I may go out and throttle a nun later.



Bejeebus

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How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads
In a series of lively essays, this pioneering book proves that US slang has its strongest wellsprings in nineteenth-century Irish America. "Jazz" and "poker," "sucker" and "scam" all derive from Irish. While demonstrating this, Daniel Cassidy simultaneously traces the hidden history of how Ireland fashioned America, not just linguistically, but through the Irish gambling underworld, urban street gangs, and the powerful political machines that grew out of them. Cassidy uncovers a secret national heritage, long discounted by our WASP-dominated culture.



Keep your pants on!

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Judge cleared of rush-hour flashing
Sir Stephen Richards, 56, who sits in the Court of Appeal as Lord Justice Richards, left the City of Westminster Magistrates' court a free man after being cleared of intentionally exposing himself to a fellow commuter twice on trains in south London last year. A panel of three magistrates, made up of Timothy Workman, the senior district judge for England and Wales and two women lay magistrates, ruled there was no independent evidence to identify him as the guilty man. Mr Workman also criticised the British Transport Police for failing to carry out a thorough investigation.
This is disturbing. The defendant was charged purely on the basis of identification evidence uncorroborated by video or any by any other witness. In addition, this woman cannot be identified, even now. Indeed she can never be identified. Had she been stabbed, kicked, and half beaten to death however she would not have been able to keep her identity a secret. Go figure.

There is a running gag in my household that if my wife is ever called to give identification evidence for the prosecution I will immediately offer myself as a witness for the defence.

I know this is sexist but fuck it, lives are at stake! Sirs, if you have ever watched a complex thriller with your wife or girlfriend aks yourself honestly. How many times will she say something like: 'But I thought he was dead'? or "He was the chief of police a minute ago, now he's the murderer' And so on. My ex-wife was convinced that a dustmen in an action movie was Paul Newman. 'But he's not in the film', I said, and if he was he wouldn't be playing a dustman would he?'.  She remained adamant. Jeeez.

See also: The judge, his briefs and the idiocy that now pervades this country



Another article tossed off

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The creepy populism surrounding Paris Hilton and Scooter Libby. - By Christopher Hitchens
I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking. (Kingsley Amis, a genius in these matters and certainly no Puritan, once captured the combined experience of the sordid and the illicit by saying that, even as he wanted a certain spectacle to go on, he also wanted it to stop.)
I suppose if the only sex you get is an occasional hand shandy (when you stay off the booze long enough to avoid brewer's droop) why not watch Paris Hilton getting back-scuttled if it helps you on your way. Personally, I haven't seen Hilton getting shagged and I have no desire to do so. I gave up watching porn years ago. I prefer the real thing, with a real woman, not watching some bimbo with her legs around her neck, in glorious Minge-O-Rama.
So now, a young woman knows that, everywhere she goes, this is what people are visualizing, and giggling about. She hasn't a rag of privacy to her name.
Yep. How did that happen?

And now, a middle aged wanker knows that, everywhere he goes, this is what people are visualizing, and giggling about.

Yep. How did that happen?


Spirited defence of The Independent

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Peter Kellner robustly defends his paper against Blair's attack.


Simon Kelner: Would you be saying this, Mr Blair, if we supported your war in Iraq?
As the only representative of the multifarious British media mentioned by name, it's hard not to be flattered. Or, indeed, vindicated - our principled opposition to his policy on Iraq (or the Middle East as he quaintly put it: note he couldn't refer to Iraq by name) has clearly exasperated him. But that misses the point. We are unabashed about the way in which The Independent has evolved, although we would point out that this newspaper was not established as an antidote to the idea of journalism as views, but as an antidote to proprietorial influence and narrow political allegiance.
And Simon Carr adds his rejection of Blair's thesis:
There were quite a number of questionable assertions in his argument. This cynicism, for instance, where does that come from? The media? Or from politicians themselves? Fiddled statistics, waste, partisan abuse, mutual blame, twisting of facts and quotes, deceptions, disasters and dishonesties. That's what they say about each other in any representative day in Parliament.And why is Parliament not considered more important, he asked. His answer: because of "the way it is reported. Or not reported".

There are many reasons why Parliament is not considered more important, but reporting is not one of them. If he were right, the Parliament channel would attract more viewers than the 68 misfits and obsessives who tune in to it.For 90 per cent of the time they are open for business, the debating chambers of the Commons are 90 per cent empty. MPs aren't interested in what goes on in Parliament; isn't that more significant than how the media present it? And why are they not interested? Maybe it's the junk legislation that fills the days and nights in the House. So many laws pass through like sewage through the system in order to "send a message" to society (a novel interpretation of what laws are).
'Opinion and fact should be clearly divisible' says Blair. It would make a fine epitaph.


Leaner, quicker and undistorted

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I've had to take out the accordion on the sidebar and I've removed pretty well everything else as well for the moment until I can be sure which piece of code is causing rendering problems. The problem only shows up in IE, naturally. Firefox, Safari, Omniweb, Opera and Camino are all fine. It's just Gates's poxy browser that chokes on the page.

It's a blessing in disguise though. Clearing out some of this crap will speed page loading. And the page looks better too. I hate those cluttered pages full of buttons, clashing icons, and adverts. All that careful work selecting the right colours and font sizes goes out of the window when some ugly banner gets planted amongst it all.

So, most of this stuff will end up on separate pages of their own linked to from the sidebar. Tidier and less likely to distort page layout when  in the main section, even if the code is a bit 'dodgy'.