70 years ago today

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The Hindenburg Disaster

803.8 feet in length and 135.1 feet in diameter, almost as long as the Titanic, the German passenger airship Hindenburg (LZ-129) was the largest aircraft ever to fly.  The commercial flights of Hindenburg, along with Graf Zeppelin, pioneered the first transatlantic air service, carrying hundreds of passengers and travelling thousands of miles before being destroyed in a tragic fire on May 6, 1937 at NAS Lakehurst.

In less than a minute the giant airship was completely destroyed in a fire that killed a third of its crew and passengers and left spectators crying in horror.

On the ground a radio reporter named Herbert Morrison was covering the airship's arrival. His emotional commentary on that evening is a legendary piece of reportage. 'Oh, the humanity'.


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I am not now, nor ever have been...

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spiked | What next, a Committee on Un-Scientific Activities?
A group of scientists and science communicators has written an open letter to WAG, a TV production company, insisting that it make changes to its film The Great Global Warming Swindle before releasing it on DVD.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the 38 scientists’ call for a film on global warming to be ‘corrected’ is just how anti-intellectual such a demand is. Ideas are developed, indeed facts are established, only through the most rigorous debate possible. As John Stuart Mill wrote nearly 150 years ago: ‘Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.’ 

In short, the only way to test out ideas – to prove them or improve them, to see if they’re right or true or useful or nonsense – is by submitting them to free and open debate. Restricting the communication or publication of certain ideas damages intellectual debate across the board because it limits our ability to weigh things up and work things out.




At last!

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Great news with the latest SquareSpace update. Search! Miles faster and better than any third party app the new search facility is what I've been waiting for. As usual the SS people have exceeded expectations and come up with a great little tool. It's very quick and the results look better than in Google. It also updates on the fly. No waiting to be re-indexed. I've set it up to yield results in date order (newest first) rather than 'relevancy' but I can change back if I need to. I'll test it out for a few days. It's site-wide and includes the old blog, so feel free to search any of the 3,700 odd pages here. It won't keep you waiting :)

UPDATE: It will not search the external feeds (Newspages, article links, weekend papers etc) because, unfortunately, as they are Javascript driven as opposed to PHP there is nothing to search except a line of code! But each feed has an archive link which provides an rss feed and a full search facility.


David Gest has a blog

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HELLO I'M DAVID GEST

Hi! I’m David Gest and I’m from California. Over in the States I’m a big-shot TV producer, but I’ve left that all behind to come to these shores and mix with YOU BRITS!!!

I used to be married to Liza Minelli, but not anymore. And I spent some time in the jungle, remember? OF COURSE YOU REMEMBER!

I love jewellery, my Japanese friend Ricco, and the British way of life. Pints of beer, mooshy peas, buying rounds - I LOVE IT!!!

Maybe I’ll see you around when I’m walking down the street - don’t forget to say Hi. And I’m going to be doing my own show, it’s going to be wonderful, I can’t wait!




Me neither mate!


...just not out loud please

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Freedom to Read
During Freedom to Read Week in Canada, CBC Radio prevented Booker prize winning author Yann Martel from reading Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the air. The CBC had asked Martel to appear on The Afternoon Edition because he was scheduled that evening to read a challenged or banned book at the Frances Morrison Library in Saskatoon. The reading at the library was part of Freedom to Read Week. Martel had chosen to read Mein Kampf.

But half an hour before the interview began on CBC Radio, Martel received a call from the show’s producer, Joanne Skidmore. She relayed a message from a senior executive. “I was called by the producer and told that CBC did not want me to read from the book, though I could talk about it,” Martel said. “The producer herself was not happy about this decision.”

Jeff Keay, a CBC spokesman, recognized the irony of stopping an author from reading a challenged book during Freedom to Read Week. But Keay said the CBC’s decision best served listeners. “Worse-case scenario, someone’s driving down the road and they turn on the radio and suddenly without any context or mediation they’re listening to Mein Kampf,” Keay said. “We’re very comfortable with the decision as we made it.”   Via Reason
Jeez, on that basis there must be thousands of books you couldn't read on air.

Just ask Dave
‘In horror she let go, as Edward, rising up with a bewildered look, his muscular back arching in spasms, emptied himself over her in gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities, filling her navel, coating her belly, thighs, and even a portion of her chin and kneecap in tepid, viscous fluid...'
Stop! Stop!....enough already! 

I nearly mounted the pavement!


Queer bashing revisited

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More Lies from the Supposed Guardians of Truth
I've watched Religious Right leaders lying about gay people for years. Over and over again, people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Lou Sheldon and others tell their followers that gays are their enemies, out to destroy their churches and their families.

But even after years of hearing and reading their manipulative and misleading rhetoric, I still shake my head at the willingness of so many religious leaders -- people who put themselves out there as advocates for Truth -- to be so brazenly and unashamedly dishonest in pursuit of a political goal.

Their immediate agenda here is to derail the hate crimes legislation that would extend federal law to cover violent crimes committed against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. The vast majority of Americans supports these protections. In our increasingly diverse society, it makes good sense that we take a strong stand against singling people out for violence because we don't like something about them.

The radical right, however, opposes any legal recognition for LGBT people. And since they can't defeat the bill on its merits - even most ultraconservatives seem to understand that beating up or killing someone for being gay isn't something to be proud of - right-wing groups like the American Family Association and Repent America have decided to haul out their favorite weapon, the charge that equal rights advocates and Democrats in Congress are out to criminalize Christianity.