Love's Farewell

With a houseful of guests things are a little hectic here so I'm having a couple of days away from t'internet to complete some jobs that need doing. There's not much happening out there anyway, a lot of bloggers are complaining of running out of steam and half the sites on my newsreader are showing up as 'no items'.

I'll leave you with this clip, the final segment, from 'Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell' shown earlier this evening on ITV. Moving, harrowing and disturbing but ultimately uplifting as a testament to deep, abiding love.
(This was an) update on Paul Watson's 1999 documentary Malcolm and Barbara: A Love Story, about Barbara Pointon's struggle to cope with her husband Malcolm's Alzheimer's disease, which developed when he was only 51. Four years in the making, the film provided a poignant depiction of courage against the odds. This new film follows the couple in the years since, and reveals how Malcolm's condition eventually led to his death in February
Google the title and all you'll find are stories about the 'controversy' of Malcolm's 'faked' death. Stirred up by The Daily Mail (natch) it grew to completely overshadow the real story of the film- the plight of carers, the lack of resources, the skewed priorities and the frightening prospect that this dreadful disease may become the scourge of the 21st century.







iPlayer




I've spent the morning playing around with the BBC's iPlayer Beta. Naturally, being the BBC, everything is more complicated than it needs to be. The player and the downloads are not intergrated and the DRM system (which is utterly pointless anyway and won't stop pirating) has major bugs and after downloading three programmes and being told I don't have a licence to view them I gave up.  iPlayer is Windows only (and XP only at that, so if you've upgraded to Vista, tough) and, even though I've got XP on my Mac I can't be arsed to switch OS to watch a BBC repeat. Having said all that, from what I can make out from the message boards once the thing is up and running it is pretty impressive. But I like things to work first time so I'll hold back a while.

Fortunately I can watch and record from Freeview on my computer and BT Vision on the telly. It would be handy to be able to 'watch again' as easily as you can 'listen again' on BBC radio and maybe when iPlayer is available for Mac/Firefox and is out of Beta I'll give it another try.

I'm not even sure why the BBC decided to develop it's own player rather that collaborate with existing, experienced developers. I think they hope to flog the technology to other TV networks and make some money off it. I've got my doubts but time will tell.



Kamm defends terrorism?

LENIN'S TOMB: Horrorism on a grander scale.

Lenin responds to Oliver Kamm's defence of the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 'Terrible, but not a crime':

This is an argument for terrorism. It isn't only that, of course. I only point out that it is because terrorism is one of the few inexcusable crimes in bourgeois ideology. Suicide attacks in Israeli and American cities, recall, are said to communicate a genocidal intent, and are without extenuation unforgiveable assaults on civil society. Well, any argument that suggests that it is reasonable to use nuclear strikes and dispose of over 200,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to intimidate a government into surrendering is an argument for terrorism at the very least. To that, I will add that it is despicable and outrageous and implicitly racist, since it applies a standard to an Asiatic society that I submit would not be applied to a largely Anglo-Saxon apartheid society...

Whatever the historiographical arguments, the conclusion that it was necessary and right to use nuclear weapons against civilian population centres requires such a conspicuous contraction of historical possibility that it can only be apologetic. It cannot be the result of a rational engagement with the evidence. I would only add to that the author is an advocate of continued nuclear armament on the grounds that Western states are civilised (while Iran is not): chew on that for a while.



Outraged, bigoted, fatheaded, amateur, boring, fraudulent apex predator

Dennis The Peasant: The Six (Seven, Actually) Deadly Blogging Sinners
...as you cannot pay me to listen to talk radio or watch anything on Fox News, I am going to stick to listing the blogosphere's seven worst right-wing bloggers. And believe me, the names I came up with literally leapt off my computer screen.

Beyond that, though, I intend to use my list of bloggers to illustrate what I consider to be the Six Deadly Sins of the political blogosphere. Each selected blogger is, in my opinion, the very personification of the sins themselves. Understand, however, that these transgressions are by no means unique to the bloggers I am presenting here. Nor are they the sole province of right-wing bloggers.

What they are, in my opinion, is a set of sins that are slowly herding the political blogosphere towards the sort of intellectual irrelevance one associates with the Jerry Springer Show.

Dennis's list will be US centred but I would love to see someone do something similar over here. This is his list. Oh god, it's soooo tempting:

The Amateur (the sin of being amateurish),
The Fraud (the sin of pride),
The Bore (the sin of being self-absorbed),
The Well-Meaning Fathead (the sin of being simple),
The Outrage Artist (the sin of being unthinking),
The Bigot (the sin of unreasoned hating), and
The Apex Predator.

He's already started the list with 'Pammycakes', Pamela Geller, who blogs at Atlas Shrugs. She's his nomination for 'The Amateur' category. Who would the UK equivalent be? Mmmmmmm.


No, not CPFC!

Crystal Palace's dinosaurs saved from extinction
For more than 150 years, they have stood as a symbol of the beginning of the world's obsession with dinosaurs and were considered the first attempt to recreate what the prehistoric creatures looked like. Now after a £4m restoration, the concrete and brick dinosaur sculptures at Crystal Palace Park have joined Buckingham Palace and the Royal Albert Hall as Grade I listed structures.
I used to see these quite a lot as a child when I visited Crystal Palace to go fishing. They were in a bit of a sorry state back then so it's nice to see them restored and preserved.





Make mine a Babycham

Bid to make ales 'women-friendly'


Brewers of real ale should join forces with publicans to make the drink more appealing to women, a campaign group has said. The Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) says 80% of female drinkers have never tried a pint of bitter in a pub.




What next, women-friendly pipes? Mmmm, hang on -
Camra's research coincides with the opening of its Great British Beer Festival at the Earl's Court exhibition centre in London, which runs until 11 August.

Well, fancy that!

Hiroshima

Eyewitness account of Father P. Siemes August 6th 1945
From my window, I have a wonderful view down the valley to the edge of the city. Suddenly --- the time is approximately 8:15 -- the whole valley is filled by a garish light which resembles the Magnesium light used in photography, and I am conscious of a wave of heat. I jump to the window to find out the cause of this remarkable phenomenon, but I see nothing more than that brilliant yellow light. As I make for the door, it doesn't occur to me that the light might have something to do with enemy planes. On the way from the window, I hear a moderately loud explosion which seems to come from a distance and, at the same time, the windows are broken in with a loud crash. There has been an interval of perhaps ten seconds since the flash of light. I am sprayed by fragments of glass. The entire window frame has been forced into the room. I realize now that a bomb has burst and I am under the impression that it exploded directly over our house or in the immediate vicinity. I am bleeding from cuts about the hands and head. I attempt to get out of the door. It has been forced outwards by the air pressure and has become jammed. I forced an opening in the door by means of repeated blows with my hands and feet and come to a broad hall-way from which open the various rooms. Everything is in a state of confusion. All windows are broken and all the doors are forced inwards. The book-shelves in the hall-way have tumbled down. I do not note a second explosion and the fliers seem to have gone on. A few are bleeding in the room, but none has been seriously injured. All of us have been fortunate since it is now apparent the wall of my room opposite the window has been lacerated by long fragments of glass. We proceed to the front of the house to see where the bomb has landed. There is no evidence, however, of a bomb crater; but the southeast section of the house is severely damaged. Not a door nor a window remains. The blast of air had penetrated the entire house from the southeast, but the house still stands. It is constructed in the Japanese style with a wooden framework, but has been greatly strengthened by the labor of our Brother Gropper as is frequently done in Japanese homes. Only along the front of the chapel which adjoins the house have three supports given away (it has been made in the manner of a Japanese temple, entirely out of wood). Down in the valley, perhaps one kilometer towards the city from us, several peasant homes are on fire and the woods on the opposite side of the valley are aflame. A few of us go over to help control the flames. While we are attempting to put things in order, a storm comes up and it begins to rain. Over the city, clouds of smoke are rising and I hear a few slight explosions. I come to the conclusion that an incendiary bomb with an especially strong explosive action has gone off down in the valley. A few of us saw three planes at great altitude over the city at the time of the explosion. I, myself, saw no aircraft whatsoever.

"Defra is a byword for immobilism, incompetence and ineptness."

Putting our farmers first would be good start
Country people might be forgiven for thinking that there is something almost Biblical in the way they are being repeatedly tested. "Behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which is in the field," says the Book of Exodus. "There shall be a very grievous murrain." But this murrain might turn out to have been spread by human agency.

It is still too early to know exactly what caused the infection but, should it emerge that the virus came from a government facility, the episode might stand as a neat metaphor for the way in which our rural communities have been treated by Defra and, more widely, by the first British government whose Cabinet had not a single MP from an agrarian constituency. It is true, as Janet Daley says

My stepson, Harry, had a brief experience of Defra this year. After Cambridge and a PhD at Bristol he decided not to pursue a reseach post and instead joined the civil service fast-track working at Defra as a statistician. To cut a long story short he ended up handing in his notice (unheard of for a fast-tracker) and telling his boss he would rather wash dishes for a living than spend another day working for Defra.** Incompetence and ineptness? You don't know the half of it.

(**He's now back in a university department, heading up a research project. He walks to work, earns more money and is much happier. And he's no longer surrounded by twats.)




Hot links

Britblog Roundup No 129 - Philobiblon

The first link on the roundup concerns 'bandwidth theft' or 'image leeching' . Matt of Wardman's Wire had an image hotlinked to (through a genuine mistake, as it transpired) and complained about it. He received an apology and everything is sweet again.

I get a little pissed off when people throw around the term 'theft', as in 'image theft' or 'bandwidth theft' because in most cases the person complaining has actually lost nothing at all. In my book someone has to be deprived of something before a theft can be said to have taken place. It is possible, of course, that The Wardman Wire is paying a lot for its bandwidth for some reason in which case the best thing to do is block hotlinking altogether using ht.access or some other method (or find a better deal).

I don't block hotlinking and I don't monitor it either. With over 4,500 gigs of bandwidth available for my image hosting  (increasing by 16 gigs every week) the leeching of a 20kb image isn't going to cause me sleepless nights. Nor is it going to cost me anything, which is my main point. I don't pay extra for the bandwidth I don't use so, effectively, it's free. Even if I did pay for bandwidth like I pay for my electricity the cost to me of 10,000 image calls would be a massive 2 pence. It might be polite to ask before hotlinking but, frankly, I am not about to call you a thief if you do it.


Lowering expectations

alicublog
The best we can hope for, the consensus seemed to be, is a “Jordan-style” Iraq with a moderate, somewhat reliably pro-American regime that will, on occasion, vote with us in the United Nations. What we need in Iraq is a “strong state” that can assert its will domestically. A Jeffersonian democracy on the Euphrates isn’t in the cards, most agreed.

Refresh my memory: why did we depose Saddam? It sounds like we could have just sent Rumsfeld over to shake his hand a few more times and achieved a similar goal.
Many of us now think this was the planned outcome from the start.



Presidential hopeful

Tom Tancredo: Threaten to bomb Muslim holy sites in retaliation
“If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” Tancredo said. “That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong, fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent, or you will find an attack.”
Perhaps someone should ask the congressman if he actually knows were Mecca and Medina are located.