Yesterday evening, after a few too many cocktails with lovely people from work and an emergency Italian meal, we walked back towards Charing Cross to catch the tube only to see a van full of police officers looking weird and mischievous while playing the theme tune to Mission Impossible incredibly loudly and driving up and down the Strand. They all looked about seventeen, and like they were wearing their dads’ uniforms. These are not the uniformed whores from Morrissey’s The World is Full of Crashing Bores and that’s quite nice. I wasn’t scared of them or anything. But I wasn’t exactly filled with confidence either…
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Earthquake 10.5 is Bunk! Bunk! Bunk!
The TV miniseries Earthquake 10.5 is just airing in the UK. It is – bluntly – an unmitigated pile of shit. Interestingly if you search for it online, pretty much the first thing you get is a long page by earthquake experts explaining precisely why it’s total bunk:
Fiction: There can be a magnitude 10.5 earthquake
Fact: The magnitude of an earthquake is related to the length of the fault on which it occurs–the longer the fault, the larger the earthquake. In order to have a magnitude 10.5 earthquake you would have to have a fault that circles the Earth – no such fault exists.Fiction: Thinking an earthquake is an aftershock because they couldn’t find an epicenter – all earthquakes have epicenters
Fact: Aftershocks ARE earthquakes!! The only difference is that they occur after a larger earthquake instead of by themselves.Fiction: Nuclear explosions can “seal” faults
Fact: Nuclear explosions CANNOT seal faults. Earthquakes are part of a global tectonic process that generally occurs well beyond the influence or control of humans.
Additional Earthquake 10.5 fictions that are enough to drive you nuts:
- An earthquake creates dust clouds visible on satellite radar
- Using the term lateral skip
- Earthquakes can cause trucks to sink in dirt, long after the earthquake happened
- Scientists being able to successfully predict earthquakes over short time intervals
- Plates conjoin at 324 feet below the earth’s surface
- The magnitude of an earthquake in progress cannot decrease/stabilize
- Water draining into the faultline
- Fault opening at the ocean and water rushing up the fault
Now I know it’s churlish to expect entertainment to be completely accurate, but this is just a few things from a list of dozens! I’d like to think that people doing stuff like this had some grasp of what they were talking about, but evidently not…
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Informal request for assistance…
Apparently some people using IE6 are having trouble logging into Typekey via plasticbag.org and as a result can’t post comments. Most other browsers seem to be working OK – certainly all Mac browsers that I’ve tried – but obviously this is a problem that I need to resolve. If anyone has any idea why this is happening (presumably I’ve messed up some aspect of the template), then I’d be delighted if they could e-mail me on my normal e-mail address: tom {at} plasticbag {dot} org. Otherwise I’ll look into it more thoroughly tomorrow evening, once I’ve slept and worked the requisite number of hours.
Massachusetts has become the first state in the US to allow same-sex couples to get married. Whether it will last or be crushed under the weight of a Constitutional amendment I don’t know, but it’s bloody wonderful in the meantime:
Other towns and cities across the state were also prepared to wed large numbers of same-sex couples as the law came into force. The Supreme Court ruling upheld a decision by the state’s highest court. It said that denying marriage licences to same-sex couples violated anti-discrimination laws.
The Massachusetts ruling has fuelled heated debate across the country – and the controversy has been particularly intense in an election year. In a statement, President Bush said he had called on the Congress “to pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and a woman as husband and wife. The need for that amendment is still urgent, and I repeat that call today.” His rival John Kerry – who is a Massachusetts senator – is also opposed to same-sex marriages, but favours a more limited form of legal recognition.
I think the issue of gay marriage only started to matter to me when I realised that many of my gay friends actually wanted to get married. And on the day when a friend of mine showed me a marriage booking form online in San Francisco and I started looking for the section for gay people and there wasn’t one – It was all the same form… That affected me too I think – to realise that while it was clearly an issue at the moment, the whole point of this battle was about completely collapsing that difference around relationships. That’s a pretty cool goal…
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The tarnish is the flag…
It’s probably evidence of the good that a couple of days off work can do to a man that I suddenly find myself able to write a brief post about politics – a subject that I’d normally handle with kid gloves attached to the end of a long barge-pole, itself glued to the end of some kind of excrement-encrusted stick. In my experience, most arguments about any subject function by flattening down complexities to tiny arguable issues. Normally we derive significant utility from this style of argument – but I think with politics our ability to find core and simple arguable issues disappears. With each person added to a political situation, the complexity grows exponentially, and when we try to reduce things down to first principles we end up with the sparsest and most atavistic of binaries – things like “them” and “us”, and appeals towards cheap solidarity or patriotism, desperate attempts at face-saving and feeble gestures towards self-interest.
Which brings me to a post from the 37 signals weblog called It’s good that you’re upset. It’s not an evil piece, it’s not even a stupid piece – it’s actually a desperately sad and mournful piece that tries to scrabble for positive meaning out of the behaviour of a small selection of incredibly stupid American servicemen overseas. Here’s a quotation:
The world is rightfully disgusted by the treatment of some Iraqi prisoners, but the fact that the world is outraged is a good sign that America is still held to a higher standard. The Arab street remained mostly quiet when Saddam tortured for three decades or when American soldiers were dragged through the streets and hung to dangle in public a few weeks back. And how many leaders in the Arab world will be outraged that one of their own ruthlessly beheaded an American contractor after forcing him to name his parents and his siblings (and donít forget about Daniel Pearl who had to admit he was a Jew before his head was cut off)? The world barely gave notice to the Talibanís systematic and despicable treatment of women in Afghanistan or the destruction of ancient works of irreplaceable art and culture. The world was barely interested in stopping the carnage in Bosnia until over a half-million were killed (and then the UN still didnít want to get involved). The world is still barely affected by the genocide taking place right now in Africa. But, when the US humiliates some Iraqi prisoners, people are outraged and are calling for resignations at the highest levels of our government. And thatís a good sign for America. Weíre held up to a higher standard and itís something we should be proud of. Not the vile treatment, of course, but the worldís response. Weíre in trouble when people stop caring about how we act as a nation.
I wish I could agree, because although the UK’s own parallel media situation has been resolved, I don’t doubt for a minute that some British soldiers somewhere have undertaken very similar actions to the ones that these American servicemen perpetrated. But to try and find in that evidence that the tarnish is so noticeable because the flags are so bright… Well, it’s pretty far from convincing.
The world is not looking towards these things as a momentary blip – that’s not why they’re so powerful. They’re seen as emblematic, as representative, as illustrative of a relationship that America has with the rest of the world. These actions are seen by people to be illustrations in microcosm – direct analogies – with the way America (and the UK) acted flagrantly without consent from the United Nations. They’re seen as directly illustrative of their disregard for international law, directly illustrative of America’s perception of itself as superior to the rest of the world and qualified to police all of it according to what best serves it’s own best interests. Those countries that are railing against America because of these pictures are not doing it because they’re holding America to a higher standard, they’re doing it because they finally feel they have human-scale evidence of the enormous insensitivity and clumsiness of the entire nation.
I think the most important thing I could say at this point is that it doesn’t matter whether that’s true or not. It doesn’t matter whether or not America is a rampaging power, it doesn’t even matter that an incredibly small minority of US forces have been behaving in this way or exposed. What matters here is that we in the west actually understand and accept that the stances of our governments are not seen by much of the world to be moral or good or positive, but rather self-serving, arrogant, interventionist and actually corrupt, and that pretending that we’re well-liked isn’t going to anyone any good.
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More on the Typekey upgrade…
So my installation of Movable Type has never been the simplest of things. I’ve had to use cgiwrap to avoid some of the more arcane problems with pair’s process throttling and I’ve got MT installed in a completely different directory and domain to my site. For someone with as little overt server knowledge as myself, this means that every time something’s supposed to be a simple installation or adaptation process, everything goes completely wrong. This is all by way of me saying that I’ve still got lots of problems around the place with integrating the Typekey registration system, including but not limited to it randomly not working, having lots of really nasty preview screens that remain totally untemplated and generally feeling more than a little rough around the edges. I’ll endeavour to get it all sorted out this evening so that the Monday morning crowd don’t start snarking out at me… Plus: Lots of actually interesting posts on real subjects to come soon!
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Bring it on, spam wankers!
First impressions of the new MT are generally really positive. I’m still having the same problems with incredibly slow performance that I had before, which I’m now assuming are to be laid at the door of my $140 a month host – pair.com. While I can now manage to do a full-site rebuild without my server throttling the process, if I pre-moderate or delete more than two or three comments in one go the whole thing shudders to a grotesque halt. For this reason (and because I’ve had some twat try and pump another forty incest-related bits of spam through the site), I’m putting the ultra-draconian comment management features into effect from this point on. I’m afraid if you want to make yourself heard on this site from now on you’ll have to register with Typekey. I’m terribly sorry, guys, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my site prop up the porn empire of some grotesque little money-grubbing freak who thinks that pissing around with the personal sites of well-meaning people in order to make 0.01 cents a pop is a legitimate thing to do. Wankers.
If you’ve tried to comment on the site in the last few hours then you’ll probably already have noticed that I’ve upgraded to MT 3.0 and that I’ve turned on most of the draconian comment features. In the last couple of days I have had the better part of sixty comment spams from various hardcore pornography, bestiality and rape sites and quite frankly I’ve had enough.
Anyway as a result of the upgrade there are a few templates across the site that have broken and look a bit crappy. I’ll try and get that stuff sorted over the weekend, once I’ve ploughed through my new book on Illustrator. I’m so far behind in my various obligations outside work that I can’t really imagine I’m going to get everything done I want to over the next couple of days, but I’m going to give it my best shot. In the meantime, I can recommend Troy – it’s long and it’s not particularly accurate, but it’s mostly pretty compelling and has a few ridiculous Classics jokes which appealed to me in it. Back in a bit.
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And relax!
Wow. What a couple of weeks. I’ve been working so hard that at times I swear that my keyboard fingers have been getting cramps. Certainly my brain has. A succession of twelve-hour days, plus travel (including weekends) has left me a little the worse for wear and not really in the fittest state to talk to the general public. And – of course I have this epic post gestating in the background that I can’t get rid of and can’t finish that I really just need to release into the world as is. Mental constipation due to an overly refined diet of work, I think…
Anyway – I’ve carved myself out a long-weekend of slacking off and not thinking about work at all, both Friday and Monday to wander around the place and think about personal stuff and catch up with what’s going on online and clean my flat and try and get a few design treatments done for some things I’m working on. So far I’ve already seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, watched the final episode of Friends and the penultimate Enterprise and Angels, gone for lunch with Cory and ripped a few new albums. And later today (when I’ve got bored of standing up in the Human-Computer Interaction department of Foyles scabbing off their wifi) I’m going to wander off and catch Troy. Tomorrow is cleaning and basic creativity, I think. And then I might spend Sunday on the blog and Monday doing personal project stuff before the slog begins anew… Relaxation is fun.
Strange, arcane shapes are starting to appear in the landscape of the breedster eco-system, carved out of the faeces of insects (map):
