Another quote from The Cambridge Spies because I got it for my birthday and I’m watching it again because I really enjoyed it last time…
Queen: “Never trust a man with a bad moustache. Homosexualists never have moustaches… Have you noticed? I think it’s a signal… To other chaps… ‘Look! No moustache! Come and get me!’ Ponces and spies, Anthony. The people with the most to hide never have moustaches. So which are you, Anthony? Ponce or spy?”
Anthony Blunt: “Oh… A little of both… Aren’t we all?”
On The Cambridge Spies: “In a dirty bogus business, riddled with deceit, manipulation and betrayal, an intelligence service maintains it sanity by developing its own concept of what it believes to be the truth. Those agents who confirm this perceived truth – even if it is wrong – prosper. Those who deny it – even if they are right – fall under suspicion.” It all sounds terribly familiar. Perhaps internet punditry is the new espionage?
The awesome stairs of Broadcasting House…
Until I started my new job at the BBC – with the exception of miserably short stints in cyber-cafés and the like – I hadn’t used a Windows PC in getting on for two years. Now I’m compelled to. My work e-mail is only accessible if I persuade the hated beast to allow me access. Worse still is the effect this has on my outboard brain – that place where my articulation of ideas occurs, that home of recorded impression. My iBook hippocampus – the component of my prostheses that deals specifically with the creation of memory – has been hacked from the network and sits like a thousand pound brick by my desk all day.
As a result my extended connections to my social network – mediated through my alien stone, my totem computer – continue to atrophy. My sense of what’s going on around me is collapsing. I’m no longer sitting at the centre of the Panopticon. Instead I’m peripheral. What is central is the urinal of Windows machinery that, if I am thirsty for information, I must drink from. The internet that squeezes its way through task managers, continual crashing and word processors in browsers is not an internet I’m familiar with. It’s an ill-formed, thick and sticky horror – like Roast Lamb gone cold and congealed with fat. Coughed up by a used car salesman.
Or maybe the shame is that I’m beginning to get used to it…
Thanks to Mr Hammersley, I’m currently playing with version 1.1.1 of everyone’s favourite collaborative editing tool Hydra. The big change? There’s now a built in live-updating HTML preview facility. Some of the implications are fairly obvious – you can now easily collaborate on the writing of web pages in all their glory. Less obvious is the fact that you can now collaboratively write notes in HTML – which could make the composition of semantically well-constructed collaborative writing that can be easily web-published easier than ever… I’m fascinated…
What have I done this weekend? I’ve driven (mostly with Nick and Katy) about three hundred and fifty miles. I’ve taken my friends to a Norwich gay bar full of army fetishists. I’ve smashed things with my Hulk Hands. I’ve chased Mo around a garden. I’ve turned thirty-one, cooked a massive breakfast, fed baby lambs and goats, been scared by a turkey, eaten fudge, laughed at cups with puppy heads, bought tons and tons of meat, ploughed a boat into shallow waters, cooked steak on a barbecue, watched an eighties sunset, snapped at a friend, watched music videos, eaten watermelon for breakfast, watched This Island Earth, cleaned like I’ve never cleaned before, become obsessed by the sky, eaten hamburgers by the ton, connected to a wifi node in Primrose Hill to check film times, took a high-speed trip to Tottenham Court Road to watch The Hulk, but missed the film, drank a Caipirinha and drove home. Wrote stuff. Became really tired. Went to sleep.
I’ve been reading Blair’s speech to Congress (page one / page two), and I think my first reaction is that it’s an interesting combination of jingoism, liberalism, pragmatism and self-love. The bits that are a bit craw-sticking are the fawning tones – even when they’re only preludes to more serious comments.
“Let me also express my gratitude to President Bush. Through the troubled times since 11 September changed our world, we have been allies and friends. Thank you, Mr President, for your leadership.”
Masturbation cuts cancer risk: “Men could reduce their risk of developing prostate cancer through regular masturbation, researchers suggest. They say cancer-causing chemicals could build up in the prostate if men do not ejaculate regularly. And they say sexual intercourse may not have the same protective effect because of the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted infection, which could increase men’s cancer risk.” [via a triumphalist IM from Matt]
Two people who – as usual – have managed to find specious grounds to bitch about the weblogging event at the House of Parliament yesterday: (1) Andrew Orlowski (2) Simon Kent (hitherto) from 2lmc.org. Some people seem to be able to find Andrew’s permanently dribbling bile gland entertaining – and a few seem to find it genuinely informative – presumably in the way that people who want to have their prejudices confirmed get value from the Daily Mail. I have quite a lot of trouble with this way of reading – “Well, he confirms my prejudices, so he must be right” – just as I have trouble with him continuing to reference previous work of his even when pretty much every ‘fact’ inside that ‘work’ has been been demonstrated to be full of (at best) unsupported speculation and at worst demonstrably wrong.
It’s almost not worth engaging with the body of this latest piece, except to say that while Andrew is bitching (yet again) about how useless weblogs are and how politicians must find the whole thing ridiculous, said politicians are talking at events in the House of Commons (like this one) explaining how useful they’re finding them.
As to Simon Kent, I think it’s this kind of determined negativity and workaday sniping that pisses me off the most about debates like this. I’ll be honest – I simply don’t think I’m able to understand the type of person who gets pleasure out of such dreary, repetitive, contentless complaining. More precisely, I really don’t understand the idea that there is much in the way of meaningful qualitative data (are they shit or not) about people that can be derived from simply grouping together everyone who uses the same tool no matter what said people plan to do with it. I mean if a fishmonger buys a mobile phone and a nuclear scientist buys a similar mobile phone, does that make them “Mophers”, who can be easily dismissed as a group of weirdos and idiots? Of course not – and why? Because we are able to see that the tool is valuable and useful (even as it is profoundly simple in concept) and that it could facilitate every kind of speech from shouting about the price of fish to discussing atomic physics. The irony of the whole thing is that Simon (and 2lmc) perpetually demonstrate their own discomfort with people who make these kinds of insanely vacuous value judgments when – despite the fact thay run sites that are patently weblogs – they continually deny that they’re in any way associated with them. Why? Because fundamentally they’re finding the form useful while not wanting to be associated with (or subsumed within) the stereotypes (that they themselves perpetrate) of the collective. To which I can only reply – hopefully with only the most complicit of irones – join the damn club…
From Palace of Westminster to The West Wing in one bus ride… I’m too exhausted to write much about the Vox Politics event in the House of Commons that I attended earlier this evening – I’ll leave in depth discussion of that until tomorrow, I think. But in the meantime, the collaboratively annotated Hydra document from the event is worth reading (and online) and here’s a picture from later in the evening when Tom Watson (MP for West Bromwich East) met Tom Coates (Minister for Weblogging Affairs) down the Westminster Arms. All through the power of interhighwebnet.