Category: Random

Today on Barbelith: Around the USA – “”Yesterday was September 11, and it was one of my best friend’s birthdays. We’d been trying to talk her into ditching her classes for the day but she’d have none of it. So I rode the el with her to work – it was my first day temping at at Chicago’s NBC tower. We were both pretty tired and didn’t say too much on the ride, but as I got off, I wished her a great day.” and Life during wartime: “Here in America, we’re awash in red white and blue and flags flying from currency exchanges, taxicabs, suburban homes and government offices. As if they were Christmas carols, The Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America can be heard on every radio and at every corner. And our president talks of ‘War’, of a ‘Crusade’. ‘This will not stand,’ he cries.”

Noam Chomsky – always a startlingly intelligent man – has said some of the most insightful and terrifying things about the current situation around the world. A recent transcript has been posted on Barbelith. A couple of excerpts from his interview follow:

“It is also widely recognized that Bin Laden and others like him are praying for ‘a great assault on Muslim states,’ which will cause ‘fanatics to flock to his cause’ (Jenkins, and many others.). That too is familiar. The escalating cycle of violence is typically welcomed by the harshest and most brutal elements on both sides, a fact evident enough from the recent history of the Balkans, to cite only one of many cases.”

“The decade-long US-British assault against the civilian population of Iraq has devastated the society and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths while strengthening Saddam Hussein – who was a favored friend and ally of the US and Britain right through his worst atrocities.”

“The U.S. and much of the West, prefers a more comforting story. To quote the lead analysis in the New York Times (Sept. 16), the perpetrators acted out of “hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage.” U.S. actions are irrelevant, and therefore need not even be mentioned (Serge Schmemann). This is a convenient picture, and the general stance is not unfamiliar in intellectual history; in fact, it is close to the norm. It happens to be completely at variance with everything we know, but has all the merits of self-adulation and uncritical support for power.”

The sheer blind fury of writing a long piece (ironically about anti-war protests and Tariq Ali) and then losing it due to a system crash or failed internet connection is familiar to all those who maintain a weblog of any description, unless possibly they are using Unix in a bomb-shelter with its own generator. That’s forty-five minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.

I don’t quite get The Blog Twinning Project, but I’m certain it’s bloody genius idea.

A reconstruction of how cool it could look:

So I’m watching this TV program rather than do any work, and it’s about properties that are for sale around the UK – the slightly weirder, more beautiful, stranger places to buy, live and work in. Suddenly this incredible place comes up on screen. Am underground fort – victorian in origin – later used as a kind of way-station for troops in World War Two. Full of underground rooms, and over three miles of tunnels and rooms which were previously gun placements. My mouth hit the floor. I was in love with Fort Borstal.

It didn’t take long for my mind to start working overtime, imagining corridors lined with cabling, huge underground server rooms, places to live, places to work, places to play. A huge, underground hi-tech geek utopia of weird thinkers, dreamers and weirdos. I talked to Matt about it immediately and he got just as excited as I had. But how much would it cost? How much would a disused, run-down underground metropolis cost? Three million? Five million?

No. One hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds – an amount of money that you couldn’t buy a two bedroom flat in decent parts of London with. It would cost hundreds of thousands, millions even, to get the whole thing up and running, but for an initial outlay, it’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was sold, in the end, to a woman from South London who wanted to buy goats.

God, I write crap. Every so often I look back at what I produce – what I write – what I put out into the public arena – and I’m ashamed of myself. I can’t tell whether it’s because my thoughts are stagnating, or because I’m too stressed to think things through properly, or whether I have got used to using plasticbag.org as a braindump rather than as a notepad. But I look back at the kind of writing I’m producing and it’s just awful. Why do any of you people read this stuff? What possible benefit could you get from it?

Barbelith bandwidth bills for September look like they are going to be around the $120 mark. Which is not completely unreasonable, I suppose, and likely to be met by the donations that I’ve already received from the people who regularly use the site. But is this any way to maintain a site long-term? I can’t keep scrabbling for cash every month to pay the escalating bills.

An American in LA has just watched Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and insists that I must watch it immediately. Except of course that I doubt very much that I’d be able to. Amazon.co.uk doesn’t appear to have it, and it doesn’t appear to have been released in the UK for cinema or video release. Every so often I forget that the US and UK are completely different countries, half a world away from one another. I somehow assume that everything that you can get access to in the US can be bought or found here somewhere. But it’s just not true.

Tom, rather poorly, reviews Superman II: “The film’s message may be a clichÈd staple of comic books – with great power comes great responsibility – but it’s handled with sincerity and skill. So much so that even Richard Lester’s lapses into camp humour and cheesy patriotism don’t derail the feel-good adventure fun.”