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For World Day Against Cybercensorship
Category: Humour
Funny. Or meant to be funny. Or about funny.
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The Liberal State-Controlled Media
Well, it’s good to know I suppose.
Leo Varadkar, Fine Gael minister for transport, has accused state broadcaster RTÉ of “liberal bias”. Yes, his exact words. Just like he was on Fox News. Brings an entire new meaning to the term Irish Republican, doesn’t it?
Though it is sometimes hard to tell where Fine Gael are coming from politically, if you had to characterise them in a single word then “Liberal” would have been it. They’re a good fit for what it traditionally means – in Europe: In favour of individual freedom, including the freedom to use the advantages you were born into. So, laissez-faire economics and no particular interest in your private life.
But he seems to be using it in the American sense, where the phrase liberal bias has come to be coded language for anything not conservative, Christian and pro-Republican. Witness Conservapedia, the online encyclopaedia invented to provide information free from Wikipedia’s liberal bias – by which they mean evolution and other non-Biblical aberrations. In this mindset, neutrality itself is liberal bias.
I don’t claim RTÉ have no problems with objectivity, and I am sure that Varadkar is not actually a Creationist. But it is more than worrying to see a politician adopting the rhetoric of wilful ignorance. Does he really want to align himself with the likes of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum?
Related articles
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Narwhal Circus
…Will be resumed as soon as possible. I’m in bed with a bad cold.
Well I say bed, it’s more the couch, in front of the TV. Sipping a hot drink. I’m recording TV and updating my phone. In the oven, a whole chicken is roasting for dinner. It doesn’t sound much like hardship, and I have to admit it’s not. I’d probably enjoy doing this little – if I was doing it of my own free will.
But I’m cooking the chicken now because on Sunday I was too fuzz-headed to figure out how, and I haven’t written this blog – or done anything much else even remotely constructive – in days. I think the closest I got to creativity was a couple of rounds of the Game of Liff over on my friend Susan’s blog, and even then I faded out almost immediately.
That’s typical in fact. I don’t feel so bad – my inner ears are little diving bells, but there’s no other real discomfort – I just can’t concentrate. Not that I’m a paragon of laserlike focus when I’m well, it might be admitted, but now I’m all, you know, kind of
That was going to be a sentence that trailed off aimlessly, but while I was writing I honestly fell asleep. Weirdly, my attempt to describe reality became the reality. But I feel a bit better for it at least. Maybe today I can write something coherent.
Hoping you’re well.
Related articles
- Colorful Peruvian lizard surprises scientists (msnbc.msn.com)
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Roots Of Religion
I came across something extraordinary. Chimps may have a religion.
When the seasonal rains come, chimpanzees – the dominant males especially – do a special sort of dance or ritual. It’s hard for us to guess their motivation of course. Are they celebrating the change of season, defying it, placating it? All you can really say is that it’s a social reaction to an environmental phenomenon. And that is surely one of the hallmarks of religion – personifying and attempting to communicate with natural forces.
It’s especially interesting when you consider that there doesn’t seem to be a human society without some religious sense. A traditional (non-religious) explanation is that when faced with the inexplicable, we are forced to ascribe it to the caprice of an unknown will.
Seen that way, religion is a consequence of intelligence. But what if all humans have religion because religion is older than humans, and our ancestors treated the forces of nature as living beings, malevolent or benign, long before they had language or culture?
It would explain some things – like how people with barely any language or culture can be so religious today.
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Hallmarked For Life
Roses are infra
Violets are ultra
Invisible flowers
That I bought to insult ya
So what did you do for the Feast of Frustration? I had a great idea. I made a date with an attractive woman.
Then I cancelled the date, stayed at home and wrote an emotional letter to the woman who dumped me three weeks ago. That sounds like a good idea, right?
Actually it was. OK, I cancelled because I’m exhausted and a little unwell after the (finished!!!) major commission, which kept me up most of the last two nights and days. And to be honest it wasn’t really a date, but dinner with a friend who had also broken up with someone recently. So more a sort of anti-date.
And that letter was something that had been brewing in my head for the last few days. Now I had time to write it, and V-Day seemed like a good pretext. It was more for my benefit than hers – though it might I hope be to hers also. A way for me to let go of the angry stage and move on to the philosophical.
I had a good girlfriend there, I could really see a future for us. But it’s over. Sad, but what can you do? Die just a little inside, smile ruefully, and remember the best parts. She is a great woman and I wish her nothing but better things.
There, I’m sane. Sappy, but sane. I have moved on, I’m over her, my emotional tensions are all resolved and I am ready again to form a new relationship.
Preferably immediately. Anyone free this evening?
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Loosening Up
I must apologise form the infrequency of posts in the last while. That whole girlfriend business didn’t exactly help of course, and I’ve a cartoon commission on that has proven to be much more tricky than expected.
My work usually concerns ideas and words – so much so that at their worst, my cartoons are just two people talking. My drawing, if it can even be called such, is normally minimalistic, loose, and spontaneous. This job is quite the opposite. While still cartoony in style, it’s to illustrate the precise way that certain tools are used (I’ll tell more when the clients have actually published), so suddenly I have to pay enormous attention to tiny details. The tools have to be drawn correctly, they have to be held correctly. Hands! Endless hands. No one likes drawing hands… My own are physically tired now.
And we’ve had predictable communications problems. The clients of course know precisely how the tools are employed. So when they describe what they want, they know what they mean. I merrily walk off with a profound misapprehension of their wishes, and consequently have to discard hours and hours’ worth of entirely useless work. Perhaps I’ll do an exhibition of those later in the year. Under the title “Unnecessary Pictures”, because that will make them sound like art.
But this will be finished shortly – I hope – and I will try to make up for my absence.
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Extemporising
I’m watching a friend practise piano with headphones. The effect is a little surreal. Stripped of sound, these purposeful movements could be almost anything. She could be sending telegraphic messages, firing off banks of weapons, controlling some vast and complicated high-speed power loom.
It makes me think about several things. Like why are music keyboards this shape while typewriter-style ones are so cramped? Both are designed to let you ‘play’ them as quickly as possible, both have around the same number of keys, yet they came out so different.
Maybe it’s simply pressure on space in an office environment that forced the adoption of the multi-row typewriter layout. I’m pretty sure you could type as fast if the keys were all in a line, but they don’t need to be so you can ‘fold up’ the letters into a neater space.
Why not do that with piano keys? Well you could, but laying them out in a straight line reflects something intrinsic about them – that they have order. Though the actual notes that make up the scale are pretty arbitrary – other cultures use entirely different ones – their order is not. On the other hand there is no order to letters except alphabetical order, and that is so arbitrary that typewriters can blithely ignore it.
Having found two reasons for the difference (never be satisfied with one – nothing happens for just one reason) I move on to the next question:
Could performance weaving, composing and improvising on keyboard-controlled looms with colour instead of sound, give us wonderful new ‘silent concertos’?
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- Music Writing Device Records Notes Played on Piano (Oct, 1930) (modernmechanix.com)
- Keaton Music Typewriter (flipflipmeheidi.com)
- Carol Cole’s Mesmerizing Steinway Mandala is Made From Recycled Piano Keys (inhabitat.com)
- Self-tuning piano can tune itself, can’t tuna fish (hackaday.com)
Irish car number (license) plates work by a nice simple system. First there’s a two-digit year, then code letter(s) that represent the county of registration, then a unique number. Nothing could be plainer or more logical.
So naturally there’s a politician who wants to mess with it. I’ve mentioned Michael Healy-Rae once or twice before, not without using the phrases “living caricature” and “precisely the country’s real problem”. Indeed by Healy-Rae standards, today’s scheme is not all that embarrassing. He merely wants to introduce naked superstition into the number plate scheme. The worry is that the “unlucky number” next year will hurt an already depressed market for new cars.
Before 1991 they used code letters; in order to know how old a vehicle was you had to actually care. So this new system has probably been great for sellers. In the boom time, ostentatiously driving this year’s car was a game some were all too happy to play. Now though things are tougher for car dealerships. Could an unlucky number really put them over the edge?
Actually you could also make the opposite argument. The superstitious will probably spend what they were going to spend in the long run. But while some might put the purchase off until 2014, others might use it as an excuse to bring it forward – and presumably sales are wanted even more badly now. So fear of 13 might be a boon to dealers.
Nonetheless I think we should go for the idea of a “12A” plate. But only – and this is vital – as an option. That way you can spot people who can still afford new cars, but who owe their good fortune (or at least believe they owe it) to sheer dumb luck. And we can run them straight off the road.
Related articles
- These are America’s 12 best license plates [License Plates] (jalopnik.com)
- Today’s Puzzle 14-12-2011 (cmaankur.wordpress.com)
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Searching Out A Stranger
There are good days and there are bad days. Most are both. I was thinking this morning that it really wasn’t such a bad time to be Suddenly Single¹. My money problems of the last year or so seem pretty much behind me, work could be picking up, I’m in good health, I have I some clear goals. Life is actually pretty bright. The only thing really missing is…
Someone to share it with. And click, we’re back in the room.
The most depressing thing about the end of a relationship – no who am I kidding, among the many aspects competing for the title of most depressing thing about the end of a relationship – is the fact that you have to get to like someone new. It took me years to get to like my last girlfriend as much as I did. I’d hoped to keep on liking her more forever. But now I have to start over, from scratch.
What am I looking for? Complete intimacy with another human being. Where must I look for it? Among total strangers. It’s mindblowing if you think about it at all.
- The preferred term for ‘Dumped’.
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Newts In Space!
And as the special free-gift-inside part of his Presidential nomination bid, arch-conservative Newt Gingrich has decided that we can all go to the moon. There will, he says, be a permanent US base there – by the end of his second term.
It’s great to have ambitions, isn’t it? It’s great especially to invest in technology and humanity’s future, to discover, to spurn the surly bonds of Earth and so on. Yes, these are great things.
But what is also good is having a President who isn’t out of his ****ing mind.
Constructing a base on the moon would be, by far, the greatest material undertaking ever attempted by humans, requiring many lunar missions just to ferry up enough materials and equipment. Essentially it’s the same problem as building the International Space Station all over again. Remember how long that took? Only it will have to be considerably larger and safer because missions there will be many times more expensive and therefore infrequent. And before that construction can even begin, they need a spacecraft. Something capable of carrying a far greater payload than the Apollo/Saturn vehicle of the 60s will have to be designed, built and tested. All while America doesn’t appear to be drowning in unneeded cash.
And all, unless Gingrich has some secret plan to usurp the constitution – “My Presidency ends when I’m on the Moooooon!” – within eight years. That’s nuts. It’s just crazy stuff he’s saying because he’s getting desperate. Or possibly, desperate stuff he’s saying because he’s going crazy.
Yet I hope he wins the nomination. That way, the next US Presidential election will be between Obama and him – which is the closest we’re ever going to get to straight Good versus Evil. And as war between good and evil is a sign of the End Times, it will herald the return of Christ – whereupon all the Christian Fundamentalists will discover they’re on the wrong side. Which will be a laugh.
Related articles
- Newt’s Right: We Should Build A Permanent Moon Base (forbes.com)
- Gingrich: “I’m Going to Colonize the Moon” (weeklyworldnews.com)