Preoccupations

Re-echoing that Mac/DOS piece

When I read Stephen Fry's first Saturday Guardian column (previous post), I took in the cross-reference to Umberto Eco's piece about the Mac/DOS:Catholic/Protestant parallelism but didn't follow it as I recalled having read it before. Then I saw friends bookmarking it and something made me check it out. What I recall reading (in October, 2005, it turns out — see Labyrinths and Internet) was something fuller — short of a full-length newspaper column but more than a clip.

I found it on the web in The Modern World and I see from the same site's page of Eco's writings that it says of this, the Mac/DOS piece: 'This ubiquitous work has, by now, found its way all across the Internet'. So there we are. And here it is, again.

The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS by Umberto Eco

The following excerpts are from an English translation of Umberto Eco's back-page column, La bustina di Minerva, in the Italian news weekly Espresso, September 30, 1994.

A French translation may be seen here.

---

Friends, Italians, countrymen, I ask that a Committee for Public Health be set up, whose task would be to censor (by violent means, if necessary) discussion of the following topics in the Italian press. Each censored topic is followed by an alternative in brackets which is just as futile, but rich with the potential for polemic. Whether Joyce is boring (whether reading Thomas Mann gives one erections). Whether Heidegger is responsible for the crisis of the Left (whether Ariosto provoked the revocation of the Edict of Nantes). Whether semiotics has blurred the difference between Walt Disney and Dante (whether De Agostini does the right thing in putting Vimercate and the Sahara in the same atlas). Whether Italy boycotted quantum physics (whether France plots against the subjunctive). Whether new technologies kill books and cinemas (whether zeppelins made bicycles redundant). Whether computers kill inspiration (whether fountain pens are Protestant).

One can continue with: whether Moses was anti-semitic; whether Leon Bloy liked Calasso; whether Rousseau was responsible for the atomic bomb; whether Homer approved of investments in Treasury stocks; whether the Sacred Heart is monarchist or republican.

I asked above whether fountain pens were Protestant. Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It's an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.

Naturally, the Catholicism and Protestantism of the two systems have nothing to do with the cultural and religious positions of their users. One may wonder whether, as time goes by, the use of one system rather than another leads to profound inner changes. Can you use DOS and be a Vande supporter? And more: Would Celine have written using Word, WordPerfect, or Wordstar? Would Descartes have programmed in Pascal?

And machine code, which lies beneath and decides the destiny of both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that belongs to the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic. The Jewish lobby, as always. ...

Technorati tags: Umberto Eco, Mac, DOS, PC

Satire under the Nazis

Via the excellent Smashing Telly, Laughing With Hitler, originally on BBC Four and now on Google Video. It has its weaknesses, but if you're interested in satire you'll surely get a lot out of watching it. Much struck home — some of it amusing, plenty that was simply shocking:

 

• Werner Finck ('The bad times are over, we now have a thousand year Reich to get through'; 'How odd: it's spring, but everything is turning brown') and his club, Die Katakombe — look around the 8 minute mark.

 

• Traubert Petter and his performing chimps (c 28 minutes). The chimps were taught to give the Hitler salute (to the initial, stupid acclaim of party members — 'Even the monkeys greet us'), but then a party decree was issued banning apes from saluting the Führer. Traubert Petter was sent to serve on the Russian front (and survived).

   

• Fritz Muliar (c 32 minutes) who at 21 wrote his last will and testament, thinking he would be sentenced to death for making jokes about Hitler. Instead, he endured five years of hard labour in a penal battalion in Russia: 'I thought I would never laugh again'.
  
  
• Robert Dorsay (c 48 minutes): opponent of the Nazis, he was betrayed by a fellow actor and was executed on 29 October, 1943, for telling jokes and making defeatist remarks.

 

• Dieter Hildebrandt (c 51/52 minutes): 'In those days you took a tiny hammer and hit a small bell and it went [loud, reverberating noise]. Today, you hit a huge bell with a huge hammer and it goes 'ping'.'
  
  
• Fr Joseph Müller (c 52 minutes): parish priest of Groß Düngen, he was arrested (11 May, 1944) by the Gestapo. Appearing in the People's Court before Roland Freisler, he was found guilty, sentenced to the guillotine and was executed on 11 September, 1944 — for preaching Christian values and telling a joke about a dying soldier: 'Show me the people that I'm dying for', says the dying solider. A picture of Hitler and a picture of Göring are placed by him, one on each side. The soldier dies, saying, 'Now I shall die like Jesus Christ, between two criminals'.

Technorati tags: comedy, parody, Nazis, Werner Finck, Traubert Petter, Fritz Muliar, Robert Dorsay, Dieter Hildebrandt, Joseph Müller

When the internet goes

The Onion — of course.

Technorati tags: The Onion

mosquitotone

Compound Security Systems of Wales makes the Mosquito teenager-repellent (which sounds like one of Private Eye's joke products):

The Mosquito ultrasonic teenage deterrent is the solution to the eternal problem of unwanted gatherings of youths and teenagers in shopping malls and around shops. The presence of these teenagers discourages genuine shoppers and customers’ from coming into your shop, affecting your turnover and profits. Anti social behaviour has become the biggest threat to private property over the last decade and there has been no effective deterrent until now. …

With an effective range of between fifteen and twenty meters Compound Security Devices field trials have shown that teenagers are acutely aware of the Mosquito and usually move away from the area within just a couple of minutes. The system is completely harmless even with long term use. …

It seems that there is a very real medical phenomenon known as presbycusis or age related hearing loss which, according to The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, "begins after the age of 20 but is usually significant only in persons over 65". It first affects the highest frequencies (18 to 20 kHz) notably in those who have turned 20 years of age". It is possible to generate a high frequency sound that is audible only to teenagers.

Now, the tables have been turned:

Some students are downloading a ring tone off the internet that is too high-pitched to be heard by most adults. With it, high schoolers can receive text message alerts on their cell phones without the teacher knowing. … The ring tone is a spin-off of technology that was originally meant to repel teenagers -- not help them.

There are some lessons here for the learning …

Instructions for downloading the ringtone are currently on Compound's main page, so it appears they're profiting from selling both a "teen deterrent" (a product which raises a lot of issues) and a teen-only-audible ringtone that will play well in class. Ka-ching!

Technorati tags: mosquitotone, Mosquito, ringtones, teenage, teenagers

Stephen Colbert, satirist supreme

I remember Ian Hislop once saying how he had tried to take a satirical programme (a version of Spitting Image?) to the States, only to be met there with disbelief: 'You mean you want to make fun of the President?'. Which makes the performance of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner the more remarkable.

Thanks to Tom Coates (del.icio.us) for these links: a clip of some highlights (this may have been taken down; at least, it's not running right now — has CSPAN paid them a YouTube visit?); a BitTorrent link to a movie of the evening; an Editor & Publisher piece about the speech.

Botherer covered it well:

… what wasn’t reported in the UK and elsewhere, disturbingly including the USA, was the main speaker for the evening, Stephen Colbert. Currently riding high with the success of his excellent Daily Show spin-off, The Colbert Report (pronounced “Colbert Report”), the honour of giving the main speech at the dinner, which is intended to poke fun at the president, was his. From the reaction it seems no one was quite expecting what Colbert had to say.

In character, he addressed the audience from the perspective of his programme, ironically adopting a Fox News-like stance in order to make a mockery of it. Throughout, Bush was sat two chairs to his right.

“Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Salon, too:

Make no mistake, Stephen Colbert is a dangerous man -- a bomb thrower, an assassin, a terrorist with boring hair and rimless glasses. It's a wonder the secret service let him so close to the President of the United States.

But there he was Saturday night, keynoting the year's most fawning celebration of the self-importance of the DC press corps, the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Before he took the podium, the master of ceremonies ominously announced, "Tonight, no one is safe."

To my friends and colleagues teaching satire: teach this! There's a transcript of Colbert's speech at Daily Kos (excerpt below) and, in addition to the Torrent link above, you can download the full video at these links: Part 1, Part 2. It is compelling, very sharp and very funny.

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world. …

And I just like the guy. He's a good Joe. Obviously loves his wife, calls her his better half. And polls show America agrees. She's a true lady and a wonderful woman. But I just have one beef, ma'am.

I'm sorry, but this reading initiative. I'm sorry, I've never been a fan of books. I don't trust them. They're all fact, no heart. I mean, they're elitist, telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American! I'm with the President, let history decide what did or did not happen.

The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will. As excited as I am to be here with the President, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the President's side, and the Vice-President's side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the President makes decisions. He's the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the Press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

You can leave a thank-you-Stephen-Colbert message here. There's a good Flickr photo from the evening here. And if you use Firefox and haven't yet got the Video Downloader extension, it's here.

Update! Inside Google reports:

The Google Video blog posts on how they’ve come to an agreement with C-SPAN to show the content, and agreement YouTube apparently failed (or never tried) to make. You have three options: You can watch the entire 1 hour, 35 minute video of the dinner, or stick to an 11 minute excerpt of President Bush and Bush impersonator Steve Bridges, or go for the 25 minute excerpt of Steven Colbert’s speech. Of course, if you want to enjoy Colbert’s biting remarks, make sure you quit about 16:45 in, because the press conference/chase segment is as tragically unfunny as it gets.

Technorati tags: Stephen Colbert, George Bush, White House, journalism

YouTube

Be it Frank Zappa specials, such as I am the Slime and Mike Nesmith and Frank Zappa on 'The Monkees', or Captain Beefheart — Lick my decals off, baby … or the loftier heights of The Hearts of Age (Orson Welles) and Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren), YouTube is going to become compulsive viewing. (All links via del.icio.us, the first three via Merlin Mann, the last two via Warren Ellis.)

Wikipedia on The Hearts of Age:

The Hearts of Age is the first film made by Orson Welles. The film is a four-minute short, which he co-directed with William Vance in 1934. The film stars Welles' first wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as Welles himself. He made the film while attending the Todd School for Boys, in Woodstock, Illinois, at the age of 19. The plot is a series of images loosely tied together, and is arguably influenced by surrealism. The film is rarely seen today, but many point to it as an important precursor to Welles' first Hollywood film, Citizen Kane.

Meshes of the Afternoon, to my shame, is a discovery. Better now than never. Wikipedia here. An Uruguayan site here (Spanish). (Both these links via absurdita, who uploaded the film to YouTube.) IMDb entry here.

Technorati tags: Orson Welles, Maya Deren, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, YouTube

Meetings

The last week has been too busy for much blogging, so … some catching up.

One thing that caught my eye a while back was David Heinemeier's (37 Signals) posting about meetings — and their frequent lack of value. A nod of recognition here to Mike's magic beans send-up of this, but I do believe that many meetings are a waste of time: they're often held out of a sense of what's required (the due process) and are often allowed to run for far too long and with too little purpose. I like David's bulletpoints contra meetings:

• They break your working day into small, incoherent pieces on a schedule incompatible with the natural breaks in your flow
• They are normally all about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or a screen of design)
• They usually contain an abysmal low amount of information conveyed per minute
• They often contain at least one moron that inevitably get his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense
• They drift off subject easier than a rear-wheel driven Chicago cab in heavy snow
• They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what its about
• They require thorough preparation that people rarely do anyway

David linked back to a Guardian article (which appeared in January), reporting on research conducted by Alexandra Luong and Steven G Rogelberg and published (March 2005) in the journal, Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice. The summary of the report on the APA Journals site runs:

Meetings are an integral part of organizational life; however, few empirical studies have systematically examined the phenomenon and its effects on employees. By likening work meetings to interruptions and daily hassles, the authors proposed that meeting load (i.e., frequency and time spent) can affect employee well-being. For a period of 1 week, participants maintained daily work diaries of their meetings as well as daily self-reports of their well-being. Using hierarchical linear modeling analyses, the authors found a significant positive relationship between number of meetings attended and daily fatigue as well as subjective workload (i.e., more meetings were associated with increased feelings of fatigue and workload).

The Guardian article was by Marc Abrahams. (He edits the Annals of Improbable Research and organises the Ig Nobel Prize.) It's an amusing read about something we all know is true, even if the "experiment" conducted by Luong and Rogelberg seems to have used such a tiny number of subjects as to look like a good example of 'improbable research'. 37. (37? Is there a joke running here …?)

In my experience, people who put faith in meetings often rate process over the messiness of practice. This is a good place for me to bookmark Ross' initial post, The End of Process, Euan's comment there (which he also posted afterwards, here) and Euan's excellent, later posting, More on process.

By the way: most of last week was not spent in meetings, and the two conferences I attended (I'll post about these shortly) were certainly not a waste of time.

Technorati tags: meetings, organisations, GTD, process

Graffiti, not comments?

This takes the prize:

Wow, the internet is a messy place. Like most of you I got here through the Radiohead website, and I will also treat this post like graffiti.

What I would say is that if Web 2.0 means anything, it had better sort out this comment/presence/'I woz here and smiled'/'I woz here and frowned'/etc problem. You just can't conduct anything approximating to a "normal" conversation via a blog's comments -- it's all so hit, miss, infrequent and entirely dependent upon making the effort to go back and see what's happened. Too many strands, too. Graffiti's quite a good alt term for what goes on a lot of the time. Graffiti's good.

As I said before ...

(And I hope not everyone is coming here via Colin's referral … I have some regulars, surely … But thank you for that great graffiti, Chas.)

++ let's hear it for chaos (hear, hear) and conversation.

Paparazzi, Pavarotti

Ben Trott writes about K-Fed's Pavarotti/paparazzi "confusion" (is it deliberate?). This reminds me of a son of a friend, attempting to get across London in a taxi cab the week of Princess Diana's death. As the cab got bogged down again in the traffic jams caused by the thousands of people out on the streets, mourning Princess Di, my friend's son made a move many of us … er, avoid, and asked the cabbie what he made of it all:

Oh it's terrible. I mean, what a terrible way to go, being chased across Paris by a dozen Pavarottis.

So, he'll be resigning then …

Charles Clarke has vowed to "eliminate" anti-social behaviour and disrespect in society by the time of the next general election "whenever it comes". BBC News

Synchronicity

Via bowblog, a Will Self anecdote from The Independent. Steve Borwick says: 'The good thing about the paper's otherwise-annoying paid-for service is that the free taster is just long enough to include the punchline of a very good coincidence gag'. Here it is:

In this space last week, I recalled a drive through the Australian outback - from Alice Springs to Ayer's Rock - during which I managed to miss the only turn for 500 kilometres due to marijuana intoxication. The same journey was notable also for the most extreme coincidence involving children's literature. We were bombing along, the desert on either side of the thin, tarmac strip, dimming from ochre, to magenta, to purple; my wife was reading our then two-year-old son a jolly little book that had the hook line: "Children, children what do you see?" Whereupon the lector turned the page to reveal a creature, then chanted - hopefully accompanied by the compliant kiddie - "I see a green turtle looking at me!"

She had just got to the point where the chant was "I see a red bird looking at me!" when a large red bird flew into the windscreen, leaving a smear of blood, a few wing feathers and a large crack. Shocked as much by the synchronicity as the near-fatal SVR ("Single Vehicle Rollover" as this most common accident is termed in Australia) I pulled over and panted atop the wheel for a few minutes. "If you think that was a lucky escape," my wife said after a while, "on the next page there's a blue horse."

Calcium Made Interesting

Calcium Made Interesting is the title of a newly published collection of Graham Chapman's writings. Chapman (1941–1989) has been called 'the only true anarchist in Monty Python' (Jonathan Lynn). Trained as a doctor, but turning to comedy sketch-writing and then emerging as a comedy actor/performer, he nearly ran on to the self-destructive rocks of alcoholism. Michael Palin:

His restless ever-inquisitive need to be freed from the boring and the conventional had led him to the brink, but his cautious disciplined rational side saved him at the last minute from toppling over.

Eric Idle said of Chapman's A Liar's Autobiography, 'This is life viewed as comedy, that only a doctor faced constantly with the physical comedy of our bodies can see'.

John Cleese's famous speech at Chapman's memorial service can be read here and a clip viewed here:

I remember his being invited to speak at the Oxford Union, and entering the chamber dressed as a carrot---a full length orange tapering costume with a large, bright green sprig as a hat----and then, when his turn came to speak, refusing to do so. He just stood there, literally speechless, for twenty minutes, smiling beatifically. The only time in world history that a totally silent man has succeeded in inciting a riot.

I remember Graham receiving a Sun newspaper TV award from Reggie Maudling. Who else! And taking the trophy falling to the ground and crawling all the way back to his table, screaming loudly, as loudly as he could. And if you remember Gray, that was very loud indeed.

It is magnificent, isn't it? You see, the thing about shock... is not that it upsets some people, I think; I think that it gives others a momentary joy of liberation, as we realised in that instant that the social rules that constrict our lives so terribly are not actually very important.

The new book is reviewed today in the Telegraph by John Preston (not online — yet?), and two things in this piece caught my attention:

From the start he seems to have been beset by conflicting impulses: orthodoxy on the one hand and extreme unorthodoxy on the other. When he was a child, Chapman once put a chair in the kitchen sink and sat on it for several hours in order to gain a different perspective on the room.

And the other, a stage direction to a script:

A corridor, fairly butch.

And then there is this quotation, via Eric Idle: 'After all, who of us in our lives hasn't set fire to some great public building or other …'

Theology in high places

Joi Ito, way up high in the mountains of Utah:

I just finished chatting with reverend AKMA about my last post, trying to see if there was something similar to good theologians and open source leaders. We talked about the importance of humility and the risks of greed. (AKMA pointed out that he was by far the most humble person on the planet.) I noticed that my thoughts seem to be somewhat more spiritual than usual.

Then I remembered reading somewhere that there was a scientific study that showed that people were more likely to have spiritual experiences in high altitudes due to the lack of oxygen. They theorized that maybe a lot of enlightenment in the past occurred on mountains because of this. (A bit disconcerting to think that a lot of our theological thought comes from the asphyxiation of hermits.) But then I remembered another article I read somewhere that said that 20% of all scientific studies are wrong. Then AKMA reminded me that according to David Weinberger, 78% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Now via Cameo Wood (commenting on the original post):

Why revelations have occurred on mountains? Linking mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience

Shahar Arzy^{a, b, c}, Moshe Idel^d, Theodor Landis^b and Olaf Blanke^{a, b}

^aLaboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain-Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
^bDepartment of Neurology, University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland
^cDepartment of Neurology, Hadassah Hebrew University Hospital, Jerusalem, Israel
^dFaculty of Humanities, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Received 26 March 2005;  accepted 21 April 2005.  Available online 28 July 2005.

Summary

The fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions, among many other revelation experiences, had occurred on a mountain. These three revelation experiences share many phenomenological components like feeling and hearing a presence, seeing a figure, seeing lights, and feeling of fear. In addition, similar experiences have been reported by non-mystic contemporary mountaineers. The similarities between these revelations on mountains and their appearance in contemporary mountaineers suggest that exposure to altitude might affect functional and neural mechanisms, thus facilitating the experience of a revelation. Different functions relying on brain areas such as the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex have been suggested to be altered in altitude. Moreover, acute and chronic hypoxia significantly affect the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex and both areas have also been linked to altered own body perceptions and mystical experiences. Prolonged stay at high altitudes, especially in social deprivation, may also lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions such as low resistance to stress and loss of inhibition. Based on these phenomenological, functional, and neural findings we suggest that exposure to altitudes might contribute to the induction of revelation experiences and might further our understanding of the mountain metaphor in religion.

Mystical and religious experiences are important not only to the mystic himself, but also to many followers, as it was indeed with respect to the leaders of the three monotheistic religions. Yet, concerning its subjective character, mystical experiences are almost never accessible to the scholars interested in examining them. The tools of cognitive neuroscience make it possible to approach religious and mystical experiences not only by the semantical analysis of texts, but also by approaching similar experiences in healthy subjects during prolonged stays at high altitude and/or in cognitive paradigms. Cognitive neurosciences, in turn, might profit from the research of mysticism in their endeavor to further our understanding of mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self consciousness. Science Direct

I must ask my theologian friends about this.

Morning call

My son, at home after a gap year, working again pre-university and burning the candle at both ends, isn't the earliest of risers. This morning, just up and with 15 minutes to go before his shift at work, he told me:

I dreamt you came into my room and said, 'Right — I've pulled a few strings and you're off to Iraq'. … I woke up.

I should think he did. (And totally bizarre: I have no military connections that could get him to Iraq … and — what a surprise — no desire to see him go there, either.)

Tyson to become a missionary

'Slut': the Danish Mac OS led us to realise that it must mean 'quit' …

Finnish paper crisis!

Jyri et al — if this is a problem, we can bring some … relief to Copenhagen (Reboot):

Finns are hoarding toilet rolls as a strike in the paper industry - already in its third week - threatens to go on until the end of June. BBC News

Hoodies

Thank God for Private Eye. It's been a busy fortnight and I'm catching up. The hoo-ha about hoodies — are we supposed to take this seriously? Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in The Independent (registration and fee required):

… as soon as they have latched on to an issue, New Labour falls headlong into trite, headline-grabbing, dangerously Maoist ideas, thus alienating those who would be onside. The young shall not wear hoodies at the false churches of modern Britain, the consuming malls which only respect money. The Bluewater shopping centre in Kent and others like it, which have killed the human spirit of this country, now have the power to dictate what people may wear - not for reasons of decency, but arbitrarily. Young men and boys and women and girls, too, in sweatshirts with zips and hoods are deemed a terrible threat to the nation.

My sweet daughter loves them, and has just bought two tiny hoodies for new twin boys in our family. Our delicate Deputy Prime Minister has thrown his bulk behind this ban, saying he is scared of hoodies, finds them intimidating. Are we meant to respect these views of the legendary Mr Fisticuffs? Does he respect our intelligence when he comes out with this rubbish? Sure, for some criminals, the garment helps them to avoid identification on CCTV, but for others it is only ever a fashion item. By the way, are they going to ban shops selling hoodies in the centres, too? And what next? Women in burkas? People in large sunglasses and caps?

Mark Steyn in The Daily Telegraph (free registration) blames CCTV:

The British are the most videotaped people in the history of mankind, caught on camera by official surveillance devices as they go about every humdrum public manoeuvre. If you're a grown-up, this might not seem a big deal: you can go back to your pad, collapse on the sofa and pick your nose far from Tony Blair's prying eyes, though doubtless this chink in the 24/7 monitoring system will eventually be rectified. But, if you're an adolescent, far more of your social rituals take place in public - meeting friends at the bus stop, enjoying a romantic moment by the non-operative ornamental fountain outside the KwikkiJunk Centre, etc - and it seems entirely reasonable that adolescent garb has artfully evolved to provide its wearers with such privacy as can be found under the constant whirr of the Big Blairite Brother's telly cameras.

Le Blog Personnel de Jacques Chirac

Ici.

Exhausting the vein …

Through the eyes of The Sun

Wednesday, 20 April: WHITE smoke billows from Sistine Chapel as Vatican appoints Pope

Banksy Graffiti Gallery

via Metroblogging London, a link to Banksy Graffiti Gallery:

This is not Banksy's website, if you want that go here. This is a collection of his graffiti taken all around London, Brighton and Bournemouth.

A whole load of new pictures were added in Jan '05.

Links also to other London graffiti artists.

Banksy goes Stateside

via Jason Kottke, news that Banksy has installed 'four pieces in New York's most prestigious museums - The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Natural History' — Wooster Collective : A Celebration of Street Art.

The Brooklyn Museum:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The Museum of Modern Art:

The Museum of Natural History:

Staff at the New York Met discovered and removed their new aquisition early Sunday morning while Banksy's discount soup can print took pride of place in the MoMA for over three days before being torn down. As of now, the other two pieces currently remain firmly in place...

Photos of Banksy installing his works ('This historic occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine art establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some high strength glue') at Wooster Collective.

England, My England

In amidst much else that is gloomy (our probable lack of preparedness for the threat posed by avian flu) or, shall we say, arresting (the new powers of the Home Secretary to impose Control Orders), the Telegraph (may require registration) lightens our world with news of the death of its eccentric, erstwhile reporter, Harry Greenfield:

He joined The Sunday Telegraph in 1965 and soon became the defence correspondent. He was a genial man with a bushy beard and had a tweedy, shambolic air. He could never bring himself to open his post and the Ministry of Defence press releases piled up on his desk to form a barricade.

Once Sebastian Faulks, one of his colleagues at the time, pulled an envelope from near the bottom of the heap, opened it and said: "Ah Harry, I see Mafeking has been relieved."

He had two Jack Russell terriers, named Chindit and Sherpa. After the death of Sherpa, he often brought Chindit to the office where he would sit on Greenfield's lap as he worked. If anybody approached, Chindit would go for them. Chindit never had his owner's impeccable good manners and had Greenfield banned from most of the pubs in Clapham, south London.

Greenfield moved on to become a feature writer with a style much more elegant than his appearance and he covered many aspects of country life. He had a passion for fly fishing and he also wrote a memorable article about Chindit's success in a ratting contest.

After his departure from the newspaper, Greenfield became involved in paganism and his former colleagues heard tales of him dancing naked at stone circles. He was 65 before he had his first tattoos and he told a friend that the thing that most embarrassed him about his past was that he had worn a tie-pin.

Hugh "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" Macleod

© gapingvoid

Ugandan Discussions

Ugandan Discussions, that familiar-to-many Private Eye euphemism, is also a website repository (not connected with the magazine) of Private Eye front covers. There are so many to choose from, but here's one I like:

Copyright Private Eye (© 1961-2004)

Banksy

Banksy has produced a new book, Cut it Out, available from Pictures on Walls.

I have blogged about Banksy before, here.

Standard time

The graffiti reads, "thank god, now I can regulate my life".

Flickr

Chris Morris

Anyone interested in Chris Morris, satirist par excellence (The Day Today, Brasseye, etc), will find Cook'd and Bomb'd of great interest (link via Metafilter). It's a fan site with many downloads: the On The Hour page gives links to downloads of both the Series 1 and Series 2 broadcasts.

When Armando Iannucci, the producer of Radio 1's cutting edge comedy series The Mary Whitehouse Experience, heard Chris Morris reading out some of his ridiculous but also faintly plausible mock news stories on GLR, he contacted Morris to suggest that they should collaborate on a series. The result was On The Hour, a slick parody of current affairs broadcasting, that shoehorned Morris' surreal stories and interviews into an alarmingly convincing pastiche news presentation style, attacking everything from war reporting to the BBC's time signal along the way. Morris presented the show, in addition to writing it in conjunction with Iannucci, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, David Quantick, Steven Wells and Andrew Glover, and acting as associate producer. On The Hour was without question a groundbreaking landmark in radio comedy, and went on to win several awards including the 1992 Writer's Guild award for Best Comedy. Twelve episodes were made between 1991 and 1992, as well as a short special for Radio 1. All episodes exist in the BBC's archives, and a compilation of two hours of material is available on a BBC Radio Collection cassette.

Canada reports huge jump in immigration

Borowitz Report (via Memex 1.1):

Over 55,000,000 Requests for Citizenship Since Tuesday Night

Canadian immigration officials have reported a huge increase in the number of requests for Canadian citizenship in the past twenty-four hours, with over fifty-five million such inquiries pouring in since late Tuesday night. Of those fifty-five million requests, well over 99.99% of them came from U.S. citizens, the lion’s share residing in such states as New York, California, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew said that he was “flabbergasted” by the fifty-five-million-plus requests for Canadian citizenship, adding that it was difficult to pinpoint the precise reasons for the staggering increase. “My only theory is that after many years of exposure in the U.S., hockey is finally starting to catch on,” Mr. Pettigrew said. He cautioned, however, that it is impossible to know exactly what is sparking the su