Old Fart's Almanac

Mad Mandy

2009-11-22T18:26:32Z

What do Peter Mandelson and Herpes have in common ? They're both a massive pain in the cock that you can't ever get rid of. And they both manifest themselves as purulent scabs. How did this happen? Twice now he has been forced to resign in disgrace (what normal people call "being sacked") for being a big slimy crook, and yet again he's back in power, without being elected. As if that wasn't bad enough, he's now trying to push a bill through Parliament that will make him all powerful and immortal and stuff. He is currently attempting to pass the Digital Economy Bill which, despite its friendly and harmless-sounding title, is actually a terrifying piece of Orwell-inspired oppression. The most alarming component of the bill is where Peter Mandelson is trying to give himself so-called "Henry VIII powers" which would enable him to create and modify legislation without parliamentary interference. It's worth repeating: Mandelson it attempting to pass a law that would let him make and modify laws, without parliamentary involvement. If you're not shaking with fear and anger, please re-read that last sentence. Meanwhile, it turns out he has also been secretly plotting to take control of Europe! Somebody stop him! Gordon, can't you have him killed? Please! Does anyone have a human-sized can of anti-fungal cream? Has anyone tried pouring a bucket of water over him? Garlic? Failing that, can I urge every Brit to sign this petition to kill the bill, and call your MP. [read the full article]

Bullying

2009-11-20T04:41:34Z

In the past I have been accused of bullying. I've also felt like I'd been bullied, although at the time I really felt it was my fault for being weak. I was weak. Also, I was a coward. Looking back at those times, I realise I was party to bullying, and I was personally bullied. But now I'm not weak. Well, physically I'm the biggest weakling you've ever met, but I'm not scared any more, and I'll take on any fucker even if it results in being hospitalised. At school there was a kid in my class, let's call him "Dick". He was a weird-looking moron who spent his entire life talking about all of the things he believed he got up to outside of school. All of them not only bullshit, but offensive: tales of killing cats, and setting fire to old ladies houses. Me and my geeky friends didn't like him, and didn't want him hanging around with us. But he was glued to one particular friend that I really liked. We used to regularly try to run away from him, mock him, and generally let him know we didn't like him. That was bullying, even though it didn't feel like it at the time. Years later we discover that he was from a fucked-up family, and he had secretly been introduced to our friend as someone who needed support. We were kids, we didn't know or understand what could turn a frightened kid into a nasty, bullshit-spouting git. Maybe that's what happened to Nick Griffin. Nowadays I'm only too acutely aware of bullying, and frequently see it in everyday life. None of the bullies would consider themselves so, and the victims likewise. Social pressure is a strong motivator, and it's too easy to forget how strong the urge can be to pretend you're ok, even to yourself. Tonight we watched the next episode of "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here" which should now be more aptly titled as "the international bullying awards". Jordan/Katie-Price may be an odious, ego-driven, publicity-whore. But does that justify our entertainment of watching her genuinely suffer? We all wish we had her money and we all know she got it through being a publicity-whore; a job at which she is obviously skilled. But does that really justify watching her undergo treatment that is, clearly and genuinely, traumatic ? Since Jordan entered the Jungle last time she has transformed from a genuinely beautiful woman (albeit with ridiculously over-sized, concrete-looking, fake, breasts) to being a freakish demonstration of the dangers of plastic surgery. She now looks beaten-up, especially her pathetically fucked lips. She's also older, which is a curse that weakens people. Every day so far "the general public" have voted her into performing like a wounded sea-lion for everyone to laugh at. It feels like watching They shoot horses don't they? [read the full article]

Aviary

2009-11-15T03:45:27Z

As I write this, I have a small green bird on my shoulder, a beautiful budgie (who looks like a little fluffy cloud) in a cage next to me, and a Meyers Parrot sitting on top of his cage grinding his beak. Our two "big guys" are in the kitchen, covered, and sleeping. That's five birds. There are five birds in my house. How did this happen ? How did I end up with a house full of birds ? How did I end up with a house ? I'm only 15. Earlier this evening I wish we could have taken a photo of us eating a curry, watching Harry Hill's TV Burp, with five beautiful birds around; and then sent it back in time to myself at age 21. The first thing I would have noticed was the gorgeous blonde girl sitting next to me. Then I would have noticed the parrots, and spent the next few years trying to find girls that like birds. Asking M if she was into birds at the time would have resulted in "no, just bats" so the future probably wouldn't be altered too much. The reason for our increased flock size is that we are bird sitting The Grinch, and we're looking after a beautiful little budgie until we can re-home him/her. If you live near NW Philly and believe you could give enough TLC to a beautiful little parrot, please let me know. He was terrified at first but now, despite being too scared to step-up, he's far more confident. He also makes some of the most incredible noises we've ever heard. [read the full article]

Quote of the day

2009-11-10T01:56:54Z

"Now I'm going now down to the showers, stretch me legs, and to wash em n'all. Then after that I shall come back and sit in the chapel, and contemplate the error of my ways and try, to make peace, with my bookmaker."

Norman Stanley Fletcher - Slade Prison - in the 70s

Big numbers, v6, and baby squirrels

2009-11-07T02:47:42Z

For a while now I've been convinced that one of the biggest hurdles to the human race is our inability to deal with large numbers. As soon as you get to around 10,000 it all seems a bit samey. Hence the inability of creationists to understand about geological time, the inability of most people to understand cryptography, people's willingness to do the lottery, and the bizarre acceptance of the bank bailout by everyone outside the banking cult. For example, the odds of winning the UK national lottery are around 14,000,000 (14 million) to 1. So, if you play twice a week, you'll probably win once every 130,000 years which, providing you believe in reincarnation, is around 1800 lifetimes. The human race hasn't existed that long yet. These are diabolical odds but people still indulge. I'm far from immune to this cloudy judgment. When I first learned about how the Internet worked, I was shocked to discover that Internet Addresses were 4 bytes (thats 32 bits) long. "That's tiny!" I thought, "that means there's an absolute maximum of 4 billion." Technically I was right, but the fact that 18 years later the Internet is as ubiquitous as it is, whilst still remaining limited to those paltry 32-bits of address space, shows I didn't really know what 4 billion meant. In fairness, we would have run out by now if the wizards behind the scenes hadn't cast a bunch of magic spells (called things like NAT, and CIDR) to wring every bit of space out of the addresses. But we are now at the very, very low watermark level and it's only a matter of months before we run out of addresses completely. The Wizards were on the case though and in 1998 they created an entirely new Internet Protocol called "IP Next Generation (IPng)", or more formally "IP version 6 (IPv6)" to replace the existing Internet Protocol (known as version 4). I was really excited at the time! It was actually a cut down version of version 4, with much of the useless stodge removed and new cool stuff like auto-configuration and encryption built-in. It also allowed for many more addresses as it used 128 bits to represent each address. At the time I remember thinking that 128 bits sounded pretty meagre. Why not 1024 bits or 2048 if we really want to future proof ourselves, I thought ? At the time I worked at an ISP and badgered them into allowing me to hook up our network to the experimental IPv6 Internet (known as the 6bone) so that we could lead the way into the brave new world. After the initial excitement of playing with the new addresses, protocols and tools, I got bored because there was nothing to see yet. There was only one website that I could find that was on the IPv6 Internet...and it consisted of a page of rants about the problems with the new protocol. It was slow too. Really slow. 11 years later, the Internet is still running on IPv4 and, despite most people's computers being able to use the shiny new IPv6 network, very few ISPs support it. I still don't really understand why. A couple of weeks ago some fear-mongering articles in the press about the paucity of IPv4 addresses rekindled my interest and I decided to get hooked up to IPv6 at home. Surely, I thought, my ISP must have IPv6 support by now. They don't. So I had to resort to a method called "tunneling" which is how I had to do it back in 1998. But this time, things were very, very different. The IPv6 Internet exists, and works as we were promised it would! Setting up a tunnel involved registering with a free tunnel service on-line and running a single command on my Linux box. Bang - the box was pingable on both IPv4 and IPv6. I ordered a block of addresses for the other machines in my house (we have about 5) and as if by magic, they all configured themselves with their new IPv6 addresses automatically. Networking has never been this simple! But there was something that worried me, and this is where we get back to big numbers; the number of addresses I'd been allocated. It turns out that these days IPv6 subnets are all 64-bits - what that means in simple terms is that my tunnel, which needs precisely two addresses (one for me, one for my ISP) is using up 18446744073709551616 addresses. We are wasting a number of addresses which is equal to the size of the regular IPv4 Internet, squared. The next thing that alarmed me was that the size of the block of addresses I was given for my other 4 home machines also seemed a little large. It was a 48 bit prefix which equates to a million, billion, billion addresses. I only needed 4! At this rate, I thought to myself, we'll exhaust the 128 bit address space in no time! Why would these ISP's have such a disgracefully cavalier attitude to address allocation ? Had they learned nothing from the IPv4 experience. I mean 128 bits is a lot, but it's not that much... After doing some reading and some very basic maths, I found the reason for their "reckless" behaviour: 128 bit numbers are enormously, vastly, adjective-defyingly huge. I could write out how big it is, but like the expression "128 bit", it doesn't really give much insight. The fact is that we will not run out of addresses. Ever. NAT for IPv6 doesn't exist, because it's just not needed. Someday everyone will have as many fully routeable IP addresses as they can eat. As I said, big numbers are difficult to comprehend...for me and many others if not for you. So the next time you hear a journalist, politician or banker talk about billions of anything, don't let it lie. They don't really understand how vast those numbers are either. Thanks for reading this far. I would have got bored about 3 lines in. Your reward is the baby-squirrel bit. Last night Michele took me along with her to the wildlife rehab and let me hold a couple of baby squirrels while she fed them. I got to stroke them and feel their little feet. They were even cuter and more beautiful than I imagined they could be! They were really playful and snuggly too. It's bad form to try and relate to them I know, but not too long from now they'll be released back into the wild. [read the full article]

Name That Scumbag

2009-11-03T03:14:20Z

Good evening everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of "Name That Scumbag"! What a lovely audience you are. So much better than last week's! But seriously, can you name this week's scumbag ? Here are the clues:

He got the bus with me this evening
Half way home he said he was getting tired and needed a sleep
He laid back and closed his eyes ready for slumber
Then, whilst appearing to sleep, let out the most obnoxious, deathly, abomination of a fart that I have ever been unfortunate enough to smell

It made my eyes water! It was awful, awful, awful, and I knew that the crowd of people sitting around us were having problems with it too. There was coughing! I tried closing my eyes to stop the watering, but it started to sting and all I could do was wince. If this could have been bottled, Saddam would have won the second Gulf war. Everyone nearby was clearly having problems and understandably thought it must have been my fault, as I was apparently the epi-centre. Surely that soporific cherub next to me would never have been able to produce something so vile. Obviously, I considered waking him up with a loud reprimand, but I knew he would be loudly, and devastatingly frank about it, and as an Englishman that would have been enough to force me to join the foreign legion. So David, what sort of scumbag could let out a guff like this? [read the full article]

Kerosene

2009-10-07T04:53:51Z

Last night, sitting on the sofa, listening to music, and typing, I was suddenly aware of a conflagration over the road. Someone had set fire to our opposite neighbour's front door. By the time I'd put Leo in his cage and got to the house, the fire was out, and all that was left was our neighbour looking perplexed and bewildered on her doorstep. We still don't know what it was all about but it scared the bejesus out of all of us. We went over to see if she was ok (I woke Michele after an initial visit) and she seemed suitably jumpy. When we asked if she had any idea who could have done it she said "No! I haven't been on drugs for 10 years." Hmm.

Note to self: the UK is more fucked than you remember

2009-10-07T04:11:33Z

It's far too easy to forget that rose-coloured glasses are a distortion of the real world. So when I read about mad shit like this it doesn't seem as bad to be living in the US. The only things I really miss are my family and friends [and highly accessible Indian food]. Other than that, we're all surrounded by maniacs. We're also all within a short ride of someone sane so it doesn't seem so bad. Let's be happy about the sane people.

Mark Steel and Sue Perkins on the Ungovernable Force

2009-10-07T03:11:46Z

From the latest News Quiz, Mark Steel and Sue Perkins on the invaluable role of the Police in British society:

Top of the fascists

2009-10-06T01:54:36Z

Italy has forged ahead in the pan-European race towards Fascism by bringing back the blackshirts! Obviously they're not actually wearing black shirts any more, this isn't the 1920's! No, now they're wearing beige shirts, but the racist underpinnings are exactly the same. All bad things are as a result of the immigrants. Go Italy! You better buck your ideas up Britain; putting neo-nazis into the EU was a coup, but Italy has now knocked you down the leaderboard with its invocation of the the thug paramilitary. Meanwhile, in the utopia that is the USA, we are fortunate enough to be witnessing an historical set of events that could well be the most epic of fails in the history of the country. It's tragic that The Daily Show is still the only serious journalism available nationally here. There was even an interview with Ron Paul, during which Jon Stewart managed to ask him the one question I've wanted to hear answered by the Libertarians: how do you prevent Corporatism. Watch at about 6 minutes in to see Ron gracefully dodge the question. The only potentially viable alternative to Jon Stewart is with PBS/NPR, but really it's pathetic. This evening, because I was off work today (gutrot), I managed to watch the BBC World News on WHYY. As the end titles were rolling we were subjected to the list of wonderfully philanthropic benefactors who are responsible for us being privileged to watch it. As if this wasn't bad enough, it was followed by three commercials^H^H^H^H^H^H^H PSAs that could be the nominees for the international irony awards:

Firstly, a promo for PBS/NPR. This consisted of a handful of "artists" giving soundbytes on why pubic media is important. One of which included the phrase "we prefer a conversation, rather than a soundbyte." Genius.
Next was a commercial^H^H^H^H^H^H^H PSA from Monsanto explaining how they help farmers, save terminally ill babies and cure lepers [ok the last two were a slight exaggeration. Slight].
As if the Ironometer could take any more, the next commercial^WPSA was from Toyota (the car manufacturer), explaining that they don't just manufacture cars, but they also devote themselves to saving the environment.

It's very important to realise that these weren't commercials; they were PSAs. Now you may wonder what the difference is between the two and the answer is quite simple: I'm buggered if I know. [read the full article]

Reasons to be Cheerful

2009-10-03T04:14:34Z

Charlie Brooker
tonight we watched part one of his new "GamesWipe" series. Everything he says seems to align with my world outlook. Charlie, if you're ever in Philly and need somewhere to crash, drop me a line.
Dan Bull is a middle-class, white, English rapper who somehow manages to be cool. He recently wrote a wonderfully succinct open letter to Lily Allen that I agree with on every count. The rest of his album is well worth checking out too.
After a load of bad reviews of one of my iPhone apps, I had nice experience with a total stranger that managed to renew my faith in humankind.
Near work is another hotel bar that, on Wednesdays, has a happy hour involving free "fancy cheese" and wine.
Birds are amazing little things.

Britain is officially a Fascist country

2009-09-28T01:31:23Z

There's a big grey area between proto-Fascism and Fascism. I'd have argued that America and Britain were both proto-Fascist countries until today; because today I read this article from the peerless SpyBlog. You need to read it, and then you might understand why I'd now refer to Britain as "Corporatist"...which is what Mussolini himself referred to as Fascist. You can kip on our couch if you want to. Or, if you know anyone in Sweden who doesn't mind us kipping on their couch, please let us know.

The Bus of DEATH and Routers

2009-09-25T03:33:25Z

When the bus reached Gulph Mills station this evening the driver, for reasons of his own, got out. I was busy cocking-up a Sudoku and didn't notice, so it was only when the shouting started that I looked up. As we were driving away, evidently we'd left someone off the bus because many passengers were standing up and pointing out of the window. Once I'd realised that it was the driver who we'd left behind and that the bus was driving itself down towards the steep hill and the oncoming traffic (headed-up with a beautifully cinematic School-bus) I allowed a gentle panic to take over. People had rushed towards the front of the bus to try and stop it, using whatever pedal, button, or lever it is that stops a bus. By now the driver had acknowledged the situation and ran back like the proverbial clappers. He leaped on, there was some yelping, and the bus violently jolted to a halt. I later found out that the yelper was a woman he had knocked over and that rather than being stopped by his ninja-style lunge at the brake, the bus actually stopped because it hit a pole. There was a load of faffing about for around half an hour while we filled in incident reports and the poor sod of a driver held his head in his hands whimpering. Most of the bus seemed to be on his side and tried to comfort him. Septa, to their credit, had a new bus and a supervisor on the scene rapidly and we continued on our way while the supervisor did her best to upset the driver even further. Oddly, I didn't get freaked out by this experience at all. In fact my heart remained calm; much calmer than it has been in moments during the days at work recently. Meanwhile, 3000 miles away, I know there are a bunch of geeks who are all dangerously close to heart attacks; Rapidswitch, the ISP where my server is hosted (together with my email, websites and everything else) is down. When I say the ISP is down, I mean it literally. The entire ISP is unavailable to the Internet! Even their nameservers are offline! As a result of this I thought I'd discovered a legitimate use for Twitter; searching for #rapidswitch yielded a bunch of disgruntled people bitching about it. But, it was a false alarm because I found that far more useful information was available via Google, which had up-to-date links to people discussing the issue on bulletin-boards. So, for the first time since being in the US, I'm writing this in dear-old vi. [read the full article]

The Six Pillocks of Libertarianism

2009-09-19T17:52:32Z

The peculiarly American concept of Libertarianism has, as I've mentioned before, been a constant source of confusion and bewilderment to me since I moved over here. Last night I was lucky enough to further my education and take part in some "lively debates" with some real bona-fide Libertarians. Freedy neet is, of course, drinkin neet and in the absence of a friendly local boozer we often go to the nearest bar after work which is in fact a chain restaurant in a large Hotel/Conference center in Valley Forge. Brits are probably cringing at this idea, but it's not too bad. We also get to mingle with the conference-goers-du-jour which can be entertaining. So far we've shared the bar with gun enthusiasts, bikers, salesmen, wedding parties and even knitting fanatics (it took us a while to realise that was what the conference theme was - initially we were convinced that it was the annual meeting of The American Society of Frumpy Middle-aged Dykes...sorry). Last night the conference was organized by Campaign for Liberty which, after a quick Google, I realised was a Libertarian group. Now, the word "Libertarian" has a lot of different meanings, and it's frequently applied to political ideologies ranging from neo-nazi to anarchism but from what I have managed to deduce, the core of Libertarianism is solid, well defined, and quite different to the public perception. One thing it is not is aligned in any way with the frothy-mouthed right-wing Glen Beck 9/12 racist teabagger wingnuttery that gets a disproportionately large amount of news coverage. So, I had a couple of "heated discussions" with some willing opponents to whom I was introduced, by my gregarious and loquacious friend, as "a bloody British Socialist." The first guy was a pacifist Quaker, the second was a high-school economics teacher. Both were anti-interventionist, anti-war, believed that religion and government should have no connection and firmly believed the free market was the solution. I learned a lot about the fundamentals of Libertarianism, and after a few simple syllogistic explorations the only thing I can say is "you haven't really thought this through have you ?" Some examples follow further down. There is one area of the debates where we would always hit a logical barrier of belief that it's probably not fair to discuss because I can't defend my point of view any more then they can; to me it's so obviously ridiculous I can't even entertain the idea. To them, it's so obviously correct it defies debate. That point is (and I'm paraphrasing, probably unfairly) "The free market failures of the past have been as a direct result of government interference and financial support. If the government stopped propping up big corporations and imposing regulations and restrictions, the free market would work as it should". Now I'm all about stopping the government giving tax money to corporations, but really...the idea that if you leave them alone they'll take care of everything is just...I mean...really ? you really...ok - see we'll ignore that aspect for now. The first interesting concept was that of being against the instigation of violence and therefore, because taxes were compulsory and enforceable by coercion, taxation was a "violent act". So, no taxation. Instead, everything must be done voluntarily. Even at this point I'm on board. But after a few more questions we arrived at a point where the guy was defending the scenario we'd arrived at: where we live like they did in the good old days of the early America where everyone was truly free. The fact that life in America during those times was hard, violent and that the population has massively increased since then didn't bother him. We all become farmers and stop moving around the country. If you get ill, you die. What if someone comes up to you and nicks all of your food, or claims your land ? That won't happen. He genuinely defended these assertions. At this point we shook hands and agreed that our beliefs were too different to continue. Meanwhile, my other friend had discovered that "these Libertarians have some really hot chicks with them" and was darting from table to table like a randy bee. The Quaker I'd been arguing with noticed how keen he was and gave him a copy of a glossy booklet which turned out to be a calendar featuring the Ladies of Liberty Alliance; basically a calendar featuring some scrawny birds in their skimpies accompanied by captions extolling the joy of the free market. Much like the egregious "News In Briefs" in The Scum. It also contained ads for various Libertarian organizations and swag, several featuring pictures of typical Libertarians out and about. One picture included a guy in a circle-A t-shirt, and this perplexed me. Anarchism is clearly incompatible with Libertarianism [if you disagree with this, we should have a chat] and I wondered how the Libertarians themselves felt about this. The guy sitting next to me by now was a high-school economics teacher, close to retirement age and we had been exchanging pleasantries, so I asked him what he thought of the guy in the picture's t-shirt. He didn't know what it represented, and when I told him he was quite firm: "We're not anarchists. We're far removed from Anarchists. We don't believe the same things at all." Ah good, we're agreed on that then. He also told me that no Libertarians would claim to be Anarchists, nor would they claim to be pacifists. I found this difficult to believe, mainly because I have met examples of both. But, OK, it's possible they are outliers, after all this guy obviously knows far more Libertarians then me. So, I asked if he would be kind enough to explain the fundamentals of Libertarianism to me, and he enthusiastically got stuck in. As with the Quaker, he started with the taxation as violence argument but with a slight twist; if someone attacks you, you can and should defend yourself. The golden rules is that violence shouldn't be instigated. Good, I'm still on the same page. Then it started getting weird. He explained there were six fundamental "pillars" of Libertarianism and began enumerating them. The first was "The Right to Private Ownership." I had to stop him and ask how that worked because there is a bit of a boot strapping problem associated with private ownership - how do you initially decide who owns what? He didn't understand what I was getting at until we started discussing land, and the fact that without land, you can't build, harvest resources, grow food or produce the possessions that you have the right to own. He agreed that land was fundamental, but seemed not to understand the problem of who has the right to claim ownership. "Well you trade it like you do anything else!" "But how do you get the land in the first place ?" "Well you buy it from the previous owner!" "But where did he get it ?" "He bought it!" "But if you keep going back, you eventually have to ask who had the right to the land in the first place, which was essentially a case of people claiming it and defending it by force." "Well yes if you go right the way back, yeah" So, what do you do about that ? How do people initially get the resources they have the right to privately own ? He didn't want to dwell on the first pillar any more and was getting very anxious to move onto the second one so I dropped it. I don't remember the details of most of the other pillars but they were mostly reasonably trite and inoffensive until we got to the free market. I asked how it would be possible to prevent price-fixing, market manipulation and capers like Enron...his answer stumped me: "Well that's illegal. That's fraud." "But who is enforcing the law ?" "Well, the government." "The government ? So you're in favour of a government ?" "Yes! As I said, we're not anarchists!" Evidently not. "So how is the government funded ?" "Well, taxes" "You're arguing in favour of taxes now ?" "Yes! We're not anarchists. We'd need some level of taxation, to pay for the essentials." Essentials...would that include Healthcare I wonder ? "And you'd need laws ?" "Yes of course" "All of which would be enforced by coercion ?" "Well yes I suppose" Wow. Judging an entire ideology on two beery arguments in a pub is really unfair, but unless the opportunity arises for me to talk to Ron Paul or some other highly-regarded Libertarian who can put me straight, it really does seem like you haven't thought this through very well doesn't it ? [read the full article]

Audit this

2009-09-16T16:22:44Z

My hatred of auditors began whilst working at a University. They came in, asked a few questions and then insisted on us implementing a bunch of cliched security measures such as password aging (making passwords expire every so often) and would not listen to our objections. They had no idea of the real security threats and clearly no idea how anything worked. We flatly refused, and I would happily have lost my job over it. These people were not being audited themselves. This was obviously before the Enron scandal. The hatred became purer and more focused during my stretch at MegaCorp where the auditors commanded total power and demanded utterly ridiculous tasks. So, years later I'm reading an excellent book on Security Engineering and come across this in a section on financial security:

[...]the big audit firms have their own list of favourite controls, which often bear little relationship to the client�s real risks, and may even make matters worse. For example, our university�s auditors nag us every year to get all our staff to change their passwords every month. This advice is wrong, for reasons explained in Chapter 2 � so every year we point this out and challenge them to justify their advice. But they seem incapable of learning, and they have no incentive to: they can be expected to nitpick, and to ignore any evidence that a particular nit is unhelpful until long after the evidence has become overwhelming.

Now, I'm not saying "I told you so"...actually...yes, yes that's exactly what I'm saying. [read the full article]

Dreamtime

2009-09-13T17:36:16Z

It's generally accepted that time perception during dreams is totally unrelated to real time i.e. a dream may seem to take place over a period of days or months but in reality you're only asleep for the maximum of a few hours. But I've never been able to prove this to myself until last night when I feel to sleep with a headphone in my ear. We have a cheap little MP3 player solely for the bed on which we have many hours of radio and stand-up comedy. Frequently we'll drift off to sleep listening to something, and frequently the audio will break though into my dreams. Last night, the way it manifested itself in my dream was that the comedian "Spencer Brown" was with me and the others in my dream. Now, his set on the MP3 player is no more than an hour long but it spanned weeks of dream-time. In fact, because I've heard this routine many, many times, I was getting irritated that this guy was being seemingly quick-witted about the things that were going on but really he was just using bits of his well rehearsed act. I was pretending that I'd never heard it before and laughing out of politeness but it was getting quite irritating to have him permanently there. One (dream) morning I woke up and he was still there and I was thinking "oh god when is he just going to go away!" Worse was that in reality his stand-up routine was shaping the events in the dream so that he always seemed to have a perfect comment to hand for what was going on. The other people were loving it, but I'd heard it all before... The main thing that struck me about this was not the audio entering and shaping the dream - that happens a lot - but it was that I was aware of days passing in the dream. I've never had that happen before - my memories of dreams are of a long fluid series of events and time doesn't really have any recognisable divisions. Alright alright, I just thought it was interesting. [read the full article]

Hard Labo(u)r

2009-09-11T03:14:09Z

Hey, what did you do with your Labor day weekend ? If you have an answer for this then frankly I'm not in the least bit interested; if you don't then you're probably thinking "huh huh, he didn't put the 'u' in Labour", in which case please shut up. Labor Day is an American celebration of Labor - a bit like the English "Labour movement" but without all of the nasty traitorous "new Labour" overtones. Over here very few people realise it's a Socialist holiday and instead it's regarded as the real end of summer. Of course to me it's just another crap Bank Holiday Monday, but here people treat it like it's a six month paid holiday in Thailand. It's just a Monday off work! Not only that, but any holiday benefits you had before (like early Fridays) finish afterwards. It's nothing to celebrate! If the masses realised that Labor day was a genuinely socialist celebration they would immediately go back to work out of patriotism. Over here the word "Socialist" means "all of the bad things like Hitler, and communism, and you know, terrorists and stuff". It's quite sad. Meanwhile, the true patriots are engaged in the ultimate battle against evil: the battle against a healthcare system that will allow them to get treated when they are ill without having to go into even more poverty. I thought I knew a bunch of pig-ignorant racist arseholes in London, but nothing like the army of porky tosspots who live here. Sadly the problem seems very simple and it's what we already knew: the Rightards are pathetically scared of black people. Not only that, but when a black man can stand up in the face of a bunch of shit-for-brains cracker senators and deliver a beautifully well written speech with confidence and dignity, they get terrified! Can you imagine what's going on in their little pea-brains ? "I like what he says, but he's an evil nazi communist, socialist, evil murderous muslim. DOES NOT COMPUTE! Mr Beck says he's evil and Mr Beck is obviously right because I understand all of the words he uses...and he cries when he talks about AMERICA...so he must be nice." If America fails to end up with healthcare-for-all after this, then America doesn't fucking deserve it. [read the full article]

Awesomeness: The Roots of Breakdance

2009-09-04T02:54:10Z

Rather than rant on about all of the things that have caused my Stressed-Eric vein to throb this week, here is the most awesome thing ever made: The Roots of Breakdance. My friend Gary showed me this at work today and it blew my mind. I only hope it's genuine because it will improve the world. [ Update - it's fake, but it's still an amazing piece of work ]

Euphemism of the week

2009-08-26T14:00:00Z

Euphemism of the week this week goes to Hilary Clinton for: "extending a defence umbrella over the [Gulf] region", meaning to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran. The close runner up is: "Extended Deterrents", meaning to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.

Libya/Lockerbie Anger - but he didn't even do it!

2009-08-24T03:46:37Z

Before you get irritated about the "Hero's Welcome" received by Abdel Basset al-Megrahi in Libya please remember the one fact that no news network is happy to report:

HE DIDN'T DO IT!

This will probably be news to most people because The News(TM) would never dare report the rigorous, accurate, investigations undertaken by serious journalists at the time. Yes, at the time, serious journalists did exist. Regardless, the guy didn't do it. Even Nelson Mandela believes the Libyans were set-up... maybe because he was one of the few that bothered to examine the evidence. Buy Private Eye's "Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice", read it, and then get angry. If you can't afford £5 then let me know and I'll let you borrow my copy. Obama's outrage about Megrahi's "hero's welcome" is either ignorance, or lies. Neither option is a comfort. The reaction from the Republicans is not of interest to anyone with a brain. [read the full article]