Just another false alarm...

Jason brings to my attention the story of yet another school pulling stunts to please Ofsted. You have to ask 'why bother?' It must be years since anyone seriously thought that an Ofsted report would tell people anything about a school's real standard. The schools which do well are just those who have been pulling tricks longer.

My own experiences of school inspections only confirmed the low opinion I already had, both of Ofsted and of my school. In one class we were told that everyone should put up their hands for every question when the inspector came in; right hand if you actually knew the answer, left hand otherwise. In another the teacher told us to hitch up our skirts if the inspector was male. The fact that our school produced even a single feminist is a near miracle. Single sex education warps your mind.

During the inspections I was, as usual, close to expulsion, so had to keep my mouth shut. Other dissidents were threatened with similar, and we all looked enviously on at the one model Catholic pupil whose fierce anti-authority mother shouted at the headmistress in the way the rest of us could only dream of. But it was only one voice among many and as a result the final report was of course excellent... What a farce.

We may be losing the war on terror, but apparently we're winning the war on correct punctuation. Strict adherence to the London Underground's latest anti-terrorism posters may lose more lives than it saves. Passengers be warned - if you see an unattended package "Don't touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff or dial 999."

Yes, that's right. Just whistle and move on...

"...the weight of a stack of five nickels.. the wait of a hummingbird..."

As this long and somewhat pretentious final musing continued, I almost expected Sean Penn to start crying out hysterically "THE WEIGHT OF AN ABORTED ZYGOTE" or something similar. 21 Grams is not one of the year's great films. It's often over-emotional; its refusal to be linear isn't very interesting these days, and its themes are played out poorly.

I would have been willing to view it more highly were it not for its uncritical presentation of abortion-as-evil. In the film, one of the central characters, seeing her partner (Penn) dying, wants to have his baby as a memory of him. Her fallopian tubes are, however, damaged from a previous abortion. The doctor demands to know why she had that abortion - none of his bloody business - and then gives her no chance to explain. Later on, her partner (now better) also finds out about the past abortion, and uses it as an excuse to break up with her. He's been having affairs all over the place and wants any reason to leave her, but she's an evil killer, so obviously he's a saint for putting up with her this long. The kiddy-killing bitch deserves everything she gets. Ri-ight...

After that I felt suspicious throughout the film, on guard for more insidious bits of reactionary propaganda, found several (mostly religious or gun-related) and decided not to bother with it any more. Benicio Del Toro and Melissa Leo are pretty good, as is Clea Duvall in a supporting role. Otherwise, this film really isn't one to watch. I've always thought Sean Penn was greatly overrated, and given its wilfully 'artsy' style, I'm surprised the film reached the big screens at all. If something had to do it, why not A Mighty Wind, Elephant or one of the other excellent small films out this year?

Despite this disappointing experience, though, I continue to think that this year has so far been one of the best for excellent new release films - including those made last year, and only out now - in a very long time. Roll on the summer blockbusters!

My family has never taken Mother's Day at all seriously, which is lucky, because I forgot about its existence until yesterday. But apparently some people are very fond of their mothers indeed - Lorna and I were in a cheap buffet restaurant today, which regularly has loud-speaker birthday announcements interrupting the stream of Boyzone/Tom Jones muzak, followed by a tinny 'Happy Birthday To You' recording.

Well today we were instead treated to a Mother's Day shout-out, with the strains of Cliff Richard - "Congratulations, and celebrations, when I tell everyone that I'm in love with you".

I love my mum (as Baldrick would say); but not that much...

And on a similar theme, I went to a marvellous exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery today, called Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood. Apart from learning a great deal about India's film industry and cinematic morality, I came across a wonderful poster for a film called Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, with the somewhat unfortunate tagline - "It's all about loving your parents".

Of course, it may all just be my filthy mind...

As always, I took a walk through Birmingham today to see what had changed since the last time I left it. Usually I can expected a new shopping centre, a closed cinema or the like, but today there wasn't too much different. The main reason I've been happy to leave Birmingham as often as possible is the City Council's willingness to prostrate all of what remains of our civic pride before whatever commercial forces come our way... So, for example, while the town hall - a beautiful neoclassical thing - is being renovated the scaffolding has been treated as free space. Over Christmas this meant that we were treated to the delights of a giant Coca Cola advent calendar and since then one of Birmingham's most visible (and historic) squares has been one big advert. Naomi Klein eat your heart out.

But today I was happy, because the winds have blown the posters off the side, and the town hall is, however briefly, visible again. The Council has also risen a little in my estimation, due to its new poster campaign - "Homophobic Violence: Ignoring is Condoning".

Though this does assume that the average homophobe would know what condoning means, and wouldn't just go 'damn right' if they did...

How common is received pronunciation? According to one source a third of the English speak it, but another says the figure is only 6%. It's probably a smaller number than that, I'd guess, given the habit of public school children to 'dumb down' their accents, and the Queen's 'shocking' laziness.

There must be more people speaking Brummie - Brummie for RP!

Having followed the saga of Coca Cola's 'ultra pure' tap water from the beginning, I really have no reaction other than the above to the fact that they've had to recall every single bottle...

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I've casually said I'd only ever baby sit for them if their children weren't the usual self-righteous brats, or perhaps it's my surprisingly detailled plans for how I would rear one child up entirely normally while subjecting the other to every possible social torment, but my friends have, with increasing intensity over the years, told me never to have children.

I always thought this was unfair, since I only talk in that way and am actually quite fond of kids, in the same way I'm fond of cats - I like both my friends' and the variety seen running wild - but today I realised there may be something in it, as my first reaction to this post by Michael was to think 'Excellent! But I'm sure we can do better than that...'

But all my efforts (which ranged quickly from Babbling (Brooke) and Kitty-go-lightly to 'Oi!') and even those of an illiterate Western fan can't, to my mind, match up to the cruelty of the standard 'we wanted a boy set' of names. Nigella springs straight to mind...

Having spent all week joking irreverently, I feel almost personally responsible for the fact that the retreat has now been cancelled due to bad weather. Somewhat at a loose end now, but I think I'll stay in Oxford and watch films for a few days instead. Religiously themed films! That'll do for atonement... Ingmar Bergman here I come again...

Of course, it's a very bad idea to leave an over-excitable person with packed suitcases and a potential £1500 overdraft to her own devices. I'll be in Paris by tomorrow afternoon... or Moscow!

It can't be good for my religious belief that I surround myself with people whose reactions to it are so sarcastic. Upon hearing that I was going on a silent retreat tomorrow, my brother asked whether anyone had ever gone with the specific intention of making the monks speak; while Lorna immediately remembered Terry Pratchett's depiction of the prattling order (I'm not a Pratchett fan, so excuse incorrect references), and suggested that I do the exact opposite of everyone else, descending into silence only at meal times and during services. Of course, I can't just blame them. I was already planning to take along the book I'm reading at the moment, being Guérin's collection of anarchist writing - No Gods, No Masters.

Anyway, that's where I'll be for the next few days, so there will at least be silence from me here.

I've been getting very involved with the various versions of The Dreamers since withdrawing from the cinema at 1.30 in the morning two weeks ago in almost drunken high spirits, demanding of the anarchist and revolutionary graffiti on Oxford walls why it wasn't translating into action. I spent a very pleasant day on Tuesday dashing my way through the latest book version, sitting in the sun in this early spring. I'd been hoping to find Gilbert Adair's original, The Holy Innocents, but it's long out of print and now supplanted by this, part original, part novelisation.

Unusually, I prefer the film. It begins in the Cinémathèque Française. Michael Pitt as Matthew, the American, is narrator, setting the scene of the regular cinéphiles in their natural environment. This then moves to arriving at the Cinémathèque to find it closed, with a demonstration going on outside. The first of many beautiful moments in the film happens, as Bertolucci flashes the scene to and from this reconstruction and some newsreel footage of the same scene as it really happened in '68. The tension in both scenes is palpable, the colour giving life to the passion of the grainy grey.

This then melts into the main scene - for our central characters - as Matthew approaches two fellow film buffs at the gates. He's not met them before, but they recognise each other, and the pair, who Matthew had thought were lovers, but (or, rather, and) turn out to be brother and sister, convince him, in the absence of a real film, to act one out instead. They become the trio from Bande à Part, dashing through the Louvre in record time, with the scene again flashing back and forth from the original.

This move between our action and the films and events to which it refers occurs throughout the film, a dazzling wash of cinema and history. As a film fan, I loved it, though I quite understand why those who don't recognise any of the references might find it pretentious (but this film really is a film for the sort of people it depicts in the film. An insiders thing, where cinéphiles are still unbearably hip). I recognised shockingly few of the references, but the effect was exciting enough nonetheless, as, for instance, the twins come out of the Louvre chanting 'one of us, one of us' at Matthew, as Freaks plays alongside. The few bits I did recognise showed me just how exciting this would be for someone who knew it all, as a terribly clever reference to the ending of Mouchette late in the film, while Je ne regrette rien played in the background, simply took my breath away. Sublime...

At one point in the film I decided to start taking notes, and simply wrote - '1968, Keaton/Chaplin argt, Janis - oh yes!' I was so happy just to see so many of my favourite things brought together in one scene, as Janis Joplin played in the background of Théo's bedroom, posters of Mao and film stars all over the wall, and the trio argue it out over whether Buster Keaton or Chaplin is superior. The film creates an air of magic all over the screen, as the Dreamers retreat into their own mad world, stakes raising between them all the time, with les évènements building up just outside the window.

The soundtrack is Janis, Bob Dylan, Hendrix, Cream, The Doors; this different from the book, which has only one perpetual background song, the song of 'the game', Charles Trenet's Que reste-t-il de nos amours? The change is typical of the film, which allows the main characters to be part of the spirit of the times, with Théo in particular entering into their world in abandonment of his normal student activism, his friends asking him why he's not around anymore, his father, and eventually Matthew, teasing him for his radicalism which manifests itself only in speech. This works to create some of the resentment in his character, present also in the book in a different way (for the film removes all but a small part of the tension between Matthew and Théo), but is perhaps a little incoherent, since part of the point, in the novel, is that the three have been missing what's going on just outside them, completely unaware of it and screened from the world in their Cinématheque and then their games.

The reminders of the real world are there in both film and book, however. The film does this more sharply than the book, making full use of the medium by having the camera pan out into the streets below and then into real newsreel footage of some of the riots. The ending in both is an emergence of sorts into the real world, though the book ends very differently from the film, with the three emerging from their slumbers into the real world in a sharp climax - "debout les damnés de la terre!" - leaving them to reminisce bitter-sweetly in the cinema when it reopens. The film has their relationship crescendo and perhaps collapse, a question mark for its ending as the credits rise in reverse.

The book is slick and interesting, lots of cultural non-film references thrown into the narrative which aren't in the film and a more detailled background to the characters. But the film wins, playing the role of another Cinema Paradiso, a love letter both to film and to the Paris of 1968. For instance, as Matthew and Isabelle kiss on a date, the shot fades out in typical cheesy style, circling in to the point of their faces meeting and then disappearing. The references fit every time, There May be Trouble Ahead playing on their first morning together, The Spy as Matthew enters Isabelle's room. At one point they refer to history as a movie, where everyone's an extra, summing up the whole feel of the film.

The atmosphere throughout is taut and sexy, an onslaught of young excitement and romance, through the distorting lens of the period and of their own world. The sex is done matter of factly, but in other ways its more subtle than the book; the twins' romance is not stated so sharply, the frisson between Matthew and Théo only slight. This isn't to back away from its content, but rather to place it in a more enticing light. A knowing sort of incest, a shy sort of homosexuality. Criticising it for its full frontal nudity seems to be missing the point, as most of the criticisms have done to my mind. This is a wonderful film and a great read, both of which I recommend very highly.

A big up today for the women who are hoping to set up Yes Radio, which will soon come to London and has been featured on Woman's Hour. It will be a rap station which bans the casual (and not so casual) sexism usually found in rap lyrics. The women in charge of it are intelligent, interesting and positive in their approach. They've set up a station in the community, inviting young rappers to come in and talking to them, taking an educational approach and showing them how their music can go in a different direction. Rap music can sometimes be great, and all praise to a station which tries to take away the sort of imagery which prevents people like me enjoying it.

I often scare my liberal friends by saying I'm not against censorship in some areas. But it's only a very imperfect solution for me, and I'm much more in favour of finding ways to prevent people thinking of saying the kind of things which I would want to ban. Women's representation in group leadership will often change the entire atmosphere, not because idiots aren't thinking what they always think, but because they're too ashamed to say it out loud. If they do, then they know they'll receive some fierce argument in turn.

This forces people into self-censorship, but only insofar as it forces them to be rational, beyond their casual prejudices. Perhaps they do resent it, and talk about 'feminazis' and the like when they're among friends, but all the more reason to make such representation as wide-ranging and accepted as possible, to make sure such people are never 'among friends' in this respect, to force them to reconsider their ideas.

Sport is when it comes out most, where drunken men watch football in the bar and, for 'mild' insults say the players are acting like girls. Much more often, though, it's saying they're 'poofs', 'fags' etc. Needless to say, I think a need for the same sort of representation is just as pressing for the queer community.

A strange situation exists in some groups, which deem themselves 'enlightened', where women's representation has been abolished, because women are supposedly already fully considered (always a bad sign when a man is telling you this, as I've had happen to me), while LGBT, ethnic minorities and disabilities representation remains. It's almost the worst of all possible worlds, with women ignored for the reason above, implying that those in power are happy to admit that they are prejudiced against all the other groups. So much for enlightenment.

That tag line on the Baz Luhrmann production of Romeo and Juliet always infuriated me. After several years I've grudgingly come to admit that it's a very decent film - I avoided doing so originally in reaction to everyone's love of Leonardo DiCaprio - but I still believe it worked despite its story line, not because of it. Romeo and Juliet is my least favourite Shakespeare play. There are worse ones, sure, but none to which young people are subjected more often, none for which such a reputation is claimed without desert.

There are a few nice lines in the play, I'll admit, but hopelessly marred for me by the fact that these people have only just met each other and are taking what essentially seems to be mere animal lust to ridiculous lengths. Romeo is obviously the sort of person who, if he lived now, would be coming home from a club every weekend telling his friends he'd met the girl of his life, while said friends rolled their eyes, groaned and said 'not again', while Juliet is a spoilt little kid looking for any way out of an arranged marriage (fair enough, but why him?). The only thing tragic about this love is that its allowed to bear the name, and dares to speak it only too much. Send these kids back to their rich daddies and tell them to wake up and smell the shit.

However, the reason I'm writing this, as I'm sure everyone has an embittered friend around who can moan to them about Shakespeare (no home is complete without one), is to rave about an example of what can be done with this story to improve it. Now I often used to be accused of being a musical snob, but I've broadened my tastes in response to the real snobs I've met. At school I had a music teacher who would weekly declare that opera is the highest form of art, and would refuse to allow us to listen to anything non-classical in class. No suggestion ever that there could be any musical merit in, say, jazz, rock, even country and western. No, opera was the highest, the only really pure, form of art because it combines everything - theatre, music, dance. Anyone else recognise another form of art which does that? Musicals!

Now I'm quite willing to make fun of musicals along with the best (see below), but I'll confess that I've been a huge fan of them ever since I saw Guys and Dolls in Edinburgh, aged seven (no, that doesn't mean I like the Tory Bastard Andrew Lloyd Webber. I still have some taste). I spent much of my youth listening to musicals recordings, thanks to The Musicals Collection magazines which came out in the early nineties, and from that experience I've known the songs from West Side Story for most of my life.

But a couple of weeks ago I was given the chance for the first time to see it on film, in the famous version from the 60s which made all the young girls swoon. And really, it's exciting stuff. The leading man, Tony, is a slimeball, but other than that the whole thing is well nigh perfect. The film begins with just a screen of coloured shapes, which after a little of the overture gradually melt into an American city skyline. The focus gets narrower, from the city, to the West Side, then to a basketball court, where the two groups, Jets and Sharks, are antagonising each other. These are our Montegues and Capulets. The Jets are white trash boys, 'socially sick', the Sharks Puerto Rican immigrants, and the racism they suffer, mainly from the law, already adds an extra element to the old story.

For the first ten minutes of the film nothing much happens apart from gradually increasing taunts and chases between them, until they're separated by some policemen. The orchestral backing ebbs and flows in support, while the action is straight out of a ballet, groups stalking along in perfect time, clicking their fingers and rapidly building up the tension. Only after they separate do we get the first song, and that's when Sondheim's wonderful lyrics make you realise the whole experience is going to be something out of the ordinary.

Like every Romeo and Juliet story the Romeo and Juliet characters themselves are the least interesting part of this, or at least their duets are the least subtle part of the music. These are the songs people have heard of - 'Tonight', 'One hand, one heart' and 'Somewhere' - but the best bits of this are easily the group numbers, where the energy of the youthful actors brims over in everything they do. It's the ultimate advert against obesity - just watching it makes me want to go to a gym and learn to dance. But so far the only result it's actually had is to make me write this, proof that nothing can make the determinedly lazy person change her ways.

It's in the group numbers, too, that the politics comes out. 'Gee Officer Krupke' is an eloquent assessment of society's attitudes to delinquent youth, 'America' shows the different experiences and views of the American Dream among immigrants. Both are serious songs, but are conducted wildly, joyfully, life-affirmingly. Here, too, the story is examined more closely, so that in 'I Feel Pretty' Maria (Juliet) is made to feel as insane in her attraction as she really is.

Youth is emphasised everywhere, and unlike in the traditional story the couple do not really get married, but act out a marriage in the dressmaker's shop where Maria works. It's a sweet scene, but it shows just how unprepared for a serious relationship they really are. Maria is the more grounded of the two, making fun of Tony (Romeo) at first for his wild assertions of love. She recognises the problems of their different backgrounds and her family's fear. Bernstein, Sondheim et al never try to suggest that theirs is 'the greatest love story ever told'. The story works because it brings out the foolishness and futility of their romance to the full.

What's tragic in this is that these two groups, both targets of 'society', fight each other rather than joining their efforts. It's the old story seen everywhere, the lower classes played off against one another, anything to prevent them rising up and fighting those in power. Every once in a while you see them doing it - as in the cafe at midnight, where the Jets all stay silent rather than allow the police to take in the Sharks (who are their main targets, being foreign). But still their first hatred is reserved for the other group, who are taking their territory, meagre as it is.

The sadness of the love story is that fighting has made what would probably have been a brief fling into something secret, sustained and, ultimately, something tragic. It's not just a tragedy for Maria and Tony, but for all of them, left in the end with nothing more than they had when they began, still demonised, still worthless. As Maria and Tony sing 'there's a place for us - somewhere', it's not just for the two of them, but for all of them. The rallying cry of a better life.

Romeo and Juliet is by no means the best love story ever told, but it can turn into a truly great story when music and dance is added to words, and when social struggle is added to romance. Here we see the lowest in society venting their frustration - tragic young men going down under bullets, as in the best Westerns - their pointless lives tunnelled into frustration after frustration, finally ending in death. The moral, of course, is not to try to rise above the other group, but with them. Join forces! Fight the bastards who keep you down!

Chris, via Graham, has already linked to the 'world's first self-writing weblog'. It's in the fine tradition of the Daily Mail headline generator for strangely convincing rubbish, and it already has this blog's true colours down. So it's straight onto the blogroll...

Unlike Michael, I'm not very busy, but given most of my time is spent reading and under-employed, I still don't have much to say here. So I'll take the Friday Five challenge too:

1. What was the last song you heard?

'Tonight' from West Side Story. Given my habit of whistling along to whatever I'm listening to, and the intricate parts of the score to this musical, I've been getting very odd looks walking down Oxford High St with it on my walkman this afternoon.

2. What were the last two movies you saw?

Imitation of Life and The Dreamers. The first is a Douglas Sirk melodrama from the fifties, and absolutely typical of the genre. Someone storms out slamming a door or has an emotional breakdown on average every seven minutes or so. Fear not, though, faithful readers, I stayed strong against its emotional manipulation (until the end, where I cried like a baby). The Dreamers is marvellous, and I mean to post on it at more length when I've got a hold of the book for comparison.

3. What were the last three things you purchased?

Putting grocery shopping, alcohol and newspapers aside, probably Carina Round's Lacuna, a beginner's German course (it was between that, Russian and Czech, and for once I was sensible), and a job lot of (I think) every issue ever of the magazine Encounter. I've spent three weeks moving those to where I live, up three flights of stairs with no lift. FBI-funded literature never seemed so tiresome...

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?

Finish reading The Republic, practise a reading for tonight's Lent service in church, eat, sleep. That is, I have nothing I need to do this weekend, which is blissful.

5. Who are the last five people you talked to?

My parents and my girlfriend, via two phone calls; a shop assistant; and a directions-requesting tourist. I was reading in The Independent the other day that old people are getting lonelier, seeing on average two people a day, where people my age are meant to see an average of twenty. Given my sole human contact today has lasted less than two minutes in total, perhaps I should worry...

Thursday's attacks on Spain upset us all - they upset me much much more than September 11th, since less than half an hour after hearing about that I was already thinking 'Oh God, look what the US is going to do now...' Perhaps it's because I've always felt very European, but I've found the scenes from Spain absolutely heartrending.

But my grief, and the grief of the collective 'British voter', is hardly likely to be assuaged by a conference speech from Tony Blair, apparently designed to 'soothe gloomy voters'. There seems to be this strange assumption in the press, and obviously among politicians, that they have influence on us beyond their impact as policy-makers, and that we will take their assertions as having some special authority. But why would we? It's not that I think politicians are all liars and corrupt; I just don't see what they have that any sensible person doesn't by way of good sense.

So Tony telling me that Britain is safe and that I can be proud to be British - which is anyway a laugh and a half for an anti-patriot - is hardly likely to make me feel more upbeat. We can see the world for ourselves and make our own judgements. Many people other than myself have made the judgement that we're all in big trouble the way we're going. British foreign policy, whether or not one supported the war in Iraq, has been deeply mismanaged, and our profile in the world - to us anyway - seems like it's being dragged through the mud.

What people like Tony Blair should be worried about is that our reactions have turned to cynical gloom, rather than to the sort of panic seen during the Cold War. You can manipulate panic, but as for gloom... Well, I think I won't be alone in reacting to his speech today with 'Tough luck, Tone. You won't bring us back to the ballot boxes like that.'

BBC 6 Music's poll of 'songs that saved your life' reveals that The Smiths' I Know It's Over is the song that has most saved its listeners' lives. I'm not exactly surprised, given that the title of the poll is a Smiths reference, which arguably made a Smiths-y outcome inevitable. This song, from the greatest album ever The Queen Is Dead was for a very long time my favourite Smiths song, but I can honestly say that it more often led me on the path to self-destruction than saved me from it. I can't say that lyrics like 'Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head' are the most obvious thing to pull people back from the brink.

But there's a strong case for songs like this helping people precisely because they allow us to wallow in our depression and feel that someone else does understand. That's a cheesy thing to say, because not all of us are crying out for someone to understand us, but I Know It's Over, as one respondent said, does often feel like 'a giant pair of arms coming out of the speakers to hug me'. Morrissey, throughout his career, has been the lyricist par excellence for creating a feeling of sympathy, without ever allowing the listener to become too self-indulgent. So even in the depths of despair, we're invited to mock ourselves a little, with lyrics like 'If you're so very entertaining, then why are you on your own tonight?' with the response 'I know, 'cause tonight is just like every other night'. An exemplary song from his solo career is November Spawned A Monster, which is much harsher than most - 'Sleep on and dream of love, because it's the closest you will get to love' - but still manages to have sympathy with its subject.

The other songs in the poll could be categorised corresponding to the types of people who listen to them, whether terminal manic depressives like me, people who look to music in crises or people who just want something fun to get them out of a funk every once in a while. So in the first category would be I Know It's Over, The Cure's Pictures of You, Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb and perhaps Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees. As with I Know It's Over, all these other songs arguably envelope the listener in a wall of sound to fit the mood, allowing thoughts and feelings to be focussed in sound rather than inside. None of them are telling the listener to get over it and have some fun. I'll come clean now and say that all of them are prominent in my music collection, and so it's interesting that they are also more prominent than most in the 6Music poll - perhaps it's a self-selecting audience, and obscure music obsessives are all just social inadequates...

The second sort of song/listener would include things like REM's Everybody Hurts. They have cross-over appeal, and nobody would just say you were being a miserablist for listening to them, but at the same time they serve a similar purpose to the previous category, while at the same time allowing that these things do pass and everyone has problems sometimes. It's the sort of thing a permanent depressive in an irritable mood could get disgusted with, but most people find touching and powerful.

Lastly, there are the bouncy songs, which are really annoying. Bowling For Soup, The Darkness and The Beatles are among the artists listed here. The songs all just cloy at you and grate on your nerves if you're really down, saying 'Come on! Stop being a misery guts and get on with life!' If anyone suggested one of these songs to me as a way to get out of depression, I'd probably punch them. I mean, dammit, it's like they want us to be happy!

(Cheers to Constant Reader for passing on the link)

Continuing with the somewhat pointless posts of late (personal crises as usual) today is National Panic Day in the US. What makes you panic most? Nearly a quarter of respondents to one poll have said that it is the unelectable one himself, George W. Bush.

Today is also the feast day of St Frances of Rome, patron saint of motorists (despite the fact that she almost never left Rome, and travelled everywhere by foot). Get your cars blessed today!

It's International Women's Day. I believe that the date, March 8th, was picked in memory of women's protests around the world against the First World War, which seems an excellent choice. But I may be wrong about that. To mark it, here's a link to Amnesty International's Women's Campaign.

Searching for interesting articles on the subject, I came upon this piece from The Times of India by someone who thinks that IWD is 'an appalling trivialisation of the issue [of women's equality]'. She argues that days which refocus attention on 'beleaguered minorities', such as World AIDS Day, are good and important, but that women are not a special interest group and women's interests are not so trivial as to require a 'day' for us to focus on them.

Of course, I disagree. To say that IWD trivialises women's issues, is to say that things like World AIDS Day or, say, Holocaust Memorial Day, are okay because what they commemorate is already trivial. This is far from the case. Such days exist to remind the world that these issues are really important. I understand, and to some extent sympathise, with the point that women aren't at all a minority and to allot only a day to women suggests that we can safely ignore them for every other day of the year. This is a danger, I guess, but surely the only people who would happily ignore the pressing issues of gender equality are people who wouldn't particularly care whether or not it was International Women's Day either.

We need International Women's Day because, while women are not a minority in the world, and are not a 'special interest group', they are unequal. In the West people are abandoning the cause of feminism long before it's achieved its aims, and all over the world women are taught to feel themselves inferior to men, to feel themselves suited only to certain roles in life, and are treated as unworthy to make their voices heard. IWD is important, like so many other 'days', because it is intended to show how much we still have left to do.

To some extent it is a day for those of us who are already converted to the cause and of course it's by no means enough. But it is not a bad thing. It at least reminds people of the work which others do throughout the year, and to celebrate the achievements which have been made, no less than marking out what's left to be done. It's no time for complacency - the article marks out terrible problems in India, and all over the world we face problems from unequal pay to death by stoning for suspected adultery, or simply for demonstrating a shred of independence. But while women's and human rights groups labour on, often unrecognised, to highlight these problems bring these issues onto the agenda, IWD provides an institutionalised reminder, which the establishment is forced to recognise. It cannot simply be discarded as the 'feminazis' whining on. Sure, it may only result in a few token articles in the liberal press, but in a time when so many women deride the cause of feminism, and when apathy has made any sort of 'cause' unfashionable, we need to take whatever we can get.

International Women's Day serves a purpose. I wish it didn't, but I don't foresee it becoming unnecessary at any time in the near future, and for that reason I'm happy to celebrate it with millions of other women, and men, from all over the world.

UPDATE: The BBC has the International Women's Day in pictures.

In the mood for some misanthropy, I decided to skip the long and self-indulgent teenage rants and get straight to the strong stuff. I Hate Music is a good enough fix in the absence of specific people-hate, and today's post yields an excellent discussion of the merits of The Sound Of Music:

Three and a half hours long! There are pregnant women in labour who don’t suffer for that long... [Maria] is a mentally damaged imbicile [sic] and should not be left to look after six children. Especially children who turn twee into an artform. Much like Maria turns curtains into clothes. Do you remember the kid whose mum made him clothes out of curtains at school. No, me neither - I guess I repressed his tragic suicide from my mind.

...As for Captain Von Trapp of the Austrian Navy. Austria is land locked. He just putts a few yachts around Lake Geneva. So we have a failed Nun, a pointless captain and a family of halfwitted children (especially the youngest one with a face like a sprout) - versus the Nazi’s. Am I really the only one cheering on the Nazi’s here? Go Rolf, go.

Apart from this enjoyment, though, there is challenge offered up - Tanya thinks that 'the lonely goatherd' and 'Table D’Hôte heard' together form 'possibly the worst rhyme in musical history'. It could be, but I'm willing to look for others.

There are many rich sources (Annie springs to mind) but I think to qualify on the grounds set down the rhymes must not only be awful - there are simply too many candidates - but cruel and unusual, as with 'table d'hote heard'. So here goes (in no particular order):

~ "Paris is so sexy/Riding in a taxi/Gives me apoplexy" - Victor/Victoria
~ "You'll open wide him?/(I'll subdivide him!)" - Camelot
~ "Will it be birds in spring or hara-kiri/Don't worry deary" - Follies
~ "Oh Noah/You go-a/All the way back to the protozoa" - Children Of Eden
~ "No one cares for you a smidge/When you're in an orphanage"- Annie

More suggestions welcome - that is, if anyone else is foolish enough to have listened to enough musicals to know...

Having spent a few minutes on MSN messenger just now, ranting at a friend about the lazy and insidious tendencies of people in immigration debates to talk about 'our culture' and 'our shared values', when I don't share any values with the BNP supporting, Daily Mail reading scum of this world and, increasingly it seems, not that many with our Prime Minister, I was pointed in the direction of Support or Deporter?

Can you make out the difference between the football supporters and the BNP? Even with some counter-intuitive guessing ("he looks normal, so he *must* be evil!") I only got 6/10.

UPDATE: Following on from this, Chris Lightfoot mentions the 'Computer programmer or serial killer' quiz, which can be found here.

Michael reports on another Michael's assessment of the impact of iPods over at Mischievous Constructions. As the happy owner of a battered Walkman which never leaves my bag and rarely leaves my ears, I think they've got it wrong. I've never even seen an iPod, but all that they report about the 'changes' it's producing leaves me cold. 10,000 songs - now that's something. But apparently iPod listeners listen to the same half dozen songs every day for weeks on end. Michael himself confirms this, talking about the happy 90 minutes a day he spends with his iPod. I can't be the only one who things "90 minutes? That's a mix tape!" That's time for the full span, the arc, the beauty of a mix tape!

I can see how an iPod would be efficient. I imagine, the way technology's going, that it's something onto which music can be recorded and a selection of tracks set down in a matter of minutes. But where's the fun in that? Where's the nights spent up late, knowing there's work the next day, but not caring because you're engulfed in making something that's truly yours. So people like 'control of their journey', matching the music to its sections? There could be no more pure sense of control than marking the exact gaps between the tracks on your tape, running the cymbal beat of one straight into the bass guitar of another; or leaving some seconds for a pause, a change of tempo or just an awareness of keeping the time of the last track, so the next one comes in on the perfect upbeat...

It takes me three hours to make a mix tape, double the length of the tape itself. Three hours, every time. I've made hundreds of them and they've served every mood imaginable. They've often been full tapes of a single band or group, constructing the perfect album that never was. But more fun is the real DJ's touch; it's mixing the completely unlikely in such a way as to floor even the most doubting. Get them onto a track they love, have the intake of breath as we wait for the next, and then 'Wham!' - perhaps literally. This doesn't mean that I play my tapes to other people; but in my head there's always an audience other than myself, the audience which recognises the loving care I put into a tape. I play the audience too, of course, but it's not at all rare for me to be so distanced from the person who made the tape the night before, not knowing whether the arc in her head would come out right, that when I hear one song move into the next and then another, I'll just be shaking my head in disbelief, sometimes unable to contain a manic grin - to the great confusion of those around me.

But my music is as private as anyone's. I want to share it all the time, I want to make other people love the things I love and the mix tape is my evangelism, but when I've put it out on the line I want to grab it straight back, deny people what's there because, while I'm happy for them to hear the bands, the singers and the rhythm, the arc of the mix tape is still mine and everything in me goes into it. The journey is timed to perfection - I spent six months leaving the house to the same song - but more than that. It's timed so that every moment of every song is right. Some of the most wonderful experiences in my mundane life (as opposed to my other, exciting, life of espionage, obviously) have been when the music on my headphones matches exactly the world outside - Morrissey singing up and down at the end of Vicar In A Tutu, while the bus I'm on hits some bumps in time; the slow intro of U2's With or Without You on a coach riding into the German sunset on the worst night of my life; or Springsteen's State Trooper howling away on a dark country road. How can music become 'more personal' than that?

If I had 10,000 songs at my disposal, then I'd feel guilty if all I still listened to was the equivalent of a mix tape. There'd be a sense that I should be trying other things, like when I've left a CD in its wrapper since buying it months before, knowing that I should play it rather than the other music that's always there, but 'never finding the time'. The mix tape is perfect, because it's personal, it'd finite and the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. Plus, there's the thrill of turning it over at the end of the 90 minutes, knowing it's all about to start again...

Give me an old cassette over an iPod any day - when can you find an old iPod lying around and transport yourself back in time just by turning it on?

Continuing in the line of mindless posts from me, here's the George W. Bush Conspiracy Generator (Thanks to SJH).

Not quite up to the Daily-Mail-O-Matic standards, but I did learn that "George W. Bush has not captured Osama bin Laden so that white men could kill Michael Moore".

UPDATE: Sarah (H) informs me that the link she actually meant to send me was for the less intellectually-stimulating, but much funnier, Dancing Bush.

Just a note for any Morrissey/Smiths fans - tickets are available online now, not tomorrow as advertised, for Morrissey's gig on 22nd May. Go through links on MorrisseyMusic.com to order standing tickets.

For those who aren't Morrissey/Smiths fans - you fools!

Spurred into Googling by Chris' post at the Virtual Stoa, I discovered that Drop kick me, Jesus is a real song, but also managed to find many further examples of classic country and western song titles - the blunt You're The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly, the punning If My Nose Were full Of Nickles, I'd Blow It All On You and the almost political I've Got The Hungries For Your Love And I'm Waiting In Your Welfare Line being among the most interesting. More here.

If those prove inspirational, then another great find was the "Do-It-Yourself C&W song generator". My effort:

I met her in a gay bar stoned on oatmeal;
I can still recall the hearing aid she wore;
She was drinkin' Dr. Pepper with Led-Zeppelin,
and I knew that she would be a crashing bore;
The blood test showed I'd warp her mind forever;
She said to me that Nixon didn't lie;
But who'd have thought she'd yodel while in labor;
She freaked out on the lawn and screamed goodbye.

I've always been fairly convinced that Windows is evil, but apparently it just takes the right frame of mind to love it. And broken down, giggling mania appears to be the one. I've just discovered that I don't have to put up with its default sound effects, and concurrently I've found Daily Wav, so now I can happily avoid Brian Eno's masterpiece, and instead log on to the sound of Daria - 'welcome to hell', and log off to the Animaniacs - 'and we did all that without computers!'

Apparently Windows has led me to regress to the age of 9. But I'm okay with that.