Just another false alarm...

John B has found something rather lovely. The quickest way to get from Haugesund in Norway to Trondheim in Norway? Well, it's via Germany, Belgium, a little bit of France and England. Naturally.

This makes Virgin Trains' policy of taking five hours to get from Coventry to Oxford on a Sunday seem truly efficient...

Just as Norm reports on the health benefits of regular stroking (for women, anyway), I bumped into this soundbite - from Lenin, of all people - at The Voice Of The Turtle:

"I can’t listen to music often, it affects my nerves, makes me want to say silly compliments, stroke people on the head for living in this filthy hell and creating such beauty. But nowadays, you mustn’t stroke anybody on the head, or they’ll bite your hand off; you must beat them over their heads, beat them without any mercy, though in principle we’re against using violence on people."

So, stroke people for their benefit, beat them over the heads for the benefit of the world. A fitting suggestion for every member of the royal family, as Chris pretty much argues here.

Having finally fixed up iTunes on my computer a couple of months ago, I've been abusing the myTunes addition to take songs from others on my network, something which they do in equal measure. The effect of this is to create a fairly substantial number of songs/artists which almost everyone owns in common, most of which is bland MOR rock or the latest indie/rock darlings, but there's also a good deal of country and alt. country, jazz, some classical, and various bits of weirdness.

All of this is quite heartening, as a lot of the people with this music aren't the sort who'd normally think of themselves as being 'into' music at all, and are probably listening to a lot more and broader stuff than they used to do. But on the downside, there's an equally marked tendency to listen to absolute crap. When not buying the music and, with more hard drive space, don't even have to think of the space it wastes, the willingness of otherwise self-respecting people to listen to Britney Spears, Eminem, Avril Lavigne etc. is astonishing, as is the tendency to download lots of 'nostalgic' crap from several decades - Snap, M People, ABBA, A-ha, Take That, Spandau Ballet etc.

I'm not immune from this, having a few of these on my own list, and it all suggests that the reach of mass produced pop is much further than one might expect, as even those who would never buy it in a million years are quite willing to listen to it and even enjoy it in their secrecy of their own rooms. The influence this gives the music industry in changing people's attitudes and tastes perhaps more than makes up for the loss of sales these programmes arguably produce.

[Via Norm] (I will return to substantial posting at some point...)

Norm's compiled two lists for this one, so I shall follow his. From another person's list, pick out the books you don't have on your shelves, and in bold put the ones you do.

Fiction:

1. Evelyn Waugh
2. Thomas Hardy
3. Yukio Mishima
4. Jane Austen
5. Haruki Murakami
6. Ian McEwan
7. Mikhail Bulgakov
8. P.G. Wodehouse
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. William Shakespeare

Non-fiction:

1. David McLellan
2. Michael Warner
3. Ian Kershaw
4. Judith Butler
5. Primo Levi
6. Joseph de Maistre
7. Antonio Gramsci
8. Ralph Miliband
9. Brian Barry
10. Alisdair MacIntyre

It's the T-shirt Rebellion in Missouri! A gay student was sent home for wearing pride t-shirts, as were a group of his friends when they wore similar t-shirts in support a week or two later. The reasoning? These t-shirts were 'disruptive and distracting', and therefore broke the school's dress code, which stated:

"Dress and appearance must not present health or safety hazards, be indecent, disruptive, distracting, or inappropriate for the classroom."

(I'd say that some cheerleading-type outfits are very distracting, and I'd bet the people wearing those don't get sent home...)

The case is being taken to court, and the precedent for a good verdict (though it was narrow even then) is Tinker v. Des Moines in 1969, where three students were suspended for wearing black armbands to protest against the war in Vietnam. The court opinion for that case included these words:

"Students and teachers do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of expression at the schoolhouse gates.”

Of course, these days they probably do...

Since Norm seems to be going a bit barking while waiting for entries, I thought I'd direct anyone reading this to his top songs of rock'n'roll poll. Recommend your favourites. Unless you prefer to rant about all this sort of thing being overrated. Then you might want to throw in your two pence worth here.

I don't know what I'm going for just yet. I like Dave's list, but won't go for most of them. To avoid the bias towards music made before the 70s in results to other of Norm's polls, I won't vote for anything like Dylan or The Beach Boys either. So it'll probably be songs by people like Bowie, Joy Division, Suede, The Ramones, Springsteen, Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths etc...

If you see one vote for Magazine's Song From Under The Floorboard, then that'll be me.

[Via Michael Brooke] The office of the Director for Public Prosecutions has, over 75 years after the fact, released papers disclosing that Stanley Baldwin's government wanted to put Radclyffe Hall in prison for the novel The Well Of Loneliness. Good on them. It's appalling stuff.

One of the classic reviews at the time declared that "I would rather put a phial of prussic acid in the hands of a healthy girl or boy than the book in question", and the government's fear was that it would corrupt the young. I've no idea why, since the book is basically a several hundred page attempt to say how miserable it is to be homosexual (or transsexual, really, since the main character seems to be more that than gay), how most 'inverts' end up alcoholic druggies, and how they are ultimately likely to commit suicide from guilt for corrupting others. Seems like the best anti-homosexual propaganda possible.

But Hall should certainly have been imprisoned for forcing generations of lesbians to 'find themselves' in that drivel. That's really corrupting the young. I'm with Baldwin all the way on this one...

This year's Oxford Amnesty Lectures are on the subject of Land Rights:

The thirteenth annual Oxford Amnesty Lectures series explore the various ways in which claims on the land might be imagined, argued and, most importantly, resolved in the world of the 21st century. Indigenous peoples and governments, industrialists and ecologists all use – or have at some stage to confront - the language of land rights. But what does it mean for a person or a people to invoke their 'rights' to land? What assumptions - economic, political, legal, philosophical, anthropological - does such a language imply?

A very interesting area, though I've no idea what these speakers will make of it.

For all those not feeling terribly hopeful in the face of the future 2005 seems to present us, with war, famine, capitalist consumerism and the like all likely to be as prevalent as ever, take heart and take up arms (metaphorically, or otherwise):

"A happy new year!... Our readers are, we hope, rebels in heart, and hence may rebel even at our own picture of the future. If that is so let us remind them that opportunities are for those who seize them, and that the coming year may be as bright as we choose to make it... For those who choose to advance to meet Fate determined to mould it to their purpose that future may be as bright as our picture is dark."

James Connolly.

Of course, he got shot that year (1916), so you might not want to follow his call.

Yes, for those who haven't already seen it, it's the Utah Baby Namer. This is intended for those looking for "that distinctive name that says "I'm a Utah Mormon!"

[Via Lorna].

I was delighted to discover parts of the 1960s ZOCK manifesto earlier today (the Zealous Organization of Candied Knights). While the counter-culture partied and talked about revolution, Otto Muehl dreamed its dark side. Fun elements include his vision of a society in which "There is freedom for orgies", orgies which are designed to compensate for the planned "loss of allotment gardens, cars, property, family, religion, morals, forests and pastures, love of animals, mountains, traveling" in his future society.

He goes on to attack just about everything:

" First, everything representing something valuable in the eyes of a wichtel [goblin - most people] will be destroyed: old cities like Florence, Rome, Venice, etc., favorite holiday landscapes will be devastated, tourist attractions will be abolished, historical buildings and monuments like temples (Acropolis), graves (Pyramids) and palaces will be demolished."

Wonderful bits:

"The exploration of space is postponed until the last beetle is destroyed."

"School children are allowed to be shot down only on roads leading to schools."

"Priests may be shot with a peashooter when they are performing their duties during high holy days."

"Famine, which will be provoked by ZOCK's destruction of agriculture, is a welcome event in realizing ZOCK's most extreme goals. When famine has reached a certain extent, ZOCK's slogan will be: Use other humans as food."

"All women who have already born children, will be beaten to death and eaten by ZOCK youth on the occasion of a gigantic Mother's Day feast."

"World Animal Day: a call to sexual intercourse with all animals."

Muehl has also discovered the secret of past revolutionary failure: "all revolutions made the mistake of not going far enough in radically destroying traditional structures. They always let remnants of old institutions survive... ZOCK will not make this mistake.

ZOCK will destroy all structures that are older than one minute, without exception."

Excellent. I'm not sure I'll ever think of Mother's Day in the same way again.

There are some groups of Christians out there planning a protest against BBC 2's projected airing of Jerry Springer: The Opera:

"This musical, notorious for containing over 8,000 expletives, depicts the characters of Jesus, Mary and God as self-centred sexual deviants who give and receive extreme verbal abuse and a horrific series of blasphemies all in the name of comedy. The show's artistic director admits that it is a deliberate attack on good taste and the BBC concedes that the intended broadcast "pushes back the boundaries of taste and decency".

Nevertheless, the show is planned to be transmitted without any cuts."

As this was the first any of us had heard about it, when I told a friend about this, he responded "Can we e-mail them back to find what time it's on?"

[Via Shot By Both Sides]

A few days ago Michael Brooke linked to a piece criticising the latest John Chick (JC, geddit?) comic strip, which tells just about everyone, but most specifically Muslims, that they're going to hell.

Fortunately, there's now lighter relief with this spoof strip.

(Oh, and for those who thought we were immune from this rubbish living in England, think again. I was handed a nice one of JC's pamphlets in Birmingham back in 1998 or so, telling me about the evils of homosexuality. Bit late by then, though)

Well, there's been snow in Birmingham as of twenty minutes ago, and it appears to be heading South. Because it's dark I can't get a good photo, but it's falling bloody fast and sticking too. Good stuff.

From Daniel DeLeon, writing 104 years ago tomorrow:

"The “charitably minded” will attempt to lighten the woes of those who are out of work, of those who have been violently torn from the sources of livelihood, by giving them free dinners. The number of poor who will be fed today is not an indication of the goodness of man, but it is an arraignment of the capitalist system, a protest against that system and a menace to the human race. It is well to assist the fallen, but it is dangerous, it is criminal, to throw them to the ground so that you can assist them. More charity is shown in pointing out the right way for society than there is in feeding millions of men who are kept in servitude.

The arrangements that were made for the wholesale feeding of the poor gave the lie direct to the claim that we are either a civilized or a prosperous nation. If so many mouths must be fed at the expense of others, and if thousands, or hundreds of thousands, will get but the meager dinner to which they are accustomed from day to day, then prosperity is distributed so unevenly that that such a large proportion of the people are cut out of it, that it is better to abolish the whole thing and substitute a little justice...

...There was a time here when it would have been an insult to a man to offer him his Christmas dinner. He was capable of providing all that he needed. He is no longer. He must depend on what charity doles out to him. He is made a suppliant for Christmas cheer. He is no longer capable of providing for himself, and must depend on what is given him...

Such a “merry” Christmas cannot come unless there is some great and terrible wrong. Such a state of affairs works the ruin of all who take part in it. Its increase betokens disaster. Its continuance breeds crime.

A merry Christmas should be a Christmas that finds all men capable of producing their own merriment, instead of having it ladled out to them, to a chorus of self-praise and gratulation on the part of the givers."


This is all founded on an economic argument about capitalism necessarily pitting wage workers against non-workers in order to keep them all down, but it works just as well as a moral argument, I reckon.

[Via Norm and others]

Three Names You Go By:
1. Sarah Cotterill
2. Sarah Lloyd
3. Alex Lloyd

Three Things You Like About Yourself:
1. My oh so sweet and bubbly personality. Obviously.
2. My taste in music.
3. My taste in friends.

Three Things You Dislike About Yourself:
1. My inability to stay awake when I need to.
2. My inability to sleep when I need to.
3. My habit of saying embarrassing things I regret for weeks afterwards.

Three Parts of Your Heritage:
1. Woolly lefty liberal
2. Christian
3. A combination of Birmingham and the Home Counties (and what a great accent that makes)

Three Things That Scare You:
1. Large groups of people
2. Loud noise(s)
3. Sudden movements

Three of Your Everyday Essentials:
1. A pencil
2. Some book or other
3. Diet Coke

Three Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
1. A fedora
2. A Smiths t-shirt
3. Trainers

Three of Your Favorite Bands/Artists at the moment:
1. Suede/The Tears
2. Hank Williams
3. David Bowie

Three of Your Favorite Songs at Present:
1. "I can't help it (If I'm Still In Love With You" - Hank Williams
2. "Ballad For Americans" - Paul Robeson
3. "What Would You Do?" Kander/Ebb from Cabaret

Three New Things You Want to Try in the Next 12 Months:
1. Passing finals well enough to get out of the country.
2. Getting out of the country.
3. Staying out of the country.

Three Things You Want in a Relationship (love is a given): Why is love given? I don't want it...
1. Informality
2. Openness
3. Not too much emotion

Two Truths and a Lie: (in no particular order)
1. I wish I'd spent more time involved in the theatre.
2. I enjoy cross-dressing.
3. I've never worn make up.

Three Physical Things About the Opposite Sex That Appeal to You:
1. A lack of breast tissue.
2. More sharply defined features (without anorexia)
3. Fewer whiny, high-pitched voices. Only a bit, mind...

Three Things You Just Can't Do:
1. Climb anything vertical
2. Master Sondheim on the piano.
3. Listen to 'girl talk' without becoming deeply sarcastic and/or patronising.

Three of Your Favorite Hobbies:
1. Listening to music
2. Going to the cinema
3. Flirting.

Three Things You Want to do Really Badly Right Now:
1. Have a can of Diet Coke.
2. Magic myself either back to the beginning of uni or to the end of finals.
3. Sleep. (1 could be replaced by 3).

Three Places You Want to Go on Vacation:
1. San Francisco
2. Paris
3. Edinburgh

Three Kids' Names:
1. Fifi
2. Trixibelle
3. Champ

Three Things You Want to Do Before You Die:
1. Write an important book/article.
2. Live alone.
3. Relax.