Quod petis, hic est, Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit aequus
Yesterday’s front page splash in The Sun was special. Next to a near full-page picture of a hanging judge, complete with black cap and gavel, the headline:
99% OF YOU WANT THIS
An unexpected result, for sure. I’d always thought hanging was too good for most Sun readers.
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My Swiss trains watch thinks it’s the 32nd of January. In fact, it would go up to the 39th if I let it. Love the watch as I do, I can’t help but read it as another sign that Big Brother is hoving into view.
Funnily enough, the figures on the dial don’t go past 12.
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And so I had just the very best weekend for a very very long time. It was meant to mark the long slow resurfacing from a bad bad year, and it worked (for me, for us) on every level.
Topped off nicely by my impromptu appearance in a real Yorkshire village cricket match, in a proper Yorkshire field, swatting away the midgies while we disputed who should be fielding in the deep (really, the deep, where the field dropped down three feet, marked by a row of stones). I made 3 not out in my one over at the crease, then sent down two overs of dibbly-dobbly wafty medium pacers for 2-1-2-2.
That included getting my brother-in-law stumped and bowling their big hitter with one that pitched outside the off-stump, turned sharply, then turned back on the second bounce to clip leg stump. Monty would have struggled to do that, I guarantee it. Oh, and I made a run out too, whipping the bails off Jonty Rhodes-style as I steamed in from mid-off. My stats (unbeaten at the crease, bowling average of 1) are sure to decline from this high point when I return next year.
Perfect weekend, and, I hope, a turning point.
(N.B. Due to everything, don’t bother posting comments at the moment: it’s full of spam which hasn’t been cleared. One day soon I will upgrade the site software and clear everything up. For the moment, email is better.)
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The new British prime minister has shuffled his hand and his cabinet. This included the now traditional splitting of departments into new and unmemorable rebrands. What’s that new one again? Skills, something and something else?
He’s missed a real trick, though. Government department naming could go so much further in demonstrating their real purposes. Here’s a starter:
The Home Office becomes the Department for Looking Tough in the Face of Overwhelming Problems
The Department of Work & Pensions becomes the Department for Discouraging Scroungers
The Department of Education becomes the Department for Keeping Kids Off the Streets
The new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills becomes the Department for Keeping Academics In Line
The Foreign Office becomes the Office for Public Bravado, Private Apology
The Ministry of Defence is merged into the new Department for Looking Tough in the Face of Overwhelming Problems
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport becomes the Department for Keeping Journalists and Intellectuals Busy Over Nothing
I could go on, but you get the drift.
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England have completed their crushing of a very poor West Indies touring cricket team. Time, I think, for a field guide to what the commentators mean when they roll out those overly familiar tags for the current England team:
Alistair Cook
What they say: Classy and uncomplicated
What they mean: Tall, has only two strokes
Michael Vaughan
What they say: Classically elegant batsman
What they mean: Holds his pose when finishes the stroke, because a dodgy knee won’t allow him to run
What they say: Imaginative captain
What they mean: Bends the rules, setting fields to obstruct the batsmen and sending bowlers off for a quick relax before bowling, but wins lots so we’ll let it pass
Kevin Pietersen
What they say: Oozes confidence, looks to dominate the bowlers, untroubled by doubts so typical of English batsmen
What they mean: Like the Americans in the second world war, unspeakably arrogant, but tolerated because we need to win. However, he’s not really English, so what can you expect?
Paul Collingwood
What they say: Works hard to overcome lack of natural talent
What they mean: Ginger
Ian Bell
What they say: Fidgety, uncertain
What they mean: Technically excellent batsman, but not tall enough to make the shots look glamorous
Matt Prior
What they say: Audacious batting
What they mean: Riding his luck, and don’t mention the wicketkeeping…
Matthew Hoggard
What they say: Delivers great booming offcutters
What they mean: Swings more than a Basingstoke housewife, batsman probably distracted by shock of straw-hair
What they say: Honest son of the soil
What they mean: Country yokel, probably didn’t go to a decent school. You can tell by that plodding walk.
Steve Harmison
What they say: Gets steepling bounce, frustratingly inconsistent
What they mean: Goes whole games without tonking a single batsman on the head
Ryan Sidebottom
What they say: Line-and-length county pro
What they mean: What’s he doing in the team, particularly with that hair?
Monty Panesar
What they say: Crowd favourite
What they mean: Beard and headgear make him the only player you can confidently identify from the cheap seats
BONUS: A spotter’s guide to the English players
Shoulder-length perm - Sidebottom
Very tall - Harmison or Pietersen. Distinguish the latter by the cockiness of his walk
Short - Bell
Sunhat - Vaughan
Flat-footed - Hoggard
Lanky - Cook, or Harmison/Pietersen standing a bit further away than you thought
Shouting - Prior
Nondescript - Guess Strauss or Collingwood. Distinguish by the former’s huge forearms and the latter’s agility
Beard - Panesar
In this 11th century French biblical manuscript, a leather ribbon operates as a traditional bookmark to indicate the desired pages. But also a vellum tie slides up and down the ribbon; the tie holds a revolving bookmark. To provide instructional information at the point of need, the circle rotates in its tie to show either “Lege ad Dexteram” or “Deinde Lege ad Sinistram.” These words presumably point the reader to the right or left page. That’s pretty good depth of search: book, double-page spread, single page, line on that page. Readers probably did not dog-ear pages in biblical manuscripts all that much, at least in those that have survived for 1000 years.
Edward Tufte illustrates a nice instance of early modern advanced search: not just to the page, but the line, and then to the part of line.
And, yes, isn’t it ironic that I can’t point you to the exact point on Tufte’s page where he discusses this. Look out for the whacking great image of a manuscript with a circular object on it.
I’ll admit it, the Americans haven’t exactly bought cricket, but they (ESPN, owned by Disney) have bought Cricinfo, the only cricket site that really means anything on the internet. The sad decline of the The Guardian’s over by over coverage since its Ashes 2005 heyday has been mirrored by Cricinfo’s almost perfect refinement of its tone. Reading the ball by ball coverage on Cricinfo has become, in its own way, as warm and rewarding an experience as listening to Test Match Special.
Jokes about Pietersen now being described as a pinch-hitter and Panesar delivering curve-balls are cheap, but not too cheap to stop me making them just now.
So few people choose themselves a motto any more, and so few places have them. While we’re here, however, I might suggest “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” over the entrance to the new Wembley stadium.
So, finally, a proper Latin inscription above the gates of Rogue Semiotics.
Quod petis, hic est, Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit aequus
Meaning, roughly, “Whatever you seek is here, in this remote place, if only you have a good firm mind”.
Good old Horace.
The European Journal of Pain is clearly a publication to be reckoned with.
(Yes, I am still here, I suppose)
From rather different directions, evidence of the unending influence of two of my favourite manic Americans:
Which Philip K. Dick story are we living in today?, a regular digest of news through the lens of Phil Dick’s mind-loosening reality-games.
Houdini to be exhumed to determine cause of death. Because, of course, Harry Houdini wasn’t really killed by appendicitis aggravated by blows to the stomach, but by the ‘psychic mafia’. Their suspicion falls particularly on Mina Crandon, better known as the psychic ‘Margery’, with whom Houdini had a hugely entertaining battle of wills, recounted at length in his typically bombastic book ‘A Magician Among the Psychics’. Chances of this being true: close to zero. But at least it did remind me for some reason of Rudy Rucker’s mischievous short story about Houdini, in which the great escapologist’s stunts go wrong and he dies, over and over again. Houdini would have been more cross about the Rucker story than being murdered, I suspect.
No time to describe what these are symptoms of, but I don’t think you particularly need my assistance on that:
1) New work laptop, so I have been catching up on Microsoft Office improvements I’d previously and happily ducked. Having persisted with the default ‘Reading Layout‘ in Word for at least a day, which carefully and consistently renders every document I handle utterly unreadable, I was forced to trawl Microsoft’s support to find out how to SWITCH THE DAMN THING OFF.
2) “The whole thing is the visual equivalent of a moronic clip-art jumble sale poster designed in the dark by a myopic divorcee experiencing a freak biorhythmic high.” Charlie Brooker (here on the design of his appalling mobile phone), can’t be nice to know, but he does splenetic like nobody else.
3) Headline in today’s Metro (slightly paraphrased as I can’t find it on their site):
LOST BIRD IS ‘LIVING DODO’
There’s something of value to be said about the way ‘dodo’ clearly no longer refers to real dodos, but I’m too busy making up Charlie Brooker-ine insults for the Metro subs to concentrate on it right now.
Crikey-blimey, Bob, they’ve gone and invented “Web 3.0″ already:
This is web 3.0 - semantic web - technology, technology that actually understands the value of content on the page rather than just a page of ones and noughts.
That’s the BBC’s Director of Future Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield, tunnelling into the future via an IBM technology that will allow kids to search for their favourite CBeebies programmes. How glorious if we backed into a semantic web because the Beeb can’t afford to properly tag its Balamory archive.
No detail, of course, on what the technology will really do, and as Highfield says: “There is of course the big question of whether it will all work.” The hoopla suggests some kind of whizz-bang image identification work going on, but it’s important to note that “semantic web” technology could quite easily just be another type of tagging.
And, of course, labelling it as “Web 3.0″ is just silliness. Most people have only just upgraded to Web 2.0, so they’ll be waiting for their free upgrade to 2.1 before they have to splash out all over again on 3.0.
The local art gallery (run, somehow, on a shoestring by a local artist couple) has made it into the news agenda, albeit for its annual Starchy Gallery joke exhibition.
Very proud.
In other arts news, Dr Jonathan Miller appeals for the return of the three scrap metal sculptures that were accidentally removed from his front garden:
Mr Miller said: “We were having our old cast iron bath replaced and it was broken in half and left in the front garden. A group of people in uniforms with some utterly forgettable title knocked on our door and offered to clear the front garden and I said fine and left them to it.
“It was only a couple of hours later that we noticed that the sculptures had gone too. I was amazed because they were very heavy pieces. We did what we could to find them and made some tentative enquiries but had no luck.”
He doesn’t sound too upset, so it would be cruel to suggest that this story is funny because it’s Miller. He’s well known these days for complaining loudly that nobody takes him seriously as an artist, presumably because he started off doing sketches with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. I think this is known as direct art criticism.
Then again, who isn’t an exhibiting artist these days?
There are plenty of parts of South London at the moment where you’re allowed to feel a little bit scared of being shot. Realistically, of course, a casual visitor to Peckham is probably a great deal safer than a local, but it still can’t be doing wonders for the tourist trail down the Old Kent Road.
In the increasingly swish part of South London I call home, the serious danger to your wallet isn’t theft, it’s the price of organic coffee. If you really wanted to guarantee yourself a good kicking where I live, your best bet would be to go to one of the many coffee shops equipped with this babywear, courtesy of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science.
This week, it’s all going to be all right. Cheap solar power will save us, even if we live in upper Siberia.
Apparently Shilpa Shetty is now a big star in the UK, not for her prodigious output of Bollywood blockbusters, but for being bullied by some traditional English girls.
Excellent, then, that this story ends with a real rags-to-riches escapade. Ms Shetty will (probably) front the English version of India’s smash hit TV show, Cricket Star. It’s a reality show in which the winner gets a one-year contract with Leicestershire CCC.
Presumably, the runner up gets two years.
Joy at stumbling across the public information films fan site (yes, Rolf Harris is there, teaching kids to swim) quickly turns to frustration as I find that it contains no more than sketchy memories of the PIF that haunted me as a child.
I grew up with farmland on three sides of the town, and the school itself on the road to the marshes. As an eight year old, my teacher showed the class a safety film based around 10 Little Indians (yes, I know, but I think even in the 70s this had been sanitised). Ten children playing on the farm, each foolish enough to lark around with a piece of farm machinery, near a silage pit, or the like. Gradually, the farm bumped them off with quite gruesome energy. It was like a live-action version of a Gorey story.
Punk band Sham 69 have split, news which is rather like learning that Plato and Aristotle have fallen out over the reality of ideal forms. You really assumed this was all ancient history.
Back in the present day, I am possessed with the restlessness of a parent who can’t quite believe that both (not one, not the other, but both) of the kids are united in sleeping soundly all evening. I am recording this incident in case, in future years, I come to doubt my memory.
After Dr Hunter S. Thompson’s decision last year to shuffle off this mortal coil in a cannon, maybe there’s something in the air. Ashes, most likely.
Heavens Above Fireworks celebrates the life of a partner, relative or friend. We arrange special fireworks displays amongst which will be a number of fireworks specially modified to incorporate the cremation ashes, allowing for a spectacular memorial event and happier farewell.
Yes, you can buy a display called “Going out with a bang”. How nice to know that your friends can leave your funeral knowing that part of you will always be with them. Until they wash their hair.
One of the behavioural curiosities of the modern day web is the manner in which loose virtual networks are made incredibly tight through constant reinforcement in services like del.icio.us. There, I can see everything that my pretty arbitrarily found del.icio.us network are bookmarking, with their comments. Pretty soon, particularly if you happen across one of those people who seems to be on a singlehanded mission to document the entire web, you’re getting a constant stream of selected, themed and commented links.
So you stop looking much further for material, because you’re pretty much full to the brim with what these people are annotating. And so, gradually, their selections become your selections. Their eyes become extensions of yours, meaning that you use your own eyes less: this being the efficiency payoff.
Curiously, though, this intensely distilled version of blogging (”Hey! Look at this page…and this…and this”) is feeling to me increasingly like the old-fashioned top-down directories, such as the early Yahoo!, still prevalent in the mid-nineties. There is a core of observed and commented information (albeit constructed exactly around your semi-random personal network, not one that serves for everyone), and then there’s everything else, which you will never see.
This is prompted by me observing the text of The Hays Code: the code of practice adopted by Hollywood in 1930 to stave off accusations of immorality in motion pictures. I particularly enjoyed the admonitions on the naughtiness of dancing:
VII. Dances
Dancing in general is recognized as an art and as a beautiful form of expressing human emotions.But dances which suggest or represent sexual actions, whether performed solo or with two or more; dances intended to excite the emotional reaction of an audience; dances with movement of the breasts, excessive body movements while the feet are stationary, violate decency and are wrong.
I thought all dancing was inherently sexual, but then again I also thought moving your feet was pretty much de rigeur, so I stand thoroughly corrected.
As I say, I observed and enjoyed the Hays Code. Then I realised it wasn’t my observation at all. It was one of Kevan’s. But is there now any genuine difference? Most of what I see is now predicted by my network. If went away for a month, it would keep on seeing for me. Perhaps, in time, that networked seeing will become more important than the contingent happenstance of whether I have seen the thing for myself or not. Just as this week the White House defined part of the Iraq project not as a failure but as a “success that hasn’t happened yet”, I now think that there are things that I really do see and think, even if I personally haven’t happened to see or think them yet.