Blah Blah Flowers

You may well find it useful to file this under annoyingly addictive game. However, you will also find it useful to turn the annoying bloody music off too. [via B3ta]

After the MP3 breasts a few weeks back I now give you the Bluetooth Vibrator.

The thing that worries me is-

Okay, let's start that again.

Many things worry me. At the moment I worry that the voice of God is telling me to kill the dirty whores to usher in the End Times, but apart from that old chestnut, what worries me is that in the UK we have a Government that has to win, regardless of the cost. Whilst that is one of the definitions of a Government, this leads to some really stupid situations. Take top-up fees. Yes, they were evil, but there was a faint chance that with them in place the better-off would subsidise the worse-off (although I doubt it). So all the Labour MPs from middle-class consituencies revolt. Does the Government decide to shelve the bill or wait and try and find a way around? No, because failure is bad. STRONG TRUTH. So, they force through an abortion of a bill in which everyone pays more and no-one is helped out at all. This deal with the problem of the numbers of people going to university as only the upper classes can afford them, once again.

Then there's ID Cards. Obviously you know where I stand. But I would have to admit that an argument can be made for their usefulness in containing information on a person, health details, credit history etc and so on. But, faced with a civil liberties revolt from everyone outside of the Cabinet, does the Government give up? No! They instead turn the ID Card into little more than a piece of plastic with your photo on it. When the Government announced how much these things would cost they were much cheaper than what the reports suggested, but forty pound is still a lot higher than the fifty pence it costs for my ID badge at work. So what is the point of having them at all?

With behaviour like this New Labour should thank their lucky stars they're in a majority. If they weren't then they'd not be able to get their hamfisted, suicidal, self-defeating legislation through Parliament any more. Then they might have to create laws that actually made sense.

Vegetables were recently introduced into this country and viewed with suspicion by the people, who preferred to eat mud and rose petals. A massive advertising campaign has been started to persuade people to eat vegetables, including the carrot, the potato, and the Tory politician.

UPDATE: Creepy Lesbo has noticed this too, here.

Following up this, some clarification of the story.

Yay me. I am number 2 on a Yahoo search for I am 27 weeks pregnant and have come into contact with slap cheek virus. Surely fame and fortune will be following close behind. I'll just sit here and read a newspaper while waiting for it to catch up.


Dum de dum...



Any minute now...

It's amazing how you can take two stunningly average tunes and mash 'em together for pure audio pleasure. Head over to GYBO and download Aggro1's masterful boot of Bloc Party versus The Pussycat Dolls. You won't regret it. In fact, if you want to build some sort of statue as a way of thanking me for pointing it out to you, then go right ahead.

Aggro1's own site/blog is here.

Eye-melting optical illusion.

"Look into my eyes, the eyes, don't look around the eyes, don't look around the eyes, you're under. When you wake up you will have forgotten that The Day Today ever existed and you will find Broken News a new and hilarious concept. One, Two, oh, and isn't it nice to see Claudia Christian on the telly again? I must admit, I'd watch it just for her, one, two, three, you're back in the room."

It's not that someone is doing something that Chris Morris has already done that annoys me, he made the godawful Nathan Barley after all, it's just that they don't seem to be bringing anything new to the table.

Lie Girls - Telling You What You Want to Hear.

Following on from here, a few more thoughts on Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.

The chapter that looks at the inaccuracies in Bowling for Columbine is pretty devastating, if even a half of it was accurate. The following chapter, by Anthony Zoubek, on the people that have made excuses for Moore's facts being wrong is equally strong. As someone who tends more to Moore than conservatives I'm annoyed that Moore doesn't seem to defend himself anywhere on his site. However, these two chapters are probably the best part of the book.

'Moore's Money' paints Moore as a miser who is always trying to get the most money out of everyone while giving away the minimum of his own but skips around back and forth through his life, ending up at a time in his life when compared to these days he had little. 'Michael Moore's Last Days in Office', things the authors want Moore to do before stepping down from public life, is just mean-spirited, especially as they claim that Moore was wrong about Shrubya being a deserter but I don't remember that issue ever being settled, just passed over. Then there's 'And the Oscar for Acting Out Goes To...' where the authors stress they have no knowledge of psychiatry before then proceeding to attempt to psychoanalyse Moore from a great distance. They say Moore writing a chapter of Dude, Where's My Country? as God is proof of narcissism, rather than a well-known humorous device. I suppose they also believe Dame Edna Everage is a biological woman or that Helen Fielding lives under an unfortunate delusion that her name is Bridget Jones. Similarly they decide not to understand the point of his open letters and pretend that he's really writing to people like Shrubya or Yasser Arafat but accidentally posts them to his website or in his books instead of popping them in the post.

Writing on Fahrenheit 9-11 before seeing it because you want to publish a book now rather than wait a few months so you can properly critique the work is pretty shoddy, even justifying it by saying that Moore would obviously be copying Stupid White Men is no excuse. (I can't be sure but didn't Moore say before he made Fahrenheit 9-11 that he would be using the same material from SWM?) The 'Moore Stories' chapter looks suspiciously like free advertising for another anti-Moore project, before finishing on a high-note of seeing how close they can come to tying Moore in with Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism, confusing Moore giving an explanation for why groups of people in the world might want to attack the US with a justification for doing it.

Read this book for everything up to the end of Bowling For Columbine. After that it just goes terribly wrong as the authors realise that while websites can be as big or small as you like it's a bit more tricky in book form.

Melanie Phillips sneers at religious freeedom. Presumably because it's not Jewish religious freedom.

Touchingly The Guardian worries that by meeting Tony Blair the Kaiser Chiefs will lose credibility with der kids. Insert your 'can't lose what they never had' comments here...

Rosa Parks dies at 92.

"Excuse me. I know that, as a librarian, I have to make sure I don't confuse you members of the public with jargon and specialist terminology that you don't understand, but if you're having difficulty dealing with the idea that I cannot give you your free hour on the computer because we're closing in twenty minutes that I would urge you to get sterilised for the future good of humanity."

... Was what I should have just said.

I'm reading Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man by David Hardy and Jason Clarke. It's one of a number of Conservative rebuttals/attacks of/on Moore. It's quite good in that it sets out to point out occasions where it believes Moore has either stretched the truth or snapped it completely. Where it suffers is that it's authors are as far over to the right as Moore is to the left. It's incredibly partisan. Part of the chapter on Moore's first big feature, Roger and Me, is a paean to capitalism. As the title might suggest, Hardy and Clarke are writing this to be in many ways a mirror image of Moore. While Moore may not have much liking for Conservatives, Hardy and Clarke clearly don't like liberals and Democrats. Moore sometimes finds flimsy reasons to dislike people he writes about? Fine, Hardy and Clarke will find unnamed sources from Moore's first jobs in media to talk about how he wasn't a team player. At one point they even have a go at him using CAPITAL LETTERS for emphasis, as though this is Michael Moore Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Everything they say could well be true, even in the British media there have been those willing to question and find inaccuracies in Moore's reporting, and those that have pointed out that when publicly called on his accuracy Moore tends to get shirty very quickly. But copying Moore's style in order to attack him isn't very clever. In the end this book comes out as only for those who dislike Moore already to read, whereas it might have been a bit more useful to try for more accessibility, to aim for those outside that niche audience. It would have been nice if they could have written this without weighting every sentence with a belief that those on the left are stupid and deluded.

I'm also glad to report that, as one of the authors is behind the Moorewatch site, that I've reached page 48 and, other than the title, neither of the writers have felt it necessary to make a completely unnecessary reference to Moore's size.

Eddie Izzard.com First time I've bothered to look at this in ages... "Eddie backed the [Olympic] bid", "Eddie chats to Tony Blair"... God, when your heroes let you down they really let you down don't they?

How odd, I've started doing titles but they aren't getting published on my blog. I wonder what I'm doing wrong...

In other news, the Branch Administrator has just walked past wearing pyjamas. What was in that bottle of orange juice I drank at lunchtime?

Any trannies who are handy with a pair of knitting needles might fancy having a go at knitting their own fake breasts. Originally developed by a woman who had undergone a mastectomy but I think there's an untapped market out there who might be grateful... [via Boing Boing

I knew this wasn't going to be a good day when I woke up at 3:00 am this morning, now i'm spending a ten hour work day at another library, where I've been sent only because it seems there's two times in the day when they need an extra body to cover service points. Well, maybe I'll be able to catch up on my sleep at least.

A Librarian who refused to serve a customer she caught sharing sexual fantasies on a library computer is facing disciplinary action, while he has been sent an apology.

Although I've not yet been caught up in such a situation it doesn't surprise me when staff don't get back up from their management. And an 'internal investigation' might end up with their procedure actually being given a backbone. We have the delightful situation that a member of the public has to be abusive to staff on two seperate occasions before he can be excluded from the library. We always hear about people's rights, we hardly ever hear about the responsibilities they owe to society as well.

Do you need a few thousand suggestions for what sci-fi to read?

Is this one of the worst pieces of journalism this year? I mean, it doesn't make any sense.

Over-dependence on profits from DVDs and videos has led Buckinghamshire county council to cut 18 staff jobs and plan the closure of eight branch libraries.

Okay.

The county council lost £400,000 a year income when the entertainment industry raised prices by 300%, said a report to Buckinghamshire county councillors. The county already spends less on new library books than anywhere else in Britain.

Why did the county council lose £400,000 a year? Did they try to pass on the increased cost to the public? Were they just unable to afford to pay for DVDs? Did they hope that by charging more for DVDs and videos they could make enough to plug the hole in their media fund? Did anyone at the Guardian try to find anything out or are they just getting this from reuters or somewhere?

The cuts are among the worst in any library service for 20 years. Yesterday the libraries campaigner Tim Coates accused the council of relying on "fools' gold".

Why on earth does anyone still talk to Coates? My Mum knows more about libraries than he does, after all, she uses them.

Wrongness. I just don't understand how CSI: Miami slash could exist, as the only relationship in that show is between Horatio and... Horatio. Mind you, some sort of drinking game could probably be created around the number of times Horatio takes off and puts his sunglasses on in a scene and/or promises a small child he'll make everything all right.

The biggest drawback to the Conservatives to find a new leader is that it's the Conservative party and it's supporters that pick them. So Ken Clarke is almost certainly stuffed and will just have to go back to selling cigarettes to African children for the rest of his days but David Cameron, the only other Tory that might be popular outside of the Tory party is building support. Watching this whole affair over the last week is curious, are the Tories genuinely not-to-concerned about drugs, or are they really running a 'look how magnanimous I'm being not talking about drugs and whether prospective Tory leaders have or have not taken any' campaign?

Meanwhile, as ID Cards come up yet again, with the Home Office saying the price will be £30 (and apparently not saying anything about why this cost is so different to previous estimates by both them and the LSE) and news that biometrics won't work with anyone going bald, with brown eyes, black hair or, it would seem, fingers, Charles Clarke is saying today that the information on ID Cards won't go any further than passports. I'm sure I remember his predecessor doing much the same, we'd have weeks and weeks of stories about how ID Cards would solve all our problems for us, how they'd do so many things. Then someone fairly senior would insist that the ID Cards data would be extremely limited. Then stories would leak out again about how ID Cards would cure the lame and make the blind see. But the point of this story is that ID Cards are still pointless and expensive.

Gaaah. Just 'Gaaah'. It's partly AA Gill, one of those people who, once you encounter them even by the several times remove of reading articles they write, makes you glad that there is unlikely to be any social event at which your paths will cross. Then there's Grayson Perry, after several years on the tranny in the spotlight being the wholly presentable Eddie Izzard we now have someone who spends most of their time dressed like Arnold Rimmer in Red Dwarf when he went nuts.

Anyway, I bought one of these a few weeks back and was thinking about wearing it to work. Ahhh, bless my work, where they haven't yet found a way to stop my occasional bouts of transvesticism. Anyway, haven't worn a skirt for a good long while, bit pissed off at the moment, sounds ideal. I have a slight problem in that, being born a boy, through no fault of my own, I never got taught about things like colour co-ordination by my Mum as my Dad was trying to get me interested in hammers instead. So, my co-ordination tends to be limited to 'wearing all the same colour', what we might call 'the Neil Gaiman method' (oh go and Google "Neil Gaiman" and black, do I have to do everything round here?) and I don't have anything in a similar shade of brown, or even a decent autumnul green that I could risk.

And these things matter. Because for a woman to walk down the street in crap clothes, well, that's what Sixties feminists burned their bras for, but for a transvestite to do that, well obviously they bring shame upon all their kind everywhere and get chased up hills by angry mobs with flaming pitchforks shouting "That lipstick doesn't do a thing for you!"

True story.

I thought we'd lost the Super Mario Brothers Flash series ages ago. But here it is, on Alxlen's site. Hurrah!

There isn't enough 'Squeeeeee!' in the world for this, but I'll try anyway:
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-Eh, < cough > Ack!

Oh well, I tried.

I did go into town yesterday and, yes, replacement bus services do indeed suck giant robotic mega-goats balls. I waited half an hour for the promised Replacement Bus Service and, when that didn't arrive, got a regular bus to a overground station instead and did the journey by train.

Rachel Whiteread's new Embankment installation at Tate Modern was attracting a lot of attention but was underwhelming. Though what I know about art could be fitted into one of her boxes without touching the sides I would guess that the dimensions of the Turbine Hall make it difficult to exhibit in, so while previous exhibits have been as much about the empty space not filled with anything Whiteread has gone for the opposite approach, trying to fill it with thousands of white boxes. Only... these are not boxes. No, they are in fact the insides of boxes, cardboard boxes filled with plaster, left to dry, then the box has been peeled off, and the remains recast in 'translucent polyethylene'. The person who wrote the leaflets for the Tate thinks this leaves us with the ghosts of interior spaces or the 'positive impressions of negative spaces'. I tend to feel that, unlike the house, which I didn't see, or Room 101, which I did, her gimmick of casting the inside of something doesn't really work here, cast the inside of a cardboard box and all you really get is a slightly smaller box.

The more interesting exhibition to me was the almost-over collection of objects by the wonderfully named Jan De Cock, Denkmal 53, which I'm probably not going to get the chance to see properly before it's over at the end of the month. Maybe he can come back at some point in the future and design a large-scale Denkmal for the Turbine Hall.

Photos of both on my Flickr site BTW.

Right now I wouldn't trust Shrubya and Tony bLiar to tell me I was on fire if I was standing in front of them, had doused myself in petrol, lit a match and given it to either of them and told them to throw it at me. So it's so depressing that, after the fact that the only thing the Allies got right about Iraq was that they still knew where to find it (and who can forget that terrible weekend in 1998 when Iraq went missing and then it turned out that Russia had a new breakaway state: Iraqistan), that they seem to be telling exactly the same rubbish about Iran. "They have nuclear weapons and it's vital to kill them before they get nuclear weapons and so become too dangerous to attack to stop them". "There are members of Al Qaeda in Iran". About the only difference between Iran and Iraq is that if we get into a battle with Iran then at least they wouldn't be shooting us with weapons we sold them, underwritten with our money.

Cocks. The Northern Line appears to be staying closed this weekend. LU were yesterday trying to appear 'cautiously optimistic' about a limited service running this weekend but that seems to have gone out the window. I can go into town via mainline train services, London buses are the work of the devil and should be scorned as such, especially with all the other people who use them because the tubes are down.

Tate Modern have opened their new Turbine Hall exhibit, Rachel Whiteread's Embankment, I saw it on The Culture Show and was extremely underwhelmed, wonder if it'll look better when I'm actually there.

So in some part of America there are two almost identical sets of the West Wing and the Oval Office. That seems rather unnecessary. Couldn't The West Wing and Commander in Chief have some sort of time-share deal on the set? I'm actually liking the second, despite the annoying young daughter. But there's a good cast in there, old man Donald as the evil Speaker of the House with his a-plottin' and a-schemin', Geena Davis as our heroine, Harry Commander Locke Bennix and Ever Carradine. It's a shame that Bruce Boxleitner was a guest appearance rather than a regular.

The MP3 breast implant.

After the break, the new Apple iCock.

It's the end of one of my ten hour work days so am knackered, but it's one of those rare good types of knackered, managed to get some work done for once. Even the token mad lady who tried to complain about me because I pointed out the fines and overdue books on her record hasn't got me down. Need to sleep now though.

Following on from yesterday's CV story: Intolerance in the Bible.

Everyone's favourite charmless bigots, Christian Voice, have popped up again. After their ultimately unsuccesful dabbling in the world of theatre they've turned to being book critics, claiming they'll use the new religious hatred law to prosecute bookshops that sell the Qur'an, claiming that by doing so they are promoting religious hatred.

The only member of Christian Voice ever willing to stick his head above the parapet, possibly their only member, director Stephen Green said "If the Qur'an is not hate speech, I don't know what is. We will report staff who sell it. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that unbelievers must be killed." He then went back to throwing stones at glass houses.

I'm not so worried about Islam, it's big enough and ugly enough to take care of itself. I suspect that the religious hatred law is more likely to protect Islam than Stephen Green's crocodile tears of concern. What worries me is that the charmless bigots aren't going to march into battle with Waterstones if this bill is signed. They don't go for battles with people that can afford to fight. They prefer to fight those who cannot afford to fight back. I suspect they'll go after independent bookshops, who lack the resources to see them in court and so get them knocked back. Hopefully if this all comes to pass a bookshop that finds itself in this position will be supported by the nearest local Muslim population.

This also highlights why the religious hatred bill is not such a great idea.

More charmless bigotry.

In what I assume is either a report which will be quickly denied tomorrow or a present for me because God considers me one of his special cherubs, the Catholic Church has decided that some parts of the Bible were not literally true. In what worryingly sounds like common sense coming from Vatican City (so you'll understand why I have to take this with a Dead Sea's worth of salt) the Church has said that some of the Bible contains symbolism and metaphor and should not be taken literally. Now all the Catholics have to do is give up this equally silly idea that making sure Priests aren't gayers will stop the straight ones being Paedophiles and they may be ready to enter the second half of the twentieth century.

I wait for the denials of this story tomorrow, or for the Times to admit they were mistaken, as absolutely no-one else seems to be carrying this story...

More4 has started and they're showing The Daily Show. Fucking hell Americans! You weren't joking were you? Jon Stewart is amazing!

David Blunkett says being at work is better for people's stress and mental health than staying at home watching telly. But of course, until last Christmas, Shiteyes had a job where he could channel his stress and depression into being beastly to people and he's obviously not going to be keen on telly when there's stuff like this on...

Stupid Stupid Stupid...

Me: Good evening, can I help you?
She (On Telephone): Oh, I wasn't expecting you to answer so quickly, can you hang on?
FX: Footsteps going away.
FX: Footsteps coming back.
She (On Telephone): I had to get my notes, do you have a copy of...

Only 1 hour, 11 minutes and 4 seconds until the end of the working day... Only 1 hour 10 minutes and 56 seconds until the end of the working day... only 1 hour 10 minutes and 47 seconds until the end of the working day... I wonder if working would make the time pass quicker? Best not to risk it. Only 1 hour, 10 minutes and 22 seconds until the end of the working day...

Pink Five Strikes Back. A sequel to Pink 5 (obviously). Very funny.

Excellent Winny-The-Pooh crossed with Doctor Who story from Peter David: The TARDIS at Pooh Corner.

Pah, this. Elton John, Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant, 'Ever Fallen in Love, all together as a tribute to John Peel? I mean, what on earth do these people have to do with Peel now? It's like getting Shaun Ryder and The Fall to compose the new National Anthem and unveil it, unheard by anyone else, at the funeral of the Queen Mum or something. It's like the flower, when you think of tulips naturally John Peel comes to mind straight away.

Scary people...

"Devastating" early drafts of a controversial book recommended as reading at a US high school reveal how the word “creationism” had been later swapped for “intelligent design”.

This week's New Scientist has some very interesting articles on the current battles between faith and reason and the psychology of the fundamentalist and the rationalist. Also on the kind of groupthink that starts developing whenever people get together, overriding societal norms and making them think "Let's kill Jews!", "Let's invade Iraq!", "Let's hunt and kill Salman Rushdie!" May actually buy a copy for once rather than just read the library issue.

But meanwhile, Shrubya now thinks he's one of the Blues Brothers. Isn't the belief that you hear the voice of God inside your head symptomatic of schizophrenia? Anyway, if God has told George to sort out Israel and Palestine I don't suppose He could come back and suggest Shrubya get a move on rather than make evils at Iran?

Gah, there was me wondering what happened to Oliver Letwin and now he's cropped up on News 24, telling us how wonderful Michael Howard was. So, still nutty as a moonpie then.

I'm finding the Conservative Party Conference strangely alluring, possibly because it's coinciding with the whole 'who will be our leader?' thing. Certainly no-one seems to be talking policy beyond the leadership hopefuls talking about what they'd do when they are in charge. I suppose I've always been a bit of a sucker for this sort of thing since Grimlock stood on a 'Crush puny Decepticons!' ticket against Optimus Prime for the Autobot leadership back in 1987.

As a unfocused left-wing Lib Dem kind of voter I'm obviously hoping for an attempt by the Tories to head back towards the centre-ground, since the start of the 90s they've let themselves get pushed rightwards by a combination of mad backbenchers like the Eurosceptics and then New Labour. I'm sure the Eurosceptic part of the party is still there (one old duffer on Newsnight last night seemed to think that Kenneth Clarke was the best candidate in every area except his Europhilia) but they seem to have quietened down and don't get on telly any more. As New Labour seem happy to lurch rightwards with proposals for ASBOs for babies that cry too loudly and making it a crime to comfort pensioners (I may have misheard that one), this would be an ideal time for New Tories to nip round and tack some centre ground.

A combination of Clarke as Tory leader and Cameron as his deputy seems to be shaping up as an attractive one. Certainly other candidates like David Davis and Dr Liam Fox don't appear to be offering much more than 'the reason we don't win elections these days is that we're too left-wing' but the Tory party is so far right that the only votes they can now pick up is from the Nazi party who unfortunately can't vote being German and dead.

Does anyone know what happened to Oliver Letwin? He seems to have completely disappeared from the radar since the election. Has he gone to find this island he thought we could exile all immigrants to?

Pimp my Party. Awful but strangely compelling.

[In 1936] officials feared that censoring books on lesbianism might lead to court cases providing women with much greater knowledge of the practice, according to papers released today. Hopefully these new books weren't as bad as The Well of Loneliness...

Laughing at someone else's misfortune: Check out Siobhan's Psycho Lodger story.