back in the people's republic

(Recent Entries) (Archive) (Friends) (User Info)

Dec. 9th, 2005

Jan. 7th, 2005

03:26 pm - Strange LJ problem...

Right, I know that some of you folks are rather more competent at this livejournal stuff than yours truly so maybe one of you will have some idea what might be going on here...

( Read more... )

Current Mood: confused

(4 comments | Leave a comment)

Dec. 14th, 2003

12:34 pm - this is not a time for cliches...

...but i feel the hand of history upon us.

well fuck me - they've finally found saddam hussein. a pretty freaky sight to be greeted with when you turn on the tv on a Sunday morning. i hope and pray that the yanks manage to reign in their triumphalism although paul bremer beginning his press conference with the words "we got him!" isn't a great sign. saddam is reportedly co-operating with the americans and it could be fascinating few days. on the other hand, it seems that saddam has literally been living in a hole in the ground which makes me doubt that he's had much to do with the ongoing attacks against the american forces.

i guess we just have to sit back and await developments...

Current Mood: curious

(4 comments | Leave a comment)

Oct. 27th, 2003

Oct. 22nd, 2003

Oct. 5th, 2003

10:22 pm - favours in the beetroot fields

just watched the derren brown russian roulette doodah. more tension in one minute than the whole forty-odd days of muppet blaine sitting in his bloody box.

bsp last night were great. and absolutely barking mad. they gave out free kendal mint cake too.

not much else to report. ah well, back to the grindstone tomorrow...

Current Mood: impressed

(1 comment | Leave a comment)

Oct. 4th, 2003

03:08 pm - find a station playing sad sad soul

hello

yes, i'm still very much alive. been frightfully busy lately with a combination of work (i could write a frightful techno-geek post on our recent problems but none of you would be interested) and heavy drinking.

the only real highlights have been vale's continuing good form and meeting the legend who is devon malcolm at lccc's end of season awards dinner.

off to see british sea power at the charlotte tonight if anyone's interested.

oh, and i'm thinking of going to australia in February but can't quite make my mind up. thoughts?

Current Mood: content

Current Music: wrexham vs port vale

(3 comments | Leave a comment)

Sep. 17th, 2003

Aug. 12th, 2003

11:11 pm - i promise not to make this a habit...

but why oh why oh why are we incapable of any kind of run in the league cup (no sponsorship here mr interbrew)? total domination of almost the entire game against a team tipped for promotion to the land of unimaginable riches and we blow it all in a penalty shoot-out...

and so in a mere three days the return of football proves itself to be as bitter-sweet as ever. i hate this game for making me care so....

Current Mood: disappointed

Current Music: Wire - Champs

(7 comments | Leave a comment)

Jul. 31st, 2003

11:22 pm - public service announcement

stop whatever you are doing. proceed immediately to your local multiplex. purchase a ticket for t3: rise of the machines. enjoy.

seriously, best movie i've seen in an absolute age. i sat for two hours grinning in the dark and even now a full hour later i'm still chuckling to myself. if you've recently been as dismayed as i have by rubbish like matrix reloaded and hulk go see this for proof that it is still possible to make a big dumb action movie that's actually a joy to watch.

Current Mood: ecstatic

(1 comment | Leave a comment)

Jun. 23rd, 2003

09:35 pm - harry sodding potter

i started writing this as a comment in sarahluigi's journal but i figured i had enough to say for a post of my own ;o)

i've been railing against the harry potter "phenomenon" ever since it became prevalent enough to pierce my consciousness. i've never read one, i've not seen the movie. these are proud records i intend to keep intact. so, why do i hate potter? several reasons...

1. i hate the argument that "it gets kids reading" - somebody show me some evidence that anyone other than irritatingly spoilt middle-class brats have ever picked up a harry potter book. that's always what they show on the news anyway. it's never some deprived kid from seacroft is it? i had an email from kirsty wark earlier and she tells me that 'newsnight' have something to say on this later tonight...
2. it's completely skewed the book market from a publisher's point of view. i read on Saturday that bloomsbury had to take out insurance to cope with potential losses between printing a gazillion copies of whatever the latest tedious potter opus is called and getting the money from retailers. bloomsbury are now almost entirely dependent on the future success of one series of novels....
3. potter-mania is pushing independent book-sellers closer to the edge. places like asda and tesco have already sold hundreds of thousands of copies of 'harry potter and the mass market' at heavily discounted prices. prices which small, independent bookshops have no chance of competing with, thus depriving them of a healthy source of income...
4. the legitimisation of the 'dumbing-down' of society. i'm no elitist, but i find the media's reporting of rowling's outpourings deeply disturbing. however you look at it they're kid's books, written for and aimed at kids. childrens books tend to be written from a good/evil, black/white point-of-view. that's how kids see the world. adults, on the other hand, should recognise that the world is made up of shades of grey. there are no 'goodies' or 'baddies'. it's my opinion that the mass consumption of rubbish like this merely makes society more accepting of a tabloid agenda which is written in the same black and white terms...
5. just one final point. why the hell can't rowling write aobut modern life? potter appears to be full of steam trains and ford anglias. a wistful longing for an england long gone. nesbit, lewis and blyton wrote about this era because this was their era. rowling appears to be merely aping their style. perhaps this more than anything explains the popularity of potter amongst otherwise rational adults?

enough for now. i'm sure that this will attract claims of elitism from all the potter-readers out there but i really couldn't give damn. what's more, anyone who actually knows me should realise that i'm anything but. i stand by what i've written and i expect a flaming. what will surprise me is if anyone can put forward a compelling argument for harry and his chums' place in our society.

Current Mood: annoyed

(7 comments | Leave a comment)

May. 21st, 2003

11:45 pm - in the words of zammo...

the matrix reloaded - just say 'no' kids.

all in all 'twas much as i expected. some nice whizz-bangs punctuated by a lot of up-it's-own-arse pretentious sci-fi bollockery. what i wasn't quite prepared for was quite how much of the latter there was. or quite how dull it would get. agent smith was cool though.

i'm not going to waste time writing more about this 'cos i feel like i already wasted two and half hours of my life on it.

to cap it all off it appears that the uefa cup final was a bit of a blinder...

Current Mood: disappointed

Current Music: The Who - Cut My Hair

(1 comment | Leave a comment)

May. 2nd, 2003

11:38 pm - vote bnp!

yeah they won a few council seats, yeah they're the second biggest party on burnley council.

time for a reality check:

there are around 11,500 council seats in england. the bnp hold 13 - just over 0.1%
there are 45 seats on burnley council. the bnp hold 8 - less than 18%
the number of people entitled to vote in burnley yesterday: 65,282
the number of people who voted bnp in burnley yesterday: 5057 or 7.75% of the electorate

yes, they're a bunch of rabid, racist fuckwits but let's get it in perspective. the green party has three times as many councillors as the bnp and i don't recall anyone ever thinking that they were a major political force.

admittedly the bnp are very clever. they pick the seats they fight very carefully to gain maximum votes and therefore maximum exposure. it was a combination of a low turnout and good targeting which won the bnp it's "success" yesterday. at least one of those seats in burnley was won by 3 votes on a 41% turnout!

the answer is not to confront them directly. the answer is to re-enfranchise the 60-ish% of the electorate who didn't think there was any point in voting yesterday...

Current Mood: discontent

Current Music: Manic Street Preachers - La Tristesse Durera

(1 comment | Leave a comment)

May. 1st, 2003

11:21 pm - election day

why the hell do the media persist in presenting local elections as "a test of the government's popularity"? people should be voting for candidates who they think will do the right thing in their local area but they're hood-winked by the london-centric media into treating elections like this as some sort of massive opinion poll. it just pisses me off when our democracy is twisted like this. and it's no surprise that turn-outs are so ridiculously low for everything other than general elections when that's the message that's pumped out by tv, radio and newspapers...

on the issue of low turnout - is it just me who thinks that it's going to take something a little more fundamental than postal-only voting to significantly reduce apathy? i shouldn't be overly cynical since it's reported that in wards where this has been tested out the turnout is in the region of 50-70% rather than the usual 35-ish% we see in local elections. still, i'd be interested to see a breakdown of those figures by age, sex, class, etc because deep-down i still think there's a massive number of people, and particularly young people, who have become completely disconnected from party politics. and since uncle tony found he can gain massive majorities under first-past-the-post he seems to have forgotten all about proportional representation...

you can take the boy out of psephology but you can't take psephology out of the boy

Current Mood: contemplative

Current Music: White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

(3 comments | Leave a comment)

Apr. 10th, 2003

06:54 pm - mad dogs and government ministers

interesting edition of 'question time' last night.
there were a couple of points which really highlighted the incredible contortions that the us and uk governments have been forced into to justify their invasion of iraq. both interestingly related to the whole "weapons of mass destruction" thing.
first off the foreign office flunkey that blair sent along (and surely these people can't really believe what they end up saying - can they?) tried to claim that the fact that iraqi troops had protective chemical warfare suits was proof that they must have chemical weapons and must have been preparing to use them. eh? how does that work? by that bizarre logic, anglo-american generals must also have been ready to use the same weapons on the iraqis as their troops have been issued with nbc suits, gas masks and antidotes. later on, an audience member asked why, if the iraqi regime has all these terrible weapons, has he not used them in an attempt to repel the forces invading his country. mr flunkey kindly explained that we'd made it known to saddam that if he used chemical or biological weapons against "our" troops then he would be treated as a war criminal. double eh? so he's not a war criminal now? even though he used poison gas against the iranians, the kurds and the marsh arabs? in the words of mark little "so saddam's thinking 'i better not use the gas or i'll really be in trouble'". like i said - bizarre!
to add to the fun their were also a couple of gems from the audience. first off one chap suggested that the iraqis must have banned weapons because otherwise the un wouldn't have spent so much time and money looking for them. an argument that i think hope blair noted down for his next press conference. and later, some bloke who pointed out the suspicious similarity between the current cost of the war (c.?5bn) and the revenue raised by the increase in national insurance (c.?8bn). good theory, except that the increase in ni was announced in last year's budget. unless "they" were planning to invade iraq even then... oooh - conspiracy theory alert!

Current Mood: amused

Current Music: Mull Historical Society: Only I

(Leave a comment)

Apr. 3rd, 2003

07:32 pm - further musings on the nature of war...

prompted by quis_ego's recent post

for what it's worth, i think that the most likely iraqi plan is to withdraw into central baghdad. they learnt from the last gulf war that they can't take on the technologically-superior anglo-american forces in the open desert and expect anything other than annihilation. this bloke puts it far better than i ever could.

the major political difficulty (and let's face it i tend to look for the political angle in most things) for bush and blair is that every single death, on either side, in this conflict increases the pressure on them to pull out. this has always been the problem for deomocracies fighting wars and has been exacerbated by the round-the-clock media coverage the current war has garnered. clearly in the eyes of the (western) media, and therefore a large part of public opinion, not all lives have equal value. i think the basic equation is something like: suicide bomber<iraqi soldier<iraqi/arabic civillian<anglo-american soldier<anglo-american civillian but they all go some way to weighing down one arm of the balance of public opinion. saddam, of course, does not have this problem. firstly because his opinion is the only one that matters but also because the very idea of a "pre-emptive strike" (dontcha just love these euphemisms) has gifted him the moral high ground. dead iraqi soldiers are heroes defending their homes. dead iraqi civillians are victims of murderous invaders. dead invading troops are killed only in self-defence. for all their talk of "liberation" bush and blair have effectively invaded a sovereign state on, at best, morally and legally dubious grounds. this is in no way the same thing as engaging in combat to remove an aggresor which has itself invaded a neighbour and makes it far easier for the iraqi leadership to rally their population in resistance. most people anywhere in the world (particularly, i suspect, in america with all it's saluting the flag patriotism) would fight for their family, their home, their land, their country if threatened. it's a subjective noun: i'm a patriot, you're a nationalist, they are the mindless puppets of a dictator... that said, i don't want to be the sort to say "told-you-so". some anti-war types now seem to be taking a stance where every day that this insanity drags on, every maimed child, every dead soldier further vindicates their stance. i think these people are even more distasteful than the jingoistic, flag-waving, "let's bomb the shit out of baghdad" morons. they sit smugly in their ivory towers bathed in the cathode-ray glow of 24 hour news bulletins seizing every opportunity to tell all those around how superior they are. what they seem to forget or dismiss is that real people are dying every day that this war goes on. some of this links into a general feeling of superiority over the general populace that this type of individual nurtures at every opportunity manifesting itself in the implication that the average squaddie is intellectually and morally inferior and therefore they are dispensable in the pursuit of proving a point. more on that attitude another time. personally, i want this war to end. preferably now and with as little further suffering as possible. if that means saddam surrendering, going into exile and never being held accountable for the crimes he has perpertrated against his people so be it. the important thing now is to bring relief to the innocent people of iraq and then figure out how the hell we're going to clean-up another of our post-imperial messes...

Current Mood: worried

Current Music: The Divine Comedy: Middle-Class Heroes

(2 comments | Leave a comment)

Apr. 2nd, 2003

07:03 pm

my hair appears to have turned a really, really dark purple. apparently this is what happens when one adds blue-black to hair which has already been dyed bright red.

the bt conference i went to today was mostly dull. i perked up a bit when they started showing off a new call analysis package (since this is what i actually do) and there was some intersting "in-development" stuff about natural voice recognition. lunch was nice though. i've never seen crab claws and whole fresh prawns in a buffet before. probably because i don't often get to go on these corporate jollies.

three days in and i've already started wibbling on in a way i swore i wouldn't... ahh well, beats talking to the walls...

Current Mood: lonely

Current Music: Radiohead: Nice Dream

(Leave a comment)

12:06 am - two posts in two days! (nearly)

hello again

if i can take a moment to navel-gaze (and if i can't do that here where can i?) i've just re-read yesterday's diatribe and can't help feeling i ruined some perfectly valid points by trundling off up some george orwell-themed cul-de-sac. ahh well c'est la vie.

today i could talk about any number of things including but not limited to:

why practical jokes are no more acceptable on april 1 than any other day of the year
more british soldiers dying in accidents than combat in the gulf
scary mystery pneumonia spreading across the globe
why i'll never understand rugby
designer babies

but i'm tired and i have to go to a (more than likely very dull) conference tomorrow so i really can't be bothered. and i just broke my cardinal rule of not wittering on about what i'm doing. but then i always did reserve the right to contradict myself.

night.

Current Mood: sleepy

Current Music: MSP: Epicentre

(Leave a comment)

Mar. 31st, 2003

11:49 pm - welcome

so i finally get myself all lj'ed up and immediately find i have nothing to write about...

well there's the war of course but surely that's all been done to death by now hasn't it? after all we've been at war with iraq now for ages haven't we? must be months or at least weeks. surely it can't only be twelve days since we finally let the american generals rip the wrapping paper off their new toys and set about "liberating" eye-rack through the use of overwhelming force?

and that, for me, is the strangest thing thus far about "gulf war 2". it started less than two weeks ago but already it seems difficult to remember a time when our tv screens weren't full of special extra latest news updates live from the front and newspapers promising either another twelve pages of in-depth analysis or a glossy pull-out poster of "our weapons of mass seduction" depending on which end of that particular trough you feed at. of course, this proliferation of non-stop coverage needs something to fill it but this is war and the first casualty of war, as we all know, is truth. so in the absence of fact we are fed a steady and seemingly uncontrolled diet of speculation, rumour, half-truth and full-blooded, bare-faced, unashamed propaganda. journalists "embedded" with frontline troops are engaged in a war of their own, a battle to be first with the latest exclusive. get the story on-air/in-print and worry about checking the facts later. so we get a steady stream of storied which flare-up and then disappear again just as quickly.

- the fall of umm qasr.
- the uprising in basra.
- the chemical weapons plant discovered by us marines.
- the column of iraqi tanks destroyed outside basra.
- the republican guard counter-attack south of baghdad.

these are just a handful of the stories that have been presented at various times over the last fortnight as unchallenged fact and then quietly forgotten about when the slightly less dramatic truth was revealed. journalists living day and night with anglo-american troops constantly cite "military sources" to give their stories a ring of truth but the head of bbc news himself admits that a "military source" can mean anything up to (or should that be down to) a humble squaddie sharing a ration pack with his new best mate the reporter.

we have, of course, seen all this before. orwell's 1984 has as it's backdrop a war between oceania and eurasia. a war which the general populace know of only through the war films and newspapers all rigorously controlled by the ministry of truth. a war who's origins appear to be lost in the mists of time. after a mere twelve days we already seem to be slipping into a state where war seems the norm and all other news is marginalised. this is indeed a good time to bury bad news. link this conflict with dubya's amorphous, ill-defined and seemingly perpetual "war against terrorism" and the american government's use of 9/11 to introduce the homeland security act with it's draconian powers and the world described by orwell appears even more prescient. but then we shouldn't worry, only remember "war is peace".

and so ends my first entry. original? probaly not but i felt the need to get "something" out there. don't necessarily expect every entry to be like this as what i really want to do is use this space to experiment with writing. people have often told me that i should write more and i guess this is a chance to do that and even, possibly, get some feedback...

Current Mood: pensive

Current Music: Mercury Rev: Holes

(2 comments | Leave a comment)