In case anyone at conference was wondering why I looked distracted this weekend, it's because I had this specific song as an earworm. It's DJ Zebra mixing Shaggy and Rage Against The Machine, in case you're not down enough with the kids to tell that straightaway.
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I've long bemoaned the poor standard of discussion on newspaper websites, with slavish, abusive and irrational SNP supporters usually the main culprits. A challenger arrives today, though, on this Telegraph article (note: I hit the complaint button, so the comment may disappear).
Now, plenty of cybernats use appalling comparisons, with Brown normally compared to Mugabe using the super-clever phrase "ZaNu Liebour", but this comment goes right to the classic idiot's favourite - Hitler.
In case anyone's not familiar with Godwin's Law, the original states that as time passes in an online discussion, the probability of a Nazi analogy tends to 100%. More recently, it has been redefined to mean that anyone making such an analogy automatically loses whatever argument they're engaged in. I hope we can all agree that's what's happened here.Note: I am not related to this particular "James", before anyone suggests otherwise.
My favourite Liberal MSP (I know, I know, tough contest) is undoubtedly Jamie Stone. His CV is a motley affair, including a spell running Highland Fine Cheeses, the family firm behind Caboc, a yummy soft cheese. According to the Metro today, it's 50% fat, which explains the yummy, and sales are up 40%.
One Rory Stone is quoted as follows: "I can't understand why people still want it."
First, what modesty. Second, why indeed would people buy such fatty foods, especially in Scotland, renowned as we are for our healthy eating? Rory and Jamie are clearly chips off the same block of Stone.
Caboc is available from all good cheesemongers, and is online here. Hopefully a share of the profits isn't diverted to support the Liberals.
Disclosure: this may or may not be related to the fine hospitality he showed me one summer a few years ago.
Yesterday in the chamber Alex Salmond, Iain Gray, Jeremy Purvis, Margaret Curran, Malcolm Chisholm, Ross Finnie, and Andy Kerr all made reference to the work of John Maynard Keynes. But every last one of them pronounced his last name wrong, to rhyme with Beans when it should sound like Canes.
How do I know this? One of our most determined activists is a relative of his, and she listened to the debate, getting more and more cross. His Wikipedia page also confirms it.
Why do the Liberals not know this, when they claim him as their own? Answers would be welcome in the comments. No tracts, please.
(the title is a random train of thought: perhaps Milton Keynes is named for Milton Friedman and Keynes, and perhaps the pronunciation of the town's name has caused this misunderstanding?)
I'm really not following the Olympics, except for heroic stadium-saving cyclists, the occasional bit of table tennis, and of course the beach volleyball.However, this caught my eye. Four horses were caught taking capsaicin, and will be banned. Capsaicin is one of my favourite things, being the active ingredient in chilli peppers. If you're not a horse, or at least not a horse at the Olympics, may I recommend the chipotle tabasco?
Gristmill note that the most recent American government figures on driving show a substantial drop: a 4.7% reduction in mileage, motivated by the increase in oil prices (154Kb pdf).A 4.7% drop amounts to a staggering 12.2 billion miles. In other words, one year's reduction in U.S. driving is equivalent to 489,940 fewer car trips around the world, a standard unit of mega-distance.
Looking at the bigger picture, the total American mileage over the last year is 2,954,326,000,000 miles, roughly. That's a little more than half a light year, the next largest such unit. Now, the nearest star system to our own is, as everyone knows, Alpha Centauri, which is 4.37 light years away.
Over George Bush's term of office, therefore, Americans will have collectively driven as far as Alpha Centauri, more than 25 trillion miles, and all at about 24.6 miles per gallon. Other sci-fi dorks may find this as shocking as I do.
Despite the ascent of Salmond to power as the "new king of Scotland" (and I think we can all agree that he's better than the "last king of Scotland"), the cybernats remain full to bursting with bile and bad puns. I think everyone else has left the Scotsman and Herald discussion boards to them, now they're such polluted spaces.Scottish Unionist (formerly known as AM2 on those same discussion boards) has done sterling work keeping track of some of these loons (Gordon Girvan, Jay Kay etc). A few more just caught my eye in a piece about the Council Tax.
Vivas, first of all, subtly suggests there's something wrong with Gordon Brown. I don't think this is one of the SNP's key messages.
Persuasive, as this fellow is, he's not in the same league as Iainbroch, who I think must work in PR. The way they use "Liebour" gets funnier and funnier, and I think if I hear it one more time I'll join the SNP. Not.
The most striking of all, though, was from someone trading as "Vote for Scotlands Future, Vote for the SNP on". Yes, it just ends like that. And is devoid of the apostrophe. But these are minor linguistic misdemeanors compared to the true evils of this comment.
This disgrace to Scotland explicitly says he would like a Scot to be denied healthcare in England, and then to die, so we could have a bloody separation from England, presumably along the lines of the end of Yugoslavia. I thought initially that this person must be an agent provocateur, but he or, I suppose, she has a bit of a history, some mad, some not so.
I've been telling the SNP for a long while now they need to pull their cybernat forces back, because these comments are not exactly helping their cause. Perhaps I shouldn't have: it's better that people know what lurks on the fringes.
You can really see what has interested me of late from this graphic, generated by Wordle. I fully expect the rest of the Scottish politics blogosphere to do this for their own sites, or if they don't get around to it, I'll do it for them. Particularly pleasing: Wordle give you the right to use the images any way you see fit.
In the legends of ancient Rome, the name Horatio (or Horatius Cocles) appears writ large. Accounts vary, but they agree on this much. Rome was under threat from an Etruscan army (the Etruscans are coming, the Etruscans are coming!), and Horatio took to the Pons Sublicius to defend the city, eventually single-handed. The Etruscans were defeated, and Rome survived.But why the dull history lesson? Because the hard and nigh-solitary blogging of Kez about Glasgow East reminds me of Horatio's effort. Now sceptics may say that no election yet turns on battles online, but if this story comes out in the MSM, could Glasgow East be the first? (read the comments to the original, the sequel is here)
It may seem an unlikely tale, but I find it hard to believe that Kez would make it up. Now outing an SNP Minister for a minor infraction, enough to get booted from a shopping centre, might seem trivial, and not particularly heroic. However, this is the sort of thing which can get a lot of interest during a heavily managed campaign. I'm not saying it's comparable, but the UK general election in 2001 is solely remembered for John Prescott's punch (7 second youtube link).
And if should Labour win Glasgow East, will the honours be hers? Or will it turn out more like this?
Despite this morning's drama, I don't expect to blog for a week. I'll miss you too.
But apparently it's the end of the world. The fact that they've even taken the time to deny the possibility that the mini black holes they're creating could expand and swallow us all just alarms me all the more. I know, doom-mongering greens. But seriously, do you feel better after reading that article? (musical relief available here)
Last year I learnt what this interesting term means from an unexpected source. It's the Victorian profession of gathering up "dog chocolate" for use in tanneries, because, unbelievably enough, the stuff was believed to be "pure". There's even a poem.It's one of those great long-abandoned career paths, like abacus operator, footman, or pyramid designer. A list to which we will soon be able to add oil industry executive, SUV salesman, and environmental consultant to Donald Trump (left).
Some bright spark had a vision of what Google News could look like on a good day (via BB). I recommend the secondary headlines too, like "Lucas confession: Yes, Han really did shoot first".
However, "Rowling: I have heaps more to write about Harry" is a vision from a horrific alternate reality I'm glad I'm not part of. Take it all away!
So whenever a female politician gets her appearance condemned, cheered, or even sleazed over, we feminists get cross. Why is it always the women who are judged so superficially, or treated as sex objects? We men also get cross when we're not treated the same.So the Guardian, in the spirit of equality, pored over "Dave" Cameron's hair today. Right on, brothers. Curiously, though, they claim that parting to the left makes someone look more leftwing. Che Guevara, when you pried his beret off him, went a bit to the right. And Green men are disproportionately bald, myself included: what does that say? Neither left nor right, just forward, perhaps? Who knows.
But on Dave, they missed the crucial hairstyle, i.e. the posh-boy semi-mullet as adopted at the Bullingdon (he's #2 in the pic above, click for a larger one). To me that says "I know I'm going to get an excellent Establishment job - possibly The Big One".
Note that Boris is entirely unchanged. Not just the same hair, the same everything. How has he managed to avoid either aging or growing up?
Discussions online tend to be appalling, filled with racism, homophobia and even spelling mistakes. Youtube, for all its joys, has little else below the videos. Slashdot, for the more geeky, is not as bad as its reputation, but still more or less invented flame wars. As for the Scotsman and Herald commenters, well, we've talked about them a lot and I'm not going to go into that well of despair again.
Besides, I didn't bring you here to depress you. I brought you here so I could make you happy and share Metafilter with you. If you have another nominee for best discussions online, let me know, and I'll explain why Metafilter is better. The material linked to is endlessly fascinating, and the discussions bring in new ideas, often very informed, often funny, and, sure, sometimes pointless. Tip - the discussions aren't easy to find at first - click the "n comments" link under a story.
Recent examples include an interesting discussion on fuel costs, an explanation of online ecology in a hacking thread, and a thread on what sounds like The Best Wine Ever, including comments from people lucky enough to have tried it.
And one of the key reasons why it works, and isn't full of comment spam? They charge a one-off $5 to join. Plus some good moderation, and real community pressure to keep the site on track.
(Honourable mention for discussion: When Saturday Comes, formerly just sport)
I read Peter Hitchens' blog fairly regularly, because however wrong I believe him generally to be, I think he's sincere, and also a good writer. Every once in a while (and I racked my brains to think of the last time) I find myself agreeing with chunks of his stuff.This case is pretty easy, given the unlikely line he's taken - praising Peter Tatchell. OK, it goes off at the end into rabid Euroscepticism and an implicit line against tolerance, but you can feel the unexpected warmth and respect he feels for 'tother Peter.
We'd be much the poorer without them both (please don't fill the comments with objectionable Hitchenisms - I do know how far we diverge, thanks).
Ah, the internet. Thank you for your inventiveness.
It was pointed out in the comments to the last item that the anteater was in the classic "Bring it on!" pose, as adopted and then dropped by oor Wendy. The anteater looks more convincing, though, more consistent, more determined, and indeed more photogenic. The referendum on eating more ants will be definitely be supported, whenever it comes, you can tell.
Perhaps when Wendy does finally resign, to wailing and gnashing of SNP teeth, Labour could see if the anteater wants the job.
Perhaps when Wendy does finally resign, to wailing and gnashing of SNP teeth, Labour could see if the anteater wants the job.
One of my colleagues found ants in her.. house. Sympathetic as we are, and Green as we are, Patrick and I came up with a couple of solutions. His is to the left, the biodiversity solution. Mine is here, the locally-sourced produce answer.Any other ideas?
David Maddox has a piece in today's Scotsman about the limited number of participants on the Scottish Government's so-called "National Conversation". George Foulkes is quoted in the article discussing "the small army of cybernats who bombard media and political websites in Scotland". Anyone ever visiting the Scotsman or the Herald's political articles is familiar with the phenomenon.
So is it any surprise that the army strikes in the comments to this very story, and strikes hard? You have to laugh at their touching faith in the power of ranting to deliver independence.
Ranting, and also always renaming. Even more than the Trots, this particular section of the Nat ecosphere loves to rename. It was always Tony Bliar, from Nu Liebour (even in this set of comments), however dull and pointless that kind of "humour" sounded the nineteen thousandth time. So in this story the Scotsman becomes "DeadManWalkingsMan" or the "CringeMan", Foulkes becomes "Lord Zebedee" and "Lord Foulking Drunk", while Wendy is "Bendy Wendy" and the "Mouth of the South."
The irony is I can't imagine anything more likely to drive the floating voters away from the SNP as they float across the websites of our national papers. Keep it up, troops!
