Christmas Greetings to the USA form the UK

Sunday 21 December. A short drive west of Reading to Douai Abbey on the shortest night of the year for the Advent service of music, scripture readings and reflections by the monks. The exquisite music was conducted as usual by Dr John Rowntree, who has been running the music at Douai since the year dot. Driving home through the dark Berkshire countryside I was trying out a recently bought Johny Cash CD. Track 9 is introduced by merrily strumming guitar chords:

"My name it is Sam Hall, Sam Hall,
My name it is Sam Hall, it's Sam Hall,
My name it is Sam Hall,
And I hate you, one and all....."

It's always good to have an alternative voice at this time of compulsory love and peace to all mankind. I bought this album some weeks ago, and had put off listening to it until now, for the same reason - Track 2, "Hurt". I was introduced to this searing confessional piece by Madeleine Bunting, a presenter on "Something Understood", part of BBC Radio 4's early Sunday morning Godslot. Her subject for that week was pain and suffering and "Hurt" was one of the songs she played. The Man In Black, as usual, tells it like it is. There can't be many songs about injecting yourself for diabetes - I don't know of any others. Some have called it Cash's epitaph; it describes like few other songs the torments of physical disintegration and loneliness as your contemporaries die off.

Speaking of pain, I was doing some last minute shopping in Waterstones (the British equivalent of Barnes and Noble) on Tuesday 23rd when I spotted a whole new section within the wall of tomes in "Biography". I am not making this up - this ceiling-to-floor bookcase was headed "Painful lives". And who was featured within this bookcase? The greatest shelf footage was given over to biographies of Princess Diana, one of the most over-privileged humans in history. Is it too late to persuade Tom Lehrer to come out of retirement to write a suitably brutal piss-take of a song?

This is the time of year when God makes a temporary break out of the Godslot and appears in some unlikely corners of the British media. Monday 22nd saw a discussion of Christmas traditions on "Beyond Belief", a 25 minute general religious discussion program at 430pm on Radio 4 which runs for only part of the year. On 15th December "Beyond Belief" covered religious attitudes to eithanasia. At other times of the year this slot is occupied by an even more unlikely subject. "More or less" enlightens you on the subject of mathematics and statistics. Such programs must be even rarer than songs about diabetes and "More or less" is always straightforward, informative and thought provoking - as is "Beyond Belief".

The trouble is that 25 minutes is hardly long enough to do justice to any serious topic, secular or sacred. On top of which, you can't help feeling that the time of day reflects the importance which BBC bigwigs attach to essential subjects of which they know nothing and care less. 430pm is almost another graveyard slot, like the 600am-9am place for the Godslot. 430pm is too late to include such material in schools programming. It is too early for the drive time listeners coming home from work. And even full time homemakers will be preoccupied with children fresh home from school. Yet maths and religion are at the heart of the modern world and modern science. Statistical information and disinformation is essential to all policy development in every area of public life and propaganda, from economics to climate change to social security decisions.

The local papers do huge spreads of photographs of Nativity plays from most of the local primary (elementary) schools, both religious and secular, a happy reminder that there is no separation of Church and State in Britain. Children dressed up as shepherds, the Wise Men plus Jesus and Mary, get almost as much coverage as the local sports teams for a day or two. Local clergy may get quoted on the meaning of Christmas, though, as ever, our asinine Archbishop of Canterbury is guaranteed a bigger quote as he opens his mouth on the possibility of disestablishing the Church of England. If even the guardians won't guard the national church, what hope has it got? It seems strange that it takes a practising Jew to make the case for retaining the Church of England's current privileged status in British society: see www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=631

Even that temple of secularity, "The Guardian" gives a few column inches to God - even if it is only the appalling Polly Toynbee, their star columnist, heading her Christmas message: "God probably does not exist". Well, at least she declares her vested interest - as "President of the British Humanist Association and honorary associate of the National Secular Society". One of the most heartwarming sights of nearly every week is the ferocious savaging which Polly receives in the reader comments posted after every column she writes. Any other columnist on any other paper would have been politely requested to retire years ago before she became a total embarassment to the editor and owner; I can assume only that she has a bomb proof contract for life.

This year we have not one but two Midnight Masses in the parish. St James, in the town centre, is having Mass in English, while St William of York, in the University area, is having a full-blown Tridentine Latin celebration, probably with excellent choral support. Apparently they had Latin Midnight Mass at St William in 2007, but it was not publicised widely. I shall be paying a return visit to Douai on Wednesday evening for the 900pm Mass. You have a magnificent sung celebration, Benedictine hospitality afterwards with mulled wine and mince pies, plus you get to bed at a reasonable hour.

With fondest greetings to all in the USA.

Hacking the Rainforest

Ars Technica:
"107 brazilian timper companies hired hackers to game the permit site in order to generate more permits for timber removal."

And For Adults It's Exciting!

From the makers of Ass Kicker.

This is where backwards compatible marketing would come in handy.



A fine Mego product.

Richard Dorfmeister Live in Singapore

Facebook : Hacienda Dec 20th:

Back to the Garage

Wired :: How Economic Turmoil Breeds Innovation:

NameVoyager

The Baby Name Wizard:

A Century In Video - 1923

Probably one of the earliest (If not the earliest) examples of a "making of" featurette.

This short details some of the trials and tribulations of trying to film a feature film in Death Valley.

The film they were making was 1924 Erich Von Stroheim's movie Greed based on the book McTeague.

"The plot follows an honest dentist whose wife wins a lottery ticket, only to become obsessed with money. When her former lover betrays the dentist as a fraud, all of their lives are destroyed."
(From the Wikipedia entry)

Out of curiosity I also watched this bit from the end of the movie:



Now I have a few comments:

• Yellow?


• For crying out loud, cut the dead guy's hand off


• If the horse / mule is dead. So is the canary

Branded!

Chris, defined by Brands:

Visual CV

Reinventing the Resume:

Music Wallpapers

Enjoy

Tracklist

01 - 15 Step
02 - Bodysnatchers
03 - Nude
04 - Weird Fishes_Arpeggi
05 - All I Need
06 - Faust Arp
07 - Reckoner
08 - House Of Cards
09 - Jigsaw Falling Into Place
10 - Videotape

Download HERE

Enjoy

Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

Tracklist

1. Mansard Roof
2. Oxford Comma
3. A-Punk
4. Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
5. M79
6. Campus
7. Bryn
8. One (Blake’s Got A New Face)
9. I Stand Corrected
10. Walcott
11. The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance

Download HERE

Enjoy

UnReality TV

Dear Stan,

Another brilliant piece by Peter Hitchens. It underlines the sinister effect of TV on so many people - if you see it "with your own eyes" it must be real and true. The most unreal of all are of course "reality TV" shows like Big Brother or, the mother of them all, "The Family" which depicted the "real life" of a Reading family in 1974 and which I described in an earlier post. As proof that you cannot keep a bad idea down, a 2008 version of "The Family" has just been aired, showing the dreary life of a family in Canterbury, 40 miles south-east of London. Needless to say, that city's peerless cathedral and Christian heritage were not much in evidence.

I particularly loved Peter's observation on men wearing makeup. A few years ago Reading Crown Court was under media siege because of the trial of a woman accused of murdering three of her children. As I walked past the court building and the satellite trucks, a young man was powdering his face and studying the results in a small mirror. It was a particulary creepy and unsettling moment; I assume he was a reporter for one of the numerous channels I do not watch, as I did not recognise him. Even a purely "factual" report evidently could not be delivered straight without the reporter adjusting his own image.

The young mother was acquitted of all three counts and all the channels displayed her joy at being "proved" innocent. But, in the best whodunnit tradition, it was revealed afterwards that she had been investigated separately for the attempted murder of a fourth child.....

Peter's comments on our two biggest icons, Tony B. Liar and Princess Diana, are particularly revealing. Both were plainly utterly unworthy of the status and public influence they were given; Tony's catastrophic appointments to Government positions alone show how completely unfit he was for public office. But somehow on TV they were highly convincing performers. Princess Diana must have been the most "recognisable" person in history; yet Peter did not recognise her at first meeting.

===================================================================================

........the perniciousness of TV would be just as bad even if it were used to promote causes I like. I can say this quite safely since I know that it won't do so, but it also happens to be true. TV influences the human mind in ways which defy and avoid reason and ignore facts. It is also seduced by appearances, and extraordinarily bad at picking up the subtle negative signs that humans give off when you meet them personally. I have often pointed out that TV is good at making bad people look good, and also at making good people look bad.

Two striking examples of this are Princess Diana and Anthony Blair ( and of course now Barack Obama). I am not suggesting that any of these were or are personally wicked. But I am suggesting that their effects on our society have generally been bad, and that without TV they could not have achieved those things. Diana's televisual glamour was astonishing, and made people ignore her many episodes of bad behaviour, most notably her erratic private life (surely unwise in the mother of young boys) and her incredibly destructive BBC interview with Martin Bashir. Compare the response to Prince Charles's equally destructive TV interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, which rightly rebounded hard on him and has done him damage ever since.

In the case of Mr Blair and Mr Obama, I have never seen Mr Obama in the flesh so I can only comment on his record, but he seems to me to be a rather ordinary and undistinguished politician who once made one good speech but generally contents himself with imitations of Martin Luther King. Those who have the 'I have a dream' speech imprinted on their brains, as many of my generation do, must have noticed how similar Mr Obama's voice, cadences and inflections are to those of Dr King. As I scurried through various US airports during the election campaign, Mr Obama's speeches were often relayed on TVs in the concourses, and more than once I thought I was actually hearing Dr King. But how can this be? Dr King's voice and vocabulary were the product of a specifically Southern and deeply Christian upbringing and background, especially an intimate knowledge of the Authorised (King James) version of the Bible.

Mr Obama has never lived anywhere in the American South, he did not have a Christian upbringing and his acquaintance with the Bible only began when he signed up to Trinity Church. If he sounds like Dr King ( and he does) it must be because he - consciously or unconsciously - seeks to do so. You think this unlikely? You're welcome to do so. But politicians are very concerned about how they sound. We learned on Sunday from my colleague Simon Walters that the teenage Tory Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has used a voice coach, apparently in a (not wholly successful) effort to make himself sound less posh.

In the flesh I expect Mr Obama is a fairly ordinary person, who I suspect smells quite strongly and unglamorously of cigarettes if you can get close enough to him. Princess Diana, likewise, was so beloved by the camera that the reality was deeply disappointing. The first time I saw her in person, from about ten feet away, it took me 30 seconds to realise that this was the face that launched a thousand headlines. This angular, awkward figure was the monarch of glamour? Surely not. Yet it was so.

As for Mr Blair, my own experience and that of many others who have dealt with him directly has been that he is a person who knows very little about the world, rarely reads, and is of rather limited intelligence. Yet TV has managed to make him look like a world statesman.

That is one of TV's faults, its creation of wholly false images. But because it enters the mind unmediated, a word whose significance Mr Lewis seems to have missed, it bypasses all kinds of important filters. A child dealing with an adult, be it a parent and teacher, gets its impression of that adult not just from a screen persona which may or may not be true, but from a complete experience. the child will see that person when in a hurry, on the mornings when that person has overslept or missed the bus or had a puncture, or left a label standing up at the back of a shirt. The child will have seen that person in good and bad moods, tired, irritable, distracted. In short, it will be much better able to judge what that person says. TV persons are too good. They never make mistakes or have spots. They are always on their best behaviour, always combed and properly dressed, always carefully lit to their advantage, always anxious to show their good sides and conceal their bad ones. Even the men wear make-up, and (I speak as a person who has appeared a few times on TV) the relaxation of tension when the cameras finally turn away and the microphones are off is considerable, as is the difference between the behaviour and language of TV people off and on screen. People on TV are consciously not being fully themselves.

Then there is the difference between books and TV. A child who reads books forms his own pictures of the characters, sometimes aided by verbal description but undoubtedly his own. He imagines their voices and mannerisms. So does the author. But each experience is individual. This is why, for those of us who were brought up before TV was the overwhelming master of our culture, the filming of beloved classic books is always a disappointment. We know the characters did not speak or look like that . Similarly, once TV or movies have taken over a classic, there is only one image. Sherlock Holmes will now always look more or less like Basil Rathbone (actors who play him until the end of time have to pass this test) Inspector Morse, who didn't look in the least like John Thaw in Colin Dexter's early books, came in the later books to be identical to Mr Thaw, and acquired a red Jaguar too. Even 'Brideshead Revisited' was so taken over by the Jeremy Irons version that the miserable movie remake often copies the TV series in visual imaging (the casting of the minor character Hooper is particularly striking. The film actor is obviously based on the TV actor). As for 'Pride and Prejudice' , this is now rapidly ceasing to be the property of Jane Austen. In the end, Andrew Davies will have remodelled most of English literature.

It's Been a Thrill(er)

[DianesDigitals's Photos]

Michael Crichton - 1942 - 2008

My first Michael Crichton experience was watching the movie Andromeda Strain on TV around 1973 or so. It scared the shit out of me. Especially the scene where a dead guy gets his wrist cut open, and only powdered blood comes out. Ewwwwwwwh!

[The Andromeda Strain (1971) TRAILER]


Fun fact: Crichton has a brief cameo as a doctor in the original. The director made him sit down because his height (6'9") was too distracting.

(IMHO the remake sucked several different types of suckiness.)
Since that first viewing I've enjoyed most of Crichton's books. I first read the book Andromeda Strain when I was about 13 and loved it.

Yes I know he didn't write serious literature, and he got criticized for some of the science. But he knew how to write a engrossing thriller.

Your fans will miss your work Michael.

VOTE 2008

Tomorrow is voting day! To help get you in the mood, here are some fun voting finds! Now get out GO TO THE POLLS and VOTE!!

Vote T-shirt- Gap

Vote Screenprint- Jason Hill Design

Republican Bracelet- FoundontheBeach

John the Elephant Bib- NinaBina

John McCain M*A*S*H* Shirt- WearYourVote.com

Palin Buttons- ButtonDivas

Vote Bib- Lily Sky

$135,340 for every 'Yes' Vote

H.R.1424 - Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 | MAPLight.org:

Book: Data Flow

Gestalten:

Halloween Etsy Finds

Happy Halloween everyone! Although it would be a bit too late to buy these for today, I thought I share a few adorable pumpkin finds from Etsy. Don't fret- pumpkins can carry over through the rest of Autumn. Check out a few of my faves:

Pumpkin Hair Clip - LiliBugBoutique

Pumpkin Baby Booties- prettylittle

Pumpkin Applique Bib- upsiedoodle

Pumpkin Spice Hat- LullabyLamb

Pumpkin Applique Bib- upsiedoodle

Hope you all have a very happy and sweet Halloween- don't eat all of your kid's candy... and enjoy some pumpkins in any form will ya!

A Century In Video - 1922

Just in time for Hallowe'en I bring you a vampire classic.

Warning. This is the entire movie. So don't start if you don't have 1:25 to waste on a bald vampire.



Here is the Wikipedia entry.

And from IMDb.

Fun Fact!
If the lead actor Max Schreck was still alive, he'd be 129 years old. Of course since vampires are immortal, his age doesn't matter.

Happy Hallowe'en everyone, and watch out for the scary shit.

I'm Not Putting That In My Mouth

[hotcactuspepper's Photos]

I can't stand sweet liqueurs.

Which is probably a good thing or I might be really tempted to down a Popsy

Ewwwwwwwwww!

Speaking in Tongues

One of the fascinating aspects of my visit to Scotland last June was the reminder that English is not the only British language. The extraordinary little resort of "Tongue" on the far north coast was originally the Gaelic Tonga. The language is still spoken by over 60,000 people on the Scottish mainland and islands, where geographical isolation has helped to ward off the all-conquering English dominance. This was the depressing statistic cited in a recent "Scotland on Sunday" article, where specialists fretted that this "60,000" was the figure below which its long-time survival was unlikely. "Scotland on Sunday" pays lip service by having about a quarter of a page each week devoted to an article in Scots Gaelic. But it is otherwise as marginal a presence in the Scottish media as it is in the population.

The occasion for this gloom was the very expensive launch of a BBC channel dedicated to the Scottish Gaelic language (not to be confused with the Irish Gaelic, which Irish friends assure me is as different from its Scottish relation as German is from English). I wondered if this pessimism was justified. Minority languages hang on in the most unlikely and surprising corners of the world.

The example which surprised me most was the various dialects of Sorbian, a Slavic language spoken by small communities in Eastern Germany. Despite being immersed in the German speaking majority for centuries and persecuted or ignored under Nazi and Communist regimes, they have preserved their language and culture. Estimates of the number of Sorbian speakers vary from 45,000 to 60,000, close to that of Scottish Gaelic speakers. This seems to be a magic survival number, at least for the rational computerised models which predict the number of speakers, and the extinction of the Sorbian language at some point in the 21st century has been similarly forecast . But I would not bet on it.

If you drive in the west of England and scan the radio waves, you may find an unusual text appearing on the radio display: "BBC CYMRU". Yes, you have hit the BBC Welsh channel, which caters for a much larger number of speakers than its Scottish counterpart. Cross the Severn Bridge into Wales and bilingual signs appear by the roadside. Go deep into Wales and you actually hear people speaking Welsh in the street.

You are very unlikely to hear it in the capital city of Cardiff, where Welshness is flaunted mainly by sticking a dragon on everything from the sides of buses to the postage stamps. But go to the wild and beautiful north and you hear young men out on their lunch break in small town centres in animated discussion in their native tongue (most likely of Rugby results). With 600,000 speakers, its survival looks mor assured than that of Scottish Gaelic.

I stopped at a farmhouse in North Wales for the night during a brief holiday in 1991 and my charming hostess served me tea and biscuits (cookies). The phone rang and she immediately switched to high speed Welsh talking to a friend. She took me upstairs to the bedroom, which was obviously the children's bedroom on other occasions. The brightly coloured spelling chart on the wall did not show "A for Apple" and "B for Bird". The Roman alphabet was taught using Welsh words.

In the 1970s I worked with a colleague whose second language was English. He had spoken only Welsh up to the age of seven. But then he was of an older generation, immediately before the all-conquering power of video and TVs in every child's bedroom showing multiple TV channels. The seductive attraction of this beautiful language was vividly illustrated in the recent film "The Edge of Love" about two of the women in the crowded love life of the poet Dylan Thomas. In one very telling scene Thomas and Vera, one of his old flames, sing a song in Welsh in front of her English husband. The bond of a common childhood language is something which the husband cannot share.

Many Welsh schools provide education in Welsh as well as English and universities still offer first and higher degrees. A friend has recently achieved first class honours in Welsh studies at Aberyswyth University.

Also there is official endorsement for Civil Service puposes. If you write to a Government department in Welsh, your letter should be answered in Welsh. After all, it is a much more ancient language than English. For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s I maintained the Department of Social Security's collection of standard letters - about 2,500 WordPerfect files covering all the major benefits - sickness, incapacity, widows pension, etc. One initiative which was proposed was to duplicate all these letters in Welsh. Two major problems were immediately obvious. One was finding enough skilled translators to turn all these documents into legally accurate Welsh. The second was how to shoehorn these extra 2,500 files onto the ancient PCs in local offices around the country. Even with the help of data compression software, their tiny hard drives were already bursting at the seams. Fortunately I moved on to other tasks and dumped my paperwork with my successor before we reached that impasse.

The Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Sorbian languages are all recipients of substantial amounts of public funds to assist their survival. There is good reason to doubt the effectiveness of public subsidy in the face of the overwhelming English linguistic imperialism. When even major European languages such as German and French are challenged on their home ground, it would be amazing if marginalised language groups could hold their own. One scathing Irish commentator described the results in the "Gaeltacht", the Gaelic-speaking western fringe of the Irish Republic, "We are spending millions to subsidise a Gaeltacht of rural slums where the everyday language is English, employment is unobtainable and a once proudly independent people have been corrupted into relying on public handouts". That was written well before the "Celtic tiger" revolution in the Irish economy transformed the prospects of people in the poverty-stricken west. But this financial transformation has had other utterly unpredicted results; the minority language you are most likely to hear in the west of Ireland these days is Polish. The regional centre of Limerick was grimly portrayed in "Angela's Ashes" as a place that dynamic young people of the 1940s and 50s were desperate to escape at any price - to England, Australia, America, wherever. Now it is invaded by dynamic young Poles to the extent that Polish shops, restaurants, banks and a medical centre have sprung up.

We are prepared to spend huge sums to conserve ancient buildings and works of art. A language embodies the essence of a living culture. Imagine if English disappeared as a living language and all the works of English literature could be appreciated only in translations and by a few eccentric academics studying dusty texts. It seems equally necessary to keep languages alive as to keep threatened species of animals in being; to have a living population of speakers rather than a mass of neglected textbooks and forgotten classics in the corner of a library.

At least one neglected language needs no public subsidy to keep it alive. At St William of York I go to the 900am Mass on Sunday. We cannot linger too long afterwards for coffee and conversation. The cups have to be washed and stored away because the Latin Mass Society (LMS) have arrived for their Mass at 1100am. A whole new wooden platform is quickly assembled in the sanctuary, so that the post-Vatican altar for Mass facing the people can be used for Mass where the celebrant has his back to the congregation. A sizable congregation turns up, some from as far as 20 miles away. Minivans carrying large families crowd the car park; even the parents are clearly too young to remember the Latin Mass as it was said up to the 1960s. You can hear the traditional Latin Mass in many parts of the country, but the next nearest venues would most likely be in Oxford 30 miles to the north or London 40 miles to the east.

I say "hear" the Mass because for most of the service the congregation is silent and the priest alone recites the prayers. I have been to a couple of these Latin Masses and they are a striking reminder of what a recent innovation the dialogue Mass is. It is a 1950s innovation. For 19 centuries Mass was recited as the LMS arrange it today.

It is also a reminder of how recently the Church was so powerfully united by one language. Wherever you went in the world, it was as if the curse of Babel had been temporarily suspended, for at least one sacred hour. We could all share the same words without a translator. Like the first Pentecost, people from all over the known world could hear about the marvels of God, simultaneously, albeit not in their native languages.

Go to Lourdes or some other major international religious site nowadays and you get a taste of linguistic bedlam. As if the major services at Lourdes were not long enough, you get some sections recited 4 or 5 times in French, English, Italian, Spanish and German - plus extra repeats if the Poles or Flemish-speaking Belgians (as opposed to French-speaking Belgians) are in town..... 50 years ago it was one united service which everyone could share spontaneously. It is a reminder of the tensions between the advantages of linguistic unity and preserving precious jewels from the margins of human genius.

O.M.F.G! The Pepper, The Pepper...

... It's out to get me!

I love the site Faces in Places. People all over post pictures of things that look like faces.

Sounds simplistic? It is. But it's also kinda weird and wonderful. Pictures can be funny, whimsical, bizarre. Or as in this recent favourite, kinda scary.

It Was an Itsy Bitsy, Teeny, Weeny...

...minuscule piece of art

Willard Wigan literally creates art in the eye of a needle.



See his site for more examples of his work.

Apparently enough people doubted his art that he rated a Snopes entry.