Moolies

::Waves::

Hello yes. Still here. Bit distracted.

Lots of things I want to get off my chest though, and no time to say them.

For absolutely no reason at all I've been researching ethical footwear. Well, no, if I were writing a column, I'd say it's because I need a new pair of shoes, and I'm a bit fed up with wearing petrochemical ones, BUT, I am a vegetarian. So what gives? Is there a truly ethical shoe company, from whom one can source decent winterish shows that last, that have a low carbon footprint and dare I even mention this, might even be made of leather, given that leather is a bi-product of an industry where the carbon etc has already been accounted for? Ans: Not so simples. So more on that later because it's *interesting*. 

Watching a documentary about the Great War last night, I was struck how much the war, for long stretches, seemed to be characterised almost by hysteria, throughout the players. Sending tens of thousands of men to their deaths, surrounded by the carnage from the days or weeks before in a landscape so much closer to hell than anything by Jake and Dinos Chapman. Andrew Marr mentioned one Army Officer who had been a maths teacher before the war, who had calculated the rate of loss of his men if they went over the top, as a result of their knowing the exact position of the German machine guns. 100%. He took this evidence to his superior officers, and he was told "Obey your orders". They were all killed.

Back in the UK, in London - astonishing, this. you could actually hear the bombardment. From London. The siege mentality and paranoia gripping the UK must have been like a form of insanity. The whole war during the middle period where no gains were made on either side sounded unbearably irrational.

We went on holiday, James is growing up so much... I enjoy his company more and more I have to say. When he's not whining, he is a delight to be around. The whining is merely a phase, I'm sure. The holiday was wonderful and I wish I was back there now.

A whole slew of other ideas and Oooh, this that and the others - and I still haven't written about Arthur blinking Jefferson. But he'll have to wait.

So I joined in the whole Jan Moir thing

Just to get this on record for anyone who is following this, this is the complaint I sent to the PCC earlier on today, using a form which I can't currently get the URL to, given that the site is down. Here is the wording of my complaint (left out the admin type bits)

(No, I don't think I really need to post a link to the article do I? Not now. Not going to either. I think I had to link to the Mail once on here, and I didn't like it then.)

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Explanation : 1. Accuracy. The code states:
"The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or
distorted information".
Even in the headline, which does not take care to suggest any
possibility of problems in the medical examination of Stephen Gately
after his death - it states clearly that the medical result was
inaccurate (and presents no factual evidence to back up this claim)

2. This is repeated during the article, again, with absolutely no
factual evidence to back it up, and yet Ms Moir seems to be determined
to press home her creative and non-factual version of events:
"Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural
one. Let us be absolutely clear about this."
No evidence given. Clearly Ms Moir is either entirely wrong, or quite
the worst investigative journalist I've ever read, since she doesn't
lay out her case.

3. "Intrusion in to grief or shock".
This terrible article, which is inferring lies, extreme  homophobia  and
insults not only about Stephen Gately, but his civil Partner, less than
a week (OK! I got that wrong, I don't follow celebrity death that closely) after the young man in question died of natural causes is disgusting.

5. Discrimination: the whole article is permeated with homophobia - fear
of a homosexual lifestyle, or homosexual relationships. Jan Moir infers
that the "ooze" of a gay lifestyle is somehow terrible and awful.

I could have been more specific but I, you know. Was at work n'stuff. So here's the reply from the PCC, from a Mr Yip (points for them though, at least it came from a human being):

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Thank you for sending us your complaint about the Daily Mail article on
the subject of the death of Stephen Gately.  We have received numerous
complaints about this matter.

I should first make clear that the Commission generally requires the
involvement of directly affected parties before it can begin an
investigation into an article.  On this occasion, it may be a matter for
the family of Mr Gately to raise a complaint about how his death has
been treated by the Daily Mail.  I can inform you that we have made
ourselves available to the family and Mr Gately's bandmates, in order
that they can use our services if they wish.

We require the direct involvement of affected parties because the PCC
process can have a public outcome and it would be discourteous for the
Commission to publish information relating to individuals without their
knowledge or consent.  Indeed, doing so might unwittingly add to any
intrusion.  Additionally, one of the PCC's roles is dispute resolution,
and we would need contact with the affected party in order to determine
what would be an acceptable means of settling a complaint.

On initial examination, it would appear that you are, therefore, a third
party to the complaint, and we may not be able to pursue your concerns
further.  However, if you feel that your complaint touches on claims
that do not relate directly to Mr Gately or his family, please let us
know, making clear how they raise a breach of the Code of Practice.  If
you feel that the Commission should waive its third party rules, please
make clear why you believe this.

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I'm not going to start ranting about how confusing it is that I had a complaint, and I went to the "Complaints" commission, and apparently they don't want to hear it. I'll just put my reply up:

-------------------------------------------------

Sirs,

Thank you very much for your email explaining your position.

Whilst I agree with you that on matters of privacy and personal grief,
those aspects of the article should come under the umbrella of you
'Direct involvement' requirement, the complaint also puts equal weight
behind the lack of accuracy with regard to the cause of death, which
is public knowledge, and more importantly, the article makes broad
ranging generalisations with regard to the institution of Civil
Partnership, which are not directly related to Mr Gately. It also
attempts to make a comparison between the death of someone recently
who was battling a drug addiction with this death. The only
similarities in the cases being that the parties happened to be gay
men. This is clearly discriminatory in a  broad, and not personalised
sense. My case then is that this affects me personally, not only as
someone who knows people who have had a civil Partnership, but as a
woman who has had relationships with women, and therefore could be
described as bi-sexual or as having had "gay" relationships.

I hope that given the weight of, and number of justifiable complaints
in this case that you will act upon the more universal aspects of the
complaints, since the only other avenue for those who are horrified by
the homophobia in this article is the courts. My own view would be
that the organisation created to handle "Complaints" should be a more
efficient mode of dealing with the fallout from this?

Thank you for your time,

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So very polite, I hope you'll agree. We'll see what they come back with.

It is interesting, all this. I'm not sure anyone really knows how to deal with these crowd situations, and have no idea what the impact is or will be. But those crowds, they keep on coming.

Greenpeace on the house, everybody say Yo

Hmmm. Well it's been a bit of a weekend, really.

First: Kingsnorth new coal powerstation - withdrawn for the moment. Okay, pretty good stuff.

Second: BAA say they're not going to pursue the new Heathrow runway. Bloody hell!

Third: Ayrshire firm has major investor withdraw from new coal fired power station. Ok...

Fourth: Greenpeace are currently up on the roof of parliament waving banners saying Politics has to change. ready for the new Parliamentary term

So it's all good stuff. Here's Greenpeace's 12 point policies for change, which I don't expect will happen now, but will happen purely because they have to - struggling in to being over the next few years, but unfortunately not at a speedy enough rate. you see, you look at that list, and every single one of them says "Government spending". Now I know that, and you know that. Unfortunately for the planet, we live in a democracy where every vote counts, and a large percentage of those votes are predicated on not having vast taxes making your lifestyle a bit more crap than it is right now.

In reality, what we need is a tripartite green governance mini-government a bit like a war cabinet, with a mandate to introduce this stuff Because We Have To. Then the rest of governance could go on as usual, with bitter infighting and sniping and so forth... but no one could blame any one party, and we could still make the changes.

Because we are at war, you see. We are.

Anyway! In other related news, I joined The Green Party, finally, today. I don't agree with some of their long term policies, but looking through their short term ones, it is remarkable how much that rhetoric is bandied around by the powers that be as if it was all their idea. The point is, I vote Green, and I'm, in the end analysis, a political, ideological animal seeking a belief system (it's in my genes) so I'm going to see if it works. I'm not going to stuff envelopes (solely!) though.

Gawd, I've got so much I want to write about atm, but I have gone on a sort of short holiday, which is in fact, fairly indicative of the point that I'm pretty happy right now, and feeling engaged in actions and... er... 'things' instead of staring at the computer thinking "I know I should probably be anxious or active about something, but I just don't feel up to it". That can only be good.

Meanwhile, having blurted, I've got to rush home to see my three lovelies.

Poor old Robert FitzRoy snubbed again

In my capacity as an amateur defender of the great Admiral FitzRoy, it has come to my attention that the BBC has committed an unforgivable sin of omission by talking about The Beagles's logbooks as if they were *Darwin's*, and even going so far as to talk about Captains' logs mere moments before mentioning the great naturalist and international interloper, as if he was the Captain himself! Here's the offending piece:

"Logbooks may yield climate bounty"

It wouldn't be so terrible (although it really is, rather), but what makes it worse is that they really harp on about the Beagle, and much, much worse, the article is about climate change and the weather. It's as if they hadn't bothered researching the point that FitzRoy was *obsessed* with the weather, and indeed, basically founded the Met office! You couldn't get a more apposite person to mention in the same breath as an analysis of climate.

Poor FitzRoy. Ignored so much in death, as he was in life, and so very unjustly. Here's his grave, that I managed eventually to go and see.

Read about him, if you don't know anything about him. He was a fascinating, flawed character with a big heart and a voracious appetite for geographical / meteorological knowledge but also sufferer of acute, and miserable depressive episodes. I've provided the two best book links below:

Evolution's Captain, by Peter Nichols. Really exhaustive but brilliantly readable and exciting history of The Beagle and Mr Fitz, going back to the original Captain and what happened to him (erk). 

This Thing of Darkness, by the late Harry Thompson. Very easy read. A novelisation of the relationship between Fitz and Darwin, but dwelling on FitzRoy, what happened next, more on the Fuegians and all sorts. 

I like to think that the overwhelming weight of evidence in Darwin's favour might have eventually turned Robert Fitzroy's desire for God to exist and everything to be in its place, as a glory unto him (etc) in to something he himself saw as more anachronistic and he might have eventually dropped it, if other events hadn't intervened. After all, he was far from stupid (although he was intensely proud, so it would have meant a huge leap for him to admit he was wrong). In life, he suffered intellectually a great deal, and had the rug pulled from under him several times. I empathise with the man for his frail humanity, and our shared condition of depression (although he suffered voluminously more than I ever have).

Anyway, there you are, Boo, BBC, do your homework and don't mislead people about something, er, admittedly relatively minor but still significant historically!

Ear popping sounds!

The trouble with kevlar tyres is - you just forget how to mend punctures. Easily. Having just spent nearly two hours... well, ok, I spent a large amount of that time also degunking the bike but having just managed to relocate the way the bloody wheel is supposed to go in to the er, wheel slots, with the chain not getting in the way etc, I proceeded to pump up the tyre to the recommended level, thought "ooh, that's a bit hard", then stopped putting it in to its outdoor home when aye aye, I realised the back wheel wasn't moving. Hmmmmm.... er... a bit of air out perhaps? Try that? the breaks didn't appear to be problematic...

BANG!

Whole damn thing burst, right in my bloody ear.

That was a bit of a surprise.

...and at 23.26 I think I'll call that a night. Sigh.

A brief holiday, apparently

I seem to have entered a period of "bored with the sound of my own voice", which will revert to the normal spouting gibberish within... ooh. Hours, I'm sure.

Oddly, there's quite a lot of stuff I'd like to talk about including:

-The ethical consumer conundrums: a) The kettle b) Is it possible to source ethical leather shoes, if you're a vegetarian (to reduce your carbon output)

...I've got a feeling I've done kettle before though. I am a creature of a small but intensely held series of thoughts

Family updates a go-go.

Meanwhile, I have a tale of surprising positivity where Ikea is concerned. James' dust allergy appears to be having far more outward symptoms these days, which is sad. He wakes up sounding like he has a heavy cold every day, and about 20 minutes in to leche / story time, he will suddenly sneeze, twice, necessitating the removal of an enormous amount of heavy duty, dark green mottled snot. He's been breathing in dust all night, see. not to mention the red eyes and constant rubbing in the evenings.

So. Children's' stuff tends to be dust-trap-a-go-go, so after extensive research I found that Ikea's "Trofast" system comes with the potential for lids for all its bucket-like plastic slot-in shelving er... bits. Reducing available surfaces to flat, hooverable cover ups is far, far preferable to a random surfaced clump of god knows what ie: a load of old junk piled up in a corner or something.

Astonishingly, I found myself deciding to go to Ikea on a Saturday night, after the kids had finally gone to sleep and managed to get there at 10pm, 1 hour before closure. After racing (as much as you can do whilst pushing a huge wheely trolley) through the store, finding a total lack of colour choice and thus ending up filching as many plastic buckets (of varying sizes) from the displays as I could, afterwards  negotiating the utterly frustrating crap of dragging your arse through the 'market place' to get to the not exactly awful but nevertheless extremely tiring business of dragging enormous cardboard covered packages on to your trolley. On your own. At 10.40 at night... I did indeed manage to purchase our entire shelving solution. Sans lids! Not a single bloody lid in the place! The whole point: the very reason I'd chosen this system in the first place was missing. They'd all been gonded by shoppers braving the Sat afternoon scrum.

Two things happened subsequent to standing in the till queue at 10.50 on Saturday night:

1) They delivered all the goods at 7.45am the following morning. Less than 12 hours after I'd bought the stuff. Now that, I respect, I have to say. There is much wrong with the Ikea experience, so it's surprising to write something positive about them.

2) You can get the lids online! Wooo!

So, hopefully we should be able to organise the kid-crud, and maybe reduce James' symptoms. I hope so.

Oh, bugger. That's a post, isn't it! Well, er... it'll be ages till the next one, just you wait.

Nora's review of my talk at Interesting09

"Why didn't you say any jokes?"

A post about Arthur Jefferson will make its way to these pages in the next couple of days when I have the time to write it. The rest of the weekend just gone was spent tidying the house to continue the route to dust free living, sewing up James' trousers and all sorts.

I think I can say that it went "Ok" - which for a first time in front of an audience (except for times when you're unprepped, which I don't really count) in so long I'm actually having difficulty remembering when I last did it (if I have done it at all since leaving school) I'm guessing can't be bad. (Unless the people who politely told me it was good were all mortified and couldn't think of anything else to say! Argh - heh).

But anyway, here's an oddity. I met 2 people at my friend Kevin's 40th birthday drinks on Wednesday, and they turned out to be doing Interesting talks on Saturday. That is almost ridiculous. One was Dan Maier, who did an hilarious and quite amazing talk on Sir Francis Galton and the other was Leila Johnston, who was completely lovely on Wednesday night, and whose brilliantly nerd-friendly book, "The Enemy of Chaos" has just come out, published by a very small press, so it's worthwhile everyone telling everyone that the book exists, via their blogs, in case the publicity department can't afford to PR it that extensively. What were the chances of that happening? Well, fairly high, realistically.

What with looking after Nora and having to leave early, I missed quite a bit (still, missed less than last year, so it's a steady improvement), but for me, the real highlight of the day was the astonishing talk given by Josie Fraser about girls' magazines in the 1970's. So far so Bunty, right? How wrong can you be! It turns out that Pat Mills did an awesome job of trying to create a kind of female readership equivalent to 1950's apocalyptic science fiction magazines for boys in the magazine "Jinty" before going off to 2000AD. The covers were *incredible*. Here's Josie's post about the talk. I am in complete awe, and am left wishing I could find all the ex-Jinty readers and finding out the profound effects reading this crazy stuff must have had on its audience! Hopefully an Ebay search for "Jinty" will allow me to snap them up, I'm desperate to read these now!

Oh, yes, I forgot to say a thing. It occurred to me part way through the day that there were an awful lot of women doing talks. And I mean really cool women, too (not including myself, obviously). If you look down Roo's list, it's not just that there were a ton of women speaking, but that many of the topics women were discussing were predicated on having a particular female geekiness. If you had an all male conference, can you imagine anyone coming up with "Ponies I have loved, real or imagined". Completely and utterly wonderful to be in an eclectic, lovely atmosphere where anything genuinely interesting was welcome. More like this please. More more more ladies with horses and whacko sci-fi girls' magazines.

Watching home video of 9/11

I made myself watch "102 minutes that changed America" the other night, although watching it with the ridiculous number of advert breaks that it had made me feel queasy and slightly ashamed of Channel 4.

But then they stumped up for it, I suppose.

The film was a heftily edited selection, in timestamped form, of the whole of the 9/11 terrible saga, from a few seconds after the first plane hit. We were in France on that day, and only got hold of the news via me reading my email over a standard 56k modem, and saying "Er, there's a rumour that a plane has hit the World Trade Centre". We switched on the satellite news and I think we emerged, blinking in to the Catalan afternoon sun some 5 hours later.

Watching it, it surprised me just how long there were between the first and the second hits. There must have been a good ten, fifteen minutes and good god, the utter horror of the second hit - the sheer terror in the voices of the people who were videoing. Not to forget, obviously, that every so often, a person could be clearly seen jumping out and hoping for a swift death, rather than burning. The phone calls to desperate people in smoking and burning offices were there too. Sit tight, smash the windows if you have to, we're coming.

The handheld nature of the thing gave the film a screwed up, post-Cloverfield sheen, because of course it was New York. And to make matters even more emotionally confused, the viewer already knew the ending - they'd seen the spoilers and the inevitavle fall to earth hung like a spectre over the unfolding events. Waiting for the second plane to hit was unbearable. That shred of time felt real, and miserably unchangeable.

It is as important to bear witness to the events that take place in affluent countries as it is to listen, and watch, straight backed, to the horrors meted upon people by other people, or indeed natural events, in the developing world. There is no cynical response to the unbearable shock, grief and misery of that day. What came next could not be laid at the door of these New Yorkers, shaking with fear, trying to shield their children from what was going on, or burning alive, or being crushed to death. So many firefighters on video, I was left thinking  - How many of those guys are still alive now? Our friend Emma, who lived in Brooklyn at the time, had good mates in guitar bands who fought fires by day. She didn't see them again.

Watching it from that personal perspective through the shaky camera's untrained eye - how the hell can anyone who was there, and saw it happen, get over that day? Even people blocks away were covered with the volcanic dust cloud as the towers spread in to a dust storm across the city. They must still think of it, every day.

Bedtime crooning

Nice post #2:

Nora used to hum to herself in the bedroom before going to sleep. Particularly in the afternoons. Now we have James who will do the same. Given that we have begun to explore Tex Avery's cartoons*, is recent singing has been:

Ohmadarlin

Ohmadarlin

Ohmadarlin

Whatsername

...over and over. One day, we will have to stop listening to them on the monitor, but it is very funny in the meantime. Nora saying "Shush!" every so often. Heh.

Now, Droopy Huckleberry Hound sang Clementine, but who sang "Whatsername"? I'm not sure that was in any Avery cartoons? I'm asking this out loud but a penny to a pound my brother, Stephen, is going to answer the question... I can't find out on Google because it's a bit too random.

Obviously I've virused the song by remembering the false ending from somewhere else.

*Having established it's not Droopy, I've a feeling it comes up in the "Poochini" cartoon or alternatively, I just sing it round the house ;)

Oh oh!

Time for non depressing, optimistic and lovely posts!

Post no.1:

Disney are re-releasing Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in 3D! I'm not 100% sure what 3D will do for two films certainly not optimised for that format, but more  to the point - big screen again! Toy Story! 

Oh oh, Nora is going to go nuts for this. I really hope James can put up with watching it on a big screen too. I know he's only three but how many times in your life do you get to see the films you love on big screens, eh?

Admission: I adore Toy Story.

Bonus link. Here's Jim Hill (excellent blog for animation fans, by the way) posting Mr Lasseter talking about some swoon-worthy new Toy Story toys for the new 3D movie (very nervous about whether it's any good or not - nice trailer but... still. I'm sure they've been handling it with kid gloves).

Not that I'd advocate his idea of buying the toys twice mind you.