The moving finger rants

Today's link is obvious enough that it gets a linkdump all its own:

• http://www.isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk/
  Yes.
  (tags: bloodytories

There will be more later, but right now I have a bottle of limited-edition, Ximenez finish, single-cask 1996 Ben Riach I've been saving for today.

Ding dong.

At times like this I'm reminded of my youth. When I was in the Cadets, despite being located right next to a large body of something which was technically termed water, there aren't many places to go sailing when you live in Hull. Hiking is a possibility. Drawing semi-permanent artworks on the surface of the clayey soup known as the River Humber is a regular pastime. In order to get in a boat that goes anywhere, you have to travel for some distance. To get to Welton Water, where the mire was sufficiently ungelatinous to be navigable, we had to drive for half an hour and go through one of those antiquated level crossings where you have to press a bell and wait for the wizened level-crossing-supervisor to wake up and get out of his little house and determine that no trains are coming so that he can ponderously wind the barrier up for you with a big handle.

And when we got there, there were no facilities. I remember a pissing session up against the wall at the back of the boathouse. There were no toilets in the boathouse so it had to happen at some point. I hate having to do this, my commanding officer said to me as we stood next to each other, pointedly not looking left nor right, and as we waited, as one does, for the streams to emerge; going back to nature, doing as the animals do. Surely, I thought, but did not say because he was the CO and I was young—but mostly because we both had our cocks out at the time—surely, thought I, this is glorious! going back to nature, as the animals do! Let us run free with the metaphorical wind in our hair, and let us piss up against this wall as MEN do, as VIKINGS do!

I thought it but didn't say it, because, even aged fourteen, I wasn't a total fucking fucknut. Male urinal etiquette is awkward enough without introducing naive conceptions of Romantic philosophy into the argument at the point of, for want of a better word, expression. We finished peeing and I went back to trying not to drown in my jeans because I was too young to own any proper sailing gear yet, and no more was said about it. But it's a conversation that has always stuck with me.

And then we get this.

British company Captive Media thinks it has developed a product that fills a gap in the market - a urinal mounted, urine-controlled games console for men.

It calls it the first "hands-free" video gaming console of its kind.

There really is nothing left. When a man can't pee without being sold something, then surely we've lost all conception of what it is to be people.

Personally, I think that civilization ended when they started putting adverts at eye-height above the urinals. All that's left for us now is vomitoria and an inevitable invasion by the Turks. What we're seeing now is just the final decline before we all become a footnote in the history books of future evolved cockroaches. Let the President lead the way!

This blog post brought to you by the letter P and half a bottle of Zoładkowa Gorzka. Poland's best kept secret, it says on this label, which means that my staff have been holding out on me.

Cutting-edge political insights, as ever, from The Scotsman:

Mussolini was hanged from a Milan petrol station for public display. Such a scenario would ensure that Gaddafi did not have to face a court.

Obviously I never, under any circumstances, want to give the Daily Mail the benefit of my pageviews. Every time I click on a link to dailymail.co.uk I get counted and increase the value of their website to advertisers, and I don't believe the Daily Mail deserves to be considered valuable by anyone. Sometimes, however, I want to read their articles to see what kind of a car crash they've come up with this time, and this is where istyosty.com steps in.

Istyosty.com reads the Daily Mail so you don't have to; saving a cached version of the page so that it only gets viewed once on the Mail's server, and can then be pointed/laughed at at our leisure elsewhere. The cached version, when viewed, might have comments that are out of date, but seriously, nobody reads Mail comments.

It occurred to me that it might be nice to have a browser plugin that automatically redirects all Mail traffic to the appropriate cached page. Thus, between bouts of providing the best customer service in Edinburgh, I have spent today hacking Javascript, by far the ugliest programnming language known to mankind. Halfway through the process I discovered that istyosty provide their own browser extension that already does it, but by now I am in blood stepp'd in so far, returning were as tedious as go o'er.

I will get this damn thing to work. Once it's done I'll probably install the official version instead, but this has become personal now. So far it installs properly, but doesn't actually work. I'm learning things about variable scoping that I really hoped I'd never need to know.

Still, it beats doing real work.

It's come to my attention that I should probably make the following clear: I was not actually present at the demo/riot in Parliament Square on Thursday. Somehow in my blog post I managed to neglect any mention of the words BBC News live stream, which might have made the whole thing significantly more clear.

It might also have been more clear for those of you who read me on the Twitters, on which I made comments like

@gominokouhai I got no work done today and BBC News is burned-in to the company monitor. Thanks for the economic stimulus, fuckos.

I don't have the money to go down to That London for a demo. I went to That London for a holiday. I came back, and as soon as I'd done so, I watched the place burn on live TV. The content of the post is still 100% accurate: I saw all of those things happen, I just saw them happen through a browser window.

What's interesting, though, is the distinction between the live news stream and what was later shown, after editing, on the 8 o'clock news. I suppose that's why they call it a news story. The BBC have a duty to provide balanced coverage, but sometimes I wonder if they take that duty too seriously: there's a difference between balanced and insipid. It's blatantly obvious from the raw footage that the Met instigated the violence. The march was peaceful and good-natured, and was proceeding along the agreed route until the demonstrators saw a kettle being formed ahead. We've all seen what happens in kettles, and it's entirely understandable that they might want to avoid it.

@PennyRed To avoid kettling, bits of the march are splitting off down sidestreets then rejoining. Benny Hill again!

I read another blog post (can't find the link right now, will edit if I see it again) that suggested that the agreed route was cordoned off. The marchers had nowhere else to go, so kept walking, and found themselves in Parliament Square. They weren't supposed to be there, but they hadn't been given a choice. The Met subsequently used the fact that they'd deviated from the agreed route as the sole justification for everything that followed.

Once inside the kettle, the police continued to deny that it was a kettle. Protestors who wanted to get out were sent to the opposite side of the square, where they were told they could exit; once there, they were sent back to the other side again. I watched Chief Superintendent Julia Pendry claim that no containment was taking place. At the same time I could watch the crowd trapped in the Square and read their Twitter streams: it must have felt very different to the demonstrators on the ground.

When you get 20,000 people in a small space, there is inevitably going to be some pushing and shoving. I watched it on the live stream. It looks like nothing more than a quiet crowd of people confined in a small area. Certainly there was nothing going on that warranted this mounted charge.

A lot has been made of the fact that a police officer was pulled off his horse and injured. We've got the footage of that too. There are no protestors anywhere near him; it looks like the horse gets spooked and he falls off because he's a crap rider. The BBC report suggested that the horse bolted because of a firecracker; not a very good police horse either if it can't deal with loud noises (Note: see expert commentary below), and besides this is a world away from being dragged off police horses and beaten. Furthermore, behind the guy falling off his horse you can see two young women being whacked with a baton for no reason whatsoever. So the violence had already begun by this point, and it wasn't the students perpetrating it.

Newsnight last night was a fifteen-minute condemnation of the fact that some protestors brought snooker balls with them. The NUS spokeswoman, who hadn't brought snooker balls with her, spent the whole time being asked why she might have brought snooker balls with her. We have one single report of a snooker ball being thrown (and one of a golf ball), which rapidly snowballed into Chief Superintendent Julia Pendry announcing that her officers were under constant attack with snooker balls. I would expect a senior police officer to at least be able to count to three, let alone one; it's the number of 'ellos they're supposed to say.

While we're at it, let's look at Charlie Gilmour. The kid's a prick, no question. What's important is that there was one of him, and let's be generous and say ten idiots who'd brought snooker balls. That leaves 19,989 people in the kettle who were not utter tosspots and who had no reason to be contained.

In any gathering of 100 people I fully expect 90 or 95 of them to be fucking morons. That's simple statistical expectation. The fact that we can only talk about two or three idiots in a throng of twenty thousand says a great deal about the majority who were there for peaceful reasons and who remained peaceful throughout, even while the batons rained down indiscriminately. The police, on the other hand, went to Whitehall spoiling for a fight. Not finding one, they created one to suit their purposes. While they did so, Julia Pendry was lying on national TV about methods of last resort.

And now: linkdump! Here's just a selection of eyewitness reports.

• Laurie Penny's excellent piece: Inside the Parliament Square kettle
• This is what democracy smells like
• Jody McIntyre was dragged from his wheelchair and beaten; police later set about beating up the empty wheelchair
• Police claim they showed restraint at student demo
• Here is a photo of a police officer laughing while hitting a 15 year old girl
• Lies, damned lies, and crowd control

While I'm here, this is an excellent summary of the reasons underlying the protests, and why it affects more than just students: What we're arguing against and what we're fighting for

I marched with the Edinburgh University occupation to Holyrood today to protest against the cuts to education. Nick Clegg wasn't there, despite reports that he might be; we put the wind up whoever was there instead.

Reports of kettling at New College after I'd left remain unconfirmed. Also apparently police used tasers in Brighton and there have been mass arrests for no good reason in London. Myself, I skipped out early and went to work. A full blog post with pictures will be forthcoming.

Right now, I have a sazerac and mince with winter vegetables and fantastic crispy dumplings. It's been a long day and I deserve this. Also, baklava.

I think I've figured out how to destroy the Conservative Party. How to make their tiny inbred brains asplode so that we can move into their disproportionately huge Knightsbridge houses, roll around in all their leftover money, and ultimately become the very things we hate and thus let the cycle begin anew. It's ideologically unsound but it's a vocation, at least.

The trick is to make the Big Society actually work.

Nothing will make that oleaginous Etonian fuckface and his waxen-fizzoged fourth-form fag (I am convinced that Gideon Osborne is secretly an Auton) more angry than the sight of poor people getting on with their lives and being relatively comfortable. It is our moral duty to see that this is so. With any luck, we can make them all die from a combination of gout and hypertension. Let's let the retired colonels seethe themselves to death at the sight of poor people being happy.

The Big Society is, as everyone knows, a giant lie intended to make poor people suffer. Let's call their bluff.

Let's help those of our friends who need medical care. Let's set up charities and trusts for the disabled and the mentally ill. Let's generate community-based work programs directed at the unemployed with the goal of beautifying our townscapes. Let's do these things, not out of a sense of love for our fellow men (although feel free to do that if that's your bag; in which case, groovy), but because it will drive Cameron and his ilk into a full-on rage.

In ten years time, we'll be living in flower-bedecked, well-tended communities with neighbourly values and a functional system of socialized healthcare. They'll have gorgeous glass and steel towers in central London, but there'll be nobody there to clean their toilets or look after their children or work in their Starbuckses.

The societies that we form will actually work. Theirs will be hate-filled, conspicuous-consumerist hellholes full of rich people who sneer at their neighbours and fear everyone else. We will have good coffee and clean toilets. They will have large bank balances. Let's see which of us sleeps warm and cosy at night. And when they come crawling to us because they have terrible liver diseases brought on by overconsumption which we know how to treat, we shall say: sorry, you can afford private healthcare, thus you're not eligible.

Their children will be spoiled brats with an aristocratic sense of entitlement. Our children will know how to make stuff and do stuff. And when the class war finally comes between our two societies, it will be be fought by people who know how to shout orders on one side, and people who know how to make guns on the other. I predict it will last about twenty minutes.

Let's do it.

My editrix informs me that I should make the following clear: when I say fag above I'm talking about the public-school sense and not with any reference whatsoever to homophobia. (Interesting, however, that the word fag is a homonym.)

While I'm at it I should probably point out that the good coffee in the socialist utopia described above almost certainly won't come from the former Starbucks workers previously mentioned, unless they can learn new skills on departing the Starbuckses (although the clean toilets possibly will). Good coffee by definition comes from other, non-Starbucks, coffee shops.

I watched the march along Princes Street this morning: 20,000 people turned up. I stood next to two beautiful, but very bored, police horses and watched the protestors file past in a line stretching out beyond the horizon. It felt like 1983, except it wasn't in black and white, and there were iPhones and vuvuzelas.

I couldn't join in because I had to rush off to an audition, but I'm starting to think I should get some practice in while everything's still peaceful. I'd hate for my first rally to be the one when they start throwing bricks around.

A while back, I wrote If I woke up tomorrow morning in a terrifying neo-Thatcherpunk dystopia, then so be it: start stockpiling guns then. Is it time yet?

Auntie has an article about the hatefulness that is Comic Sans today. In the comments is the following gem:

I like it. I wouldn't use it in a business e-mail, but it's my choice of font for less formal conversations in the corporate version of MSN that's used where I work. I was completely unaware that it was controversial!

S Weekes, Cardiff

Dear S Weekes from Cardiff: everyone in your office secretly hates you. They wish death upon you every time you send an email. Out of your hearing, you are known as the one that uses Comic Sans, and the person thus addressed always rolls their eyes and says, oh, God, yeah. You'd never have known about this if it wasn't for the information you receive from an unbiased media outlet. Murdoch would have just let you continue oblivious as a despicable excuse for a human being.

Seriously. The BBC has educated ≥1 person about the awfulness of Comic Sans. That's worth the licence fee even if I didn't already get Doctor Who.

A spectacular new low for The Scotsman today, reporting news 3,000 years old. It's dead-tree only in that illustrious Edinburgh organ, so here's a link to the almost identical online version from the Torygraph, regurgitated no doubt from the same press release.

Dixson found the same formula for what men favoured in women came up every single time—a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7. In other words, a waist measurement exactly 70 per cent of the hip circumference.

[The Torygraph gets a picture of Jessica Alba, but we get a bonus sentence fragment. Good literary device. Will use more later.]

Yes. It's called the Golden Ratio. The ancient Greeks knew about it.

I know that the dead-tree press is struggling to keep up in the Internet Age, but printing a Fascinating New Discovery that was originally published by Euclid is just embarrassing. It's a concept so common that it has its own Greek letter. And this apparently justifies an entire column on page three.

As if that wasn't enough, they got the ratio upside down.

This paper needs a science correspondent so badly I could spit. Or at least someone who finished high school.

Don't get me started on Barnaby Dixson, the alleged anthropologist who apparently got funding for this.