The moving finger rants

In 1787, Robert Burns the Ploughman Poet walked along the riverside by the Falls of Bruar. Bruar Falls, in Athole, are exceedingly picturesque and beautiful; said he, misspelling ‘Atholl’ as he did so, but their effect is much impaired by the want of trees and shrubs. Thus inspired to action, he did what any of us would do. He wrote a poem and addressed it to the landowner.

Let lofty firs, and ashes cool,
My lowly banks o'erspread,
And view, deep-bending in the pool,
Their shadow's wat'ry bed:
Let fragrant birks, in woodbines drest,
My craggy cliffs adorn;

and so on and so on

There was already a birk adorning those cliffs, but he'd gone home to write a poem.

As a result the Duke of Atholl instituted a massive tree-planting programme. Because some inkstained twit wrote a poem. Is that how you get a public works project approved? Is some latter-day Bard even now penning A Humble Petition to just get the damn trams finished already? Or is that, as I suspect, a niche that these days is filled by the letters page of the Scotsman?

Nonetheless, a couple of weeks ago I popped up north to view the result. The Falls of Bruar is an area of outstanding natural beauty, and these days you can't see any of it because there are trees everywhere.

I already can't stand Robert Burns. Now he's actively ruining things I like to do (viz., looking at waterfalls). I'm inclined to start taking this personal.

I can't write like Burns (thank Christ), so perhaps a humble petition after the style of Scotland's other favourite son will suffice.

Ohh, 'twas in the month of July two thousand and twelve,
Into the woods around the Falls of Bruar did we delve,
And tho' the scenery was beautiful like a painting or a frieze,
None of it could we see because of all the bloody trees,
and ooowhhh ...

I may have slipped into a Milligoon voice towards the end there, but in my defence, it's hard not to.

Remainder of the photoset is here. I had to climb down slippery rocks on cliff edges to get some of these shots. Rabbie is actually trying to kill me.

Part One of an occasional series. Today: On Owning a Garden.

Someone is torturing ponies next door. This won't do. It makes the neighbourhood look bad (neighbourhood, hurr hurr), and I'm about ready to call the SSPCA.

What's that you say? Small humans make noises like that?

Can we have the wet weather back again, please?

Okay, so when Chekov and Captain Terrell beam down to investigate the planet for suitability for the Genesis Project, they think the planet is Ceti Alpha VI. Then, when Khan explains that THIS IS CETI ALPHA FIVE, he says that Ceti Alpha VI asploded—secretly!—fourteen-and-a-half years ago. This is stated as the reason why Ceti Alpha V looks a lot less hospitable than it did during TOS, and it's presumably the reason why the crew of the Reliant weren't capable of accurately counting to six.

Planetary systems are numbered from the inside out. Ceti Alpha Prime would be the planet nearest the star, Ceti Alpha II would be the next one out, then Ceti Alpha III, IV, and Ceti Alpha V would be inside the orbit of Ceti Alpha VI. So when the Reliant warps in on its planetary survey mission, they count planets Ceti Alpha one two three four five six... and beam down to the wrong one.

If Ceti Alpha IV had asploded, they might be forgiven for getting the name of Ceti Alpha V wrong. There would still be the pressing issue of a suspicious-looking additional asteroid belt that wasn't on the charts. But when Ceti Alpha VI asploded, six months after we were left here, the only planets that change their name are Ceti Alphas VII and onwards. The only way for Chekov and Terrell to end up on Ceti Alpha V in a system that, unknown to them, has the sixth planet missing, is if they were actually trying to beam down to Ceti Alpha VII and they still fucked that up.

This has bugged me for thirty years, and no amount of Ricardo Montalban's acting can change basic planetary physics. No, Ricardo, stop trying to distract me with your chest. This isn't even basic planetary physics, it's basic planetary arithmetic.

Also, did the star chart not have a big X marked on it, with Here be incredibly dangerous genetically engineered criminals from the 20th century? Did Kirk not actually tell anyone when he established a colony of psychopaths in a habitable system at the end of `Space Seed'? Carol Marcus does mention, only fifteen years afterwards, the galactic problems of population and food supply. Did Kirk hide a bunch of incredibly powerful, genetically-engineered lunatics on a valuable planet, and then try to act surprised when an innocent survey vessel caught hell for it later?

I used to own The Nitpicker's Guide to Star Trek (unsurprisingly), and it went on at length about Kirk apparently forgetting to notify Starfleet about the nest of big-titted maniacs he left carelessly strewn about the galaxy. It didn't mention that Ceti Alpha V cannot be mistaken for Ceti Alpha VI. The guy who wrote the Nitpicker's Guide also failed to count accurately to six. This bugs the hell out of me.

Life is currently an unending, relentless nightmare, but I have 701 Greatest Hits of the 1980s on .flac and you, dear reader, and the rest of the benighted universe that spawned you can kindly fuck off and leave me to it for an evening.

I'm currently up to B. And this one has Bonnie Tyler.

(I'm amused that I go into a directory marked 701 greatest 1980's music hit Singles and think, ooh, what should I listen to next, so I hit double-tab to bring up autocomplete and the computer asks me if I want it to Display all 699 possibilities? I'm glad that penelope has my back. BitTorrent, you have failed me for the last time.)

(It has Bonnie, but there's no sign of Video Killed the Radio Star. And they have the wrong Spandau Ballet track, but so does everyone, and one can't have everything.)

Also: The Doctor's Wife. OHMYGOD YES.

I'll live.

^[0]

I was standing in Parliament Square two days ago. Today I watched it burn.

Specifically, I watched a peaceful protest march take legitimate steps to avoid an unauthorized kettle on the street ahead of them, which the Met then used to justify random and wanton police brutality against unarmed students. There was a bit of jostling, sure. Maybe some pushing and shoving. That sort of thing happens when you have a crowd of ten thousand people in one place. Then I watched the horses charge for no reason. It takes a lot of people to organize a charge like that: you can see the unmounted officers simultaneously move aside, presumably on a prearranged signal to let the horses through, who stampede into the crowd with no warning. I can understand a certain amount of violence from individual policemen who might get caught up in the moment: they're human like the rest of us. But here we see that somebody in command made a decision to charge into a mostly-quiet crowd, and the order was passed on to several hundred trained police officers, each of whom is charged with maintaining the peace. Not one of them said: hang on, this might be dangerous.

And then I watched Metropolitan Police spokesperson Chief Superintendent Julia Pendry lie, and lie, and lie again. First she said that the police had been facing constant violence all day, which was a lie. Then she said that no one was being kettled when they were. Then she said that kettling was a necessary act of last resort, which it isn't, and which doesn't explain why the Met always hurtle to use it at the first available opportunity. We saw them try to establish a kettle while the march was still peacefully processing along the prearranged route. That's why people deviated from the march route in the first place, and why all of this kicked off in the first place.

If the Met insist on using kettling as a standard practice, people are going to start dying, and it's going to be the Met's fault.

I was standing on Whitehall just the other day, doing the tourist thing. Big Ben was right there and Downing Street was right behind me; all these icons of our common culture that stand out. REVOLUTION was still spraypainted on the walls from the last protest, but I was able to look beyond these temporary aberrations and see the beautiful buildings and architecture of a glorious nation.

Not any more. This is Britain now, and we're all fucked. I want out.

Apparently national icon and jovial cuddly polymath Stephen Fry feels sorry for me. Apparently, if straight women were as mad up fer it as gay men were, I could go cruising. That way, I could have a lot more sex, because as a man, I want lots of sex. Gay men don't have this problem because when two gay men have sex, they're both men, and they both want sex, so they both have sex. But when a straight man wants to have sex with a straight woman, the straight woman doesn't want to have sex, so the man has to buy chocolates and flowers and shit and it's just not fair.

Do you hear that, straight women? The smartest man in Britain says that you're letting the side down. You're oppressing me with your persistent failure to organize dedicated areas of parkland where I can go to anonymously stick my wanger into you whenever I feel like it. For shame, straight women. Men want sex and you're not providing it. There must be something wrong with you.

Oh dear.

As a straight man, I'll be the first to admit that I've not had nearly as much sex as I'd like to have had. And I'm in a committed relationship now, so I'm unlikely to get much more of it. All I have left is my memories, and they're no good—most of the women who feature in them were from Hull. I understand that my oat-sowing days are long in the past and that, even when they were going on, they weren't all that much cop. I hardly think that this is a reason to feel sorry for me. I feel that, as a straight man, I've received a number of other benefits that more than make up for the lack of sordid secret handjobs on tap.

Besides, there are straight cruising areas. They're the bars on the main street of every town on a Saturday night. And the surrounding areas. And anywhere within shouting distance of any sufficiently drunken straight man. These areas are designated as cruising areas by straight men and straight women don't get a lot of say in the matter.

Basically, all this shows is that sex is probably a little bit more complicated than one might think, even if one is a popular, reasonably intelligent, celebrity media figure.

(PS. All that stuff he knows about when he's presenting QI? I don't think he actually knows all of it. I think he reads a lot of it off an autocue. Industry secret.)

I shall leave it to those better qualified than I to make less facetious commentary: go ye and read.

(h/t highlyeccentric.)

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.

I don't get it. The Queen is Defender of the Protestant Faith, right? So the Pope comes to town tomorrow, and she's making him tea. She's still excommunicated as far as I know. Shouldn't they fight?

I'd pay twenty quid to see that—much better than some boring Mass any day. We can give the Queen a handbag with a brick in it and Ratzinger has those Gucci shoes with the wicked heel on them. Old person fight! Roll up, roll up! Centuries of doctrinal conflict settled at last in one glorious battle to the death! Official programmes £15. Bring your own popcorn. Soundtrack provided by Battle without Honor or Humanity, natch.

Personally, I think the Queen could take him. Ratzo is a couple of years younger, but she's the bloody Queen, mate.

Okay, it's a state visit, I can grasp that. We get those sometimes and it's very nice for the economy. But the state of which Popeface is head (can't read my, can't read my, no you can't read my Poper face) is, let's face it, a bizarre theocratic dictatorship responsible for millions of deaths and the systematic coverup of organized child rape, not to mention the Crusades, some degree of complicity in the Holocaust, and a great deal of arrogant swanning about the planet like they own the place. If Robert Mugabe came to town, I'd expect a little outcry. The amount of opposition to this has consisted of a single letter to the Guardian. And no one has even begun to talk about my personal inconvenience.

There are nineteen pages of traffic restrictions for the Papal visit tomorrow. Basically, His Holiness pootles into town in his little glass-enclosed mobility chair, and as a result no one is allowed to drive or park anywhere in the Capital. You can do whatever steps you want if \ You have cleared them with the City of Edinburgh Council, which naturally means that nobody will be doing any stepping of any kind.

The Pontiff's route neatly bisects a line between my flat and my work: I have advised my bosses that, if I'm not in on time tomorrow, it's either because traffic is terrible (which it will be) or because I've been arrested.

This year alone I've killed two million fewer Africans than that bloke has. I'm just an honest citizen trying to get to work. Where's my fuckin' motorcade, Officer?

Trying to work out the best way to fit SECULAR HUMANISM ROCKS YOUR SOCKS RIGHT OFF onto a banner.

Yeah. Tomorrow's going to be fun.

I'm getting a little tired of this travesty that supermarkets call bacon. As we all know, they add water to make it sizzle. Because, obviously, the most important thing about bacon is what it sounds like.

I understand they've got to do something to maintain their profit margins. No one would be sadder than I to see Mr Sainsbury or Lord Tesco destitute, rummaging through the bins at the back of their own once-great stores for spare Ferraris or Learjets past their expiry date. Our captains of industry are fragile and need our support. Viscount Wal-Mart of Somerfield alone maintains a vast harem of mistresses, each of whom requires necessary breast augmentation surgery to survive: please, donate as many millions as you can spare. Lines are open until just before you leave work, when they'll shut arbitrarily so that you have to go shopping first thing in the morning.

With every donation of £100 or more we'll send you this FREE GIFT of a stylish clubcard point! Call now!

So they add some water. I can live with this. Recently, though, they got carried away. Now there's so much water that, when it leaches out of the bacon, it fills up the frying pan. Bacon fully immersed in water doesn't sizzle any more, it simmers. There's a pathetic bubbling noise while the meat curls up and goes exactly the wrong shade of pink and, more importantly, ceases to be bacon.

Boiled bacon is such a horrible, 19th-century slum housing dish. It's what the Cratchits would eat before goin down t'pit. It's what you eat if you can only buy whatever bit of the pig nobody else wanted, and also you never learned to cook because your mother died of typhoid when you were seven. I demand Maillard reactions with my bacon, and for that the pan has to be dry.

So I've developed a habit of pouring out all the water half-way through cooking—trying not to drop the bacon in the sink in the process—and, as a result, the stuff actually starts to sizzle again. By adding water the supermarket people have achieved the opposite of their goal.

That's assuming that their goal was to make it sizzle in the first place. Their actual goal is to take cheap pig-flavoured slush of the sort that ought to be sold (if at all) in bottles, call it bacon, and sell it at three quid a pack. This is understood, but at some point they abandoned any pretence that they were doing it for our benefit. I wouldn't mind the lying so much if it wasn't so brazen.

Don't get me started on the fact that the bottom rasher of every pack is half as thick as all the others. Somebody, somewhere, specifically designed the bacon slicer to do that. Great job, Bacon Slicer Engineer Dude. Sleep well. One day I will find you.

All that said, my ragu recipe specifically calls for cheap shitty supermarket bacon, because I drain off the salty pork-infused liquid and use it at a later stage. My bacon, pepper and pig-slush bolognese is a thing of beauty. I'd like to see Jamie Oliver the Mockney Prat put a positive spin on that.

All of which has made me crave proper bacon. And the Friendly Local Butcher waved at me when I was passing the shop the other day (I wasn't even wearing the cloak at the time, which is what makes this stand out, since I suspect it's often the cloak that gets noticed rather than the handsome young dude inside). Must be a sign.

I am, of course, avoiding the bloody football as much as possible, but I've still managed to hear about the great vuvuzela debate. They're horn things that make a noise, and some people have been complaining that the noise is distracting them when they're trying to watch the match. Because everyone knows how much you need to concentrate on the little men running around on the field. It's a tough job when you're a football supporter and therefore your entire cranium is filled with pus and luncheon meats.

Some football fans. Are complaining. About some other football fans. Making noise.

The irony is killing me.

Where can I buy me a vuvuzela? I shall stalk the streets of Edinburgh on Saturday nights, the Cloaked Avenger. Noisy bastards shall flee at the sound of my terrifying death-honk.

Not to mention the galactic logical disconnect involved in holding a World Cup in South Africa and then being surprised when South African fans act in a South African manner. The fact that people are whining about this demonstrates exactly the intellectual capacity of the average football supporter.

Three days down. How long is a World Cup, and when can I come out of hiding?