The moving finger rants

I had an exam. It was a resit exam, second year artificial intelligence module 2Bh. I had done no revision, which was pretty common for me at the time. It was twenty years ago. It was a Tuesday. I was twenty-one years old and in some ways very stupid, not least of which was in my assumption that I could wing this one. The exam was at Adam House, a beautiful old Adamist neoclassical hall on the same street as my lab, and scheduled for 2pm. As I walked across the Meadows I listened to music on my Creative NOMAD Jukebox mp3 player, which had the size and form factor of a Sony Discman.

2pm UK time, when my exam started, is 9am in New York. The first plane hit the North Tower at 08:46.

The rule in exams is: no one leaves the hall in the first thirty minutes. The questions were all on generalized modus ponens and other tedious matters of formal logic. I'd taken a degree in artificial intelligence so that I could build the Terminator and this stuff was all far beneath me. I put in a few perfunctory answers and spent ten minutes watching the clock tick onwards to 09:30.

On the dot of 09:30, as I got up and left the hall with a flourish (I wasn't wearing cloaks then, but it was the early oughts and I had a fabulous swishy leather trenchcoat), I drew behind me a train of five or six other students who'd all been waiting for the same moment.

Met up with Dragal outside the exam hall. He'd been directly behind me during my flounce. (I wonder what he's up to these days?) We went to Starbucks on North Bridge for a chat and some sort of elaborate caramel frappuccino, and then dropped into the machine lab to catch up on email. Going to a specific physical location in order to connect to the internet was a thing in those days.

(For unrelated reasons, mostly to do with my then-burgeoning and now firmly-established anticorporate stance, I've never spent money in a Starbucks since that day.)

Facebook didn't exist then, nor did Dreamwidth, or even Livejournal. But I was on everything₂, an early attempt to invent the concept of the wiki that didn't ever really catch on. Logged-in users had a chatbox down in the lower right corner. (HTML frames!) As I surfed the nascent web, I became peripherally aware of comments going by like: As of 10:15 both towers are down, and I deduced that something might be happening. So I opened a new instance of Netscape Navigator for Solaris and directed it towards a popular news website.

Holy shit.

On the way back home across the Meadows I used SMS on my Nokia 8110 (which of course I'd bought because it was the one from THE MATRIX) to text my then-girlfriend^* (I wonder what she's doing these days?) and my father. I spoke to my father later on a voice call. The conversation mostly consisted of commentary regarding how much the scenes unfolding at the Pentagon resembled scenes from the current videogame Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2.

I turned the radio on when I got home, and left it on. I slept that night with a torch under my bed, because I didn't own a gun. We had no idea what was going to happen next, and it was what I had, and I didn't know what else to do.

The following day, 12th September 2001, the Telegraph ran an editorial stating that, since the attacks were obviously coordinated on the internet, the US military must immediately be allowed access to every communication that had crossed it, just in case it might be relevant; also, that any ISP that failed to comply should be immediately targeted by Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Some things haven't changed.

I still have no idea what generalized modus ponens is.

And Starbucks still sucks.

There's plenty of scope in current events for a constructive and far-reaching debate about cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation, but naturally I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about how much of a dickhead Jamie Oliver is.

TL;DR: it's a lot.

It's fair enough to say that all cuisine is stolen from somewhere. We've been cooking for at least 1.8 million years and pretty much everything has been done before by someone somewhere. This is especially true in GB, where our native produce consists entirely of watercress and mammoth meat with absolutely everything else having been imported from somewhere. Apples come from China, dormice came over with the Romans, fish & chips are Jewish. There's no such thing as authentic British cuisine, and we like it that way. The cultural appropriation is the bit that makes it delicious.

There are considerations to bear in mind, though. Nobody seems to mind cultural appropriation when it's done with a modicum of respect for the source culture, and/or if it's done well, and that's what's lacking on this occasion.

This latest flap involving the fat-tongued mockney twat is amusing precisely because it's so clear-cut. Jamie's punchy jerk rice is not jerk, and it's barely even rice. Jerk is a meat marinade based on citrus juice, allspice, and scotch bonnets, none of which appear in this travesty. What Jamie has done, as is his wont, is whack a bit of this in and a slosh of that, and probably a luvverly good glug of olive oil because it's Jamie and he can't help himself, all without the remotest concern for the people he's ripping off. And then he calls it jerk not out of any respect for the culture that served as his inspiration, but because putting words on things sells units.

Crucially, apparently the result is disgusting, because amongst all of his myriad other faults, Jamie is a terrible cook.

As we all know, he's not only a terrible cook but also a terrible human being. This is clearly evidenced by every action he has ever taken in his worthless life, not least the smug, sanctimonious attitude, the arrogance, the hypocrisy, the poverty-shaming, the fat-shaming, and the constant moral crusades against anyone who's insufficiently upper-middle-class for his Winchester-addled tastes. But the specific example of his odious nature which is most pertinent right now is his cluelessness. Faced with the prospect that he might have made a teensy social misstep, backed with the weight of plenty of evidence and the outrage of the British Afro-Caribbean community, Jamie's only response is to double down, and call his detractors mad. So now we can add mental-health-shaming to the list.

Far be it from me to encourage Britons of Jamaican origin to take up the torches and pitchforks and show Jamie what a real barbecue looks like, from the inside. But if you all would choose to do so, I'd consider it an added bonus.

If like me, this whole controversy has just left you craving proper jerk, the Irish Times has a recipe.

Across the nation, every beloved comedian, treasured thespian, and talented musician tentatively opens door #1 on their festive calendar, hands all a-tremble. Can they last through to calendar's end?

It was a choice what was behind that door: a choice between a miniature chocolate and the Reaper Himself. Anxiously collapse that waveform. The chocolate behind door #1 is, however, an advent calendar chocolate, and therefore somehow still manages to be disappointing.

2016 is 91.667% done with, folks. Let's at least try to make it with [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] still intact. Names removed, because at this stage I don't want to tempt fate.

I suddenly find myself unable to continue ignoring the royal wedding. It's got Daleks in it.

A royal wedding street party with a difference will see a Dalek serve up trays of drinks and snacks to guests on Friday - presumably with cries of 'Extermi-Cake'.

More likely, WOULD YOU CARE FOR A PLAS-TIC CUP OF LUKE-WARM CHE-RRY-ADE. Although, the more I think about it, the more this starts to make sense. What better way to celebrate a great British institution than with a terrifying symbol of imperialistic aggression? Particularly, one that some bloke from the Home Counties has spent a week painting red, white and blue?

I am no stranger to those odd periods of mass hysteria that we're all subjected to on occasion. When Diana died I bought Candle in the Wind twice. I saw Titanic three times in the cinema (and each time, because it is a four-hour-long behemoth, I had to go to the loo just before Kate Winslet gets nekkid.) We're all allowed to get emotional beyond the bounds of reason now and then, especially if we blog self-deprecatingly about it years later. But this one just seems supremely pointless. Two people I don't care about are performing a ceremony I don't care about. I'm not invited. I don't get any of the cake. I am unsure what, as a nation, we all gain by waving flags to solemnize the fact that, according to a book most of us haven't read, two young people are now permitted to fuck.

I shall be at work tomorrow. Although I might take the opportunity to have an excuse to rewatch The Princess Bride.

Apparently Chris Morris says that attempting to create controversy is one of the most boring things you can do. It seems odd, then, that he never sits down and thinks: for my next project, I'll write about the droll antics of a cartoon dog. Instead, for his first feature film, he's taken on the popular subjects of Islamic extremism and suicide bombing. A rollicking good time is guaranteed for all.

Morris is doubtless going to receive unending flak from the same people who spectacularly missed the point of Paedogeddon by claiming that it was making light of a taboo topic. But terrorism is comedy and has been for some years now. Remember the Glasgow Airport attacks? Two idiots drove their car into a bollard, a wee jakey baggage-handler having a fag break kicked them in the nutsacks, and they fell over. While on fire. That's not terrorism, that's slapstick. With a provenance like that, a film like Four Lions can't fail to have comedy value. But is it good satire?

It doesn't have to be. Morris' satire is uncompromising and uncomfortable; it goes beyond amusing into disturbing when he depicts a bunch of bizarrely stupid people, then turns the mirror around and says, That's You, That Is. You squirm in your seat and maybe come away with a different view of the world, but you don't laugh. This is why I've always preferred The Day Today to Brass Eye; it's sillier, and it bites less. No one can deny that Morris' satire bites with the viciousness of the deadliest shark, but you don't always want to settle down and watch a fun comedy only to find, halfway through, that your arm's hanging off.

So in tackling the very current and pertinent subject of Islamic terrorism, Morris has wisely chosen to use it only as a setting. This isn't a film about terrorism, it's a film about dysfunctional group dynamics. The characters are jihadists, but they might as well be a five-a-side football club or a scout group engaged in some crazy caper. Actually, thinking about it, they might as well be The Young Ones. There's the bossy one, the thick one, the cool one, and the slightly-saner one. As they bumble and bicker their way through doctrinal disputes and IED manufacture, we get to see some wonderfully-drawn character moments and learn convoluted new insults amongst the immensely quotable dialogue.

The plot follows our eponymous Lions through the tribulations of martyrdom: building suicide bombs, trial runs, selecting targets, and avoiding detection. Everything is presented in such a straightforward way that when they finally start to execute their plan in the final reel, it comes as a jarring shift in tone. The awkward juxtaposition of domestic comedy with real horror perfectly mirrors the characters' own feelings towards the end of the story, and thus was probably intentional on the part of the filmmakers. Morris may not always be subtle, but he knows his craft.

There's some incredibly effective use of hand-held camerawork to create an immersive feel, and not in the usual, tired manner in which they lazily emulate the fly-on-the-wall documentary. Since the characters spend half of the film pointing cameras at each other, when your point of view wobbles it simply means that you're standing in the living room with them, a fifth uncredited co-conspirator with another camcorder. The performances are genuine and natural: the characters are just blokes who happen to be making explosives on their allotment.

If anything, that's the message of the film. Terrorists are human beings, just like you: which means that, just like you, they're incompetent, clueless, and foolish, vainly stumbling through life in a harebrained struggle to find some sense to make of it all, an attempt that's ultimately doomed to be an utter failure. Most of the kneejerk criticism from the tabloids is going to be about the fact that the film portrays terrorists in a sympathetic light, but what it's actually doing is portraying people with bitter, nihilistic cynicism, in a heartwarming sort of way.

The climactic scenes are set at a major public event such as that where terrorism might conceivably take place (no spoilers here). They feel like a bit of a copout, as if it's an attempt to cram some extra humour into the film by having everybody in silly costumes at the end. If so, it's a wasted effort: the film is hilarious without help. I laughed a lot. And because it wouldn't be a Chris Morris production unless it made me feel horrendously uncomfortable in some way or other, I laughed a lot, realised with horror what nightmarish events I was laughing at, and then started to laugh at that instead.

It's a very British film. I think it's a very important film, but only in an incidental way. Mostly it's a film with brilliant characterization. If it horrifies us then it's because we find ourselves relating to and engaging with monsters, but we did that in Frankenstein, Downfall, and Dr Strangelove. Sometimes it's good to stare into the abyss, and to realise that the abyss is pathetic.

Just like you.