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Sunday Breakfast Lunch Mixed Bag

Blinded by Science, Civil liberties, Culture, Funny, Kittens!, Video, War on Iraq, War on Terror
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A selection of interesting, silly and disturbing things to look at with your Sunday morning breakfast: afternoon repast:

Wow, so much we still don’t know.A new form of life has been found in Arctic waters. How many other of these unknown new forms have we already destroyed inadvertently?

How’s that democracy-spreadin’ goin’, guys? The FBI says laxity in recruiting means gangs are joining the military and may spread US gang culture worldwide. A bit late to be worrying about that surely?

How happy is your country? Check the World Happiness Map

Video: how the US Army is selling reenlistment to the troops in Iraq

“All you ever wanted or needed to know about kitten-huffing.

Health warning: mass kitten- huffing may be 'armful.

My first thought on reading this is oooh, ooh I want one – the pen that remembers what you’ve written:

I left CES with around 20 free pens. I went a little crazy with it. “Hmm, yes, that’s very interesting…eh, do you have any pens?” I’m thinking of starting a pen blog where every entry is scanned in after being written with the pen I’m talking about. People could send in their unusual pens from around the world for review. I’d call it “Pengadget.” One for a rainy day I suppose. The best pen I saw at the show was not for walking away with. The Wowpen Memo requires the user to clip a little device to the top of any sheet of paper of any size. The writer then does their thing, taking notes, sketching, whatever. Once done, the little clip device plugs into the USB port of your computer, where it transfers all your notes and other doodlings to your PC, ready to be viewed onscreen. I think it uses a technology called “magic.” You can even convert your notes to text providing you have handwriting recognition software.

But think what a boon to ‘law enforcement’ iit could be… perhaps not, then. Not that the innocent have anything to fear from the police. Heaven forbid.

The stairway to cat heaven.

Remember the orange Bavaria beer pants that all the cloggies were wearing at the World Cup? Wel, they continue to turn up in some unlikely places.

Scrappy Chinese manufacturer, Wang Ming, saw an opportunity where others saw a crisis and pressed the excess pants into service as props in a baffling looking board game named Smack The Lion.

I dread to think what the rules of that board game are. Oo-er, missus.

Eat your bacon or sausage sandwich before you read this.

The official hairstyle of the ’08 Presidential Election

China – what’s more important to the Chinese population, democracy or stabilty? ( h/t Blood & Treasure)

Video: an octopus in a maze

Whiter than white: the utra-brite of beetles.

Ultra-brite beetle

Bread, Racists & Circuses

bigotry, Culture, Manufacturing consent, Media, Race, Video
Published on 2 Comments on Bread, Racists & Circuses

I can’t get Channel 4 so haven’t seen for myself what this racism on Celebrity Big Brother row is about. So I had a little dig at YouTube and found this video of Jade Goody asking Jermaine Jackson (yes, that Jermaine Jackson) whether or not he is black and if so, how is it his brother is white. See for yourself and cringe:

I think that settles the question of whether Jade Goody is a racist or not, don’t you?

But leaving the jawdroppingly banal yet strangely fascinating onscreen behaviour aside, all the hooha in the world press over this, encouraged by Channel 4 and Endemol, is all just so much bread and circuses to pacify the proles. Look! Over there! Slebs! Behaving badly! I would not be at all surprised if the remaining three inmates, all of whom are hungry for fame, had come to some mutially beneficial arrangement with Endemol : how very odd that this happened just as rating slipped…

Lenin calls Bg Brother and other ‘choose your evictee’ type shows ‘placebo democracy’ and says they originate from the same political place as control orders and ASBOs, a way of allowing people an illusion of control so that they don’t notice the lack of real democracy.

That glass box, again. posted by lenin

The whole point of Endemol’s shit-fest on Channel 4 is to force together personalities so incompatible that normal human comity would be impossible, never mind solidarity under the stress of sensory deprivation and constant surveillance. Getting ‘celebrities’ on the show (three of whom are only ‘celebrities’ by dint of a previous connection with the show) therefore guarantees a daily hit of scandal, and therefore mega mega advertising revenues. Further, since C4 controls every condition obtaining in the show, and since their interventions are designed to be humiliating and bizarre, they can always confect a bit of controversy when phone-in rates slump and the tabloids find something else to gyrate over. And what is more, when the bad guy of the hour is evicted, a new balance is created and the recipient of much sympathy the day before can become the latest villain. The infinite malleability and masochism of the characters is one of the dramatic points on a desperately boring programme. So, rancour, humiliation, indignity and daily bullying are part of the mix, and it is entirely hypocritical for people who watch and like this show to complain about it.

[…]

can’t help but think of this whole ‘Neighbours from Hell’ drivel we get in the British press, in which readers are titillated and outraged with daily tales of torment from hideous people next-door or down the road. If it isn’t kids spitting and swearing, it’s old men flipping the bird, or trimming the hedges from over the fence. If it isn’t rowdy couples, it’s gyppos settling on the commons, and asylum seekers eloping from the back of a lorry. These are the people New Labour promises to “boot out” and leave to fend for themselves “in a crackdown on yobs”. These are the people who are expected to face ASBOs and “welfare disincentives” as part of the government’s Respect Action Plan. These are the families the government pledges to put in “Sin Bins”, a conceit that could quite easily have been supplied by Endemol. These are the people New Labour pledges to evict from the very country. New Labour’s campaign message – vote to evict the arsehole! Let them fend for themselves in the ghetto. The tabloids will feature pictures and descriptions of new arseholes every day and encourage readers to participate in a phone-in poll to demand eviction. A daily diorama of candidates for the Sin Bin will be the topic of quasi-anthropological inspection and curiosity, their fate to be decided by our placebo democracy..

There’s only one arsehole I want evicted and he’s sitting in No. 11 day-dreaming about his ‘legacy’ and ignoring the fuckups he’s created. Well, Tone, here’s your legacy in all her glorious ignorance and ill-educated spite. I give you Jade Goody, the ultimate product of Blair’s Britain:

Doesn’t she make you proud?

Read more: UK culture, UK politics, Racism, TV, Big Brother, Jade Goody, Jermaine Jackson

Linky, Linky

bigotry, Blogs, Culture, Food, Kittens!, Media, Race, UK politics, US politics, Video, War on Iraq, War on Terror
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Mineralia:

Why carbon offsetting is just as another money making scheme exploiting liberal guilt.

How does Bush define victory? It’s the oil, stupid:

Under the new American-drafted law, the Iraqi government will offer contractual concessions up to 30 years’ long to foreign companies, using a system known as a PSA (Production Sharing Agreement). In other words, American and other Western oil companies are being allowed to exploit Iraq’s current predicament and negotiate self-serving, one-sided oil PSA’s that will legally commit the entire country of Iraq for the next 30 years.

Animalia:

3 cat videos –

Hot cat on turtle action!

The cat that likes to floss

Just Say No! Cats and the demon weed

Vegetalia:

Professional chav Jade Goody’s racism gives a fading reality show a popularity injection and the nation something to talk about. (Pssst, don’t mention the war!)

These white women, behaving like bitchy schoolgirls in the playground, have reduced Ms Shetty to tears on several occasions, accusing her of wanting to be white, having facial stubble, being “a dog”, making their skin crawl, touching their food (“you don’t know where those hands have been”), and have signally failed to get her name right, calling her “the Indian” at one point.

They might not have been quite as motivated by group tyranny as Orwell described – that “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture . . . that seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” – but there seems no doubt that their pack behaviour was offensive to Ms Shetty and damaging to our desire to be seen as a tolerant nation. Remember the message: without intellect we are lost. Clips of those lumpen women are being broadcast round the world as typically British, voicing British sentiments; by default we are all cast in the same mould of molten ignorance; all reduced to the racist drone of a thousand pub conversations.

Marginalia:

Madison Guy has links to some of the best street fashion photoblogs on the web, courtesy Avedon’s comments section.

James Wolcott asks why are are British sex scandals so much more interesting than American ones? Short answer, for our politicians the illicitness is 75% of the fun and the danger of being caught adds more spice. American politicians do it from a feeling of entitlement rather than in the spirit of titillating adventure, so it’s more about the greedy consumption of a ‘luxury’ sexual product like high-class call-girls (or rough trade or kids as the case may be) than the eroticism and thrill of the chase. Though the erotic aspect falls down somewhat in light of the four-year liaison between former PM John Major and ex-health Minister Edwina Currie – “By the way, Edwina, that was a not inconsiderably satisfying orgasm”. Ewww.

Resolution? What New Year’s resolution? For your sweet tooth, here’s Fanny, a French patisserie chef who blogs in English at Foodbeam.

Read the recipes and patisserie reviews, drool over the pictures, and get baking. I made her Petits carrés au caramel et au chocolat, known to us commoners asmillionaires shortbread, last weekend using white chocolate ( because that’s what we had) and it was very, very rich and absolutely delicious.

Read more UK, Politics, Oil,IraqCats, Cake,Big Brother, Fashion,. Sex scandals.