Sometimes the world can see us in a way that’s different than who we are

Ok, so I’m trying to tidy up my draft posts, and this is a film review I wrote a few weeks ago.  It was going to be part of a longer post (basically saying how much I had enjoyed my first alcoholic Saturday night in years, even though it had involved watching a crappy pre-teen musical), but the second part didn’t flow, and I abandoned it.  Still, the review works on its own, I think:

Not a good time to be a gay American

On Monday, residents in the state of Maine were voting on a referendum motion to overturn a law that had extended marriage rights to same-sex couples.  The motion carried – I haven’t been able to find the full results, but to be fair, I didn’t look very hard once I discovered that the ‘No on 1’ campaign (i.e. the people supporting gay marriage) had conceded.  This is, clearly, depressing.  So far, referenda to outlaw same-sex marriage have been held in 31 states, and every time the supporters of gay marriage have lost.  Last November, California – one of the most liberal states in the Union – voted to overturn gay marriage.  This November, Maine – in liberal New England – has voted to do the same.  The unpopularity of gay marriage in ‘red-neck’ states isn’t surprising, but the unpopularity in liberal heartlands is truly bizarre.

It hurts, as well, that in both California and Maine, the referendum was not a pre-emptive strike to prevent gay marriage being enacted, but a decision to overturn a law that was already in place.  People have got married, residents of California and Maine had seen the joy and happiness when people like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were finally able to marry after 55 years together – and have then gone out and voted to take that opportunity away.  This isn’t just bigotry, it’s spite.

If they can’t get you coming, they’ll get you going

I’ve been doing some reading about personality disorders, and I came across the contribution of one Harry Guntrip to definitions of the schizoid personality type.  There are nine alleged characteristics of this personality type which Guntrip pulled out of his arse described, one of which is withdrawnness:

Meanwhile, in real life

I don’t really like writing about things that affect my real life on this blog, as you will have gathered.  I would like to give the impression that I am a disembodied intellect drifting high above the surface of the planet, occasionally focussing on some aspect of the scene below, but I am not, and real things keep happening.

Old Mr Buffett sat on a tuffet…

I was watching TV on Monday night, and I heard a man say, about Wall Street bankers and financiers, something like this (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

This idea that the class of people who move money around are somehow special, and deserve special treatment – well, it’s getting pretty far away from where we should be, I think.

And about the super-rich he said this (again, I’m paraphrasing from memory):

The super-rich aren’t as smart as they’d like to think they are.  They like to think they did it all themselves, they made all their money because of their own efforts, but they wouldn’t have made that much if they’d been in Bangladesh, or somewhere.  The society had a lot to do with it.  And that’s why I believe we need a taxation system, and a system of personal ethics, that says that most of that money has to go back to the society, to help the people who got a short straw in life.

Admirable sentiments, I think.  But who said it?  A trade-unionist?  A left-leaning academic?  Someone who’s just had their house repossessed?  Someone who can’t afford healthcare?  A successful businessman who’s just seen his business fold because the bank wouldn’t lend him the money to buy a new van?

Did you know this about the postal strike?

Because I didn’t.

In all the talk about the postal strikes, we’ve been hearing a lot that the Royal Mail is dying.  No-one sends letters anymore, we’re told, they use email instead.  It’s a persuasive argument, because it seems intuitively correct – I send quite a few emails, and I almost never write a letter.  But then again, if I stop to think, I never really did write letters.  Pretty much the only times I used to use the Royal Mail were for sending out christmas cards and returning forms.  These days I use the Royal Mail for sending out christmas cards and returning forms.  I would guess the same is true for an awful lot of people.

Of course, there have been other changes – 15 years ago if I was looking for a job I might have sent out several letters on spec, whereas these days I’d send emails instead.  Also, lots of people have opted to have their utility bills and bank statements delivered to them online, rather than through the post.  (Although I haven’t – if something goes wrong with my bank account, I want to know that I have the proof of it in hardcopy, and in my possession, not in easy-to-alter virtual form on a server belonging to the company I’m in dispute with.)  But at the same time there have been other changes in the opposite direction – think of the volume of books and CDs sent out by Amazon and the like, not to mention the DVDs flying backwards and forwards thanks to companies like LoveFilm.  I’m also pretty sure I get a lot more junk mail than I used to.

Still, the Royal Mail tell us that their official figures show a year-on-year reduction in mail volume, and they must know what they’re talking about, surely?  Well, I don’t know about you, but I had naively assumed that the way that Royal Mail knew the volume was reducing was by counting the number of letters they were delivering, but it turns out that’s not been their approach at all:

Help! I’m an idiot

Picture the scene.  It was early evening, and I was, as is my wont, footling around on my computer.  I decided I would like to download and install some new software that would allow me to bulk-grab images from websites.  Er… that’s websites with addresses like lookattheprettyrainbows.com, obviously.  What sort of a pervert do you take me for?  Oh, yeah, right…

So anyway, I had a quick google to see if such software existed, and it did.  I found one particular package that mentioned the word ‘free’ in practically every sentence: ‘free download’; ‘free to use’; ‘no usage restrictions’; and so on.  I downloaded it in preference to other alternatives, mainly because it made a point of being able to grab images from ImageBam galleries, which I knew, from reading a couple of forum posts that cropped up on my google search, not all bulk-image grabbers can handle.  (ImageBam is a free image-hosting service, and it’s very popular with people who run blogs that gather together pictures of…er – what was I pretending I was looking at again? oh, yeah – rainbows.)

I downloaded the software.  It was free, as promised.  I installed the software.  It was free, as promised.  I launched the software and pointed it at a gallery.  It told me it could see the pictures, and it even automatically spotted the difference between the thumbnails (which I wouldn’t have wanted to download – you can’t see the…er…colour gradations properly on a small picture) and the full-size linked images.  I clicked on download.  It asked me to specify a folder to download the images into.  It asked me if I wanted to re-name the images as they were downloaded, or if I just wanted to add some particular characters at the start of the filename.  This was a very useful feature, I thought.  The gallery had lots of pictures of the same attractive 22-year-old…uh…rainbow, and I was quite taken with the idea of being able to have all the images delivered into a specified folder and renamed so that instead of just being labelled ‘001, 002, 003, etc’, as they were on the site, they would be labelled ‘Eric 001, etc’.  (What, you don’t give pet names to your favourite rainbows?  You’re weird.)

I clicked ok, and momentarily thought everything was going swimmingly.  Then a dialog box happened:

How low can you stoop?

As you may have heard, Jan Moir, a columnist for the Daily Mail, wrote a vile, hate-filled column ladling serves-him-right spite all over the (at the time) unburied coffin of Stephen Gately.  I was going to do a take-down of the column itself, but many, many people have beaten me to the punch, so there seems little point.  I especially recommend Charlie Brooker’s piece in The Guardian, which says everything I would have wanted to, but with the added bonus of humour, a quality I would probably have struggled to include.

I also recommend, by the way, that you follow the advice he offers at the close of his article about complaining to the Press Complaints Commission.  As he points out, the Mail has been positively unstinting in its desire to encourage outraged readers to complain en masse every time a broadcaster coughs, so it seems only fair to treat them in the same way.  Which is the worse failing, after all: to make humorous references to the sexual activities of a man’s granddaughter on his answerphone; or to insinuate that a grieving mother is deliberately ‘spinning’ the facts of her son’s death?

This is the thing, you see.  If you write for a newspaper that regularly uses its privileged position to whip up public mobs, you can’t then complain about people on twitter ‘orchestrating’ a ‘campaign’ to target you and the commercial interests of the paper you work for.  It’s like the old saying has it – live by the sword, die by the sword.  Not, of course, that this has stopped Ms Moir from attempting to complain in these terms, or from producing a statement which seeks to justify her actions.  I have taken the decision not to reproduce the whole of her statement – parts of it seem to me to be almost as vile and hate-mongering as the original article it is attempting to defend – but it is available if you follow the link.  Nonetheless, there are a number of aspects of the piece that I feel compelled to comment on.

200 posts

…that’s nearly enough for a fence!

Yes, loyal blog-readers, this is my 200^th post.  I know, it feels like I’ve been wittering on for longer than that to me as well.  I don’t want to say a huge amount about this – these kinds of posts can end up being very narcissistic, I think – but these are a few of my thoughts on the subject, some of which may actually make sense.

41 semi-sentences

Well, I haven’t done a meme for a while, so I thought I’d give it a go.  Eroswings (from whose blog, Eros Den, I’ve stolen this idea) answers this much better than me, so be sure to go and check it out.  The basic idea of this meme is that there is a sequence of 41 beginnings of sentences, which you then have to complete in any way you want.  If you fancy having a crack at it, you should feel free.  (Oh, and the bits of the sentences in red come with the meme, while the bits in black are my completions – but I would guess you could have worked that out for yourselves.)

Ok, let’s go.