FromThe Friday Thing:
// Fact: We couldn't be arsed to write anything about Stephen Byers this week. It's all already been said. And we used the headline 'Bye Bye Byers' months ago. //
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May 2002 Archives
What is this country coming to when it's only old gits like us (no, he's no relation) who can be bothered to utter a voice of dissent every now and then?
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Here you go, Alec.
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but I'm glad someone's fighting it. You can read here about a new attempt to keep the government's nose out of our beeswax.
It seems ironic after watching Mark Thomas trying to stick his nose (our nose?) into the government's beeswax last night. My favourite bit was when he asked an MoD policewoman where the Burlington Bunker was. She said that there was no such thing, that was just a phrase that gets 'bandied about'. It turned out that there was no such thing as the 'Burlington bunker' but there was a complex of underground tunnels and things that they don't refer to by that oft-bandied phrase. She did have a sense of humour about it all, though.
btw, does anyone know the story behind the sign we saw out in Essex which points the way to the Secret Nuclear Bunker? It's just one more option on a big green roundabout directions sign.
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Well, it works. The little [b]s that (some of) you (might) see after links are links to blogdex. When you click on a little [b] it takes you to a list of sites which also link to the site I'm linking to. If you want little [b]s too, you can find out how to get some at Metalinker
There are two reasons you might not be seeing the little [b]s:
a) your browser can't cope
b) I've temporarily disabled them 'for technical reasons'
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The London Design Collective are the proud creators of guimp: the world's smallest website. It's a must-visit. My favourite page is pong Sorry, dug, it's using Flash - but in a good way...
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Well, at least the NME liked Eminem's album. Grownup reviewers seem to think he's gone downhill, so I'm kind of pleased that someone likes it. The NME reviewer's ingredients list is:
This album was made from:
Legal difficulties: 36% Misogynous rage: 30% Southern-style bounce: 22% Post-September 11 politics: 15% Aerosmith samples: 5% Tender lullabies: 2%
They certainly got it right when they reviewed the Slim Shady LP. Their verdict:
If you're retarded, stoned or 12, you're going to absolutely love it.
I must admit, one of the best things about eminem is that you can really irritate 12-year-old boys by telling them how much you like him.
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And meanwhile, Dug's mum and dad are cruising off the coast of Norway. They phone us every now and then to see if there's any news. We have their shore-to-ship number so we can pass anything on.
Hope Ruth's coping with the tension. When we finally gave birth, Ruth was so anxious she passed out in the hospital and spent the best part of a day in casualty.
Nicki has been in labour since Monday morning, which means, of course, that Dug has been in co-labour since then.
We're all obsessively checking Dug's blog to keep up with developments.
It's the kind of obsessive state that the phrase "beside yourself" is made for. There's part of me here, there and wherever and part of me permanently thinking about D&N and wondering how it's going for them.
As well as thinking of them, it also brings back the first time Ohna and I went through the giving birth thing. And it's also got me thinking about other people and their birth experiences (Peter and Marina, Hans and Villy, etc. etc.)
They are going to be two very tired parents by the time they get home to start dealing with those sleepless nights ...
Just read this:
which told me about this:
and also about this:
The metalinker idea is really cool. Looking forward to seeing how well it works.
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In raindance writers' lab: write + sell the hot screenplay, which is a pretty good book about how to write and sell the hot screenplay (exactly what it says on the tin), Elliot Grove says:
Reservoir Dogs had a very different meaning for us farmboys growing up in America. You city slickers, or Europeans, probably thought that this title was a cutesy arty title. And it is. But to me it had a different meaning which summed up the movie in two words.
As a kid we were told never to go into a dry reservoir. They did a lot of open quarry mining for gravel near where I grew up. There were two types of quarries - some quarries would hit a spring and fill up with water. We used to dive off the sides of these in the summer. Other quarries were dry quarries. There would just be a puddle in the bottom after a rain shower. Dogs and rats would fall down into the quarry, and be unable to get up. The only way they could survive was by eating each other. And every summer there would be a sad story about some kid who went down into a dry quarry and was ripped to shreds. Knowing that now, isn't that the story of Reservoir Dogs?
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Just watched Crimson Tide on the advice of Lawrence, who's been helping me with a radio play what I wrote. Apparently, Quentin Tarantino helped with the dialogue, 'spicing up' the characters with such things as (surprise) references to popular culture. It worked. Some of the best moments were when Denzel Washington explained things to his crew by referring to Star Trek, the Silver Surfer and so on.
But the real lesson for aspiring screenwriters is the way they generate and handle the central conflict between the Captain (Gene Hackman) and his 'XO', i.e. Executive Officer (Denzel Washington). Both of them have around the same amount of irritating traits and both make around the same number of 'wrong' decisions (that's wrong if you want to be friends, but right if you want to be the subject of a screenplay). So you can see both sides of the argument, and feel involved by being a bit annoyed by each of them.
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PS You can tell the acting was pretty good because it's one of the few occasions where Gene Hackman's performance doesn't stand out as miles better than the rest of the cast.
PPS Kirby's Silver Surfer rules ;-)
PPPS As an experiment, picture Denzel Washington acting. Do you see what I see? We have a theory that he's one of a group of actors with a trademark expression. With Denzel, it's that kind of wide-eyed, suppressed anger look. I wonder if he's insured it?
PPPPS Do you want to know why Reservoir Dogs is called Reservoir Dogs? I'll tell you tomorrow.
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Had to get this headline in before one of the papers uses it.
Could this be the most overdue event ever? Sorry, Nicki, not sure how well you're doing in this competition at the moment ;-)
I think that Byers's 'I have made mistakes' could be the greatest understatement I've ever heard.
Wonder how long Blunkett will survive?
Just re-viewed the Horizon documentary about the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language. It's a fascinating story, about how kids in Nicaragua invented a new language. It happened after the Sandinistas brought deaf kids together for education after the revolution. Before the revolution, education was less of a priority and deaf folk were fairly isolated, communicating with basic gestures. When they were brought together, they communicated through an ad hoc gesture system, like a pidgin language. The younger kids quickly developed a full language based on these gestures. This is what linguists call 'creolisation'. The linguist who did most of the work on this is Judy Kegl, from the University of Southern Maine. Here is an article about it all (with links to other good sites).
What's really amazing, though, is that it seems pretty much all kids invent their first language rather than just learning the language of the grownups around them. Read about it here
There are some really good web resources on sign language.
This is a good resource for British Sign Language (BSL): http://www.british-sign.co.uk
This is a good one for American Sign Language (ASL): http://commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/aslweb
And this is just a good one: http://www.handspeak.com
Signstream ™ is a really good use of web technology. It's a database for showing annotated videos of signing: http://www.bu.edu/asllrp/SignStream
I could go on, but the last thing I'll tell you about for now is a really good monthly magazine for linguists, called Glot International: http://www.glotinternational.com/geninfo.htm
A recent issue of glot contained this fascinating article (in pdf format) by Neil Smith: Singing By The Dead
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Message from John:
This is fun.
It is fun, but what do they think they're doing with the name 'pumpernickle'? I mean, surely pumpernickle own the mis-spelled version, don't they?
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Sorry, didn't mean to suggest nobody doesn't know nothing about language and the brain. Just that the full story is still quite a long way off.
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Another good piece by Ben Hammersley in the Guardian yesterday. Swarm intelligence refers to the collective intelligence of a group of, say, ants as opposed to the individual lack of intelligence in one ant, an idea that's being used more and more in developing web and other technology. It's one of those ideas that's really obvious after someone's pointed it out to you and has a lot in common with connectionism
One thing that interests me about this kind of thing is the gap that still remains between the activity of the ants/neurons/whatever at brain level and whatever's going on at mind level. Us linguistics folk tend to operate at mind level while assuming that one day we'll explain how it all relates to brain level. But so far, we don't really know exactly how to connect the two.
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For those of you still struggling, the coded message in the earlier posting is:
Spooks is fun
I'm enjoying this so much that:
I might be some time
If you have a devious mind, and you want to try more puzzles like this, you could try:
If you play this one, you won't save the world but you might end up working for her majesty's government
Another option is to visit:
If you play this one, you might save the world, but maybe that's all (and maybe that's not enough?)...
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To help you decode the last message, here's a clue:
If I'd wanted to spell my name in this code, it would have come out as: aaaaa ;-)
If you're interested in cryptography at all, the best book on the subject is The Code Book by Simon Singh.
A good site for introducing cryptography (aimed at kids but I like playing with it) is:
If you find any of it confusing, I'd be happy to pass on any tips I can.
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I'm enjoying this so much that:
h exvjs tt hdod ixod
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I've finally managed to have a look at thameshouse, where a new game has begun based on the tv series Spooks.
It's very much my kind of game, since it's based on cryptic puzzles and deviousness rather than just killing people or taking free kicks (which seems to be the latest pre-world cup craze).
I'm off to have a look.
Will report back later (possibly in code)
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Just saw this in the Guardian:
The third degree
At last hard-pressed modern languages departments have cause to cheer. Last week an impressive role model appeared to aid student recruitment in the shape of Margaret MacDonald, the enterprising madam running a massive vice-ring with the aid of a few mobile phones, a website - and fluency in six languages. A graduate of the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University) and Reims management school, she impressed the arresting Paris police with her business and linguistic ability. "Whenever she is in Paris she goes to evening classes at the Sorbonne to perfect her Greek, Japanese and Arabic," a source told the Guardian. Enormous sums are believed to lie in her offshore bank accounts. Expect to see language courses surprisingly popular during Clearing this summer.
What is it about languages and linguistics? God know, VCs don't think they're sexy...
(VCs = the most appropriately named "Vice-Chancellors")
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Yes, I know it's published by Jonathan Cape in the UK. And yes, I know that you can get it for less than 18 pounds if you go to amazon (£14.40 + p&p, to be precise, and 23 pence more if you prefer a used copy)
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It has been pointed out that the last posting might have been a bit cruel, raising expectations which were destined never to cease to not fail to be unfulfilled. Sorry, I'm afraid Jimmy Corrigan is not free. It costs eighteen pounds.
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Fantagraphics are the publishers of the truly magnificent Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth by Chris Ware (read it if you haven't already):
They've also made this available free:
You have to download it one page at a time and there are 24 of them, but it's pretty good. It's called Blank State and it's by Alex Fellows.
I particularly liked the response to the chain email which you can find on page 6 (be warned that it contains rude words, though)
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They're mad. I don't understand but I truly admire the project that the Textarc people are working on. I don't know how to summarise it properly, but it's kind of like a computer reading a book and writing it on screen in a big circle with concordancing, representations of associations, and stuff like that appearing as it goes. It's wonderful, even though I'm not sure what or why it is.
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Here's the start of a recently written essay (thanks to Fabio for showing it to me):
Postcultural objectivism and modernism
John Y. Wilson
Department of Politics, University of California
1. Dialectic desublimation and the precultural paradigm of expression
The characteristic theme of the works of Rushdie is the role of the participant as writer. It could be said that if capitalist discourse holds, the works of Rushdie are an example of self-fulfilling nationalism.
The primary theme of Sargeant's1 analysis of postcultural objectivism is not conceptualism per se, but preconceptualism. Therefore, Lyotard uses the term 'postcultural theory' to denote the role of the artist as participant.
What do you think? Not bad, considering it was randomly generated by the Postmodern generator using the Dada Engine
It's simple but effective. They also do other genres. Adolescent poetry is worth a look.
It reminds me of the Social Text Affair where the physicist Alan Sokal decided to run an experiment to explore the question:
Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?
No doubt you'll be shocked to discover that the answer turned out to be yes. Sokal's account of what he did is here
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The nme just reviewed the new album by Hundred Reasons (a website that needs some work, imho, but they are relaunching on the 20th, so we'll see). You can read the review here. Apparently, it's punk. They mention the well-known truism that punk rock is ours, it owes us a living, and the closing comment is:
Here's what they can do with five-and-a-half chords and a will of iron - now it's your turn
I'm sorry, but if you want to do punk rock, that's at least two-and-a-half chords too many B-)
I haven't heard the record but I did see Hundred Reasons live and would thoroughly recommend them. They're long, they're thin, they're loud. What more could you want?
I thought I might post a gratuitous flag to complement Rem Koolhaas's design (see earlier posting) so I looked up this old Guardian article about new designs for the Union Jack. If you visit this site, you'll see what professional designers came up with, and you can link to suggestions from ordinary folk. One of the ordinary folk, Justin Ginetti, sent the above. He deserves some credit for the flag, but he should probably be sent off to 'Pseuds' Corner' or the Plain English campaign for coming up with this comment on his work:
This "flag" image is art object cum ironic nationalist symbol. On the one hand, the vertical lines recall the work of Barnett Newman; they also call to mind those ubiquitous bar codes and the bands of genes on chromosomes. The red and blue "bars" also suggest prison bars reflecting the different cultural tolerances/attitudes about nationalist or imperial agendas. The white spaces in between the red and blue bars explicitly signify the unbalanced and tenuous status of nationalist icons. I think the cumulative effect of the image tends to destabilise the hegemonic weight of tradition - even inevitability - which the Union Jack conjures up in this post-colonial era. This image is a veritable reordering of that which was.
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dug just told me about 
What a good idea B-)
You must know about The Friday Thing In case you don't, it's a weekly email which you pay ten pounds a year to receive. I've been finding that it gives me more than my money's worth, even though I might not recommend it to my more faint-hearted friends.
Anyway, following up our recent discussion inspired by David Blunkett's linguistic shamelessness, here is what tft have to say about a new development in the linguistic behaviour of a certain resident of SW1:
'CHANGE IS THE ONLY CONSTANT' SHOCKER
This week the Queen said: 'Change has become a constant. Managing it has become an expanding discipline.'
Apart from the sheer vacuity of the statement, it's a sign that management speak has permeated into every bastion of life. Once the preserve of, er, management, management speak can now be found in schools, the army and even the monarchy.
Where management speak originates from is unclear. The language is taken from other areas of life - but primarily the military and scientific worlds, see 'strategy' and 'paradigm shift'. Some of it is just misappropriated ('synergy', 'rationalise' etc.) and some of it is simply made up ('downsizing', 'pro-active' etc.)
Given that management speak first became prevalent in the US, it seems likely it originated in business schools there, and has gradually migrated to the UK. As with all jargon, management speak is fundamentally a way of making its speaker sound more knowledgeable, and privy to some expert information. Its other purpose is to obscure meaning. In business, the phrase 'manufacturing facility', or some variant, has largely replaced the word 'factory'. Why?
What's misguided about this banal attempt at deception is that it's so transparent. Whether you call it a facility or a factory, if you go inside a noisy, dirty factory/facility full of greasy machine tools and heavy machinery, it's obviously a factory.
Business abounds with this drivel. The sheer thoughtlessness of it is evident in phrases like 'human resources', which means 'staff' or, more simply, 'employees'. In this case an uncontroversial word like 'employee' has been replaced with a phrase that suggests people are resources just like iron ore or natural gas.
You can read the full text of the speech at Brenda's homepage
I could go on about this management speak mullarkey, but I'll save it for now, except to point out that the Web Economy Bullshit Generator would be great if it worked a wee bit better. As it stands, it gives good gobbledy-gook but the output doesn't always have much to do with the input.
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I went to the Foreign Office today. They were having an open day to celebrate 'Europe Day'. (That Gilbert Scott didn't do things by halves, did he?)
There were people from European states with info on this, that and the other. I picked up materials on Denmark for my soon-to-be-a-dad brother-in-law, Dug, who's currently investigating his Danish ancestry. The Czech Republic were by far the most popular state. Not only did they have two stalls but they were dishing out bottles of Budwar and loads of food. You couldn't get near their stall.
Anyway, I asked people from the EU stalls (i.e. representing the Union in general rather than member states) about the groovy new flag (see last posting). None of them had seen it. In fact, they all started asking me questions about it. Then I found the EU Parliament stall where they pointed out that they were keeping their old 'stars' flag and handed me this Press Release (from a stack they had ready to give out):
Contrary to a number of reports in the press, the European Union has no plans to replace the current 'gold star' design of its flag with a multi-coloured striped logo.
The new design formed part of an independent report aimed at underlining the unique and different role of Brussels as the capital of the EU as well as Belgium. None of the illustrations and designs contained in the report were commissioned by the EU.
The suggestion that the EU is being forced to redesign its flag as a result of the forthcoming enlargement of the Union is completely false. The number of stars on the current EU flag has never been representative of the number of the Member States. There are 12 stars on the flag and, currently, 15 member states. This number will not increase as the Union enlarges.
There. Now that's cleared up. Phew!
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Well I definitely like the flag that Rem Koolhaas has come up with for Europe. Not only aesthetically pleasing, but also playful and ironic with its allusion to barcodes and all that that implies. The only report on it I've found is in the Independent
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With reference to the earlier posting about waxworms, Ohna has just pointed out that the people who took the time to make the director's chair for the waxworm were contributing to the tick-tock of the $120,000-a-day Clock of Doom, rather than paying the price.
I am a sentimental fool B-)
RE: waxworms and the human spirit (from Dug)
Just thought I'd point out that Ohna is Billy's husband (and she works in the film industry)
People of a certain age are wallowing in a wave of nostalgia for those punky days at the moment (that's the first punk, starting in the UK around 1976, rather than the several later varieties), which is fine by me.
In the record shop today, I had a bit of an epiphany when they were playing one of the recent punk compliations and John Cooper Clarke started to tell me about:
those pouting prima-donnas found within the swelling j. arthur ranks of the sexational psycle sluts
It's that live version where you can hear the audience behind him. I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed him in those days.
If you want to read more about "those nubile nihilists of the north circular", or any of his poems, you can find them all at cyberspike
There's an interview (from 1996) at the Idler
And there's some fun stuff on JCC's own page
John has also tried his hand at that notoriously challenging form, the haiku:
TO-CONVEY ONES' MOOD
IN SEV-EN-TEEN SYLL-ABLE-S
IS VE-RY DIF-FIC
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Mio amico Peter il libero italiano (well, he lives there, at least) asked me what a weblog is. Here's one definition:
A weblog (sometimes called a blog or a newspage or a filter) is a webpage where a weblogger (sometimes called a blogger, or a pre-surfer) 'logs' all the other webpages she finds interesting.
That definition came from robotwisdom The best artists in any field are always trying to push back the boundaries, as you'll notice I've been doing here (where are all the links to webpages? what's all this waffle he's posting? why isn't Billy a she?). Anyway, for those of you made uncomfortable by the avant-garde, here are a couple of links to discussions about weblogs:
What the hell is a weblog and why won't they leave me alone?
By the way, did you know that:
a hotdog was originally called 'a hot dachshund sausage sandwich', and was shortened to 'hot dog' by the boys that sold them at baseball games. The 'dachshund sausage' was simply a particular NY butcher's very successful variant of the well-known 'frankfurter', which had become a fixture at Coney Island.
Grazie per questa informazione, Peter B-)
Just been reading the screenplay for The Shawshank Redemption, one of the best screenplays you could read, which has already started to be used as an exemplar in some of the "how to write screenplays" books.
It's also one of the best publications of a screenplay, complete with words from Stephen King (who wrote the novella it's based on) and Frank Darabont (writer and director), explanations of changes from script to screen, storyboards and, most importantly, it's the unadjusted screenplay that was taken onto the set on the first day of shooting, rather than a polished-up version of what you actually ended up seeing.
I particularly enjoyed the bit about how the representative of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals revealed that she was there not only to protect the rights of the baby crow which Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore) keeps in his jacket pocket but also to look out for the maggot he feeds to the crow. Quoting Frank Darabont:
she decreed that no live worm be fed to the bird. Only a dead one would do. One that died of natural causes. My suggestion that we have the maggot autopsied to determine cause of death drew nothing but a blank stare. Patiently explaining that the maggots were actually waxworms purchased by the prop department at a local bait shop also cut us no slack. Apparently, the God-given right of any fisherman to blithely feed a waxworm to a steelhead bass is denied the Hollywood filmmaker and his baby crow, even when the Clock of Doom is ticking off $120,000 a day in production costs. Thank God we found a dead waxworm in the batch, or we might still be there.
Before the day was out, our intrepid grips had presented us with a tiny director's chair made out of matchsticks, just in case any of the waxworms needed a breather between takes.
God bless the human spirit, which has time to make a matchstick chair for a waxworm for the fun of it, even when the Clock of Doom is ticking at $120,000 a day!
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By the way, I have tapes of these interviews if anyone would like to hear them again, although you can still access them via the BBC Radio "Listen Again" page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml
And here's a link directly to the page with the interviews: what did Blunkett actually say?
Does anyone think I should post a transcript of relevant bits?
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Need to stretch your brain? Try some of the puzzles from the "Linguistic Olympics"
I didn't have anything to do with this site, but if you find them too much of a stretch, e me and I'll see if I can help.
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