Punk Rock Show
April 29th, 2007 at 16:23

Well that went moderately well. A few hours ago I presented a radio show on my university’s radio station, Demon FM as part of the “Cherry Poppers” strand, for radio n00bs. I think it went all right considering it was my first attempt. Don’t take my word for it, have a listen yourself.

I speak a bit fast and fail to construct a sentence far too often, but I think I’m at least semi-coherent. It’s annoying because I’d like to be good at ad-libbing – every time I have to do something where I speak to an audience, like a presentation or whatever, I always try and ad-lib assuming that I’m able to do it (nothing to do with it being less effort than having to write a script, honest), although I always seem to come across as a stuttering incompetent.

I had some quips and gags planned, which despite excessive planning, unfortunately managed to make their way out of my mouth and on to the collective conscience of society at large:

• “Punk is all about rebellion, anger and sticking it to the man… plenty of that will be occurring, as long as it occurs within the Ofcom broadcasting guidelines, as I don’t want to be taken off air”.
• “That was Propagandhi’s War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, May All Your Interventions Be Humanitarian – or W I P F I S M A Y I B H for short.”
• The gist of this. (Dropped as calling them sell outs might be libellous.)

But nevertheless, the songs were played out correctly, the right buttons were pressed – mainly because I wasn’t the one having to do that bit.

If you’ve had a listen to the recording linked above, you might think that I just recorded that at home and am merely pretending that I presented a radio show. If you want some proof, have a look at this picture of me in a real radio studio:

I’d like to thank JP and the other people at Demon FM for putting me on the radio. They are excellent people.

Will I have more radio adventures soon? I…I… don’t know.

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Column – 27/04/07
April 27th, 2007 at 19:17

Read it online here, or read the original which is more or less identical: here.

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Holy CAP!
April 27th, 2007 at 17:00

I’ll be honest with you. That awful pun of a title is going to be the most exciting thing in this blog entry. Why? Because I’m writing about the Common Agricultural Policy. Sort of.

Next month is going to be interesting. For my European Union module, rather than have a traditional exam, we’re spending the day in a simulation exercise pretending to be different EU countries, and we’re going to spend the day renegotiating the CAP budget. Seriously.

I’m one fifth of the Netherlands delegation, and my specialist subject is going to be Community Preference.

Er, I say “specialist subject”, but I don’t actually know that much about it, yet. I’ve tried to do some research over the past couple of days. The trouble is, with it being related to the European Union, it automatically means that whatever I have to read is crushingly dull.

I tried to read a brief overview of the CAP and nearly hanged myself after just the first paragraph.

I have a bit of a problem though, and I need your help. I don’t really know what ‘community preference’ is, and the internet is resolutely refusing to tell me in terms that an idiot would understand. Through my research there’s two definitions I seem to have found:

1. Community Preference is buying agricultural goods internally from other EU members, rather than third countries that are not members of the EU. (Here seems to think that.)
2. Community Preference is favouring buying goods from former-colonies of EU states rather than third countries, such as buying bananas from former British possessions in the Caribbean rather than Brazil or wherever. (I think my lecturer explained it as this.)

Are there any Eurocrats reading? Which one is it? If you can help explain what this is so I at least know what I should be talking about it would be dead useful.

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Top 3: Name-droppable Authors
April 27th, 2007 at 00:59

Being the educated type, I’m not adverse to reading the odd book. I do enjoy reading, and I’d like to do more of it.

Right now, I’ve picked up John Keay’s Sowing the Wind again, and I’m trying to force myself through it, as I know it’s good for me. It’s about the history of the Middle East and why it’s all fucked up, basically. It’s an irritating read, because it’s full of flowery poetic descriptions over the sort that can never be verified scientifically. Talking about Lawrence of Arabia, Keay describes what was going on inside his head and exactly what he was thinking at that time – he doesn’t even say “Lawrence wrote in his diary…” or anything, so it just comes across as baseless assertions. It’s the same sort of irritation that William Shakespeare felt on July 8th 1610 at around 3pm, when one of the lesser playwrights told him that he thought he should cut some of the “chick crap” from Romeo and Juliet.

But anyway, one of the best things about reading is that it makes you feel self-satisfied and entitles you to act like a smug knowledgeable twat for a couple of weeks after you’ve read the book. This feeling lasts longer if the author is well known and is invariably described as an “academic”, or if the book is described as a “classic” or “seminal” work. So I present to you, my top 3 name-droppable authors (who’s work I’ve read).

Richard Dawkins is quite popular at the moment. Or at least that’s the impression I get from the observable evidence (hoho!). The God Delusion is an excellent book, and despite what you may think is merely a man ranting about religion, it’s actually a sort of operators manual for atheists, which arms you with a rebuttal for every pro-religion argument. Idiots may say things like “Dawkins is just a fundamentalist atheist” whilst stroking their beard in a self-congratulatory way about how wry they can be, but Dawkins argued his own way out of this: he’s not a fundamentalist because his beliefs are willing to change if evidence proves that he was wrong before, which is something a religious fundie would never do. Drop Dawkins into your conversation and you’ll immediate add loads of rational scientific weight to whatever you’re saying.

2) George Orwell

This is largely assumed reading, but if you’ve read Orwell, you’re allowed to make knowing references to aspects of his work without actually naming the book. It sort of separates you from the proles – if you can casually drop “everyone is equal but some are more equal than others” into a conversation about say, receiving preferential treatment when acquiring a good or service, your peers will immediately respect you and laugh at your clever reference.

1) Noam Chomsky

Said to be the world’s most important academic, Noam loves saying vaguely controversial things about America in his books. It’s almost a trump card in a political argument to say that “Chomsky proposes that democracy isn’t about letting people run their own affairs, it’s about keeping power from the people and running their lives for them”, or whatever. And you can’t really go wrong if you make a comparison between the war on terror and the Nazis, just like Noam has done. Chomsky loses points, however, because he’s somewhat polemic. He’s a big liberal, so can be undermined by an idiot saying “Yeah, but he’s bias” because of his left-of-centre opinions, whilst unwittingly implying that everyone else is somehow not bias. But still, name drop Chomsky and you’re guarenteed to sound educated.

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Johnny Quest thinks I’m a sell out.
April 26th, 2007 at 20:43

Yesterday I received an interesting e-mail from someone wanting to “sponsor” (as he put it) some posts on my blog. “Hmm…” I thought, as I realised that I’d been presented with my first opportunity to properly sell out on all of my opinions, lose all credibility in the eyes of my peers, but maybe make some money, which would be help cushion the victimisation and social exclusion that I’d then be on the receiving end of.

I was a bit sceptical – he was asking for a “positively or neutrally framed review” of whatever products and services he told me to write about. Here’s part of my reply:

“If I were to do this, I’d want to decide whether to participate on a company-by-company basis, and I’d clearly flag up to my readers that I am being paid by the company to write the article. My credibility means a lot to me, and I think my readers are savvy enough to know when there’s a hidden motive behind something. I imagine that it would be within your interest to let me point out to readers what is going on – Google for ‘alliwantforchristmasisapsp‘ if you’re unsure as to why!

“If I were to review a product, then I would actually want to review it, and not just regurgitate a press release. Similarly, whilst you ask for a ‘good or neutrally framed’ review, I would still approach it objectively – obviously I would not be unjustifiably cynical or negative, though.”

I’m not willing to be used as some sort of corporate shill. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll happily sell out if the price is right, but just because I’m a blogger doesn’t mean that I’ve got no concept of journalistic ethics. I get the impression that the marketing men think blogs and viral marketing are key to reaching difficult demographics that TV advertising doesn’t reach (ie: young people), and think that because its the internet, then they can subvert normal accepted standards of advertising practice.

It got a little more bizarre when I recieved another e-mail giving me some more specifics. Rather than explain it, here’s how they described what they want me to do:

“We are not asking that you review any products or services, but rather just have a look and comment and add a link within the first 200 word of the post or a couple of links inline text links; one to the home page or article and one to a specific product page. You are also welcome to link to any other resource that you like in the post, whether this is general market research, a comparison with a competitor – whatever you like – while not essential, is ok with us. However, we do ask is that not defamatory comments are made.”

“We certainly do not want bogus reviews or anything that would require a disclaimer on the post – just make a comment if you feel it is worth doing so and do so with your own flair and style.” They basically wanted me to astroturf for them. They don’t seem to understand that I’d want to put a disclaimer on anything that I’ve been paid to write on a specific topic about*.

What makes this particularly odd is the companies who they wanted me to promote. I’m not sure what companies you’d associate with me, but all of the companies listed later in this second e-mail were offering financial services of sorts.

Why on earth would you take financial advice from me? I think you’d get more success taking advice on nation-building from the Bush administration, or advice on how to tackle fires from Alan Ball. (Too soon?)

And wouldn’t you readers think that it’s a bit odd that rather than posting stupid videos, or, er, complained about selling out, I started doing comparisons of the mortgages that different banks offer? “Wow, I’ve just found this really great mortgage! It’s a variable rate tracker so you know it can save you, yes, you, a lot of money!”

So I’ve e-mailed back and said that I’m not interested. Was this the right thing to do? What would you have done in my position? Why not post a comment and tell me?

Also! Are you a big company? As I made clear a few paragraphs ago, I don’t mind writing stuff for money, as long as it is done fairly, and flagged up. For example, I could review your companies products. Of course, I’d be objective, but if your company’s stuff is any good, then this shouldn’t bother you. Why not send me free stuff and/or money? Contact me on james (at) jamesomalley.co.uk if you’re interested.

(* ie: You can pay me to write stuff if I can write what I like, and I won’t get on my high horse about receiving payment, as if I’m given the freedom to write what I like then I’m not being censored or whatever. You know what I mean.)

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When I got the music, I got a place to go
April 26th, 2007 at 13:56

Exciting development! This Sunday at 12pm, it turns out I’ll be presenting a one-off punk show on Demon FM, my university’s student radio station. So if you live in the Leicester area or have an internet connection, tune in and listen to me talk rubbish between playing songs that you’ll hate.

I’ve got to do a fair bit of preparation for the show – it’s a pre-watershed programme and unfortunately its quite easy to anger up bands of this genre, so they seem to enjoy nothing more than swearing. This unfortunately means that I’ve had to rule out playing Propagandhi’s Fuck the Border, and Choking Victim’s Fuck America, among many, many others.

To make matters worse, of the non-swearing songs I’ve picked, the one I wanted to open the show on, MXPX’s Punk Rock Show, in order to act as a sort of theme tune, turns out to be hideously tainted. Playing it would be like eating Polonium-210 on toast. Why? It turns out that MXPX are a Christian-punk band. For fucks sake, MXPX.

I’m currently trying to think of some things I can say between songs – it’s all well and good me taking in a pile of CDs and saying “that was x, now here’s y”, but if I want to stand out, I need to do some banter. And unlike Steve Wright, I can’t pre-record it all, so have to do it live. I’m thinking that I can repeat some of my best columns and pass it off as new material – it’s a different market I’d be broadcasting too after all. And I’d get to offend railway workers and religious people all over again!

I’ll post more (hopefully with clips) on Sunday.

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Catholicism: Now with added salvation
April 21st, 2007 at 18:15

One thing that never fails to amuse me, other than watching videos of people hurt themselves on YouTube, is the overwhelming hypocrisy of organised religion.

Apparently, the Catholic church have had a committee decide to abolish ‘limbo’. As far as I can tell, this ban extends to both the dance and the half-way place between Heaven and Hell.

It turns out that despite the Bible being the divine word of God, full of infinite wisdom and being 100% correct for all of eternity, that a sub-committee of religious types can change what God has said and/or done. I don’t understand how they can do this so obviously without undermining their entire religion.

“We’re closing down limbo after extensive public consultation and a build up there of dead unbaptized babies”.

“But God said that there’s a limbo, and he’s always right, because God’s brilliant”

“Yeah, well we just re-read the Bible and it turns out that if Catholic recruiters in Africa are having a hard time selling it because of the child mortality there, then we’re allowed to tell everyone that the babies go to heaven after all”

“But if mankind can change what God has to say at will, doesn’t that mean that the Bible isn’t in fact the work of some greater being?”

“Shut Up.”

According to the linked article, St Augustine said that unbaptized babies go to hell. They changed this in the Middle Ages to Limbo… and now they’re saying they go to Heaven. This is a complete U-turn on the part of the Catholic church. This doesn’t strike me as a very… divine.

It’s slightly odd that they seem to be changing the religion for PR reasons. In Africa there’s loads of child mortality and not many baptisms, and Islam has a much more attractive system than “your dead kids are going to limbo”, so they’ve changed their product to suit the market. Why don’t they just do a New Coke and completely reinvent the product? People seem to like Islam, so why not chuck in a few new daily prayers and turn your spires into domes? History has consistently proved that (Biblical) God is little more than a fictional mascot, like Uncle Ben or the Honey Monster so they could take an, er, “nothing is sacred” approach and completely remodel the entire Catholic church?

How about a new version of the Bible for the web 2.0 era? They could write is using a Wiki. That’s a bit like how the first Bible was written anyway: by a number of authors that looks accurate on the surface, but is actually riddled with inaccuracies.

I think there are problems with the current Bible (v1.0). I don’t like its ‘holier than thou’ attitude. I just think its bizarre that religious people can re-read it and come up with completely different conclusions. And doesn’t this make religion seem farcical?

When the Catholic church put Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the solar system is heliocentric, it later did a massive U-turn and decided that he was in fact right after having another flick through their Bible. Does that mean the Pope at the time of Galileo who had condemned him is now sitting up in Heaven? Surely God wouldn’t reward someone who falsely imprisoned a great scientist?

Similarly, all of those dead babies that originally went to Hell… are they actually in Heaven? Have they all been given a compulsory purchase order on their homes in Hell and been moved to Heaven? How does this work?

I think the answer is that it doesn’t.

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Gridlock a good idea
April 20th, 2007 at 01:00

Despite Gridlock’s terrible, terrible premise, or cars being stuck on a motorway for years, it has actually given me an excellent idea about how we could improve the country’s transport infrastructure and save the environment simultaneously. Bear with me, it’s a bit radical.

It’s basically co-operative peer-to-peer motoring – there’s probably a programming analogy that could explain it well.

What if no one had their own car? What if to get from A to B, they had to essentially hitch-hike? We should nationalise cars and ban the private ownership of motor vehicles, but at the same time, leave all of the cars on the road and make them free to drive for anyone who needs them… but with one key caveat: a motorist is obliged to give a lift to anyone wanting to go to the same place. Basically, I’m proposing a nationwide system of car sharing.

You find a car parked up somewhere unused, you can take it, drive it to where you need to be, and park it again for someone else to take. When you need to get home, you can simply find any other parked car and use that. Who knows, in the same day you might drive a Rolls Royce, a chav mobile and a milk float?

We can use modern technology to track the cars, to match up people who are travelling to and from the same place, as well as keep an eye on the distribution of cars (government monitors may need to drive cars to places where cars are needed).

Car sharing can be encouraged by creating fast speed limit car pool lanes that require three or more people (just like Doctor Who).

So for example, say I want to get to London, I can put this information into a website, or mobile phone applet or whatever, and it will randomly pair me with someone else who is heading to London, meaning fuel is saved and I can get to more or less where I need to be without needing my own car.

The key to this system is cooperation. Giving lifts to people who don’t drive can still be doable, by offering some sort of tax break or monetary incentive for giving lifts to these people – fellow motorists will be able to get lifts for free because they will be expected to reciprocated in the driving agreement. Similarly, motorists who give lifts to more people could build up some sort of points system, which would give them extra weight when the car allocation systems are matching people up, leading to quicker access to cars. (As you can tell, I’ve really thought this through).

Car crime will become a thing of the past too, as everyone will be able to take cars anyway. I suppose there’s always the risk of getting into a car with a nutter, but, all cars would be tracked by a central government system, so it’d be hard to murder someone in one and get away with it.

Thinking this through, this is quite a Soviet idea, what with the nationalisation and close surveillance of people. Maybe it isn’t such a good idea after all?

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Driving me mad.
April 19th, 2007 at 02:24

I recently reached an unimportant milestone – I’ve now been driving under my own steam for just over a year, by which I mean, I’m euphemistically describing having held a valid driving license for a year, not that it was only a year ago that I thought about installing a combustion engine into this metal frame with wheels that I used to push around.

I’ve had a bit of a love/hate relationship with driving really- by which I mean, I love driving, but driving seems to hate me. I started learning to drive in the week following my 17th birthday in June 2004. I wasn’t very good at it, but I kept trying.

My progress was stalled slightly when as a Christmas present the same year, my parents added me as a named driver to my mum’s car insurance. So I took the car out on to the deserted Christmas day roads, and somehow, within two hours of being behind the wheel, managed to end up smashing up the front of the Nissan Micra by hitting a bollard when swerving to avoid a wobbly drunken cyclist. On Christmas Day.

Unfortunately, this is absolutely true. The car was sent to the Body Shop for them to have a look at, but it unfortunately turned out that some aromatherapy oils or whatever it is the Body Shop sell were no use – it was written off and it sort of spoiled Christmas a little bit. On the plus side, the bollard was fine though – it was hollow and it popped back up again and was fine.

So I continued having lessons for over a year – passing on my second attempt at the driving test in March 2005, after once again being insured on my mum’s insurance on her new car. It’s a dark-green Ford KA, which I’ve been driving to this day, and a car which I still believe is the manliest car on the road, regardless of whatever its effeminate shape or popular opinion might say.

I’m actually thinking of trying to “pimp” the car, as seems to be the fashion amongst young people today – I might put some white lights on the front, red ones on the back, with some intermittent orange ones on the side to give it some extra class.

I am concerned though that being a motorist has changed me. I still love the environment and hate pollution right? And the oil companies are still evil? But then… why should I take the bus when a car takes me to directly where I need to be? What difference does one extra car make anyway?

I’m even becoming irate at things that traditionally irritate motorists: I get impatient when stuck behind caravans and other slow vehicles, for instance. Old people too… at what age do old people think “right, I’m old now, so despite the speed limit being 70 miles per hour, I’m going to drive at 40 and infuriate everyone in the cars behind me”?

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Good Mourning
April 18th, 2007 at 13:53

Yesterday I found out that they’re planning to have a “one day blog silence” because of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Although obviously well intentioned, I find it a little perplexing that not updating your blog apparently means that you are showing “respect and love to those who lost their loved ones”. I’m not sure how not updating does this – it’s just going to make Google Reader look slightly emptier and the world will collectively shrug their shoulders.

I think the fatal flaw is that whereas in real life if there’s a respectful silence and you’re in a public place you see everyone around you standing still and looking a bit unhappy, whereas in the “blogosphere” (for the unfortunate lack of a better term), if someone doesn’t update you just assume the writer is lazy.

In fact, I’d argue that actually updating about the relevant subject matter is a better way of showing “respect and love”. I’m writing about the Virginia Tech killings at the moment, so you’re probably thinking about it right now. If I hadn’t posted this blog entry, you’d probably be thinking about whatever drivel I would have written in its place, and if I hadn’t updated at all, you’d have clicked away to something else about another topic.

On the OneDayBlogSilence website, it contains this text, which strikes me as a late addition:

“But it´s not only about them. Many bloggers have responded and asked about all the other victims of our world. All the people who die every day. What about them? This day can be a symbol of support to all the victims of our world!”

Oh, right, so the campaign of “respect and love” is now for the families of dead people in general. People dying all the time in horrible injustices means that we shouldn’t update our blogs for the day? How, er, logical?

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