Career Aspiration #2
June 18th, 2007 at 19:22

If the Doctor Who thing doesn’t work out, I quite like the idea of having a career as an academic. I’m a big fan of learning, and I’m self important enough to look down my nose at the sort of plebs who don’t even know who Thomas Paine was.

I like the idea of spending my days being paid to read books and write down what I think about things, under the guise of it being “research”. Maybe I’d have to occasionally turn up in a lecture theatre and tell some lazy students about whatever it is that I know about, but the vast majority of it could basically be very prestigious slacking.

I could even pop up as a talking head on the news or in the papers as a rent-an-expert whenever my specialisation is in the media, and provide some undoubtedly insightful analysis on what’s going on. I might even be able to set the news agenda myself by releasing a press release to try and justify my latest research grant: “EXPERT UNCOVERS NEW EVIDENCE THAT SITTING IS NICE”. Maybe I could even come up with a meaningless formula describing an every-day occurrence that could capture the public’s imagination and make an excellent “And Finally…” piece, like a formula for the perfect cup of tea or perfect parallel park. That sort of thing.

One thing I really like about academics is that they specialise in really specific areas of knowledge – its almost like being paid for being a nerd. For example, one of my lecturers is an expert on domestic German politics and another knows all about the French Presidency – I’ve vivid memories (it was a shocking and formative experience for me, clearly) of attending a university opening day back when I was in the sixth form, and having the academic who was doing the tour explain that she was an expert on The Break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992-1993 – which is pretty damn specific.

I think if I were an academic, I’d like to specialise in general knowledge – I don’t really know enough about any topic to say anything insightful or useful, but I know a little bit about a lot – so I should play to my strengths. The best bit would be being the only PhD-educated person in the world who when asked what they specialise in, answers “oh, nothing in particular”.

Specialising in general knowledge means that I’ll be able to spend the vast majority of my time arranging my bookshelf and filling it with important and impressive sounding books. The sort of books that don’t even have a colourful dust-cover with an eye-catching slogan, but have a blunt and specific title like “BRITISH ECONOMICS: 1973″ or “REALLY DIFFICULT SCIENCE”. I’d make a point of framing all of my articles that appear in academic journals, and hanging them right next to a shelf containing all of the stuff people might want to borrow, so that if anyone comes in asking to borrow my stapler, I can simply wave my arm and say “yes, it’s over there right next to my award winning article about night tending to follow day“.

Do any universities do MA courses in general knowledge?

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New Advert
June 18th, 2007 at 17:40

One thing I forgot to write about in my post that vaguely resembles a review of the new Fantastic 4 film was one of the adverts beforehand.

It was really cleverly made – two groups of men and women opposing each other and then going into battle using their gender stereotypes as weapons. For example, you see the men kick footballs at the women, and then the women retaliate by throwing their handbags. After trying to defend themselves with electric guitars and flat screen TVs, the men retaliate by sending remote control cars in the female direction, who then counter by setting their little chihuahuas on them. The battle is ended when they crack open crates of… the Mail on Sunday’s supplementary magazines.

I should have put some spoiler tags around that, as that’s essentially the storyline for the entire advert. You can watch it yourself here.

I feel conflicted as I really like the advert, and think its really clever, but at the same time I really hate the Mail on Sunday. I imagine this feeling is similar to what repressed gay people feel when they find themselves liking something they are so, in theory, diametrically opposed to.

I think the reason I like it is because its not what you’d expect from the MoS – the advert is full of young aspirational people who presumably live in the big city, use their mobile phone to text people and listen to the Kaiser Chiefs, or whoever the “in” indie band is at the moment. Y’know, the sort of people who wouldn’t be seen dead with the Daily Mail. This is in contrast with the Mail reader stereotype of Countryside Alliance twats and racists (these groups are not mutually exclusive).

Its perhaps the most obvious case of trying to reposition your product since ITV gave in to their lowest common denominator image and literally broadcast a pile of shit, uninterrupted, for three hours whilst the BBC were showing the World Cup final last year. No one was watching at the time, so nobody noticed.

But yeah, I think the advert is clever. I’m trying my best to decide to hate it on principle, but it is cleverly done – watch it and you’ll see. Here is a list of reasons I have so far as to why I should dislike the advert, if you can think of any more, please drop me a comment:

1. Its just perpetuated tired gender stereotypes, such as men liking football and women liking fashion. Typical Daily Mail.
2. The stars of the advert are the almost equally reprehensible aspirational people who everyone hates anyway.
3. Its not as good as the car made of cake advert.
4. Young people? Ethnic minorities? It’s political correctness gone mad!

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“Alright, Not Bad” 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
June 17th, 2007 at 20:27

Last night I went to see the new Fantastic 4 film with my dad, because of father’s day. I think my verdict is similar to what I thought about the first film: it’s pretty good, as long as you don’t think about it too much. It has all of the action scenes and superpowers that you’d expect from a superheroes film and is entertaining to watch. Just don’t go in there expecting to see a Spiderman calibre film.

The unfortunate thing is that since seeing it last night, I have been thinking about it too much and have come to the conclusion that the film contains more holes than a Swiss cheese with a termite infestation.

For example, throughout the film the Fantastic 4 travel around the world in pursuit of the Silver Surfer – this takes them to central London and the Black Forest in Germany – bizarrely though, they’re under the command of an American General. Despite this explaining why the real life London Eye currently has a big picture of the Surfer in the middle of it, it doesn’t explain why the London Eye wants to promote a film in which it gets nearly destroyed and its passengers put in significant peril.

Even more confusingly, (spoiler alert!) when the Silver Surfer is captured, he is taken to an American military base in… (wait for it)… SIBERIA. Seriously, wtf?

Also, what I imagine is a more of a proper film-critic criticism: the characterisation of the Silver Surfer seemed a little bit too human for someone who was supposedly an alien. Ignoring the other character’s blind acceptance of the existence of alien life, the silver surfer had some distinctively human characteristics to his personality, not to mention that he looked like a human and spoke English.

The way in which he (major spoiler alert) changes his mind and decides to fight of Galactus (and easily defeat him?!) was a bit too quick too. It seems a thirty second conversation between the Invisible Woman and an alien who has spent a career destroying planets is all it took for him to change his entire world-view.

I think it goes without saying that science in the film is completely implausible. But as I’ve said time and time again, I like my sci-fi to have some plausible pseudo-science to explain it – otherwise accepting the plot is a bit like accepting creationism.

Reed Richards, or “Mr Fantastic”, as he’s modestly known is set up to be this amazing scientist – but I think the film makes him appear just too fantastic. He seems to be an expert at everything. In the film you see him build and analyse some sort of cosmic ray machine – as well as the “Fantasti-car”, a flying car that has no wings or wheels and is inexplicably is capable of separating into four separate flying machines mid-flight.

Considering an alien had just popped up on earth, Reed certainly knew how to deal with them – apparently a Tachyon field will stop the surfer. Alright then, if you say so.

One of the key plot points in the film was The Human Torch gaining the ability to swap powers with the other three – this is set up throughout the film with a few power swaps. What bothers me about this is that the finale hinges on (spoiler alert!) the Human Torch getting all four powers at once simply by touching the other three people at the same time – something that was previously untested. Why would this even work? Even if he had gained the powers of his three team-mates, surely they’d all have his original power? Yet the final fight clearly showed him being a human torch.

But anyway, this is getting a bit sad. It was a good film, really. I enjoyed watching it. And that’s what its all about. Probably.

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RE: Bad Teaching
June 17th, 2007 at 01:51

Apparently they want to teach Religious Education for a post-9/11 world. Long story short, apparently Ofsted are saying “RE teaching is crap – sort it out“. That’s a gross generalisation – but one excellent sentence in the linked news article jumped out at me: “[Ofsted] says teachers should include ways in which religion is not always a force for good.”

Excellent!

Thinking back to my school days, which were four to six years ago now, the RE I was taught (for a “half GCSE”, which is a somewhat meaningless qualification really) was certainly a bit crap. I think it was mainly down to the terrifyingly apathetic teacher.

Admittedly, he had to teach a class of 30 kids about a subject none of them cared about. And most of the kids were little bastards anyway. This was GCSE, so it was full of the awful people who are filtered out of the education system before you reach A-levels. But my old RE teacher’s main teaching gimmick, by which I mean, his only teaching gimmick was his vast library of videos.

Every week for RE, he’d put a tape in the player and press play, and sit back and bask in the glory of being a teacher. This wouldn’t be so bad if he’d shown us… I don’t know, documentaries about religions and what they believe and all of the sort of stuff that might be useful in the study of religion. The unfortunate thing was that he tended to show us films – presumably whatever he’d taped a couple of weeks previously.

The extent of my education on Islam was to be shown the film East is East. Seriously. I think I learnt more about how grim Salford was in the 70s than Islam. Apparently back then people didn’t have phones in their houses.

When we were, er, studying “the afterlife”, we were treated to the Kiefer Sutherland film Flatliners, which Wikipedia describes as a “suspense thriller” where people who have near-death experiences have their sins come back to haunt them.

Perhaps most ludicrous of all, at around Christmas time – perhaps the holiest time of year, the time when the Bible has the most easily accessible back-story, the video we got to watch was…. Robbie the Reindeer. An Aardman animation about a reindeer competing in the reindeer olympics, voiced by Ardal O’Hanlon.

I think we were also showed The Life Of Brian on more than one occasion.

The terrifying thing is that we were shown these videos in order to try and get us to pass a (half) GCSE. The ludicrous thing is that I came out of it with a B grade. Thinking back to the exam, I remember writing at length about moral relativism and evolution – so I haven’t changed much since then, then.

At risk of getting serious (I don’t know if you’re ready for that sort of commitment yet), I think this “religious education” left me dangerously unequipped for life in the future – half qualification or not. Maybe my own hideous ignorance is to blame, but I grew up (and indeed still live in) a town that is probably 99% Christian – in culture if not active religion, and I now go to university in a city that is now full of people from all sorts of different backgrounds – and horribly, perhaps due to my own ignorance, but I’d prefer to blame my old school, I’ve had many, many foot in mouth moments because of it.

For example, talking to a Muslim on my first week at uni, which at the time was quite a new experience for me, I confused Ramadan with Divali – that’s two completely different religions (one is polytheistic for a start). This has happened over and over – although I now don’t mind asking shamelessly stupid questions, because its the only way I’m going to learn, after all.

I mean, yeah, religion in all of its guises is ultimately a pointless exercise, but it must be pretty annoying if not offensive that I’m so spectacularly ignorant to not know even the basic gist of a belief system that controls a big chunk of someone’s life. And I can’t endlessly criticise something if I don’t understand it – or at least justify why I dislike it.

I’m not sure what grand point I’m working towards in this blog entry. Let’s just assume it is “yeah, I agree with Ofsted”. Perhaps not my usual controversial self, but still.

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Making an RSS of myself #1: Political Blogs
June 16th, 2007 at 16:15

I’ve had an exciting idea for a new recurring feature on my blog: links to other blogs! How revolutionary!

I’m going to tell you all about the other blogs that I read – the theory being that if you too start regularly reading them, you’ll be gradually moulded into sort of clone of me. And wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone spent about a quarter of their day, every day, racing to reach “zero new posts” on Google Reader? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone was more like me? I mean, aside from all of the horrible genetic side effects that similar genes breeding can create. So here are some of the political blogs I read:

Foreign Policy: Passport is really good. That’s my review: “really good”. Its a bit like reading the news but with all of the boring and tedious local stories taken out. And by “local” I mean “national”. This is all about countries who hate other countries, and things like that. One of the best bits is that every day they’ll post a “Morning brief” that gives you the gist of all of the important international stories. It does get a bit right-wing at times though, as the writers don’t seem to be big fans of state intervention in the economy.

Guido Fawkes is the blogger who all of the politicians hate. A lot of the time he tends to have tomorrow’s news today. Which is exciting when you’re cripplingly addicted to political news like myself. Some people don’t really like him though, because a lot of the time he’s to the political blogging world what astrology is to the rational world: wildly inaccurate bollocks. Apparently. He’s also a bit of a right winger, although does seem to attack of all of the parties in a fairly “fair and balanced” way.

Iain Dale is a Tory blogger. Boo. But if you can ignore all of the awful Tory stuff, some of things he has to say are quite interesting. He tends to do quite a bit of “gossip”, like the aforementioned Guido does. Which is fun.

Recess Monkey is another blog that tries to do the Westminster gossip thing. Its written by a Labour guy, so, er, I suppose that provides some balance to Iain Dale. A couple of months ago he prematurely announced Thatcher’s death – so premature in fact, that she’s not even dead yet. Which, er, undermined his credibility a little. And it was irritating how I sat up later than I normally would waiting for the news to break on TV. Which it didn’t. Because she’s still alive.

Yeah, despite complaining about celebrity culture in the past and exaggerating my surprise every time ITV wheel out another gimmicky talent show, the world of politics is just like the world of celebrities really. Fuck foundation hospitals: what I really care about is whether Prezza is having another affair or not. I’m awful, really.

Daily Mail Watch, despite being essentially a one-trick pony has a surprising amount of mileage in it. Its just the Daily Mail and Express front page every day. The best bit is the comments. On “good” days when the Express has Princess Diana on the front and the Mail has “Asylum seekers cause house prices to fall”, it re-affirms my faith in humanity as other people think it’s absurd too. On “bad” days, when hell freezes over and the papers maybe cover something reasonable, its still fun to see the more dedicated commentators try to pick holes in the front page that day: “A serif font! How backwards and old fashioned! Typical Daily Mail!”.

Simon Howard always offers some nice political commentary – he reminds me of me if I were training to do something worthwhile in life and wrote about more worthy topics than Doctor Who.

Likewise, Doctorvee’s blog is good too. I always enjoy reading his take on Scottish politics, as you don’t get much of that down here. He also has interesting stuff on blogging and techy stuff like that too. But that’s not political, so that doesn’t technically count in my completely arbitrary list.

Speak You’re Branes is excellent. Some poor person actually bothers to read the idiot opinions of the general public on the BBC News site, and highlights the particularly stupid ones for us.

So yeah, there’s some of my favourite political blogs. Honourable mentions also go to: Beau Bo D’or, Bloggerheads, Harry’s Place, Duck News (is this still going?), the BBC’s Magazine Monitor, oh, and UKIP@Home is always enjoyable, because UKIP are rubbish. They lose points though for their purple and yellow formatting being retained in the RSS feed – making it impossible to read in Google Reader.

Next time: best media blogs? Something like that? Yeah? We’ll see. Maybe.

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Column – 15/06/07
June 15th, 2007 at 14:16

Is this week’s column the nerdiest yet? Probably not, but it comes close. Have a look: here. Or see the original here.

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London Zoo
June 15th, 2007 at 01:05

Long term readers, assuming you exist, are probably vaguely familiar with some of the stupid videos that I’ve made. I think its fair to say that my three “best” videos thus far have been maybe the time I went to the Space Centre with Katy, my trip to London in April, and a trip to Twycross Zoo. Yesterday, being someone who has horrendously original ideas, and doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase “flogging a dead horse“, I, er, went to London Zoo… with Katy. And did a video:

As you can probably tell from the video, the zoo portion of the day went swimmingly (think back to the aquarium bits and this is puntastic). We saw lots of animals, as, er, you might expect: zebras, monkeys, pigs with moustaches, lions, lizards, llamas (with excellent faces), a ferret, which bit the trainer’s arm, and an excellent guinea pig. (Photos? Here.)

Travel logistics seemed to be a bit of a recurring issue all day though. First off, as I explain at length in the video, actually finding the zoo was a lot of hassle – its not as well sign posted you might expect, and Regent’s Park is a few magnitudes larger than a “normal” park too. Here’s a map of the route we took. (I think this is easily the most web 2.0 blog entry ever).

On leaving the zoo, it turned out that it was actually really close to what a countryside person like myself would describe as Camden town centre. So after eating we got the tube back to the train station to go home, only to discover that because it was now “peak time”, our tickets weren’t valid. Bugger. So we had about two and a half hours to kill, so we did the most obvious thing and went to Westminster (via the circle line clockwise, tedious travel fans).

I love Westminster. From the second we left the tube, I was reeling off near-guidebook calibre trivia (slight exaggeration) constantly. “Bloody hell, it’s the Cenotaph!”, “Look! Banqueting House! That’s the last remaining part of the Palace of Whitehall! Oh My God! Ofgem!“. I think my boundless enthusiasm for all things London began to irritate Katy at this point. Probably because aside from enthusiasm for seeing the road where the Channel 4 Headquarters is, we both knew that I was sort of cheating, having studied up on the area only a few months ago.

We ended up sitting outside Parliament just in time for the six o’clock news – where we saw Sky News’ John Craig do a piece to camera live, and another broadcaster (I guess ITN) do the same thing. It was especially interesting to see that by ten past six, with the live done and dusted, they packed up and went home. Presumably they were all home in time for the regional news.

When we got back to St Pancras station to try and get home, the train had been delayed for yet another hour, and worse still, the trains that were scheduled for later on seemed to drop certain stations to presumably get back on track faster – meaning that it was nothing but hassle trying to get on the correct train. I’d call Midland Mainline the Stasi again to try and kick up a fuss, but I think that’d be too much of a compliment – presumably the Stasi were well organised, efficient and knew how to handle a crisis – completely unlike Midland Mainline.

In summary: Trains – boo. Zoos – hooray!

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Tax Free
June 14th, 2007 at 00:12

Today was my last evening working at the tax office. In retrospect, I actually feel vaguely saddened that I’ll no longer work there – presumably because of the people rather than the work involved. As much as I loved endlessly processing forms in a navy-blue on grey console application, I don’t think I’m going to find myself wishing I could be back there.

Leaving in the way that I did has been a bit like euthanasia in a way – I’ve chosen to leave on my own terms – I don’t have another job to go to – I simply fancy doing bugger all for the summer.

As it was my last day, the mood was a bit more relaxed – I was tempted to just say “big tax rebates for everyone!”, as I processed a pile of tax forms. What were they going to do? Sack me?

To try and win the kudos of my (now former) colleagues, despite months of secretly slagging them off on the internet, I bought a couple of boxes of Cadbury’s Miniature Heroes in. Vaguely interestingly, it was once again proved that nobody likes Picnics and Topics, as they were the only ones left over. This has happened in every Miniature Heroes Occasion I’ve ever participated in – presumably this now means that I can call this phenomenon O’Malley’s First Law, and have loads of creationists dispute this official scientific theory. They’d probably claim that this natural (non-random) selection doesn’t occur when someone picks a chocolate.

Excellently, my colleagues got me a card as I was leaving – and it wasn’t just a regular card, it was bereavement card, just to illustrate how sincerely they’re going to miss me. “May your memories be a comfort to you”, says the front of the card. I’m assuming the fireworks and high-fives as I left the building was just a coincidence.

I spent a lot of today shamelessly plugging my blog to my colleagues, so hopefully one or two of them will be reading this – so I’ll just re-state my opinion on the record that it has been lovely working with the following people: Michael, Nick, Keyur, Kam, Nilay, Hemel, Michon, Nit, Jeet, Ricky, Linda, Manish, Julia, Lee, Chet, Jit (I think that’s everyone) and all of the casual acquaintances who I’ve been too rude to learn to the names of over the past ten months.

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What do I have to say?
June 13th, 2007 at 01:30

Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on this blogging business – I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now and I think I’ve more or less picked it up as I’ve gone along. And I dare-say I’ve had some limited success. As far as I can tell, if you want to be a blogger you only need:

1. Somewhere on the internet that you can call your blog
2. Some ill-conceived opinions

I know that I’ve got the first one – and that’s fairly consistent. I pay the hosting company some money each month and they sort that out. The trouble is, that the second thing on the list – the opinions – are somewhat variable. And it’s really irritating.

There are some days, when I’ll have so much to say that I’ll post two or three times and it’ll all be A-material (well, maybe) – but there are other times, like the last few days for instance, when I’m just devoid of inspiration. You’d think that someone like me (ie: a self important nobody on the internet) would have a few things to say about that Olympic logo everyone’s talking about or whatever. But I don’t really have anything to add to the debate other than “yeah, it’s a bit shit”. I can’t even turn it into a thinly veiled attack on anyone.

I do have sort of a plan to try and combat a lack of inspiration of what to write about – I’ve got a file on my computer called “blog ideas”, containing, er, ideas for things I could write about in the future. The trouble is, they’re all pretty rubbish ideas. Here are some samples which will never make it into fully fledged blog entries:

—

Rupert Murdoch is apparently trying to buy the Wall Street Journal – why is he going to all of the hassle of having big business meetings and tonnes of negotiations over it? Can’t he just go to a newsagents and pay the $1 cover price like the rest of us?

—

I think ‘txt spk’ says a lot about someone – specifically that they’re a fkn cnt.

—

Villains don’t help themselves by hinting the gist of their devious plan at the hero. For example, ‘The Wire’ in the Coronation episode of Doctor Who says to the Doctor “You’ll be glued to the screen“. Which is, er, what happened.

—

Pol Pot’s name was “Mr Pot”.

—

At university, there are usually a number of people hanging around the student union giving out flyers – sometimes you can’t walk past them without being harassed to take one. Other times, however, I walk past and they ignore me – clearly judging me and deeming me not worthy to deserve a free drink at RnB night at some sort of nightclub.

—

The Eurovision bloc-voting dilemma that plagues the internet annually after every Eurovision Song Contest could be resolved by mimicking the make-up of the US Congress. Have it weight so that 50% of the points are weighted relative to the population of the country, and the other 50% are an equal number allocated by each state. There you go, there’s a solution to a problem nobody cares about.

—

Dsylexic vampires are weakened by gaelic

—

Car radiators cool… where as house radiators warm. Hmm!

—

Yeah, I’m not really sure where I’m going with these “micro-ideas”. Maybe this is why I should use Twitter or something?

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Spam of the day
June 12th, 2007 at 23:42

Having my e-mail address plastered all across the internet I probably get more than my fair share of spam. Usually its just images of text promoting Cialis, slanted at such an angle that software spam-deleting things won’t pick it up. There’s also a lot of Russian women who seem to really want to contact me.

When checking my e-mail today though, I noticed this particularly bizarre e-mail:

“Hello my friend!

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here ([url removed]) are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive ”

W…W…What? It reads almost like a short story. A man decides to kill himself and his dog in protest at the price of medicine, but luckily finds a website hosted in Hong Kong, promising “CHE@P MEDS”, so decides that suicide isn’t the answer. A pretty crappy short story, admittedly.

Here is the same story again, but as a Haiku:

I am ready to

Kill myself and eat my dog

If Prices are bad

Mental.

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