khbrown

Maybe this is a case in engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed man, but I was amused by Richard Barnbrook's comments, as reported here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7382831.stm:

Richard Barnbrook's language in London was different, couching an anti-immigration pitch in terms of "fitting in" with British society - the target being Muslims.

"You may have your religion behind your closed doors, but you don't bring it onto the streets," he said.

"You can be gay behind closed doors, you can be heterosexual behind closed doors, but you don't bring it onto the streets, demanding more rights for it."

Does this mean we can expect to see the BNP councillor campaigning against - say - people wearing crosses in public, or open displays of affection between heterosexuals? Somehow I think not...

Does anyone know what controls whether fonts are displayed only by name or also present a preview of themselves in Windows/Word/InDesign? Is it a setting in the applications or in the OS?

Browsing torrents of audiobooks, two made for an interesting contrast:

Fahrenheit 451 (ironic, given the novel's theme and the living books who memorise/recite the texts)
V for Vendetta (why? isn't the whole point of a graphic novel that it's, well, visual?; why would anyone want to listen to 1984 lite?)

Is there a reason why it is the Alien 'quadrilogy' and not 'quartet'?

Succumbed to temptation and bought a new monitor to replace the one I've had since 2000 or 2001. As the new one has a HDMI to DVI input, I hooked it up to my second DVD player, which I bought mainly because it can play AVI files and has a USB connection but which is also more featureful (sp?) than my old player. That was when the fun started. Not with getting things to work, which was fairly straightforward, but with dealing with the mass of cables and connections. Murphy's law dictates that any cable will be either too short or too long, I suspect.

What is the law on seatbelts in the UK? Is it broadly speaking that if you have a car which has seatbelts you are supposed to wear them, but if you have an old - i.e. by now vintage - car without them you're not required to retrofit seatbelts to it or stop driving it?

The reason for this question is that Paypal is taking action against those using Internet Explorer 3 amongst others because it doesn't protect against phishing attacks, commenting that "In our view letting users view the PayPal site on [an unsafe] browser is equal to a car manufacturer allowing drivers to buy one of their vehicles without seatbelts."

But, I'm thinking that IE3 is the equivalent of a vintage car in this regard - something that its user uses at their own risk because they've got an absolutely ancient PC that won't support a more modern browser.

Thoughts?

[Yes, I do seem to be getting randomly distracted today]

"Perhaps the most important factor in allowing a rational debate about immigration has been its changing nature over the past few years.

The issue has been dominated by the arrival of migrant workers from Eastern Europe.

They are different from the waves of immigrants who came from the Indian sub-continent and the Caribbean.

Firstly, they say they have no desire to settle here. Second, their motivation is purely economic.

Thirdly, and perhaps most crucially, they are white."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7353601.stm

I'm a bit confused by the statement that the waves of immigrants from the Indian sub-continent and Caribbean had no desire to settle in the UK, as from what I understand of the history from sociology classes many years ago was that the shift from a migrant labour population to a settled family one was actually an unanticipated consequence of changes in immigration legislation.

Point three is also a bit dubious, insofar as there were long more Irish immigrants in the UK than any other group, even if the goalposts of who counted as white shifted; remember all that E P Thompson, Making of the English Working Class stuff, even if this BBC reporter doesn't seem to.

"Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he understands people's fears over the economy and insisted that keeping it on track was his "sole focus"."

Does this mean paying no attention to other things or a more pro-active policy of - for example - getting out of neo-imperialist adventures in Iraq that don't have any obvious benefit for the UK economy other than whatever scraps the US lets fall from its/Haliburton's table?

Cynically...

Went to the Cameo this afternoon to see the original US version of Grindhouse - the double bill with faux trailers etc.

Struck me that it's a film (or pair of films) 'about' bodily mutilation, in terms of the themes of the films themselves plus the presentation with the fake damage and missing reels, which ironically then became the case with their re-releasing as separate features because audiences didn't get the concept as had been planned.

Too much film theory...

FUCK MICROSOFT WORD AND ITS GETTING RID OF THE DO NOT SHOW PAGE NUMBER ON FIRST PAGE OPTION!!!!

I should not have to waste time with this shit!!!!!!!

Burning books != burning people

I've been writing an article for a writing on film class I'm doing, about censorship. Tangentially related to this, it got me thinking about the old equation between burning books and burning people, that the latter follows from the former. Specifically, is this really necessarily the case and whether the freedom to burn a Bible, Koran or whatever is actually a vital defence against getting to the point of burning people.

Thoughs?

Watching compilation of chop socky trailers, complete with lots of music borrowed from other films and simply at random - Curtis Mayfield's from Superfly, plenty of Morricone and the odd bit of Jean-Michel Jarre. One trailer has an performer with the unfortunate name of Wang Dong :-)

Forgotten how much I enjoy Hong Kong trash cinema; will need to reacquaint myself with it once I've finished with Italian stuff, which will take rather a long time given an average of 200+ films for 20 odd years and the increasing availability of all manner of obscurities via Greek and Finnish VHS rips and the like.

A random question for the more literary types among you: have there ever been any writers who have refused to have their work translated into other languages on the ground that it should only be read and experienced in the original on ethical type grounds? Or, for that matter, any artists who place particular unusual-seeming restrictions on how their work may be performed, exhibited etc?

I'm thinking about the issue of dubbing and subtitling cultures in cinema and the effects these have on who sees a film, where they see it and how they understand it, and wondering how this compares in other cultural forms.

Had one of those near coffee spluttering moments this morning. In the Scotsman's arts / review section there was a little piece with a Australian (?) comedian, asking him his favourite music. He said about how he used to listen to a lot of music while driving around and mentioned the Rush album Moving Pictures as something he found good driving music. He also mentioned it has a song about a car. The title of the song is Red Barchetta, but somehow this got into the article as Red Bar Cheddar!

Would make for an amusing mondegreen: "A brilliant red bar cheddar, from a better vanished time"

I suppose in the defence of whoever did or transcribed the interview the way barchetta is pronounced is more like bar-chetta rather than barketta.

Succumbed and bought an Asus EEE, the 4GB model with the webcam.

Now thinking this was a very bad idea.

The thing just keeps freezing at random, sometimes literally every five or ten minutes.

Back to the shop I go on Tuesday. Yes, I could no doubt play around with bios updates or Ubuntu rather than the default Xandros, but given that these would inevitably invalidate the warranty and have no guarantee of fixing things there's no real point.

Not a happy consumer.

This looks interesting - a Blair Witch Project style faux documentary about H P Lovecraft's visit to Italy:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0461331/

"The whole world is watching China's reaction to protests in Tibet, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has told MPs."

And China will go 'yes, so what'

That's the price of doing business, human rights abuses be damned...

Potential poll:

Do you correct your significant other's (others'?) spelling and/or (xor?) grammatical errors:

Yes
No
What significant other? (You inconsiderate bastard!)
I would if I could
These are bourgeois constructs to repress the free expression of the proletariat
Cowboyneal

Mickey Knox's autobiography: $1.09

Shipping and handling: $10.90 or thereabouts.

I went to see the "print the legend" exhibition of western-inspired art at the Fruitmarket Gallery this afternoon.

On the way I passed the anonymous people protesting on south Bridge opposite the scientologists place, which was pleasing to see - as were the drivers honking their horns because they also disapproved of scientology and / or its tactics.

The exhibition itself was a mixed bag. What I found most interesting was how, after getting home and reading a review of it in a newspaper website (can't remember which offhand) the write up was so heavily based on the programme notes for the exhbition in a did the author actually have any opinions of their own or do any research at all sort of way.

One of the installations is a film exploring the homoerotic undercurrent in westerns or somesuch; I couldn't help thinking they could have just stuck a clip from Django Kill of the bandito Zorro and his black leather clad muchachos aand played Revolting Cocks' Beers, Steers and Queers atop it.

Another was a large wall-covering piece with bands going from white to black in successive shades of grey, with the names of Lee Marvin, John Wayne and James Stewart in the opposite positions from where you would expect, coding Marvin as the white and Stewart as the black. Would have been a clever inversion, had not The Good, The Bad and the Ugly already explored the meanings of these terms far 40 years ago. Indeed, it was the sort of piece where I wondered if the dimensions were in the proper aspect ratio for the film it was referencing, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and if the shades of grey paint matched those of the Kodak greyscale.

Then there was the video which used Ennio Morricone's theme Jill's America from Once Upon a Time in the West. This would have been fine, except there was little attempt I could see to choreograph the images to the music in the manner of the film itself.

The colt pistols at their earliest stage of manufacture were nice, though I think it would have been better had they not been in a case and somehow accessible to pick up and feel. Likewise, if you have to tell people they're from an especially iconic model because at this stage of manufacture that isn't evident I'm not sure...

Still, what do I know? I'm just a pleb who doesn't have the right conceptual vocabulary or cultural habitus...