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The only reasonable response to the BNP membership list leak: a LOLcats v Neo-Nazis image macro clash. In other words, LOLGriffin.

The only sensible comment of the whole financial malarkey comes from 2004, by briefly shiny pop duo Johnny Boy (which I also posted in this) – and their single You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve:

I’m actually about to buy another pair of shoes online right now, in case anybody should think about absolving me of my hypocrisy.

Compare and contrast:

and

My vote’s going to the dude pretending to be a dude confused for another dude.

As Chris has already written about, Saturday saw the return of Open Tech, the British geek conference, after an absence of three years. I went along, hungover like a bastard, and a good time was had by all.

Some quick highlights:

Danny O’Brien (excellent as always) somehow turning the Open Rights Group talk into a revivalist meeting, as Bill Thompson led a movement of those not yet saved to come forward and be baptised (and hand over a tenner). Also, the first half of the talk was conducted entirely in Foundation references, the second half entirely in Doctor Who references. It was all very enjoyable, and a delight to see how well the completely spontaneous idea (ahem) that Open Tech 2005 came up with has progressed. If you care about any of the issues ORG fights on – privacy, e-Voting, freedom of information, copyright reform, and host of others – you should probably go and join them now.

The MySociety guys giving the lowdown on WhatDoTheyKnow?, another great, simple political application that makes submitting FoI requests easy, and automatically publishes any response. It’s a great site, and along with all the other MySociety stuff (the video on TheyWorkForYou, the travel time maps) gives you hope that maybe this world isn’t entirely doomed after all.

The same goes for the guys behind the Power Of Information project, who are actually doing cool things within government to free up data and give it to people to use – it’ll be fascinating to see how ShowUsABetterWay works out, because it’s a potentially brilliant scheme.

The guys from guardian.co.uk, who explained the thinking behind the architecture for the Guardian’s web refit. I’ll not go into detail right now (it’s too late to try channeling Martin Belam) but I was pleased in an entirely egotistical way that a lot of their thoughts were similar to thoughts I’d had. Hurrah. They, of course, have the advantage of actually having done them, rather than just vaguely thinking about them.

Overall, there wasn’t quite the same sense of excitement as there was at previous iterations of the event – no “wow” factor stuff like TheyWorkForYou being unveiled, or Audioscrobbler being explained and me totally failing to get it, and a lot less of the useless-but-fun tech hacking that it had in its NotCon days – but instead there was a sense that things were maturing and actually getting stuff done. Which is good, I think,

People I saw but didn’t have anything sufficiently interesting to say to that would have justified me talking to them: Ben Goldacre, Danny O’Brien, Toms Steinberg and Loosemore, Simon Willison, Rufus Pollack and an awful lot of familiar faces whose names I couldn’t quite place. People I was going to talk to but then couldn’t find: Becky Hogge, who now runs ORG and I went to university with. People who I realise I never actually introduced myself to although I was technically in a conversation with even though I wasn’t saying much: Tom Reynolds. Puzzling conversations about Charlie Stross books with someone who clearly thought I was someone else: 1.

Fuck.

Iraq just offers more of the same: death after death after death after death, until each death becomes nothing more than a dull pulse on a soundtrack; the throb of a neighbour’s washing machine we learned to filter out months ago; the invisible ticking of a household clock. We’ll notice if it stops, but not before…

…Particularly striking is the figure regarding the total number of Iraqi dead – striking because it’s so huge, and so vague. It lies somewhere between 150,000 and 1 million.

Between 150,000 and a million. That leaves 850,000 people who may be dead or alive. We simply don’t know. They currently exist, or do not exist, within a cavernous margin of error. Our minds can’t process this degree of horror. No wonder we change the channel. No wonder nothing feels real.

Charlie Brooker is also good when he’s not being funny.

Briefly to note, in a stream of cultural consciousness: A few days ago, I wasn’t even aware of the existence of the long-running American political debate show The McLaughlin Group. Then Rex Sorgatz at Fimoculous wrote this post about this Esquire article about how it was actually excellent and not rubbish like all the others, which sort of piqued my interest. Now, a few days later, my absolute new favourite blog, clapclap, which I only found today via this MeFi thread about the Jeff Buckley essay which is currently in my linklog, wrote this post about a challenge that Fluxblog set hard-partying rocker Andrew W.K. – who I hadn’t heard anything about for about five years – which was to record a song based around this wildly bizarre bit of conversation from The McLaughlin Group, something which I might not have checked out of I hadn’t already had my interest prompted by the previous piece and blah blah blah.

All of which is merely a bit of context-setting build up so that hopefully, when I tell you to download this mp3 of Andrew W.K. singing a 47-second long song based on the transcript of a political debate show because it is BASICALLY GREAT, you won’t think I’m completely mad.

I’ll leave it to other, wiser heads to debate the serious ramifications of the hilarious “all your data are in the post” cock-up by BRMC HMRC that was revealed today. What I want to know is – how on earth did the Open Rights Group manage to arrange for this news to break on the day that they launched their big fundraising drive?

Good work, Becky, Michael, Suw, Danny, et al! But, um… could you give back the disks with everybody’s bank details on now, please?

“It’s just like Northern Ireland!”

Nearly two years ago, in response to the traumatic non-events of July 21st, I created this new version of the terror alert scale, to better reflect the nature of the threat we faced:

Now, as the country reels in shock from the recent incidents in London and Glasgow, I feel it is my civic duty to replenish the scale anew, once again so that it can fully encompass the sheer level of horror that confronts us. Remember – we are at war with people who hate our way of life. And by “way of life”, I mean they hate the fact that we can tie up our own shoelaces without assistance.

I think we might be entering the calm after the web storm that followed the unveiling of the unspeakably hideous London 2012 logo today. Aside from all the Lisa Simpson jokes, swastika rearrangements and stealth goatses, there’s really very little to add to Chris’s excellent, spot-on dissection of why it isn’t just a eye-buggeringly ugly design, but one that manifestly fails to achieve its stated goals.

But – as a Londoner who is actually quite excited, albeit from a rather sceptical and pessimistic perspective, about the Games – what was almost more distressing than the day-glo fellatiform abomination of the logo was the irredeemably vacuous guff spouted by Coe and co at the launch. So I’m going to slag that off instead.

The new emblem is dynamic, modern and flexible reflecting a brand savvy world where people, especially young people, no longer relate to static logos but respond to a dynamic brand that works with new technology and across traditional and new media networks.

It’s not just that this is buzzword-laden marketing arse talk. It’s not even that that it’s deeply unimaginative, badly written arse (using “dynamic” twice in one sentence? Hire. A. Copy. Editor.) It’s that it actively, almost aggressively, has no connection whatsoever to the actual emblem they’re talking about. Or, indeed, to reality.
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Ha! I was just jotting down some notes on a Blair resignation post I’m toying with, when I found myself browsing through some old, unpublished draft posts that I never finished off (there’s roughly as many of them as there are actual posts). Anyway, I found this old one from yonks ago, and I’m not quite sure why I didn’t publish it then. I think I was planning on adding a load of stuff about the Edgar Allen Poe story “The Imp Of The Perverse”, re-working it to try and explain the political self-destruct button of flailing leaders everywhere. Or something. Anyway, it’s moderately entertaining and stands quite well on its own, and it fits neatly with the theme of Blair’s leaving – especially all that misty-eyed bollocks about Britain being the greatest country EVAR. So – here’s four introductory paragraphs to an unfinished article, back from the halcyon days when we didn’t even know when Blair would announce the date of his announcement of the date when a date would be announced…

* * * * *

Posted on Monday 10 October 2005

It’s usually quite easy to tell when a leader has felt the cold hand of political death upon their shoulder. For one thing, normally sober political commentators turn overnight into fairground prognosticators, giddily insisting that the symbolic colour of the leader’s tie makes it clear he’s not going anywhere soon, or that very senior sources have told them to look for reassurance in his selective quoting of Beach Boys lyrics. But more notably, the leader will rapidly start unveiling vast, ill-thought out policy initiatives, predominantly designed to work in the field of abstract qualities – stuff like “national pride” or “public morals”. The moment a leader starts promising that “never again will Britain be known for her squeamishness”, you know someone, somewhere, is plotting to stab them in the back.

There’s several things that, fairly transparently, are going on in their mind when they turn to such policies: they want to simultaneously divert attention from their current troubles and to tighten their grip on power by setting a bold new agenda; but they’re also painfully aware that if they don’t start leaving a “legacy” behind, their chances of having a historical period or an ideology named after them are worryingly small. Hence, simplistic yet sweeping imperatives in the general direction of human nature. It’s like going for an ambitious long-range pot that still leaves the cue ball safe behind the green, only in this case you’re also hoping it distracts everybody from the fact that you were actually supposed to be playing ice hockey.

Of course, the best thing about such schemes is that they always go embarassingly, hideously, catastrophically wrong.

And yet, they keep on doing it. In the few weeks since Tony Blair unveiled his new, finger-wagging focus on “Respect”, the Labour party has beaten up an old-age pensioner, been jailed for sixteen months for committing arson while binge drinking, and managed to insult an entire fucking country. You’d think that maybe one of the legion policy advisers swarming around Number 10 could have pointed out that it was a thuddingly stupid idea – that all it does is to ensure that the behaviour of every person and institution connected with the party is now fair game for criticism, and that every action becomes viewed through the filter of your own rhetoric? It’s like none of them can remember Back To Basics (in which John Major called for a return to simple, modest British decency, and was promtly flattened by a stampede of rampant penises wrapped up in brown envelopes.)