Ah, fuck politics, political bloggers, and my stupid pointless bitter rants about both.

Born in Eastern France, the filmmaker is a biologist by training but says he’s as attracted to adventure as he is to nature. One day he came across a classified ad that said something along the lines of: “Looking for fearless biologist, ready to spend 14 months at the end of the world.” The assignment was to capture images of emperor penguins and track them, but it became so much more.

“I can’t really pinpoint what it is about them that’s so extraordinary,” he says. “You can see penguins everywhere, in advertisements, on calendars, on [the television cartoon] Pingu. I think partly it’s that some things about them are so human, sometimes their behaviour has a correlation with ours. And of course they’re cute, but they are also a cursed species. I think maybe there’s just something special because their home is in Antarctica, which is so extreme.” (source)

Here’s a trailer for March Of The Penguins, in case you’re not aware of it. Gets pretty good reviews. I don’t know if I will go to see this, because, well, it’s just too obviously me, isn’t it? I don’t want to be penguinholed.

Well, okay, I probably will.

See, this is another example of what I was talking about last night. There’s a story in the Independent called “US lied to Britain over use of napalm in Iraq war“.

Despite persistent rumours of injuries among Iraqis consistent with the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, Adam Ingram, the Defence minister, assured Labour MPs in January that US forces had not used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq.

But Mr Ingram admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. “The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you,” he told Mr Cohen. “I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position.”

There’s a Westminster angle in that Mr Ingram is only now coming out with this whereas he knew before the election. But any MPs who cared about the issue could have read a story from August 2003, again in the Independent, called “US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq“. I was certainly able to, and there are numerous other sources with the same story. Why Mr Ingram felt able to state that MK77s had not been used in Iraq in January 2005 when you can just Google “us napalm iraq mk77” and get the answer, I couldn’t rightly say. Why MPs did not challenge him on this I couldn’t rightly say either. But for anybody to express surprise now is quite astounding.

Perhaps they were all taken in by the oh-so-clever Pentagon spin in the matter, as laid out in this page specifically about the MK77 – that they did not use napalm, because the MK77s they were using were version 5 not version 4, and the contents had a different composition to what was originally called “napalm” (using kerosene rather than gasoline and benzene), even though the effects are basically the same and any sane person would call both of them napalm.

This allowed the Pentagon to deny reports of napalm use for several months at the time and, when found out, claim not to have been lying. It’s rather like saying “I don’t have a hoover” and then, when challenged, admitting that you do actually have a Dyson, but claiming you weren’t lying because they’re not the same and “hoover” is not a generic term. But they were found out, publicly, two years ago, so claiming that there is still confusion about the issue isn’t very believable.

According to the latest Independent piece, the State Department only actually put the details on its website a few months ago, but all of the information has been out there for a while. When Mike Lewis from the Iraq Analysis Group says:

“Evidence that Mr Ingram had given false information to Parliament was publicly available months ago.”

what he should say is:

“Evidence that Mr Ingram had given false information to Parliament was publicly available from the moment he gave it.”

It leaves me desk-head-bangingly frustrated, and it happens again and again. At the time when decisions need to be made, politicians ignore rock-solid evidence, and then, after the fact, when it doesn’t make any difference any more, they act all shocked. You know that they’ll do exactly the same the next time, too. If they’re going to suspend all critical faculties whenever “war” or “terrorism” are mentioned, why bother having them there at all during those times? Speed things up, save a bit of money – just have the administration doing what it wants for a bit without even having to bother to lie, then bring Parliament back afterwards so they can squabble about it, try to get each other sacked, and not change anything.

One thing I find very hard to understand is the American interest in the “Downing Street Memo”.

The reason is that it has always been painfully obvious that the Bush administration had every intention of attacking Iraq from 9/11, and potentially onwards. There are many, many indicators of this. One does not, for instance, cause inspectors to be pulled out if one is serious about WMD inspections.

I was in the States before the attack on Iraq, and the media played the game of pretending that the war was not inevitable, but they were pretty transparent about it.

CNN: And now we have General X. General, what will the US do when they attack Baghdad?

General X: Well, they’ll move in from the south and pacify region Y and then move on to… <insert various wargasms>

CNN: Thank you, General X. Of course, this all depends on whether the US invades Iraq or not based on what Saddam does. smirk

General X: Oh. Yeah. Sure. smirk

In the weeks coming up to the invasion they didn’t even bother doing that. It was so obvious. And now, people are pretending that there was any doubt at all, and a memo containing the impressions of a foreign official actually gives any more information than was available at the time? Hello! You were spineless fucks then, who appeared on TV repeatedly pushing The War On Terror because you thought that was what the viewing public wanted, and now you are ass-covering spineless fucks.

I hope you do some damage, simply because of the idea that lying presidents should not just get away with it, but all of you disgust me.

I don’t play online RPGs. This may come as a bit of a surprise to anyone who knows that I am fond of both online interaction and traditional pencil-and-paper, sit-around-the-table role-playing games. But no, I don’t play them, and the reason is not that I have a Mac (after all, you can get Everquest, and if I was a proper fan I’d get a PC).

No, I don’t play them because I don’t enjoy them. I’m bored by endless levelling, having to bash monster after monster over the course of literally weeks or months of real time just to get to the stage where you can do anything interesting. When I was at school I played a game called Avalon for a bit; my friends and I used to pop down to their offices at times and play on the terminals they had there. Somebody in the year above got completely addicted and gave up a university place to work for them. But I always found the experience frustrating; I would have loved to get involved in the political scene, groups warring against groups, intrigue and so on, but I ended up trying to beat up badgers and getting my arse kicked.

I’ve read a few things recently about the real world economy intruding into game economies – people trading important items and characters on eBay and so on – and I’m relatively neutral to the idea since, well, I don’t care. But the following statement really does indicate an utter failure to understand the real problem.

» Continue reading “fundamental problem of perception”

Unfortunately it would be a bit obvious if I actually started playing Mario 64 on the thing in the office, so no pictures of that.

It’s very nice though. And I can play my old GBA games on it as well. Bit larger than I thought it would be.

I haven’t been able to muster up the oomph to finish off the piece about aid and development that I’ve been writing, so instead here is something about Kilroy.

I was passing a Securitas van outside just now and for a second I thought it said Veritas. This might be considered evidence of a recent unhealthy obsession with fringe xenophobic politics, but on the other hand it might be considered evidence of a healthy interest in the King Emeritus of Daytime Television. Whatever. I am not at home to Mr Introspection, not for the duration of this post anyway.

At first I thought this unconscious mistake must be based purely on the similarity between the words, but when you think about it, there are good reasons why the Veritas party might require an armoured van with a very secure door and guards wearing helmets. How else is it that one would transport a Kilroy? You think a simple saloon car, even with the child locks activated, would be sufficient? You clearly have a wanton disregard for public safety, and I am thinking of calling the police in the hope of having an ASBO placed upon you. For shame.

No, just as with gorillas and velociraptors, a sturdy vehicle is required, and not only to prevent the passenger from getting out, but also to prevent others from getting in. I am told that in certain areas of North London one could easily get fifty thousand pounds for a live Kilroy, and the teeth regularly go for several hundred each on eBay. (They grow back, but removing them is a cruel process.) A Kilroy transporter would prove a tempting target for thieves and hijackers. Not only that, but small children and the elderly would flock to it, hoping to enter and receive a kindly hand on the shoulder and a sympathetic word, possibly about asylum seekers. We can’t be having that sort of thing, not outside of the studio. It leaves stains.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more likely it seems to me that Securitas is actually Veritas, and all those vans you see are in fact either Kilroy vehicles or Kilroy support vehicles. That man collecting a box of what you assume to be banknotes from Sainsbury’s? It’s special hormone-enriched honey, made by the bees that live behind the doughnut shelves. He needs it to maintain his healthy glow. And one of these days I hope to see an actual Kilroy-container disgorging its contents near the back door of a conference centre or TV establishment – witness the hurried bundling of the magnificent cargo, hands in thumbless mittens and crotch bound tightly in impenetrable duct tape, into the building, to be carefully drugged and coiffed in preparation for another appearance as England’s premiere exemplar of social conscience.

You’d never get that with Garry Bushell.

Michael Jackson has been found innocent! Quick, everybody, stop talking about politics and shit!

Sign up for the following pledge on PledgeBank:

“I will refuse to register for an ID card and donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge.”

http://www.pledgebank.com/refuse

And pass it on. (Yes, I know, ID cards, front-end to a wider system, in themselves not the whole point etc etc, but symbolic gestures are better than none.)

As if recklessly allowing Militant Anarchists to destroy G8 (with spike-wheeled unicycles, explosive juggling balls etc) wasn’t enough – or was that Andy Kershaw? – old Mr Geldof is now jeopardising the safety of our borders by encouraging immigrants and asylum seekers to cross the channel. Presumably on a giant swan, which they will then proceed to eat.

Bob Geldof’s plan to ferry 10,000 French G8 protesters Dunkirk-style to Britain is causing alarm among immigration officers, who warned yesterday that the proposed armada could be “hijacked” by illegal immigrants.

John Tincey, national vice chairman of the Immigration Service Union, said that “hundreds, if not thousands” of people were camping out on the other side of the Channel “just looking for an opportunity to get to the UK.”

He said: “There are lots of people there keen to jump on board, and I fear there might be total chaos. I think Bob should have a lie down. He has no conception of what could go wrong.” (Telegraph)

I think Bob should have a lie down too, but only because he looks like he hasn’t slept for thirty years. In this case, the Telegraph gives a lot more space to this story than the Sun does, though I suppose Bob is a celeb and is doing things with other celebs, something which might give the Sun pause but which to the Telegraph is just another excuse for a sneer.

A few more notes and slightly more measured conclusions about the Aptel/Inple thing.

• No, you will not be able to run OS X on your PC. Just to repeat this point. Apple are not a software company. They sell computers and write software for those computers. Intel make chips. Intel do not only make x86 chips. See Spot. See Spot run. Run Spot run.

• Development problems don’t seem to be quite as bad as I thought, but are still pretty bad. There’s support for people to write apps for both for both architectures built into XCode apparently, so that each distribution contains two binaries, one for Intel and one for PPC. But come on, developers are going to stop doing this if it bulks out their code, and I’m sure it’s not going to be quite as simple as is claimed anyway – there will be effort involved for everything but the most basic program, particularly if the app uses things that are specific to a particular chip. It will be better than developing for Mac and PC simultaneously, sure, but if one architecture is designated “soon-to-be obsolete”, you know which is going to fall by the wayside soonest.

  I suspect that this will really hit PPC games. It’s been enough of a struggle to get them written for OS X at all. Don’t expect to be able to play any new games on your PPCmac in a year’s time, or maybe sooner than that.

  Oh, there’s something called Rosetta which enables Intelmacs to run PPCmac programs, but with some speed reductions, and there’s a big long list of things that it won’t do, so if you buy an Intelmac don’t expect it to be able to run all your old stuff perfectly. You shouldn’t care too much though, your machine will be the priority for all active OS X development.

• The old-school Mac faithful are really going to hate this, but apparently Apple don’t care much about them anyway, they don’t bring in a lot of money. They’ve been bitching about Apple’s corporate direction for years now and they’ve just got the finger, but this is actually going to stop them from using their machines. Remember that people hang on to Macs for ages, far longer than they do PCs on average, and one of the things about OS X was that it could run quite happily on six-year-old computers, and in fact got faster with each subsequent release (or so I’m told). Now they’re screwed. I’m not sure how long Apple will even continue to develop OS X itself for PPC.

  Also, recent switchers will be feeling a bit betrayed, quite reasonably. It’s not just the annoyance of buying a new computer and then a better one comes out cheaper straight afterwards – you can’t stop that happening, and at least in that case your old one is still compatible and more importantly will remain so. This group, I think, will be key. If Apple get a reputation as a company that sell you a computer and then make it obsolete it will really hurt them. They’ve built up a lot of consumer goodwill through word of mouth and this could reverse that.

  On the other hand, the “Powerbook-and-latte” crowd won’t mind because if you buy a new machine every year this doesn’t matter at all.

• There’s no way I’m ever going to be able to sell my current machines now. Shit. I knew I should have at least sold the iBook. Now I’ve got a few grand’s worth of laptops which are just going to be curios in a couple of years’ time. Jobs, you bastard. I also don’t know how Apple are going to sell all the PPCmacs they’ve got in warehouses right now, though clearly I have no sympathy. This might be a good time to look for a cheap computer, if you only want it to be supported for a year or two.

Now I have to stop whinging for a bit. Excuse me. I need a special wrench.

skreeeeeeeeeeeCLUNK

Okay.

• There should at least be some better machines, assuming that the whole company doesn’t go under from the weight of outrage, which I doubt it will. Apple are claiming that there were good hardware reasons for the change, and there would bloody have to be; I don’t think they would have done this just to piss me off.

  Things weren’t looking better in the coming months, Jobs said, saying that IBM’s PowerPC road map would only deliver about a fifth the performance per watt as a comparable Intel chip. (ZDNet)

  Whenever Apple hardware comes up as a topic the words “G5 Powerbook” are never more than a second away. Well, we’re not going to get one now, but there should be something equivalent.

• x86 has dominated for so long now that it’s easy to forget that architectures do change; I used to have a BBC B, an Atari ST, an Archimedes, all of these things are now effectively just curios too, and the systems that succeeded them were better.

And of course, at the end of the day, when all’s said and done, when it comes down to it, it’s just a computer, really, isn’t it?

isn’t it?

stares into faces of horde of hippies waving Blueberry iBooks, outraged schoolteachers, confused but angry relatives who believed the nice man in the shop, and zombie iMacs

brief scream

ripped into tiny pieces