Badge of the day: Natural History Museum

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Natural History Museum panda badgeSo this is the second in my series of “badge of the day”. I’m staying true to my word so far of picking a random badge from my old collection and saying a few things about it. The key word here is random – you have been warned! Not all badges will be as interesting as others, but I’ll try to make them interesting if I can…

So – random badge. *feels around in box of badges trying not to prick fingers* Aw, a panda. I can’t remember any particular trip to the Natural History Museum as a kid when I might have bought this, but it’s an interesting choice. It’s not actually an image I would associate with the museum. The image everyone associates with it is the gigantic dinosaur skeleton in the main hall. I guess this is ironic in the sense that that is of course natural history, but it’s also not celebrating something which is alive and walking around at the moment, which is just as important. So I’d like to think that I chose this badge because it does that. Or I may just have thought the panda was cuddly. [See below for an update to this]

I visited the museum any number of times during my childhood. We lived in Surrey, about half an hour’s train ride from Waterloo, and many Sundays were spent going up to town for a wander around. My favourite places for walking were the South Bank (still is) and South Kensington, home to all the main museums. Whether I was most fascinated by the Natural History Museum or the Science Museum around the corner is a tough call. Often we’d go to both. The Natural History Museum though definitely takes the prize for best building of the two. It’s one of the most exquisite buildings in existence, like a cathedral, except it celebrates real things, life and nature and evolution, instead of something imaginary as cathedrals normally do. I can’t seem to find any decent images of the building on the web that aren’t copyright-protected, so click here to Google some up or here to see lots on Flickr. There’s also a fascinating section on the NHM website about the history of the building and its architecture.

This badge though might also have been collected during a school trip. I remember one visit when I was about 10, and a guy outside selling rosette badges from a tray around his neck with photos of different pop stars. I bought an Adam and the Ants rosette and a friend bought a Madness one. Sadly said rosette isn’t included in the badge collection, but they were probably knock-offs anyway. The only other thing I remember about that visit to the museum is using a computer for a quiz. There was a small screen built into a display unit and three or four buttons for answering multiple-choice questions. Some of the possible answers were obviously wrong, and my friends and I found that if you deliberately pressed the wrong answer enough times the computer got annoyed and realised you were doing it on purpose. It gave a warning of something like “If you press that button again, the quiz will restart and your score will be deleted.” So of course we pressed it to see if it would make good on its threat. It did.

UPDATE 20/6/13: My excellent friend and panda expert Jules has since pointed out that the image is most likely of Chi Chi, a much-loved giant panda and resident of London Zoo from 1958 whose remains were exhibited in the Natural History Museum after her death in 1972. I don’t particularly remember seeing Chi Chi at the museum, although I’m wondering now if the badge was obtained on a forgotten, much earlier visit occasioned by said exhibitionary taxidermy.

Badge of the day: Fonzie

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20130615-183052.jpgThis is the first in what promises to be a regular series of short blog posts about my badge collection. This isn’t quite as geeky as it sounds: it’s not a huge collection and I don’t actively collect them anymore, but recently I moved house and dug out of the loft a sizeable quantity of personal stuff I’d hoarded saved, some of it going back to my childhood in the 70s and 80s, and this box of badges was among the memorabilia. They were mostly given to me by benevolent grown-ups, or I got them for free when visiting some show or exhibition, or I bought them from the gift shop on a school trip. I think they might be fun to write about because they’re of a certain period. Even the sizes of them are interesting: most are larger than badges you’d see in gift shops now (probably as much to do with production costs as fashion), one or two are ridiculously huge (the 70s being a time when bigger was always better) and some are button badges of the 80s variety you bought to line your jacket lapel to let people know the bands you liked. A lot of them are rusty and although I’ve been desperate to show them to my own children, I instinctively warn them away from the sharp pins, notwithstanding the fact that it was perfectly normal to be trusted with sharp objects during my own childhood.

But anyway. I’m aiming to pick a random badge from the box each day and post a bit about it, starting with the one above. The Fonz was everyone’s favourite character from the 70s US TV sitcom Happy Days which I watched religiously as a little kid (the only other show I remember being as devoted to in the 70s was Batman). The show revolved around the trivial shenanigans of a group of Milwaukee adolescents in the 50s and 60s. It was filmed before a live studio audience, and every time “Fonzie” walked on the audience cheered. He didn’t have to do anything to get this reception except simply show up. My recollection is that he was a minor character who stole the show in every episode; you had to sit through what seemed like hours of silliness just for five minutes of brilliance. It seems to me that Fonzie has persisted into popular culture despite Happy Days being one of the few 70s cultural icons that haven’t been shamelessly revived and exploited, with Samuel L. Jackson famously referring to him in a particularly tense scene in Pulp Fiction.

(The above video is interesting because it includes not just the Samuel L. Jackson scene but also appends some scenes from the original Happy Days featuring the Fonz which are a tad politically incorrect now, even if they are probably a pretty accurate reflection of the era.)

Of course as a grown-up you realise Fonzie was something of a pastiche and a caricature but at the time he did genuinely seem the epitome of cool, with his gestures (the swagger, the thumbs-up, combing his hair), his leather jacket, his minimalist vocabulary (“Hey”, “Cool it”, “Sit on it” – the latter I never fully understood), his confidence, and his good looks. I remember a defining episode in my own primary school life when the whole class was grounded because someone wrote something on the blackboard: I can’t remember exactly what it was – it wasn’t a swear, but enough to enrage the psychologically sadistic PE teacher, and when the room dissolved into chaos the idea struck me that I could dissolve the tension by yelling “Cool it!” It worked in that moment. But in general, as a nervous, utterly uncool child, Fonzie set me an example which I have never since managed to follow; in fact I blame him for setting the standard hopelessly high.

PCC complaint about the Daily Mail’s Philpott coverage: a response

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Today I received an email from Simon Yip of the PCC in response to my complaint, posted on 4th April, as follows:

Thank you for your contacting the Press Complaints Commission. I do apologise for the slight delay in responding, which was due to the number of complaints we have received regarding the Daily Mail coverage.

You have raised concerns over one or both of the following the Daily Mail articles: “Vile product of Welfare UK: Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefits system is guilty of killing six of them” (3 April 2013) and “Michael Philpott is a perfect parable for our age: His story shows the pervasiveness of evil born out of welfare dependency” (2 April 2013).

The Commission has received a large number of complaints about this coverage, many of which have been framed under Clauses 3 (Privacy), 5 (Intrusion into grief or shock), 6 (Children) and 12 (Discrimination) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.  In general, the Commission’s experience has been that it is best able to consider complaints about such issues – including whether an article has intruded into the grief or privacy of a family – with the involvement of the family.

Given the nature of the story, it appears that it would be difficult for the Commission to investigate or understand this matter fully without the participation of the family involved. In addition, the outcome of a Commission investigation (such as a correction, apology or adjudication, for example) would need their approval.

We recognise, however, that the concerns you have raised are significant. Therefore, in the first instance, we will attempt to contact members of the family to make them aware of our services and the fact that we have been alerted to this coverage as a possible concern. We will endeavour to keep you updated on the outcome, but I should make clear that these approaches frequently take some time to result in a decision whether or not to take forward a complaint, so it may not be possible in this case to revert to you.

In regard to complaints about matters of general fact under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code, the Commission can investigate complaints from any concerned reader.  As such, we are currently investigating the accuracy of these articles following earlier complaints.

You are most welcome to contact us if you would like to follow up on these cases.

Best wishes
Simon Yip
Complaints Coordinator
Press Complaints Commission

My complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about the Daily Mail’s vile coverage of the Mick Philpott verdict

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Daily Mail front page 3/4/13

Yesterday the Daily Mail published the front page pictured here.

To clarify, the first subhead reads: “Man who bred 17 babies by 5 women to milk benefits system is guilty of killing 6 of them”.

This report came two days after the coalition introduced huge changes to the benefits system affecting hundreds of thousands of people. (The report was also published on the same day that the BBC, with unbelievable insensitivity, published a “class calculator” on its website.)

Following the advice in Zoe Williams’ excellent article on the Mail’s vile piece, I picked my head up off the table and submitted a complaint to the PCC about the article. When you do this, the complaint form asks you to state why you believe the story breached its Editors’ Code of Practice. I submitted the following complaint:

This piece of “journalism”, aside from offending common decency and intelligence in every way conceivable, breaches the code in the following ways:

1) accuracy: it is not accurate to maintain that Mick Philpott committed this terrible crime because he was on benefits. He did so because he was jealous and greedy to a psychopathic extent.

2) opportunity to reply: the children he killed do not have the opportunity to reply. Neither did they ask to be born to this man.

3) privacy: it is an invasion of the dead children’s privacy to publicise their photographs on the front page, especially with the claim that they were simply “bred” by Philpott.

4) harrassment: this article effectively harrasses genuine claimants of state benefits by positing falsely that Philpott’s crimes were linked to his benefit claims.

5) intrusion into grief or shock: several children were killed by this man. Everyone in the family as well as self-respecting members of the public (especially in the Derby community) would be grieving and appalled at the usage of dead children to score political points.

6) children: these children are dead. They also had siblings now potentially tainted by association. Does that not say enough?

7) reporting of crime: the Code says “Particular regard should be paid to the potentially vulnerable position of children who witness, or are victims of, crime.” Again, no such regard was paid to either the dead children or their surviving siblings for the above reasons.

8) discrimination: the article discriminates against Philpott and his family, as well as any other benefit claimants, for being “vile products of welfare UK”.

This news story is about a terrible, tragic crime and whilst it is in the interests of the public to know what Philpott did, it is not in its interests to be told that his being on state benefits had anything to do with the killing of the children.

I await the PCC’s response to my complaint.

No surprises… what the HMRC said when I asked if I could negotiate my personal tax liability

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A month ago I wrote this letter to HM Revenue & Customs.

Dear Sirs

I have just read an article on the Daily Telegraph website, “Starbucks opens negotiations with HMRC to start paying more UK tax” (1 December 2012).

I find this story most interesting, and would like to also “open negotiations” with yourselves over my own tax liability. Please can I apply to pay 2% tax on my income? I realise this is somewhat lower than the 20% I currently pay, but it is still quite a lot more than the 0.28% corporation tax that Starbucks have been paying according to that article (£8.5m on profits of £9bn). Also, this is of course a negotiation, so I thought I should start low!

Whilst writing, I should clarify that I do actually believe that people and companies who can afford it should pay a proper amount of tax, especially at this time of “austerity”, and that 2% of my salary isn’t a great deal of money. However, as the government is currently cutting benefits to those in society who don’t have very much, such as sick and disabled people and the unemployed, the taxes you are taking from me aren’t really helping the needy much anyway. Hence what I would prefer to do is pay a smaller amount of direct tax so that I can donate the difference to causes I personally believe in, such as the Trussell Trust which runs food banks for people on low incomes, Shelter for homeless people and the QEF Foundation for the disabled. I hope you agree that this makes sense?

I look forward to entering into negotiations with you as soon as possible, as I feel that getting more of my money to people in need is quite urgent, really.

Season’s greetings,

Yours etc.

Today I received this letter back from HMRC:

Thank you for your letter dated 2 December 2012.

I cannot comment on other individuals [sic] or companies [sic] tax situations. I enclose a [sic] HMRC briefing on the taxing of the profits of multinational business which you may find useful. [Hard copy attached of this PDF “Taxing the profits of multinational businesses” dated October 2012]

As an individual taxpayer who is taxed on his employment through Pay As You Earn you cannot negotiate the rate of tax you pay on your taxable income. The rate of income tax and the amount of your income that is taxable is agreed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the budget and applies to all UK individual taxpayers whether they are employed or self employed.

Yours sincerely.

I have to say I was disappointed. Especially as my tax return is due in a few weeks.

In my opinion the briefing linked above is pretty waffly. It talks a lot about how important the location of the company is, to wit: “Having UK customers is not the same as having a branch in the UK”. Well, Starbucks do have branches in the UK – that’s the whole point. Also note this sentence: “Although an apparently low tax rate in a company’s accounts might indicate tax avoidance, it could also be the case that the business has acted entirely properly, by making use of specific tax reliefs and incentives designed, for example, to encourage capital investment or research and development.” That isn’t the case with Starbucks either. They’re not an engineering firm given tax incentives to develop some gadgetry for the benefit of mankind. The only research and development Starbucks are doing is seeing how many customers like to drink thin, tepid, brown water and pay for the pleasure.

Needless to say, I completely boycotted Starbucks the moment the news broke and to be honest always did my best to avoid them anyway precisely because of how dreadful their coffee is. There are plenty more options in the high street, such as Costa, or indeed your local independent coffee bar, who very likely charge less anyway.

New Mark Knopfler album – exclusive preview

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ImageAmazon today sent me an email saying “Customers who have purchased or rated Daylight Crossing by The Webb Sisters might like to know that Privateering by Mark Knopfler will be released on 3 September 2012. You can pre-order yours for just £11.99.” I didn’t really see the connection as the Webb Sisters have proper singy voices and don’t play virtuoso guitar, and (as much as I loved their contribution to Leonard Cohen’s tour band) Daylight Crossing sounded a bit like a rejected Bangles album, which in fairness isn’t the case with even Knopfler’s records. But nonetheless, I read on. The album cover depicted an old van in the woods somewhere surrounded by some old tyres and a sad-looking Collie. This wasn’t terribly inspiring. More so however were the track titles which were then listed. As I read them I was building up a picture in my mind – an audio picture, if you will – of what the album sounded like and what the songs were about. I still haven’t listened to the record but this is what I understand, from the track titles alone, the album to be like.

Disc 1 [OMG. A double album?!]

1. Redbud Tree. Mark secures his return to the songwriting scene with this acoustic, sleepy number about the simple things in life. Lyric: “I wish I was Nick Drake / Or Sir Francis Drake / Or that other guy, the American one / Then I could spend all day / Drifting on a lake / Somewhere in America / Picking my dobro.” Guitar used: dobro (unexpectedly).

2. Haul Away. Nautical-flavoured rock anthem about Mark’s new-found love of boating. Soaring vocal “Haul away, haul away / Off the coast / Of America.” With a great electric guitar solo (played on his famous custom Pensa Mk2) ladelled like custard over the American apple pie of sweet lyricism, this marks Mark’s firm return to form.

3. Don’t Forget Your Hat. Jaunty, light electric ditty performed on 1960 Telecaster advising on how to prepare for a day in the American woods: “Don’t forget your van / Don’t forget your dog / Don’t forget your cat / Don’t forget your hat / Or a spare tyre / Or twelve. / The album cover doesn’t look like a serial killer’s hideout / Does it?”

4. Privateering. Downbeat, smoky number sees Mark get out his red Strat for the first time since Sultans of Swing. “I had a private earring / I wore it all the time / But in America they took it the wrong way / So I took it out again.” The Strat incidentally has since had a new neck, new frets, new pickups, new tremelo, new electrics, new body and a new headstock installed at a cost of £25,000 as well as a new set of Ernie Ball strings (£5.95).

5. Miss You Blues. Plucked on a custom Gibson steel-string, this beautiful track sees Mark at his most mournfully reflective. “I’m on a big tour / Of small arenas / In America / Darling I miss you / Although actually it’s quite nice here.”

6. Corned Beef City. A memoir of growing up in the slums of Glasgow, which Mark experienced first-hand in middle-class Newcastle. A rocking “number” in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis bashed out on a Fender Jazz bass specially customised to have six normal guitar strings. “I sang in Corned Beef City / They didn’t pay in kind / Which was just as well / As I am a vegetarian these days / It’s the American influence / You see.”

7. Go, Love. Mark’s first outing on a mandolin, a custom McLanahan “Markdolin 94 B” with humbucker pickups. “Go, love / If you don’t love me / I will understand / I’d rather you just went / As there’s plenty more fish / In the sea / In America.” Tender.

8. Hot or What. An absolute spanker of an upbeat rock melody, with a full band consisting of Knopfler on five different guitars and Guy Fletcher on all other instruments. “Is it hot or what? / Here in Texas / In America / I don’t always agree with the politics / But Texas is where it’s at / ‘At’ can rhyme with ‘what’ can’t it?”

9. Yon Two Crows. Possibly the saddest of all Knopfler songs ever written on disc 1. A short-but-saccharine acoustic ballad performed on Mark’s custom “Spanish Bastard” nylon-string guitar. “I’m just an old folk singer / Who can’t really sing / My baby done left me / And my voice is all trembly / But at least I’ve got these two yon crows / In my 500-acre back yard / In America / To sing to / Oh bugger, they’ve gone.”

10. Seattle. Mark gets out his fuzz box and cranks up his custom Fender Mustang in an embarrassing take on the popular new American musical style, grunge. “I came to Seattle / To find my way / Now God only knows / What I want to say / Because I cut up all my lyrics / To make them sound more interesting / And this is the result / Er, they still sound pretty boring / Oh dear.”

Disc 2 [OMG, there’s more.]

1. Kingdom of Gold. “I came to America / From Ireland / To search for this Kingdom of Gold,” sings Knopfler in this soaring opener, featuring The Chieftains, Michael Flatley and the Nolan Sisters. Mark himself plays a custom green-painted Gibson Shamrockster. “I am Irish really you know / Even though I was born in Glasgow / Or was it Newcastle / To be honest I can’t remember / Anyway America was disappointing / I didn’t find gold / But I did make a lot of money.”

2. Got To Have Something. A chunky little riff chopped out on Mark’s custom Fender Bloke. “You’ve got to have something / You can do / Whether’s it’s rolling in clover / Or visiting the zoo / I found something / It wasn’t much / I’m just a little folksinger / Anglo-American folkpicker / But I ain’t lost my touch.”

3. Radio City Serenade. A welcome return to the Making Movies-era in this 8-minute fully-rocking dobro anthem to Liverpool’s famous tower. “You thought this song / Was going to be about New York’s music hall / But ha! I got you there / Just because I always write about America / And pretend to be American / That is when I’m not pretending to be Irish / Doesn’t mean I can’t also still write about / My home, the United States of Kingdom.” Features ex-Queen bass player John Deacon, in a wry pun on St. John’s Beacon.

4. I Used To Could. Mark’s first foray into speed ukulele, Knopfler reportedly drank two espressos before recording this song “just to get the feeling right”. “Those were the days / When I could spell / And knew my grammar / I was an English teacher once you know / That’s how I got the idea / For Romeo and Juliet / I used to could do all them things / And talk proper / uh-huh, uh-huh.” Basic track laid down in Mark’s home studio, twelve guitar solos overdubbed via the Internet and mixed in American Studios, America.

5. Gator Blood. A disc of firsts, this choppy little Gibson Chopper riff sees chunky Knopfler being influenced by the deep south of America. “I was in the bayou / I got in the swamp / And shot a political allegory / My hands wrist-deep in blood / That’s gator blood / Also known as gatorade / Those big corporates are bastards, you know.”

6. Bluebird. Another bird song (geddit??), this is in fact a 4-verse blues take on Sebastian Faulks’s epic WWII novel Birdsong, reflecting Mark’s fascination with history. “I went to France / in 1871 / I did some rude things / Then it all fell apart / So I went to America / And did some other things / History is just one darn thing after the other.” Soaring blues solo on Mark’s Ibanez Pecorino 9-string custom played for the first time since 2002’s Songs of the American Songwriters 4-disc set.

7. Dream of the Drowned Submariner. Astonishing 19-minute, multi-section epic musical odyssey featuring Rick Wakeman on Stylophone. Contains a 6-minute guitar solo played on Mark’s original 1966 Fender Doughnut. Unfortunately the other 13 minutes contain lyrics such as “I dived deep down / Into the ocean blue / But I forgot my nose-clip / So now I have a sinus infection / This sort of thing wouldn’t happen / In America.”

8. Blood and Water. As disc 2 starts to end, a water theme to the album emerges – in fact a water and blood theme. Performed on Mark’s custom Gibson Atlantis, built specially for this song with a clear glass neck encasing a ship in water which glides up and down as you tilt it like in one of those biros you used to be able to buy at Cornish resorts. The Knopf turns the lights down low and laments: “I sang this song / Which was a political allegory / But all those idiots / Thought I was singing about alligators / That’s the last time I sing anything meaningful / In America / Oh hang on, that can’t be right.”

9. Today is Okay. Knopfler’s custom Gretsch Bert Jansch (originally owned by Roger Whittaker) lifts the mood for this jaunty, choppy little cheeseburger of a song. “Today is okay / It could be worse / I could have no money / And no talent at all / Instead I’ve got oodles of both / So today is okay / Today is quite good.”

10. After the Bean Stalk. After Neil Young’s After the Goldrush, The Eagles’s After the Thrill is Gone and Freddie Starr’s After the Laughter, Mark Knopfler pays tribute to the “after” genre with After the Bean Stalk. “I threw out the beans / This stalk grew up / So I climbed up / And up and up / And reached the top / There wasn’t much there / So I moved to America.” Performed on, oh I don’t know, some sort of guitar I presume. I’m past caring to be honest.

Disclaimer: I love the early Dire Straits albums and spent many years trying to play guitar like Mark Knopfler. Privateering is available from Amazon.

Prometheus – a review

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Noomi Rapace in PrometheusI haven’t been to the cinema in at least five years. Having small children and a wife who works evenings has made me something of a babysitter by default. I have however seen the first few Alien films, including the first many times over, and with an unusual opportunity to take myself out I decided last night to go and see Prometheus. The following review contains spoilers, although it will probably become clear that there isn’t actually that much to spoil.

The film opens with a giant ship flying over a stunning Earth-like landscape – great lakes, mountains, hills. A figure in a robe straight out of The Name of the Rose appears at the top of a waterfall. Removing the robe he reveals himself as a super-muscly albino humanoid, like a pumped-up Silas from the Da Vinci Code. Super-Silas takes what appears to be a nuclear pomegranate from his pocket and eats it. Then, as is usually the case after eating dodgy fruit, he becomes very ill, collapses and tumbles down the waterfall.

Cut, as you do, to the Isle of Skye in 2089, and geologists discovering cave paintings of muscled giants pointing to objects in the sky, which match other paintings they’ve found elsewhere in the world. One of the scientists is Noomi Rapace, a Swedish actress I’ve never seen before because I never go to the cinema. Fast-forward a couple of years and she’s in stasis on board Prometheus, a ship sent out into the far reaches of space by mad trillionaires the Weyland Corporation to find the planet responsible for inspiring the cave paintings.

Standing over Rapace is Michael Fassbender, looking confusingly even more like a Nazi than he did in Inglourious Basterds. With his bolt-upright posture, charming uniform and perfect blonde hair he is obviously a robot, as many Nazis were. Nazibot watches Rapace’s dreams, which are very dull. Then he plays a bit of basketball on a bicycle, learns a language and watches Lawrence of Arabia, just in time for tea.

The ship looks hideously expensive and slick. Classical music plays. The film seems to want to be 2001, but is too boring already. Something’s got to happen soon.

Thankfully something does. The ship wakes everyone up because it’s nearly reached its destination. Rapace and the rest of the crew come out of stasis and all throw up, apparently a “perfectly normal reaction” to being asleep for two years, according to Nazibot. The scene is hardly necessary even if only because the crew would be unlikely to have much in their stomachs after such an epic snooze, but more so because it’s pointless. If the vomiting had turned out to be an important plot detail it might be justified, but, reader, I watched the whole film and it didn’t.

Indeed, the language of the film is very different to Ridley Scott’s original masterpiece, Alien. In that film John Hurt woke up from a similar stasis and simply rubbed his neck. It is a measure of the actor’s skills and the confidence of the director that Hurt simply looked like a man who’d been asleep for a long time. Not only was there no vomiting, there was no dialogue. If Prometheus says anything about cinema’s evolution over the past three decades it’s that these days you can’t be trusted to work out for yourself that you’re going to feel a bit rough after being asleep for two years, and now have to have a robot explain it to you.

So anyway the crew are assembled to be told their mission on this planet the ship is arriving at, which is something to do with Rapace’s theory that humans are descended from the local inhabitants. I can’t really remember the details as I was busy trying not to listen to Rafe Spall’s and Idris Elba’s chronic American accents, the worst this side of Alpha Centauri, or wherever it is they were. With the 17-strong crew also comprising a Scottish woman, an Irish bloke and an English geologist (this is starting to sound like the setup for a dodgy joke), why on earth have two decent British actors try to sound American? Even Nazibot speaks with the sharpest of clipped British accents (sounding more terrifying as a result). But then I suppose he can be programmed to do that.

Having been briefed by a virtual, now-dead Marlon Weyland (Marlon may not be his real name, I just made it up because it sounded good), and punky geologist Sean Harris having argued with the dreamy Rapace about the whole point of even being there in the first place (CONFLICT), the on-board corporeal Weyland representative in the statuesque form of Charlize Theron starts giving everyone a hard time. Looking even more like a Nazi robot than Fassbender, unlike the others she was doing press-ups straight out of stasis rather than throwing up and now tells Rapace and her scientist BF Logan Marshall-Green that they can’t basically do anything interesting at all. More CONFLICT.

Inevitably they all end up on the planet exploring a cave and don’t have any weapons with them because Rapace has said this is an exploratory mission. This sequence contained my favourite bit of the film, as Sean “marked for death” Harris sends some nifty electronic grapefruit flying through the caves to digitally map them, forming back on the ship a 3D representation of every detail of their environment. The team, for reasons of pace, having thus saved themselves about six weeks of geologising, then uncover a decapitated body and a tomb with a giant Easter Island-type head in it, Nazibot showing suspicious abilities to open locked alien doors. Then they find lots of pods, which seasoned Alien viewers will recognise as being VERY DANGEROUS. A storm comes in and they have to race back to the ship, Nazibot stopping to secrete something gooey from one of the pods about his robot-person, and Spall and Harris getting left behind.

Finally on the ship, Rapace and the Scottish scientist examine the head of the decapitated corpse, which has the same features as Super-Silas from the opening sequence. They sterilise it, a message flashing up on a computer screen saying something like “Sterilised and decontaminated, safe to examine”. “Sterilised and decontaminated and safe to examine,” repeats the Scottish scientist, as if I’m deaf or just stupid. It’s like those people who read the words off the Powerpoint presentation they’re showing you. YES I CAN READ, THANKS. They then try to resurrect the head and accidentally blow it up, although not before establishing that its DNA matches ours. So we’re all in it together.

Meanwhile Nazibot examines what appears to be a pickled cucumber from his stolen pod and, during a very dull conversation with Marshall-Green, secretes a bit of the cucumber in his glass of champagne. M-G then gets randy and enjoys close encounters with Rapace, who economically in the same scene we are told can’t have children. Back in the cave, the two errant crew members, who have been told “ironically” by Elba “try not to bugger each other” (the worst line in a film of shit lines), are “ironically” savaged by a phallic reptile. I really like Rafe Spall as an actor but I must say that his accent was so dire that I breathed a sigh of relief when the eel-like creature shot down his throat and shut him up.

Despite all of this action it still felt like the film was going nowhere. It was probably about 45 minutes in by now and apart from anything else I was half-deaf from the Cineworld volume. There seemed to be bass speakers actually in my seat, so anytime anything dramatic happened I was practically vibrated out of it onto the floor. This wasn’t cinema, it was a fairground ride on a plane experiencing turbulence, with a thrash metal band thrown in for good measure.

Next thing I know the crew are exploring the cave again, Nazibot discovering an H.R. Geiger room with a cool 3D planetarium projection thing and a Super-Silas in suspended animation. Sadly though they have to cut their trip short again as Marshall-Green is feeling rancid. Theron, fearing contamination, won’t let him on the ship (typical elf’n’safety Nazi), and brandishes a flame-thrower at him stolen from the first Alien movie. M-G volunteers to be incinerated, which goes to show you should never accept drinks in poncey glasses from Nazi robots. Rapace also feels rough and upon examination turns out to be three months’ pregnant, only a few hours after intercourse! “It’s a miracle,” she doesn’t say, fingering the cross around her dreamy conflicted-scientist’s neck. Nazibot doesn’t let her see the scan of the foetus and gives her a shot of valium, so we know she’s gestating an alien, but she manages to escape and program a nasty-looking robot operating table to perform a caesarean. The scene is as farcical as it is disgusting, the robot lasering the flesh, removing the thrashing squid-like foetus and stapling the wound up again, all while Rapace is wide awake. It is actually a shame that it is either disgusting or farcical, because it should be terrifying – the whole film should be terrifying, as the first Alien film was (within infinitely less gore, CGI or budget). Obviously there have been several other films in the series, none of which matched the first in almost any respect (although I do love the second one, Aliens, for Sigourney Weaver’s performance), but I draw the comparison because of Scott’s involvement. I couldn’t actually believe the two films were by the same director, especially when Rapace then manages to run down lots of corridors mere minutes after major abdominal surgery. I suppose it’s the adrenaline.

Rapace fetches up in a room in which the ancient and supposedly dead Marlon Weyland (I still don’t know his first name and don’t really care) turns out to be ancient and ALIVE, albeit evidently played by some much younger actor behind acres of prosthetics, because you know these days you just can’t get really old actors, or maybe you can but they only act in films that are any good. Weyland has been secretly part of the mission the whole time in a quest to make contact with the aliens that apparently created humans so he can find the secret of eternal life. Cynics would draw a comparison here with the 75-year-old Ridley Scott interrogating his 1979 masterpiece for the secret of making great films, but I’m not jumping on that bandwagon.

So, if you’re still with me, what’s left of the crew and Weyland go down to the caves AGAIN and resurrect Super-Silas, who doesn’t throw up despite having been asleep for thousands of years, proving what an amazingly advanced race he comes from. Nazibot, who speaks every language in the universe, says something to him in Swahili, or at least it sounds like it, the alien’s response to which is to rip Nazibot’s head off and beat the crap out of everyone else. Weyland dies, which is actually disappointing in more ways than one. I mean you go all that way to discover the origins of humanity, you don’t find anything that makes any sense whatever and then you’re beaten up by a massive albino. By the end of the movie you’re more or less feeling the same way yourself. (I’ll say one thing though, from certain angles in this scene Super-Silas looks very much like Blake’s painting of Isaac Newton, which is a nice touch.)

So it turns out that the Super-Silases aka Albino Newtons created us and then wanted to destroy us, for no obvious reason except that we make a lot of shit films. Super-Silas then flies the cave, which has actually been a ship all along or something, out of the ground, apparently destined for Earth to put Ridley Scott out of his misery. Over her radio Rapace tells Elba and his co-pilots back on Prometheus that they have to stop the ship “or there’ll be no home for us to go back to!” On the strength of this weedy plea, Elba and his team – more or less grunts who have barely been involved in any major discussions about the mission – immediately volunteer for a suicide mission to crash Prometheus into the alien ship. Theron manages to escape in a flying pod, only to get crushed by falling debris. Rapace survives, but finds her only companion now is the disembodied head of Nazibot, chatting to her from the floor of the Geiger room while she scrambles to safety in a jettisoned section of Prometheus. Rapace, seemingly in the clear, staggers towards the operating theatre where she had earlier left the tennis-ball-sized creature extracted from her abdomen to find the room now occupied by a giant squid. “Can you hear me?” comes the calm voice of Nazibot over her earpiece. “You have to get out of there.” BECAUSE WE HAVE TO BE TOLD THIS BECAUSE WE ARE ALL STUPID. Super-Silas, who has managed to survive the Prometheus crash (what a guy!), reappears and struggles with both Rapace and the squid, which luckily shoves a tentacle down his throat, leaving her to escape with Nazibot’s head in a bag. As she flies away in another ship handily left lying around, the familiar shape of the original alien we know and love emerges disgustingly from Super-Silas. So the future is uncertain, but appears to involve a sequel.

Overall I’d give the film 5/10, mostly for the flying grapefruit. As it’s basically well made and beautifully designed and shot, it’s like Dr Johnson said, worth seeing, but not worth going to see.

The nonsense of the EU cookie law

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CookiesThe following is the text of a letter I sent to the Guardian following the enactment of the new EU cookie law on 26th May. The Grauniad didn’t publish it and I meant to post the text anyway but had an extra prompt today from an article reporting that, a couple of weeks later, four out of five UK organisations are ignoring the law.

I manage several websites in various capacities and this law has been a great worry for firms ever since it was announced.

The likely interpretation of the law has been unclear and much (mis)interpreted, so even though all the sites I manage use cookies in a completely harmless way (for instance to anonymously keep a count of the number of visitors and page views, or to work a shopping cart), I’ve had to spend time auditing cookies, attending workshops, liaising with colleagues, clients, legal advisers and external suppliers, wading through the ICO’s own information and other articles offering their interpretations, and trying to update web content accordingly.

While you can’t expect web developers to work for nothing, I’ve found that some web development firms have taken advantage of the law to charge hundreds or even thousands of pounds to implement hi-tech cookie-control solutions – especially dubious when there is a duty of care to ensure a client’s website complies with law. And although there are open-source solutions available, technical knowledge is still required to put those in place.

One website I manage is for a small cheese shop business and for them to consider spending even a few hundred pounds on a developer to implement a cookie-control widget has been an unwanted distraction and concern for them, especially in this climate. They also depend on analytics software, which uses cookies, to see which parts of their site their visitors are viewing so they can interpret that information to improve the site and remain competitive. As the legislation has again been unclear on this, small firms especially have been stuck between a rock and a hard place in deciding whether to risk breaching the law to retain reliable statistics.

And only now in the past few days, after firms have spent time and money trying to comply, do we hear that most of the Government’s own websites won’t comply in time – this may not actually be surprising given the Government’s contempt for the Information Commissioner’s demand to release the NHS Risk Register, but it hardly sets an example to ordinary businesses and citizens who have no such ability to ignore the ICO.

To rub salt into the wound, the ICO’s Dave Evans announces the very day before the law is implemented that “implied consent” is acceptable and that he finds it “hard to imagine a situation in which we will levy a monetary fine”. The latter is especially disingenuous when the ICO have referred clearly on their website to their maximum fine of £500,000 in relation to this law and others within their remit.

Even though the law may have originally been well-intentioned to protect consumers from a minority of malicious website owners, the ICO themselves admit they won’t be able to monitor every website and so will depend on consumers reporting potential breaches – but when most average users don’t even know what a cookie is, what’s the likelihood of them knowing a website is in breach?

The ruling and its management has left ordinary, honest businesses confused and out of pocket, while normal consumers are as much at the mercy of malicious website owners as before. Both will feel the ICO, EU and Government have let them down.

Addendum: possibly the only good thing that’s come out of the law is the BBC’s fabulous retro photos on its privacy and cookies pages.

Blog post from the past: Why “Thoughtcat”?

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A Twitter friend asked me the other day where my name came from. I wrote about the origin of “Thoughtcat” on the original website some years ago, but as with most other pages there, it’s a tad difficult to find now. So here’s the story…

One of my all-time favourite poems is Ted Hughes’s The Thought-Fox, which draws an analogy between a fox prowling for food through a forest and a writer sitting up at midnight on a similar hunt for thoughts, or a poem, in his head; the poem has been a part of my own head ever since I first read it as a teenager. A few years later I was browsing in the poetry section of a bookshop and came across An Unusual Cat Poem by Wendy Cope. Various other (feline) influences came to bear, including a few poems by Brian Patten, and an observation my late grandad once made: “They’re contrary buggers, aren’t they, cats? You feed ’em and look after ’em and give ’em a home, and then they turn round, give you a filthy look and bugger off.” Eventually all this coalesced into my own version of Ted Hughes’s poem (below): inspiration is contrary, it comes and goes; you have a moment of sublime profundity when you can write absolutely anything – and the next moment you’re back, as Leonard Cohen once put it, crawling across the carpet in your underwear searching for a rhyme for “orange”. Russell Hoban has called this “normal work panic”, an essential respect for the “thing-in-itself” which you may think is your idea but actually exists outside of you. Even though you’re the one putting the words on a sheet of paper or the screen of a word-processor, you need to recognise yourself as a kind of channel for this thing, be patient and let it come of its own accord. Like cats, ideas don’t respond well to being forced or told what to do. If you want the love of an idea, you need to keep it sweet by providing a nice home for it and cultivating the circumstances under which it will be fruitful – but even if you do, sometimes it’ll just up and disappear and there’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to wait until it comes back – if it does come back, that is. To mix my metaphors, Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, once said about writing a bestselling novel in middle-age that it’s a bit like being chased by a dog: you come across a stream and somehow you manage to jump the stream and escape, but when you look back from the other side you wonder to yourself whether you were just lucky, or if could you do it again… anyway, here’s the poem that, for better or worse, started it all off.

The Thought-Cat

A cat wandered into my garden.
I was charmed.  “Hello,” I said.
“Miaow,” it said.
I petted it and chatted to it.
“Miaow,” it said again.

It kept on miaowing until I fed it.
Food was the only thing that kept it quiet.
Then it came indoors, curled up in my lap
and purred itself to sleep.

Next morning the cat was still there,
still hungry, still miaowing.
I fed and petted it some more.
It seemed to like me.  It stayed.

By now I was flattered as well as charmed.
“Wow,” I thought, “I have a cat now.
What a lovely thing to have in a life.”
Having a cat made me feel more human.

We became good friends, the cat and I,
and then one day it disappeared.  Vanished.
Just upped and went of its own accord.
I was very upset.  I had grown very attached to that cat.

But I tried not to take it personally.
Easy come, easy go, I thought – reminding myself
that it wasn’t even my cat to begin with.
This is just the way cats are, I said –
independent, self-sufficient, unsentimental.
I wished I could be more like that myself.

I looked for that cat everywhere, tried staking it out
with bowls of food in the garden, calling its name.
It didn’t have a name so I called out “Cat!  Cat!”
But it didn’t come.

I thought of buying a cat of my own.
I went to the pet shop, was charmed and seduced
by a whole range of kittens and their tiny miaows.
But it broke my heart to have to choose one.
I was afraid that even if I did, it would only leave me one day
just like the first had done.
And anyway, that first one was impossible to replace.
I left the shop empty-handed.

These days I raggedly wander the streets,
still calling out “Cat!” from behind my straggly beard.
The passing children point at me and laugh.
“There goes the cat man!” they say.
I just smile, and they go on their way.

I loiter around pet shops,
stroke and chat to any cat I meet,
beg for pennies and spend them all on cans of Felix
in case the cat ever decides to come back.
I hope it does.  Because if nothing else,
this poem will end rather badly.

 

(c) Thoughtcat Poetry Inc 1999 or thereabouts.

Blog post from the past: My teaspoon, my wife and me (30/11/03)

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Here’s another in my occasional series of re-posts from the original Thoughtcat blog. It is still available on the original site along with lots of other daft stuff but content there is, putting it mildly, difficult to read, as I had a “Microsoft Word” approach to blogging in those days. (Here’s the link for other pedants/masochists.) Anyway, this one was always a favourite of mine for some reason, and the re-post was prompted by my finding a new spoon in the kitchen today, which I think may have been something to do with my wife…

A teaspoon

I am nothing if not a creature of habit.  In just about every area of life, I find a routine quickly and I stick to it.  Take the way I make a cup of tea: firstly I need the right teabags (Yorkshire Tea is my longtime favourite, although anything strong and flavourful will do), as well as semi-skimmed milk and white granulated sugar.  Secondly I need a good mug: it has to be a decent size, sufficient both to brew the tea (too small and it’s too strong; too large, too weak) and make the drink last a good thirty to forty minutes; it should be unfussily decorated, either with one or two strong colours or a simple pattern; and it needs to have a rim that feels comfortable on my lips, neither too thick nor too thin, and definitely not chipped, encrusted or cracked.  Thirdly, the water needs to be just boiled, the electric kettle clicking off exactly as I pour the water into the mug and onto the bag.  Finally, the spoon needs to be right.

At the risk of ending up in Private Eye’s ‘Me and my Spoon’ feature, I’ve always had a thing about A Good Teaspoon.  Obviously it has to be metal: I can’t stand those plastic spoons you find in budget cafés, and especially not those ridiculous ‘stirrers’ that don’t even look like spoons, as favoured by McDonalds.  I’m not hot on metal spoons with plastic handles, either: I need to feel that steel.  The spoon also has to have a large bowl – not so big that it becomes a tablespoon exactly, but, after years of using reasonably-bowled spoons, small spoons confuse my sugar measurements, and worst of all used teabags have a tendency to fall off small spoons in the process of being transferred from the mug to the bin, the bag either ending up on the floor or, worse, dropping back into the mug from a height of several inches, causing the tea to slop out over the sides of the mug and, by adding more tea to the water, altering the strength of the brew I’d just a few seconds before judged to be precisely right.

My only other teaspoon requirement is that the older it is, the better.  Using a brand new teaspoon, even a gleaming silver one, does nothing for me: I need a stainless steel spoon that is actually stained.  I should emphasise the difference between ‘stained’ and ‘dirty’ – I always rinse a spoon before using it, but I like a teaspoon stained golden-brown from years of stirring, tattooed by decades of tannin.  I’m not sure why this is: perhaps it makes me think of past generations using the same spoon in old kitchens to make tea thirty, fifty, eighty years ago perhaps, when all the teaspoons of my imagination were made of stained stainless steel, when things were authentic and had a bit of style, before everything was cheapened by plastic and denim, when men wore hats and suits and ties no matter what job they did (or even if was their day off, come to that), when there were Lyons’ Corner Houses instead of McDonaldses, when tea really was tea… I mean, I could get carried away.  But this is beside the point.

The point is that there is a particular spoon I always use for making tea which matches exactly the above criteria.  In fairness to myself, I’m not really a spoon-nerd; it’s the comfortableness of the spoon I’ve ended up using that has set the standard, not the other way round.  I always use the same one despite having a selection in my kitchen of at least a dozen.  Mum and Dad gave them all to me, together with a bunch of other kitchen utensils, in a job lot when I left home some ten years ago now.  They didn’t need to give me so many teaspoons, but being the way they are, it wouldn’t have happened any other way: they’re the sort of people who have at least three of every household object you can imagine, and in most cases about three hundred – pillows, blankets, towels or teaspoons, you name it, they’ve got half a drawerful going spare.

The spoon in question is just over five inches in length.  The bowl is one and three-quarter inches long, exactly an inch at its widest point and just over a quarter of an inch deep; heaped with sugar it makes for one sweet drink, even in a big mug.  With the exception of a sliver of shine across the bottom of the bowl where the spoon sits on its base, the metal is worn and scuffed as well as stained, such that hardly anything is reflected in it beyond a blur.  My face appears in that fragment of shine, my nose even longer than it already is, my lips protruding, my head curved and exaggerated fisheye-style.  There are no patterns on the spoon except a simple design of two adjacent semi-circles at the tip of the handle’s underside.  One way up it looks like a wide, curvy W; turned upside-down it becomes the top of an owl’s face; on its side it’s a crescent moon with a pointed nose in the middle, like an illustration you might find in a children’s storybook.  A little way in from the pattern are five tiny stamps in the metal: the first four read, respectively, E, P, N, S, the last A1, as if denoting excellence, perfection; research reveals the spoon is actually not stainless steel but silver-plated.  It’s a good spoon, and I love using it, to the point where if I lose it I get depressed, and a cup of tea or coffee made with another spoon just doesn’t taste the same.

True, it’s very rare for me not to be able to find my spoon, as I’m very protective of it.  But sometimes my wife hides it.

Okay, in honesty I don’t think she deliberately hides the spoon; its disappearance generally coincides with her doing the washing-up, and where I dry the spoon and return it immediately to its home (a cup on the worksurface) after washing it, she just buries it in the cutlery drainer with all the other utensils.  I get it back in the end but only after a prolonged and precarious game of Kitchen Utensil Ker-Plunk, where if I’m not careful the removal of the wrong fork at the wrong moment can bring a large Sabatier down on my foot.  No, there’s no malicious intent on behalf of my wife’s kitchen behaviour: I think she simply doesn’t relate to my position on this whole teaspoon issue.  And rightly so; I think it would be a bad day for our relationship if I were to ever say to her, “Look, please don’t hide this teaspoon.  I need to know where it is at all times.  I can’t make a cup of tea with any other spoon.  If you use it, please put it back here where I can find it.”  I mean, shades of Sleeping With the Enemy or what?

Sometimes I’ll go into the kitchen after my wife has made a cup of tea, and see the spoon she used lying rinsed on the draining board: it might be a gimmicky cartoon one that came as a free gift with a box of Tetley about 20 years ago, or one with a blue plastic handle that came in a cutlery set (a Christmas present from my Nan), or even a plain, ordinary, unpatterned, tinny, almost flat one which I don’t know the origin of at all but never use if I can help it.  Try as I might, I can find neither rhyme nor reason to my wife’s teaspoon choice; she just seems to take one at random from Mum and Dad’s original selection.  This is possibly the main difference between us: I’m a creature of habit; she’s flexible.  I tend to want to keep things the way they are; she likes to change them periodically.  But I can live with all this.  This sort of thing is what marriage is all about.