Older blog entries for marnanel (starting at number 926)

12 Mar 2012 (updated 12 Mar 2012 at 12:05 UTC) »

Why I don't support the Premier Radio petition

Premier Radio has been putting a petition around. It's asking for a law to be made requiring ISPs to block pornographic websites if the person logged in is under 18. Here I am explaining why I don't support this petition and won't be signing it. This is not intended to disparage anyone who has signed it; it is only to explain why I shall not be doing so.

Firstly, it is incoherent. The concept of "logged on" applies to a computer, not to a network. Various operating systems implement this in various ways, and some have no such concept. The ISP has no way of knowing this information.

Secondly, the term "pornography" is notoriously difficult to define. Facebook have recently used it to prevent mothers posting pictures of themselves breastfeeding their own children. School boards in the United States who wished to promote abstinence-only education have used it to stop their students reading about safe sex. How is the term to be defined, and who will be making the decision, and how will they be accountable? Not too long ago, a Pennsylvania official who had the ability to block websites based on their content abused his power to prevent anyone in the state reading a political website which was critical of him.

Finally, the petition is couched in such terms that to dissent from it is almost to be seen to approve of child abuse. This is not a reasonable way to put forward an idea, and I wish to have nothing to do with it.

Edit: I've been pointed to http://www.crimperman.org/2012/02/29/why-internet-blocking-will-not-protect-our-children/ which is another opinion concurring with this one.

Syndicated 2012-03-12 10:51:46 (Updated 2012-03-12 11:44:04) from Monument

Admin dreams

I woke up twice in the night, each time from an exhausting admin dream. Do other people get admin dreams? I have nightmares where nothing particularly bad happens, but I'm run ragged trying to keep up with the demands of dozens of unhappy clients. At one point I remember being asked to look after a lighthouse while the lighthouse keepers were on holiday, and then needing my phone and losing it. Each time I woke up exhausted.

Syndicated 2012-03-01 09:16:20 from Monument

And we were singing...

And we were singing...
Bye-bye Mr Raspberry Pi,
Seems your suitors want computers that are short in supply.
I guess they'll wait till another comes by,
then I reckon they will all reapply.

Syndicated 2012-02-29 11:27:25 from Monument

Rosehips

This morning, while waiting for a train, I was sitting on a bench in memory of someone or other. Just beside it, also in this person's memory, was a rose-bush that nobody cared for.

Let me tell you a bit about roses here. You and I, who plant the roses, believe that the purpose of the rose is to grow flowers. But the rose has other ideas. To the rose, a flower is only the means to the end of producing a rosehip, which is its seed; the irony, lost on the rose, is that all cultivated roses are infertile anyway. The rosehips don't fall for a season or so, and there won't be any new flowers there until they do. So one part of caring for a rose is to cut away the hips, or the "dead heads" as people sometimes call them. This rose had scores of hips, and clearly wasn't being looked after.

Rosebush

So I got my hands a bit bloody this morning, but there will be roses again in the summer. I couldn't help but be reminded of Jesus's claim to be the true vine, "...and my father is the gardener; every branch in me that bears no fruit he will remove, but every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be more fruitful." For me and for the rose, feeling the edge of the pruning knife means I'm doing something right.

Syndicated 2012-02-28 07:53:31 (Updated 2012-02-28 07:54:07) from Monument

Cholera

The scene: A work break room. MARNANEL is getting a cup of coffee from the machine, and CLEANING PERSON is squirting disinfectant into the sink.

MARNANEL: Thank you.

CLEANING PERSON: ...For what?

MARNANEL: For cleaning the sink.

CLEANING PERSON: Cleaning the sink? (She wrinkles her nose in confusion.) You're saying "thank you" for me doing this?

MARNANEL: Yeah, so we don't all die of cholera. Because I don't LIKE dying of cholera.

CLEANING PERSON: ...Cholera?

MARNANEL: And other waterborne diseases! People died of them ALL THE TIME before we started disinfecting sinks and so on. So I'm glad you're cleaning the sink, because it's a horrible way to die.

CLEANING PERSON: It is?

MARNANEL: Yeah! Bloody diarrhoea! Vomiting! And then you die painfully.

CLEANING PERSON: *stares*

MARNANEL: *decides this would be a good place to end the conversation*

Syndicated 2012-02-27 15:07:54 from Monument

"The Aristocrat" - G K Chesterton

Like much of Chesterton's (and Belloc's) work, this starts in a fluffy manner but becomes very serious at the end. The inimitable Sydney Smith apparently characterised some people's view of heaven as "eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets". Chesterton points out that this will become its own kind of hell.

One point of explanation is necessary: "the blues", depression, was originally "the blue devils" (see OED). So "and that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird" means approximately "what was once happiness becomes depression".

The Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stay
At his little place at What'sitsname (it isn't far away).
They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,
And fairy scenes, and fearful feats that none but he can do;
He can shoot the feathered cherubs if they fly on the estate,
Or fish for Father Neptune with the mermaids for a bait;
He scaled amid the staggering stars that precipice, the sky,
And blew his trumpet above heaven, and got by mastery
The starry crown of God Himself, and shoved it on the shelf;
But the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't brag himself.

O blind your eyes and break your heart and hack your hand away,
And lose your love and shave your head; but do not go to stay
At the little place in What'sitsname where folks are rich and clever;
The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever;
There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain;
There is a game of April Fool that's played behind its door,
Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more,
Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,
And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark:
And that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird;
For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word.

Syndicated 2012-02-27 10:38:17 from Monument

Sitting at the bottom of the swimming pool

When I was a child, I read this somewhere in a magazine: I forget where, or I'd send the writer my thanks. It's one of those offhand things which become part of my mental furniture for the rest of my life.

The writer said that when she was a little girl, she used to go with her friends to the swimming pool. And her friends would end up splashing around and making a lot of noise, which is fun for a while. When she got tired of it, though, she would take a great lungful of air and make herself sink to the bottom of the pool, and there she would sit happily beneath it all in the calm, looking up at the sunlight and the chaos above her, beneath it but not part of it.

And one day she learned that she could do the same thing anywhere. No swimming pool was necessary.

Syndicated 2012-02-24 10:04:41 (Updated 2012-02-24 10:06:49) from Monument

A week of picking on trans people

It's hardly unusual for trans people to be picked on by the rest of society, but this week has been egregious.

Firstly, there was the news story of the five-year-old child who was born male but wants to be a girl. Several national newspapers saw fit to publish not only this child's name but also the name of her school, some of them on the front page.

Secondly, the bookmaker Paddy Power ran a campaign which invited people at a racing meet to judge whether women were transgendered or cisgendered (the bookmaker asked people to "spot the stallions from the mares").

Thirdly, after a transsexual man reportedly recently gave birth in the UK, the Sun set up a hotline for its readers to tell its reporters where he lives. Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton, is to be commended for tabling an early day motion in the Commons condemning this behaviour.

And fourthly, the charity Plan UK decided to make a bus shelter advert that was visible only to female observers. This worked by using facial analysis software, and was apparently 90% accurate. It seems that nobody thought of the dangers inherent in having a machine declare a person's observed gender to the rest of the bus queue. (If the machine had a 10% false positive rate, can you imagine what a gift it would be to a bully waiting for the school bus?) Sarah Brown gave this device the wonderful name "Out-o-tron". Plan UK are not apologising and have permanently lost my support.

Syndicated 2012-02-22 12:40:34 (Updated 2012-02-22 13:08:29) from Monument

Apaches

I can honestly say that being made to watch this film in school was one of the most horrifying half-hours of my life. Did any of the rest of you have to watch it?

Syndicated 2012-02-15 22:51:29 from Monument

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