Is it just me?

Or have none of these scientists read Oryx and Crake????

The clue as to this woman's sanity

Would be in the bark, bark, bark.

One has to be able to distinguish the fiendishly evil from the barking mad.

Binge drinkign - curse of youth

Young folks always over-do. They haven't had enough negative consequences, hang-overs etc. to make them change their ways. Usually, in the late 20s, something makes them look at themselves and think 'no, won't do that again'. And they don't.

The ones who keep up this behavour are arrested development cases or have issues, issues, issues. What can be kinda cute in a febrile way by 22 year old is just sad by a 42 year old.

Who am I? Only the Govt can say.

I recently renewed my passport and had to deal with the Identity and Passport Service on the phone. I love the fact that we have a Govt body looking after my identity, and presumably conferring it upon me, or at least confirming i had one.

Yet it was my understanding that free-born English persons were assumed to come with an identity and with rights that a Govt could only abrogate with their collective permission.

Or did I miss something on the route from the Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution to the upheavals of the 1840s to the 20th century.

isn't this the institution...

... that dumped mountains of old newspapers and other rare and impossible-to-replace periodicals from its collection because all of it was hard to store and they'd microfilmed the lot? The microfilms are often dodgy and the film isn't stable, yet paper, if cared for, lasts pretty much forever -- at least centuries, and lets see if a strip of film or a CD that manages that.

Periodicals weren't the only thing the BL got rid of. This is a scandal. And we would give librarians who want to be 'with it', but apparently have ceased to be professionals for whom the printed word is a sacred duty to protect, huge rsources to 'store' websites? Aren't websites much like conversations -- ever-changing? Why not suggest the Powers That Be simply record all of us everywhere?

Oh, wait a minute...

I am gutted

I wanted there to be lesbians. I mean, we can be underworld crime bosses too! But sadly, only staright models (I assume) and a male recruiter.

But still, I like to think there was a little chic for a while among the unspeakable crooks that peddle drugs.

Hooray!

We Londoners can finally have all of Grosvenor Square back without all the chicanes and armed police in a very nice part of Mayfair.

How much the American Ambassador will like being out in the sticks is anyone's guess, but at least we won't have to watch American diplomatic cars drive into the heart of the West End Congestion-Charge free. I hope our Ambassador in Washington DC is currently withholding some local city tax, to give them a taste of civil disobedience.

I opted out

I am the author of one modest published novel and many short stories in anthologies, as well as poetry. I opted out because i am so 'under the radar' and also in the UK that Google would have swept me up int heir 'orphan works' clause, and I would ahve been excluded from the digital version of my own works.

While this would be gutting for me, my major concern is the huge public and university libraries int he USA, who joined in thinking they were helping to create the biggest public library in the universe. Sadly, they were lambs to the slaughter: Google prohibits them from having a full reading copy of any digital work, even of those books they have given from their collection for Google to digitise.

Meanwhile, the two 'author associations int he USA have agreed to a dribble of dosh from the Google book coffers in return for rolling over and playing dead. They also rather assumed they represented authors around the globe. I hope the EU keeps fighting on. Funny that we European uathors now cling to the fighting spirit of the Germans for ultimate victory!

Just look at paintings...

The great paintings of Titian, Rubens, etc. etc. showed heavy women (because, let's face it, that is what the article is here for, given that the assumed audience is mostly male) as heaviness = sexiness because heaviness = fed, propserous, not cadaverous, not broken out in the sores and illnesses that come with malnutrition, etc.

It is thought that men's beards provide the same sort of function as tail feathers on, ay, pheasants: it is a visual marker to females of the man's/male bird's healtha nd therefore potency -- glossy feathers with complex patterning = alpha, thick, glossy, full beard = alpha. Malnutrition, because you are lower down on the pecking order and therefore have less access to food, means dull, less-patterned feathers or patchy and thin beards.

In the same way, a woman with heft (I am not talking obese, as neither was the Italian study) has the ability to bear children and suckle them without risk to her health, and has the energy storage that will ensure that she lives to raise her young.

So, before the male El Reg fans do their 'snurg, snurg' comments, let them check he phsycial attibutes they display for reproductive selection, and be not the ones who cast the first stone.

erm...

Now if only those expat Brits in Israel had had the ID card, none of this would have happened...

I do wonder, however, over the 'assassination by suffocation'. Suffocation? As in, with a pillow? As in strangling? Are we sure this gentleman was assassinated, and not, say, accidently killed in some kinky sex games? I don't want to cast aspersions on the dear departed,but a male dead in a hotel room tends to be a corpse from a lot more likely causes than assassination.

So, the conclusion is...

... that comfort food brings comfort? That a hot, savoury treat is a treat? That being fed is nurturing?

Can I get a science grant to prove that the sun rising in the morning makes the day seem brighter to us? Or to find out if getting a bonus makes people feel valued? Or that getting grant money for specious studies makes us feel bloody clever?

bring them back!

If they can surmount the pesky safety record, I think it would be great if these came back into use, not just for lifting and moving freight over long distances cheaply, but also as cruise ship sint he sky. I think back to the Buenos Aires-Europe runs in the 1930s and think it must have been fantastic: quiet, slow-ish, elegant. Surely the bang-per-buck stacks up again now?

That would have got me

I came to the UK as a graduate student, stayed to work, and now happily earn pots of money and pay huge taxes. Big win for the UK. If I had faced this sort of search, scrutiny, reporting, tagging and other unpleasantness, I would have gone elsewhere. Given that I am white and female, I wonder if the full force of these distasteful measures would have been rained down on me, or it the assiduousness of the Border Contol folks would been focused on browner people from poorer countries?

golden arches

If McDonald's is good enough for most graduates, it's good enough for them.

or even uninterest...

...given that 'disinterest' is a synonym for 'altruism' or, more exactly 'not having an interest in' the same way one not benefiting from something derives no interest from it.

I know I am fighting a lonely fight here.

surely this was deliberate

Not the contrails, but the sperm bank sign. I love it! Does just what it says on the tin.

OK, I am stumped

I warbled 'Kookaburra sits...' for years as a girl, and when I heard the Men At Work song, no echoes came. This is very silly.

Hollerith

UK -- proudly leading the way up a path only the UAE wants to follow.

wayback machine

I do a lot of research on a wide range of new topics, and so what I searched for yesterday is pretty much not what I am searching for today. Ads served up for yesterday's search patterns are going to be cold porridge as far as I am concerned. I guess I am in a sub-set, and that everybody else always searches for the same things day in, day out...

DAB good, DAB radios bad

I need a clock radio by my bed, and only DAB gets me reception, as the old mansion block i live in kills anything else in that particular location.

I have tried two different DAB radios and, while they work, they are so @*!%#£ difficult to use that I have given up on both. I want the thing to turn on witht he right time and date, then allow me to find my preferred radio station BBC3, set a weekday and a weekend alarm, and that's it. But hours later, I was finally reduced to getting out my old battery alarm clock and using that, with the clock/radio gatthering dust at the back of the night table.

I am not sure it's DAB that died, or whether the unbelievably user-unfriendly radios killed it.

it's not the screens I'm worried about

But the people watching throse screens. Airport security hiring practice is a bit of a joke, with a low but constant level of stories about unsuitable people found to have been hired by airports (baggage handlers, etc.) All you need is one person with a squeaky-clean record to be suborned (suitcases of money), or blackmailed (by something in his/her life that isn't a security risk, but which he or she is desperately ashamed of), or threatened ('we know where your wife works...) so as to have them on shift when your colleague, the terrorist who knows a little more about explosives than our dear Pantsbomber, is going to be walking past the scanner.

Or, of course, let nature take its course, with tired, over-working, bored, under-paid, demotivated security staff finally so nauseated by lardy passengers that he or she simply glazes over to the point where someone in a semtex catsuit can hula past the camera and not be spotted.

Ah, would that we could

I'd love to have an advert for a developer that required slim, well-scrubbed, sober, good looking bloke, well-hung and well buff, with good social skills, if only for the eye-candy, but I would be faced with probably one Polish candidate. If that.

But of course every male developer I've known secretly thinks any girl is lucky to get him. Well, every male.

happy girlhood days

I used to head out on my bike for a whole day, or even days. Before mobile phones or anything. My parents explained the dangers of 'odd' strangers and nasty men, of being brave and sensible when hurt, of not being stupid when climbing trees, etc., but 'if duffers, better drowned; if not duffers, won't drown' was their attitude. So I and my siblings learned to repair our own bikes, get back home after dark, make treehouses, build rafts, play with other children unsupervised and unwatched, fight our own battles, spend our pocket-money as we chose, make the friends we wanted to make, and to rue the consequences of bad choices, and so on.

Maybe we were lucky, in a young city in a young country in an time period where children were thought to thrive best when not force-fed or watched too much. Are we better adults for it? I quess we'll see when this current crop of kids grows up and we can compare.

Nice parallel

The slaves shouted 'I'mSpartacus' voluntarily, willing to be tortured and killed in their hero's place.

That kind of volunteerism is exactly what was asked for from Manchester, and yet they failed to step up to the honour. Shame, shame and yet again, Mancunians, shame. They will never make a movie about you.

So this means...

...all 2012 athletes will have to card up? I can hardly wait.

Lads, lads...

My favorite bit was the comments that he'd seen only three or four similar incidents in his 17 year career.

Lads, come on, a steel pipe? How on earth is this going to be a good idea, let alone a sensuous experience, especially in this cold?

I remain un-outraged

As a ladee, I have no problem not being associated with a kind of disc.

A lesson from history

A quick glance at new France versus the English colonies to the south in the kate 1600s and early 1700s shows the difference between a controlled environment, where every innovation has to have royal approval, and a wide-open world of invention, scrambling for money, and creativity.

I don't want to be in a colony, I don't wan tto use things approved by a Royal Governor, I don't want to be limited by what the Crown thinks is good for me.

That's why I have no Apple devices.

Not good for the EU

Lthuania already takes on too many Russian practices (check out how its judges handle cases -- very politically) and weint he EU support it. Now to have them dependent on Russia for power makes them vulnerable, and more abuses will creep in as they try to do their master's bidding, within anEU content.

I am all for a wider EU, but I think we rushed into embracing some eastern European countries without thinking hard about making them less 'Soviet' and more 'liberal'.

Redact

I for one mourn the degradation of this useful and specific word to a simpler usage, i.e. 'blocked' or 'censored'. But 'redacted' sounds important and technical, while 'blocked' isn't col. "Redacted" in its true sense is great and we shouldn't lose it. Sadly, I am already waving bye-bye.

And they laugh at medieval scholastics...

'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin' is seen as medievial scholars arguing specious and silly arguments. But this is asking 'are angels corporeal and therefore fixed entities or are they incorporeal and can change size and shape, and indeed not even take up any dimensions in the solid world at all, but rather live in our minds and souls?'

So medieval scholars with access to about eight books can explore the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions of faith at a higher level than a modern professor, and can understand that symbolic trappings (wings, halo, whatever) are needed merely to represent the spiritual.

so now what...??

What can sh*t in the woods while a bear is Catholic?

Very sad news

She was a cracking character actress and was always a pleasure. She was super in 'Clueless' and always gave interesting and engaging performances. That her sadly early death should be trivialised by those with not enough life to fill their lives is a shame.

'oops'

Oh gosh, does it give us God-like powers, just as in China? Oops, tee hee, our mistake. Colour us embarassed!!! :)

It's not just the police

We were taking photos around Paddington Basin development in London when as security guard emerged to send us on our way.

We went, and so didn't have coffee in the local Starbucks, nor did we stay for lunch in the basin, as planned, so two local businsses lost out. But they are certainly secure from our little cameras!

We all remember Huntly, but...

...the real risk to children is more likely at home than at school, from strangers. By running around with their heads of fire screaming 'we must protect the children' and then instituting daft over-engineered vetting schemes, the Govt distracts from the real risk. Better to run a huge advertising campaign to say: here are the signs that your child might be being abused: changes in personality, secretiveness, over-eagerness to please, bed-wetting, physical changes such as bruising or blood,...etc'. For every murderous Huntly, there are two dozen dads or boyfriends (and yes, mothers or girlfriends, but mostly as accomplices) or vicars or priests who are making life hell on earth for some children.

Having alert staff at schools with the time to check up on adults in the building, sensible security to and from school and so on offers good protection. Simple record-checking vetting procedures would merely be another line of defence.

'fair use' poorly understood

'Fair use' tends to be used for 'I didn't take very much and I didn't profit by it (much).' But is is a restricted use of someone else's copyright, well-defined in law, and Nesson was a bit mad to try to ram fair use through for 'I took and shared lots of someone else's work without paying for it.'

this is how it works

Shamans from the dawn of time have clocked onto the fact that you have to (1) jolt the 'patient' out of his or her mental rut (2) do impressive things that seem to invoke power (3) give a very positive experience to back up (1) and (2) and (4) make it cost the 'patient' something. Castaneda's books are examples of the shaman at work. Good shamans, including priests, psychiatrists, etc., who have figured out that the mind can heal itself of its emotional woes through a bit of adroit 'magic' actually help people. They are smart if they limit their claims to the achievable. I say our trucker is a very wise man, as well as good in the sack. Nice gig!

There is the stupidity aspect

As with the BART killing, and with this deceased chap, and with many other deaths by police I have seen, the stupidity of the perp is always eye-watering. It's not even always down to ingestion of substances. People are just thick. And the police are part of that group.

II've been on both sides of the interview table

When I interview, I am looking for the candidate's experience and savvy. When I see things that distract me from the story the should want to be telling, i.e. how fabulous they are as a candidate, then I question whether they will have the drive to do the job, or whether their heart really lies elsewhere. So flagging up Christian (or animal rights or folk music) suggests to me that they are more into their identity than into their work, and will spend working hours on their first love. So I wouldn't automatically reject them, but I would have a big, big warning sign saying: be careful with this one, and I would ask more probing questions. They have raised the difficulty and they shouldn't be surprised if I feel I have to deal with it..

With Christians specifically, I find the ones who 'declaim Christ constantly' without words, i.e. by truly Christian behaviour, are lovely to work with, and those who 'declaim' by bullying, sounding off and getting in people's faces, are 'Christianists' who use the cloak of a faith to do what they really want to do, which is to dominate (i.s. sociopaths). The former seldom put any indication on their CVs of their faith. The latter seldom put any faith in their actions.

As for AC of 13.51: I find the whiners are not women or ethnic groups, but working class white men. I haven't noticed that white men have been wiped out as a species in the upper echelons of power. In the company I now work for, every single upper management job is filled by a white man save one (a white woman), and save for some HR or 'soft' departments, headed by women. I don't know if these men are middle-class or working-class, but the group 'white man' is only feeling hunted because they don't dominate 100%. As Joanna Russ said in the 1980s, dominant groups believe they are being 'taken over' or 'edged out' when 7% (seven percent) of their colleagues are not like them. So my heart remains unwrung by the plight of working-class men, who need to do so very little to have it all.

a cheaper solution

Use the money to buy hospital equipment, school equipment and so on and send them to the Middle East, no strings attached, but with a lot of good diplomacy.

he was his own worst enemy, but that still doesn't mean...

... that the Police should have wasted their time hounding him. A smart person who gets sucked into the undertow of police attention does NOT miss bail or court appearances, but gets themselves a lawyer immediately, and doesn't screw himself with silly actions such as carrying a knife or trying to get a new passport. He is one of those people who just keep doing stupid things, most probably because of his mental condition. Believing that he has a right to silence is another stupidity. A decent lawyer could have saved him from himself.

But the police should not be going for such an easy target, nor should they hound him because he pissed them off. It's too easy to chase a non-threat like this, and to feel the heady surge of power of another human being, than it is to do the hard work of actually catching terrorists so, instead of bending over backwards to consider the whole of his case (mental illness, children's toys, bit of a saddie) they decided to ramp it up. Poor judgement and self-indulgence from the police, and now yet another harmless person in prison for no reason but coming to the attention of the authorities.

If many people pay for the privilege, isn't that good?

They can queue intot he longer and longer fast-track booths, while I can stay in the shorter and shorter bog-standard queues. Works for me.

One could argue

...that the film promotes the selfless power of love. But THAT wouldn't be compatible with organised religion, would it?

jobs for the ultra-Orthodox?

Nice one, guys.

Too bad Israel is such a good market. I'd be tempted to pull out.

Another example of extremists re-shaping civil society to better fit their own view of the world. What a pity Intel didn't just tough it out.