Linda Smith RIP

Comedian Linda Smith has died of ovarian cancer at the age of 48.

She was President of the British Humanist Society and can be heard talking about her beliefs on the Radio 4 show Devout Sceptics here (nasty realplayer needed, boo)

Online obituaries: the BBC, Chortle, more undoubtedly to follow

Nasty, nasty man...

Man raped his dying stepdaughter

A man who raped his unconscious teenage stepdaughter as she lay dying from a head injury has been jailed for nine years at the High Court in Glasgow.

Sentencing Judge Lord Philip told George McKee, 50, he had committed an "appalling crime" which filled members of the public with "horror".

McKee admitted raping Kerry Muchan, 14, in her Paisley home on 23 July, 2005 while she was unconscious.

Kerry died soon after the rape from a head injury caused by a fall.

Lord Philip said: "Any sentence I impose has to reflect the revulsion and horror society feels at this kind of behaviour."

...

The court heard Kerry had fallen ill after taking a cocktail of alcohol and drugs.

Her death less than two and a half hours after being raped was caused by head injuries sustained during falls.

These included a fall down stairs after which McKee took her to his bed and raped her.

He was found in bed with his stepdaughter by a relative.

When paramedics arrived, they found a faint pulse.

However, she died later in the Royal Alexandra Hospital.

A postmortem examination revealed she was still alive when her stepfather raped her.

It found she had horrific injuries consistent with being raped with considerable force.

The court was told McKee and Kerry's mother Lorna Muchan had lived as man and wife and he treated the girl as his own.

He's done it again...

Have you seen this man?

If you know where this delightful fellow is, some people would like to hear from you, he seems to have been mislaid...

You might like to pass on the info to Interpol, or alternatively, they'd be happy to hear from you in Holland too. There are a few charges they'd like to discuss with him...

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Churchillplein 1
The Hague
Holland

He doesn't like bullshitters, he doesn't like arselickers...

...and he's back on our TV screens tonight. Yes, Sir Alan Sugar is back, as series two of The Apprentice starts tonight on BBC2. I've watched the American versions as well (where the bitchy in-fighting of the female contestants is simultaneous depressing and highly amusing), but I have to say Sir Alan is far more entertaining than Donald Trump, largely due to his downright blunt manner. Never one to suffer fools gladly, he can be quite rude in the boardroom sackings, although if the last series is anything to go by, being a gobby upstart seems to win him over quite successfully.


So what fate awaits the winner? Well last year's successful candidiate, Tim, is now launching a delightful product, the Integra Face Care System. Lucky him... I suspect that an expansion of the shopping channel sales task wasn't quite how he pictured the job upon finding out he'd won. That's the main problem for the winner, they'll more than likely end up involved in flogging Amstrad's less than impressive range of goods. Take for example the E-m@iler Plus (oh look, they used an @sign, how cutting edge..): on it's launch a few years back, it was retailing for round about the hundred pounds mark; I saw it today going for just £12.99. Maybe Sir Alan should target candidates who can come up with some better, more viable product ideas for him

Sidebar content in amusing me delight

Those two features to the right of this post, the word and quote of the day, are most splendid today.

The word, verisimilitude, has now resulted in me having the Teenage Fanclub song of that name in my head, which is always a pleasure.

And the quote gave me a good chuckle, in an "oh dear, sounds like something Jack the Ripper might agree with" kind of a way. For the benefit of those who make it here after it's changed, it goes a little like this:

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

- Honore de Balzac.

Ah, those wacky ole French fellows, what are they like?

Toodlepip chaps and chapesses!

"I really really want this..."

Finally, the perfect place for all your reality TV wannabes - it's Camp Falsehopes

Irving and Free Speech

David Irving is a very unpleasant man. He writes books which espouse hateful ideas by the use of selective use of facts (and is responsible for my one and only act of book vandalism, as a university copy gained some added "notes" - normally I'm loathe to so much as break a spine or fold a page, let alone actually write in books). Until facing a jail sentence, he has consistently denied the existence of the Holocaust:

"Seventy four thousand died of natural causes in the work camps and the rest were hidden in reception camps after the war and later taken to Palestine, where they live today new identities."

- Speech in Vienna, 1989 - quote from the Independent

Even his last-minute "conversion" was less than convincing:

The judge repeatedly asked Irving if he still subscribed to the views articulated in the 1989 speeches. "I made a mistake saying there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz," he conceded. He claimed the Holocaust figure of six million murdered Jews was "a symbolic number" and said his figures totalled 2.7 million.

He said he was not sure how many died at Auschwitz, but he mentioned a figure of 300,000, a fraction of the accepted total. And he still believed Hitler protected the Jews and tried to put off the Final Solution - the systematic killing of all European Jews - at least until after the second world war.

- quote from the Guardian

He is a racist:

Irving composed a poem for [his wife], which ran: "I am a baby Aryan/Not Jewish or sectarian/I have no plans to marry an/Ape or Rastafarian."

- quote from the Guardian

His works encourage assorted right-wing loonies in their own Holocaust denial, allowing them to believe they have "proof" on their side:

A former Australian beauty queen and socialite divorcee has dramatically championed the case of British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving...
In front of camera crews and reporters, Renouf called for the bodies of "so-called Holocaust victims to be exhumed to see whether they died from typhoid or gas"...
Renouf praised Irving for "standing up to the Zionists" before a member of the Austrian press shouted at her: "Do you think your British flag entitles you to bring your Nazi propaganda into this court?"

- quote from the Courier-Mail

He provoked the Austrian courts by returning to the country despite a previous ban and an outstanding warrant for his arrest:

Asked by the Observer last month why he appeared deliberately to court trouble in Austria by returning when he knew he could be arrested and prosecuted, he replied: "I'm from a family of officers and I'm an Englishman. We march towards the gunfire."

- quote from the Guardian

All of this makes him nasty, twisted, misguided, stubborn and a little stupid. It doesn't, however, mean he needs to be locked up. It is understandable why Austria and the other European countries most affected by Nazism have laws against Holocaust denial - law is, after all, developed within the historical context of each nation, and addresses real issues pertaining to its culture and development. The jailing of Irving, however, will not do anything to prevent his ideas from being propogated, and will not dissuade anyone who supports him from continuing in their skewed thoughts.

The only likely outcome of this prison sentence will be to promote Irving to the status of martyr within neo-Nazi ranks (I for one could stand not to hear a Horst Wessel style song with Irving as its hero), and to damage the concept of free speech. Within the recent context of the cartoon riots, this issue is of more importance than it has been for some time, and it is somewhat hypocritical for a European nation to object these protests while simultaneously seeking to restrict the rights of a different opinion to be heard.

In a free society, haters must be free to hate (so long as they don't commit or incite violence based on these hatreds), differing opinions must be allowed to be aired, and debate must be allowed to develop. And only by listening to the likes of Irving can their errors be highlighted. Public suppression of his ideas would not allow other prominent and respected historians to refute his notions, thus allowing the true story to be heard, and possibly even preventing some others from accepting Irving's version of the past as true. Outlawing Irving in effect prevents debate and continued research on an important subject.

As an aside, I have often (well, occasionally) wondered how someone renowned for his archive work and detailed knowledge of his subject area could allow such bias to dominate his work. While this appears to be mainly due to him having already held some rather odious ideas, I wonder it is also in part due to his lack of formal training in historianship. One of the first lessons to be learned is the ability to spot bias in the work of other historians, in the accounts of witnesses, and indeed even in the choice of material recorded within the all-important primary resouces (i.e if you don't want people in the future to know about something, don't leave a papertrail proving its existence. What is absent can be as significant as what is present, particularly so in modern history). Perhaps this has made it easier for him to read his own views into the material he has found?

Holy Terrorism, Batman!

I wonder if they have neighbouring caves...

Peanuts

The Art of Valentine

It's Valentine's Day tomorrow, so, helpful as ever, I've been having a look at some of the ecards available out there.

For "what the hell is that" value, head for Penny Postcards, where you'll find a collection of some of the most bizarre images ever used in the name of greetings card sales.

These are some of my particular favourites. Would you trust the romantic butcher, clutching his cleaver and ready to carve up your heart?

If you survive that, the lady on the left is feeling a little homicidal too apparently. And as for the card on the right, I have absolutely no idea what's going on there. I probably don't want to know...

Why who's that lurking in the bushes? It's your Valentine's stalker of course! Fabulous! And it just isn't Valentine's Day without some charming bigotry!

I don't know about you, but nothing says Valentine to me more than some geese and a bible quote. Just as well I found CrossDaily.com then... The lucky old USA gets efforts like that on the right at American Greetings. And it's not in a "kitschy old style" section either.

Don't despair though, there is some good stuff out there. For classy understated flash ecards, head over to Jimpix. Lovely work.

And then there's the source of these four images, Hipster Cards, who have a great selection across a number of styles. And no animated singing balloon-clutching teddy bears in sight...

I for one welcome our new parasitic overlords...

Mind Control by Parasites

Half of the world's human population is infected with Toxoplasma, parasites in the body—and the brain. Remember that.
Toxoplasma gondii is a common parasite found in the guts of cats; it sheds eggs that are picked up by rats and other animals that are eaten by cats. Toxoplasma forms cysts in the bodies of the intermediate rat hosts, including in the brain...

Oxford scientists discovered that the minds of the infected rats have been subtly altered. In a series of experiments, they demonstrated that healthy rats will prudently avoid areas that have been doused with cat urine. In fact, when scientists test anti-anxiety drugs on rats, they use a whiff of cat urine to induce neurochemical panic.

However, it turns out that Toxoplasma-ridden rats show no such reaction. In fact, some of the infected rats actually seek out the cat urine-marked areas again and again. The parasite alters the mind (and thus the behavior) of the rat for its own benefit.

If the parasite can alter rat behavior, does it have any effect on humans?

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey (Associate Director for Laboratory Research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute) noticed links between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia in human beings, approximately three billion of whom are infected with T. gondii:

* Toxoplasma infection is associated with damage to astrocytes, glial cells which surround and support neurons. Schizophrenia is also associated with damage to astrocytes.
* Pregnant women with high levels of antibodies to Toxoplasma are more likely to give birth to children who will develop schizophrenia.
* Human cells raised in petri dishes, and infected with Toxoplasma, will respond to drugs like haloperidol; the growth of the parasite stops. Haloperidol is an antipsychotic, used to treat schizophrenia.

Dr. Torrey got together with the Oxford scientists, to see if anything could be done about those parasite-controlled rats that were driven to hang around cat urine-soaked corners (waiting for cats). According to a recent press release, haloperidol restores the rat's healthy fear of cat urine. In fact, antipsychotic drugs were as effective as pyrimethamine, a drug that specifically eliminates Toxoplasma.

In other news, Spyware Barely Touches Firefox -

Internet Explorer users can be as much as 21 times more likely to end up with a spyware-infected PC than people who go online with Mozilla's Firefox browser, academic researchers from Microsoft's backyard said in a recently published paper.

"We can't say whether Firefox is a safer browser or not," said Henry Levy, one of the two University of Washington professors who, along with a pair of graduate students, created Web crawlers to scour the Internet for spyware in several 2005 forays. "But we can say that users will have a safer experience [surfing] with Firefox."

and Microsoft Anti-Spyware Deleting Norton Anti-Virus -

Microsoft's Anti-Spyware program is causing troubles for people who also use Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus software; apparently, a recent update to Microsoft's anti-spyware application flags Norton as a password-stealing program and prompts users to remove it.

According to several different support threads over at Microsoft's user groups forum, the latest definitions file from Microsoft "(version 5805, 5807) detects Symantec Antivirus files as PWS.Bancos.A (Password Stealer)."

When Microsoft Anti-Spyware users remove the flagged Norton file as prompted, Symantec's product gets corrupted and no longer protects the user's machine. The Norton user then has to go through the Windows registry and delete multiple entries (registry editing is always a dicey affair that can quickly hose a system if the user doesn't know what he or she is doing) so that the program can be completely removed and re-installed.

Mozilla 2 Microsoft 0...

And more Wikipedia editing -

In the wacky, sometimes wickedly funny, world of Wikipedia, the internet's free encyclopedia, Tony Blair has been given the new middle names of Whoop-de Doo.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, makes surprise visits to Ilford instead of Iraq and Robbie Williams earns his millions eating pet hamsters. Oh, and David Beckham was a Chinese goalkeeper in the 18th century...

Last week the 19-page entry for the prime minister was being changed as many as 25 times a day. He was briefly accused of having posters of Adolf Hitler on his bedroom wall as a teenager and of starting a “false” war against Saddam Hussein...

One saboteur, codenamed Thruston, changes the same sentence in Blair's entry on an almost daily basis to accuse him of setting out to “destroy” civil service neutrality.
John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, has his own antagonist who regularly insults him with such epithets as “fat bonehead”. The caption under a photograph of Prescott was changed to read Rhubarb Pie...

Another hacker regularly removes whole sections of Gordon Brown’s biography and replaces it with one word: “tax”...

Enemies of Sienna Miller, the actress whose on-off affair with Jude Law has captured tabloid headlines, dispute her height and claim that she has modelled nude. An entry for Robbie Williams, the singer, last week read “. . . makes his money by eating domestic pets in pubs in and around Stoke”.

wow wow wow

The Black Lodge is a must for anyone with a love of David Lynch, anyone interested in the creative possibilities of the internet, anyone fascinated by alternate realities... oh never mind that, just anyone. No restrictions. Go visit it now.

Wigtastic!

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Well whadda ya know?

An innocent man?

Jenkins: the allegations of violence the jury never heard

Billie-Jo 'suffered in silence'

Profile: the contradictions of Sion Jenkins

Billie-Jo was not the only victim in a household torn apart by suspicion

How rumours and Jenkins's lies made him prime suspect

This isn't just a blog post, it's a lovingly written, beautifully crafted word sculpture...

Ahem.

Well, it's no more ridiculous than a Marks and Spencer food advert. You know the ones - Fleetwood Mac's Albatross plays in the background, the camera lingers over close-ups of some delicacy or other, and Dervla Kirwan starts up with her latest "this is not just food, it's ludicrously over-the-top food pornography" script. Those of you from foreign climes can see an example here.

A quick trip into the store confirms that the hyperbole isn't restricted to the television advertising, it has made its way onto the labels as well. No simple straightforward descriptions here; their chicken kievs are "oozing" with garlic, and the pizza bases are, of course, "hand crafted". Fruit flavoured fizzy drinks eschew plain ingredients in flavour of sicilian lemon and mexican lime, and alphonso mango and passionfruit.



Here are two particularly lovely examples:

on a pack of chicken thighs and drumsticks

the meaty full flavour of chicken thighs and drumsticks sprinkled with a wonderfully aromatic mix of garlic rosemary and parsley.

and on a pack of rump steak in peppercorn sauce

succulent, 21 day matured beef accompanied by a glossy pink peppercorn sauce finished with double cream, madiera and brandy

Even the basics have more description than ordinarily (and slightly higher ethical standards to go along with them it appears), with Muir Den pork and Oakham chicken, and an emphasis on fair trade goods in some areas. They even have a special magazine telling us how wonderful they are.

Now if only they could make the clothes sound good, they might just regain their pre-eminent high street position...

At last my quest is over

Many, many years ago I stumbled home one night and, not feeling overly tired, decided to watch whatever trash the TV could throw at me. And my oh my, what trash it was - a sub-sub-sub-sub-Conan the Barbarian style film with cheesy dialogue, a ridiculous "plot", and the most ridiculous monster sidekick ever committed to celluloid - a peculiar white Chewbacca rip-off with extremely limited arm movements (the costume designer really ought to have given the poor actor some more room in the armpit area).

Years passed, and I began to suspect I'd really just dreamt this film into creation (although I'm not sure my mind is quite that twisted...) until I decided to try to track it down online. All I really had to go on was the genre, that furry monstrosity, and a vague recollection that it might have been dubbed, but lo, the mythical quest has ended in success, and I now know the title - Wizards of the Lost Kingdom. Apparently there was even a sequel, a ludicrous concept if ever I heard one. The original film is reviewed in some style here (also where the beautiful pic above comes from). And even more joy - the trailer is online too!

Good old internet, now I can rest easy in the knowledge that my brain doesn't conjure up dodgy eighties sword and sorcery "epics" while I sleep...

What the?

Tonight on Question Time...

Adam Rickett.

Of wooden acting on Coronation Street and short-lived not aimed at the gay market, oh no not at all pop career.

What a crazy world we live in.

In Memoriam...

Smash Hits Forever

Geek Chic

I've just been watching this:

Tyrone Power's finest acting hour, the marvellously bitter (if you ignore the tacked on sort-of-vaguely-happier ending) noir Nightmare Alley. The main attraction of the film is it's carnival setting - a fascinating world of outsiders, con artists, freaks and, the lowest of the low, the geek. The film is an adaptation of a supposedly far darker novel by William Lindsay Gresham, which I may well now have to track down. In a not-completely-coincidental way, I stumbled across Sideshow World the other day while a-browsing, so if you want to know more about the whole subject, that's the place to head.

Me and my bright ideas...

Dubya is wittering away about something or other on the TV. The cat is chasing invisible mice in the hall. And I'm at a bit of a loss.

There's a workman coming round at eight in the morning, so rather than - gasp! - get up early, I decided the smart (!) thing to do was sleep in late today then stay up.

Sigh.

I'm a lazy sod at the best of times, but I doubt anyone manages to feel productive at 3am. There's a huge pile of ironing I could easily make a start at if I felt so inclined. I could watch one of the Christmas pressie DVDs I haven't looked at yet. I could even read a book. But my brain and body are in agreement: it's all just a bit too much effort. So I'll just sit here. Staring at a computer screen. Occasionally risking overtasking myself with a mouse-click.

Meh....