‮hjap‮

To: tycho@penny-arcade.com
From: [me]
Subject:Seasonal microbrews, brigand

Dear Jerry/Tycho

I've enjoyed reading PA for many years, but today's comic was a stroke of pure genius that struck a chord deep within my very soul.

I hereby unconditionally offer you my firstborn.

All the best,

pajh

~

They're my lungs [their title, not mine]

Sirs,

Sheila Duffy of ASH Scotland witters interminably about the already well-known dangers of smoking (Opinion, 23 September), with cherry-picked statistics about the cost of smoking to the NHS. She neglects to mention that tobacco tax revenue far outstrips this figure and provides plenty of extra money left over to pay for the generous government grants that make up her salary. [sources: http://tinyurl.com/lvbm37, http://tinyurl.com/m2z8pk]

The simple fact of the matter is this: at no time in the last fifty years has a rational human being in the western hemisphere, whether adult or child, ever read the Surgeon General's warning, smacked their forehead in despair and cried to the heavens that they should have been told before. We all know what smoking does to us and some of us still choose to do it, and the figures show clearly that we more than adequately cover the social costs of our choice. It is not within the Government's remit to tell us what we can do in the privacy of our own lungs, and is certainly not up to interfering busybodies like Sheila Duffy and ASH.

Fact is it's got precisely fuck-all to do with the dangers of smoking to the individual, and it's got even less to do with somebody please thinking of the chiiildrun. It's got everything to do with the fact that Sheila Duffy personally doesn't like the fact that some people smoke.

I am glad to live in a world in which Sheila Duffy doesn't get to tell me what to do.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/193517.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

The EHRC has requested that the BNP comply with the Race Relations Act. Well, I'm glad that's all been sorted out. What would we do without the EHRC to defeat fascism for us?

~

Following this moderately amusing exchange in recent Scotsman letters pages—which, for once, I had nothing to do with—comes the story of Larry W. Peterman, acquitted on pornography charges because of the records of what everyone else in the community was watching at the time. Further information in the New York Times. I love it when stuff like this happens: there are fewer dirty secrets, and the secrets that are left don't stay dirty when we know that everyone has a handful of harmless ones. The unbounded accessibility of information makes us all a bit more equal.

Related: via miss_s_b's random squeezings comes tyrell's insightful post: There is no more plausible deniability in the world. It's harrowing to hear of Neda Soltani's death, but the ray of hope is this: it can't be long before despots realise that they can't get away with this shit any more. If the state-sponsored murder of an Iranian woman doesn't hit your personal buttons, then remember Ian Tomlinson. That which affects Iran affects us all.

They've got guns and sticks, but we've got the Internet. The panopticon works both ways.

Next: find some way to empower the dissemination of information on tyranny such that that it will actually stop tyrants doing it.

~

I'm going to the Actor Expo tradeshow on Saturday. I'm not entirely sure what one's supposed to do there, but I've signed up for a couple of seminars, including How to make it big in Hollywood, from which I'm hoping that some generalized non-Hollywood-specific information can be extrapolated. If it turns out to be an hour on how to get a US visa I'm going to be disappointed.

Typically, neither my headshots nor my business cards are likely to be ready until after the expo. Oh well.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/191632.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Lovelace and Babbage!

Starring: Ada Lovelace!

And Charles Babbage!

This is quite possibly the best thing ever. And the artist claims that she's not doing a comic. I need all of you to email her and tell her how many copies you'd buy, and convince her otherwise.

( Quite long )

Off to the West Coast for the weekend. I need a holiday.

This entry was originally posted at http://gominokouhai.dreamwidth.org/190644.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Right. I have had it with these motherfuckin' asterisks in this motherfuckin' textual medium.

If you're going to say fuck, then for fuck's sake, say fuck. Anything less, and you merely demonstrate that you lack the courage of your convictions.

It's like anything else. Either reword the sentence so that you don't have to say fuck, or, if you want to, just say fuck. This applies for other similar words, too.

Less pathetic bowdlerization of language. More saying fuck when the word fuck is required.

(WARNING: mosts of the following post will be composed of cheap digs at the Scotsman's abysmal science coverage. Since this is not exactly news to many of you, feel free to skip. Otherwise, feel free to immerse yourself in the deathless wit of my pin-sharp prose. 'Cos it's, like, pin-sharp.)

( Pin-sharp deathless prose follows )

Several members of my friends list may be interested in Five reasons not to visit the Edinburgh Festival. Specifically, many of you may be all too familiar with reason #5.

--
[0] Because I can. Also, because the Scotsman doesn't seem to have any qualms about doing the exact same thing to Guido's blog on the exact same page.

Remember that ridiculous three-strikes-and-you're-out legislation to ban filesharers from the internet? All you'd have to do is be accused, not convicted, of filesharing three times, and then your ISP would be compelled to cut you off. The EU sensibly voted against it.

Now they're trying to sneak the same legislation into an otherwise dull, sensible and bulky Telecoms Package.

This doesn't just affect filesharers: it means that your ISP is forced to monitor your connection at all times, and if somebody else uses your wi-fi or your kids use your connection wile you're not watching, you can be cut off without ever knowing what you did wrong.

And the bill is going through on a Monday—this Monday—while all the MEPs are preparing for summer break and have better things to do than meticulously pore over dull telecoms legislation to look for the creepy shit hidden within.

You know the drill by now. Write to your MEP, because your MEP works for you, and make this stop.

cairmen has an excellent form letter here, and there's another one on BoingBoing here.

Coming soon: machinima activism.

Somebody has left a pamphlet in the office about the evils of caffeine. I'm very glad they did. It reminded me that I have a cup of tea brewing. Mmm, tea.

~

Today's constitutional crisis, threatening to rock the very foundations of the Scottish establishment^[0], is that Our Eck reckons that the Stone of Scone is a fake. I'm not sure what constitutes fake when we're talking about rocks. Is it secretly made of plastic? Is it just rock veneer on a cardboard facsimile? Is it somehow less rocklike that we've been led to believe?

I've alway thought it was a pretty stupid national symbol in any case. Down south, they have the Crown Jewels in all their resplendent finery. Up here we have a chunk of rock, and we're proud of it.

Mind you, Edward I the Scots-Hammer went to the trouble, in 1296, to raise an army and come all the way up here in order to steal the same said chunk of rock. Who's looking foolish now?

And theories persist that instead of the historic throne of Scottish kings, he was given a toilet seat instead. Who's looking foolish now? I've often wondered how that would have worked. Let's imagine it together, in Braveheart-style glorious Technicolor™-o-vision:

( Lights! Camera! Irish Army Reservists! Action! )

From the article, Professor Ted Cowan says: How credible is it that you can just make a replica of something like that in five minutes because Edward I of England is coming to steal the real one? Actually, it's really very credible indeed. It's a rock. You can find them just lying around.

The Professor, we're told, is one of Scotland's most senior historians. And yet he doesn't seem to know the scarcity value of rocks. I think Edinburgh isn't what it used to be.

--
[0] Pun not intended, I swear.

Right, so. Let me see if I've got this right.

It's not okay to touch people's boobs at a comic-con. This is fine, I can understand that.

But it is okay to express why it's not okay to touch boobs at a con by advocating face-punching and nut-kicking, not just directed at the one wanker who suggested the boob-touching, but at all men.

Dear Feminists: kindly fuck off.

I really thought that we were finally getting somewhere. I thought that some of us had penises and some of us had vaginas, but that we looked at each other and we saw people. The rest was details. But no, everything has to be Us vs. Them and everybody has to be categorized into tiny little exclusive boxes. And specifically, all men fall into one of the two categories of Threat or Menace.

This should be a better world, a friend of mine said. A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where [one could] say, Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts, and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.

Nice idea. Then they made the mistake of trying it, which was pretty stupid. Then they made the further mistake of writing about it on the Internet.

About three hundred comments later, it all went horribly wrong.

I was particularly amused by the handful of people who, after two hundred comments all saying brilliant and beautiful and I wish I'd been there, piped up to post this is completely reprehensible and under no circumstances could anyone ever think it was remotely appropriate. And then, when I had the gall to ask a simple question like what distinguishes this from other forms of social interaction, or what's so different about boobs, all I get—from otherwise highly intelligent people whose thoughts I am honoured and privileged to read—is argument by repeated assertion and a whole lot of well if you don't understand, then I'm certainly not going to tell you.

You ever wonder why we filthy men spent centuries thinking you were all stupider than we are? It's because of shit like this. You won't talk to us.

I don't have boobs. I don't know what it's like. This is the Internet. We are having a discussion.

TALK TO US.

The Internet[...] work[s] how [it's] supposed to, crow the militant third-wavers at feministsf. How's that exactly? By stifling debate and restoring the status quo? By screeching the loudest until everyone else backs down?

Now we're back to the 1970s again—in which I'm scared to approach anybody in case they turn into a spitting harpy who tears my groin off when I offer them a compliment; in which men are from Mars and women are from Venus and this is apparently okay because acting like we are members of the same species is apparently beyond people; in which I can't have sex with anyone at all because even if they say yes they're probably just a brainwashed agent of the Patriarchy.

Now we live in a world where no-one is allowed to even think about questioning ingrained social mores, in case people shout at them on the Internet.

Thanks, feminists. I expect you think you've made progress.

ObWondermark.

~

Comments are disabled because when I say talk to us I mean us in general. Don't talk to me. I am tired of dealing with this bullshit and you've all depressed the hell out of me. I'll come back and play when you're capable of treating people as people.

I trust verdandiweaves is happy now that my position on vegetarianism has been made clear. In the pages of a national newspaper, no less.

I really wasn't expecting them to print this one, since it consists of a cheap joke and a vaguely jingoistic anti-French sentiment, but then, that's the Scotsman for you.

Su Taylor (Letters, 15 April) attempts to assert ownership of the term "vegetarian" on behalf of the Vegetarian Society. Sadly, language doesn't work that way, and there are several types of vegetarians that fall outside the society's narrow, 150-year-old definition.

To name but a few: there are lacto-vegetarians, who allow themselves milk; lacto-ovo-vegetarians, who have milk and eggs; baco-vegetarians, who eat bacon; felino-vegetarians, who are vegetarians except for kebabs on drunken Saturday nights; and the French, who make an exception for foie gras.

Unfortunately, there still seems to be no word for "sensible people who eat meat because it's tasty", but, then, there are so few of us left.

PAUL A J HAMILTON
Viewforth
Edinburgh

PS: figg, I stole your joke, then disguised it by going pretentious and Latin. Hope that's okay.

Hang on a minute, they edited me! The bastards! I said drunken kebabs on Saturday nights and they... actually improved it immeasurably. It makes a lot more sense that way around. Oh. Okay. Thanks, Scotsman editor-type people.

I forgot to put in the bit about Sue Taylor, who is so weak due to a lack of B-vitamins that she lacks the strength to press down the E key at the end of her first name, but that would perhaps have been a little cruel.

~

Stepping out of the Hotel yesterday in the cloak and the hat, I walked into an unexpectedly dramatic gust of wind. A child of five or six, who happened to be passing at the foot of the steps, dropped his jaw to the floor and declared: Who's that?!

His father gathered him close and bustled him away, beginning Ah, well. Who can say?...

I managed to restrain the maniacal laughter until I was about half a block away.

It's not quite as good as Who was that masked man?, but it's a shade better than Who was that masked halfwit?, so I'm going to consider this a success.

Sunday Times columnist Rachel Johnson doesn't get blogging:

I don’t get blogging. It’s not only that I’m reluctant to write for nothing. There are all those people who ask, Do you blog? at parties (our own sad neutered version of the Do you swing? question), and who warble about wikis and web presence. Still, a few weeks ago I started to write one. It’s very easy - even a middle-aged woman can do it. I wrote about what I was making for supper that night. And food shopping in the Portobello market. Then I checked to see the global response to my debut. Nothing. On my next five posts? Zero comments.

I shall refrain from making any obvious comment, because that would be cheap of me, and after all I am writing for nothing here. It's important for we poor slovenly non-professionals to maintain some dignity.^[0]

Nonetheless, this leads me neatly on to something I actually wanted to talk about.

Saturday was the first Farmers' market since the Fife Diet week that I've had any money (the Fife Diet is expensive). stormsearch and I picked up a cheap gigot roast and a couple of packets of 40p bacon offcuts, and a bunch of organic vegetables. None of it was from Fife. As far as I know it was all from East Lothian, which actually has food in it.

It was a huge relief just to be able to go to stalls and not have to say are you from Fife?, but instead to simply look at produce and pick what I wanted to eat. Everything was still organic, locally-sourced and from small producers, but without any ridiculous artificial restrictions.

Likewise, whenI got into the kitchen it was a huge relief to be able to use stock cubes. I made a random soup with potato and parsnip, and I could add extra stuff like smoked garlic and nutmeg. The result was bloody marvellous, hearty and warming with texture and flavour. Hello, taste buds! Long time no see. You've had a nice holiday, now let's get you back to work.

~

stormsearch and I have been talking about getting a weekly organic box delivered, and doing something like this regularly on the cheap. Bloody hell, I think this might be getting serious afer five years.

~

I've been thinking about Bouvrage, the Fife Diet-approved raspberry drink that was pretty much all I was allowed last week. I don't actually like Bouvrage that much. I'll drink it if it's there, but it's always had this really harsh alkalinity to it that spoils any enjoyment I might otherwise have got.

Last week, though, I really started to develop a taste for it. After a few days with a choice between Bouvrage and tap water, it became delicious nectar, sweet and refreshing. I'd bought five bottles of it for the week, and had one left at the beginning of the post-Diet frenzy of consumption.

Frenzy completed, it's back to the status quo. I've got a bottle of this stuff left. Better drink it before it goes off. Good thing I like Bouvrage these days, huh? I raised the sweet elixir to my lips, and drank... harsh, brackish, regular old-fashioned Bouvrage from the bad old days before I'd learned the value of vegetables.

Hypothesis: my standard, non-Diet blood sugar is so high that Bouvrage doesn't register as sugary. My body chemistry is naturally sweet^[1].

This is because I naturally have a shitty diet high in sugar and saturated fats.

This raises Gastronomic Implications (wbaenfarb). If taste is dependent upon preexisting body chemisty, I won't taste the same things as someone who ordinarily eats a lot of vegetables or is on a different diet. The restaurant experience is partially determined by what I had to eat for the rest of that week.

It seems obvious, but this sort of thing becomes really significant when the tasting menu at the Fat Duck costs £125 a head.

--
[0] Although I should observe that the lassie's blog, rachelsjohnson, has a somewhat unfortunate title that could be read as Rachel S. Johnson or Rachel's Johnson. If it's the latter then I'm not surprised that she's not getting many comments, because that sounds like a really specialist type of blog. The Internet can be a complex place for the traditionally-minded, the mainstream, the professionals.
[1] Just like my personality, then.

Half of my friends page has erupted in an enraged frenzy about self-declared fattist and narcissistic, imperious, self-absorbed bitch Ruth Fowler's article in the Grauniad today. Good on you all.

This comes shortly after a post on British Dining about Jay Rayner's idiotic allergy sufferers are all attention-seeking whiners screed in that self-same organ. I think that the Graun's Comment Is Free section is becoming a refuge for all those wankers who have been booted off the BBC's odious Have Your Say section. It's best just to ignore them and hope they go away.

The current flap appears to have been kick-started by that eternal beacon of small-minded nastiness the Daily Hate, who have denounced the Miss England finalist as being fat. Much as I hate to link to the Hate, go and have a look. There are pictures. (There would have to be, knowing the intellectual capacity of the average Mail reader.)

That's Chloe Marshall, size 16, BMI 26.03. Yep, she's a wee bit chunky on the thighs there, but she's smiling, she's got a pretty face, she's comfortable with her body and so should you be. Furthermore, she probably knows how to string a sentence together without infuriating the entire western hemisphere. Ruth Fowler, the Graun's resident fattist, has none of these qualities—although, for an allegedly serious writer, she does have an awful lot of nudie pictures on her shitty frame-based website.

One of these women is a normal, happy person. The other is an attention-seeking, misogynist, hateful, tiny-breasted, mean-spirited cow. To be perfectly honest, I know which of the two I'd rather fuck, but that's only because, as a wise man once said, woman unable to talk bullshit with cock in mouth.

Never before has the phrase I'd hit it been so appropriate. Doubly so, in fact.^[0]

If I had to take one of them out for dinner, I'd take the one who looks like she knows how to enjoy food—or, indeed, enjoy anything at all. Chloe Marshall might not be the brightest button in the box either—she is, after all, seventeen years old and a Miss England contestant—but I've seen no evidence that she's quite so utterly stupid as the bitter hag with the Cambridge First^[1], and she is, at least, a human being.

~

To my knowledge, to date, no terrorists have been caught with the use of the new anti-terror provisions. The ones that have been caught have had a tendency to announce their intention to drive flaming jeeps into airports by, um, driving flaming jeeps into airports, which was illegal before the new laws were brought out anyway. If I recall correctly, blowing stuff up was also illegal before September 11th, which makes one wonder what all those new laws were for in the first place.

This is what the anti-terror laws are being used for instead. Anybody surprised?

I've never met a terrorist and I don't need protecting from them. But I do need protection from officious council scumbags. Can I get some laws? Thought not.

~

All should read cairmen's excellent post on the bloodspell blog, in which he points out just exactly how copyright laws are doing the opposite of protecting the artists. Speaking as an artist, I'm not being protected by a blanket refusal to allow the release of my work. Nor are Bioware being protected by preventing distribution of a work that uses some of their art in a manner which is, pretty much undeniably, non-infringing. This really is taking the use of the phrase derivative work to extremes.

I've never met a plagiarist and I don't need protecting from them. But I do need protection from officious lawyers. Can I get some laws? Maybe—cairmen's post outlines how to start.

--
[0] While we're on the subject: never has the phrase I'd hit it been quite so inappropriate.
[1] It's a First from New Hall, so it barely counts anyway. And once you get into Cambridge, it's relatively easy to get a First as long as you buckle down to studying and eschew all semblance of a social life. I suspect that wasn't much of a problem for the Sociopathic Narcissist, since with a personality like that I doubt she would have been in much demand at all those garden parties.

I just got a telemarketer to hang up on me. Ah, good times. Getting ragingly angry with morons for being moronic: it has its benefits. I'm thinking about writing a lifestyle course.

~

Rory Bremner is in the Scotsman today, lamenting the unsatirizable state of modern government. He's got a point: it was so damn easy with Blair. Ping-pong ball eyes and a creepy grin and everyone knew exactly who you were. Spitting Image even did a fair job with Major, but Brown seems to have no qualities worthy of caricature.

It's a bit like having an uncle who's been building something in the shed for the last ten years [quoth he]. You go down and see what he's up to, look through the window—and there's nothing there.

It's partly our own fault. When Blair turned into a crazed warmongering lunatic (on about Day 2, as I recall), we were all frantic to get him out. What's this about some secret deal struck over bruschetta in some London restaurant?... Blair is to hand over to Brown? fantastic! Brown for President! Brown for Pope!

We all latched onto the Granita deal and waited and prayed for that glorious day when Brown would lead us triumphant into a new era with Britain free from pop-eyed gurning self-important madmen. We all got exactly what we wished for, and now people are complaining that it somehow isn't sensational enough.

Brown so far has not introduced any interesting new police-state legislation or forced us into any more illegal wars. Nor, to my knowledge, has he spent ninety per cent of his time saying look at it from my perspective and what you must understand is this. He is, in fact, almost exactly like that last episode of Doctor Who: nothing happened in it, but at least it didn't have farting aliens and blowjob jokes and Peter Kay.

~

Also in the Scotsman today is a letter from D MacDonald of Edinburgh, whose woe is expressed thus:

With the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns on the near horizon, it seems pertinent to point out that Edinburgh does not have a street named in honour of our national poet. This is surely an appropriate time to consider remedying this anomaly.

D MacDonald neglects to mention that, while it is true that we have no street, you can't walk for ten yards in the Old Town without colliding with a plaque celebrating the fact that the quill-wielding hack once paused near here to tie his shoelaces.

I have never understood the point of Burns and I never will. The man sold out rich millennia of Scottish culture and history for personal gain, and he was successful to such an extent that we are known across the planet as a race of skirt-wearing offal-munchers who can't talk properly. Scots isn't even a language: it's a dialect, and since the one linguist on my friends list appears to have gone crazy-religious and dropped off the Internet, there's no one to debate me on this point.

No one, ever, has ever said fair fa' yer honest sonsie face unless they're reading that crappy poem on the night we have dedicated to the ink-slinging old fool. Sonsie isn't even a word.

The man's got a national holiday, a dozen statues, two sets of commemorative stamps, and a plaque on every street corner in the land. I'm quite happy that we name our streets instead after obese stocking-clad Germans and their retarded inbred offspring. Let's at least try to give the impression that there's a bit more to Scotland than tartan haggises and bagpipes, shall we?

Old Who: Y'know, just once, I would like to see an alien that doesn't look like an actor in a rubber suit.

New Who: Y'know, just once, I would like to see an alien that doesn't look like a marketable action figure.

( SPOILARZ )

And I suppose I should half-heartedly congratulate them for turning lowering the manufacturing costs on the inevitable action figures into some sort of art form. Cheapest spin-off revenue generator ever— but I must admit, if they bring out a plushie version I am totally getting one.

On a vaguely related note, since it grew out of a discussion of the Comedy Opening Sequence:

(22:57:27) pajh: Strange thing about television. Put some music behind it and use some framing, and you can generate Drama out of the most mundane shit.
(22:57:52) scotm: Sure. Just edit out the truly boring stuff.
(22:57:48) pajh: You should see the rough footage of me cooking.
(22:58:08) pajh: In a world... where pajh... makes an omelette.
(22:58:57) pajh: They said he'd never cope without butter. They said that that wasn't what the Fife Diet was about. Now... one man... and a jar of dripping... proves them wrong.
(23:07:10) pajh: In theaters now. pajh Makes An Omelette. Rated R for language.

Almost forgot to mention: Planet of Hats is by far the best joke that Rusty's ever done. Pomo and post-structuralist and intelligent and a geeky injoke for the Internet people that he hates so much! Was he feeling all right?

There's hope.

On the train over to Fife on Friday, we encountered the first—but, I suspect, by no means the last—infestation of mindless jobsworth officialdom to plague Three Guys Argue A Lot About Cookery (title subject to change).

We were filming ourselves sitting at a table talking about the Fife Diet while Fife itself rolled into view beyond the window. Because we are Professional Televison People, the camera was balanced precariously on top of the bike rack across the aisle. And every time one of us tried to say anything, the bloody recorded woman decided to announce again that the next stop was Inverkeithing, as indeed it had been for the last twenty minutes.

INT. TRAIN CARRIAGE. DAY

Our Heroes are sat around a table, talking about the Fife Diet. Enter stage right THE TICKET INSPECTOR.

THE TICKET INSPECTOR
You can't film in 'ere, mate.

OUR HEROES
Why not?

Beat.

TICKET INSPECTOR
Because... there are people walkin' past.

OUR HEROES
Okay.

Exit THE TICKET INSPECTOR, satisfied. HOLD on OUR HEROES as the CAMERA continues rolling uninterrupted.

(TELEVISION SCRIPTS always have some of the WORDS in CAPITALS, usually PROPER NOUNS but also sometimes VERBS. This is because it helps DIRECTORS to CONCENTRATE after they've DONE all of that COKE.)

The mind of the bureaucrat is a simple one to understand, if not always this simple to subvert. You can't do that invariably translates as you are doing something slightly different, therefore Strange and Frightening to me, and you must be destroyed.

~

Most of the discussion on the Fife Diet has been going on over at cairmen's LiveJournal. This is because he has a vastly greater number of friends than I do, and as such is a comment on the quantity, not necessarily the quality, of such friends—although it wouldn't hurt if you buggers commented every once in a while. You know who you are.

Most of the commentary seems to be along the lines of:

But why are you doing this?
But you don't live in Fife.
But that's not what the Fife Diet is about.
You should be doing something completely different, or better still, nothing at all!

Fortunately, the response to all of these queries is the same one:

SHUT UP!

I am doing this for Science and, as already discussed, for you, the entertained viewer. As a result I am already looking forward to ten more swede meals before Saturday. The last thing I need is an existential crisis on top of my critically low blood sugar levels.

The only way to explore a concept is to push at its boundaries. The most popular, highly-publicized and critically-acclaimed experiment in local sourcing is The Fife Diet, so we decided to investigate it and use it as a stepping stone to explore the wider concepts of food miles and local sourcing. Thus, we've taken a strict interpretation of the Fife Diet in order to see just what, exactly, local produce actually means.

To take an early example: followers of the Fife Diet as set out in their press releases are allowed bread, for instance, as long as they make it themselves. We found out on Day -1 that the flour may be local, but the wheat that makes the flour is from Canada. This raises serious questions about what constitutes local, what we're all going to have to learn to deal with when the oil runs out, and—perhaps most important of all—how much hypocrisy we're all willing to put up with from hippies.

We could, theoretically, invent our own diet and call it the Edinburgh Diet and test that, but that wouldn't prove anything about the Fife Diet. Doing so would be irrelevant and pointless. Doing this instead has the potential to enlighten, and to inform and entertain. And I'm getting to eat vegetables, which may or may not be a good thing.

When the entertained viewer gives every impression of merely being a playa-hater or, worse, a bureaucrat, then I start considering quitting my diet. If I quit it now, then I've spent eighty quid, pissed off my managers, and eaten leaves, and none of us will have learned anything as a result.

(Although I have learned what happens if you make porridge with the wrong kind of oatmeal.)

With thanks to lady_rani here:

Doctor Who executive producer Russell T Davies has accused BBC1 of cocking up the scheduling of the show, claiming it will lose 1.5m viewers in its new timeslot.

He then goes on to whine and stamp his feet a lot. More so than I think JNT ever did when they buggered about with the scheduling on his watch, but possibly less than Toby Hadoke did. In any case it's somewhat unbecoming—isn't it?—for the BBC's darling to throw a tantrum in a trade journal instead of maybe doing something about it or getting on with his job.

And frankly, Auntie's new attempt to recapture the glory of Britain's Got Talentless Media Whores needs all the help it can get. Didn't everyone get sick of back-to-back talent shows about three years ago?

Bitching about a scheduling conflict is, like, so 2007, dude. The viewers don't care any more. In times gone past, the announcement of a new season would launch a flurry of panicked complaints about: shit! I'm at work then orbut I have to go to a paaaarty that night. This year, the entire Internet has proffered a collective shrug and said: I'll catch it on iPlayer.

The most common thing I hear about BBC iPlayer, in every case is almost exactly the same words: It has totally revolutionized the way I watch television. I don't make a habit of asking people their opinion of iPlayer, but it often comes up in conversation regardless, because it is a Remarkably Cool Thing.

I still don't own a television set or have TV reception in my flat. (We do pay the licence fee, though.) Over the last two months I have watched infinity per cent more television than ever before. Much of it has been good television, which has forced me to reassess my attitude towards the medium. And my BitTorrent usage has dropped right off.

This is LiveJournal, so everyone reading this is acutely aware that the Internet has made it a million times easier to whinge and prate. Sometimes, when done right, the Internet also removes the reasons for such grousery in the first place.

(Although, now I come to think about it, it would make much more sense than it really should for Auntie to continue to determine ratings figures the old way even when everyone in the country is using the newer, more convenient, niftier 21st-century system. As a result, the entire next commissioning round would be decided on the basis of the five people left in the country who think that Satan invented the Internet.)

Oh, one more thing:

I'll rewrite [scripts] 100% if I have to, [Rusty] said. With Steven Moffat's scripts, I don't touch a word, but anyone else's I do.

...is by far the smartest thing I've ever heard him say. And it shows, Russell, oh how it shows.

Hey, kids! It's time for your Annual Reminder!

If you let Hallmark tell you when it is appropriate to express affection, then you are doing it wrong.

(ObLinks: Oh, Charlie Brooker, you so crazee and the Anti-Valentines cards. Happy unimaginative, comsumerist-oriented and entirely arbitary, manipulative and shallow interpretation of romance Day. That'll do me.)

I bought Jehane wooden roses about three years ago. They haven't died yet. I'm still golden.

Children. I don't get it. How is it that we're not allowed to have sex in public, yet we're allowed to display the resultant fruits to all and sundry, when all and sundry are just trying to enjoy their eggs benedict and mocha in peace?

I'm allowed—not that I've ever felt the inclination—to go up to a baby and coo my, what a beautiful child, although if I ever did so I'd be channeling Alan Rickman and thus would scare the crap out of everybody (or at least, such is my fervent hope). This, to my mind, is functionally equivalent to going up to the mother and declaring how gloriously fecund you are!, which would get me locked away.

Madam, your functional genitalia do credit to our society. See? I'm not allowed to say it. I'm even less allowed to say your contribution to overpopulation cheapens us as a species, but your fertile uterus is nonetheless a cause for celebration.

In this era of compassionate-conservative, aw-look-Cameron's-just-a-cuddly-bear, thinly veiled bigotry that passes for Tory sentiment these days, the standard line on The Gays is: we don't mind what they do behind closed doors, just do they have to flaunt it so much, with their holding hands in public and their leather trousers with the bottom cut out? This is not an attitude with which I agree (except possibly for the bit about the trousers), but it seems that it's a thing considered socially acceptable to say. Why does the same not apply to standard, vanilla, heterosexual breeders?

...oh, right. Because standard, vanilla, heterosexual breeders are a significant voting demographic. Of course.

Far be it from me to suggest that Vile Spawn should be locked up until they can be productive members of society: that would be illiberal of me. I just think it would be fair if, when they won't shut up, we can duct-tape them shut.

Happy pigs make the best bacon, it's true, but I'm with A A Gill on chickens. Not only because he's disagreeing with the Mockney Prat, but because I really hate chickens.

Jamie's got himself some good press recently, but it's for all the wrong reasons. Right now he's campaigning about the living standards of chickens, and chickens are scrawny little bags of evil covered in fluff, worthwhile only as an accompaniment to bacon. I have looked into the eyes of a chicken, and it was then that I knew true hatred. (Admittedly, I did proceed directly to eating its unborn offspring, who were delicious.)

You can't cuddle a chicken or train it to fetch your paper. Cows, sheep, and pigs could be considered cute and/or fluffy. Even fish have personalities, and I'm in favour of farms that include playparks and whatnot for fish. Chickens, on the other hand, are drumsticks with a beak attached, held together by pure rage. It's a bloody good job for them that they're so damn tasty. If it wasn't for the existence of garlic, I firmly believe that we would have eradicated chickens long ago, like we did to wolves and snakes.

Before that, Jamie gained notoriety by championing the concept of nutritious school dinners. Nice try, but I don't care about children either. Children should shut up and eat their gruel, or whatever it is they have nowadays, thus leaving more of the good food for me. (Such as those free-range chickens that take up acres of farmland.) I had to suffer when I was their age. We called it `character-building'.

The right ideas, the wrong targets. Despite some mellowing in his old age, he still has some way to go before I'll admit to agreeing with him about anything. And besides, in my head he will always be the Naked Chef, and as a result deserves eviscerating with a blunt whisk.

I am in favour of free range, organic, slow-reared, locally-produced food not because of ethics and certainly not because it's got more effics innit, geeza. I give neither a hoot nor a fig for my Carbon Footprints or my Food Miles. I am in favour of free-range, slow reared, locally-produced food because it tastes better.

(Offer not valid if you happen to live next to a battery farm, but then that's your loss.)

A A Gill is right when he observes that this is unsustainable over the whole planet, but for once he misses the point. Who gives a fuck about the rest of the planet? It's full of people who only want to eat McDonalds anyway.

And if you have even a shred of respect for the animals that provide us with food, you should make sure that they do not die in vain. And the way to do that is to make sure that they don't end up in anything with a label marked Tesco Value anything.

The Scotsman printed my last letter after all, only a week after I'd sent it. I wasn't expecting them to print it at all, let alone completely unedited, including the cheap dig at the fundie troll that I'd deliberately put in there. Possibly there is some relation to the fact that it comes only a day after he'd had published a rather nasty, hateful and homophobic piece of blatant religious bigotry, which had half-convinced me to stop treating this like a game.

On the other hand, it's quite likely that the Scotsman hacks had their office Christmas party last night (the women's section would imply as much), and they needed some copy fast so they could get out early.

Good times, good times.

And now, back to Castrovalva.

( Oh dear, he's at it again )

Thus:

Richard Lucas (Letters, 12 December) is justified in his concern at being tarred with the same brush as the American ``Christian Right''. His Dispensationalist brethren across the Atlantic have a remarkable knack for making all other Christians look bad by association—although sometimes it seems that Mr Lucas needs little help in this regard.

The phrase ``Christian Right'', in common usage, has come to encompass much more than a simple description of neoconservative politics as they apply to pronouncements of faith. The phrase can also imply religious bigotry, overzealous proselytizing, a penchant for warmongery, or, very often, a smug conviction that no one else is entitled to theological opinions of any kind.

May I humbly submit to the Scotsman the phrase ``Christian Convinced-they're-right''?

Well, I thought it was funny. Today I am setting conference rooms and doing accounts, so I am easily amused.