What everyone wants

Start typing 'how to get' in your Google search bar. It turns out that most of us want babies, and to travel, to look good, to not be fat, and not have acne (and thus to get a girl like you). Oh yeah, and to get on MySpace at school. Humanity's primal desires. For the record, I was not searching for any of these things, although I'm starting to worry about love handles.

Save the boobies

I keep seeing these hilarious banner ads for some kind of computer game. Help! Save the Queen! (or else this guy is going to stab her luscious mams)

It's not that they never learn, it's that they don't care

Here we go again. According to the BBC:

A controversial database which holds the details of every child in England has now become available for childcare professionals to access.

Ahh, is this sort of like the one where they lost the banking details of every parent in the UK a year or two ago?

A report into the project by auditors Deloitte and Touche said it could never be totally secure. Last summer ministers delayed the database, admitting there were some "issues" identified in testing. It says 390,000 people will have access to the database, but will have gone through stringent security training.

Well I feel better hearing about that stringent training. As long as there are no security bugs in the database software or the computers they run on (presumably not running Windows) and none of those 390,000 people are crooked or stupid, the sensitive details of every child in the UK should be nice and secure.

Blogger.com: sayonara if you say so

A few weeks ago, as I scanned my email Spam folder with my finger poised to click the 'delete all' link, I noticed an email from blogger.com*, the site that I use to manage this blog. It said that their robots had determined that my blog was a "spam blog". Further, it said that if I didn't click the supplied link and request an "unlock review", my blog would be deleted in 20 days and that until then, my readers would see a warning on my blog. Gosh, thought I, lucky I spotted that, or my blog would've been deleted!

I clicked the link. Broken. No messages in my dashboard control panel thing. I published some posts, but the promised warning did not appear. It seemed like a phantom email, or as if the robots had changed their minds about me in the meantime. I tried clicking around blogger's help pages, but there was nothing relevant, and there is no way to contact a human at blogger (when you eventually find a 'contact us' link, and start feeling hopeful, you are dismayed to discover that it has been disabled, and redirects back to the help pages). There are no people steering this ship**.

A couple of weeks later, in my control panel, a warning appeared:

This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations. You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked***.

This blog will be deleted within 20 days unless you request a review [ followed by a link to request the unlock review ]

I clicked the link, and was taken to the following page where I was asked to enter a 'captcha':

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What is a spam blog?) Since you are an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy and we sincerely apologise for this false positive.

Your readers are seeing a warning page until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than two working days.

OK, fair enough, I thought: a computer made a mistake and a person will soon set it right in less than 2 working days. I think you can probably guess how the rest of the story goes from here: A couple of weeks went by, but the message persisted. After that, it was replaced by the original message (though no email this time) asking me to unlock my blog or lose it within 20 days, and promising that they would review it within 2 days. I went through the procedure again. This evening, a couple of weeks later, it happened again.

OK, the unsupervised robots running blogger.com want to delete my blog. Fine, effing let 'em, I'll use another service. I'm not going to let myself be bullied by a badly-written computer algorithm. Sayonara if you don't want me, though I have a sneaking suspicion that it's just an empty threat, and that their blog-deletion system is probably broken too. I guess I'll find out in 20 days.

[ * It's ironic that an email from blogger.com (who are owned by Google) accusing me of spam would end up in my Gmail spam folder ]

[ ** If a human who works for blogger.com ever actually sees this message, please leave a comment - with proof! - and I will post a photo of me eating my shorts ]

[ *** The fact that you're reading this post proves the statement is untrue ]

He's betting we forget

Can you spot what's missing in the following quote from Dick Cheney, defending his torture regime?:

Now, if you'd look at it from the perspective of a senior government official, somebody like myself, who stood up and took the oath of office on January 20th of ‘01 and raised their right hand and said we're going to protect and defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, this was exactly, exactly what was needed to do it.

Gosh, either Mr. Cheney forgets what he actually swore to defend (unlikely) or he's betting that you forget. He swore to protect and defend the US constitution -- not the US itself. And it was, ironically, the constitution Dick Cheney and George W Bush kicked to the curb along with the Geneva Conventions these last 8 years. Apparently the best he can do to defend himself now is to retroactively redefine his oath of office.

Quote of the day

"Marriage is good. There is something special about unions of husband and wife. Unless we bring men and women together, children will not have mothers and fathers."

- Carrie Prejean, Miss California

Erotic interrogation

It would be interesting to ask torture advocates if they also think it should be OK to rape terror suspects, as long as it is done under strict legal guidelines, no more than X number of times per day, gently, with plenty of lubricant, etc.

If you think about it, it's no worse morally than other forms of torture, should not leave any physical scars, and has an obvious advantage over waterboarding: the prisoner's mouth is left unobstructed should they choose to 'break' and start talking.

After all, it happens to regular prison inmates all the time. Heck, some guys even do it to each other for fun, right? Where's the harm in it if it saves lives? We can even give it a nice name; since "enhanced interrogation" is already taken, how about "erotic interrogation"?

Calm down dear, it's only an election

After the election of Barack Obama in America, I confess to feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude, watching the fear and loathing of the hardcore right-wingers (or in Rumsfeldian parlance, the Bush/Cheney dead-enders) gnashing their teeth and forming proverbial "circular firing squads". [For my Republican readers, schadenfreude is a German word meaning "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others"].

For a while it was interesting and entertaining, but latterly the debate seems to have been taken over by the certified, Kool-Aid-drinking moonbats. I find myself clicking on links to right-wing articles and blogs, or beginning to watch YouTube video clips of Fox News commentators, only to click the 'back' button moments later. What was once (gratifyingly!) bitter disappointment at their 'side' being out of power, has descended into pure unadulterated rancor and malice. It's not clever any more. I can feel the hatred coming through my laptop screen like radiation.

All of which is slightly difficult to understand, since president Obama has been in office fewer than three months, and hasn't really had much time to do anything truly controversial. Sure, there are legitimate debates to be had about the economics of bailouts and stimulus packages. Frankly, there is probably no single correct answer. Obama inherited a financial crisis, and he's doing his best to fix it, but any reasonable person should be able to debate these things without getting too emotional.

That's why I find all the "tea party" stuff so disturbing (except for the unintentionally funny stuff about "tea-bagging"). There's no theme there. "Burn the books"? What do they actually want, specifically? No one seems to know; It's just an increasingly angry mob making decreasingly veiled references to violent revolution. They're supposedly angry about the budget deficit? Why were these same people so silent while Republicans were spending like drunken sailors these past 8 years?

The hatred and vitriol coming from the rump of the Republican party has long ceased being logically coherent. They're throwing every epithet in the book at their president -- terrorist, wimp, socialist, communist, fascist dictator -- except for the one I suspect many of them wish they could say in public (perhaps prefaced with "uppity").

It seems as if a lot of right-wing true believers in America right now, for example the followers of Rush Limbaugh, would rather see their country fail than see a fellow the likes of Barack Obama succeed. Something has snapped inside of these people. The political wilderness will be a good place for them to spend the next few years having a 'time out'.

Stupid quote of the day [updated]

From Canoe: Eleanor Maticka-Tyndale, Canada's "research chair in social justice and sexual health" (never mind asking what those two things reasonably have in common) wants the government to:

require warnings on packages about how often condoms break and leak, leaving people at greater risk of pregnancy and disease.

For what purpose? To deter condom usage for, say, disease prevention? Is Maticka-Tyndale against condom usage? Or does she propose some alternative besides "no sex for you?" Not in this article, she doesn't. That certainly seems like a responsible, reality-based message.

But wait, the kicker is here:

"We always assumed that whatever the failure rate is, it is due to human error -- that we don't store them properly, we get our fingernails caught in them, we don't make sure that there is enough air in the tip," she said.

Words fail. Let me spell it out: Canada's sexual health research chair, critical of condom failure rates, thinks that when you put on a condom, there should be plenty of air in the tip.

Update: In response to a private email (because the quote was so unbelievable, I had to ask her for clarification) Eleanor Maticka-Tyndale writes:

Dear Andy,

I just saw the article and there are several errors in quotations. I will contact them and request a retraction of the ones that clearly misinform, such as air in the tip of a condom. The quote should have read, 'no air in the tip ...'

This is one of many reasons why many researchers refuse interviews with the press! Thank you for alerting me.

Eleanor

So: I take it back -- about the quote, anyway. I still think failure warnings on condoms are counterproductive, even if the intention is to make manufacturers accountable for failure rates.

Germany photos

I've posted photos from my solo visit to Berlin, Germany in March 2009. I was there for business but managed to schedule some time for sightseeing.

Spain photos

I've posted photos from the long-weekend trip that Kim and I took to Majorca, in January 2009.

Poland photos

I've posted photos from the long-weekend trip that Kim and I took to Krakow and Auschwitz, in November 2008.

Take these bits from me, I don't need them anymore

Just in case I haven't signed the right forms, or told the right people: when I go, I want to be an organ donor (hey, I ride a donor-cycle!).

They can take any bits they want to put in other people. I'm not so keen on donating the whole mess for creepy scientific research, but if living people want the parts I don't need anymore, go to town muchachos.

There we go - I've put it out there on the interwebz, so it's official and forever.

France photos

I've posted photos from the trip Kim and I took to Paris, Halloween weekend, 2008

Crimint those varmints

I guess, living in Britain, there's always a part of you that understands these sorts of things happen routinely. However, to find out that it's real is still a bit shocking:

Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.

Photographs, names and video ­footage of people attending protests are ­routinely obtained by surveillance units and stored on an "intelligence system". The ­Metropolitan police, which has ­pioneered surveillance at demonstrations and advises other forces on the tactic, stores details of protesters on Crimint, the general database used daily by all police staff to catalogue criminal intelligence.

One of the worst things is that when heavyhanded police tactics and surveillance are revealed, it's almost always the case that they've previously denied it or lied about it. Further:

Police surveillance teams are also ­targeting journalists who cover demonstrations, and are believed to have ­monitored members of the press during at least eight protests over the last year.

That seems like a sign of a healthy democracy.

Activists "seen on a regular basis" as well as those deemed on the "periphery" of demonstrations are included on the police databases, regardless of whether they have been convicted or arrested. Names, political associations and photographs of protesters from across the political spectrum – from campaigners against the third runway at Heathrow to anti-war activists – are catalogued.

Well, it's surely nothing to worry about. After all, the government is good. This is a free country. The government is only looking out for our safety. You've got to keep track of peoples' "political associations", right? Political activism is just one step away from terrorism, don't you know.