Alright, so this is immensely childish, but this obscene Tube Map (probably NSFW) made me smile - it’s as if Harry Beck had drawn inspiration from Buffy’s Swearing Keyboard. It’s funny, not just for the filthy stations like Cocksucker, Bell End and Bumhole, but for the way it’s mixed in with random celebrities (Gillian Taylforth, Fatboy Slim), TV show mentions (Starsky & Hutch, Battlestar Galactica), the utterly surreal (Marks & Spencer, Honey Nut Loops), and the odd Chris Morris homage (Shatner’s Bassoon), as if somehow they’re all equally as filthy as terms like Dried Up Crackly Knicker Bacon. Though in the case of Noel’s House Party, that’s almost certainly true.

Update: Oops, only just realised that the UKBlogs Aggregator has started to syndicate this site… everyone who has read it is now treated to a load of bad words. Sorry.

…about my RSS feed. Specifically, problems with escaping special characters like angled brackets. Yes, really, I did.

I am probably beyond therapy, the best solution is for me to abandon computers entirely and live the rest of my life in shack on a hill somewhere.

The Guardian reports on Police using EMP weapons to stop criminals’ cars - as all modern cars use computers for fuel injection and the like it should stop them dead. Part of me wonders why they haven’t thought of this before, though it’s probably becuse it will lead to anarchy on the roads once everyone gets hold of these - police cars will be just as vulnerable to such attacks from the criminals, and pedestrians and cyclists will finally have a way of striking back the next time they nearly get run over.

More entertainingly, it will perhaps lead to a renaissance of old, computerless cars on our streets - the Citroen 2CV becoming the bank robber’s car of choice. That can only be a good thing.

Well, a nice evening out, went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 as part of the Cambridge Film Festival.

And my impressions are… quite good. Better than Bowling for Columbine, the main point (that America’s working class are being sent off to Iraq to be killed and dehumanized while the elite reap rewards) being more coherent and persuasive, and the film less gimmicky and confrontational than his earlier work.

It was frustrating in some respects, though. Moore tries to cram in every little bit of Bush trivia, his failings as a businessman, the 2000 election, the links to the Bin Laden family, his gaffes, the climate of fear generated, and so on. While it was educational in some respects (like James Bath, Bush’s duty-skipping buddy in the Air Guard being legal man for the Bin Laden family), there lacked a single coherent thread through this first part of the film. The second part was much better, as he focused on the situation in Iraq and let the facts and the people involved tell the story. Once he started shutting up and concentrated on on-the-ground reportage and good research, cleverly editing the two, the film really took off as a stark illustration of Bush’s folly.

Also, the isolationist attitude of the film irked me. The UK and Blair barely get a look in (maybe to avoid offending American viewers who still hold Blair in high esteem), and there’s an entirely unecessary sneer at some of the members of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ like Palau or Costa Rica (especially when, later, there is footage of terrified Japanese aid workers being kidnapped). But, at the end of the day this film was aimed at an American audience, and was always intended to be a polemic for the American market, rather than as an enlightenment to the rest of the world.

Still, it is a convincing work, Moore has grown up, he kept the childish stunts and confrontations down to a minimum (and acknowledges the futility of one of them at the end) and has stopped being so in love with his own voice. The research is superb, with some wonderful stock footage illustrating the lies of the Bush administration, coupled with some quite disturbing footage of troops in Iraq and the human damage (to both sides). On their own, they make for a great work. If only he’d stuck to the main points - the Bush administration ignored the warnings of terrorism, then took advantage of 9/11 to invade Iraq and let the poor, mainly ethnic minority, troops do the dirty work for their corporate friends while the taxpayer foots the bill, without wandering into the realms of conspiracy theory all the time, then the film would have been all the more effective.

This kottke.org entry links to a Wired article about hacking Friendster. First, the funny bit - when Wired contact Friendster about the (apparent) leaking of personal data on their site, the response is as follows:

Notified of the security holes Moore and Chisholm exploit, Friendster rep Lisa Kopp insists, “We have a policy that we are not being hacked.”

Ha ha ha. In a similar way, I have a policy that this is the best blog in the world.

Now, the sinister bit is this. Following on from this, Jason Kottke goes on to quote the Wired article:

When I explain that, policy or no, they are being hacked, she says, “Security isn’t a priority for us. We’re mostly focused on making the site go faster.”

Which is pretty shocking. Now compare to the Wired article as it now stands:

When I explain that, policy or no, they are being hacked, she says, “Security is a big concern. We haven’t seen this problem, though. No complaints about it.”

with no explanation of any correction made. So what’s happened? Did Jason Kottke deliberately misquote - I find that impossible to believe, him being a respected blogger and his source open to verification. So he must have copied and pasted that text as it was, and it got changed in the meantime. So did Wired make a mistake, if so how have they managed to get it so wildly wrong? Or did the Friendster spokesperson actually say that, and it’s been rewritten in the meantime to cover up? Curious.

Addendum: My opinion on this, incidentally, is that Wired fucked up, as I can’t believe that any company would be able to make a magazine correct a statement that had really been made, while I can believe slightly more strongly that a reporter could get it so badly wrong.

You’re a talentless newspaper hack with two pages to fill and your deadline is rapdily approaching. But you haven’t the wit or ability to write anything, not even about whether asylum seekers will give your pension AIDS. So what do you do?

Why, you grab a load of pictures off the internet (via b3ta) for free and try and turn it into an picture feature. Is there any credit to any of the artists involved? Is there heck. If there were any author’s taglines on the images, they’ve been cropped or airbrushed.

This isn’t the first time the Mail have happily plagiarised someone else’s work - they’re famous for having ripped off TV Cream in an article before (with the legendary defence of “There isn’t any rule against copying stuff off a website, is there?”), as well as lifting an article from The Register.

To be fair, it’s not just the Mail, virtually every paper did it after the England match with those Beckham/Wilkinson pictures, happy to fill pagespace with something other than clichés and the local police beating Englis hooligans. There is a massive misapprehension in the established media that just because someone published it for free means you can use it to flog your newspapers. Copyright licences that restrict profiting from freely distributed works do exist. Sooner or later someone is going to get properly sued, and boy, will that be a fun day when it happens.

The Guardian report on an architecture competition for under-18s - some of the designs are quite cool, but this one scared me. Not for any aesthetic reason, but for the fact that it is a sports centre with a McDonald’s incorporated in it. A precocious stab at irony, or a worrying sign of how fast food companies have managed to get themselves so closely associated with sport in children’s minds?

Although having that sports centre nearby might be a good idea, after all it takes an adult nearly an hour of heavy exercise to burn off just one Big Mac, and presumably even longer for a child.

An informative article in today’s Observer by Nick Cohen, on the insanity of executive pay, especially when someone is given a multi-million golden handshake for running a company into a ground. The best bit is this extract:

Free-market economics can’t explain the runaway growth in incomes. Try as hard as they might, conventional economists can’t find a link between executive pay and performance. The outstanding Ruth Lea, the only person to have been thrown out of the Institute of Directors for being too right wing, tried her best when she gave evidence last year to a Commons inquiry into rewards for failure.

[...]

Lea explained that a successful executive didn’t only need a £1m-plus annual package as an incentive to be a success. He also needed the incentive of a gigantic pay-off in case he became a failure. Her logic, and you will have to hang on in there with me on this one, was that the promise of huge redundancy packages for losers ‘might provide an incentive to executives not to seek new employment’. If a company wanted to keep potential losers in other words, it had to promise them a small fortune when they lost.

Cohen’s article attacks the now-accepted philosophy of meritocracy, though I’d argue that the lack of correlation between the absurd levels of pay received by executives and their actual performance goes to show that the top level of British society is still very much anti-meritocratic. The inequality produced by meritocracy can be justified (especially by the Blair government) by saying if there is true mobility and the low and high can change places easily and equally, then no-one is being penalised for anything other than their own merits. But this justification is useless in a society which is nowhere near as meritocratic as New Labour would like to believe.

This highly evident shortfall in meritocracy’s abilities can only be rectified by other means, such as redistribution. As Richard Reeves said in a very good article in the New Statesman on the subject last month:

Because neither [total meritocracy nor total equality] is possible, social democrats have to think about the balance between the two objectives. Social justic requires not a choice between equality and mobility, but a continuing - and necessarily only partially successful - war on both fronts

But New Labour’s approach to social justice has been dominated by the theme of meritocracy. The folly of such a unilateral approach will be felt for years down the line, when, as Cohen predicts:

It’s a fair guess that workers in Sainsbury’s and firms like it will have no pride in or respect for their company. They will be sullen and do just enough to avoid dismissal - go on ‘internal strike’ as they used to say in the Soviet Union.