a splendid duck-billed platypus

screams

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:11:47 GMT

"IMPORTANT: GJ is currently running on a backup DB - we recommend using exporting journal and using insanejournal instead"

Yeah, well: Insanejournal looks like it's currently gone down.

This does not make me happy...

Scooby-doo, where are you?

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:30:07 GMT

View Poll: #44118

If you want to say where you are, where you're moving to now that greatestjournal is dying *cue spooky music*, or anything else, comments are all screened. (Unscreened on request.)

Organisation for Transformative Works (aka "An Archive Of Their Own")

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 19:40:32 GMT

Way back in the summer, someone mooted the idea of an independent fannish archive, a project called "An Archive Of Our Own". I had already left livejournal, and all discussions about it were taking place on livejournal, so the only comment I remember making about it was to the effect that the lesson I thought Six Apart ought to have taught us was that fandom needed more de-centralisation, not less.

As far as I can tell, all the fans involved with OTW stayed with Six Apart to the very end, and are intending to stay with SUP now it owns livejournal, so self-evidently they find the benefits of centralisation outweigh the disadvantages of being vulnerable to central control.

This is a kind of dry-run post for feministsf: I'm not feeling quite smart enough to think out the ramifications of what's going on with OTW, which seems to have acquired a fair amount of structure and policy without actually having done a thing, yet.

But one of the things that definitely puts me off getting involved in any way with OTW is the fact that while the OTW crew mirror otw_news to IJ and GJ, they disable comments there, so that no community of fans interested in OTW can form anywhere other than on livejournal. It is a very pro-centralisation tactic, and very much in opposition to what I see as the major strength of fandom, which has been considerably weakened by so many fans becoming so completely dependent on livejournal: that fans are not normally a centralised group. This is not just a petty "Grr, they won't let me respond!" though I think that either deliberately or through indifference offending fans who have already left livejournal is probably not good strategy. It's an example (I think) of an underlying philosophy that I just flat disagree with: that fans can't be trusted without a strong central directive. That you don't want groups of fans going off and talking about stuff all on their own because who knows what they might come up with?

PS: I really have moved over to insanejournal. Consider this journal a backup.

I ATEN'T DED

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:13:39 GMT

In accordance with a long-standing tradition, comment here if you would like a flashfiction story written for you as an online Christmas present. Give me a fandom, a word, and, optionally, a theme. First ten commenters only.

Foggy in the head

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 23:00:29 GMT

I hate feeling like this. It's not as bad as yesterday. It will not be as bad tomorrow. Colds. Ugh.

In the news today, Nicely of www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com is today explaining the intricacies of VAT in the Guardian.

Staple foods are zero-rated for VAT. Cake is a staple food. Biscuits can be a staple food, unless they are luxury items. A biscuit usually becomes a luxury item when it is covered in chocolate. Because Jaffa cakes and teacakes* strongly resemble biscuits and are covered in chocolate, they have been classed as biscuits, and taxed accordingly, but are now legally cakes and therefore staples and therefore zero-rated.

The most fiendishly delectable thing about all of this is that even if a cake is covered in chocolate and filled with smashing orangy bits, it's still a staple food.

Of course I am foggy in the head, but I still find this somewhat amusing.

*Not the currant buns which are split, toasted, and buttered: the biscuity-things which are made with a layer of biscuit and a mound of gelatinous fluff falsely called "marshmallow", covered in cheap chocolate. I say "biscuity things" but in fact this is probably now illegal to say and they are in fact cakes. Cakes. Staple food. Zero-rated.

Christmas tree!

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:03:56 GMT

You Should Have a Green Christmas Tree

For you, the holidays represent tradition and memories.
You tend to do things the same way each year. You find your holiday customs comforting.

You enjoy all of the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of Christmas.
You can't imagine getting any joy from an artificial tree.

Your green tree would look great with: Classic ornaments

You should spend Christmas Eve watching: How the Grinch Stole Christmas

What you should bake for Santa: A gingerbread house

What Color Christmas Tree Should You Have?

Moving time...

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 09:45:57 GMT

From a recent announcement in news I think it safer to infer that greatestjournal is about to die on us than not.

So: backing up this journal, to save all of your lovely comments, but also: I would like to move my katra to insanejournal. That is, rather than posting here and copying to there, I'll post there and copy to here.

Who on my f-list has an insanejournal? Or are you already elsewhere? Please comment here and tell me where you are!

All anonymous comments will be screened, so if you want to leave contact details in private just log out and post a comment. Actual changes will happen at the weekend: I don't believe this is we-have-just-hit-an-iceberg time, more let's-change-to-another-ship time.

For lunch today I had a gingerbread latte. Read into that what you will.

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 13:29:15 GMT

View Poll: #43460

Copyright and plagiarism and derivative use

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:54:46 GMT

We honestly have no rights once we've posted our stuff? (a response to ingrid's post here)

Actually, we do.

Anything I write, I own the copyright of.

If anyone takes my writing and turns it into a novel, files the numbers off and sells it, I can sue that person for stealing what I wrote: even if they just took what I wrote and created a directly derivative work from it, I can absolutely make their future publishing career troubled, brutish, and short. (No publisher is going to be happy having a writer connected with them who steals another writers' work.)

Fanfic falls in a grey area from definitely-legal to definitely-infringing: the novelisation of an episode, for example, would fall under "infringement" - probably, unless it was a parody, which is always legal - but a story written based on the series? Quite possibly legal, if it was different enough from the original that the people who own the copyright of the original could not claim that you were infringing on their copyright. Certainly, while (for example) Paramount could step in and say "Wait, we own the copyright of Star Trek and we are claiming this work is unfairly derivative of Trek" a third person who doesn't own the copyright of Trek cannot step in and say "Hey, this story is illegal, that means I can steal it."

The legal situation is weird, basically, because (until this incident with a romance novel writer stealing a K/S story) there has never been a good reason for a fan to take someone to court over their own story. But this situation is a good reason to do it - or at the very least, to pay a solicitor to write a couple of letters, one to the publisher and one to the "author", to notify them that you own your own words. Which you do. Copyright law is quite clear about that.

The corporations who own the copyrights of our original materials are much richer than we are and can afford much better lawyers: but I think one reason why no corporation has ever made a concerted effort to root out the fanfic is not just because it would piss off their fanbase: it's also because their very good lawyers have doubtless warned them - pick on the wrong story and the wrong writer and they might lose. And a lose in the courts - for example, a lose that definitively makes fanfic with non-canon pairings explicitly legal - would not be a good move for them.

(Fanfic set in written fandoms - Harry Potter, frinstance - is on a much edgier basis, just as songvids are: it's more likely to be considered directly derivative. Of course, fanfic set in written fandoms that are out of copyright is perfectly absolutely totally legal... Sherlock Holmes, anyone?)

Now, it's possible that if it ever did get to the courts, we'd lose - some forms of fanfic would become definitely illegal, instead of "undecided". Maybe it would turn out that although I wrote and published a story, I can't claim copyright (and more than possible that if we got to the courts, and won, and this made Disney unhappy, they'd just get the US government to pass a new law saying the court was wrong) but it seems unlikely. Truly: the law of copyright is, you own your own words. To change this - to argue that a writer can't claim copyright when publishing a derivative story using characters and situations that belong to another copyright - would be to radically change copyright law. Maybe Disney can do that, but a random romance writer who just stole a K/S story can't.

Fans who talk as if we already had that fight and we lost are just wrong. We haven't yet had that fight, and if we did, we don't know yet if we'd win or lose.

In other news, Six Apart sold Livejournal to SUP, which has been running Livejournal in Russia already.

Most sensible comment I've read so far about the latest from SixApart

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:22:45 GMT

Word.

Amused, kinda

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 10:04:56 GMT

I still look at Roz Kaveney's livejournal sometimes.

Since the new Livejournal we-must-protect-the-CHEELDREN changes, Roz's journal is flagged as unsuitable for anyone over the age of 14, and every single entry (as far as I could see down the page) was flagged: ( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Some of the journal entries now tagged as "may not be appropriate for minors" are:

Because it is one of the most wonderful things ever anyway, and I love this cover version of the music, may I share with you the Pink Elephants sequence from Dumbo remastered with Sun Ra and his Arkestra.

Dying of the cute
Watching Pushing Daisies - Olive and Chuck in ninja burglar outfits!

I'm not very keen on most of what the BBC puts out as drama these days - Who and Life on Mars aside. I've never quite fallen for Hustle for example, though I can see the case for it, and the only classic serial I've liked in ages was Bleak House.

However, the show I love and which I get the impression a lot of my US and Canadian friends don't watch is Spooks which is the show that 24 might aspire to be if it had any brains, and was not just a neocon apologia for torture and god knows what.

How do you do mental arithmetic?

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:21:48 GMT

(Assuming that you do, of course.)

If someone gives you a figure like 4573 and asks you to divide it by 53, what is your mental working?

Mine is: 53 into 457 is 8, and 8 times 53 is 424, so 4240 subtracted from 4573 is 240 from 573 is 300 plus 33: 53 into 333 is 6, 6 times 53 is 318, 33 minus 18 is 15. The answer is 86 remainder 15.

Which I just checked on Google Calculator, in case I had misplaced a digit somewhere, which is the chief problem with doing mental arithmetic. For a figure that size it would be easier if I had somewhere to write down "80", or ask someone to remember it for me, but I can do it in my head without that, though with the uncomfortable feeling that I want to be able to check it somewhere. For larger figures I would definitely want to have a scrap of paper to write it down on, though the basic technique is good for knowing what the answer should be.

The odd thing is - this came up in the course of a conversation, and I realised that I do not recall ever being told how to calculate figures this way. The technique just arrived, sometime when I was a teenager, as a consequence - I assume - of being taught my times-tables and addition and subtraction until they were coming out my ears, and then discovering that in fact there were realworld situations where it was useful to be able to do long division in my head.

In other news, can you spell schadenfreude? Heh.

Ian & Derek 4EVA

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 10:00:33 GMT

There is much other good stuff in this interview with Ian McKellen in the Guardian, but right now I'm all overcome with the news that when Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen were at Cambridge together, they were in love with each other... but both of them were too shy and too scared (this was the 1950s, and the decriminalization of male homosexuality was ten years away) to admit to each other at the time.

Suddenly, I want to write RPS.

Also, I'm longing to see McKellen as a bear.

Britain reinstates the death penalty

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 08:49:05 GMT

Craig Murray was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, 2002-2004. Via Sideshow, and Craig Murray's blog, I find that the UK is planning to deport a failed asylum seeker, Jahongir Sidikov, back to Uzbekistan. From Craig's blog, 22nd November:

Jahongir Sidikov is still in detention at Heathrow, having offered passive resistance to the attempt to deport him today. Next time they will use staff authorised and equipped to use force.
I am deeply depressed. All yesterday I was working on trying to save him from being returned to the horrors of the Karimov regime's treatment of dissidents, and it was like living inside a nightmare. Together with an Uzbek friend, we got in an emergency application to the European Court of Human Rights for an Article 39 stay on deportation as Jahongir's life was in danger. This involved my friend filling and faxing numerous forms. I spoke with the legal officers filing the report to the Court, and with the National Council for Assisting Deportees who told me that a temporary stay was "always...automatically" granted so the case could be investigated. By the early evening Jahongir had already been taken to the airport to be deported, and still no result. Finally, the news came from Strasbourg - the appeal for a delay had been rejected by the assistant registrar of the Court. I have no idea why.
I am still in a genuine state of shock and disbelief that we should start shipping asylum seekers back to Uzbekistan, of all places. It is as though the government have gone into official denial of what kind of place Uzbekistan is. I am also astonished that I have been met with complete indifference from everybody - officials, MPs and journalists. I can't get anybody to take an interest.

Fax your MP and your MEP. You can find the Home Office details here.
Human Rights watch reports that torture is endemic in Uzbekistan's criminal justice system. Deporting Jahongir Sidikof back to Uzbekistan is illegal: the UK is signed up to the UN Convention Against Torture, which states at Article 3.1:

No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

Fax your MP and your MEP.

Dear MP,

I wonder if I could persuade you to take an interest in the case of Jahongir Sidikov. He is currently in detention at Heathrow, awaiting deportation to Uzbekistan.

Prior to this the UK has not deported failed asylum seekers back to Uzbekistan, because of justified fears for their safety.

Jahongir Sidikov is a member of an opposition political party in that country. This deportation has been fast-tracked by the Home Office (Home Office ref. – S2185191) and approved by the FCO.

The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, believes there is a very high likelihood that Sidikov will be tortured, and that he may perhaps even be executed on return to Uzbekistan. Hence, that the deportation is illegal under Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture.

Amnesty International's report on the Uzbek regime says that "The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, reporting on a visit to Uzbekistan in 2002, concluded that torture and ill-treatment were systematic and condoned by the authorities."

The most recent report made to the UN Committee Against Torture on Uzbekistan, presented on 9th November 2007, says that "Uzbekistan’s human rights record continues to fall well below acceptable standards"; "Opposition parties have been denied registration, their members face harassment and sometimes arrest", and that since the presentation of the 2002 report, the practice of torture remains unchanged.
http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/cats39.htm

I hope you can take up this man's case and prevent him from being deported. I also hope that you can re-affirm and stand by the principle that Britain does not deport people to countries where they will very likely be tortured.

My MP's response

Thankyou for your email. As a general rule, it is the MP in whose constituency someone resides (or most recently resided) who will take up a case such as this. This is a sensible rule, as otherwise MPs would be likely to get so many requests to intervene they would not be able to give sufficient priority to deal with their own constituents.

However as this case does raise wider issues I am willing to take up the general point with the Home Office. I will be in touch once I have a response.

Starship Troopers - review (only 10 years late)

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:25:41 GMT

I missed Starship Troopers when it came out, because it sounded like the kind of bug-ugly movie I prefer to ignore. But I've read the book, and read Joe Haldeman's fictional reversal of the book, and I spotted it on the shelf at The Forest, and thought, in a guilt-free way, I can pick it up, watch it, and return it.

So I did.

What most of the reviews miss (all the ones I've read so far, except those written by SF fans for fans) is that the movie itself is a conscious narrative. It takes the events of Heinlein's novel, more or less, and condenses them into a military recruitment film for the Federation described in Heinlein's novel. That recruitment film is the movie Starship Troopers.

You get hints at this at the beginning, and it's definitely spelled out by the voiceover at the end. Too, if you know Heinlein's novel, you can see the changes the Federation made: Juan Rico's name was kept but he was cast as six-foot-plus soldier type, who barely says an unpatriotic word. (In fact, all of the male soldiers are big-and-hunky-and-handsome, and all of the female soldiers are small-cute-busty. Of course they are: the Federation, making a propaganda movie, isn't going to cast realistic soldiers in the roles.) Ther are clues all through the film - clips from news programmes, the constantly re-iterated "Do you want to know more?" that should hint you're not watching the usual kind of movie.

It is hard to explain, but obvious once you see it - if you see it from beginning to end, and if your mind is open to the idea.

But not one of the professional movie critics I read saw it (or if they did, were not prepared to go out on a limb and say they'd seen it). Given they're writing to an audience that finds The Truman Show a difficult movie to follow, and Bladerunner impossible unless Harrison Ford is telling them what they're seeing, is it a wonder? But then - were they meant to? At least one fannish critic (who, I can't remember now) said back then in a review I then didn't understand, that they thought the director was trying to have it both ways - do a blood-and-schlock movie that any gamesplayer would understand, like, and want to buy the videogame - with a narrative framing device that turns it into an ironic comment on the blood-and-patriotism thinking that's broadcast in the movie.

Kenneth Turan in the LA Times: "But it certainly is a jaw-dropping experience, so rigorously one-dimensional and free from even the pretense of intelligence it's hard not to be astonished and even mesmerized by what is on the screen." (The IMDB, however, does have a synopsis "In a sardonic use of war-effort propaganda vernacular, wholesome young Earth people are drafted by their government's media machine into a jingoistic invasion of a neighboring planetary system. Genocide is their response to the foreign life form's attempts at self-defense; the heroes' individuality is similarly wiped out as they are crushed by the grinding wheels of conformity. A love triangle, and the high school buddies' various paths toward violent glory and bloody tragedy, stitch together the tapestry of irony with grand-scale spectacle." - but this was written, most likely, by a fan ("rhinocerosfive-1") not by a pro critic.)

So what was going on? Did the critics just not spot it, or were they afraid to call it in case their readers didn't, or what?

Why I'm unlikely to follow up recs for TV shows compared to recs for books

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:03:22 GMT

If a friend says "This book is really good, you should read it" I'm very likely to file that rec away in my mind, and follow it up.

If a friend says "This TV series is really good, you should watch it" I'm very likely to go "Sure, whatever" and not follow it up. Especially if the friend says "It's really tightly plotted, great storyline, you have to watch it from the beginning!" even though I agree this is generally an excellent sign of a good TV series.

And the reason for this is dead simple, even though it seems to cause confusion. (At least one friend, when I accepted a book rec with enthusiasm and reacted to a TV rec with apathy, looked extremely confused - perhaps because this happened virtually in the same 15 minutes...)

Following up a book rec - or an author rec - is relatively cheap, and easy. If the book's in print, I can find it in a bookshop, take a check at the writer's style before buying, and if the first chapter looks readable, buy it. Cost (if paperback) probably around £7, maybe less, maybe more. If the book's only available in hardback, or is out of print, I can get it via the library system. Cost: 50p. (More if it's really rare and unobtainable and the library has to go to some trouble, but still less than the price of a new paperback.) Investment o my time, in either case: minimal. If the book strikes me as unreadable, I've wasted only the time it took me to find that out (and it's rare that a friend will recommend me a book that's really unreadable). If the book is readable, even if I end up not liking it as much as the friend thought I would, I've still only wasted the time it took to read the book - and if it's really unenjoyable, well, I may just not finish it. (Especially if it's a library book...)

Following up a TV rec can be cheap, if the show's still on TV at a watchable hour, though not if it's "really tightly plotted", etc: if I know when the show's on, what channel it's on, and if it doesn't matter that it's halfway through the seccond season, if I have a free evening at the right time I can just switch on the TV and try it out for an hour. (If it's not on at a watchable hour, this entails doing VCR stuff and then making time some other evening, and oh lord how the tapes used to pile up when I did that...) If it does matter that it's "really tightly plotted" etc, and the reccer is saying "You should watch this from the beginning!" that's pretty much a surefire way to make sure I never will watch a single episode of the show, because unless I happen to catch the show being repeated, and can get the first episode at a watchable time, etc - well, then, I never will watch it. Following up a TV rec like that expensively entails buying DVDs, which are never cheap for a brand new show (or paying for pirated videos, in the old days, which weren't cheap either), and by the time they're affordable usually the old rec is buried under all the other recs. (I never watched a single episode of Hill Street Blues because the fan who rec'd it to me did so in exactly those terms - that I really needed to watch it from the very beginning.) It's expensive. It's troublesome. It just doesn't work. Because a lot of the time, the series a friend is recommending so urgently is not going to be worth the trouble - at least, it never feels as if it will be when I'm looking at the effort of trying to get into it.

Yet I have got into shows: how?

1. The fan who wants me to get into it sits me down in front of the TV and gets me to watch episodes from it. This worked for West Wing, MacGyver, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (well, in that instance it was the movie Shoshanna got me to watch, but the principle was the same), Now and Again, Forever Knight, The Professionals, Due South. (This did not work for Tenth Kingdom, Three Brothers movies, Wiseguy...)

2. I fall in love with the Queen song in the episode opener, and end up watching more and more of each episode. (Highlander. It took quite a while before I just stopped switching the TV off at the first flashback, though.)

3. I just happen to be in the house and the TV's on and I find myself watching it and I fall in love: Blake's 7.

4. I read the spinoffs or the fanfic and I want to watch the thing itself: Star Trek, Doctor Who, M*A*S*H. (Shows which I tried and failed to get into because I liked the fanfic: X-Files, Angel, Smallville....)

5. A show is rec'd. I find out Hugh Laurie is playing the disgruntled doctor. Some time later, my cat dies. That evening, I decide I need to not think. I switch on and watch House.

That's pretty much it. (There is also Big Love, which I got into by reading the recaps on TWOP, but watching a few episodes convinced me that I might just as well go back to reading the recaps. Besides, I don't think it's on TV over here.)

How do you get into shows?

Justice is not achieved with e-petitions

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 20:47:27 GMT

Hwaet! Give ear to!

This afternoon a friend sent to my work address (I think hoping I might use my work resources to publicise it) an e-petition that begins:

Outrage in South Africa

Last week a 3 year old girl in South Africa was beaten and raped. She is still alive. The man responsible was released on bail yesterday. He is walking the streets. If you are too busy to read this then just sign your name and forward this on.

The Government is planning to close the child protection unit and this is a petition against it. This is a very important petition. It is an essential part of the justice system for children. You may have already heard that there's a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. (Note: that part is perfectly damnably true.)

The younger the virgin, the more potent the cure. This has led to an epidemic of rapes by infected males, with the correspondent infection of innocent kids. Many have died in these cruel rapes. Recently in Cape Town , a 9-month-old baby was raped by 6 men. Please think about that for a moment. The child abuse situation is now reaching catastrophic proportions and if we don't do something, then who will? Kindly add your name to the bottom of the list and please pass this on to as many people as you know.

If you are signature no.: 1000 - please forward the mail-list to c h i l d p r o t e c t p c a @ s a p s . o r g . z a

There are 643 names on the copy that reached me, beginning with a name in Australia.

When this e-mail arrived, I glanced it over, and thought my usual think: E-petitions are no good, why do people keep forwarding them? and a less-usual think, because I was at work: I should look this up and see if I can publicise it, or if I can't, suggest better ways to the friend who sent it to me. A Facebook group, I thought. Something.

This specific kind of petition, where the author asks you to add your name and forward it to "everyone you know" is a kind of viral meme. It can be worthwhile in drawing attention to a specific issue (as with the Afghan women petition of a few years ago), but actually regarding it as a petition to be sent to an e-mail address where "someone" will do something about it is pointless: an e-mail petition of this kind is regarded about as highly as a blank sheet of paper, and the influx of e-mails to the e-mail address given will, soon or late, mean that e-mail address has to be shut down due to overload.

This, however, is a more treacherous kind of petition; it's a hoax. As I found in five minutes googling, this is a known hoax that's been circulating on the Internet for at least eighteen months. The Child Protection Unit in South Africa is not being closed down: it's being expanded, restructured, and renamed the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit. (The e-mail address given is not a valid police address.)

There is a grain of awful truth in the e-mail.

The Virgin Cure belief isn't specific to South Africa - in fact, it may have come to southern Africa with European colonists in the 19th century:

The myth of the Virgin Cure has a rich and culturally diverse history stretching back to 16th century Europe, and more prominently to be found in 19th century Victorian England, where, in spite of the emphasis on morality, rectitude and family values, there existed a widespread belief, that sexual intercourse with a virgin was a cure for syphilis, gonorrhea, [and other STD's]. (HIV/AIDS, the stats, the virgin cure and infant rape)

The phenomenon of infant rape in South Africa is very real:

"In our culture, as a woman, you don't say no to a man. Sex is not open for discussion," [Rose Tamae, a survivor of gang rape] says.
"So they think they can do as they like.
"In a place like Orange Farm, where most people are unemployed, and the women have to go looking for work far away, often the children are left at home in the care of men, or strangers.
"They are vulnerable. In one case a little girl was being given food in return for sex, and she didn't want to go home empty-handed to her mother, who had Aids and was sick. " (BBC)

But though rape reporting to the police is on the rise, the actual figures of rape may not be, and may not be connected with the "Virgin Cure" phenomenon:

Dr Jewkes and two of her collaborators, Dr Lorna Martin (Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, University of Cape Town) and Ms Loveday Penn-Kekana (Centre for Health Policy, University of the Witwatersrand) believe other factors are to blame for these violent acts.
"The idea that having sex with a virgin cleanses you of AIDS does exist in South Africa and there have been reported cases of this as a motivating factor for child rape, but the predominant evidence suggests that this is infrequently the case," Dr Jewkes says. She quotes Mr Luke Lamprecht, the manager of the Teddy Bear Clinic in Johannesburg, which is the referral point for all child sex abuse cases in the metropolis. According to him, he has only seen one child rape case where the perpetrator believed the myth. This happened some 4 years ago - and the child's mother agreed that the HIV-positive man could rape her 4-year-old in exchange for cash.
"According to another report on child rape which investigated injury patterns, management and outcomes, there was a 1% sero-conversion rate.* This was, for most cases, in the absence of anti-retroviral therapy and therefore suggests that this myth is not an important cause of rape. If it had been, in view of the extensive injuries common in child rape, a higher rate of sero-conversion would be expected," says Dr Jewkes. (The 'virgin myth' and child rape in South Africa)

These are horrors. There are real things people can do: get involved with your local World AIDS Day event; donate to the AIDS Foundation of South Africa; read more about AIDS in Africa; support Rape Crisis NGOs in South Africa (the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust is one of the oldest and does work around the country as well as in Cape Town); if you live in the UK, you can support Community H. E. A. R. T, a UK charity that supports "Health Education And Reconstruction Training" in South Africa: if you live elsewhere, you can find a similar charity based in your country. These are useful things to do. Forwarding an e-mail petition isn't going to do a damn thing, ever, even when it's actually factually true.

(On the other hand, I wouldn't want to discourage you from e-mailing Pope Rat at benedictxvi@vatican.va, or ringing him at the Vatican Switchboard (+39.06.6982) or even writing to him at Vatican City (you will have to address the envelope "His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, 00120 Via del Pellegrino, Citta del Vaticano": I imagine envelopes sent to Pope Rat or That Nazi Bastard just get weeded out at the sorting office): and asking him why the Catholic Church is spending more resources to oppose condoms in Africa than it is on opposing the lie of the Virgin Cure.)

Ah well...

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:43:28 GMT

I attempted to wring a new phone out of T-Mobile. Unfortunately, it didn't work, but it was worth a try.

I'd been looking at mobile phones and had been really struck by the Nokia 8600, which is a dream of a phone - no-scratch screen, titanium case, nice design. Price: £400. But no phone company is offering that as a free phone, so I thought I'd try and brace T-Mobile for it, on the basis that I'd been with them three years, my contract expired 18 months ago at least, and hey, if I didn't ask, I wouldn't get.

02 were prepared to offer a much better price plan and a free Nokia 6500 Classic. T-Mobile were prepared to match 02, but no better than that: they would happily have offered me more and more free minutes and texts, but I didn't need more free minutes, what I fancied, frankly, and I told the bloke at T-Mobile this, was a much better phone. The best he was allowed to offer (he said, not at all reluctantly) was a Nokia 8600 for £170. As the price difference between 8600 and 6400 is more like £145 (I looked up both models on Amazon) I asked him for a PACs code instead, and he gave me one. (I need to port my number over from old phone to new. I hate changing numbers.) I'd have bargained if he'd been able to bargain, but if the lowest he was allowed to go was £170, there was no point.

letter to T-Mobile

Having not heard from T-Mobile about changing my price plan or upgrading my phone in almost two years, I looked round at other price plans on offer and discovered I could cut my phone bill and get more time via O2, along with a free Nokia 6500 Classic handset.

I was sure T-Mobile could match the offer, but wondered if you would be interested in retaining me by offering a better handset.

I opened the discussions with a Nokia 8600, and was told I could only have that if I was prepared to pay £170. As the price differential between Nokia 8600 and 6500 is more like £145, and as the person I spoke to was apparently neither empowered to reduce the price nor able to think of offering another handset, I concluded T-Mobile was not interested in retaining me as a customer, and asked for a transfer code instead, which I got.

I was slightly disappointed that T-Mobile prefers to lose customers rather than consider offering them better deals in order to retain them, but I had already figured that out when I realised how long I had been on Relax 100 without any attempt by T-Mobile to contact me.

Good luck for the future.

A Bible translation project I can really get behind!

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:28:19 GMT

1 Ceiling Cat iz mai sheprd (which is funni if u knowz teh joek about herdin catz LOL.) He givz me evrithin I need.

2 He letz me sleeps in teh sunni spot an haz liek nice waterz r ovar thar.

3 He makez mai soul happi an maeks sure I go teh riet wai for him. Liek thru teh cat flap insted of out teh opin windo LOL.

4 I iz in teh valli of dogz, fearin no pooch, bcz Ceiling Cat iz besied me rubbin' mah ears, an it maek me so kumfy.

5 He letz me sit at teh taebl evn when peepl who duzint liek me iz watchn. He givz me a flea baff an so much gooshy fud it runz out of mai bowl LOL.

6 Niec things an luck wil chase me evrydai an I wil liv in teh Ceiling Cats houz forevr.

LOLcat Bible, Psalm 23

I have my camera back

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 14:29:17 GMT

*celebrates*

First five people to ask: I'll take a photograph of anything you say! (Within reason. And SFW, thank you.)

Straight people are just so much more interesting than you, Mark

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:18:50 GMT

Gay playwright announces he's going straight.

Seriously. Mark Ravenhill, a boring man with a lot to be boring about, has announced that as writing about LGBT people makes him yawn, from now on all his characters are going to be 100% heterosexual.

This will be welcomed by critics who have been compelled to sit through his plays about gay characters, such as Mother Clap's Molly House.

The Mother Clap Trap by Rictor Norton in Gay Times, September, 2001, issue 276, pages 33-34.

"Frankly, I am glad that no permission was sought or granted, so that I am free to dissociate myself publicly from Ravenhill's play. It is dominated by themes of perversion, abnormality, unnaturalness, shame and self-hatred, all of which are absent from the real world of 18th-century gay men, or 'mollies' . Ravenhill has systematically distorted gay history."

"Good gay history is so rare, it is a great shame that once positive images have been unearthed, they should be deformed by homophobic stereotypes. The press release proclaims Ravenhill's play to be 'a fascinating insight into a hidden chapter of London's history'. On the contrary, it is a gross misrepresentation of gay history."

It's a sin by Mark Simpson in The Independent on Sunday: Etc, 26th. August, 2001, page 7.

"If Mother Clap's Molly House succeeds in showing the shockingly pleasurable side of buggery at the National Theatre perhaps it might prove as much a cultural watershed as The Romans in Britain. Since it was staged in 1980, using anal sex as a metaphor for imperialism, sodomy between men has been completely colonised by violent cliché - and not only in the theatre, but in films and even TV soaps."

"What's truly scandalous, however, is not just how often this meta-anal cliché has been deployed on stage and screen, or even the way that the audience just lies there and takes it, but the way in which every playwright/scriptwriter lazily reaching for it seems to think that they are being original, so fearless, so visceral."

(from The Knitting Circle)

Letter to Boots

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:14:40 GMT

Letter to Boots - first draft

For some years now (since February 2001, in fact) I’ve been using the weight monitoring machines in Boots. In many ways, they were ideal: accurate, providing a receipt with a record of my starting weight and a list of the past 10 weighs, and would record my weight in kilos or stones/pounds as I preferred.

Their one disadvantage, which got more and more irritating over the years, was that they weren’t owned or run by Boots, and the maintenance contract that Boots had with the owners was completely unreliable: if one went out of action, you could be certain that it would remain out of action for weeks, sometimes months, and it was useless to complain to the manager of the Boots shop: as they would politely tell you (and I asked several, several times), they had nothing to do with the machines and could do nothing to get them repaired faster – their sole connection with the weighing machines was to sell/recharge the smart cards.

This was annoying, but at least when the machines were in working order, they were good devices.

Now Boots has apparently ditched the old machines and bought new ones. Like the old machines, these are apparently not owned or run by Boots, and so will have the same problem as ever of being unreliable and unmaintained. Probably a worse problem, because they’re more complex than the old machines, so more to go wrong.

They are considerably more expensive than the old machines – 50p or 70p a weigh instead of 30p – and while there is space for a card to be inserted, I asked one of the assistants at the Boots branch where I saw the new machine, and she told me that Boots do not sell smart cards for these machines. (She also tried to claim that Boots had never sold smart cards for the old machines either, which is trying too hard: I have a smart card for the old machines, which still has £1 of credit on it.)

The new machines don’t just weigh you. They’ll also tell you your BMI and measure your body fat. Thanks, but no thanks.

Net result: Boots failed to maintain the previous weighing machines, and has bought in a range of new weighing machines to put the price up for new unrequested “services”, while – judging by the emergency number to call on the machine – skimping on the maintenance, which will lead to the same problems all over again.

Letter to Boots - second draft

I’ve been using the old Boots weight monitoring machines since February 2001. I found them valuable and effective in regularly checking my weight for a systematic programme of weight loss.

Their one flaw was not directly connected with the machines, but had to do with the Boots plc decision not to have the machines under the control of the local pharmacies in which they were placed, and not to pay for a regular maintenance contract to ensure that a broken machine would be fixed within days, rather than (usually) left unfixed for weeks or even months. This was annoying, but when the machines were working, they were excellent, and I am sorry that you decided to get rid of them.

In the Boots branch I generally use (address given) I saw that the old machine was gone, replaced by a new machine, which had the following flaws:

1. Most serious: evidently these new machines, like the old, are to be left unmaintained and unrepaired (the phone number to call to report problems tells the tale), so that it won’t be possible to depend on them for regular use.
2. The price has gone up; 50p/70p per weigh instead of 30p. The excuse offered is that machine offers new services, but none of them are actually desirable – BMI measurement, “fat measurement”, and we’re not allowed the same service as before at the same rate.
3. Boots does not sell smart cards for the machines (I asked the counter assistant if they were available from Boots, and she said no).
4. There’s no clue where you can get smart cards on the machines, just a note that the new charges will be cheaper if you can get a smart card.
5. There’s no offer anywhere to trade in your old smart card for the previous machines to get a new one: evidently we’re just expected to swallow the loss of any credit on the old cards. (The counter assistant tried to tell me that there had never been smart cards available, which I suppose she had been told to say: it is not sensible, however, since I have in my possession a Boots Weight Monitoring Smart Card.)
I would appreciate a letter notifying me how Boots plans to resolve these problems, especially the key problem – the decision not to maintain or support the machines.

The cost of the Olympics

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 13:53:48 GMT

Gardens destroyed:

Halfway up Waterden Road in Hackney Wick, east London, down an alley between a bus depot and a cash-and-carry and across a little bridge over the river Lea, are the Manor Garden allotments. Or at least, that is where they were, until two months ago. Now, if you walk down Waterden Road, you arrive at the 10ft-high blue fence and steel gates of the Olympic Park, and you can go no further. The 87 allotments, bounded on both sides by water, overflowing with potatoes and tomatoes, sweetcorn and aubergines, wild plum trees and leafy chard, with figs, chillies and big, bobbing heads of fennel, are abandoned; they will make way, come 2012, for a concourse between the hockey stadium, the velodrome and the BMX venue, and for a giant TV screen for non-ticket holders.

Following a battle that very nearly ended in court, the London Development Authority agreed to come up with a replacement site. This proved to be in Waltham Forest, beside a sliproad leading on to the M11, with no access by public transport. The Manor Garden plotholders, the Clarks included, are supposed to pick up their keys this month. Nobody seems very enthusiastic about it, nor very reassured by the LDA's promise that they will be able to return to within the boundaries of the Olympic park once the games are over, although not to the same spot.

Hassan Ali, 65, gardened there for 17 years:

"The allotment was wonderful, beautiful - like an island, with big trees, apples and peaches. I have a fig tree I planted 16 years ago, now it's 30ft high, and what figs! Everyone loved my figs. When I got a plot 17 years ago, Reg was my guide. He would say how to grow things we didn't know how to grow, how deep to plant the potatoes. The allotment's so social - always dinners, barbecues and parties. I think the very best thing in this world would be if everyone had a little bit of land and grew their food."

Reg Hawkins, 76, gardened there for 55 years:

"My father was at Manor Gardens before me. That's more than 70 years our family has been working that soil. There's a lot of history, a lot of memories. And such good people: from East Enders to Ugandans, Jamaicans, Greeks, you name it. But everyone was always happy to do a bit of watering, share seeds - and cook! They should have called Hassan's shed Hassan's Cafe, there were so many people in there being fed."

The allotments have been there for nearly 90 years: all that treasure of work stored up in rich soil will have been buried for a road to the 2012 Olympics, and Hassan's fig tree will have been cut down.

A common treasury:

A truly Green suggestion by another plotholder, Julie Sumner, an antenatal course supervisor in the NHS proposed a novel form of sponsorship: the plots could feed the athletes of one national team. ‘It would have to be a very small country with not too many participants, but we probably have enough of a selection to keep anyone happy and fit, no matter where they’re from.’ Naturally, this was rejected by the Olympic Committee.

Bulldoze this.

Hello, I'm Johnny Cash

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:05:56 GMT

I saw the Johnny Cash biopic when I was staying with my sister; her son and his father like Johnny Cash, and so do I, and my sister had picked up a DVD of the movie, Walk the Line, so we watched it on Sunday night.

It was, in a very, very real sense, absolutely terrible. The scriptwriter had seemed to feel that it would be a good idea to work in as many references as possible to songs that Cash wrote, or sang. The first time I noticed this, it was sort of cute. The cute wore off about the second or the third time, but it went on happening.

Joaquin Phoenix was chosen, I suppose, because he could kinda-sorta pass for looking almost like Cash (too slender, too pretty, but almost) and he could sing, even if his voice wouldn't have been mistaken for Cash's even by a completely non-musical person. Reese Witherspoon was just extremely good: not only in sounding like June Carter (which was doubtless helped by the simple fact that all of what I know June Carter's voice sounded like is from a handful of lines on Johnny Cash DVDs) but also in reacting to Cash.

I haven't even thought of a RPF story since I was a teenage B7 fan, aside from a brief flirtation with Have I Got News For You fic. But I do understand the appeal.

Because the biopic was wrong.

As far as I know, the only fact it got wrong was in saying that Cash got the idea of doing concerts in prisons and taped the album Johnny Cash in Folsom Prison right there and then: in fact he'd been doing concerts in prisons for years.

The basic story of Cash as given by the biopic is of a boy with a brutal father, a good older brother, and a loving mother, who lost his brother, left home as soon as he legally could and joined the air force, got married, had two daughters. tried to be a door-to-door salesman, made it as a singer, went on tour, got addicted to amphetamines, became famous, fell in love with another singer, even more famous than himself, got arrested and charged with illegal drug use, nearly lost his career because of his addiction, lost his wife, but finally got the woman he'd fallen in love with, got his own house, his family all talking to him again, and the film closes then; on June Carter and Johnny Cash hugging each other on stage as June's just said yes to Johnny's proposal, with title cards rolling up over the screen that tell you they married and lived together till June died in 2003 and Johnny followed four months later. It's a love story - Johnny Carter was listening to June Carter's voice when he was a little kid and loving her voice then. It's a classic poor-boy-makes-good story. It's a bad-boy-reformed-through-love-of-a-good-woman story. (Yes, kids, you too can kick a drug habit! All you need is True Love!)

And all of those stories were wrong. I don't care how true to the framework of facts they were: they were wrong. Oh, okay, this is egoistical: I mean, in a RPF kind of a way, this isn't the Johnny Cash story I want to see.

The Cash played by Joaquin Phoenix isn't the Johnny Cash who sang "Nasty Dan" on Sesame Street. Or who sang "Ghost Riders In the Sky" on the Muppet Show. Or who wrote and sang "A Boy Named Sue". Or who started giggling when he was singing "A Ring of Fire" with Willie Nelson, and got back on track after a deadpan look from Nelson. Phoenix plays Cash laconic, serious, sad, with one-liners delivered deadpan. You can't imagine Phoenix's Cash doing a quick combover and mimicking Elvis Presley live on stage, still less the delighted grin of Cash with the muppets. You can't imagine Phoenix's Cash singing a song to make you laugh. And while Walk The Line makes reference, twice, to Cash's dressing in black, it never references the lyrics of "Man in Black".

I don't want to decry Phoenix's achievement. He couldn't make his voice sound like Johnny Cash's voice, not at that age or any other, but he could mimic Cash's inflexions and his facial expressions. He was damned good. But it was like looking at a very, very lifelike wax model of a person: no matter how alike, you could never mistake the one for the other. Not that this mattered much except when Phoenix was singing. Of course he was singing quite a lot.

What bothered me more than anything else was nothing any film could have done better: if I wanted a version of Johnny Cash's life that would satisfy me, I would probably have to write it myself. Making stuff up as needful.

How to make pizza

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 12:18:07 GMT

I read Pizza cheese to come from milked cats (it'll be part of the Observer Food Monthly, apparently), and frankly, I'm appalled. Not at the news that the price of mozzarella may be about to rise substantially - sad though that is, and I'm quite fond of mozzarella.

Pizza is one of the great overpriced dishes of our time.

You only have to make pizza once to know this.

To make pizza, you take bread dough - ideally, made out of a very high-gluten flour, so you can roll it very thin, like pastry - and roll it out into a pie-shape. Whatever shape of pie you like. Place on an oiled pie-dish or a tray or whatever you care to use.

Spread a sauce on the flat dough. Tomato paste is fine: pesto: a thick pasta sauce: a really hot chutney, spread thin - whatever you like. Not much of it, though.

You add toppings. Whatever you like. But you don't need much. (You can, of course, add much too much and have not so much a pizza as a heaping layer of food which you eat balanced precariously on each slice.) For a big mushroom pizza, you need maybe four mushrooms, sliced thin. Two cloves of garlic. A single not-very-big tomato.

You can then, if you like, add cheese. (Or do it in reverse - sauce, then cheese, then toppings. But I like the cheese on top.) You can add any cheese you like, or none at all. It doesn't have to be mozzarella. It doesn't have to be any kind of Italian cheese. I've made very delicious pizza with Arran cheddar.

And again: you don't need much. (Unless you like pizza which is basically layers of cheese on layers of cheese, but even then: you are not talking about much cheese.)

Pizza is cheap. It's sold in this country for £10 a time primarily because it's billed as labour-intensive (which, to be fair, if each pizza is handmade when the customer orders it, it is) and partly because people are used to paying a certain price for pizza. But it's a cheap, cheap, cheap dish, which is delicious if properly made and awful if made with cheap dough and bad cheese and stale vegetables and dull sauce, but that's par for the course.

I like pizza. Mostly, these days, only when I make it myself: the cheap pizza is not nice, and the nice pizza is always shockingly overpriced.