Stansted airport, yesterday morning. Each traveller locked in his or own personal world. No interaction.
Essential equipment
Yes — it’s BananaGuard! Order yours now. Parents, you know it makes sense.
Free broadband
Seb and I are sitting in the departure lounge in Cork airport, making liberal use of the free wireless broadband service provided. Civilised country, my homeland,
Jerry Springer naked
Nancy Banks-Smith is one of the funniest writers alive. Her dismemberment of the Jerry Springer show in today’s Guardian is a classic.
In Radio Times, Jerry Springer gives the English language short shrift. “Your talk shows plod along – it could be radio. The rule on my TV show is you have to be able to watch it with the sound off. If you still kinda know what’s going on, that’s compelling.” Eager to please, I watched The Springer Show (ITV1) with the sound off.
AM I THE DAD? DNA RESULTS! What appears to be a snake-oil salesman enters. The audience rises, revealing tattoos on their buttocks. The snake-oil salesman shakes hands with the front row. Daniel, a simple soul in earrings, is sitting on a bare stage. Not spending much on production, are they? Enter Jessica. She points her tremendous breasts accusingly at Daniel, picks up her chair in a marked manner and moves it some distance from him. Two enormous women lumber in from opposite ends. Judging by their strong resemblance to Daniel and Jessica, these are their respective mothers. Absolutely no DNA test is needed. The mothers fling themselves at each other like worlds colliding. Bouncers tear them apart. The snake-oil salesman fans himself with an oleaginous hand.
Captions shed some light on all this heat. JESSICA SAYS THE BABY LOOKS LIKE DANIEL. More precisely, she screamed at her mother-in-law, “She is the spitting image of you. Poor cow!” As Jessica’s mother-in-law looks like a Sherman tank, the audience loved this.
Like his namesake, Daniel is surrounded by roaring. Springer said he felt the noise go through his suit. Sometimes intelligible insults (“Silly cow!” “Slappers Reunited!”) float free from the fracas. Silence always indicates the excision of some obscenity.The DNA results were opened on stage and Daniel, to universal recrimination, turned out to be the father of Jessica’s daughter. “One day your little girl may see a tape of this show. God forbid!” said the snake-oil salesman piously. By his standards it was all a bit tame. “If she were pregnant by another woman, that would be in my American show.”
Now let’s try watching it with the vision off.
iVideo
You can, apparently, play videos on your iPod, provided (a) you have already installed Linux on it and (b) have a PhD in comp sci. Having lots of free time would also help. I don’t qualify, alas.
Death by chocolate
An unsuspecting Cory Doctorow was lured by cruel, unscrupulous Ben Hammersley into Hemingway’s in Florence. Outcome described as follows:
Afterwards, I fell asleep for half an hour on the sofa in Hemingway’s, collapsed on one of my dining companions. My brain was overwhelmed with the tastes, and it had to shut my body off so that it could process the input. I have a feeling that from now on, whenever a little money finds its way into my pocket, the temptation to blow it on a plane ticket to Florence (cheap from London, as these things go) and have a cup of Hemingway’s Montezuma is going to be nigh-irresistible. I no longer feel the need to blow my cash on computers or gadgets — just hook an IV of this thing straight into my arm and leave me to die by chocolate.
Homage to Catalonia
The George Orwell Plaza in Barcelona has 24×7 video surveillance. Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.
Quackery
What is it about ducks? The other morning, Chris Patten, the former EU Commissioner for External Affairs (and now Chancellor of Oxford University), described the EU Constitution as a “dead duck” after the Dutch referendum result. This morning I heard another politician on the radio describing Jacques Chirac in the following terms: “He may be a lame duck president, but he’s a lame duck with a bite”. And who has ever seen a lame duck anyway?
Update: My daughter reminds me that she was once bitten by a duck. But that was because he coveted the bit of chocolate cake she was holding at the time.
Bless me, father, for I have Googled
Today’s Observer column on following what Vannevar Bush called “associative trails” — into the confessional.
Cybersecurity
Ed Felten has some interesting reflections on the threat of cyberattack on the US information infrastructure. He puts his finger on the nub of the problem:
the traditional governmental processes are ill-suited for addressing cyberthreats. The main reason is that national security processes result in plans for governmental action; but the cyberthreat problem can be solved only by private action. The cyber infrastructure is in private hands, and is designed to serve private ends. Government can’t easily change it.
So what can be done? One idea he discusses is that since unprotected computers in private hands make the entire infrastructure vulnerable, then perhaps individual computer users ought to be personally liable for damage caused by their carelessness/ignorance. Ed points out that there are lots of things wrong with this idea. But, oddly, he doesn’t discuss another obvious possibility — that software manufacturers like Microsoft should be legally liable for damage caused by the security holes in their products. I’ve never understood why the computer industry should be able to avoid liability in this way. Just imagine the fuss there would be if automobile manufacturers were able to avoid being held responsible for flaws in their products. It’s unthinkable. But we tolerate this crazy situation with computers. Why?