Not what it used to be

Posted on July 16, 2003 by acb

A Miracle, is what Pat Robertson told his audience to pray for, after the Supreme Court legalised liberal sex: “One justice is 83-years-old, another has cancer and another has a heart condition. Would it not be possible for God to put it in the minds of these three judges that the time has come to retire?” It really worries me. If Pat Robertson thinks that getting an 83-year-old judge to retire demands a miracle, he can’t think God’s capable of very much.

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Just idealism from now on

Posted on July 16, 2003 by acb

This morning the nerdy feeds were full of the good news that AOL has set up a Mozilla Foundation to “safeguard the independence of Mozilla”. At lunchtime I glanced at the Register, and discovered that AOL just shut Netscape, and sacked almost everyone who worked there. That means, of course, almost everyone who did active development work on Mozilla. The one thing that we know about the Mozilla project is that only about ten people can understand it. As an experiment in open source democracy it failed miserably. OK, Firebird is a nice browser now. But who is going to pay for its further development? Mitch Kapor put up $300,000; AOL cut them loose with $2m; others will do something. But that’s not going to pay for real developers out of interest. From now on they’re burning their capital. My back of the envelope guess is that Sun is spending $5m a year (100 full-time developers is the figure we know) on OpenOffice. If they pulled out, who will keep it going? The only answer that I can see is some kind of EU body. But the essential point is that it won’t be kept going by nerds. It won’t be kept going by idealists. Big software projects like this need big pockets behind them. In this instance, people are going for OpenOffice, and Linux, because they know that Microsoft wants to keep up its 80% profit margins on Windows and Office. But if MS were prepared to settle for less grotesque profits, it could almost certainly offer a much better product for perfectly reasonable money.

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Napster won’t do this

Posted on July 16, 2003 by acb

There are a couple of insurance horror stories doing the rounds at the moment from America. One concerns a programmer friend of Brad Choate’s, whose child has an expensive cancer which will go untreated if his father cannot find a job with medical insurance — Choate is the man responsible for all the pretty smart quotes on this and a million other MT blogs.

The other, I discovered ten days back, is a Texan singer/songwriter named Alejandro Escovedo, who has Hep C, cirrhosis, and no medical insurance. I ordered one of his CDs from Amazon, because I’m a sucker for the stuff that’s now known as Americana. It just came htis morning. I urge you all to save this man’s liver and buy some for your own collections. I’m just listening to a completely wonderful version of “Sway”, for younger readers, a song by the Rolling Stones, a popular singing group, which manages to invest it with all the poisonous melancholy that the lyrics deserve by adding a cello and a violin. I’m not sure that “completely wonderful” and “poisonous melancholy” fit well in the same sentence. But this is impressive stuff. And maybe with a new liver he’ll write some happy songs.

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would you find this advice helpful?

Posted on July 14, 2003 by acb

Cary Tennis, Salon’s agony uncle, was responding to a reader (with a four-month-old baby) who wondered whether he should stray with an attractive and flirtatious workmate: “Keep away from her like she’s a vat of dangerous chemicals”. wrote Tennis, which seems helpful enough. I’m not sure about what he goes on to say, though:

“You have to regulate the goings-on of your own mind as well.
Do not under any circumstances imagine her bending forward over your desk, her palms planted on your blotter, her panties around her knees, her skirt up over her waist, her red lips parted and her shining blue eyes looking back at you as you mount her with all the fury of an assistant regional manager of sales for furniture and home appliances (Western region).”

Posted in Journalism | 2 Comments

What we were told #2

Posted on July 12, 2003 by acb

On this day, a year ago, the Daily Telegraph had a leader discussing the popular uprising that President Bush had determined must overthrow Saddam. The paper explains the role of the Iraqi people in the war:

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nunc in quadriviis et angiportes

Posted on July 12, 2003 by acb

An extraordinary piece, mixing gossip and despair, by an Oxford contemporary of Christopher Hitchens, which I found through Electrolite.

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Evil spirits up your arsehole

Posted on July 12, 2003 by acb
Christian Life Books of Shreveport, Louisiana, has come through with Graham Dow’s little pamphlet on deliverance, which is the polite term for exorcism. Here is a partial list of the practices that the Bishop of Carlisle believes are caused by, or symptomatic of, evil spirits. They are all verbatim quotes taken from pages 34-37 of “Deliverance explained” published in 1991 by Sovereign World of Chichester.
  • Involvement in religious cults or sects which deny that Jesus is the one true God and died for our sins
  • Use of some alternative medicines, for example, homoeopathy or acupuncture. It is where those treatments are associated with a life force that the danger comes. There is openness to spiritual powers other than the Holy Spirit of God
  • Any occult practice by the person or their ancestors and relatives. [my italics]
  • Irrational dislike of God’s ministers or feeling persecuted by them
  • Repeated choice of black for dress or car; markedly unrestful schemes for dress or house decor.
  • Addiction, eg, drugs, alcohol, smoking, gambling, eating (or not eating. Anorexia, I believe, usually involves a destructive spirit.)
  • Immovable bondage to temptation and sin such that real attempts at repentance appear to make not impression on the problems, for example, in the areas of sexual lust, deviant sexual practice, criticism, unbelief, unforgiveness, bitterness, anger and deceit.
  • Spirits are indicated by a person’s attraction to occult practices and powers, eg, witchcraft, spiritualism, occult books, horror films, horoscopes, masonic practice.
You may wonder what a deviant sexual practice is: the bishop gives us a helpful footnote:
“There is a view that both oral and anal sexual practice is liable to allow entry to spirits”
Note that the bishop has personal experience of a rather less dramatic wrestling with a demon — God forbid that he should ever have had a blow job — “I have myself experienced a spiritual sickness which appeared to have no life-span and did not follow the usual pattern for an infection (a mild stomach disorder).”

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Posted in God, Journalism | 4 Comments

credo quia impossibile

Posted on July 9, 2003 by acb

I have been having really strange intermittent problems with the net these last few days. At first I thought it was a problem with my blog, then with my server. I just could not post anything longer than about 256 chars. If I tried, I got a “connection closed by remote” message. But it wasn’t just happening here. I couldn’t buy a book from Amazon. From the downstairs computer, Rosie complained that she couldn’t post on Dogz boards. So, in despair, I rang NTL. Nice, competent Welsh person there took down my details and told me I didn’t exist.

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Posted in Software | 2 Comments

domestic violence at full length

Posted on July 9, 2003 by acb

Phone rings at half past eight this morning. A well-spoken, rather angry woman says “May I speak to Caroline?”
“No. I’m afraid she’s out getting flowers. Can I take a message?”
“No. I’ll call later.”
“OK. Who shall I say is calling?”
“None of your business!” — and she hangs up.

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the horror

Posted on July 7, 2003 by acb

Last night I watched the Philip Larkin film, something on TV which could for once properly be described as horrifying. So much of the excellence of the poetry survived: it was wonderfully read, in such a natural tone that the rhymes came unexpectedly and gained redoubled force. There were some things only TV could show: the slow inflation of Larkin’s face, from the curious, big-eyed, delicate youth, absurdly reminiscent of an Arthur Rackham fairy, to the moon-faced drunk with polyfilla jowls. Curiously, in memory, their real sequence is reversed, so that I see the young man in colour and the older one in grainy black and white.

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