Bloody builders due again

So more random social notes.

  • Newspapers scouring the country for a woman who’ll admit to sleeping with Simon Hughes. Probably gone into hiding alongside Anne Atkins’ gay friends.
  • To the Telegraph’s Scientists meet the media bash last night, dressed for the occasion in a suit and tie. Meet on the stairs a contributor to this comment section who is with a pretty young woman who looks thoughtful and amused, rather than enraptured, to be in the company of two such distinguished old farts. Our conversation goes something like this:
    Commentator: “Ah – Andrew. Loved the Caitlin piece.”
    Pretty Young Woman: “What was that about?”
    C: “Blow jobs!”
    Discussion becomes general and rather confused.
    PYW: “And how did you know about it?”
    C: “I read it on his blog.”
    I become aware that I have just been, in effect, introduced to a complete stranger, someone with whom, under other circumstances, I might have enjoyed some conversation, as a man who keeps a blog about blow jobs. No wonder George Carey won’t sign the comments he makes here.
  • Not one person I talked to at the party had a good word for Richard Dawkins’ TV series. The most vigorous denunciations all came from atheist scientists. I was a little surprised, since one of them had been very close to him.
  • Sue Blackmore’s hair has gone quite white — and green, and red, with only a few yellow streaks left.
  • Richard Harries signs his emails “+ Richard”.

At this, the doorbell rings, preserving you all from further excitement.

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Sillies, while waiting for a builder

  • Interesting Google survey of a billion pages showing that no one, to a first approximation, uses CSS correctly. hundreds of millions of font attributes around, and more <br> tags than <p> tags out there. I admit that I gave up trying to do all the positioning on this page in css after spending three hours failing to get the two books lined up as the current table displays them in all browsers. But it’s only a very small table.
  • Full page Telegraph obit of “Peter Simple” fails entirely to mention the surely quite interesting fact that his second wife had two children by his friend — and indeed the man who hired him to write the column, Colin Welch, later deputy editor of the paper.Next to to it a generous and acute appreciation by Craig Brown, who is married to one of Colin’s daughters by his own wife. The two families ran in parallel for a decade or more.
  • The Vatican asserting its IP rights over encyclicals is a story that needs more thought. It makes a kind of bookend to the great firewall of China. What they should have done, of course, is to release them under Creative Commons licenses.
Posted in Blather | 3 Comments

Mother love

Last year a pretty Australian girl was caught with four kilos of cannabis in her luggage entering Bali and sentenced to 20 years. Cue general Australian outrage, protestations of innocence, and so forth. So this afternoon I was looking for a story about molluscs duelling with their penises in the Sydney Morning Herald and I came across an interview with the girl’s mother:

Asked about three of her six children serving time in prison, Ms Rose said: “What are you supposed to do? At least I know where my bloody kids are, even if they are in jail.
“There’s people who don’t even know where their kids are.
“I kind of liked Clinton being in jail because I knew where he was … before I’d worry about him, always expecting the phone call – he’d pinched a car and rolled off a cliff.
“But when he’d ring from jail, I’d be thinking, ‘all right, hope you get a couple of years there’.”

Refreshingly plain speaking, eh, what?

Posted in Travel notes | 1 Comment

But how to sign oneself?

Well, here you are, retired person still full of energy, and you discover this blog racket, full of young people talking informally. So, how do you sign yourself when you leave a comment? Scroll to the bottom to find out.

Any Episcopal personages who want to comment here, perhaps on Christian sex toys, should feel completely free to do so.

Posted in God | 2 Comments

Silly gadget fun

The latest gadget is ["a little Nokia phone,":http://www.expansys.com/product.asp?code=119374] which I bought because I was exasperated with the Motorola clamshell losing the power of speech: often the only way to hear the person on the other end was to turn on the speakerphone. With gadgets, I have accelerated relationships. I run from hope and happiness, through disillusion and exasperation to the long trudge of resignation in about a week.

Disillusion: the Motorola did two clever ringing things that the Nokia won’t: it had a setting to vibrate before ringing, and it allowed me to associate individual ring tones with particular people. It also worked much more closely with the palm pilot. The Nokia won’t dial numbers or send texts from the Palm.

None of this really matters. The new phone pretty much entirely replaces the Palm for everything except ebooks. The calendar works. The predictive text is good enough to allow me to send legible messages fairly quickly. The phone books holds 1000 contacts, which is enough. I have managed to ["get the email working":http://www.expansys.com.sg/forumthread.asp?code=119374&thread=56] so that I can read and send emails from the phone directly. There is even "a tiny version of opera":http://www.opera-mini.com which is absurd but wonderful too. Maybe the rest of the world has been there forever, but I am really impressed.

Posted in nördig | 3 Comments

Hot, throbbing — and married

I was once asked by a distinguished Cambridge theologian whether it was permissible for the Archbishop of Canterbury to practise oral sex. In the context, this was meant to show that certain lines of enquiry should stop at the bedroom door — also that Humanae Vitae didn’t understand sex.

So I suppose that the existence of a site for Christian sex toys, to be used only within the confines of a monogamous heterosexual relationship, shouldn’t sprain my mind. But it does. Hurry there, and you will see what is probably the only site in the world selling vibrators, rings to be worn in places Sauron would never think of, and fishnet bodystockings with the naughty bits tippexed out on the model, as well as Nicky Gumbel’s book on why you should postpone sex until you are married.

But in all this, the thing that really makes my mind reel is the seasonal selection. At the moment, the only martyr they seem to be commemorating is St Valentine, but the liturgical calendar is surely rich with suggestions for interesting bondage games. I must check back at Easter to see if the offer products for resurrection of the flesh.

Posted in God | 1 Comment

Edukashun bill

Andrew Adonis may not be right about how to mend the state system, but at least he sees it’s broken. There was a brief fuss in the papers at the end of last week because one of the “Academies” had been put on notice by Ofsted.

I wasn’t surprised by this — when I went to the creationist Academy in Middlesbrough, the very impressive headmaster told me that he didn’t believe that 200 academies could solve the problems of poorly performing schools, essentially because he doubted there were 200 headmasters and — what — 20,000 teachers of sufficient calibre. That sounds arrogant, but it has the ring of truth.

When you look at the figures, though, the story becomes more complicated. The measure of “five good GCSEs” is essentially asking whether children can read or write, no more than that. The Bexley Academy has been judged to fail because only 30% of the children leave with these useful skills. That’s failure by anyone’s measure. But what are we to make of the comprehensive it replaced, where the pass rate was four per cent?

How could any system of more formal selection betray the poor or stupid more than that?

Posted in British politics | 1 Comment

A fairy tale of Wyoming

Brokeback Mountain is beautifully acted, powerfully told, and lovely to look at. I’m glad I saw it. All the same, I don’t believe it, in the specific and damaging way in which it is possible not to believe in a work of fiction.

Prolonged spoiler follows, but is necessary for the argument.

Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 4 Comments

an epistemological note

If I am told something theological about x in the world, I have learnt some theology, but nothing about x.

Posted in God | 1 Comment

Blow jobs: the conclusion

UPDATE: we can all argue this with even greater authority now that the article has appeared online

David Weman said in comments that he was sure the article was silly because Matt Yglesias had said so. Here is actual conclusion that Yglesias thought “Wrong and also almost silly”. I wouldn’t describe it as any form of silly. Whether it’s wrong or not rather depends on how American teenagers are actually behaving these days, which Flanagan makes clear that no one knows and Flanagan cites one reputable study suggesting that half of all 17-year-olds and a quarter of all 15-year-olds have been doing the bonobo.

The modern girl’s casual willingness to perform oral sex may—as some cool-headed observers of the phenomenon like to propose—be her way of maintaining a post-feminist power in her sexual dealings, by being fully in control of the sexual act and of the pleasure a boy receives from it. Or it may be her desperate attempt to do something that the culture refuses to encourage: to keep her own sexuality—the emotions and the desires, as well as the anatomical real estate itself—private, secret, unviolated. It may not be her technical virginity that she is trying to preserve; it may be her own sexual awakening—which is all she really has left to protect anymore.

We’ve made a world for our girls in which the pornography industry has become increasingly mainstream, in which Planned Parenthood’s response to the oral-sex craze has been to set up a help line, in which the forces of feminism have worked relentlessly to erode the patriarchy—which, despite its manifold evils, held that providing for the sexual safety of young girls was among its primary reasons for existence. And here are America’s girls: experienced beyond their years, lacking any clear message from the adult community about the importance of protecting their modesty, adrift in one of the most explicitly sexualized cultures in the history of the world. Here are America’s girls: on their knees.

But I can’t see how anyone could dismisss that last paragraph so fliply — any parent, at least.

Posted in Journalism | 14 Comments