News Ticker Generator

[A] today called on [B] to [C] [D] [E], in order to protect [F] and promote [G].

[A] Roll 1d8:

1. Ministers
2. Public watchdogs
3. Special interest groups
4. Business leaders
5. Activists
6. Leading scientists
7. Protesters
8. Someone

[B] Roll 1d6:

1. community leaders
2. parents
3. schools
4. Muslims
5. sports personalities
6. cowboys

[C] Roll 1d6:

1. crack down on
2. tackle
3. condemn
4. warn against
5. raise awareness of
6. defenestrate

[D] Roll 1d8:

1. inappropriate
2. Internet
3. offensive
4. potentially inflamatory
5. extreme
6. extremist
7. hate
8. existential

[E] Roll 1d6:

1. material
2. content
3. contact
4. myths
5. preaching
6. strawberries

[F] Roll 1d8:

1. children
2. the vulnerable
3. children
4. consumers
5. children
6. disadvantaged groups
7. children
8. gnomes

[G] Roll 1d6:

1. community cohesion
2. human rights
3. Green issues
4. social mobility
5. public participation
6. junior ministers

Yes, the Grail Card

I wanted to look through SaGa Frontier (NA)'s map files to see whether there might be any dialogue left over from the cancelled segments, and since the dialogue isn't conveniently stored in a single block per file like FFVII's, but threaded directly into the field script, I decided this would be an opportune time to learn to write a text viewer. As it stands it's decidedly incomplete – hence the {??}s – since I've only deciphered a few of the script commands (with varying degrees of tentativeness), and therefore isolating the dialogue in the first place involves a rather rough regex job.

Square's usual redundancy in play: this doesn't actually come out as a single sequence in the game.

I Predict the Reactive Development of Meta-Estrangement

From a recent column on sociologically inspired manipulation as a policy instrument:

It is possible, indeed usual, to have entire policy debates in which the science of human behaviour doesn't figure at all. For instance, in the past two weeks we have had discussion of obesity and of knife crime. Social norms have hardly figured. If everybody thinks that everybody else is getting fat, then more people will put on weight. The campaigns designed to reduce obesity may be spreading it. Similarly the very idea that every young person is carrying a knife increases knife crime. The obvious route of making such behaviour seem odd and isolated appears not to have occurred to any major politician.

Somehow, that last sentence gave me a shudder of hypothetical pre-nostalgia: imagining myself a few decades hence, recounting how in my day we had authentic, grassroots isolation, I tell you, none of this artificial social rejection handed down and orchestrated by Whitehall, and when we looked down on the conformist masses we did it from a position of real, bespoke eccentricity, never mind the State-sponsored stuff that never gives you the full-blooded sense of estrangement like I remember—

I wonder to what extent it would be true.

Moral Micropanic

Reading a condemnation of British showering habits is vaguely like being flogged with a damp liquorice bootlace.

Firstly we get told off for 'not caring about contaminants' entering the drainage system—'contaminants' apparently being substances like soap and shower gel used in the cleansing process, not the dirt washed off by means of them. It's unclear whether concern is actually warranted, since 'the recent... report Sustainable Water highlighted the need for research into the effects of flushing contaminants down the drain into the sewage system' (my emphasis); nevertheless, 'concern' in itself, a bare psychological attitude, is presented as meritorious. The aretaic shower-user cares about the unknown effects of using soap.

On the other hand, the condemnation of people exceeding their allotted showering period – mysteriously given in absolute terms, rather than relative to the volume and tenacity of dirt to be removed – is almost worthy of Cato the Elder. A chemist fulminates:

We must not wait until the 59th minute before we tackle impending environmental disasters. Are we so short-sighted that we act only when the consequences are already upon us? ... One should be able to shower thoroughly in a couple of minutes; we hear stories of people staying in the shower for half an hour at a time, which is absurd and self-indulgent.

Given that householders get billed for the water, however, they might be forgiven for thinking it falls to the utility companies to ensure the supply (Summers of hosepipe bans notwithstanding). I don't in principle object to a micro-ethics of showering, but this sermon lurches from free-floating 'concern' to the size of the British population, to the entire compicated question of water availability internationally, and seems to employ rhetorical vigour to paper over its explanatory cracks. To the chapters of anti-diabolical advice imagined by Wilkie Collins – from 'Satan in the Hair Brush' to 'Satan among the Sofa Cushions' – we had better, in light of these apocalyptic pronouncements on our Gomorrah, append 'Satan In the Shower Cabinet'.

Presumably the Voters Took Heed...

...since if towers were suddenly surging out of the ground in Spain while predatory bats swooped and people began to resemble marble statues, we'd probably hear about it.

This dates from 2007; in my defence, we don't hear much political news about Valencian nationalism here. (I found this accidentally after reading about a completely different campaign ad, running into 404s and Googling by file name.) Which may be a pity, since by the standards of political campaign ads this makes remarkably decent viewing.

It probably aids my appreciation that I have no idea what was at issue. It might be fun to play 'Magic Roundabout' and just make a script up.

Barren Soil

Another case of suspicious blank regions: for each menu scene in Astronoka the TIM containing the graphics shows at least one unused slot.

Could there have been a debug mode...?

A dummy file with no contents. Rotters.

Bad Enough For a Cult

I've known about the glory that is the 2008 DRUPA song for a while, having seen it flagged up in a comment when Design Observer posted on The Most Unwanted Song (that song likewise being a thing of immense majesty which convinced me that rap should be performed only by those suited to it, i.e. classically trained sopranos). However, it was only today, with DRUPA 2008 itself a month over, that I learnt of the whole tradition which began with the poll-winningly awful DRUPA 1986 song and was brought into full-time service in 2000, giving us a full four doses of DRUPA commercial jingle to date, a bit like Tom Lehrer's approach to 'Clementine' in its skipping between genres, but without a shred of such knowing self-awareness. Somehow, perversely, these are immensely cheering.

The regular download page lacks the 2008 song, while the Wikipedia article lacks a link to the 2000 song, so here for the benefit of the Internet at large is the complete list:

• 1986
• 2000
• 2004
• 2008

[Update: it turns out the 2008 song's lyrics are available, and on a related note, cultists might enjoy yet another example of the corporate awfulness genre.]

Alas! Reform will come too late / To see how Prescott might debate

I have a new proposal for parliamentary reform. It involves importing a poetic form from the Philippines.

I can't find any translated examples of balagtasan, and I can't read Tagalog, but the central idea of debating in verse sounds like one with universal potential. Orwell said that 'political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind'—and how better than in poetry to do so with a shred of lingering dignity? Better yet, since it's so trivially easy to be vague in verse the form would enhance the distinction of those little clearings of clarity in which a genuine thought slips through, while the need to avoid doggerel would aid in the elevation of sentiments in public discourse.

The protagonists in the balagtasan are still required to be skillful in memorizing long verses with rhyme and metre and reciting with flair... in public..., [and] the poets are expected to argue logically and exhaust every imaginable source of reason to defend their side... [and] to entertain their audience, too...
Art and Politics in the Balagtasan

It sounds likely to produce a debate better prepared than we currently see, and at least as clear and eloquent.

Not the Sharpest

Reading the latest political one-upmanship on 'knife crime' I'm struck by the bizarrely fetishistic bent:

"In [the Tories'] view there should be a presumption of imprisonment if you are found with a knife over three inches and you can't show lawful authority or reasonable excuse."

"We will continue to make absolutely clear that carrying a knife is unacceptable in our society," [Gordon Brown] added.

Mr Isaac... warned knife culture could take as long as 15 years to reverse.

It's the same approach to law and order that mysteriously singles out imitation Japanese swords for a special ban: there's a weird focus on the object, rather than (rather more relevantly) on the person or the use, as though the thing itself exerted some independent, occult power on society.

My best guess is that this should be interpreted as an abandonment of moral leadership, of attempting to act on the person and therefore having to acknowledge the existence of a 'person' with a mind to be reasoned with, in favour of commodity management. Not that it's actually that novel: compare Prohibition, or even sumptuary laws.

Illegible Auto-Collage

I just got a hit from something called 'del.icio.us poetry', apparently some sort of exploration of the æsthetic potential of loading recently added del.icio.us links on top of each other:

According to Salvatore Iaconesi, 'your browser will probabily crash after a bit, trying to open up all of the links in del.icio.us' most recent bookmarks page, in one screen. If you search on the Web about delicious poetry you will find it featured on several art festivals and exhibitions, as well as on several webmasters' forums, trying to figure out if it's malware or a crazy website.'

It has a striking visual effect, certainly: 'poetry' of pandemonium as it gradually recedes from readability, so that one recognises the presence of meaningful, ordered utterances and at the same time the impossibility of extracting them.

Elven Latin

Reading a rendering into Latin of a certain piece by Tolkien: 'Tres anuli alborum regibus...' Alborum ('of [the] whites')? How did the translator come to decide 'elven kings' should be 'kings of the white ones'?

A little searching sent me into the depths of reconstructed proto-Indo-European, to a root albho- ('white') which begat both elf (English via Germanic origins) and Latin albus; an article at Lingwë goes further, stating that the Latin word is the direct ancestor of the Germanic, and that elf seems formerly to have denoted a (shimmering) white figure. (Incidentally, the same article notes that the -alf in Gandalf is in fact also elf—that makes 'Gandalf the White' a kind of tautology.)

While I can understand Lalaith's needing to cast around for a suitable word – Wiktionary's pumilio ('dwarf'!) is hardly suitable, and perhaps there was a futher aim of avoiding fairytale connotations – I can't find it satisfactory (though I'm impressed by the resourcefulness), because its effect was to confuse me and pull me up short. But what are the alternatives? Elfus has a certain 'brute force' quality about it (while elf, elvis is too horrible to contemplate), and as a translation from English the result shouldn't have to rely on Tolkien's languages (Quendus? Elda, Eldae?).

Apparently there are historical cases of ælf-based words in Old English being used 'to gloss Latin words for nymphs. Around the eighth century, it appears that Old English had no close equivalent to words for the supernatural, feminine and generally unthreatening nymphs: words for supernatural females denoted martial, monstrous or otherwise dangerous beings, while ælf seems not to have denoted females—at least not with sufficient salience to be used as a gloss for words for nymphs. Glossators instead found ways of altering ælf’s gender in order to create a vernacular word for nymphs.' However, adopting nymphic terminology to refer to elves of any sort would clearly be misleading.

At the moment my best idea is to accept a borrowed elv- root but insert the sort of adjectival suffix found in e.g. Romanus, so as to imply 'elven [one(s)]'. The downside is that this still involves employing a non-Latinate root.

First Folio of Shakespeare, First Find of Seven

I'd never heard about the theft before, having become a student at Durham some years later, but the good news today is that a 17th Century First Folio of Shakespeare which was stolen from the University Library in 1998 has been recovered.

Durham Police (UK) arrested a man in Washington, Tyne and Wear, two weeks after the First Folio... turned up at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, where it remains in safe care... It was one of seven books stolen in December 1998 from the University's Library on Palace Green... The theft appears to have been undertaken by professionals with long-term international connections in the art world.

Bill Bryson, Chancellor of Durham University and author of an acclaimed book on Shakespeare, said: "This is not only wonderful news for Durham University but for all Shakespeare’s scholars and fans around the world, of which I am most definitely one.

"Like Shakespeare himself, this book is a national treasure giving a rare and beautiful snapshot of Britain's incredible literary heritage. I'll certainly be joining the crowds who will be eagerly welcoming it home."

I hope I'll be around to attend the book-welcoming too; there doesn't seem to be a date arranged for it yet. It feels strange to think that I've actually handled some other rare books in Palace Green Library without having any idea it was the scene of such a crime.

Now I Wait and See How Many Hits I Get

According to Private Eye #1214, this is how the Telegraph site keeps its hit count high:

First, news hacks are now sent a memo three or four times a day... listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those key words [as possible] into the first par[agraph] of their story. Hence, if the top stories being Googled are [pop singer] and breast cancer—hey presto, the hack is duly expected to file a piece about young women 'such as [pop singer]' being at risk from breast cancer.

While there may be adverse effects, this does have potential as a form of mildly constrained writing. At the time of writing, 'today's hot trends (USA)' include 'free slurpee day', 'who issues one rupee coins and notes in India', 'strip ping pong', 'cyanocobalamin' and 'billabong pro'.

Billabong pros today condemned the decline of the billabong tradition among young people more interested in pursuits like Strip Ping Pong, collecting One Rupee coins from India and organising Free Slurpee Day. "Few of the rising generation have half the cyanocobalamin they'd need to paddle up a billabong properly," said one, who wished to remain anonymous.

Talking To Myself and Somehow Failing

Introduced to the SPF controversy when I heard about Gmail silently dropping incoming e-mails, I tested myname@dunelm.org.uk forwarding to myname@googlemail.com and found the e-mails from my Gmail account to itself did indeed get silently dropped – testing with two non-Gmail accounts showed Dunelm forwarding to be working generally – and I'm now wondering whether it is SPF or whether it's some other problem.

Things started working normally after I added myname@dunelm.org.uk as a 'send mail as' option in Gmail (whether or not I actually send as myname@dunelm.org.uk); setting this up involved having a verification e-mail sent to myname@dunelm.org.uk from mail-noreply@googlemail.com, and it did get through to my Gmail inbox, suggesting it may not be the googlemail.com sender domain that's problematic. So, having been able to produce the problem only when Gmail doesn't 'know' the forwarding address is mine and when sending from my own account to itself, I'm scratching my head and off to raise this in the Help Group. I wonder how much use that will be.

The Answer Isn’t ‘Wallace’

Guess the author of this autobiographical morsel: clearly a staid and scholarly mind, gastronomic but meticulous in cataloguing...

I bought numerous translation[s], which I was surprised to find at Lodi, which hitherto had been only famous in my mind for its cheese, usually called Parmesan. This cheese is made at Lodi and not at Parma, and I did not fail to make an entry to that effect under the article 'Parmesan' in my Dictionary of Cheeses, a work which I was obliged to abandon as beyond my powers, as Rousseau was obliged to abandon his Dictionary of Botany.

It may have been beyond his powers (or he got distracted by other interests), but such a project must have otherwise suited Casanova: elsewhere we hear that 'Casanova famously swore by blue cheese and red wine as a powerful aphrodisiac' (StiltonCheese.com) and by him women were 'most appreciated when they smelt of cheese' (Telegraph). Fond of eating generally and cheese especially; also keen on showing off incidental knowledge—goodness, I resemble Casanova more than I'd ever have imagined.

Entretiens sur la pluralité des hommes

Have you seen the Hybrid Medical Animation Demo Reel that's doing the rounds? After watching CG human anatomy appearing in the manner of a sort of fantasy landscape, I was reminded of a lovely insight by J. B. S. Haldane:

Every educated person should know what his or her inside looks like. Models and dead rabbits do not produce the necessary effect on the mind. It was not until I had attended a few post-mortems that I realized... that even the ugliest human exteriors may contain the most beautiful viscera, and was able to console myself for the facial drabness of my neighbours in omnibuses by dissecting them in my imagination. I do not suppose that I shall live to see this point of view generally adopted...

No doubt GC models likewise fail to produce the effect on the mind which Haldane thought important, but perhaps a rather fantastic flavour, the feeling it would not be wholly surprising if some aquatic or alien creature floated into view, might in its way add to rather than detract from Haldane's approach to interpersonal experience. The lumpen obstacle in the way of my supermarket trolley becomes not merely a shell containing fountains of anatomical majesty, but a whole microcosmos open to the imaginative populator in the genre (now that I think of it, well established in fiction) of anatomical demography: perhaps his disinclination to budge, I shall tell myself, is occasioned by a distracting outbreak of civil war between the embittered, acid-tongued denizens of the gall bladder and the mute, melancholic colossoi of the spleen.

Identity PaRade

I've seen it suggested, not unreasonably, that the characters Red and Blue in SaGa Frontier are meant to 'be' Red and Blue from the Square-published Treasure Hunter G. I've also seen doubt cast on the suggestion – and after all, even within SaGa Frontier itself Square managed to have one major character named Red and another called Rouge – so I thought I'd present the visual evidence:

Treasure Hunter G: Blue.

Treasure Hunter G: Red.

SaGa Frontier: Blue (above) and Red (below). I can see why the jury's still out. My suspicion is that their chromatic names are at least partly a reference to Gray from Romancing SaGa—just to complicate matters further.

Definitely Not From Aidensfield

Today I'm finding myself in sympathy with Saikusa in being frustratedly curious about Green Glass: given my taste for such opulent sensory banquets and creations of delicate femininity as these (and while there is that prevalent conviction that the feminine aura is so great it should be applied to both sexes, at least here we may see some intriguing deviancy thrown into the mixture), I'm once again marvelling at this world so full of lovely things that legions must remain unknown to me yet.

Some quick Web searching suggests it's at least possible to obtain these works through some Western sources, but that distribution maybe isn't terribly widespread. (That's why I've linked to some scan sites, which I don't normally do.) I wonder whether anyone can actually bear to use such things as letter paper; I'd be terrified of applying anything but the finest calligraphy to them, and even then...

This Title Is Supposed to Say This

Here's another excerpt from The Book of Disquiet:

In this large downtown square, the soberly multicoloured flow of people passes by, changes course, forms pools, divides into streams, converges into brooks. While my eyes distractedly watch, I inwardly fashion this aquatic image which is more suitable than any other (in part because I thought it would rain) for this random movements.

As I wrote this last sentence, which for me says exactly what it means, I thought it might be useful to put at the end of my book, when I finally publish it, a few 'Non-Errata' after the 'Errata', and to note: the phrase 'this random movements' on page so-and-so, is correct as is, with the noun in the plural and the demonstrative in the singular.

Errata haven't to my knowledge been much played with, and that's probably because Alasdair Gray's 'This erratum slip has been inserted by mistake' is so imposingly, formidably classic an example of the genre—but non-errata open up new potential, and not just for framing grammatical eccentricities. Suppose I wrote some apparently innocuous story and appended a note referencing an apparently insignificant sentence, and insisting that it is just as correct as it appears actually to be. The reader who doesn't assume it's a self-refrential joke (in which the non-erratum is itself in error) will begin to wonder, why should that sentence be imagined to be incorrect...? Or, why does the book insist (like a book with something to hide?) that things really did happen the way it claims? (Combine this with an unreliable narrator for extra complexity.) A search begins for inconsistencies with other passages, for any such clues that might lead to a reappraisal of the whole story and the emergence of a concealed subtext. Thus:

On page so-and-so, the assertion that the butler found the body in the summerhouse is correct.

...Yet, does that mean 'correct' in that the butler really claimed it (though the detective later proved that the butler did it, and in the drawing room), or that the author really claimed it (misleadingly...?), or that as a matter of in-world truth the butler really did find the body—and the detective got it wrong...?

It strikes me that one could make up lists of subversive errata and non-errata for already existing texts, prodding them into new and stranger shapes...

Value

Violins at the ready:

The debate was filled only with those who called for MPs to have the courage to defy public opinion and increase their pay. Those such as Tory MP David Maclean who said that "We have a responsibility for making mega mega decisions. And for that we're getting the level of pay of a 2nd tier officer in a district council."

It could be worse, old chap. You could (like MPs of the olden days) be getting the rate of pay of a peer reviewer for an academic journal.

Contrast: Why This Weblog Will Remain Obscure

• Title of yesterday's post here: Strange Black Rectangles

• Title of a news item from yesterday at Werewolf News: Ellen Page No Longer Involved in Teen Lesbian Werewolf Film