We hear that Cadbury's, the makers of fine chocolate, are in merger talks with Kraft, the makers of .. er, stuff. Now, we know that there are many good reasons to boycott their rivals Nestlé, but are there valid reasons not to support Kraft? They support the gay games, which strikes us as A Good Thing and certainly nothing to be scared of. There were mutterings earlier in the decade to boycott them because they were owned by Big Tobacco, but Philip Morris cut the food branch free in 2007, so they don't benefit from it. We've got calls for a boycott over sugar taxes, but that's an argument between governments. There is unease about Kraft's involvement with genetically-modified crops, and a historical argument that they don't treat dairy farmers particularly well.

In fact, we cannot find a formal boycott against Kraft at the moment. Not that we'll be cheering them on: we believe that localism is important, and worth fighting for.

Comments? | Permanent link

With Freakytrigger's Popular reaching the period at which we became interested in pop music, we're taking the opportunity to look back at those songs, and the ones that almost made it. Links to number one singles, and greater discussion of the number 2 and 3 singles and big ones from the top 5. Songtitles of number one singles are linked to their discussion at Popular, videos are editorial choices, links to Dailymotion, and are accurate at the time of posting.

(More: Nine number ones, of varying quality.)

Comments? | Permanent link

Or, How is straight female interest in slash fiction like straight male interest in "shemale" models? And why in the world does this matter?

In the beginning, there were the fanfic writers. Then there were the wannabe cognitive neuroscientists. Put the two together and - obviously - you're going to get an opening for research. And what better way of doing research than a questionnaire?

Well, actually, there are plenty of better ways of doing research, like making up evidence as you go along. In this case, it's a really rubbish questionnaire. After the usual demographic data, and asking after SAT scores (whatever they are), they ask some increasingly bizarre questions about fanfiction habits, both reading and writing. Then it got entirely Salfordish, asking what sort of sexy stories the respondent read and whether they ever had rape fantasies. Because, of course, when you're reading about Rufus and Gordon making sweet gopher luuuurve, that's got to be at the front of your mind.

There now follows a short graphic while we empty our mind of that.

Ahem. Let's return to the questionnaire, which isn't so much methodologically dubious as planned by someone who thinks ethics is to the south of Suffolk. Their survey was open to all and sundry - no screening for youngsters, questions that just invited false responses, falsely claiming to have university approval. And the authors didn't disclose that they had a hulking big book deal and may well have been mining for juicy quotes, rather than conduct proper research.

It's been posited that the researchers were only interested in heterosexual females that wrote and read slash, specifically hard-core kinky slash, and expected to find them more guilty about having sex. If the evidence doesn't fit, well, they might have a few quotes.

Amongst the people seeing, commenting on, and critiqueing the mess were social researchers, lecturers, feminist academics, and other neuroscientists. And they exposed the basic pretext: It's unexpected that a straight female would want to read fanfic about two guys having sex, just like it's unexpected that a straight male would want to want to watch sex involving someone with both a penis and female breasts.. All of this rather assumes a certain mindset that can be summarised as rampant heterosexuality. You know, like Jason Donovan. And it assumes that unexpectedness is a useful surrogate measure for correlation, causality, or anything more than stuff happening. When this blog kicks a ball and it moves, that's causality. When this blog kicks a ball and Wall Street falls by 10%, that's unexpected. Should we be stopped from kicking balls on that basis? Because that's what our researchers seem to be arguing.

The net result: failure on a scale so epic that it transcends rational argument, bypasses sensible discussion, leaves apology behind, makes argument through quotation superfluous, and penetrates so deeply into ept that the only possible response left in the arsenal is... cat macros. More: Alison MacLeod, Rough Theory, and Metafilter. (Readers are cautioned that the Metafilter article contains links to explicit stories about the videogame Pong. Really. We've already posted the barf icon once...)

Those of you who are experienced game show fans may wish to note that one of the researchers involved is Ogi Ogas, winner of a metric half-tonne on Who Wants to Appear Opposite Meredith Viera? and the Michael Penrice to his local tournament of Grand Slam.

Hat-tip: Ljgeoff for the title

Comments? | Permanent link

Why are we no longer friends with Mighty Big TV? 1) It's stopped calling itself Mighty Big TV. B) NBC doesn't know how to run a bath, never mind a community o'snark. γ) Sarah Bunting and other friends of so-called are no longer involved. ∂) The writing is even more confusing than what happens when Round Britain Quiz and Only Connect got drunk.

So, being just about the only people in the universe who can see an RBQ question and go hicka-bicka-boo it's unpacked, here's our take on the passage in question. It's relating to the second season of True Blood, and if you're still watching that in the UK, or you're planning on watching it when it comes to Channel 4 later in the year (and we can't honestly recommend that), look away now.

(More: Oh, this bit contains spoilers.)

What kinds of teas are okay with milk and sugar?

Tea that works with milk and sugar, bearing in mind that we're not tremendous fans of sugar in our tea. Roughly, the darker and stronger the tea, the better it will taste with milk. "Traditional" breakfast teas, and blends like Assam and Ceylon are generally taken with milk. Lighter teas - Earl Grey, most Afternoon blends - tend to be softer, and Earl Grey is generally thought to be better without milk. Green teas will never take milk. Flavoured teas can be brewed strong or weak, and milk is to taste; teas with citrus don't take milk, because milk and citric acid tends to make a mess.

Sugar is entirely to taste: we only add sugar to some bitter fruit teas.

More: Tea, Ways of Making a Good Cup of Tea, A Nice Hot Cup of Tea, and Tea in Britain: a Social History at the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Next question?

if I purchase a book at a store, then resell it to a used book store, and that's perfectly legal, why can't I do the same with ebooks?

Er... pass. Can't you ask something more simple, like das Runder Schleiswig-Holstein Frage?

Comments? | Permanent link

Ever so quietly sniggering at an automatically-translated billing for tonight's Schlagen den Raab. The musical interludes are, we're unreliably informed, Stefanie Heinz, January Delay and Tokyo Hotel. That'll be...

• Stefanie Heinzmann, winner of the casting show Stefan sucht den Superstar, der singen soll, was er möchte, und gerne auch bei RTL auftreten darf (Stefan seeks a superstar who can sing freely and happily appear on RTL television), a mini-show within Raab's regular show TV Total. British readers may be more accustomed to the UK version of the format, Britain's Got the Pop Factor and Possibly a Brand New Soapstar Superstar Strictly on Ice. Heinzmann's best song was her debut, the catchy soul number My man is a mean man; she's now promoting her second album.
• Jan Delay, a hip-hop and funk performer, with the hit single Oh Jonny and a video clip that (we're told) re-creates something from Die Blau Buüder. Delay is currently promoting his fourth album.
• Tokio Hotel, about whom we wrote two-and-a-half years ago, since when they've released a second album, one in English, won the Headliner award at MTV's EMA event... and yet mean two-thirds of naff-all to the UK, where such hits as Schrei and &Uml;bers ende der Welt and Durch den Monsun are completely unknown. Teenage girls go Sqeeeeeeeeeeee!, parents go Why has the singer got a porcupine on his head?, critics go They're the new Evanescence. Not that that's a bad thing. and the xenophobic Brits go We'd rather be listening to Take That, because we still think it's 1992. Ver Hotel are now promoting their third album.

Comments? | Permanent link

The Irish government has commissioned an independent study into how it might save money (An Bord Snip reported in the summer) and now how it might broaden the tax base. Frank Daly and his commission recommended this line of attack: 1) property taxes B) spending taxes γ) income taxes. In keeping with this philosophy, he recommended an annual property tax, tax on child benefit, a new rate of income tax with breaks to ensure no-one loses, integration of the health levy into income tax, the end of stamp duty on bank and credit cards, the introduction of water charges and a carbon tax, the elimination of vehicle road tax and tax relief on trade union subs, and Oireachtas expenses should be in line with those for mere mortals.

All of this is entirely sensible: we particularly welcome the idea of taxes on property, to properly hurt the speculators who helped to bring down the tiger economy. We're also in favour of water charges (which means metering) and carbon levies. But we do wonder, who is conducting a similar exercise in the UK? Where is the British equivalent to the Cuts Board? Who is looking at fair and equitable ways of broadening the tax base? Labour isn't, they seem to have ground to a halt for the past couple of years. The Conservatives aren't, they haven't had any coherent policies since 2005. The Lib Dems have ideas, but don't get to put them across.

Rather than offer a coherent plan to tackle the ballooning budget deficit, the governing Blue String party spoke of "targetted cuts" without giving details, while the opposition Space Cadets said they would impose symbolic cuts on politicians. This misses the point: it's not only the politicians who got the moon into this mess, it's the bankers, and neither party is doing anything to keep those bankers down.

Back in Blighty, attention is still - for a third week - on the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. The debate has widened out: it's generally agreed that McAllister's actions were a judgement call, and while the opposition is entitled to question his judgement, they don't have much other than ad hominem attacks. The involvement from the south side of the moon is more difficult: there have been rumours and counter-rumours flying about that the agreement was brokered for naked trade reasons, Mr. the Soup Dragon is contradicting his justice minister Mr. Strawman, and the whole thing is just an almighty storm in a piddling teacup. This is the sort of government the UK's endured for the past couple of years: dithering and blaming each other while London burns. It makes us want to bang heads together.

And linking the two, Nigel Farage enters campaign for Irish referendum. The leader of the Unitedkingdom Independence-from-facts Party wants to distribute its literature in Ireland, ahead of the Republic's second vote on the Lisbon treaty next month. Irish foreign minister Dick Roche has described the extremist nationalist party as an extremist nationalist party, the sort of actual honesty that we'd do well to emulate on this side of the channel.

General Motors decided to withdraw from the European market, selling its Vauxhall-Opel marque to Magna, a parts supplier from Canada and Austria.

Flash floods in Istanbul killed 30 people, and set off a round of Pass the Blame.

Sr. Berlusconi said that he was the best prime minister Italy had ever had. Thanks to the unique way in which Italy was governed between 1945 and 1994, we can invoke Giles's Law and state without evidence that there has to be something better. There simply has to be.

Permanent link

• On Glickoblog: Two quarter-final losers go through England, Spain, Paraguay qualify for next year's World Cup.
• On Glickoblog: Beat Virginia NCAAball week 2, and Virginia, Ball State are in deep trouble. They're worse than Eastern Michigan!
• On Ice Crystals this week: The Lyric Board twenty two snippets of song, more accurately identified than not.
• Plans, stuff coming up over the next few months, and more rotten research.

Summer has arrived! High pressure became established over the UK, and has brought some gloriously sunny and warm days. OK, Tuesday was mightily humid under the cloud, but the rest of the week was marvellous, without the extreme heat that we're likely to experience later in the summer. What? Well, it's likely to remain very nice for most of the coming week, and for a change it's the south that might have the worst of the weather, as a depression over the Med has the potential to spread rain up over the near continent. By next weekend, there may well be a vigorous depression over Iceland, and that could bring more general frontal rain to most parts of the UK. Temperatures will be at or above normal, so do wrap up.

07 Mo sunny              15/21
08 Tu cloud, humid       17/22
09 We sun                10/19
10 Th sun                 5/19
11 Fr sun                 6/19
12 Sa sun                 6/20
13 Su sun to cloud        8/17

Rainfall in September: 20mm; monthly average: 61mm

Degree cooling days: 108
2008: 114/114
2007: 91/91
2006: 347/360
2005: 233/238
2004: 198/198
2003: 299/328

Permanent link