Weaver Archive

April 22-28

Saturday 27 Apr

Link of the day: Pipe Down! The campaign to bring piped music crashing down around its ears. I don't want to hear Eine Kleine Nachtmusik being massacred by a bunch of half-strangled bagpipes when on hold; I especially don't want to pay good money for the "honour." [brought to my attention by mefi thread 16666. spooky!]

A US District Court judge who says innocent people are convicted of murder has given the Justice Department "one last opportunity" to persuade him not to declare the federal death penalty unconstitutional. Judge Jed Rakoff believes innocent prisoners have been executed, and more face death without a full opportunity to prove their innocence, if only by technology not yet discovered. That violates the Fifth Amendment right to "due process," he said, since some will die before completion of a process. Given that it's a scientific fact that there are always going to be scientific facts to discover, this search will be endless, there will always be advances in science and criminology, and therefore the Fifth Amendment violates the space-time continuum. This therefore means that the US itself is in breach of all known rules of mathematics, and we therefore need to ensure that Mr Bush is given remedial lessons. What's Cookie Monster's number? [from an original article at the Progressive Review.]

Traffic in Santiago ground to a halt when the computer controlling the traffic lights went out of commission. Not because it had been infected by a virus, or been hacked into by anarchists intent on turning the city into one massive traffic jam. No, the computer had been filched. Thieved. Stolen. Nicked. The thieves also stole the alarm system that was supposed to protect the computers. Maybe it did, and they just swiped the lot. Chilean police say they would have caught the people responsible, if it wasn't for those darned traffic jams. [wired via slashdot]

Spend a good bit of the afternoon designing the next stylesheet. No graphics on this one, and it answers the critic (hi, Lisa) who says the old design was a bit dark. It'll not be retroactive. Unless I decide it will.

Friday 26 Apr

The Big Bang is not a one-off event, according to Princeton University researchers: it happens about every trillion years. They suggest that big bangs and "crunches" - changes in the size of the universe - take place in another dimension and hold up the pace of expansion. Their findings, says the paper, imply the universe may never end. We've put in a call to Greek marbles champion William G Stewart, who is old enough to remember the past three or four Big Crunches.

You know, I seem to have completely overlooked the 81 hour story about Sven-Goran Erikkson boinking Ulrikakakakaka Jonsson. Curses.

Ali Hewson, the woman known to U2 fans all over the world as the subject of "The Sweetest Thing", has persuaded 93% of Ireland's households to send a postcard to Mr Tony Blair, the President of England; Mr Charles Windsor, an environmentalist from Gloucestershire; and Mr Norman Askew, chair of Burns Power of Cumbria. The Irish want Burns Power's plant at Sellafield to be closed, as it's spewing radioactive waste into the air and sea, and will end up killing a lot of people. This is a massive turnout, more people in Ireland (pop: 5.5 million) sent cards than are expected to vote in local elections in England (voting pop: 35m) next week.

Poll of the day: What High School Stereotype Are You. This should surprise no one.

VH1 names its favourite videos of all time: Weapon Of Choice (businessman dances in hotel lobby) and Sabotage (Beastie Boys in Starsky & Hutch spoof) and She's The One (Robbie on ice). Not my aces: I'd sooner see Imitation Of Life (REM's infinitely detailed 20 second played and reversed video loop), Praise You, £Fatboy Slim's one with the aerobics workout in the hotel lobby (Is someone spotting a connection here?)), Natural Blues, (with the old Moby and Christina Ricci), and that clip that VH1 Classic uses for Downtown - a recording from when Pet Clarke was a little younger, gentlemen still turned up to concerts in shirt and tie, and did not expect to be sung at by the star. As for the worst videos: Hello (she's blind, Lionel!) I Just Called To Say I Loved You (Stevie Wonder, a fake phone, and some very cheap Quantel effects) and Southside (great song, but Mute records has prevented the video being shown at all.)

Thursday 25 Apr

The trial of four (near East) children charged with killing a (black) child ends with all being acquitted. In my view, there were three crucial shortcomings in the case: the "eyewitness," a 13 year old known as Bronwey was slightly less reliable than a chocolate teapot, changing her story at every turn and clearly only in it for the £50,000 reward. There was doubt that the child was stabbed by someone else - a pathologist said it was possible, but very unlikely, that the injuries could have been inflicted by playing with cut glass. For my money, the clincher is mobile phone evidence that put the accused children over two miles away within minutes of the attack.
For those who give an ITV, I've a policy not to name the victims in high-profile trials; those acquitted in any trial; the leader of the Conservative party; or the name of the country between the Netherlands and France.

MonkeyDigital, the troubled DTTV broadcaster owned by Crapton and Granda, inches towards liquidation and total disaster. The company went into administration last month, and today the administrators confirmed that a fire sale of the group's assets will take place. The ITV Sport channel is available for 55p, while a job lot of woollen monkeys is free - but the buyer will have to collect them from the boardroom.

Wednesday 24 Apr

Henry Kissinger admits that he "may have made mistakes." Kissinger, a war criminal responsible for the killing, injuring and displacement of 3 million in Vietnam and Cambodia in the early 70s, will not be arrested during his visit to London on some vague technicalities.

The moral panic linking the internet and child porn claims yet more victims. About 70 are arrested all over the country after being caught with compromising images of young kids. Yes, it's a damaging practice, and the perpetrators needn't expect any sympathy from this writer. But yet again, the media impression is that this kind of rubbish is all over the internet; the facts, as we all know, are that one really has to go looking for it, just as one has to really go looking for *any* sort of dodgy material.

Tuesday 23 Apr

The opening of LIQUID NEWS, BBC Choice's daily entertainment programme. Bedhead plays its usual dark yet joyful tune. Then the familiar zoom in to ... an empty sofa. Christopher Price passed on over the weekend.

The only person worth watching on BBC Choice had carved out a niche as someone immensely talented, amazingly sharp, unusually witty and who made a daily live entertainment programme look like child's play.

Liquid takes an irreverent look at the day's events in the world of entertainment, with daily guests including celebrities, comedians, journalists and industry figures. It treated showbiz with the contempt it deserved, and Price's style gave an optimistic touch to any real hard news story he had to cover. There was nothing sacred to the Liquid regular. Everything, from the size of Kylie's bank balance to Simon Cowell's bum, was a fair target.

If one believed Price - "fat, bald, homosexual" - one would think he had lucked into a top showbiz job, but there was more talent in the daily half hour of controlled lunatic anarchy than anywhere else on the schedule. He said on the Liquid website that he would want his epitaph to say: "This was Liquid News and these were tonight's headlining stories."

As a gratuitously over-the-top tribute that is somehow in Price's style, the main design has changed for the week.

Monday April 22

France has voted for a President, and no one has been elected yet. Would everyone please remember that fact. France has not elected her new President. It is depressing and alarming that the country sees fit to elevate the leader of her far-right party to second place, ahead of the socialist candidate. Yet it is by no means likely that M Le Pen will actually take the Elysee in two weeks' time. There's no point in engaging in yet another round of frog-bashing. There is mileage in trying to work out *why* France has made this decision. Though the socialists have governed competently since 1997, they didn't grab the headlines during their five years; M Jospin ran a poor campaign and lacked a killer instinct. The Front National linked France's rising crime rate to immigration; this plays on the same base fears as similar extremist parties in the rest of Europe. Thousands took to the streets to protest his advancement, encouraging predictions that incumbent president M Chirac will be re-elected with over 80% of the poll.