Posts

Posted on

Collected activism

Copyright is forever, not just for Christmas

The Eldred vs. Ashcroft case was decided, in Ashcroft’s favour, by the US Supreme Court last week. This was the case calling into question the constitutionality of the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act. Lawrence Lessig (one smart cookie) was Eldred’s lawyer, and he writes about the defeat in his blog. He has already proposed a comeback, which would allow an estimated 98% of copyrighted works to enter the public domain as if the copyright extension hadn’t been upheld. It sounds like a fair compromise, that people from all sides of the argument could rally to. So it’ll probably fail.

Fuel efficiency is for pussies

Via Webword come two articles (here and here)on how SUVs are not nearly as safe as their manufacturers would like you to think, and how their owners are generally more aggressive and careless behind the wheel. And they have concrete facts and figures to back this up.

“To illustrate the kind of selfishness that marks some SUV drivers, Bradsher finds people who rave about how they’ve survived accidents with barely a scratch, yet neglected to mention that the people in the other car were all killed. (One such woman confesses rather chillingly to Bradsher that her first response after killing another driver was to go out and get an even bigger SUV.)

“The tragedy of SUVs is that highway fatalities were actually in decline before SUVs came into vogue, even though Americans were driving farther. This is true largely for one simple reason: the seatbelt. Seatbelt usage rose from 14 percent in 1984 to 73 percent in 2001. But seatbelts aren’t much help if you’re sideswiped by an Escalade, a prospect that looms yet more ominously as SUVs enter the used-car market. Not surprisingly, last year, for the first time in a decade, the number of highway deaths actually rose.”

If you’re going to drive a tank, chances are you’re going to treat the road like a battleground. And vice versa. It’s a nice self-fulfilling prophecy that does nothing but stuff money into the pockets of the car manufacturers and–most of all, the oil companies. Yes, them again. Remember: by driving an SUV, you’re supporting terrorists.

Truth in advertising? No thanks.

Also via Webword (people will start accusing you of being a Socialist soon, John 🙂 comes notice of another US Supreme Court case up for consideration soon: are corporations entitled to “free speech?” The simple answer is “no,” but unfortunately corporations have gained so much political power in the Western world that they’ll probably come out with a “yes”, or at the very least a strong “maybe.” If the justices do come out with a “no”, it’ll be framed in such a way that it still leaves the door open for corporations to be treated as “persons” in plenty of other areas of the law. Cynical, moi?

War on Iraq

Via Charlie Stross, a highly eloquent article in the Times from John Le Carré. There are circumstances in which war is justified. This war, though, is predicated on dishonesty. If it goes ahead at all, the US and British governments will have won their first victory already: they will have defeated their own people. That first battle is being fought with PR, spin, defective reasoning and outright lies. Decades of television and media infestation have worn down our intellectual defenses. “If we say you can go to war, will you please let us go back to our soaps and our reality TV?”

Wake up. Saddam Hussein is a bad man, but this isn’t the way to get rid of him. It isn’t the way to put a stop to terrorism. (Would an invasion of Ireland have put a stop to the IRA bombings in the 70s, 80s, and 90s?) And it sure as hell isn’t going to stop the proliferation of nuclear or biological weapons, as North Korea is busy proving. Or are we going to invade them, too? (Hmm. I think not.)

Overall: grrr

At some point I’ll have to do my paranoid rant about how I think corporations have developed some kind of gestalt consciousness of their own, and are controlling the world at a level beyond the comprehension (and influence) of ordinary humans. (It’s a Gaia kind of thing, but more selfish and less benign.)

Posted on

Diseased (update)

I thought I was sick last week. I was. And I thought I was getting better. By last Saturday my voice was starting to get back to normal, the sore throat was easing up, and my blocked nose felt like it was clearing.

Oh, no it wasn’t. It was just revving up for a massive sinus and ear infection. On Sunday and Monday I was double-dosing Lemsip and Sudafed, but that wasn’t cutting through either the congestion or the pain. (Note to self: pseudoephedrine makes me nauseous. Avoid in future.) I saw my doctor on Wednesday and got tooled up with some antibiotics, which finally seem to be doing the trick. It’s only today that I’ve been able to get through the day using just paracetamol, instead of topping up with ibuprofen.

And I can finally smell again.

Posted on

Hot, hot, hot

I didn’t know that the heat of peppers was actually measured scientifically in “Scoville Units” until Webword pointed me at this page of (extremely funny) reviews for “The Source”. This is a hot sauce, rated at 7.1 million Scoville Units. For comparison, a jalopeno pepper is somewhere in the region of 2,500 to 5000 Scoville Units, and 15 million units is pure capsaicin. The hottest pepper around is the scotch bonnet pepper, which weight in at about 200,000 – 300,000 units.

As one reviewer put it, “When I taste THE SOURCE I went into the epileptic seizure for 6 hours and I cried tears of liquid fire and blood. The sun turned black and the demons from hell came and danced around the dead bodies of my family, laughing and pointing at me. THE SOURCE is an evil demon from hell. It should not be!! It is el infierno manifestado.”

Posted on

Alex and the dolls

Treasured moment of the weekend: yesterday evening after Alex’s bath we played around in our bedroom for a while. I went to the bathroom, and while I was in there I heard some scuffling and giggling. When I came back out, I saw that Alex had gone through to his own bedroom, climbed into the rocking chair, and pulled the blanket from his cot over himself. Completely over himself. When he heard me coming towards him, he pulled the blanket down from his face and went, “Boo!”

We both burst out laughing. He loves going to bed these days, and he loves playing night-night games.

He is also starting to role-play with his dolls. At Christmas he got three of them: a Teletubbies Po doll, a Tweenies Milo doll, and a soft plain baby doll. Recently he has been trying to push his noo-noo into baby’s mouth. And this morning, he insisted that Po should wear a bib, and should sit up at his little table to have breakfast with him. He was hugely amused by my attempts to feed her Weetabix.

The Po doll also seems to have another effect. He wanted to take it with him to nursery this morning, and he held on to it all the time while I was taking of his coat and handing him over to the nursery assistant. And he didn’t cry.

Alex has been going to nursery two days a week for over a year now, and every morning I drop him off, he weeps inconsolably when he sees that I’m leaving. As soon as I’m out of sight he cheers up and starts playing quite happily (he does actually love being there), but every morning he puts me through the emotional wringer in he hope that maybe one day I won’t leave him behind.

But this morning, nothing. He clung to Po and let me hand him over without a peep. He looked very solemn, and quite concerned about the matter, but he didn’t cry. I was amazed. I still am. I’m wondering if it was the Po doll, or if he was just too tired to protest (he did wake up quite slowly this morning, and seemed pale and sleepy all through breakfast). If he wants, I’ll let him take Po in again tomorrow to see if it wasn’t just a fluke.

I’d certainly be relieved to see him happier when I leave him behind in the mornings, but possibly a little sad as well. When he cries, and wants to hold on to me so fiercely, I feel the close bond of love between us very strongly. I’m consolde by the knowledge that he has a great time during the rest of the day, but it would be better for both of us (and the staff at nursery!) if he could be a little more relaxed about these partings which, after all, only last a few hours.

My little boy is growing up. I love him so much.

Posted on

Smell (or lack thereof)

I can finally breath through my nose again, but my sense of smell still hasn’t returned. It’s only when you lose it that you realize just how much of the sense we think of as “taste” is actually smell instead. Ham and cheese toasties still have a wonderful mouthfeel, though.

In terms of child care, having no sense of smell has an up side and a down side. The good thing is that changing dirty nappies is so much less unpleasant. The bad thing is that you can’t tell when they need changing. Which vastly increases the danger of “creepers”.

(A “creeper” is a poo that rides up the child’s butt crack, emerges from the nappy, and keeps on crawling right up the back. If you’re lucky, the child will be wearing a shirt, which will catch most of the unpleasantness. If not, you end up with a brown sticky trail on the floor.)