2014 — 30 June: Monday
Given the number of people now signed up to Facebook's social media network1 the current sh1tstorm about its manipulation of news feeds to test rather simplistically for "emotional contagion" can probably only give all sorts of bad people bad ideas for future tinkering, say around election times. Still, at least the Ministry of Justice has £56,000,000 less of my money to fling in this sort of direction for any of its unused CPU cycles.
In the real world...
... there's real contagion2 to worry about. (Link.)
And a somewhat-depleted cupboard for Mrs Hubbard to get anxious about.
I was unaware...
... of both the acronym and the fanzine.
When afraid, when in doubt, Run in circles, scream and... PLOKTA!
(G)rumble
I've just noticed both the time and the currently-empty state of my tum.
I've been scanning, and OCRing, some fairly venerable clippings from the Grauniad that I'd been keeping stuck behind a plastic frame — but that had been yellowing almost to the point of illegibility — up in the books warehouse.
[Pause, for lunch]
Here I am, innocently browsing a Grauniad piece touting the repeat showing of that wonderful 1985 series "Edge of Darkness" as a worthy alternative to endless boring football. But what's this lurking at the foot of the web page?
#GU_SHIFT test for user migration # add the 'cohort' date to the omniture request. # this ends up being the date this user first visited us
On a bookshop trip I made...
... to London at the end of September 1990 I found twenty books. Including the magnificent Eric Gill tome you can see here. For today's purposes, however, let's focus on another of that day's titles, shall we? One by comix genius Robert Crumb (one of two, in fact, on that day). Now, the problem with our Mr Crumb is that his work is regarded, in the UK, as comics. And comics are regarded, in the UK, as material aimed at the kiddywinks. You may be able to sense where this is going.
Fast forward to January 1995, when an idiot employed by Brenda in her Customs and Revenue department takes it upon himself (or herself, but I'm betting it was a "him") to simply ignore previous rulings and now decides to seize this particular "comic" on the not unreasonable grounds that it ain't suitable for kiddywink consumption. And, let's face it: it isn't:
Crumb's troubles with women (1990)
These idiots have considerable leeway in exercising their renowned-the-world-over high standards of trained artistic judgement (some might say "prejudicial hangups") when it comes to
deciding what is, and what is not, allowed to besmirch Brenda's magnificent, squeaky-clean3 queendom. The officials (perhaps confident of
victory) loyally closed ranks in defence of their man (or woman) on the front line. A trial ensued.
They lost.
And they had to pay up.
Crumbs! :-)
I'm less than...
... half way through downloading from the BBC the nine available episodes (of ten) of Season #2 of "Orphan Black" in 720p "HD" when in pings an email from my suddenly-worried ISP:
you have now used 50.37% of your total download allowance
Yes, I know. But this is also the last day of the month and you'll be resetting that allowance back to 50GB in about six hours from now, will you not? Jeez. I know perfectly well what I'm doing.
Could it be...
... that the good Doctor Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre is waxing a little sarcastic here?
After all, as any trendy MMR-dodging north-London middle-class humanities-graduate couple with children would agree, just because vaccination has almost eradicated polio — a debilitating disease which as recently as 1988 was endemic in 125 countries — that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing.
It took a while...
... to locate my Rowlandson book, but I was pleased to see my recollection of what it said in the Introduction wasn't too far off the mark:
