Deadlier than the male

In the battle of the sexes, size matters.  Here’s a species where the male is about as big as a fruit fly, while the female is approximately the size of a banana.  Oh, all right then, if you don’t count the legs, she’s only as big as an unshelled peanut.  Anyways, I’ll leave you to do the proverbial math.

This little minx set up shop right outside our kitchen window.  Which is fine with me because  it means I can shoot her from pretty close up secure in the knowledge that there’s a reassuring pane of glass between us.   I’m speaking from experience here: I once tried approaching one of these puppies outdoors and she spat something (silk? venom?) at me from out of her back(?) — or maybe it was ventrally launched? All I remember for sure is how she re-oriented herself, hunkered down and took aim before letting fly…  Luckily I was using the old ‘hat on a stick’ trick, so she squirted the hat rather than my face, but hey, lesson learned.

This is more or less actual life size. The species is Nephila maculata, and they’re pretty common in forest areas all over the island, especially in the fall. They weave classic ’spiral orb’ webs about 4~6 feet across. Here’s another nice picture showing the underside on one of these things. And there’s a bunch more pictures and info here.   Whoa, and some cool ethnozoology stuff here.

Dan Brown has some competition

‘His eyes were beautiful, and despite being tired they sizzled[.]‘

It’s not a page turner, and I’m not sure if it can really be said to have much of a plot, but judging from the first chapter of her debut novel, The Mistress,  Martine McCutcheon is right up there with the Master himself when it comes to inept phrasing.

Of course, the density of her ineptitudes inevitably falls far short of what the Master can achieve; Brown often manages to shoehorn several clunking infelicities into a single line, whereas McCutcheon seems to average only about one per page. But the comparison is hardly fair: Brown has been perfecting his ’style’ for years, while this is McCutcheon’s first attempt.  And she definitely shows considerable promise.

She skipped down the stairs in her satin high heels, trying to avoid slipping in the puddles [...]

Mandy [...] tried her umbrella[...]. ‘Eureka, it works!’ she trilled, as if discovering a new invention.

[H]er make-up sprawled on the shelf in front of her[...]

She moved to walk away, her body turned round – but her feet stayed firmly planted on the floor. Mandy found herself hopping from one foot to another [...]

‘We have also been expanding and going down new avenues.’

And for dessert, a bizarre unmotivated laugh-fest that runs from giggles to guffaws and back again –

Something about his sincerity made Mandy want to laugh. Maybe it was nervousness at such emotional honesty. There was a tickle in the air and the two of them burst out giggling like school kids as if it was some kind of forbidden release. Mandy saw an even more gorgeous side of Jake when he was laughing so much. He seemed lighter, more alive.

‘What are we laughing at?’ he said between guffaws.

‘I don’t know, but at least it broke the ice!’ Mandy giggled.

Lastly, by way of encouragement, here are some words that Martine’s protagonist, Mary Sue Mandy, has lived by ever since ’she’d read a greeting on a card once in Paperchase on the King’s Road’ –

‘Reach for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.’

Not ’shoot’ or ‘aim’, either of which would actually make sense, but ‘reach’. You’ll need very long arms for that. But go for it, girl! You can do it! On your tippy-toes now, and st-r-e-t-ch….

Martine McCutcheon before and after application of her sprawling makeup.

Technology is good

And so is David Hockney.

Drawn with his thumb on an iPhone, every one of these elicits a gasp of delight.

This is not my fault

Oh, all right then. Yes it is.

My Favorite Mushroom. I found this little puppy growing on the kitchen window sill this morning. Yes, we have a problem with damp.

Hypocritical cunts

So there’s this big hoo-hah at the moment about how toxic-polluting motherfuckers Trafigura instructed their legal slimeball attack dogs Carter-Fuck to slap a super-injunction on the Guardian (and others, including Private Eye I think. In any case, PE is as good a place to start as any since they were in on the start of this debacle; my only concern with linking to them is that their content might become inaccessible after a few weeks.) 

Where was I? Oh yeah, so thanks to the Streisand Effect, Trafigura’s attempt at suppression has caused all the details of this unknown unknown to become very well known indeed, and the twisted logic that supports this bullshit has been very entertainingly written up by the inimitable Charlie Brooker.

Of course, people are now starting to wonder how many more of these unknown fucking unknowns are out there.  Well, quite a lot it seems.   And here’s one of them –

Stand up, please, all you hypocritical cunts at the Guardian, who smugly published the Charlie Brooker piece, but are inexplicably — and inexcusably — censoring a particular topic in the comments.  That topic appears to be some Blairite called James Purnell and his Welfare Reform Bill.  I have no idea who James Purnell is, nor, at this point, do I know or care anything about his Welfare Reform Bill — thank fuck, I  no longer live anywhere near ‘this Septic Isle… this England‘ — but presumably it’s about money and power and fucking people over, ie the usual business of parliament.

Here, for example, is a perfectly reasonable, completely apropos, entirely non-sweary, omnibus comment that ‘Moonwave’ posted on this topic in the comments to Charlie’s column:

moonwave
19 Oct 09, 4:06am (about 2 hours ago)
Is this super-injunction something along the same lines as when comments are disappeared completely from a CIF thread, as if they never existed, and you’re sort of sure there was something else there when you look back – or was it a dream? – and nobody else is aware that they ever existed at all?
Is this in the same way as how it is implied that they must be so objectionable that it be neccessary that they be removed from existence, so it’s for our own good that that they ever had existence not be known about?
For example, like some (quite a few) of the comments from the last James Purnell article? – a little of which I reproduce below to fill some of the sudden gap near the end of that thread – in the support of the spirit of the Guardian’s battle against the injunction of reporting.
@RuralRides
I notice that a large number of posts complaining about immoderate ‘moderation’ have been removed.
Can people please email Alan Rusbridger to complain about this. It’s all getting to be a little much.
Thank you.
Re the moderators: I had assumed that the posts chosen to be disappeared contained expletives, gratuitous ad hominem attacks or potential libels.
How naive I am. A post of mine that was up for a couple of hours yesterday has now gone. It contained none of the above but simply said that Purnell’s Welfare Reform Bill was the most savage piece of legislation since the Poor Laws and went on to ask why he was in the Labour Party when, clearly, he represented people who wouldn’t come within 20 miles of states schools, council estates or the NHS.
For this, I get deleted. I’ve read the Guardian for 40 years and admit to being a little shocked by this. This newspaper really does want the Blairites to remain in control of the party doesn’t it. And James Purnell, it seems, is the man that someone, somewhere, has anointed.
Welcome to the future – cuts, mass unemployment, poverty, our children struggling to lead decent lives. And if you suggest that there is an alternative? Prepare to be disappeared.
Someone at the Guardian should be ashamed of themselves.
…. ….
@moonwave…
Anyone who witnessed the extreme censorship on this thread last evening/night, or who agrees that it’s not right for any comment which says too much about the real effects of the Welfare Refom Bill, the exploitive harm of the privatisation of our services, the growth of a controlling surveillance state, the wrongness of waging war on peasants for US gain, or anything which too closely criticises Labour, or points out the close involvement of the writer of this article in many of the policies to do with selling out our most vulnerable citizens to the highest bidder; should not be automatically deleted, along with the complaints about their deletion…. please point this out, and make sure the Guardian know how shocked some of us were about it.
From a Guardian reader of over 30 years.
… …
@RuralRides
Sorry to bang on about the Moderators but things get worse.
Yet again a post of mine has been disappeared but this time there isn’t even the grey text to say that it was once there. All trace of it has gone.
Why? What did it say other than that James Purnell has enacted viscious social legislation and that I fail to understand why he’s in the Labour Party.
Or was it that I suggested that The Guardian had picked him as its man for the future of the Labour Party?
Either way, it’s rather creepy.
I also note a post from @EvaWilt saying that she’s ‘too scared’ to comment fully. So this is what we have come to: decent, law-abiding people afraid to express the most mildly left-wing sentiments because they feel that, somewhere, a computer is alerting another computer and that someone will add their names to a database. And that it will cause them problems.
How did the words to Rule Britannia go? ‘Britons never, never . . . ‘
So, yes, well done to Alan Rusbridger and the Guardian for standing up for the ungagging of freedom of speech.

Being familiar with the ways of the interwebs, as soon as I saw this, I grabbed the text, just in case.

And sure enough, one hour later, instead of the above, there’s only this –

This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.

Cunts.

And who the fuck is this Blairite toerag James Purnell anyway? And exactly what the fuck is this Welfare Reform Bill all about that we can’t even fucking mention it?

UPDATE: And now another comment that referenced the original Moonwave comment above has been deleted. What the cunting fuck is going on here??

Labour MP James Purnell, resplendent in a neck-tie that once flew as a royal banner over Hampton Court. I invite you to read Mr Purnell’s Wikipedia entry and form your own opinion, but as far as I can tell, he seems to score approximately zero on the integrity meter.

Cartoon classic

It’s true of course:

But these days, everyone suspects it.

Chivas turns chivalry to shit

The problem I have with this ad — and it isn’t helped by the sublime music and extremely high production values — is not that it’s emotionally manipulative per se, but that it takes peoples’ legitimate fears and aspirations and distorts and abuses them with the sole purpose of selling some bullshit product. So listen up, suckers: purchasing a pretentious brand of alcohol won’t save you from your grey, pointless lives; wearing black tie doesn’t equate to chivalrous behavior.

These are lies, and they have fuck-all to do with heroism or straight-talking — straight talking FFS! Oh the freakin irony! — or freedom or chivalry or any other emotional buzzword.

As Bill Hicks says, marketing people are ‘the scum of the earth’, ‘the ruiners of all things good.’

So wake up and smell the friggin hangover, before these insidious fuckers pollute every last decent thing on this planet.

That’s why I hate this fucking ad. And that’s why I’m shouting at the people who are swallowing this bullshit whole.

Name and Shame — Nokia

I bought a Nokia 1680c-2 a couple days ago, and I’ve been regretting it ever since.

For starters, the fucking digital clock screensaver just flat out doesn’t work. And then it turns out that there’s no way to adjust the very short time interval before the screen drops into blacked-out standby mode and you have to wake the fucking thing up again. You can imagine how much fun that is if you’re the sort of person who pauses midway through entering a number or stops to think while composing a text message.

And then there’s the little problem of connecting the thing to a computer, eg for downloading pictures, uploading ringtones and apps and so on.

I will try to contain my incandescent anger at the blizzard of misinformation about this phone on the Nokia websites and forums.

For instance, you will be told by ‘gurus’ that’ [t]he 1680 has no user connectivity via USB. The USB port present is only for use by service personnel. ‘ (link) — This is utter bollocks.

A couple hours ago, I finally managed to connect the bastard thing to a PC. Because oh yes, it is fracking possible, despite everything that Nokia would have you believe.

This is how I did it.

I’m using LogoManager’s MobiMB v3.5.3. (Download the free 30 day demo first, just to check that it works for you. Note: older versions of MobiMB won’t necessarily work. Update: MobiMB v3.5.2 is supposed to be OK too, though fwiw I didn’t have any luck with it.  Chris — see below — reports that v3.6.x works fine.)

The cable is the Nokia N1200 cable (USB/serial). Out here, it was easy enough to find, and it cost me about 8 bucks. In the MobiMB software, it’s configured as a CA-42 cable connection.

For the cable to work, I had to install the Prolific PL2303 driver.  (UPDATE: Chris — see below — tells me that the current version of the driver on Prolific’s website doesn’t work, so you’ll need to get the 2005 version from It’s not hard to find, but fwiw I downloaded it from here.  The link is in the left hand column, near the top, where it says ‘Download USB Drivers’.)

What can I tell you? It works.

My thanks to Waleed who put me on the right track with this.

(Apparently there used to be earlier versions of Nokia’s PC Suite that supported this phone. I haven’t been able to verify that, but PC Suite has certainly been crippled now. So fuck that.)

New Learning 2

I learned something yesterday. In fact, I learned two things.

First, it’s a bad idea to install a desktop power supply unit in the dark.

Second, those keyed 4-pin ATX plugs will in fact fit quite easily in just about any vaguely ATX-shaped socket regardless of the orientation or configuration of the keyed pins.

What idiot designed the key-shapes on this fucking thing? A semi-octagonal peg will go quite easily into a square hole. And vice versa. FFS.

The good news is that my motherboard is smarter than the idiot who designed the crap ATX plug key system — and smarter than the idiot who jammed the fucking thing into the wrong hole too. Because despite a bad case of Voltage Abuse, in the cold light of dawn, once I’d literally seen the error of my ways and re-connected things properly, the machine powered up as good as new.

Phew!

n=5

Five data points today to illustrate all that’s wonderful about the interwebs and all that sucks. I’m guessing that you’ll be able to see a pattern…

1. The cheap new cellphone I bought last night has, inevitably, a built-in camera. However, even though it takes quite decent pics and has a data port, after half an hour of wading around on Nokia’s corporate websites — oh yes; they have more than one! — I discovered that they don’t support/authorize connectivity to a PC on the 1680c-2. So all that I can actually do with the pics after I take them is, um, erase them again. So thanks for that, Nokia, and fuck you too.

And the digital clock screensaver doesn’t work either.

2. Meanwhile, out on the intertubes, there’s all kinds of jolly hackers with free info on how to make this fucking phone do all the things that Nokia says it can’t do — and more! Risky business of course, but hey if the worst happens — I don’t think it will — and I brick the fucking thing, then what, I’ve blown 50 bucks. And then I’ll go buy another cheap phone — and it won’t be a fucking Nokia either. Or a Sony.

The really stupid thing is, I don’t even much care if it has a camera or not. All I really want is a 1G phone that works. But I’m damned if I’m going to have a camera on my phone and then not use the bastard.

3. And then I go over to my Youtube homepage, only to find that Youtube 2.0 has pissed all over it. Well, I knew it was coming, but my channel is still fucked and there’s nothing I can do about it. So thanks for that, Youtube/Google. Thanks a lot for ‘listening’ to what people wanted and then doing the exact fucking opposite.

4. And then the internal battery in my ‘prosumer’ Sony DSRPD150 has failed — which in combination with several other problems now means that this camera is no longer a production machine. There’s no way I can use it on a shoot when it’s crashing all the time. These days, in the middle of recording, it keeps deciding that the Sony batteries I’m using aren’t Sony batteries after all, and after displaying a petulant error message, it promptly switches itself off. And as if that weren’t already bad and gratuitous enough, with the internal battery down, this means that everything gets reset to the ludicrous factory defaults.

So, OK, again, I know that opening this puppy up isn’t something that should be done lightly, but will Sony even tell me where this battery is located so that I can replace it? Will they fuck.

(To be fair, the information is actually publicly accessible, but Sony ain’t tellin’, so unless you know where to look, you’d never find it. At least, I never did.)

5. Compare and contrast with this: will the guys on the DVinfo forums help? Hell, yes! They sure will! Information, technical schematics, even the DSRPD150 service manual. And loads of encouragement and camaraderie.

So Nokia, Sony, Youtube, I know that if it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have these phones and cameras and websites in the first place, so thanks for that. Really. But then you turn round and behave like total cunts. It’s just so unnecessary. Why the fuck can’t you try to be helpful and decent for once, like a normal human being?

EDITED TO ADD:

For all you people who think I’m being too cynical — or maybe too idealistic, whichever — here are a couple more points on the graph to show that corporations really can and do get it right sometimes.

First, TaiPower. The electricity at our house has been flaky for a while now, and yesterday I finally got around to tracking down the problem: I narrowed it down to somewhere between the outside power lines and the circuit-breaker box inside the house. So it’s about 4:00pm and I get on the phone and I’m speaking to a very helpful lady at TaiPower and she says someone will call soon. And fuck me! Half an hour later, or forty minutes, tops, two blokes turn up, happy and cheerful and every bit as helpful as the nice young lady on the phone, and they borrow a step-ladder and they’re all over it.

The problem turns out to be the meter; everything inside there is corroded to shit. They don’t have a spare, so — and this is the best bit — they wire up the house without a meter. Free electricity until they get a chance to come back and install a spanking new one. I mean sure, it’s the obvious thing to do. It’s simple and it costs them maybe a few cents, but still — they did it! I’m so impressed. TaiPower, you guys rule!

And second, of all people: Facebook. I finally signed up to Facebook a couple days ago and yeah well to be honest, I’m not sure that I’ll be sticking around too long. But here’s the thing: I have an idea for a simple app — basically it’s just a filter to cut down most of the noise — but I poked around to see how they deal with 3rd party apps, and as far as I can tell after some cursory investigation, they’re not only totally open to it, they’re actively helpful! Of course, this makes perfect sense because they’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain. But again, the point is there are a million ways they could have screwed this up, and yet they seem to be doing it right. So, way to go Facebook!