Pigdogfucker

There are some individuals whose lives are so important that they deserve reporting in national news media. However, Rick Stein’s dog is not one of them.

And I say that as a fan of camp, drunk Mr Stein – after all, he’s the best approximation we have, apart from Keith Floyd, to Keith Floyd.

It’s a BBC piece on a single-pixel digital camera, which gets around its obvious disability by using an enormous array of mirrors and complex software processing to capture an image through sequential snapshots.

This digital micromirror device, as it is known, consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium.

“From that mirror array, we then focus the light through a second lens on to one single photo-detector – a single pixel.”

As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession.

Complex mathematics then interprets the signals assembling a high resolution image from the thousands of sequential single-pixel snapshots.

The camera is hooked up to a computer to display the captured image which can take minutes to construct.

This is rather clever, and rather cool, if somewhat irrelevant for non-specialist purposes (specialist purposes are imaginable, especially if the radiation being observed is not visible light and therefore involves a more expensive sensor than a standard camera one). However…

Although at the experimental stage at the moment, if the device ever makes it to market it could make digital cameras more efficient and dramatically improve battery life by doing away with the need to process and compress each image.

Urggh?

I’m reminded by Obsolete of the universally reviled John Reid’s scaremongering prediction that terrorists would ruin Christmas.

Irritatingly, I can’t find the post where I offered a £100 bet to all comers that this absolutely wasn’t going to happen. But I’m fairly sure I actually did. Sadly, even the crazy people who believe in the ‘terror threat’ weren’t willing to put the money up, so being right hasn’t actually brought me any real benefits.

‘Twas ever so…

We all know Fox News is evil and that it lies ceaselessly (my recent favourites include “accidentally” referring to Barrack Obama as ‘Osama’ and to Mark Foley as a Democrat). We also all know that the Commentisfree comments are full of illiterate gibbering nutcases of various different hues and ideologies.

However, ‘Lafayette’ has a very good point:

I find it particularly rich to see British folks holding up Fox News as the prime example for why American media is horrible. Murdoch’s formula for Fox is a simple one: take a British red-top and put it on American television.

I’d be interested to see a comparison in lies-per-fact between Fox and the Sun. I’d even consider doing it myself, except that reading the Sun tends to make me overly keen to exterminate the white working class.

Stephen at Unspeak makes a valiant attempt at translating George Bush’s recent speech into English. The highlight:

“We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us through these trying hours.”

Translation: God help us.

It’s funny, and/or terrifying, because it’s true.

On reading this story, as with various others, I found myself tragically disappointed.

If we had a real leader of the opposition, he’d engage in mass polygamous weddings, iron girls’ breasts and go to jail for gay libel just as well as the people of south-west Africa…

Unless you’re Tony Blair’s bum-chum, then you obviously accept that the BBC was right in the whole Hutton scenario, and that any suggestion otherwise is a whitewash. One of the more proficient Whitehall whitewashes, but a whitewash nontheless.
Anyway.

It’s been pointed out that when the government cheated and lied in order to stitch up the BBC, having bribed Lord Hutton, the supposed checks and balances went for slaughtering everyone concerned – and Greg Dyke also resigned.

Despite sharing responsibility for the far worse fuckup of, err, Iraq, Gordon Brown didn’t. And unsurprisingly – if i were faced with that kind of “yes, we’ll go against the will of the British people, even though they’re actually quite crazy-fascist in their own right” – in order to support the stupid, reviled cunt who’s bought himself into the Presidency – Mr Brown is now less popular than anyone… except for the only other candidates, Tony and John Reid.

What’s the end point? I don’t know. Given that David Cameron is the worst scumbag I’ve ever heard of or encountered, on any level whatsoever, I’m concerned. Given that Gordon Brown is the best chancellor of the exchequer that we’ve ever had, I’m slightly less concerned. But weirdly, daft righty cunts who ought to be grateful are far more annoyed by Mr Brown’s impending leadership than people who, y’know, are actually poor and who might welcome some kind of socialist, redistributionist person, which Mr Brown certainly isn’t.

Some hippy:

“Half the baby food market is organic. This isn’t just posh people making lifestyle choices. It’s about people being worried about the quality of the food they give their babies and worried about the use of pesticides and antibiotics.”

Neither the government, nor Ruth Kelly herself are handling her “disabled child at private school situation” well, either on a moral or a political level.

On a personal level, I respect Ms Kelly’s decision to do what she feels is the best for her disabled son. However, this does not make it appropriate for her to send her child to an independent school while remaining the government minister for education – given that this proves beyond any doubt that she does not believe the system you are running is capable of providing her child with the education that he needs.

In any line of business, refusing to use your own product shows that you are happy to inflict it on others while being fully aware that it is poor. Being minister for education, as it is conventionally understood, involves not admitting that the education system is poor. On this basis, Ruth Kelly has no alternative but to resign, and anyone seeking to defend her on the basis that she’s doing the best for her family in a hard situation should have the knee-jerk sympathy beaten out of them with an iron bar.

However, shifting the goalposts a little, there is one way in which Ms Kelly could keep her job: if she publicly admitted that the education system does not adequately provide for the parents of children disabled in whichever way her son is disabled; announced the steps that her department was going to take to address these flaws in the system; and announced a date when the system would be sufficiently fixed to regain her own personal confidence. Sadly, this involves concrete policies, personal responsibility and admission of culpability, and therefore will never happen.

Meanwhile, David Cameron is absolutely cleaning up – unlike me, he can profit massively from the situation while not even having to criticise Ms Kelly. “We all have to make the decisions as parents first, not as politicians. Ruth Kelly is a parent first and foremost“, he says, while the papers do the job of pointing out the context that Mr Cameron has a disabled child who attends a state school.

Mr Cameron is an ex-PR man, and therefore definitionally unscrupulous and untrustworthy. I think it would be pushing it to suggest that he had his child deliberately disabled for political advantage, however. Also, fuck, this bastard is going to win, isn’t he?

Update: Tampon Teabag makes the above paragraph look inoffensive.

From A Word A Day:

malkin (MO-kin, MAL-kin) noun

1. An untidy woman; a slattern.

2. A scarecrow or a grotesque effigy.

3. A mop made of a bundle or rags fastened to a stick.

Which definition do you think is most accurate?