Lost Worlds

That's What They Think We Are Like

On a sachet of Nescafé Latte Skinny Less Than Half The Fat:

• Empty a sachet into a mug
• Fill the mug with 200ml of hot but not boiling water, stirring all the time. Add sugar or sweetener if required.

Is that how stupid they think we are?

No. They think we're stupider. Because the instructions continue:

• Enjoy your deliciously frothy latte!

Ah. Thank god they told me. I had been wondering what to do with the damnable stuff.

Technorati Tags: infantilization, advertising

"Gonna Miss You Loads" My Ass

Oh lord. Oh god. Shall I... no. Further comment would be otiose and we all kno otiose comment's like gunna make Kong like totally crap on the rug, right?

Technorati Tags: culture, infantilization, web

Irony-Free Zone, If Only Briefly

In 1994 the British conductor Paul McCreesh reconstructed a Lutheran Mass as it might have been sung on Christmas Morning 1620. The music was mostly by Michael Praetorius, with some by Samuel Scheidt and Johann Hermann Schein.

He recorded it in Roskilde Cathedral, Norway.

The 1640 organ at Roskilde

Praetorius is better-known for his secular and deliciously sexy Terpsichore, a collection of Renaissance dance music. This shows his other side, as a composer who delightedly embraced the new opportunities of Lutheranism. The recording is an astounding achievement -- certainly for me one of the finest recordings of the 20th century of anything, by anyone -- and a marvellous corrective to the seasonal sludge of sleighbells and hooting, viscous carols. Whether or not the Incarnation celebrated at Christmas was in any sense true, or whether the religion whose heart it lies at has any claim to validity, Praetorius's music and McCreesh's flawless and joyful interpretation make it all too clear why so many wanted, and want, to believe it. If the final In Dulci Jubilo -- a "macaronic" hymn which swings between the German vernacular and the pre-Lutheran Latin, and which, in doing so, sums up the spirit of Martin Luther's reforms, does not leave your heart singing, then there is no life in you. Imagine the cold morning, the filled church, the town trumpeters waiting (by Praetorius's own recommendation) outside in the snow, and then the doors thrown open, and the sound flooding in on a tide of light as they sing of heaven

Where the angels sing
New songs
And the bells ring
In the court of the King
Oh! to be there; Oh, to be there!

Bah? Possibly. Humbug? Perhaps. But a wonder all the same.

(And faintly, though unseasonally, pleasant to think that General Pinochet probably never heard it, nor ever will, even if there is no purgatory waiting to scour him or hell to gape.)

Technorati Tags: music, Baroque

The War On... What Was It Again?

Miles Davis would be in prison in the USA today; as a felon, he would be stripped of his right to vote; when released, he would be unable to get a student loan. His driving licence would be revoked and he could not travel to work.

So would Samuel Johnson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Gladstone, John Keats,Jimi Hendrix, William Wilberforce, Dorothy Wordsworth, W C Fields, Elvis, Sarah Bernhardt, Sigmund Freud, Florence Nightingale, Johnny Cash, Edith Piaf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ray Charles, Wilkie Collins, Janis Joplin, Bella Lugosi, Sir Walter Scott, Marvin Gaye, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Eden, Branwell Bronte, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Lenny Bruce, Jean Cocteau and Tim Buckley.

Quite right too. They were all drug users. And the state must punish drug users. Ideally, the state must mostly punish black drug users, and the USA is doing well at that. As are we. But white drug users will do at a pinch.

Or you could look at it this way: if you are a black woman in America and you have a son, there is a one in three chance that your son will end up in prison.

Aren't we doing well, with this war on drugs?

Now go and have a look at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and ask yourself: What have we learned?

(Nothing. Absolutely nothing.)

Dies Irae, Adonai Elohenu al-Hamdalillah

The Sunday Times reports that

Thousands of dying patients are being denied the last rites because hospital chaplains are not being given access to their personal records to establish their religion.

Why? The Data Protection Act -- foreseen by Aeschylus in the Oresteia; in which the watchman says "For them as knows, I'll speak. For the rest: my mind's a blank."

Another. Damned. Disclaimer.

The Burger King "I'm a man" commercial? Where Men in muscle vests and hard hats show how Manly they are by eating 20,505,321 calories of meat? Have you noticed how, halfway through, a subtitle flashes up which says:

"FILMED ON A CLOSED ROAD

?

What it should say is:

Most MEN in muscle vests and hard hats are actually GAY ICONS and
LOOK AFTER THEMSELVES and
eat LETTUCE

Vista™®™™®™®™™™® - It's™ sublime®

The image of Windows™®©™ Vista©™®:

What are they looking for, this cosy adventurous couple perched in a Rousseauiste landscape of uncompromisingly pure sublimity? A computer that works, perhaps? But this has nothing to do with computing, and everything to do with not-computing.

And whatever it is they are looking for, they haven't yet found it.

But let's remember that Rouseau found it necessary for the™ sublime to make him afraid.

Technorati Tags: computing

It Was The Voices In My Head That Made Me Do It, Honest

If the corporation is a legitimized psychopath[1] then the advertising industry is a schizophrenic; behaviour associated with schizophrenia includes confabulation (making up stories to fill in the blanks), associative looseness, neologisms, clang association, word salad, and echolalia...

ADDENDUM: The redoutable Seamus McCauley accuses me of supporting the film of The Corporation and Bakan's thesis in general. Just to clarify, I haven't seen the film [2] and I think Bakan's thesis is, in essence, bollocks - largely because it houses, at its very core, a nasty little category mistake.

[1] Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.(First published in the USA by Free Press - Simon & Schuster, 2004). London: Constable, 2004.

[2] But am now going to have to see, thanks to McCauley's attack on it and me. Sodding blogosphere.

Technorati Tags: film

Sorry, But You Are So Stupid You Need It To Rhyme

I bought some miso. It is perfectly decent miso. You squeeze it out of the little plastic packet (which is itself satisfying) and add hot water and lo!, miso, and LO!, bits of seaweed.

But they can't just sell miso. No; they need a little rhyme. Here you go:

Sushi made Japan-easy™.

Is the terrible thing

(a) That they think a little rhyme will make us think "Gosh, I'll buy that stuff, which I wouldn't have otherwise"? Or
(b) That the little rhyme itself is so inane? Or
(c) Grown-up people with families and hopes and lives actually sat round thinking it up? Or
(d) They were prepared to take the money? Or
(e) Some asshole actually trademarked the little rhyme, filling in all those forms and putting a suit on and being important? Or
(f) The trade mark people didn't say "Oh for heaven's sake grow up and fuck off."?

Or is the terrible thing, as usual, that that's what they think we are like?

The Post-literate Society

Mark Bernstein blogged this pictogram:

One of the very few which doesn't fall foul of the Utterly Bloody Pointless Pictogram rule, which goes as follows:

(1) Not everyone can read.
(2) Therefore we should give them notices -- NOTICES! We need LOTS OF NOTICES! -- in pictographic form.
(3) But the pictographs are often incomprehensible, so
(4) Underneath the pictogram, we write an explanation. Which means that
(5) A significant number of people can neither understand the pictogram nor the explanation. Which in turn means
(6) They are just ignorant (from the Latin ignoro, 'I do not know') while we are fools (from the English fools, "fools".)

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut--

As many as 16 million Americans have been affected by intermittent explosive disorder (IED) in which the sufferer displays unwarranted violent outbursts.

Ooh Look Ma, Big Brother's Got A New Computer.

Brian Hughes comments on my recent post about privacy:

Do you really think "the Government" has got nothing better to do than keep an eye on boring old farts like us? And how many people d'yer think they'll need to employ for the task?

Privacy? British Lower Middle Class invention circa 1908. Bah!

Fairly near the truth; The Invention of Privacy would be a good book for someone to write. Plenty of cultures don't even have the concept, even in Europe; Turkey, for example.

But it's not "the Government" who will be keeping an eye on us. It's the Government's computers. And that's a very different thing. Even now it can be quite chilling; have a look at this and see if you like it...

Technorati Tags: computing, society

Give It To Me, Big Montage

The Independent on Sunday. My journalistic alma mater. October 9th, 2005, page 10. "The lonely minister, the blonde and the honey trap". David Blunkett and a rodent-faced estate agent. You know the story. And there's the photograph of the two of them together, she standing in front of him in a Little Black Dress, circled fist at Blunkett crotch-height as though miming a quick mercy-toss. Ugh.

But wait. She may be in a Little Black Dress, but he is in a suit, overcoat, and scarf. Is he preternaturally sensitive to the cold? Is she warmed by the inner fires of lust? Or greed? Or—for we must think the unthinkable— could the IoS have (I hardly know how to say this) faked the picture?

They faked the picture. Look closely and you can see the tell-tale borders of a piece of incompetent PhotoShopping, done by an intern who knows not of blending, the healing brush or the <feather> setting.

Truth in journalism. A picture is worth a thousand words. Or, in this case, sixteen: "This newspaper is telling a lie and, what's worse, isn't even bothering to tell it convincingly."

Technorati Tags: journalism, media, UK, politics

The Power of the Word

Burger King is having to redesign its ice-cream lids because Rashad Aktar, 27, claimed the image reminded him of the word "Allah" in Arabic script and threatened a personal jihad. This will presumably be the same Allah who hides his name in aubergines, tomatoes, eggs, beans, potatoes, watermelons and an albino tiger fish.

Mr Aktar is described as a "business development manager". I wouldn't really want him developing mine, though I do wonder how he came to be in the — non-halal — Burger King in the first place.

Technorati Tags: culture, society, religion

Hey, I Know What, Let's Do Some More Managing

Nobody could deny . . .

[PAUSE]

. . . See? I told you nobody could deny . . . that "management" "science" is one of the great curses of the last half-century, neither qualifying as science nor assisting in management but merely existing to generate bullshit. Great companies (like Apple) become great because they do great things. Lousy companies (like Microsoft) become lousy because they are more interested in "management" than in what they do.

(Yes, Microsoft is richer than Apple. Nicholas van Hoogstraten is rich.)

Note that I say "management", not management. They're different. Management is a necessary part of a system. "Management" is a process run out of control. The ex-Rolls-Royce turnaround wizard Tony Roulstone put his finger on it the other day: "The big problem is when the process takes over the system".

Remind you of anything?

Remind you of almost everything?

Now Will Shipley (Omni Group founder, code wiz and top banana at Delicious Monster) has embedded a crucial piece of business advice in the middle of an eloquent but standard-issue polemic against the Palm Treo, which has mightily displeased him. If everyone involved in "management" were to read it, our culture might just possibly take a turn for the better.

But they won't, of course; just as the creationists are far too busy praying to read some science.

We Will Get Fooled Again

For an intelligent and moving account of what (may have) changed after the Miami New Orleans (that's what comes of writing in the middle of the night while listening to Randy Newman singing Miami) debacle, read this. As Matthew Kirschenbaum writes, "let's hope he's right".

I doubt if he will be. Miami no no, New Orleans (my attention wandered. Now where did I put that Ritalin?)
may have exposed "the illusion that words can substitute for real work and real knowledge", but will it really have "ended" it? The people of America have had ample evidence over the decades that spin, hype, bluster and rodomontade are just those, and nothing but. But still they buy them. The same thing goes for the British, as the government lies, twiddles, fiddles and boasts. The same thing goes for people all over the world, who would rather suck lies from the political tit than face the truth. We are none the wiser. We do not learn from experience.

And one of the things we do not learn from experience is that we do not learn from experience. I can't see how Miami can be any different.