Violetta Crisis

In the spirit of Anton Vowl's Winterval Cards over at The enemies of reason:

That urge to leave angry comments in any available space, even though the writer you're annoyed at isn't going to read your insights and everyone else will think you're a prat? It's not just an internet thing:



From Marianne Hester's Lewd Women and Wicked Witches

Ok, so it's within the bounds of possibility that the reader had genuinely linked two thoughts in their brain and was worried they wouldn't remember, just as they hadn't remembered to buy any paper before starting their course. This one, however, is pure spite:



From Nancy S. Love's Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity

These are just the ones I found today. Anyone else found a good one?

Technically I don't have time for this but I have two flimsy justifications to hand:

1. I'm making pea soup with dried peas that are... 6 years past their best before date. I can't go to the library until they're soft enough to eat, and they've already been boiling for nearly 90 mins.
2. I haven't posted anything here for ages and need to kick-start the blogging. This seems an easy (if self-indulgent) way and hopefully more worthwhile and interesting posts will begin to flow.

So then, the method is explained fully over at Pop Sensation and similar ideas have been pinging about Facebook etc. for a while. The following list is the product of shuffling my "good stuff" playlist, which excludes all the sample RP telephone calls and business negotiations I use for teaching. I don't consider this to be cheating.

Violetta Crisis: The Soundtrack

Opening credits:	Live Forever - Oasis	A very optimistic point of view and a very good song.
Waking up:	Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks	Isn't there a film where someone wakes up to this? It's a great opening riff to start your day with.
First day of school:	Sorted for E's and Whizz - Pulp	Hmmm. Well there was none of that at my C of E primary school but I guess it clearly conveys the general bewildered wanting-to-call-your-mother feeling.
Falling in love:	If I ever lose my faith in you - Sting	There are dozens of songs I've listened too obsessively whilst falling in love. This was never one of them.
Breaking up:	Bitch - Meredith Brooks	Yes, yes I was.
Prom:	Go let it out - Oasis	I always hated school / uni discos. In this scene, I'm relaxing in the grounds with an illicit bottle of vodka.
Mental breakdown:	When Logics Die - Soulwax	Perfect!
Driving:	Rip her to Shreds - Blondie	I don't drive, but this is a good song for stomping about angrily to.
Flashback:	Half the lies you tell aren't true - The Stereophonics	Oooh, a resentful flashback
Getting back together:	The Time is Now - Moloko (orig. album, not the remix)	Appropriate lyrics and not at all sappy.
Wedding:	Love and Affection - Joan Armatrading	Incredibly that's the one of three real possibilities. The others are "Dancing in the Moonlight" by Thin Lizzy or "Ava Adore" by The Smashing Pumpkins.
Birth of child:	Common People - Pulp	It had to be on the soundtrack somewhere, but why here?
Final battle:	C'mon People - Paul McCartney	...which I listen to when battling my own apathy. Not a bad choice.
Death scene:	Shiver - Coldplay	My favourite Coldplay song, but far too uplifting to die to.
Funeral song:	Save Tonight - Eagle-eye Cherry	Well now you're just taking the...
End credits:	Hazy Shade of Winter - The Bangles	I'm seeing... skeletal trees and swooping shots of a fog-filled Lake District.

Personally, I'd have swapped the beginning and end credits (having been born in the middle of winter), and played Boston's "More than a feeling" at the prom (cheesy, but it has to be done) and Pink Floyd's "Fearless" at the funeral.
I now need to pick out a good song for a "essay-planning montage with music". Or I could waste less time and actually do the bloody work. Hmmm.

I'm not particularly impressed with this BBC story on the events in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester today. For a start, they've given all readers a clear view of one side's banner, with a fairly appealing slogan (if you don't know much about the EDL), right at the top of the page.
Secondly, I'm not sure about the accuracy of their numbers. From what I could see of the EDL group (I'm short, but I was there a while and tried my best to get an overview of the situation) there were never more than 90 - 100 members. The BBC estimates 2000 "protesters" in total in the gardens, though whether they counted everyone or just people with placards, I don't know, but says the EDL were outnumbered 3 to 1. How?
Ok, so those are minor points and I could be wrong about the numbers. This mistake, on the other hand, is unarguably idiotic and someone deserves a slap for it. Defence? Democratic? Same difference, right?

Against: I'm not sure that protests and demos really convince anyone of anything. The only message people get is "Here's a protesting rabble of jobless loudmouths".

For: According to who? The usual Have Your Say / Daily Mail commenters maybe, and they'll downplay and belittle any campaign.

Against: I definitely don't want members of the EDL to come to harm. We have to be more civilised and understanding than them or we're just giving them ammo. We can't have anything that looks like Britain's coming apart at the seams.

For: So the more pacifists there the better, surely?

Against: There must be something more original we can do, with a message that'll appeal to borderline BNP supporters.

For: But what? And until then, are you just going to sit at home reading about street battles in 1920s Hamburg?

Against: I'm small and scared.

For: Fucking get over it you wuss.

...this year's winner of the Clumsiest Headline Award, with an additional honorable mention in the Articles with a Pro-Death Bias category:

Cervical cancer jab girl died from unrelated chest tumour as researcher calls vaccine plan a 'mass experiment'

By Daniel Martin and David Derbyshire
Last updated at 12:59 PM on 01st October 2009

(Article and headline may be subject to change without prior notice.)

Hello there!

Shameless self-promoter that I am, I have three blogs at the moment:

• Tatty Jackets covers (mostly) out-of-print books from German flea markets, looking at what Germans of the past thought about the UK / USA.
• This blog is the preferred dumping ground for self-indulgent griping about the state of the media, politics, anti-science loudmouths anti-postmodern loudmouths and anything else that's got on my nerves (plus links to people who say it all much better than can).
• The Teacher's Bag covers EFL teaching tips, whinges and related matters.

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There's something iffy about one of the comments on Carole Malone's witty, intelligent, original, brave and thought-provoking* report on immigration.
There are actually some intelligent remarks made in News of the World comments and due to the absence of scoring system, they aren't relegated to the very last page. Some people have pointed out hairline fractures** in her argument - something you don't often see over at the Daily Mail, for example.
Then there's the usual gushing praise from people who claim she's put into words what everyone else has been too afraid to say (so why did I get the feeling I'd heard every sentence at least 100 times before in every British pub?). And then there's this:

Nonense this country is full of workshy british people, you dont work, icome here and have good monies off goverment
By mikael. Posted July 26 2009 at 3:43 PM.

Now, as an EFL teacher (English as a Foreign Language), I'm somewhat baffled by this writing sample. On the one hand, non-native speakers often have problems with prepositions, particularly knowing when to use "of", "off" and "from". Missing the 'n' from government is also understandable, as is the misuse of an uncountable noun. On the other hand, I'm surprised that the same person wrote "this country is full of", when "full from" is often heard, even from advanced learners, and "workshy" is very advanced vocabulary indeed.
Writing fake immagrunt-inglish to prove a point is a lot harder than it looks.

* This may not represent the view of every reader. Others may assume that she went round eating the brains of drunk BNP supporters and then vomited onto the page.
** See Tabloid Watch for detailed examination.

Quite a few blogs have already covered the PCC's impotent hand-wringing over the Scottish Sunday Express' pointless bile-spouting piece attacking Dunblane survivors. I think they've come up with a brilliant get-out-of-punishment free card which I intend to use at every opportunity. Behold:

ME: I know I stole your car and drove it through your living room window, killing your entire family, but it was a crime so serious that no apology could remedy it so... whaddaya gonna do?

RECENTLY BEREAVED: The humiliation you face is worse than any possible penalty. Justice has been served.

Caption from this Daily Mail rant (which was summed up beautifully over at The Daily Quail):

How many of Mark Thompson's private sector equivalents have his gold-plated pension and recession-proof budget, courtesy of the taxpayer?

Even I, fanatic expat supporter of the idea of a non-commercial national broadcaster, have to admit that the answer is "probably none". Of course most people responsible for a private-sector organisation of that size are paid much, much more that Mr. Thomas. On the other hand they are - by definition - not paid courtesy of the taxpayer. Clever boys...

(Also, my internal red pen is telling me that "to down play" is not standard English. It should be either one word or a phrasal verb, no?)

Looks like the pink-painted random opinion generator which spews out articles for the Daily Mail's awful Femail section could do with some fresh input. The "staff" have changed their minds about those dresses and I'm sure this isn't the last we'll see of them either. I guess now that BGT is over, "femails" will be deprived of something to talk about until the next big frock occassion comes along.
If newspaper sections were people, this would be the monotonously catty elderly aunt who is still going on about Our Shirley's wedding dress 15 years after the divorce.

There doesn't seem to be an evil right-wing agenda to this so I'm taking it as evidence of massive staff cuts, overwork, lack of proof reading, lack of interest on one's own output and also general rubbishness. From the Daily Mail website today, linking to this story, by a journalist who's not quite as ignorant as whoever typed out that title:



1. It's just a long red dress. It's absolutely nothing like what you're comparing it to, as shown by your own pictures.

2. It's "Jessica Rabbit", as in "Mrs Jessica Rabbit", married to Roger Rabbit. That woman there, in the picture in the middle of the blasted story, is clearly not a rabbit. If in doubt, look for these:




3. I would have been interested in the dresses anyway. They're nice dresses in a variety of styles and I sometimes like to look at dresses I can't afford and wouldn't be able to walk in anyway. You could have attracted someone who is not part of your regular readership. So why did you have to go and make it crap? Do you hate your job that much?

David Cameron has pointed out that the BNP "are not pleasant people". Well done him. On the other hand, the same Q&A session brought up this:

A mother raised the issue of her two children not knowing what it was to be British because they did not learn history at school.

Mr Cameron said: “It is one of the great betrayals of school children that we have swept away with narrative history.

“We should be proud of what we have achieved as a country. Teaching people about the British Empire does not mean covering up the bad things that happened. It means having an honest explanation about the good and the bad.”

Now, I'm seriously contemplating a whole academic career of looking at narrative history and the problems it throws up, especially when it's the main way that history is spoon-fed to children, and especially when one of the aims is to "be proud of what we have achieved as a country". Naturally it would be unthinkable to cover the history of the British Empire without bringing up "the bad things that happened", but simply covering the negative sides isn't necessarily enough.

I'm currently reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which has some brilliant observations about the way in which atrocities can be trivialised or brushed over, even when the events are described accurately (very long quote coming up, but it didn't seem fair to cut it down):

Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multi-volume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus’s route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”
That is one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. [...]
One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.
But he does something else - he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important - it should weigh very little in out final judgements; it should affect very little what we do in the world.
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others, This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographical information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the mapmaker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economical or political or racial or national or sexual.
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker’s technical interest is obvious (“This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation - for short-range, you’d better use a different projection”). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not an intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations.

I don't have enough information on current history teaching in schools, and I know that many people are scathing of the 'transferable skills' approach which has taken time away from providing children with an overview of British history. On the other hand, I don't want to see a return to the situation 100 years ago, when history was taught to the proles primarily to foster unquestioning patriotism and respect for the all-important drive for 'progress'. I'd much rather children learned that one narrative, from a single narrator, is never enough to understand past events, that every historian has a point of view and limits to their knowledge and understanding, and that critical thinking skills are the only real protection against the bullshit they'll have to deal with when they enter adulthood.

It doesn't surprise me all that much that the leader of the Conservative Party might prefer the Victorian approach.

First up is a new post on Tatty Jackets, the first of many extracts from Raubstaat England (which I mentioned here a while back).

The second thing is even more nerdy as it's a dialogue from the 1971 edition of Englisch für Sie which I've made into a movie, via the quite brilliant site xtranormal. I can see myself wasting quite a lot of my life on there.

A later edition of Englisch für Sie can be found on Google books. It contains some of the most entertaining and useful dialogues I've ever found in an English textbook. The one in the movie is from page 34.

Now here's surprise:

• It's a story about public funds being wasted.
  
• It contains a quote from the Taxpayers' Alliance.
  
• It suggests that the findings are just common sense.
  
• It's linked to from the front page under the sarcastic heading: Science advances - ducks 'like water'
  
• There's no evidence that the words 'like water' appeared in the original research.
  
• An amusing picture of a duckling takes up rather a lot of space.
  
• You have to wait until the end of the article to find out the real, useful point of the research.
  
• In no way can the title be considered an accurate summary of these scientific findings.
  

So in which tabloid can this shrieking piece of anti-public-funded-science fluff be found?

The Guardian

On the other hand, at least they're not warning working mums that their house-husbands might be cheating on them.

I'm definitely far too busy to be rambling about the blogosphere any longer. Here are a few things that stuck to my shoes:

• The BNP have used stock photos on a campaign leaflet, alongside your typical voter testimonial guff. Over at Newspeak they've tracked down the originals and it's quite clear to anyone glancing over the license that they should not have been used in this way. I've been dealing with open source / stock photo licenses and the like quite a lot recently and pretty much all of them protect the models from being made to look like criminals, evangelical customers or supporters of a particular set of opinions. It's not hidden away in any kind of small print and there's no way that kind of misuse could be accidental.


• This Guardian article provides a side to the expenses row that isn't as well publicised as it should be, no doubt because it proves how some journalists are devastating fantastic and others smell of poo.


• Finally, if I ever put together a book of newspaper / website cuttings to show to the grandchildren (or local schoolkids forced to interview nursing home inmates about the olden days) this image from the BBC News front page is definitely going to be included:
  
  
  
  I can't imagine a better combination of stories to sum up the first half of 2009.

Right then, back to work I go.

After a full week of abstinence I finally caved in and spent a while tittering at FAIL Blog. Someone's sent in the logo for a brand of sausages we saw everywhere in Prague.

That reminded me, a good 18 months after the event, that I also took a photo. Mine's better because it shows the delightful white drips which later got removed from the signs:

First of all, I've put another book up on Tatty Jackets.

Secondly, I'm a bit bemused by the controversy - if there is indeed a fire lurking behind the Daily Mail's industrial smoke machine - surrounding the BBC's Robin Hood series. I seem to remember some previous grumblings about them making it all dumbed down and relevant (as if making a program no-one's interested in would be a better use of the license fee) but it's the introduction of a martial arts expert that's caused the latest kerfuffle. Hang about, that should read "black martial arts expert".

Now, I can sometimes be a stickler for historical accuracy, but it only has steam coming out of my ears when it's a rubbish, misleading reenactment in what's supposed to be a serious documentary. This is fiction. It's a fictional series loosely based around a character who has appeared in lots of other fiction. Absolutely none of his appearances can be considered more 'accurate' than the others.

Maybe some people would disagree and claim that you can trace a likely candidate for the 'real' Robin Hood, find his mortal remains, discover his height and build, run DNA tests, reconstruct his face, pin down exactly what years he was alive and dress him only in the fashion of the time, in the materials that would have been available. Above all, make sure he speaks only medieval English, in his local dialect. Oh, and perfect teeth are not an option.

Does this sound like any Robin Hood you've ever seen? A quick image search reveals variety of hair colours and facial hair arrangements, shoes ranging from hobnailed and durable, to ridiculously pointy:

There's been a futuristic Robin Hood, a vain, idiotic Robin Hood whose band was led by Maid Marion (also on the BBC) and I don't think that was considered a problem. Nor do I recall howls of protest when Disney "reinvented" Friar Tuck as a bear.

This process of making stories more relevant to the audience is not a feature of modern political correctness or dumbing down. It's been carried out in various art forms for centuries. Artists have always sought to present characters in a new light, to make their audience think and see new aspects of the stories or morals they portray. That's the whole damn point of art - that's what separates fiction from fact. Do an image search for Helen of Troy or the Virgin Mary (ignoring any result involving toast) and you'll see how their clothes and hairstyles and stance were altered as tastes changed. Those medieval manuscripts that every European country is so proud of - most of those are rehashed old tales, chopping and splicing stories from different centuries and different areas, changing names, adding or removing characters. Digressing from these 'original' stories isn't some kind of travesty or a betrayal of our heritage. It's merely continuing an artistic process that those manuscripts were one small part of.

I only read through a few of the readers' comments before deciding that life is too short for that kind of thing but I still found one worth getting very, very angry about.

Well what a surprise, the BBC does it again. They won't be happy until they have completely removed all traces of native English culture from our land by brainwashing the public, gradually introducing anti English and dare I say it anti White propaganda; and by the way, its not racist to highlight the concerns of white people who want to hold on to their own culture!

Why is it suddenly racist to say I'm proud to be White? It's not racist to openly say I'm proud to be Black!

Why is it racist to say I love my country and my culture? It's not racist for a Black person to say I'm proud my homeland and my culture!

Having other races and faiths in the UK is fine, but don't tell me I'm racist for being proud of who I am!

These issues are a concern when we have the BBC trying to rewrite history in an attempt to put other cultures first!
Click to rate Rating 234

- John, Birmingham, England, 28/3/2009 14:52

Now, David Harewood was born in Birmingham. He has British citizenship, and no other. The legends of Robin Hood are as much a part of his cultural heritage as of any other Brit. We could of course decide that only actors who can prove that all of their ancestors since the reign of King John were born on English soil are worthy enough to play these characters. On the other hand, that would result in Robin Hood disappearing from our screens altogether. Then we'd have a real example of 'native English culture' being lost.

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As always, my heartfelt thanks go to MacGuffin and all other bloggers who trawl their way through the tabloids so the rest of us don't have to.

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