Walk and Talk the Vote
The West Wing cast reunite for a campaign video. Sweet.
USA
The White House brew house
Barack Obama has started brewing beer in The White House kitchens. There have been so many requests that they’ve now published the recipes, which utilise honey from the first beehives on the White House’s lawns.
Mitt Romney would just buy a brewery, and then have them change their recipe to the blandest, most insipid bilge possible.
via BoingBoing
Michelle Bachmann is making Sounds of Soldiers relevant again
I started writing Sounds of Soldiers on November 1st 2008. It’s a near future travelogue satire on the presumptions and world view of technothrillers which takes place, mostly, after a big dumb war. Given when I started it, I always saw it as what could happen if “the wrong people” won the US elections.
Thankfully Obama won. His presidency may be turning out a huge disappointment, but just imagine how much worse it would have been if McCain/Palin had won. The simplified back story of Sounds of Soldiers was that McCain keeled over after a couple of years in one of the most stressful jobs in the world, Palin took over and the stupid just cascaded from there until the Americans were bombing their European allies and ordering their soldiers to run amok across the continent. This is mostly alluded to, but there is at least one mention of “the mad woman” taking over.
The mad woman was Palin, of course, but now Michelle Bachmann has come along as the Tea Party’s preferred Republican candidate and she may be even more scary. So Sounds of Soldiers is relevant again (well, Palin never went away, I guess Bachmann makes it more relevant).
Sounds of Soldiers is available from
The Solar System for simpletons
Bill O’Reilly is a well known and, sadly, influential US TV pundit. He specialises in a brand of arrogant ignorance which is amusing until you realise that a lot of Americans take it as guiding principles. He recently outdid himself by claiming that tides were evidence for God. When it was pointed out to him that it’s been known for centuries that tides are driven primarily by the Moon (with a 30% or so input from the Sun) he came back with a selection of questions designed to silence his critics-
“How’d the moon get here? Look, you pinheads who attacked me for this, you guys are just desperate. How’d the moon get here? How’d the sun get there? How’d it get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that and Mars doesn’t have it?”
Tough, tough questions. Which have all been answered, of course. Starts with a Bang gives short, coherent answers to all of O’Reilly’s questions. It’s just a shame that neither he nor the majority of his followers will bother to read them and actually learn something.
But, as a bonus, here’s a clip from The Colbert Report which was included in the post-
Will Amazon ban Switzerland?
Amazon is suffering from user fury again, but on a smaller scale than over their behaviour towards Wikileaks. They have recently been deleting books from their Kindle store without giving a reason beyond a generic statement that “these books were removed from sale for violating our content guidelines.” The content guidelines are very vague about what subject matter would be in violation, but the books removed have been primarily about adult incest fantasies. Not a subject that many people are comfortable with but not one which is explicitly barred from their site. What’s more, the banning of books has the appearance of being arbitrary, as other books with similar, or even more bizarre, subjects have not been banned.
Most likely, after a furore about a self-described paedophiles’ handbook a few weeks ago, Amazon have become more nervous about complaints and are knee-jerk jumping to ban almost anything which is complained about. They’re a commercial entity, they have every right to run their business this way. But it could harm them in the long run if they are seen to be doing the censors’ work for them and harming free speech. If the banning net is cast any wider every one of the independent authors publishing through Amazon would have reasons to be nervous. Sounds of Soldiers could be viewed as anti-American (to paraphrase one of the Dilbert collections
On the subject of incest, the upper house of the Swiss parliament has drafted a law which would decriminalise consenting sex between adult family members.
Daniel Vischer, a Green party MP, said he saw nothing wrong with two consenting adults having sex, even if they were related.
“Incest is a difficult moral question, but not one that is answered by penal law,” he said.
There are some obvious jokes about a certain bunch of castaways
Air Manhattan
A bunch of remote controlled plane enthusiasts calling themselves Team Black Sheep shot some great aerial footage of New York. These are the sorts of views we mere mortals would have to steal a helicopter in GTA IV
Can I have one of these to fly around the Lakes when I’m at home some time? Wasdale comes to mind first, but there are a load of other neat valleys I could take it through.
via Jalopnik and Brooklyn Heights Blog
Cropsey
As research for a story idea (which, if written, I’ll probably be releasing under a pseudonym, though it may be as transparent as Gareth Pattinson) I’ve seen the legend of the Cropsey (or Kropsy) Maniac cited as inspiration for more than one story. Amongst these films, and one which I watched last night, is The Burning
The film Cropsey is a documentary about the legend and how it collided with reality in a bunch of child disappearances on Staten Island. The film’s website has more information. I can’t find any other mentions of the legend online except in relation to the film- here’s the Wikipedia article about it– which seems a little odd.
Press release: Manchester author creates a dark Green future for the city
Manchester based author Ian Pattinson imagines a Green future for Manchester after a cataclysmic war rips apart Europe and destroys the United States in Sounds of Soldiers. Returning to the city after five years on the continent reporting on the war, Robert Jones sets out to reconnect with friends and family and find out how life has changed away from the front line. Presented as a travelogue with flashbacks to the war, Robert finds recycling projects, a new sense of community and shadows and ghosts reaching across the Channel for him.
The novella was written as a reaction to the narrow focus of technothrillers and the overblown rhetoric coming from the United States since the 2008 election. “There are a lot of books which create ludicrous wars to make a, usually rightwing, political point. They always concentrate on the politicians and military personnel, the USA always wins and everything returns to normal afterwards. I used
to read a lot of them, but they often left me unsatisfied. I wanted to create a story which looked at the effect on civilians, where there was an aftermath and where the USA didn’t win. Some of the wilder commentary coming out of the States before and since the election of Barack Obama gave me a basis for the war- what if a US government believed some of this stuff and went overboard in reacting to it?”
Sounds of Soldiers is available as a paperback and ebook and can be purchased online at Amazon. Details of all the formats it is available in can be found at http://www.spinneyhead.co.uk/books/
High resolution copies of the book cover image can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/spinneyhead/5123539218/
How do you hang a wall
Written in a notepad somewhere- to be put into a folder I need to start of story ideas- is something along the line of “How would someone steal a valuable piece of graffiti?”
It turns out the answer is straightforward- they’d just chisel out the section of wall and cart it away. This is what happened to a Banksy piece in the huge, long abandoned Packard plant in Detroit. The group that took the wall section- a local arts collective- claim they only did it to protect the art. Others aren’t so sure. Matters are made more complex because ownership of the property isn’t clearcut. Maybe it belongs to a man serving time in California, maybe the owner is the mystery name on documentation, or perhaps the city has the right to reclaim the site for its own ends.
Says Luis Croquer, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, “This may be unprecedented, because in most other cities, you wouldn’t be able to take a wall home… What does it mean to move a wall? And beyond legality, who does the wall really belong to, and now does the art belong to the gallery? To everybody? To nobody? We’re operating in this space where there’s this lawlessness that opens up possibilities that would be much harder to encounter in other cities.”
Tales from Area 51
Lots of Area 51/Groom Lake veterans are popping up to tell tales of working on top secret projects and spy planes in the 50s and 60s as the USAF declassifies material on what was really going on in the Nevada desert. The Los Angeles Times talks to a few of them.
via BoingBoing
Too confusing for Fox News
This advert, with a fairly straightforward and simple message, wasn’t carried by Fox News because they claimed it would be “too confusing” for their viewers.
I’d rather be a pagan loser than a moralistic moron
Apparently the whole of Europe is a disaster zone because we don’t believe in God. Is it any wonder the one dissenting voice at the table looks so exasperated when the other four are so witlessly ignorant.
The CIA and UFOs
via Respectful Insolence, who was mostly linking to this piece about Area 51 veterans. The veterans’ group is called Roadrunners Internationale (be warned, embedded music on the page) and they meet up in Vegas to reminisce about Blackbirds and the like.
There’s crazy, there’s stupid and there’s pompous. And then there’s Glenn Beck 1
Yes, the Obama administration want to kill Glenn Beck. In Glenn Beck’s head. There’s a reason I have a category called American Idiots.
Point of Contact shall feature a character called Ben Glock (unless I change my mind and use the man himself because no parody could be as extremely stupid as he is), who will look like a balloon on a stick propped inside a bad suit and saying the dumbest things possible whilst thinking he’s being clever.
Congratulations to the USA on joining the civilised world 2
More or less. The USA has taken a big step towards having a healthcare system they can be proud of.
I can’t be the only person who’s watched this unfold and felt that the Republicans weren’t opposed for ideological reasons but out of fear. By doing the right thing- making life easier for millions of people- Barack Obama will win a huge number of votes. The Republicans are facing years in the wilderness, no wonder they were scared of health care reform.
Watch this now- Requiem for Detroit
Requiem for Detroit is available on BBC iPlayer until March 20th. You should watch it, it’s incredible.
From being the USA’s fourth largest city in its heyday Detroit has suffered a slow apocalypse, destroyed by- amongst other things- the very cars which made it great. Now nature is reclaiming whole neighbourhoods, schools are closing, historic buildings are decaying and being cannibalised for scrap and the roads are all but empty. Requiem for Detroit takes us for a journey through the city and its history. It’s a powerful, scary film, but with just a hint of optimism at the end.
Rounding up a few links
That conspiracy theory about Labour re-engineering Britain’s population through immigration? (Just read that sentence and try to get your head around the absurdity of what some people want to believe.) It’s utter rubbish, of course, and Five Chinese Crackers does a good job of dismantling it. Just don’t tell the conspiracy theorist who’s trying to Fisk me, he’d invent a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy to quash the original conspiracy theory.
Sometimes, there comes a point in a discussion where you just have to look awkwardly at your feet and shuffle away, like when when the troofer tells you the CIA were responsible for 9/11, or the cab driver tells you he blames the blacks, or when the shouty man on the bus tells you he invented paint. Any rational response would fall on deaf ears. If vague mentions of social benefits of immigration being cut from speeches can be proof of deliberately importing voters, nothing you can say will make a difference.
The Oath Keepers, the scary sort of organisation which appears when people take conspiracy theories too seriously. It sounds like an unwritten part of Sounds of Soldiers.
A battery technology which uses a carbon polymer could be the future of electric cars. One idea is that the car’s body will serve a double purpose by being made out of the battery material.
The Daily Mail and Sunday Times’ climate journalism is made up to suit their climate change denial agenda. Which is a shock and surprise to me. Really.
Lulu will give me a free copy of any book I upload to them by the 16th of next month, to use as a galley copy for proof reading. I do have an urge to collect the short fiction which has appeared on Spinneyhead over the years (and one or two of the comment pieces as well maybe).
South Cheshire Militaire. Which I shall be visiting on Sunday. Because I’m a geek.
That’s cleared away some of the open tabs.
A quick look at the political blogosphere
With an election due soon I thought I should start looking for good British political blogs. I had some fun, found out a lot and worked out some of the background to Sounds of Soldiers through reading US political blogs in the run up to the 2008 election. Perhaps I can do something similar for the UK. A while ago I started adding poliblogs to my Bloglines account and following their updates. Some I’ve been reading since before Christmas, others I haven’t even looked at yet. Here are my impressions of a few of them-
Worst first, I think. I’ve been reading Guy Fawkes’ blog since before Christmas, though it quickly descended into waiting for something worthwhile to read. It hasn’t arrived yet. GFB is a very popular blog, as ‘Guido’ won’t fail to tell you as often as he can. It may have done something to get into that position in the past, but nowadays it’s all about throwing out red meat for his ravenous commenters to rant about. He also has a habit of referring to himself in the third person, which is about right for an obnoxious, self important blowhard. And a dumb one at that, he jumped right on the ‘Climategate’ non-story before Christmas, pretending that the hacked emails somehow negated all the evidence about climate change. I’ll carry on following Guido, but I’m not expecting anything interesting.
And another thing…. is the blog of Tom Harris MP. Unlike Guido, Tom puts some thought into the point of his posts rather than how to score cheap points with them, even if they do occasionally read as if he’s gone through them with an eye for spin. Whilst I don’t agree with many of his points it is nice to see an attempt at communication.
Harry’s Place is full of long, dense posts that probably reward careful reading. It’s just a shame my attention span’s so
Iain Dale is what Guido might be if he wasn’t so desperately trying to impress people. He’s very obviously of the right, and has the occasional point scoring jibe at Labour or the LibDems, but does it with a much lighter touch. You get the feeling that if you were dining with him at Le Caprice the conversation would about something more interesting than how wonderful he thinks he is.
Enough for now. I shall return to this subject again soon. And probably even more until the election.
How to speak teabagger
The creator of this cartoon, Mark Fiore, is getting death threats because of it. Which proves his point.
The White House in 3d
Part 2 of Point of Contact (I know, I haven’t even begun drawing part 1 yet, after Christmas, I promise) has a scene in the oval office. There’s a White House photostream on Flickr, which will be good for detail reference and images of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton to get a good likeness. Even better, there’s a section in the White House museum dedicated to 3d models of the building, key rooms and Air Force One and Marine One.