That’s not a paywall. That’s a taking-the-piss-wall

After reading Mupwangle’s comment regarding The 4 of Us (in the Anorak’n'Roll thread further down the page), I decided to try and find out from the horse’s mouth why the band went completely off the radar in the mid-90s. There isn’t much online, but I did find a link to a recent interview in Hot Press (Ireland’s equivalent of the NME) that might have been worth reading. Unfortunately it turns out that the piece is behind a paywall, and there’s not even an extract, not even a paragraph, to indicate whether it’s going to be worth paying to read. So how much does Hot Press expect me to pay?

This article is now part of the hotpress.com archive. To access this article you need to subscribe to hotpress.com for the bargain price of €20 or be a subscriber to Hot Press Magazine.

Even by Irish standards, twenty euros seems rather pricey.

Who needs facts when you have faith?

There’s a truly extraordinary article by AN Wilson in today’s Daily Mail which, after something of an online storm, has been tweaked – so it’s no longer illustrated with a picture of Hitler, as it was this morning.  I’m not going to link to it because I’m increasingly convinced that the Mail runs really crazy stories for no other reason than to boost traffic.

It’s incredible, though.

The trouble with a ‘scientific’ argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts

Imagine people relying solely on empirical facts!

Mr Wilson then compares scientists with their empirical facts to Dr Mengele, and suggests that Science = Hitler. I’m not making this up.

The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth

Here was me thinking one of the differences was that Hitler was a crazy motherfucker. Apparently not.

I am not suggesting that any British scientists are currently conducting experiments comparable to those which were allowed in Nazi Germany or in Soviet Russia. But I see the same habit of mind at work in Professor Nutt and his colleagues as made those mad scientists of the 20th century think they were above the moral law which governs the rest of us mortals.

Professor Nutt dared to suggest that government drugs policy was based on politics rather than reality. That’s not quite Mengele.

In fact, it is the arrogant scientific establishment which questions free expression. Think of the hoo-ha which occurred when one hospital doctor dared to question the wisdom of using the MMR vaccine.

That’ll be the hoo-hah which occured when one doctor made shit up and newspapers ran with it, seriously damaging the vaccination programme for no good reason and exposing children to potentially fatal illnesses. The worst offender? Yes, the Daily Mail.

The point here is not whether he was right or wrong

He was wrong. And here we are, years later, still suggesting that Wakefield is a victim rather than an offender (with pure intentions, perhaps, but the effect was still parents abandoning vaccination and exposing children to unnecessary risks). Scientists? It’s the newspapers we should be scared of.

Vaccines bad, m’kay?

Here we go again. Malcolm Coles argues that media reports are doing an MMR, this time with the cervical cancer vaccine:

Let’s be clear. The only reason parents are worried, boycotting the vaccine, and demanding suspensions of the vaccination program is because the media whipped up a storm with no evidence whatsoever.

Lily Allen, Halo 3 ODST

Today’s Guardian reports that Lily Allen’s blog had been removed due to online abuse, but neglects to mention that the abuse was over her own copyright infringement.

Earlier in the day Lily Allen, one of the few younger artists to speak out against online piracy, said she was dropping her public campaign against copyright theft because “the abuse was getting too much”. She had set up a blog “It’s Not Alright” – in reference to her first album Alright, Still – collating artists’ views after her comments that “filesharing is a disaster” for new talent. In its statement last night the FAC, expressed support for Allen and condemned “the vitriol that has been directed at her in recent days”.

Anyone else spot the irony of artists criticising the vitriol directed at, er, copyright thieves? It’s hard to disagree with my esteemed colleague Karl Hodge on this one:

http://bit.ly/4xE2qg – Lily’s blog down, comments gone, her wolf-cry of abuse taken at face value, discussion ends, revisionism begins.

The link he’s included is to The Word magazine, which shouts “misogyny” – even though the abuse was largely on other sites, not Allen’s; the abuse only became intense when she ignored reasonable comments; and the abuse is a fraction of the shit heaped on Lars Ulrich over Napster. As far as I’m aware, Mr Ulrich is not a lady.

It’s pathetic, really: the official story is already that brave copyright fighter Lily Allen had to take down her blog after the nasty internet people called her names, when the real story is that confused copyright infringer Lily Allen deleted her blog in a fit of pique after internet people caught her “stealing” other people’s content.

Fuck’s sake.

Meanwhile, the turkeys have overwhelmingly voted in favour of Christmas. Or rather, the artists have voted in favour of three-strikes against file sharers. This will, of course, mean the end of illegal file sharing and the return of bloated musical profits, and is in no way a Canute-esque stand that won’t change a bloody thing. At least Canute was trying to prove that he *couldn’t* stop the tide.

On a completely different note, Halo 3 ODST is an interesting (flawed) experiment. I don’t think I’ve played a first-person shooter inspired by Rashomon before, and it’s an interesting way of telling a story in an action game. But by god, it’s a short story. If someone as crap at gaming as me can get through it in a few hours, l33t players will no doubt get through it in ten minutes. As Mupwangle has rightly pointed out, that’s because it was originally a Halo 3 expansion pack; unfortunately it hasn’t been priced accordingly.

It’s still fun though, if you like wandering around in the dark listening to jazz.

Perhaps it’s Scotland’s politicians that need “rebalancing”

Oh joy, the new Scottish booze legislation comes into force today. Supermarkets are reorganising their displays, pubs are spending thousands of pounds on applying for new licenses (which, in the case of North Lanarkshire, mean some 25 pubs won’t legally be able to sell booze from today due to delays in the application process. Council says don’t worry, cops say WE WILL BUST YOU) and staff will require mandatory training to make sure they don’t encourage drinkers to have another drink. Imagine it! Pub staff asking if you want another drink!

Apparently the move, which makes my life that little bit more annoying by preventing me from buying wine or beer when I do my normal 8am shop (you can’t buy booze before 10am now, which I’m sure will prevent alcoholism) is about “rebalancing” Scotland’s relationship with booze. There’s another bill along on Thursday which will flout EU law by trying to impose price controls on booze too. Rebalancing, again.

Which reminds me of a story.

Barney is a decorator, and he cracks me up. A while back he was telling me about a woman whose house he was working in, or trying to work in: she had one of those really yappy little dogs, and it was driving Barney daft. She did apologise for the dog’s incessant barking, and said she had no idea why it was so hyperactive.

“Oh, I know why it is,” Barney said. “It’s out of balance.”

“Balance?”

“Yeah. Sometimes their wee heads get out of balance, and they become really bad tempered. Easy to fix, though.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“How do you fix it, then?”

“Well, what you need is a little bit of metal. Lead’s best. And what you do is, you put the lead into the dog’s ear and that rebalances it.”

“My goodness! So how do you get the lead into their ear?”

“With a FUCKING GUN!”

I can’t help thinking some of our elected representatives would benefit from a similar procedure.

Mr Ballmer goes to Cupertino

Yesterday, Steve Jobs went to Microsoft. Today, I’ve put Steve Ballmer in the top job at Apple. Can I get through an entire article without mentioning the monkey dance?

Ballmer may be best known online for his infamous Monkey Dance

That’ll be a no, then.

Steve Jobs has moved to Microsoft

Not really. But what would he do if he was there? Let the fun commence:

Unless Windows Mobile 7 is a ground-up rebuild – which we doubt – then Mr Jobs would can it, put the entire development team into a dungeon and refuse to let them out until they built something insanely great.

I love this kind of stuff. Tomorrow – Ballmer goes to Apple!

Remember that Digital Britain thing? Forget it. The government has

Me on Techradar:

Sometimes we think we’re living in Groundhog Day. “We’re going to cut off illegal downloaders!” the government will cry, before abandoning the plans. The next day, “We’re going to cut off illegal downloaders!” The next day… you get the idea.

Guess what’s happened today? That’s right! The government’s going to cut off illegal downloaders!

When readers won’t behave

This is brilliant: The Guardian hosts a reader Q&A with Neal’s Yard Remedies, an ethical beauty/homeopathic remedy company. The readers duly post questions and NY changes its mind about participating. [Via MetaFilter]

Linked below is a book [NY sells] on ‘Homoeopathy for Mother and Baby’. Given that homoeopathy has never been shown to have any effect distinguishable from placebo, do you regard it as ethical to profit from publications which seek to exploit the anxiety of new mothers to sell pseudo-medicines?

Does your part in the MMR scare make you feel guilty? Do you feel bad when you think of the children who have suffered measles and possibly even had brain damage or died because of the scare which you promote?

And journalists wonder why everybody hates them

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but Graham Linehan has beaten me to it: on the 8th of March, the Scottish Sunday Express ran a contemptible piece of shit by Paula Murray about the survivors of the Dunblane massacre. There’s a PDF link here. For some mysterious reason, the paper has wiped the online version. As Linehan writes:

As others have pointed out, the gist of the story is that these kids are showing disrespect to their dead classmates by… being alive.

Here’s an example of Paula’s scoop: “For instance, (name deleted), who was hit by a single bullet and watched in horror as his classmates died, makes rude gestures in pictures he posted on his Bebo site, and boasts of drunken nights out.”

Rude gestures. Boasting. Drunkenness.

As Chicken Yoghurt puts it:

If only the doctors and counsellors who treated the wounds and mental scars of those children all those years ago had had the foresight to say: ‘Now, children, you most now go forth and live the lives of angels, not only in tribute to your dead schoolmates who no doubt would have wanted you to live puritanical lives, but also to avoid the predations of journalists barely worthy of the name who, as soon as you turn 18, will ransack your private lives in search of cheap, revolting scoops.’ All this could have been avoided.

Tim Ireland may have discovered a teeny-weeny little bit of hypocrisy. On her Facebook page, she boasts about getting wasted.

In her attack on Dunblane survivors, Paula Murray castigated and demonised survivors of that tragedy who “boasted about alcoholic binges”, which is EXACTLY what she’s doing here.

Obviously, this is just cherry-picked text, and making a judgement based on these statements alone would be a wrong.

So to back them up, here’s a series of photos of Paula getting pished with her mates

Still, the Press Complaints Commission is on the case.

The editor of the Daily Express, Peter Hill, left the board of the PCC last year following front page and high court apologies from Express Newspapers titles the Daily Express, Daily Star, Sunday Express and Daily Star Sunday over a string of false stories about the disappearance of four-year-old Madeline McCann, which resulted in payments of £550,000 in damages to the McCann family.

Back to Linehan:

The press likes us to believe they’re a properly regulated body, but they’re anything but. First of all, The PCC seems to be a completely toothless organisation by design. It is made up of representatives of the major publishers, who are obviously not inclined to be too hard on themselves. Also, unlike Ofcom and the Advertising Standards Authority, who have easy-to-use complaint forms on their websites, the PCC don’t even accept third party complaints – in other words, unless you are the person named in a printed article, they’re not interested in hearing your opinion. So when faced with an affront to our humanity (which is what I believe this Express story is), there is no official channel for us to register our anger. That’s right – if you are offended by something on TV, Radio or in an advert, you can complain; if you’re offended by something in the print press…well, you’re just going to have to walk it off, because literally no-one wants to know.

While we’re on the subject of contemptible pieces of shit, what’s wrong with this picture? Clue: she isn’t dead yet:

I wonder, what company owns OK?

Copyright ©2009 Northern and Shell Media Publications.

Do they publish anything else? Yep, the Express and Sunday Express. According to the corporate website:

Northern & Shell is determined to maintain all its products and activities as benchmarks of excellence to its readers, customers, advertisers and business partners.

Benchmarks of excellence? Jesus wept.