Archive for July, 2007
Purity rings and hats of meat: what’s God got to do with it?
The Silver Ring Thing case has been thrown out of court on the entirely reasonable grounds that wearing a purity ring is as much a part of mainstream Christianity as wearing a hat made of meat. The only downside is that my plans to send my own child to school dressed as either a ninja or a pirate to honour the Flying Spaghetti Monster have been ruined by the judgement.
As ever, online comments prove that people never let the article get in the way of their opinions. From the Daily Mail’s article on the case:
Last year, Muslim Shabina Begum, 15, fought to wear a jilbab - a long loose gown - in class, and earlier this year a 12-year-old who cannot be named battled a Buckinghamshire girls’ school for the right to wear a full-face veil. Both were granted legal aid, and both lost their cases.
Presumably that was too far down the article for the commenters to read. Here’s genius number one.
Would not dare ban the ring if it was any other relgion than christrianity. What a country that denies its own culture and promotes others.
Our own culture? The Silver Ring Thing is American, and was created by a youth minister in 1995. It arrived in the UK in 2004.
Come in number two!
Another case of religious freedom for anyone but Christians…
This is not a religious thing. It’s a business thing. Irrespective of its intentions, The Silver Ring Thing is a business that sells costume jewellery, clothing, DVDs and training courses - and the girl at the centre of this case is the daughter of two key figures in the UK franchise for that business. That SRT claims to be non-profit is irrelevant: it’s not a registered charity, and therefore its status is identical to any other limited company. It’s no different to a McDonalds.
Actually, that’s a thought - a marketing opportunity for your local burger bar. Jesus was a fisher of men, yeah? Well, that means preventing kids from eating Filet-O-Fish in class is a breach of their right to religious expression! Yeah!
Let’s backtrack. School has uniform policy, kid breaks uniform policy by wearing costume jewellery, kid gets away with it until she recruits a bunch of other kids to buy the same jewellery from her parents’ business, kid claims religious persecution and nearly costs the school £12,000 in legal fees. What a nice, heartwarming story. Maybe the Beeb should rewrite its intro:
A 16-year-old girl was not discriminated against when she was banned from modelling her parents’ jewellery range in class, the High Court has ruled.
Jon from London, you’re a breath of fresh air:
The school isn’t banning the universally accepted symbol of Christianity - pupils can wear a crucifix if they so choose. It is banning, under its existing rules, a piece of jewellery - the purpose of which was almost unknown in this country until all the free publicity generated by this court action. A court action started by Lydia’s parents (who also just happen to be the UK agents for the movement’s founders in the US - from whose webshop the ring can be exclusively purchased along with a range of other expensively priced ‘merchandise’).
Update, 18 July.
As Simon Pickstock points out over at the PC Answers blog, Ministry Of Truth uncovered key information that changes the story completely, and it’s appalling that MOT’s information hasn’t been reflected in any of the subsequent coverage:
It’s a shame that traditional news sources can’t be so thorough in their reporting, especially when it makes the front page of so many papers.
I wish my grass was emo. Then it’d cut itself
If your dog’s dug holes in the lawn, don’t do what I did and buy super magic grass-o-lawn seeds, or whatever they’re called - the ones that promise fast results. Because once the new grass has grown, it keeps on growing. And growing. And growing. Normal grass needs a lawnmower; I think this stuff needs Agent Orange.
The great pineapple dessert conspiracy: good news at last
Last year, I wrote about a threat to the very fabric of civilisation: the disappearance of pineapple yoghurts and pineapple jelly cubes from supermarket shelves. I haven’t been back to the subject for a while because - hurrah! - I discovered a nearby ASDA that wasn’t part of the conspiracy, and I’ve been able to source Hartley’s Pineapple Jelly from there.
It was too good to be true, of course, and now even ASDA’s succumbed to the conspiracy. Pineapple jelly no more.
So I wrote to Premier Foods, the firm that owns Hartley’s. And they told me this:
We are currently supplying Sainsbury and Morrisons with this product. We
deliver into their central warehouses so if you do not see the product on
the shelves, if you ask at customer services they can order it in for you
from their warehouse.Sainsbury careline number: 0800 636262
Morrisons careline number: 0845 6116111
Order while you can, people. Order while you can.
More on Manhunt 2
There’s a nice, balanced Manhunt 2 piece on Eurogamer by someone who’s actually played it.
If there’s a conclusion to be gained from my brief time with Manhunt 2, it’s that Rockstar appears to have been naïve and reckless when, considering the microscope its predecessor fell under, it should have been cautious, clever and alert.
Bring the noise
There are endless “best song” polls and discussions online, but I haven’t seen any that focus on noises - the little bursts of sound that elevate a song from “all right” to “blimey”. A few examples:
- The blast of feedback in London Calling by the Clash
- The beep in Beep by Pussycat Dolls
- Pretty much anything going on in the background of a Public Enemy song
You get the idea. I don’t think guitar effects or other instrumental effects should count - so no room for the mighty “Der Der!” bit from Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, and no room for the superb keyboard sound from Keane’s Is It Any Wonder or some of Edge’s infinite guitar U2 stuff - and I’d rule out spliced songs too (so no “take me back to dear old blighty” from The Smiths’ Queen Is Dead) but I reckon bizarre backing tracks of found sounds fit the bill, so I’d include Timbaland’s work on the current Justin Timberlake track (which is largely a collection of breathing noises).
Any others?
Video nasties: when publicity stunts go wrong
I’m sure you all know this already, but I’m indebted to Total Film’s Jamie Graham for adding to the sum of useless but mildly interesting stuff that floats around my head. I always thought that the 1980s video-nasty panic originated in the tabloids, but Graham’s piece in the current TF points out that it was largely due to a publicity stunt that backfired.
It all started with Driller Killer and Cannibal Holocaust. The lurid ads for the former caused a lot of complaints, but the distributor for Cannibal Holocaust decided to kick things up a notch. Posing as an outraged member of the public, the distributor wrote to Mary Whitehouse expressing shock and horror that such filth was available for purchase. The distributor helpfully included a copy of the video so Whitehouse could be shocked too.
Whitehouse did exactly what the distributor hoped and went ballistic, but the issue gathered momentum, the tabloids seized on it and inevitably, there were demands that Something Should Be Done. That resulted in the Video Recordings Act, the expanded role of the film censors and notoriety for the 30-odd titles dubbed Video Nasties, but it also created the system that recently banned the computer game Manhunt 2.
The moral of the story? While it’s fun to wind up the self-appointed guardians of public morality in an attempt to boost sales, once you’ve wound them up you can’t always stop ‘em. Headline-chasing games developers might want to bear that in mind.
Keep taking the stone tablets
I think the writer of this piece is getting a bit carried away:
THE British Museum yesterday hailed a discovery within a clay tablet in its collection as a breakthrough for biblical archeology - proof of the accuracy of the Old Testament.
A tablet that verifies the entire Old Testament? Blimey. So it’s a giant tablet’o'facts? Er, not quite.
The cuneiform inscription in a tablet dating from 595BC has been deciphered for the first time - revealing a reference to an official at the court of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, that proves the historical existence of a figure mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah.
It is rare evidence in a non-biblical source of a real person, other than kings, featured in the Bible.
And that’s it. It’s fascinating from a historical perspective and of course, it’s a big deal in biblical scholarship circles, but it hardly justifies the opening paragraph.
Apple drops the ludicrous QuickTime tax
According to Digg and various tech blogs (I haven’t downloaded it yet to check), the latest update for Apple’s QuickTime software (7.2) has an amazing new feature: you can watch things in full screen mode without having to pay for the QuickTime Pro upgrade or arse about with AppleScripts.
Ding dong, the QuickTime Tax is dead. About bloody time too.
Panic on the runways of Glasgow
Squander Two notes a cruel irony of the Glasgow airport attacks: the terrorists may have been ineffective, but the airport and authorities’ response - keeping all inbound passengers shut in their planes for several hours - led to six hospitalisations and 14 people needing medical treatment.
Anyone stuck for five hours out the front of the airport, where the bomb actually hit? Nope. Any of the people who gave the terrorist a good kicking, thereby becoming a part of the event themselves, locked up for five hours and denied food, water, fresh air, and medication? Nope. The only people locked up were the ones on planes on the opposite side of the building…
Of course, it would have been irresponsible to let the passengers off until the authorities were certain there weren’t any bombs waiting for them in the airport, but they didn’t start moving people until 9.30pm (the attack happened at 3pm, ish) and didn’t finish until 2am. At which point everyone was sent home? Nah, they were bussed to the SECC.
Online shops “crap at customer service” shocker
From the “confirming what we already know” department comes a press release from Fasthosts:
A staggering 78 per cent of British consumers have been disappointed by a slow response to a customer service email enquiry, with the average consumer sending three emails before receiving a satisfactory response, according to research released today by Fasthosts Internet Ltd…
More than 30 per cent of consumers surveyed said they regularly wait three days for a reply, while nine per cent have waited up to a week and even two per cent reported it can regularly take up to a month. Interestingly, men are statistically more likely to receive a quicker response (21 per cent regularly receiving a reply within six to 12 hours).
The average consumer (51 per cent of the survey group) sends three emails before receiving a satisfactory reply to their enquiry, while 33 per cent say they have sent up to 10 emails about a single enquiry. Of the latter group, men seem to be the most persistent sex, with 5 per cent more men than women sending up to ten emails; while women are more likely to abandon emails in favour of telephoning the company.