Thursday 27 September 2007

3.10 to yuma - spoilers

Went to see this last night. I did my usual thing of not recognising people. Didn't recognise Peter Fonda - almost forgivable. Didn't recognise Ben Foster, which is really unforgivable as he is the best thing in the movie. My excuse is he's grown up since I last saw him.

As for the movie, spoilers begin here.

I can comfortably say that it's the most confusing movie I've ever seen. I was musing with my daughter on the way there about why people make westerns nowadays. Unless you have a new interpretation or one that chimes in with the times, the genre is quarried smooth. Well, 3.10 to Yuma is different, that's for sure. The bad guy might not be so bad, but spends a lot of time trying to convince us he's really really bad. That doesn't work so well because Russell Crowe clearly isn't convinced that he's really really bad. Then there are good guys who are semi bad guys, then other bad guys who sort of become good guys and then others are on the side of the good guys and other good guys are on the side of the bad guys. Then the bad guy helps the good guy get him to the train he's going to prison on. Then the bad guy's gang shoot the good guy, then the bad guy shoots the bad guy's gang, and then does he get away or doesn't he. That last bit, the non/getaway is a cop out I reckon, just a bad piece of film making, unless they were leaving the door open for "3.10 to Yuma 2".

I decided in the end that it's either a completely revisionist western in which they haven't blurred the lines between good and evil so much as completely rubbed them out, or, more likely, it's a metaphor for Iraq. It works very well on that level. In Iraq the US is in a complete mess, has no idea who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and ,ast week's bad guys turn out to be this week's good guys, and the whole thing is just utter confusion. If that's what they were thinking, then it's pretty good. If it wasn't, the film's a mess.

Tuesday 25 September 2007

While I'm being a bit political...

... I'll link to this.

It gives me no pleasure...

As a Spurs supporter, I would normally delight in Arsenal getting ensnared in something. But the fact that their ownership has moved partly into Mr Usmanov's hands is not something for any blogging football fan to be happy about. Usmanov has a criminal record and is not happy about the world knowing it. The full story, including the censorship of Craig Murray, Tim Ireland who is back up and blogging here, and their internet hosts, is at Chicken Yoghurt, and the list of bloggers who have linked to the story grows and grows.

For the record, it is currently as follows:

Curious Hamster, Pickled Politics, Harry’s Place, Tim Worstall, Dizzy, Iain Dale, Ten Percent, Blairwatch, Davide Simonetti, Earthquake Cove, Turbulent Cleric (who suggests dropping a line to the FA about Mr Usmanov), Mike Power, Jailhouse Lawyer, Suesam, Devil’s Kitchen, The Cartoonist, Falco, Casualty Monitor, Forever Expat, Arseblog, Drink-soaked Trots (and another), Pitch Invasion, Wonko’s World, Roll A Monkey, Caroline Hunt, Westminster Wisdom, Chris K, Anorak, Mediawatchwatch, Norfolk Blogger, Chris Paul, Indymedia (with a list of Craig Murray’s articles that are currently unavailable), Obsolete, Tom Watson, Cynical Chatter, Reactionary Snob, Mr Eugenides, Matthew Sinclair, The Select Society, Liberal England, Davblog, Peter Gasston Pitch Perfect, Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe, Lunartalks, Tygerland, The Crossed Pond, Our Kingdom, Big Daddy Merk, Daily Mail Watch, Graeme’s, Random Thoughts, Nosemonkey, Matt Wardman, Politics in the Zeros, Love and Garbage, The Huntsman, Conservative Party Reptile, Ellee Seymour, Sabretache, Not A Sheep, Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, The People’s Republic Of Newport, Life, the Universe & Everything, Arsenal Transfer Rumour Mill, The Green Ribbon, Blood & Treasure, The Last Ditch, Areopagitica, Football in Finland, An Englishman’s Castle, Freeborn John, Eursoc, The Back Four, Rebellion Suck!, Ministry of Truth, ModernityBlog, Beau Bo D’Or, Scots and Independent, The Splund, Bill Cameron, Podnosh, Dodgeblogium, Moving Target, Serious Golmal, Goonerholic, The Spine, Zero Point Nine, Lenin’s Tomb, The Durruti Column, The Bristol Blogger, ArseNews, David Lindsay, Quaequam Blog!, On A Quiet Day…, Kathz’s Blog, England Expects, Theo Spark, Duncan Borrowman, Senn’s Blog, Katykins, Jewcy, Kevin Maguire, Stumbling and Mumbling, Famous for 15 megapixels, Ordovicius, Tom Morris, AOL Fanhouse, Doctor Vee, The Curmudgeonly, The Poor Mouth, 1820, Hangbitch, Crooked Timber, ArseNole, Identity Unknown, Liberty Alone, Amused Cynicism, Clairwil, The Lone Voice, Tampon Teabag, Unoriginalname38, Special/Blown It, The Remittance Man, 18 Doughty Street, Laban Tall, Martin Bright, Spy Blog The Exile, poons, Jangliss, Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From?, Imagined Community, A Pint of Unionist Lite, Poldraw, Disillusioned And Bored, Error Gorilla, Indigo Jo, Swiss Metablog, Kate Garnwen Truemors, Asn14, D-Notice, The Judge, Political Penguin, Miserable Old Fart, Jottings, fridgemagnet, Blah Blah Flowers, J. Arthur MacNumpty, Tony Hatfield, Grendel, Charlie Whitaker, Matt Buck, The Waendel Journal, Marginalized Action Dinosaur, SoccerLens, Toblog, John Brissenden East Lower, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Peter Black AM, Boing Boing, BLTP, Gunnerblog, LFB UK, Liberal Revolution, Wombles, Focus on Sodbury…, Follow The Money, Freedom and Whisky, Melting Man, PoliticalHackUK, Simon Says…, Daily EM, From The Barrel of a Gun, The Fourth Place, The Armchair News Blog, Journalist und Optimist, Bristol Indymedia, Dave Weeden, Up North John, Gizmonaut, Spin and Spinners, Marginalia, Arnique, Heather Yaxley, The Whiskey Priest, On The Beat, Paul Canning, Martin Stabe, Mat Bowles, Pigdogfucker, Rachel North, B3TA board, Naqniq, Yorkshire Ranter, The Home Of Football, UFO Breakfast Recipients, Moninski , Kerching, e-clectig, Mediocracy, Sicily Scene, Samizdata, I blog, they blog, weblog, Colcam, Some Random Thoughts, Bel is thinking, Vino S, Simply Jews, Atlantic Free Press, Registan, Filasteen, Britblog Roundup #136, Scientific Misconduct Blog, Adam Bowie, Duncan at Abcol, Camera Anguish, A Very British Dude, Whatever, Central News, Green Gathering, Leighton Cooke (224), , Skuds’ Sister’s Brother, Contrast News, Poliblog Perspective, Parish Pump, El Gales, Noodle, Curly’s Corner Shop, Freunde der offenen Gesellschaft, otromundoesposible, Richard Stacy, Looking For A Voice, News Dissector, Kateshomeblog, Writes Like She Talks, Extra! Extra!, Committee To Protect Bloggers, Liberty’s Requiem, American Samizdat, The Thunder Dragon, Cybersoc, Achievable Life, Paperholic, Creative-i, Raedwald, Nobody’s Friend, Lobster Blogster, Panchromatica (251).

A university degree in plumbing

I was giving a colleague of mine a lift back to Luton Airport - from which he could get back to Belfast more quickly and much more cheaply than I could get back to Sussex, but that's another issue - and we were chatting about the state of things in Higher Education. Notice how I give that Capital Letters, to distinguish it from middle or lower education. He mentioned how difficult it was to get universities to recognise degrees that involved a lot of playing around with boxes (i.e. servers) and how, to a degree, pardon the pun, they are leaving the market behind, because employers want people who can actually do things, as well as think. The same sort of problem dogged the beginning of the course we both teach on, the Open University's TT280,because it was hard to get the university to recognise that it deserved a level two university status - isn't it just training, some asked. Well, there is a particular issue there, which is that anybody can make web pages, but to make web pages well, you have to be able to think. You have to have the skills that any university would recognise as worthy of one its undergraduates - to be able to think critically, analyse, problem solve, etc, etc.

The more general problem though, is that in this country - probably in the rest of the developed post Enlightenment world as well, but I can't vouch for them - we have a serious problem about separating thinking from doing. We're so hung up on dualism that we can't stop ourselves dualising. And when we do that, we have to label one as being "better" "superior", and the other as being "worse" "lower". "Thinking" is seen to be upper, worthy of university status, and "doing" is not only "lower", but to incorporate it into a university degree would contaminate the "higher" thinker to the extent that their thoughts would become worthless. It works the other way as well. Doers are dualists as well as thinkers, and there are plenty of doers who won't touch, let alone open, a book, because it contains all that airy fairy useless theorising stuff that bears no relation to the real world.

I suppose, if you went deeply into the history of it, you'd find the clammy fingerprints of class all over it. The lower classes sweat, the upper classes merely glow. Usually with satisfaction.

Anyway, I wonder what there is intrinsically to prevent there being a degree in plumbing. You need to know a lot to be a good plumber; you need to think a lot too. I know a plumber (actually I know several). He's a good plumber, in terms of putting blowtorch to pipe. He's a very nice man. But his plumbing is often dreadfully slow, and the reason for that is that he doesn't know how to solve problems. And plumbing, apart from the odd bit of blowtorching, is mostly about how to solve problems. how do we idedntify that knocking sound in the boiler? How do we squeeze that pipe round that corner and under that cupboard? How do we get this cemented in tap off that bath? (Yes, it happened in our house). And this guy has really never learned how to approach a problem logically. Maybe he wouldn't have got on very well at university; but in that case his schooling failed him, because of course we had that dualism in our schooling system for so long - grammar school versus (inferior and therefore relatively low funded) secondary modern. And while those labels have gone, we still think far too readily in terms of "academic" versus "vocational". Far too readily.

Saturday 15 September 2007

Low Carbon Ringmer

Ringmer and Ouse Valley Liberal Democrats are launching Low Carbon Ringmer. The website for it is here. It tested my limited skills as a web designer to the, er, limit. I'm particularly limited on the back end, so I was pleased to discover that 1&1, the hosts, do a form builder with its own MySQL backing, and all I had to do was think of the questions. Formatting options are limited, but the colours blend quite well with the site colours. The price you pay is the appearance of a 1&1 advertising page when you send the form. I hope our users in Ringmer find that bearable.

In addition to the site, I hope to cultivate the idea of a web *presence* as opposed to just a web*site*. So I've created flickr, delicio.us and pb-wiki accounts for LCR and will be doing my best to encourage the good citizens of Ringmer, or at least the wired portion of them, to participate as much as possible.

EU referendum

Ming Campbell's call for a referendum on the EU has received quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere, from friends and foes alike. I like the idea, though I wish it had come out in a slightly more coherent way.

One particular reason why I like it is that I think the pro vote would increase if the arguments were properly aired during a campaign, as the LibDem vote itself tends to do at election time. Most British people's opinions of the EU are founded on either ignorance or downright falsehood. I used to teach about the EU when I tutored for the WEA. The first time I tried to teach it in a rational way by talking about the institutions etc, but the class was always getting sidetracked by the latest scandal. So I changed the presentation, because I needed to confront the issue of falsehood straight away. I chose to start with one of those true/false quizzes - the EU wants all pizzas to be square - true or false? The EU wants fishermen to wear hairnets - true or false? Inevitably most of the class said most of them were true. They were in fact all false, but had all been announced as true by [insert name of any tabloid here]. I always told my classes that I was basically pro the idea of the EU, but I didn't in the least mind people continuing to disagree, as long as they did so on the basis of the truth, not the bilge that they are fed daily by the tabloid press.

I then used to go on to the budget. I drew a graph on the board with Richard Branson and Bill Gates down at the bottom, just to get some sort of scale in, then the UK government's budget vaguely in the middle, and then the US government's budget at the top. I then asked my class where they estimated the EU's budget would be. Inevitably, again, they would put it near the top, vastly more than the UK's budget. I would then astonish them by giving them the true figure, which was and remains considerably less than the UK's budget. The figures for this year are for the EU 115b euros, which at today's exchange rate translates into £79.5b. The UK budget for this year is £587b,so the EU budget is around 14% of the UK's. (The US budget is more difficult to track down but this page from the White House suggests around £1.4 trillion.)

So how do these stories get in the papers they would say. There must be a grain of truth in them. So I would illustrate by taking the story of fishermen and hairnets. I don't know that this is what happened but I can guarantee that something like it did. A civil servant in Brussels is given the job of harmonising health and safety rules among the EU countries. She breaks the job down into a variety of fields. One of them is use of moving machinery, so she drafts a paragraph or two to do with industrial workers wearing hairnets while using moving machinery that might catch their hair. Then, being a sensible civil servant, she sends a memo to all her colleagues in the other directorates to ask for their comments. Her colleague in Agriculture writes back to say there's clearly going to be an issue about people working on, say, tractors and fishing boats. Some sort of exclusion will be needed. The memo goes into our first civil servant's in tray. In the evening the cleaner comes round and as he wipes his duster round the desk, his eye falls on the memo "Fishermen, hairnets. Gor blimey", he says (or whatever the Brussels equivalent of gor blimey is). Next day at the cafe, he tells his friend "Saw something about fishermen and hairnets yesterday. What do they spend their time on." At the next table is a stringer who overhears, and promptly rings [insert name of any UK tabloid here] because he knows there's money in it for him. Next thing you know, a journalist is saying, "Nice one, my son. Hundred nicker on its way to your account now", and another "Brussels does it again" headline is in the making.

The only thing that bothers me about the idea of a referendum is that millions of British people will be confronted with the fact that they have been deliberately and persistently lied to for a very long time, and it may be too uncomfortable for them to believe it.

Saturday 8 September 2007

Atonement

Just been to see it at Uckfield cinema, which is a very nice small cinema, as long as you can cope with never knowing how loud the sound is going to be. It varies from ever so slightly too loud to a lot too loud. unlike most big cinemas where it's a lot too loud most of the time.

Spoiler alert, don't read the rest if you don't want to know how it ends...

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I decided in the end that I didn't like it. Very well made, very well acted, lots of good things and good scenes. I'm prepared to say it's a good movie, possibly even a great movie. But I didn't like it. That is to say I liked it right up to the end, but the end didn't do it for me. I gather from seeing what people who've read the book say, that the film gives a slightly different impression. Ian McEwen apparently says that the book is about the strength and weakness of authorial power. You can rewrite the past very effectively but you can't deal with the hurt you've caused that way.

The film, however, leaves it very unclear as to whether it's saying that or not. It lets the elderly Briony say that she hoped to atone for the damage she caused by rewriting the story so that Cecilia and Robbie live happily ever after "as an act of kindness". Now I was at that point furious with Briony for believing that she could do an act of kindness to two dead people by rewriting their story. But it's not clear that the film, as opposed to the book that I haven't read, intended me to think that. The film allowed her to say her piece in the context of an uncritical interview with some arts interviewer, and then validated it by showing, as the final scene, Cecilia and Robbie walking on the shore by the cottage that they never actually got to. And I found that most unlikeable.

Friday 7 September 2007

Opinion polls and other things

I've just been playing cricket on the green. Not a proper game, just knocking it around. This follows an attempt at doing the same two days ago. Given that this is 7th September that tells us something about the summer we've had. I got bat in front of ball better today; on Wednesday I couldn't stop myself backing away to leg when batting, and when I was bowling the ball went all over the place.

I have discovered that I'm not as fit as I thought I was. I've also remembered things kids do, like marking as accurately as possible where the ball went because you know that when you get there it's going to look completely different; amazing how these things come back.

That was the other things bit. On opinion polls I've just read a really good, if somewhat long, article on Liberal Democrat Voice. Being a Liberal Democrat, I'm used to us being trashed in the polls, and then get far more in the actual elections than everyone, including us sometimes, thought we were going to get. And on that subject, for my Yorkshire readers, there was an excellent win for us this week in a by-election in Heworth Without. In the LibDem Voice article, I like particularly the the standard health warning near the end "all opinion polls should be taken with several sackloads of salt, whether they show your favourite option going up or down. They are not ‘news’, merely irresistible, so remember that however fevered the analysis, we’re only pretending they matter until actual elections come along". That phrase "not news, merely irresistible" is brilliant.

There will be more posting on vaguely political topics in the next few days. I'm not planning to go to the party conference even though it's in Brighton. The firm I work for has a habit of fixing its annual meeting to clash with whatever party conference is taking place in Brighton, so no politicking for me. If it stays as hot as this, I'll be glad I'm not in the conference hall.

October election? Who knows. Gordon Brown is playing a very canny game. Lord Sainsbury's two million is only going to make a difference to the temperature of the speculation, and not to the actual decision, I would think.

Saturday 1 September 2007

Diana and heritage

Today seems to be Diana day, though it feels to me as if it's been going on for weeks. Best summed up, I think, by a headline in the Whiskey Priest's blog: "Diana: still dead", closely followed by "In Other News: Deaths in Darfur, Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan continue...."

The OU is about to launch a course called "Heritage, whose heritage?", which I think I'll apply to teach. The course description starts: "Do heritage objects reflect my memories of the past? Or are they different? What kind of presence of the past do I want in my community?" I think there's a big place for a thoughtful approach to heritage, particularly in this country because we have such a peculiar view of it. Part of the time we're desperate to preserve anything because it's old and therefore English (I leave aside the issue of "English" versus "British" history and identity, to which I would need to devote an entire and lengthy blog), and part of the time we're cashing in on it by commercialising it. So my working definition of heritage is "the redefinition and commercialisation of anything old regardless of its intrinsic value". No doubt any philosophers among my esteemed readership will have a field day with the concept of "intrinsic value", and I will have to revisit that bit when I've thought about it a bit more.

There was a nice treatment of the issue, kind of in reverse, in "The man who lost his head" on ITV last weekend. The show is listed on IMDB, and the user comment entitled "Good solid family entertainment" is a perfect summing up of what I thought. The ITV web page details are quite fun, especially Martin Clunes' description of New Zealand being like Cornwall but with more reggae.

Anyway, that's what's happening to Diana. Redefinition (more or less every week in the Daily Express) and commercialisation.