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June 30, 2005
Creeps me out
I'm trying to work out just why this photo stream on flickr - really creeps me out and makes me quite queasy.
In my head I'm getting a stream of mixed images of Nazi-youth, Huxley's 'Brave New World' (his characters had soma - these people would have Prozac, Viagra, Ecstasy, Steroids, Crystal Meth, etc. ) These are the sons of the 'Stepford Wives'. The vanity, the empty-headedness, the self-satisfaction, the smugness, the plastic artificality of them all... they've all seen the Abercrombe and Fitch adverts and they live in a simulacrum of that world - a world of smooth bland surfaces. The other people they might meet outside of their tight circle are just 'a guy' or 'a trick'. Charming.
There are no pictures of the world around them, of sunsets, sunrises or views - even of food or interiors - just an endless parade of people showing off their expensive dental work and their gym honed bodies.
I get the impression that this is what they smugly believe we're all supposed to aspire to and admire and envy.
*Shudders*
by groc at 10:39 PM | Comments (3)
Momus writings
by groc at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)
ID cards
The case against ID cards
by Peter Lilley MP
(and when I find myself in full agreement with Peter Lilley on something - then it really is saying something about how far to the Right the Labour Party has lurched!)
Damian Green on the ID card.
Tony Blair in the 1995 Labour party conference in Brighton.
by groc at 03:46 PM | Comments (0)
freedom of the press
Indymedia server confiscated in Bristol.
OK - so in this, the age of the interglobalwebnet - who exactly is supposed to decide what counts as 'press' and 'news' and what amounts to censorship? Is it only the Big Corporations now that are allowed to report the 'News'? . If something like this happened in old Communist Russia or East Germany - the whole world would be in outrage mouthing platitudes about Liberty and Human Rights. But because it’s happening here... nah, that's OK.
by groc at 02:46 PM | Comments (1)
June 29, 2005
WARNING!
| groc may explode without warning |
| M EXPLOSIVE |
From Go-Quiz.com
hOW TRUE, HOW VERY TRUE
by groc at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)
Gay TV (but not too gay) on it's way
I just love it when gay people win acceptance and tolerance only when they're a exploitable demographic...
Logo General Manager Lisa Sherman cited studies saying there were some 15 million openly gay people in America, an attractive demographic for advertisers, considering that many will have no children, meaning more disposable income.
I'm getting a just a little bit sick and tired of capitalism and it's warped values now.
by groc at 09:50 AM | Comments (2)
bye bye Cult TV at the BBC websites.
I'm suddenly reminded of the early days of the BBC back when they blithely erased thousands of irreplaceable programmes off early video tape. Nowadays they realise what a utter folly that was. Especially in these days of nostalgia and home DVD releases -but oh look - here's history repeating itself.
They're about to erase huge swathes of the cult pages over at bbc.com.
I can't believe how stupid this is. Probably the idea of some Middle-management types. Gah!
by groc at 03:03 AM | Comments (4)
June 26, 2005
water
I can’t believe they advertise bottled water on TV.
I think it’s stupid enough that they take water from other countries and bottle it and transport all over the place, because it’s such a pitiful waste of resources. Then there’s all the environmental impact of all those billions of plastic bottles clogging up the landfills. Then there’s been problems of people getting bacterial poisoning from it, which after transporting it across the world, then letting it fester for a while in warehouses and then some more in the shop shelves/fridges shouldn‘t really surprise anyone. Because well, how can that be healthy?
But then to have TV commercials for it - in the style of a perfume advert, or else implying it’s suddenly going to make you super healthy after one swig. It just fries my brain.
(Actually that it should be advertised like perfume shouldn’t surprise me - perfume is another one of the great cons. Most people have no idea just how astonishingly cheap perfume is to make - people are paying over the odds for the packaging, the marketing and the ‘image’. Exactly as with the bottled water.)
People are dumb falling for all of this.
Friends of the Earth - on plastics.
by groc at 02:38 PM | Comments (3)
June 24, 2005
rail
Um. OK so we all know it’s illegal to lock pet dogs in cars without any kind of ventilation in hot weather, because, you know, there’s a very good chance they might f**king die. But apparently it’s perfectly OK by GNER Rail Managers to leave stranded train passengers to suffer and very nearly die in 115F/46C temperatures in sealed carriages for two hours - because. Well, there isn’t a because. They’re basically just clueless morons. What was that brilliant idea about 'congestion charges' again?
Am I alone in thinking that we’re getting near a time where an entire level of the management structure in this country needs to taken out, lined against the walls and shot? Now it's becoming clearly apparent that their levels of stupidity have descended down to the point where they are now actually endangering people’s lives?
Gaaaah. I despair.
by groc at 01:44 PM | Comments (3)
June 23, 2005
new Rom Zom movie
ooooh, new Romero Zombie movie!
by groc at 09:03 PM | Comments (1)
June 22, 2005
groans
What? How completely retarded is upper and middle management in this country exactly? This barmy idea of wanting to slap an extra, extra ‘congestion’ charge on Rail Tickets. That someone somewhere gets paid to think up these shitty ideas just beggars belief.
by groc at 02:04 PM | Comments (3)
June 18, 2005
if they think it's bad now?
read this link first
just imagine what will happen when the UK has the biggest honey pot of all with the National ID card - with all that juicy personal information sat in a centralized database - information that will be passing (probably totally unincrypted) from Government department to Government department... practically begging to be intercepted. Actually, it doesn't bear thinking about.
by groc at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)
phe-whoooo!
And so it proved that wretched idiotic idea which was going around about Adam = Davros had nothing to do with anything. Just as I thought and expected. Mainly because it made no dramatic sense whatsoever. Do you see why fans are fans (including the obsessively inclined audience) and writers are writers now? There are very distinct reasons for that.
And ..... was the bad wolf. Oh -eeer. Except that doesn't reaaaaaally make any sense - why chose Bad Wolf? This is not ever adequately explained. One can only hope for better clarification later - except you know it will never come.
Mmmm and I detected more than a few hints of RTD and the other writers having had a few Buffy lessons along the way. How end of season 'Buffy vs Adam' was this ending exactly? Let's say very and move on quickly.
And hah! the BAFTA peeps must have been given a set of totally different episode to watch and left to report on. Cool. I love that RTD has a long history of messing with the press and whole publicity machine - this is how it should be.
[[Meanwhile on planet Earth I'm very, very pissed off with my DVD recorder for having carefully made a recording for me - but without any sound whatsoever. Gaaaaaaaah! Don't buy Philips DVDRs people - they're rubbish. I love it (I do heart DVD) but it has been loads and loads of trouble. Oh well - I can do another recording but this one will have the bloody BBC three logo all over it. Grrrr - I hate those stupid logos!]]
by groc at 07:54 PM | Comments (3)
June 17, 2005
Have you noticed
how the older Tony Blair gets - the more he looks more and more like Jack Nicholson's Joker?
by groc at 10:21 PM | Comments (1)
oh finally
Apparently the Guardian has at last pulled it's head from out of it's own arse and is set to publish in a smaller size format (which they're calling a 'Berliner' size - to just keep their pretentious middle-class credentials intact, got that? Not tabloid - not ever, ever, ever tabloid that's too plebby - no, 'Berliner'. You know, like the doughnut, or the American President who got a hole in his head. Gah. Smaller than a broadsheet but a little bit bigger than a tabloid - are they now going to have to rebuild all the places where the paper is on display?)
BTW I'm narked at the Guardian requiring registration to read their articles in the Media section. All it ever does is lead me to make stuff up to register.
by groc at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)
Who-eeer.
Not to beat my own drum or anything - but I've just seen the latest teaser trailer for Saturday's episode - and oooh, looking at the screen - that Emperor dalek looks not too disimiliar from my artwork. Yay me.
Badwolf: mmmm now, how did that old fairy tale go again? What big ears you've got... What big teeth you've got... all the better to...
by groc at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2005
Spoiler Alert - look away now...
by groc at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2005
too much red meat increases risk of bowel cancer
Oh really? and what have vegetarians being telling everyone for years and years and years - if not decades?
What are all those people who are on the Aktin's diet going to do now?
And whatever happened to BSE?
by groc at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2005
Who - er, what?
Over the past couple of days I’ve been entertaining and boring myself in equal measures trawling through these long (1) and (2), long (3) pages the comments of which have been hijacked by Who fans wittering endlessly on and on and on with their own theories about the current series. (If I owned these sites -I’d be considering asking expenses off of the BBC for my hosting/bandwidth bills.)
But one of the more unlikeliest theories that a large number of people have got hold of and refuse to let go of -is that boy genius Adam of the ‘dalek’ and ‘long game’ episodes is going to become Davros - the creator of the Daleks.
The tenuous indications of this are supposedly that
1. he’s met a single dalek once.
[at a distance - I got the impression he held only a junior position in Van Statten’s alien museum/research labs, and only got to spy in on the Dalek at a distance via CCTV.]
2. now has a hole in his forehead Just where Davros has a glowing eye thing.
[Except in Davros - it is just that -a replacement for his two missing eyes - and a hint at how far into Dalek-like state he himself had de-evolved to. but certainly not ever a device that is fed raw information through and which turns his brain into a computer processor.]
3. that he’s supposed to carry the entire history and knowledge of the human race up until the year 200,100. (Hope I’ve got that right.)
[Except he doesn’t - that knowledge wasn’t kept in his head (quote: ‘it would have exploded’) he had to phone down what he could to an answering machine, and although it is vaguely possible his mother changed the ansaphone tape like he asked -just before nipping down to the shops - and that the Doctor destroyed only a new blank one. This seems all very unlikely. If she wasn‘t already down the shops - she would‘ve answered the ‘phone surely -especially to her son she hadn‘t heard from in months.]
This whole theory also ignores a number of inconsistencies and facts:
1 that Davros already existed (exists still?) once already (otherwise where would the original Daleks have come from?) and that he came from an entirely different planet altogether. Adam would have to be Davros II.
2. Why would he ever want to recreate the Daleks? Why? He knows from the single one he’s seen that they’re super-hyper-dangerous homicidal psychotic maniacs never to be trusted -ever. If he's a boy genius - surely he's also smart enough not to touch.
3. There’s also the problem of how he could’ve managed to transport himself so many hundreds of years into the future, especially it looks like Humans won’t develop time travel capability until the 51st century (Cap. Jack’s original time period) Why would he even want to go to that period of history? The indications are that Human development was already being stunted and manipulated for the worse in the 90 year period before Adam’s little visit with the Doctor and Rose.
But my biggest problem with this whole theory is -as to what exactly could his motivation as a human being/Earthling be -to want to devastate the entire human race - and over such a ridiculously long period of time? All that just to teach the Doctor a lesson for having abandoned him on Earth with a hole in his head? How is that supposed to make any dramatic sense? Get a grip.
Adam was a self-serving, self-interested chancer certainly -but there were no indications of him being capable of being downright genocidally evil. Rose and the Doctor’s teasing him over the hole in his head could hardly engender the sort of long lasting hatred and seething evil that would span thousands of years of planning and plotting just to exact revenge. One that may or may not have also taken in a massive Time War along the way? Such nonsense.
After all that I’m just left with the conclusion that a lot of people really, really want to see Davros back and that desire is obviously so very strong. Certainly stronger than rational thought would dictate.
Unfortunately it looks like they may have to make do with a 1960s style Emperor Dalek instead. Hope the disappointment won’t be too crushing for them.
Of course, there's nothing to say I'll be the one who's got it terribly wrong and it's me who'll've egg all over my face...
I doubt it though.
only 4 more days to go... and counting...
[[I’d better state here -from a personal point of view, I always thought Davros was a bit rubbish as a super-villain.]]
by groc at 11:30 PM | Comments (4)
June 12, 2005
what? Grrrrrr.
Do these people remind you of anyone? They were just a bit too big and in your face to be mere background detail.
by groc at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2005
OKey Dokey
"Johnny Vegas - eighteen stones of idiot" is by far one of the worst things I have ever seen on television - and I've seen some shit television in my time believe you me.
by groc at 11:02 PM | Comments (2)
June 09, 2005
White Spam
A half baked idea.
In an old comments box of mine -Leff pointed out quite correctly that the main drive behind spam is that it’s only target is pretty much the last few handful of gormless rubes in the world who are willing send off money to enlarge their breasts and/or penises, or to claim money on a lottery they never entered, or buy generic viagra (ain’t no such animal) and try to help hapless or corrupt Nigerians get money out of that country by paying bribes and sending total strangers all their bank and passport details -etc.
Well, I’m thinking that in addition to the Bayesian filters and blockers etc. that maybe we should start adding in white spam. A series of ‘health warnings’ and plain-English explanations of how those scams work, and why those herbal remedies don‘t etc. If this white spam gets in those inboxes of the rubes in among with the real spam Then maybe just maybe this could work for the last few remaining people that are still gullible enough to allow themselves to be scammed. After all these people simply aren’t bright enough to go onto the internet and find out about these things for themselves - but if it’s actually delivered to them with the rest of the junk then they're certain to read it.
by groc at 07:09 PM | Comments (3)
June 07, 2005
uh uh -redux
Just toss this news item on the ever growing pile of things that say 'I don't like where this is heading. Stop it now before we live to regret it'.
by groc at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)
June 06, 2005
tracking
Um. OK. So if you live in London and have one of those Oyster card things on the tube - there’s a record of kept of where and when you use it to travel around on the tube. Great. Now they’re considering a this whole charge-by-the-mile road fee thing so at first that’s likely to mean lots of toll-gates being put up everywhere - to no doubt, be quickly replaced by some hi-tech in-car Global Positioning Gadget that will automatically deduct money from your credit card, and oh… keep a detailed record of wherever you are and wherever you go in your car. As if speed cameras reading your license plates wasn’t already enough intrusion and what about those gazillions of CCTV cameras that record your every move down any UK High Street and through every shopping centre and through most public spaces these days. Now very shortly we’re all -each and every last one of us, to be fingerprinted, iris scanned and tagged - to be charged a big chunk of money for the privilege of being treated like a common criminal. Doesn't that sound awful to you?
Am I the only one who doesn’t like the way things as a whole are going in this country?
by groc at 02:44 PM | Comments (3)
Superbugs
Oh, look there's another one.
Point one - I remember being particularly disgusted with part of the Tory election poster campaign that came up with the bright idea that just putting a ward matron in charge of the cleaning, would solve everything -as if s/he didn't already have enough work to contend with. Especially when in the first place it was the Tories great idea to try and save money in the NHS by getting rid of in-house cleaning staff and force Hospitals to contract in outside cleaning services. Which - oh, by total coincidence is about when we started to get the whole superbug scare. Now why would that be? Gahhhh!
Second point. Phages. The medical profession needs to get off it's fat lazy gormless asses and get some effective research done into bacteria-eating viruses -phages. Apparently Russia's health care system never had any problems with dangerous bacterial infections or outbreaks because they used phages in solution liberally sprayed over the place instead of disinfectants and antibiotics (which the bacteria just eventually evolve a resistance to). These phage viruses just target in on the one specific bacteria killing just that and nothing else - much better than blinkly chucking disinfectants around hoping for the best, because any bacteria that survive the attack are going to be that bit more resistant to the next attack until they get to the point where they're immune. It's standard evolution theory in practise.
by groc at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2005
eeeek!
'xcited.
by groc at 07:35 PM | Comments (2)
sigh
Over the past few days - even though I'm using firefox - I've noticed a few pop ups are now getting through, having managed to get around it's built in protection, and are growing in frequency.
The mentality of the people behind this and similiar forms of advertising - such as spammers and cold-callers really staggers me. If someone has put up any sort of barrier to these things - why then persist? They've had one 'NO - not interested' statement which only makes it all the more likely they're going to get an even stronger 'NO - I said NOT interested' the next time. It's a double waste of everyone's time and effort.
The marketing and advertising (even for the out and out con merchants) world have got to come up with better strategies than merely throwing enough enough shit out into the world and vainly hoping some it might stick. You know? There's even a chance they might actually do more selling (or conning) that way.
It's a form of psychosis isn't it? When a person does exactly the same thing over and over and yet expects a different result - it's a form of insanity. Proof then that these people really could do with being locked up and given some treatment.
by groc at 04:52 PM | Comments (2)
wolfy
Arf.
"...Doctor Who is a fairy tale."
Christopher Eccleston.
Don't look here if you don't want to know who the big bad (Buffy ref.) of the last two episodes is. Beeeeg givaway.
by groc at 02:52 PM | Comments (1)
June 01, 2005
who's afraid?
Other obsessives like me collecting the findings...
Yet I've not seen anyone anywhere use the well known phrase "wolf in sheep's clothing..." although I have seen people mention that Rose (red - hello!) was wearing a Hoody when she first met the Doctor. (Echoed in 'the Empty Child' when Nancy was talking to the Dr. "What big ears you have...")
But who's going to be Grandma - and who the woodcutter that will save them all at the last minute?
The Editor... ‘The right word, in the right broadcast, repeated often enough, can destabilise an economy, invent an enemy, change a vote…’
Oh look, I just quoted the Editor from Satellite 5. How could that be at all relevant?
Me, I think it would be cool if the Doctor turned out to be the Master - or something like the 'Valeyard' (the dark, evil side of Colin Baker's Doctor*) and went off to actually cause all that trouble, death and disasters throughout history (like Clive's collection of data suggested he might. With time travel it's likely all those things haven't actually been made to happen yet (except of course they have, but... oh you know what I mean). I say that because in episode one, the Doctor looks at himself in amirror and comments on his appearance -as if he's never seen his new face before. It seems unlikely he'd have been through all those previous dates in history without passing a mirror at some point along the way.
But maybe Capt'n Jack with his two year memory hole will be the villian, although I think I'd prefer it if somehow he turned out to be the real Doctor. If only if because it would make a brilliant change to go from the tradional a-sexual Doctor to a full on omni-sexual. But, it being a kids show that ain't going to happen. Shame.
Oh and it would be so cool seeing Eccleston coming back from time to time as a villian - but how likely that is to happen is anyone's guess. Probably not very.
*I read that somewhere - because I haven't actually seen most of those episodes.
In other cult media: I'm finding I just can't get interested in Big Brother this year. They're just all the one giant amorphous blob to me - I can't tell one annoying stupid fame-hungry young person from another. This might change when they've weeded a few of them out - but at the moment... feh. Wake me if anything interesting happens. (Some gay sex would be good, you know, now the Hets have been at it.)
by groc at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)
ID
Jumping the gun: Government in ID card talks with firms before Bill passed.
by groc at 01:08 PM | Comments (0)
ID
cage o' monkey's blog entry with a pertintent comment on those pesky ID cards - with two external links well worth reading.
America-land wants easy access to our (proposed) ID card information, probably because they think we were responsible for that September 11... er, hang on a minute...
by groc at 12:43 AM | Comments (0)