American Sniper; the bit no-one seems to be talking about

Michael Moore is being barred from all kinds of hamburger joints because he called snipers cowards.

He probably felt like he was on a winner. Nobody likes snipers. Read any English language memoir of World War II; if there’s a sniper in it, it’s a cowardly German or Japanese hiding in the bushes picking people off from a distance, and getting stomped something wicked if the brave Allies caught up with him. You can argue that there’s something sneaky or underhand about snipers if you want to, but it’s one of those jobs like flamethrower operator where you go in knowing that if anything goes wrong, you’re not going to be getting any of that Geneva Convention stuff everyone else gets. 

Underneath it all, there’s a visceral unease about what snipers do. They shoot people on purpose. Most people can’t do that. It takes about six weeks of systematic dehumanisation to get men comfortable with the idea of just blazing away randomly at a faceless enemy they can barely see. After WWII was over the US Army did a study of what their troops did in the Pacific. Less than a quarter of them even fired their weapons; only one in ten of those men aimed at anyone. And then there’s snipers. Taking aimed shots at people they can see quite clearly in their telescopes. Snipers kill more enemy soldiers than whole platoons of ordinary grunts. A good one will kill 50 or a hundred people before the law of averages catches up with him. An average one can stop an entire infantry company in its tracks. In Normandy company commanders would just shell a whole neighborhood rather than waste time trying to figure out where the sniper was. Snipers are, pound for pound, the most efficient killers of men in any armed force.

Kind of makes you wonder why generals don’t just make the whole army out of snipers.

Well, Michael Moore would probably say that it’s because snipers are freaks and decent soldiers are better than that. And he’d be wrong.

The reality is, if anything, more depressing for the American view of its wars and its victories. Snipers are losers; or rather they’re a weapon which only losers can use. A sniper can blunt an attack, slow down an advance, keep an enemy confused and disrupted. But he can’t take ground. He can’t attack. A sniper stays still. A sniper is permanently on the defensive. The reason Allied memoirs are full of ENEMY snipers is that the Allies were winning and the Germans and the Japanese were trying to slow them down with snipers. A force of snipers is not how you win a war; it’s how you launch a last ditch struggle not to lose it. It’s how you try to hold the ground that the real army has taken with blitzkrieg and shock and awe. When you’re relying on snipers, either you’re defending your home, or it’s time to GO home. 

Gangster Squad; another lesson in poor management technique

On a scale of one to ten for "You got that job how, exactly?" John Lithgow's crime boss in Cliffhanger comes in at eleventy billion and a bit, simply because it's hard to understand how someone could be clever enough to figure out how to rob a plane in midair, charismatic enough to get a whole gang to give it a try, and yet visibly monkeyshit crazy enough to think that "When they err, murder them." is a viable management technique. Using the same scale, Sean Penn's Mickey Cohen rates about a seven or eight, tops, because there's no moment during the movie which suggests that we're in the presence of a sophisticated mind; clearly Mickey is the product of an eco-system which prizes pure atavistic murderousness over mere subtlety.

Since the movie Gangster Squad is also the product of an eco-system which … well you can see where I'm going here … this insight into Mickey's psychology is spelled out for us in a voice-over which stops short of explaining where Los Angeles is and what its average rainfall was in each month during 1949. Mickey is bad news, ruling by fear and whatever he has to do to generate more fear. So we meet him having a guy ripped in half by two cars. On the one hand, I'm not sure if it works as we're shown it, and on the other I bet that never happened in real life, but then again the movie ends with a shoot-out which rivals the storming of the bunker in Hell is for Heroes, so it might be that real life wasn't a big influence (the movie opens with the title card "inspired by real events", the Hollywood get-out-of-jail-free card for making stuff up entirely but at least getting the hats right). 

While it's not much of a shock to see that Mickey treats his rivals poorly, it's depressing to see Hollywood continue to push the idea that the essence of effective leadership is instant hideous death for anyone associated with a setback. Mickey's pimping academy gets raided; his response is to burn it down, with the manager inside. Mickey's heroin shipment gets intercepted; his response is to have his subordinates drill a hole in the sole survivor's head. This left me wondering why the LAPD thought they needed a Gangster Squad. Given Mickey's efforts to make the gangster lifestyle profoundly unattractive for anyone living within a twenty mile radius, there didn't seem to be much call for a secondary effort to discourage people from joining his forces. I'd have figured all they really needed was one guy in a nice suit to sidle up to all the aspiring crims and whisper out of the side of his mouth "That Mickey, huh? Kind of a dick. Really would make you think about moving to Florida, wouldn't it?"

Because movie world, no more than the real world, does not run on the basis of my common sense ideas, Chief Parker (growled, rather than performed, by Nick Nolte) went another way, empowering Josh Brolin to put together a dirty half dozen or so and go round breaking the law on an epic scale to slow Mickey up somewhat. I have to admit, this was why I watched the thing at all. In addition to the ever reliable Josh, we had Ryan Gosling and Robert Patrick. They're always fun, particularly Robert Patrick, who's growing into a more affordable and less annoying Jon Voight. Anyhow, they put the hurt on Mickey something wicked, pausing from time to time to take casualties in the most predictable way possible. This is yet another one of those movies which allows every doomed character one last speech about their hopes, dreams and doubts, and then having duly humanised them just enough, schwacks the holy hell out of them. In Hollywood, if you want to live forever, get a job on the good team, act as much like an asshole as you can while still staying almost likeable, and never, ever waver. The moment you show weakness, compassion or humanity, you're a goner. Also, avoid having a kid, or anything which might play like a kid. No pets. Don't mentor anyone; I cannot emphasise enough just how suicidal it is for a law man to have a young protege who needs to learn just one more lesson.

And why is all this worrying? Well, it's the impact of all this violence on weak and easily influenced minds. Specifically, the weak and easily influenced minds of senior managers everywhere, who will learn from this movie that; effective management involves killing the survivors of any setback, regardless of whether they were involved; it's always a mistake to show kindness or human emotion; it's suicidal ever to share the secrets of effective work with anyone junior to you; and rules are really just for the little people; big people are above such things.

R.I.P.D.: Dead on arrival

Sheesh. I need to sit myself down and have a long chat with myself about the ways I spend my time. Teh intarwebz had already spoken and declared RIPD to be the Living Dead That Should Be Returned to Sender. I went anyway, hoping that this would be the elusive great white whale of suck which would give me something to harpoon properly. What the hell is wrong with me? I'm deliberately going to terrible movies so that I can waste time watching them and then more time writing about them? This is what I'm doing with my life?

I'd love to riff off from this and say that RIPD made me think about mortality and how lives are wasted, but any pile of crap could have done that; it's not as though its themes of life after death mobilised any extra brain cells.

Thing is, I was kind of hoping teh intarwebz were wrong; I was making an each way bet where if the movie turned out to be fun, I'd have some fun, and if it was terrible, at least I'd get a mean blog post out of it. I felt like a canny hedge fund manager; I still feel like a hedge fund manager, but not the good, rich kind. RIPD is some kind of piece of work. It's not much fun, but it's not wrong on a grand enough scale to be worth hyperbole.

The reviewers have been swift to dismiss this as tepid remake of Men in Black, which is unfair to remakes, tepidity, and probably both the comic books which got pulped to make the movies in question. A remake of Men in Black is a completely unnecessary thing (as two sequels demonstrated) but if they'd at least done a shot by shot homage, they might have made a fun movie by accident. As Lloyd Bentsen might have said if he'd been a remedial blogger rather than a vice-presidential candidate, I knew Men in Black, and you're no MiB. Actually, I'm being unfair to Dan Quayle, who was a better remake of JFK than RIPD  is of anything. That's how not-good RIPD is. It's not even a tolerable remake.

What it is is one of those standard brand hero's journey snorathons in which a flawed character has to seek redemption, gain the love of a fair lady, earn the respect of a new peer group and save the world. Always with the saving the world. How many times do I have to say this; give us a strong character and a good actor, and we'll be on the edge of our seats watching him trying to save a kitten (pop culture test case; go watch the classic ER episode Hell or High Water. Two guys and a storm drain, and it was a tv show; you knew George Clooney was going to make it. Still riveting. I tried watching ER after that, and it could never live up to that intro for me). Added snore components; every goddam thing in the world is connected back to our blank everyman hero; the big villain for the whole world is also the small villain of his tiny pre-mortem world. Fafuqzake. This makes White House Down look inventive.

I know, let's just rip it right the way down. Ryan Reynolds is the hero, if that's the word I want to use, which it isn't. We meet him burying a bunch of shaky looking lumps of gold under an orange tree in his back garden in Boston. Yeah, no way that's not going to turn out important later. Then he has some PG13 sexy times with his French wife (because why the hell not, and why the hell should we bother explaining it?). He finally gets out from under the sexy times and goes to work. His wife goes off to - hell if I know, really; chick's a total plot coupon; she jogs off with an iPod on her arm and the next time we see her she's at Ryan's funeral, which comes about as a result of him being murdered to bits by his crooked partner because of the whole burying the gold thing. I bet you didn't know Boston had a major meth problem, but it turns out that it does, and the best plan Boston's finest can come up with to contain it is to launch an enormous raid on a vast isolated derelict warehouse absolutely full of meth dealers. Without taking even three minutes to recce the place, they all just barrel in, dick first into the beehive. I  was starting to see how Boston would have a meth problem; the finest minds they've got could lose at tictactoe playing against Leeroy Jenkins. They seemed perfectly capable of having an out-of-control gummy bear problem.

So Ryan Reynolds get killed by his crooked partner, though if I'd been his crooked partner and some kind of evil mastermind, I'd have just sat back and let natural selection work its magic; Ryan's a stone bonehead, and everyone else was letting him decide what to do, so how long would it have taken? Everything freezes, and he gets whisked up through a whole bunch of CGI clouds before getting whisked into an Eames chair and the moment which gave trailer watchers some reason to hope; Mary-Louise Parker's deadpan "Tough day." Turns out heaven has a police force, and they're hiring. Ryan gets a choice between going straight to hell (what with being a dirty cop who didn't quite get the chance to un-dirty himself, though he was trying, kind of, right up to when his partner shot him so much) or hiring on as heaven police. God, heaven police are even dumber than Boston PD. They've got a file on Ryan two inches thick (it's waved out of the screen in 3D at one point, like I don't see enough files in my day). They know he's both thick and crooked, and he's just what they need? Christ, I thought reality was badly run.

So that's the RIPD, hiring the crooked and inept to chase down the dead who won't stay dead.  I actually liked the business case; on the one hand, the afterlife just can't handle the volume any more, so dead souls are slipping between the cracks, and on the other hand, dead souls hanging round after their time rot out the world around them; man, that explains so much of life, including bad cell phone reception.

This is the point where the movie takes its big hit for trying to be MiB all over again. You got your noob, and you've got your old school mentor, and you've got weird abominations trying to hide in plain sight and then all hulking out into eldritch atrocity while being shot at with stupidly big guns. I hope that didn't sound fun, because it turns out that it's not. Which is perversely impressive. Although most of the money went on special effects, they had just enough money to hire Jeff Bridges (who will do anything I guess), Mary Louise Parker and Kevin Bacon. And T-Bag from Prison Break.  And a ton of extras for the crowd scenes. And Ryan Reynolds, as I mentioned earlier. I'm listing them in order of the fun they are. Notice how I didn't list a writer. I'm going with the idea that they gave the key grip a crayon and a copy of Contour (Follow, the link, I dare you. They BOAST that it reduces screenwriting to a fill-in-the-blanks approach. Then movies like this fill the blanks WITH blanks).

Wackiness ensues. The RIPD come back in new guises, which for maximum yucks involves Ryan being a tiny Chinese person and Jeff being some wanton blonde hottie (Jeff gets a few lines to slap down casual sexism from all the people who ogle the hell out of him, and everyone just gets right on with dissing elderly small Chinese guys because, screw Chinese people, I guess). And of course Ryan, first day on the job, figures out that there's something weird happening with the dead-os collecting gold, which must be connected to the gold he helped himself to - and what do you know, hey presto, his crooked partner (Kevin Bacon, phoning it in and still effortlessly outshining Ryan) is the mastermind of a whole undead plot to reassemble some ancient doohickey which will open the gates of hell (though for some reason that exact phrase never comes up) and let all the damned souls of eternity return to earth.

Apparently this is a bad thing, though by this stage I was rooting for Bacon and seeing him as an undead Moses trying to free his people. No worries; Ryan and Jeff save the day (despite - how could I have forgotten to mention this - having been suspended half way through the movie) and the vast flood of souls stops at the last minute and gets hoovered back up to hell, which is above us. Don't ask. So there's just the property damage and the three or four thousand deaths from flattening thirty buildings in downtown Boston during business hours. Just a hair-mussing, really. Carry on.

And Ryan's wife gets in on the end of the world, because - for no reason at all - Kevin Bacon decides to use her blood to power his engine of destruction. So she gets almost killed just enough that she can have a tearful reunion with Ryan, but then gets better. Which is sugary, but actually less icky with where I thought they were going, a place where a woman can only be happy if she's horribly murdered to get back together with her creep husband. Which would have been an objectively bad message to send, assuming anyone stayed awake long enough to be influenced by it.

Yet, I wanted to like this dog. A) Jeff Bridges. B) Mary Louise Parker C) afterlife hi-jinks. Jeff Bridges doing a comedy cowboy just left me thinking of True Grit. Mary Louise Parker left me thinking of Red and Red 2, and all the good stuff she's done on TV, like Weeds (yes, frequently terrible, but she was always interesting). And after-life hi-jinks:

For better after-life is bureaucracy by other means: Beetlejuice

For better hunting down the dead because they're just plain bad;

Brimstone; where to start? If I don't have you at Crispin Glover as the Devil, you're beyond saving. 

and

G vs E; completely nuts, and probably objectively no good at all, but a show about Good vs Evil with the production values - and general tone - of a 70s cop show? What's not to like? Plus Marshall Bell as the watch commander, leaving you permanently wondering just how good the forces of good really were

(in a month you'll be able to get RIPD on Blu-Ray and you still can't get either of these shows anywhere…)

For bureaucracy and hunting down souls on general principle Dead Like Me; Mandy Patinkin and more sarcasm than TV had ever seen before. Huge fun.

2 Guns; it's a free market, not a free world

Goddammit. Is just everything an adaptation of a comic book? The next thing I know, I'm going to be sitting in a new version of Pride and Prejudice, and the credits will come up "based on the graphic novel by Jane Austen". Presumably with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor, since being dead's not much of an obstacle to that kind of thing.

At one level, 2 Guns is older than I am, since I can't remember a time when they weren't making movies where two mismatched protagonists would get together and ... fight crime. At another, it's new, since we're living through a revival of the things which seemed fresh back when everything seemed fresh to people now my age. Based on the demographics of the Hidden City fleapit this evening, the studio's gamble may be paying off; I was the only person in the place who'd even been born when this stuff was last fresh, and so for all those kids it probably WAS fresh.

It's a dumb movie which has to trade on the charms of its leads (who are more or less the only people with speaking parts who get out of the movie alive) and a deliberately tricky narrative structure in the first twenty minutes which keeps switching back and forth in time so as to make the motivations of Denzel and Marky Mark more cloudy. You see, they seem at first to be petty criminals trying to rub by on the Texas Mexico border, but then we see that Denzel is an undercover DEA agent - and then <shocker> Marky Mark is undercover Naval Intelligence </shocker> (somehow, of all the things I've pondered when I've thought about Texas, its coastline never prompted me to wonder about its navy, but never mind). So there you are; two undercover agents, trying to set each other up, neither realising the other's secret identity. What a twist, huh? You can see how you'd sidle up on a thing like that, letting it slowly dawn on the audience. Or, you could do this. Guys, as long as you were going to tell everyone the whole plot in the trailer, why bother with the misdirection?

Anyhow, Denzel and Marky Mark eventually kill everyone which the baddies haven't already killed, and ride off into the sunset together, presumably to take up a life of crime, since they've straight up murdered anyone who could conceivably exonerate them from all the crimes they started out the movie being framed for, not to mention all the crimes they actually committed. And the cast needed quite a bit of killing; I haven't seen such a bunch of irredeemable oxygen thieves since the glory days of Walter Hill movies. Many of the cast probably got killed in their youth in those very same movies. It was a regular Oh look! festival. Edward James Olmos, back playing Mexican drug lords when he'd been doing so well in Battlestar Galactica. Bill Paxton, for once only doing the jerk part of his craven jerk schtick. Fred Ward, who used to lead in those kind of B movies (and is by far the best bit of Tremors and Miami Blues) now relegated to playing the authority figure who turns out to be even worse than the bad guys. Robert John Burke - well, except for The Unbelievable Truth he's spent pretty much his whole life on one side of the law or the other (including a spell as Robocop, as if it mattered by that stage in the franchise).

Honestly, it's kind of fine. Denzel and Marky Mark are good together and even on their own they're dependable actors, so it's not like the movie is actively terrible while they're centre screen. The back-and-forth between them, which is the heart of all these dumb buddy movies, feels grounded, and some of it is even funny. The action scenes were visibly shot to a budget (never more so than one sad helicopter all on its lonesome at the end), but most of the time less is more for that stuff anyhow (there's a clever running gag where the lights keep going out during an interrogation; cost nothing, but got a lot done).

It's still a bad movie, like a lot of other bad movies, and it's a bad because of the message it's sending. Like so many other buddy cop movies, the tale unfolds in the Hollywood world where no-one can be trusted and the government least of all. Everyone is lying to everyone else, and everyone's on the take. Denzel and Marky Mark rob a bank, each thinking that they're setting up the other for a fall which will lead to evidence that will bring down a drug lord. Instead they've accidentally cleaned out a CIA slush fund, and find themselves on the run from their own bosses, the Mexican mob, and Bill Paxton's horrible CIA fixer. Everyone's a complete dick, and most of them get schwacked for their pains.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating; this recurring Hollywood mindset is some of the most evil propaganda I've ever seen. It's ingenious, but it's terrible. It works at so many different levels. On the one hand, it props up the capitalist notion that government is just inherently bad, thus bolstering big business's underlying agenda of ensuring that the general population will hate the government and collude in tax breaks and corporate welfare for the Walmarts of this world. At a slightly more subtle level, it makes it look as though the US is a democracy in which people can freely criticise the ruling structures without fear of consequences; but what's actually happening is much more clever; they're creating a world in which people think that the only place the government behaves like criminals is the movies, freeing them up to behave like criminals in real life because no-one thinks it actually happens that way outside the movies. 

And if I could ask for just one thing to be retired, even if we can't fix the rest of what's broken in the world, can we put an end to the tired convention of the heroes happening upon the baddie-in-chief breathing his last, whereupon his hand twitches towards a weapon and they blast the last of his soul out of him? Just once, can they either murder him honestly out of spite or just walk away to let him choke on his own blood? 

The new improved TV license; a service you'll be happy to pay more money for

One of the few privileges of being a wetback is not having to watch Mexican television, so - for example - I've been treated to about 90% less Uncle Greybo explaining about the digital switchover this year. (Like all Mexicans, I couldn't wait for the digital switchover, because TV without Uncle Greybo and those two moronic dogs was going to be a huge improvement even if the digital service came in black and white). It's proven harder to escape the ads for the TV license, which Telefis Mexico has been screening to fill all the gaps where they used to have proper adverts, back when we had money. I think they're going about this the wrong way - although like all Mexicans, it would be hard for me to think of a time when they went about anything the right way. Of course no-one wants to pay the TV license - that's a given. But what really sticks in our gullets is the thought that the money we give them for the TV license goes to the likes of Pat Kenny, who then lectures us from the lofty heights of half a million pesos of extorted TV license fees about how we're living beyond our means and we all ought to be paid much less.

Meanwhile, Ryanair is making money hand over fist by selling ostensibly cheap aeroplane tickets, and then giving us the opportunity to hand over extra money for such premium services as being allowed to get on the plane early enough to get an overhead luggage space, or not have to sit in the actual toilet. For a mere ten extra pesos, the passport office will promise to try to get you a passport while you still look something like the picture you sent in. I suddenly realised, Irish people are willing to pay a bit extra to make something horrible a little less unbearable.

Thus, a modest proposal. RTE should offer a "premium" TV license. It will cost five pesos more, but will come with a guarantee that none of it will be used to pay Pat Kenny. I guarantee that it will wind up being the only kind of TV license they ever sell. 

Magical thinking; your iPhone might as well be an amulet

Without me quite noticing, my thoughts on Taken 2 turned out to be my 200th post, which a more self-important blogger might have kept for some state-of-the-blog reflections. I can't think of anything important which needs to be said about this blog; it's enough trouble to think of things to say about anything else without disappearing into meta-oblivion. I do continue to be baffled that it has actual viewing stats; I was much too lazy even to figure out how to look them up until I discovered that I had occasional commenters. The night before last, at one in the morning in Google time (GMT? UTC? does it matter?) there was a spike of 160 views, which I assume was some bot-related glitch that is making someone else microscopically richer. As far as I can tell, almost all the hits from actual people come from people wanting to find out about the Belfast episodes of Sons of Anarchy - notice how I don't provide a link to that post, since it's safe to assume everyone who cares has already read it. Despite the resulting temptation to make this all Sons of Anarchy, all the time, no sweeping change of policy is imminent. This is mostly me trying to remember how to write something which isn't a report on the troubles of the sandbox or the psychoses of Nordor and the lack of mass attention suits my purposes far too well to mess with obscurity.

Now, to my scheduled programming. The other day an email conversation broke out among my exiled friends in Mexico on the theme of "What the hell is wrong with SF these days?", though in much the same way as you can go to a perfectly good riot and a hockey game will break out, it wasn't too long before we were arguing over climate change and then inevitably someone mentioned economics. I'm not sure that we even got as far as agreeing that there was something wrong, let alone what it might be, but one thought did surface which I wish I'd had myself. This was that technology has become so glossy and unknowable that people are drifting into magical thinking. I've pondered the thought before that the rapid pace of change today is making people more interested in books where despite wars and magic happening at all times, nothing ever really seems to change. But somehow I hadn't made the jump to thinking about the kinds of technology we have today and how it's changed the way we relate to it.

Machines have changed in the past twenty years in ways which have completely altered our relationship with them. They've become much easier to use, but much harder to know. Modern cars are easier to drive and safer than what I first drove, but if anything goes wrong, there's no chance at all that you're going to be able to fix it yourself. I used to be able to pull the plugs out of my first car's engine and replace them in less than ten minutes (a leaking head gasket you can't find time to fix will build that skill very quickly). I haven't even been able to find the plugs in any car I've owned since then. I sometimes wonder if they actually still have spark plugs. My current car occasionally just sulks and the easiest way to deal with it is literally to reboot it; disconnect the battery and leave it for a while until the electronics reset. If that doesn't work, the next step is a tow truck. And if you can't fix it, do you really own it? Sometimes it feels like I have a bizarre lease on my car where I make unpredictable huge payments to the only garages in Mexico and Nordor that have the magical permissions to talk to the computers without which it's just a pretty 800 kilogram paperweight.

That's unknowability in things that we used to think we could know. It's deeper and denser with things that we never understood, like computers and mobile phones. I figured out once what a laser printer actually did to produce slightly chemical smelling perfect black and white pages and it froze me in place like a chemical-free acid trip. Go on and look it up; I can wait. That kind of thing might as well be magic. It's almost absurd that we use it for something as banal as printing out bank statements. It ought at least to be printing out the coordinates of distant planets or some such. Mobile phones; even before they put in cameras and GPS and touch screens, they were the stuff of wizardry, complicated computer systems in the background keeping track of exactly which phones were in range of every antenna in the country and handing them off more or less seamlessly from one to the next without the average user even blinking at the wonder of it all. It just works, to the point that we get borderline psychotic when for some reason it doesn't. GPS is a worked proof every microsecond of special relativity and all most of us think about it is that the user interface sucks and the maps are never up to date.

I have not digressed. Our world is full of small shiny objects which do things which were previously unimaginable, by means we don't understand. If they fail us, pretty much all we can do is throw them away and get another one. They might as well be amulets.

So Joe advanced the argument that a population surrounded by amulets is vulnerable to magical thinking, on the one hand looking for books full of magic - thus the growth of fantasy "literature", or harking back to a more comprehensible world where a man could get out three screwdrivers and a pincers [1] and have a shot at getting something broken to work again; hence the sudden growth out of nowhere of steampunk and its various outliers.

We read to get away from the world we're in, and the books we buy tell us a lot about the things we're trying to get away from. It's probably not a good sign that the growing trend in SF - the preferred reading of nerds, geeks, and all folks technical - is to run away from the technical side of the world we live in. 

[1] I haven't actually seen a pincers on sale in a hardware shop for as long as I can remember. Either they've been entirely displaced by better designs of claw hammer or we've given up on the idea of ever needing to pull anything out of something else.

Comments; who knew?

Checking back on an old post about Sons of Anarchy, I discovered that there were three comments on the thing. I have comments? I was astonished. Not quite as astonished as I was when I discovered that there'd been almost 1400 page views of that blog entry. I got curious enough to go and look through the whole blog for comments to see what else I'd been missing. It looks as though my blog, pitiful little thing that it is, probably gets more hits than my work website…..

So, an apology, and a slight change of policy. I've always treated this blog as something that no-one much except me was bothering to read. That's still almost true, but plainly not completely true, so it's time I started dealing with it a little bit differently. It turns out that there's a way to monitor comments, so I've set that up, and will try to respond to comments as they're made. I imagine that all the people who commented gave up on me completely as a bad job, but still, my apologies to Rev. Mac, Hyperbore, A Question of ITIL, RickM, werkkate, rae, SteveM, SUBSIM, robertcorrie, "vhjk, vbk, uhj", and Pianista; I wasn't ignoring you, it just never occurred to me that anyone was listening to my ravings….

Shooting the Messenger

I've ruminated in the past on the need to remember that at some point, we're all the guys who have to ask a silly question, if only because questions tend to arise from localized silliness. And I preached toleration in the face of those questions.

There are people, however, who can't even come up with the stupid question on their own, and the question is, should we be so lenient with people who come bearing borrowed idiocy?

You'll always know these clowns, because at some point in the conversation - sometimes, presciently, before they say anything else, other times defensively, when they've already said too much - they will utter the words "Don't shoot the messenger!"

To which I've always said, "Well, why the hell not?" The notion that you shouldn't kill the messenger goes back to the medieval origins of diplomacy, when it dawned on kings and tyrants of one kind and another that if they took to whacking emissaries from distant tyrants, nothing would ever get done. Like most medieval ideas, I think it's a little past its sell by date, and besides, nothing I've ever seen of diplomacy has left me with the notion that it's a vital public service without which the world might end. Thus, my working approach to poor long suffering messengers was to put them out of their misery as briskly as possible. Such messengers were a bug up my ass, a pox on my day, a nuisance and a setback in buzzing, gnat-like, almost-human form. Killing them was fun, and carried a number of collateral benefits. If I killed enough of them, one of two things would happen; either they'd stop coming altogether, freeing me up to deal with something more interesting, or whatever boss-level moron was sending them would be forced to lever himself out of his mud encrusted lair and lurch down to convey his stupidity in person, which would lead either to me schwacking him, to the general benefit of the populace, or teaching him to be less stupid, to the slightly smaller benefit of the populace but presumably the greater benefit of my soul. 

So, with a sense of regret (occasional, it must be admitted) I would bludgeon the benighted and get on with my day. It was unfortunate that undeserving schlubs had to feel my wrath in order to make the world a better place, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs (though - it turns out - you can break any number of eggs and still not make an omelette).

Lately, I find myself working with people who have tested that simple sense of justice to its sticking point, and I feel a subtle shift coming on. I have concluded that messengers actually deserve to be schwacked, and that whatever they get, they got coming.

I used to buy into this self-serving schtick that they were just innocent victims, powerless to prevent that old debbil boss from telling them to come and ask me questions for which the only honest answer was measured in foot-pounds of impact energy to the solar plexus. But I'm getting older, and I have realized that this is no more an excuse than any other variation of "I was only following orders." If you know you're being told to do something stupid, you still have choices. You can refuse, you can pitch alternatives, you can tell the idiot that the only way to sell something so monstrously dumb is to use the weight of their authority directly. And yet, the messengers troop down to my lair and beard me just like it wasn't a thing.The problem, I've come to see, is that I'm living in a world where people are more afraid of their bosses than they are of me.

It is plainly time to revisit some of these lenient policies which have led to me being seen as a soft touch. Starting with this lax notion of shooting messengers. I'm thinking skulls on stakes round my doorway.

Ashleigh and Pudsey; So. It has come to this.

Heaven knows, I try not to let anything shock me. I am not going to pretend that the outcome of Britain's Got Talent shocked me or knocked me off stride. The news that, faced with people who could sing dance and the lord knows what else, the great British public voted for an agile dog and his owner did not me surprise me in the slightest. I'm not actually sure what it would take before the outcome of text voting in the UK mainland would make me take a deep breath and say "Well, that, I did not expect." The restoration of chattel slavery and the reintroduction of sumptuary taxes, perhaps. The replacement of the monarchy by an animated waxwork of Henry Hawley Crippen, voiced by Cherie Blair. No, wait, they already did that with 10 Downing Street, and it wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened there in my life time.

Still, it was weird enough to get me thinking, and most of what it got me thinking was "Is THIS what it's all about? Are all of these reality shows with viewer voting just meant to make us give up entirely on the notion of democracy?". Because you've got to wonder, don't you? There goes the British public voting for some random woman and a dog that does what she tells it to do. That's what voting gets you, is it? And then it struck me; some pretty face with a couple of sound bites, backed up by a tame poodle what hogs the camera? Didn't the UK just do this in 2010? Does reality game show land even NEED to point out the futility of voting?

The Quinn Group Redux

In April last year, I ranted briefly on how perhaps the collapse of Quinn Group was down to the kind of faulty maths that would let someone overestimate the cost of dole payments for all the group's employees by a factor of three. We had to dig out the group, or the taxpayer would be hit for €3.6 million a week in dole payments. The horror.

Turns out, it would have been cheap even at that price, since the Dáil is now in the throes of bringing in legislation which will impose a €240 million euro levy on - well, taxpayers.

Cold. Damn.

I haven't been to the movies in two weeks, because it's just too damn cold here. Air from Siberia has been capriciously mixed with air from the Arctic, and we're living in a winter wonderland here, by which we mean, it's winter, I wonder if this crap is ever going to stop. The most hilarious aspect of it is watching the weather people troop on each evening and tell us that tonight it will be super cold but tomorrow night will be much warmer. That's happened five nights in a row now and I'm starting to think they're using the same software the Department of FInance uses for economic forecasting.

At first it was kind of fun and all, since Ireland gets snow about as often as it gets competent prime ministers, but snow gets old real fast in a country that doesn't have the practice, and now I just want it to get the hell out of my way and let me get back to normal life. Instead, it's outstaying its welcome with the kind of tenacity normally only seen with drunks on the bus and those marvelous people who think that part of the social mission of public service in Ireland is a commitment to spend four hours on the phone listening to them work through everything in the world that isn't really their fault. (Maybe it is your fault, maybe it isn't, but I do know it ain't my job to fix what's wrong with you, because I can't see a copy of the DSM IV anywhere on my office bookshelf).

It was all great and fun and stuff when it was just soft and fluffy snow making my car twice the height those Swiss guys made it, but three days in, the soft and fluffy stuff turned into a lumpy hardpack crust getting between me and everything I gotta do to pay the bills and all the things that I run up the bills doing.

And at first I was cheered up by the way that people were nicer to each other as we wrestled with the misery, but nearly two weeks into this nonsense what I'm noticing is all the people who don't think that they need to do anything to clear the ice away from the front of their businesses. Big business is too big for that kind of thing, I notice. The banks, those kinds of people. Little guys who actually own their stores; you can navigate past those places safely. Big business; not so much. It's going to be brisk business down the Four Goldmines next year as they start to work their way through all the people who picked themselves up from outside big businesses and while they waited for the ambulances remembered what Dillinger used to say about the banks. Thanks goodness I won't need to sit through that.

For me, it's just a matter of wondering whether I'm going to be on my bike again this side of Christmas. The house is still surrounded by a half mile thick no go zone of pack ice before you can get to a main road, not that the main roads are any kind of picnic for bikers. What ice is still left is piled up semi randomly in the gutters, leaving you to wonder whether to get out in the middle and risk some clown skidding through black ice into you, or get in close and kill yourself on whatever's lurking beside the kerb. So I've been riding the buses, which has been educational and impressive. I don't know how bus drivers are getting to work in the first place, given that they don't get paid enough to live anywhere with good transport links or decent roads, but get to work they do, and then they fight their way through stupidly messy roads to get the rest of us to work. I'm a fan of bus-drivers suddenly.

And maybe there's a lesson for us in how we're dealing with the snow in how we ought to deal with the other storms of crap which are falling on the country, but whatever that lesson is, I'm just too damn cold to think what it would be.

emobile; as if the world needed another stupid company

Check it out. Ads like this are going up all over Dublin, for Eircom's newest attempt to capture the mobile market. These three people are allegedly part of the management team, which consists entirely of altogether-too-relaxed-looking clowns with supposedly reassuring titles. That's Sara, In charge of thinking ahead, John, Head of Non-Complication and Mark - Director of Simplicity. Not shown; Paul - Director of eliminating duplication and redundancy, because apparently they don't have that position. How else to explain the existence of two guys who apparently have the same job. Oh, you're arguing that non-complication and simplicity are different jobs? Not if they're done right, they're not. If your organisation actually has a difference between making it simple and making it not complicated, it ain't simple. Or not complicated. So the message here is emobile; it takes two kind of annoying looking guys to make it simple enough to use.

Also check out the way that five out of the six hands are in their pockets. Unlike in real life, when all six hands are going to be in YOUR pocket.

Blowing up gas stations with cell phones; if only killing stupid people was that easy

Last week one of the many walking parodies of bureaucratic ineptitude which clutter up my life circulated an email to everyone in his address book warning us all that if we used our mobile phones at petrol stations, we ran the risk of annihilating the entire world through the evil of cell phone sparks igniting the insanely volatile fluid we routinely fill cars with.

I deleted the email immediately rather than have it sitting on the screen tempting me to hit reply all and say something which would only get me into pointless arguments with buffoons in suits. I'm annoyed to discover that I'm still brooding on the idea that there's no law against putting technology in the hands of people so pestilentially stupid that they can actually believe that cellphones can transform petrol stations into fireballs.

The idea has long since been thoroughly debunked. Mythbusters took it down in their very first season. In the UK, Brainiac, a show dedicated to making EVERYthing explode, concluded that the only way you can get a cellphone to cause an explosion is to replace the phone with a stick of dynamite with the word Nokia written on it.If TV doesn't float your boat, snopes.com blew the story out of the water:- http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/static.asp

http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/gasvapor.asp

Even if the assembled might of TV and websites don't persuade you, lets just think about the numbers for a moment.

There are 330 million people living in the US, with 1.15 cellphones for every inhabitant and 245 million cars and SUVs between them. It seems safe to suggest that at the very least, there are a billion instances of people filling their petrol tanks a year in the US, and that in the overwhelming majority of those instances, there's at least one cellphone present. That's assuming that each car is only filled up four times a year, which I think you'll agree is a very conservative assumption. So even if the odds against a phone igniting a petrol station were a billion to one, there should be one incident a year. Yet, there has never been a reported incident. Not once in the fifteen years since cell phones began to get common and then ubiquitous has there been a confirmed incident in which a cellphone lit up a petrol station.

Now that's just anecdotes meeting data; just because something has never been reported doesn't mean that it's never happened or that it's impossible. But the fact that in ten years there's never been a confirmed incident anywhere in the world suggests that you're significantly more likely to win the lottery than create a Michael Bay scene at your local BP station. In fact, you're significantly more likely to win the lottery, even if you haven't actually played it.

But it's better than that, because it's comparatively straightforward to prove with actual scientific deduction that it's vanishingly improbable that you could detonate petrol with a cell phone. A cell phone operates with milliwatts of power from a battery rated in the ballpark between 500 and 2000 mAH. A car battery, even a tiny one, has 40 AH. The smallest conceivable car battery has twenty times the power of the largest possible cell phone battery. Hold on to that thought. It gets better. The operating voltage in a cellphone is between 3 and 5 volts. The operating voltage in a spark plug is a minimum of 12,000 volts. It takes quite a lot of electrical judo to get the power out of a 12 volt car battery and through a spark gap at a minimum of 1,000 times the rated output voltage of the battery. And car manufacturers don't go to all that trouble because it's fun, cheap, or cool. They do it because it's the only way to be confident that the spark will ignite the petrol in the cylinder every time.

Which brings me to the contents of the cylinder. Immense ingenuity goes into ensuring that each cylinder in the engine is filled with a precisely measured mixture of petrol and air so as to get the maximum explodiness out of the petrol each time the spark plug fires.

So, to go back over this again; the most common kind of ignition of petrol fumes in air requires a precise mixture of petrol vapour and air in a confined space and a minimum of 12,000 volts. 12,000 volts. Cell phone voltage - 3 to 5, depending on the phone. Spark plug; big open spark gap hanging right in the middle of the petrol-air mix. Cell phone - let's keep this simple; have you EVER seen anything in your cellphone emit a visible spark? No, you haven't. The entire device is sealed in plastic, with every single electric component carefully screened away from your sweaty hands because the electronics are so subtle and complex that your sweat could interfere with the working of the machine.

If cellphones could make petrol explode at petrol pumps, the car manufacturers of the world would be replacing the electrical systems of cars everywhere with cell phones. They're not. So the next time someone sends you that email alerting you that you could turn your local Maxol into a Michael Bay cut scene by taking a phone call - well, it's up to you what you do. But if enough of us can keep quiet while stupid people get to shout from the rooftops, soon the only thing we'll be able to hear is stupid.

The Quinn Group; I think I see where it all went wrong

People have been asking how it could all have gone so wrong for the poor old Quinn Group. I think I've figured it out.

On my way home, I passed a big banner which said "Support the Quinn Group if you want to avoid paying €3.6 million a week in dole payments" It's not signed or anything, so I can only speculate who hung it up, but it seems like a safe bet that it was some group of people working in or with the Quinn Group.

Anyhow, there are 5,500 employees in the Quinn Group in Ireland, according to its own website. And dole payments max at €196 a week. Multiply those two figures together...

€1,078,000

So I think I see how the Quinn group might have wound up not having enough money to cover its insurance exposure. Its finest minds may not be up to the challenges of high-ish finance. And if that sign was put up by Quinn Group employees, it's not a puzzle any more why Elderfield sent in administrators; the puzzle would be why he didn't send in remedial maths teachers.

Front Line; would be so much better if it was a real front line, with shooting.

Since I got tired of wargaming, I've been spending Monday evenings at home and watching TV I'd never seen before.

Which is how I'm getting to see Pat Kenny's The Front Line, or rather how I'm getting to see about twenty minutes of it before I remember that after a 20 per cent pay cut I probably can't afford to replace the TV every week and so I'm going to need to change channels before I actually jump up and head butt the screen so hard I wind up wearing the Sony like a toilet seat round the neck of some cartoon character. If it doesn't do anything else it might eventually drive me back to wargaming, because it's getting so that being furious with losing isn't as bad in my memory as the the red mist that I get from watching Front Line, or as it should probably be called, Ireland's most annoying whiners.

I was pitching the theory to John the other night that The Front Line existed because Joe Duffy has always hated Pat Kenny and wanted to make him look like a fool, so he pitched the idea in the RTE canteen one morning that what Pat should do was run his own version of Liveline or whatever it is that Joe Duffy's morning moan-fest is called. John riffed on it beautifully, suggesting that the actual pitch would have been for Joe to say "You know what I always wanted to do? Do Liveline late at night on the TV." Which I agree, is much more subtle. However it happened, Pat's run with the idea, and there he is with his very own live line clone on TV.

Dear, suffering, holy, god almighty tonight, it's enough to make you despair of the ability of the average Irish person to buy a bus ticket without a UN peacekeeping force to handle the complex paperwork and fraught commercial negotiations. You've got a studio audience full of people who volunteered to be on the show. As you can imagine, the kind of people who volunteer to be on the audience of a TV show devoted to grilling politicians for getting things wrong - well, you're not moved to volunteer because you've no strong feelings about anything. It would be easy to single out some of the whingers for detailed excoriation, but it doesn't feel entirely fair, even though I've never managed to watch the show for more than twenty minutes without conceiving the visceral urge to go down to Montrose and beat at least one specific individual until I died of exhaustion.

Despite all that, it's fairer to generalise. And in general the vocal part of the audience of The Front Line consists entirely of a selected band of cretins who will reliably advance the same set of moronic opinions each week:

1. The government should take personal responsibility for every single thing that ever happens and collectively resign en masse every time anyone stubs a toe, fails to win the lottery or overhears something which hurts their feelings
2. Nothing that happens is ever the fault of "ordinary decent people"
3. Everything that happens is the cause of deep anger in the overwhelming majority of the population. Bonus points if you can get two consecutive speakers to announce that two diametrically opposed things are both unanimously opposed by everyone. Bonus points are awarded no later than fifteen minutes into every damn show
4. The government should pick up the tab for every trifling need of every single citizen
5. No citizen should actually pay taxes
6. No service, of any kind, should attract any form of charge
7. Everyone should be paid more than the average wage, because we're all entitled to loads of money
8. Everyone should be paid less than the average wage, because we need to be more competitive
9. Notwithstanding 2. above, there would be no problems at all in Ireland if people just took responsibility for looking after things like they used to back in the good old days

If for any reason the audience forgets its responsibilities, there's almost invariably some invited guest who can be depended on to say something which would give any reflective person an aneurysm. It's hard, sometimes, to believe that we live in a world where you go on the TV and announce you're an expert in something that hasn't traditionally had professional certification, and the very worst you can expect to happen is that they'll give you an appearance fee. I'm still waiting for the moment when the host of these lunkfests turns around to one of these walk-on opinion-wranglers and says "So, Mr Leotard, you claim to be an expert in the challenging field of prospering in a collapsing economy. Just how much money have you personally made other than through selling gullible people dumb ideas you haven't been stupid enough to try yourself?" or "So, Dr Ludaramaun, you claim to be an expert in disaster recovery technology. How many lives have you actually saved in the course of your long and successful career as a superhero?"

Brain exploded yet? Mine usually has by this stage.

The thing which makes it clear that this is actually Joe Duffy's subtle revenge on Pat Kenny - doubtless Pat squatted on something important to Joe, like the Late Late Show or something - is that as the season has rolled on, the audience has got progressively more likely to include at least one mouth-breathing redneck under-achieving cretin who will bring his intervention around to everyone's favourite, an unfocused rant about how "ordinary decent people" are getting shafted while the government cossets druggies and pikeys and immigrants and so on and so on. Now when Joe gets that on the radio, they just hang up the phone and say something like "Whoops, we seem to have lost the connection". When Pat gets that, he's stuck with it. It's live TV, and the goon's physically there. They can take the camera off him, but they can't actually gag him. And no amount of audience-screening is going to protect Pat from this. Joe can have his researchers chat away to the phone-callers for a couple of minutes to decide whether they're going to be a disgrace, but Pat has the clown show bussed in hours ahead of time and it's no struggle for them to put up a facade of calm till their moment in the spotlight. It was kind of hilarious when some maniac spoke for us all and ripped into Pat for telling everyone else they should accept less pay and benefits while he got paid sixty times what someone on benefits can hope for. But when every week you can be sure that you're going to get the kind of bigot - well let's put it this way; a lot of these guys, if they were in a taxi, after three minutes the driver would stop and refuse to move until they got out.

Yep, getting beat stupid by my friends is starting to look more inviting every week.

Can I ask you a stupid question?

The only appropriate and safe answer is "Yes".

Here's why. No matter what the problem is, there's only going to be a couple of questions which will help you get closer to the solution. All the other ones are going to be stupid questions. And let's face it; no halfway sensible person asks questions they already know the answer to, or which they could figure out the answer to by sitting quietly for a second. So if you ask a question, it's because you don't know stuff, and the chances are that you don't even know enough about the subject to know what a good question would be. So the chances are that any question you ever get asked, on its merits, is going to sound pretty stupid. For that matter, the chances are that any question you ever ask is going to be stupid.

If you're unlucky enough to work in a job with easily defined parameters, most of the questions you're going to get asked will be non stupid ones, but they'll all be the same question, more or less; they'll be versions of "can you tell me when the next train leaves/whether this item is in stock/what price extra fries are?". If you're lucky enough to have a job that pays well, it's almost certainly paying you well because it requires you to think. And if you're paid money to think, it's invariably because there are lots of people coming by your shop who find it too much trouble to think about the things that you're being paid to think about. Those people are going to ask you stupid questions.

Rejoice. For two reasons. The first is that your job wouldn't exist if it weren't for stupidity. I've made a good living for twenty five years out of the fact that the world is full of people who don't know how to do things that I know how to do. It's frustrating dealing with the consequences of stupidity, but whenever I find myself wishing that for once people would just get a clue, I remind myself that if they ever did, the first sensible follow-up would be to put me on a farm somewhere. And the second reason to rejoice is that stupidity is neither general nor incurable. There are irretrievably stupid people out there, but the majority of stupid people are specialists. Just as no-one can know everything, no-one can be ignorant of everything. And people can, and sometimes even do, learn.

So when someone comes up and says "Can I ask you a stupid question?" fight the temptation to embroider your reply. It would be amusing to say "Apparently, you can." or "Only time will tell." Lord knows, I've said that often enough. It's tempting to say condescendingly "No such thing as a stupid question.", although I hope I've just talked you out of that fallacy. The simple and true answer is "Yes." With no baggage or condescension, and with the humble awareness that your own turn in the barrel is coming, say "Yes." It won't make you feel much better about the idiocy to come or the mental gymnastics needed to jump over it. But at least it won't make the person asking the question feel like any more of an idiot than they have to.

Lem-Sip; spreading disease in your workplace

Dotted all over town these days are posters for Lem-Sip. For those of you who don't know what Lem-Sip is, congratulations on not living in a country where everyone has a cold from October to May. Lem-Sip is a sublime rip-off; synthetic lemon flavour and a gram of paracetamol which you can put in a mug, add boiling water to, and sip while you feel sorry for yourself for a) having a cold b) not having enough sense to take two paracetamol tablets and a mug of real hot lemon juice instead. It's important to keep in mind that Lem-Sip doesn't cure your cold; it just damps down the symptoms enough that you can do something other than feel sorry for yourself.

Anyhow, for a couple of years now, Lem-Sip has been advertising itself with campaigns which make out that Lem-Sip will turn you into a real man instead of a whinging crybaby who lies in bed when he's sick; up until now, the advertising hasn't been too clear on whether Lem Sip will turn even women into real men. Possibly someone noticed this, and their current round of marketing is non-gender specific. The posters say "When staying in bed isn't an option." The message, I think, is that Lem-Sip will give you the fortitude to be up and at 'em whatever way you feel, though in my view the only time staying in bed isn't an option is when the bed is actually on fire.

Anyhow, it's an annoying campaign, but I bring it up because its cunning goes further than making people who don't buy Lem-Sip feel like whimpering inadequates. The beauty is that if you buy the message, you drink the Kool-Aid and then you get up and walk amongst the healthy population. Spreading germs wherever you go, and infecting the people you meet with the very illness that had you thinking of staying in bed. And those people will now buy Lem-Sip so that they too can go to work and infect everyone around them, and so it goes, and so it goes.

Pure brilliance, as long as you don't think that wittingly spreading illness to improve sales might be immoral. Or maybe it's just that cold viruses are now so highly evolved that they've co-opted big pharma. You decide.

The juxtaposition of the pitiful

Walking the none-too-mean streets of my none-too-mean city today, I was jolted by two things ten feet from each other.

To my left, a man drinking a cup of coffee from a cardboard cup with one hand while juggling his crutches with the other; my double take was when I saw that his left leg was missing from mid thigh. There was a time when you didn't see people with missing limbs in Ireland. Medical care was good enough that hacking off limbs wasn't something doctors had to do all that often, and we could afford to fit people with prostheses when it came up. The first time I ever saw someone with a leg just gone and not even a peg in its place was in Jerusalem in 1990. Threw me then, still throws me now. Where are Ireland's new amputees coming from?

And to my right, a prosperous man in his thirties watching over his child's push chair. Which is one of those oversized overspecified all terrain vehicles which seem to have evolved in the same way as the owners' taste in SUVs. I've become accustomed to stepping out of the way of these ludicrous mobile shrines to the God of Personal Satiety - like their bigger SUV brothers, they don't corner too well, and their drivers take the view that it's up to other people to figure out how to get clear rather than for them to pay attention to what they're doing - and I don't for the most part pay them too much mind. Life's too short, I'm mad about enough things already, and hey, think of the children!

Well I do. Specifically I think of how many children could get access to clean water if these bozos had instead bought the kind of push chair that they themselves had spent their childhoods in and given the change to Concern. But let that pass, because bozosity in push chairs may have peaked once and for all.

This push chair had disc brakes. As God will judge me in this life or the next, I am not making this up. Disc brakes. I am trying, without success, to imagine a scenario in which disc brakes on a push chair would perform a useful role. In what hilarious combination of circumstances could you conceivably get a push chair up to a speed where the only way to stop it was to use the kind of stopping technology usually relevant only to high performance cars? And if you stop it that hard, given how top heavy these things are, wouldn't it just flip immediately like an original Mercedes A class taking a corner? Other than giving me fresh reason to despair at the self indulgence of the people I share this island with, is there any point at all to disc brakes on a push chair?

And is there any point at all to pretending that this is a community any longer when you can see on one side of you a man who cannot afford and apparently has no-one who will give him an artificial leg, and on the other side a man who has so much spare cash and so little sense of what it is to be a man that he can lavish it on buying a baby-SUV, disc brakes and all that cost more than an artificial leg would cost in real money and does a job so much less useful?

Sometimes you just have to talk about something fundamental

A friend of mine in steady employment forwarded me this story Fallen angels of the US plaintiffs' bar this morning. Executive summary; the US legal firm of Milberg Weiss is under investigation because of claims that they paid - in fact cultivated - potential class action litigants against major US companies. If the claims prove out, what the firm did was to encourage people to buy shareholdings in different US corporations specifically so that they'd be pre-positioned as lead plaintiffs in class action law suits against the corporations if their earnings weren't as expected. Apparently, this is against a number of specific rules governing the behaviour of lawyers in the US; in other news, there are apparently rules governing the behaviour of lawyers in the US.

Since there is no conceivable news about lawyers which would actually shock me, this didn't exactly rock me in the aisles when I read it. What did annoy me enough to take up the cudgels is the editorial coda of the piece, which I reproduce below for your reading pleasure.

After all, the temptation to pay a lead plaintiff would only arise in a situation where there was competition from other lawsuits: Messrs Lerach and Weiss wanted to be first at the courthouse because others were right behind them. If they had not sued corporate America, it would have made little difference: someone else would have done (and did).

It is "absolutely unjustified" to suggest that the indictment proves the lawsuits brought by Milberg Weiss were fraudulent, says John Coffee of Columbia University law school, a securities law expert. The main victims were other law firms, possibly other plaintiffs, and the US legal system, which suffers whenever anyone commits perjury. He does not think corporate defendants "were hurt in any way that the law would recognise as injurious" since other law firms had already sued them and would have controlled the cases if Milberg Weiss had not done so.

Indeed, other legal experts argue that paying lead plaintiffs is good for everyone in the plaintiff class: it gives them a bigger incentive to fight hard for a win or settlement. And their kickback, after all, is alleged to have come from Milberg Weiss's own fees. So where is the harm?

This is market-based justice: let the one with the strongest self-interest win. It is not pretty, but it is our system. Get over it.

First paragraph; there's nothing wrong with this because if they hadn't done it, someone else would have. If that's a valid response to the issue, then there's no such thing as a crime at all. And if it's not intended to make that point, what the hell point IS it making?

Second paragraph; the main victims are other law firms, possibly other plaintiffs and the US legal system, none of whom apparently matter.

This paragraph, and the two "Screw You, Greed is GOOD" paras which follow are what really gets my motor running. They seem to proceed from the idea that there is no social cost to predatory behaviour. This is arrant nonsense, and I expected better of the FT. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If someone makes a predatory profit, someone else, somewhere else is taking it in the neck. In a monetised world, that's the only way these things work.

So if Milberg Weiss and their clients make out like gangbusters on the back of their scheme and everyone else loses, those losses are real. And because they're real, either the people suffering the losses will have a less pleasant time than they otherwise would have had, or they will recoup their losses from someone else in turn. These things trickle on down. Reagan was wrong about benefits trickling down, but by god the bad stuff is always going to keep moving downwards until it hits an immoveable obstacle. So when the law firms lose out, they up their bills to compensate, and the people paying their bills have to shoulder the increased costs.

And let's not lose track of where all the windfall money is coming from; the corporations which got targeted. They pay out, and that's money they don't have to do other things with. So people get fired, or the price of what the corporation does goes up. Either way, the larger social grouping gets hit with the true price of the windfall to one group of lawyers.

Now take that a step further, as other corporations look at what happened to Milberg Weiss' targets and cut their costs to make sure that they don't get hit the same way. And the community as a whole gets to pay the price of those cost cuts, whether it's outsourcing of jobs, punching up the price of the product or skimping on environmental protection. All so that Milberg Weiss and the other legal firms it was competing with can make money from something completely unproductive.

Last, but not least, the airy dismissal of the US legal system as a victim with any real interest to hurt. People don't give it very much thought, but the legal system in any country is essentially the thing which stops us from settling our disputes with machetes and living in armed camps. The knowledge that there's a system in place to vindicate our claims and protect our safety is what gives us the confidence to trade with strangers and walk around in public without feeling the need to carry a weapon. Erode that confidence and you're on the beginning of the trail that leads to anarchy. Which looks pretty cool in Mad Max, but in real life it's more like Black Hawk Down.

I don't mind too much when some fool in a bar can't figure this kind of thing out, but people actually read the Financial Times expecting it to have some relevance to their decision making.

Shooting fish in a barrel

For the millionth time in a row, the stars of the Eurovision song contest are the stage set and the BBC voiceover from Terry Wogan. The only reason I ever watch the Eurovision is to listen to Terry gently rip the whole thing to shreds. I think I've managed to watch it every year since 2002, at least for the voting section, which is priceless for Terry's barely controlled sense of outrage over the way the phone voting is more like a map of how the next war in Europe will line up than any kind of musical judgment. That's some countries - with the richer ones the voting doesn't tell you who their friends are, it tells you who's cleaning their toilets.

He's not wrong, of course. If I was sitting down trying to draw the maps of a future Europe, I'd probably start with Eurovision voting patterns. Just for badness. It's not that I really think that Croatia and Serbia should be united with Greece, it's just it would serve them right.

The other thing is that I swear to God that the show is getting more decadent every year. It was always supposed to be some kind of lowest common denominator show, putting up kind of crap music which wouldn't bother anyone too much. The lowest common denominator is getting pretty damned low these days. The songs are lame as ever, but way too much of the costumes and the choreography seem to have been cooked up in the back room of one of those strip clubs which were an obligatory part of every American cop movie of the 1980s. And there have been way too many acts which left me wondering were they self hating gays, or taking the piss out of something I'm too straight to understand. That's Ukraine, for starters.

Luckily this year they've all been kind of overshadowed by the set. I imagine Finland could have put a man on the moon for what it cost to surround the the acts with enormous projection screens which could show anything at all that struck their fancy. Since the bands couldn't really have known just how much over the top ness would be at their disposal (there may not even be that many flat panels in all of Moldova for all I know), I found myself wondering, at a purely practical level, how they worked out what the backdrops ought to be. But they were good - generally better than the song.

Someone needs to tell me what the Germans are on. Last year, they sent a country and western band - this year it was the big band sound. Germany seems not to be very good at either of these things. You'd think sixty years of US occupation would have let some of it rub off, but apparently not.

As I write this we're at the voting stage and so we're running back through the songs - my word, they're as bad as I remember them from the first time. The up side is that showing the songs means we're spared having to listen to the Finnish presenters, who seem to have been hastily cloned from the couple of muppets they used last year. Maybe they ARE clones; perhaps the EBU keeps a blond idiot of each gender in an ice-box someplace and thaws them out every May to yell at the audience in something which is almost, but not quite colloquial English.

Which leads me to wonder half-heartedly why it is that everyone in show biz feels the need to pretend they're working in a call centre. The presenters always have a head set with with thumb sized boom mike. Why don't lapel mikes work any more? Did the man who had the recipe die? It wouldn't bother me except that they insist on making the spit shield flesh toned (in the same way that band-aids are flesh toned - the Eurovision's never had a black presenter so I've never seen whether they'd tailor the spit shield for one). So as the muppets bob their heads around, it's hard to shake the feeling that they each have curiously regular and quite enormous warts on their cheeks.

The Ukrainians just showed up again. I can't rule out the possibility that their lead singer is Kim Jong Il.

The interval act; well, not like the other children. A guy just shoved a lit fluorescent tube down his throat. I'm simultaneously impressed and disturbed. Though Lordi should have put us all on notice last year that Finland has a rich geek tradition. Flipside, I've just watched with my heart in my mouth as a trapeze artist working without a net jumped in and out of her trapeze in a series of moves which were sinuous, beautiful and absolutely terrifying. I was impressed as all hell, but would have been so much happier if I hadn't been thinking she was risking her spine at the very least. Mind you, maybe it's not as impressive unless there's a risk of maiming.

They've just introduced the EBU's executive supervisor, prompting me to wonder what he does the rest of the year. It's just too dispiriting to think that he might spend the other eleven months getting ready for this. There has to be something more important he does.

I got distracted from voting there by other stuff, but it's the same old same old, except less fun because they're trying to save time by letting the Hello Helsinki people call out only the top three results. So it's harder to get the sense of the patterns - and of course Terry hasn't had the chance to pick it apart much either which takes the fun out of things. However, all the Balkans are voting for each other; what WAS that war about? Obviously not music. Of course, it's not like the Eurovision is about music either.

In other shock news, the UK is stuffed again. No-one's voted for them yet, which seems just mean. It was a stupid song, but it was sort of fun and bouncy and plenty of votes have stuck to much worse songs. Ireland's only done a little better, but our song was lame beyond belief and didn't deserve to get much. Ah, late breaking news. For some reason, our colonial overlords just got seven votes from us. Why? Malta just gave them 12, but then who else were they going to give them to? Libya's not in and the Italians stopped playing years ago. I must look into why, one of these days when I've got literally nothing else to do.

And Serbia has won. Possibly because of bloc voting, possibly because it was sung in Serbo Croat and no-one knew what it was about. So this time next year, Belgrade. My word.

Of course, you can sing a soppy song and still be a Serb. As she made her way to the front to do her encore, the lead singer marked her joy by shaking her fist as though she'd just won the all-Balkan celebrity atrocity competition.

Ireland was completely stuffed. Serve us right.