Waffle

Found via blogads on Shakespeare's Sister:
TV Smarter, a collection of resources on TV, social capital, brain activity and democracy. Fascinating stuff which I, as a non-TV-watching person who is unfortunately also an internet addict, could wastespend many hours reading. There's an associated blog, Trash Your TV.

Ian Richardson died today. I mostly knew him from his fantastic performance as Sir Francis Urquhart in House of Cards and its two sequels. I also enjoyed him playing the Voice of Death in the Sky adaptation of Terry Pratchett's novel Hogfather broadcast last Christmas. One of very few lines in the script to that two-part series that deviated from the novel was that line. The line from the Francis Urquhart series that everyone who's seen it remembers. "You might think so; I couldn't possibly comment" Even as Death, Richardson couldn't get away from his most succesful role.

I'd been rather hoping that he'd stay on for a sequel to Hogfather. From the accompanying "Making Of" documentary, there was no indication that he wouldn't be up to it. At 72, he looked fit and in good spirits, and indeed the news reports say he wasn't ill.

I'd been singing Ian Richardson's praises to my younger studio-mates, telling them that they had to see the Urquhart series some time. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any preview material on YouTube, otherwise I'd have taken the opportunity to show some right here and now.

Below, though, is a longish excerpt from Hogfather, towards the end of which Richardson says the line.

Every once in a while, the issue of how to copyright your artistic work comes up in a blog or forum. When that happens, chances are someone will bring up the neat trick of sending a copy of your work to yourself in a sealed envelope, so that the date stamp proves that you owned the work on that date and that it was created before that.

Here's what Plagiarism Today has to say on Poor Man's Copyright:

It is the worst kind of myth. It is wasteful, achieves nothing, gives a false sense of protection and can leave good people more vulnerable than if they had done nothing at all. There is simply no way that poor man's copyright is a valid strategy for protecting one's work.

To find out why, read the rest and read the Snopes.com entry on the myth that PT links to.

This is not safe for work, immature, puerile, tasteless and you've probably seen it before. It's also an earworm. Therefore, I am posting it here:

Update: I found out that the video I linked to was no longer available for, ahem, some reason. However, I could find another version easily, and updated the link.

Hey, he's having fun, all right? If you haven't ululated along with Finntroll, you haven't lived.

Just when you thought it was turning into the Warsaw Pact Song Contest, Finnish entrants Lordi win the Eurovision Song Contest. They... don't look a bit like Värttinä:

I've been told this is Finland's first win, but if they just send Finntroll next year they'll have their second victory in the bag soon enough.

Monster band has Finland fretting over face it shows - International Herald Tribune backgrounder

Another quick one from my childhood: Drawn's Jay Stephens reminisces on A Bear Called Jeremy. I recognised this guy at once... funny how all the media my brother and I consumed when we were little has stayed with me, when I can hardly remember anything I actually did myself.

Anyway. This fella was known to me as Beertje Colargol, het beertje dat kan zingen and seeing him again brought a little smile to my face. Maybe I should try writing and drawing for children's television, to brainwash a generation or two into loving my creations.

A good, carpet-F-bombing rant from Fuckchristmas.org:

Can we back up just a couple steps here? At what point did a basic understanding of the separation of church and state become a fucking war on religion? And how did we get to the point where you can call an organization set up to defend our civil liberties "Terrorists" on national television and no one fires your ass? Enough. Fuck all of you lying little shitheads who wish the world was out to get you so you could play the poor oppressed victims. Wake up assholes — you're the cowboys, not the fucking Indians.

"But we want to display our Christmas tree on city property!" You can, go right ahead. "They're stopping us from praying in school!" They're not, so fuck off. "We're not allowed to say 'Merry Christmas' anymore!" Are you fucking kidding me? Knock yourself out. Say it at work, scream it in your high school lunch room, hell, tattoo it on your fucking forehead for all we care. Guess who's gonna be there defending your right to do every one of those things? The fucking ACLU. One of these days you bastards are going to drive those fuckers out of business, and then you'll see some actual attacks on your religious liberties. I thought conservatives were supposed to be all proud and independent? When did they turn into a bunch of fucking crybabies?

[snipped bit including an interesting link to a Christian website summarising the known scholarship on the birth of Christ and its celebration, or rather, the lack thereof, in early Christian history]

But you boys at FOX still freak out every year about how everyone's out to get your special trees. This is really the most important thing you have to talk about? Whether Target says Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas? Here's a brainstorm: there's a fucking war on. Our soldiers are out there dying while you guys do your 14th live feed of the day from WalMart to show us what good little consumers we are. What Would Jesus Do? He'd jump over that newsdesk and kick your ass for that shit. Are you sure you want to hang your journalism credentials on a story about what some guy calls a tree?

Well we've fucking had it. You want to play bullshit games and scream about how God's fucking judgment is gonna come raining down on us if we don't start watching our vocabulary? Go right the fuck ahead. But let me clue you in on something: fire and brimstone ain't no deterrent for us. We're not going to hell, assholes, we're fucking in hell. We live with you.

That cheered both me and Jeroen up after a difficult Monday and Tuesday morning... (Via)

A repeat performance from Andrew Rilstone in which he demolishes another "PC Brigade" story, taking off with the headline

"Yes, it's hard to believe, but now Santa AND Christmas lights have been banned."

. Upon closer examination, the actual story turns out to be

Local council doesn't ban the word Christmas from light switching on festivities at all.

AND

Town moves Santa five minutes round the corner

.
Again, read it. And next time you come across a story like the one he dissects, or a second-hand report of same, engage maximum skepticism. You may want to blogroll Andrew's blog as well - he doesn't post much but when he does it's always great stuff.

Update: See this story at Media Watch Watch. It gets a bit confusing because that website was set up to counter an organisation called Media Watch and in this post links approvingly to Australian Mediawatch but once you've got the sourcing figured out, it's another good example of a non-story being turned into a story by means of Making Shit Up. It's about a report that British banks were "banning" piggy banks for fear they might offend Muslims. The reality: banks haven't been big on porcelain porcines for some time.

We should campaign for the breakup of Belgium. We should also stir up local trouble between the German Bundeslaender, in the hope that Bremen, Hamburg, Niedersachsen and Nordrhein-Westfalen —our nearest neighbours— all become independent nations. A minor civil war may be a price worth paying; after all, the former Yugoslav Republics were all killing each other's citizens a decades ago, and now they love one another, they really do. This basically validates the aims of the event. They are good aims, and they work.
We should stop sending people of Surinamian or Antillian descent. Sorry to be so bluntly racist about it, but New Europe doesn't want to look at them, doesn't care about their musical heritage, and won't award them points. Instead, we should pick the teenaged daughter of a Yugoslavian refugee off the streets, dye her hair blond, stick her in front of a microphone, and let her warble in her ancestral language. English doesn't increase appeal like it used to. Actually, we may not have to dye her hair blonde — it seemed to me that the peroxide quota was down this year.
What we should stop do is pick contestants based on their singing abilities. First of all, sounding like Whitney Houston is clearly worse than singing out of tune. Secondly, we have a history of sending out singers who fail to hit that high note on the big day, in the same way that we have a history of missing penalty shots when the pressure is up. Better not to shoot for that high note at all; after all, there were quite a few contestants who couldn't sing at all, and they got through to the finals. As a strategy, impressing the viewers with your vocal qualities is doomed to fail.
We should probably try to get some decent songwriting into the event, but only if it's squarely aimed at the lowest common denominator. Danceable ethno-pop or tunes that sound like John "Jellybean" Benitez rejects from 1985 will do quite nicely; impassioned soul ballads will not. Alternatively, we should finally embrace the high camp of the event like everyone else.
Only if we do those things will the Netherlands have any chance of ever taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest finals again, let alone winning. So let's start fomenting unrest in Germany and Belgium today.