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Punk sell out?

The Queen of Punk Vivienne Westwood has apparently been awarded a damehood by the Queen of England.

Not really news but it was news to me and I only found out because the fashion designer was appearing on the BBC’s Sunday AM programme to talk about the British human rights and civil liberties organisation Liberty.

It does seem odd to me that a prime exponent of the punk movement should accept such an award from the Queen. It’s not even justifiable in the same way that many people who are considered republicans have accepted similar awards saying that although the award comes from the monarch it is effectively being awarded by the state. Surely as a punk Westwood would be opposed to the Establishment which includes both the monarch and state.

But then she has been to the palace previously to accept her OBE back in 1992 and caused a bit of a stir by not wearing knickers. Is it possible to be an anti-establishment member of the establishment? I think Dame Vivienne Westwood might just be able to pull that paradox off.

Edit: According to the Yahoo News Italia she was made a Dame by the Prince of Wales, oddly it seems to be the only news source that mentions the Prince of Wales other than The Daily Mail and there is no way that I’m linking to that fucking publication especially as they seem obsessed with her lack of knickers.

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A House For One Red Paperclip

Kyle MacDonald has succeeded in his quest to exchange via a series of trades one red paperclip for a house. [via]

It’s “official.” I’m going to trade one movie role for one house with the town of Kipling Saskatchewan. But nothing’s official until Dom and I go to Kipling and shake hands with the Mayor. Dom and I will be in Kipling on Wednesday July 12th to shake hands with the mayor of Kipling, Pat Jackson, and Bert Roach, Kipling’s community development officer…and probably a whole bunch of other people as well. Then it’ll be official – without the quotation marks. (Funny enough, I actually held my hands over my head and did those “quotation mark” thingy’s when I typed out the word “official” the first time. Please don’t ask me how I managed to type the word “official” with my hands over my head. Unlike trading one red paperclip for a house, I still have no idea how I did it.) Anyhow, this is gonna be so much fun. We’re going to seal the deal on July 12th – exactly one year to the day I put a picture of one red paperclip on this site.

One of those crazy schemes that the power of the internet enables to become a reality. Even more remarkable is that he has done it in a single year mostly due to the fact that his last two trades have been amazingly fortuitous.

The town of Kipling will give him the house in exchange for a role in the latest Corbin Bernsen movie. There must be some smart cookies on that town council because they are actually getting a great deal in their exchange as they are determined to market this phenomenon to the full extent and the whole town seems to have embraced the idea. They are even going to have an annual Red Paperclip holiday.

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Whitehall fights ID costs demand

BBC News:
Whitehall fights ID costs demand

The government is battling to ensure that estimates of the benefits and risks of identity cards remain secret.

The freedom of information watchdog ordered the Department of Work and Pensions to publish its findings about how the cards could fight ID fraud.

Now the department has decided to appeal against the information commissioner’s ruling.

What have they got to hide?

How can we have faith in a government that refuses to be open and transparent about one of the most significant changes to happen to this country’s citizens in centuries?

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What? But I only suffocated the one child.

From a children’s classic that I loved as a child to a classic piece of literature and one of my favourite novels as an adult The Count of Monte Cristo.

Jay Pinkerton has reimagined the tale of a man wronged who then takes his revenge into a tale of delicious black humour in his Classics Desecrated online comic series.

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I’ll eat you up, I love you so…

Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak was one of my favourite books as a young child if not my very favourite.

I readily identified with Max and his wolf costume, and the wild things themselves were fascinating and a little scary.

“And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws”.

I’ve discovered that this children’s classic is to be made into a motion picture and will be directed by Spike Jonze. Perfect.

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Teen burns down house over test grades

Teen burns down house over test grades

TOKYO (Reuters) – A Japanese boy burned down his home, killing his stepmother and two younger siblings, for fear his parents would find out he had lied about his score on an English test.

The 16-year-old, whose name has not been released, is thought to have set fire to the house in Nara, western Japan, and left his stepmother to die along with his 7-year-old brother and 5-year-old sister, domestic media reports said on Saturday.

The boy’s parents had been due to attend a meeting with teachers about his exam results that same day, reports said. The teenager told police his father, a doctor, had put him under extreme pressure over his academic performance, Kyodo news agency said.

Mark my words this will be Britain in less than a decade from now.

The pressure to succeed in school and pass tests is ever increasing now that league tables of test results is the be all and end all of the British education system.

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Sport Uncategorized

World Cup: England and Brazil out.

The bane of the England football team in major tournaments the penalty shootout did for us yet again and we lost to Portugal. Was the loss of Rooney who got sent off for what seemed a quite vicious stamp on an opponents groin the deciding factor in the match?

Who can really say but I’m sure it will be much discussed in the days to come. Down to ten men England upped their performance and held Portugal at bay and though the real chances were few both teams looked like they could score. But it was not to be and the Portuguese goalkeeper Ricardo repeated his performance from two years agao and made the crucial saves in the penalty shootout.

I hope Portugal go on to win as it is slightly less crushing in retrospect to go out to the eventual winners but I think that the winner might just prove to be the resurgent force that is France.

A great match, much better than the England-Portugal one, saw the favourites Brazil put out by a French team that most people thought were over the hill. Perhaps they have secretly discovered the fountain of youth because they were back to their best form in their previous match against Spain after spending years in a state of relative mediocrity and they kept that form up here against Brazil.

It’s not as if they have replaced their aging stars with new young talent like Argentina, this team still features the players such as Zidane and Barthez the world champions of 1998 and the laughing stock of 2002.

This will be the first time since 1982 that we’ve had all European semi-finals with neither Brazil nor Argentina making it to that stage here. I think that we will probably see a final between the hosts Germany and the comeback kings of France.

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Monster Island

I just got through reading the novel Monster Island by David Wellington and thought it was pretty damn good for a first novel.

There’s a bit of a zombie zeitgeist at the moment and though I’m a fan of the genre this is the first zombie novel I’ve read, I’m not even sure if there are any others. The novel does give the typical zombie story a wider scope than you get in a movie much in the same way as the events in the excellent The Walking Dead comic series written by Robert Kirkman does.

Basically civilisation has collapsed and the Earth seems to be overrun with zombies. Ironically states like Somaliland which were unstable and ungoverned are now the most stable places on the planet. Dekalb an American UN weapons inspector is captured by a female Somali warlord and despatched to New York (the monster island of the title) with a troop of Somali girl soldiers to retrieve much need medical supplies from the UN headquarters there.

In addition to your standard zombie fare there are a number of new ideas and expansions on the basic themes particularly in the case of the character of Gary, a zombie that has managed to retain his human faculties and intelligence.

I first learnt of the novel due to David Wellington’s website on which he publishes his work chapter by chapter in a blog-like format that readers can read entirely for free. I read much of Monster Island there before buying the novel and as I couldn’t wait I have already started reading the sequel Monster Nation online and will no doubt start on Monster Planet the final part of the trilogy in short order.

I’m convinced that publishing like this online or like Scott Sigler who records podcast audiobooks of his own work is the future and more and more writers will adopt it as a way to promote their work and interact with their readers.

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Politics Terrorism Uncategorized

US Guantanamo tribunals ‘illegal’

BBC News: US Guantanamo tribunals ‘illegal’

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Bush administration does not have the authority to try terrorism suspects by military tribunal.

Justices upheld the challenge by Osama Bin Laden’s ex-driver to his trial at Guantanamo, saying the proceedings violated Geneva Conventions.

The ruling is seen as a major blow to President George W Bush – but it does not order the closure of Guantanamo.

So the tribunals are ruled as illegal, doesn’t surprise me as they seem as fair as the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita. But having fair and open trials was never the reason for the prison at Guantanamo the prisoners were not there to be tried and punished for their crimes they are there solely for the extraction of intelligence in order for the US to carry out their War on Terror. Any open and fair trials would jeopardise this and would reveal the true nature of the detainees there including that many of them are probably innocents that were sold to the US by corrupt members of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. The fact that children were picked up and held before being released is surely an indication that people were detained without first establishing who they were and what threat they constituted.

I think that the pressure has built to such an extent that the prison will soon close particularly as the Bush administration seem to have finally woken up to the fact that it is a PR disaster. But any such closure will simply be the next step in a PR campaign as it will not mean the closure of those less well-known prisons around the world and the unknowable numbers of secret and hidden US military prisons.

I would be very surprised if we ever see more than a few token open and fair trials conducted under US law occur.

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Comics Copyright Uncategorized

Alan Moore’s Lost Girls

Alan Moore writer of seminal graphic novels Watchmen and From Hell faces controversy and accusations of copyright infringement over his latest work Lost Girls.

Moore not only faces criticism for the pornographic content of the graphic novel but also because Great Ormond Street Hospital maintains that it holds the copyright for the character of Wendy Darling from Peter Pan, who is one of the main charcters in Lost Girls.

But is Peter Pan in the public domain and if it isn’t are the characters copyrighted. Never Neverland: Peter Pan and perpetual copyright

Alan Moore discusses Lost Girls and the issues surrounding it in this BBC Radio interview.

Neil Gaiman has written in his online journal about Lost Girls.