cynicalbastard

Got a couple of emails about ‘lost’ comments. Currently I’m getting around 200-250 spam comments every day. Anything held in the spam queue gets wiped without checking. If you comment with any links in the comment, you get treated as spam.

One of my beloved brothers has started bloggin and ranting over here. Nice stuff, like a mini-uk boingboing at the mo. Course he’s very late into the blogoshire, but I’m sure he’ll grace it rather more than I do at the moment. I’m awaiting the flippant throwaways on xianity to spark off a family war…

A few other ranters have added me to their blogrolls (which is very flattering, considering how little I post), and can now be found over in the blogroll. Special mention to the wonderful Dr. Rant team, who are taking apart the changes in the NHS with bewildering speed (they need that Gerry Robinson bloke).

BoingBoing has a post about the new Pipes service from Yahoo. which looks well interesting in a web 2.0/social network/what the hell is this really for? type way (see flickr/delicious, etc).

First thing I think? Cool, I can get BoingBoing without Xeni Jardin (which would be ironic considering she wrote the pipes post). But seems someone’s beaten me to it. Xeni, another waste of that second X chromosome.

If any of you want to talk about the famous novel, I’m afraid you’ll be blacklisted. The amount of spam I get that references Harper Lee is astonishing. So Harper Lee disappears into negative space. Which is a shame. Though I preferred the film.

Looking at my usage stats ((yeah, I know, but its either that or going to bed even earlier), I have a lot of incoming this month from disney.com. Is this an ISP? Or someone working there looking for cynicalbastards?

If you’re looking–’give us back our (Pooh) Bear! He’s not ‘merkin, he’s English.’

Thank you

By way of the comments, Gary James’ (I never know what to do with the apostrophe on names ending in s—its why I didn’t become a xian for years, all that confusion over Jesus’s or Jesus’, now I just settle for x and have done with it) newish blog.

Should maybe be over on ilkley rocks as a link, but he’s not in Ilkley (I think). Anyway, ver’ funny, albeit far too mentions of Crowded House for my liking. Particularly like the line ‘I’ve never forgotten that, largely because it’s only been a few minutes since I made it up’.

And Doctor Vee finally gets on to the blogroll months after he should have been. Despite a bewildering liking for Formula One, and having a far too clever understanding of blog layouts and all sorts of fancy pants stuff. He has very good taste in music, lovely and obscure. Oh, and also cos, when I was a pretentious youngster, I called me’sen ‘Vee’. Indeed most of my most pretentious work was done for various student rags under that sobriquet.

Euan Ferguson in the Observer having a snap at bloggers.

standing like a dumb know-nothing head-lolling droolpot, might as well start my own blog

How right he is. Why would anyone start a blog these days?

Interesting what comment spam is doing now. Got one today that went

black, full, faithful nothing comparative to small: http://www.moviegallery.com/ win create roll - that is all that grass is capable of , roll slot is very good mistery

Hmm, beautiful in its own way.

Worstall carries a story from Michelle ”teeth whitener’s best friend’ Malkin.

It’s one of those typical IPCGMITY stories, school in suffolk bans hot cross buns because it might offend religious sensibilities of non-Christins. Seemed a bit odd to me as it’s still a way to go even till Lent. Unlike most of these stories (straight bananas, banning xmas, etc) however there’s a grain of truth. But only a grain. The story was picked up by that mighty organ of record the Ipswich Evening Star and then on to the Mirror and elsewhere and lots and lots of places in the US. It’s rushing round the blogosphere as we speak.

With the result that the head in question is getting hate mail. But what’s this? The papers and blogger haven’t got the whole story. Says the head,

I have not imposed an outright ban on hot cross buns and we look forward to having them before we break up for the Easter Holidays.”

So what happened? Well, she requested the suppliers to remove the cross because it wasn’t yet Easter and THIS might offend non-christians. Well, okay, the latter bit is a bit odd (though most of us would applaud anything that delayed xmas till the start of December). But the actual decision is perfectly sensible. It wasn’t the time to eat hot cross buns, so they weren’t going to. Perhaps, rather than the appaling attacks on this woman, she should be applauded for resisting arrogant consumerism threatening to turn important xian festivals and their associated rituals into all year-round excuses for consumerism.

The Evening Star plays both ends by asking its readers, ‘do you think Miss Jackson deserves hate mail?’

Rafael draws attention to the scourge that is the grey squirrel.

My mother has the right idea. She catches squirrels in squirrel traps and then dumps them in the pond. They drown in five seconds or less. As she puts it, ‘it’s them or the bulbs’.

my absence from posting doesn’t seem to be affecting my page views, hovering between 200 and 300 whether I post or not. Who are all you people visiting when there’s nothing to see?

(Edit: yes, I KNOW it’s because of feeds pinging here to see if anything’s going on, but, hey, it’s still early and it takes a while for the world to focus)

Back later this week or early next. I’m brewing on a post called ‘In defence of violent pornography’. But I’m not sure whetgher the writing can live up to the title.

on to this one, but it made me laugh a lot. The latest Toy-Fu cartoon at Blue Cat.

Well, except for Lennox, and Muhammad who is the closest thing to a Saint the US has at the moment (whatever he did to Foreman).

But the current crop don’t make for much. Okay, Fraudley’s worthy of praise for earning millions without ever getting into a fight.

But female boxers? Well, they come in four types–daughters of famous male boxers (Laila Ali), ex-Z list celebrities (Tonya Harding), corner-street bruisers (no names mentioned) or glamour girls.

For female boxing still hasn’t quite rid itself of the foxy boxing tag, at least in the UK. And it’s hard to take seriously as a boxer someone who makes most of their money from associated merchandising featuring them standing in very little clothing and pouting (and we wouldn’t want Danny Williams to be doing that, would we?).

And, if they are both good looking and excellent technical boxers, it’s even harder to take them seriously politically (I know, that’s my preconception, but I bet you shared it).

So step forward Mia St John. Excellent boxer, world champion, rather tough, stunningly beautiful, playboy centrefold, and…explicitly discussing the war in Iraq.

Her blog features latest reading; beauty mags? boxing biogs? Nah, Kennie Andersons’ ‘Land of Hypocrisy’ and Steven Vincent’s ‘In the Red Zone’. Short thoughts on Palestine too. In recent entries, you get the feeling her PRs are trying to keep her off the politics though…

She quotes MacArthur–

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a
continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave
national emergency.
Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous
foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly
rally behind it.”

Respect is due…

Not sure what happened there, but apologies to anyone who noticed the outtage.

Gave me time to wander around the interweb a bit, and hang out at the Bad Plus site. The Bad Plus are one of the best young power-jazz acts in the world, most noticeable for an eclectic range of covers (heart of Glass, something by Aphex, Smells Like Teen Spirit).

They’re also on Sony and suffered from the recent rootkit debacle. It was a strange list of acts that Sony inflicted this DRM on, mostly seeming to be jazz (Blaket, Armstrong, Mulligan) rather than the most-piratable targets.

The Plus also blog, and blog properly, rather than the written-by-a-junior-PR style you’d expect from a Sony-signed act. Therein, various ruminations on music, books, touring and especially the contributions of Charlie Haden to American (and world) music. THis cynicalbastard likes Charlie Haden.

Okay, so this blog didn’t get nominated for Justin’s new list over at T’Sharpener. I’m not offended (mind the pool of tears).

Just wanted to note a couple of ones that did that are worth checking out. At least for the few of you that won’t already have seen the whole list and worked their way through it.

First up is pickled politics, which I’ve mentioned before. Excellent round up of Brit Asian and general SOuth Asian news and views. Excellent writing, mixing high-brow with popular culture.

And then there’s the World Weary Detective, ‘between you and the underclass’, the blog of a London Detective. Sits alongside coppersblog and of course the excellent Random Acts of Reality as news from the frontline of the emergency services.

Now what we really need is a way of bringing together all these reports with others from dealers and criminals to give a proper view of what’s really happening in our city streets.

Nosemonkey did an interesting post over at The Sharpener on the current state of the Blogoshire. I read it with, as I say, interest, but with a certain sense of ‘this doesn’t fell right’. Just not sure what.

A Bag of Bears has sorted it out for me (as a good bear should). I don’t write this to be taken seriously (you can tell, can’t you?) I used to be a journalist and a pretty okay one (well, I made a living and got lots of freebies, which is about all I cared about it), but blogging isn’t about honing words, it isn’t even about re-reading what I’ve written. It’s just, well, blogging (I find it much harder to make sense in this style, so now I don’t really try).

It’s nice that a few people I like to read, even if they’re wildly opposed politically to me, occasionally pop by, which is why I went to all the trouble of telling four or five of them about the new site, but it’s hardly a major marketing campaign is it?

At the end of the day, I don’t really care. I’d still write even if only a few of my acquaintances wandered past occasionally. And I certainly don’t want another job on a national. I can’t think of anything worse.

The mind the gap blog is documenting the campaign against violence against women currently being run by a group of feminists in Cardiff.

Very laudable of course, but it’s just a shame that they patently care nothing about violence against men. It’s men, after all, who are by far the likeliest victims of violence, whether on the streets of the UK or in wars across the world. But then, perhaps, violence isn’t a gender issue at all?

The George Best post made it into the Britblog roundup for this week, for which I thank whoever nominated it.

As usual when looking through the roundup, I discovered a couple of new-to-me blogs with some excellent writing. So kudos to Early Modern Notes (and I really must explore the world of history blogging right after I have enough time to see my family again). And through early modern to the True Crime blog (excellent writing and none of yer Ann Rule type tabloidisms here).

And also to the wonderfully named Boob Pencil for a hilarious piece on a trip to IKEA and the resulting mental and physical tribulations. As this blog is based for half the time in Manchester, the world of Manc bloggers is another I’ll have to explore the week after I spend some time with my family (and finish my dissertation, and pass my driving test).

Praise to all.

over at random rants…

I’ve got a Board meeting that day, but, hey it’s worth a try…