What Comes To Pass

I know I shouldn't jump to conclusions but.

Convicted peadophile Gary Glitter is about to board a plane from Vietnam to Bangkok. He’s swiftly arrested.

I mean that’s the equivalent of watching someone dressed in a stripy shirt and a black eye-mask, carrying a large bag marked “SWAG” wander into the bank.

Y’know, I honestly thought he was smarter than that.

Meanwhile Rock and Roll Christmas maintains its lengthy absence from Christmas compilation albums. For some reason no one wants to listen to a paedophile sing Christmas songs to their kids - don’t ask me why.

Later

John

BBC fails basic Journalism

After the fiasco that surrounded a few American media outlets (and the subsequent fallout over their massive screw-up) over the White Phosphorous story you’d have thought the BBC would have had the intelligence to read the newspapers and not make the same mistake.

WRONG

Booyah! - US used white phosphorus in Iraq

That headline could read US used White Phosphorous in WWII on European and Pacific fronts, In the Korean War, In Vientam, in the First Gulf war and in the Second Gulf War

White Phosphorous has been around forever. It’s not a chemical weapon, it never has been classified as a chemical weapon, about the only thing chemical about it is the fact that it is, itself, a chemical.

“the substance - which can cause burning of the flesh”

Correct, WP can cause burning of the flesh if you were to take a shower in it, when ignited.

However, WP has basically 1 primary purpose, to create a massive cloud of white smoke - which is why it’s used in artillery training (you can accurately gauge the shell’s impact) and in Helicopter drills (massive columns of white smoke are easy to see).

I think one thing should have tipped them off: This came from RAI. They say that the reason the RAI channels are so vehemently socialist (think the BBC only magnified a thousandfold) is that the other channels are all owned by Silvio Berlusconi, however at the end of the day, that doesn’t excuse poor reporting like this.

This sort of thing reminds me of the old Brass Eye TV show where they’d get celebrities to take part in a public information broadcast about made up drugs with names like “Cake”, describing ridiculous effects and the outlandish consequences of taking the fake narcotics. You can say anything, no matter how stupid and if someone wants to believe it, they’ll pick it up and run with it.

Later

John

Updatey

If there’s ever a documentary made about my generation, I’d like the music to be the Zerowing Theme tune (All Your Base Are Belong to Us). What better synergy of the 8-bit video gaming of our youth and the internet can there be?

Anyhow.

Went to a dinner on Friday to meet up with as many Shatin College students from our year as possible. The collection was pretty impressive: Shaun, Helen, Richard, Kevin (who I hadn’t seen in ages), Jen, Hei (I think he went to SC but it was before my time there), Janaken, Tiff, Natalie, Elaine and Charlotte (who said “… Didn’t you used to be in my form class?” when she saw me).

Then again, I have no right to complain about people forgetting names. Arriving at Heathrow back from Hong Kong I ran into Jen Hancock and completely forgot her name. In fact it took me 20 minutes with my year 13 Yearbook in front of me (before I resorted to the Year 12 book) to remember Charlotte’s name.

“So, what have you been up to” is a question that I wish I could answer a lot faster.

The meal was excellent and later we toasted Caleb. The mood was, on the whole jovial, almost wake-like. I loved it.

Still, for those who weren’t there and who found this site when searching for Caleb Jordan (This site is still the 2nd rated Google search result when Calebjordan.org is a more deserving of that place) I’d like to share one of my fondest memories of Caleb.

It’s traditional to have a selection of awards given out during the Leaver’s formal and as all the awards were voted for by the yeargroup, the whole of year 13 was gathered into the SSC to mark off their ballots.

They range from the usual “Most likely to succeed” fare to the bizarre categories like “Most likely to become a cantopop star”. Caleb was nominated for the latter award.

Everyone who was nominated had to get up and give a short demonstration of why they deserved the award. I’d been nominated for (and subsequently won, complete with vaguely ridiculous ‘victory feather boa’) “First millionaire” because people had tagged onto the whole John Swaine = Rich meme (it’s my family, not me guys, family - I’m not earning yet) so I pretended to sneeze and wiped my nose with a 50 dollar bill.

When it came to the Cantopop Star award, the two girls who went ahead of Caleb refused to sing (this was after all extremely short notice). When Caleb was asked to show some Cantopop characteristics he stepped forward. Tilted his head and threw up the Peace Sign with an airy grin thusly:

100% Cantopop star, except 7 foot tall, with blond hair. The whole room cracked up - it was awesome.

Best to all the Shatin College guys.

Later

John

Well it had to happen sometime

The Labour party could only stop itself from shooting itself in the foot for so long. Our MPs still contain the same number of ill disciplined prats as they did in the 80s and early 90s.

Last night they actually managed to vote against public opinion, with a concerted Tory-Liberal coalition to defeat what was described as a vital piece of security legislation requested by Police chiefs, advisors and an independently commissioned report.

Yeah… Well done guys, seriously. Momentous.

Did they honestly have so little faith in the British Judiciary that they were willing to believe a High Court Judge could sit down and preside over the same perversion of justice 12 times in a row?

This, I think is the fundamental issue. If indeed the hypothetical miscarriage of justice that has been bandied around were to occur, it would require a High Court Judge to rule incorrectly a dozen times in the space of 3 months.

No one raised this issue. They should have, it’s a shaming of those who voted against the government’s bill.

I guess it was naive of me to believe that the parliamentary party could go on for a decade without crippling itself spectacularly. Is this the Labour the rebels think the public will choose next election? The same infighting, backstabbing rabble that successfully lost 3 consecutive elections?

As a party member I offer the parliamentary party a slow, monotonous golf clap. Back to the good old days. When things were simpler. When you didn’t have to formulate policy, when you were free to swing languidly in opportunistic self-indulgent circles and survive in safe seats.

David Davis’ useful idiots.

Later

John

Disappointed

I’m disappointed with the new Elbow album (ok so now it’s not that new). Admittedly I had high expectations as Cast of Thousands was one of the best albums of its year but so far Leaders of the Free World is not hitting anything like the 3 good tracks required to make an album “worth buying”, let alone the 6 that make it a “good album”.

In fact one of the best riffs is wasted on a song which contravenes the Alice Cooper principle:

“If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.”

Even with one of the best lyricists around today, Elbow can’t help churning out a simplistic sensationalist track when they get into politics. Sorry guys, musicians making political statements almost always fall flat on their face in implementation and end up with flat, ultimatum driven dross.

John Lennon’s superlative “Imagine” is the one really beautiful political song that comes to mind and that’s also founded on ridiculously simplistic grounds (John himself called it a “sugar coated communist manifesto”).

Anyhow, on first listen there’s nothing close to Fallen Angel, Fugitive Motel, Switching Off, Not a Job or any of the amazing tracks on Cast of Thousands. Hoping for better on second run-through tomorrow.

Thankfully, even if Elbow doesn’t pick up on further sampling, I have The Essential Herbie Hancock to enjoy. Hope its selection is as good as The Essential Dexter Gordon which I was very impressed with - hauling in tracks that let him draw from his Bebop sensibilities with a solid session group.

Fact: It’s impossible to write anything about music without sounding pretentious.

Later

John

Rest in Peace

EDIT: Janaken, another Shatin College alumnus has sent out an email (which I received only indirectly since I think only 2 people from Shatin College remember my email address - or maybe I’m just not popular, who knows?) The email explains that Calebjordan.org has been set up, with the intention of creating a memorial book and setting up a scholarship fund for impoverished kids. They’ve got my backing 100%.

One of my old Shatin College classmates died on the 5th. I only just found out.

Caleb Jordan sat opposite from me in registration throughout my time in Shatin College. Sixth Form had been divided into 12.1-2-3-4-etc instead of keeping people in their house groups and I always thought that in addition to wanting to promote a more informal atmosphere, Shatin College had decided to take this move because Hillary, the house Caleb and I belonged to, was severely undersubscribed.

In our entire house, in year 13, there were 5 guys in Hillary. 5.

Myself, Kiyong Kim, Jarkko Walrus, Michael Lee and Caleb Jordan. We would have been the laughing stock of sports day were it not for the ridiculous physical attributes of Jarkko and Caleb.

Caleb was something insane like 7’. He’d tower over just about anyone and the fact that Hillary’s 5 guys contained the 3 tallest people in the year was a source of entertainment in House Photos. We put that to good use during the onsite sports section of the House championship.

Basketball, Volleyball and Netball were all played onsite. Kiyong worked out that we wouldn’t be getting any actual rest breaks because as we cycled through events we would always have to be playing at least one sport to make up the numbers. This posed something of a problem.

We had an ace up our sleeve in the Netball tournament though. Shatin College’s A team was basically Hillary Girls + Kate Townsend so we could realistically field one other player and have a full, unbeatable team to make up for our inevitable trouncing on the basketball court.

Caleb, took up position in goal defence, which was kind of cheating by virtue of the fact that noone, in the serendipitous formulation of the rules of netball, foresaw a 7’ dude goaltending.

The game was hilarious. When the Hillary girls weren’t wiping the floor with their outmatched opposition, any attempted shots were blocked by a preternaturally long hand which seemed capable of comprehensively covering all but the most ambitious vertical lobs.

When it came to playing the Volleyball, we managed to field a team that included the tallest 3 guys in the year in a predominantly asian college. Imagine if you will the sheer bad-sportsmanship that this entailed: at any given time, we had one player who’s head popped over the net, blocking and parrying with considerable success simply because he had one physical attribute that was so key to the game’s performance, that he outclassed the entire opposition by having it in excess (until we played Tasman who had a well rounded and arguably, not-too-short team).

We somehow won the boy’s sports trophy because Caleb and Jarkko carried the track and field sportsday but I’ll always remember the onsite events fondly.

I can’t claim to be one of Caleb’s best friends, I didn’t see him outside of college, I think the only time I did was when he joined our large Shatin College horde that won notoriety as “underage beer drinkers” in the SCMP’s guide to HK nightlife but I, like many others have only good things to say about him.

I remember sitting in registration with him, talking about the Lord of the Rings films or about his family. Gangly legs draped in impossibly baggy jeans and a sweater who’s sleeves covered half of his hands.

And now Caleb Jordan stares, smiling through a pair of thin framed glasses, out of the class picture on my wall.

I wish his reason for not attending the next Shatin College reunion would be something fun or adventurous, like taking a trek through China, or playing basketball for his College - those are the sort of thing’s you’d associate with Caleb but instead in ten, twenty years we’ll probably just have a photo on the nametag desk, surrounded by cheery recollections and anecdotes about our memories of Caleb.

I hope they find one as nice as the one on my wall.

Later

John

Oh dear god..

When you hear about the excellent book The Physics of Superheroes and the various success stories of comic book writers who understood physics and applied them to their storytelling, you come to wonder exactly how anyone in that industry can be this moronic:

Mr Hyde, a big, burly, mad scientist, is struggling with Ant Man’s daughter.

Ant Man, for the uninitiated, had the ability to grow or shrink his body at will. His daughter has the same power.

Anyhow, she’s trying to grow bigger so she can throttle Mr Hyde’s phenomenal comic book neck when he swings her around and shouts:

“The bigger they are… The more likely they are to fall at six times the acceleration due to gravity!”

…

What. The. Fuck.

Seriously… Did this writer take idiot pills when he wrote this? Did he fail, not only High School physics, but Elementary School physics?!

Gravity! C’mon people! It’s a uniform force on this earth! 9.8ms^-1! The same no matter how heavy you are! Oh dear god! Galileo proved this over 400 years ago! How stupid do you have to be!? The fact that the writer actually submitted this script is bad enough, but somehow it got past editors!

Holy crap! How does he think Airplanes fly if someone 6 times heavier than a human is subject to 6 times the gravitational force!?

I’ll be ok in a bit. First I have to go freak out Sean by pasting the script to him. This thing will probably kill a physics major like him. Mwahahha!

Later

John

Fire and Forget blogging

I’ve just been going through my archives for the past months and I’ve got duplicated posts, posts without the links they discuss and a great variety of blogging screwups.

Being sporadic with posting I can handle, but this sort of thing is just sloppy.

Unfortunately, it’s because my Blogging tool of choice (ecto) has been grappling with my heaving old installation of MovableType which is, by all accounts, in need of a total revamp. I’ve been too lazy to find out what the hell the end result of my posting has been so this collection of silly mistakes has built up.

Heck, Comments haven’t worked for about 3 years now so I’ve been missing out on such classics as the old “bitter little Law man” post I got back when I was suffering from clinical depression (yeah, classy - tell a guy he’s bitter, twisted and laugh at him when he’s got serious emotional issues - that girl needs a job in PR). If I ever get round to fixing this site (which I promise to do when I get to Hong Kong, new theme and all - honest!) I’m not sure I’ll bother to turn comments back on, I look at the mêlée that other bloggers have to deal with on their sites with comment trolling and spam and I honestly can’t be arsed to deal with it all.

I think I’ve caught all the typos and mis-posts now.

(Oh wait.. Now I can’t actually DELETE the extra posts. I think a hot-fix is necessitated)

Later

John

Using our own system against us

At a time when the Government’s Anti-Terror legislation is currently being altered following a step down, it’s nice to learn that the innocent here have not be made to suffer because of our zealous defence of basic Human Rights.

I’m certainly not attacking our fundamental respect for Human Rights, but the matter at hand demonstrates just how easily our own decency can be turned against us, it is a weakness in the character of our nation but a very necessary one:

It transpires that the court martial brought against 7 UK soldiers has in fact been founded on a tissue of lies, propagated by bribery and sleaze.

Mrs Rishek, a mother of 11, who does not know her age, told military investigators she was beaten by the soldiers during the attack, the court sitting in Colchester, Essex, heard.

But she has admitted to the court that she lied and never sustained any injuries.

In court on Monday, Neil Ford QC, representing Private Scott Jackson, one of the accused, asked Mrs Rishek whether it was accurate that she had told investigators she received a “dreadful beating” while pregnant.

She replied through an interpreter: “Correct, but I was not hit.” Richard Ferguson QC, representing former Private Roberto Di-Gregorio, asked Mrs Rishek whether her tribe considered it “a matter of shame” to be found telling lies.

She said: “Yes, it is a shame. I am ashamed of it now. I don’t know what I was saying.”

Mr Ferguson then asked her whether she had lied to obtain compensation for someone else or to back up lies told by other members of her community.

She said: “No, by Allah, I did that on my own. No, it was not for that.”

Last week, the court heard Mrs Rishek, along with other witnesses, is being paid 100 dollars a day to give evidence at the trial.

She also admitted that she had only agreed to give evidence after being told she would be paid.

This court martial is taking place right here in Colchester. Colchester is a garrison town and whilst you come to disdain the general activities of squaddies ‘on the piss’, after living here for a protracted period of time you learn that fundamentally, our military is made up of a great many upstanding men and women. Our next-door neigbours are perfect examples of that - I’ve moved home over 10 times and I’ve only known 2 other sets of neighbours who come close to comparing to them in decency, kindness and bravery.

The idea that a collection of our fighting men and women decided to arbitrarily beat up a young pregnant girl is so fundamentally ludicrous that I can’t honestly claim to be surprised at the outcome of this court martial. The charges could only be considered likely (and thus, considered to have sufficient grounds to succeed for the briber) by someone with an intense hatred for the people of our military and who possesses massive ignorance of their conduct and nature.

I can think of persons without and persons within this country who would be sufficiently motivated (and foolish) to bring this farcical perversion of justice about and whoever they are, I hope subsequent proceedings discover their whereabouts and bring them to justice.

The media would have paraded this crap over TV for months (in fact they did so in the lead up to this investigation) had it been shown that there had been misconduct on the part of our soldiers. How long will this scandal, inverted upon the sub-human scum who paid that young girl and then held her bound by her own piety and faith, be played across the airwaves?

Later

John

Holy Crap

Shaky Kaiser snaps one of the craziest photos I’ve seen in a long time. Even with the questionable local practices of picking random English words and plastering them on shirts (although, admittedly I’ve seen someone walking around with the Chinese characters for “Exit” tattooed on his shoulder here in England) the choice of a Swastika with the words Adolph Hitler swirling around it is just jaw-dropping.

Simon reckons people ought to walk around with Japanese Imperialist regalia, it might give some assistance to locals who don’t understand just how unbelievably disgusting that symbol is.

I preferred it when people just abused Bill Waterstone’s copyright with Calvin and Hobbes T-Shirts.

Later

John