boreders

I was less than shocked to discover today that The Mirror has managed to stretch out Holly’s cleavage to a further day of discussion with a 2-page article discussing the right and wrong amount to show in public. Obviously just a chance to show a dozen or more pictures of celebrities in flesh revealing dresses, from the tasteful and currently highly popular Angelina Jolie to the utterly deranged and hardly dressed Jodie Marsh. With death in Kenya, incompetence and nepotism in Parliament, and street violence on the rise in the UK - you can see why women and their breasts demand so many front page inches.

Dancing on Ice was flooded with complaints after host Holly Willoughby showed off her cleavage in a skimpy dress.

Flooded. Cleavage. Skimpy clothes. The shock of it all. What has saturday evening entertainment come to when a young and attractive woman wears a dress. Damnation and brimstone rain down on her satanic soul!

I read about this with incredulity, because I know what papers will do to sell copy. It would appear the ‘flood’ amounted to five complaints that Holly showed a little too much skin this last Saturday. What do these five people do as a day job? In truth, they’re probably professional complainers. Reminds me of a sketch from ‘Saturday Night Fry‘ where a woman (played by Phyllida Law) blurts all sorts of obscenity in a discussion about dirty minds (with Hugh Laurie) and then promptly sends a letter of complaint about the poor standards and language just in time for the end of the show (she complains they used the word ‘penis’ twice in the course of the show, three times if they read out her letter…).

Holly used to be a model. She’s an attractive woman. Women have been known to wear dresses and use their appearance to their advantage. That rubs off on the success of the show. People who feel that seeing cleavage constitutes some level of uncalled for nakedity really should just pack up and go hold a 24/7 vigil with placards outside their local lap dancing club… Maybe they could go down the newsagents and tear the topless ladies out of the tabloids, to save people from themselves. Revealing dresswear and pornography occupy quite different points in the spectrum of decency - and judging by the pictures of Holly and the dress, there’s nothing wrong here.

I have an cold coming. A slow, insidious bug of some kind intent on taking its time. Having spent too long in a freezing cold meeting room on Thursday, I had a sore throat by Friday… and now, it’s got worse. The minor sore throat now feels like I have pebble-dashed the inside of my neck with gravel. I have an extra touch of Barry White in the tone of my voice - and a gathering feeling of congestion. I hate this sort of stuff… I really do.

I received some finely crafted spam today… the sort that really has you convinced from the outset:

Dear user!
We let you know,
that you have 6 unread messages in your letter-box.
Please, check them here:
URL REMOVED
Best regards,
Administration

I mean… that’s good, isn’t it! Never mind those mails from PayPal, eBay and that bank you’ve never had a current account with in Australia, this one really shows craftsmanship. I mean, what was I thinking leaving all those messages unread. No wonder I don’t have any friends on Facebook… I’m just ignoring opportunities thrust upon me by caring parties as yet unknown. One of those messages might be from that nice man in Nigeria who needs my help with his $34 million fortune!

I’m off to check…

France seems to thrive on l’exception culturelle, running against the grain of what the rest of the world might consider commonsense. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has, of late, shown a very different approach to personal relationships while in office, the sort of thing that would see uproar, crazed media assaults and impeachment around the rest of the world. In the UK when a business declares job losses you might expect unrest and a spot of light industrial action from the unions, but in France you can expect riots and acts of arson.

Now, Amazon has raised hackles in France because they offer discounted books and, woe is me, free shipping. The Lang Law of 1981 protects small publishers and booksellers by enforcing tiered discounting - basically making competition nigh on impossible without breaking the law. Amazon’s offer, of combined discounts and free shipping on new titles, exceeded the lawful 5% - and following court action, where they lost, they have now chosen to ignore the law and the decision of the court, while paying off a fine in neat little chunks of $1,000 a day. You have to accept that you can’t rescue everyone by force of law - the smaller retailer either has to find a niche or move on… you can’t coddle them and wrap them in cotton wool.

Expect burning books quite soon, probably lit by enraged book stall owners.

Why is it that one days when I decide not to bring a packed lunch to work the prepared dinners prove to look as unappetizing as possible? Or fail to be what you recalled seeing on the menu earlier in the week. I mean, I didn’t bring a lunch in today and recalled seeing roast beef or some kind of meat ball dish on the menu. The beef didn’t materialise and the meat ball meal came in at £2 without much in the way of supporting side dish - savoury rice that has sat under a heat lamp for an hour… Hmm… Now, let me think whether I fancy one scoop or two!

So, I end up eating crisps instead - admittedly cheaper, but far from the filling, warming meal I had hoped for. Maybe I should lower my expectations or go out somewhere for something to eat? Then I might not end up so damned hungry and disappointed.

One can only hope that this does for Knight Rider what Ronald D. Moore did for Battlestar Galactica. They already tried a sequel with Team Knight Rider in the late 90s… and I never saw that, so I can’t really comment on it. However, they have tried other re-imaginings of late - like Flash Gordon - but they don’t always work - and I have seen nothing but awful reviews for Flash. Here’s hoping…

I don’t have much to do with blogs. Hardly write online at all. Never engage in pointless chit-chat and banter simply to fill space.

Oh… OK. Who am I kidding? I have one or two blogs around here somewhere. And now, I have an ‘experimental’ blog - on the alpha test - over at profy.com. The blog comes from Russian coders and shows promise. Apparently we’re only seeing about 20% of the potential functionality so far - but the site seeks to combine blogging and social networking into a natural whole.

I shall blog here and there about my experience and findings. Over there I inhabit the Borederland - so, if you get the chance, do read and maybe even try it yourself.

… Several Words Arranged To Confound preHension.

I currently suffer from a severe case of acronygnorance (see what I did there?) at work, where the TLA (three letter abbreviation¹ ) rules supreme. I, as an upshot of this, find myself staring blankly at emails, notes and documentation bemused by the needless density of hidden meaning generated by a fascination with reducing everything to a minimal length.

When you text someone or post a classified advert in a newspaper, I can understand the need to abbreviate - letter count can cost money and time better spent elsewhere. However, anyone communicating thoughts, intentions or a new process should endeavour to do so with clarity. No one wins over anyone with confusion. Send me a document laced with acronyms and you can expect me to attend the next meeting none the wiser and far from convinced about the point and purpose of your initiative. Want feedback? Sure - stop using stupid acronyms.

Adding a glossary can help, but even that represents a degree of laziness. In theory, a piece of software like Word can actively replace a series of letters with something else - so if you know you intend to use a technical term that begs for an acronym, set it up for automatic replacement. HTML provides an alternative with the ACRONYM tag, which allows you to provide the meaning together with the acronym - revealed simply by hanging over the term in a supporting browser. Perhaps software could provide something similar for those reading documents via computer? That would considerably assist poor sods like myself who struggle to keep up…

1. Yes… abbreviation. An acronym forms a pronouncable word and since when has TLA been anything of the sort? [↩]

Watched “Hugh’s Chicken Run” last night (the first of three programmes about organically reared poultry versus the intensively farmed variety) and I fear I may never eat supermarket chicken again. I know when I eat meat I eat something that lived and breathed not too long ago, but how that animal lived and died matter to me. I knew battery farming wasn’t so great - but in a few random scenes, my view of the intensive process has deteriorated. The enforced survival of the most profitable situation that results in the premature execution of injured or sickly birds by broken neck really bothered me - and I suspect it will get more distressing as the birds get older.

To live and grow under such pressure and in such squalor for less than 6 weeks - have we grown so heartless and indifferent to the lives of the animals around us. I’m reminded of the title of the book recording the last interviews with Philip K. Dick - ‘What If Our World Is Their Heaven?‘ What if he was right? And, even if not, do we have a right to make the short lives of these farm animals so damned unpleasant simply to feed our already distended bellies?