Culture – Page 21

So True….

Published on July 15, 2007

….especially on yet another rainy, dismal summer Sunday full of wet washing, when you may have to get out the chainsaw just to alleviate the stir-craziness…

Mariella Frostrup in answer to a reader on the agony page of the Observer:

[…]

Let’s talk about the difficulties of sharing a home with a man – a subject that I’m sure will double my mailbox next week. What is it about the opposite sex that makes them so adept at filling space? Whether it’s a bedsit or a mansion, men, with their all-pervading presence, seem to squeeze you into a corner. My opinion is, I admit, marred by my own experiences and therefore subjective, so forgive the gross generalisations. Women do colonise small corners of a shared home with enthusiasm. The bathroom cabinets will be brimful and the wardrobes full. But men manage to fill not the obvious storage spaces but the air itself. Why does making a pot of coffee involve saturating the entire counter? Why does having a shower leave more water on the floor than can have emerged from the showerhead? Is it impossible to lift the lid of the laundry basket instead of depositing discarded items on top? And then, even if you’re lucky enough to have found a tidy Virgo type, there’s the noise pollution: radio, TV, their opinions, their favourite CDs. The only thing men seek out privacy for are their phone calls, and ironically that’s the only part of their lives you may have a minuscule interest in eavesdropping on.

[…]

It doesn’t matter whether the male in question is a partner, parent, child or sibling – I suspect most women who read that today did so with pained recognition.

Girls Just Wanna Have… Fairies?

Published on July 12, 2007

It may be unfair to judge a book before it’s published and before I’ve even read it, but I did hear the author on the radio this morning and on hearing what she had to say my feminist radar immediately went “Spung!! Twee stereotype alert!”

And I speak as someone raised on Arthur Mee’s Childrens’ Encyclopaedia and Enid Blyton. But I also read Swallows and Amazons and Ursula LeGuin and knew when I was being talked down to by condescending adults.

The book in question is called ‘The Glorious Book For Girls’ and purports to be a riposte to that best-seller to middle-aged men, ‘The Dangerous Book for Boys’. There’s certainly room in the market for a book that teaches girls survival skills – it’s just not this one.

I must say my hackles went up right away just at the title: The girls’ book is called ‘Glorious’. But why not ‘Dangerous’? Don’t girls want to tie knots, ckimb trees, collect coins and stamps, start campfires, make their own microscopes and cause small explosions too? I know I did and I still do.

Here’s the publishers’ blurb:

Homemade scones, pom-poms, daisy chains. . . The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls will take women back to a time when we made cup cakes with our grandmothers, when girls weren’t obsessed with all things pink, when they didn’t wear ‘hot to trot’ t-shirts aged eight and when a bit of sticky-backed plastic and a tissue box could be the answer to your dreams.

Perfect for mothers, grandmothers, aunts and godmothers (as well as daughters, granddaughters, nieces and goddaughters, of course), this is a book for all women who secretly, or not so secretly, loved playing French elastics, dream of making elderflower cordial and need reminding of how to play cat’s cradle.

Sounds quite tempting, doesn’t it? I certainly enjoyed doing those things when young.

So despite my misgivings about the title I was quite interested. But as the discussion progressed between the author and the feminist lawyer who’d been invited to give the opposing view – because as any fule kno, any BBC radio news discussion must be reduced to two opposing views- the book’s actual content became clearer and my heart sank.

Glitter and ponies. How to talk to boys and pluck your eyebrows; how to bake a cake, sew a hem and what? How to sulk?.

Surely it couldn’t be so regressive, could it? The author couldn’t be trying to turn girls into little po-faced, fairy-loving Violet Elizabeth Botts or embryo Fanny Craddock memsahibs, all flowery pinnies and high maintenance hairdos – could she?

Oh, yes she could.

The Telegraph (what a surprise that the Tory papers should love this book) gives a little more insight into the book’s topics:

10 Things Every Girl Should Know

1. How To Deal With Boys
2. How To Have A Best Friend
3. How To Cope When Your Best Friend Gets A New Best Friend
4. What To Do When Introduced To Older People
5. How Not To Be Fazed By Other People’s Strange Habits
6. How To Keep A Secret
7. How To Tell If An Egg Is Fresh
8. How To Sulk
9. How To Have A Crush
10. How to Set Your Inner Alarm Clock

To which I might add, 11. How to tell when someone with no conception of girls’ lives today other what she gleaned from Enid Blyton school stories is talking down to you. Or 12. How to tell when you’re being flim-flammed by your own side.

I could go on, but you get the drift.

This is the corresponding publisher’s blurb for The Dangerous Book For Boys:

The Dangerous Book for Boys gives you facts and figures at your fingertips – swot up on the solar system, learn about famous battles and read inspiring stories of incredible courage and bravery. Teach your old dog new tricks. Make a pinhole camera. Understand the laws of cricket. There’s a whole world out there: with this book, anyone can get out and explore it.

That’s the book I’d’ve wanted to read, not some twee advice about fairy cakes or ballet shoes. If someone had bought me a book like the Glorious Book when I as a girl, I would’ve thanked the giver and immediately ‘lost’ it (the book and my temper) the moment I came across this :

Build your own fairy house

Fairies usually live in hedges and little bushes, so you should look out for them and help make their houses more comfortable. Choose the tree or bush you think is most likely to be a fairy’s house and carpet it with moss and flower petals.

Acorn cups make good bowls for water and basins for the fairies to wash their faces and clothes. Small fluffy feathers are very soft for pillows; if you live in the country, find some lamb’s wool – fairies love to sleep on it.

Empty snail shells make good sculptures for fairy banqueting rooms. Find pieces of wood to make a grand dining table and benches for the fairies to sit on.

You can leave tiny things to eat. Fairies like small garden peas, berries and rose petals.

Mark out a garden path with tiny coloured pebbles and make a fairy garden with flowers and twigs. If you dig a little hole and place a small bowl or cupcake tin in it, this could be a garden pond.

Fairies don’t like to be seen, so usually come out at dusk, just before bedtime so they can find your gifts and eat their supper while you are sleeping. In the morning, when you go back to the fairy house, you might have a little clearing up to do to get it spick and span.

So when climate change starts to hit, our female young will be perfectly prepared to build shelters, find food and care for ~~themselves~~ fairies.

I think that speaks for itself as to what the authors think it’s useful for girls to know. Not how to deal with bullying by SMS, or keep yourself safe on the bus, or what to do if your friend’s Dad gets a liitle too friendly or your house gets flooded. Nope, the answer is glitter, pompoms and fairy cakes. Oy.

Feminism may not be quite dead, but some of us women are doing our best to kill it.

Screw Politics, Let’s Dance!

Published on July 11, 20071 Comment

I’m having a day off reading thinking or talking about politics today, it’s making me depressed and snappy, or should I say more depressed and snappy than usual. The almost stationary Arctic-melt-fed low pressure weather system that’s obliterated summer like a great wet pancake isn’t helping. You can bet what you like that today’ll be the day Bush resigns and I’ll miss it, but what the hell, we all need a little light relief.

So instead, as you’ll have seen from the previous post, I’ve been tootling around YouTube sniffing out amusing inconsequentialities, like jumpstyle.

What’s jumpstyle? Here’s a fairly representative Dutch example, done to the Fratellis’ Chelsea Dagger :

Wikipedia, as always, has more:

Originally, the gabber dance style called “hakken” was used to dance to jumpstyle music, although it is slower than hardcore; but later a new dance evolved called “Skiën” (to ski). Skiën means kicking one’s feet forward and backward on the bass line, while the torso goes the opposite way (right foot forward, torso back), once in a while lifting one foot significantly higher than usual to indicate a break in the beat. This dance, usually called “jumpen” nowadays (derived from English, to jump), originated in Belgium in 1997 but has seen a real popularity boost in recent years, gaining widespread fame in Belgium and Northern France around 2002 and more recently in the Netherlands. In other countries such as Germany and Austria it has also garnered some interest, albeit among a limited public. The Belgian DJs Da Boy Tommy and Da Rick are often credited with its invention.

It is also called skank but is different from the skank associated with ska and reggae music.

Often another variation of this dance called “Duo-Jump” is performed by two people who choreograph their movements and perform them in unison along side one another. This variation of the jumpstyle dance also originated in Belgium. Some see similarities in the dance style with inline dancing

Jumpers can go to special jump discotheques, often called “Jumpotheques”; for example “The Oh!” in Gavere. Also special events, like the yearly Bassleader-event in Flanders Expo Ghent, are mostly kept in Belgium, but also events like ReverZe and Explosive Car Tuning or Jumping Is Not A Crime(JINAC) do their part in spreading this music style.

This choppy, jumpy dance, mostly performed by nerdy young white working-class guys, preferably performed in an unexpected public place and filmed on cameraphones, has been the latest craze amongst Netherlandish youth and all over Northern Europe for a quite a while now. There’s a massive seam of homemade jumpstyle videos online and some of them are quite brilliant.

My personal favourite is this French jumpstyler:

It’s the reactions from the passers-by, or rather the lack of them, that’s so funny. I must say I prefer the French jumpstyle style, the NL and DE styles are a bit too much like goosestepping for my liking and besides we all know what Germanic dancing can lead to.

This being YouTube, jumpstyle videos’ve led, inevitably, to cartoon jumpstyle mashups, (if ‘mashup”s still a word that’s acceptable to use – no doubt I’m showing my middle-age there).

Simpsons jumpstyle

Family guy jumpstyle

Futuruma jumpstyle (a bit lame)

Much better and cleverer, here’s Lego jumpstyle

Borat jumpstyle:

You want to have a go now, don’t you? Well to get you started, here’s a tutorial.

Have fun and don’t scare the cats.

Epithalamion

Published on July 7, 2007

It’s weird how huge internet trends can still pass you by no matter how much time you spend online. Courtesy of Fee Glover on Radio 4, without whom I’d never’ve known, come two wedding reception dance videos, a] because it’s apparently the most popular day of the year for wediings and b]to commemorate the London bombings with a bit of cheerful life rather than yet more death.

Thriller:

Dirty Dancing

If you’re getting hitched, handfasted, pledged or otherwise committed today, have a lovely day and all the best for the future. If you’re going to a wedding, have a bloody good time. Hi Ho Silver Lining wahey!

The Great Gazoogle Robbery

Published on June 26, 20071 Comment

Picture shamelessly filched from Sadly, No

One of the many and various things I constantly and futilely rail against is data intrusion; these days there is nothing about us, no tiny smidgen of information, however ephemeral, that is not owned.

Just not by us.

The ultimate expression of capitalist society has to be when the individual doesn’t own or control the means of production of their own bodily tissue, because some corporation has claimed the intellectual property rights to their genes.

We have lost the means of production of the most basic things about us, intrinsic to our identities as humans: who we are, what we do, where we go, who our friends and family are, what we think – even what we are, when you add DNA and biometrics data.Our very identity is not our own. But where did it go, and who took it? Did we just lose it? Were we just careless and it fell out of a pocket hole? Or was it stolen? I’d say the latter: if information is currency then we’re being robbed blind every moment of the day.

One of the biggest information thieves of all is Google. Beneath that carefully cultivated image of louche, hip, beneficent consumerism is a despot. If I may borrow a little archaic terminology from those smug boomers who’re making big money from Google’s quiet march towards total information domination – you can dress a greedhead as a hipster, but underneath there’s still a greedhead. Google is the ubergreedhead in information terms – so greedy it seems it’ill never be satisfied until it owns or controls not only all the data but all the ways of getting it. Next stop Microsoft?

This is not just a paranoid geeky lawyer thing: the tech industry itself is becoming increasingly concerned at Googles datamining breadth and reach. In her a recent Eweek article Is It OK that Google Owns Us? Lisa Vass points out the sheer intrusiveness of the data that Google collects and holds about us :

Make no mistake, Google owns you. The ways in which it owns you are laid out in a complaint filed by EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) and other privacy groups with the Federal Trade Commission over Google’s proposed merger with targeted advertising company DoubleClick. Here’s the list of data that Google collects and retains and the technologies through which the company gets it, from the complaint:

Google search: any search term a user enters into Google;

Google Desktop: an index of the user’s computer files, e-mails, music, photos, and chat and Web browser history;

Google Talk: instant-message chats between users;

Google Maps: address information requested, often including the user’s home address for use in obtaining directions;

Google Mail (Gmail): a user’s e-mail history, with default settings set to retain emails “forever”;

Google Calendar: a user’s schedule as inputted by the user;

Google Orkut: social networking tool storing personal information such as name, location, relationship status, etc.;

Google Reader: which ATOM/RSS feeds a user reads;

Google Video/YouTube: videos watched by user;

Google Checkout: credit card/payment information for use on other sites.

Not to mention pictures when you thought you were unobserved:

Not only that, they keep the picture forever.

Google account holders that regularly use even a few of Google’s services must accept that the company retains a large quantity of information about that user, often for an unstated or indefinite length of time, without clear limitation on subsequent use or disclosure, and without an opportunity to delete or withdraw personal data even if the user wishes to terminate the service.

Google maintains records of all search strings and the associated IP addresses and time stamps for at least 18 to 24 months (although Google recently announced that it would only retain data for 18 months) and does not provide users with an expungement option. While it is true that many U.S.- based companies have not yet established a time frame for retention, there is a prevailing view among privacy experts that 18 to 24 months is unacceptable and possibly unlawful in many parts of the world.

Whatever your political leanings imagine what someone opposed to your politics could do with that information. Hell, just think of the leverage that kind of informational scope potentially gives Google against individuals, should it choose to use it. or should they choose or be compelled to let someone else use it.

It’s all reminiscent of the aims of the Total Infomation Awaremess Programme, which was allegedly kicked into the long grass by Congress in 2005, but which in reality is still being developed under different guises.

The FBI is seeking $12 million for the [National Security Branch Analysis Center] in FY2008, which will include 90,000 square feet of office space and a total of 59 staff, including 23 contractors and five FBI agents. Documents predict the NSAC will include six billion records by FY2012. This amounts to 20 separate “records” for each man, woman and child in the United States. The “universe of subjects will expand exponentially” with the expanded role of the NSAC, the Justice Department documents assert.

Some of this data will come from open public records, but these are intelligence files – the FBI plans an intelligence file on every single US resident containing at least 20 items of information.Where are they planning on getting this data from, exactly, and how?

The use of National Security Letters by the federal government to secretly obtain information about individuals, without a warrant and without due process, has been one of the ongoing scandals of Bushco’s Homeland Security apparatus. These figures are from 2005: how many have been issued since then, and what’s been done with the data?

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks — and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined

In autumn 2006, Google started making overtures to the Republicans, even hiring two former GOP pols as lobbyists:

Under fire on Capitol Hill, Google Inc. has boosted its political muscle by creating its first political action committee while taking steps to reach out to Republicans.

The Mountain View search-engine company joins a sizable club of corporate titans that have established major political operations in Washington in hopes of influencing legislation and votes.

“Google probably learned that to be successful, you have to make campaign contributions,” said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles and an expert on money in politics. “I’m sure they’ve been told time and time again by everyone in Washington that ‘If you want to play, you play by our rules.’ ”

Google filed paperwork Thursday to register its political action committee, Google NetPAC, with the Federal Election Commission. The company intends to use the committee “to support candidates who promote an open and free Internet for our users,” according to Alan Davidson, Google’s Washington policy counsel.

In addition, Google bolstered its clout by hiring former Republican Sens. Dan Coats of Indiana and Connie Mack of Florida as outside lobbyists. The political veterans may go a long way in building Google’s ties with Republicans, a group widely considered to be the opposition based on the overwhelming preference by Google employees to make campaign contributions to Democrats.

Like I said, their image says one thing, their actions another.

What does all this mean? In my opinion what it boils down to is that Google cannot be trusted, the US government cannot be trusted, and because of ‘national security’ there is no way to know if they are working in concert.

Google disagree: they’re all like, “Duh, we turned down a government subpoena, we’re the good guys here”:

For a demonstration of Google’s trustworthiness, the Google faithful point to the search company’s having refused to comply with a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice demanding log entries on its searches—a demand that Google competitors AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo obeyed as the government investigated how often children might stumble upon pornography while using search engines.

But now they’re in bed with the Republicans, how long can Google cruise on the reputation of that one decision to oppose government intrusion? In any case, the reason the opposed wasn’t principled: it was about protecting commercial property.

For all we know they’re handing over info already. National Security letters don’t require a subpoena, and you ca’t say whether you had one or not – it’s secret.

For me this is about the ownership of our essential selves, which are being stolen from us in an unholy alliance beteen corporate information-processors and an intrusive and repressive state. On the other hand all of this may not bother you in the slightest: you may feel your life is an open book and you have nothing to be ashamed of. No worries then.