Culture

Of all the Pythons, John Cleese depresses me the most. His wholehearted embrace of Americanisms—therapies, marriages up the wazoo, self-help, management videos, you name it—seems in some way the second most appalling fate of any member of the troupe.

I think it’s because so much of his finest humour flowed from venting his spleen at the most hateful characteristics of the Little Englander, the crawling, craven middle-class Englishman who licks the boots of his social superious, the uptight neuroses of the stiff upper lip. It was the high-octane hate that so brilliantly powered Faulty Towers. Now, it’s not really healthy to hold onto that, and I imagine that had Cleese spent the next thirty years doing so the results would be less than healthy.

But I have to wonder if replacing the quintessential English middle-class neurosis he grew up around with the quintessential SoCal neurosis is really that much of a win.

One of the more annoying arguments that I have noticed creeping into the arguments of vaccine deniers, as their arguments based on the fraudulent junk science produced by a shill for a law firm are being more widely understood as disreputable nonsense, is the notion of choice; choice is, apparently, an irrefutable, unassailable right; one may not over-ride the choices of parents who wish to expose their children to disease.

This one really gets on my tits.

My minor objection, one which is commonly voiced with regard to this line of argument, is that because vaccination relies to herd immunity to function effectively across a population this is a choice which is not self-contained. It’s an argument that ought to be treated with the contempt we’d hold for someone arguing they ought to be able to drive drunk because they’re only risking their own life—unless they only drive on private roads, that’s simply untrue. Even the most fervent libertarians usually recognise that the right to swing your fist ends at my nose; the right to kill your kids with whooping cough likewise ends at my daughter’s respiratory tract.

Which leads me into the second, less commonly articulated, but, to my mind, more important point. Children are, in fact “someone else.” We do not allow parents to decide not to educate their children, or to beat them, or hire them out as prostitutes. If parents claim this is undue interference in their rights we say, well, tough luck—because my right as a parent ends at my daughter’s nose. I may not starve her, beat her, or deprive her of an education. Why should I be allowed to prevent her from receiving provably valuable medical treatments?

I don’t watch that much TV any more, although we’ve been getting into the habit of sitting down in front of Country Calendar after dinner on a Saturday; tonight I flicked on the news and was reminded why.

Apparently, the TV tells me, there are serious concerns about the Commonwealth Games being in India after a couple of (small) bombs went off outside an IPL match. Local coverage was wall-to-wall interviews; should we be getting Kiwi players home? Should we abandon the Commonwealth Games?

This is the point where I started yelling rude words at the magic box, which is never a good idea with small ears ready to seize on them for future use, but I am afraid it was that or collapse in an apoplectic fit.

You will remember, of course, how New Zealand didn’t send sporting teams to the UK when the IRA were merrily blowing up bits of Britain. Or how we seriously mulled over whether the United States should ever hold a major sporting event when their domestic terrorists started blowing people up at an Olympic Games. We didn’t stop sending teams to South Africa even when their white government was telling everyone about those terrible ANC terrorists.

Horseshit. We’re happy to have sporting events in harm’s way. We have been for decades. The only “problem” here is that the people running security are brown instead of white.

I’ve been thinking that iPhone vs Andoid has more than a whiff of Mac vs PC all over again about it, and Apple going after HTC as a proxy for Google just bakes that impression in; I’m not the only one who remembers as far back as Apple’s look and feel lawsuits, although that seems to be rather undercommented upon these days, as is Steve Jobs’ apparent long-forgotten view that people making expansion cards for the old pre-Mac Apple platforms were stealing money that belonged to Apple (which was, presumably, part of the reason why the original Mac was a sealed box).

Apple’s hostility to openness is one of those odd features of the modern computing landscape; they are, to the best of my knowledge, the only company the FSF refused to have software ported to (because of the look-and-feel suit), and their modern-day developer agreements for their sealed platforms are fabulously Draconian. It was one of the weirder aspects of LCA2010 to hear people booing DRM, software patents, overzealous IP law, and Microsoft, while watching them poke at their iPhones and Macbooks. Disconnect much?

There is one thing I must disagree mightily with Harry McCracken on:

So here’s the grim and dystopian scenario, and it’s grim and dystopian for Apple, not for HTC or Google: A few years from now, maybe this new case will end up looking as ill-advised as the 1988 one.[...]Maybe people will see the iPhone as a breakthrough that lost ground to a less inventive but more pervasive competitor. I hope not.

I hope so. I mean, my preference would be for Maemo-MeeGo-whatever the fuck it’s called this week to win out, but I think Nokia’s recent record of shooting its toes off will probably carry over to what is, the bleatings of Google fanboys notwithstanding, the most open phone platform on the market. But as a realist, I’d settle for seeing Android crush the iPhone, if only as a consumer. Consider the iPhone: a sealed unit, no expansion, no replacability, what Apple think I need. It’s Apple 1984 all over again. Andriod, on the other hand—you want an expandable phone? Get an HTC Legend where you have SD card support, rather than paying Apple an extortionate sum for the igger phone option. And a battery you can change. You want to live in the future? How about lobbying Samsung to release their Beam as a product, rather than waiting for Steve Jobs to decide whether you deserve a projecter. That’s the nice thing about the ‘droid; like the PC universe created by the ubiquity of DOS and then Windows, you have multiple manufacturers vying to lure you to their product, and responsive to your niche. You want a better-than-shitty-2 MP camera? There’s a droid manufacturer who’s releasing those. You want a bigger screen? More storage? Longer battery life? Go nuts.

The Android ecosystem is far from perfect; Google are certainly nowhere near as open a company, or as good at playing with the open-source projects they crib from, as their more enthusiastic fans would have you believe. But they are a hell of a lot better than the sealed-hood world Apple would like you to live in. If Apple’s decision to wage patent war against Android backfires and consigned them to the (ultimate) irrelevance of their decisions to prefer litigation and owning a high-priced vertically integrated stack did in the late 80s and 90s, I, for one, will be delighted.

See this? Different (and longer) perspective on what I was getting at here.

I discovered that I’ve forgotten large chunks of Ka Mate.

The shame.

There are a number of issues here. One, of course, is the theat which IdiotSavant refers to; bullshit scaremongering by the celebrant mafia. The other is, more generally, how the business of providing celebrants is provided in New Zealand.

Let me tell you a little story. The better part of a decade ago I got married. We had a number of requirements for our wedding, and one of those was that we were not interested in any kind of religious ceremony. Given about a third of Kiwis identify as non-religious in any given census this is hardly an unusual situation; it’s also one that celebrants are tailor made for.

Unfortunately this is where theory and practise get all buggered up. A search of local celebrants revealed that the ones available were all what might be less than charitably described and evangelical New Age Fruit Loops, possessing both the unlovely habit of insisting that I really am religious if only I understood that I believed what they believed, and, more to the point, too addicted to their belief system not to try and inject it. Which is not only incredibly offensive, but it defeats the whole damn point of have celebrants available. If I wanted religious nonsense at my wedding I’d go to the Catholics. At least they have some style, a sense of occasion.

Where it went horribly wrong, instead of merely wrong? Well, we spoke to a relative who we’d be happy to have officiate. He has a certain gravitas, and passed all the requirements for a celebrant: a resepected position in the community, several other people had independently asked him to become a celebrant in order to officiate at weddings, and so on. When he started looking into jumping through the hoops, though, he was told to bugger off. Why? Because there were “enough” celebrants and if they let any more people become celebrants it would “undercut people’s living”.

Fuck that. Sorry, but need for a celebrant that’s interested in serving the (rather large) segment of the community that wants non-religious services is actually quite a bit more important than a government-sponsored monopoly for a bunch of religious folks to make a living when they can’t persuade a bunch of people to build church and pay for the lifestyle they want. And the DIA have no business acting on behalf of a cartel in defiance of the legislatively-directed requirements for celebrants.

I’d vaguely hoped that things had changed from when we got hitched—which ultimately involved us getting a formal doco done at a registry office and having the big event mock-celebrated with a non-celebrant to work around this flavour of bullshit—but if the tactics adopted by June Russell to put the frighteners on suggest I’d be dissapointed if I needed to inquire closely on the topic.

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Many argue that the remaining towers should be left to moulder quietly in to oblivion as should the Nazi past of the country. There are, of course, the public safety arguments that go against this – as well as those that say these monuments should be fully preserved in memory of the war and its visctims, but it remains a poignant argument

This does not, to me, seem like an especially hard question; we have preserved many awe-inspiring buildings that are also associated with horrors; the Crusader castles in and around Israel and Palestine were the result of the invasions by the Franks, with the objective of wiping out Muslims in the “Holy Land”. The great castles of the north of England and the south of Scotland are mostly testament to power aquired in the Borders by butchery. The castles of Wales were tools to brutalise anyone who diasgreed with English control of said country.

In more extreme examples, the Cathedral of Carcassonne became assocaited with the Crusades against, and wholesale extermination of the Cathars: a religious genocide. We do not, however, contemplate obliterating the traces of this savagery.

If we can keep those things—and many others—I don’t see any reason to discard the flak towers.

Ada’s first big-girl lego - a tractor.

We had a milestone on Sunday: Ada’s first real Lego. What’s especially gratifying is that the set she chose is old-school Lego; rather than being what I tend to think pejoratively of as modern Lego, with large, irreducibly fully-formed pieces, it’s a collection of small pieces that form the whole, much like the Lego I had when I was a lad. Even more pleasing is that it was in a section of similarly old-style boxed sets, alongside some dedicated collections of block types—boxes of wheels, boxes of windows, boxes of roofing tiles.

For a while Lego was beginning to look more and more like Playmobile than Lego: a castle might be made, not from acres of grey blocks, but from half a dozen large segments that snapped together. The tractor is at the other end of the spectrum; the wheels could be repurposed to a moon rover, the cab the observation deck of a spaceship, the headlight to a sports car.

(If you’re wondering why the references to spaceships, it’s because Ada was trying to build rockets with her Duplo; this provoked me to bringing out my old Lego, which I’ve build many a fine spaceship from, and knocking up a small fast spaceship, a large spaceship with swing doors that can carry cargo, and Space Truck, a mighty assemblage that, under Ada’s guidance, has evolved to carry passengers, Siku metal cars, sport cranes, grapples, and a tree; the last of these is presumably fodder for the Space Koala that sits atop the back of the large spaceship.)

Here’s the thing: for me that’s the whole point of Lego. There are no shortage of toys that give you defined, channeled play: toy cars, dolls, houses, what have you. The magic of Lego is that you can enjoy your pristine, perfect creation of an object from instructions, or you can tear it down and rebuild your own thing, learning, along the way, a little about the nature of things, about how to build strong buildings and how to avoid weak buildings, about how much better things fit together if you think about it a little ahead of time, the problem-solving of making limited resources fit elaborate schemes. The play is not just the objects, the play is the creation of the objects; child as creator and producer, not child as consumer. And that, for some time, is what it looked to me like Lego had lost in pursuit of idiot-proof, instant-gratification licensed product sets and so many of their themed products.

I’m glad there’s real Lego still being made.

That said, I still have a few reservations: I’d like to see some slightly less hideous gendering with it. I’d like to see fewer grim-and-gritty angry little Lego people, too, for that matter.