Bizarre Search Phrase Of The Day
So checking the web stats today, I see somebody found my site from
this Google search. Well, it is the week of Burning Man, ma
ybe t
here’s som
e connection?
Entries Tagged as ''
Fare Thee Well, Irish Porn Star, We Hardly Knew Ye
Well sadly this morning’s Google doesn’t think I’m an Irish Porn Star at all. This is kind of sad. I guess recency counts for a huge component of PageRank, but that it’s contribution (obviously) fades very quickly. There must be some sort of rapid half-life for the recency weighting in Google’s PageRank calculation… I think the other, longer-lasting element of bombing Google must require several dozen weighted links to the phrase you’ve decided to bomb. So you need a couple of dozen people, or a couple of dozen domains…
Earlier here.
Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile
And On The Seventh Day God Created Manchester… The Second Summer Of Love…
We went to see a remarkable movie at the weekend in the Embarcadero - 24 Hour Party People. It’s a cool narrative pseudo-documentary about the birth of “Madchester” and Factory Records, following Joy Division through their evolution to New Order, how the Blue Monday dance track funded the Hacienda nightclub (while failing to enrich the band itself), and how the Hacienda birthed rave culture and the Happy Mondays. This movie is really something special, and worth seeing alone for the acapella version of Blue Monday. The understated performance of Sean Harris as the doomed proto-goth Ian Curtis is amazing, and Steve Coogan (who based his “Alan Partridge TV comedy character on Tony Wilson) finally gets the chance to be a better Tony Wilson. It’s also amazing how unearthly similar John Simm (the Jip guy from Human Traffic) actually is to New Order’s enigmatic vocalist Bernie Sumner. Spot-on casting there. Unfortunately in a bit of Stalinist-type revisionism, it deletes Gillian Gilbert from New Order as she’s nowhere to be seen. Sadly though, the guy playing the OG Freaky Dancer Bez, the archtype for all the hardcore ravers that were to come, “Fred Astaire’s baggy bastard son”, doesn’t look nearly wasted enough to seem authentic. It’s time to go listen to the John Cale-produced and immaculately titled Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) album again…
One In 32 in the Gulags
A new Justice Department report confirms that nearly one in every thirty US citizens is trapped within the “criminal justice system”.
Earlier here.
The Thin Blue Line
I really liked this expose of bad policing. At last it explains to me just why around a dozen cop cars arrive at trivial and insignificant car crashes in San Francisco and hang out there for ages while other parts of the city are no-go areas for citizenry. It’s also got a rather lurid description of how some cops like using their new found Drug War-freedom to perform forced fistings in public. Whither thou, Serpico?
Half A Billion Americans?
While I’m prepared to continue to treat this article with some degree of interest (despite obviously sycophantic and pandering sentences such as youthful, exuberant, multi-coloured America and ageing, decrepit, inward-looking Europe), I see three main problems with its conclusions.
The first is that the demographics of 2050 reflect the data collected in the 2000 census. Others have already pointed out the methodological and political inconsistencies in the 2000 census. I’d add that given that the 2000 census “surprised” relative to the 1990 exercise, the assumptions of this article are at best highly speculative.
The second (assuming the article’s speculative demographic trends continue) is that with such a huge population of mostly underclass young adults that US society contues to reflect the societal structure of a first-world nation. Personally I think that’s quite a long shot. I’d expect the US to alter to resemble Southern Hemisphere superpowers such as Brazil instead.
Indeed, given that US social mobility has been declining for decades, and in fact US social mobility now ranks only in the second tier of developed nations such as France (compared with the more socially mobile English and Germans), I think I see this trend clearly evidenced.
Thirdly, the assumption that half a billion Americans can continue to consume such a vast and disproportionately large and unsustainable quantity of natural resources (fresh water, gasoline, electricity, land) in the style to which the society has become addicted is ludicrous. The US profited greatly from the conquest and genocide of the native populations and the importation and deployment of the European biota within the “virgin” lebensraum has delivered military victories, territorial hegemony, and maximised returns for many generations.
However, the advantage the US enjoyed in natural resources relative to the older, more worked and exploited European geographies is quickly vanishing. I expect much of the US to revert to a lower-level, less intensive agricultural exploitation that will perforce shed much of its European biota features. This biota simply evolved within a vastly different ecology and the harsher, more arid expanses found in the US (relative to Western Europe) are only capable of supporting a crude simulacrum of the European biota using massive inputs of energy, aquifer draining, and pathologically large ranges.
The destruction or reversal of the European biota throughout much of the US will doubtless be accelerated by the living demands of the new couple of hundred million or so Americans. Thus I expect many of them to live at a lowered socioeconomic level — if not at a subsistence level — while the agricultural and economic support systems evolve towards some new homestasis.
Others have also remarked on the amazing cultural shift within certain areas of the US towards a tribal religious fundamentalism that contrasts ever more severely with the more “mannered” (think Norbert Elias here) humanist ethos displayed along the north-east and north-west seaboards. The effort required to shift resources from the richer, fertile areas along the coasts and major rivers to the arid regions may prove excessive and a loss of political will and economic ability lead to a localized political destabilization or defederation of the Union.
There may indeed be half a billion “Americans”, but there may not be a “US” as we recognize it today.
Irish Porn Star!
Well, that was easy. I now show up as the first hit on Google for Irish Porn Star. But coming in a close second (or is it third?) for the slight variation of Irish Porn Stars. I must try harder…
Earlier here.
Star Chamber Not Playing Along
So there’s a secret Federal court that oversees domestic spying and surveillance, and apparently they feel that Mullah Ashcroft’s Justice Department was abusing its powers even before September 11th. They’ve rebuked him publicly, which is apparently unprecedented. Here’s how the FISA court works. Ashcroft’s becoming the most unpopular snooper since Nixon and his gang of unmerry men.
Earlier here.
Counterpunch Notices Ireland
There’s a nice article by Andrew Cockburn about the latest EU anchluss referendum in Ireland.
Spaniards Quite Stringy, Even When Boiled
There’s a review of a food history book here, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food, with this illuminating excerpt:
Fern�ndez-Armesto kicks off his chapter on food and symbolism with an enthusiastic discussion of cannibalism. The tone is set by an epigraph recording what the seventeenth-century Caribbeans thought of their various visitors from Europe. The French were delicious, the islanders said, the English rather less so, and the Spaniards quite stringy, even when boiled.