The police cordoned off half the university this morning, though it wasn't clear why. I imagine the Museum was burgled again; either that, or the Bee Gees were getting another honorary degree.

I have a cold, and I blame the freshers.

Soon I have to go to a lecture.

I have nothing to say.

and then we went to blackpool there was a piano and we played alpine golf under dangerous power lines nearly death perhaps and then back we came queues on the road through salford yes we are lost again hello kro bar dinner rice dish hello hello hello work mates out again i see not alcoholics honest no not alcoholics two taxis ah this club has a long queue two hundred people maybe more what we can jump the queue yes we can and free entry as well yes we can this club is very big they dont have enough bar staff how unlikely we are leaving are we oh yes bye must go early start and everything yes bit pissed you see morning alarm twice shut up register must register stop watching television what yes i know that where are you tutor you are late never mind lunch time sod it there she is walking through the cafe hello hello signature received must register registration complete hello john you will supervise my dissertation thats great thank you goodbye hello computer

Just as last year, I started my new job on the Sunday afternoon before Freshers' week. People there are nice... it's certainly better staffed than the Footage was. Got back on Saturday night after sitting behind a big crash on the M56 for two hours. That used a quarter of a tank of petrol, but at least my car didn't overheat. So here we go, final year; I'd better start doing some work sometime soon.

I went to town today here in Oxford. I saw some unusual things which made me laugh. A woman in unnecessarily high heels was walking in front of me on The Broad. She tripped slightly, as you do, which was, itself, amusing. The thing is, then she did it again a few metres later. I thought this was really very amusing, and she was clearly becoming increasingly self-conscious. And then she did it a third time. At this point I actually started laughing out loud. She crossed the road.

Later on, in Blackwell's Music, where I managed only to spend £12.50 (on a book of Franck, Durand edition reissued by Dover (cheaper than the Urtext)), an old man tripped me up with his umbrella. He started apologising, and then I told him to stop, and I began thanking him, because he had alerted me to the fact that I had left my umbrella on the second floor. Finally, on the way back, I saw three children, aged about ten, stood at a bus stop. They were headbutting it. Over and over again. I think they might have eaten too many Haribo. Stuart: take note.

• Protecting a national tradition; (Jonny Billericay)
• Courtesy of Ionicus, the Top 10 weirdos in Manchester; (Galaxy 102) (Here's a link to Ionicus)
• http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcde
  fghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/; (via Ben Hammersley) (Here's a link to Ben Hammersley)
• School puts Big Macs on the menu. (BBC News)

• This Bible You Sold Me Is Clearly Defective, And I'd Like To Return It, Please; (McSweeney's, via kottke.org)
• Call Centre Confidential tells us how to deal with spam phone calls, but in the absence of a permalink, I issue a quotation below: (Call Centre Confidential)

There's a sure-fire manner of dealing with unwanted telesales calls. It works and comes free with this master-class. Until the next lesson, I want you to practice the following approach in front of a mirror:

1) Listen politely and wait for a pause...
2) Say politely: "Thanks for telling me about that (name). It sounds really good. Goodbye."
3) Put down the phone.
4) Continue watching Bargain Hunt.

The adviser will be so confused ("were they interested or not?") that they will make sure you are never called again.

• A wonderful compare and contrast exercise on Daily Mail front covers! (Pete Ashton, via Wherever You Are) (Here's a link to Wherever You Are)
• Is Russia inching back towards dictatorship? (Economist)

I am sitting in a most tranquil conservatory, which is not too hot, and which has nice blinds and a solid roof, watching the washing blow around in the wind. I'm sure this little corner of Oxfordshire gets madder every time I visit. This time, auntie and I have had to potter around, hiding behind doors and crawling behind hedges, in order to avoid one of her neighbours. Auntie believe that she probably has actually lost it, and tries to evade her gaze, because this woman is convinced that there are Moroccan slave-girls being trafficked by her next door neighbour, and that people from Puerto Rica wander around on the street corner all night. Furthermore, she's trying to prevent the local pub getting a public entertainment licence, which would allow it to open until the unearthly hour of midnight.

I have nicknamed this neighbour 'The Bucket Woman'. Those with a taste in early-1990s British light comedy will understand the significance from the television programme Keeping Up Appearances, since I feel that our relationship with her is akin to Liz and Emmet, forever keeling over in fright.

Auntie has stopped answering the phone due to the risks involved. Apparently, this woman sometimes rings up and starts talking aimlessly, without stimulus, about her career as a professional violinist. The post, too, is a cause for daily trepidation, since there is usually a new bundle of information relating to her campaigning to the council.

I might slip her a few Valiums.

You guessed it. This website is dedicated to the life and work of Conservative backbencher Ann Widdecombe, who appears below:

• Scaryduck's house is haunted!
• Us diarists are making ourselves ill! (New Scientist, via prolific.org) (Here's a link to prolific)"
• Some pro-hunters lose some support... (BBC News)
• What happens when Prince Charles edits BBC Online for the day; (BBC News, via London Calling) (Here's a link to London Calling)
• U. S. universities in the U. K. (BBC News).

Today I received a spam email from gokzhvmyk@goldenmail.ru saying nothing but:

hi

which I thought was unusual.

I discovered this weblog today, which documents what it considers to be examples of BBC bias in its reporting of current affairs. I do not quite understand what it hopes to uncover. Well, that sounds stupid. Of course, what it hopes to uncover is examples of BBC bias.

What the writers seem not to acknowledge is that if they are in search of genuinely objective reporting, no such thing is possible, because what constitutes objectivity is bound to be a matter of personal opinion. While some people may consider that the role of an objective public services broadcaster such as the BBC is to cover events impartially on a local, national and global level, due to the pressures of time and audience there have to be decisions made about what is said and what is not said. In my opinion, any news service, the BBC included, which spends the first eleven minutes of the day's main news programme discussing someone dressed and Batman climbing up a wall rather than the tens of thousands of deaths in the Sudan, or what is going on in the D. R. C., or Zimbabwe, is hardly being objective. But that is merely my opinion.

If the site were making the point that the BBC is not even endeavouring to be impartial and balanced, then, if it found evidence, it would have a case. But, from what I have seen in its archives, the majority of objections seem to be on fine details of the use of language and minor editorial decisions. Furthermore, I do not think that anyone talks up the BBC, either within the corporation or in government, as being a faultless news source, and it would be wholly counter-intuitive to consider anything as such.

I would rather listen sceptically to a substandard public service broadcaster than have my entire diet of current affairs reporting provided by Rupert Murdoch.

For a whole host of reasons, this story, about the need to revive the appreciation of battered testicles, is one of the most disturbing I have read for days. Not only, I may add, because I am vegetarian, but rather because reading it involves the simultaneous consideration of three revolting images: 1) a farmer; 2) a farm; 3) battered testicles.

I rest my case. Outsourcing is the only way forward.

• Fucking Crazies! (Observer)
• Black communities and cultural cues (I think this analysis is probably correct); (Observer)
• Geo-political motivations of terrorism (as if we didn't already know). (Economist)

Two Red Bulls

Two pounds for two Red Bulls!

I blame the Welcome Break

For the fact I'm wide awake

After drinking two Red Bulls.

I drove along the A road!

They gave me stimulation

For the length of my vocation

In going up the A road.

It's ten past one a. m.!

The caffeine worked too well,

And the taurine's living hell,

At ten past one a. m.

I'll never sleep again!

Just Red Bull flavour poetry

From now until eternity.

I'll never sleep again!

[11.8.04]

Labels: poetry

I watched a car crash on our street this afternoon. It was like watching a car crash.

I also went for a job interview, and I got the job. So that was good. I will be cooking (God forbid) in a kitchen (gasp), but there will always be two of us to do it. Which is an improvement on my last job, where I occasionally did eight-hour kitchen shifts on my own.

Since it is September 11th, the day when everyone from churches across the nation will get on their bikes to raise money for old buildings and the like, I thought it would be interesting to collate the top stories from newspapers and news services, to see, on the third anniversary of terrorist attacks in America, where the press's priorities lie:

• The Independent: We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world;
• The Telegraph: Ivan hits Jamaica;
• The Guardian: Coup plot leader gets seven years;
• The Sun: Zeta Jones in kidnap terror;
• The Daily Mail: America remembers Twin Towers attack;
• The Mirror: Find this bomber;
• BBC News: US marks three years since 9/11;
• New York Times: Bush and Kerry step up attacks in swing states;
• CNN: September 11 remembered.

It's surely right to remember the past, so that we don't forget its lessons. But, three years on, have we not learnt that there are more important things to worry about in this world than our own misplaced sense of corporate grief?

• A post about shit. Oh, and Heather redesigned as well; (Dooce)
• Follow Stuart's progress after a week in Germany; (Seid Bereit)
• And John Redwood said the Tory reshuffle had gone well... (Independent)
• Flickr Blog. (Flickr)

1. The Bangladesh Students Society. I am not Bangladeshi.
2. The Cuba Solidarity Society. I mean, I ask you.
3. The Free Fall Parachute Society. I don't like heights.
4. Conservative Future. I shan't join a society which cannot avoid contradictions in terms even in its name. I ask you, the degree of degradation in our standards of grammar today.
5. Manchester Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. Although I know someone in MANSEDS, I'm not sure I'd be able to afford their day trips.
6. Tai Chi Chuan Society. My room doesn't need rearranging.
7. Wing Tsun Kung Fu Society. I'm not hungry.
8. The L. G. B.. I joined two L. G. B.s. The first had about three members, two of whom were there because they couldn't get laid, and the second had about three hundreds members, all of whom went there so they could dress up. Never again.
9. The Darts Society. The images are appalling.
10. The Jewish Society. I am not Jewish.

• David Blunkett does civil liberties; (b3ta)
• Cynical as we must be about both governments and rebels, it is stories like this which are at the heart of the matter, and from which the most good can come; (BBC News)
• I found this weblog, which I might read.

A week away from my Blogmobile. Some of you may have guessed that I only moved things on to Blogger so that I could hide more easily the inefficiency and infrequency of my posting. See how insignificant, small, and apologetic that little date marker's got now? All the way down there are the bottom? In little text? Without even a timestamp to go with it? You mark my words. "The days are coming, says your lord Yahweh, when the posting will no longer be identified even with any discerning mark of its provenance in time." (The Dead Sea Kama Sutra, 3:69)

There've been three beautiful days here in Manchester, and, as I hear all your Londoners, Bangorians, and Great Yarmouth people screaming, in the rest of Britain as well. Except Cornwall. They don't have internet access because the farms get in the way. Over these days I have been mostly doing nothing, except for eating, drinking cans of Bass, and watching the television. I did treat myself to some items for my room and for myself, including a Marks and Spencer desk lamp which looks like an Apple speaker, some jewellery, and an assortment of Boots merchandise, much of which, I hasten to add, was at a very reasonable price. Some items were even on long terms price offers!

Unfortunately my visit to town on Tuesday was spoilt by a very FAT woman walking around with her stomach hanging out. I had to go and have a regular cappuccino with an extra shot of espresso, and then walk around the basement of Selfridges admiring the very expensive bread, before I could handle seeing the public again.

Anyway, tomorrow it will be raining and we'll all be SO depressed. Have you noticed that, even when we've had a prolonged spell of very good weather, like the last couple of weeks, local weather forecasters always manage to complain about the weather nevertheless? "Oh, what a miserable day." "What terrible weather." But when it's sunny, it's: "Oh, what a miserable day it's going to be tomorrow. Oh." What a depressing loads of old tosspots we all are. I have proof! Just read the archives.

• Too much, too young for boys? It's not what you think. (Independent)
• Stuart has gawn orf to Germany, and the last I heard was that he is living in a homosexual German monastery fraternising with vegetarian meals in a seedy Catholic bar! But I think I might be getting text messages mixed up. He should be posting his news soon at Seid Bereit.

At a time when I am searching for a starting point for my dissertation research, that Kirsty Wark has alerted me to the Will Cummins story, is a welcome development. Apart from anything else, it's quite interesting. Though it's not particularly relevant, the British Council tonight says that it's sacked the person who wrote the articles.

About ten minutes of surfing has already uncovered a minor mountain of confused and confusing journalism. It is some time since I read the Daily Telegraph regularly, but when I used to read it almost daily at school, although not agreeing with either its opinion, or the slant of its reporting, I generally appreciated that it was well-written and not quite narrow-minded enough to prohibit a modicum of free speech within its pages.

Although to most people I'm sure this will be old news, there has been a running argument in the Telegraph over the last few weeks between Jenny McCartney and Will Cummins. A brief bastardisation of the discussion is that McCartney adopts a vaguely liberal position on the inclusion of Islam and Muslim culture in British political systems, while Cummins (a pseudonym) has compared Muslims to Nazi tyrants and generally dismissed the entire tradition as Satanism incarnate.

You may have guessed from this description which side of the fence I come down on, so, given that this is hardly an academic medium, you can probably guess that what I have to say is unlikely to be considered objective. However, I feel that, when faced with arguments such as these, the extension of ultra-lefty free speech principles, that is to say, not engaging with the discussion because of a misplaced sense of relativism, is not constructive. Too often, liberals tolerate too much in the belief that doing nothing is the best thing to do, not realising that this is tantamount to washing our hands of a thread of cultural discourse which is potentially damaging to the future of multicultural societies such as the ones in which I live in Manchester and Leicester.

Anyway, let me get back to the thrust of this post. Here, you can read Mr Cummins' article Muslims are a threat to our way of life, which, as Ms McCartney illustrates, is full of factual and logical inaccuracies. Although it is veiled in historical analogy and apparently intellectual language, it makes little sense except in a dichotomised dreamworld occupied by some on the Right where white is good and coloured is bad, Christianity pure and foreigners evil.

The most worrying thing about this argument is not that the articles by Mr Cummins are being published. On the contrary, it is a good thing that the potential for discussion is being realised. It is not even worrying that the articles are being written, because everyone knows that this sentiment is there, has always been there, and probably will always be there to some extent. What is worrying is that I'm pretty sure there is a growing number of people who sympathise with this view of society. This demonstrates that, as Ms McCartney suggests, the shared aims of the anti-Muslim British Right, and the anti-Western Muslim Right, that is to say, the escalation of conflict, are being realised.

A friend of mine who has a habit of making wildly inaccurate, ill-thought-through comments, said a couple of years ago that if things didn't change he could envisage the escalation of an international religious war. I wouldn't have agreed with him then, but I can inch a little closer to that opinion now. Just look at another article in the Telegraph published recently, this time written by Charles Moore. Again containing factual inaccuracies, or at least representations of interpretation presented as fact (this time on the details of Islamic banking, and on the socio-economic deductions made from its cultivation), this article is another sweep at a way of life which many see as a threat. Moore argues that Islamic banking, a concept which he clearly does not understand very well and treats as a unified system when it is not, may eventually come to dominate British banking. And then, he suggests, God forbid, we might be subject to the whim of these dastardly foreigners:

Once there are Islamic financial institutions, how long will it be before Muslims insist that the state and business direct all their monetary dealings with Muslims through these institutions (boycotting businesses with Jewish connections en route)? How long before Muslims, extending the logic of their concentration in places like Bradford and Leicester, seek to establish their own law within these areas, the germ of a state within a state? And how diverse would such a state be?

His argument is paradoxical because Islamic banking is itself a moderate idea. It is the reconciliation of conflicts between Western banking models and Islamic law (which, incidentally, Christianity's scripture also contains (that is to say, the prohibition of usury, or the taking (but not the giving) of interest), and which the Christian movement Radical Orthodoxy (cf. Graham Ward, et al.) seek to restore). Islamic banking was cultivated in the Arab world, but even there the amount of money in Shari'a bank accounts is less than £200m, an insignificant percentage of the area's gross product. Islamic banking, and the institutions associated therewith, are by their nature born of the dominant, liberal, Muslim consensus which has been present in Europe for well over 150 years, following the work of al-Afghani in France and Egypt.

Too often these factual inaccuracies are let slip, and the impressionable readership of tabloids are led to believe false things about all sorts of matters. I apologise that this post has not been entirely coherent, and I shall try to draw together some more material in the near future. For the time being, I refer you to Ismail Patel's article in the Independent last month, illustrating, surprisingly, that not all Muslims want to destroy the world.