The Chinese Menace Revisited

I woke up this morning and, as I usually do, made it my first job of the day to check the web traffic. The numbers were quite high or, at least, higher than they've been recently, so I smiled and felt better about the world. A wash, a shave, a spot of breakfast later, I checked again and this time cast my eyes down the list of visitors. I began to wish I hadn't bothered to shave. My visitors were from the UK, then Germany, then China, then the US, then China, then China, then China, the US, China, China, Malta, China, China, the UK, the US, China, China, China... About half of the morning's visitors were from China. They've clearly not blocked me, despite my constant support for a free Tibet and taking every opportunity to mock their leadership. How many times must I mention that Xi Jinping likes to wear pink knitted sweaters and ballet pumps?

I don't have a problem with Chinese visitors reading my blog but I know these hits aren't from real Chinese visitors. Actually, now I come to think about it, I *never* get real Chinese visitors. These are Chinese computers hitting my server for reasons unknown and which makes me suspect that these machines up to no good. I've said it before and no doubt I'll say it again: China is already at war with the rest of the world. It's just that the rest of the world haven't been told by their respective governments.

Even as recently as a few years ago, Chinese SPAM was relatively rare. Russia was the main culprit. The last twelve months, though, China seem to have become the most maleficent force on the internet. I'm beginning to wonder if governments shouldn't actively get together and sever China's connection to the rest of the internet. In the meantime, I'm stuck adding blocks of IP addresses to my website's firewall to block further traffic. I know my statistics will plunge and will make me consider, yet again, quite why I bother writing a blog read by so few people, but this can't go on. The Chinese are playing a terribly cruel trick: they're making me think this blog is almost popular. Those evil devils!

No cartoons today. I've drawn three but now I have The Gag Machine working, I've been churning out good ideas and I intend to send a few off this week to see if I can get any of them published. Until they get rejected, they won't appear on the blog.

An Atheist Trying To Think About God

Radical Rodent left a great comment last night and I found myself writing a response this morning which began with a couple of lines and then ran to a page and a half. If you're not interested in vague theological rambling, then I've also drawn a slightly less profound cartoon for today which you can see below. If you enjoy theological rambling, then excuse what follows for being heavy on the rambling and light on the learning. Though I largely agreed with what she'd said, I didn't know how much I agreed. I've never really tried to consciously write about my atheism, God or my sense of theology in a coherent way. This is probably my first attempt to do just that. The result is that I think I agreed with what Radical Rodent said about God but that's dependent on what we think of when we talk about God.

First of all, I think we'd probably agree that there's a difference between religion and theology. Religion is the localised interpretations of the big questions. There are various religions, each with a claim to being the 'one true religion' based on its age and number of followers. There are other religions which are unpopular, crazy or even parody. What this should tell us is that the human mind has a great capacity for creating myths. In a sense, it's what we're very good at. It's extremely easy for the brain to create something that quickly becomes too complex for our understanding. For example, we need only thing of an extremely large number. It's impossible to exactly comprehend what 3,383,382,383,942 different clowns would look like if they were sitting on each other's shoulders. Even if that were possible, you only have to keep multiplying that number by another big number and the clown could would eventually get too big. Religion is a bit like that. We create something of such logical and lexical complexity that we then spend centuries arguing about the detail when never actually addressing whether the 3,383,382,383,942 different clowns exist.

So, I'm not going to do that because there's nothing I can do to refute all that. It will always come down to an a priori statement that I believe in something that I can't prove. However, I'd qualify that by saying that I certainly don't believe in a God that's a God as presented to use through the human imagination. Here I think I'm agreeing with you. However, I think Stephen Fry might also agree with you. You attack him because you think he hates God because of guilt. I really think that's a small reason for hating God and, besides, I think Fry doesn't hate God. That would presume belief. His question was a hypothetical one and his answer, through small and (perhaps) 'shallow', was merely an on-the-spot answer which we shouldn't turn into something more significant.

All of which comes back down to the question: what God do I believe in? Well, 'God' is a problematic word if we mean a self-conscious entity who lives somehow above/within/around us, observing us and capable of intervening in our business. That 'God' I don't believe exists. However, just because I don't believe in that kind of God, doesn't mean that I don't think that we're without a transcendental authority. Dostoevsky was pithy but he was also wrong when he wrote that 'if God does not exist, everything is permitted'. It's why I'm not convinced by the argument that 'without God there is no sin'. God didn't create sin. Man created sin or, rather, sin was made in us. Sin is part of our psychological makeup in the form of taboos that have existed in our cultures since our earliest ancestors. All cultures have taboos and you don't need a holy text to tell us what we should or should not do.

I believe that the universe is guided by simple laws of nature which, when combined in their multiple millions, produce something that is extremely complex. So complex, indeed, that it begins to resemble what we think of as God. If God is that manyfold expression of simple rules, then I would accept the existence of a 'God'. But that God is not self-conscious or in any way in our image. It is simply the very form of the universe itself which is forever beyond our comprehension. We are simply in awe of its majesty and that, I think, is the only true religious position to take.

It also, I would add, provides a framework by which we can assert a kind of morality. If I understood it more than I do, I'd probably be a fan of some kind of logicism of in which everything from maths to morality is reduced to simple logic. What I tend to believe is that time moves forward and matter has a tendency towards entropy. If the Big Bang was an act of creation and the heat death of the universe one of destruction, then nature has in itself a kind of moral code. Things which tend towards disassembling the universe are bad. Things that maintain or create structure are good. That's pretty much how I view the world around me.

We should be encouraged to create, to retain history, and to be positive towards our fellow human beings. Wars are always bad but sometimes necessary if they save us from greater ruin. Anything that restricts our freedom is bad but, at the same time, certain types of freedom can do us greater harm and we should guard ourselves against them. Compassion is also good because it produces civil society and holds back the forces that would threaten to tear us apart. In all, I think it's not that different to a religious morality but without all the hokum about loaves and fishes and voices in the clouds.

As for the comparison with 'dark matter', I think it's a poor analogy. Dark matter is a hypothesis reached by following a rational process of inquiry. If that rational process should disprove the existence of dark matter or should no evidence be found, the theory dark matter will be thrown away. The existence of God, in the many forms forwarded by the many religions, has been reached through no rational process and no rational process will ever dissuade believers from believing.

That, I guess, is my uneducated and rambling thought about God. It's deep enough for me and anything deeper becomes the subject of elbow gazing: pointless, self-defeating, and, ultimately, a waste of our God-given time.

 

A Cartoon I Won't Explain

Humanists shouldn't apologize for being human

My throat is sore, my joints are aching, and I'm shivering. I also lack the energy to coat my words in sugar so let me just hammer this keyboard and see what comes out for the next thousand plus words.

I'm writing from my sickbed because I just want to know what the hell is it with apologies today. Tristram Hunt has been apologising to nuns, Channel 4's Cathy Newman has apologised because she might or not have been turfed out of a London mosque, and I've just noticed that Stephen Fry has apologised lest his comments about God had somehow upset Christians.

I'm not sure what annoys me the most: that three eminently rational people felt obliged to apologise to believers in dogmatic nonsense or that believers in dogmatic nonsense should be so sensitive to insult that they demand an apology whenever their beliefs are questioned. At least two out of the three opinions shouldn't warrant an apology and I'm not entirely convinced that Cathy Newman has much to feel ashamed about either.

I'd previously thought it commendable that all three showed a little independent spirit and expressed opinions that many people would quietly share. Whether you like him or loathe him, Stephen Fry spoke undiluted sense and did so in a way the expressed the compassion as befit a true humanist. What's so wrong about questioning God about the suffering of children? In fact, I see no point in making this point any further. If a person is misguided enough to believe that the world is flat, then no empirical data will alter their opinion since we're clearly dealing with a matter of psychology rather than intellect. And belief in religion is precisely that. It is not a belief in empirical data. It's a state of mind like ecstasy or depression which might one day be entirely unlocked by science but, for now, remains an unexplored realm of organic chemistry.

Instead, let me just talk about Tristram Hunt who admirably let his political blandness slip a little in order to question the right of anybody to teach children without proper teaching qualifications. It was a moment of passion and revealed more character than some of the charlatans we usually see peddling the party line on Question Time. Despite the notion that Conservatives are somehow for the privileged elite, it's been a long time since they were advocates of the intellectual elite. At least since Thatcher's day, they have actively promoted the destruction of the professional classes, constantly trying to introduce less qualified people into hospitals, schools, the army, the police force, as well as the judicial system. It wasn't that long as since they floated the notion of non-qualified teaching assistants taking lessons. Just a couple of days ago, I noticed that they wanted to reduce the time it takes doctors to train as consultants. It fits perfectly into their long established practice of cheapening costs at the expense of quality. Tristram Hunt never attacked nuns. Nuns obviously have the right to teach providing they have teaching qualifications. Yet it seems patently absurd to say that somebody has the right to teach children simply because they've chosen a life devoted to God. In many ways, such irrationality should invalidate them from teaching children. If I walked into the local primary school and declared 'I'm been chosen by the spirit of the late Sir Alec Guinness to spread his message of love, hope, and the Jedi mind trick, now lead me to your infants!' what kind of response would I get? At the very least, I'd expect a restraining order to keep me away from the school but, in truth, I should really be sectioned under the mental health act as a danger to the community.

As for Cathy Newman, whether she was 'ushered out' of the mosque or simply turned away, she was making a valid point about the discrepancy that exists between the values of a modern liberal democratic society and a culture in which woman are routinely treated as second class citizens. At the worst, you could argue that she set out seeking to make a story in the sensitive period of time after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, though you could also argue that is precisely what journalists do and that was a valid time to do it. People have predictably accused her of stoking racial tension but the tension isn't and shouldn't be seen as racial. It's the debate that needs to had about mutually exclusive mindsets, one of which expresses the right of every individual to live their life free from religious persecution and the other which actively promotes religious persecution towards non-believers. It's an important debate that needs to be heard and not dismissed by conflating it with incendiary topic of racism. To do so genuinely promotes racism. Indeed, the rise of UKIP is not simply a sad reflection on the rise of the political right in British politics. It's a shameful expression of how there's been a lack of intelligent debate in the centre ground. If the Tories can be accused of destroying education, health and pretty much every other area of our 'elitist' culture through their obsession with market forces, it's to the great shame of the Labour Party that, for at least a decade, they routinely avoided questions about immigration and integration by accusing their opponents of racism, as they did to great 'success' in the 2005 general election.

Yet all three examples demonstrate a problem we have in society. It seems to be borne out of the rise of social media, where debates become polarised into 'issues'. It's ironic how in the early days of social media it was heralded for increasing our freedom. The 'Arab Spring' (remember that?) was seen as a victory for social media in which enlightened youth in tyrannical regimes could organise themselves so they might express a belief in intellectual and personal freedoms. How naive that all seems now that social media has turned into a bully's playground, where free speech is routinely shut down by organised campaigns which the newspaper shamefully promote as the latest 'Twitter outrage'.

People are forced to apologies simply because they haven't the energy to expend in argument against the vitriolic thousands. I sense that Fry apologized because it's the easiest thing to do, Hunt undoubtedly apologized for political reasons, and Newman probably apologized since she clearly values her job more than she is willing to invest time in an arguably weak case.

Before my energy runs out, let me ask: what's wrong with a good old fashioned difference of opinion? It is your right to practice any belief so long as you do so peacefully and without restricting another person's fundamental right to hold a entirely contradictory belief. In a free society, men should be allowed to have men only mosques as women should are allowed to have woman only Tupperware parties or sit around chatting about Fifty Shades of Grey. As abhorrent as I find Marine Le Pen and George Galloway, as ridiculous as I find a Christian fundamentalist preacher or a fanatical imam: they all have the same right to speak. I might feel a little prickly whenever I see a woman wearing a headscarf or veil but I also defend their right to do so if it's truly their choice.

The notion of freedom of expression is inherently simple. Everybody has the right to be offended by an opinion but nobody should feel obliged to apologise for what they think. Inciting violence towards others is, of course, the point at which this abstract concept becomes a matter of practical law. If one were to believe utterly in freedom, one would maintain a distinction between words and actions. However, to do so is to believe that humans are somehow rational beings. We're not. It's what makes us so interesting and capable or great beauty as well as terrible evil. The best we can ever hope for is a kind of clamorous riot in which we all walk away unscathed but slightly more enlightened.

Today we had three people contributing to that clamorous riot but walking away looking a little bruised. That's not how it should be in a free society. The fact they apologized actually shames us all.

Cough, Cough, Splutter...

Damn, my luck never changes. Today I'm feeling properly rotten! Sore throat, shivery, weak, aching... I guess I've come down with a cold, which is too quick for it to be from the hospital yesterday so was obviously a surprise gift from the woman who sneezed over me at the Post Office two days ago. I had something better than this almost written for today but I'm not in a fit state to finish it. Instead, here's a cartoon I drew last night and for which I can't think of a better caption. Mark this one down as a cartoon that doesn't quite work...

Yesterday was strange. My experience of the NHS is that when you expect them to do something, they do nothing. When you expect them to do nothing, they do something. We expected nothing but my sister's appointment lasted nearly half an hour. Turns out that after waiting six months for test results, we now have to wait again. The local GP had botched two samples six months ago and one hadn't arrived at the labs and the other was in the wrong container. So, we now have to start again. The positive was that we actually had a sympathetic consultant who gave a fairly broad indication of what the problem might be. Of course, with the NHS there is now a high chance that when we go to the next appointment, we won't see the same doctor and the whole thing will have to start from scratch.

I'm really delighted that a couple of you have already made use of the Amazon search box. I really can't thank you enough. It's a fantastic way of helping support the blog and my work without donating or costing you anything that you wouldn't have already spent at Amazon. Of course, anything already in your basket doesn't get credited as a referral, but if you click on the Amazon link before you begin your shopping, the small percentage of the referral fee will help me immensely. So, if I could also encourage you to buy extremely reasonable items like Organic Baeri Sturgeon Caviar from Pyrenees and an extremely tasteful Allurez 4.31ct 18k Two-tone Rose Gold GIA Certified Oval Shape Natural Fancy Pink Diamond Ring, that would be wonderful and would actually give me a small crumb of comfort as I sit here trying to work despite this raging throat and aching bones. Simply type 'Organic Baeri Sturgeon Caviar' or 'Allurez 4.31ct 18k Two-tone Rose Gold' into the box in the top right corner and let Amazon do the rest.

Okay. I need hot lemon and chicken soup. Did I mention that I feel rotten?

Computer Puzzle: Expert Help Needed

So here's a question for which I can't find an obvious answer.

I keep getting hits on the blog from Beijing, China. The IP address is around the area of 123.125.71.21. The hits happen at all times of the day, sometimes minutes but often hours apart. They look at individual pages, sometimes once or sometimes two or three times. Sometimes they've made multiple visits.

None of that is interesting. However, when I posted my blog post about my Tim Marshall letter this afternoon, I got a hit on the page immediately. That is also uninteresting until I tell you the puzzling part. I got the hit before I'd even made the page public.



How did somebody in China look at a page I hadn't yet made public and I'd only that minute titled? The only answer I can come up with is that the hit has something to do with my machine. Yet if that's the case, what on my machine is communicating with Beijing, China? I've uninstalled all plugins from my browser thinking they might be routing something through China. I've also run a full virus scan on my PC and come up with nothing. I've now changed my blog password yet the Chinese hits are still coming in. They're don't seem to be linked to my browsing habits but, if not, what's with China? Have they hacked the blog? The network? My internet provider? How the hell did they get access to a page that wasn't public and which only I could know about?

Answers, please, on a postcard, in the comments, or via email, for the attention of 'Seriously Paranoid cc The Chinese Secret Police'.

The Tim Marshall Letter

Apropos of almost nothing: is there a more annoying song than 'Things Can Only Get Better' by D:Ream feat Professor Brian Cox? I didn't actually know Cox was in the band until he was talking about it in The Independent this morning. I'd forgot how annoying that song is, though not musically. I mean the lyric: 'things can only get better'. It's a terrible song for a political party to adopt as its anthem. It's like saying, 'we can't do much worse than the last lot', though, obviously, there's always room for things to get worse. I would have thought a professor of astrophysics would have realised. Unless we're talking about the complete heat death of the universe, there's always a 'worse' direction for entropy to go.

Right. Glad I got that off my chest. I was slightly reluctant to blog today simply because I didn't want to push my previous post down the page. I rarely look at anything I've done and think it particularly good. I don't believe a person can ever gets real satisfaction from their own work until enough time has passed for them to forget the process by which they arrived at the finished article. You write what you know about and therefore nothing you read back to yourself can be much of surprise. Yet having said that, my previous blog post is one of my favourites. I think I dug deep enough to find some genuine blood and spit.

It's been a week and I've still not heard back from James Harding, aka 'Harding the Hack', aka the honcho in the chief's poncho down at BBC News. It's a nervous wait though I can't separate that mild nervousness from a deeper dread since I'm waiting to go to the hospital where my sister has an appointment to see a consultant. I expect nothing from the appointment other than a sense of frustration. However, deep breath and hope for the best.

In the meantime, I might as well post my original James Harding letter here so as to keep my records in order. The story so far: Tim Marshall announced that he'd left Sky News and I was determined to do something about it so I dusted off my Stan Madeley mask and once again became my alter ego as the UK's top Richard Madeley lookalike and cabaret chisel thrower to the stars.

50 Shades of Moronic: Sex, Culture and the Jackass Jihad

If this planet had an ejector seat and if I hadn't already pressed the red button a long time ago, then I'd be hammering the little bugger right now.

For millennia, artists have tried to imagine what the End of Days would look like. From the splendor of Michelangelo's Last Judgment to the nightmare visions of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, they had the entire gamut of hellish ends covered. Or so they probably thought. Yet not one of them ever bothered to include Phillip Schofield in their little festival of doom. Not one of them thought to paint the day when the gates of Hell would open up and the grey-haired incubus came forth to reap souls whilst giggling and grinning and acting so damn virtuous and up for fun.

Because let's face some hard facts: Phillip Schofield is an odious little prick. He's Mr Sunshine and Candypop. He's the clean TV smile, nice with the ladies, not an offensive bone in his perfectly proportioned TV body. Yet there he is hosting a feature about sadomasochistic sex at ten o'clock on an ITV morning. And why is he hosting a feature about sadomasochistic sex at ten o'clock on an ITV morning? Because 50 Shades of Grey has just been released as a feature film and that nasty little show feels obliged to promote that nasty little film based on that nasty little novel.

I've written before about the pornification of our culture but whether you're for that or against it, it's the snivelling hypocrisy that I can't abide. It's the chuckling and the playful giggling and pretending to act a little shocked as he's taught about bondage for beginners by some middle class Annabelle, a so-called 'sexpert', whose claim to fame seems to be a line of vibrating knickers available at Amazon. This is TV made for the Daily Mail generation: people who claim to be disgusted at the very same time as they're voyeuristically enjoying the intimate details of a person's private life. They're the moral guardians who seem to have more of an interest in the prurient details of sleaze than the very worst pornographer to whom the whole thing has become a boring flaccid reality. It's TV made by people who have no moral code. They have no notion of decency. They simply want to drive standards down and turn everybody into the same type of vapid consumerist arsehole you see crowding the fast lane into every cheap burger drive-through on their way to a pseudo-American sized coronary.

What kind of witless desk cracker comes up with this stuff? No doubt it's some snivelling wine bar Charlotte  with a glandular filofax and a hectic social life, shuffling between meetings with promoters and agents and advertisers and who never once looks at her own life and sees it for the abyss of moral turpitude it really is. She is well paid and happy in what she does because she can afford veneered hardwood floors and chandeliers that hang over the long dining table in her cramped London flat. It's a shallow life of fifty shades of shallow dream and even shallower outcomes. The product of her life is a society that is more indolent, less educated, but ever more subservient to Chinese corporate capital and vapid American stupidity which passes for internet culture.

Oh Lord! How far have we fallen! Monday 29 June 1987 was a terribly dark day in our country's history. That was the day when the 1972 Broadcasting Act was obliterated by the second Thatcher government. 'Thatcher Thatcher the Milk Snatcher' snatched educational TV away from the children and put it on in the hands of the capitalists who promised to maintain standards. To think that we scoffed at the ITV of my youth. From morning to lunch, it was devoted to educational shows. At school, our teacher would wheel in the big cathode ray TV and plug it in so we could all cram around and watch ITV schools programmes on the amazing 22 inch colour screen. The whole timetable was set so we could catch the start of yet another rerun of 'How We Used To Live' or ' Stop, Look, Listen'. Compare that with the current diet of nipple clamps and men who ejaculate 100 times a day or the woman with the world's biggest tits. Now seriously try to tell me that we've not regressed as both a country and a society.

We live in a world of freakshow everything. Yesterday ISIS burn a captured Jordanian to death in a cage over a pool of oil and we wonder from where that sickness might derive. It derives from a world that has lost all sense of moral limit because, make no mistake, this wasn't simply a rehash of punishments written in ancient texts. That was murder by psychopaths who are deeply entrenched in the Youtube generation. That was death as a meme and it is so toxic because it is so pervasive. It extends beyond the reach of censors or nations or even the choice of individuals. It's the horrific images that appear unbidden in your inbox or pop up behind your current screen or in your Twitter feed. It is a sickening death culture that becomes tomorrow's animated GIF or the comic trope on some forum where the juvenile mix with the serious deranged. This is murder by men who sit around imagining their next outrage in exactly the same way that teenagers try to imagine up the next stunt they can play for their Youtube subscribers. What we are witnessing is the Jackass Jihad.

And yet we in the West think that it's all very 'over there' and somehow we're better than that, whilst never once recognising that those extreme ends might have begun here at home. They say that the British Jihadists are some of the worst and most brutal. Maybe it's wrong and simply misguided to draw a causal link between those brutal acts and the decline of our culture. Yet the truth is that we have allowed our TV to descend even further into the bastardly and the bland where only the gratuitous gimmick is noticed and given time.

Meanwhile the wine bar Charlottes turn up on TV to extol the virtues of spanking and it's just a little bit of fun to break the tedium of the morning. Yet the pattern is set. Big tits this week is the guy with the enormous penis next week. There's playful giggling and claims that it's educational. But the truth is that it's a sickening demonstration of what we've become. It's shock for the sake of being shocking. It is a despicable form of exploitation given a veneer of 'niceness' by Schofield who seems quite happy to be part of this spectacle so long as it continues to fund his new wine and food twitter channel.

Well, excuse my language but fuck Philip Schofield's wine and food channel. Whatever rights Philip Schofield had to portray himself as sophisticated doyen of London society were lost the moment he signed on to represent bitch-slap TV.

A Public Apology

As you can see, there's now a donate button but I feel like I need to apologise. I don't want you to feel like I'm suddenly shuffling up to you, tin cup in hand, and making a nuisance of myself. The most important thing to me is ensuring that anybody who reads this blog regularly will keep reading this blog regularly. If you've read me long enough, you'll know that I'm not the super slick corporate type who only wants you for your money. I've blogged for nearly ten years without a button. I've added it simply to make that option available to anybody who feels a sudden upsurge of generosity. Perhaps they've suddenly come into millions and want to spread the love. Perhaps they genuinely like something I've done. I don't know... I just figure that without that button, I'd never know.

The horrible part of this is knowing that you'll be thinking 'Damn, I suppose he's now waiting for me to donate'. I'm not. I'd feel really ashamed if the appearance of the button made anybody feel like that. I'd feel double ashamed if it suddenly received donations from regular readers. The button is simply there for the future instances when something I've written has particularly touched a somebody or made them laugh. It's for the times when my Rotring advice has saved a person the cost of buying new pens. It's just a punt which might earn me enough one month to save me from the breadline. They say that artists are always poor. I'm poor but I don't consider myself much of an artist. I simply do what I do because I love doing it. Without writing and cartooning, I'd be nothing. The donate button is an attempt to stop myself becoming nothing.

So, that's all I'll say on it. I'll try not to mention it again. I hope it doesn't offend anybody. I hope you just understand that I'd be stupid not to try every avenue that might raise a little income.

A Doodle About a Drunk Called Larry

A late night doodle based on a late night idea. In other words: the kind of thing I draw when I'm tired in order to keep my mind busy. I'm not sure if it's a cartoon. I makes me smile but I find my tastes are becoming even more peculiar. It's probably not finished but this is as finished as I'll take it. Yesterday was a really bad day on the blog despite three updates. Today my email account was overloaded with SPAM, most of it about tinnitus. Overnight the blog received 12 comments. All of them in Spanish which Google mangles into such unreadable English that I have no idea what they're about. Really dissuades me from blogging today.

Despicable Things

Nearly knocked off my bike today. A guy in a black Fiat came flying around a blind corner which had been reduced to one lane due to parking. It meant he was in my lane and because he hadn't waited to see if there was traffic, he drove straight at me. There was a horrifying moment when I could see that I was in his blind spot. The pillar at the edge of his windscreen was obliterating his face so I knew it was also obscuring me. Not that he seemed to care. When he did see me, he didn't slow down. By that point, I've swerved to the edge of the road, my wheel had hit the edge of paving, and I'd gone flying across the verge whilst screaming obscenities. Didn't catch the number plate. Black car. Fat guy in his thirties. Despicable type.

**

Had a peculiar SPAM comment tonight. The English was broken and the link to their website clearly meant to get people to visit a lousy shop but the message was just insulting. Not sure what to make of it. It was almost a real comment in its abrasive quality but not the kind of comment right minded bloggers would want to publish. A sad part of blogging is having to wade through the hundreds of SPAM comments falsely praising you. Having to wade through comments that just tell you that you and your work are  worthless is something I'm not sure I want to get used to. Despicable business.

**

Unlocking my bike outside the local Tesco today, I heard two female voices behind me.

Female one: 'Oh, so was it your boyfriend?'

Female two: 'No, it was one of my exes.'

You might think there's nothing unusual in that and I thought exactly the same thing. Then I turned around and found myself looking at two schoolgirls who weren't much older than twelve. Twelve years old and she's already talking about her exes. Despicable world.

**

What was shocking about Isis incinerating the Jordanian pilot was that it wasn't so shocking. There are few forms of human barbarism that weren't described in our most sacred texts. Despicable people. Despicable evil.

**

Drawn a Valentines card to send to somebody as a joke. Now contemplating using it to send Valentines cards to a few other places. Not sure what I'd get from that except a sense of amusement. Not sure who to send them to. When the Tories were last in opposition, I once sent the entire Shadow cabinet Valentines cards (about 12 cards, I think), though I also signed them and gave them a return address. I believe only one replied (Caroline Spelman) which, I think, says everything you need to know about politicians. Despicable manners.

**

Finally worked out how to put a donate button on this blog. I might do it tomorrow. I have quite a few tutorials on here which have proved popular and which some visitors have told me helped them and saved them quite a few quid. Perhaps they'll show a little generosity and help me in return. Nothing ventured nothing gained and times are extremely tough. Last chance saloon and all that. Despicable desperation.

How Do I Open A New Blog?

The new banner has making me rethink my whole blogging operation and I'm not sure what to do. Hence my writing this blog post in the hope that somebody might have a bright idea.

I'm tempted to ditch 'The Spine' identity. I chose that blog title nearly 10 years ago and it's been as useful as it's also been really unhelpful. I don't like it when people call me 'The Spine' because it sounds a pretentious thing to call yourself. I've never liked that whole side of the internet were ordinary folk call themselves 'OrcRanger' or 'NightshadeBladder'. At the best it sounds juvenile. At worst, slightly psychotic. I've never actually identified myself as 'The Spine'. That was just the blog I write and it was only called 'The Spine' because it was originally meant to be a satirical news blog filled with backbone. Then, as it moved to become my own blog, I changed it to mean 'spine' as in 'thorn'. It was meant to be sharp and prickly.  Now I'm not sure what it means.

I want a change because I particularly get annoyed that some people still confuse me with 'The Spine blogger', an infinitely more popular blogger than I'll ever be. She/he has been writing a blog about orthopaedics (I know!) since 2009 (I started to blog in January 2006) and the appeal of that blog just baffles me. The latest post alone has 134 comments! I'd make deals with the devil to get that kind of following. That one post has more comments than I get in an entire year of writing/drawing a blog post every single day. It's the kind of statistic that just makes me want to give up because it makes me realise how little popular 'magic' I have. I'm either a personality free zone (very likely) or I'm just not intelligent enough (certainly true). I know I jump around too much. My blogging follows my interests and projects, though satire, comedy and my love of writing, has always been somewhere in the mix.

In addition to The Spine Blogger, I have other identity confusions on Twitter. The only time people talk to me there is when they confuse me with The Spine, Britain's most brutal race. Messages to me usually read '@TheSpine nearly killed me today'  or '@TheSpine is evil', neither of which refer to me but refer to the 268 mile race. It's really annoying being less popular that the abstract concept of a long distance mountain race that leaves people needing hospital treatment.

All of which makes me think it might be time to change my blog around. I want to move to a blog that more closely identifies with me and not this mysterious 'Spine' character which I've never really played at all. I think if people think 'Ah, I'll visit David Waywell's blog', they might see me as a real person and not as this strangely disconnected voice coming from behind an oddly named blog. Because, the truth be told, I write this blog because I like talking to people and I like people talking to me. I write it to make friends and, truth also be told, I make very few.

So, I'm not sure how I might do this. If I moved to a more suitable domain name, I wouldn't get the traffic this blog gets each day simply on account of it having been around so long. Google wouldn't be so kind because my Pagerank would reset to the lowest. Could I link two blogs under one domain? Should I change the name of this blog even if that doesn't match the domain name? Should I post to two sites concurrently? I have no idea if I'll do this but I'm sick of being the least successful 'Spine' around. I think it would be rejuvenating being the most successful version of me that I can manage given my limited ability and resources.

The question is: how to do this right and not find myself sitting on this side of a blog that would lucky to get three hits a day?

When God Met Stephen Fry

The response to Stephen Fry's rant against God has been telling. What Fry said about God wasn't exactly profound. It was no more than I'd hope any articulate atheist, agnostic, or even believer would ask when faced by their maker. What he said was a pretty standard attack on the cruelty of God and has been expressed so many times before to make this latest example seem pretty trivial. The reason it isn't trivial, however, is that it was expressed by Stephen Fry and some people's response seems to be one that would prefer if we phrase the question a different way. What would God say to Stephen Fry? Would God ask: what was it like working on The Hobbit? How did you get so many Twitter followers? Are you really as all knowing as you seem on QI or do you have the answers piped into your ear?

It's perhaps a symptom of the terminal decline of intellect in our postmodern hyper-celebrity-adoring age that even a mediocre attack on religion should receive such coverage. When a philosopher makes a sustained attack on God, their words are rarely reported and, certainly, never reported at such length. Richard Dawkins is quite possibly the most outspoken, well known, and 'followed' atheist of the moment and yet even his outbursts never receive such prominence, even in the broadsheets.

Again, it would appear that we are less interested in what somebody says and more concerned with the person saying it. It's a psychological response to how we view our fellow men and women. I know it myself because I'm not immune to doing the same thing. How I think about, for example, Ralph Steadman is very different to how I think about some anonymous cartoonist whose work I find on the web and whose style I particularly like. Steadman has an authority which the other cartoonist lacks and there has to be a process of familiarisation before another cartoonist becomes, in my eyes, quite so canonical.

The same is true of writers. I might read something by Will Self and enjoy it but it means something different to an article which doesn't have such a high profile name attached. There's something in 'celebrity' or, at least, 'being known' that carries an air of authority. Stephen Fry's rant about God was an authoritative  pronouncement that is far more significant than any learned paper written by a respected but little known professor of theology. It was significant because we know everything about Fry and this latest pronouncement fits into that known background. His is a life narrative being written in the public space. This latest event is a twist in that tale.

The reasons for this are probably layered into the collective psychology our society. It has something to do with the explosion of communication that happened over the past half a century. There is simply too much communication and no single person can ever hope to hear it all. Celebrity is the function that filters out the noise. Yet lost in the noise is the articulate and sane, the wise and the learned. All we hear are the trivial but loud. And that's where the problem lies. Stephen Fry's words, whilst neither dumb nor particularly profound, were loud. They were loud simply because he is Stephen Fry. His voice booms louder than any other. Louder too, it seems, than the voice of God.

If I met God, I think my first question would be: why did you create Stephen Fry? But, then, I suspect God might be thinking the same thing.

Yet if there is a God, then perhaps it was God who brought mugging victim Alan Barnes to the public's attention. God moves in mysterious ways and, in this instance, the mysterious way was beautician Katie Cutler who set up the appeal to help the sixty seven year old after he was knocked to the ground by a mugger resulting in a broken collar bone. The fund was aiming to raise £500 but currently stands at £322,899 with 24,322 raising that money in only 5 days.

Yet God didn't work quite so mysteriously in the case of Paul Kohler who was 'savagely' beaten by four burglars. He was in the papers this last week after four Polish immigrants were jailed for the assault which left the university lecturer with a fractured eye socket, jawbone, nose and his facial bruising was so bad that he was unrecognisable.

There are, of course, stark differences between the two cases and a clear reason why Mr Barnes' story touched the nation's heart as well as its purse strings. Yet is it right to ask what kind of God would make Mr Barnes suffer a life with his disabilities but wrong to ask why the media highlighted one case over all the other sad stories that routinely pass for reality?

Nobody asks that because none of it ultimately means anything. Even the loudest bray of stupidity ends like the utterance of the wisest thinker. It's all meaningless noise and life is just one hellish lottery played by a blindfolded gambler with the odds stacked very much against him.

A Gag Machine Update

It's only been a week or so but I'm already delighted with people's response to The Gag Machine. It's also been great/surprising/motivating to hear back from real users. Google's engine has now kicked in and hits are steady and slowly growing. Actually having sales also means that I can now justify the time to update The Gag Machine with new features.

That's the reason why the first big update has just gone live and I think it's my favourite since I started. I'd originally conceived 'The Gag Machine' as a small tool to use beside other software. However, when a user emailed to suggest that I make it full screen, I realised that it would give me chance to really expand its functionality. This new update introduces an optional full screen mode which has really pleased me with how it's turned out. I might be the coder behind this project but primarily I'm its chief user and I'm excited with anything that helps me come up with more ideas for my cartoons or stories. Before I extend the functionality even more, my next job will be to come up with more 'gag packs'. The key behind this project is definitely the data. I've already discovered that the more selective the data, the better and more consistent the results.

Anyway, to mark this new update, I've made a shorter introduction video covering the basic functions of The Gag Machine.



Of course, if you've downloaded an earlier version (or are one of the enlightened people who have so kindly supported me by buying it), then please download the latest version and give it a try. Ideas and suggestions are always welcome. If you think this could be software for you but it's missing some key component, then please email me your suggestions. I'm looking to make this useful to anybody who wants to use it.

A Rare Stan Hit

I rarely get hits from people Googling for 'Stan Madeley' so when I do send out a Stan letter, I keep an eye out for hits. It's usually a bad sign. It means that a letter has been read, questions raised, and then a web search has resulted in a letter going straight into the bin. Well, I tried my best, though on reflection, why Sky Broadband and not the usually BBC IP address? Perhaps there's still chance I'll get a reply...

The Joke Machine Perhaps

Worked on a cartoon last night but fell asleep before I could finish it. It means that I'm a bit light on material to post today and I've a dozen things to do so I haven't time to write a long essay on the newly discovered Michelangelo bronzes or 50 Shades of Grey or Stephen Fry and God or any of the things currently in the news. Shortly I'll have to nip out to Tesco to see if my nemesis is on the till. Before then, I have code to write.

Over the weekend, The Gag Machine underwent a little update. Unlike a lot of software which is written by people who don't use it for people who need it, The Gag Machine is written by the person who needs it and offered to people who might want it. It's why I'm happy to leave it as a quiet backwater of the internet. I've not yet mastered it enough myself that I'd want *every* cartoonist buying it and using it. The key seems to be finding the magic number of words to combine in an idea. It can work with up to seven fields but two seems to be the best for quick ideas when I'm really tired. Early in the day, three and four can work really well.

I'm just finishing the new update which has added a full screen function, which means I have more screen real estate to deal with and extra functions to write. I'm eager to spend some time using it this afternoon but an American friend suggests I change the name since he thought gag had something to do with strangulation. I have to rethink websites and logos. The Joke machine might have been a better title but I don't know if I can be bothered changing it now. Not when I have so much to do and one pair of hands is about four hands too few.

Humanity Explained

Various Unrelated Thoughts

I wish I didn't have to program, though I know it's entirely my choice. How paradoxical does that sound? It's my choice to do something I wouldn't choose to do. My life has always been like this. No matter what I've accomplished, it's always my computer skills that people want or demand that I use. I wish I could just spend my days writing but there's no money to be had in writing. Not here. Not outside London. Possibly not inside London unless your mother was a columnist and is happy to land you a gig on the nationals. I can't cartoon well enough to earn money that way. So, I'm stuck trying to brush up on the only thing I've ever been slightly good at and for which there might just be a demand, even though deep down I don't actually enjoy doing it.

Or perhaps isn't the right phrase. I do enjoy it but I enjoy it too much. My interest in programming is something I shouldn't feed. It makes me too distance, uncommunicative. It feeds the very part of me I'm sure is completely Asperger's. Sometimes, it's like giving a junkie a needle. Computers are my needle.

Today I spent pulling my hair out in frustration. I'd wanted to write and draw but I forced myself to learn to program in 'Windows Presentation Framework'. To the non-geek, programming is usually done in one of a few languages. The most popular is probably Java but the use of C# (pronounced C sharp) is rising and that's what I use. However, the language is only half of the business of being a programmer. The language you use to code is actually communicating with something bigger and more powerful. I suppose it's a bit like knowing French and being able to order an army around the field. The 'army' I've recently been 'commanding' was called Windows Forms and it was an easy thing to do. I'd say 'Create a window' and it would create a window. I'd say 'When somebody clicks on this button, count the number of beans in this pile' and that's what it would do. It was easy. In its way, it was fun.

I'm still 'speaking' in C# but I'm no longer using Windows Forms which is considered old fashioned. Microsoft want people to use this WCF system and, frankly, it's a royal pain in the arse. Somebody said it doesn't so much have a 'learning curve' as a 'learning cliff'. It's monstrously complicated to do even the simplest things. I finally have a basic program working but took me all day to do something that in Windows Forms (the old technology) would have taken me an hour.

Wish I could just write for a living but doesn't everybody? Everybody believes they can sling verbs and nouns together and produce readable prose. The truth is that so much of the prose I read is written by people with a cloth ear to the nuances, flows, and beauty of the English language. Thank god fewer people can code but, then, even that's not as rare a thing as it once was. I figure there's some guy in India who does everything I do but at a lower price. I'm plagued by that guy in India. The bargain bucket me.

***

I was bought a gift today. I'd been wanting to play Assassin's Creed Unity for a while but I'd dismissed it because I'd read so many bad reviews. No game has received such bad press and has been perceived so poorly. However, it was on sale and I'm lucky enough to have somebody who cares enough about me that she keeps my spirits raised with the occasional game.

Tonight I spent three hours playing the unpatched version and about half an hour on the patched version. I have to say: either patched or unpatched, Assassin's Creed Unity is a stunningly good game. Of course, there are the occasional glitches but, based on my experience of the game, they are so mild as to be completely forgivable. It's not even a matter of praising the glass half full rather than the glass half empty. The game is brimming with moments where I'm sitting there just spellbound. Perhaps it's because I've always loved that period of the late eighteenth century. Revolutionary France fascinates me because it was an expression of those forces I'll be been waffling on about in subsequent paragraphs. I also love Paris, Gothic architecture, the novels of Dumas and anything that involves a sword fight. For me it's the best game I've played in a long time and it just feels like it's opening up into something very special. I have no idea where the criticism has come from. Perhaps people were playing a different game. Makes no sense to me. Ubisoft have just become my favourite developers again.

***

As I settle down for the evening and try to figure out what the hell I'll draw tonight, I notice that ISIS have killed another hostage. Another journalist killed for doing what journalists do. This is an obvious thing to say but I'll say it anyway: ISIS is very different to anything we've seen before. There might have been equally bad pockets of nihilistic ideologies in recent history. My mind goes back to the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. In Africa, we've seen genocide in places like Rwanda. Yet for over half a century, it's the Nazis who have been our measure of the worst forms of human barbarism. That said: the current situation around Syria and Iraq feels so very different. There was always something deeply rational about the Nazi blood cult. It's why it's so often associated with Nietzsche who wrote about the irrationality of compassion. They mechanised killing in a way which, had it been any other discipline, they might have been considered Modernists. ISIS are not Nazis. There is no reason to ISIS. There's a feral cruelty about everything they do, as though some collective adrenal gland has gone bad. In that sense, I tend to think that Boris Johnson was right in what he said today. This isn't just a bad ethos or bad 'thinking'. It's pathology. It's self-abuse. It has the stink of postmodern. It's death for death's sake.

I'm beyond thinking I'll ever understand the Middle East. This last week there's been so much criticism about our government lowering our flag to honour the dead Saudi king. We're rightly appalled at Saudi regime and the brutal punishments they inflict when people try to express their right to free expression. Yet the reality is that none of us would want the lid to come off that tinderbox of tribal rivalries. Was it naive of anybody to believe that by taking down Saddam that democracy would flourish in the region? Freedom in anything is frightening but it takes the truly enlightened to enjoy it. With the freedom to do anything comes the potential of chaos. It's the great paradox, I suppose, that to enjoy freedom you also have to accept a self-imposed restraint. Again (I always make this point), it is the thing Conrad expressed so profoundly in 'Heart of Darkness'. Civilization is founded upon a lie but that lie is crucial is we're to keep our civilization. What ISIS prove is that some societies are not mature enough to deal with freedom. In the place of one brutal dictator, they would put a thousand brutal despots, each interpreting a desert fable as though it were an eternal truth. I don't hold the UK or America apart from that truth. I'm generally a Republican but there's a small part of me that realises that a Monarchy might at least impose a sense of order upon the country. For everything the monarch represents, there's the truth that there's all the things they don't represent which would come to the fore in a Republic. There's also the fact that when you destabilise any system, you should be prepared for the long process of it finding a new balance. Revolutions are not things you'd really wish upon any people.

I always think of it in terms of my gut. I sometimes have a tricky gut. Since I was a child, I've always had problems with some foods. It makes me cautious about what I eat. Friends and family mock me because I always eat the same things but I view my stomach as a system. Disturb its equilibrium and it's a sod to get it balanced again. So much of the world works the same way and the sad reality is that equilibrium is often maintained through hellish forces. ISIS might itself be a hellish force which will produce a new equilibrium. I'm not sure. I just don't know what hellish force can come along and silence them. I'm not even sure we want to know what hellish force could silence them.

A Bit of Andy Kaufman History And One Damn Funny Story

I have to recommend this to you if you're not too easily offended. It's the latest podcast by the great Gilbert Gottfried and is an hour and a half with Bob Zmuda. I guess that neither is a household name here in the UK and this whole thing probably needs a little preface in the form of a brief history of American standup comedy.

Gottfried is one of my favourite comedians, though I've not had the chance to see much of his work beyond Youtube. He's just not a big star in the UK. I have no idea how big he is in the US but he's one of those comics that I just can't resist watching. I love his voice, his facial expressions, his laughter, his jokes... Most of all I love his daring. He's just out there in places where most comedians can only dream about going. I think I've posted this before but it's one of my favourite things on the internet and is itself definitely not safe for work. It's Gottfried's audiobook version of '50 Shades of Grey'. What I love about this is that it cuts through all the precious bullshit that's spoken about that damn book and he reads it exactly how it reads on the page.



So, like I was saying, his latest podcast is devoted to Bob Zmuda who was Andy Kaufman's writer and friend.

Andy Kaufman, for those too young to know their comedy history, is simply one of the great oddballs of American comedy. He's most famous for his role in Taxi but his live comedy is as far left field as left field goes. Example:



Kaufman died tragically young though stories continue to persist that he faked his own death. HIs life was the subject of the excellent 1999 Milos Forman film, Man on the Moon, with Jim Carrey as Kaufman. He was also the Andy Kaufman of the REM song the same name.


So, Zmuda was his friend and writer and he continues to add to the Kaufman legend by appearing as one of Kaufman's more famous characters called Tony Clifton. Tony Clifton is a bit hard to describe but he's a bit like Dean Martin crossed with Sir Les Patterson and then with the debauchery cranked up to 11. Example.



Clifton is deeply repulsive, which makes the story that Zmuda tell all the funnier. It begins about the 14.50 mark and is about time Jim Carrey was invited to the Playboy mansion by the star struck Hugh Heffner. Like I say, it's not for the easily offended. Definitely NSFW. The details get pretty pornographic but it's hilarious and like the best comedy, revealing about human nature, in this case, the worst kind of human nature involving celebrity .

 

The New Banner

As you can see, I've started to doodle a new banner for the blog. I've always wanted a completely hand drawn banner but I've never thought my skills were at the point where I could pull it off. I'm still not sure my skills are the at the point where I can pull this off. I intend to work on it slowly, perhaps adding things that have relevance to the blog. Perhaps things that have no relevance to this blog. The tortoise was a mistake and will be removed tonight and something else put in its place. I have no idea why I added the tortoise. It was very late and I have a lot of space to fill.

I did think of adding virtual likenesses of anybody who leaves a comment but I had second thoughts. Firstly, I don't know what anybody looks like and, secondly, I don't want to put off anybody who might be thinking of leaving a comment. Besides, what would a 'Radical Rodent' look like? With the exception of the guy on the right who looks (very vaguely) like me and the woman prodding 'me', who is a bit like my nemesis from Tesco, none of the other characters are meant to resemble anybody other than the generic stereotypes I constantly seem to come across. Well, okay. Perhaps the guy flying the drone might be my perception of what Barman looks like but that's a vague ill formed thought and not worthy of pursuing.

Today: I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm making very little headway programming with WPF. I should get into it but my spirits are lacking. Yesterday was an odd day. It reminded me how much fun I used to have working on my spoof letter project. Today I need to be more productive. Deep breath. I should work on figuring this WPF out. I can't let it beat me.