Vox cani

I met a fella in the pub last night that my friend put onto me after they’d been discussing the EU and the Euro in particular. Having spent the morning writing an essay on whether joining EMU would be a good idea for the UK, this was rather ridiculously appropriate. Anyway, the fella was Austrian with imperfect English, and a good few inside him, so we didn’t have so much a debate on that as he espoused his very interesting take on it and then we moved on rather than I try to engage him on the economics. One doesn’t meet many true European believers over here, but this lad was absolutely vehement. He wouldn’t let me call EMU a “project”, as for him it wasn’t at all take it or leave it, it was reality, it was who they were as Europe. Europe wasn’t a separate thing, it wasn’t a set of institutions, it was an identity and a belief system. It’s hard even to put into words, but discussing whether the EU was a good idea would have been some sort of equivalent of asking the Pope whether it was a decent idea for people to postulate something apart from physical reality on Earth. It was fascinating.
We moved on then to a discussion of the comparative marketing and funding of research into fusion and quantum computing, as he lamented the lack of support for his, the former, field. He got to explaining to me some of the weirder points of quantum, and its boundary and conflict with the relativistic view, choicely advising me “Perhaps it’s better if you forget about time.” as I tried to understand what it meant for their to be instantaneous communication of particles, as seems to have been demonstrated, and theoretically is pretty fundamental. Wow. This stuff is pretty out there, and I would like a lot to carry on to where I might understand it better; especially as I’ve had some interesting thoughts on both quantum and relativity.
The conversation turned more to life as well, and I went into central Oxford nightlife for the first time in a while, with my lovely drunken Austrian friend, but I was just thinking today, that was a real only in Oxford evening. Hope to see you again mate. :)

IDS is on the radio saying that the lack of much giving to the earthquake appeal is because the coverage isn’t making it look like people like us are suffering, and that it has occurring now rather than when we’re all at home with our families for the tsunami. So much everyone else has said, though I’ve not heard the Christmas point before.
It seems to me though that there’s a reason that hasn’t really been suggested in the media; that is that the earthquake appears like just another bit of bad news in a place that always has that. It’s like when there’s a flood in Kashmir: it doesn’t seem like news to people. With the tsunami it was like yikes, bugger, hell, these people just had this big super mega smashey thing. With this it’s more: those people who always have crap happen to them…yep… it’s happened again. It seems to me that this one sounds to people like the same old, and so it doesn’t change anything for them.

My iTunes sharing name is now “If you don’t like Prince then you’re wrong.”

Oh, and great quotation, from a response to the right-wing talk shows. I don’t know the landscape, but I have a feeling that the equivalent people on the right in the US have a bit of a more sophisticated operation. (via, which via)…

“If the Republicans are smart, and they are…. They may be evil, but they're not dumb.”

Charles Clarke calls for a consensus on something beyond 14 days, and talks to achieve it, after weeks and maybe months of saying that he believed in the 90 days but was willing to compromise on it. What the hell do they have to do for people to realise that this is a straw man? 90 days is totally ridiculous; we bloody know that. The problem is that it’s a very clever straw man, which can’t be ignored once this is realised, but still needs defeating.
That said, it isn’t so hard to talk about more than one thing, especially when Charles Clarke trails his straw man by talking about the 90 days every three seconds. Our Opposition have sucked a lot for a long while, but allowing the focus just to be on this and not attacking the rest of this terror legislation is rubbish. The Opposition are being utterly outmanoeuvred. This when Labour’s majority was cut to one today on this. ONE! (Although I looked at Hansard and I don’t understand the counting, cos I got 297 votes for amendment plus 2 tellers, and 300+2 votes against… This looks like my mistake though, cos the guys doing Hansard must be pretty able.)

I’ve been missing one of my favourite sitcoms of all time, Action. I used to watch it at 2AM on Channel 4, drinking milk after going out jogging. It ended up good for my health, as the run was a good excuse to stay up that late in days when my default was about midnight. A little research reveals that it was one of Fox’s flagships for the Fall Season (it’s an American thing I reckon, there’s not really the same concept of an Autumn TV season) of 1999, when the awesome West Wing debuted. Back then, people raved on it, and rightly so, because it rocked. Unfortunately, the ratings were rubbish, and it’s swearing, drug use, and general attitude annoyed enough people that they didn’t need too many reasons to cancel it. Apparently the season finale was rewritten when they knew it was being cancelled, and so Peter Dragon, the excellently enthusiastic lead turn of Jay Mohr (the nasty dude in Jerry Maguire, which I watched recently, and which turns out to rock), died of a heart attack, with the time of death as the end of the show’s slot when the final episode was shown. Fox quite literally killed the show. Of course, whilst endless crap comes out on DVD; we’re still waiting on being able to see this masterpiece in anything but glittering memories. Amazon reckon it’s being released on DVD in the future, 1969 actually, so we may have to wait for the calendars being rejigged for the Second Coming (and 1000 years of Satan in charge) to see it again. Please let’s get it back before then, if only just to prepare us for the horny dude; it probably won’t help, but there’s a petition.
It rocked so much….

I don’t know if this counts as real innovation, but Hik made me a Sidecar, and I found it a bit sour, so I got him to add rum and tonic, and it became something really rather lovely. It’s fun to say I invented a cocktail, anyway. He named it the Sidecar Fountain, which was a bit of a strange name. A Sidecar Named Desire would be better, but I need to check that it really is good, and that no one else has named the recipe, before using a name that I do rather like…