Brief notes
I’ve been a bit remiss recently, and haven’t been blogging as much as I used to. Yes, the Song Of The Day feature continues unabated but where’s all the other good stuff? Well, to try and put that right, here’s another in my series of Brief Notes. This one is a bunch of news stories that have caught my eye recently, for one reason or another.
File under tolerance
A number of stories over the last few days have highlighted the lack of tolerance of other people’s views / lifestyles / religions / whatever that exists in society today. Which, really, is not a very cheerful thought and doesn’t inspire hope for the future.
A priest in London has come under fire for suggesting that all gay people should have their backsides tattooed with the words “Sodomy can seriously damage your health”. He maintains that he was being satirical, attacking the militant promotion of homosexuality by groups such as Outrage. The type of viewpoint that insists everyone is gay, they just don’t know it yet.
While Rev Mullen’s words might have been a little ill-thought out, is his stand against militant gay groups necessarily wrong? Shouldn’t those on both sides of this argument be able to see the other’s point of view?
Priests are not having a good time of it just lately; Yvonne Hobson, a parish priest in Cornwall, has received death threats simply because she’s a woman priest. Not exactly the peace and love that religion supposedly teaches us, is it? Why does the fact that Ms Hobson is a woman affect her ability to be a priest, or her ability to believe in God? I know they can be a bit insular down there in Kernow, but even so…
Once again, Muslims are getting their knickers in a twist - this time over a novel. Seems that we can’t say anything about their faith - good or bad - without them wanting to firebomb the infidels. As with so many religions, the fundamentalist view seems to be the only one that hits the headlines, and the millions of peace-loving Muslims across the world are tarred with the brush of their violent, bomb-happy brethren.
Every religion has been guilty of this at some point in history, but the modern world offers much greater capacity for death and destruction than existed at the time of the Crusades. Again, isn’t religion, belief in God, supposed to be about peace, love and understanding?
Even Corrie has had to pander to minority opinion recently, after they received complaints about a Scottish character suggesting that he could never support Rangers. Apparently, Rangers fans - being the delicate, sensitive souls that they are - felt hard done by over this, and Corrie bosses have changed future scripts to remove similar references.
Two things about this: first, it’s only television - it’s not real! Second, why is television programming being changed according to the wishes of a very small percentage of the viewing population? I don’t watch Corrie and couldn’t care less about Rangers, but what worries me is the trend we seem to have at the moment to not want to upset anyone, however much of a minority they might be. TV is already bland enough, if we continue on like this there won’t anything left to watch, no programmes out there to question what is happening in the world, no hope for the future.
We’re all green
Starbucks have come under fire again (they must be used to it by now), this time for wasting millions of litres of water every day. Apparently, staff are not allowed to turn off taps that are used to clean spoons; this helps to reduce the growth of bacteria and helps the global chain to achieve health and safety standards. I’ve never been in a Starbucks (because I have a kettle at home and know how to make a cup of coffee for myself), but I can’t imagine that the experience is worth the waste of so much water.
Lung disease is set to kill 83 million people in China over the next 30 years, according to a recent study. Mainly because of widespread use of wood burning stoves for heating and cooking and the fact that the Chinese smoke one third of all the cigarettes in the world.
China has a population of just over 1.3 billion people, crammed into a land mass of about 9.3 billion square kilometres (as opposed to the US where 303 million people live in about 9.1 billion square kilometres), so you’d think they might be glad of the extra room.
Got him at last
We all knew it had to happen some time; OJ has finally been thrown in jail. Not, as you might expect, because they’ve found some way to find him guilty of his wife’s murder after all these years, but because he committed an armed robbery.
But we all know that really he’s been put away because no-one ever believed he was innocent of his wife’s murder.
Not our fault
Apparently, the fact that they shot an innocent man seven times in the head, on a crowded London tube train, is not the fault of the officers with the guns, nor of the Metropolitan police as a whole. It’s the fault of the nation for not preventing the 21 July bomb attempts of which Mr de Menezes was suspected. And, just to make sure that we all feel re-assured, it has been said this sort of thing could happen again. Is DAC Cressida Dick living up to her name?
And finally, a Max Moseley story
Max has been in the news again, saying that Formula One needs to drastically cut costs if it wants to remain credible. Which I think is a bit much, really, coming from the one man who has done more than any other person (except perhaps for Bernie Ecclestone, who insists on taking the sport to tracks that even Ferrari don’t like) to make Formula One a laughing stock across the world.
If Max wants to make F1 credible again, then he should stand down as president of the FIA.
Bernie, what are you doing to us?
With much fanfare and publicity, Formula One has today had its first night race at the new Singapore street circuit. Much has been made of the added excitement that night racing brings to the sport, how fantastic the circuit is and what a great day it has been for the sport.
The main force behind getting a night race, and another street circuit, has been F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone. For some reason of his own - probably something to do with European television rights, as if the man wasn’t rich enough already - Bernie has decided that night races are the way to go. The same thing was tried with the opening race of the MotoGP season this year.
Having watched both the MotoGP and now the F1 race under lights, I find that I have to ask the question “Why?”. I just don’t get what all the fuss is about. After all, it’s not like they’re racing in the dark; there are so many floodlights around the place so that the cars can be seen on TV that they might as well not bother and just hold the race in the daytime.
“Oh, but it makes it more exciting” I hear you cry. Which is a nice idea, but unfortunately isn’t borne out by what actually happened in the race. Singapore is a street circuit, like Monaco. It’s narrow, there are no real straights and there are only about two places where an overtake can be attempted. So, basically, it’s a procession from start to finish. Yes, today’s race was full of incidents and the pole sitter didn’t win - but those incidents were either in the pits (Massa’s fuel rig still being attached as he drove off) or caused by accidents and subsequent safety car sessions (Piquet, Sutil).
F1 has been processional for quite some time, but there are circuits that do at least have some chance of giving us some racing. The street circuits don’t do that. Monaco was under threat not so long ago because it doesn’t make for good racing, and was only saved (I think) because so many of the drivers are based there. But at least it’s pretty to look at. But now we’ve got this new Singapore circuit, which is even worse from a racing point of view and most certainly isn’t pretty to look at - most of the time, it looked like the cars were driving round a multi-storey car park.
Yet, this is apparently what Bernie wants for the sport. He’s also added a new street circuit at Valencia this year (didn’t see that race, but apparently it was no better) and has said he wants more. And he wants more of the long haul races to become night races, too. What he should be trying to do is move the races to proper circuits where cars can overtake each other and we don’t have to rely on incidents and accidents to give us some entertainment.
Brief notes
1. What do you do when your helicopter breaks down in Snowdonia? Call in the RAF to airlift it back to base for repairs. I think this qualifies as “amazing footage of the week”.
2. Congratulations to Lewis Hamilton for winning the British GP this weekend; he’s now back in the running for the championship. Commiserations to David Coulthard for crashing out early in his last ever home race. And well done (!) to Bernie for finally doing what he’s been trying to do for years and taking the GP away from Silverstone. Given that one of his objections has always been the lack of facilities at Silverstone, I’m not sure how he thinks that Donnington is a suitable replacement, when it needs even more work than Silverstone.
I don’t know who it is at the BRDC that Bernie doesn’t like, but there’s obviously someone! Or perhaps it’s just that the BRDC told him where he could stick his outrageous demands for money. The sooner that the premier class of motorsport is not controlled by such a devious, manipulative and two-faced person as Bernie Ecclestone, the better that it will be. Between him and Max “not a Nazi, but definitely the son of a fascist” Moseley, the sport long ago descending into farce and it needs to be stopped.
3. You’ve probably seen much talk of this around the Net over the last few days, but in case you missed it a judge in the US has ruled that Google must hand over a log that contains details of the videos that You Tube users have watched. The log, which “contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details” has to be handed over to Viacom in an argument over copyright infringement.
Quite rightly, privacy groups are up in arms that this information is to be handed over, as it contains data that could allow individuals to be identified and is a massive breach of privacy. But what worries me, additionally, is why this information is being kept in the first place. Yes, I can understand you want to know which videos are popular, etc, but why do you need to keep personal information? Isn’t it enough to know that a video has been watched 100,000 times? Why do you need to know which 100,000 people watched it?
There has been some speculation that Viacom may use this information in an attempt to prosecute individual users, so I’d recommend that if you’re a You Tube user you only watch non-copyright infringing clips from now on.
4. In a related issue, Virgin Media is warning file-sharers that they risk being taken to court if they illegally download music. It’s part of a BPI initiative to stop the illegal downloading of music by making the ISP’s responsible for it. Years ago we had “Home taping is killing music (and it’s illegal)” stickers on LPs and cassettes; now we have its online equivalent. But the “Home taping” campaign back then was based on a fallacy, and it’s the same today; music was never at risk. What was at risk was the strangle hold that the music industry had on it, while they milked it for every penny they could. They can’t (and never have been able to) move with the times and want to protect a profit margin that really doesn’t belong to them anymore. If it was all about protecting the artists, as people like the BPI would have us believe, I could give it more support but it isn’t; it’s all about record label profits.
If I download an album through iTunes or any of the other online music stores, rather than buying the CD, why should I have to pay the same price as the CD? There’s no physical product that has to be manufactured and shipped to a retail outlet, after all, and my consumer experience is reduced because there’s no cover artwork or inlay card, etc and no handy CD to enable me to take my music on the road with me. Why, then, was my recent purchase of Melody Gardot’s Worrisome Heart only £0.30 more for the CD than it would have been for a download version? (And, in fact, at the moment it’s actually cheaper for the CD!)
The music industry needs to wake up to reality and rather than going after people who illegally download music, they should be making it much easier to download music legally. Which must also include getting rid of DRM completely, and making artist’s back catalogue’s more readily available.
More camera shenanigans
After the photography challenge that Collin set a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been experimenting with my camera - finding out exactly what it will do. One of the things it will do is take video, so on a visit to Brands Hatch last weekend I made extensive use of that feature:
Lewis, where did it all go wrong?
This weekend’s French Grand Prix was not a good one for Lewis Hamilton. Following on from his disastrous mistake in Canada (running into the back of Kimi’s Ferrari, which was stopped at a red light on the pit lane exit), this weekend Lewis was deemed to have “gained an advantage” when he straight-lined a chicane as he tried to overtake Vettel. Hamilton is now fourth in the Championship, ten points behind leader Felipe Massa.
These things happen; Formula One is a fast, high-pressure sport where split-second decisions are required constantly and where even blinking at the wrong time could cause you to have a big accident. You can put them down as just racing incidents - just wasn’t having a good day. But after the promise of last season, which ended so crushingly with poor tactics in the second-last race and an attack of the nerves in the final race, it seems that Lewis is (already) in danger of doing a Coulthard (or a Button, in fact). Promising so much and not quite managing to deliver.
At the moment, Lewis’ problem seems to be that he thinks everyone is out to get him, saying in an interview this week “You can keep on giving me penalties, whatever you want. I’ll keep battling, and trying to come back with a result.” Lewis, they keep giving you penalties because you keep breaking the rules. You ran into the back of stationary car - in the pit lane, no less - two weeks ago, and didn’t have the grace to apologise properly for it (”I saw the red light but it was too late to stop. I don’t think it’s a racing incident. It’s just unfortunate when this stuff happens… I apologise to Kimi if I ruined his race”). Now, you straight-line a chicane because “I couldn’t turn in on the guy, or we would have crashed”, which seems to indicate that you hadn’t overtaken him until you went straight on.
I want to see Lewis win the Championship (it’s about time another Brit did) but I’ve got a horrible feeling that his chance this year is not as good as it was last year.
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