If the book was “450 pages of irritatingly gripping tosh”, then the movie accurately reflects the book – except the movie isn’t gripping.

The movie has been getting terrible reviews, and I so wanted to be positive, but it’s difficult. But then, to serve its purpose, the movie had to be bad. It was a chance for pop-lit readers to emulate more widely read individuals by coming out of the film complaining that “it wasn’t as good as the book”, and give them another chance to slip into conversation that they read, ergo they must be intelligent. Some even go to the trouble of slipping in how “Angels and Daemons is a much better book”, as if to emphasise how well-read they are, when in fact they’ve merely read a second novel by the same author following the same formula. And then, at the same time, it gets people like me going to see it, to see just how bad it really is.

I don’t intend to be all snooty here, but it’s hard to be nice about a terrible book being made into a terrible film. Much like the book, the film really has no point to it. There’s a whole world of the morality of faith to be explored, which is just ignored in favour of pseudoscience and revival of popular myth. It was the ultimate formulaic Hollywood blockbuster, just at the book was the ultimate formulaic best-seller.

In truth, the film isn’t all that bad. As with the book, it acheives everything it sets out to do and more. It’s just a shame that its objective appears to be to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and not to explore the real issues. But, heck – since everyone’s talking about it, it’s probably worth seeing anyway.

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One for my readers here in England:

Due to the nature of the quality of driving in England the Department of Transport has now devised a new scheme in order to identify poor drivers and give good drivers the opportunity to recognise them whilst driving. For this reason as from the middle of May 2006 those drivers who are found to be driving badly which includes:

– overtaking in dangerous places;
– hovering within one inch of the car in front;
– stopping sharply;
– speeding in residential areas;
– pulling out without indication;
– performing U turns inappropriately in busy high streets;
– under taking on motorways and
– taking up more than one lane in multi lane roads,

These drivers will be issued with flags, white with a red cross, signifying their inability to drive properly. These flags must be clipped to a door of the car and be visible to all other drivers and pedestrians. Those drivers who have shown particularly poor driving skills will have to display a flag on each side of the car to indicate their greater lack of skill and general lower intelligence mindset to the general public. Please circulate this to as many other motorists as you can so that drivers and pedestrians will be aware of the meaning of these flags.

Department of Transport

Today marks the launch of a new joint campaign between The Observer and Amnesty International over the contentious issue of internet censorship. They are calling on internet companies to stop colluding with repressive governments by denying citizens access to certain websites. Of course, the most publicised occurrence of this is Google’s decision to censor its search results in China, but Amnesty reports similar activities in Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

The campaign is, doubtless, a little misguided. After all, all Google actually did was remove inaccessible search results from it’s Chinese search engine. In the old version, people could see the results, but not access them thanks to censorship from the Chinese government. It’s arguable that removing such sites from the index prevents the Chinese people from being aware that such documents exist, whether or not they are able to access them, but it also makes the search engine much more usable on a day-to-day basis.

It’s also slightly unfortunate that, in fact, most people support internet censorship to some degree. Most people would support the closing of child pornography websites, for example. Why? Because they are seen as offensive, damaging, exploitative, and culturally unacceptable. Surely similar arguments could be constructed for other forms of censorship. Amnesty argues that Human Rights Standards form the basis for acceptable censorship, but Human Rights legislation is largely based on Western ideology, and it is questionable as to whether it can truly be applied in non-Western cultures.

However, despite its flaws, the central message of the campaign is a worthy and positive one, and one which I have supported in the past through posts like this one. It is, therefore, a campaign which this site will be supporting – albeit in a somewhat symbolic way – by carring quotes from otherwised censored material in the sidebar, in order to raise awareness of the issue.

If you would like to find out more about the campaign, it’s website is here, and the launch articles from today’s Observer are here.

Forty-five years ago, an article in the Observer led to the launch of Amnesty International itself. Where will this campaign lead?

On the Today programme this morning, some Labour official or other insisted that the pension reforms they’d come up with were designed to be ‘non-partisan’ and they hoped to reach a ‘cross-party consensus’, not play party-political games. The claim was repeated on The World at One, and quite possibly on many other news broadcasts throughout the course of the day. Of course, making such claims simply sets up clear criticism of any party who dares to point out flaws in the White Paper, so really it’s a good strategy. If only they stuck to it.

Unforunately, they didn’t. Tonight, I received an email from the Labour Party (much like those I’ve received in the past):

The proposals we are publishing today represent the greatest renewal of our pensions system since the post-war reforms implemented by Clement Attlee’s government… Since 1997, we have made real progress in tackling the appalling legacy of pensioner poverty we inherited from the Tories, so far helping a million pensioners out of poverty.

Non-partisan? I think not. Why is it that even when they think they’re doing the right thing, the Labour spin machine just can’t help pumping out lies? And how can they say they’ve had ‘real progress on pensioner poverty’ when Council Tax has soared, and OAPs imprisoned for failing to pay? I just don’t get it.

Mr Hutton’s changes mean that I will be working until I’m 68. That’s fine, I have nothing against working into old age. I mean, most 68-year-olds can’t set a video recorder, and I’ll no doubt have a similar incompetence when it comes to the medical breakthroughs and technologies of the 2050s, but I’m sure that won’t be a problem. And when I’m taking your blood or excising some growth, I’m sure you won’t be too worried about my small tremour. And at the end of a twelve-hour shift, I’m sure you’ll forgive my aging brain for prescribing a drug that just happens to react with something else someone else gave you.

Of course, working to 68 will allow me to earn the money to cover the student debts that Labour have given me – otherwise my net income over my working career would be reduced.

Not that much of it matters anyway: Predictions are that there will be 3,000 junior doctors unable to find suitable training posts by the time I qualify. If I never get a job, I’ll never have to retire. Now there’s a cheery thought 😉

First Shahbaz went nuts, and now Dawn’s done a Nick and been thrown out for rule breaking. Tomorrow, another’s going to be thrown out because, hell, we don’t like them.

So we’ve already got fourteen housemates, one more’s going in through a Kit Kat promotion, and there’s two more to go in to replace the two that’ve been kicked out. After one week, we’re up to sixteen housemates. Then there’s eleven housemates from series one, eleven from series two, fourteen from series three, thirteen from series four, thirteen from series five, sixteen from series six, plus thirty-three ‘celebrity’ contestants. That’s 127 Big Brother Housemates. Another eight from Teen Big Brother takes the total to 135.

Surely there can’t be that many more people who want to go in? Everyone knows that the majority of the contestants are treated cruelly on the show, and then ridiculed by the press, before fading to obscurity. We have the experience of 135 people to tell us that. I wouldn’t know Tania Do-Nascimento, Herjender Gosal or Lynne Moncrieff if I fell over them in the street. Why would anyone put themselves through all that?

I’m sorry to report that the site is currently receiving huge amounts of comment and trackback spam, and despite the filter managing to zap (literally) thousands of messages, a few are getting through, and are having to be deleted manually. This takes a silly amount of time, so apologies if posts are sporadic at the moment. As the filter updates over the coming days, I’m hoping the problem will resolve somewhat, though if it continues, I may have to consider other options like bringing back the captcha, which I’m not keen on doing, as it makes life difficult for large swathes of the population.

Is it worth making commenting more difficult for the sake of stopping this becoming a haven for the impotent and debt-ridden? It’s hard to tell. Let me know what you think.

It’s interesting to note that the number of spam emails making it through to my inbox has increased dramatically in the last few weeks, too. Presumably, the spammers have become wise to the latest attempts to stop them, and the next generation of spam-killers is required.

And then (yes, I know it’s a tenuous link) there’s the unwanted intrusion onto our TV programmes, with the confused Fathers 4 Justice invading last night’s National Lottery draw…

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If this site and blogging in general represents the supposed new media, and I’m posting videos of the supposed old media world of TV, does that mean I’ve just discovered a whole new medium, somewhere between old and new? 😉

This is an interesting question, and one that techies like to debate for hours on end. For the record, I use Firefox with IETab, so that sites that have to use Internet Explorer still can, without needing to bother me. But Firefox isn’t the only browser, and it may not be the best browser for you.

As a webmaster, I’m often pushed in the direction of recommending a browser, whether it’s by pestering you to death through plugins like these, or by incentivising me to point you in the direction of one browser. But, frankly, who am I to say which browser is best for your needs? I don’t even know you!

I think how you want to use the net is up to you. So the philosophy around these parts is to make the site as near to identical as possible whichever browser you might want to use, and also to allow some different methods of access to the site. I’ve just finished the latest little bit of tweaking which now brings the Firefox and IE interpretations of the site design a little closer (the differences now are barely perceptable), and also allows the site to be zoomed more gracefully, so that the fixed-width gives if you want to read at a greater font size.

Of course, the old facilities of listening to the site through the audio links or podcast feed, or even accessing the site via a mobile phone are still available (see the Site Guide for details). And if you like to print a hard copy, go ahead. It will always be formatted for printing automatically. It doesn’t make sense to me for people to worry about whether they’re viewing the ‘Printable Version’ or not. Surely if you’re printing, the printable version is what you’re after – so why put it another click away?

This site is certainly not unique in this kind of design – and, in may ways, this site in particular is far from perfect. But I do wish that more sites would strive to be more openly compatable: Only when they are will the end-user really have full choice of which browser they prefer.

Bad books sell better than good ones because so many people are semiliterate.

That’s the opinion of Andrew Brown in his thought-provoking piece “Unputdownable but unspeakable” over at Comment is Free.

Well worth a read.

The front-page news that pre-1992 coppers (coppers that are actually made of copper) are now worth more than their face value in scrap has apparently sparked meltdown at the Mint, with them being forced to put out a statement reminding people that it’s illegal to melt down a coin of the realm. So there’s a thing.

Perhaps bank robbery could be worth it after all – steal the coppers, melt them down, and you’ve got untraceable money worth more than the coins you started with. Not that I’m recommending bank robbery, here! You could always try selling your 2p coins on eBay, though.

But how many such coins are still in circulation? In the interests of research (and just because I was bored), I went through my penny jar, expecting to find very few pre-1992 coins. (I’m not usually this dull, it’s just that I’ve finished my most recent rotation today, so was at something of a loose end.) As it so happens, I have quite a number of these coins. A good proportion of them are older than me, let alone pre-1992. It’s interesting to think what a remarkable piece of design it takes to be in every day use by all sectors of society, and still as functional as the day they were first produced a quarter of a century later. How many other things have survived so long in everday use?

Of course, the design itself hasn’t lasted so long, which is why the 1992 cut-off exists. The copper-zinc mix was then replaced by a steel version, with a thin copper coating. So coppers aren’t really coppers anymore. And I guess that probably goes for the police force, too.

But, at the end of the day, my money is worth more than it was last week. And, under the circumstances, it’s difficult to complain about that.

Dave Hill has written an entertaining piece over at Comment is Free about his experiences of visiting the doctor with embarrassing problems of the nether regions. As he says,

Seeing the doctor about an intimate ailment is embarrassing for any man. But it can be richly entertaining, too.

Well worth a read.