Personally I struggled to find the image when I first heard the news and I’m including it here, not to further the problem or to try to snatch a few extra visitors to this rubbish blog (seriously, and honestly, I’m sorry if you think that) because of that reason. Hopefully people will understand that that’s the true reason behind my posting it. As Google themselves have said, the image itself may cause offence but actually the conversation that’s sprung up is interesting (in a social sense) and infuriating in lots of others.

Initially a lot of people will take offence at the fact that I’m republishing the image. Let’s put that argument to one side – I didn’t make the image, I’m not promoting hatred or anything other than discussion. Let’s move on:

So the crux of the argument seems to be that because black people have commonly been referred to over time as “monkeys”, that this image is offensive. It’s interesting, even in originally writing this sentence I came across a way of viewing this that does lead slightly away from the “Oh get over yourselves with this rascism thing”… which was:

“…because black people have commonly been referred to over time as “monkeys”, photoshopping any black person as a monkey is rascist.”

Yunno, actually, I was reading a lot of comments on other sites and wasn’t convinced but now I have to admit, I am rather more so. I read peoples’ suggestions about thinking about it in terms of footballers getting “monkey chants” when on the pitch but that didn’t really wash. I think the truth is: yes, this image IS racially offensive. Google correctly says this but chooses not to censor. Well done Google!

The further arguments that I read about were about George Bush (and Barack Obama!) and other white people getting “monkeyfied” and so, actually, this was just another and “no-one complained when it was a white person getting this photoshopic abuse”. And whilst that’s true, I think it’s actually a bit of a straw-man argument – it sounds right on the face of it but doesn’t actually mean that the image itself isn’t offensive.

Anyway, I’ve been highly intrigued by the argument and think it’s genuinely useful to have this kind of debate in modern times where many of us claim to be relatively sensitive to social antagonisms until actually faced with them. Personally I feel sorry for the Obamas, and Michelle in particular, because this whole nonsense embroils her into an argument which isn’t anything to do with her own actions, and she’s entirely unable to prevent them.

Anyone?

It's moustache time!

Hey, you may remember a post from a while back asking you to command your moustache – well, today opens the 2009 World and Beard Mustache Championships.

I think everyone should get involved in this battle of the beards and moustacheii, start today, compete next year – you could be the grand winner of the 2010 World and Beard Mustache Championships.

My recommendations are to “shake up” a competition that already looks like it’s been placed inside a bag of baubles and dropped off the side of a cliff. Let’s face it, the people who go into that competition are nutters, most of them look like they’ve been hitting the gin a bit too hard. What kind of brain makes them think “Hmm, I guess if I only shaved one half of my moustache, that could give me just the kind of tactical advantage I need”. And so on.

Let’s fair it, these hirsute behaviours are as disturbing as they are beautiful. I, for one, would like to see a contestant with a moustache of bees. Please, please help make that dream become a reality.

For my own purposes I change the “Error documents” part of the IIS setup for a website and redirect to /404.htm (or something) and have a CGI script check what it’s supposed to be showing, if anything. But Wordpress doesn’t require anything like this… and I’m stumped.

This question raised itself even more when I realised it has something it calls a “virtual robots.txt” file. And indeed, the file doesn’t exist, but try to access it and it does. Freaky!

I’m primarily a ColdFusion developer and that uses an Application.cfm file which pre-pends itself to any ColdFusion request on the site. If php has the facility to do anything like this then it’s news to me… but otherwise I don’t get how wordpress can be doing it!!

Weirdness. Answers on postcards. Virtual or otherwise.

I’m not interesting, I do nothing that’s useful, I am living a normal life with nothing to say. Even if I did there’d be little to no point “blogging” about it. Yeah, I’m going to put blogging in bloody quotation marks because that’s how fundamentally nonsense I think the whole thing is.

I don’t know, I know a lot of people who socialise and I can kinda get that. It’s not my bag, but: Facebook away! MySpace away! Tweet all the hell you want! But blogging? Who gives a ****?

If I want news, I’ll go to a news site. If I want opinion, I’ll ask my friends. If I want to waste my time, I’ll blog about it.

What. Ever.

Amen [to misquote Ben Folds]

The 4 requeried words

So what are the four required words? Well, I don’t think there are any, as such. It’s all just a mish-mash of sentences devoted to trying to get somewhere without having to do any real work or having to make a jot of sense. If sense comes in jots, which I’m not sure about.

What I am sure about is that it’s all a bit of a swiss cheese of a situation.

OK, OK, none of that *literally* makes sense, but some of it is still quite beautiful.

I’ve been thinking about moustaches, I do, admittedly, have a moustache but I don’t like to talk about it. I prefer my beard of bees – now THAT is a site to behold. In fact, why don’t get moustaches of bees? All it would take is a single smearing of jam on your upper-lip and Bingo! There’s your moustache of bees. Once you’ve got your bees in line, you could command your moustache to take flight at an enemy, smite them in whichever way they see fit (some kind of stinging, probably, knowing the unimaginative bee).

I wonder if this is where the phrase “bee-line” came from?

So, I’m going to score the moustache of bees a healthy 8/10. Go bees! And everyone else, don’t you wish you could command your moustache?

So, asthma is bloody awful. I see a nurse about it every 3 to 6 months and my condition goes up and down so much that my medication changes incessantly as well. My fault, I must admit, I’m not particularly “into” taking medicine and taking something long-term and daily leaves me very cold indeed. I know this is a pathetic excuse, there are people with far worse things going on in their lives that have to take medication many times daily for their well-being. All I should have to do is take a single preventative inhaler once a day and I can’t even manage that.

So what exactly am I reviewing here? I suppose I should rate Asthma a 3/10 – it’d be selfish to suggest anything lower than that, it’s not crippling, it’s not making me bleed out of my eyes… but to those who just think it’s an excuse for people to get out of sports at school – it really is quite horribly painful and scary.

How many people die from asthma?

Each year around 1500 a year in the UK and 5000 a year in the US die from asthma, usually after very severe asthma attacks to long existing sufferers but sometimes quite out of the blue to people who have never before exhibited symptoms. Quite scary. But, if it’s well managed (and mine should be) then you should be very happy and healthy, barring the overeating of burgers and voles.

6.30AM is for mugs. I look forward to any day when I can leisurely rise between, ooh, say 2 to 3 in the afternoon. That’s about right, nice and warm under a duvet – sounds perfect to me.

I’m not disheartened yet, long way to go before that, but it’s probably the hardest thing about blogging. Personally I chose not to use an off-the-shelf blogging package which gives me a fair few headaches when it comes to getting traffic right from the beginning. Wordpress (for instance) seems truly excellent for just getting one’s website immediately into search engines and “pings” to various blog aggregation services. The trade-off, in my case, is that I can at least custom build EXACTLY what I want to without any restriction. If I can imagine it, I can make it do it. Kind of.

Starting a new blog is also difficult because it’s hard to make sure you’re writing about the stuff that:

a) is actually interesting to anyone who isn’t your mum
b) is interesting and fun to write about
c) doesn’t take too long to research or do

So for me it’s all about making sure I’m doing what I said I’ll do: review everything I can that I come across and feel moved to do.

Starting a new blog gets 5/10 for me. It’s early days so my feelings are pretty much so-so. Fingers crossed traffic will pick up and I get some real people on here, perhaps even posting :O

Love to y’all.