Scoville Units Unite

It looks like the jury can’t decide on a verdict of unlawful killing after the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes.

I remember the day unfolding and posting in the thread on UGS being sceptical about the numerous claims made by the Police: he was running, was challenged, had heavy clothing to conceal a bomb etc, all of which turned out to be nonsense.

Where are the Tories bleating about the abuse of state powers and Stalinist government today? Or are Labour only stamping on civil liberties when Tories are the subject of their regime?

One of the many reports

Various news agencies have reported on EC President Jose Manuel Barroso talking about Britain and the Euro.

I don’t mean this will happen tomorrow, I know that the majority (of British people) are still opposed, but there is a period of consideration underway and the people which matter in Britain are currently thinking about it

Democracy EU style as usual. No doubt if there was a vote against it another follow shortly after.

I don’t really care what currency I have in my pocket whether it’s Euros, Pounds Sterling or Scottish Pounds.

In other political news the Tories are spitting in their corn flakes about the arrest of Damian Green. They have now come to the conclusion that New Labour have a wee bit of an authoritarian streak about them and that the anti-terrorism laws are being abused. This from the self righteous hypocrites who were trying to decide whether people should be locked up for 28 or 90 days without charge, support locking up children in prisons before they are sent back to regimes where they face torture and excecution and stayed silent whilst the laws were used to attack Icelandic assets in the UK.

Yes it’s a bad thing but after the litany of attacks on democracy by both Labour and the Tories they are hardly able to complain.

It’s that time of the month again: SciFi Now Thursday!

I started getting this about issue 6 (now 22) and it’s really good. The movie reviews are focused on SciFi/Fantasy/Horror/World Cinema type stuff so really covers most of my main movie interests. So far I haven’t noticed any signs of the reviews being biased by ads, they’ve been quite accurate for the most part. Quite the opposite of bought by adverts actually, they did a huge exclusive preview spread drooling over 30 Days of Night and then slated it in the review the next issue.

Today’s other new release is Viz. After really going down hill for about 8 months the last 4 or 5 issues have been superb. Last issues Profanisaurus was excellent.

The other release of this week which I won’t actually get for another fortnight is Buffy Season 8: Issue 19. The concluding part of the Fray arc of the Buffy comics looks to be good and after being hit by the curse of Fray and delayed so long it better bloody be.

I had never been a big comic fan (He-Man when I was young excluded) but Buffy Season 8 really sparked my interest. I have been getting Buffy, Angel, Spike, Serenity and a few other random TV related comics randomly. I obviously picked up the Watchmen and from one of the Angel staff got Everybody’s Dead which is a really silly/cool Zombie short series. I got Conan for a while then dropped but am enjoying Solomon Kane. Other random pick-ups have been X-Files and Lost Boys, I noticed there is an Underworld series coming out so I may pick that up to see what it’s like.

I got Wii Fit for Christmas (and it’s open now, so no surprise) and it’s surprisingly fun. I had been trying to find it for months and decided it may be more useful using it to track weight in the run up to Christmas than preventively on Christmas Day.

Whether I will keep using it for months is yet to be found out but it feels like when I first got the Wii. You want to play it all the time. The added bonus is that you then decide not to have that chocolate bar after lunch as it will show up on your weigh in.

An extra motivation for me is to try and get a bit fitter. I used to be really fit, then my job went from carrying heavy boxes in a stock room or running round a shop floor to sitting on my arse in front of a computer all day. At roughly the same time I injured my ankle in the infamous suitcase staircase accident. The first cut down the amount of exercise I got and the second really demotivated me to do any because my ankle hurt like hell doing most of the exercise like activities I did before. Dancing all night in a night out, jogging around, I used to walk down town and back on occasion from mums (3+miles each way).

My days of 32″ waist and 12 second 100metre runs and 5 minute miles are gone but I think accepting that has made me accept going a bit too far in the other direction. When my work moves to the new office I intend to get a bike to cycle there which should help too. There’s no way I’m cycling the route to current office considering the number of overturned lorries that happen nearby its a bloody death wish.

spEak You’re bRanes is the excellent site which pokes fun at the paranoid, dangerous, delusional and the daft who inhabit the BBC Have your say comment section.

If ever you need to complete the input-> process->output diagram with Daily Mail as the input this is your best bet.

My favourite has to be the EUrophobe who rants about the metric temperature measures. The other excellent parody of this section is the From the message boards section in Private Eye

I was an early member of UGS, having user number 37 until a database cockup a while back (Thanks KJ!).

It originally started as a board about hip hop, then a well timed explosion of the Dundee music scene a number of years ago co-ordinated with the death of the Kerosene board due to Colin deciding he was too old to be a DJ meant it had a period of rapid growth and then a decline when social network sites started taking off and filled the space sites like UGS were taking advantage of.

It now seems to be diversifying a lot after being narrowly focussed on the Dundee rock scene for a while.

I can heartily recommend it for random stuff, happenings in Dundee, crap films, good films and loads of bitter late 20 and early something ranters about the state of the world.

Linking

I am trying to write a short piece about why I am linking to a particular site and what it means to me rather than adding a plethora of random links from the blog. This means I have to actually think about my association with them and if I can’t write a short paragraph about why I am linking to them then I can’t really expect any readers to be interested in them.

I currently have a large pile of unread books which is fast depleting. When Oxfam bookshop in Dundee was open I would be in weekly and regularly spent £10 on a Saturday. This closed and so my pile of “growing faster than I can read them” is slowly in reverse. One reason for this was the Thomas Paine book I read. So dense was it that I resorted to the Star Trek Next Generation pulpy 25p novels to balance it out.

Shortly before it closed there was a worrying trend of book prices rocketing. It became common to see hardbacks for more than the cost of a new paperback edition. Having the dedicated bookshop meant that all the other charity shops had lower quality books in and also started creeping their prices up.

There are a couple of charity shops on the Perth Road who regularly have decent stock in, but the ones in the town can be pretty dire. One Perth Road shop used to have a decent selection of political/academic books and is also where I got the amazing Michael Scott Rohan novels for 50p each. The last time I went in I was excited to see some newish Computing textbooks in, but they were £10-£15 each. Maybe they were bargaining on the rarity factor of having computer books that don’t boast “Office 97” on the cover and were making the most of them, but it was certainly more than I was going to pay for some second hand books they got for free.

The Wee Red Bookshop in Glasgow and Word Power in Edinburgh have me sorted for political stuff but I wish there was somewhere locally I could get both political/academic books and novels regularly and at decent prices. Can anyone recommend anywhere or do I have to resort to eBay (10p plus £80 postage) or amazon (10p, £0 postage and your soul)?

A book I have been slogging through for nigh on a year is Thomas Paine – social and political thought.

I hadn’t been reading books for a while so to get back into it started taking them for the bus journey to work and back. Unfortunately this was probably a poor choice for reading early on the day.

It’s a book analysing late 18th century political theory and is written in a style to match. Really dense, black hole academic dense. I quite enjoy books with loads of endnotes and footnotes.

The bibliography is almost 30 pages.

30.

pages.

That tells you how many endnotes etc. there were.

The book was enjoyable, interesting and informative. It just achieved these attributes in spite of its style. And it was a bargain too, normally £20+ I got it for £3 from the SSP‘s Wee Red Bookshop.

I recently finished the book Bad thoughts – a guide to clear thinking by Jamie Whyte.

It was a really interesting and engrossing read.

The book is split into a number of chapters, each dealing with a type of logical fallacies. These include “The right to my opinion” and “morality fever”. It is well written and funny, dissecting statements from the great and the good, showing their flawed reasoning. As well as contrasting hypothetical positions of liberals, socialists, conservatives and libertarians.

One timely chapters deals with stock brokers. After discussing whether their high salaries are rewarded for luck or for skill, and discussing statistics of results and how some of the traders will have good runs he concludes:

Investment banks should employ former winners of Lotto tickets for them. No salary could be too high for these wizards of ticket selection.

I have started throwing up some quick vodka reviews. More will follow as I can be bothered. Some vodkas I haven’t had in a while so will need to buy again so as to take a picture of the bottle. Others I don’t want to buy again (Stoly I’m looking at your overrated ass).

Tried a bottle recently and will review at some point:

• 42 Below
• Absolut
• Blavod
• Crystalnaya
• Finlandia
• Ketel One
• Luksusowa
• Reyka
• Smirnoff
• Smirnoff Blue
• Stolichnaya
• Svensk
• Wyborowa