I have an idea for a play. An articulate, middle class man from the UK travels to America to track down a former US soldier: a guard and torturer from Guantanamo Bay. He finds his former enemy living in poverty, alone, in a trailer park in Atlanta. How does the new power balance in their relationship affect them? Do they discover that they now have more in common with each other than they do with the people around them? And who will win the heart of Millie, winsome, big-hearted owner of the local store? No, strike that last bit.
The Observer | UK News | Freed Briton reveals horrors of life inside Guantanamo Bay
I heard that Bush junior had a blog, well now I think I may have found his secret home page. I can’t give you any particulars quotes from it because it is all so fantastic. I can’t recommend it too strongly. http://www.geocities.com/deke1942/tccop/war.htm
I have worn a swastika armband. When I was a teenager I was determined to shock and upset as many people as I possibly could. I was a socialist (or maybe an anarchist) and I loathed racists but I borrowed a nazi armband from a school friend (more on him later) and for a while it was a part of my wardrobe. It certainly did the trick. The oh so nice people of Surrey were very offended. They were, mostly, very right-wing, they were opposed to sanctions against the racist South African government, some of them even disliked Jews. Nevertheless they considered this symbol to be obscene.
The boy I borrowed the armband from was a collector of nazi memorabilia. He was a member of the conservative party’s libertarian Freedom Association and the right-wing Monday Club which advocated voluntary repatriation of foreign immigrants. He was also, oddly, a keen supporter of Israel and very anti-Arab. His name was Andrew Smith and I always imagined that his fascist tendencies were an affectation, particularly because they seemed so inconsistent. Later on he became even more right-wing, worked for an organisation called Western Goals UK and helped organise a visit to the UK by the French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen.
So I can agree with Harry Windsor that it was “a poor choice of costume”. And I can sympathise with him in the face of the hypocritical cant that has been directed towards him. It is only a symbol, after all, it doesn’t actually mean anything. Nobody has much reason to suppose that he is, like some of his ancestors, actually a fascist. What I have found particularly confusing is the criticism of him from the Jewish community. I’d like to suggest to those people who have been so outspoken about Harry’s choice of fancy dress that wearing a nazi armband doesn’t make him a fascist any more than carefully avoiding Nazi armbands stops Ariel Sharon from being one. Harry’s not the one running prison camps in the desert, building a wall around a ghetto, authorising the extra-judicial murder of his political opponents.
This is a such a great idea, I’m appalled that this is the first time I’ve ever read about it.
You know how if you try a print a photo in black and white on your inket it always looks terrible? And that’s because the printer’s trying to create all the shades of black in your picture by making different sized dots of black ink. No matter how clever the software is you can always see this ‘dithering’, especially in mid tones.
So if you’re feeling keen you might make your picture into a duotone or even a quadtone in Photoshop. That uses the other coloured inks in the printer to make shades of not-quite-black which improves matters a bit if you don’t mind the picture being a bit brown or blue looking.
What Piezography does is take that quadtone idea a step further. You replace the coloured inks in your printer with three shades of grey ink. So now your printer can’t print in colour but it can produce stunning black and white prints. The pigment based inks are also long lasting; the manufacturers claim they will fade by a maximum of 5% in 100 years.
Unfortunately my printer is slightly too old to use this system but it’s got me thinking - why not mix up my own inks and do the same thing?
Piezography Home Page
One of the things I enjoy while walking to work along the Embankment is the steady stream of joggers who jostle past. They often get stuck behind pedestrians and usually try to keep up a kind of jogging movement despite moving at a slow walking pace. One potential marathon champion I saw today was getting slower and slower as the bovine tourist in front of him took in the view. Too polite to ask her to move he finally had to admit defeat and become just a man taking a walk, in shorts, in January.
The number of joggers always increases drastically after the London Marathon. You can easily spot the newcomers. Apart from their having very red faces their trendy box-fresh jogging gear doesn’t have the gritty greyness that anything exposed to the London diesel fumes quickly acquires. They rapidly lose heart; the numbers are back to normal within just a few weeks.
I do sometimes wonder how much the joggers are costing the National Health Service with their inevitable sprains, strains and damaged knees. The Serpentine Running Club says that one in three runners suffer from some form of lower limb pain and injury. But then, they say, only one in ten of those injured people will need to be operated on in hospital. That still makes it quite an expensive hobby from my point of view.
I just got back from Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. One of the stories that turned up while I was out there was this one about the baby called Tsunami.
The problem with covering this disaster was that there weren’t that many developments in the story, apart from the rising casualty figures. So we had to keep finding different ways of talking about the same thing without sounding repetitive. When I heard about this baby it sounded like an interesting way of focussing in on one family’s experiences of the disaster and then maybe talking about the different ways that people try to cope with what happened to them.
We found the camp where baby Tsunami was staying fairly easily. A German tv crew with whom we had been chatting about the story at breakfast were already there filming a sequence. The set-up in the camp started to seem a bit strange to me pretty quickly. All the other camps we’d visited were quite well-organised on an infomal sort of basis. The volunteers at this one all had laminated id cards with photos and seemed very friendly with a couple of police men who were strolling around. There was no police presence at any of the other camps. Then a very charismatic man dressed all in white came over to us and started explaining that the camp was being run by his organisation, the Art of Living. He said that the baby’s mother was asleep but that we could do an interview with the father. He was also very excited about the Germans who he said were going to raise a lot of money for his organisation with a telethon. Meanwhile the father was standing nearby, looking very stressed and surrounded by three or four men who were talking to him intensely, one with a hand on his shoulder.
I told the reporter I was working with that the whole thing seemed dodgy to me and she said that she had been told that the decision to name the baby Tsunami had been made by an Art of Living committee. We decided not to do the story. I’m not sure if the Germans did or not, someone from AP certainly did.
I found a clip from Fox News on the Art of Living site which contains an out-of-vision interview with someone who sounds very like the man we talked to at the camp. What Fox didn’t ask him about was his organisation’s procedures for dealing with the people who arrive at camps like his. Professional disaster relief workers all agree on the importance of structured medical examination and record keeping in order to prevent and keep track of serious diseases, to prevent the outbreak of epidemics. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, he said people were looked at by a local doctor when they arrived. Despite his claims that Art of Living are a well established aid organisation they didn’t seem to know what they were doing to me. They are at best well-meaning and at worst dangerous. Apart from the other issues, if it’s true that they named baby Tsunami as a cynical publicity stunt then I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about them in the future.
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