Don’t normally do politics here but this seems custom designed to provoke me…

UK police said the explosions could have caused “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”.

source

What’s an unimaginable scale?

the Indian ocean tsunami last year? That killed something like 250,000 people, that’s 1/32 of the population of London, probably 3 people in my office at work, I can imagine that quite well, it would be terrible obviously but it’s not unimaginable.

The holocaust? Actually I can imagine that quite well too, thanks at least in part to the excellent holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum which does a brilliant and quite upsetting job of really binging home the scale of that attrocity, resolutely and unflinchingly facing the complex issues surrounding it.

So this kind of talk of death on an unimaginable scale is rather underestimating the power of human imagination: Say 10 plane loads of people, capacity of around 400 people so 4000 people at the upper limit. Clearly 4000 people dying would be terrible but it’s certainly not unimaginable.

The thing is that by shrieking this kind of alarmist nonsense the people that are setup to protect us from terrorism are actually furthering the aims of the terrorists, spereading fear and terror in the population. The reasonable response to terrorism is to take it in as a risk in the same catagory as accidents and disease and other things like that. When you look at it like that, whilst it’s still hard to understand the psychology of a suicide bomber (surely worth trying though), its actually a tiny problem for most people in the UK (you’re more likely to die in a car crash blah blah blah), as long as the media and government and security forces continue to run around scaring everyone with ridiculous hyperbole about “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” terrorism will continue to be an effective tactic for disruption and for airing the idiotic views of tiny extremist groups.

Also: “16/8″ shrieks the front page of the Mail, or something, “that’s when the bombs were going to happen”, or something along those lines anyway. Can we stop branding terrorist attrocities? that’s how you make something unimaginable, by reducing a complex series of events and causes to an anodyne sound byte, a short hand which can be easily railed against but which surely can only hinder any chance of real understanding or progress.

[edit]Reading this back a couple of days later it just sound like some idiot on talk radio or something so that’s why I don’t normally do politics… could be my impresison of it though ‘cos I’ve been spending a lot of time surfing around LW on a little old radio recently though

When Google maps was first released for the US I wrote a post on the old version of this site about the joy of scrolling aimlessly through middle America imagining how people lived around the streets and reservoirs that the map showed in its abstract way. When they added the satellite imagery the experience was enehanced and i discover the joy of aimless roaming again, losing a day to mountain ranges and deserts. This (sometimes it seems not to work but you should reload and retry becasue it’s worth it) brings back those first experiences simply by robbing you of context the ‘game’ presents itself as pure exploration, you can’t zoom out or get the overlay of street names. We’ve been having point to point races at work, testing our London geography and recognition of landmarks.

Here I am, flying over a cool hexagonal block of flats near our house. Reminds me of a particular board game, the name of which I can’t find out ‘cos boardgamegeek has crashed and I can’t remmebr because of the internet’s pernicious effect on my memory over the last 13 years.

Here I am recreating the bombing run which destroyed the house accross the road from us over 60 years ago.

PS. I just remembered the board game is heroscape.

About a year ago or something trailblazing hipster guru Nick T recomended Hot Chip. I finally got their recent album the other day only to find today that they’ve been nominated for the Nationwide Mercury Music Prize (I don’t really have much time for the prize but I like the bizzare stacking of sponsors, Mercury telecoms obviously not defunct sitting there like a fossil, providing the brand with herritage even though they no loger provide cheap international calls advertised by the also defunct Harry Enfield. where was I? Oh yeah that’s right … ) so now it seems like I’m into them because they’ve been stamped with the authority of people like Malcolm Mclaren and Phats and Small or whoever the judging panel are this year. I don’t know why I should care about this but I do seem to. Latent indie snobbery the pop psychologist might say.

In reality Simon Reynolds was the one who reminded that I’d been meaning to check them out, not personally I just read his website. He also reminded me of Woebot, and specifically this post which has lots of pictures which are the kind of thing I like on the internet, not too many words please I tire easily.

So to summarise…
Hot Chip: Very good.
Simon Reynolds: Written a good book or two (though I’ve never read a whole one).
Junior Boys: Tonight.

God I hate it.

Fortunately it turns out I’m not terrible at it. I think my natural urge to write as little as possible, honed by 10 years of computer programming helped to avoid boring the audience. Having stuff written down really helped. Who’d have thought?

Tangentially, I was quite surprised how little I cared that Batman Begins was really quite long, normally long films annoy/bore me but I was fine with this one. There seemed to be lots of connections between scenes in this one and scenes in Tim Burtons first Batman film but I think my mind might have been racing…

Whilst I think the more recent Superman film fell slightly flat for reasons I’m sure I bored you with in the pub*, generally I think DC characters seem to suffer the whole periodic reinvention thing better than their Marvel counterparts probably because its only really Batman and Superman, who are kind of nicely archetypal. All Marvel characters are a bit too teen angst based to be cyphers for bigger ideas and zeitgeist in the elegant way that DCs characters manage (mind you i think there are probably more strange duds littering the DC universe esp. pre Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Anyway, for all these reasons and more I’m looking forward to Joss Whedon’s Wonder Woman more than is decent for a 28 year old man (Seriously though, think about it, it’s going to be cool. Buffy was cool right? Serenity? Well there you go). Hopefully he won’t bother trying to explain too much, I mean much as I liked Batman Begins (though it never really had that heroic thrill that superheroes should be all about, everything was a bit too laboured) spending the entire film explaining why a man who’s parents get killed decides to dress as a bat is not really a great idea, it’s credit largely to Christian Bale’s nuanced performance that the film works.

*Louis Lane is a bland hollywood robot when she should be a chainsmoking, neurotic, driven, brilliant journalist. Brandon Routh loks like he’s made of wax. At least they got the title sequence and the aeroplane saving bits spot on. Also, Kevin Spacy, A+.

[discovered this in the drafts folder, don’t know why i didn’t publish it first time, seems perfectly fine to me, though admittedly standards are slipping around here]

There’s a bit in the excellent and really quite heartbreaking Minutemen documentary ‘We Jam Econo’ where Mike Watt explains that because, as a band, they were all about the working man and stuff they used to start and finish their gigs early so that people could go home and get a good night sleep for work tomorrow. Recently (over the last few years) I’ve been to gigs and had to leave before the band who I’ve gone to see have finished playing, or in one particularly infuriating case even started, playing (yeah Peaches, you, and the support were shit even by support band standards and the crowd were a bunch of pricks and i never bought any of your CDs since then so there!).

I know going to bed early isn’t particularly rock and roll, I’ve had to live with the fact that a mutation in a phosphorilation site on the protein product of the core-clock gene period (per) has always held me back from fully living the rock and roll dream for a while now, so I’m used to it, but then my general experience of club and gig promoters is that they’re a bunch of utter wankers so I’m inclined to believe that they’re doing it on purpose for evil money making reasons.

D. Boon wouldn’t approve.