BatFlattery

You may not have heard of Mohammed Al-Dura, but to millions of Arabs he is a martyr akin to Hector Peterson, an innocent victim of Israeli action. But there has always been strong doubt about whether the IDF fired the fatal shot, or even if the boy died at the scene at all.

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Why are all the UK-based domain companies such crap? All my dot-com domains are registered on EasyDNS, who make it really easy to manage and pay for domains, but I can’t really use them for .co.uk domains. I first tried 1&1, who were a complete nightmare. Then I did a few on Fasthosts/UKReg, but they’re not much better. First there was the infamous password hack, which meant a forced change to all our passwords. And today I got this lovely email in response to a support request:

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Just finished watching The Kingdom. Immediate thoughts:

1. I’m very glad I didn’t see it before my trip to Saudi Arabia in January. The compound that gets blown up looks very similar to the compound I visited, even though the scene was shot in Arizona.
2. Then again, there really is a compound called Arizona in Riyadh!
3. The security that you see at the entrance to the compound is absolutely for real. When you drive into a compound, they really do check under the car with a mirror. Every time. You really do have to drive the meander between huge concrete blocks, and there really are national guardsmen in tanks parked outside. All the time.
4. In many of the city shots it was very obviously not Riyadh. I haven’t been to Abu Dhabi but in photographs I’ve seen, it contains far more huge glass buildings than there are in Riyadh, which really has only two tall buildings, the Kingdom Centre and the Faisaliyah, and neither is a glass box.
5. Although none of the film was actually shot in Riyadh, in some shots you can see, on the horizon, the distinctive shape of the Kingdom Centre (which contains the Four Seasons hotel that I stayed at). I presume it was digitally added in post-production.

I was quite impressed by the movie: it felt authentic for the most part, and the writing avoided stereotypes and cliches. The plot was surprising and reached a satisfying climax, and all of the performances were solid; only Ashraf Barhoum really stood out. Recommended.

The state broadcaster in the UK demands that its unfortunate subjects pay a tribute in excess of the cost of 67 chickens every year to fund its dreary propaganda. Seen in the past as a mere tax on TVs, the TV Licensing thugs have now expanded their remit to cover video or DVD recorders, computers and mobile phones. If you live in what’s ludicrously termed “an unlicensed property” (ie an address that is not in their database) you are subject to surveillance and attempted home invasion by Gestapo-like “Enforcement Officers”. But look on the bright side! No need to travel to third-world banana republics to experience state repression: you can now enjoy it without leaving home!

I was thinking about the Northern accent, and much as Southerners like to make “foon” of it, there is more consistency to it than in the Southern accent.

Now I know English is nothing if not inconsistent, but why do we pronounce “put” and “butcher” differently from “but” and “gut”? No reason I can think of. So at least Northerners pronounce all “u” words in the same way. “Foony” or not.

So at work today we’re talking about Guy Pearce for some reason, and someone mentions Memento. A girl says she’s sure that she’s seen it, but can’t remember what it’s about…

So here’s the thing: at work we have two different recycling bins, one blue and one silver. Complicated rules govern what can go into which: nothing as simple as cans in one, paper in the other. Oh no. The one takes only “clean” recyclables, while the other is allegedly happy with dirty food wrappers. (But you’re still supposed to rinse out cans: yeah, right.) There are a lot of other rules too: I can’t remember them offhand.

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I was interested in this story about a monastery in Belgium that has an elaborate ritual around the buying of its beer. I was recently in New York for business, but fortunately was there over the weekend as well, so I got to do some experiencing of more than just hotels and offices. Last Sunday I took the subway down to the Village in search of McSorleys, said to be the oldest pub in NYC. It has some rituals of its own.

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OK, it’s pedantic grammar time. One of the things that bugs me a reasonable amount is the misuse of “less” and “fewer”. As here:

The differences roll-up is this: in person, I am playing against people with higher blinds and I’m playing less hands because less hands are being dealt… and I’m generally losing money. - Vegas

Or here, in the same article:

The last reason this works is obvious. I play less crap hands.

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Something weird happened to my Powerbook last week: the display has become badly garbled, and it’s not really possible to make out any of the text on the display. Other than that it works fine! Boots up, works as well as I can make out from the screen etc. Annoyingly, an external display shows the same problem, and even VNCing in shows the same distortion on the client display.

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