Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

I finally caved in and bought a Wii this week.

I’ve had a weird relationship with consoles. Ages ago, I wanted to go halves with my cousin on a super hi-tech Atari 2600. The problem with that was that my cousin lived in Germany and I lived in London. Since he was older than me, I’m pretty sure I’d never have seen that console.

I also have some vague memories of walking through Bentalls or John Lewis and overhearing a boy trying to explain to his father that he was after a joystick, not a joss stick, and that he wasn’t trying to buy drugs (for a while in the early ’80s there seemed to be an idea that joss sticks were marijuana).

I haven’t actually owned a console since the early 1990s, when I briefly owned a second-hand Gameboy. I got a bit fed up of it, since I had a PC and preferred to read on the go, rather than play games in pixellated black and white.

So why did I take the plunge and buy the Wii in the first place, given that I spend arguably enough time on the PC as it is? Well, the main reason is that it is incredibly fun and incredibly social. Instead of going head to head with Sony and Microsoft to produce the biggest, most powerful console, Nintendo have put together something very different. The Wii isn’t about having the best graphics, it’s about having fun and making gaming accessible to people who don’t usually get involved with gaming.

The really stand-out thing about the console is the much-talked-about control system, that uses a combination of infrared and accelerometers to work out what movements you are making with your hands. Thus, the little remote becomes a tennis racket, baseball bat, golf club, or your hands in the case of the bowling game or the boxing game (see photo of Rebecca beating the bejesus out of her opponent).

Pretty soon after setting the thing up, Rebecca and I were leaping around the room like crazed apes, playing the included game, Wii Sports. The controls are incredibly simple and accurate - swing the controller like a putter and it putts, swing it like a bat and it bats. It’s very easy to pick up. Anyway, without further ado, here are the results of our first, fairly drunken, fairly epic evening:

• Tennis - Rebecca won
• Baseball - Rebecca won
• Golf - Rebecca won
• Boxing - Rebecca won with a Knock Out
• Bowling - Rebecca won after getting three strikes in a row.

So it’s official - Rebecca is a natural, and I have all the gear but no idea.

I never used to be a morning person, especially as a teenager. I think I’m a lot more of a morning person since starting work, but I always want to go back to sleep when I wake up on a weekday. On the weekends, I can’t have a lie-in. It’s all very odd.

I have to admit that I’m probably not getting enough sleep at the moment, with the evenings being so long and the light piercing the blinds so early in the morning now. I suppose it’s typical human nature to see the bad in the good, so I’ll hold off any implication of a formal complaint about the weather, the sunshine etc and just say that I’m probably not getting enough sleep at the moment.

Anyway - the weather’s warm, but the tubes are sweaty and hot, but I’m working in my company’s very cool office near Borough Market at the moment. I don’t often get a chance to work here, usually I’m posted out to some nasty industrial estate or something, so I make a point of having what I think is probably the best cup of coffee in London.

This isn’t meant to sound like an advert, but Monmouth Coffee on Borough Market absolutely does it for me. Hands-down. 100%. There’s even a Facebook appreciation group for it now! It’s expensive, at £2 for a small cup, but a great treat and loads better than Starbucks. I make a point of buying an almond croissant from the bakery just across from Monmouth, but since the coffee is so rich and creamy, I’m almost too full to devour the croissant after sucking down that coffee goodness.

My friend at work, Tom Hopkins, has some pretty damning things to say about coffee these days. Where many of us just shrug their shoulders about the parlous state of coffee on the go, Tom’s written an entire post about it on his blog, including an analysis of the horrors of “Americano” coffee and “magic box” coffee machines. I can’t disagree.

However, whilst Tom agrees about the best cup of coffee in London, we disagree over which is better: Latte or straight filter with milk.

I’m right, of course.

Sorry I've been off the radar a bit recently. Several factors have contributed to this:

• Work taking up more and more time than ever
• Hayfever making me drowsy and unmotivated
• The heat in my attic meaning that I can't stand being on the computer
• The sunshine keeping me outdoors and away from my computer
• Facebook eating up every spare moment I could be using for blogging
• Heroes
• Gardening

So it's the last point, gardening, that I'd like to tell you all about today. Check out these beauties!  

  I've become a bit of a greenfingers of late. Rebecca's had to put up with me pottering about in the garden instead of being slumped in the attic on the PC, or out at the gym, but she's also been helping out a lot with moving the plants from growbags into planters. Growbags are pretty good to start with, but don't give much support to the tomatoes when you need to stake them. That's where planters really come into their own (plus you can move the plants around easily). We've got a pretty small garden, but approximately 15 tomato plants, some rocket, some petit pois and a lonely aubergine. Because of where the sun falls, I have to crowd a few of the plants near the kitchen window. A leisurely reakfast on the weekend resembles the state of siege endured by the protagonists in The Day of the Triffids. So I've become a little bit gardening mad. I'm looking forward to the idyll of a place out of town, with a big garden and room for a greenhouse. Soon after that, I'm sure I'll be fretting about the condition of the lawn and start wearing a dressing gown that doesn't quite close properly, slippers and maybe even start smoking a pipe.

There’s a great moment in the movie, The Untouchables, where Eliot Ness, watching Al Capone on trial, decides that the mobster is just a little too comfortable for his liking. Ness wonders why Capone is joking with his lawyer and seemingly unconcerned that the case against him is water tight. You see the realisation creep over Ness’ face and he asks the judge to change the jury for one in the next court room: Capone had bribed the jury.

Paris Hilton went to prison on June 3rd 2007. She had been sentenced to 45 days in prison because:

• She had been arrested in September 2006 for drink-driving and had her driving license suspended, as well as being sentenced to 36 months probation and ordered to attend an alcohol awareness programme.
• In January 2007, she was pulled over for driving with a suspended license.
• In February, she was pulled over again. This time, she was driving with a suspended license, and was doing 70mph in a 30mph zone. She also didn’t have her headlights on. What a twit.
• On May 4th, in view of the above, she was sentenced to 45 days in jail. I think she had quite a few chances to avoid jail, really. Probably a lot more than the poor would get under the Three Strikes Law.
• Even before going into jail, she had her sentence reduced to 23 days for “good behaviour”. Double-eww-tee-eff? I thought “good behaviour” applied to inmates, not to those who violate probation.

So why did Paris Hilton seem unconcerned about the jail term that awaited her? She certainly talked a good game, saying, “I’m going to do the time and I am going to do it the right way.”, never mind the fact that she was going into a special prison for celebrities. One punishment for the common person - another for the loaded.

She also had that Capone-like quality of appearing at an MTV award bash hours before starting her sentence. I don’t know about you, but I’d be busy at home crapping myself at the thought of going to prison in a couple of hours. What did Paris have up her sleeve? Where’s Elliot Ness when you need him?

Well, we found out on June 7th. It seems that Paris didn’t want to do the time in the “right way” at all. In fact, she wanted to do the time at home by the swimming pool in the California sunshine. As with a lot of things, she got her way.
Clearly, the law was being an ass, and the judge who originally sent her down for 45 days ordered her dragged back into chokey to do the full time (and do it the right way, presumably).

She was very upset. I’d be upset if I were dragged into prison, which is one reason why I don’t break the law and hold it in the contempt that she appears to.

I think the only way to redress the balance is to rename her Bangkok Hilton and deal with her appropriately.

Ellen and Andy got married in Kent on 28th April 2007.

All the digital photos are here. I still have to develop the film ones. More to follow shortly.

Got a hero?

I’m a big fan of George Orwell.

Not only do I admire his incredible mind and writing, but he stuck his neck out for what he believed in. He went out to Spain in 1936 and fought in the Spanish Civil War to defend the elected government of Spain against the Fascists. He wrote of his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, which was later used as the basis for one of my all-time favourite movies, Land and Freedom.

I’m getting a lot of spam. I made the mistake years ago of putting my email up in plain text on my old site and in a couple of other places. I corrected this later, but that’s it. My email’s out there and they won’t bloody stop. Just in the past day, I’ve had to root through my mail and this is the result:

So just under TWO PERCENT of the email that arrives every day is genuine. The rest is rubbish. I’ve got some spam filtering in there, but it isn’t great. It sometimes junks genuine emails and I’ve lost some good opportunities through this (I almost missed the New Statesman gig after my spam filter killed it).

Not only is it rubbish, but it is stupid rubbish; I get stuff in cyrillic, adverts for stuff I can only buy in the USA, penny stock scam tips and phishing attack. I’ve even been promised the opportunity to “ejaculatte“ for my “lady” if I buy some detritus herbal remedy (just as well we both love coffee!).  

One trick spammers use to try to get around spam filters is to use random text or text lifted from magazines or novels. It is very incongruous at times, but I wonder how Orwell would feel if he saw his work used in this way?

Those of you who are Orwell fans will notice that this line comes from 1984 and is recalled by Winston Smith as he writes his diary and thinks of his ex-wife Katharine. You can read it in context, here.

I’m sure the great man would have been delighted to see his work used to sell  condoms, penny stocks, housing stock, rolling stock, vitamin pills, slimming pills, happy pills, muscle pills, penis pills, Russian wives, Malaysian wives, Thai wives, Chinese wives and if you’re not happy with them, you can buy breast enlargement pills too! 

If anyone knows any good ways of getting control over my inbox, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Update: As if to add insult to injury, a comment popped into my moderation queue quoting this very post within seconds! So now I’m getting spammed on my blog about the spam in my email. How ridiculous is that?? Incidentally, my blog’s spam filter’s pretty aggressive and has fended off almost 8,000 spam comments since last summer.

Bring it on!

I've always been interested in cults and the devastating harm they can do to individuals and the people around them.

The video does outline some of the actual techniques that cults use on prospects and members, and even if it seems a little light-hearted at first, it makes some serious points. These cults are a serious problem, there are lots of cults in existence today and plenty of atrocities throughout time, including:

• Order of the Solar Temple (Famous Swiss murder-suicides in which 48 people died in 1994)
• Peoples Temple (909 deaths, including 270 children in 1978)
• Aum Shinryko (gassed the Tokyo tube system in 1995)
• Heaven's Gate (Suicide Cult - The "Heaven's Gate Away Team" left Earth in 1997)
• Lord's Resistance Army (has been waging a civil war against the Ugandan government since 1987 using child soldiers)
• The Manson Family (of Charles Manson fame - responsible for a string of brutal murders)

Years ago, I read a book that outlined the mechanisms that these cults often use to effectively brainwash recruits into their ideology or religion. If you think you're clever enough to avoid their fate, think again! I knew a good few people at University who got hooked into cults. To read more about cults and be aware of the dangers, take a look here.

Humanist, socialist, World War Two veteran and one of the greatest writers and most original thinkers of all time died yesterday. He was 84.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007)

To get a glimpse of this man’s genius, look here: Kurt Vonnegut on Wikiquote

A few weeks ago, I was approached by the New Statesman Online team after they found my blog and decided they wanted me to write a few articles for them about atheism for their Faith Column. Of course, it's a little ironic to be asked to write about a lack of Faith in a "Faith Column", but it's been a real pleasure to write again on this topic. I've just gotten on with my life, really, and haven't really been thinking actively about my atheism recently. Off I went and dusted off some of my old books and got on with writing the posts. It's been refreshing! The first post went up today, called: I believe in one less god than monotheists…. They'll be serialising another three, and all four will be available here. I'll also archive them on my own site, here.

Happily munching my lunch in the beer garden of my local, this cat walks along the wall. I love cats, so I talked to it and he jumped off the wall and came to say hello back!

I congratulated myself on being a “Cat Whisperer” - having an deep affinity with cats and being able to communicate with them above and beyond that of any normal human.

My bubble was popped mercilessly when the little blighter started trying to get at my food!

I was eating a particularly nice big piece of grilled chicken with salad and he kept trying to get on the table and steal some, so I had to put things in his way and watch him like a hawk. Look at his grumpy little face (and click the picture for more…).

This always happens! I think they want to be friends with me and I then find out that all they want is food!