Well, I can't let that go...

Josh writes:

OK, turns out they've pulled the post. Nevertheless, Steady Eddy at that Whale Oil place is, not to put too fine a point on it, a cunt. Not to mention a shockingly bad liar. (Lying's an honourable pursuit, but when you're that shit at it, it's just insulting. Which I guess was the point, but in a different way. Now I'm confused, damn it.)

Still, nothing better for site than a blog war I guess, so I'll just say that while I can't prove that Steady Eddy throat-fucks aborted cow fetuses while Whale Oil masturbates watery grey semen into a duck's rectum, I've never heard them deny it...

Right.

Josh writes:

A few things:

1. The other day, we passed our three year anniversary here at Brain Stab. I'd have posted on the day, but I was in Prague at the time.

2. Yeah, I'm holidaying in Europe at the moment. Having a White Christmas, but not in the racist way.

3. I'll be back, but not to write here for a while. I'm surprised I lasted this long, frankly - my normal routine has been to write somewhere for about a year, get bored, quit, then find myself with the urge to write again about three months later.

4. See you in about three months, or, if my extended time here is the start of a new trend, about nine months.

Chestnuts; Hoary Old

Josh writes:

It seems that so tiresome are accusations of "Political Correctness" these days, that the standard response of "Political Correctness doesn't fucking exist anymore -- as a phrase, it's so overused that it's become meaningless" is becoming equally tiresome. Nevertheless.

Today's Herald contains an article about Stephen Fry's new pantomime, including a digression into how "PC" pantos are becoming (can't find a link to the article -- it's not on the Herald's site, and I'm buggered if I'm going to hunt it down on whatever news agency it originated from). So what counts as "PC" today?

Avoiding Hansel and Gretal, with it's references to child kidnapping -- I suppose you could make a case that this is the sort of prohibitionist, cotton-wool-wrapping that has been a staple of PC claims in the past.

Avoiding Aladdin because of its stereotyped Arabian villain and Snow White because of its comical portrayal of dwarves -- again, pedantic attempts to avoid offense are, I guess, typical of what gets called PC.

The abandonment of the old panto tradition of having the male (child) lead played by a girl, on the grounds that it seems a bit like lesbianism, given his/her relation to the female lead. Hang on. Avoiding spurious racism = political correctness; avoiding spurious height-ism = political correctness; pandering to homophobia = political correctness? And precisely what the common thread between any of this and the Hansel & Gretel thing is is beyond me, too.

Could it be that maybe, just maybe, "political correctness" really is just used as a stand-in for "lefty/liberal/postmodern stuff I don't like"?

Shoots, Roots and Leaves

Josh writes:

PM: I'm the devil you know - if ever a headline called out for the addition of a comma...

Whichever copy editor let that one pass unmolested is made of stronger stuff than I. Even if I actually liked Howard, the shining comedy value alone would make it more, much more, than I could resist.

UPDATE: From a copy editing blog I frequent: More missing commas.

Not Dead in Any Significant Sense

Josh writes:

Gracious, it's been more than a month -- sick, tired, lazy, having more fun elsewhere on the Internet, etc.

I suppose I should start by saying that I care more about the games of Facebook Scrabble I'm currently playing than anything to do with rugby. I realise that saying this after the All Blacks lost makes it sound a bit like sour grapes, but I assure you it's been my attitude all along. I was actually a little offended at the article in the Herald a few weeks ago that breathlessly informed us that there are actually people in this country that aren't interested in the World Cup, with advice for how these poor afflicted souls can occupy their empty lives while the rest of humanity camps in front of the TV for the next few weeks...

What else? Politics? Look, I know no-one really gives a shit about local body elections*, but for Christ's sake -- the reason Hubbard was voted in last time was the bare fact that he was not John Banks, please God no, anyone but John Banks. Are memories really that short?

And it's been linked to far and wide, but just on the off chance you hadn't heard, Stephen Fry has a blog, in which he provides further evidence that he is the Perfect Human.

That'll do for now.


* I personally only give as much of a shit as is required by the fact that my wife is running for a community board, and even then, I dare say that's more of a shit than most of you combined.

Generic Music Rant

Josh writes:

I don't know music, but I know what I like. I just don't know why a lot of the time.

I mean, apart from the usual trouble I have formulating a reply when people say "What sort of music do you listen to?"* -- "I dunno, a bit of everything... um" -- I'm not even sure what it is about individual songs in some cases.

The collected works of Timbaland for example -- there are very few numbers he's had a hand in that I haven't hated instantly, then grown to really like after repeated airplay. While my sense of grammar recoils at "The Way I Are", and its lyrics are at best questionable ("Don't have a motor boat but I can float your boat" -- that's just bad) I can't get the fucker out of my head, and I find myself not minding at all. See also Regina Spektor's "Fidelity" (the "it breaks my hea-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-art" one) -- bugged me at first, but it ended up on the playlist at my Civil Union, right alongside Timbaland-produced "My Love".

And then there are the ones that go the opposite way: like it on first hearing, get sick of it right quick after a few more. I actually liked "Hey There Delilah" for a while -- the lyrics were abysmal, but the melody had a nice old school Simon and Garfunkel feel. It didn't take me long to lose interest though -- maybe the lyrics just got the better of me. Current offender is "Konichiwa Bitches" -- I liked its moxie to begin with, but somewhere around the fourth time I heard it on C4/Juice in a single Saturday morning familiarity started to breed some serious contempt. And there should be a comma in the title.

Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry" though, is utter shit and always will be. Always.


* And seriously, who really does have a succinct reply to that question? How many people would really classify their musical tastes as purely "hip hop/R&B" or "Future Industrial EmoPopWave" or "FUCKEN METAL \m/ \m/"?

Anti Child Abuse; Pro Multi-Car Pileups

Josh writes:

You can't be serious. Stop your car on the motorway and perform a meaningless gesture that does nothing to actually combat child abuse? Is Christine Rankin on the crack or what?

No, hang on.

*chants to self "Principle of Charity, Principle of Charity, Principle of Charity"*

So what did she actually say? Well, I'm not sure. Here's the quote from that article:

"If they have the courage and they stop wherever they really are at that time then that is fantastic, go for it."

There's no actual indication that she said this in response to "What? Even if they're driving their car down the motorway?" so it's possible that the implication is being drawn without her actually explicitly stating it. But in any case, it's a stupid fucking idea -- one that will likely cause more harm than good, as people think "right, stood for three minutes, that's my bit to stop child abuse done" and do nothing more productive -- so she's full of crap, Charity or no.

I am getting a wee bit sick of contextless quotes in the media -- and worse, contextless partial quotes. I would love to see the full transcript where Helen Clark supposedly called John Key "it" for instance. Did she actually say "We hates the Leader of the Opposition. It is a foreign exchange dealer and it stole our precioussss"? Or was it more like "The biggest threat facing New Zealand isn't gangs or dogs -- it is a foreign exchange dealer who thinks he knows what's best for us" or something equally politically-bitchy-yet-not-actually-dehumanizing? I guess the Herald doesn't think we need to worry about such trifles.

Mmm... trifle...

Slings and Arrows and Lesbian Bikers

Josh writes:

OK, do we all watch Outrageous Fortune here? About last night's episode...

Can someone explain this to me? Van goes, in the space of half an episode, from A Bit Thick to Genuinely Mentally Damaged, fucks up his life in a fit of hysterical paranoia and contributes directly to the death of his girlfriend, and yet the overall feeling I got from the episode was that we should be feeling sorry for him? Or at least, no sympathy seemed to be on offer for Aurora, who's only sins were to try to please all the people all the time and fail to penetrate the heavy wall of Retarded Jealousy that had magically materialised around Van, getting nothing but a "stop messing with my son" from Cheryl. The "Goodnight Kiwi Music" playing at the end was a nice touch, but only really served to make Aurora's death all about Van, as opposed to, say, Aurora.

Was that bad writing? Am I just being overly critical, possibly suffering Chasing Amy flashbacks or something?

And where are they going with this, if anywhere? Is it meant to be telling us something about the nature of Cheryl's relationship to Van (Bad Son in season 1, Good Son in season 2, Mummy's "Special" Little Boy in season 3)? The trailer for next week's episode seemed to indicate that the Wests are in full-on righteous indignation mode at being refused access to the funeral of the woman their son killed, rather than, say feeling a bit guilty or contrite or anything. We'll see.

Laugh or Cry?

Josh writes:

OK, seriously: Are they taking the piss or what?

Pedanterasty

Josh writes:

OK, I thought everyone knew about this one by now, but I've seen it crop a few times lately, so just to be clear: "refute" means "disprove", not "deny". To refute a claim, you have to actually demonstrate that it's false, not just say that it is.

David Benson-Pope has not refuted the current claims against him, he's denied them (and not very convincingly at that).


Bonus pedantry! I haven't seen his in ages, but just in case it makes a comeback: "fulsome" means "excessive" or "overblown" -- "fulsome praise" is exaggerated and insincere, for example. People sometimes assume that it means "full" or "comprehensive" -- I was once told at a job interview that I had a "fulsome CV" (which the interviewer meant as a compliment). I didn't tell her that she'd actually just insulted me, not wanting to make a bad impression. Now that I think about it, maybe it was a test of my vocabulary to see if I'd make the correction -- or maybe she was surreptitiously insulting me and assuming I wouldn't get the insult...

Hey, a Bandwagon! Jump On!

Josh writes:

So it looks like Facebook is having its own little tipping point moment in New Zealand -- everyone starts talking about it, which starts everyone else talking about it and before you know it, it's Paris Hilton. One of the more interesting aspects to it is the class war that various people seem to be trying to foment between the users of it and MySpace. Supposedly MySpace is for lower class yokels and idiot teenagers, while Facebook is the preserve of the educated elite. Certainly Facebook seems a bit more mature in appearance and organization, but I don't know that that says much about its users.

Case in point: as part of my job writing documentation for a software company, I keep an eye on developments in software and website usability. This morning, I read an article on a hugely controversial development on Facebook that I hadn't been aware off (seeing as it happened a few months ago, before the site took off here). You see, on your Facebook home page there's this News Feed that has a bunch of one line summaries of all of your friends' recent activity -- Tom added a photo, Dick posted a message, Harry joined a group and so on. This saves you having to check every one of your friends' Facebook pages to keep up to date with them -- handy, no? That's what the Facebook developers thought when they unveiled it, and were therefore a little surprised when people hated it and organised protest groups with hundreds of thousands of members against it.

Why? Well, it's like this: Lots of people would add as their friends anyone who'd so much as looked at them from across the street, so that they could then brag about how they had fifty thousand friends and were more popular than Jesus. Of course, having added these "friends", they would then ignore them completely, since they were just after ego-padding, not actual interaction. Then comes along the News Feed, and suddenly they're inundated with updates about all these people they didn't care about. Worse than that, since they don't actually know most of these people or even remember that they added them, it appears that they're being updated on the statuses of a group of random strangers, which leads to the erroneous conclusion "hey -- if random strangers' details are being broadcast to me, that means that my details are being broadcast to random strangers as well! Gaah - invasion of privacy!!" And then with the screaming and the protests and the stupidity. Eventually everything settled down, adjustments were made, habits were changed and everyone was happy, but apparently it was a massive issue at the time (like I say, it wasn't big news here because Facebook wasn't on the local radar at the time).

The article I linked to looks at the whole issue from a usability perspective, asking what went wrong and what the Facebook team could have done differently. While they try to be fair about it, what it comes down to is that Facebook's users are retarded, and the Facebook team's mistake was in not realising how retarded their users were.

So much for your class war, then -- I mean, if the users of Facebook are supposed to be the clever elitist ones, then MySpace would have to be some sort of drooling, buck-toothed orgy of banal non-entities, talentless musicians and horny adolescents desperately soliciting webcam snaps of teenage girls in their underwear, which is clearly... Oh.

Never mind.

In Poor Taste

Josh writes:

What's worse than a girafe with a sore throat?

A rhino with a prolapsed penis!

Oh shit, that wasn't funny at all -- they had to put him down and stuff. And people loved that rhino. Fuck. Um... SAN DIMAS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL RULES!

*legs it*

Fish!

Josh writes:

Yeah, so let's talk about discrimination.

Discriminating means choosing, that's all -- it's neither good nor bad[1]. What makes it good or bad are the reasons behind the discrimination. Discrimination on unreasonable grounds is unfair and should not be condoned. I bring this up, of course, because of the front page story on yesterday's Herald on Sunday about Talley's Fisheries being done by the High Court for gender discrimination in refusing to hire a woman for the position of fish filleter on the basis that she is a woman.

The boss of the company, Mr. Andrew Talley, thinks this is bollocks, and brings up an interesting example in disputing it:

There are jobs - pole dancing being one and fish filleting being another - that have a higher predominance of either men or women.

Well let's look at those two vocations. Without wanting to appear crass, the job of a pole dancer is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, to give heterosexual men erections. Without wanting to get into a debate on gender politics, it is a fact of biology that heterosexual men get erections from looking at women, but not from looking at men[2]. There is therefore a genuine reason why women are more suited to the task of pole dancing than men, and therefore legitimate reason to discriminate on the grounds of sex when hiring a pole dancer.

What, then, are the requirements for being a fish filleter? Well, the job of a fish filleter is to fillet fish -- as far as I'm aware, that is done with the hands and not, for example, the penis[3], so there seems to be little reason why a two-handed person of any sex couldn't do it. What's that? "[T]he job sometimes required lifting fish bins that weighed up to 30kg," you say? Right, so a requirement is upper body strength sufficient to lift a heavy bin of fish. Call me silly, but I would have thought a good test for whether or not someone can lift a heavy bin of fish is to get them to lift a heavy bin of fish, not to check whether or not they have tits.

Now sure, it is also a biological fact that men on average have greater upper body strength than woman, but there's no reason to believe that any given woman doesn't have the required strength for this job just because she's a woman. Unreasonable grounds = unfair discrimination = book 'em, Dano.

What confuses me is that Mr. Talley goes on to say that Talley's employed female fish filleters "and always has done as far as I'm concerned" -- doesn't that undermine everything he said beforehand? Ah, well -- you know those fisheries bosses...


[1] As a former linguist, I'm obliged to point out that, English being the mercurial whore that it is, the word "discrimination" is often used as a shorthand for "unfair discrimination against human beings" -- so much so that this sub-meaning is fast becoming the main meaning. This sort of thing happens all the time -- deal with it.
[2] Unless they're attractive transgendered people who they think actually are women, I guess.
[3] That'd be something to see, though.

Squirrelgeddon

Josh writes:

It begins...

Although, it's not like we didn't see this coming.

Somebody?

Josh writes:

Can somebody help us out here? Apparently, Brain Stab was mentioned "in the paper" on Sunday -- the Herald on Sunday, I think. I'm just wondering, purely for the sake of ego, if this is true or not. I can say that we haven't seen any real increase in site traffic since Sunday, which either means it's not true, or no-one cares what the Herald on Sunday says. Obviously, I'm stumped.

In other news:

Aw...

Oh shit.

I try, but I can't help myself. Sorry.

Josh writes:

So, the season finale of Lost. I am mindful of the fact that it hasn't screened here yet, but I want to get this down while I think of it, so I'll keep the rest of it off the front page. Spoilers follow, but nothing major -- certainly nothing about the bit where Sawyer turns out to be Jesus and the monster is revealed to be made entirely of cheese. Anyway.

So, by and large who gives a fuck, eh? I could make predictions about where it's going from here...

...that "Jacob" will turn out to be Santa Claus, held captive on the island by the Others (he has lists of who's naughty and nice; he can give you whatever you want; he's there with Polar Bears from the North Pole -- it all makes perfect sense)...

...that the story will be complemented by the arrival of private investigators David Addison and Maddie Hayes, whose sexual tension will be dragged out into a seasons-long plot point, collapsing the show entirely when it finally pays off...

...that the majority of Season 4 will just be home video footage of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof fucking you in the ass and high-fiving...

...but that holds little interest for me. Or for you, I imagine. What does interest me is the reactions of the fanbase. Here we have a typically wanky Salon.com review, where they try to tell us that if we don't like Lost and want answers we're just being impatient and childish and we just don't get it, man. Make sure to read the replies, many of which point out that it's not just the constant teasing/padding in the storylines; it's the fact that the characters are forced by the writing to be such uncurious motherf*ckers in order to enable the teasing/padding.

And over at Lostpedia.com, the events of the finale appear to have finally driven them over the edge into full-on fanboy obsession. How else to explain the ever more desperate and grasping attempts to find references or homages in everything that happens? That bit where Charlie hits Desmond in the head with an oar? That's a homage to the bit in The Talented Mr. Ripley when Matt Damon hits Jude Law in the head with an oar and a homage to the bit in Pirates of the Caribbean where someone hits someone in the head with an oar. The bit where Charlie talks into a microphone? Clearly a sly reference to the bit in Star Wars where Han Solo talks into a microphone. The best (and yet worst) by far, though, is:

• Rose makes Bernard repeat he is a dentist, not Rambo. This is a homage to how Dr McCoy repeated [sic] claimed he was a doctor, not something else.
• It's also a reference to Rambo.

I dare say it is.

Civilised? Unionised? CUPped?

Josh writes:

So I am now legally attached to my partner of five and a half years, Arna (photos here). The day was fantastic, everything went smoothly, and everyone involved seemed to enjoy themselves. Nice to finally meet Span in person, too -- she's known both Arna and other members of this blog for quite some time, but we've never been in the same place at the same time for some reason.

This site seems like a suitable venue to address the obvious question: "Why a Civil Union? Aren't they for Teh Gayz?"

Basically, marriage seems to us to be a religious institution, and since neither of us is religious, we figured that a Civil Union made for a better secular option. This way religion stays out of our life, and we don't cynically rubber-stamp an institution that other people attach significance to. Arna's feminist sensibilities also twitched at the historical connotations of marriage (the symbolic transfer of ownership of the bride from her father to her husband).

In the event, it worked out very well. Because there are no traditions associated with Civil Unions, and hence no expectations, we were free to organise things however we wanted -- formal and meaningful, but not rigid. It all made for a very relaxed and friendly atmosphere. The only real problems were the complete lack of "Happy Civil Union" cards for people to get us, and the similar lack of vocabulary for describing our relationship to each other now (hence the title of this post)...

Attention Seeking

Josh writes:

I guess I should say that these are my opinions, and not necessarily those of anyone else at Brain Stab.



Yeah, I don't really do boycotts. Certainly, that particular Subway manager is a prize dickhead, and I'd be interested to hear what sort of justification he could possibly come up with for being so pedantically officious in enforcing the employee's contract -- it certainly sounds like something personal. However, the idea that by making a show of not buying the occasional meatball sub from the Newmarket franchise I might have any bearing on the operations of a separate franchise in Dunedin just seems a little, well, self-important. The mainstream (or as like to call it, "real") media's onto this -- that's the sort of naming and shaming that'll get something done about it.

Just to be completely clear: Of course you can say that this situation is bollocks -- of course you should say that it's bollocks. It is. And if you don't want to buy from Subway, who am I to tell you what to do. But when you start making noise about it in this way, it's not about the issue, it's about you.

Just like this post here -- see how it's really all about me? Don't I sound like a bit of a dick? Exactly.

"Mortgage" means "death pledge"

Josh writes:

As I intimated a while ago, my partner and I have been house-hunting. Six weeks ago we made an offer on one we liked -- last weekend we moved in. Having first-hand experience of the house buying woes that are all around the media these days, I figured it'd be a good idea to put my two cents in. The process of finding and buying a house has taught me the following:

1. Houses are expensive.
2. People like to whinge.

When people complain that they can't afford to buy a house on their income, what they usually mean is that they can't afford the kind of house they want/feel they deserve on their income. True, you can't afford a house in Mt Eden -- so go live in Massey. There are affordable houses out west or down south, but people don't want to live there. (As a side note, this is why I find unconvincing the suggestions that the way to sort all this out is to free up land and let the city sprawl more -- sprawl happens on the outskirts, and that's not where people want to be.)

So part of the problem is pickiness; part of the problem is an unwillingness to prioritise -- you might be able to afford the house you want by sacrificing some of the lifestyle you want (trips overseas and the like). We're planning a trip to Germany at the end of the year, hopefully bankrolled by gifts from our impending nuptials -- however we end up paying for it, it'll be the last extravagant spend we do for a long time. We're also going to have to put off having kids for some time, too -- longer than we'll want to, I imagine, but again: priorities.

Pickiness, unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices... I feel like I'm forgetting something... Ah, that'll be it: Houses are fucking expensive. Here's where I disagree with the other side of the commentariat as well. All the smug pricks who bought a house ten or twenty years ago -- back when the average-house-price-to-average-wage ratio was half what it is now, education was free and you could support a family on a single income -- sneering at we 20/30-somethings snorting lattes out our noses at the size of the mortgages we'll have to take on. It is harder to buy a house than it used to be -- that's just a fact.

I find it hard to blame anyone other than investment property owners -- and not just the people who rent out twenty houses; the swarms of people with one investment property for their retirement. I don't know much about economics, but doesn't restricting the supply of something make it cost more? More houses owned by investors = less houses for people to buy to live in = higher house prices. What to do about it? I dunno. I don't see what's so horrifying about a capital gains tax on investment properties that makes it "political suicide" for anyone to even talk about bringing it in -- politicos, care to comment?

Pedumentation

Josh writes:

I've delivered a close approximation of this rant elsewhere in the past -- if you've heard it before, you can go back to your catblogging.

A slightly deceptive post, this one -- what appears to be another "Argue More Gooder" post is actually an "Obsessive Pedantry" post in disguise. Or possibly the other way around (it gets a bit hazy).

What I want to talk about today is the argumentum ad hominem fallacy. Let me make this quiet clear: "ad hominem" does not mean "personal abuse" -- an ad hominem is when you try to argue against a person's position by introducing facts about the person that aren't relevant to their argument. An ad hominem may involve personal abuse (e.g. the irrelevant fact that you introduce may be "he's an arsehole"), but just because you've been abused doesn't mean the abusers have employed an ad hominem. Consider the following oversimplifications:

A: "I think Sue Bradford's bill should pass, because Section 59 needs to be amended."

B: "Yeah, but you don't have kids, so you don't know what you're talking about."

That's an ad hominem argument, but it doesn't involve personal abuse.

A: "I think abortion is wrong, because it's the murder of an innocent human being."

B: "Get your head out of your arse -- an undeveloped foetus doesn't count as a human being, you moron."

That argument contains abuse, but it's not ad hominem.

To say that Lucyna's views on homosexuality and its relation to Nazism are obviously, cartoonsihly false because she is a crazy person would indeed be an argumentum ad hominem fallacy. However, to say that Lucyna is a crazy person because of her obviously, cartoonsihly false beliefs on homosexuality and its relation to Nazism would not. For example.

Why bring this up now? Well, to lend more weight to Hewligan's most recent link to us for one thing. But also to express annoyance at people's habit of referring any abuse directed at them in response to something they've said as "ad hominems" when they're not. Saying "Waah! People were mean to me!" doesn't sound as impressive as "People can only resort to ad hominems in reply to me", but it's usually more accurate.