OMG, I'm a Troll !

Yes, me. I just realised it. I jump in on people's blogs with comments that are (somewhat) off topic and (sometimes a tiny bit) rude. I even do it on blogs and to people that I like.

Maybe it's a sign of my extreme old age, or maybe just an unpleasant side to my otherwise-perfect personality. The thing is, I have a number of strongly-held opinions. (No, really.) Sometimes I read things that trigger them and, in an almost reflexive jerk of the fingers, I blurt them out.

Like the other day when a writer I admire did a post on the psychology of how to change people's minds. It was a perfectly unexceptional piece, reporting the research in a nicely balanced way. But I jumped in with a small rant on why people waste their time trying to change society when it all comes to nothing in the long run. (And then some air-head responded, saying he 'fully understood me' and making several other patronising comments which got right up my nose, to which I foolishly responded, and suddenly there was a (rather polite) flame war going on on someone else's blog!)

Then, today, I read another writer's blog and my fingers twitched into action. She had explained part of the 'world' of her new story and it involved mind transfers. These are very common in sci-fi but I have a serious problem with them (i.e. they are intrinsically impossible.) I wrote several hundred words on my obsession before I got a grip and dragged my hands off the keyboard.

That's when I knew. I am a troll. (Hvat's troll nema þat? as the Old Norse might have asked.)

Now I must strive to curb this tendency. The first thing I need to do is to ask myself, every time I comment on anything, whether I'm actually contributing to the discussion or whether I'm taking it into deeper, darker places no-one else wants to go. When the answer is the latter, then I must close the blog of the poor innocent and open this one. For this is where my obsessions properly belong. This is where people expect me to rant and rave. This is my proper place, under the bridges of the data highway, lurking here for unwary travellers.

Good on ya Joanna

I was born just ten years after World War 2 ended. I was raised in Hull in Yorkshire, a major fishing and cargo port and one of the worst-bombed cities in England. When I was a kid, my friends and I played 'Jerrys and English' in the bombed out ruins of buildings still not yet rebuilt. Every adult male I knew back then had been in the army or the navy. All my friends' fathers, and all their grandfathers too. My own paternal grandfather was bed-ridden all the time I knew him because of injuries sustained in the war.

I don't know how kids view war these days. I imagine they don't see it in the way we did. Since World War 2, wars have become shabbier and less honourable. The disgraceful invasion of Iraq makes even Vietnam seem marginally reasonable. Yet everyone I knew as a child was proud of what we did in World War 2. We had stood firm against oppression. We had saved the world from tyranny. We had been brave and strong.

And among all the many stories I heard in those days, of bravery and courage and skill, the stalwart loyalty and fierce bravery of the Gurkhas was often mentioned.

I think, like many other Brits, I was astonished to discover that Gurkhas who had served in the British Army Brigade of Gurkhas had no automatic right to settle in Britain on leaving the army. I was also shocked to discover that a sly deal at the time of Partition had left the Gurkhas with a reduced pension compared to other British Army servicemen.

For some years now, there has been a campaign to achieve better rights for Gurkha ex-servicemen. Small wins have happened from time to time but the big battle - for their right to settle in Britain - has only just been won. After a surprise 'first day motion' defeat for the Government (the first since 1978) the British Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, announced that "All Gurkha veterans who retired before 1997 with at least four years service will be allowed to settle in the UK". As Nick Clegg, a UK politician quite rightly said, it was "a victory for decency" and "the kind of thing people want this country to do."

Certainly it is what people of my generation would want, people who heard the admiration and respect in the voices of our forebears when they spoke of the brave and loyal Gurkhas.

But there is still work to be done on the Gurkha's behalf. We still need to ensure that Gurkha Brigade veterans receive full pensions in the UK. But, as 'Gurkha Justice Campaign' lawyer David Enright says, "that is for tomorrow". Today, he and other campaign leaders - including figurehead and active campaigner Joanna Lumley, whose father was an officer in a Gurkha regiment - are celebrating yesterday's tremendous victory.

Not A Twit After All

I'm not saying I'll never twitter again, but I have noticed that I havent tweeted for several weeks now. So the grand experiment is over. It seems I'm not the twittering type...

...unlike millions of others. According to research by A C Nielson from March this year, unique visitors to the Twitter site grew by 1,382 percent year-on-year, from 475,000 in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. Plus, there were another three-quarters of a million people accessing Twitter via their mobile phones and about a million sending and receiving Twitter SMS messages. I guess you could say it has become popular. It all adds up to about 240 tweets per user for the quarter to Feb '09. That's more than 2 per user per day. (No variances were given but I suspect there is a broad spread of usage patterns.)

I averaged just over half a tweet per day i the four months since I started.

Mind you, I picked up some interesting followers, including one young lady whose picture shows her posing in a latex catsuit.

I won't be closing my account or anything but I think I should acknowledge that this is not for me. Honestly, I don't care what someone I barely know in Indiana is having for breakfast, or that their dog just threw up on the carpet. And that @reply feature, where you get to see half the conversation someone you follow is having with someone you don't (about poetry markets in Belgium, or their holiday plans) is about the most useless load of nonsense I've ever seen. You'd think it would be intriguing, wouldn't you? Well, it's not.

Maybe when I've got something to sell, I will start stalking following hundreds of people the way everyone else does. Until then, I just don't see the point.

Thinking It Through Fail

Last Wednesday, the World Health Organisation pushed its pandemic alert status for the recent swine flue outbreak up to 'five' (out of six). As far as the WHO is concerned, then, a pandemic is imminent.

The Australian government (and many others around the world) has its own pandemic plan which is keyed to the WHO alert levels. At 'five' various announcements should be made and actions taken under this plan. One of these is for Australians to stock up on food, water, household supplies, and basic medicines so that each household could last a fortnight without them.

Now this is obviously a recipe for triggering panic buying on a national scale, probably accompanied by punch-ups at checkouts and little old ladies being trampled to death in the rush to buy bags of sugar and other essentials. So the government has said that it won't be instigating this part of its (clearly stupid) plan. Presumably they will wait until the alert level hits 'six' and a pandemic is actually underway before they mention that people should have been stockpiling food so as to avoid the food riots that will then be starting up in all the major cities.

In fact, I suppose, like all governments everywhere, they are quietly hoping it won't come to that, that the pandemic won't happen, and that this is all a storm in a petri dish. Maybe they think that having your head in the sand is the best protection against viruses.

The fact remains, however, that the plan they have is rubbish. If a pandemic hits (and WHO thinks it is imminent) there will be food shortages, there will be shortages of all kinds of commodities. The government's plan for everybody to stock up against such an event is probably quite a good idea. Trouble is, they didn't think it through, did they? With typical stupidity, their thought processes only got so far and then petered out.

If you're going to announce, at alert level five, that every Australian should stock up for a fortnight, then at, oh level two or three, say, you should probably compel all the supermarkets to stock up for the big rush that's coming. That would be reasonable, wouldn't it? After all, in these days of just-in-time buying, the supermarkets and their suppliers are only keeping about three days of supplies. That's why everyone buying a fortnight's worth is such a problem. The supermarkets and even the wholesalers, would be cleaned out instantly with no chance of re-stocking.

Not only would it be impossible for people to buy a fortnight's worth of food, after the first lot had tried, there would be nothing at all for everybody else. It would be a catastrophe.

But how could the government compel the supermarkets to stock up for the level five announcement when the wholesalers don't have that much stock? How could the wholesalers stock up when many of the producers couldn't provide their produce fast enough? (They too are working on a just-in-time basis don't forget.) And then there's the question of compensation. If the government forces the suppliers to over-supply and the retailers to over-stock, what happens if the level five alert never happens?

In fact, whatever dimwit wrote that requirement into the government's pandemic plan (probably an extremely expensive consultant from one of the big consultancies) ought to be sacked. He or she is clearly an idiot.

Must stop now, I've got to get off to the shops before the breakfast cereal is all gone.

Gaaa! Spammed!

Sorry everyone but I'm going to turn comment moderation on for this blog. It's not that I want to moderate your comments. I'm happy to have them and I don't want to suppress any opinion at all, but spammers recently found two of my other blogs and the only way I seem to be able to keep the scumbags off my pages is to use moderation. (Also, Blogger's facilities for letting me delete spam comments don't work. Way to write software, Google!)

This means that, when you next comment, the software will treat you as a first-time commenter and will ask me to approve you. This will probably take some hours, I'm afraid, since it emails me and sometimes I don't check my email that often. Once that has happened once, you'll be treated with the respect you deserve and your comment will go up straight away.

Can I just remind everybody in the world that the only way to beat spammers in the long run is for nobody, ever, to reply to a spam email or click on a spam link. They only make money because there are enough idiots out there buying stuff off them and encouraging this disgusting practice.

Come the revolution, spammers will be lined up against a wall and shot (right after the politicians, business managers, and lawyers.)

Amazon and the Creeps to Whom it Panders

Amazon's recent 'glitch', which de-ranked a whole load of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgener books, along with others of an explicitly sexual nature (including Lady Chatterley's Lover!) was another dismal consequence of the way certain people think - or would prefer not to have to think. Religious and right-wing types don't like sex. Some think their magic god creatures have told them not to like sex (unless sanctioned by a man in a dress who likes abusing small children). Others just have weird hang-ups about it. Some spend their days trying to stop anybody doing sex, seeing sex, or reading about sex. It is for these sad souls that Amazon has an 'adult' field in its book description database - so that it can, if it chooses, hide these books from our view. It is for these same sad souls that the Australian govenment is about to instigate a Web censorship scheme that will give it the power to hide anything it deems 'adult' (or, in fact, just anything it doesn't like) from the entire Australian population.

These weird sex-haters, these creepy people who shudder with distaste at any expression of human sexuality, put a huge amount of effort into pressuring governments and commercial organisations into censoring what we can read. They justify much of their perverted sex-hatred by saying it is to protect children. But they cannot explain why it is necessary to keep children in ignorance of sex. How does ignorance protect anybody from anything? Their intention, they say, is to prevent the 'corruption' of young minds. But what does 'corruption' mean here? Reading a book about gays is not literally going to rot your brain. But it might strike a chord for people who are gay and let them know that other people feel the same way, that not everyone thinks it is disgusting and depraved. This is the 'corruption' the sex-haters are afraid of, that through learning about the experiences of others, people may better understand their own nature. The sex-haters are not trying to protect people - least of all children - they are trying to protect themselves from a world that disgusts and frightens them.

Well, sorry guys, but that's the real world, and it's pretty harmless and mostly benign. You are the creepy, scary misfits, and it is you we all need protection from.

Bertie and the Echidna

Echidnas are cute but, until now, I didn't know just how cute. I saw one near the house once. It must have been young and confused because it was quite small and trying hard to be invisible when Bertie (the dog) trapped it in a corner. (For those who don't live in Australia or New Guinea, an echidna is a monotreme - an egg-laying mammal - which resembles a large, variegated, long-spined hedge-hog, or smallish, short-spined porcupine.)

I suppose Autumn must be a busy time for echidnas because Bertie seems to be finding them everywhere these days and is developing a bit of an obsession with them (although not as bad as the obsession he has with the feral cat he chased up a tree a few days ago!) Today he found the specimen below in our little orchard.


To help you make sense of this picture, this is a full-grown echidna - maybe 30cm long (that's a foot in old money) - desperately trying to bury itself in the ground. The little group of spines on the right is the echidna's tail. It's head is well buried.

It was still digging when I shot this picture - and slowly disappearing. I imagine this is a fairly good defence. It certainly had the dog flummoxed as all the poor little dimwit could get to were spines. It was pretty creepy too. It looked like some kind of evil cactus, pulsating as it slowly sank into the soil, probably digesting the last dog foolish enough to put its snout too close.


And, in honour of Bertie's first birthday (which was two days ago) here's a shot of him looking into our current echidna problem.

First Puppy: The Motion Picture

I despair. President Obama's dog now has its own series of books for children.

Why do I despair?

1. Because people refer to this pooch as 'The First Puppy'. Doesn't that just make you want to throw up? It's not the dog's fault, of course. If the Obamas had bought a tortoise we'd have books about the First Damned Tortoise instead.

2. The world is full of aspiring writers, some of them writing very good books that will never be published because the world's publishing houses just don't have the capacity to publish every good book that is written. One of the reasons they don't have the capacity is because they're publishing crappy, ghost-written celebrity memoirs, celebrity cook-books, celebrity novels, and, now, stupid celebrity dog stories!

3. The 'vast majority' of the Obama family's US$2.5 million annual income comes from the sale of his own celebrity memoir! No doubt the First Tortoise's contribution will take this income up considerably - especially when the film rights are sold.

4. People are idiotic enough to buy these books. (And, no, I'm not going to give you a link. If you really want to find them, Google on "stupid dog books for the mentally disabled".)

Heloise and Abelard

Here’s a question that has been puzzling me for many years.

Was Abelard’s cooling towards Heloise due to his castration? Was it because, chemically, he was no longer the man that had loved her so passionately? From the tone of his letters, fifteen years after the event, it sounds as though he can no longer even understand what had driven him to such passion whereas poor Heloise remembers it all too well.

Are there any medieval scholars out there who could enlighten me? I assume this is a well-known speculation and therefore that there must be well-known opinions on the matter.

This post first appeared on my writing blog but no-one there seemed to know the answer. I'm hoping WND readers will be more erudite :-)

Jobs, Justice and Climate

In the UK yesterday, Trades Union Congress general secretary, Brendan Barber, said this to world leaders assembling for the G20 summit meeting next week. "The old ideas of unregulated free markets do not work, and have brought the world's economy to near-collapse, failed to fight poverty and have done far too little to move to a low-carbon economy."

The Metropolitan Police estimate that 35,000 people marched through London on the 'Put People First' demonstration, the first of many events planned for the G20 summit. Put People First's slogan is "jobs, justice and climate".

With civil unrest growing across Europe as job losses mount and the recession bites ever harder, I really hope that the G20 leaders are listening. We've had decades of unfettered greed and government-backed corporate callousness, the rich have got richer and the poor have starved. The fiction that 'economic growth' will filter down to the poorest and make everybody better off has been exposed, and the future is looking bleak for working people everywhere as the value of their pensions has halved in a single year.

We might struggle through this recession but worse ones are coming. Peak oil is nearly upon us. Climate change is now unstoppable. The population is still growing and resources are still dwindling. Economic growth has natural limits and we are reaching them. Managing global capitalism requires more skill and ability than the world's capitalists and their governments are able to provide.

This is the kind of future that leads to uprising. It is the kind of future that leads to riots and even revolution. I hope the G20 leaders, isolated as they are from real life by their power and wealth, do not underestimate the amount of anger there is among the people they have been exploiting for so long. That crowd of 35,000 in London is the tip of an iceberg of resentment and disgust. It could easily turn from a peaceful march with reasonable requests into a furious mob, burning effigies and storming the parliament.

As Others See Us

I've been heavily involved lately in the design and construction of a gazebo on the garden. This is a fabulous, palatial building, five by four metres by 2.4 m to the eaves. I did the design myself and I'm at the point where all the materials have been ordered and delivered, the site has been levelled and the post-holes dug. Now, with Wifie's help, the first few uprights have gone in and it is beginning to look a bit like a building and not just a building site.

I was going to leave all this out of my blogs since it is hardly something most people will be interested in. But, yesterday, I happenned into Wifie's office while she was writing an email to a friend. Reading over her shoulder, I realised it was about us building the gazebo. I just had to show this to you. Not only is it written in her dry, witty tone but, for me, it was one of those moments where you get the 'giftie' of how others see you.

Here is the relevant extract from her email (with her permission).

We were rather slow getting on with the patio and gazebo. The drawings went on for many iterations and it was a wonder we didn't do a prototype. Eventually, Graham started digging the base but didn't get very far because even a mattock was very hard work. I talked him into letting me phone a man with a bob cat and he levelled the site and dug the post holes. Of course, the bob cat's work is by no means accurate enough for our designer, engineer and workman. Then it took a while to order the wood until I finally suggested that we go and see what sizes they could supply which would help with the design iterations.

We started work last week and are doing a post a day except days when we have to go shopping/ Bertie training/ anything else we can think of. It's mostly been too hot to work after about 10 am hence the one-post-a-day. The post holes were within tolerance but the first post we put in, we got to one side of the hole and now have to compensate with all the others. This results in much standing around debating in quarrelsome manner. We had finished number 3 yesterday morning in 26 degree heat at 10 am. At 2 pm, the heavens opened, hail the size of broad beans came down, then more rain than we've seen in months and the patio base was a paddling pool with the post holes forming plunge pools at its edges. Bertie thought it was wonderful until his leg went down into a plunge pool. Today we bailed out the plunge pools since most of the water drained into them as we took it out. Because the soil is just decomposed granite about the texture of course sand and it sits on rock, there's not much natural drainage going on at the moment which is strange when you remember we're on almost the highest point for some distance around.

If we get the uprights right, the rest won't be so hard. We're very glad we decided to build the gazebo before laying the patio as by now we would probably have dislodged all the slabs and maybe even thrown them at each other.

And, for those who are finding it hard to visualize a three-post gazebo with built-in paddling pool, here it is.

It's All About The Guns, Stupid

Another damned mass murder, this time in Winnenden in Germany.

The boy who did it was described by Heribert Rech, interior minister of Baden-Wuerttemberg state as "completely unremarkable, there was nothing in his background to suggest this could have happened." Except the boy was a trained marksman! Except he had access to firearms! Except that he was an isolated loner who played computer games all day!

For God's sake, wake up! If you give weapons and training to disturbed children, some of them are going to go nuts and shoot people.

Here's a simple way to stop young men from shooting their classmates: don't let them anywhere near guns! It isn't hard. It isn't rocket science. If you give kids guns, they will shoot people. Incidentally, the same goes for grown-ups.

And while I'm ranting on the subject, how is it we can, as a society, spend billions setting up evesdropping services like the famous Eschelon, that listen to everybody's phone calls and read everybody's emails, trying to protect us from the extremely minor 'threat' of terrorism, but we can't use the same technology to monitor the Web for kids who openly brag that they are going to shoot their classmates? Like the German killer-nutcase did seven hours before he went on the rampage in Winnenden- and as so many others do. If we're going to lose all our privacy to the NSA and MI5 anyway, why can't they at least do something useful with their supercomputers like stopping assholes shooting children.

End of rant. Thank you for your patience.

Babies Shame Mothers Into Caring For Them

At last I understand why babies cry.

I've puzzled over this for many, many years. A baby's cry is loud, grating and nerve-wracking. My own sweet little daughter used to bawl so loudly that the woman in the house across the street could hear it. And that should have been a clue. But I was so caught up in the idea that a baby's cry was to alert the mother to its needs - even if every predator for miles also gets the message that a tasty human morsel is there for the eating.

Now, research by a UK/Puerto Rican team led by Dr Stuart Semple, has shown that rhesus macaque mothers respond differently to their crying babies depending on who is nearby. If there are other adults around to be irritated and made aggressive by the baby's wailing, the mother is more likely to tend and feed the baby than if no other adults are nearby.

How many times have you seen it - a mother in a supermarket, or on a bus, with a screeching baby and everyone around frowning and tutting and muttering about what a disgrace it is? And the poor mother, cringing under the onslaught of all that social disapproval.

It's so obvious once you're told. My daughter wasn't just crying for attention from her mother, she was crying to get on the nerves of the woman across the street, so that she would put pressure on the child's mother to do something about that damned baby! That's why crying has to be so loud. That's why it has to set your nerves jangling.

Raising a child is exhausting. There comes a time when every woman needs a break from it, just ten minutes to herself! But the child's needs never take a break, and something has to be done about keeping its mother's nose to the grindstone. The baby is already using all the maternal instincts it can exploit to keep itself cared for, so what else can it use when its mother is exhausted? Social pressures, disapproval, the threat of ostracisation, even the threat of violence (particularly from males nearby).

Who's a clever baby?

Jathia's Wager - Don't Bother

I just finished watching an open source movie - and it was awful.

Now I like open source software. I use it all the time. It's great. So it seemed worth a look to see what an open source movie was like - especially since this one is a sci-fi movie called 'Jathia's Wager'. Go and see it at the Moviepals site if you have 20 minutes to spare.

I suppose it's early days and open source movies might get better, but this one was very badly written. (The filming, directing and acting looked pretty ordinary too but what do I know from making movies?) There were tedious passages with no dialogue where almost nothing happened. There were tedious passages of pure exposition where absolutely nothing happened. Oh, and did I mention it was tedious? Don't waste your time looking for realistic dialogue or any hint of humour, either.

[WARNING: Spoiler.]

As for the plot, I have no idea what happened. It's a mystery. There was a guy running around a lot. He seemed to be one of some humans left behind when others went transhuman. Although most of the future humans were religious nuts and liked being ignorant (so no change there, then) our hero had the option to join the post-humans , which, after one of the tedious exposition segments I mentioned earlier, he took. Then he came back for his sister, who either went with him and came back again, or had a dream about it and then ran into the hills screaming. Don't ask me which, or why. As for the 'wager' in the title, maybe I missed something...

In places the film had that quirky, amateurish quality that made 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' so charming. In other places it was just amateurish. Parts were even (unintentionally) comical.

I imagine it took the people involved lots of time and effort to put this together, so it is sad that they wasted their opportunity to do something interesting and good. There must be hundreds of excellent writers out there who could have written a script a thousand times better than 'Jathia's Wager'. Maybe the up-side of this is that, having set the ball rolling, the next open-source movie project will attract better writers.

Catholics in Disgrace

Once you start believing in things that are not real, they can lead you into all kinds of bizarre ethical quagmires.

If a nine year old child had been raped by her stepfather and became pregnant, most people would see the whole affair as repugnant and awful. Most would see the stepfather as a monster and the child as the victim of a hideous crime - especially when the pregnancy, according to her doctors, threatens her life. Most people would do everything they could to help the child.

Sadly, this is not a hypothetical situation. It actually happened, recently, in Brazil. And the child was pregnant with twins.

The child was given an abortion, of course. What other sensible action could there be? What else could a compassionate and caring society do? Who in their right mind would inflict a full-term pregnancy on a nine-year-old rape victim, along with whatever psychological harm there might be for her if she survived it?

Nobody.

Which is why the rantings and ravings of the Catholic Church seem especially twisted and inhuman in this particular instance. They say the child should have been made to suffer the full term of the pregnancy and the possibility of her death - and the death of the twins - because of their bizarre beliefs. The Church has villified the doctors who most probably saved the child's life, and they have villified the child's mother. They have also excommunicated the whole medical team and the mother (the child too, for all I know) - for all the harm that will do anybody.

It makes me want to cry out 'What is wrong with these sick bastards?' It makes you ask how anybody could be so cruel and care so little for the welfare of this poor child.

Yet the answer is painfully obvious. Catholics believe in a magic being who tells them what to do and what to think. The scribblings of some deranged mystics, thousands of years ago, have become the laws that these people must follow. Laws so weird, vague, and self-contradictory that Catholic witch-doctors can give their 'blessings' to Hitler's armies but they can't show compassion for a child whose life has been devastated and who desperately needs help.

The Catholic Church has done more than most over the past couple of thousand years to destroy the lives and innocence of young children. Maybe it's time they sought psychological counselling instead of inflicting this sickness on more helpless children.

More hope than you can shake a stick at

(Cross-posted from my writing blog)

Remember that four-part magazine I told you about - put together by speculative fiction fans and full of stories and artwork donated by Australian writers and artists? Well, the first edition has now been published.

All the money raised by the sale of this magazine will go towards the disaster relief fund for the survivors of the recent catastrophic bush fires in South-Eastern Australia. So get out your credit cards and visit this page to make your donation and get your copy. I've seen the first edition and it is astonishingly good - packed to the rafters with the work of top-notch writers and illustrators. The quality is so high, you'd want to buy it anyway.

To get out a magazine like this in just a couple of weeks is an astonishing achievement. My hat is off to Grant Watson, Ju Landéesse and Maia Bobrowicz, who made it happen - and to all the many Australian spec fic writers and artists who contributed. For the likes of me, giving away a story doesn't cost a great deal - since I don't get paid so much for them - but for some of the big-name contributors, this represents a significant donation. Make sure this generosity isn't in vain, order your copy of Hope #1 now. In fact, why not order all four of them?

Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible

Apologies to all my regular readers!

I don't know what happened to my front page but Blogger seems to have had some kind of psychotic episode, removed all the posts and rearranged all the widgets. Everything is still here (thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster) but you now have to look a little harder to find things!

I'll be sorting it out a little later in the day (got to go and measure up the garden for a DIY job we have planned) so please bear with me.

If you like, while you're waiting for normality to be resumed, you may curse Blogger. I'm sure it helps.

-oOo-

Later that same day...

All sorted!

Don't you just hate programs with a mind of their own? They won't actually have to do anything to take over the world. They'll just have to stop doing it right for a couple of days and we'll be back in the Stone Age.

HOPE

(Cross-posted from my writing blog)

If you'd like a really great way to help the victims of the Victorian bushfires, you should order your copies of Hope. This is a four-issue spec. fic. fanzine created by enthusiasts in Western Australia, with all proceeds going to support fire victims. Issue One should be out this weekend (Valentine's Day). The other three should follow at weekly intervals.

It's being put together at incredible speed. All the material is donated by the Australian spec. fic. community. The latest update shows the state of play. Keep an eye on angriest for news of how to order your copies.

Apart from a story by me :-) there will be a previously unpublished piece by Sean Williams, another 135,000 words of fiction, loads of Dr Who fan-fiction, and enough cartoons and images to fill a whole edition of their own!

This is a fantastic effort by Australian writers to help people who have lost almost everything it is possible to imagine losing. Please buy your copies of Hope, and spread the word.

A Public Announcement on Behalf of Grumpy People Everywhere

Here's an organisation that has just been begging to exist since the days of Reagan and Thatcher dehumanised society to the point where just being alive became a cruel and unusual punishment: The Grumpy Group.

The vision of The Grumpy Group is "to exploit grumpiness in any ethical way that can be creatively imagined and implemented". Specifically, they want to harness the hithertofore untapped power of grumpiness to cheer people up, to help people stand up for themselves against a world turned indifferent, and to stick it (back) to The Man.

For those who can't afford to join a class action, or who believe that whingeing on and on on your blog doesn't actually do any good, for those who'd just like to get the electric company to accept that their bill really was paid three months ago and get their power back on, The Grumpy Group may be the very thing.

By the look of the site, they don't have many members yet - maybe something to do with the fact that hard-core grumpies gave up on the Web years ago when those f**king annoying pop-up ads first started appearing - but, hey, there was a time when MySpace only had a handful of members, right? A time when there were only three videos on YouTube? A time when the United States of America was just Idaho, or Nebraska, or whatever it was, yeah?

And so on.

The point is that grumpy people deserve to be together.

Or something like that.

Death and Suffering in Australia

At the time of writing, the bush-fires that are still burning in south-eastern Australia have claimed 173 lives, with hundreds more injured and almost a thousand homes burnt down. It is Australia's largest natural disaster ever. Whole towns have been wiped out. Whole families.

Up in the north-east, there are record floods. Some towns have been cut off for weeks. Several people have died, several more are missing. Homes have been wrecked, businesses devastated, crops are standing under water, choked with mud.

I've got no point to make, no axe to grind. I just want to acknowledge this terrible moment of suffering and grief, this horror, literally all around me.