Black Dog Blog

BBC is facing 'moment of realism', warns Mark Thompson

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Longest pizza record attempt in Poland

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Tiger cub found among stuffed toys in Bangkok luggage

Get out from there, tiger. You are not a cuddly toy, you are a tiger.

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Police issue warning after Highland big cat sightings

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It's impossible to get enough octopodes. Talented octopus dupes predators by impersonating fish

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South Sudan to end use of child soldiers

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Scarf of Hope to remember Peru's missing

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Mexico's Catholic Church fans flames of gay rights row

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The strange virtual world of 4chan

I don't have an actual wooden spoon in my immediate possession, but kindly imagine me slapping one contemplatively against my palm in anticipation of the first person here to go "RULE ONE AND TWO!!2!".

A correspondent has said, not at all in an impolite way, that I come over as anxious and reason like a 12-year-old.

He is very probably correct.

Cue another round of "what am I doing in this job? I don't even have any letters after my name" anxiety. (The irony, you can all but cut it with a knife.)

Dude, best. I dreamed about a whole bunch of red pandas.

I appeared to be at a concert that was being held for my brother's birthday. I was sitting some way up the auditorium, a nice stone classical affair, and chumming up with someone I think was my old physics teacher.

Some animals came on, and while they were pygmy dachshund-like pigs at first so of course I didn't recognise them, eventually they became identifiable as red pandas, and climbed onto a few people's laps. Their trainer attending servant put one on my brother's lap. I headed down to the front sharpish and got hold of some of the green gobstopper-like treats people were given to feed to them, but the red pandas were already finishing their act.

Cool or what? My logic, which is correct, is that if the wahs have found a way even into my mental fortress, it won't be long before the entire world falls to their cute. The unutterable teases.

Coalition government – the first 100 days

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KENT LANE OLSEN STOP THE PRESSES GET ME MORE North Tyneside lifeguards help ducks across road

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Prehistoric 'terror bird' could kill with a single peck

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Southern Sudan unveils plans for animal-shaped cities, because just what we need in the middle of downturn and genocide is a Dubai-style construction effort. Obviously.

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As existing readers will know, I'm of the staunch opinion that non-human animals are much like human animals, and that includes bullying specimens that differ from the main herd:

Somerset animal sanctuary rescues bullied bald cow

We're all animals, baby, and not only in nice ways.

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Catholic charity's appeal over gay adoption fails

I don't think any gay parents wanting to adopt should go to Catholic charities, considering the odious teachings that church espouses and has espoused on the topic of people who fall in love with people the Church doesn't want them to, but for me this is about organisations engaging in special pleading and trying to flout the law.

For a church that's also trying to get the whole "Catholics can't marry into the British monarchy" thing repealed, you'd think they would try to be model, cooperative citizens, not attempt to create mini-Vatican states for themselves.

The charity's toys-ex-perambulata response, preferring not to help any children at all rather than comply with a law that won't affect them much because gays are well aware they're not welcome in Catholic organisations unless they're also lying, predatory paedophiles, just shows the nastiness that lurks under the surface.

Nastiness that they seem determined to prioritise when things like this are going on:

US Catholic church sued by alleged abuse victims

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Speaking of schadenfreude, thirty injured as bull jumps into crowd at Spain arena

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Australia judge orders witness to remove niqab in court

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France will begin expelling Roma in police crackdown

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Ultra-orthodox Jews on the rise in UK

Despite bucking the overall trend in the Jewish community and witnessing a rapid growth in birth rates, [Haredi Jews] are experiencing high levels of poverty.

Jonathan Boyd is from the Institute of Jewish Policy Research. He told the conference that the Haredim have been so successful in maintaining their numbers that they could double in size every 18 years.

Sorry, but those two facts together are not "success". Success is children NOT being born into poverty. Children being born into poverty is in fact FAIL. I don't care who you are – don't have more children than you can afford.

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Let's say Burma in almost every paragraph, to annoy the junta.

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Australia's 'toxic' asylum issue

They gloss over the "queue jumper" aspect quite quickly, but that's the most salient point for me.

In which (three short updates) we see a little glimpse of Young Suitov's values. Wait, he has what now?

Suitov was currently standing at the top of the steps, in the early morning light, raking the gravel of the driveway. This was accomplished without touching it physically. When one is fifteen and a new mage, one tends to do things the flashy, inefficient way for the sake of it.

One Dog Night continues. (I really need to find a better name. They've been together for, what, a couple of days now, and the story's continuing for at least another couple.)

N.B. There is an overlap of a sentence at the end of some posts. That's just to do with where I break off writing. Will be fixed in a final edit.

Man grows pea plant inside lung.

Past cases like this inspired me to a particularly silly (and possibly icky, depending on your tastes) piece of worldbuilding. Fiction based on real life weirdness, especially medical, is always the more WTFish for it, I find. Fun times, fun times.

(Warning: acerbic)

Do you believe in God? What religion are you?
I'm God. I don't mind if anyone else is too, but I don't believe in them.

Do you believe in an afterlife? What do you believe happens when you die?
Interesting bioelectrical functions cease. You cease to be amusing*. You decompose. Intellectual and emotional infants around you comfort each other by pretending you're in a better place.
*well, depending on the method of death…

Read the rest of this entry »

Anke (who's currently tinkering with PmWiki in a quest to get us an integrated system on which to run Profusion 2.0 – yay Anke!) reminded me of this quotation from Suitov:

If I lived in your era, I'd be – in the chess club. Editor of the school magazine. Head of the drama society. Picked second last for cricket and rugger, just ahead of the asthmatic girl in bottle-end glasses. But I live in my own context, and I'm employing what are essentially Phys Ed teachers to shout my troops into order. If you don't find that boggling, you're stronger-minded than I.

Which I'd completely forgotten writing, but it strikes me that yes, of course he would say "rugger" (a very posh-schoolboy way of saying "rugby").

Anyhow, current Pro members, you may be able to test the working version soonish, whenever Anke's ready.

Military dog recovers from PTSD after Iraq war

PTSD, which the military characterises as a condition that develops after a life-threatening trauma, has not been researched in animals as thoroughly as in humans. But some experts say animals can experience a form of it.

When will we get over the idea that our psychology couldn't possibly be anything like that of another large social mammal? Of course a dog can develop a traumatic disorder! Know something else? They can feel grief, jealousy, loneliness, humour and joy. Of course they bloody can.

All of those have biological uses. They're not just pretty, meaningless trappings we picked up around the same time as Gug and Mog worked out how to bash two flints together. There's a word for people who think they are the special only ones in the universe who can ever truuuly feeeel things so deeeeply. Well, there are several words for it, but I was thinking of "teenager".

I tend to work from a basic assumption that anyone with a nervous system pretty similar to mine is going to have a brain pretty similar to mine. Making allowances for my weirdly overdeveloped abstract thought and language habits, beginning from the standpoint that the other person's point of view is different but possible for me to understand, at least partway, hasn't led me far wrong before.

I think this is an advantage of being one of those strange, shadowy autistic creatures with supposedly no Theory of Mind. What I actually have is a default assumption that other people don't think like me, but that they do think. In my view that's much superior to swooping around empathising at people on the basis of what I personally like and dislike, not even realising how ridiculously I'm projecting.

"Oh you poor dear, how did you get all that red lacquer on your nails? Do you feel very ridiculous? Oh don't worry, I won't think you're necessarily a shallow bitch!" ← Learning not to do this has stood me in good stead.

The Golden Rule is not gospel for aspies. It's dangerous. I treat others, always assuming I care about their happiness, as I think they would like to be treated. Because then it's about them, not about me. Another good thing about that approach? It includes the potential for iterative improvement.

Via Article_Dan:
Get Lamp: a documentary about text adventure games (aka interactive fiction)

Looks cool. AND as part of that project they've made a video for MC Frontalot's nerdcore track, It Is Pitch Dark, which is all about Zork and similar Infocom zaniness.

Text games are so frotzing cool. I mean, I'm crap at ones you can't finish in a sitting, and do not mention that FRIGGING Babel Fish puzzle, but they're great. In the past I've even tried my hand at writing a few in Inform 6 (sadly these died in a hard drive crashycrash episode, except for a few copies of the compiled games that may still survive somewhere).

Readers with long memories may remember that I loathed Neil Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan". The links in that entry have gone offline and I can't find replacements, but it's a short story (collected in Fragile Things) about CS Lewis's Susan Pevensie and what happens to her after her three siblings die and, cough, go to Narnia. That part of Gaiman's story is fine and well-imagined, as far as I recall, but there's also a section that's needlessly disgusting.

In that story Gaiman is taking a similar line to Philip Pullman's acidic public criticisms of Susan's fate. For what it's worth I agree with them, albeit with a somewhat more sympathetic understanding of Lewis's fear and hatred of adult women (which is, after all, a product of his religion, upbringing and time as much as the silly ideas he put into his head later in life). What happens to Susan is entirely consistent with the Narnia uni(/multi)verse, and considering how badly other characters were screwed over in the last book, not all that exceptional, other than for the petty-sounding reasons given in-character.

Anyway, that is the background.

Now, if you have read Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy and also know a little of Narnia, you must now read The Ivory Horn, the best crossover fanfiction I have ever read. (Not that I have read many, because I hate the very idea, which should tell you how special I think this this one is that I'd praise it to the skies.)

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My daemon's a red panda because I say so. It is currently asleep. Possibly this is a result of salsa cashew nuts, which may, it is airily theorised just now by experts me, have a soporific effect on daemons similar to cedarwood's. Or possibly my daemon is just a lazy little sod, like its realer half.

"You look ill, Rige," Lottir understated.

"Really? Where does it show?" asked Lord Suitov of Applestone, who was sweating bucketfuls, trembling slightly, breathing so hard he was almost panting, and apparently undecided about whether or not to throw up.

Heatstroke

Just about universally requested by my readers, when I asked what I should post more of, were fiction excerpts. That made me happy, so here you are.

In this one we get to see both more of Suitov as a young man, and more of the drawbacks of those atavistic Nordic genes of his.

It's not particularly hot here at present, but I've had the image of… well, what he does at the end… in my mind for a long time.

(delayed post because I've already been quite vocal today)

Is it ever OK to call someone a Nazi?

Another surprisingly thoughtful piece from the 'Magazine' section of BBC News (one could even call some of their articles over-thought, with the amount of detail they go into about apparently trivial news-related topics. I, of course, love that sort of thing).

So when, if ever, is it OK to call someone a Nazi? In my view, if you substitute "be very rude" for "call someone a Nazi", the answer's roughly the same.

Last night, after going to bed quite upset about the family cat remaining seriously ill, I dreamed about my long-since-ex-dog, Bracken.

I was in some kind of town centre pedestrian shopping street, and she needed to wee, so I found a tree for her and that was all right. (Picture the usual sort of trees that grow in a one-paving-slab-size patch of dirt in town centres, surrounded by grilles on the ground, where idiots tend to drop cigarette butts.) Right near the end of what I remember, I saw my mother also preparing to pee on a tree, which was just odd.

Piper continues alive and alert, although lethargic, complaining of a dry mouth and barely eating (clear signs of kidney trouble, which both his humans suspected before it was diagnosed). On a positive note, we haven't seen any frothy pee after he started antibiotics. He is receiving fluids subcutaneously (in case you didn't know this, cats have a LOT of space under their skin. Loose skin is good protection from other predators who might try to grab them, and helps them squeeze through tiny places. Our neighbour Princess, a huge Maine Coon cross, has been observed forcing herself through a 6cm gap). (Apparently my school teacher genes are activating as some kind of coping mechanism.)

Giving up on our spoiled cat is not an option while he remains bright-eyed and squeaky and wants to live. If there were such a thing as kidney dialysis for cats, his mother would have him on it. We're far from rich, and he's not even a dog, but this is still a family member we're talking about.

Animals are sort of a big deal for me. I'm autistic, so it's a given that I can relate to non-human animals more easily than to humans. Furthermore, and given that it's my understanding that humans are hard-wired to need tactile contact with others, I can't touch other humans without it hurting (the discomfort is psychological but altogether real). If I'm after touch stim, I need – physically need – an animal.

The family pet is the first thing I look for each morning and the first thing I go and find when I get home from work, unless he happens to want something and has consequently come to wait by the door. He's my perpetual fall-back topic of conversation. He never comforts me when I'm sad, but he amuses me whenever he's hungry.

As it happens, I'm wired to live with two dogs, so lodging with a single cat was already less than ideal, but the thought of a house empty of quadrupedal life is… not something I can contemplate with equanimity.

This is the source material. Do I really write like JKR? :S

edit: I pasted in a previous blog entry and it told me I write like Dan Brown! Revolver, noose or pills, blog-readers?

edit 2: I pasted in my subsequent blog post and now I write like Douglas Adams. That I can live with. Seriously, I wonder how on earth it judges these things. Length of words? Number of times the term "subcutaneous" is used?

I have a confession. I really dislike the niqab – the full Islamic veil. If I were asked to vote on a ban, I'd really have to grit my teeth in order to vote against it rather than abstain. But I would vote against. My own feelings about the demonisation and control of women are my own business, and I do not accept that they belong in law.

Statistically there's far more risk to the public in this country from cats than from face veils¹, and (albeit, again, on principle only) I'd be against banning cats too.

How will the vote go in France? Will other countries follow suit? The Netherlands perhaps? It's just not going to end well for moderate hippie can't-we-all-get-along bleeding-heart-and-artist scum like me, that's all.

¹ I have not verified this. This is what is known as an unfounded claim. (If you've never seen one of those from me before, you haven't been paying attention.) But you get the point. There's definitely more danger from water than from either of the other things, but stalwart attempts to ban H₂O haven't yet made headway.

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Questionable statistics time! By 2051 in the UK, by comparison to the 2001 census, there will still be a comfortable white majority, but other ethnicities will have increased in number by a long way. 79% white d00ds is the prediction, compared to 92% in 2001.

This is from a study published by the University of Leeds (and led by a geographer for some reason) and compiled by a bunch of statisticians, who, though Bau knows I like you all in a generalised benign sort of way, just shouldn't be allowed to predict anything to do with living beings ever.

I shudder to imagine how the red-masthead headlines will summarise this. The BBC's long-form headline is relatively neutral and informative. (update just before posting: oh look, I was right)

Incidentally, we don't have enough ethnic minority spies. I hear there are some Russians currently looking for work…

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Businesses 'profit from investing in nature'.

A survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) finds that in some nations, more than half of CEOs see nature loss as a challenge to business growth.

That seems bizarre, and I guess consumer-driven, but possibly a good thing?

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US 'disappointed' that Switzerland won't extradite an old man who admitted anally raping a thirteen-year-old girl. Oh, and his house arrest has been lifted too. The Swiss are holding to their position based on some legal technicalities. Fine, but just wait until he sets foot outside the border…

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Schools are advised against holding swimming lessons during Ramadan. To prevent children accidentally drinking water.

I don't know if things have changed since I last splashed around in a school swimming pool, but the very last thing I wanted to do was swallow that chlorinated, wee-filled stuff.

It's not only swimming lessons that should be rescheduled, apparently. Exams and sex education should also be postponed because of the disruption to sleep and the requirement to avoid sexual thoughts during the month.

Am I misremembering the principle of the thing, or isn't the point of Ramadan to fast around and in addition to your normal life, in order to feel closer to those without enough food, rather than to change everyone's lifestyle to suit your requirements? I'm sure I remember something about how following your faith ostentatiously is kind of missing the point.

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Katherine Jenkins to star in Christmas Doctor Who. Next Easter special: Dizzee Rascal. Next Christmas special: Nick Griffin.

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Earth 0.01% younger² than previously thought, say scientists. Young Earth creationists claim victory!

² my maths, so blame me if I forgot the difference between a Brit and a Merkun billion. Can't they publish these figures in sensible powers of ten?

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A new 'liquid armour', working on the principle of "what custard does when you whack it", which is more formally known as shear-thickening and is a particular habit of things called non-Newtonian fluids, can STOP BULLETS WITH ITS MIND. And some Kevlar for show, but basically with its mind.

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Choir to sing their own DNA. "Somewhat uninspiring lyrics but the music was terribly natural and organic and, um, nucleosidic."

It's a full step in geekiness above the Ayreon song that features vocalists singing in binary…

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Pictures time. This tapestry maps the lines of what claims to be the world's biggest diffraction pattern. (Yes, I have heard it publically claim this…)

A rare Brazilian tapir calf at Linton Zoo

A margay (wildcat) making like a parrot…

…and a cyclist in a supremely daft pose, for which we at Black Dog Blog salute him.

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The Royal Horse Artillery goes one step further than eating their own dog food, instead cuddling up with their own… well…

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And finally, the earliest evidence of a pet tortoise in Britain. Pretty cool to find a pet tortoise alive 130 years ago, wouldn't you say? Well, what if I tell you it was A GUARD TORTOISE IN A FRICKIN' CASTLE and that it had dominion over a PACK OF VICIOUS ATTACK DOGS AND CATS? This was one badass Tetsudo, my friends. It was probably called something like Avenger or Bloodletter³. The fact that it was the only pet tortoise in the vicinity was no stop to its badassery, because its supreme awesomeness permitted it to impregnate other tortoises anywhere within 45° longitude of its location, which, as was previously mentioned but bears repeating, was a FRICKIN' CASTLE.

Tortoises are so cool.

³ or possibly "Lightning", because some senses of humour never change.

I know, a sodding football story, but I love octopuses too much not to give Paul a brief spot here.

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DNA repair 'scissors' discovered

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Gang 'picks up penguin' from Dublin city zoo

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Green woodhoopoes pumping each other up for a big fight. "You're a tiger! You're invincible! Say it; say 'I'm a tiger'! Now get out there and peck 'im!"

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Purrvy underwear-stealing cat is reported to the police by his own servants. THE BETRAYAL!

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When should GPs refrain from saying "actually, you bloody nutter, I'm calling the police"?