Bastard.

I stand by all my previous comments about that bastard David Blunkett. Because I was right:

David was certainly furious. He was also hysterical. He directed me, without delay, to order staff back into the prison. I told him that we did not, at that time, have enough staff in the prison to contemplate such a move but that many more staff were on their way from other prisons. I insisted, however, that although I was determined to take the prison back as quickly as possible, I could not, and would not, risk staff or prisoner lives in attempting to do so. He shrieked at me that he didn’t care about lives, told me to call in the Army and “machine-gun” the prisoners. He then ordered me to take the prison back immediately. I refused. David hung up.

I'm one of those people who believes that prisoners have fewer rights than the rest of us and should not be mollycoddled; prison shouldn't be all that nice a place to be. I don't, however, think that Home Secretaries should be allowed to gun them down. Call me picky.

Wow.

It is distinctly possible that this is the best blog post ever.

A rather difficult personal issue in 1985/6 saw me disappear into the underbelly of Glasgow, emerge driving a minicab at night in Peckham, S.E. London, then reappear, with a surprising number of extremely colourful acquaintances, working for a spy equipment shop in Mayfair. I left and set up my own "security" business in the Borough, just south of London Bridge, in partnership with an ex-armed robber called Tom.

You can probably picture the next couple of years: bug sweeps, body armour, unofficial meetings with the Foreign Office, ex-SAS soldiers, hidden video cameras... and there were less predictable things ...

 

The real problem with Americans.

As you might have noticed, there's always a lot of talk about what stupid insufferable imperialist uncultured arrogant fat violent ignorant parochial bastards the Americans are, and I disagree with it for two reasons: firstly, because it's not particularly true (apart from the fat thing, but, as I've said before, the food over there's just so fantastic that anyone who lives in America without getting fat is, frankly, stupid); and, secondly and far more importantly, because it distracts from the real problem. For yes, there is a real problem, and no amount of arrogantly and stupidly invading countries like Iraq and Germany and Japan for no reason at all while eating hot-dogs could ever come close to the sheer awfulness of what that bloody nation insists on inflicting on us.

Americans think Chevy Chase is funny.

Just think what a great film Spies Like Us would be had they cast anyone else in his role. Anyone at all. Ava Gardner would have been an improvement.

As if that weren't bad enough, it turns out that Americans love that Chevy Chase thing, whatever it's supposed to be, so much that they just can't do without it. And his recent and blessed lack of film appearances has therefore created, rather than a gigantic sigh of relief, a gap in the market.

Step forward, Will Ferrell. Great.

I was very pleasantly surprised by how good Wedding Crashers was. It was excellent, in fact. I was really enjoying it till Will Ferrell entered and, even with just a tiny cameo role, proceeded to shit all over the film. Like Chevy Chase, not only is he not even slightly amusing at his best, not only does he nevertheless inexplicably exude the smug certainty that he is the funniest thing alive, but he also has no ability to appear even vaguely realistic. It is impossible to maintain any suspension of disbelief while watching a gurning twonk who might as well have the words "Look at me! I'm in a film! Acting!" emblazoned on a large puce hat.

I have a request. I do not wish Chevy Chase dead — that would certainly be unreasonable — but the fact remains that, one day, contrary to the impression given by the look on his face, he will die. Chevy, when you go, could you take Will with you? Cheers.

Keeping up.

Jon provides plenty of ranting about this ridiculous story, so I don't have to. I'm just going, as is my wont, to pick up on one little detail:

But they say her comments afterwards raised further concerns, for example allegedly referring to the students as "blacks" — something she denied yesterday.

I think I've mentioned before that, when I was at school in South London in the Eighties, it was considered borderline offensive to describe black people as "black" and polite to describe them as "coloured". Forward to the Macpherson Report, and one of the damning pieces of evidence of the police's institutional racism is the fact that many of their officers described black people using the offensive term "coloured" instead of the polite "black". If I could bear to spend more than about ten minutes in London, I could find myself being condemned as racist as a result of trying to use non-racist terminology. Which would be annoying. But now it looks like it's changed again. That a girl used the word "black" is now considered by some as an excuse to arrest her, and the suggestion that she did so is considered such a serious allegation that she feels it worth bothering to deny it.

Personally, I'm not superstitious about language, and don't care which words people use as long as they don't say "wacky" or "zany", but I'm perfectly willing to accommodate people who are deeply offended by certain words: I don't say "fuck" within earshot of my grandma, and I won't say "nigger" around black people. What I'm not willing to do is to waste my time reading press releases from victim groups so that I can keep up to date with which words I'm allowed to use this year and which I'm not. Make up your minds, please.

There is a good reason.

I and others argued for bloody ages here about scientific consensus, but none of us managed to make this beautifully succinct point:

The consensus convinces because there is no good reason to suppose that so many eminent scientists are lying or deceiving themselves when they say climate change is happening. But if you give me cause to believe that departure from the consensus gets a person ostracised, then there is a good reason.

Thank you, Natalie.

Got my vote.

There is only one good thing about this story, and it is this:

Tory MP Philip Davies said of the attack: "This is outrageous.

"If there's anybody who should f*** off it's the Muslims who are doing this kind of thing. Police should pull out the stops to track down these vile thugs."

I do believe that this is the first time I've seen an MP use the phrase "fuck off" in an official statement. And a Tory, too. My, my.

Numerology.

I wasn't blogging back in 2001, so didn't get an opportunity to rant as publicly as I can now about the crappy numerology emails that started circulating on the 12th of September. "Oo, look! If you add the flight number of the first plane to the fuel capacity of the second one, then convert the name of the destination of the third plane into numbers using this arbitrary calculation, then square it, then take away my birthday, then round up to the nearest 911, YOU GET 911!! COINCIDENCE??!!? I think NOT!!!!!!" I did point out to one of my more superstitious colleagues (who had forwarded such an email to us all) that, if the date had any significance to the perpetrators, it was slightly more likely to be the Siege of Vienna, and that the planes might well have been picked for their large fuel capacities and hence explosive power rather than the mystical significance of their flight numbers — especially when numerology has its roots in a Hebrew tradition, not something Muslims are notorious for their reverence to. She was very upset and shouted at me about how I always have to be right about everything and since when was I such an expert that I could claim to know more about this than whoever the fuck it was who'd originally written the email that Simon in Accounts had forwarded to her? I agreed that yes, some random numerologist with an email account, a font fetish, and a gippy caps lock key probably did have more insight into the event than the combined ranks of the FBI, CIA, and FAA. (Hey, it seemed like a good bit of sarcasm at the time. It was early days. How was I to know I was right?)

Forward to today, and... oh, for crying out loud.

Since when is five years and one month a special, significant, momentous anniversary? Anyone celebrate their five-years-and-a-month wedding anniversary? Anyone mourn the five-years-and-a-month anniversary of the death of a loved one? Anyone remember their five-years-and-a-month birthday party? Anyone?

The incident occurred exactly five years and one month after terrorists flew two planes into New York's World Trade Center, bringing down its landmark twin towers.

In other words, the incident occurred on the eleventh. Of a month. So fucking what? Is every minor disaster that occurs on the eleventh of some month or other going to be given this stupid coverage from now on?

Yes, of course people were reminded of 9/11 because a plane hit a building in New York. That's a genuine parallel worth reporting on, obviously. Had it occurred on the eleventh of September, again, it'd be stupid not to mention it, even if it were mere coincidence. But the eleventh of any other month is not worth mentioning. We have eleven of them every year, and stuff happens on those days. Get over it.

And what's so special about a month, anyway? Are months really more significant than weeks? What if this had happened on, say, the 18th of September? Would it have been reported as "exactly five years and one week after terrorists flew two planes into New York's World Trade Center, bringing down its landmark twin towers"? Probably, sadly, yes.

So, to recap, any disaster that could possibly look a bit like a terrorist attack and occurs on the eleventh or twenty-fifth of any month, the first or eighth of January, February, April, June, August, September, or November, the second or ninth of May, July, October, or December, or the fourth or (in a leap year) the third of March, is likely to be reported as some sort of significant anniversary of 9/11, and therefore scarier than if it had happened on the dull old nineteenth of June.

All because of an attack by people who use a different calendar.

16 Blocks.

I don't tend to go to the cinema these days — films are released so quickly on DVD now, and I see no reason to fork out a handful of money just to listen to other people cough into their mobile phones. So film reviews on this blog are likely to appear a few months after the film was actually in the cinema. Sorry about that, but hey.

So anyway. The Gauntlet is a seriously good film — strangely little known for one of the great Eastwood films. So I was interested to hear that a remake was underway. And then I heard the big idea behind it: instead of having to get a witness safely across a couple of states while the mob and the entire police department try to kill them both, the hero was only going to have to go sixteen blocks. That seemed to me like a very nice idea: concentrate and intensify the action. Bruce Willis playing the Eastwood role — another good idea. This film was elbowing its way to the top of my must-see list. And then I discovered that Richard Donner was directing. Hmm.

It's not that Richard Donner's a bad director. He's made some very good films. But he's made some dodgy films, too. And, even in his good films, he has this penchant for conveying action and excitement by getting the whole cast to shout at each other at once. It kind of works in the Lethal Weapon films, but combine it with high-pitched voices — as in The Goonies — and you get a noise that never fails to induce a migraine. And the Lethal Weapon films, though great fun, are kind of frivolous — not a tone that suits The Gauntlet. He likes a bit of silliness, a bit of slapstick. On the other hand, he's great at conveying camaraderie, making actors really seem like they're the best of friends, and he prefers a good honest explosion and a squad of stuntmen to CGI any day. So he might have been right for this film. And might have been quite disastrously wrong.

So I bought it. And it was a great relief and pleasant surprise to me to discover that 16 Blocks is by far the greatest film of Richard Donner's career.

I just cannot fault this. Willis gives an astounding performance as the washed-up alcoholic cop: looking totally hungover most of the time, then occasionally flashing into bright-eyed alertness, like his younger self is fighting to get out. David Morse is as good as ever, if not better, completely underplaying his character's menace to seem like a genuinely reasonable guy. Mos Def, who up till now I'd only known as a rapper, is excellent too. The script is superb: it takes the essence of the original and retells the story on its own terms, coming up with new motivations for the characters, a different back story, and a better ending — the weak ending being the only real problem with The Gauntlet. And the direction is perfect: the photography's beautiful, the pacing and tension are just right, and Donner hasn't asked his actors to conduct half their conversations shouting over gunfire — in fact, everyone's very quiet most of the time. I cannot think of any way in which this film could be any better.

Donner could, though. The DVD includes the alternative ending that they shot but didn't use, providing an object lesson in how people capable of true excellence are often incapable of quality control. Donner and Richard Wenk, the screenwriter, introduce it by explaining that the ending in the film is what was in the script, but that, while shooting, they saw an opportunity to improve the ending, offering, they say, more empathy. Empathy? The alternative ending, in the space of a few seconds, turns Morse's character from a thoroughly believable bad guy into a silly plot-driven caricature, turns the ending from a beautiful bit of understated realism into an over-the-top cartoon, and is not even as well shot. Looks like it took some disgruntled preview audiences or pushy producers to tell these guys to stick with the work of genius and ditch the poorly-thought-out hackery. Funny old world.

In short, watch this film. If you didn't already, six months ago.

Proper science.

Back in June, I expressed a certain amount of cynicism towards the results claimed by scientists who rely excessively on computer models. Despite my saying up front that I wasn't especially picking on climatologists, there was still a bit of an indignant kerfuffle in the comments courtesy of a reader who believed that any even tangential criticism of the humans-are-boiling-the-planet-to-death theory — even just a criticism of the methods that some of its exponents use to reach some of their conclusions — is an ignorant attack on the science of climatology and, indeed, on the whole of science itself.

So it's nice to see this example of climatologists using some seriously impressive science to get some proper results:

A team at the Danish National Space Center has discovered how cosmic rays from exploding stars can help to make clouds in the atmosphere. The results support the theory that cosmic rays influence Earth's climate.

....

The experiment called SKY (Danish for "cloud") took place in a large reaction chamber which contained a mixture of gases at realistic concentrations to imitate the chemistry of the lower atmosphere.

Ultraviolet lamps mimicked the action of the Sun's rays. During experimental runs, instruments traced the chemical action of the penetrating cosmic rays in the reaction chamber.

The data revealed that electrons released by cosmic rays act as catalysts, which significantly accelerate the formation of stable, ultra-small clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules which are building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei. A vast numbers of such microscopic droplets appeared, floating in the air in the reaction chamber.

"We were amazed by the speed and efficiency with which the electrons do their work of creating the building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei," says team leader Henrik Svensmark, who is Director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research within the Danish National Space Center. "This is a completely new result within climate science."

Now, this result is going to get jumped all over by some very enthusiastic people who think that global warming is complete bollocks but know very little about science. I'm not one of them. This is a very new result, and it would therefore be foolish to go drawing too many conclusions from it. For all we know, for various reasons that no-one has even thought of investigating yet, this makes it even more likely that man is catastrophically heating the Earth and needs drastic action to save future generations. (For the record, my main disagreement with the global-warming crowd is over what that drastic action, if it prove necessary, should be.)

No, I'm drawing attention to this news for two reasons.

Firstly, we now know for a fact that every single climate model ever developed, from the basic ones to the very best of the best, omitted a major and significant piece of information about what shapes our climate. It was omitted simply because no-one knew it. It would be very surprising indeed if more scientific discoveries about what affects our climate aren't made in the next century. That doesn't mean that there is no point in using computer models in science — they are very useful indeed. But it does remind us of how rash it is to make a prediction of the future based on a model of a system that we do not fully understand. This isn't a criticism just of the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming, either: all those climate models that showed that the Earth was cooling down, that it was staying the same temperature, that it was warming up but not because of man... all those models are now every bit as obsolete as the ones which blamed America for plunging us all into a fiery death, or something.

Secondly, this is a great example of a proper climatology experiment. What's happened here is that a group of scientists have discovered what happens when the gases of the lower atmosphere interact with ultraviolet light and electrons, and they can be confident that they're right because the way they did it was to take the gases of the lower atmosphere, some ultraviolet light, some electrons, and mix them all up and watch to see what happened. And here's a thing: we know enough about electrons to model them accurately, we know enough about the various gases in the atmosphere to model them accurately, and we know enough about light to model it accurately, yet no-one got this result from a mathematical model. In fact, if this result had come from a model, it would still be regarded, quite rightly, as a hypothesis, albeit one with a little more evidence in its favour; it is only once the result has actually been replicated in reality — as it has — that it attains the exalted status of fact.

Over the years, climatologists have often used similarly robust methods to develop the theories behind global warming — how do you think we know that carbon dioxide contributes to the Greenhouse Effect? — and those theories are generally solid and sound. At other times, climatologists have used computer models to make predictions about what will happen a hundred or more years in the future. There is a reason why some of us place a lot more trust in the former and cynicism in the latter, and that reason, thank you very much, is not ignorance of climatology, ignorance of computer modelling, or ignorance of science itself. On the contrary, it is scientific ignorance that leads the general public to give both types of result the same weight.

Improvisatorily coinificating.

Speaking to someone yesterday, they three times used a word which I suspect is entirely of their own devising: "updation", meaning "update".

Nice one, I think. I like the idea of "I'm going on a blind dation."