Shank

Geddit? It sounds a bit rude, doesn't it?

As a vegetarian it's a little hard to think of anything meanigful to relate about shank. It makes me think more of:

The Shawshank Redemption
Longshanks, Strider's nickname in the Lord of the Rings.

Given Strider is already a nickname, the fact that he in turn had a nickname is silly. But you can't really say that it was Aragorn's nickname. Multiple identities can give you a massive headache.

Speaking of which, I was both entertained and appalled by the news that US agents are adopting multiple online personalities in order to promote American interests on facebook, Twitter and, for all I know, the Doctor Who Fan Forum. Not appalled because it's so wrong - it's especially revealing in moral terms that they aren't allowed to do this in English for fear of US lawsuits - but because I've done it myself.

Many years ago I was engaged in an online argument. I was losing. Not on rational grounds, I believed, but simply because there were more people with the opposite view on the site than agreed with me.

So I cheated. I created, basically, a sock puppet who sided with me. To make it more convincing, my sock puppet didn't entirely agree with me, but backed up the core arguments. At one point I was even arguing with myself. Eventually, with two people onside, the tide of debate turned. It became more acceptable for other voices to agree with me. I won.

This victory was so massively important to me that I cannot now remember what the fuck it was about.

So I can hardly blame the US military for stooping to this tactic when I once used it myself. In the end, the second online persona became so dominant over my original online identify that it took over completely and eventually got its own website. I scare myself sometimes.

S

PS: Apparently the sock puppets are specifically not targeting Facebook and twitter. Don't panic.

Gigahertz

I'm not much of one for radio, apart from a few teenage years spent listening to the cricket coverage from around the world under a blanket. I don't know why I was under a blanket, it was 7 o'clock at night and they were playing the West Indies. I must have been hiding from someone.

My roommate in my first year at University loved radio. He loved it so much that he turned it on while I was still asleep. Despite this, when he finally moved out he accused me of forcing him out. I'm still, to this day, trying to work out what I could possibly have done that was worse that switching the radio on while someone else in the room is still asleep. Fucking weird. Maybe I unleashed a horde of killer pixies that devoured all his favourite family pets. I don't remember doing that, but I was pretty drunk a lot of the time.

I went for a time with no TV, and radio suddenly became a lot more important to me. When I worked in Cardiff between 1997 and 1998 the wireless was my entertainer, and the only place to turn for news, drama and music.

God, I was bored.

On the other hand, a radio show is my favourite thing in the entire universe: the BBC Lord of the Rings radio series, an adaptation so good that it's almost possible to suggest that it surpasses its source material. After all, the Lord of the Rings, while magnificent, is not a contender for the best book ever written. Most popular, perhaps. Not best. The BBC LOTR, on the other hand, must be one of the finest bits of radio drama ever committed to tape. If you've never heard it, seek it out.

Bolshevik

I simultaneously have a problem with authority and a dislike of confrontation. This, as you can imagine, leads me into a spaghetti junction of contradictions as a person, and is probably the core reason why - every now and again - this blog turns into a rant. I don't like ranting to the people I ought to be ranting to, so it all comes out here.

For this, I apologise. If anyone actually read this, I'd apologise doubly, perhaps while wearing some sort of punitive vegetable on my head.

But is it too much to ask that our authority figures not be complete morons? Skimming lightly over a Government so shallow that it makes policy based on TV documentaries, why do so many of us get stuck with senior colleagues with no management or leadership skills, whose main job is to lead and manage. Did the people who in turn appointed them get their idea of the world by watching the henchmen of evil villains on old TV shows?

"What I really need is a right-hand man who is so monumentally dim that they will never challenge my authority, but will - through their fucking massive incompetence - inadvertently scupper every plan I ever have to rule the world or, possibly, catch that pigeon."

Yes. That must be it. There's probably an ILM course about it.

This is all very well if you're a fictional character who must be clever enough to hatch plausible stabs at planetary domination, but can't actually ever succeed. If you're running a medium sized organisation I'm less clear of exactly what benefit you derive from giving out top jobs to the mentally enfeebled or those so far up their own bottoms you could use them as a bowling ball. How do we think Fred Goodwin happened? He must have started somewhere, like Ebola.

I count myself stupendously lucky that I couldn't possibly say any of these things about my actual colleagues. They are universally spiffing. Oh yes.