Dave Gorman's Blog, page 23

Flickr Sometimes Deletes Your Content Even Though They Don't Have To

So flickr finally replied to my questions.

The answer was: "After reviewing your recent correspondence, we have no further comments to make regarding this case, and consider it closed."

I think this sums it up. Click on the image to see it at full size:


I guess it's time to start searching for a new online photo-community...


(Previously#1 and Previously#2)

Oh Flickr, You've Been Degbanned

This is a follow up post. It'll make more sense if you've read the first in the saga, but for those joining the story here, let me give you a brief synopsis of the tale so far:
January 12, 2006: I post a photo to Flickr. The photo leads a happy, productive life, making lots of friends around the internet.February 17, 2012: I receive an email from Flickr telling me that the photo has been deleted because a company called Wasteland, Inc. has filed a copyright claim on it.February 17, 2012: I file a counterclaim to Flickr's owners Yahoo.March 2, 2012: I receive an email from Flickr telling me that my counterclaim has not been challenged and that I am now allowed to repost my photo.March 3, 2012: I discover that Wasteland, Inc - who turned out to be a pornography company specialising in fetish and bondage work - had hired a "multimedia copyright protection company" called Degban to handle their copyright claims.March 4, 2012: I email the CEO of Degban, Taban Panahi, to ask him how on earth they came to believe my photo was copyrighted by Wasteland. His, somewhat odd reply, tells me that Degban has been subject to a hacking attack and that it's not their fault and that I shouldn't be angry at him and that actually I should feel sorry for him and anyway his dog ate his homework... Or something like that.And much has happened since. It's been written about at slashdot, The Daily Dot, Torrent Freak, TechDirt, links were tweeted by giants of the twittersphere, Glinner and JackOfKent and, perhaps, most exciting of all, it was mentioned by the porn industry's trade mag, Adult Video News. Woo hoo. One for the scrapbook, there.

All this means that I've been bombarded with information and comments, here, on twitter, on flickr, via email and elsewhere. And to varying degrees, I've been in communication with the three companies involved. I've gathered more information and some fresh perspective on things. I'll divide it into three parts.

Part 1: Degban
Since my preposterous Taban Panahi-mail we have had two phone conversations. They have been as preposterous as the email.

Selected Highlights:
"I'm pretty sure... I'm very sure... some idiot in my company just thought the password is too long, I'm going to change it to 1 2 3"), "when I'm in London I will buy you a beer, you can see that I am genuine, I'll apologise in person and, if you are angry enough you can even punch me, I wouldn't mind, ok?"
The main thing was that Taban was sticking to his story. They were hacked. It wasn't his fault. He wants to be friends. I'm being unreasonable. He was thinking of offering me a job. I should be careful. It's not his fault. They were hacked.

I have no idea if Degban were hacked or not. It doesn't sound like a credible explanation to me. It sounds like someone trying to distance themselves from something because they know it has legal repercussions. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

The first public comment from Degban that I saw, was in the AVN piece:

"On February 29th, our SMTP server was accessed by an outsider through a password phishing scam," the company said. "The intruder then used our SMTP server to report legitimate content as piracy, using our own Take-Down notice templates. This was done to reduce our credibility with hosting companies..."

There's much more of it and you can read it in the article if you fancy, but it's the first three words that interest me. On February 29th.

Hmm.

My photo was deleted from flickr on February 17th. Those hackers are much more sophisticated than I imagined.

But other holes were starting to appear in their story too. Because other people were scrutinising what they do. Thanks to ChillingEffects there are plenty of examples of them filing bogus takedowns. The Torrent Freak article explains how, of the 82 takedowns they issued for the porn star Destiny Dixon, 25 were incorrect. (When you learn that the incorrect takedowns included albums featuring Destiny's Child and Alesha Dixon you start to see quite how unsophisticated it is)

So I did some digging to see if any of the takedowns issued by Degban on behalf of Wasteland were similarly, obviously, out of whack.

This is a notice they sent to Google on January 31:
Numbers 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 16 and 20 relate not to porn produced and owned by Wasteland but to an episode of the TV show, Dexter called, Teenage Wasteland. In this example, and the one discovered by Torrent Freak, above, over 30% of their takedowns are aimed at the wrong target.

There are countless other examples. On January 29 they issued 38 takedowns for the game, Tony Hawk's American Wasteland as well as several for an audio recording by the American comic, Patton Oswalt (called Zombie Spaceship Wasteland), a film called Children of the Wasteland, Music from Pete Doherty (Grace Wasteland) , music from In This Moment (A Star Crossed Wasteland) and more episodes of Dexter. On January 30 they took down Children of the Wasteland and an album called This Present Wasteland by The Church. There are more obvious mistakes on February 1, February 4th and again on February 4th.

Now it might well be that each of these examples was infringing someone's copyright. But it shows that their system churns out false positives and the checks and balances required to oversee it are simply not in place. And if you're hitting false positives, not all of them are going to be infringing.

Like, say, for example... mine.

Degban works almost exclusively for the porn industry. It's an industry that feels very threatened by piracy and so anyone offering a solution is bound to be tempting. But there's no real excuse for a company that fires off DMCA takedowns without double checking that the content is infringing on their client's copyright. In those few links there are more than 100 bad takedowns. All sent in the name of Wasteland. You can't have that kind of hit rate and not hit innocent parties.

Part 2: Wasteland

The CEO of Wasteland left a comment on my previous blog post. I emailed him. We've exchanged quite a few emails since. So far, I don't think he's put a foot wrong. Apart from hiring Degban obviously. He seems appalled and embarrassed by what has happened in his company's name and is keen to hold Degban to account. He's certainly the nicest pornographer I've ever dealt with.


That was a short part. Part three is going to be long. Shall we have a cup of tea first?


Now...

Part 3: Flickr/Yahoo
I think this is the part that disappoints me most. It's saying something when the only one of the three companies to come out on the front foot and offer to communicate with me is Wasteland. But that's what's happened. Congratulations, Yahoo! Your conduct is worse than that of the pornographers in this tale.

I have to communicate with flickr and Yahoo! separately. Flickr have yet to reply to a single email about it. Yahoo do reply. Eventually. It takes them 5 days. And then it's the kind of reply that doesn't actually reply to anything. Imagine typing a reply to someone who's asked 4 questions, knowing that you've not attempted to address 3 of them, and still ending it with the words, "we trust this answers your concerns"? It doesn't. And they know it doesn't. That's Yahoo.



But putting the lack of communication to one side (there are reasons) it's flickr's ham fisted interpretation of the DMCA that I think is inexcusable. And here's where my perspective has shifted somewhat. Because since all this erupted I've read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in some detail. And I've looked around at other sites and the way they handle takedown notices. And I can't find one site that does it quite like flickr. They're all subject to the same laws... so you'd think they'd have established the same policies too.

The terms of the DMCA dictate that when someone files a copyright claim the service provider - in this case, flickr - is obliged to: respond expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing.

And when a user - in this case, me - files a counter notice that goes unchallenged for 14 days, flickr is obliged to replace the removed material and cease disabling access to it.

But flickr have not replaced the material they removed. They removed the whole page. Not just the photo but everything that went with it. And they've replaced not one jot of it.

Flickr's policy on this is complicated. If both parties are based in the US they don't delete the content. They just disable access to it - hide it - until the issue has been sorted out. It's only when one or both parties are not US based that it pans out in this clumsy and unsatisfactory way.

Earlier this evening - as I was writing this post - flickr's senior community manager, Zack, sent me an email asking if he could call me. It's the first time flickr have tried to communicate. Finally. I thought we were getting somewhere.

We weren't. We had a lengthy phone conversation. It achieved nothing. I liked Zack. He's not a preposterous idiot, like Taban, but he seems hamstrung by his job, seemingly unable or unwilling to answer almost any question in case that somehow gets him into trouble further down the line.

We could agree that my photo was not infringing any copyright and that I had paid flickr to host it and that they had deleted it... but not that they should replace it.

When I asked Zack if he could tell me why the rules were different for non-US based customers he said that he couldn't tell me. I asked if he knew and couldn't tell me because he wasn't allowed to or if he couldn't tell me because he simply didn't know. He replied that he couldn't tell me that either. When I asked if he thought they could replace the photo he said he didn't know. I told him that I knew they had managed to replace a whole account that had been deleted recently, and he told me that replacing an account was not the same as replacing a page. I asked him why he thought they didn't have to comply with the terms of the DMCA and replace the photo and he told me he wasn't able to answer questions like that.

I don't believe Zack's employers are giving him the tools required to do his job.
"If it's possible to replace the photo, will you do so?"
"Ack... I ... um... that's tricky... I can't say yes to that."
"But the only reason you wouldn't say yes to that, is if you can imagine a situation in which you discover it is possible but still don't do it?"
"Yes."
"And can you imagine that happening? Can you imagine one of your engineers saying that he can replace the photo... and you deciding not to do it?"
"Well... no."
"So promise me that if it's possible to replace it, you will replace it."
"I don't think I can do that."

Sigh.

The thing that intrigued me most was that several times Zack repeated that he found it highly unlikely that any company would ever explain its policies on things like this. I disagree. That's not been my experience at all.

Flickr is a photo-sharing site. It does not want to delete its customer's photos.
If it didn't want to delete my photo then it must have felt compelled to do so.
In my experience companies always explain when they are compelled to do something that they don't want to do and that they know their customers don't like.
Why wouldn't you pass the buck and blame the big, bad authority that's making you do the unpopular stuff?

"I'm sorry guv, I'd love to give you another drink but we're only licensed til 1am so I have to stop serving," makes much more sense than, "I'm sorry guv, I'd love to give you another drink but I'm not going to and nor will I explain why."

Of course the alternative is that it's just a badly formulated policy. In which case... just change it.

I'm much more interested in seeing them change the policy going forward than I am in seeing this one picture replaced. And it's not as if I'm asking them to defy the DMCA. They're already doing that. I'm just asking them to obey it.

The Man From Degban, He Say, "Um... it wasn't us, honest!"

If this picture looks a bit familiar it might be because I blogged about it back in January 2006.

Or, of course, it might just be that you're familiar with the alphabet. I think most of us are.

Here's the thing. These letters are painted on metal shopfront shutters. They're by an artist called Eine. He's become quite famous these last few years. In 2010, David Cameron gave Barack Obama one of Eine's paintings... but that's by the by.

In January 2006 I went out for a late night bike ride with my camera and my tripod and returned having snapped several of these letters. I posted them to flickr and added some musings about whether or not the complete alphabet was in the area.

People started leaving comments on the photos saying that they knew where some of the missing letters were and within two days I'd completed the lot. Putting them together in one image like this was the obvious thing to do... so I did it. Individually I don't think the pictures are much cop... but together I think they look quite nice.

Anyway, this soon became one of my most popular images on flickr. By October 2007 it had been viewed by nearly 160,000 people. It had received 100s of comments and favourites from fellow flickr users. It was published in a Brazilian magazine and linked to by hundreds of blogs and was one of the first image search results for words like typeface, font and alphabet. It was linked to by the brilliant Boing Boing, and by Wikipedia as a reference on Eine's page... all of which kept the views turning over long after it had been buried beneath all my other photos.

But I can only tell you the number of views/favourites/comments etc. up to October 11th 2007 because that's the last record of it at its original url in the internet archive.

Unfortunately, on February 17th this year, Flickr - who are owned by Yahoo! - deleted the image from their servers. The page it was on disappeared... and with it, all the comments, favourites, and the record of its views disappeared too. That stuff matters only because I'm vain... but every blog that linked to it now has a broken link that goes nowhere and that matters because links are what make the internet the internet. With all those links broken, 6 years worth of photo-sharing has been undone.

I don't have a beef with Flickr for deleting the image. They didn't do so because they wanted to or because they were being bloody minded. They did it because they had to. By law. It's down to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Sites like flickr - and yahoo, twitpic, youtube, yfrog, facebook, blogger, wordpress etc etc - allow their users to upload content. If they were held responsible for every bit of content on their sites the way a print publisher is responsible for the content of their magazines/newspapers etc then they simply couldn't function. To avoid being sued for breach of copyright they would have to check each bit of content before publishing it. Which is impossible. (There are more than 6 billion pictures on flickr already... who'd look through them all and how would they check who owned the copyright?)

So instead of being responsible for them they abide by the terms of the DMCA. Which means that when someone else sends them a legal notice saying that their copyright has been breached they have to take it at face value and remove the content. No questions asked. It gets deleted. They don't have to check to see if it makes sense - in many cases it would be impossible to know anyway - they just have to delete the content.

And that's why my picture was deleted. Because someone else - a company called Wasteland Inc. had told flickr/Yahoo! that they were the rightful copyright holders. It crossed my mind that maybe Ben Eine was behind it. It seemed unlikely... the letters are painted in public places and it would be impossible to claim nobody could photograph them. And I received an email from Ben a few days ago confirming that he had nothing to do with it and didn't have a problem with the photo.

I knew that the copyright for that image was mine, so I got in touch with Yahoo! and worked out how to file a counterclaim. Which means I sent a legal notice - under threat of perjury - asserting that I was the copyright holder and again, Yahoo! has no choice but to follow procedure. They passed my counterclaim on to Wasteland, Inc who then had 14 days to decide if they wanted to continue to fight by sending a court order to restrain me! 14 days later, Yahoo! wrote to me telling me that I could repost the picture.

But reposting it doesn't bring the comments/views/favourites back and nor does it put it back at the same url which would preserve the links. They're all gone for good. The picture's life from January 12 2006 is destroyed... instead it is reborn on March 2, 2012, its history wiped. (At least we share a birthday)

I googled, 'Wasteland, Inc.' to see if I could find out who they were and why they had thought they owned the copyright to a picture I'd made. That suggested a secondhand clothes store in the US (and online) but when I asked if they were responsible, they came back saying that it had nothing to do with them. I believed them.

So I went to the Chilling Effects website to see if I could find a record of any other DMCA activity from anyone called Wasteland Inc. I could.

It seems that Wasteland, Inc. are pornographers (bondage and fetish if you're asking) and they've employed a company called Degban to file copyright complaints on their behalf. They were doing so in January/February 2012... so it seems highly likely that they're somehow responsible for my picture being deleted. (And not just mine... they also filed a copyright complaint against a picture of some canal hardware.)

So I looked up Degban. Their website describes them as a multimedia copyright protection company... and says, "Whether you are a multi national media conglomerate, Community based music label, a University owned publishing house or just an independent multimedia producer, Degban can rescue you from the plague that is Digital content piracy."

I'm not sure how many community based music labels or University owned publishing houses they represent. It doesn't take much googling to establish that they work, almost exclusively - if not wholly exclusively - for the porn industry. Which might explain why they recently hired a former porn model, Ella Black, as a spokesperson. (I don't have a problem with that by the way, pornographers are just as entitled to copyright as anyone else... but it does serve to make them landing at my picture even more bizarre and unlikely.)

I emailed them and had no response. I called them and nobody answered the phone. So I did some digging. I discovered the CEO is a man called Taban Panahi. He's on facebook, but he didn't respond to the message I sent him there. He recently joined PenpalParty too... but I decided not to try and be his penpal.

But I did eventually find, an @degban.com email address for their spokesmodel, Ella... and using that, I took a guess at one for Taban. I sent them both an email... and at last, Taban has replied.

Degban make all sorts of spurious blind-them-with-science claims on their website. It's not easy to understand quite what they're claiming because their use of the English language is a bit creative - although it is good to know that their client care team isn't just made of people who are only pleasant - but I think they're claiming that they have some kind of automatic detection software running and an automatic process that then files thousands of takedown notices a day. Or an hour. Or whatever sounds most impressive.

So in my email I asked Taban and Ella to see if they could explain the process. It can't just be automated because every time you file a DMCA notice you have to do so under threat of perjury. But if it involves a person, with eyes, looking at the image and deciding that, yup, they do need to deal with it... then how the hell did they wind up filing against me?

Here's Taban's reply. I can't say it's all that convincing:

Hello Dave


I do apologize for the inconvenience, we have been victim of a phishing/hacking attack, which was aimed at reducing our credibility
among clients and the public as you can see how, I truly am sorry
that you were effected as such, but allow to humbly suggest that
you channel a part of your anger at those holier than thou hackers
who effect users like yourself by such irresponsible actions
we are working hard to fix the matter, but alas we can not do much
as the size of the attack was larger than we could have expected

I am hoping you can manage to get back your traffic and are never
affected by such issue ever again

Yours
Taban Panahi

Degban Ltd.

Which is either bullshit - which is worrying... or true... which is even more worrying.

It could be that he doesn't have any automatic detection software and that all Degban do is manually send out as many DMCA notices as they can with little regard to the truth behind them because all they want to do is show their clients that they've had x-hundred replies saying that content has been removed. Which is worrying because whoever you are, if you have photos, or videos, or songs or words on the internet somewhere, you could find your host is one day forced into deleting some of them because Mr Panahi - or someone else in his industry - is simply showing off to a pornographer.

Of course it could also be that they do have some kind of automated process running without any human intervention. In which case this is worrying. Because whoever you are, if you have photos, or videos, or songs or words on the internet somewhere, you could find your host is one day forced into deleting some of them because a computer is working on an algorithm so schonky, it can wrongly identify, say, a picture of some street art, as, say, some fetish porn.

Or it could be that Taban Panahi is telling the truth. Which is worrying. Because whoever you are, if you have photos, or videos, or songs or words on the internet somewhere, you could find your host is one day forced into deleting some of them because one of Mr Panahi's rivals has hacked into his site and sent deliberately false and malicious copyright claims to them in order to discredit him.

Either way, it surely adds up to the same thing. Degban - and the DMCA claims they file - can't be trusted.

I don't have a problem with people trying to enforce copyright. But I don't think the DMCA is the way to do it if it's this easy to get wrong. (According to this, 37% of notices are not valid copyright claims)

Every single bit of content you and I have online can potentially be destroyed. Either because Degban - or companies like them - are incompetently/negligently scattergunning DMCA notices around hither and thither, or because their industry is worth enough money to encourage the kind of skulduggery Taban describes so convincingly in his email. Does it really matter which one it is?

Why should a company be obliged to destroy content when there's such a high chance that the claim is incorrect. (Actually, why should they do so when there's any chance that the claim is incorrect. Surely they should let the claim/counterclaim/court process finish before acting accordingly)

Or to put it another way:



I think that's the mature response called for right now.

Not on the air today...

Doc, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

For my birthday this year I got an ear infection. It's novel, I'll give it that... but it's not what I asked for.

It feels like someone is stabbing a knife in my ear drum and waggling it about a bit. It's felt like that for three days. It has given me toothache in a way that I don't really understand. It has left me deaf in my right ear and confused my sense of balance. But the cruelest trick is that the pain is ten times worse if I lie down. Which is making sleep tricky.

I've tried. But the pain wakes me between 2 and 3am each time and the only way of making it feel less than excruciating is to not lie down any more.

I'm 41. I've been lucky in terms of health - in my adult life I've only been to see my GP three times.

This was one of those times. He's prescribed antibiotics. I've never taken antibiotics before. Well, you have to go to the doctors to get them so I wouldn't, would I?

I've never missed work because of illness either. Today is the first time. I'm not doing the Absolute Radio show this morning. I'm gutted. It's not because I need a rest to help me recover, it's because I'm deaf in one ear, have lost my sense of balance and if I try to talk, every other word is a pain-led expletive because for some reason, moving my jaw makes it more painful again.

I'm gutted. I love my Sunday mornings on the wireless and if I'm going to miss one I'd at least like the luxury of a lie in. It seems I can't have that either. I have an illness that makes lying down more painful. Go me.

Anyway. I'm sorry we're not on the air. But I'm not just sorry. I'm also in excruciating pain.

Taking Over @SouthbankCentre

The country of Sweden has a twitter account. It's @Sweden, since you ask. Every week they hand control of it over to a different Swedish citizen. Which is very democratic and, well, Swedish of them.

In a similar move, the Southbank Centre (@SouthbankCentre) are going to allow me to take over their tweets today. From 10am til 4pm.

I say similar. It sort of is. If you think of a country as being like a big arts venue and a-citizen-of as being like someone-who's-going-to-perform-there-soon and a-week as six-hours-on-a-Thursday.

Anyway... it's happening. I'm not sure what I will tweet yet but this afternoon I'll use it to host a Q&A. So if you have (spoiler-free) questions about the show (or anything else really) then tweet them to @SouthbankCentre this afternoon from 1pm.

Now... the first question... this is the avatar currently being used by @SouthbankCentre:
Should I replace it with this one for the duration?

Time Travelling Lookalikes

Gioacchino Rossini was born on Fenruary 29th, 1792.
Here are some of his lookalikes from history:

Gorden Kaye. aka Rene in Allo Allo.

Arthur Scargill

Bernard Manning

I'm pretty sure someone used to run a blog of modern-day-lookalikes-in-historical-paintings... but I can't find it now. If there's one out there let me know. In the mean time I've created a Tumblr blog for these: timetravellinglookalikes.tumblr.com/

Let me know if I'm treading on anyone else's toes.

And let me know about any time travelling lookalikes you might have seen. But not men with red beards that you think look like me. I'm a bit bored of those.

Like a horse and carriage...

Like many people I never thought I wanted to get married.

And then one day I did.

And now I am. And I bloody love it. I don't know that it's possible to describe in what way it is different to not being married. I know that today wouldn't really pan out any differently for Mrs G and myself if we weren't married. It's one of those undefinable things. I love my wife and I love being married to her.

I recently saw someone online arguing that they were against the idea of same-sex marriage because they felt it would belittle what marriage meant in some way. I don't know in what way because I simply can't begin to get my head around it at all. I cannot imagine a way in which the love I have for my wife - and, more pertinently, the love I have for our marriage - could be affected by other people getting married.

As an argument it puts me in mind of the way shallow teenagers sometimes talk about music. Y'know... they love a particular band. They say a particular song is their favourite song. And then the band becomes huge. And everyone likes their song. And the shallow teenager decides they don't like the song anymore.

The chord structure hasn't changed. The lyrics are the same. The melody is the same. All the ingredients of a song that your brain reacts to are the same. But what the shallow teenager really liked was feeling special. Feeling part of a small and select group.

That's what straight people objecting to gay marriage remind me of. Sulky teenagers, grunting and shrugging that marriage won't be special if we let everyone do it. As I said before, I can't imagine a way in which that could make my marriage less special. I really can't.

As I was at a computer when that thought drifted through my mind, I tweeted it. I don't think it's a particularly challenging thought. If anything I thought it was so obvious it didn't really need saying. But having put it into 140 characters I pressed send all the same.
I got a few pats on the back, a couple of people called me a poof and that was pretty much as I was expecting. But a few people also got in touch to tell me they simply couldn't understand what I was saying. I think some of these people were thinking, "But a band is less cool when everyone else likes them... so what's that got to do with gay marriage?" But I don't know for sure. Still, when 5 or 6 people had expressed their confusion, I decided that maybe 140 characters wasn't the best medium for that particular thought and so laid it out - not unlike the start of this blogpost - using twitlonger. Problem solved. No room for confusion.

Or maybe not. Here, someone calling themselves Funky_Dung chipped in with an argument that I'm still trying to unravel. Here's some of the to and fro...(Where more than 1 tweet was sent, I've photoshopped them together to make it an easier read) Now there were probably enough warning signs there already that this wasn't going to be a sensible discussion. The whole "serious views about the core of human society" is a clue. But I didn't take it all in and was actually concerned that someone thought I was being prejudiced with my silly, wanting the same rule of law for all. So I replied.

No insults. Just an explanation of what I think. But Funky had me bang to rights!
Which is interesting. (Or not. Feel free to stop reading any time you like, I appreciate this isn't for everyone.) If I read this right, Funky D is a gay person who is opposed to gay marriage and he thinks it is prejudiced of me to say I think straight people who are opposed to it remind me of a shallow teenagers' shifting musical allegiance.

For the record, I think gay people who are opposed to equal rights for same-sex marriage are silly too. But of course it would have been nonsensical to include them in that first tweet because they don't remind me of the shallow teenagers for an obvious reason. I don't think it's possible for a gay person to be against gay marriage because it would make their straight marriage less special. Something I tried to explain to my new friend, Funky: But he wasn't finished.
Of course, I think it's important for men and women to enjoy stable relationships too. Not necessarily for evolutionary reasons... but they're nice and important and stuff. But we're back to square one for me... I don't understand how a same-sex couple being happily married would make a male-female couple any less stable. I just don't. And stating that male-female relationships are important doesn't explain why someone thinks same-sex marriage shouldn't be allowed. Or, as I put it at the time: And this is where I start to find this kind of discussion frustrating. Because to me this conversation is civil and has an obvious route to take. To keep it civil and flowing all Funky has to do is explain the detrimental effects that he believes same-sex marriage would have. But instead of explaining in what way same-sex marriage would be detrimental... he just repeats that it would be:

Hmmm. When did he say it? Am I the only person who inferred it here? I mean, I thought that was an argument for straight marriage and against gay marriage and it seemed to hinge on the importance of stability for straight relationships and silly old me put two and two together and assumed he was saying that marriage helped to provide that desired stability. If he wasn't, I have absolutely no idea what point he was making.

And it went on in this vein for ages. With Funky restating that my initial tweet was anti-straight because it only belittled straight people and also that I was anti-gay because I have insisted that he must agree with me because he's gay (I didn't). And every time I asked him to explain in what way gay marriage would be detrimental to society his argument seemed to boil down to, "because it would be detrimental to society." And when I asked him to explain why he thought I was being anti-this or anti-that his argument seemed to be, that I should just know.

Here are some highlights:
How many times did I ask him to explain his point of view? To give me an example? (Answer: at least 4. How many times did he do so? None that I'm aware of.)


Of course, I have to imagine them because he refuses to explain what any of them are. What divides in particular is he addressing? What kind of wedge will be driven into them? What damage to society will be done? He won't explain and instead just urges me to imagine something that I simply cannot imagine. I've tried to imagine something of that ilk. I've genuinely failed.

And finally, my favourite tweet of the lot...

For the record. My beard is ginger. My hair isn't.

This all happened yesterday. Today two people have tried to tell me that Funky is right. But I've cut those exchanges shorter because, well, because they were entering the same circular it's-not-fair-to-allow-same-sex-marriage-because-some-people-think-it's-not-fair-to-allow-it-and-who's-going-to-think-about-them? logic. (You can read one of them on Storify here.)

So... please don't pile in on twitter and send any angry tweets their way. I'm not trying to raise a mob. But I am interested in the debate. And I feel frustrated when people refuse to properly engage in one.

To be clear, I don't think it's got anything to do with religion. (And nor does Funky). If a particular faith wants to be against same-sex marriage then that's up to them. But my marriage has nothing to do with God and I don't think the State should have either. There's no point in allowing for marriages that are not informed by faith if you're going to restrict access to them based on faith.

Someone also said, "a civil partnership is exactly the same legally so why is anyone bothered about whether it's called a marriage or a civil partnership?"

Well exactly. Why is anyone bothered by it being called a marriage? Isn't that where we started?

My apologies if this is somehow too painfully right on for you to read. Normal service will no doubt be resumed shortly.

On the show this week...

The two songs I brought to the show this week were...

Back Of Your Neck by Howler:


and
I Felt Like Jesus by Chuck Prophet:


We also saw the return of the Autofill Quiz this week, with a listener, Seth, taking on Danielle. I won't spoil the result for you as it's on the podcast... but let's just say it was almost as if neither of them wanted to win. A sort of precursor to the Carling Cup Final penalty shoot out that happened later in the day.

That, and all the other blather - (Pun Street, Found Poetry, Ward's Weekly Word, Martin's Song and Listener's Lexicon) - can all be heard here (itunes) or here (not itunes).

A Nomination

It seems the tour has been nominated for a Chortle award. For best tour.

It's a strong list - I mean, I'm not sure about this Seinfeld chap, he must be new or something - but the others are all great.

Anyway... it's one of those things you can vote for, so, y'know, if you feel that way inclined and... well, this is awkward isn't it? Hmm. Well. Right.

It seems odd to not let people know about it at all but then it feels like you're asking people to vote and that feels even odder. It's here if you're interested.

I'm just going to walk away, now. You can find me at the bottom of the page telling you where you can still see the show.


The tour's been extended so there are still plenty of chances to see it. I've got three warm up gigs at the end of March - two in Newbury and one in Chelmsford. Then I do the four night run in London at the start of April before heading to Melbourne, Australia for a couple of weeks. Then from may 19th to July 6th I'm on a full national tour. All the details are on the Live Dates page here.

On Today's Absolute Radio Show...

Every week on the wireless I bring a couple of tracks in of my own choosing. We always put the details up on the Absolute Radio site, but for the last few weeks I've been making an effort to put the songs here too.

Two great tracks this week. Coastlines by Hares which has only just been released:


And Barton Hollow by The Civil Wars which has been out for a while but surely deserves to be heard by more people.


I hope you enjoy.

Todays topic was retaliation. Sadly, this tweet arrived after we'd finished the show.
I recommend all women try it. In fact, what the hey, men should try it too.

Of course the songs don't make the podcast - we just put the chat and nonsense in there. But not just the chat and nonsense that went in between the songs on the live show... we do a whole load of extra chat and nonsense especially for the podcast.

There was drama in the Pun Street Planning Committee Chamber this week. People have been rattling on the door for months trying to make us address the scandal of 300 Spartans... well, this week, their calls were answered and the issue dealt with.

That, and all the other blather - (Found Poetry, Ward's Weekly Word, Martin's Song and Listener's Lexicon can all be heard here (itunes) or here (not itunes).