Daniel > Recent Status Updates

This is a walk in the park compared to most other shoots. On Queer as Folk, we had one day so bad that the police were called in. We were filming outside Stuart's flat, in a dead rough area, and the local pub turned its music up deliberately. When they discovered the show's name, they turned it up further still. It was blasting out. When we went in to ask them to turn it down, the crew was threatened with machetes!

Aubrey's friend, Sir William Petty (1623-1687): 'in 1650 he achieved considerable notoriety by reviving Nan Green, a woman who had been hanged for the murder of her bastard child. Soon after this he was appointed Professor of Anatomy at Oxford.'

Andrew Paschall [...] wrote regularly between 1674 and 1693 painstaking if somewhat prosy letters; and in 1683 enclosed an account he had received from the incumbent of Barnstaple of the doings of a 'discontented daemon,' which had been disturbing the neighbourhood, a description that closely accords with happenings now broadly documented as poltergeist phenomena.

Her mother, she said, used to duct-tape her and her siblings together into a large knot, then leave them like that for an hour or more at a time. Had the woman known back then how easy it was to escape from duct tape, she said, perhaps she would not have spent so many hours duct-taped to her siblings. Unsure of how to reply, I laughed—then saw the expression on her face and immediately regretted it.

one burglar would actually pay other burglars to photocopy vacation rosters when they broke into offices late at night so that he could take note of any upcoming vacations. This can be extended to your own home: a common piece of advice for vacationing homeowners is not to write their exact vacation dates on their home calendar, precisely so that future burglars won’t learn that you’ll be gone for another three days

Think of the hapless burglar—one of my favorite examples yet—who called the police himself when he became convinced that someone else was in the house with him. He thought another burglar was somewhere out there in the darkness, tiptoeing through the unlit rooms, perhaps heading straight for him.

He would steal only one thing at a time, which helped make it all but impossible to tell if something had been stolen or simply misplaced, if your kids had innocently moved it or if your spouse had put it away somewhere without telling you. You might think it’s memory loss or early-onset senility; it’s actually a patient burglar robbing you and your family in slow motion.

More’s Utopia shows that police visions of the metropolis are integral to the Western literary tradition. Indeed, the possibility that a twenty-first-century Utopia might yet be written by a retired police helicopter pilot or by an FBI bank-crime investigator is oddly compelling, even if, as with More’s own classic text, it is unlikely that every aspect of their ideal city would appeal to everyone’s taste.

They think I am the villain in a pantomime and everybody cheers the villain in a pantomime. You ask me are the people stupid. Very far from it. They can smell a fraud a thousand miles away. But ask me if they know what’s best for them, then the answer is a resounding no, because their besetting weakness is that they love a fraudster.

‘He has, Your Highness,’ the physician reported, ‘what I’d call Tourette’s, only without the Tourette’s.’
‘Will he get better?’ the Grand Duchess asked.
‘In the sense of will he extend his range of pejoratives? He might, Your Majesty.’

As Charles Stross has noted, the very richest inhabit a world in which most goods are, in effect, free. That is, their wealth is so great relative to the cost of food, housing, travel, and other amenities that they rarely have to consider the cost of anything. Whatever they want, they can have.

In April 2015, Russian hackers took over the transmission of a French television station, pretended to be ISIS, and then broadcast material designed to terrorize France. Russia impersonated a “cybercaliphate” so that the French would fear terror more than they already did. The aim was presumably to drive voters to the Far-Right National Front, a party financially supported by Russia.

Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.

Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.

We find it natural that we pay for a plumber or a mechanic, but demand our news for free. If we did not pay for plumbing or auto repair, we would not expect to drink water or drive cars. Why then should we form our political judgment on the basis of zero investment?

'This affords good protection,' said Colonel Smith, recalling his adventures on the western plains. 'We can get close to the Indians - I beg pardon, I mean the Martians - without being seen.'

Fighting-machines stood tall and inert, looking a little like the water towers you see in some American states.

Surely, if we have learnt nothing else, this war has taught us pity -- pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.

I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.

I think Wells disapproves of the illustrations in the original magazine serialisation.

Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. [...] And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede - without order and without a goal, six million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.

The often-used definition of a species that it is 'a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring' is just one of many definitions in use. This has its limitations: it's not a lot of use on fossils for a start, and it is hardly practical to keep trying to see if any given pair of animals can interbreed.

unsnubbableness

Moreland--not long before he died--had spoken appreciatively of Delavacquerie's poetry, in connection with one of Moreland's favourite themes, the artist as businessman.

'I never pay my insurance policy,' Moreland said, 'without envisaging the documents going through the hands of Aubrey Beardsley and Kafka, before being laid on the desk of Wallace Stevens.'