28th February 2024
In this week’s Eyecatching Words:
- Shamima Begum: evil or abandoned?
- The next government: A bitter inheritance or a golden opportunity?
- Islamophobia? What’s that then?
- Trident: Faking it
- Lord of the Rings cosplay
- The millennium bug – 24 years later
- Bollocks to that
Just a reminder that Eyecatching Words is also available as a podcast on all major platforms if you prefer to listen rather than read. Link below to Spotify:
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The Shamima Begum case reached a conclusion of sorts with the Supreme Court ruling that it was legal for her to be stripped of her citizenship in the interests of national security. What I find interesting about this case is just how murky it is and how the driving motive of successive Home Secretaries has been to make an example of her.
Now I know nothing of the young woman. She may be an extremely unpleasant person (the Daily Telegraph would have you believe so). She may be an innocent abroad (that would be her case as expressed in a BBC documentary and elsewhere). It is a matter of public record that she went to Syria in 2014 at the age of 15 to join Islamic State and was a radicalised muslim. She subsequently had three children at the hands of her ISIS husband, all of whom died.
The government’s case is based on national security considerations and she is therefore in no position to counter these arguments since the sources of intelligence cannot be openly discussed. For my part I wonder why a fifteen year old who was radicalised and abused is being shown no mercy, but of course having committed to this course of action the UK Government is now determined not to lose face.
What is less commonly known about this case is that it is more or less accepted that the individual who groomed her and other young women was working for Canadian intelligence, and was encouraged to carry on with his activities (including smuggling the girls out to Syria) with the knowledge of the British authorities. In other words she was knowingly groomed, probably abused, publicly vilified and subsequently stripped of her citizenship as a pawn in a wider effort to bring down the ISIS caliphate. All of this began when she was a minor who presumably should have been entitled to support through safeguarding processes. History will, I suspect, judge her as a naive and possibly unpleasant young woman who was set on the path that subsequently destroyed her life by the evil that was ISIS, and by the unscrupulous government agencies fighting ISIS in the shadows. There will have been many other victims like her and many of them will be women who have been used by men.
The next government’s inherited position has been the subject of much discussion in the last week, with both the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Tory One Nation Group highlighting the dire state of public services that already exists and could get far worse. The dismantling of the welfare state that has taken place under the tories over the last fourteen years is astonishing. It has been nothing short of an attack on British society itself and will be looked on in future as just that. But how Labour, if they are successful at the polls, can manage it is beyond me. And yet they did it in 1945, and even forced subsequent conservative governments to grudgingly accept the broad consensus around a state that balanced the public and private sectors and provided a safety net for citizens across health, welfare and education. This even survived the Thatcher years, and between her departure from office in 1990 and the Conservative – Lib Dem coalition of 2010, Britain had only three Prime Ministers (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) whose philosophy was one of economic stability, growth and a mixed economy for the country. But that consensus was destroyed by the unholy trinity of David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne. They were succeeded by a series of incompetent Tory leaders, no fewer than four in four years, but the destruction of the country as we know it remains their responsibility.
Then there was the Islamaphobia row. Lee Anderson, the MP for Ashfield, lost the Conservative party whip after refusing to apologise for saying Islamists had “got control of” Sadiq Khan on GB News, saying in true Anderson style that the London mayor had “given our capital city away to his mates”. It then transpired that polling had revealed that more than half of Conservative party members believe Islam is a threat to the British way of life, which is double the proportion of the overall population who believe the same. Astonishingly it also found that 52% of tory party members believe the unfounded conspiracy theory that some areas of European cities are under sharia law. If you ever wanted evidence that the tories are out of touch with the rest of the country that was it.
Taken together these news items tell us a lot about modern Britain, not least that it is ill-informed, vindictive and unwilling to face up to its problems. The destruction of the public sector created an environment in which people looked for scapegoats and currently the scapegoats include (but are not limited to) muslims.
As if to illustrate the point In my occasional trawl back through my personal journal on Blipfoto I came across the following from 28th February 2018 about, of all things, a visit to the dentist.
There was one of those intrusively gregarious old people in the waiting room who started banging on about how difficult it was to get a GP appointment because there were too many people using the NHS. “I’m too old to be politically correct” she said “but you know what I mean”. This got my back up. Age doesn’t deserve respect when it’s talking racist bollocks.
“Do you mean immigrants?” I asked.
“Yes” she said defiantly “I do”. We then had a rather terse difference of opinion during which she trotted out a number of facts, none of which were true enough to even make it on to the side of a Brexit bus, although they probably could have slipped easily between the covers of a BNP manifesto.
“I think you’ve been reading the wrong newspaper” I said to which she replied “I don’t just read one newspaper. I make my own mind up. I read The Mail, The Telegraph and The Express. They can’t all be wrong”.
On the personal level:
Friday we hit the wine bar in the evening. It was good to get out but my wife took one sip of her wine and gave it to me to drink on top of my beer. Something about dieting and jet lag. Who am I to complain.
Saturday was a Lord of the Rings Marathon which I report on more fully below.
We spent practically the whole of Sunday drinking tea and eating cake. You could argue that is what a very wet Sunday in February was made for. We certainly gave it our best shot. I made an apple and cinnamon cake which was the second cake I’d made in just over a week. Mary Berry me.
On Monday we paid a short but respectful visit to the military graves at Brookwood Cemetery. It is a curiously peaceful thing to do in these troubled times. And it is always good to be reminded of the past.
On Tuesday I got a message saying that our daughter’s boyfriend was flying over from Vancouver to Brussels with a five hour layover at Heathrow. Never having met the young man I took the opportunity to drive up there with her older brother on Wednesday and give the poor jet lagged chap a taste of the family he had decided to get involved with. Actually he was lovely and it was a very positive experience once we had managed to navigate him out of the transit lounge so that he could meet us. Modern life is remarkable. So are Heathrow parking charges. Lunch was £75 for the three of us and the car park was another £25. Ouch.
Cosplay
I discovered last Saturday that it is a Wizard’s lot to stand out from the crowd yet somehow remain something of a loner. It all began some weeks ago when my eldest son announced gleefully that there was going to be an all day Lord o the Rings marathon with the three extended editions of the movies being shown starting at 10.20 in the morning and finishing at 11.20 at night. Thirteen hours of hobbits, orcs, trolls and dragons, clashing swords and thundering hooves. I rashly got carried away by his enthusiasm and said that not only should we go but the three of us – his brother was also dragged into this enterprise – should use it as an opportunity for cosplay. I felt sure that most of those attending would go full fandom and wear the costume of their favourite character, which in my case was of course Gandalf as I am now older and bearded and have height and authority. I duly dug out a grey onesie to double as a robe and bought the following accessories online: A three part plastic wizard’s staff; a pointy hat; and a grey wig and beard set. The result was spectacular.
Now I am one of those people for whom dressing up means full assimilation into the character I am playing. Some years ago I made a charity appearance at work dressed as Marilyn Monroe and went the whole hog with the famous white dress and blonde wig. I even shaved my legs although had to go barefoot as size eleven high heels were difficult to source. But more to the point I act the part. I may act badly but I give it my all. With Marilyn I visited the three buildings we had in Leatherhead and made speeches about the loneliness of being a starlet using quotes from MM herself. People obligingly coughed up for children in need and I raised £550 in two hours, but got carried away and ended up trying to use the ladies loos without thinking .
Gandalf of course is famous for a number of lines from the movies, most notably “You shall not pass!” And “Fly, you fools!”. My favourite now I am senior in years is this one: “I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to.” However as we walked into town to go to the cinema I became more and more immersed in the role and started asking strangers if they knew the way to Mordor, much to their bemusement. I even made up a joke as follows:
Q: What is the difference between Mordor and Woking?
A: Mordor hasn’t gone bankrupt yet.
Walking past our local Waterstones I even tried this little act out on one of the sales assistants. On reviewing the video I could see she was in two minds as to whether to laugh or call security. There’s a fine line between madness and genius, Frodo my lad …
On getting to the cinema I discovered I was the only person in the entire place who had dressed up. Where have all the fun young people gone? People go to see The Sound of Music wearing nun’s habits so don’t tell me we can’t all take one for the Tolkein team. But the film experience itself was rather brilliant. Not only did I stay awake, I loved every 4k cinematic thirteen hours of it, and the Dolby sound was truly amazing and came at you from all four corners of the theatre. I fell in love with the digitally remastered Liv Tyler all over again, although if I shopped on the other side of the street Viggo Mortensen would have me swooning as well.
The irony of all this is that I redid my Myers Briggs Type Indicator again a few day later and looked up the character’s types on a Lord of the Rings website that said I was more like Legolas. Totally not. Give me a dirty robe and some pipe weed any day.
Faking it
I was talking to my friend Mr Bear recently about my thoughts on Trident and he volunteered an idea that I consider rather genius. You will recall my rant from two weeks ago about the enormous cost of continuing with this waste of space expensive deterrent and my amusement last week when a test demo had to be aborted. Well he suggested we take a cue from the people who used to have fake burglar alarm boxes on the outside of their houses. They looked like the real thing and in theory deterred would-be burglars from even trying. So he suggested we have a fake set of submarines patrolling the northern hemisphere that would occasionally fire a failed missile (just like the real thing) at a fraction of the cost of an actual system.
This idea does of course have a long an noble history to it. During World War Two, fake inflatable tanks were massed in various places to deceive German reconnaissance aircraft and to mislead them about the real landing area for D-Day. And it is a little known fact that the top generals of World War 2 were also in fact just balloons made up to look like real military figures. Panic ensued at one point when Montgomery became overinflated and shot up several thousand feet in the air and started to drift out over the English Channel. Fortunately he exploded when hit by a German anti aircraft barrage and equally fortunately the British Army had had the foresight to prepare a spare which they pumped up and used in newsreels and to be photographed alongside Winston Churchill.
Joking aside Montgomery really did have a double played by an actor, and in the late 1950s his story was filmed to some acclaim. The movie was entitled “I was Monty’s Double” . Bizarrely the actor who impersonated Montgomery played himself in the film, thus becoming probably the only man to impersonate a genuine impersonation of himself. Or something.
What a difference a day makes
February 29th 2024 was a nightmare date for a few organisations around the world and bought back memories for me of Y2K, the great millennium bug farce. On one level a leap year shouldn’t present any problems for modern software but we have to remember that software is created and monitored by people who are fallible. The Pragmatic Engineer reported a wide range of issues around the world through its Substack email.
- In Colombia, airline tickets were printed incorrectly by the nation’s largest airline and had to be re-issued
- Payment terminals at petrol stations stopped working in New Zealand.
- A brand of Indian smartwatch got stuck on the day’s date and wouldn’t move forward (ironically, given that one of the purposes of a smartwatch is to monitor your movement).
- And of course all the toasters in the world just died.
The last one was a joke but the others are all true stories.
It is nearly a quarter of a century since Y2K fever spread across the world. The reason was that until the 1990s many computer programs were designed to abbreviate four-digit years as two digits in order to save memory space thus causing confusion between 1900 and 2000. Many feared that when the clocks struck midnight on January 1, 2000, many affected computers would be using an incorrect date and thus fail to operate properly unless the computers’ software was repaired or replaced before that date. Other computer programs that projected budgets or debts into the future could begin malfunctioning in 1999 when they made projections into 2000. To make it worse, the year 2000 was a leap year.
The Y2K problem was not limited to computers running conventional software, however. Many devices containing computer chips, ranging from lifts in tall buildings to medical equipment, were believed to be at risk. So across the globe (particularly in the governmental sector) there was a huge push to minimise the risk. Less well developed and impoverished countries struggled and rather like Covid, boats getting stuck in the Suez Canal and the War in the Ukraine there was concern that this would affect the global economy.
An estimated $300 billion was spent (almost half in the United States) to upgrade computers and application programs to be Y2K-compliant. But as the first day of January 2000 dawned and it became apparent that the impact was minimal, there was widespread relief and a backlash against those who had identified the issue some years before, followed by accusations that the risk had been greatly exaggerated from the beginning. The counter argument was that the benefits of the improvements made to systems went far beyond simple Y2K compliance and would continue to be seen for some time to come.
Tara Westover, who wrote a book (“Educated”) about growing up in a bizarre North American family convinced that the world’s end was at hand, gave a very personal account of this. Her father basically sat up that night waiting gleefully for the apocalypse to begin and was embarrassed and deflated when it didn’t (not least because he had secretly and illegally stored a thousand gallons of petrol in an underground tank on his extensive and isolated compound). Twenty five years on it seems that half of America (the half that votes for Donald Trump) simply believes that the apocalypse has been deferred only being a white god-fearing christian fundamentalist will ensure you safe passage beyond the end of days.
The fear of a global meltdown in computer systems remains a real one. In the year 2000 the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Apps on smartphones were a thing of the future for most of us. So we have to remember that now the degree of computerised system’s sophistication, their all pervasive nature in society, and the arrival of Artificial Intelligence leave us with huge opportunities but also on a knife edge of risk. So keep an eye on your toaster. It may be the first sign that there is something big about to pop up, and we’re not talking extra thick sliced white here …
Bollocks to that
The world’s first test-tube testes have been created by a group of researchers at an Israeli University, which holds big promise in various key fields of research such as foetal sex determination and male infertility. More importantly the testicles, like the buttocks, are a great source of humour for dilettante writers such as myself. So if you aren’t up for a spate of bad below-the-waist jokes, don’t read on.
Apparently the artificial testes, produced using mice, are the spitting image of the real thing, right down to the labyrinth of internal sperm-producing tubes, although it is too early to say whether they could end up producing actual sperm. Understandably the research team don’t want to go off at half cock.
Up until now only two dimensional models of gonads have been available which have their limitations. Well they would wouldn’t they? It would be like having discs rather than spheres dangling between your legs. Ironically the research team is led by a woman called Dr Gonen which sound uncannily close to gonad.
So where will this work go next? Could men get augmented balls in the same way that women get augmented breasts? What would be the implications for the fashion industry and trouser sizes? Would it bring a new and more positive meaning to the phrase “getting the sack”? Alternatively you wouldn’t have to stop at having the traditional two and could ask for an extra one to be grafted on.
After all that it is only fitting to end with a testicle joke.
So: a father and his young son are in a fast food joint and the boy is amusing himself playing with a couple of coins his father has left on the table. Unfortunately he accidentally swallows them and starts choking; despite his best efforts the father cannot dislodge them and the boy starts to turn blue.
A serious looking woman in a business suit is sitting at a nearby table reading from her laptop and sipping a cup of coffee. She gets up from her seat and makes her way over. She swiftly takes hold of the boy’s testicles and starts to squeeze and twist them firmly. After a few seconds the boy convulses violently and coughs up the money.
The father thanks her with tears in his eyes saying “thank you so much, that was fantastic. Are you a doctor?”
“No,” the woman replies. “I’m with the Inland Revenue.”
Eyecatching 