CleverBlogName

Well, Deco is less hideous than Azure. Unfortunately the helpful theme migration hints don’t cover all the features of the old CleverBlogName theme, which itself was ripped off the never-converted-to-4.0 Monochrome.

I’ve had Joyriders running through my head for the last day or two, so I popped the whole His ‘n’ Hers album on my playlist for the first time in a while. I’m blown away by what dark, sharp, perfect pop Pulp really were. I’d been describing The Killers’ Hot Stuff as an adequate knock-off, which it is, but Joyriders, Lipgloss, Have You Seen Her Lately, hell, the whole album remind me of how far Pulp outclass everyone else.

And let us not speak of Sam’s Town other than to say that perhaps the Killers should spend less time bagging Green Day for being insufficiently patriotic and more time working on their music.

In general, I’ve enjoyed pretty good interaction with New Zealand’s police force; both times I’ve been burgled the police have tracked down at least some of the culprits (in the first case a year or so later, in the second the next day), and they were concerned and polite; police at check points and the like have always been professional, and the only two times I can recall less than good attitudes the cops in question were not, shall we say, being entirely unreasonable in their reactions to dumb teenagers acting up.

But I’d have to be in the ostrich position not to notice that it is not always thus. There are occasions where police act rudely, over aggresively, or behave in outright abuse of their powers; sometimes this is response to provocation, other times it’s a dick in a uniform acting like a thug with a badge. In the most abhorrent cases there are rapes, planting evidence to obtain convictions, and similarly dire behaviour.

It seems to me that in the police, as in any profession that exercises significant power over others—teachers, priests, what have you—there are always going to be these sorts of problems. For one thing, there will always be the sorts of people attracted to the profession that revel in the opportunity to behave like an arsehole.

But there are also people who become part of the problem, even if they weren’t to start with. It’s not hard to see how that happens for police officers: it’s a job, after all, that involves spending a lot of time with everything from the hard-core scum, through to the time-wasting idiots who waste time that could be better spent. Police are also a political football, and it’s easy to imagine how the average plod could feel that, on top of all this, the people they protect are quick to criticise—witness the obnoxious stream of attacks from the middle aged owners of powerful cars who feel that the police shouldn’t be enforcing the law when they break it.

Something I don’t think improves the situation at all is to enhance this sense of separation with a blizzard of special laws that value police officers over and above the rest of the community. We already extend the police considerable powers over and above the ordinary citizen to enable them to do their job. I’m not comfortable with the idea that police ought to be protected over and above ordinary citizens, and I don’t see doing so enhances the idea of the police as members of the broader community.

Or, as my friend Ewen likes to say, common sense isn’t so common.

Heather has some useful and insightful things to say about the idea of freebirthing; to amplify one of her points—that part of the reason we get whacky ideas about the value of modern medicine is our magnificent safety—I present an excerpt from Pediatric Grand Rounds 1.19:

The London Bills of Mortality up to 1830 had documented a significant improvement in death-rates for the under-fives: from 1730-79 66.2 percent of the children died; from 1780-1829 there was a substantial drop to 37.8 percent.

To put that in more concrete terms, of the children I see most regularly, my own darling Ada, Lias, and Heather’s own daughter Rebecca, only one of them could be expected to make it to primary school.

I’ll take a double helping of the wonders of modern medicine, thanks.

Is the result of an upgrade with broke my old theme. Prettification will resume at a later date. As will working links.

OK, so this is a petty niggle, but it’s there. And what is a personal web site but a venue for venting petty niggles on the world?

I see a few design firms around town who use the modern Mini and modern Beetles as company cars. I assume they’re trying to send a message, something about being cool, with the leading edge of design and so on. This irks me for a number of reasons; there’s an element of hollering “we are all individuals” about it for a start.

The new Beetle and the new Mini were both heavily hyped, and are common as muck. Neither of them, unlike their antecedants, are actually aimed at being highly practical cars (more on that in a moment); the message I take from this is a kind of worst-of-all-possible-worlds design sense: the designer isn’t into the practicality of a Corolla, but neither are they really on the cutting edge. I expect their portfolio to be full of superficially cool trends of the moment with no more than a passing nod at utility.

What made the old Beetle and Mini iconic, beyond simply being cheap enough for ordinary people to afford, is that they were groundbreaking designs in their day. Porsche was a pioneer of aerodynamics and the Beetle reflected that; he was obsessed with simplicity and weight-saving measures, hence the arcooled flat-four engine. Form followed function even more in the Mini, where the placement of the wheels, the low centre of gravity and so on were all aimed at producing a cheap, drivable car that made the best use of the sheetmetal available. They were triumphs of design because they were able to fulfill a tight brief with a certain quirky style that appealed to people; they did a job and did it well.

The new Mini and Beetle, on the other hand, are simply trendy ressurections that look like their ancestors, but share few of their qualities. The modern Mini is almost as large as a Corolla, and the layout has none of the attention to space maximisation as the original. It’s an attempt to cash in on the classic design without offering much of the original value (or, indeed, value for money).

Overpriced herd-follower. Is that the message you want your design company to send?

We’ve been well served by a couple of baby carrying devices to date; as well as a car seat/pram hybrid, we’ve had a couple of front carriers; a front pack and a long winding cloth carrier; unfortunately Maire is finding these becoming too hard as Ada gets heavier, so we went shopping for baby backpacks and came upon the wonder of (New Zealand) engineering that is the MacPac possum.

My main concern with these sorts of packs is the potential to have the baby ride higher than my head, and thereby become a target for every door frame in the world; happily the Possum has an adjustable seat height that lets me keep Ada riding slightly below the level of my head.

Because it’s engineered with the same sort of rigid weight-transferring frame as a tramping pack it actually feels like I’ve got next to nothing on my back - there’s an odd gyroscopic feel that makes it a little harder for me to get off-balance than normal; Maire notices more weight, but on her legs rather than her back, which was the desired improvement.

The MacPacs get bonus points for accessories: a sun hood and rain cover that don’t prevent the kid from seeing the outside world, for example; this has been a bugbear of ours with a lot of the pushchair designs that seem to be focused on hermetically sealing (and thereby boring silly) babies and kids away from the world.

…a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.

Renaissance is a black and white animation set in a future Paris, as the title implies. The thing that hit me first is that animation; it’s delightful to look at, and drew me in; the style of the visuals makes me think of the French comic artists I’ve seen through Heavy Metal.

Unfortunately therein lies the problem. After being captured by the visuals I notice the voice acting, which is good, and then the story… well, the story is not so good. I mentioned Heavy Metal, which was long held to be a great introduction to serious (Continental) comics for English speakers, who spent most of the period from the 1950s to the 1990s cursed with lightweight superhero melodrama as the idea of what comics could be; on mainland Europe comics were treated as being a more capable art form. The problem with all the Heavy Metal I’ve seen is that it tends to be good and sophisticated by the standards of comic books, and really, not even by the standards of the Vertigo era comics. Maus or Stuck Rubber Baby, by way of contrast, are sophisticated by any standard; Heavy Metal’s stuff tends to be sophisticated only in as much as it ackowleges people have sex, or offers nods to literary or philosophical thinking.

Renaissance reminds me of that; a mish-mash of fairly stock standard film noir and sci-fi elements which aren’t even blended especially expertly and it suffers from weak exposition: Renaissance is interesting, and visually intriguing, but ultimately left me dissatisfied. It was worth borrowing and watching, but I don’t think I’d bother buying it.

I enjoyed this. Nicely woven plot, albeit with a few overly obvious twists and turns, with a few good “surprise!” moments.

This is the London of Canary Wharf and the post-Thatcher era of common-as-muck moneymakers in nice suits and old clubs; director Matthew Vaughn noted in the Q&A session added to the Region 1 disc that he wanted a step away from the lower class grubby pubs of the two Guy Ritchie films he’d produced (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch), and one that would showcase a more beautiful London.

Violence tends toward the nasty, brutish, and short variety, rather than slo-mo-porno choreography.

Good, tough, smart crime film with minimal comedy, well acted, recommended. I can see why Sony wanted Craig for Bond with this on his resume.