Ramblings

When desperance  visited us, he remarked that he had lost his supply of paperclips. A mailing from my alma mata suggest that they may not be lost, just hidden. It seems that scientists at the University of Birmingham have developed an invisibility cloak. Research is still in its early stages, but already they can conceal paperclips.

The Guardian has published an illuminating map showing where the organisations are whose funding has been cut. (The Simon Rogers whose name appears as the contributor is actually shewhomust's cousin's son.) Lowlights in our region are:

• Flambard Press, a client who have a 7½% cut to £20k next year then nothing in 2012/13. This for a press that has just published Brian Aldiss's poetry and a few years back published Blood Waters by desperance . New Writing North, who share the same building, get a 64% rise which gives them another £125k -- six times as much as Flambard is losing. 
• Side Gallery, again a 7½% cut next year to £58k and nothing after that. A post on their website calls it a " profoundly stupid, culturally illiterate and illogical decision." It seems that their collective structure did not go down well with the suits, though it has stood the test of time since its birth in (honestly) May 68.
• The Theatre Royal Newcastle. Again the 7½% cut to £44k and nothing afterwards. I know little about the Theatre Royal, but I note that the Gala Theatre in Durham, whose director Simon Stallworthy stormed out because he could not work with the County Council, gets £200k, one of the newly funded bodies.
• North Tyneside Council lose £46k - they have been quite good to Cloud Nine Theatre Company and to Peter Mortimer, and that's going to be more difficult.

Side Gallery are quoting extensively, and scathingly, from the assessment they received. No doubt the other bodies have received theirs but haven't fully digested them yet. Expect to see a lot of come-back in the next few days.

I have just discovered that since last August, Scottish Television (STV) have been uploading thousands of hours of their archives to YouTube, going back over 20 years . My search began via a Google alert for an interview with Anne Fine first broadcast on 4 November 1990 (when Anne qualified as a Scottish writer), which led me to the STVPlayer and from there on to the books programme Off the Page, and to Aly Bain and Friends, featuring the legendary (well, he is now) Shetland fiddle player. The first programme of ten (aired 6 November 1987) featured Richard Thompson previewing The Turning of the Tide, at that point unrecorded.

The quality is excellent, both technically and artistically. It's played straight, no gimmicks, and if you want to compare today's tv with that of 20 years ago look no further. Many hours of happy viewing lie ahead.

The rules:

1. If you'd like to play along, reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. You then list (and upload or link to the video, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Then, as I'm doing here, you'll post the list to your journal with the instructions.

valydiarosada assigned me M...

Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark and Hilldale Love, from Forever Changes

(Talk to me of) Mendocino Kate and Anne McGarrigle, with Karen Matheson providing harmony. Written by Kate. OK, maybe the brackets are a bit of a cheat, but I'm not leaving this one out.

Mr Tambourine Man Bob Dylan

Man on the Moon REM ~ classy video

Matty Groves Fairport Convention, with on this video, a line from the Kipper Family's Fatty Groves.

I've written before about the English and Welsh libel laws, and how they stifle comment and the shining of lights into murky corners. Now my inbox carries an appeal from three victims of the English libel laws:

Dear Friends

We are emailing as victims of England’s libel laws to ask for your help at a crucial time for libel reform.

The Government is writing a new defamation bill and is due to publish it in the New Year. This will be the first time the libel laws have been substantively reviewed in a century. The libel reform campaign is being led by small organisations and it has been because of your wider support that we have got to this exciting stage. Your petition signatures have helped draw attention to the problem, your emails to politicians have helped raise awareness in Parliament, your donations have allowed us to host meetings and produce campaign material, your blogs and tweets have helped spread our message and your personal accounts of encounters with the libel laws have helped us build the case for libel reform.

We have to take this unique opportunity now to ensure that the reforms in the Government’s bill address the problems we have had to face and that the campaign has been hearing about from scientists, bloggers, journalists, human rights activists, biographers, novelists and many others. The libel reform campaign is exploring the potential of alternative dispute resolution, talking to bloggers about their experiences, surveying medical and science editors on the hidden costs of the libel laws and is running events at the three main party conferences to try to ensure the Government fulfils its pledges.

Can you donate £10 towards the costs of these at www.justgiving.com/libelreform? If 1,000 people can help us at this crucial stage, it will help engineer a truly effective libel reform bill, as opposed to one that might be watered down by vested interests. We know how unfair and damaging the laws are and we need your help to ensure no other scientist, writer, blogger or doctor goes through what we did.

(If you are a UK tax payer, please tick the Gift Aid box so the campaign can make the most of your donation. Thanks.)

Best
Ben Goldacre (Matthias Rath v Goldacre/Guardian)
Simon Singh (BCA v Singh)
Peter Wilmshurst (NMT v Wilmshurst) - ongoing

I have made a contribution and the point of this cross-posting is to suggest that you might also want to.

From The Guardian's obituary of Basil Davidson:

Take a look at the Nielsen BookScan UK top ten fiction titles.The 13-digit ISBNs are shown as floating point numbers, eg

Pos	ISBN	Title	Author	Publisher	Price
1	9.78185E+12	Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest,The	Larsson, Stieg	Quercus Publishing Plc	7.99

D'uh!

Have a great day!

The BBC has just reported that science writer Simon Singh has won his libel appeal against the British Chiropractors' Association. The appeal court has ruled that he can rely on a defence of fair comment, which is very good news indeed. There are other cases ongoing and I hope that these will be brought to a swift conclusion and allow open debate to resume.

I invite you to compare this web page In the Kitchens of the Roq, written by shewhomust in April 2001 for the Outremer web site, celebrating the books written by m'friend desperance , and this blog posting by Abhijit Das, posted last Friday. They are, as far as I can tell, identical.

I have written a cease-and-desist email. If the posting has not been taken down by close of play on Monday, I will invoke the Google/Blogspot dispute procedures.