Personal: January 2006 Archives

I've put up week six of my set of Spanish flashcards, designed to accompany Instant Spanish, over on my iFlash page. I've also added combined versions of both the Greek decks and the Spanish decks, so you can revise all the words in one go once you've completed a book. Enjoy!

PS Learn rudimentary Spanish in six weeks? More like six months in my case. You know why? Journalist with something to do but no deadline: that's why.

Thanks (as always) to Charlie Brooker for another of his weekly columns in The Guardian. This time he singles out Liz Jones of the Standard for her tossy, pretentious column and this particular piece of stupidity that should give Ben Goldacre on Bad Science an absolute field-day if he ever touches it with a ten-foot bargepole.

She's fine now. The same column goes on to describe how her depression was cured by a “psychic healer” based in Harley Street, who uses “sonar energy and quasar light (you don't actually hear sound or see light) to draw out negative energy from your body, realign your chakras and straighten out the kinks in your polarised magnetic grid ... it could be the best £125 I've ever spent”.

Can you see the blood coming out of my ears from where you are?

The Standard, incidentally, is the sister paper of the Daily Mail - the newpaper science forgot (or at least was refused entry to).

Want to see people doing the Rubik's cube in 11 seconds or blindfolded? CNet has the video you're clamouring for then.

Embarrassingly, my mother-in-law gave me a Rubik's cube for Christmas and I can still do it. It may be 23 years or so since my halycon cubing days, but the moves are still there. Oh yes. Five minutes start to finish when I'm on form.

Sometimes, I hate myself with every fibre of my being.

Thanks to Hoses of the Holy in the Hallmark Universe for pointing me in the direction of this highly useful guide to pronouncing Sir Menzies Campbell's name correctly.

I remember the good old “thorn” from my days proofreading CD-ROM transcripts of the Tyndale Bible. That was a joyous experience, let me tell you.

From today's Romensko:

High school journalists in Stillwater, MN investigated a man pretending to be teenage member of British royalty who wanted to enroll at their school. They discovered that “Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the Fifth Duke of Cleveland” was actually Joshua Gardner, a 22-year-old convicted sex offender from Austin, MN. “Why would a member of the royal family come to Minnesota to go to school?” asks a school newspaper staffer. When quizzed last month by student journalists, “his accent started to falter, and he became agitated,” says a student editor.

Wow. Just like Scooby Doo.

Still, all it would have taken was just one English person to have heard his name and that would have been “case solved”. For Americans reading this, claiming to be called “Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the Fifth Duke of Cleveland” is to being English as claiming to be called “Brittany Mary-Lou Faffermeir-Kerry from Springfield, Hawaii” is to being American.

By the way, if he'd actually described himself as a “British duke” or having a “British accent” that would have given the game away even quicker: we only talk about English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh accents here and only ever Scottish or English dukes. Only Americans talk about British accents or dukes. Just some advice if you're ever planning on passing yourself off as someone British...

PS Did you see what I did there?

So I decided not to pitch to that lifestyle mag with the porn bound in that approached me. Ethical problem solved by erring on the side of the angels, I reckon. But it seems that's not enough for those ethics testers in the sky. Because today I hear a rumour that Remnant Media, publisher of Asian Babes and other “gentlemen's magazines”, might be cruising after Highbury because of its ownership of Front – Loaded for those who can't reach that “illustrious” mag because they've stunted their growth.

I refused to pitch articles to Evil.

Then Evil came after me and begged me to pitch.

Now, Evil is going to buy someone I already work for and dare me to stop working for them out of principle.

Can I pass this challenge? I hope so. I'm hoping even more that Dennis or EMAP buy Highbury's magazines, though. I can't really be all that ethical if I already work for Front's publisher, now can I?

PS Apologies for the illo, but that was the cleanest one I could find...

Updates and related entries
January 17, 2006: Accountancy Age reckons Ernst and Young have whittled the list of potential buyers for Highbury's assets down to two: Imagine (as I'd hinted at some time ago) and Remnant Media (which I suggested on Friday). I'm surprised that EMAP and Dennis aren...
January 21, 2006: Two more mags have picked up the Imagine-Highbury story since my coverage yesterday: Next Generation and Gamasutra. It looks like Imagine have only bought five computing titles, including iCreate, Play Magazine, GamesTM, Advanced Photoshop and Digital...

It's very easy to have theoretical morals. You can say to yourself “I'll never write anything for Associated Newspapers for as long as I live”, knowing full well that the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday et al aren't going to beat down your doors with thousands in cash to make you.

But what happens if someone dubious does come to your door, offering you money? Is it easy to make the same commitment?

I have an ad in Press Gazette. It runs weekly and is mostly useless; I'll get round to changing the wording some time, I'm sure, but I doubt they'll ever get round to so much as hypertexting my URL and email address on their web site. Lazy buggers.

Anyway, I've just had my first editorial enquiry as the result of it. A Spanish company is launching a new mag, 24-K, and they're looking for freelances to fill its pages. The money isn't brilliant but it's not awful and they're looking for gadget and film reviews, which I'm more than up to.

The problem is this: bound into every edition of the magazine will be 12 pages of hardcore porn. And this is a Spanish magazine we're talking about here, so I'm guessing 'Confessions of a Window Cleaner' it ain't.

Now I'm not especially against porn in principle. My concerns are for the models who are often drug addicted, psychologically damaged after sexual abuse and so on: these are well-worn arguments and I don't have to repeat them here. If the models were all happy, well-adjusted, well paid and so on, I'd have no issues.

Anyway, essentially, this company has made its money from the exploitation of the vulnerable and anything I write will not only be paid for in part with that money but will be accompanied by yet more exploitation.

On the other hand, it'll be cash, a new client and more articles to add to my portfolio that could eventually get me more clients, more cash, etc. Maybe this company's models really are happy, well-adjusted, etc and I'm just making assumptions. And there are plenty of companies out there who have made their money dubiously without any of us realising it: how many Daily Express readers know how its proprietor made his millions? How many Daily Mail readers know that the Rothmeres supported Oswald Mosley and Hitler? Then there's GAP, Nike, McDonald's, WalMart, et al. Do I stop working for or buying from any company that may have compromised ethics? I'll starve if I do.

Suddenly, the ethics of the situation don't look clear cut. What do you think I should do? I'm siding with the “don't do it” argument at the moment, but I'm still feeling the temptation...

Updates and related entries
January 13, 2006: So I decided not to pitch to that lifestyle mag with the porn bound in that approached me. Ethical problem solved by erring on the side of the angels, I reckon. But it seems that's not enough for those ethics testers in the sky.

I'm already on record as having more than a marginal dislike of Generation Y. Now I see there's a book, Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to be Young, designed purely to inflame my visceral hatred of these Nathan Barleys. It seems that while they've been taking these three month jobs to pay for walking trips in the Andes, they haven't actually been paying for them at all. Instead, they've been mounting up debt on their Virgin credit cards. Gits. Anyone can do that: you're just lucky enough to be the first generation that credit card companies have been willing to give stupid credit limits to. Now you're complaining you have to pay it back and you can't fit your canoeing lessons in any more? Bah!

My reason is too clouded to give a full critique of the book, but Slate has a nice counter to it, written by someone equally as embittered as myself.