Quotulatiousness

February 2, 2011

Thousands are sailing flying

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

Patricia Treble reports on the new wave of Irish emigration:

With their economy in a tailspin and bad financial news piling up, the Irish people are voting with their feet—they’re leaving the Emerald Isle at the rate of 1,000 a week. Last Thursday, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) published a grim forecast: net outward migration will reach 100,000 in the two years ending in April 2012.

Packing up and leaving in dire times is nothing new for Ireland. In the 1800s, millions fled the island’s famines and disease for the chance of a better life in countries such as Canada, the United States and Australia. Even recently, there have been waves of emigration. The last time the emigration numbers were as high as they are now was in 1989, when 44,000 fled the economically depressed nation. Soon after, Ireland cut taxes, attracted massive foreign investment and transformed itself into a Celtic Tiger. Property prices soared along with personal wealth.

It’s always a good time for some Pogues music:

A tribute (of sorts) to Wiarton Willie

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

John Scalzi, several years ago, wrote a tribute to Wiarton Willie, who was in the news in an unaccustomed way at the time:

To tell you the truth, the most disturbing thing is not that the groundhog died — certainly this animal earned his eternal rest — but that his handlers couldn’t think of anything better to do but tell a festival crowd that he had croaked. Those kids in the crowd will be forever traumatized. Groundhog Day will no longer be a happy time, but a constant reminder of death and mortality in the bleak midwinter. 10 years from now, I expect that Wiarton, Canada will become the new North American epicenter of dark, gothic teenage poetry.

Lying frozen in the snow
The groundhog soul resides far below
Gone to a place of doom and gray
Now winter will always stay.
Die Groundhog Die!
Mommy and Daddy Lied!

But wait, there’s more:

Now, on to the groundhog Wiarton Willie, who, as you know from yesterday’s entry, died before Groundhog Day and whose body was photographed lying in state in a dinky little pine coffin. Or was it? Now news comes from the sordid little burg of Wiarton, Canada, that the rodent corpse in the coffin was not Wiarton Willie at all, but a stuffed stand-in. The real Willie was apparently found so decomposed that the gelatinous remains were unsuitable for public display. So the town elders found a stuffed groundhog that just happened to be lying around (apparently the body of a previous “Wiarton Willie,” who was no doubt poisoned by the current, and now rotting, Willie in an unseemly palace coup), plopped it into that Barbie coffin, and presented the remains to a horrified public. Here’s the groundhog you’ve all been waiting for! And he’s dead! Winter for the next ten years!

The people of Wiarton meant well, I’m sure. But I’m having serious doubts as to their combined mental capacity. First off, the real Willy was found in a state of advanced decomposition, which means he had been dead for weeks. Weeks. How could that happen? This rodent is the cornerstone of Wiarton’s entire tourism economy for the month of February, and no one bothers to check on him from time to time? Did they just stick him in a cage after last Groundhog Day and then forget to feed him? Every kid in the world had a hamster they forgot to feed, but you’re usually, like, five at the time. These were actual adults. They say he was hibernating when he died. Sure he was. I used that excuse about the hamster.

QotD: “Welcome to the Canadian Internet. Now stop using it.”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Welcome to the Canadian Internet, where extreme concentration in telecoms and a weak, lame regulator have given rise to a nation where your Internet access is metered in small, ungenerous dribs, and where ranging too far afield during your network use results in your ISP breaking into your browsing session to tell you that you’re close to being cut off from the net.

The incumbent telcos have successfully petitioned for “usage based billing,” wherein their customers only get so much bandwidth every month (they’ve also long practiced, and lied about, furtive throttling and filtering, slowing down downloads, streams, and voice-over-IP traffic). This will effectively make it cheaper to use their second-rate voice-over-IP and video-on-demand service than it is to use the superior services the rest of the developed world enjoys.

If you were a Canadian entrepreneur or innovator looking to start your own networked business, this would be terminal. How can an innovative service take hold in Canada if Canadians know that every click eats away at their monthly bandwidth allotment? I can think of no better way to kill Canadians’ natural willingness to experiment with new services that can improve their lives and connect them with their neighbours and the wide world than to make them reconsider every click before they make it.

Cory Doctorow, “Welcome to the Canadian Internet, now stop using it”, BoingBoing, 2011-02-02

BBC’s Top Gear team spark hostile response from Mexico

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

I guess that diplomats must do things like this, but anyone who’s watched more than five minutes of Top Gear would not take them seriously as political commentators. Hilariously funny, yes, but not particularly representative of British or British government views. Mexico, however, has chosen to take offense and has sent a demand to the BBC for a formal apology:

The irreverent British motoring show “Top Gear” has driven into diplomatic hot water after a host branded a Mexican car “lazy, feckless and flatulent” and said it mirrored Mexico’s national characteristics.

Mexico’s ambassador to Britain fired off a letter to the state broadcaster protesting the show’s “outrageous, vulgar and inexcusable insults” and demanding an apology.

In the episode, host Richard Hammond likened a Mexican sports car to “a lazy, feckless and flatulent oaf with a mustache, leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat.”

Co-host James May went on to describe Mexican food as “like sick with cheese on it,” or “refried sick,” while Jeremy Clarkson predicted they would not get any complaints about the show because “the ambassador is going to be sitting there with a remote control, snoring.”

I’m sure the BBC will provide the requested apology, but I doubt that it will change anything. Top Gear without the over-the-top commentary would be just another bloody car show.

The Register: Let’s replace the discredited term “scientist” with “boffin”

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:28

The Register, reacting to the decision by the Advertising Standards Authority to allow homeopaths and herbalists to be described as “scientists”, offers an alternative term:

We here at the Reg would like to offer as a new gold standard our use of the term “boffin” to replace the now officially discredited term “scientist” — which was already in our view unacceptably loosely applied, including as it did researchers in such fields as sports science, psychology etc.

A boffin, on these pages at least, will be a researcher whose work is based on hard sums and/or hard facts such as fossils, atomsmasher collisions etc. Statistics, especially ones gleaned by surveying students or counting up patents granted etc, will generally not count. Persons who work with the latter sorts of material will normally be known as eggheads, trick-cyclists, economists etc as appropriate.

And even though the word “scientist” now officially means nothing, we still aren’t going to apply it to homeopathic smellies experts.

UK government trying to further economize on helicopters for Afghan service

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

Lewis Page is concerned that, on top of the wrong-headed approach to cutting military costs, the coalition government may further reduce the Chinook helicopter plans:

In its last months in office, the previous Labour government announced plans to order 22 new Chinook helicopters (in addition to two which would replace recent combat losses in Afghanistan). The money was to be found by cutting squadrons of fast jets — in particular, Tornado low-level deep strike bombers. The first 10 helicopters were to come into service in 2012-13.

On arrival in office the Coalition carried out a Strategic Defence Review, personally supervised by Prime Minister Cameron, in which it was decided that the Tornado bomber fleet would be preserved intact, the Chinook order would be cut to just 12 — and, controversially, that the Harrier jumpjet fleet would be scrapped entirely.

Even the much reduced Chinook order has so far failed to actually be signed, and there have since been suggestions that the Ministry of Defence financial assumptions which underlay the Review were too optimistic – thus, that more cuts might be required.

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