Dan O'Huiginn

[crossposted from ohuiginn.net, as part of the “stop putting everything where nobody can find it” campaign]

Channel 4 yesterday had two documentaries on Iraq – neither very good overall but both with interesting aspects.

Much tediousness: it isn’t even waffle about Iraq, it’s waffle about people waffling about Iraq. Nothing to see here

Channel 4 yesterday had two documentaries on Iraq – both with good aspects, but both quite seriously flawed.
The first was devoted to Dispatches: women in Iraq. It’s quite poorly edited and planned for a mainstream documentary like Dispatches, the same footage keeps on cropping up multiple times, and there are some dubious-sounding statistics. Despite that, it’s good to see footage of Iraq from beyond the usual ‘violence and high politics’ perspective, and having programmes made by Iraqis rather than Brits is a Good Thing.
Then a couple of hours later we had John Snow in “the real Iraq”, talking about why documentaries like that one are made by Iraqis – or rather, about how impossible it is for Western journalists to get enough access to interact with the real Iraq. He’s right, and it’s a useful thing to drum on about. But it all falls down because his perspective is not “why the world can’t know about Iraq” but “why Jon Snow can’t know about Iraq”.
It doesn’t do the rest of us any harm at all to be forced to rely on Iraqi journalists and bloggers, and to ignore Western reporters for anything except high politics.
He did at least make a very good point about the lack of nuanced understanding of Iraqi current affairs, in what could almost be a mission statement for the Iraq Analysis Group:

“What we have in iraq as a result of bloggers, fledgling journalists, new media of all sorts, is a kind of scattergun effect – we have a a little bit of knowledge about different bits and pieces. What there is very little of, partly because there is so little western media here, is any real analysis or interpretation of events that we can relate to”

Forgot to say. For those of you interested in the (fluffy Cambridge) Earth First campaign, there’s a facebook group and a petition to sign (for the university to not stop using renewable energy). I’m not entirely convinced by the petition opposing hydro power, but then I don’t know much about hydro, and 1500 people have already signed – so why grumble about details?

Also:

1. I had no idea my angst was so popular
2. The Center for Tactical Magic is awesome in a way that makes me wish I was as creatively bonkers
3. Calling comes round again tonight. Sure I’ll be as excited as a four-year old by this evening, but right now I feel “oh, well, here we go again”; regularity has its downside.

…and back another day, to a very very pleasant Friday – the usual goths in the evening, but also a reunion/wander round Cambridge with uisgebeatha (doesn’t meeting somebody you knew four years ago give you an immense sense of getting older?). Her friend in Corpus has the most stunningly beautiful room, which makes me pine for those bits of stereotypical Cambridgeness – and it was quite enjoyable trying to keep up with her geek-talk (much easier than mjg59‘s!).

Between those two, went to a talk on climate change, organised by the Cambridge eEarth First Campaign, who despite their name are a CUSU campaign rather than a network of hairy vegan green anarchists. This was unexpectedly good: the room was so full we had to move out and sit on a lawn in Kings (yay!), and all three speakers were good (double-yay!). In particular David Howarth was there, and he’s come on impressively as a public speaker since I last saw him talk over a year ago. Clearly being an MP gives you the arrogance you need to talk in public.

Oh, and Thursday night before that was an excellent get-together of inactive activists with food and grass and political ramblings. What’s not to like?

[Zeugma](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma_%28city%29) is such a fantastic name for a city; I’m disappointed not to have run into this one before. Ho-hum, yet another mostly-ignored corner of the ancient world then.
Also, the BBC finds underground pyramids in Bosnia, including one with a 2.4-mile-long underground tunnel. That’s pretty huge, no?

Surreally hilarious. Stalin vs. Hitler, superhero style. Somebody has also created an English translation (although the original does have English below the cartoons).

It’s another “too lazy to write properly, but don’t want to forget what I’ve been doing” update.

Yesterday was writinghawk‘s barbeque, in which I learnt to play Go very very badly, discovered yet again that mjg59‘s geek-talk is stunningly incomprehensible, met claerwen, remet James (not something I had expected to ever happen), whinged at far too many people, and was unnecessarily nasty to at least one (sorry!). This may have some connection to me going home afterwards and deciding to create an angst filter. Beforehand, I spent the afternoon having one of those incredible dreams that makes you reconsider great swathes of your life. I may write a separate post about it if I can do it justice.

The previous day was the great atreic/emperor wedding ceilidh. Not having been to a ceilidh [1], I had the usual feeling of “How have I been alive 22 years and not got involved in this?”. All that was interspersed with simont-like musings about the social-engineering aspects of organised dance. writinghawk: your rant about music makes a lot more sense when transposed to be about dancing, no?

This is getting long – I want to write about Friday and Thursday too, and about that dream, but I’ll leave it at this for now

1: well, I think I remember one barndance, but that was almost a decade ago and I wasn’t paying attention

I’ll be in London this weekend, probably from Saturday until Tuesday. Saturday is full of a picnic followed by warming the_alchemist‘s house, and I have possible plans for Sunday afternoon. Anybody want to meet up the rest of the time, or point me at things I’d enjoy doing? _proserpina_?

Following a conversation with lavendersparkle yesterday, I’ve decided to start using more filters.

Current filters, and why I’m extending them

Great few days – as I keep saying, they always come in clumps. Lots of things I’d like to write about properly, but I know I never will. So I’ll jot them down here, and if you’re (un)lucky I might come back to some of them later…

Wild Thyme Cafe was excellent, mainly becuase it was full of people I haven’t talked to nearly enough. Most of them don’t have livejournals, so I can’t point and giggle. The usual Cambridge small-worldness culminated in me being asked if I knew mjg59‘s girlfriend. There was also the joy of seeing lavendersparkle for the first time in 9 months or so; I just hope it wasn’t too unpleasant being the civil servant in a roomful of anarchists

Then I went off with writinghawk and Francis and emerged four hours later with a lot to think about. In brief, so I don’t forget:

• Why so many geeks are big on civil liberties
• Faith schools + ‘modular religion‘ –> state-funded Summerhill
• A bizarre horizontal tetris variant that I have no hope of ever describing
• Links between Intentional Communities and Social Software
• The Wireworld computer, a cellular automaton that must have taken a great deal of time for somebody to dream up. [Edit: As Gareth points out below, the people behind this were David Moore, Mark Owen, and friends]
• Collective fanboying of Chris Lightfoot, who is like Freakonomics only better, and should really be given a column somewhere
• Why web services are bad news for open-source software

Before that, Slimelight was also very good fun; elixir-zero has already written about it. I’m getting to understand why some people don’t like it: the druggies, the over-pushy people, the falling-apart building, the 6am exhaustion. But none of those are really downsides for me personally – ymmv.

…or at least, it is in Russia. So says Alexa.

Edit: that link doesn’t work, and I can’t figure out how to find a better one. Sorry, you’ll just need to go on blind faith!

Haven’t seen this one being propagated for a while, so I figured it was my turn to give it a little poke:

This is a picnic meme. There will be an LJ picnic on Jesus Green, Cambridge, UK on Sunday the 14th of May, from around 2pm. We’ll meet toward the town end of Jesus Green, by Lower Park Street. Nobody is organising this; it’ll just happen. Please turn up, be sensible, bring food and drink, meet new people, have fun.

Unfortunately I’m not sure I can make it – but it’ll be good despite that terrible, terrible shortcoming!