Month: February 2007

From Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary:

Clairvoyant

n. A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron. Namely, that he is a blockhead.

Via the fantastic Used FAQs, the TV Guide Oscar FAQ, including:

Question: Can I become a seat-filler for the Oscar ceremony?

Answer: Only if the Academy knows you and thinks you’re worthy. A couple hundred well-dressed men and women are utilized every year to fill in for celebrities and other guests who leave their prime seats during commercial breaks; the idea is that empty seats don’t look good on camera. But because the job is a delicate one — you’ve got to look like you belong, be fast and diplomatic, and know enough not to bother the stars — it goes only to people the Academy can trust. Years ago, an outside company handled the seat-fillers and annually sifted through thousands of applications; these days, it’s handled internally.

Is it lame that this answer effectively dashes one of my long-held dreams?

The New York Times has an article about the pioneering environmentalist Stewart Brand and his insistence that in the coming decade the environmental movement will move from being dominated by what he calls “romantic” environmentalism to a better “scientific” kind. Essentially the distinction is between those well-meaning but misguided idealists who oppose the unnaturalness of genetically modified foods and still shriek in terror at the mention of nuclear power and the current minority of environmentalists who take an evidence-based approach to evaluating new technologies. From the article:

He thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster are as overstated as the counterculture’s fears of computers turning into Big Brother. “Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational control machines into individual freedom machines,” he told Conservation magazine last year. “Where are the green biotech hackers?”

He’s also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.

If this profile is to be believed, Brand has been right more than once before. If so, this would make me optimistic that we could take a more reasoned approach to implementing new developments in future, without the knee-jerk anti-technology reactions of the “romantics”.

In the comments to my recent post about the Pope, Ronan Lowe mentioned An Taoiseach’s recent remarks about "aggressive secularists". I thought this phrase was worthy of a post in its own right. I wondered in a follow-up comment whether Ahern was confusing secularism with rationalism (or atheism, humanism, etc.—whichever your prefer), because the phrase "aggressive secularism" just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

Secularism does not mean the abolishment of religion. On the contrary, it is the only means we have of promoting religious freedom. The word, as I understand it, means the removal of religion from the political sphere and into the private lives of its various practitioners. It means allowing individuals, whether Catholic, atheist, Protestant, Muslim, or anything else, to make their own decisions about what influence their religious beliefs (if any) will have on their lives. The alternative is theocracy (or the banning of religion, which I doubt was Ahern’s intention). In this sense secularism must surely be universally embraced by all freedom-loving people, yet we have politicians speaking against it?

Ireland is still largely governed by a large Catholic majority. Growing up, I had no access to a non-religious school, so in order to excercise my right to education I had to endure the Catholic (or the alternative Protestant) attempts at indoctrination. It was illegal for me to buy alcohol last Wednesday because, apparently, the Catholic majority can’t control themselves so they need a law in place to enforce their abstention from alcohol on Ash Wednesday. Contraception is only relatively recently legal in Ireland. Divorce even more recent. Homosexuals are still subject to state-sanctioned persecution. All this because the Catholic majority opposes the liberal ideal of secularism, that people should be free to make their own choices based on their own beliefs.

If our representatives continue to oppose this ideal, the result will be a fracturing of society into groups of opposing beliefs with no apparent common ground for interaction. Secularism is that common ground: our shared respect for the nobility of human endeavour and the freedom to live our lives our own way.

When I was deciding how many recent posts to display on the main age of Soylent Red I had two concerns: that each post should have its place for a certain minimum time period, and that the page should not empty of content for lack of recent enough posts. The minimum time period right now is one week. The minimum number of posts at any time is five. That means that if I don’t post for a week, the last five posts will still be here. If I post ten times in one day, there’ll be a whole load of posts on here until they drop off the front page a week hence (assuming they’re replaced with new content).

The SQL query for this is a straightforward union: (SELECT * FROM entries WHERE posttime>'cutoff' AND status='published' ORDER BY posttime DESC) UNION (SELECT * FROM entries WHERE status='published' ORDER BY posttime DESC LIMIT 5); Here I’ve simplified the long list of fields to return to a simple "*"—I don’t recommend using the universal selector in practice. Also, "cutoff" represents a datetime value for one week ago computed in the PHP source. This is (essentially) the code I had in place until just now, but there’s a bug in it.

This is a UNION of two SELECTs, each of which is ordered by descending timestamps, so the first item returned is the most recent post, as you would want it when displaying posts on a blog. But when the UNION operator is applied to the two sets of results, the order is no longer guaranteed. The posts can come out in any order at all. Up until now they had always been returned in the order I wanted, or at least I hadn’t notced otherwise, but there had been no guarantee.

Nothing came of my listing on the site for some time. I got the occassional email or text message asking if I was available at such and such a date in such and such a place. Inevitably I wasn’t. It turned out that production companies don’t like to plan very far ahead. "Can you take the next week off to film with us? Including today? What college work?"

Fast forward—that’s an industry term for running a film at faster than real time in order to skip quickly into the future—to this Monday, when I got a call from Coco television to play a bank raider in a re-enactment of of a robbery in Monasterevan for RTÉ’s Crime Call. I accepted the offer, at the same time composing the beginning of my inevitable Oscar acceptance speech some years down the line. Short red hair and a pair of blue jeans were the requirements as stated. But they found in me something that they hadn’t expected. The ‘X’ factor.

By fortuitous coincidence, the show’s producer (I think; I never did ask her actual title. It seemed to be anything between casting director and coffee-fetcher) lives around the corner from me. She drove me in for a pre-eight o’clock start. We filmed from eight until 10 inside the bank. When the bank opened for business we moved outside to get the approach and our wild dash to freedom. Then we took a series of shots of the getaway car speeding away. Though it seems the escape can’t be described in those terms in the show’s voice-over, as there are no witness statements that say the robbers sped away. It’s an educated guess. Perhaps they took a leisurely drive.

I was the lead robber, so I got the most lines and the most screen time. Much of it was concealed under a balaclava, but I think there’s enough un-obscured footage that I’m likely to be lynched once the show goes out next Tuesday night. Such are the tribulations we screen celebrities must endure for our art.

I’ll be interested to see how it all came together in the editing room. No doubt I’ll be cringing and peeking between my fingers at the TV screen.