Charity begins at home

[Resisting the temptation to end the title "...homo". What a pity many readers would have misconstrued it.]

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle about animal charities in Scotland today. The Scottish SPCA accuses the RSPCA of  allowing Scots donors to believe that the RSPCA spends money in Scotland, when in fact it doesn’t. I’m sure the same confusion exists between the NSPCC and Children 1st (The bloody stupid name doesn’t help.)

But I think there’s a much more shameful comparison to be made here. In 2007, the RSPCA made £114.1 million to the Scottish SPCA’s £11.984 million. In the year to March 2008, the NSPCC made £119.435 million  to Children 1st’s £9.270 million. The real disgrace is that the figures for the children’s charities are much the same as the animal charities’. Aren’t suffering children worth more than suffering of other species?

Gary Larson once did a Far Side cartoon titled “Bobbing for Poodles”. In one of his books, he talked of the number of complaints it had attracted, and expressed his relief that he hadn’t gone with his original title of “Bobbing for Babies”. I have no doubt whatsoever as to which title would have attracted more complaints in the UK, and it saddens me.

Doctor Who at its best

Russell T. Davies is due a lot of credit for regenerating Doctor Who for the 21st century, but his artistic contribution hasn’t been the greatest. Hats off to Eccleston and Tennant as the Doctors, and a huge surprise in Billie Piper, whom I fully expected to be the worst assistant since Bonnie Langford. But among the writers, Steven Moffat reigns supreme. His CV outside Doctor Who is impressive, with Press Gang and Jekyll as notable landmarks. Within Doctor Who, his The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances was nothing short of stunning.

Given my high expectations, I was slightly disappointed in last week’s episode, Silence in the Library, although I was pleased that it introduced a concept I’ve long felt was strangely absent from time-travel fiction in general, namely that two people can encounter events in a different sequence. But last week’s episode was the first of a two-parter, and this week’s Part 2, Forest of the Dead, was better than I dared hope. It even managed to get a fair performance out of the real worst assistant since Bonnie Langford.

Takes me back a bit

I’m sitting in front of Pink Floyd Night on BBC4. I don’t watch much television, and I don’t listen to much Pink Floyd, but it’s fascinating stuff and it takes me back to a time when adolescent hormone imbalance made this stuff seem so earth-shatteringly significant.

There are four old guys, frightfully English Public School, terribly decent on TV and probably a huge PITA in person. I’m struck by the fact that Rick Wright reminds me so much of Nigel Havers, more by manner and accent than physiognomy. The image is so striking, I have to see resemblances in the others. Roger Waters looks like Richard Gere, but then I start to struggle. Nick Mason looks vaguely like Douglas Adams and I’m really struggling with David Gilmour – perhaps a touch of Christy Moore?

They’re talking (well, Wright is) about music in terms that are very frustrating to me. I’m a scientist by nature and training. He talks about chords in a way that is completely alien to me. I struggle to tune my 3-year-old daughter’s Spongebob Squarepants Ukulele; I certainly can’t see why Wright thinks one chord sounds so effective – I like some jazz, but obviously I lack the intellectual grounding to understand much of it.

I can’t analyse it, but I must go and play Dark Side of the Moon.

Briefly

I imagine there’s lots of stories like this. I don’t know why this one has attracted attention. Obviously, it’s a law drafted by morons, and the consequent tragedies will go almost entirely unreported.

I had occasion to chastise Stephen Fry yesterday.

World’s worst crop circle

I live in an obscure little village between Glasgow and Paisley called Ralston. It’s a village in the southern English sense, where they pretend that some arbitrarily-delineated group of roads has its own identity, distinct from the next few roads in the seemingly endless continuum of homogeneous conurbation. North of Ralston is Barshaw municipal golf course, a quite decent course available to the public.

North of Barshaw is a strange little oasis of farmland, complete with its own crop circle. Unfortunately, it’s been made by drunks, and it’s not very circular.

BBC News continues downhill (4)

Just in case anyone’s missed any steps in the BBC’s latest, and most surreal, use of News (TV, radio and Web) to plug other BBC programmes, here’s how it works:

1. make a documentary that’s likely to attract an audience of half a dozen octogenarians;
2. make a libellous trailer for that documentary by splicing together clips out of sequence;
3. report the “controversy” (that nobody else has noticed) over the trailer as a major news item;
4. make a public apology;
5. report the apology as a major news item.

Good writing

Here’s a couple of essays I’ve been reading. They have little in common except that they’re fairly well-written and seemed interesting to me.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/05/rare_risk_and_o.html (including link to http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/nyt2.htm)

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/05/back-to-dark-ages.html (via http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/if_the_description_of_the_begi.php)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html (via http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=592616)