Shocking, but predictable

"Poll firm predicts shock losses for Theresa May’s Tories at general election"

If YouGov has correctly predicted a shocking thing, this would be a predictably unpredictable result. If they're wrong, it would be unpredictably predictable.

You could spend time thinking about what the polls mean but, if you have any coherent political preferences, this information will probably do nothing to change the way you vote. So you might as well fill your mental bandwidth with something less pointless, like learning how to create a vintage teapot cake and decorate a sugar teacup. A sugar teacup would be about as robust as many recent polls and, at the end of the process, there would be a fighting chance of cake, rather than a high probability of crushing despair.

In fact, I'm sorry I even mentioned it...

Twee for two

Newport Pagnell resident shocks friends with this one weirdly specific trick:

"Vintage Teapot" Cake Decoration Workshop
17th June - 10am - 4.30pm
This 1 day workshop will enable you to create a vintage teapot cake and decorate a sugar teacup.
You will learn how to:

• Sculpt cake to achieve a 3 D effect
• Cover and smooth fondant
• Design your colour scheme
• Use molds
• Hand paint sugar fondant

Just £89 per person
Places are limited to just 8 per class

Spotted on a town noticeboard, in a town which currently supports a population of about 15,000 people and two cake decorating shops.

Not that I've got anything against novelty cakes, as such, but context is everything. Mastering the skill needed to come up with this sort of whimsical creation would be perfectly fine if you did it only once, for a very special event, or to impress the Great British Bake Off judges, but paying to reproduce it in a ninety-quid-a-pop cake-decoration-by-numbers workshop? Really? Is it just me, or is that a bit bonkers?

Fossil watch

Time is running out...

What’s more, the [fossil fuel] industry sits on a mountain of debt that can never be repaid, will never be repaid, and it’s poised between two bad pricing decisions — keep prices low, which will accelerate the industry bankruptcies caused by those debts (which will also bankrupt some banks); or raise prices higher, making the fossil fuel industry’s debt service more sustainable in the short term while driving an even faster transition to renewables in the long term.

So what is the endgame for those who are heavily invested in the fossil fuels biz? Hope and work for higher prices now and fill your boots while you can, or try to keep prices low and hope it buys you more time by reducing the incentive to develop and improve the altenatives?

I have no idea, although I'd guess that any fossil fuel interests based here in the UK would prefer the short-term "grab what you can and to hell with tomorrow" approach so typical of the British way of doing things. This mindset has been disastrous in the past - the UK treated North Sea oil as a one-off bonanza, rather than thinking of the future and sensibly diverting some of the profits from this finite resource into a sovereign wealth fund like Norway, or Saudi Arabia.

If I'm right, and UK fossil fuel interests get what they wish for, it would mean more pain and fuel poverty in the short term, although maybe a brighter future further down the line, as alternatives get taken up more quickly than they otherwise would have been.

Brendan O'Neill's hypocritical virtue-signalling

The Manchester bombing was a pointless piece of cruel stupidity. At least it brought out the best in many people, though, from offers of emergency accommodation, free taxi rides and bottled water for shaken people unable to get home, to help finding missing loved ones and so many (perhaps misguided but well-meaning) people rushing to donate blood that centres are having to turn them away. Good on those people for doing their best to do something helpful.

And shame on those members of the commentariat with column inches to fill who decided to make it all about themselves. I'm looking at you, Brendan O'Neill. You could have had the decency to keep your big hypocritical trap shut, but after a career built on scolding others for empty "virtue signalling"*, you just couldn't resist lecturing them on how much more virtuously angry you are than everybody else.

Brendan, there are people today who will be feeling far more devastated and angrier than you could even imagine, and with good reason. Don't insult them by comparing your urge to churn out yet another repetitive piece of look-at-me contrarian instapunditry to something important happening to real people in the real world.

If you had any shame we'd never hear from you again.



*Brendan also makes the waggy finger here and here and here and here and here.

Hoggart's Law versus public relations bullshit

The public relations industry exists to take away your informed consent by messing with your head and crowding out useful information with spurious noise, for the exclusive benefit of the rich and powerful (who are the only people who can afford to pay for this shit). So, definitely evil.

It wouldn't be much of a consolation, but the evil PR business would be slightly less insulting to the rest of us if the diabolical people being paid to mess with our heads were worthy opponents, with subtle, piercing intellects, weaving complex, finely-crafted webs of spin and misdirection so beautiful that we'd be forced to admire the sheer craftsmanship of the people pulling our strings.

But, apparently, they're not. They're as dumb as a bag of hammers. Don't take my word for it. Just look at the blog of a public relations professional. `

Richard Bailey, of prstudies dot com, has been thinking about how to identify the best PR blogs being entered for something called the #bestPRblogs contest. His thoughts, such as they are, occupy the space taken up by this blog post.

Let's put the pronouncements of a PR professional through a bullshit filter. The filter I'm using today is Hoggart's Law™, which states that "If the opposite of a statement is plainly absurd, it was not worth making in the first place."

Richard,  who appears to have a Phd in the bleeding obvious, titles his blog post "In praise of excellence" (as opposed to "In praise of mediocrity").

Let's examine an expert's suggestions for writing an excellent PR blog:

• "Have a blog" (because not having a blog can negatively impact your chances of winning a prize for having an excellent blog. Who knew? Do go on...)
• "Be selected for my pick of the week roundup" ("One of the guys judging this contest wants you to impress him, so you can safely ignore him for ever.")
• "Be consistent" ("Be wildly inconsistent")
• "Be brilliant" ("Be stupid")
• "Brilliant writing counts"" ("Write any old rubbish, nobody cares")
• Quality content has value" (see the opposite of "Brilliant writing counts", above). 

I don't know about his students, but Richard certainly deserves a prize. For nature conservation. So long as we have an ecosystem which supports vast herds of bovine PR professionals like him, the duck-billed platitude is safe from extinction.


Image credit.

"You might also want to try..."

Today's unintentionally funny suggestion comes from webopedia's attempt to define organic SEO. After defining the term, the entry gives examples of organic SEO techniques. I love the way that the very last technique listed is "writing content relevant for human readers."

I suppose you could try doing that if you were really desperate, but it'll never catch on.

Cultural recycling

"Why every American graduation plays the same song"[sic] was the title of this video I just came across. Never having been to an American graduation, I wondered which "song" (or rather "tune") it was. I guessed Brahms' Academic Festival Overture (or at least the tune of Gaudeamus Igitur, the rousing student drinking song that Brahms recycled at the end of his piece). Alternatively, I know from my wife, who organises degree ceremonies, that Charpentier's Te Deum and Purcell's Trumpet Tune often get an airing on these occasions, too.

Anyway, I clicked play and discovered that Americans celebrate their academic successes to the tune of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March Number 1 - the "Land of Hope and Glory" tune. For a Brit who associates the piece with the union jack-waving crowds at the last night of the Proms, this just felt weird.

Which it maybe shouldn't have done considering that, in the USA, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture is a standard feature of July the 4th celebrations and most Americans apparently think Tchaikovsky's tune has something to do with America's inconclusive 1812 war with the British. We Brits are used to cultural appropriation happening to other cultures - heaven knows, Britain did enough of it back in the high noon of its Imperial pomp, so it's about time we got our heads around the idea that it can happen to us, too.

Personally, I'm quite happy with the discovery - I'm better disposed towards the piece, now that I know that lots of people associate it with a celebration of hard work and intellectual curiosity, not just a strain of jingoist Imperial nostalgia that's embarrassing at best and delusionally destructive at worst. Here's the vid: