Britain's reputation as the most surveilled nation in the western world is safe in New Labour's hands:

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts. [...]

This isn't some medium-term plan: it's coming next March, three months from now. And of course, this is just the start:

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

And:

Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.

As you'd expect, the T-word makes an appearance:

Mr Whiteley [Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the ACPO steering committee on automatic number plate recognition] said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.

"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent."

Once this is up and running, I give it twelve months at most until the responsible minister proposes expanding the range of public bodies having access to this data to every local authority and quango in the country: after all, if you're not defrauding the state then you have no reason to object to them knowing where you go and when and in whose company, do you?

The obvious parallel is with security cameras, which the public seems to basically be happy with. The thing is, if it works as advertised this is qualitatively different; it's not just a passive system gathering potential evidence which can be reviewed if a crime is committed within sight of a camera, it's actually going to be tracking and identifying every one of us (or, more accurately, our cars), every time we come within range of a camera. Creating a pool of data ripe for mining.

If you think this is just fine, that only the guilty have anything to hide, then ask yourself this: would you have any objection to the government mounting a camera in every room of your house, with every person who comes or goes having to wear a nice big badge clearly identifying them for the benefit of the dutiful public servant watching the feed? (We'll leave the bathroom camera-free, just to be nice. But a camera will be mounted observing the window, just to make sure that if anyone or anything comes or goes via that window the Powers That Be will know about it.)

[Via Amygdala]

Cruel but funny:

One day an ipod user was walking down the road when another man accidentally bumped into him, knocking the earbuds out of the ipod user's ears.

Suddenly the ipod wearer fell to the floor, went blue in the face, choked and quickly died. The guy couldn't understand it – there was no way he had hit the ipod chap hard enough to have killed him. Then he heard the ipod's earbuds still playing so he put one of the buds into his ear – the ipod was going "…breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out…"

[Via Groc's Bloggette]

The Daily Express truly captures the mood of the nation as the first civil partnerships are celebrated in England:

Registrars fear flood of bogus gay weddings by asylum seekers.

Wankers. (For the avoidance of doubt, I'm referring to the Daily Express.)

[Via Qwghlm del.icio.us feed]

The Year in Media Errors and Corrections is highly educational. The winning entry is pretty embarrassing, but I think my favourite is from the good old Guardian:

The Strange Bedfellows Award
Congratulations to The Guardian, which managed to make two people roll over in their graves with just one error:

In our G2 cover story about Hunter S Thompson yesterday we mistakenly attributed to Richard Nixon the view that Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". On the contrary, it was what Thompson said of Nixon.

Come to think of it, the other winner from the Guardian is pretty special:

The Learn Your Lesson Award
A correction from the Guardian:

In a Comment piece headed, We must not forget how war was won, page 22, May 7, we wrote of "the genocidal destruction of the Jewish and gypsy (sic) populations". Gypsy takes a capital G. The stylebook says so: Gypsies u[pper]c[ase], recognised as an ethnic group under the Race Relations Act, as are Irish Travellers. The point has been made in corrections on the following occasions: December 7 1999; March 3 2000; May 4 2000; March 3 2001; July 25 2001; August 1 2001; September 1 2001; December 14 2001; February 19 2003; September 29 2004; March 3 2005.

[Via Do You Feel Loved?]

I do believe that I've found a solution should I get bored over the holiday season and want to occupy a few hours: plans for a paper model of Howl's Moving Castle.

It's a 50MB download, and the annotations are in Japanese, but I'm sure that'll just add to the fun…

[Via Paper Forest, via MetaFilter]

It looks as if the wreckage of the Beagle 2 probe – or at any rate, the patterns on the Martian surface that would mark where various bits landed – may have been spotted.

[Via Slashdot]

Disquieting Modern Trends by Will Layman & Chris Osmond:

Harry Potter – Just Not Getting Any?
The Harry Potter franchise is now essentially bulletproof – a cultural craze that has ten-year-olds reading 800-page books. Who’s going to get niggling about that, particularly at this late stage in the game? Well, there are the religious nuts who believe that Potter-mania is a front for Satanism, … and there’s us. Our problem in nutshell: Why isn’t Harry getting any? I mean this is a kid who goes to a coed boarding school and owns a freakin’ invisibility cloak. Not to mention that he is the star and leading scorer of the school’s Quidditch team, the winner of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and a dude with a totally boss lightning-shaped scar on his forehead—better than a tattoo! There is no way this kid doesn’t score left and right in an environment where the coolest competition has the last name “Weasley.” We don’t get it, and it causes us to question the value of a society unaware that fame plus magical ability plus a British accent equals booty. J. K. Rowling, we suggest that you spend at least a year reading James Bond books before writing that last Potter tome. And let Harry drive an Aston-Martin, maybe, O.K.? Or meet a suggestively named supervixen?

Daniel Radcliffe as the next-but-one 007, anyone?

[Via feeling listless]

There's good news about the status of pearLyrics.

The next question is how long tools like pearLyrics will be able to find sites to download their lyrics from. Nate Anderson's article about Warner/Chapell Music Group's volte face suggests that the industry is about to take a bead on the real culprits:

Note that Warner is still calling for changes in the use of lyrics to their songs. The statement strongly suggests that Warner still wants sites to license (and pay for) the use of lyrics, which will help keep the lyrics accurate and will put bread on the table of starving songwriters and their families. Warner apparently realized that pearLyrics is legal since it is little more than a search engine for lyrics (and in fact, Google now offers the same service through its new music searches). But Warner is in no way changing its stance against the actual lyrics sites.

If anything, the war is about to escalate. Billboard reports that come January, the Music Publishing Association will start suing lyrics sites (and maybe a guitar tablature site or two) into compliance or out of existence if they don't stop publishing song lyrics. Lauren Keiser, president of the association, says that he's not in the talkin' mood, but Billboard thinks a little talkin' never hurt anyone.

I wonder how big a price increase the industry will want Steve Jobs to agree to in return for the right to include song lyrics in iTunes Music Store downloads…

Good to see that Julian Barnes isn't taking himself too seriously:

Are you one of those writers who thinks even your grocery list has literary value?

Oh, it does! My grocery list has tremendous literary value. I sharpen several pencils in the course of writing it. You have to put the words in the right order, even when it's a grocery list. Especially when it's a grocery list. You have to make sure you go to the right shops in the right order.

When I posted a link to a video of the Best. Xmas. Lights. Ever! last month I did wonder how on earth the guy's neighbours put up with the racket. Trust Snopes to have the answer:

So that the Williams' neighbors aren't disturbed by constant noise, viewers driving by the house are informed by signs to tune in to a signal broadcast over a low-power FM radio station to hear the musical accompaniment.

Unfortunately, it turns out there was another problem:

After a 6 December 2005 traffic accident in his neighborhood, Carson Williams agreed to indefinitely discontinue his 2005 Christmas light display because it was causing severe traffic congestion problems.

I reckon all underground mass transit systems should have a parasite. (NB: 35MB Quicktime movie.)

[For the benefit of dial-up users, "parasite" is the title of an art project which involved hanging a box containing a computer, a projector and a battery off the side of a subway train so it could project images on the walls of the subway as the train moved through the tunnels. Including, at one point, a very creepy film of a shark that was apparently keeping pace with the train. Very strange and extremely cool. Though no doubt if this was an official piece of kit the films would be interspersed with adverts. Or just replaced with ads completely, since it just won't do to allow a flattish surface in a public space to go unadorned with advertising nowadays.]

[Via Defective Yeti]

I've heard the story of Mountbatten visiting Churchill in his bathtub before:

In late 1942, Lord Louis Mountbatten — the British military's Chief of Combined Operations — paid a visit to Winston Churchill at his official country home, Chequers. Mountbatten had with him a small parcel of great importance. A member of Churchill's staff apologized that the Prime Minister was at that moment in his bath.

"Good," said Mountbatten as he bounded up the stairs. "That's exactly where I want him to be." Mountbatten entered the steaming bathroom to find Churchill in the tub. It was generally not a wise thing to interrupt Sir Winston in his bathtub.

"I have," Mountbatten explained, "a block of a new material that I would like to put in your bath."

Mountbatten opened his parcel and dropped its contents between the Prime Minister's bare legs in the water. It was a chunk of ice.

Rather than bellow at his Chief of Combined Operations, Churchill stared at the ice intently — and so, standing by the bathtub, did Mountbatten himself. Minutes passed, and still they looked into the steaming depths of bath water before them. The ice was not melting.

[...]

However, I don't remember hearing the rest of the story; experiments in a freezer in Smithfield Market, gunshots at a meeting of the Allied chiefs of staff, a prototype that went nowhere. Fascinating.

[Via Buzz Andersen]

Beware the Murderous Manhattan Santa.

[Via The Sideshow]

As I read Martin Filler's New York Review of Books article about the work of architect Santiago Calatrava, I started googling for images of the buildings and bridges Filler mentioned. Then I came across this passage:

All the indicators of kitsch converge in Philip Johnson and John Burgee's PPG corporate headquarters of 1979–1984 in Pittsburgh, where the shape of Sir Charles Barry's Victoria Tower of 1836–1860 for the Palace of Westminster in London was altered in size, function, and material, and transmogrified into a forty-story mirror-glass office building.

I thought he was kidding. He wasn't.

Christianity Today nominates the Top Ten Movie Robots of All Time.

Not a bad selection all in all, except that I don't understand what Johnny-5 is doing in this company.

[Via kottke.org remaindered links]

Neal Pollack has one seriously twisted imagination:

Veteran science reporters guessed the 2005 Nobel Prize ceremonies would be different when the Swedish royal family decreed that Diddy would be the host, but we had no idea how different. It was immediately apparent this would be a night like no other Stockholm had ever seen.

Diddy's first order of business was changing the traditional red carpet to blue. Then he had it studded with diamonds. But he really forced people to step up their game when he announced that no one would be allowed into the award ceremony’s historic venue, the Stockholm Konserthus, without at least $10,000 worth of furs.

"This isn’t some ordinary award show," Diddy said. "This is the Nobels! You’ve got to represent."

[...]

Host Matthew Perry made a few good-natured remarks about how advances in science are being blocked by reactionary elements in the US; the crowd roared in approval. Then he introduced Nicolas Cage and 1999 Physics Prizewinner Gerardus 't Hooft, who were to present the Prize in Chemistry.

"Chemistry," according to Cage, "is a branch of science dealing with the structure, composition, properties, and reactive characteristics of substances."

"It's also something Nic rarely has with his costars," said Hooft.

[...]

Who would win a fight between Snake "Escape from New York" Plissken and Jack "Big Trouble in Little China" Burton?

Vehicle

Snake: The "Gull Flyer", a silent insertion aircraft.
Jack: The "Pork Chop Express", a semi rig with a silhouette of a naked babe on the grill.

Snake is an ace at the yoke of his whisper-quiet glider, but Jack drives a truck that hits "6.5 on the Richter Scale".

EDGE: Jack

Even if you haven't seen both films you can probably guess who's going to win this match-up after taking one look at the photos at the start. But then, that's not really the point, is it? (Me, I wasn't so sure. Jack Burton had an amazing knack of accidentally doing the right thing. And better sidekicks.)

Lifelong disappointment: the website for good people who work with shit ones.

Some epic venting going on, such as this:

About Ann, my colleague

You ugly, tatooed, loud-mouthed bitch! I am sick and tired of working my ass off all night just to have to put up with your asshole attitude just because you think you had to do too much work! Fuck you! I hope your diseased propped open heart blows the fuck up right in your chest! Or better yet, you have a fucking stroke that leaves you paralyzed but knowing just what goes on and you end up in the cheapest, shittiest nursing home your kids (that hate you) can find. You white trash, foul-mouthed ogress! Eat shit and die!

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

I don't remember seeing any mention of beehives in The Phantom of the Opera.

In the heart of Paris, on a roof overlooking the Galeries Lafayette department store, Jean Paucton cares for five hives of honeybees. And he is by no means alone. Dotted around the French capital, he guesses, are more than two dozen fellow apiarists tending bees on balconies, in parks and gardens, and behind convent walls.

[...]

It was 25 years ago that Mr. Paucton got the idea of keeping bees on the roof of the Opera, where he worked in props, after talking to a member of the in-house fire brigade who was raising fish in the basement (don't ask …).

"I had bought a hive of bees and was keeping it in my apartment until I could get to my place in the country," he recalls. "But I couldn't find time to go there. I came up here and all I could see was roofs…. I wondered where the bees would gather pollen," he says, surveying the cityscape from his aerie. "But I had to put my hive somewhere."

A week later he found his hive was full of honey. The bees had been hard at work on the Champs Elysées, he realized, or in the presidential palace gardens, or in planters on local balconies.

[...]

The article is well worth a read, not least for the account of how an apiarist's neighbours deal with the … side-effects … of living next door to a hive. And for a really nice closing line.

(P.S. – it seems to me that the Christian Science Monitor owes us an article on that fireman who raises fish in the basement.)

Mistletoe and Meat: not your typical advent calendar.

(Not Safe for Vegetarians/Vegans/Animal Rights advocates/anyone with a weak stomach.)

[Via Big Time Drama in the Adjoining Cubicle]