Unintelligent Design

Which WGW bands are playing which night?

Edit: Crud are Friday night. Bah. Not a good start.

It hasn't been a terribly productive evening. I've tidied the house a little, growled at The Silver Spoon and failed to do much else.

However, I'm currently sitting here with a glass of Amontillado and leafing through The Perfect Marriage.

( Probably only interesting if you like wittering about cookbooks... )

As some of you will be aware, there's an online (UK) petition to broaden the definition of hate crimes in the wake of Sophie Lancaster's death.

Personally, I have to say that I'm unconvinced by the concept of hate crime laws. Not just in this case, but generally. On the other hand, I don't actually have any facts and figures about this to hand - it's just a vague unease.

I'm sure someone out there knows rather more than I do, though. So...

1. Are they effective when a case comes to court?
2. Do they actually make a difference as a deterrent?
3. Should two similar crimes be treated differently depending on what motivated them - should the courts treat a completely random attack differently from a hate crime...?

I know this is a very emotive subject - and I do want to see the people responsible for this sort of attack jailed for a very long time. But is this the best way to do that? Are the existing laws sufficient - or do they need strengthening in other ways...?

Every now and then, I manage to spoiler myself for something I'm really enjoying. Heroes, for example. Or Battlestar Galactica. And a whole range of comics...

Unfortunately, I just read one too many spoilers about season three of Deadwood. I'd seen a few already, but they hadn't really disrupted my enjoyment of the show. At least not noticeably.

( No actual spoilers, but you may wish to skip this anyway. And some may appear in comments... )

Apparently one of the books Al Qaeda used as a textbook for budding jihadis in their Afghanistan training camps was Menachem Begin's The Revolt.

I keep thinking that they ought to have some knee jerk fire-and-brimstone objection to the idea of using a book by an Israeli author in this context. But I guess either expediency trumps ideology or they can justify it as "learning from the enemy". Possibly both.

(Info from Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, as referenced in Buda's Wagon - which also credits Lehi with the first effective use of the car bomb, back in '47).

Psydoll
The Glebe
Stoke-on-Trent
Saturday Oct 20th 2007

...yes, I know it's a little way out of Coventry. But it's a Saturday night, and if the band have come all the way from Tokyo, I'm sure a few Coventry people can make it a few miles to the gig, right? :)

Heh. Three weeks with barely a post, followed by a very busy Sunday evening... sorry 'bout that.

Then again, I've been a shambling zombie-morph for at least three weeks, which hasn't made me terribly good company - online or in person. This weekend has been mostly sleep. Sleep is good.

There's been a certain amount of reading in recent days, too - partly because after 12 hours of contact lenses, books seem to irritate my eyes less than screens do. Finished Making Money (the new Pratchett) and Crooked Little Vein (the Warren Ellis novel). Dipped in and out of Fergus Henderson's Beyond Nose To Tail, started Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb and almost finished Karen Armstrong's very readable biography of Muhammad.

If I can manage not to run myself into the ground again (...fingers crossed...) I might actually post a bit more this week. We'll see. :)

Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield are about to launch a webcomic - FreakAngels.

Visually, it seems to be a little bit goth/steampunk - and it sounds intriguing...