Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Last night, I got a few angry emails after I wrote on Twitter that some visiting relatives were “Bible-Bashers”. I’m happy to accept I’m wrong; they are “God-Botherers” who enjoy going to church but otherwise don’t mention it to people who don’t share their views. There’s a difference.

“Bible-bashers” are those who feel the need to spread their views to others. It’s a term that comes from the religious pamphlets of the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, describing aggressively religious people.

To find out which you are, take this handy quiz:

1. Do you believe you have an Invisible Friend In The Sky? (Yes=1 point, No= 0)
2. After spending a few days creating the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies that fill the awe-inspiring majesty of the universe, does your Invisible Friend In The Sky now spend its time closely monitoring your daily actions and reading your thoughts? (Yes=2 point, No= 0)
3. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky care which adults you have consensual sexual intercourse with? (Yes=5 points, No= 0)
4. Is your Invisible Friend In The Sky eternal, beyond the laws of causality and entropy and undetectable by science? (Yes=1 point, No= 0)
5. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky regularly intercede in the material world on your behalf (good grades, safe journeys, speedy recoveries) because you ask it to? (Yes=1 point, No= 0)
6. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky routinely neglect to help blameless people caught up in calamities like genocide, war, famine, earthquakes or tsunamis because it “works in mysterious ways” (or other manifestations of inscrutability)? (Yes=5 points, No= 0)
7. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky require subordinate behaviour from women such as covering their hair, wearing shapeless garments, not being allowed to teach in places of worship or hacking off each others’ external genitalia at puberty? (Yes=10 points, No= 0)
8. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky require you to tell people with a different Invisible Friend In The Sky (or no Invisible Friend In The Sky) that they are wrong? (Yes=10 points, No= 0)
9. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky think it legitimate or laudable to kill people with a different Invisible Friend In The Sky? (Yes=20 points, No=0)
10. Are you angered/ offended by this quiz? (Yes=5 points, No=0)

If you scored zero, you are not a God-Botherer.

Between one and five, you might be but don’t know it; you probably tell people that you’re “a spiritual person”.

Between five and ten, you’re a God-Botherer.

More than 10 makes you a Bible-Basher. 20 or more and you’re a fundie.

Sometimes I have a bad day, and on those sort of occasions I like to refresh myself by laughing at people who are stupider, uglier, or otherwise less fortunate than myself.

Here’s my list of schadenfreude blogs.

• spEak You’re bRanes – a collection of real letters to the meeja by right-wingers and godbotherers.
• Here’s a comprehensive gallery of men who look like old lesbians.
• sorry i missed your party is a collection of pictures of other people’s (dull) parties from Flickr
• People of Walmart is full of clandestine photos of Yank chavs. In Walmart. (Thanks, Pat “Herb” Lauke.)
• mug shot du jour is a special double-dose of schadenfreude, as it is full of weird or ugly people immediately after they’ve been arrested.
• Don’t judge my hair judges other people’s hair.
• Look At This Fucking Hipster—”photos of fucking hipsters doing what hipsters do best… Being a Fuckin Hipster!”
• Texts from last night (“Remember that text you shouldn’t have sent last night? We do”) occasionally has some gems.
• Tweeting too hard is where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve.
• Teen angst poetry collects reader-submitted sixth-form poetry. Brilliant.
• The Intubator distills YouTube down to its core: an endless stream of randomly selected, unedited personal videos…Videos that no-one bothered to tag, title, or describe

Got any favourite schadenfreude sites?

Langridge tagged me with one of these meme things. It is supposed to be called “seven things you may not know about me”, and Langridge wanted some comedy, but looking at my list I think my title is more accurate.

1. I’ve had carnal knowledge of women from all the world’s major religions except Judaism. Before you shout “anti-semite”, I tried very hard to rectify this deficiency with Ayelet from Tel Aviv but her room-mate came home too early.

   When I got married I decided that abandoning this particular spiritual quest would be prudent to preserve nuptial harmony. My wife agrees.

2. I have difficulty playing the basic F major chord on guitar.

3. I’m actually quite shy, but conceal this with an loud egocentric persona. People think I’m quite easy-going, but I have a vile temper.

4. I once got a girlfriend pregnant and we agreed she should have an abortion. Our never-was daughter would be 17 years old now. That thought haunts me.

5. I’m not racist, sexist or homophobic. But I dislike spending time with stupid people.

6. About a year after we were married, my wife woke up and told me that she’d had a dream of a small girl swimming towards her in the ocean. Later that day she used a pregnancy testing kit and it was positive. That’s why our daughter is named Marina (after the T.S. Eliot poem).

7. I can transform myself into a duck in my guise as The Great Duckano.

To continue this meme (which is geekspeak for “chain letter”) I have to tag seven more people to tell us seven things we might not know about them. So start confessing, Yeni Setiawan, Simon Mackie, Putri, Citizensheep, Todd Libby, Jake Smith and Joanna Geary.

I was looking at my end-of-year web stats, and have removed my “Links” page as no-one ever looked at it, but reproduce its controversial Lust List™ for posterity.

Lust List™

As you know, I’m a happily married chap, but in response to the literally zero mails I receive asking what kind of woman I find pretty, here’s my current Lust List™:

• Meera Jasmine

  A South Indian film actress, Jasmine “is a simple and down to earth person. Her choices are also undemanding. Her favorite attire is Half Saree and she loves to look homely“. Phwooooar!

• Pui Fan Lee

  I’m a bit embarrassed by this, given Pui is a Children’s BBC presenter, and played Po in the Teletubbies. But she is a fox. And she once played a lesbian in a crap TV show, but (I have to confess) didn’t look her best.

• Björk

  Björk has loads of talent, is inimitable and oddly sexy – except in this shot where she looks distressingly like Michael Jackson.

• Sheila Chandra

  Sheila Chandra has an astounding voice, and is gorgeous too.

• Alison Smith

  A willowy West Indian girl from high school. I never had the balls to ask her out, as miscegenation was too shocking a concept for a Worcestershire high school in 1982.

Top 10 searches that found this website

Turns out that a lot of people, when bored at work, type “bum” into Google…

1. bum
2. personal site
3. computers internet blog
4. bruce
5. bruce lawson
6. friday jokes
7. vasectomy
8. accessibility
9. thailand
10. stiff little fingers

The most-read posts in 2007

Good mix of professional and personal. And the bum and willy pictures (NSFW).

1. Future-proof your CSS with Conditional Comments
2. HTML 5, microformats and testing accessibility
3. CSS Zen Garden submission: “Geocities 1996″
4. Jan’s bum
5. Spam letters
6. Forms: inputting country names
7. Stupid government websites
8. Photo gallery
9. Odd Jobs: Bollywood movie extra (in which lots of people who can’t be bothered to read ask me to help them get jobs in Bollywood)
10. My big Friday night (NSFW)

It’s a tricky thing to say, because the English flag, St George’s Day and patriotism generally has long been hijacked by moron right-wingers, but isn’t England great?

• Shakespeare

  Fittingly, his birthday is the same day as St George’s day, as he contributed so much to the richness of the English language – as well as doing his propaganda bit for unity under the Tudors by blackening the name of the last Plantagenet monarch and promoting feelings of English patriotism.

• London

  Ah, London. Galleries. Theatres. Ethnic enclaves. Parliament and Big Ben, tourist traps, and carnivals; the Tube; Black taxis and red buses; medieval streets and hideous 1960s brutalist developments. Finest city in the World (if you don’t have to live there!)

• the English countryside

  The English countryside is gorgeous. Across the Vale of Evesham in the spring, the beauty of the Yorkshire Moors, the Lake District, the Cornish coast, the Severn Valley in autumn, we don’t have towering mountains, glaciers, or rift valleys. The English countryside is varied, but moderate and dependable. Just like English people are.

  Even the animals that populate our countryside are the same. You don’t get malaria from our bugs. We have no poisonous spiders, and no large animals which can eat you. Our single venomous snake – the Adder – is only as nasty as a wasp sting (and I’ve never seen one, ever).

• The Beatles, Stones, Sex Pistols and The Clash

  For a small country, we’ve produced a lot of world-changing music. We rock. Nothing more to say.

• Broadway, Henley

  They’re chocolate box-perfect English towns. They’re a bugger to live in, as you can’t put a nail in the wall without someone from the local Council making sure you’re not damaging the character of the area, but they’re damn gorgeous. There are houses in Henley that are older than many countries.

• Pubs and proper beer

  Pubs – not bars. They don’t need to be all thatched roof or horsebrasses. They don’t need to be picturesque, but do need to be authentic rather than brewery-mandated “English Pub Experience”. They need a sense of community, a character behind the bar, some grumpy regular drinkers, proper beer and probably a resident dog.

• Food

  People think English food is just fish and chips or curry – and there’s nothing wrong with either of those. But real English food can’t be beaten, and is rarely encountered by visitors. Take great cuts of meat, fresh vegetables like parsnips, sprouts, roast them all and lightly season, serve with a rich gravy and a pint of proper beer and you’ve got the best Sunday family meal in the world.

• World War 2

  We English bang on about the war a bit, it’s true – but it’s because it’s deeply embedded in our psyche. OK, it was sixty years ago, but the reason it stays there is because, for a couple of years until the yanks could be arsed to help out, England and our Gaelic cousins Scotland, Ireland, Wales stood alone: we mobilised our entire workforce, turned civilian factories to making armaments, ploughed up parks to grow food on, and tore down metal railings as raw material to make guns.

  We evacuated our children, split up our families and sacrificed our men, while the rest of the world sat on their hands or laid down their arms, because fascism so repelled us. And why shouldn’t we be proud of that?

  Jan 2 2007: It’s been pointed out to me that I may not know my history, and the UK may not have stood alone in quite the way I wrote. So don’t listen to what I say…

• The National Health Service

  I’m always astonished when I read that in other, allegedly civilised countries, health care is based on ability to pay. God knows, our NHS isn’t perfect, but get this: if you fall sick in the UK you will get treatment of the highest possible quality that the NHS can provide, free at the point of delivery, regardless of whether you’re a millionaire or a vagrant. Now that’s a civilised idea.

• Jane Austen and George Orwell

  Both used the English language perfectly to celebrate and satirise the England that they loved. Orwell, in particular, is a hero of mine with his fierce promotion of clarity of language, his love of fairness and his defence of the weak. I reckon he should be the eponymous St George today.

• English people

  I’ve a mix of Scottish and English extraction with a dash of Italian too. My wife is a naturalised Brit, from Thailand, so my kids are utter mongrels, which is itself quintessentially English. Everybody is mixed race here.

  We live next door to Naz, a British-born muslim of Pakistani background, and our other neighbours are the Murphys, of Irish descent. Across the road are the Singhs and the Cohens and the Smiths. It’s a crappy grubby urban English proper street, full of proper English people.

Hurray for England. Have a good St George’s day.

It’s three years since Wrox Press went bankrupt and I got caught with redundancy for the first time, having survived four previous rounds of downsizing in various organisations. It got me thinking about the common signs of sickness I’ve seen in each company before it slides into corporate intensive care.
Continue reading Signs of a sick organisation

Been busy busy busy this week, but still enjoyed:

• Veerle’s redesigned blog

  Fucking brilliant. And should probably be illegal to have that much design talent. So carefully designed, yet looks spontaneous and unfussy.

• The film “Downfall”

  On TV this week. Gripping, and the guy who played Hitler was amazing. Regardless of the central subject matter, should be shown to anyone who advocates armed conflict as a solution to anything.

• Serena Maneesh‘s debut album

  Noise. Breathy vocals mixed low. Mellow tunes almost submerged by chainsaw guitars. They’ve picked up the torch from My Bloody Valentine and taken it somewhere else – round to Cindytalk and Loops’ houses. It’s on almost continual repeat on my Zen mp3 player. And – staggeringly – they’re from Norway, the dullest place in the Universe.

I don’t usually do these meme things (cos they’re just geekspeak for “Chain Letter” to show that we’re not the AOL hoi-palloi), but John Oxton tagged me and he’s a big scary bastard.
Continue reading Four Things

I thoroughly enjoyed my DVD of “The Yes Men” yesterday, because:

• It is a perfect example of detournement in situationist thinking: exposing the society of the spectacle via an even greater, more ridiculous spectacle
• It did so using poo and willy gags
• The activists could only have met, worked together and set up their pranks because of the Internet
• It reminded me that most Americans are not bible-thumping money-worshipping solipsistic buffoons (it’s been three years and the re-election of George Dubya since I’ve been to the U.S., so I needed reminding)
• Much of what they were saying is absolutely correct.

1. My Bloody Valentine

   My Bloody Valentine were the undisputed Kings of Noisy shoe-gazing rock. They fucked up the 1990s for me by releasing the best album of that decade, Loveless, in 1991 – thus making the rest of the decade a bit of a disappointment.

   The vocals were always buried in the mix, and were an interplay between Kevin Shields’ weedy whine and Belinda Butcher’s breathy “oohs” and “aahs”. I saw them live once, and they were great – although one had to be in the “right frame of mind” for it. Ahem.

2. The Cocteau Twins

   Fey musical collages with Elizabeth Fraser’s deliberately non-language vocals multi-tracked. There were times when you could almost make out what she was singing – and times when there were unfortunate errors of comprehension. For example, my mate Nick ruined my enjoyment of one of the tracks on “Heaven Or Las Vegas” by insisting she sings “Sit on my face”. Check it out for yourself (290K mp3).

3. REM

   Once upon a time, REM were good, despite -or because of?- the fact that singer Stipe sang lyrics like “She’s a sad tomato” and “Singer, sing me a gibbon”. (Pippa saw them last month, and said they still kick ass, however.) Often, he was intelligble but meaningless, and thus got the reputation for surrealism and sagacity rather than someone who spouts nonsense instead of writing proper words. Yes, that is a note of envy you detect.

4. Loop

   I saw Loop live several times in the 80s. They were buttockclenchingly loud, and stood completely still, backlit, playing and layering riffs for sometimes up to 10 minutes, occasionally breathing something incomprehensible but menacing into a microphone, before all magically stopping at exactly the same time. Criminally under-rated to this day. (And if anyone has the album “the World In Your Eyes” they could send me, I’ll love you forever; some fucker stole mine, and even Kazaa can’t help me.)

5. Extreme Noise Terror

   Possibly, I’m cheating here, as E.N.T. didn’t really go for lyrics – more grunts and shrieks into a mic over furious grinding heavy rock. When I was a kid, there was a subterranean club in Birmingham (The Kaleidoscope?) which would host a 12 hour gig on bank holiday mondays, where I’d regularly see Extreme Noise Terror, Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower, S.O.B., Genital Deformities and other luminaries play live.

   I recall waiting outside to go in, in a line of crusties, punks and hippies, when some yuppie in a big car drove past, shouting “Get a proper job!”. As I was a pissed-off systems analyst for AT&T at the time, I took his advice and resigned to go travelling for 7 years. So, if you were a fuckwit yuppie in 1989 with a penchant for haranguing strangers, I offer my sincere thanks to you.

Disagree with this list? Leave a comment!