Deep Thought: Our Fearsome Web Edition

Obviously, nine new Patrick Troughton episodes of Doctor Who is a tremendous find - something which frankly fills me with far more excitement than twice that number of Hartnell episodes would.  But here's the thing.  Over the 19th Century Britain gradually took over Nigeria, until we were in complete control in 1885.  For the next 75 years, Nigeria was just one of those places we took for granted was somewhere we should be sticking our nose in. By the time "The Web of Fear" was broadcast, Nigeria had been independent for just eight years.

So does the fact that a Nigerian TV station possessed Doctor Who episodes in the first place stem from three quarters of a century of ordering people around on another continent in the pursuit of an Imperial boner?  And if so, does that take the shine off the find at all?

Update: Jack Graham has much, much more.

Shutdown III: Shutdown Takes Manhattan

Into the second week of the shutdown, now, and things continue to get more and more bizarre, and terrifying.  There's just one week until the US defaults on its national debt - or at least it would be, had the shutdown not happened, at this point no-one knows exactly when the crisis moment will come, which is helpful.  Don't worry, though, because the Republicans have it all sorted: refusing to increase the debt ceiling won't really matter all that much!

A surprisingly broad section of the Republican Party is convinced that a threat once taken as economic fact may not exist — or at least may not be so serious.

Let's recall the GOP ransom note, listing the goodies it expects in exchange for doing its job:

That's a twelve-point plan to endless conservative orgasm, right there. Fuck the environment, screw over poor people, give more freedom to rapacious capitalism - essentially a good year or two of the kind of shit you'd see if the Republicans controlled all three branches of the Federal Government.

The Democrats would have to be out of their goddamn minds to let anything even remotely like this go through.  The alternative to paying the ransom would have to be utterly horrific. Threatening so apocalyptic a disaster seems like it'd be a pretty unpopular plan with the public, though, so the only thing to do is: claim the results of default wouldn't be so bad!

There's a certain purity in the Republican refusal to see or consider anything other than the three seconds directly in front of them.  To not just believe two contradictory things at once, but to hold press conferences about them.  If the debt ceiling battle is analogous to a hostage taking, the last couple of days have been like a man running into a bank with a loaded gun against someone's head, screaming for the safe to be open or he'll blow his captives brains out, only to immediately reassure the horrified patrons that it's only a frighteningly realistic water pistol in any case.

Sooner or later, these chumps are going to break things beyond repair.  The moment they do that, they'll call a press conference to explain how it was everyone's fault but theirs.

I'm A Doctor As Well, You Know. Doctor Too, Is What I'm Saying.

With tomorrow being D-Day for those excited about newly rediscovered Doctor Who episodes - a group that most certainly includes me - I have a golden opportunity to bust some basic probability out on y'all.  What are the chances of either finishing a partly-complete story, or of unearthing an episode from an entirely absent story?

If we ignore "Mission to the Unknown" (this was Abi's idea, so complain to her if you don't like it; personally I went for it mainly because it simplifies the maths), there are nine entirely absent stories.  There are six stories missing two episodes, and one story ("The Tenth Planet") missing one.  The BBC have referred to missing episodes, plural, so if we take the worst case scenario, the chances of completing a full story are around 2%, and the chances of seeing part of a hitherto entirely unavailabe story rests at 60%.

But maybe things are less bleak.  Maybe the BBC found three episodes.  At that point, we're looking at a 3% chance of a complete story, and a 74% chance something entirely new has turned up.

Except, though, that those calculations assume independent finds, which seems pretty unlikely. Multiple finds don't necessarily mean episodes from a single story, but that's a definite possibility (see "Cybermen, Tomb of"), and the contrary idea - finding an episode from one story means the next find is actually less likely to come from that story - seems on its face to be foolish.

That means we can treat the figures for the probability of a complete story as minimum values, but the probabilities of "new" stories as maximums.

Anyway, here's the results of a few hours noodling during a day of boring talks:

(Apparently there might be as many as nine unearthed episodes, but I ran out of talks.)

Cheers to tweeps Abi, JJ, and Fonz for helping me out with the numbers of missing episodes/stories whilst I was out of reach of my laptop.

D CDs #483: correct!

Some classic albums are extremely good.  Others are merely Important.

One of the most aggravating aspects of music criticism is the common assumption that an album proving game-changing is a necessary and/or sufficient condition for listening to it decades later. Pitchfork Media in particular has turned this idea into an art form - good luck wresting more than a six out of them if your disc merely has the temerity to be an exceptionally good example of a well-established genre - but it's a fairly common problem.

It's a conflation, really, of music as history and music as entertainment.  A blueprint is often very valuable, but that doesn't make it nice to look at. No-one still creates antibiotics by leaving their petri dishes on the windowsill. The vogue these days is for chrome rims rather than wooden tyres. Things, in short, move on.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong of me to ignore the contribution of Entertainment! entirely. Straddling the dividing line between the Damned and the Clash - both cited as influences, though by the time Entertainment! had been recorded London's finest had still yet to release London's Calling - the disc takes a darker and more minimalist path than Strummer's band.  In the process it breaks ground on the dark expanses the Cure would play around with so successfully once they got Three Imaginary Boys out of their system and settled down to work (the perpendicular distance between the two bands is shortest between Entertainment!'s melodica-spiced "5.45" and the Cure's Seventeen Seconds).  From there vectors can be drawn to contemporary bands like The Cribs - Sharpe guitar stabs on strings apparently plucked with razorblades - and the sharp maudlin droning of LCD Soundsystem.

So, yes.  Music in general and punk in particular needed this.  It was a Big Fucking Deal.  Does that mean it must be enjoyable, too?  Of course not.

Fortunately, though, it really is.

Well, maybe I should qualify that.  It's very enjoyable in short doses.  I'd suggest approaching it as three sets of four songs.  As a whole, the CD loses momentum through repetition.  That's not an inevitable consequence of ploughing the same furrow, of course; indeed that kind of reiteration can be very effective in accumulation.  Here, though, things are simply too sparse for that tactic to work.  

With each (admittedly arbitrary) division allowed to breathe, the effect is far greater. Each short suite gets its own driving force, whether that be the delirious guitar slashes of "Natural's Not In It", the insistent wig-out of "I Found That Essence Rare", or the relentless taut violence of "5.45" (seriously, starting this laundry list of horrors with a melodica is a move of unquestionable genius).

It's three EPs on the themes of isolation both emotional - "Glass, "Contract" - and political - the call-out to political prisoners in Long Kesh that provides the backbone of album opener "Ether" - that slam together in "I Found That Essence Rare", bikinis being after all both a way to ogle women and an atoll where we let nuclear weapons out to play. The personal may be political, but that's only because they both seem so far outside control to the young, or to the smart.

Being reminded of that isn't pleasant, but maybe we need it. So it's important those reminders come at us looking like this.

It's important that they be good.

Eight tentacles.

Shutdown II: The Shuttening

When the shutdown kicked off, I told Fliss I'd wake up on Friday morning to discover a deal was in place.  Whether I'm going to get anywhere close to the mark, I don't know, but it's looking more and more like an absurdly optimistic prediction.  This, after all, is what the Democrats are dealing with (via Balloon Juice):

We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.” — Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN)

Not exactly encouraging.

Of course, all of this is just small potatoes compared to what we'll be facing in a fortnight.  That's when the US has to start defaulting on its debts unless Congress votes to pay them.  Not to incur new debts.  To pay the ones they've already incurred.  Unless the Democrats accede to all sorts of lunatic demands from the Republicans [1]:

the US will announce to the world it can no longer be relied upon financially.

I'm not an economist, but the people that are seem to be lighting their hair on fire. The ones that aren't predicting dire consequences are gibbering softly in a corner.

In the 50s, the Republicans were bad for America.  In the 60s through to the 80s, they were bad for anyone who wanted to be simultaneously Communist and not white. In this century they've been bad for anyone sitting near an oil well and praying towards Mecca.

Nowadays, they're quite literally bad for the entire planet.

Of course, there are plenty in the US media is keen to remind you that the Democrats are at fault here too.  After all, they're position is just as inflexible.  They may have repeatedly asked for meetings to avert this crisis - and been rebuffed each time - but they sure don't want to meet now. And since "We won't negotiate with a gun to our head" is exactly as unhelpfully hardline as "we won't negotiate until we've had time to load this gun", I don't see how anyone can disagree that Both Sides Do It.

(h/t to Steve Benen for the above list.)

[1] Most of those are reasonably self-explanatory, but you might like to know that Dodd-Frank was a bill put together following the financial collapse to try and make it harder for bankers to steal money from everyone everywhere and then whine like bitches when it stopped working.  The CFPB is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, designed to stop banks from deliberately fucking clients over so as to make themselves more money; see collapse, financial.  In short, the Republicans are demanding either US banks can return to the rapacious madness that screwed the world, or they'll default on the debt and screw the world.  Oh, and they want ten other things as well.

Of course, by saying all that, it's just like I'm lynching black people in the Old South. I feel pretty bad about that.

They Want A Body Count, They Don't Care How They Get It

I should probably say something about the shutdown of the federal government over in the US.

No-one who reads this blog or knows me personally probably needs help in working out where I stand on the matter, but just for the record:

As long as the government is shut down, the National Institutes of Health will turn away roughly 200 patients each week from its clinical research center, including children with cancer.

Unless President Obama and the Democratic Senate agree to allow hundreds of thousands of the countries poorest citizens to give up access to health insurance, treating children with cancer is something the GOP figures can be done without.  They know they can't win, but every day they can delay a restart is another day when people who aren't then can suffer, and it turns out, die.

As poor old Miss Hardaker would say "No love in Heaven or Earth for you".

Who Could Hate A Country That Reads The Daily Mail?

Fuck, obviously, the Daily Mail. It's not even that going after the dead father of their political enemies is low even by their standards - they'd have to literally give away the eyes and hands of Muslim orphans as free gifts if they want to sink any lower. It's that they called a MP's dad a traitor, then argued the fact the MP got really fucking furious is evidence that MPs shouldn't have oversight over the press. That's like sending letter-bombs to the Post Office and claiming it proves the mail should be privatised.

Oh, and while I'm ranting; Harry Cole? If this article is standard fair, please to be stating examples. If Ed Milliband's reaction demonstrates political calculations, please to be explaining to us how a man seeking to defend his dead father's name without political manoeuvring would act. Absent such revelations, sit the hell down. I rather think enough stupid things have been said today.