The lesser or greater of two evils?

Posted on by January 16, 2004
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I use POPFile to help sort my email. It looks at the words used within each email and uses Bayes Theorem to classify it into the categories I've chosen according to what I've taught it.

After a day or two, it achieves over 99.5% accuracy (less than one in two hundred emails needs any corrective action from me) so I was rather surprised when an email offering me 'generic viagra' was in my main inbox just now.

Hmm, look at the header to see what POPFile thinks it is… 'unclassified'??

Open POPFile's control panel to see why… Ah ha!

definitely_spam 0.508370
probable_spam 0.491630

It couldn't decide whether it was 'definitely spam' (deleted on sight by my email program) with slightly more than 50% chance, or just 'probably spam' (stuck in a folder for possible later examination) with slightly less than 50%!

London LGBT Pride(s)

Posted on by January 9, 2004
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After doing a post about how they were considering it, I forgot to do a VICTORY !!! post when the evil London Mardi Gras (spit) actually decided to give up and go home.

Ken would like a 'high profile' 'world class level' event next year.

So it looks like next year's event will be on 3rd July (ok), be free to attend (yay), cost about £300k to stage (told you so), involves Jason Pollock, the ex-festival director of LMG (hiss)… and looks like being held in Jubilee Gardens (eeek).

Why eeek? Well because of the London Eye, Jubilee Gardens is even smaller now than it was in the mid-80s, when it was just large enough to hold the event. I can remember the fact that Erasure were going to play there one year (1988?) was kept 'secret' to stop hordes of teenage fans attending – there wouldn't have been room for the people on the march and them!

It seems to me that 'high profile', in this location, means almost by definition that it can't be 'world class', not least as the people at the Mayor's consultation forum wanted the community village section to remain too. Last year, that alone would have taken up about a quarter of the space available. Ghod knows how they're going to control entry or how many people will be allowed in.

Perhaps it will be spread along the South Bank? That would roughly double the available space, but it would still be much smaller than any event since 1990ish, when Kennington Park got 100,000 people.

Oh, it looks like Soho Pride wants to become an annual event. 1st August is the date next year, St Anne's Gardens.

And there's a mention of 'North London Pride'. Ghod knows what, who, where and when about that one.

Huntley guilty

Posted on by December 17, 2003
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… and it turns out he was very well known to the police. Albeit a different force.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3313501.stm

The string of dropped rape cases makes me even more convinced the reason the CPS have chosen to omit this section of their guidance from their website is that they're embarrassed at how easy it is for rapists to avoid being put on trial, never mind found guilty.

Naughty pun

Posted on by December 12, 2003
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Responding to a query about the legality of bukkake parties yesterday, I couldn't resist saying that…

if it's an 'in your face' event

…it was more likely to get raided.

I did add '(sorry)' though 🙂

drdoug's 'Beliefs which I once held which I now think are wrong' meme

Posted on by December 4, 2003
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The big one is "That no-one would buy Magic: The Gathering."

I can't find it on google groups, but there was a post way back on rec.games.design (or r.g.d.board) from someone called Richard who said something along the lines of 'I have this card game that people seem to like and we're thinking of selling if we can raise the money. You both have a subset of cards from a very large deck – which you don't have all of and will have to buy in small pieces, like trading cards – and you don't know what the other has, so there are plenty of surprises. Oh, and if you lose, you have to give them some of your cards.'

I thought, "No-one's going to want to play that, never mind buy it. Where's the fun in being trumped by a super-whizzo card you've never even heard of? Where's the skill element? You can't be sure of getting any particular card – you can bet they're not going to let you pick which you get in the packs. And after splashing all that money, you have to give the cards away?? Nah."

Several billion card sales later…

… I'll confess I still can't see the appeal. There are lots of better card games out there. But I was wrong. And had I put up the some of the money he was looking for…

Oh, another belief is that "People will not pay large sums of money to have a crap website."

Sexy moments

Posted on by November 30, 2003
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I'm quite glad I didn't actually tape this. I'd have been going 'oi, noooo'.

I mean, yes, Basic Instinct (#5). I loved it. I loved it so much that, when I next went to the US, I bought an ice pick.

But the next good one is at #15: Rocky Horror Picture Show. Then we're waiting for #32 Bound, #36 Trainspotting, #38 This Life (UK TV series), #43 Body Heat, #45 Last Tango In Paris, and #47 Secretary in the top 50. That's 8 out of 50.

Beyond that, apart from a couple I'll mention in a moment, there's only #51 Risky Business, #52 The Name Of The Rose (the TV version darkens the sex scene, so you can't see that Slater's willy is definitely flaccid, making it a curious example of censorship making a scene more erotic!), #65 The Avengers – Diana Rigg, yumm, #75 American Gigolo – Richard Gere yumm, and #91 The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover, curiously the only Greenaway.

So, why so low for..

#55 Don't Look Now – should have been top five for that 'realistic because it was for real' scene,

#76 The Tall Guy – should have been top ten, and not just because I think Emma Thompson is very yummy.

Fascinating to see #48 Debbie Does Dallas as the top 'porn' film, with Caligula and a Mary Millington the only others.

… but the fabulous remake of Cat People is nowhere?? Nastassja Kinski being fucked while tied to a bed? What more do you want?? Malcolm McDowell, John Heard and Annette O'Toole? Yep, all of them are in it too.

I did like the comment for # 92. Jism (2002): "Bollywood's not known for the explicit sexual content of its films, which is why the appearance of Jism on our screens is something of a surprise." Oh dear, oh dear 🙂

Death penalty thoughts

Posted on by November 28, 2003
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Browsing through the House of Lords judicial decisions on their website, I was struck by something referenced in one case.

One defence against a charge of murder is that you've been sufficiently provoked *

As Lord Hoffman says, a case in 1942 established two aspects: "First, the provocation had to be such as to temporarily deprive the person provoked of the power of self-control, as a result of which he committed the unlawful act which caused death. Secondly, the provocation had to be such as would have made a reasonable man act in the same way."

But, "in Holmes v. Director of Public Prosecutions [1946] A.C. 588 it was decided that mere words could not constitute provocation, whatever their effect upon the reasonable man might have been."

In those days, you typically went from arrest to – if found guilty – dangling at the end of a rope in the matter of a couple of months.

So as a result, Leonard Holmes was hanged on 28th May 1946, in Lincoln prison.

A few years later, the law was changed so that words alone could indeed be sufficient… Without doing some rather deeper research, I've no idea if he'd have been acquitted had he been tried then.

But it's another reason for me to be against the death penalty.

* This defence has been used in somewhat dubious ways, especially the 'homosexual panic' defence – 'he made a pass at me, so I had to kill him', but that's a post for another day.