Month: October 2023

The long wait

Talking of Wikipedia, I rather randomly discovered the extraordinary story of Gavriil Popov’s fourth symphony… composed in 1949 but not given its first public performance until this year cos it kind of vanished. I don’t actually know much about Popov and I don’t think I’ve got any of his music, but I find the tale of this symphony quite remarkable. He finished it in 1949, a couple of years after Zhdanovshchina became the USSR’s cultural law; one of the manifestations of that was a 1948 resolution against “formalism” in music, with the composers’ union going after a number of composers including Popov for not being socialist realist enough in their work. So Popov bent the knee somewhat, which produced this curious response noted in the symphony’s Wiki entry:

In her review for Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti of the symphony’s world premiere in 2023, Vera Stepanovskaya wondered why Popov would turn to what she considered were “hollow Soviet texts” for his work…

Vera. My sister in Christ. Gavriil Popov lived in one of the most authoritarian and repressive countries on Earth, and the time during which he composed this symphony saw those tendencies get even worse. Indeed, while he was writing the first version of this symphony, the poet whose texts he was using died under apparently suspicious circumstances, hence why Popov started rewriting it with someone else’s words. He’d been specifically targeted by Stalin’s government (after having been a Stalin Prize recipient in 1946 for his second symphony), which was encouraging composers to use socialist realist texts in their works if they didn’t want to be accused of formalism. Why would he NOT have turned to those hollow Soviet texts? Popov would’ve been trying to save not only his career but quite possibly his life, I don’t suppose he relished the prospect of the gulag or having an “accident”… Prokofiev did the exact same thing when he was also specifically targeted in the anti-formalism crusade, there weren’t a lot of options. Do I know more about the history of her own country than Vera does?

RIP Bobi

Alas, the world’s oldest dog couldn’t last forever.

When a brown-and-white puppy called Bobi mewled into the world on 11 May 1992, Yugoslavia was tearing itself apart, LA was still smouldering from riots, the ink was drying on the Maastricht treaty, Sharon Stone was baiting Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct and REM were five months away from releasing Automatic for the People.
The late canine, who has died at the spectacular age of 31 years and 165 days, has not so much broken the record for the world’s longest-lived dog as shaken it violently from side-to-side, torn it to pieces, buried it and then cocked a triumphant, if elderly, leg over it.
Bobi, a Portuguese mastiff, or Rafeiro do Alentejo, shuffled off his mortal collar on 21 October in the Portuguese village of Conqueiros, where he had lived his entire life with Leonel Costa and his family.
One of the earliest tributes came from Guinness World Records, which said it was “saddened to learn of the death of Bobi, the world’s oldest dog ever”. Bobi was awarded the title of world’s oldest living dog in February this year, effortlessly snatching the crown from the paws of Spike the chihuahua, a young pretender from Ohio who was then a mere pup in comparison at the age of 23 years and seven days.

Good rest, old man. You were the most fortunate of boys.

On Hearing the First Eastern Koel in Spring

I know I promised to use this blog at least in part as an outlet for my own original creative writing but, well, there hasn’t actually been much of that to share… I can go for weeks without an idea even for a line, let alone a whole finished thing (the worst thing is when I do have an idea but I’m already in bed when I have it and I’ve forgotten it when I get up again). However, the other day I was moved to post a little rant of Facebook about the annual return of the Eastern Koel to my area, which I’ve now substantially recast from free verse outburst into these slightly approximate trimeters:

It’s fucking five a.m.,
Can’t sleep as fucking usual;
That fucking Eastern Koel
Outside in the fucking tree
Is singing its fucking song;
The fucking sun’s not up yet
While you make that fucking racket,
And every fucking year
Around now it’s the fucking same;
A hideous fucking noise,
No wonder I fucking hate you.
You bastard fucking cunts,
Go and get fucking eaten
By my neighbours’ fucking cats.

Why, no, I’m not a fan of the Eastern Koel, and I have no idea what could’ve possibly led you to that entirely correct assumption…

Whatever, Jo

J.K. Rowling Says She Would “Happily” Do Prison Time Over Her Transgender Views

Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling has revealed that she would happily do prison time over her views on transgender women.
Rowling appeared to be responding to a story in the Mail on Sunday, which reported that a Labour government in Britain could make gender identity attacks a criminal offense.
Critics told the newspaper that it could result in prison sentences for those who refuse to use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns.

“Could” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, isn’t it? Labour could do this. People could go to jail for it. Good thing for the artist sometimes known as Robert Galbraith that there’s almost certainly no danger of this actually happening, cos it would require Labour to actually win the next election, which they’re not obliged to have until January 2025, and the unelected Rishi Sunak appears to be in no rush to have it any earlier, and which, frankly, I can’t see them doing; I mean, if Corbyn couldn’t defeat that clown Johnson in 2019, I can’t see Starmer beating Sunak. Anyway, if Labour did get it, you know the Tories will do everything they can to block any law of this sort… I don’t know why but I’m getting a distinct feeling of Jordan B. Peterson’s bullshit about the Canadian Bill C-16 to this story, in that Bill C-16 existed but what Jurr Durr said about it was grossly dishonest and overblown to make people terrified about it; similarly, Labour’s promise to strengthen UK hate crime laws is evidently a thing but the Daily Fail just wants to horrify its readers with the prospect of treating trans people as human beings. Still, if Joanne’s OK with going to jail, I won’t get in her way…

That many?

I didn’t know Popbitch was still a thing until I saw this excerpt fom it posted on Bluesky:

Oh Glinner, we’re not exactly doing the numbers, are we, bro? I feel that wordsearch thing and the dinosaur colouring book will be vastly more edifying and more intellectually exercising than Linehan’s book, too…

Actually, no, THIS is the ripoff for the ages

Good fucking grief.

Meta has a new plan to navigate the European Union’s tough new ad privacy rules – charge users $14 a month.
The tech giant is considering getting customers in Europe to pay monthly subscription fees to use Instagram and Facebook if they don’t agree to let Meta use their data to serve them ads, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Users who pay the subscription fee will be able to use Meta’s products without ads.
The monthly fee would start at around €10 ($10.50) for a desktop Facebook or Instagram account, but would rise to around $14 for accounts on mobile devices thanks to the commissions charged by Apple and Google’s app stores.
The new subscription tiers, which could roll out in the next few months, are an attempt to comply with the EU’s crackdown on personalized advertising, according to The Journal.

Yeah, it’s an attempt to comply with the EU’s laws rather than a cynical attempt to screw people out of an excessive amount of money for a service that isn’t worth that much. Fourteen bucks a month? We really are trying to make Oolong’s $1-a-year-for-now deal look lightweight, aren’t we, Mark… then again at least he’s not talking about cutting off the service to Europe entirely, unlike Oolong:

In recent weeks Elon Musk has suggested Twitter could stop being accessible in Europe in order to avoid new regulation enacted by the European Commission.
Musk is increasingly frustrated with having to comply with the Digital Services Act, according to a person familiar with the company. The Tesla billionaire, who acquired Twitter, now called X, a year ago for $44 billion, has discussed simply removing the app’s availability in the region, or blocking users in the European Union from accessing it, the person said. This would be similar to the way Meta is currently blocking people in Europe from using its new app Threads.
The DSA took effect in August and requires large online platforms like X to have effective and transparent systems in place for the moderation and removal of false, misleading, and harmful information. With a wave of misinformation regarding the Israel-Hamas war quickly going viral on X, the platform is likely already in violation of the DSA.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said last week the Commission is officially “investigating X’s compliance” with the new law and formally requested detailed information from the platform on its actions to mitigate and remove harmful or toxic information.
Cash-strapped X could face a fine if it’s found in violation of the DSA. The Commission can impose “periodic penalty payments,” or fines, up to 6% of a company’s global revenue.

So for having the temerity to tell him to stop his platform being shitty and harmful, Husk apparently thinks he cam “punish” Europe or something by cutting off Twitter there. I mean, sure, THAT’LL work, when you’ve already blown the value of your service by 80% why not just cut off hundreds of millions of potential users, the advertisers will LOVE that… I can see him doing that in Australia too, though, now the government here is also on his back about the amount of CSA material he’s also doing nothing about. The problem is, I can’t see them actually succeeding at getting that from him, even though it’s a pissy sum (about $600,000), because as a billionaire he is clearly above all man-made laws, and for all the talk that he could be fined a further $800,000 per day if he doesn’t pay up… well if he’s not going to pay the original fine, I can’t see him paying the even bigger extra. But I can imagine him just turning the service off altogether here just for considering making him do something to protect kids. And what a loss it’d be if it happened, eh…

A ripoff for the ages

So Oolong Husk wasn’t kidding about charging Twitter users…

Apparently the plan is to test the subscription model in just two countries, New Zealand and the Philippines (why those two? Who the fuck knows), and from November new users will be paying $1 a year for basic Twitter functionality. Which is cheap, sure, but this is Twitter we’re talking about, it’s barely worth that much… Also, this won’t stay at a dollar per year and it also won’t stay at new users. The end begins here, surely.