I think I’m hooked.

Made it to the local “Don’t Invade Iraq” demonstration. 100 people isn’t bad for Reading and apparently good reports have been coming in from across the country. I’m always torn between wanting to support these things in Reading and wanting to join the masses in London, where there’s likely to be a better atmosphere and more friends. This time it was well worth staying put.

Malachi’s not the most common of names. But on the net so many of us use pseudonyms (and even multiple identities) that it wasn’t a huge surprise to see someone posting under that name on the university christian union message boards. It was probably when it first claimed that Malachi was its real name that I was rather surprised and perhaps a little suspicious.

It claimed to be from Tallahassee in Florida and to have applied to study at Southampton University next year. It claimed that it was an agnostic interested in the Christian faith and asked some interesting (and a lot of not so interesting) questions. It was nearly believable. There was just the right level of knowledge of VeggieTales and Left Behind to suggest a familiarity with church PR in the US. But I was suspicious. It offered no explanation for its presence on our little set of boards and why on earth it would want to join the infighting and stereotyping that typify so many of the exchanges.

It was its ‘conversion’ which really convinced me that it wasn’t who it claimed to be. Maybe there were things going on behind the scenes that I wasn’t aware of, and maybe my personal theology isn’t quite ready for public conversions over http but it just didn’t ring true. Particularly the overnight switch from self-described ‘concerned agnostic’ to hellfire-and-brimstone fundamentalist. It could be that I was offended by its insistence that Harry Potter was of the devil, but this one I couldn’t quite take seriously. I told it I preferred it as an agnostic.

Offline analysis quickly began. A few of us listed off our chief suspects, but none quite fitted the profile we’d built up. The internet equivalent of handwriting comparisons didn’t get us anywhere. Other tracing methods had so far been blocked.

In the end though, it was the claim that there were no buses and no taxis in Tallahassee which convinced those who still held onto the shreds of their belief in Malachi. Another poster quickly found a list of taxi companies, to which it replied that they’d all shut down. So this poster started phoning them. Initially just checking if they were open. They were. A few more denials and I was asking the taxi operators about their competitors and general taxi services in Tallahassee {not quite believing what I was doing} and discovering that they were plentiful. Its insistence that there were only 20,000 people in Tallahassee also irked me. Even acknowledging Florida’s history with counting important numbers that left 130,000 people unaccounted for according to State Census results available online.

This information was all posted.

Malachi disappeared.

Some days passed.

Malachi reappeared. No longer agnostic or fundamentalist, it was now claiming to be a New Ager but still laying into the same (vaguely open to the New Age) people. This time it claimed to have knowledge from a spirit guide called Dave. I’d always presumed spirit guides would have more exotic names. As the posts mounted, it was clearly the same Malachi. Still self-contradicting. Still a contradiction. Today Malachi has claimed to be from hell and suggested we’ll all meet it there. I think that’s a farewell.

I was going to rave on and on and on about Donnie Darko. 16 or so hours on and I’m still turning the film over and over in my mind. And then I was tempted to moan about Reading’s lack of decent cinemas which means I need to visit Oxford or London to watch the film again. Instead, that will wait, and I’ll simply mention I’ve been enjoying this series at Doonesbury. I’d not read it in the Guardian for a few weeks and have Daniel to thank for the pointer in his blog.

Maybe I don’t check amazon.com with the diligence someone interested in the web as the web should. Maybe this is new.

For some time now I’ve been aware of their list-making options, allowing the humble consumer to inform their fellow consumers of products they might like. Seduction of clients through the simulation of community. Providing a window into each others’ lives. I confess to having been seduced.

‘So you’d like to …’ appears to offer those same consumers the chance to write pretty much everything. Kinda like an amazon-blog. Or something like that. It’s thrown me a little. I find it fascinating to browse these sorts of pages. Something like this provides a perfect (if exaggerated) demonstration of consumer culture. But it feels a little sad that that’s the window.

Shadow was rather good last night. Only really being familiar with Endtroducing a lot of the music was new to me, but there was more to recognise than I’d expected. Perhaps it was the liberal use of Blackalicious samples after a summer where they made up a significant chunk of my listening. Or maybe I’ve just absorbed more than I realised. Regardless, the tunes were fantastic, the visuals for the most part spot-on (oh, how I’d love some kit like that for deli) and the bass thumping.

The last few tracks of the main set veered rather close to being appropriate for alternative worship settings (though obviously the whole thing was a little too front-led for that) with the choice of samples and the contrast of natural and urban images and even a CS Lewis quote.

For the opening of the encore he made use of audio-visual samples of drum-lesson-videos to build up his beats, all triggered from the sampler. Would have been nice if he could have mixed in some melodies along with it–not thrilling to listen to–but clever. Though Matt says Hexstatic (self-described “digital lo-fi cutup video breaks) do it better. But then he moved into the closing tracks and all was well again.

The day had previously seen me hacking away at fortran. I got into an annoying place where I’d worked out a really neat algorithm to do what I wanted, but it just kept refusing to work. To give in and use the less elegant algorithms that were working for everyone else was out of the question. I made it work, but I fear that leaves much ground to make up. Which was one of the reasons the afternoon of presentations was rather frustrating.

Other pressures aside, it was fascinating to hear what people I’ve been around regularly for a couple of years now would come up with for freeform presentations. Quite a few surprises. We don’t give each other enough space to talk about our passions uninterrupted.

In general browsing, this has the looks of being rather interesting. If I could just work out what they’re planning to do.

I was determined I wouldn’t leave it as much as a week between updates. And I’ve succeeded, though not in the style I’d planned. The hope was to write some summary of my response to Richard Holloway’s _Dancing on the Edge_ which I finished last weekend. Or perhaps some review of last night’s Airstar show in Oxford which goes further than saying ‘it was good’. Suffice it to say that time hasn’t allowed for either of those as yet.

What it has allowed for is a whole lot of work on the last of the three ICC websites I’ve been working on. ICC Spreading The Word is coming together well and proving a good exercise to build up my javascript reflexes. The alternative database front-end for the whole lot should hopefully follow in the next couple of days so that everything can be signed off by next weekend.

It’s also allowed for a delicatessen which, though down on numbers, could certainly be termed a success thanks to the quality of the music involved. All three acts were splendid, and I’d love to have any of them back again as headliners so long as we could guarantee the audience. Maybe with the progression of names (Boo Hewerdine, Iain Archer, Peter Case) coming up we’ll get the mailing list to the point where that is possible.

Reading has been limited but still slotted in. Ian McEwan’s “Enduring Love” is providing much food for thought and broadening a few perspectives as I continue planning my overly-ambitious dissertation. Thanks are due to Andy Tate for the recommendation.

I would mention Aaron and Nniffer’s blog but they have yet to put much up there so it’s probably not worth it as yet.

If you were going to attack a country on the grounds that you were worried about an apparent stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, would you presume that they might actually use those weapons to defend from your attack? Apparently, that is news to some people. The mind boggles. Of course this does all presume that the weapons haven’t been destroyed by previous bombing raids, weapons inspections or natural deterioration, but let’s humour the administration in question for a while. Why does it take the CIA to point out that if Saddam Hussein has chemical and/or biological weapons and his country is invaded he might use them for defence or revenge? Perhaps reports like this will begin to strike home the message that removing Saddam Hussein can never be a surgical operation without side-effects. If it happens, it will be messy.

Last night I had to talk about the debt crisis and the debt campaign. For a short while Jubilee 2000 was my life, and it’s a campaign I still try to follow as best I can. I’m kinda wishing we could take some time and have another gathering outside the treasury, or something of that sort. It’s about time. It feels like the problem is a lack of clarity right now. I can’t quickly find figures about how much debt has been written off without wading through reports. And even if I did, it’s difficult to find out how much more now needs to be written off to achieve the same effect it would have done two or three years ago, before PRSPs and more interest and collapsing markets and food crises changed the situation. I was reminded of that last night as I spoke to the select number who showed up for our first speak meeting of the new academic year, and again as I read Ann’s latest article.

I’m totally with those who are working for a new debt cancellation system (and in that have been very encouraged by recent rumours of just such a thing from the IMF) as an overall goal, but I wonder if enough is being done to deal with the immediate crisis. A moratorium on debts for countries entering the HIPC programme would seem a good first step. I guess I have a lot of reading to do. I wish the information were more easily available these days.

I should be writing an essay right now. Time to seek out a soundtrack and then return to typing.

I have a feeling that I’m not going to enjoy tuesdays for the next while. Sure, there’s not the 9am start which highlights Mondays, but the sheer intensity of it will surely get to me. Lecture after lecture after lecture. All through the day. Think very carefully before signing up for a physics course, kids.

But hey, this one’s out of the way and there are only nine more to go. And there’s always rich’s skateboarding blog to kill a bit of time (good luck mate. thanks for the link gary).

In response to an e-mail, I’ve been thinking some more about the nuanced beliefs thing I posted before in response to the Arundhati Roy article in the Guardian a couple of weeks back. Here’re some more thoughts, copied and pasted:

“I think it’s one of the most present frustrations in my life. I get into so many debates where it’s all or nothing, fundie or liberal, bible is inerrant and church rocks or it all has to be thrown out of the window, war or terror.

I guess you know all too well how frustrating it can be to spend all your life struggling to find a way to understand something only to have it caricatured as soon as you try and explain it to someone.”

I guess the ideal solution is lots of conversation. Good conversation, preferably in a funky cafe, with the objective of understanding. But that’s all too rare. Hmmmm……