A Meeting: 'an event where groups of men keep minutes and waste hours' - Milton Berle

September 28^th – Disparate stuff today, much in tune with the way my head works.

There’s lots of useless conventions and conferences doing the rounds these days; I have to thank Jonothan Eisen for what is possibly the worst ever conference title: -

‘Science Conference – SPAM:ICEME 2011 on all engineering and metaengineering’

Now, if that doesn’t have them flocking in then I don’t know what will. I’d always thought the idea was to attract people to participate in a conference so that an exchange of ideas and a platform for future work would ensue. To achieve that end surely a snappy title containing an onomatopoeic attracter (‘WHAM!’ or ‘POW!’) would be what’s called for; apparently not. Hence the film titles like;

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Vampires

or the equally asinine;

The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain

have failed to attract the masses and break box-office records…and I’ll bet the decisions were reached by committee. What’s that saying;

a camel is a horse designed by committee?

It’s like the UK’s 1990’s drive to give everyone a degree from a university; whether they wanted one or not. To that end Technical Colleges (that’s places of semi-educative ability where the working classes could learn a trade, say, engineering, and so keep the power-brokers and conglomerate billionaires fed with sufficient manual labour to generate ever more profits) were drafted into the university circle, upgraded and rubber-stamped with the authority to grant a 2:1 to any Cro-Magnon degenerate who walked through their hallowed portals. You may think that it’s being a bit premature, giving someone a grade at the start of the academic journey? Not so. It got to a point where, in some pseudo universities, the grade as decided within the first three weeks of a student’s first lecture, all that had to be done then was to fabricate and mould the course and outcomes to accommodate this. So it was that strange courses began to appear on the enrolment forms for our newly-created houses of learning. Degrees in The Phallus or David Beckham Studies to name but two. This was all part of the no-one should come second doctrine that the Labour government pedalled back in the 90’s so  we had a downscaling of school sports days and inter-house competitions; for a short while no-one lost anything, everyone was winner and we ended up with the possibility of a land peopled by non-achievers and non-tryers.

Things changed (thank goodness) when we realised that competition is actually a good thing; it’s the cheating or unfair advantage found in competition that’s iniquitous, that damages self-esteem and puts holes in the safety-net of fairness that people living in a Democracy rely on in order to be and attain a certain level of success. Along with this foolishness of the no-one should come second ideology there developed a verbal smokescreen that was eagerly picked up by politicians, especially as they sought to wriggle out of difficult situations (remember the F1-tobacco-£1m donation, people being economical with the truth, words like redaction and phrases like We’re better than this and Lessons have been learnt?)…as an aside, I’m assured by Uncyclopedia that there are three main components that make up a politician. They are, in no particular order;

24% rancid donkey piss

82% elephant shit

31% mind control instincts

67% incompetency

10% Krupuk – (deep fried, Indonesian prawn crackers)

99% conniving, thieving self-interest

62% delusions of grandeur

500% math skills

44% leech-ism

69% addicted to wealth and power

One of the finest phrases of smokescreen politics I’ve come across was said by Gov. Bryan Millar at an arm’s fair (there’s that smokescreen in action again; arms FAIR…? In common usage but wrong on so many levels). Gov. Bryan Millar said, as he ogled a stand-mounted, 50-cal machine gun;

“Fifty calibre weapons are not made to shoot people, they’re made to destroy targets.”

Great. OK. That’s alright then. Thanks for clearing that up, Bryan. While we’re on the subject, there was once a chance that a congenital idiot might make it to the White House. However, having fucked-up that opportunity, still I have to hand it to Sarah Palin for putting the argument about US gun laws even more succinctly when she said:

“Liberals can take my gun…if they can dodge my bullets.”

Sorry, sidetracked, back to education.

Conferences on International Rude Hand Gestures

on

The Role of the Sausage in Popular Culture’ (no ‘sausage role’ jokes, please)

venues that are;

Druid-Friendly

and oxymoronic titles;

How to be an inspiring bioethics teacher

All pale into insignificance when we discover that, on this day in 1997, the 103^rd annual convention of the Audio Engineering Society was held in New York. The fact that it was the debut of the DVD audio format falls secondary to the following, astounding revelation. Not only was there such a conference consisting of men (the sound world is peopled mainly by men) all huddled in corners discussing tweeters, woofers, the merits or otherwise of under-attenuation in the 46.2 hertz band, the relative suitability of ribbon microphones against an SM58 when recording a donkey farting through a tissue-paper-wrapped toothcomb. No. The astounding thing is that there had been 102 previous conventions before it.