From the Telegraph:

The nine men from Rochdale were yesterday convicted of abusing five vulnerable teenagers after plying them with alcohol, food and small sums of money in return for sex.

However, the true number of victims, who were "passed around" by the gang, is likely to be nearer to 50, police have admitted.

That sounds pretty bad. But why would the cops be worried that people would accuse them of being racist against Asians? That's not some hot-button issue over there, is it?

Kabeer Hassan, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Adil Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Amin, Hamid Safi and a 59-year-old man who cannot be named for legal reasons were yesterday found guilty of running a child exploitation ring at Liverpool Crown Court.

Ohhhh. That sort of "Asian."

Next up: Telegraph accused of failing to identify a Muslim pedophile gang
as Muslim for fear of being perceived as racist.

Tags: dhimmitude, islam, stupid media tricks

Right now I have the worst case of athlete's foot in the known fucking universe.

It's not like I haven't had it before. I think I first contracted it way the hell back in high school when I was running cross-country. I've more or less lived in a tense state of truce with it since then. Every once in a while it flares up, I grab the Tinactin or whatever and go to town with it for a couple of weeks, it goes away, I keep going with the spray for another month until I'm sure it's gone.

Right now, the entire upper surface of both my feet is a commingled mass of tiny vesicles that split open and ooze clear fluid. The spaces between my toes itch and burn so badly that the thought of getting a steel-wire brush and scrubbing that entire region with vigorous enthusiasm, or giving it a or giving it a good dousing in lighter fluid and setting it afire, is a temptation I've managed to withstand only with steady willpower and beer consumpion. The last time either of my feet was as swollen as they both are now, I'd received the unholy sunburn pictured here.

And I've got a dermatophytid reaction on my calves and chest.

Either I've finally bred a super-virulent strain of tinea pedis that's resistant to the OTC antifunals, or my toes are being melted off by some hitherto-unknown space mushroom. So far, I've avoided spreading it to my balls. But I can't make any promises on how long that will last.

Doctor can't see me until Wednesday, unless Jesus, Vishnu, and the Eskimos smile upon me and someone cancels an appointment tomorrow. If Dad were alive, he'd probably be gleefully advising bilateral amputation by now.

Time for the ObLigatory "Is anyone still using LJ?" comment.

That aside, I'm pretty impressed with CS5's contextual filtering. Here's a shot out of the camera, nothing done to it but jpg conversion:



Here it is after about 30 minutes of quick and dirty messing around with the spot healing brush:



If you zoom in, you can see some removal artifacts, but still, nice tool.

“Ken,” he told me, “if your reaction to a proposal is “HOLY SHIT, THAT SOUNDS LIKE FUN,” then as a government lawyer and member of law enforcement, you almost certainly shouldn’t be doing it.”

Right before the mental squickfest of Sleep No More, we hit WD50 for the tasting menu.



( Here be pictures )

Went to see Sleep No More this weekend.


(Not my shot, I tried to take a few but given that it was with a point-and-shoot and required subterfuge to get away with it, I didn't get anything good)



It's this massive production by this British theater company called Punchdrunk. And I really mean "massive." They've taken over 100,000 square feet of empty warehouse space in Chelsea and turned it into a sort of David Lynch LARP.

The LARP bit isn't the best description. You don't have a role to play other than "audience member," but it's an active role. You're given a Venetian mask, cautioned not to remove it or speak, and then told wander through this enormous space, which they've turned into a 1930s hotel called the McKittrick, in a nod to Vertigo.

When you first enter, the entire crowd's in a club with a bar where you should really drink something with absinthe in it. Then they move you out in groups, hand you your masks, and dump you off an elevator onto one of the 5 floors, intentionally trying to split up people who came as a group. And that's when everything turns creepy as hell. The hotel space is decrepit and twisted and will thoroughly disorient you. You're left to explore, encouraged to poke around into drawers and closets and so forth, and to follow the inhabitants around as you see fit.

The inhabitants are putting on a bizarre production of Macbeth by way of Hitchcock, and doing it mostly without dialogue. Interactions with the audience are mixed; at times, characters ignore you, and at times (usually when they're insane or dead), they take notice of you. Occasionally an actor will grab a single audience member, lead him through a locked door, and shut it behind them, separating him from the audience entirely. This didn't happen to me, but apparently the actor then de-masks you and tells you a short spooky story.

They don't let you take photos, which I can understand (actors are gettin' bare-ass naked, and plus shutter clicks and flash would be awfully intrusive), but it sucks because the art direction of this environment is incredible. Every room is filled with detail, it's as symbolically dense as a Tim Powers novel. Just as one example, in this version, Duncan's son Malcolm is apparently a private investigator. In the back of his office is a darkroom, and examination of the hanging prints and the notes and books on the shelves and the various severed bird wings nailed to the walls indicate that Malcolm's really into ornithomancy. While I'm in there poking around, Malcolm comes in (followed by various audience members), types up a report, retrieves a small box from the safe, removes a scalpel from it, looks like he's going to let loose a vein, but then changes his mind and excises a single line of text from his report, only to tie it to the leg of a dead bird.

Many rooms in the hotel exist in some not-a-hotel space. There's a forest maze (Birnam wood?), with a growling wolf statue at one of the dead-ends. There's an extensive area of crumbling stone walls and statuary where Macbeth wanders in anguish for a time. Lady Macbeth's parlor lets her retreat to a space behind a large mirror while we watch.

Eeriest room I saw was Macduff's child's nursery. An empty crib, with an empty baby's jumper lying within it, and hanging from the ceiling to encircle the crib are another two dozen or so empty baby jumpers, but these are bronzed and hence have the shape of one which holds a real baby. Spookiest performance I witnessed was Macbeth's second consultation with the witches, which takes place in a nightclub (it's a duplicate of the one you enter the performance through, so it's intended to be the same but isn't the same), and turned into a drum-and-bass driven blood orgy, complete with three naked witches (one male, goat-headed, and blood-soaked) , Macbeth, and a demonic stillbirth.

You won't see everything. You can't see everything. Even though the actors repeat their vignettes several times during the course of the night, it's your pick of who to follow or where to go that determines what you get to see. I wasn't able to follow a single thread of the main plot all the way through; I wanted to see Duncan's murder, but didn't, but did see blood-soaked Macbeth enter into his lady's parlor to tell her he'd done the deed, and then later her frenzied efforts to scrub herself clean of the blood that he'd left on her. And I ended up seeing naked and scrubbing Lady MacBeth twice, but I'm not going to complain about that because, well, the actress was pretty damned good-looking even when she wasn't gyrating lithely all around her room. There's another non-Macbeth related plotline that I couldn't follow at all, and judging from the character names it's got something to do with the novel Rebecca, which I've never read. Plus a woman in a red dress credited as "Hecate" who at one point harvests tears from one of the Rebecca characters, so regarding all that I have no fucking idea what was going on.

I think it could have been better with less dance-fighting and more dialogue, I'd really have appreciated a few more anchors to the source material; I still have no idea who several of the characters were. I couldn't tell you who was Banquo and who was Duncan, for example. And what dialogue there was was almost entirely drowned out by the atmospheric (and very effective) soundtrack; unless you're right up against an actor you're not going to make out much of what they're saying; at one point I'm pretty sure I heard Lady Macbeth giving the "And damned be he who first cries hold etc" bit in low tones, but couldn't be sure. And I get a sense that if you could see everything and follow every thread to conclusion, then the plot(s) wouldn't justify the setup, that the stage is simply too big for the drama.

But despite any of those deficiencies, it's very, very cool. Then after Macbeth gets what's coming to him, you wind up back in the first nightclub again and get to party:





This guy's got some photos of the space, apparently when the setup was just about finished but before the performance started running.

The NYT's got a few official shots.

Okay, quick backstory. Cops in Fullerton, CA, beat a crazy homeless guy so badly he goes into a coma and dies in the hospital a few days later. Police chief's since gone on medical leave, there's the standard bit where the folks on one side think the cops were justified in using the force they did, the folks on the other side who think these guys should all go to prison, and so on. But in the midst of the let's-get-to-the-bottom-of-this, check this out:

Fullerton's acting police chief acknowledged Thursday that the department had allowed police officers involved in a deadly encounter with a homeless man to watch a video that captures the incident before writing their reports about it.

Acting Chief Kevin Hamilton said supervisors allowed the review so that the officers would have a chance to refresh their memory and write an accurate account of the incident involving Kelly Thomas.

But the practice is at odds with the way many other police departments deal with serious use-of-force cases. The LAPD's former inspector general, Jeffrey Eglash, said that allowing police to look at video before giving evidence is a "bad practice."

[...]

"You want each person's recollection. I would look at the videotape like another witness," he said. "It allows the officers to conform their statements to other evidence rather than getting their independent witness recollection. It is not a practice that advances the truth-seeking."

[...]

Hamilton said there was no hidden agenda in allowing the officers to see what the video showed.

"Sometimes audio tapes or videotapes can refresh an officer's memory to what happened and then they can write about it," he said. "The videotapes were not shown to the officers in an effort to flavor anything."

The Orange County district attorney's office, which is investigating Thomas' death along with the FBI, has refused to release the tape publicly, saying investigators believe it could influence witness recollections. The Fullerton police have also rejected requests to make the tape public.

So investigators won't make the video public, because any witnesses who saw it might have their recollections influenced by the video. But they showed it to the cops...specifically so that their recollections could be influenced by the video.

Gotcha. Makes sense.

Whenever you hear someone start of by talking about how essential free speech is to society, always wait for the 'but':

British Prime Minister David Cameron thinks he's found some culprits to blame in the recent riots that have rocked London and other cities -- Facebook and Twitter.

Saying the "free flow of information" can sometimes be a problem, Cameron's government has summoned those two social-networking sites, as well as Research In Motion, makers of the BlackBerry, for a meeting to discuss their roles during the violent outbreaks.

[...]

"Free speech is central to our democracy, but so is public safety and security," said Ivan Lewis, the shadow secretary of culture in the House of Commons, according to London's Guardian newspaper. "We support the government's decision to undertake a review of whether measures are necessary to prevent the abuse of social media by those who organize and participate in criminal activities."

Translation: government needs to be able to shut this stuff down on a whim.

Just had to stop at a DUI checkpoint on my way home.

If a liberal's just a conservative who's never been mugged, then a conservative's a liberal who's never had his 4th amendment rights pissed all over by agents of the state because of some bullshit moral panix.

First, the officer "smelled alcohol." Of course he did, it's a DUI checkpoint, that's the fucking point. Clearly such objective and unambiguous evidence justifies further search/interrogation.

The field sobriety test's a fucking joke. There are so many ways for the cops to game the test that it flabbergasts me that these things are treated as evidence of anything at all. "I want you to stand with one foot in front of the other, heel-to-toe, while I explain the next test to you, which can take me a totally arbitrary amount of time. Now I want you to raise your forward foot 6" off the ground while counting out loud to some arbitrary number which I'm not going to inform you of beforehand. Now I want you to walk heel-to-toe 9 steps forward, turn around, and then do the same 9 steps back, where you're going to "fail" four steps while you're walking away from the camera on my police car and fail no steps while you're walking towards the camera on my police car; this pattern is purely coincidental with the fact that the camera can't see your feet when you're walking away from it. And of course, we have no baseline for how well you'd perform this test while sober and unstressed without a cop breathing down your neck, but that's not the fucking point, prole."

Then I blew into the breathalyzer. Clean. Went home. Pissed off as fuck. This "Papers, please" stuff is bullshit.

Funny part? My car's registration is, to all appearances, expired. Sticker expired at the end of June, I've got the temporary renewal right next to my proof of insurance in the glove box. He didn't even ask to see those.

From the AP:

Northeast braces for temps near boiling point

NEW YORK (AP) — The extreme heat that's been roasting the eastern U.S. is only expected to get worse, and residents are bracing themselves for temperatures near and above boiling point.

Weather service heat warnings and advisories have been issued Friday from Ohio to Maine.

The high temperatures and smothering humidity will force up the heat indexes. Boston's 99 degrees on Friday could feel like 105 degrees; Philadelphia's 102 degrees like 114 degrees and Washington, D.C.'s 103 degrees may seem the same as a melting 116 degrees.

Math is hard.