Give us ze reaaal danz!

This morning, the blogosphere will no doubt be rife with discussion of the merits of Alesha Dixon as the new judge on Strictly Come Dancing (BBC1, 9pm). So much so that peoply hardly need my two cents. Suffice to say that I thought there was something intangibly creepy about the sight of one moderately clueless but beautiful and amiable young woman sandwiched between three middle-aged men thanks to an inexplicable decision on high by the BBC. I, like many, found Arlene Phillips irredeemably annoying, and would quite happily have accepted her replacement by someone with some comparable expertise. Yet the presence of Darcy Bussel in the audience, who Bruce favoured over Alesha when discussing movement and grace, only highlighted the gaping chasm in knowledge between Dixon and the other judges. Or why did they not go for the radiant and lovely Karen Hardy, tragically missing from the lineup of professional dancers this year? Surely a former world champion Latin dancer (as well as former winner of Strictly) could have more to offer by way of feedback and advice? More important than this, her criticism would be far more palatable to the professional dancers, who I saw straining time and again to be gracious in the face of a young woman for whom they were dialling down their own abilities to fit her lack of training only two years ago. I feel for Dixon, because she was a wonderful and deserving winner, but a winner of an amateur competition, and she remains an amateur. She is nowhere near ready to judge others’ efforts.

However, that is not what I really want to discuss. Before the broadcast of last night’s opening installment of Strictly my Mum, my sister and many that I know were having fits of excitement about its return, yet I remained curiously numb about the whole affair. Why was this? Because I love watching dancing. I love watching good dancing, and watching people who have never danced before stumbling

Are Derren Brown’s numbers up?

Bit late to be coming over the innocent now, D-Dawg

Well, I won’t be the first to say this, but Friday night’s Derren Brown’s How to Win the Lottery (Channel 4, 9pm) was a massive disappointment, and I say this as someone who spent the two days preceding telling everyone who scoffed at the lottery trick to stop being such a killjoy. Lots of reasons have been put forward as to why it was so disappointing – the fact that, while elaborate, Brown’s explanation of “Deep Maths” and “the wisdom of crowds” for how he was able to predict Wednesday night’s lottery numbers had been discredited by Maths Professors across the country within minutes of the programme’s broadcast being the chief one, the other one being that his explanation was simply confusing. It was certainly incoherent. The idea that people become more suggestible when they are afraid sounds plausible and is probably true. It is a fact that Brown has utilised repeatedly in previous programmes. The ability of large numbers of people to make more accurate estimations than a single individual is also plausible, and also probably true. However, his attempt to link this emotional suggestibility to his lottery challenge – that the emotions of greed and ambition get in the way of our ability to make predictions of random numbers, or the fact that he equated “estimation” of an animal’s weight with “prediction” or more accurately “guessing” of a random sequence of numbers just didn’t make any sense. And frankly, the idea that we would accept this nonsense wholesale just plain insulted our intelligence.

So no wonder so many people were confused, as the responses on Twitter will attest. However, this confusion and frustration arises out of something more than the fact that it just wasn’t a very good trick. I mean, if any other magician had

The ones who hurt the most

I’m going to be a little more serious than usual today, because I have just read an article by Melissa McEwan, who writes the Shakesville blog, that describes an experience so familiar to me that it has made me want to relate a story of my own, as apparently many people have all over the internet since the article was first published.

While I was at university, for my first year, my two closest friends were male. I was very, very fond of both of them. They were witty, intelligent and silly. The three of us would stay up and talk all night, joking around and chatting about our lives. We’d play practical jokes on each other, cook together and go to each other when things went wrong.

But as the year went on, I started to feel more and more alienated from them. In the halls, we spent all our time together, but they only went out with their male friends. They told me I was their closest friend, but I was never invited into their social group. I was expected only to go out with other women. I was not of their tribe. The jokes started to take on an edge, too. They started ganging up on me with their practical jokes. A couple of times one of them even hit me when he was drunk – all in the name of fun, of course. When we would sit and talk conversations started to consist of long protracted put-downs of me, in which I would sit silently listening and hurting at the onslaught. I remember waking up one morning and seeing that someone had written ‘CUNT’ by sticking sanitary towels on the wall at the foot of the bed. When I tried to challenge them they would listen silently, resentfully. They would nod, agree, apologise. Once they even bought me flowers, but then they went and complained to our other friends at how unreasonable I was being. They repeatedly told me that they loved me, that I was their favourite ‘girl’ in college – but not favourite person, never favourite person. They would make sexist jokes and I would refuse to join in – and they would tell me it was okay because of course they didn’t really mean it. Other friends told me I was being a prude. No one seemed to see that having my closest friends constantly insult my gender was deeply hurtful and was shattering my self esteem.

It was a pattern I saw constantly. A woman who tended to befriend men at university started out with their surprised but grudging respect. Everyone would talk about how they weren’t like other girls, how they were so funny, how they

Turns out, the Pendet Dance is Indonesia’s NHS

If you’ve been on Twitter this morning, you will have noticed that “Pendet dance” and “#pendetindonesia” have become major trending topics in the last few hours. The topics are peopled by comments such as “Yo malaysia stop stealing and GET A LIFE!!”, “Pendet dance is from Bali! Stop stealing our culture, Malaysia!” and the passionate, if somewhat over-optimistic “PENDET DANCE REALLY BELONGS TO INDONESIA, IT’S ORIGINALLY FROM BALINESE! EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD KNOW THAT!”

For those that don’t know, which, obviously, is none of you, the Pendet dance is a traditional Balinese dance that can be performed by anyone, and in which offerings of incense, cakes, flowers and other items are made to a temple. (Alas, Wikipedia has little more than a stub, but you can get a bit more information here). The outrage has come about because the dance has been used in a tourism advert for Malaysia, with many Indonesians feeling that they are misleadingly appropriating an integral part of their culture.

Hmmmm, to British twitterers this will be starting to sound strangely familiar. Anyone who had a look on the #welovethenhs topic in the last few days will know that, when it comes to Twitter, there is no fury like a society faced by a rival nation making spurious claims about their institutions. To me, it marks this week out as an interesting chapter in the development of Twitter as a broadcast phenomenon. While its political importance was marked during the protests in Iran and China, when tweeters in both countries were able to broadcast their experiences to the world, the NHS and Pendet Dance phenomenons mark out something more understated. While these perceived wrongs to a country’s national identity have no concretely negative impact on its inhabitants, Twitter is clearly acting as an outlet for people’s feelings of powerlessness and

Caprica and James Marsters. Okay. Now I’m a little excited.

I thought Battlestar Galactica was great. Although I never believed it was as clever as it thought it was, I loved the explosions and I loved the actors. I loved that I really cared about the characters. I loved that I cried at the end. I respected that they successfully made an impressive, epic feeling, exciting sci-fi show that made you ask yourself questions abut morality and society. (Just look at my tag cloud, how many other shows could you write about and include the words ‘dialectics’, ‘terrorism’, ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘feminism’ in there? Well…Dollhouse, I suppose) I loved that they offered a brilliant twist on classic cowardly British villains like Dr Smith by introducing Gaius Baltar, brilliantly played by James Callis, who you genuinely never knew whether to care about or not.

Pretty vacant. Like father, like son.

However, like many, I was wildly disappointed by the final scene, which featured angel-like creatures looking archly at our twenty-first century world, followed by a montage of various forms of robotics and artificial intelligence in modern society. Was that it? Was that all that these years of Battlestar Galactica was supposed to be? A cautionary tale about the dangers of getting ahead of ourselves technologically?

This made me furious because, to me, it negated all of the allegorical relevance of the cylons as the Other that wealthy and imperialist societies have a hand in exploiting and creating and the circle of violence and paranoia that stems from such arrogance and lack of foresight. It erased from memory

Barney Frank, the hero who shouldn’t really be a hero

Hmm, it’s a shame a few Democrat balls couldn’t have dropped before they started throwing around half-promises to drop the public option.

Seriously, as pleased as I am that Barney Frank confronted this silly woman, I can’t help thinking that it should not be considered a big deal for a Democrat to show a bit of conviction and stand up to someone calling Obama a Nazi. The real and shocking news should be that people are calling Obama a Nazi. Yet elected Democrats have so roundly failed to react properly to the slurs being cast on their leader that it is starting to be considered as a perfectly acceptable part of the cut and thrust of political debate.

So the real question is, why are the rest of them so intent on responding to every cynical, false challenge to healthcare reform by looking like children trying to explain to their parents why drawing on the fridge in permanent marker is so vital to their plans for becoming a pirate captain? Yes, there are different sides to every argument. The point at which you are trying to push through a vital, historical and highly controversial piece of legislation is not the time to acknowledge them. Michael Tomasky of The Guardian makes a similar point here.

Paul Bettany in Legion. Oh, well, if you insist.

I remember the days when I used to fantasise about Paul Bettany (and I don’t like blondes as a rule, so I hope he realises the sacrifice I made in his case). It was shortly after he played an alternate universe version of Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale, in which he was young and sexy, liked parties and dressed in removably loose wool jumpers (unlike the actual Chaucer who, as far as I can tell, was a bureacrat who knew how to tell a good yarn but had a tendency to take advantage of defenceless girls and drink too much). Then he played the doctor in Master and Commander and he had that Old World actory wisdom that makes you look past the bald hairpiece and swoon. Oh Paul. Show me your insect collection. I promise I won’t make a single joke about the Daddy Long Legs compensating for something…

Then of course he starred in Wimbledon, and my brain did the sensible thing by immediately erasing any traces of my crush rather than subject me to watching that yawnfest in the cinema. So that was the end of that.

But the fact remains that Bettany is a brilliant actor, and so it is getting quite annoying that he has been stuck in the niche that so many grave but attractive British actors get sucked into in Hollywood. Over and over, he just seems to play the villain/morally ambiguous one in film after film after film. Unfortunately for Paulie, Hollywood seems to be a little swamped with these types, so Bettany’s corner of the market is quite bizarrely specific. Where Sean Bean got to stretch his

Brazil Crime TV Host kills for ratings (okay, suspected of killing)

Apparently, TV host Wallace Souza is being investigated for ordering killings so that his TV crew could be first on the scene and get the big scoop. Things got especially suspicious when he turned up on a scene while gun smoke was still coming out of a victim’s body. Frankly this horrifies most for the fact that this TV show broadcasts shots of gunsmoke coming out of a victim’s body. Bloody hell.

Honestly, I have nothing constructive to say about this issue, but there are times when you tell yourself you cannot be shocked anymore by the behaviour of other human beings, and then something like this happens. (Again, I accept that this is an ongoing investigation, but 15 people have been arrested in connection with it) We all know that people are capable of doing the most horrific things when acting as part of a crowd. The psychology of it is documented, but it is the premeditated acts of individuals purely to further their own cause that I find really unpalatable. Souza is also suspected of having long-term involvement in gangs and drug trafficking after automatic weapons were found in his home. And he was expelled from the police in the 1980s for fuel embezzlement. Oh, but he can’t be prosecuted to the full extent of the law just yet, because he’s a state representative. And I thought L.A. Confidential was bad. Jack Vincennes, eat your heart out.

Speaking of which, I am taking bets now on how long it’ll be before some enterprising producer sees fit to make this into a movie. If they haven’t already started negotiating rights, that is.

#welovethenhs takes Twitter by storm, but not anyone else…yet

Anyone who hasn’t already been on the #welovethenhs topic on Twitter should get over there now and make their views heard. While there is some ‘this is why I’m proud of this country’ and ‘we are so much better than the USA’ commenting there, the most heartwarming thing about it is that most tweets seem to fully understand the point of the topic – that it has a political role to play in the healthcare debate in the USA.

An awful lot of bile and vitriol is being spilled by right-wing commentators and politicians against the NHS, and their hysterical opposition to his healthcare Bill is causing Obama’s popularity to sink dramatically at possibly the most important time in his administration so far. One example is the gloriously #fail claim that the British-born, disabled scientist Stephen Hawking, who teaches at Cambridge University, would not stand a chance under the British system. Hawking was quick to rebuke such utter rubbish, but other spurious accusations are gaining more traction in the States, including claims that those over 58 cannot receive treatment for heart disease, that those over 70 will not be treated for cancer, and that if the cost of care in a month is over £30,000, patients are allowed to die rather than have the NHS fork out the cost.

Now, we in the UK all know that the National Health Service is an understaffed, overly-bureacratic, inefficient machine that in many ways has lost sight of the core values and principles on which it was founded. However, we also know that many of us and the people we love would not be alive or healthy without it, and we know that the above claims are absolute and total bullhockey – to steal an American term. In addition, American commentators from every shade of the argument, from Michael Moore’s Sicko to Glenn Beck, have failed to acknowledge the irony that

On the psychology of trolls: My name is topazbean, and I am a troll-fighting addict

Lately, I’ve have not been very impressed with myself. I like to think I am a rational person who knows how to walk away from a fight when it’s not worth it, but despite my best efforts, I find that I just keep getting into arguments with comment section trolls. It’s like an illness.

Yea it wudnt saprise me if jon stewart was gona eat da eagle and burn our flag uve destroid enuff of our other AMERICAN VALUES!

I spend a lot of time on the Entertainment Weekly website and, being someone who can’t resist having an opinion on everything, I often leave a comment in the comments sections. Now I get as bored as the next person by the infantile hysteria you can encounter on these pages, from the habit people have of addressing the subjects of the article directly (“Susan Boyle/Michael Jackson/Rihanna etc. you have a beautiful soul don’t let anyone ever put you down”) to the incoherent rage that people are capable of feeling about the most trivial of subjects (“Oh of course you like the Daily Show just another sign of how the liberal media is indoctrinating our society I hope you rot in hell you communist traitors”). However, by and large, I tend to ignore those people and move on to those with something more worthwhile to say, which has been made even easier now that the blog sections have adopted a more forum-based comment section.

But no matter what I do, I just cannot help getting sucked in when a troll turns up. Notable recent examples