Indy Must Be Right

Cos, like, they Underlined It.

Sloooowwww Moootioooon

Did I Fall Or Was I Pushed?

Last week Hyena saw this:


Thom Yorke was incredible, despite having to listen to a pretty tiresome spiel by the Green candidate in Cambridge beforehand. On the slow train back, staring out the black windows, Hyena heard this:

“You know they've got this iPhone app now that you can download and if you're in an argument with a climate sceptic you know one of those really annoying arguments you can look up any fact in the debate – you know, it just has them there, all the arguments and the reasons why the sceptics are wrong...”


This is what argumentation has come to, Hyena thought. This is what understanding has come to. The ability for humans to get the answer from a sacred talisman called an iPhone, as if from a magic eight ball or tribal fetish.

Prissy greens looking up the answer on their iPhones, she thought. Is there a more contemptible type in the modern world? Not that Hyena has any patience for their counterparts, the over-zealous "sceptics" who've never looked at a single graph.

This wasn't the worst of it. Another girl was ready with a tale of woe about a couple of kids standing next to her who texted and whispered to one another throughout the show.

Now if there's one thing Hyena won't stand for it's oafs who ruin concerts. And it made her wonder, about these zealous iPhone-worshipping greens. It made her think that, for a certain type of environmentalist, blind faith in warming theory points to a certain kind of inter-personal inadequacy - a need to see oneself as "active" and engaged because of the ultimate passivity of one's actual character.

Because, it strikes Hyena, if you can't even speak up about your views in a human context, where others' behaviour directly affects you, you can't really call yourself a 'social activist' of any kind. You are, at heart, just a passenger.

- - -
Having heard enough, Hyena put her headphones on.

Screenshot of the Day

An update from the backwaters of Youtube, in a piece entitled "Saving wild animals", wherein the Guardian sends Patrick Barkham to a wild animals farm to interview sheep and their carers about why they're running out of cash.


10 views and counting - and that ain't bad for the Grauniad's channel.

The Black Farmer Rides Again

It's rare for Hyena to feel truly inspired by a politician, but she has to hand it to the fantastic, self-styled "black farmer of Chippenham", Tory PPC Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones. Aside from recording his brave gallivanting about town on a led horse, his Youtube channel, theblackfarmer, features a montage of all-British food recipes set to music and footage of him canvassing in a black leather cowboy hat.

The most inspiring part, however, the real genius behind this campaign, is the way the words "I am on Your side" occasionally flash up on the right-hand side of the screen, for no apparent reason. He's certainly got one voter convinced.

Chopin

A much older version of this guy was playing Chopin in town last night:

The Post-Post-Bureaucratic Age

Hyena will post some cogent thoughts on the subject later, but for now here's a sketch she did of a few speakers at yesterday's "Post-Bureaucratic Age conference." By the end of this committee, most of the speakers had thoroughly agreed that we need better, not fewer, bureaucrats, and that transparency should not come at the cost of hurting their feelings. And Stephan Shakespeare had still not remembered to do up all of his shirt buttons. Luckily for the Tories nearly all the media had left by that point.


Still, at least you could count on Heather Brooke and the TPA to stand firm.