May 21, 2013 · 11:45 pm

Aggressive homosexuals vs aggressive heterosexuals

This morning I created an image and posted it to Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Here’s the tweet:

For context: the phrase “aggressive homosexuals” comes from a speech yesterday in the House of Commons by Sir Gerald Howarth MP (Conservative, Aldershot) during the Report stage debate of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. Sir Gerald is the current chairman of Conservative Way Forward and was Minister for International Security Strategy in the coalition government until September 2012 (according to his page on Wikipedia). Here’s where the phrase appeared in the speech:

“There are plenty in the aggressive homosexual community who see this [same-sex marriage] is as but a stepping stone to something even further.” (Hansard — no idea how persistent that link will be though.)

Sir Gerald doesn’t elaborate on exactly who the aggressive homosexual community are, or where he thinks the big gay stepping stone leads. As Hansard shows, a number of MPs tried to intervene at that point — perhaps to press him on this issue — but he declined to give way, as is his right.

It is difficult not to conclude that Sir Gerald sees pinks under the beds. He’s worked himself up into a froth about The Gays and believes that we, or at least a significant and influential slice thereof, subscribe to some kind of Gay Agenda to… I don’t know. Insinuate our way into marriage, and then what: use it to destroy the established church? I think the church is doing a perfectly good job of that itself over both gay people and women. Perhaps, looking at the context of the speech, he thinks our goal is to turn children to homosexuality by ensuring its mention in classrooms during discussions about marriage. Just as, presumably, teaching them about different religions converts them to all of those religions, or teaching them about contour lines turns them into a hill.

Back to the image.

The response has been fascinating. A steady stream of retweets throughout the day — perhaps not surprising, as it makes a strong statement on a topical, politically charged subject — and a few responses. Here are the negative replies so far:

“You do realise that despite your intentions, you’re labelling people with stereotypes.”

“That is way more offensive and way less clever than you think.”

“No. Aggressive homophobes.”

“What’s the intended goal of this? This seems to just further divide people (and straw-man the ‘other side’).”

“This is heterophobia.”

“Yeah a bit discriminatory. Ronnie Kray was a violent homosexual as was Richard the Lionheart. And let us not forget Dennis Nilsen. Violent people are of both persuasions.  Nothing to do with their sexuality.”

“Please be careful with that big stereotyping brush of yours eh?”

I haven’t replied to anyone, at least not yet. I probably won’t — it’s impossible to have meaningful debates in 140 characters. Perhaps some of them were unaware of Sir Gerald’s speech. Of course I’m stereotyping: so was Sir Gerald. Of course sexuality doesn’t determine whether you’re violent or not (but if you have to go back eight centuries for a counterexample — when sexuality was viewed very differently to today, incidentally — then you’re already on shaky ground).

The image is deliberately exaggerated, deliberately stereotypical. But it’s also showing an incontrovertible truth. You don’t, as a rule, see gay people demonstrating against straight people — Pride marches are positive in tone, not negative — but there are demonstrations by straight people against gay people, trying to deny us the rights they enjoy. There was a demonstration against equal marriage outside Parliament during the debate yesterday. And people like those shown in the image are beaten for no other reason than their sexuality. One of the men pictured was attacked last weekend with his boyfriend. Even 45 years after homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales it is still not safe for two men, breaking no law, to show affection wherever they wish in the way that a man and a woman can.

This is why the phrase aggressive homosexual community is so offensive. Gay people have suffered at the hands of the aggressive heterosexual community, indeed often through state-sponsored aggression, for several hundred years. We suffer still: religious leaders preach hate, political leaders deny us equality, and in some countries being open about our sexuality means a death sentence. And this is why I make no apology for the image, stereotypes and all.

But Sir Gerald Howarth is right on one point: we in the aggressive homosexual community do want equal marriage to be a stepping stone to something. We want it to be a stepping stone to the end of discrimination. To universal acceptance. To normality.

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May 13, 2013 · 12:14 pm

Announcing 88press

88pressThe old publishing model is dying. To reuse an analogy I’m fond of, the asteroid has hit and the dinosaurs are, one by one, coughing their last. Small shrew-like creatures are blinking into the dust-red skies and mutating FTW.

Nobody knows which new model or models will succeed. Some shrews will evolve into primitive monkeys. Some will become mammoths. Some, cute little proto-horses. Some, rats. And maybe there’ll be a unicorn in there somewhere.

However it turns out, it’s evident that services previously provided in-house by traditional publishers are already being carved out into separate entities. For example, publishers now increasingly contract out copy-editing rather than keep copy-editors twiddling their blue pencils on payroll.

And in the brave new world of self-publishing, also known as indie publishing, writers are starting to recognise — after the initial DIY that’ll do phase — that high-quality books need third-party help: one or more of developmental editing, copy-editing, proofreading, cover design, charts and diagrams, and — for those who want print-on-demand dead-tree books — professional book design and layout.

Yes, authors can do these things themselves. No, most can’t do them very well, or well enough.

Enter 88press.

88press home page

88press aims to provide editorial and publishing services for indie/self-published writers. For words: copy-editing and proofreading services (developmental editing isn’t currently on the list). For graphics: cover design (ebooks and printed books), and charts and diagrams. Plus book template design and layout for print-on-demand, for those using CreateSpace or other similar services. In other words: a bunch of services previously provided by a traditional publisher, available on a pick-and-mix basis at reasonable cost.

To be clear: 88press is not a publisher in the old-school sense. I’ll put my own books out under the 88press label, and maybe one or two others, but I don’t plan to open the door to any old manuscript. Neither do I expect 88press to deal with marketing or distribution to retailers. The goal of 88press isn’t to become one of the dinosaurs: the days of cultural gatekeepers are over. The focus is on helping indie writers release the best book possible.

Find out more at 88press.com. Operators are standing by…

PS Also on Twitter, Facebook, Google+

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April 29, 2013 · 10:58 pm

The fuzziness business

I have a mild obsession with metadata. I imagine there’s a twelve-step programme to sort me out, hopefully tagged metadata, obsession and self-referential gag so I can locate it.

My current instance of the obsession concerns dates on photographs. Not the most radical of concepts. A problem, you might think, solved long ago when the elders plonked multiple competing metadata chunks inside an unsuspecting jpeg. One minute it’s slowly interlacing its way through a lady’s bosoms, the next it’s been given a sick bag of acronyms like EXIF, IPTC and XMP. It’s drowning in dates, unlike me.

These acronyms mean I can sprinkle an image file with hundreds and thousands of items of metadata —  dates, and keywords, and copyright statements, and model release IDs, and Photoshop thumbnails, and GPS coordinates, and camera data, and Wake up! Wake up!

Unfortunately for me, these nuggets of metadata all have one thing in common: certainty. Attempt to poison the well with a droplet of uncertainty, and you’re out of luck.

Consider this:

Billy, Art and Leslie

This photo from my family’s archive was taken during World War Two, not far from the Suez Canal. It shows three friends — my great-uncle, his brother-in-law’s brother-in-law, and his half-brother — who pretty much bumped into each other while Montgomery was shaking his fist at Rommel in the desert.

Here’s the problem: I don’t have a precise date for this photo. Neither do I have a precise location. But I do have some very important and useful imprecise information: 1942 and the Suez Canal.

How do I encode this within the photo’s metadata?

Keywords, you say? Well, yes, but that’s the everything is a nail solution. I’m a fan of keywords, some of my best friends are keywords, but I don’t think they’re the solution here, at least not shovelled in as plain 1942 and Suez Canal, with nothing to identify them as approximate dates and locations.

Are there any other possibilities? On closer inspection it turns out that, at least for some date properties in the metadata ocean, you can reduce precision. Instead of the full YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.SSS+ZZ:ZZ monty you can say just YYYY-MM-DD, or even just YYYY. Whether or not any given vendor supports this is a different matter entirely – Flickr has a “chop the tail off” feature for dates, but I don’t know whether it automatically spots chopped-off dates embedded in files you upload.

But anyway: problem solved! I’ll put the date as 1942 and move on.

Except that’s not a very good general solution to the problem. And in any case, I lied earlier: I don’t know that the photo was taken in 1942. It might be 1943 — and I can’t encode “either 1942 or 1943” in one date field. Some beard-oriented committee’s idea of imprecision simply doesn’t match the real world.

And I can think of other, similar imprecisions, perhaps most importantly entities portrayed (“this part of this image shows either person/thing A or person/thing B”) and location (“this image shows either fuzzy place A or fuzzy place B”).

Is it too much to want to preserve this type of metadata in the file? It’s certainly valid metadata, and more useful in the real world to real humans than Did the flash gun fire? But it seems I can’t do this. Despite having apparently defined “date of creation” several times over in some perverse kind of Groundhog Metaday, nobody appears to have found the time to specify how to encode fuzziness.

This matters because more and more images that weren’t created by modern digital cameras pointing at actual, current events are making their way onto Flickr and Facebook etc. Let me just dangle the word genealogy here to emphasise the point. (And please note, vendors, there is a very significant difference between “date of creation of file” and “date of original creation of image”. A flatbed scanner is not a time traveller.)

Lack of imprecision is a genuine problem for tagging nerds like me, and it’d be nice if someone could fix it. Handily, the XMP standard — originally defined by Adobe, now an ISO standard, and supported by common image formats like jpeg and dng — allows for extensions: in other words, it lets people define their own metadata. You just need to convince every important vendor to support the madcap scheme you come up with.

With that rather glaring caveat, here’s an idea for dates.

First, a bunch of examples of fuzzy dates people might genuinely want to encode: “sometime in 1942”, “before 1900”, “between June and July 1972”, “between noon and 3pm EST on October 30, 1980,” “either 1945 or 1947, but not 1946,” “definitely not 1903, but apart from that I don’t have a clue”, “744 BC according to the Roman Calendar of Romulus”.

I think these examples generalise to: I want to embed a file with one or more preferably non-overlapping date ranges, possibly open-ended, with each date range specifying a calendar scale (defaulting to the proleptic Gregorian).

Excitingly, the ISO 8601 standard commonly used for representing dates and times specifies how you can encode time intervals in the proleptic Gregorian, and it’s almost exactly what I’m looking for. You can say things like “2007-03-01T13:00:00Z/2008-05-11T15:30:00+0100” — meaning “between March 1st 2007 at 1pm GMT and May 11th 2008 at 3:30pm BST” — if both ends are known with precision. If not, you can leave elements out: “2007-03/04” means “March-April 2007” (elements omitted on the right of the slash, like the year in this example, are considered the same as the value on the left).

I don’t think there’s a standardised way to denote an open-ended range, but I think you could special-case omitted dates either side of the slash: so “/1899” would mean “before 1900”, and “2063-04-05/” would mean “after first contact between Vulcan and Earth”. A single slash “/” could be used to mean “I have no idea” (which is better than saying nothing, as it lets you record a decision — to distinguish “I have examined this image and I have no idea” from “I haven’t got round to tagging this image yet”).

A list of these date ranges then defines a bunch of non-overlapping alternatives: “either this range or this range or…”, thus allowing you to easily state “1945 or 1947”, “either January 17th 1901 or sometime before June 1896”, or whenever.

Calendar scales are probably overkill, but it doesn’t hurt to think ahead. Other groups are: for example, the VCard spec suggests IANA should maintain a canonical list of official calendar scale identifiers, and says it should allow x-name experimental/unofficial values. That seems a good idea to me. In reality, since alternate calendar scales will be rare, we should treat them as special cases and not hobble the entire idea to support them.

Now to implementation…

A quick skim through the XMP specification reveals it lets you store structured data, including lists of such structures. This means we could decompose the calendar scale and the two dates into three separate fields, but let’s keep it simple: since we have the ISO 8601 time interval, and we’ve identified some simple and very useful augmentation to it, let’s just bolt on some optional calendar stuff as a prefix. Then we’re left with a plain old list of strings. Easy.

All we need now is a little naming whitewashed over the top, some well-defined semantics, and Bob’s your imprecise uncle. Still time for Adobe to implement in Lightroom 5!

XMP extension specification: Fuzzy namespace

This namespace contains properties that provide “fuzzy” or imprecise metadata.

  • The namespace URI and field namespace URI shall be “http://ns.avaragado.org/fuzzy/1.0”
  • The preferred namespace prefix is fuzzy.

These are the properties so far defined in the fuzzy namespace:

fuzzy:depictedDateRanges

Type: unordered array of fuzzy:dateRange

Description: A set of possible date ranges that apply to the document. The actual date is unknown but believed to be within exactly one of the date ranges.

fuzzy:dateRange

Type: Text

Description: A single date range. A Unicode string containing up to five parts:

  • Optional. A prefix defining the calendar scale that applies to the date range. Allowed values are as defined by IANA. If omitted, defaults to the IANA designation for the proleptic Gregorian calendar (which I assume for example purposes would be “gregorian”).
  • Optional. A single pipe character “|” (U+007C VERTICAL LINE). Must be present if and only if the calendar scale is present.
  • Optional. A “not before” date, written in the syntax applicable to the calendar scale (for proleptic Gregorian, this is the Date type as defined in the XMP specification; the syntax for dates in other calendar scales is not defined here, but it is assumed it does not contain a pipe or a slash character). If omitted, means “the beginning of time”.
  • Optional. A single slash “/” (U+002F SOLIDUS). Must be present if both “not before” and “not after” dates are specified, or if neither of them is.
  • Optional. A “not after” date, following the same date syntax rules as the “not before” date. If omitted, means “the end of time”. Must correspond to a date no earlier than the “not before” date. Must have the same or fewer date components (year, month, etc) than the “not before” date; must not have components omitted from the “not before” date.

If only one date is supplied and there is no slash, the date is used as both the “not before” and “not after” date. This allows for concise imprecision using the XMP Date value’s ability to omit date components.

Here are some valid example values, with semantics in parentheses:

  • / (“I don’t know”)
  • /1899 (“Before 1900”)
  • 2063-04-05/ (“On or after April 5th 2063”)
  • 2003 (“Some time in 2003”, same as 2003/2003 or 2003-01-01/2003-12-31)
  • 2003-01 (“Some time in January 2003”, same as 2003-01/2003-01 or 2003-01-01/2003-01-31)
  • 2003/2005 (“Between the start of 2003 and the end of 2005”)
  • 2013-04-27/28 (“On April 27th or 28th 2013”)
  • 2013-04-27T14:01+01:00/ (“At or after 2.01pm BST on April 27th 2013”)
  • 2007-11-13T00:00/15T24:00 (“Between November 13th and 15th, 2007” — equivalent to “2007-11-13/15”)
  • gregorian|/ (“I don’t know, explicitly in the proleptic Gregorian calendar”)
  • gregorian|1800-01-01/1899-11-30 (“Any time in the 1800s except December 1899”)
  • x-wombat|hatstand/banister (“Between two values meaningful in the x-wombat calendar scale”)

And here are some invalid example values:

  • (the empty string) (invalid because the slash is mandatory if no dates are given)
  • gregorian| (invalid because the slash is mandatory if no dates are given)
  • 2001/2000 (invalid because the “not after” date is before the “not before” date)
  • 2000/2001/2002 (invalid because no more than two dates are permitted)
  • 2001/2001-04-05 (invalid because the “not after” date contains date components omitted from the “not before” date)
  • 2013-04-27/15:00 (invalid because the “not after” date contains date components omitted from the “not before” date)
  • hatstand/banister (invalid because no calendar scale prefix means proleptic Gregorian is implied, and neither date component is a valid Date as defined in the XMP specification)

Addendum

You know what? You can add individual fuzzy date ranges as keywords to your images right now. You don’t have to wait for anyone. Prefix each fuzzy date range with fuzzydate: and maybe, at some point, a vendor like Adobe or Flickr might notice. Flickr already spots some specially formatted “machine tags” and treats them differently than normal tags.

Examples:

  • “Sometime during the American Civil War” is one keyword: fuzzydate:1861-04-12/1865-05-09.
  • “Definitely not 1901” is two keywords: fuzzydate:/1900 and fuzzydate:1902/.

Away you go.

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April 17, 2013 · 10:33 am

Hold the Uptrend Visiconk: Viceroy Blair succumbs to LFS

wibbly woo wibbly woo wibbly woo…

At last the great Y2K38 panic has subsided, thanks to patient years of upgrades and an unexpected asteroid in the bagging area. And now comes news long-expected: from Labour’s Space Transport House at the recently polished Aneurin Bevan Coca-Cola Moonbase (a subsidiary of Lunar Disney, incorporated in the state of Tranquility), a solemn announcement over the visiconks.

“Hashtag all,” it begins, in the new vernacular. “It is with great hashtag sadness that we omnipish the 1/5” … “following announcement. Please hold. 2/5” Then a blipvert, and then: “Viceroy Blair succumbed at last to Lunar Flange Syndrome 3/5” … “at Fanta O’Clock LMT this earthsolprebrunch. 4/5” … “Hashtag thoughts and prayers, etc in luvmems of the People’s Princessoriser. Coke is it. 5/5”

Meanwhile, deep beneath the lunar regolith at the Margaret Thatcher Pizza Hut Lunar Mining Corporation Space-Tory HQ — the “Thatch Hatch” — tributes are paid, lolspeeches are droned, but in the Homepods and the gated satellite exclusocaves there is but one refrain: Rejoice! Rejoice at that news!

A row bubbles and bursts over the spacewaves. “You disrespect a dear former leader, an old man.” “Viceroy Blair was divisive.” “He rid the world of dictators.” “He brought ruin to the land, before it became ruined.” And so on. The ancient arguments nursed again into dangerous and bitter flame beneath the pressurised twatdomes.

But as the Interplanetary Labour Party hold the balance of power, albeit in conjunction with the Lunar Independence Party, their will prevails. Many megacredits are instazapped to pay for the funeral, even though this means some go without basic necessities such as Coca-Cola. It’s not a state funeral, oh no, they insist: the Anima-Queen’s eyes buzzed red when the idea was suggested. And so it proves: the laser light extravacremanza is a slightly lighter shade of mauve, thus identifying it unambiguously as merely a ceremonial funeral. The supergun carriage travels via Tube Olive not Tube Potato, entirely different. The entrance to St Ronald’s Cathedral is lined with Chelsea Cyborgs, not the active servicedroids currently engaged in the war against Lunar Eurasia.

It is by no means a political funeral. The guest list for the service merely includes all party donors and surviving members of Blair’s cabinet, with Supreme General Overlord Omicron Mandelson telespazzing in from the Outer Worlds, and Gordon Brown sending a miniclone. Although invited in accordance with the War Crimes (Ignore Ignore) Act 2020, the Immortal Empty Soul of Henry Kissinger sends his apologies, secured as he is behind the impenetrable borders of the People’s Republic of Lunar America. By special arrangement Robodiana, sponsored by the Daily App, hovers above the plastipews scattering underage upskirt images of celebrity children as part of its immoral crusade.

In accordance with no tradition, Big Space Ben is placed in Silent Mode for the duration of the funeral service, and the Tubes are lined with the Boys in Black to facilitate appropriate mourning behaviour. Space Onions are available for an optional mandatory fee from every Coca-Cola dispenser.

These precautions do not entirely stop unauthorised rebellions, including lowered visors and retransmissions of “unbalanced” material such as the F*rty-f*ve M*n*tes speech (name obfuscated to trick the Ultra-Effectivo™ Lunar Unlimited Virgin Omnifilter). A campaign led from the deepest lava tubes of the Northern Line to propel Things Can Only Get Better to hashpos 0000001 in the bongotrends causes controversy when the LBBC decides to broadsmit only every alternate bar, intercutting with footage of Space Pope Colin II humming halluciprayers and rattling a tin from a balcony of St Peter’s Bank of Silica.

And now at last into the cathedral come the senior guests, led by the recently televoted PM Romeo Beckham and the winners of Lunar Britain’s Got Cabinet, including Chancellor of the Exchequer Maximilian Plantagenet Idaho Binge Squabbler, known to his owners as Polly T Parrot. And finally the Anima-Queen and her brood, cleansing the St Ronald’s lino of choking regolith for the ceremonial entrance of the most honoured guest, Eternal Emperor Cameron, and his little dog Gove.

Pray silence, now, for His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Tranquility, Professor Brian Cox.

…wibbly woo wibbly woo wibbly woo

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February 6, 2013 · 12:09 pm

Design and message

Last night, while wired on a trace of caffeine, I saw an infographic created and shared on Facebook by the Out4Marriage organisation. Views on gay marriage range from Of course, this is the twenty-first century to I’m the MP for Wellingborough, but leaving that issue aside, the graphic disturbed me somewhat. In fact, as a fully paid-up member of the Tufte club, I gurgled something lacking in both grammar and grace.

Here’s the graphic:

out4marriage-pie-original

I shan’t BEGIN RANT here. Suffice it to say that all those pixels have been wasted on twelve numbers, two of which are zero. And you can’t read the labels. And the colours are inconsistent between pie charts. And they’re pie charts. And they’re 3D pie charts. And pie charts with zero-sized slices don’t make any sense. And there’s a typo “Liberal Democrate”. Here’s where I would END RANT, were I ranting, which of course I’m not.

I posted a short comment against the graphic. Here’s a screenshot with the subsequent two responses:

Screenshot_06_02_2013_10_02

What particularly intrigues about Out4Marriage’s response is how it reminds me of the shields up ultra-defensive reply you sometimes receive from developers — especially of open source software — when you have the impertinence to report a bug in their code. The source is there — if you don’t like it, fix it yourself. And it made me wonder whether all voluntary organisations are inherently like that to some extent: deflecting any criticism by inviting you inside the tent to piss out.

Of course, whoever wrote that message also had a point. The people working on the campaign had had a long and tiring day and could be excused a typo, and tedious grammar pedants on the internet are the most tedious tedious grammar pedants since the Microsoft Word paperclip first interrupted us to insist we were writing a letter.

The subsequent comment, though, raised a caffeinated eyebrow. “If someone took the time to make it, we can take the time to read it,” this commenter says. I fundamentally disagree with that statement. It lets the creator of the graphic entirely off the hook. It says, effectively, design doesn’t matter to understanding. It says, effectively, user interface complexity doesn’t matter.

The principle of commensurate effort applies, naturally: you’ll put in the effort if the reward is good enough. You’ll master the incoherent hodgepodge of levers and sticks and buttons and dials and spinny things in a car’s user interface because you receive a huge benefit from doing so.

But an infographic like this has no great reward for deep study. It must communicate its messages simply and coherently and compellingly. Don’t Make Me Think!

For this graphic in particular you want to immediately convey the information that more Tory MPs voted against same-sex marriage than for it; that the other main parties are hugely in favour; and that a significant fraction of MPs failed to make a choice either way, and either abstained (technically, voting both for and against) or didn’t vote at all.

Three 3D pie charts with inconsistent colouring (with red/blue/green colours matching traditional party affiliations but not used as such) and labels too small for most to read even at full size absolutely do not convey that information. The message is lost in chartjunk.

And also: who is this chart for? If I were part of Out4Marriage I’d want a chart that supporters could share on their timelines for non-supporters to see and easily grasp. It’s the non-supporters — the ones who simply will not stop and squint and interpret a complex chart from an organisation they disagree with — you need to design for.

“Feel free to volunteer,” said Out4Marriage in its reply to my comment. So I did. Here’s what I created, minus the headlines and logos that you’d need to add:

ssm-votes

Since only one party included abstainers — the Tories — I combined them with the absentees, and so twelve numbers is reduced to nine. Three stacked bar charts with consistent colours and large labels are easy to see and understand even when shrunk into a Facebook timeline. The ‘for’ colour is taken from the Out4Marriage brand. The ‘against’ colour is contrasting, pretty much, and deliberately sickly. The ‘absent/abstain’ colour is less of a highlight but still prominent. None of the colours are associated with political parties.

Much better, I think.

(While I was creating that chart, Out4Marriage posted a newer chart that used consistent colours and included a clear legend. It still had three 3D pie charts.)

I posted another comment to the original chart, pointing to my timeline for my version and apologising if anyone was offended by my earlier comment. I hope they see it, and take notice.

Everything an organisation publishes under its name sends a message. The opponents of Out4Marriage are well-funded, sending out millions of leaflets designed and worded to convince readers to lobby their MP to vote against equal marriage. You can bet they are now redoubling their efforts, selecting data that favours their cause, even after a 400-175 vote defeat at second reading, and presenting it as if they’re on course to defeat the bill.

Design sends a message. Everyone must know what your message is. Especially you.

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February 1, 2013 · 3:02 pm

Disunited

Just a short update to let readers of this blog know that my alter ego Anthony Camber has released his latest novel. Called Disunited, it’s a comedy with added drama about a top young footballer who comes out as gay. Serendipitously it arrives to coincide with LGBT History Month and the Football v Homophobia month of action. Luckily it arrives before an actual footballer has actually come out.

Disunited is available as an ebook for Kindle, Kobo, iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch (and other devices via Lulu) and also in paperback from Amazon.

I remain staggered that I can make the final tweaks to the content on Tuesday and have professionally printed and bound copies in purchasers’ hands by Friday morning. I love living in the future.

Read the publication post on the Anthony Camber blog…

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January 1, 2013 · 10:13 am

Avaragado’s 2013 predictions

2012! Who could forget the glorious summer? The coronation of Queen (formerly Sir Alan) Amidala? Britain’s abject failure in the 1500m tug-of-raw at the organic Spacelympics? The universal acclaim for the politics of austerity?

As the dregs of the year drip from the meths bottle of tomorrow into the tramp’s mouth of history and dribble through the foetid beard of ornithology onto the mangy dog’s head of clinical studies at Guy’s Hospital, it is time to stare resolutely past the tramp’s outstretched palm of invisibility to what 2013 will bring forth, or perhaps fifth. Here’s what I think:

News

  1. The Assad regime in Syria will fall.
  2. There will be no changes in US federal gun-control laws.
  3. The Duchess of Cambridge will give birth to a human boy.
  4. At least one Tory MP will defect to UKIP.
  5. The equal marriage bill for England and Wales will pass in the Commons but not the Lords.
  6. Dangerous idiot Michael Gove will be involved in a scandal over the exam board selection process for the new EBacc exams.

Sport

  1. Manchester United will win the FA Premier League.
  2. Chelsea FC will change manager at least twice.
  3. At least one British person will win a Wimbledon title.
  4. Mo Farah will win at least one gold medal at the World Athletics Championships.
  5. Rory McIlroy will win at least two majors in golf.
  6. At least one footballer playing in the UK will come out as gay or bisexual.

Science and technology

  1. Microsoft will buy Nokia.
  2. Scientists will announce the synthesis of one or more atoms of element 119 or higher.
  3. NASA will declare that Voyager 1 has left the solar system and entered interstellar space.
  4. Scientists will announce the discovery of an ‘Earth twin’ – an Earth-sized exoplanet within the habitable zone of its star.
  5. The year will be one of the ten warmest years in the global record, and warmer than 2012, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.
  6. Archaeologists will confirm that the bones dug up in a Leicester car park are those of Richard III.

Entertainment

  1. Lincoln will receive the Oscar for Best Picture.
  2. Daniel Day-Lewis will receive the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in Lincoln.
  3. Jennifer Lawrence will receive the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook.
  4. The 50th anniversary of Doctor Who will involve appearances (in newly filmed scenes) from at least one former Doctor.
  5. The BBC will cancel The Sky at Night (probably while pretending not to).
  6. The UK entry will finish in the third quarter of the rankings (ie, top half of the bottom half) in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Celebrity Deathwatch

In previous years I’ve named six people. This year I thought I’d round it up to nine, but then discovered three of my names overlapped with Andrew’s (caution: Facebook). Consequently I added three more, to make twelve.

Also, I’m adopting Andrew’s scoring system: each valid death (occurring at any time in the year) scores that person’s age at death subtracted from 100. For example, an 85-year-old’s death would score 15 points, and a 101-year-old’s would score -1 point (thus making it a daft choice). For reference, I’ve included the age of each of my selected celebrities, as at January 1st 2013.

  1. Denis Healey (95)
  2. Nelson Mandela (94)
  3. Mickey Rooney (92)
  4. Nancy Reagan (91)
  5. Richard Attenborough (89)
  6. Robert Mugabe (88)
  7. George H. W. Bush (88)
  8. Richard Briers (78)
  9. Barry Humphries (78)
  10. Shirley MacLaine (78)
  11. Bill Murray (62)
  12. Piers Morgan (47)

Please join me next New Year’s Eve for the official adjudication and other assorted lols.

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