Google Earth breakthrough in murder trial

Lawyers in the trial of a former Rwandan army major accused of ordering the murder of ten Belgian paratroopers in 1994, just before the genocide in that country, have taken the unprecedented step of using Google Earth to explain the locations referred to, according to De Morgen newspaper yesterday. Questions the application is being asked to help solve: could Major Bernard Ntuyahaga possibly have not heard the shots from his office? Could one of the key witnesses have seen the killings from the position he describes?

The use of Google Earth could help the court to arrive at a ruling over a request by some civil parties (representing the victims) for the entire trial to make an information trip to Kigali to settle just such location questions. The court is currently considering the request.

Ups and downs

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Writing style

You've mentioned that you've got a novel in progress. What kind of novel is it?

Everybody has a novel in progress. I hate to be left out of these trends. I have an idea that could not -- despite herculean efforts -- be squeezed into the 40 pages of a picture book. And once I train myself to write a page of text without immediately running off to paint the action, like a monkey reflexively jumping to an organ grinder, I shall begin.

Cartoonist Berke Breathed, interviewed in Salon.

Good cover

Since we've been looking at some bad covers, how about a good one?

This version of a pretty pisspoor Beatles song was so earth-shattering, the guy who sang it has basically been living off the glory for the last 40 years. Unfortunate about the musicians covering for the lack of backing singers by doing Monty Python soprano parts, but still.

The only other good cover I would bother mentioning is this one. I always hated the Rolling Stones and still do. Dreadful cocky English pastiche pisstakers, not an original note ever penned or played. Ghastly fucking white-boy blues sold to suburbanites who wouldn't know any better. It was a foregone conclusion they would end up with knighthoods, hobnobbing with Royalty, how could anyone not see it?

But I digress.

Nothing to do with meow

I don't blog about cats, other than the occasional mention of LOLcats, so the subject is no concern of mine. However those of you who do may be interested to read this article on the blog Small Business Trends, which examines catblogging as a new business trend, with links to the New York Times and Kitipedia Wikipedia.

English Russia

I haven't been back to English Russia much lately. Here are some highlights of my last visit:

Pictures of President Putin's boat, even more vulgar than you might expect. It looks like a cross-Channel ferry. Links to his limo and plane, too, all equally kitsch.

Photos of a Russian graduation day, complete with short-short skirts, knee-socks, French maid uniforms and all. It was never like that in my schooldays, though admittedly I did go to an all-boys school. Still, ulp!

I'm not quite sure which of the military virtues this postage stamp is supposed to be commemorating. I've decided to adopt a policy of don't ask, frankly.

This CCTV video is almost too unbearable to watch. A man falls out of the ambulance. Cars speed by. Finally some stop, but then decide to drive round the guy slowly instead of helping. Finally, after an excruciating three minutes ... well, I won't give away the ending.

Mikhail Sholokov is most famous internationally for his novel And Quiet Flows the Don, which took fourteen years to write and won him the Nobel Prize in 1965. This is the monument he couldn't refuse in Moscow, or perhaps the horses are meant to be swimming in some deep water. Either way, pretty creepy.

That's all for now. Why not visit English Russia for yourself? It's Russian, but it's in English!

Vague and constant desire

From Towse comes a new word to me: saudade, which has a marvellous painful, tragic quality: "a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return". How could I ever have got this far in life without discovering such an essential word sooner?

Céline covers AC/DC

I'm going to skip a gratuitous and unwarranted attack on the Bay City Rollers and their fashion choices, as well as their cover of I Only Want to Be With You, because it's actually not a bad effort, and it was a cheesy pop song anyway.

But Céline Dion doing You Shook Me (All Night Long) by AC/DC? You're minutes in and you're thinking, "This can't be happening". Some other diva comes onstage, but she hardly registers.

It's all at this collection of bad covers, which I found via Jay Zero Boss's shared Google Reader posts. Anyone else who's using Google Reader these days, get sharing those posts you find interesting but can't or won't blog about. It's all about sharing.

At that site, by the way, be sure to check out the comments, which have more greatterrible material.

Loose ends

Because of all that dicking about with code to make the label cloud, I'll have to squeeze all my waiting posts into one, so here goes:

If you don't feel like waiting for Google to implement its image search tweak allowing you to specify faces in your search, there's a Greasemonkey script available that does it already. And it works. For Greasemonkey with Firefox, and if you're not using the Monkey you're missing out on good stuff. And it's easy as pie, trust me, I'm not just saying that as an expert label-cloud codificator guy.

Web Worker Daily road-tests the main apps for note-taking online, and surprise surprise Google Notebook comes out top -- admittedly from a thin field. We here at Grapes 2.0 use Google Notebook extensively, with half a dozen notebooks on the go as we speak, covering blog subjects, work links, choir-related stuff, and so on. It's all online, so you can read your notes from anywhere. You can also share with others, or publish them to the wider world.

How to survive in the subway, joining a long list of subway posts. I call it the subway because that's what it's called in Glasgow, and it's the best word for it. Londoners have the Tube, which is baby-talk. Paris and Brussels have the Métro, which is not even accurate. Other cities have other names. I'll stick with my roots. But I mean trains what go under the ground, okay?

I saved this guide to making paper aeroplanes for Boy, 9. But you can have it too, I suppose.

Spanner post

I've just spent HOURS going back through all posts to Grapes 2.0 and giving them labels, as the number is growing so fast it's becoming impossible to keep track. And then, if you can believe it, I went into my template and started dicking with it, to create that lovely label-cloud you see over there in the sidebar. That's right: I buggered about with code and everything. Copying and pasting, admittedly, but still.

If you want to know how to get your own label cloud the instructions are here. And obviously, since I managed to do it, it must be rilly rilly simpule. PS: I made the colours look like the del.icio.us cloud further down on purpose. Not because I don't know how to change them. Ask me about RGB numbers, go on. Ask me anything.

Peace on Earth

The United States is less peaceful than Jordan, Bosnia, Costa Rica, Zambia, Indonesia, Macedonia, Serbia, Egypt, Cambodia, Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala and Yemen, according to the Global Peace Index produced by the economist Intelligence Unit, which you can see not at the EIU site which is pay-only, but here instead.

In fact, the US ranks in 96th place from a total of 121 countries, handily getting better results than Russia, Iraq, Iran, Israel and Sudan. You may reflect that much of the peacelessness in Iraq is America's fault, but let's allow them the small consolation, shall we?

By clicking on a country's name on the list above, you're taken to a page containing a host of indicators which have been used to calculate the country's peace index, and its ranking on the list. Just to show that there's nothing knee-jerk about the US placing on the part of the Hate America crowd, before anybody tries that old excuse. This is the Economist, after all.

Just for the record, the US's fellow war-mongerer, the United Kingdom, could only scrape a measly 49th spot. Obviously not trying hard enough.

Word imperfect

Here's a list of 20 words. Without looking them up, how many meanings can you honestly say you know?

abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany

Not terribly difficult, you probably think, but the answer doesn't really matter. Here's the rest of the list of 100 words all high school graduates and their parents ought to know, according to the editors of the American Heritage dictionary.

You may be wondering what earthly use it is to know words like circumnavigate or antebellum, which are only ever likely to crop up in history books, where you're likely to have easy access to a dictionary. Is there a value in knowing the meaning of obscure words that can only be used in very limited ways? Is there any value in using a word like antebellum in the first place? And why would the editors of a dictionary imply, as this list surely does, that it might be a bad thing to require recourse to their product?

Here are some wayward choices from the other 80% of the list:

evanescent
hypotenuse
loquacious
mitosis
plasma
quasar

and so on. An exercise in silliness, in my view. But it'll do great business, I'm sure, because it plays on people's insecurities. Most people will see a handful of the words on the list and have no idea what they mean, or only the vaguest notion. We're all ignorant to some extent, and that's the soft-spot this campaign is pressing on. It's pretty low-down marketing, when you think about it, though it's par for the course in the self-help world.

Good food guide

A bit of link-mining brings me to a truly astounding and quite possibly the most revolting food article ever to appear in a newspaper. Here's a snippet:

The morning after a good rain, peek beneath the leaves, bricks, and wooden planks of a friend's garden and drop the slugs you find into any nonmetallic container. Allow them to fast for a couple of days, then feed them on sage or other savory leaves. Wash away the mucus—saltwater baths help—and sauté them in butter and garlic, like escargot. They are chewy.

There are plenty more tips like that. In particular, look for the instructions on how to catch and eat an ortolan, which have made it to Wikipedia.

(via Cynical-C and the aforementioned Wikipedia)

Flight of the Conchords

Flight of the Conchords was a spoof documentary broadcast on BBC Radio 4, narrated by comic actor Rob Brydon, and concerned a New Zealand music group of the same name (The Conchords, that is) and their attempts to break through in Britain. I know I listened to it, but I have no lasting memory of how it was.

Now I find it's been picked up by the electric televisual apparatus, and by HBO no less, home of The Sopranos, Rome, Deadwood and much more. The pilot episode, what's more, is available in its entirety on iFilm, and it's pretty funny. I'd watch a series based on this sample, and no doubt that's what HBO had in mind. Good use of the Web, and the freeness of the Web in particular, TV guys.

Although we'll watch the rest of the series on YouTube, before you get a chance to pull it down, bastards.

Word on the street

A dictionary of street slang, compiled by a veritable Dr. Johnson of the crack trade. Well, formerly.

An absolute must for those for whom this sort of shizzle is importizzle.