Just before teatime, I was outside, chucking some stale bread into the field for the crows to get rid of. There was a bit of a hubbub audible from the crow colony at the top of the ruined castle; that was suddenly broken by a high-pitched whistling “Pweeeh!Pweeeeh!” of a buzzard. Then the buzzard appeared over the trees and circled the field. It was still calling, and being answered by, another buzzard which soon joined the first one over the field.
“Ah, a mating pair!” I thought to myself. “So where’s the nest?” Then, a third and a fourth buzzard appeared and all four birds went into a circle and began slowly riding the thermals upwards. They still called to each other; maybe they were a family group.
Three of them hung the air smoothly, barely moving at all; the fourth had to keep dipping and correcting. When it came overhead, I saw why – there was a large gap in the main flight feathers of one wing. From a fight with something? A fox or a dog perhaps, but more likely a tussle with a crow or a raven over some tasty roadkill – like crows, their main diet is carrion.
I watched the four of them going higher and higher, until they were just specks against the clouds. Finally, a crow flapped over the field, flew around until it was satisfied the intruders had gone; then it settled at the top of the highest tree and spent several minutes cawing loudly and triumphantly.
In February / March, the newspapers were full of horrified speculation about the uncovering of decades of abuse at the Haut de la Garenne childrens’ home, with former residents telling their stories of brutality and rape ther. There were even bodies buried there, said some.
Police started digging, a dog trained to sniff out cadavers was bought in. When it became known that the dog had marked seven spots in and around the building, the news media went into overdrive; when shackles and bones were discovered, they went into frenzy. “Body found amid fears of child abuse ring on Jersey” was one of the more restrained headlines. It became obvious that a large-scale paedophile ring, involving many prominent Jersey men, had been uncovered.
Or had it?
Nearly two months on, what have the police actually discovered? Well, there were human remains buried there; to be precise, a part of a child’s skull. Because of the soil conditions, carbon-dating it is impossible and the police admit that they have little idea of when it was buried, except that it was probably “placed” where it was found sometime after the 1920s (and note that word “placed”). Other bones that were uncovered turned out to be animal. Nothing was found at the other six spots that the oh-so-clever dog had indicated. The shackles that everybody got excited about had been used for animals when the place was a farm, as had the ominous concrete bath in the cellar.
So, apart from that single piece of bone, all the evidence consists of stories and hearsay from decades back. Sounds familiar? Yes, if you’re familiar with the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s, and – especially – the stories of sex abuse in care homes in the 1990s.
This story is following the familiar arc of police using the media to appeal for former care home residents to come forward with their stories of abuse, and accepting these stories completely uncritically. Already, several former Haut de la Garenne workers have been named as suspects in the investigation; these people are discovering what hundreds of former care home workers in mainland UK have already discovered – that it is well-nigh impossible to prove that you didn’t rape children in your charge thirty or more years before.
So where are the critical voices in this investigation? Who is asking the sceptical questions? Not many, it seems. So far, only Richard Webster, who published a detailed expose of the Bryn Estyn care home scandel and who now sees the same pattern of media hysteria and witch-hunting developing in Jersey.
Will anybody listen to him this time? Probably not. The meedja like nothing more than a juicy story of abuse, violence and but-think-of-the-children wailing; why bother to print the inconvenient facts?
….I click my way through to Prophesies.us, where any anonymous nutter (almost entirely American, to judge from the posts) can post their predictions. Today, I spotted this gem on their front page, from Feb 22nd:
IN the last couple of nights Right before I begin to fall a sleep,I begin to feel a sense
of Earth Quacks and oceanic activity,
I think we’ve all had that experience of sensing earth quacks before we sleep, haven’t we?
I’ve not been posting for a while – my knee ligament has decided once again that it doesn’t want to play any more. Additionally, the car has been off the road for the last week, being prepared for MOTting and taxing. So I’ve been pretty much housebound all this time – I can just about limp around the block to see the neighbours – and dealing with the nagging low-level pain (which is easing considerably now, thank the Whatever). And getting very bored – even sitting at the comp is getting boring.
However, I am still trying out various CMSs and having some success with a couple of them. CMS Made Simple is a winner as afar as I’m concerned. It’s small and lightweight; there’s a range of modules for common stuff like galleries, calenders and forums; a good range of skins is available and if you don’t like any of them, you can simply take your own HTML template and drop in tags for the various elements – ‘head’, ‘content’, ‘menu’, etc. For a designer, that last one is a real plus; I’ve struggled for hours with the complexities of customising Joomla and Drupal and have so far got pretty much nowhere.
OK, CMSMS probably isn’t so suitable for big community sites, so I’ll still have to carry on struggling with Joomla. But it will certainly do for the small personal sites that I would like to concentrate on.
Anyway, I’ll try to come up with something more interesting to write about soon.
When PTerry announced that he was giving £500,000 to the Alzheimers Research Trust, fans decided that they would match his donation, getting500,000 people to give £1 each. So they launched Match It For Pratchett. As of yesterday, they’ve already raised almost £50,000. Keep going!
So, spent most of the evening designing my new site. The results are here (the links aren’t working yet). I quite like it…
Still haven’t decided where I’m going to keep this blog. Shoving it onto a new domain would be the simplest answer, but I’m worried about the expense of hosting; putting it onto a subdomain here wouldn’t cost anything extra, but I’m not sure how to go about moving it. Moving it to a subdomain would probably be exactly the same as moving it to another domain, but how about the MySQL database? Would that have to be reconfigured? Hmmm, got to research this…..
And what about my astrology services? Where would I put that page? To be honest, much as I like the theory, I’m not that committed to be a practicing astrologer; in fact, I’ve never really taken to it – though I’ll hand out advice, being an agony aunt isn’t my thing. And it’s been months since anybody asked me for a reading. So – do I keep that on?
Decisions…..
ETA: Whooo! Did it! Moved everything into a sub-directory, reassigned the blog URL in the admin panel. And it all works. Naturally I backed up everything first – belt & brace, belt & braces….
Now I have to write some pages to go on the main site!
Yes, I’ve been away from this blog for a week or two. Been busy with various stuff – getting the Elfin Diaries site up and running (yes, I know it looks just like the old site, but I have managed to give it a much more stable backend; there’s nothing I can do about the design, as I’m not allowed to mess with that). Plus, I’ve been helping out with the stylesheet for Astrological Association site, mashing up a dozen separate stylesheets (don’t ask) into one. Plus, I’ve had to take time out for slogging around town shopping on Friday morning and around Dumfries on Saturday morning, then taking the rest of Saturday off to recover. In fact, I’m still recovering – I’m almost falling asleep at the keyboard.
But I’ve also taken time out to think about what I’m going to do this year. Earlier this month, the hosting for my Life On Mars fansite came up for renewal. I didn’t have the money immediately to pay it; then I started thinking about it and realised that I was no longer such an enthusiast. Life on Mars was a terrific show, original, well-written and well-acted; Ashes To Ashes, the followup show, was good, better than most shows on the box. But – it wasn’t Life On Mars! The freshness and surprise was gone, the overall story arc was predictable, the writing was often less than brilliant; Phillip Glenister showed himself to be one of our better actors, but Keeley Hawes was less than impressive, although to be fair that may have been the fault of her character, who was mostly whiney and unlikable throughout. (And, again to be fair, I haven’t yet watched the final episode and have stayed away from all reviews and spoilers; I plan on waiting until a suitable footy match – hopefully one with lots of extra time – comes on TV during the week, so that I can watch it on iPlayer without interruption. It could turn out to be every bit as good as the final episode of LoM – I hope so.)
In addition to losing my fangirldom, the site demanded way too much time for updating and the ad income from it was tiny – less than the cost of hosting. So, I’ve let it go. Though I’ve kept a backup and I’m hanging onto the domain name. You never know…..
Instead, I’ll spend time improving this site. Since I aim to make a living from my web design / astrology, I really need a professional-looking site. And one with a personal blog on the front page doesn’t exactly scream professionalism. So, the plan is to take this blog to another site entirely and use this domain for work purposes only. Don’t worry – I’ll announce it and leave a link. Anyway, it’ll be a couple of weeks yet before I can buy hosting and a domain name.
Now, to get on with things…..
Arthur C Clarke’s last recording, made on the date of his 90th orbit around Terra’s Sun:
Wherever you are, Mr Clarke, may it be full of stars…
I’ve spent the last three days doing almost nothing but test out various Open Source CMS packages.
Fot a long time, I’ve been thinking of using CMS for the WordPress. I’ve used WordPress for over five years for my blog; it’s very flexible, extremely customisable and it can be used as a CMS. However, getting it to work for a pure directory site requires more hacking and template rewriting than I’m prepared to do. So, with great reluctance, I’ve had to abandon WordPress for that particular project.
of the programs I’ve tried so far, only three stand out for me – Drupal, e107 and CMS Made Simple.
Both Drupal and e107 are in the running for the Oakleaf Circle site – they’re well-supported, have lots of modules and plugins and have fairly intuitive admin interfaces. e107 is the easiest to operate, but Drupal has completely customisable stylesheets (which is what a CSS maven like me demands), plus more themes. So I’ll be playing around with both of them for a bit longer.
I’m impressed with CMS Made Simple – it does what it says. Very much suited to small personal sites (although there are modules for blogs and forums), it’s easy to operate and highly customisable. I won’t be using it for Oakleaf, but it’s certainly what I’ll use for clients who ask for a CMS.
If spam is any indication of what most of the world’s population really want, then we’re in trouble. I’ve been looking through the latest batch of comment spam caught on this blog; out of a hundred or so, there are only four subjects. In order, they are:
1) Pr0n;
2) Fake designer handbags;
3) Penis-enlarging drugs;
4) Fake designer watches.
Spammers aren’t daft. They don’t expend time on advertising stuff that average people don’t have a huge hunger for.
Which is why such a list depresses me. Is this all most people really want in life? Sex, bling and huge willies? If so, roll on the Apocalypse…..
ETA: Just two hours after I wrote this, the first comment spam flogging bloody d*s*gn*r h*ndb*gs hit this post. On the bright side, it shows that my site is well and truly SE-optimised.