Another satisfied reader

This delightful missive came straight to my email yesterday!

From: Burst Ovary, bofetot@hotmail.com

Subject: A really important question 

Mm. Charming address. 

Is it true that your interest in fencing lies in the appeal of using a big rapier to make up for having a thimble dick?

Yes! Yes it is! Nobody's ever realised that before. Not even my therapist, whom you'd think would have got there years ago. Judging by the lexical choice, spelling and aggression, this is either a module evaluation or one of my American readers.

Concerning Lard of the Onion Rings (Speaking of food, I bet you get back at Hormel by eating out of the rubbish bin):

Was that colon going anywhere? Have I mentioned Tolkien or onion rings recently? Do you work for Hormel? Are rhetorical questions really annoying? 

Don't flatter yourself into thinking that your shithole has any value that can be tarnished by the author inhabiting it.

This is a bit confusing. I can't work out whether it's me or my environs which are being insulted more here.  

It would benefit the world greatly that the hobbles of butt pirates like you be paved over so that others can drive to better places with less congestion to slow them down.

 Hobbles? Butt pirates? I'm sensing hostility. 

Thanks Detective Dipwit for your knee-jerk work to
ensure that universities in the United Kingdom will be little more than a circle jerk of know it alls.

There's a certain sonority in 'knee-jerk work', but the repetition of 'jerk' subverts the polemical thrust of the accusation. The lack of hyphenation in 'circle jerk' and 'know it alls' implies that the author could do with a little time in the academic circle jerk himself.  

Because names along with addresses can be forged in subversive maneuvering but gay dog porn is more interesting than computer science.

 The logic here defeats me, I must confess. Though the existence of 'gay dog porn' (is that for or about homosexual canines or 1920s bachelor socialites?) is fascinating. As it happens, I have colleagues who work on pornography, whom I shall alert to this new genre. 

On a closing note, Monty Python is a poor excuse for comedy. Bless Tranny Gagger and Maggot Puking with seven years of suck. (That's Terry Gilliams and Michael Palin if your misfiring cerebral processor under that used carpet made of donkey's pubic hair.)

It's not really a closing note: there's another sentence coming. I must inform my close friends Terry and Mike of this challenge forthwith! The very next time we chat over the fence of our Hawaiian compounds. Also, I'm not sure that donkeys have pubic hair. Don't they just have an all-over covering?

Also it would help greatly to remove that flute up your ass given how that terrible facial expression in your portrait outweighs any charm that musical flatulence might have. 

You know, I have been suffering intestinal pain recently. A musical instrument may just explain the discomfort. But the reference to my portrait may indicate a case of mistaken identity: here's the picture accompanying Plashing Vole: he's in no pain whatsoever. 

So: my first troll. A disappointing experience, I feel. The direct email meant that nobody else got to enjoy it. The polemic was disjointed, the lexical choices limited and the underlying themes (anal insertion, homosexuality as a negative, cultural disagreements) banal. Mr (or Ms) Ovary really must try harder. Come on, Burst. Have another go!

Michael Gove and the Palin Manoeuvre

You may have seen today's newspaper reports that aides to the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, deliberately moved sensitive discussions away from official e-mail accounts onto private free ones, such as Gmail. 


On the face of it, this is a security matter: government officials discussing the future of this country using accounts which are frequently hacked. More seriously, this is a deliberate evasion of accountability: private accounts aren't subject to Freedom of Information requests, so any government business conducted this way can never be subject to the scrutiny of the public. 


Sarah Palin did the same thing - which is why some naughty boy hacked and released her emails, and why media outlets in the US took legal action to examine them. At the root of this is actually a serious philosophical question. In an ideal world, our political overlords are in the job to do what they think is best, secure in the knowledge that the electorate has decided to trust their judgement by voting them in. This should give the confidence to do everything in an  open and honest manner. 


However, when you see government officials behaving like this:

The FT reports that Dominic Cummings, Gove's chief political aide, wrote to colleagues shortly after he was appointed stating he "will not answer any further emails to my official DfE account …"

The email continued: "i will only answer things that come from gmail accounts from people who i know who they are. i suggest that you do the same in general but thats obv up to you guys – i can explain in person the reason for this …"

then one has to doubt their commitment to the public good. If they were convinced of their altruistic motives, they wouldn't move discussions into private, unaccountable spaces. It gives me a strong whiff of not quite guilt, but certainly awareness that the kinds of things they're up to - in this particular case inventing a special class of schools run by and for their political and social allies - are not in the best interests of the country, and automatically require evasion and dishonesty to achieve their aims. This isn't corruption in the classical sense of filling one's own bank account, but it's clearly moral and political corruption of the most corrosive kind.


It suggests that they consciously see government as a vehicle for their private interests, a fat cow to be milked for selfish gain rather than used to feed the masses: in a very real sense, this is class warfare from the top. There's no principle involved here: like Palin, they publicly denounce government as an oppressive enemy of individual enterprise, while distorting its authority for their own purposes. They've captured the government and they're going to extract every penny they can for as long as they're there. 


In Kenya, political corruption is so institutionalised that one incoming government minister announced that the new regime merely wanted its own turn at the udders: 'It is our turn to eat', rather than cleaning up the system. I can't see any difference between that and the hole-in-the-corner corruption of the Goves and Palins, other than the Kenyan minister's honesty.

I'm Eddy, your helpful onboard computer…

A couple of weeks ago, my email stopped working. Despite their help - and with the aid of non-IT colleagues - I got it working again by changing from POP3 to IMAP. Then my email stopped working again today. Oh, they said, open your Web Access mail and delete everything.

So I did.

They didn't mention that under IMAP, that deleted everything from my own computer, my own Mail programme. So now I've deleted several thousand emails that I'd deliberately kept: interesting people, addresses, ideas, things I intended to follow up in the near future… the lot. Gone. Permanently.

In the words of Douglas Adams, I'd like to permanently reprogramme IT Services. With an axe. Much better to watch this (on fullscreen):

Paul Mockapetris should be boiled alive

I had so much to do today: instead, I've spent the entire morning begging IT services for help. They've been very kind, but couldn't fix my email. Who could? @drleehw, colleague and geek, who suggested moving from POP3 to IMAP. Mr Mockapetris is the evil nerd who invented SMTP, the cause of all my problems.

Sorry for the acronym overload. It's been a very trying morning indeed.