Ben & the Saint in St Tropez

I have a Google Alert set for my own name (there, I said it) which usually just provides a daily summary of eBay links to my books. Until yesterday:

http://www.saint-tropezimmobilier.com/news/Ben-Jeapes.html

"They're talking about me in St Tropez?" I thought. Strangely ... no.




What you get is page with the opening blurb from my Wikipedia page (yup, got one of those too) followed by a lot of guff about finding property in St Tropez. You can see from the URL that this is a specific web page named after me. So, someone - or more accurately, I suspect, something - has created it.

I would guess, without too much thought, that a hapless webbot roams Wikipedia, picking out the entries of individual people and creating a St Tropez page for them. At least, that was initial theory. However, that would suggest there must be a lot of them and when I did a web search based on this hunch I could only find one other Wikipedia entry that has had the same treatment:

http://saint-tropezimmobilier.com/news/Simon-Templar.html



Yes indeed, if my theory is true then the two people with Wikipedia entries judged most worthy of this treatment by our friend the webbot are Ben Jeapes and the Saint. To be quite honest, the bot may be out of a job soon.

Alternatively, I suppose it could be the work of a fan with similar taste to mine: I mean, I'm a fan of Ben Jeapes and Simon Templar, so why shouldn't someone else be? The test of this theory will be whether pages like this appear dedicated to C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke, Miles Vorkosigan, Terry Pratchett, the Doctor, Rumpole ...

I hope it's the George Sanders Saint because he was the best.

The nicest word that comes to mind is "lazy"

I suppose a peril of moving in primarily IT literate circles is that you forget how many illiterates there are out there: not necessarily in terms of grammar and the ability to construct coherent sentences (though to be honest, there is quite a close correlation) but just in terms of etiquette.

Fr'instance, a post two days ago on Terry Wogan and various domestic issues drew the following well-targeted comment, all entirely sic including the unclosed opening inverted commas:

"Hi:

Two things

1) I'd like your permission to (re)print your article on ‘Torchwood'for our website

2) I was hoping we could use your ‘scribing' talent for our website.

The Best Shows Youre Not Watching (dot) com [all one word]
‘Torchwood'one of our featured shows. We're hoping to round up a few people who can occasionally contribute perspective (via an article/blog) on the shows – maybe a recent episode, future direction, plot shortcomings etc.

What's in it for you?
Primarily a larger audience back channeled to your blog. We don't pay but the site has a lot of promise and we're pretty excited about getting it off the ground. Let me know what you think.

[I redact the URL because I've already given the name of their site and have no intention of making life too easy.]

Intriguing, because while I could swear I've mentioned Torchwood more than once, a search on the blog only uncovers one article, written nearly three years ago when the series began. Anyway. To save you looking it up, I devastatingly replied:

First, convince me you really are after my scribing talent as a result of a personal evaluation of my ability as evidenced on this blog, and that this isn't an automatic spam generated by a bot searching on the word "Torchwood".

Why might I suspect the latter case?

1. The only article I've written on Torchwood is nearly 3 years old.

2. There's a clearly visible link in the left hand column saying "contact Ben", and yet you drop a comment into a totally unrelated post. The nicest word that comes to mind is "lazy".

How you go about this convincing of me I leave up to you, but the clue is in point 2 above.

It's not just web spammers but any kind of direct marketing: the key word is clue, people. If you want people to take you seriously, show you have one. Honestly. Do you really, really think that this kind of so-obviously mass-produced, badly worded twaddle is going to convince us of anything, other than the fact that you so clearly haven't gone through our site in a search for exactly the right 'scribing' talent to suit your needs? Put another way: is it really an advert for your site that it's going to be 'scribed' by the kind of people who either write or respond to this kind of thing?

I thought I would test my theory that the commenter may not be 100% inspired by my personal brilliance. A quick search on key phrases of the comment shows:

• US TV critic Alan Sepinwall got exactly the same, in a post about American Idol and Ellen Degeneres. As a follow-up comment points out, he's apparently a high-profile critic in the US and doesn't exactly need the back-channelled larger audience.
  
• Journalist David Kirkpatrick in an article on nanotech. At least Mr Sepinwall has actually written articles on Torchwood. In Mr Kirkpatrick's case the requested article was about The Clone Wars. A quick search shows that Mr Kirkpatrick has previously written exactly two lines in different posts about the Clone Wars: on 7 January 2009, commenting on wii games: "Hell, the Clone Wars lightsaber game is downright tiring", and a link to the show's trailer.
• Finally, writer Kat Richardson got done with a comment that starts off about Medium but then segues for no apparent reason into The Clone Wars, again. A good 'scriber' is at least proficient with cut and paste and the ability to read their own spam.

And there are others, but I got bored.

Good grief, this is the kind of thing people were doing back when the web was young in the mid-nineties. I may even have done it myself, though I hope I didn't. Is a whole new generation that doesn't remember the mid-nineties now making the same mistake?

The feminine side of Ben

... is hidden on my official homepage, apparently, at least according to Gender Analyzer. This site takes a URL entered by you, the user, and (a) applies sophisticated semantic analytical techniques to work out the likely gender of the author or (b) takes a lucky guess with remarkable consistency.

For the record:

• my homepage - 80% likely to be a woman. To rub it in Google Ads kindly offer an ad for "Understanding Men"
• this blog - 62% likely male. Obviously because I belch and scratch myself as I type, or possibly because I talk about subjects other than myself ... Google Ad: "Beautiful Chinese ladies seek men for love and marriage. Join free!"
• work (out of interest) - they guess man (51%), "however it's quite gender neutral". Which is as it should be so my manager was pleased. Google Ad: "Inside A Boyfriend's Mind – 10 Free Secrets On Men & Commitment To Keep Relationships & Love Alive"

I then tried it on the sites of various friends and it guessed them all correctly, except one, the most feminist of them all who comes across as 65% man. Snigger.

In which I become a dot com

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, puppies and pussycats, www.benjeapes.com is now open for business.

To the untutored eye it might appear exactly the same as the old page, the easily memorable www.sff.net/people/ben-jeapes, and that would be because it is - the wonderful people at sff.net simply moved all the files over, and put in a redirect.

This means I can also be contacted via "ben at benjeapes dot com" (see how cunningly I outwit the spambots) or, for those who have it, mail sent to the old address still comes to exactly the same place.

End of public service announcement. Resume your lives.

Possible service break, and further reading

My regular 24 hourly dose of sheer joy at arriving at work at 8.30 was only slightly diluted by the knowledge that 8.30 tomorrow morning is when our plane is scheduled to leave the ground. Next stop JFK!

Here’s a reminder of what the next couple of weeks hold in store.

It’s not impossible that somewhere on the North American continent is a computer with Internet access. Whether or not I choose to go out of my way to find it is another matter. I will be on holiday, after all. Therefore there may be further blogging between now and mid-August, or there may not. The possibilities are endless 50/50.

But as we may be entering a two-week communications blackout, if you can’t have your regular dose of Ben I thought I would give you the opportunity for a dose of what makes Ben tick. Here are some of the sites I check on a regular basis.

Serious stuff

• BBC news
• Nick Robinson’s Newslog
• BBC Editors
• Astronomy picture of the day. This is the site that every day gives a (usually) astonishing picture of somewhere in the universe. My current desktop background is an amazing site of the ISS cruising over a cloudscape.
  

Films

• Roger Ebert. Reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times. Very often the identity of a film reviewer gives you just as much information as the actual review. For instance, if the Sun’s movie critic declares something the best movie of the summer, chances are low that I will want to see it. If Barry Norman slates it, it probably stinks. Roger Ebert and I rarely disagree.
• Christian Spotlight on the Movies. Sometimes hilariously po-faced and I rarely take it too seriously – but I will in fairness confess I’ve found useful teaching material here too. As well as a usually informed critique of the story, the production values, the acting etc., this site also feels compelled to offer a morality rating based on variables such as the number of f-words and g-words (yes, the reviewers count them), the attitude to sexuality, whether or not there is an implicit acceptance of evolution ... As a guideline, ‘Mamma Mia!’ gets a ‘Very Offensive’. In fairness, the reviewers do generally accept that a ‘Very Offensive’ can still be worth seeing; it’s the comments from the Great American Public that provide the real treasure. My favourite is still the lady who slated ‘The Passion of the Christ’ because it traumatised her toddler.

Religion

• Ship of Fools: for people who prefer their organised religion disorganised. My usual browsing is on the bulletin boards – Heaven, Purgatory or Hell, depending on the contentiousness of the topic, but there’s also the Caption Competition, amusing articles, the Mystery Worshipper report ...

Blogs of interest that make me think
That was the best title I could come up with for this section. I’m not including most of the personal blogs that I look at because they’re friends of mine for reasons that make sense to me (and my friends) but not necessarily anyone else. Though some of the following are personal blogs and they are friends ...

• Joella. Used to work with her.
• Liz Williams. Lovely lady. Writer. More successful than me. Pagan.
• Charles Stross. Nice guy. Also writer, also (considerably) more successful. Atheist. Shared a room with him once.
• Making Light. Run by two Big Names of SF Publishing, a good community for insights into all kinds of things publishing-related and spin-off related trivia.
• The Perorations of Lady Bracknell. Never met the lady but she’s inspiring, and has opened my eyes on a lot of disability issues.
• The Life and Opinions of Andrew Rilstone. Never met the gent, but ditto. He’s an unashamed Christian literate scientifically-aware geek. Look up his thoughts on Richard Dawkins, Harry Potter and Philip Pullman.
• Uncle Orson Reviews Everything. Orson Scott Card’s regular column in his local newspaper. Not always – in fact rarely – about science fiction or writing, but he’s one of my favourite authors and I generally find him worth listening to. Even when he’s wrong ...
• Baldy’s Blog. Wow. I forget how I found this and, okay, it’s of macabre interest. This guy has leukaemia and will be dead in a few months. And he’s blogging it. He denies being brave; he’s just getting on with quietly facing the inevitable.

Abingdon

• This Abingdon. Almost every day, scenes and snippets from around my favourite town.
• Mostly Books. My favourite bookshop.

Humour
And finally ...

• Calvin & Hobbes. This man is a genius.
• Dilbert. So is this one but in a different way. See also the Dilbert Blog: When Scott Adams starts flogging his dead horses of atheism, politics and free will, he’s tedious, but when he lets fly on most other topics he’s unmissable.
• I can has cheezburger? Home of the lolcats.
• I has a TARDIS. Applying the same humour to Dr Who. Rarely as funny as it thinks it is but sometimes hitting the nail on the head.
• Lolpresidents. Applying the same humour to US politics, as does ...
• Pundit Kitchen ... but more often
• Fail blog
• Graphjam

Enjoy!

Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline

The Rapture is one of the smugger, harder to swallow elements of Christian eschatology (long word = "all about the end of the world"). You can derive it from the Bible by selective interpretation of one small section of the epistles, yet Jesus himself was strangely silent on the precise mechanism of the last days, leading me to suspect that (like many other subjects that drive Christians into a tizzy but the man himself kept quiet about) it's not that important. I've never been able to get that excited about how the world ends. It will happen, one day, with or without me, and the net effect will be the same.

Summarised, the most popular interpretation of the Rapture is that one frabjous day Jesus will snatch the select, all the really good Christians, up into Heaven to live with him for evermore. Workers in the fields, drivers of cars, people on the toilet or in the shower – all just vanish. But in terms of the overall world population, this is going to be a distinct minority. Many more will be left behind for one last chance at redemption. After a certain period, up to another 1000 years, Jesus steps in, wraps up the world for good, and the really final Final Judgement takes place.

That is, apart from those who were passengers on a plane whose pilot has suddenly been raptured. Or patients being operated on by a surgeon. Or fellow drivers on the same road as a car whose driver has just vanished. They will be meeting their maker much sooner by the more traditional route of dying. This is just one of the many problems I have with the whole Rapture notion.

Others include:

• It's complicated. I like my theology simple. Complex theology should derive from a few basic truths. This is already a highly complex initial starting condition.
  
• Salvation is a sure and certain hope. This is hope + fingers crossed, eh?
  
• Jerry Falwell was for it, Corrie ten Boom against
  

But assuming that it does happen, the folks at You've Been Left Behind at least have their hearts in the right place. They can't do anything about the wave of instant fatalities that the Rapture will cause. They can however give you one last chance to witness to your loved ones who haven't made it in on the first batch.

"Our purpose is to get one last message to the lost, at a time, when they might just be willing to hear it for the first and last time."

The service lets you store up to 250Mb of documents that will be delivered to up to 62 email addresses six days after the Rapture. Messages will presumably range from "see, it’s all true, please give your heart to Jesus now!" to "na na na na na, I made it, you didn’t!"

And the really clever thing is, it's automated! Given that the sysops are presumably among the elect, it has to be. The Rapture is deemed to have occurred "when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system." (Hence the Rapture will not be cunningly disguised as an outbreak of man flu.)

You can get in and edit your stored documents at any time – and also, I would hope, delete them altogether. Because it would be so embarrassing for the Rapture to happen, and your friends to get your message, and for you to still be around ...

As a result of writing this post, I will now have this going round in my head for the rest of the day.