Hazelnut's New Writeups

Dragon NaturallySpeaking (review)

2009-10-28T22:48:07Z

It's a programme, developed by a company called Nuance Communications, that allows you to talk to your computer and it'll write it down for you. It is advertised as being 99% accurate.

As long as you have low standards and your not all that alarmed by simple grammatical miss takes, like the ones in this paragraph for example. But then again, we live in the age of txtspk so it's maybe just moving with the times.

Occasionally it comes up with something totally alarming and hilarious.

Like when I tried to write a sharply worded letter to an opposition landlord in one of my firm's cases, said opposition landlord having illegally evicted our client, I accidentally asked the little hoogstraten that was the other side to "provide our client with cheese, that he may regain access to the moon formerly occupied by him."

Or when I advised a client that he may be able to approach his local Environmental Health Officer over "conv…

October 9, 2009 (idea)

2009-10-09T14:48:46Z

So Saint Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize. Care to expand on the why, anyone?

I mean, what's he done, seriously, that's concretely made the world a more peaceful place? What wars or oppression has he actually brought to an end? Solved the conflict in Palestine, has he? Ended the genocide in Darfur, has he? Put the boot into China until they leave Tibet alone, has he? Ended the military dictatorship and associated ethnic cleansing in Burma, has he? I mean, I don't see him exactly racing to pull the troops out of Afghanistan or Iraq, for that matter.

I await a list of appropriate deeds by return of node. Sources are required. "Giving hope" does not count. Seriously. To get a Nobel Prize for anything else you have to actually make the world a better place or discover something really significant. You can't get a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for inspiring people to become chemists, you have to go and discover magic acid or something. You can't get a Nobel Prize…

Libel Tourism (essay)

2009-09-17T22:16:14Z

Libel tourism is the art of coming to England for the sole purpose of suing someone for defamation, even if neither party has anything to do with the country.

It became possible following one case in the early 20th century in which it was held that the English courts had jurisdiction in defamation over anything published or distributed in the country regardless of how many copies of the allegedly defamatory article were distributed there - it is the location of publication that decides jurisdiction in the English courts, not the locations of the parties. Nine percent of a millennium later, along comes blogging and a this argument is extrapolated to mean that if it's on the Internet, it's accessible in the UK and therefore published in Britain and thus the UK courts have jurisdiction.

The first reason why you might want to engage in a spot of libel tourism is that it is an open secret that English defamation law is gratuitously friendly to the claimant. For a start,…

Maisons closes (essay)

2009-07-21T21:27:04Z

Literally meaning "closed house," the French expression maisons closes refers mainly to brothels, and is most associated with those in Paris in the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries.

Once merely considered a historical curio, in my estimate these establishments are something from which we could draw inspiration nowadays. Considering that Vernon Coaker and Harriet Harman, here in Britain, with claims and horror stories about abuse and human traffic to back them up, are intent on making it so that being the buyer of sexual services will become a criminal offence. I oppose this because, surely, if you're after stopping human traffic and so forth, why not go after the organised crime that profits from it? But that is a whole other node. However, methinks that they have overlooked the attitude taken by our Continental neighbours around a century ago, and as such, the maisons closes are something worthy of consideration at least. And, from my reading on these places,…

Tennis Grunting (idea)

2009-07-04T00:29:34Z

For those people like me who don't necessarily follow world-class tennis outside of the inescapable two week monument to national self-pity that is Wimbledon and how Andy Murray or Greg Rusedski or Tim Henman gets booted out earlier than expected, grunting seems to be the way in which one can determine who's likely to win at a game of tennis.

Generally, the rule is this:

The player who lets off the most epic grunts is probably going to win.

Think about it. In the good old days women's tennis was less about the game than about what colour undercrackers the players were wearing, or how they spent their time lezzing out off the court. Games were generally considered a bit dull and occasionally the players might let off a coy vocalisation when they hit the ball.

Then the sisters Williams arrived, and whenever one of them hit the ball they'd give off this massive "AAAANNGGGHHH!!!!" noise as if they'd just been…

The Ten Most Politically Incorrect Metal Songs Ever (review)

2009-06-24T18:01:09Z

One of the reasons I like metal is because it sticks two fingers up at political correctness. And in today's society, that's something that's sorely needed. While my views on political correctness and the increasingly bloated state that it has engendered are a whole other node, I can say that one thing that metal of all stripes does tend to espouse is best summed up by a certain Overkill song entitled "Fuck You" which was released as a single in 1986 and has on its cover a giant middle finger. Generally, if it's any form of interference by people who think they know better, try to prescribe what you can and can't say, and so forth, there's probably a metal song dedicated to trashing it.

I should also say, though, that I've limited myself slightly in this writeup. Firstly, I've not mentioned any NSBM. This is because that would make it too easy. And besides, to research it I'd have to listen to vast numbers of creepy folks banging on tediously about "RAHOWA" and "ZOG", interspersed…