The Other Bush

I'm going to be Kate Bush.

Part of Roxanne C's graduation project is a big dinner party, with 50+ guests invited from the ranks of famous women she admires. Each guest is "played" by a friend, tutor or political associate, and some of the guests also provide the live music. Godygurn are being Sousie Soux for the night, Strict Machines are excited to be X-Ray Specs, and Kapitano will be covering Kate Bush.

One small catch: We have four weeks to get it all arranged. Well, two catches: I can't figure out some of Kate's chord changes (though they sound quite simple), and there's no way I can sing in her masterfully strange style. Alright, three catches: Strict Machines are having one of their periodic ructions about having lives and priorities outside the band.

Anyway, I've put together some basic backing tracks for "The Dreaming" and "Experiment IV" - much more techno and less subtle than the originals. I'd like to do "Hounds of Love", but "Army Dreamers" is the one others would like to hear. "The Sensual World" would be nice, with lush strings, but there's no way I'm doing "Wuthering Heights".

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I reckon I know a fair bit about computers, but I have only the vaguest notion of how OCR works, or the difference between JPG and GIF encoding, or why HTTPS is more secure than HTTP.

Then there are the people I associate with, who know you can download printer drivers, but don't know it'll be a DLL. They know about MP3, but not Ogg and ACC. And they can do their own defragging and formatting.

But then there are these delightful people, who think Office 97 is an operating system, RAM is measured in nanoseconds, and you can upgrade to the latest version of the internet.

Some say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I'd say a little confusion is more dangerous than a lot of ignorance.

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One of the online magazines I leaf through is Spiked. It's run by the remnants of the RCP - Revolutionary Communist Party, a spectacularly misnamed group of around 200 at their peak, who specialise in using rhetoric from the left to support conclusions from the right.

This edition, there's an article on last Saturday's Climate Change demo, telling us "it captured the kneejerk moralism driving the demonstration. This was no political march backed up by scientific facts, but an outburst of shrill middle-class disgust with the greedy masses and their bad habits."

Author Brendan O'Neill goes on to say, "this was the first demo I'’ve seen that effectively called on the authorities to punish us; not that they should leave us alone or give us more jobs, rights, welfare, whatever, but that they should actively intervene in our lives and stop us from driving too much, holidaying too much, eating too much and living it up too much."

He's got a point - there are strong threads of self-blame and authoritarianism in the environmental movement - but what alternative does Spiked have to offer? The same as the RCP - let entrepreneurs and corporations solve the problems of climate change.

The idea seems to be that if Shell implement green technology before Chem-Energy, Shell will still be around when the oil runs out, but Chem-Energy will not. There's the small detail that while Shell is cutting it's oil processing and increasing it's wind turbine planting and solar panel production, it's losing the race with Chem-Energy, but they don't mention that.

Or else they hope that small entrepreneurs will develop new green technology, and gradually outgrow the old oil-based companies. This requires that the oil companies do nothing to quash their possible future rivals. Perhaps Spiked thinks companies in cut-throat competition play fair?

Spiked view the world market as a self-correcting, self-sustaining system. I have to say, I view it as a trap. Even if the men who run Halliburton and Gulf Oil want to switch from oil, they can't.