Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Black September 1994

Darniaq discusses Black September over at his blog.  Black September being the month in 1994 when AOL gave its users full access to teh intarweb.  He compares the reaction of us pre-94 grognards to music fans, horrified when the hoi polloi discover their favourite band.  The comparison is, frankly, a touch tendentious.

If the analogy were apt, then I would agree with Darniaq.  I remember, when reading Ibsen's An Enemy of the People in my teens, being revolted by the elitism of the summation: that by the time the common herd have discovered a position, the cognoscenti must move on.

But as one poster (Brask) suggested, the 1994 influx destroyed the character of the thing that was there.

The music analogy is easily dismissed: if I like a band, and they have a huge hit, it actually impacts very little upon me.  Unless the nature of the band itself changes, all that alters is my view of myself as risque and edgy.  The internet itself was (with apologies to Timothy Burke for my rampant qualifier use) essentially and fundamentally altered by AOHell, 1994.

It's not a musical-tastes-type thing.  It's an immigrant thing.  Many of us enjoy small, community-type sites.  F13, for example, is a small and extremely offensive, argumentative village.  People wander in, pick fights, and are thrown out again if they breach the incredibly lax standards of the village.  These newcomers are outnumbered.  The web felt like a small city.  You didn't know most people, but you came across the same names, here and there, on occasion.  Almost everyone knew the customs.  Some people had lived there or on the BBS outskirts for a decade.  There was etiquette and there were traditions.

When AOHell came to pass (in fact, they made the change in several tranches), the newcomers outnumbered the citizens.  Like the Greeks in 1450's Constantinople we went from protected and privileged few to minority in a very small time.  All the rules that made the exchange of information and ideas smooth and efficient (how to reply to emails, when not to cross-post, never to top-post, never to "me-too-body-copy" ) and so on were largely indefensible positions, the restatement of which went from something one gently did to the odd newcomer, to a request to call artillery on your own position, such was the response from the offended, largely anti-intellectual masses.

Hmm, that makes F13 Mystras.  I am not sure that is very apt.

I know this is a declension narrative.  I am aware that came after has huge advantages: I like being able to buy stuff from amazon and dabs; to book my holiday and quickly find car insurance.  But if Greeks still visit the Hagia Sophia, almost six centuries on, and think how much more beautiful it all was before the barbarians came, then we're allowed 12 years of remembering the good old days, surely?

Morrissey Live Review - Dundee Caird Hall

Let's just get something out of the way up front.  I am aware that there are those who doubt the goodness of the blessings Morrissey bestows upon us.  Such people query the innate goodness of the man, and fail to appreciate that which he gives us.  I should say now that I respect your beliefs, but you are wrong.  Nor can I pretend that you are welcome here.  I'm sure there are other places for you: places you would appreciate more, such as here or here.

Are they gone?  Good.  Anyhow, the Caird Hall in Dundee is not quite where one expects to see Morrissey.  Obscure is a word which suggests itself, yanking insistently on our sleeves.  But the big M is doing a tour of minor-ish venues in Scotland right now (tonight is my home town of Greenock, sadly sold out), and there is no doubt that this proved one of the highlights of the Dundonian social calendar last night, as young and old alike pressed into the venue.  It was the place to be, to see and be seen.  Young ladies were introduced into society.  Scamps with the eye for a 'kerchief darted here and there amidst the throng. The elder burghers of the city smiled benignly from their seats in the balcony as their younger brethren mixed and revelled below.

Having enjoyed several recently, I am resolute in attempting to catch support acts just now.  Last night's - Sons and Daughters - started slowly but got better and better as their allotted span continued.  It was a tough crowd.  I mean that quite literally: in front of me a 45-year-old wee Dundee wifie gave a drunk, wide-o lad a look of deep menace and threateningly pointed finger as he tried to push ahead of her, and he sloped off without argument.  A hard, hard woman, but one who had clearly been in her early 20's when The Smiths started hitting John Peel's show and the indie charts of NME and Melody Maker, and I imagine that she had never stopped loving those songs since.

Anyway, people weren't really there for music as such.  They were there for Morrissey, and that fact made it tough for the support act, who I've seen a bit of recently on MTV2.  But they soldiered on, gradually winning the crowd over with a well-crafted set that built and built in tempo and volume.  The bass player needs to work on the ability to play faster than crotchets, though: I think the dominant bassline was often sampled.

Then, following a shamelessly emotional blast of us Liverpool fans' favourite anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone", Mozza himself hit the stage, his traditional banner reading, this time, "To us you are a work of art".  The setlist itself was a mixed affair, as album-promoting tours tend to be.  The latest singles were both well-received, where the other new material was often simply indulged.  The bulk of his other solo work was from Irish Blood, English Heart, and he played nothing from Vauxhall and I or Viva Hate, which was a shame, since the former in particular is a real favourite of mine.

The man in black himself was chatty to the point of prolixity, especially in comparison with previous gigs.  He has aged in the last three or four years - all that LA sun, I imagine - but was clearly happier than on previous occasions.  Buoyant, I should say.  He certainly said more over the course of this gig than I have heard before in total.

There was a sense - and he must know this - in which most of those present were here less for the later work and more for the Smiths songs.  He did not dissapoint.  Three were played, dispersed to the beginning, middle and end of the set.  The first was wilfully obscurantist: Still Ill.  The second the bouncy, cheerful Girlfriend in a Coma from the Smiths' own favourite album, Strangeways Here We Come.  But closing the set, before the encore, was the most pleasing of crowd pleasers, the culmination of twenty years of concert-going for me: How Soon Is Now.  He played How Soon is Now.  It took a second after the jagged, pulsing guitar-line kicked in for people to recognise it - I know I took a moment - and then an explosion, as people realised that this was it.  That the investment of all these years of gigs was paying off.  It was like, well, it was like nothing.  I wrote down a list of adjectives and they all fail to capture how it was.  Just ecstasy.  Ex-statis.

Eve Online - Impressions

A very long time ago, there was a game called Elite.  Elite was special for a lot of reasons.  It was a gaming sandbox before (if the head of Mythic is right in claiming to have invented it) the term existed.  It had freeform gameplay before most of the people who play GTA were even born.  It was even persistent.  I say "persistent", meaning that you could save the state of the world and of your character, which for a micro-computer game was unheard of.  It was about 1984, and it ran on the BBC micro.  Which meant that the galaxy, with hundreds of stars, dozens of spaceship types, 3D (albeit wireframe) graphics, spacestations, pirates, police-enforced law, trading, asteroid mining and even a few missions all fitted in 32kb of RAM.  It shared that 32kb memory space with the screen memory, of course, meaning that the actual code was more like 20kb.  Fortunately, the opsys and language were stored in a separate 32kb of ROM.  If you are interested in how such miracles of terse coding and compressed data were performed, Ian Bell posted his code at his home site.  Particularly impressive is the use of two screen modes to save memory, the lower of which (see right) was a colour mode.

When I first heard about Eve Online, I was told that it was the Elite sequel we had dreamed of (the actual Elite sequels tended to be pale shadows of the real thing).  I looked at it, found it to be buggy, boring and unbalanced, and decided against it.

Now, the game has survived the terrible word of mouth and is steadily carving for itself a solid niche in the MMO marketplace.  It is a hardcore, lose-millions-on-death PvP game in a world of consensual PvP titles.  The game is unbelievably beautiful in terms of the visual design.  It is rich in player-created content.  Huge player corporations and alliances struggle to hold vast tracts of space, often controlling hundreds of star systems.  Mercenary teams are hired by clients to take down opponents, and will even infiltrate their marks from top-to-bottom over a year in order to do so utterly and completely.

I fly a Merlin frigate.  It's as good as Caldari frigates get, but it's only a few metres long.  I fly past player-controlled Apocalypse battleships, hundreds of times bigger, and dock at 30km-wide space stations.  The sense of scale is staggering.

I don't know if it is grindy.  It can be repetitive.  On courier missions across high security space I leave the sound on (to warn me of missile locks) and do other stuff.  In kill missions I don't.  Crossing low security space I am utterly attentive, because I know that I can be killed in a seconds if I get careless.  Jumping across 14 star systems would be boring if I had to watch the whole process, instead of PvPing on f13.  But training skills is just click-and-forget, even when not logged in.  I am training my frigate skills up to level 4 as we speak, having set it giong last night before logging off.  I like this approach a lot, and it spares me the pain of the Kosterite barrier to advancement of actually puttnig in the hours doing mundane time-sinkage.

I'm having fun, although I don't know for how long that will last unless I get into some heavy-duty corporation action.  I don't mine.  I like fun but if I end up being ganked too much I'll probably give up.  As it is, I've been lucky so far, and haven't died in my first few days at all, despite being in 0.1 space (very scary missions) and ending up down to about 15% structure, 0% shields, 0% armour when the stargate kicked in.

Ultimately, though, just look at it!  Look how far the second screenshot (in-game footage, mind!) has come from the first!  I dreamt of something approaching this when I was playing the original.  I dreamt of having an on-board computer that talked to me; of asteroid fields and kilometre-long freighters.  So for now, I'm having fun.

Mornington Crescent

While looking idly through my old usenet postings - real vanity googling - I found this relatively recent (2001) one.  I suppose I should have posted it on April 1st.  If anyone doesn't understand the game "Mornington Crescent", then a quick look on google or Amazon will find numerous guides for beginners, although do bear in mind that any versions making reference to the old bengali Shifting Defence are now strictly non-canonical.  Use those at your own risk, as many MC tables will tend to react badly to their appearance.

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Mornington Crescent OpenMC release 0.1a update 

For those of you who've been emailing me about the project progress, here is an update on the status of the open-source Mornington Crescent Port to a Java version.

To those of you who have asked, yes, it will require the Swing API, and it uses JDBC for data-storage.

A distributed version running as a servlet on our server with a thin client will be the next stage of the project, and we'll make an announcement when we are ready to accept coding and design docs for that step.  We're all a bit snowed under with work on the station rendering engine right now.

We're very sorry that Joss Stevens felt he had to leave after the decision to stick closely to the Strict London set of rules: he felt that his OpenStation API would be better implemented as part of the BSD 3.54 Mornington release.  So long as he doesn't join Richard Stallman's Gnu/Hurd MC project, we don't mind!  Best of luck, Joss.

As one door closes, another opens, and we're very happy to welcome Ally Davidson on board.  He'll be taking over the tricky Reverse Shift implementations from Joss, as well as taking some of the heat off me in the Kernel area as we move towards a firm release date.

Apologies to those of you caught up in the unfortunate aftermath of the alpha testing of the game AI.  We've spoken to Norton and Symantec, and they've both released patches which should prevent anything similar occuring again.  The propagation of this little blighter in the field was an unpleasant consequence of the shared S-Move algorithms we'd used.  Again, apologies to those of you who lost data, but it's a reminder to us all: always back up, and never open attachments you don't trust!

One final Call For Submissions.  We've been unable to determine the details of Toksvig's Triple Cross manuevre, as used in Sunday's game on Radio 4. This one has raised a bit of controversy.  Does anyone have a copy of the IMC committee ruling on whether the shift must always start with Hatton Cross and end in Brent Cross?

Many Thanks
Keith Harrison
e...@softhome.net - OpenMC Project Co-ordinator

Date geekery

Two upcoming dates that display my varying forms of geekiness.

One is the 4th of May.  You know: May 4th?  Just after 1 in the morning?

Ach, let me spell it out for you.  At exactly three seconds after two minutes past one, on May 5th 2006, your digital clock will display:

"01:02:03 04:05:06"

I, for one, can hardly wait.  I may actually throw a party to celebrate this once-in-a-century event.

The other date that just struck me recently is of more political and historical consequence.  Next year, 2007, will the the three hundredth anniversary of the Act of Union, 1707, which marked the union of the Scottish and English parliaments, and the foundation of "Britain".  I will predict now that this will not be a date that anyone is rushing to associate themselves with.  In Scotland, even those who are anti-independence tend also not to be very pro-English at such times.  In England, Scotland and things Scottish - especially politicians - are for the first time in my life coming under scrutiny for our disproportionate success in a variety of public areas.  All in all, this anniversary will be marked, on the whole, with a few TV programmes, some staunchly unionist establishment voices saying how jolly good the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution turned out to be for all concerned, and much mainstream shuffling of feet and booking of fortuitous holidays.

Mad Clerical Gothic Excess

To celebrate the halfway point between our two birthdays, the onset of Easter and anything else we could think of, it was off to the Witchery for us this weekend.  The Witchery is primarily known as a restaurant: they only have six suites, and I suspect that they are mainly used by people intending to eat at the restaurant.

Our suite was called The Vestry, and was a celebration of the highest of arch-camp.  Rich reds throughout, tromp l'oeil drapery on the stairs and in the bathroom, clerical vestments on doors and bishop's robes on those old-fashioned tailor's dummies with a chest shaper on a stand but nothing else (these in the bathroom of all places).

It is all very well done, with the few potentially jarring modernisms hidden away (in these pictures, the TV and DVD player rises out of the bedding-box affair at the foot of the bed, for instance).  Bag is model's own.

The bedding was red velvet, there was marble everywhere, from the skirting boards to the tops of the bedposts.  And yes, for a bedstead there were organ pipes.

The food was delicious: I had roast foie gras with a soft poached duck egg and saffron brioche for starter.  Delicious as the foie gras was, it could serve as no more than an accompaniment to an absolutely perfectly poached egg. Nicole had the warmed white asparagus with mousseline sauce which was competently prepared but nothing spectacular.

For a main, I had Tournedos Rossini: a fillet of beef from the Buccleuch estate, foie gras crouton and madeira jus.  Too much foie gras?  From a standpoint of political correctness, certainly.  It was very good, but still had to compete with the memories of that poached egg, and most things would suffer in comparison.  Also, it was a touch over-salted for my taste.

And speaking of the salt: the salt and pepper shakers were the oddest thing about the meal.  We were in the Secret Garden, which is a recent creation outside the wall of the original restaurant, but which looks entirely late 16th century thanks to the materials and architectural salvage used in building it.  This isn't surprising, given that the Witchery is in grade A-listed territory about four buildings down from the castle esplanade itself.  Everything is done in perfect lock-step with this overarching theme.  Except the 1970s aluminium-and-stripped-pine condiments.  It will sound pretentious if I say that I asked to have them taken away, but really: they were awful.

Nicole, for her main course, had a roast loin of Perthshire roe deer with braised red cabbage, Stornaway black pudding and a chocolate sauce.  Her choice was, I admit, superior to mine.  The sauce was exquisite (I feared something over-spiced: every savoury chocolate sauce I have had was packed with chilli in the Mexican style) and the black pudding so good that even she ate it, which would never, ever happen normally, trust me.

We drank Chateau Musar, which I love, although I accept that some find the high levels of oxidation typical to Serge Hochar's winemaking a touch overpowering.  The vintage was 1994 which, along with the 1991, is just about the best I have tasted.  Having been met by a bottle of Pol Roger in the room, by the time we had finished the Musar we were decidedly cheery about the world.

Finally, for dessert, we each had the Witchery pudding selection which is, to quote: "dark chocolate torte with lavender ice cream; raspberry and pistachio panna cotta; rhubarb, ginger and vanilla cheesecake; and glazed Italian lemon tart with blueberry compote".  That's each.  And in the panna cotta I finally found a match for the poached egg.  It was so good that, in a spirit of positively Jacobean excess, I ordered and finished the full version of the panna cotta myself, once I had finished my first dessert.

Hearts of Iron 2: Doomsday

I've bought several games over the last month or so: Elder Scrolls IV, Ghost Recon 3 and Galactic Civilisations 2 being amongst the most recent.  But each has challenged my master, World of Warcraft, only to fall by the wayside.  I'll come back to each, but not yet. Not Yet.

But Hearts of Iron 2: Doomsday was always going to be a different proposition.  Like Europa Universalis 2 before it, Hearts of Iron 2 represented a slice of that delicious Paradox Entertainment pie of which I can rarely have enough without consuming it, and little else, for a month.  I have taken Germany to world conquest, Yugoslavia to European hegemony and dominated the Pacific theatre of operations as a number of different nations.  So the expansion pack - Doomsday - was a loaded crack pipe of addictive possibilities, which I received on launch day and eagerly installed that very evening.

But it just isn't different enough.

The game is basically Hearts of Iron 2.  There are two major differences: the addition of espionage, and the Doomsday scenario itself.  The former is of trivial impact except in leaching money.  Virtually any spying operations on a country make them utterly hate you, and you are very lucky if you find anything with a 15% chance of success.  Your major opponents will generally display a 0% success chance for most operations that you might try.

The Doomsday scenario is fine enough.  But I dislike scenarios that immediately launch you into war without any preparation, and it starts not with a period of increasing tensions but at the minute that the attack launches.  Hopefully someone will approach this using the (currently kinda broken) scenario editing tools now available.

Finally, I suppose that you could say that the game extends, now, to 1953.  But there don't seem to be any new scripted events, so basically this is just the same as changing the 1947 option in the config file to 1953.  I have done this before with the existing game - many fans have - but the AIs for the USA and USSR build units so relentlessly that the game cannot handle the processing involved and grinds to a virtual halt in any case, so I cannot recommend it.

So what one gets is:

• Espionage - a pointless but largely ignorable money sink which is a hell of glacially slow micromanagement if you want to use it for anything.
• A new scenario
• A changed four-digit date in a config file
• More powerful, if currently semi-functional, modding tools

Obviously, this being Paradox, you also get a million, million bugs.  But few mind, as the candy they hand out, although cracked and broken, is the only such taste on the market.

My hope was the addition of a series of "what-if?" scenarios.  What if the allies adopted the Patton approach and sided with the Germans against the Soviets in '45?  What if the Germans developed nukes earlier?  What if the Soviet Union collapsed in 1942  and forced the western alliess to launch their sacrifical landings at Calais - very real possibility which was planned for at SHAEF.

And I also wanted to see a really out-there scenario.  Say a Treaty of Westphalia-type Germany, with the player taking the role of one of the resulting micro-states in a Europe where the Soviet Union has collapsed, France is shattered, the UK has returned to isolation and the Americans have withdrawn in disgust.

As it is, the sole advance may be the improvement of the scenario editor tools, and the chance that they may offer just such possibilities.  It wouldn't be the first time that a game had advanced mainly by opening up to the modding community.

My Life as a Shepherd

On Sunday, driven by a desire to do some walking in snow, I found myself at the northern edge of the Souther Uplands.  Emerging from a wood, I heard a lamb in trouble.  Growing up in hill-farming country, especially once you've done a bit of lambing yourself, you learn the difference between an annoyed and mildly hungry lamb looking for its mother, and one that is actually hurt.

And so it was that we found ourselves heading off the hill in a snowstorm, into a force eight nor'easterly, the lamb wrapped in an (otherwise very useful in such conditions) coat to keep it warm.  Since, as Douglas Adams would say, stress is such a killer in modern life, I should immediately make it clear that said lamb was successfully returned to a surprisingly grateful and pleasant farmer.

It felt like a very manly thing to do.  There is no shortage of very deep-reaching language in our culture about good shepherds, about saving lost lambs, about bringing them back to the fold.  You can't help be affected by such things.  This is helped, at the time, by the similarities of lambs to kittens and puppies.  They are, when in trouble, easily convinced of your bona fides, and with warmth and words it was no time before this one had stopped complaining.  Just when I began to worry she was going into shock, she started trying to reach up and lick my face.  Fortunately, we reached her early: judging by her temperature she can only have been there for a very short time.

It reminded me of a time some sixteen years ago, when I first helped with lambing.  On the way back from the casino (?!) in Aberdeen at about two in the morning, I noticed lights in the fields at West Adamston. just outside Huntly.  I knew the farmer here, and went to school with his son.  Sure enough, Graham was out there on the hill delivering lambs, and I went up to give him a hand.  It is a wonderful feeling: driving a tractor at 3am, dressed in a boiler suit over full black tie (we really just went to the casino to play at being James Bond), a collie up with its paws up on the dashboard on one side of you, and a lamb you just delivered in a cardboard box to the right giving you an unmistakably adoring gaze.

Worst Business Ideas

Worst loss-making small business ideas no. 7: an "All You Can Eat Pistachio Bar".

"Gospel" of Judas

Quite a few papers and news websites, today, are covering the "discovery" of a so-called "Gospel of Judas".  Of course, the actual discovery happened about thirty years ago, and what has happened now is a translation, but that's not as punchy, so "discovery" it is.  And we have a ton of apocryphal gospels, ranging from the Gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene to the Gospel of Kevin the Temple Pool Cleaner and the Gospel of Shep, Peter's collie.

Anyway, when it comes to the Christological significance of the discovery, I'm more than moderately certain that the text will show all the usual nonsense that will flag it as a second-century-onwards Gnostic creation (reference to hidden knowledge not imparted to the masses is the obvious one) from the sort of people who today write Da Vinci Codes.*  As such, it will tell us something about how people saw the events of the gospel period by the time a couple of centuries had passed (and at a time when the Synoptic gospels, in particular, were coalescing into their final form), what narratives were seen as credible at the time and so on.  How it retells known events will tell us a lot more about Judaic and Gnostic mysticism at the time.  It probably doesn't contain much new information about the actual historical events (though one cannot rule out some sort of interesting transmission of snippets and background).

What interests me is the treatment of Judas.  I've never bought the whole Judas Iscariot story, which smacks, to me, of post-facto rationalisation.  I mean, look at it: you have Judas, following around after a man who is healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, physically resurrecting dead people.  You've been close-knit, travelling together for hundreds of miles up and down Galilee, and now he's got the capital alive, abuzz.  And we're supposed to believe that he just decides to turn state witness one day?

More than that, he betrays Jesus, supposedly, by identifying him to the cops.  Now, call me daft, but this is 1st century Jerusalem, with a five figure population.  And someone has been going around, not just vaguely suggesting (and refusing to deny) that he is the anointed one, the long-awaited Messiah and so on, but backing it up with regular miracles.  I am not sure that in order to find out what he looks like you need to infiltrate his twelve closest followers.  Everybody knows what he looks like.

And it doesn't hang together with what went before.  It doesn't make sense.  In a story-telling culture, where little nuances, expressions, even jokes and teasing on occasion, have been picked up and transmitted to us, Judas' volte-face comes out of nowhere.  We're not even told he was getting a bit awkward.  Just Bang!  Straight into a Cash For Kisses row.  The most notorious kiss-and-tell ever.

And yes, once we get into unsupported, mad conspiracy theories, I am vaguely uncomfortable that the post-Pauline Christian world, increasingly gentile in character after a struggle between the two traditions represented in the writings of Peter and Paul, passes on to us a story where a man called Judas, the Greek form of Judah, the name of Jewish land itself, is the betrayer.  If I hadn't read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, I would be indulging in some moronic logic myself.

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* In all fairness, I should note that the average 3rd century Gnostic gospel-producer was capable of considerably better writing than is dreamt of in Dan Brown's philosophy.  They were also far more knowledgeable about, oh, 14th century Catholicism for starters...

Swings and Roundabouts

I have to say that if you are going to celebrate your 36th birthday - and it is the sort of thing that it is better to do than not to do given that the alternative is an early death - then the blow can be considerably softened if, when walking past the Barony Bar on Broughton Street, you are wolf-whistled by one of the barmaids, outside taking a fly smoke.  Staves off the mid-life crisis another few months.  Just as well, since the last one saw me buying a convertible.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

In Scotland, about ten days ago, it became illegal to smoke in bars.  It became illegal, to be exact, to smoke in a whole range of public spaces, but let's face it: it's the places you can consume the blessed grape that matter here, not the church hall.

In Edinburgh, the only consolation for the nicotinophiles is an ashtray mounted outside the bar in question.  An ashtray which is pointedly ignored by the cigarette-wielding exiles as they huddle in the rain, faces pressed against the glass between puffs, watching those blessed inside individuals not so banished as they bask in the warm glow of the Hoegaarden sign.  In my old hometown of Huntly - where smoking is less of a scourge and more of a civic duty - my old regular (the Oak) has erected a covered shelter, complete with furniture and a patio heater.  I can see this being a desirable destination, for reasons I can now divulge to those of you considering such moves elsewhere in the world.  Read on, and be warned..

Pubs really stink now.

I mean that.  I mean, pubs always stank, but you thought that they stank of cigarette smoke.  How little we appreciated the favour being done for us by those suicidal tar-inhalers as they provided, in the only way they knew how, some protection from the stench of bodily odour, of stale beer-soaked carpets, and most of all, of endlessly broken wind.  Forgive my indelicacy (a sentiment that may make me the subject of a post by Andrew Rilstone in years to come) people sure do fart a lot in pubs, it transpires.  We never realised that the dimension we occupied - one which we left with our clothes smelling only of Marlboros - was interwoven, defying Pauli's Exclusion Principle by occupying the same space and time as a rank, stinking cesspit where the need to drown one's senses in alcohol becomes pressing indeed.

I mean, the average bar is only three or four times bigger than your bedroom, while containing a hundred times as many people.  Remember what your bedroom smells like after a night on the lash?

I have friends who work in bars.  They were looking forward to going home at night with non-smelling clothes.  It turns out they just got different-smelling clothes.

There has to be an answer.  Perhaps someone will be able to replicate the smell of smoke in non-carcinogenic form, and wise pubs shall once again reek of the stuff, as it is pumped through air-conditioning ducts to mask the festering reality beneath.  Or perhaps, like the well-to-do in plague-ridden cities of the 17th century, we shall clasp posies to our noses, seeking protection from the miasma.