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Hoses of the Holy in the Parallel Universe

January 31, 2006

Are You Clean?

Well, are you, punk?

The BBC has a story about the popularity of The TOTO Washlet in the USA. It's a kind of combination heated toilet seat and bidet, allowing you to "feel refreshed" while you worry about the world shortage of fresh water.

It's worth looking at the demo videos, if only to marvel and chortle. this one, the biggest has the best payoff, as a ghostly humanoid comes and makes use of the facility. Check the body language as the bidet operates. Bliss!

Note: they recommend you use a proper plumber and electrician. Can you imagine the hilarity if you try to install one yourself and get the electricity and the water mixed up?

Who'da thought it?

Just a day after the BBC was reporting the 99th British Forces death in Iraq, they now tell us about the 100th.

Were they working in cahoots with a betting syndicate?

Unavailable

I offer this as a silent "wow."

Take a look at their full roster!

How about Shania for your next birthday do down the Dog and Duck?

Paul Gambaccini was unavailable for comment.

What's my favourite again?

Sorry to obsess, but whatever did happen to Selina?

She was HUGE, wasn't she? I like to think her career started to slide when she was interviewing Georgie Fame on breakfast telly many years ago. He was sitting at his piano, and she said, "Why don't you play my favourite?"

...And looked off-screen and said, "What's my favourite again?"

My Hobby

Am I alone in finding the web sites of talent agencies utterly hilarious and fab?

I just love reading the potted bios and viewing the photos of all the yeah-no people, and I'm fascinated with the idea that the "resident word expert on Channel 4's Countdown" is being touted around, as, you know, an expert on words for "the news and on topical language issues."

"Yes, the word bullshit is actually unknown within the M25 nexus... it originates in some far-off land, where the Little People live."

And check out Liam Halligan, "Economics Correspondent at Channel 4 News" on his lovely red scooter. Or Dr. Nick Baylis, a psychologist specialisting in well-being, in his lovely black polo neck.

Next time you need an economist, a word expert, or an architectural historian, you know where to look. And if you ever wondered where BBC Radio 5 Live get all the experts who comment on the news, why - quelle surprise! - they're all at the same talent agency as many, many 5 Live presenters.

I love it when you can see the joins.

Pink Floyd to Tour Scotland

(That's a joke, by the way, Mr Gilmour, based on the BBC headline.)

But what I really, really, want to know is, to whom will the BBC turn for a quote about Paul Gambaccini when Paul Gambaccini is in the news in his own right?

Put another way, is there a rock/pop/jazz etc. artist/group in the history of the world that Paul Gambaccini doesn't have an opinion upon? Does the BBC have a big, fat book of PG quotes for these occasions?

Harper Lee

Thanks to Shorty PJs for the link to this New York Times story about Harper Lee (registration required).

Apart from being the author of one of the most beautiful books ever written, you have to admire Harper Lee for not having written anything else. Why bother? With 10 million copies sold, it's not as if she made no impact; and how could you top perfection? Still inspiring kids, 46 years on.

At a book signing after the ceremony on Friday afternoon, a little girl in a velvet dress approached Ms. Lee with a hardback copy of "To Kill a Mockingbird," announcing that her name was Harper. "Well, that's my name, too," Ms. Lee said. The girl's mother, LaDonnah Roberts, said she had decided to make her daughter Ms. Lee's namesake after her mother-in-law gave her a copy of the book during her pregnancy. Another girl, Catherine Briscoe, 15, one of the essay contest winners, had read the novel six times. She trembled and held her hand to her heart as she spoke of its author: "It was breathtaking to meet the most important person in my life."

When I first read the book, thirty years ago, the idea that you might one day be able to use something like the internet to learn more about the mysterious Harper Lee would have seemed impossible.

January 30, 2006

Nostradamus?

Is it just me, or does a government report that uses - surely? - no more than 50-100 years worth of data to predict climate change for the next 1000 years not reek slightly of fish?

The 1000-Year Reich? A thousand years of Met Office weather predictions? Can you imagine someone, 60 years ahead of the Battle of Hastings, producing such a document?

In the future, when much of our current knowledge and technology is forgotten or merely hilarious, will seers and prophets pore over this climate report and interpret it for their gullible followers?

Easy Listening?

Taking the listening test referred to in this BBC Magazine article (follow the link from the article) took me back to my early browsing days: waiting 60 years for each page to load, wiggling the mouse around, standing up and pacing round the room. It's probably so slow because the servers are overwhelmed due to the publicity given by the Beeb.

Anyway, if you can endure the long wait for the page loads, it's a test to see if you can tell the difference between short musical phrases. I scored 28 out of 30. I think the two I got wrong were in the middle, when I was distracted by someone walking through the door in front of me, though I may be wrong about that.

Slate on Art-House

There's an article in Slate by Bryan Curtis about the horrors of the art house:Cinema Purgatorio. As I was reading it, it occurred to me that such places are inevitably filled with misanthropists. You hate the noise and press of people in the multiplex, so of course you're going to find the foibles of art house clientele annoying.

As Curtis says at the end of the article, "You'd go to an art house by yourself. When would you ever do that at a multiplex?" The point being that the art house panders to the solitary habits of the misanthrope, and hell is other people.

I've complained about art houses and multiplexes alike, in the past. The mobile phone generation really has lost all sense of public/private, and live in a jumbled up state of being, ignoring flesh and blood in favour of the virtual, and treating everything as if it's an extension of the living room. There's no reason why art house clientele should be immune to this, and my solution has been to stay away.

But it does strike me, maybe those of us who have given up on cinema should give up the old idea of sitting quietly in the dark, and just roll with it. You're supposed to be socialising. I've spent evenings at the cinema with friends and had just a few minutes of actual conversation - in the queue outside - and then, even if we did go to the pub after, the freaking music was so loud in the pub that we couldn't talk in there, either. So if the cinema is the only place quiet enough to talk, why not talk?

January 29, 2006

Sway 2006 - the full treatment

I spent a few hours working on Sway this weekend.

Started, as with the demo, with an acoustic guitar track, added a guide vocal, then drums, bass, two electric guitar tracks, and piano.

Quite pleased with it, really. And with the brilliant innovation of Castpost, we can have an embedded file in the post. Just click the play button. It disappears for a sec, then returns and starts to play. Depending on the speed of your connection, you might get smoother playback by hitting the back button after it's loaded up a bit.

Performance of the playback link below will vary. During office hours, it doesn't seem very clever, which is a shame, because you'd have to be truly dedicated to bother with it. Shouldn't people be working? If it's very slow, you could let it load in the background by clicking the pause button and waiting, but why should you bother with that? Doubtless Castpost will get better when it moves out of Alpha...

You can grab it by following this link to the RSS feed, which should give you the opportunity to "download the linked file" - which seems to work a lot better than the streaming.



Powered by Castpost

January 27, 2006

Blogcasting

Fellow bloggers who like to make noise might be interested to know about Castpost, which gives you 100MB of storage for audio/video, with feeds - in return for the ubiquitous Google ads.

I've experimented by uploading a demo of Sway as I want to do it in 2006.

I think it might be a bit less hassle than Ourmedia, although - like Ourmedia - it is still Alpha.

Permanent Alpha is the new Permanent Beta, innit?

Anyway, I did have a cold.

Found via Bromman, who is long overdue for a reciprocal link from guitargas.

Skanked

Towards the end of September, I ordered an organic vegetable box from River Nene.

By some freak slip-of-the-mouse, I set up a regular weekly order instead of the one-off I thought I was doing. Probably thought I chose the right option from the pop-up menu, and didn't notice that I hadn't. And didn't read the confirmation email that came later. Usually, the fact that you get an email is sufficient to know your order has gone through.

Anyway, I ordered a selection of things: a fruit and veg box, a bag of lemons, some milk, and some other drinks.

We thought after this first order that the quality and quantity of what you received wasn't really worth the expense, and there was nothing there that we couldn't get more easily, with more choice, and at a lower price, in a supermarket. The bananas, for example, were so green that we hadn't even started to eat them over a week later.

You don't really realise it when you log on and make an order, but the River Nene thing is a franchise. Your order is just passed on to the franchise holder in your area, who is presumably paying a fee for all the services run by the web site (order taking, on-line payments etc.). In other words, the service is only as good as the franchise holder.

Because I thought I'd made a one-off order, I was a bit surprised when the exact same order turned up the following week. Another bag of lemons, the same drinks, another box of fruit and veg. When life gives you lemons, what do you make?

A phonecall. We phoned up, explained that we'd made a mistake, and I went on-line and cancelled the repeating order. I drove home that night wondering what I was going to do with all the unexpected produce. Another lemon soufflé, that kind of thing.

But when I got home, the order had been collected and returned, which we thought at the time was a result. That was the beginning of October...

This week I received a letter from the franchise holder, asking for an overdue payment of £18.88. Now, I don't know how it is where you come from, but I've never known companies to give consumers 90+ days to pay. 30 days is the maximum I'd expect.

I emailed them, saying that the order they were referring to was made in error, and had been delivered and returned on the same day. Not a few days later, so the vegetables were as "fresh" as they were when they turned up at the door. And since they'd taken the goods back, I didn't expect to have to pay for them.

Tellingly, a trawl round the River Nene web site revealed no actual Terms and Conditions of sale. Buyer beware!

Following my email, I got a reply to the effect that the order wasn't a mistake, because I had made it (I didn't say it wasn't my mistake) and that it had been delivered, therefore I had to pay. It's a bit like the frog ringtone thing, in other words.

I replied again, saying that the goods had been returned on the same day, and again they replied, this time saying they remembered the phone call about it being an error, but "would have remembered" driving over to pick them up.

"Would have remembered." Hmmm. If you wait 90 days before chasing people for money, you stand a better chance of them not remembering events too clearly.

Unless you're dealing with me. Still, I ended up paying it, not because he was right, but because I have previously been burned by unjustified credit blacklisting for a similarly small amount due to an accounting error on the supplier's side. Even when they are in the wrong, they always have the final sanction of reporting you as a bad debt, something you might not know about till years later, when it fucks you up good. I was turned down for a bank loan because - years before - Radio Rentals had tried to collect one extra payment for a rented TV, after the rental agreement had ended and the TV had been returned.

So River Nene can stick their organic vegetables up their organic arses and I hope Tesco put them out of business. I feel like I've just been extorted for £19 (it was over £19 including the card payment fee). Not a fortune, but I could have purchased 12 additional tickets for the £100million Euromillions jackpot with that money.

In 10 years of using the internet to buy all kinds of stuff, this is the worst experience.

Bolloxed

I've managed to fuck up and block two on-line accounts this week, due to incorrectly entered details.

I'm pretty good usually, I have a selection of usernames and passwords that I mix and match, so that - even if I forget a particular one - I can usually enter the right combination in a few tries.

Sometimes, however, it seems as if the site you're on conspires against you. Since Yahoo took over Flickr, I always have to enter my ID twice - the exact same way - before it's recognised.

On the Virgin Mobile web site the other day, I completely fucked up, and couldn't get the password correct - to the point that they blocked the account and said I had to phone them up. But I'd rather take my phone into the garden, get a hammer from a shed, and smash it up into tiny little pieces than phone a call centre, so they can fuck off. They're dead to me now.

More seriously, I can never seem to remember my log-on credentials for my new credit card account. It can only consist of so many combinations, but no matter what order I enter them in, I can never get it right first time. Last week, I tried two or three times before getting it right. And here's the thing: this has happened before, so that I know eventually I'm going to get the right combo. Except, just now, I tried and tried and tried (just a week on from the last experience), and I can't be doing anything particularly different, but I've ended up locked out, and have to phone them up now.

Maybe it's just an on-line log-on too far. The human brain isn't designed to remember 70 million different usernames and passwords. It just ain't right. But fuck 'em, I'll just wait for the bill in the post, the old-fashioned way, and they can take their on-line blah-de-blah and stick it up their arses.

It'll never catch on.

January 26, 2006

Rullsenberg Rules: What does it mean to BE gay?

Good post from Lisa on issues raised by the Simon Hughes thing.

7 items

Indeed, as Simon states below, Rafael tagged us. Blog Memes are a bit like chain letters, really, so given that just about everyone I could tag has already been tagged anyway, the chain will not go on from here, although it will certainly go on from somewhere else. As Simon says, there is pleasure in reading back through the chain, if only to marvel at our differences.

7 things to do before i die

1. pay for my funeral
2. make some friends, so there will be people at my funeral
3. eat and drink lots of combustible things so I burn well when cremated
4. throw away my asbestos underpants
5. decide where i want my ashes scattered
6. think of some witty last words
7. remember to speak the witty last words

7 things i cannot do

1. leg spin bowling
2. play piano more than one chord at a time
3. steer out of a skid
4. see without glasses
5. keep a secret
6. hold my tongue
7. hide my feelings

7 things that attract me to... Beatles for Sale

1. it is my first and last musical love
2. the twangy lead guitar
3. the great songs
4. the laid-back acoustic vibe
5. the autumnal cover photo
6. the lack of (UK) singles
7. the sleeve notes by derek taylor

7 things that i say

1. that might be important to you (after ted moult)
2. that's easy for you to say (after roy)
3. everything's the opposite of what it is (after john lennon)
4. so...
5. anyway...
6. you should work that up into a routine
7. i feel crap

7 books that I love

1. Declare by Tim Powers
2. Juniper Time by Kate Wilhelm
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Fox in Sox by Dr Seuss
5. The Integral Trees by Larry Niven
6. Like Life by Lorrie Moore
7. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

7 Movies that I've Loved (no partic order)

1. Trust
2. 10 Things I Hate About You
3. City of Angels
4. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
5. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
6. French Kiss
7. It Could Happen to You

Oh, go on then, Anna, consider yourself tagged... and Roy, Andrew, and Patrische might as well pony up as well. Blogless readers could leave them in the comments. You know who you are.

The PC World Experience

In a tale of the triumph of optimism over experience, Kieren McCarthy writes in the Guardian about the joys of computer retail:
"I have had the exact same experience with: an HP print cartridge No. 56 (told a 27 would work - it won't); a PC strategy game (offered a PlayStation shoot-'em-up); a printer (assured four times there was a USB cable inside - guess what?); an Ethernet cable (directed to phone cables); a Freeview box, a webcam, a universal plug adaptor, a camera tripod..."

And yet they manage to make so much money they can afford to advertise on the telly.

For Xmas, I gave my dad a DVD I'd made of the scanned family slides - quite a project, that involved scanning the old slides, colour-correcting and repairing them as much as possible, then putting them on a DVD with background music using iDVD and Photo to Movie rostrum camera software. Apart from the scanner, of course, it was all done on a Mac.

One of my sisters wanted to do the same with her family slides, so she went to PC World. Unfortunately, she's a Windows user, so she falls under my policy of offering unlimited support if you buy a Mac and one terse email if you use Windows. PC World offered her a cheap Epson scanner (with 35mm slide adaptor) and an external DVD writer. I'm sure they didn't enquire of my sister whether - like my dad - she had older square negatives/transparencies, or other non-35mm formats.

My sister did ask, "How did my brother put music in the background?"

"I don't know."

Of course, PC World employee wouldn't know because I used Magick and other Dark Arts like Wizardry, Incantations, and Contact With The Other Side.

I used a Mac, of course. Now, I'm not dumb enough to think that there aren't Windows equivalents of iMovie, Photo to Movie, iDVD etc. I'm sure there are. I'm sure they're not as integrated or simple to use, but I'm sure these products exist. Might even be bundled with DVD writers, you never know.

But the truly amazing thing, even if there weren't Windows equivalents of all these things (and all software is not created equal), shouldn't a PC World employee be aware of the existence of Macs, iLife, iDVD etc?

It's astonishing that they stay in business.

This is the heating system you want

My French brother-in-law was never able to explain to me - given our limited quotas of French/English - how his heating system worked, so I'm glad The Guardian has this article on the subject. It's a brilliant system, freeing us of over-reliance on fossil fuels and Johnny Ball Nuclear, and indeed cranberries.

Costs a lot to put in, but could pay for itself inside 7 years, which is nuffink in heating terms. My brother-in-law did it all himself, too, and yet is slightly embarrassed to know less about computers than me. I ask you!

Transport Apocalypse

Only one thing kept me sane last night, driving home, and that was Jane Garvey's interview with the 4-year-old girl who was summoned for Jury service on Teeside. Garvey's interview was a classic of the genre. It was recorded earlier (wot? I thought it was FiveLive etc), and Garvey herself was clearly surprised they'd played the whole thing, but she shouldn't have been. Jade Martin was first sent a Polling Card, even though her name had been crossed off the voter registration form. Then a few months later she received a Jury summons.

The first few seconds consisted of Garvey trying to get the youngster to say hello. She gave up on that and asked her what she liked watching on the telly.

"CBeebies."
"Oh, yes, I like CBeebies, too. What's your favourite thing on CBeebies?"
Silence
"Bob the Builder?"
"No."
"No, that's for Boy's isn't it? What do you like?"
"Tweenies."
"Oh yes? Who's your favourite Tweenie?"
"Fizz."
"What about Bella? Too bossy?"
"Yes."
"And what about Jakey? Bit of a baby?"
"Yeah."
"Jade, do you know who Tony Blair is?"

Silence.

Speaking to mother Jessica, Garvey asked, thinking of the jury service, whether Jade was a sensible 4-year-old, and how long Jessica thought Jade could sit still. "About half an hour..."
"...and only if her favourite video is on," finished Garvey.

That should go on Garvey's greatest hits. If you follow the link above to the news story, you'll note that the council are insisting that they need to have a written request to have Jade removed from the register. It's nice to know that the Jobsworth is alive and well in teeside.

So. The roads. The A610 in Snottingham was closed for most of the afternoon yesterday, following a coach-motorcycle interface. It opened shortly before I set off for home, and it wasn't too bad, considering, except I then got stuck in a 10-mile-Southbound tailback caused by people slowing down to look at the umpty-mile tailback on the other side. I love it when people do that. I lurve it. I want to kiss the people who do that. With my fist of wrath.

The northbound problem was caused - drumroll - by a truck and something that was now spread over most of the 3 lanes. So the motorway was closed for several hours between J23 and J23a. Cars sitting behind the incident were in the for the long haul, their lights and engines switched off (apart from one - optimistic? stupid? - Audi driver, who was clearly so Important and Busy that he was confident of being let through). At the back of the queue, police were slowly getting around to turning vehicles round and sending them back down the motorway to exit up the on-ramp at J23.

Except, there was a problem, in that all the rest of the Northbound traffic was being directed off there, too, so there was complete gridlock on the roundabout above. The second tailback went back some considerable distance, but there were still ill-informed people joining the motorway at J22, only to encounter a queue. Back at 21a, there was another queue as better-informed drivers tried to get off onto the A46. Oh joy.

The apocalypse didn't end there, because the busy M1/M6/A14 interchange at J19 was also closed - initially to Eastbound traffic, and then later, the whole area was closed off until midnight, last I heard.

The roads were strangely quiet this morning, as if people who had finally reached home late last night had then handcuffed themselves to the bedpost and refused to get up.

I was just 30 mins late home, but Jane Garvey: I love you.

January 25, 2006

Nostalgia Bulletin

We haven't had one in a while.

I started my first job in 1982, summer of. It was in the tax office in Luton. My hair had been dyed blond and was growing out, and for some reason this made everyone think I was German.

You could feel the older women bristling as I walked into the office. How dare a German person come to work for Her Majesty's Inland Revenue?

I dyed my hair several colours in those days. Various shades of blond; black; a kind of burgundy colour. When it was black, I used to think it was all falling out because you could see it so clearly against the white bath when it did. That cured me of hair dying.

I was soon - thank god - befriended by Roger the office punk, who was a very funny man, and a brave and cutting-edge performer. He was in a band called The Friction, who personified the punk ethos of doing something, anything, but doing it for yourself. The Friction splintered and morphed into the Anarchist Formation Dance Team, a kind of punk-electronica outfit that used sound effects and drum machines in an often hostile rockist atmosphere. It was the kind of humour exemplified by a name like AFDT that made me admire Roger.

His performance of "Pigs" involved him in crawling around on the floor and making a noise like a pig. It was very impressive. More impressive was the way he swaggered to the bar to get a drink in the middle of another song. I loved this move so much that I copied it, once, when my own band was performing. Only people cleared a path for Roger, such was his charisma. I sometimes wondered if he hadn't started the whole band thing in order to get served more quickly in the pub.

We did a kind of fanzine thing together once, called The AA Book of the Dead. We thought it was very funny. We advised our readers not to write in, but to do it for themselves. I remember Roger nearly got pulped by some bikers who were upset at some of his anti-Thatch rhetoric, shortly after the Faulkland's war.

Later we started a publication for our union branch, called The Conscientious Op. It was a pun on a collection of Dashiell Hammett stories. I can't remember what kind of thing we wrote in it, but it certainly upset the management. We used to distribute it in a kind of rat-run drive around local towns, dropping a pile off at each office. It purportedly got us all blacklisted on some government shit list, too, which was both absurd and a bit scary.

The whole experience taught me that people don't like to be unsettled, and are easily upset. Upset because you look German, or upset because you disrespect authority, or upset because you argue against common assumptions. They'll get upset and sit at their desks bristling, but they won't engage you in conversation. Even when your intentions are the best, and you really are trying to make the world a better place, they'll get upset and wish the world could stay the same.

People are still like that around me. They'll allow something to upset them, file it away as An Upsetting Thing, but won't allow themselves to question why it upsets them, and what it all means.

Roger and I used to go drinking, evenings and lunchtimes. Hard to believe now, but we'd go to pubs and bars where it was easy to get served; there was no piped music, though you could put the jukebox on. You could have a conversation without being drowned out. One pub was built into the base of our office building. Maximum drinking time. Another bar, called the Melson Arms, I think, was so deserted it was hard to see how it stayed open. There were rumours that the landlord had murdered his wife with an axe.

I used to really enjoy the drinking sessions after union meetings. I could never hold my drink. In this era, you could buy cocktails in little silver bottles. I drank Sundowners, because I couldn't handle the volume of beer or lager. Sundowners used to make me sick, but they tasted as good coming up as they did going down. I used to get completely lashed at lunchtime and then cycle home 2 hours later and crawl into bed.

It's for Charidee

Via Macworld, comes this Wired opinion piece, which attacks Steve Jobs for not being more like Bill Gates, who (very publicly) gives millions of dollars to pharmaceutical companies via his charidee donations.

The implication is that Gates is a Good Egg, and that Jobs is a Bad Seed.

Several possibilities. Either Jobs doesn't bray publicly about any charidee donations he happens to make. Or Jobs is too intelligent to fall for the idea of charidee. Or Jobs doesn't give a cranberry (I'm using cranberry in place of another word).

I'm sure he pays his taxes, though. And if people think that's not enough, well, they should vote for politicians who want higher taxes for the rich. Squeeze them until the pips squeak, as a heavy-browed man once said.

...and another thing

Apart from cranberries, another thing I would like to see banned is the phrase "Belgian chocolate."

Because it's not Belgian, is it? It doesn't grow in Belgium, it just gets melted a bit and filled with crushed nuts.

"Belgian Chocolate" is another marketing story, like the dreaded cranberry. It's a brand, not a raw material. And just because you coat a cranberry in "Belgian Chocolate" doesn't make it taste any better.

Southern Rock Companion

Everyone should have a mix CD or iTunes playlist of the following:

1. Ramblin' Man - The Allman Brothers Band
2. Southern Accents - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
3. Tuesday's Gone - Lynyrd Skynyrd
4. Can't You See - Marshall Tucker Band
5. Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares) - Travis Tritt
6. Blue Sky - The Allman Brothers Band
7. That's Why God Made Mexico - Tim McGraw
8. Louisiana Rain - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
9. Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd
10. Jessica - The Allman Brothers Band

I'm sure others will have their own opinions. I know Dog's idea of Southern Rock is anything from Essex.

Singing Songs About the Southlands

Following Friday's episode of My Name is Earl, I immediately went on-line and ordered Lynyrd Skynyrd's debut album, Pronounced. Yes, in the midst of a comedy show that is quite good, I was a marketing victim.

Dammit!

Quite a good album, though.

It was almost impossible to like Lynyrd Skynyrd when I was a teen in the 70s. There was punk rock, for a start, which had proclaimed all other forms of music to be self-indulgent rubbish (I didn't like punk, but still); then there was the notorious appearance of Skynyrd on the Old Grey Whistle Test, their interminable live version of "Free Bird." It was very uncool to admit to liking guitar solos in that atmosphere.

The clincher, though, for me, was that I'd committed a lot of head time to the likes of Dylan and Springsteen, The Beatles and The Velvet Underground, and the meeting of the two kinds of music in my brain would have caused some kind of anti-matter explosion.

So I didn't know that Pronounced wasn't filled with cock-rock posturing and screeching vocals, and nor was it filled with extended Blues jams, in the manner of the Allmans.

In fact, it's one step on from Exile on Main Street, but with better guitarists and un-faked American accents. I bought it for "Tuesday's Gone," but they're all quite good.

This is their album before all their songs started to be about being in a rock band that was always on the road. These are the songs they wrote before that happened to them. And, crucially, before they wrote those terrible lyrics to "Sweet Home Alabama."

Universal records proudly proclaim on the crappy CD cover that they're proud to re-issue this (and other) previously deleted records. And they wonder why people swap music on-line? They own some of the crown jewels of music history and delete it from their catalogue? What, because it wasn't selling as many copies as Britney's latest effort? Shitters.

January 24, 2006

Ban the Cran, Bury the Berry



In response to public demand, I have started a new campaign: Ban the Cran. Please leave your comments here, and I will send them to Nicky Campbell at BBC Watchdog, or Jimmy Saville. Together we can remove this foul fruit from supermarket shelves.

Cranberry lover warning: you will be abused and vilified if you leave cranberry-supporting comments here.

Google Zeitgeist

I didn't know Google did this: Zeitgeist. The 2005 year-end stats are fascinating, even if they only really confirm a kind of depressing herd instinct.

Perhaps more interesting are the local stats, and the opportunity to gauge national characteristics based on their search obsessions.

Australians, of course, search most often for Qantas; in Chile, it's the horoscope; in France, more travel: SNCF; Germans like encyclopaedias; Indians, like the French, are keen on railways; the fat British search for diets... others are mysterious and kind of local.

Why do the Russians get so keen on Xmas and the New year in November? The top Japanese search for that month remains a mystery even if you follow the links. The Italians like football, cars, and kids, which is nice.

The Emperor's New Berry

Have we talked about cranberries yet? Have I told you how much I detest them? And yet they appear in everything, as if they had the same respectability and all-round popularity of ginger or vanilla.

This Emperor's New Clothes of berries is so foul-tasting that the only context in which it had success was as a dressing/sauce for that most foul-tasting of fowls, the turkey. Only turkey tasted bad enough to make cranberries taste good.

Yet you can't buy a fruit and nut mix without cranberry contamination, Eat Natural put cranberries in one of their bars (they try to disguise the horrible taste with chocolate), and you see cranberry loaves, cranberry juice, cranberry cheese and cranberry dog shit, I imagine. Sainsbury's report a 67% increase in cranberry demand. Of course they fucking do! They put fucking cranberries in fucking everything, though I certainly didn't "demand" it.

It's because of all this health food arse-wank, isn't it? It's all bloody marketing. Some numbskull tried to claim cranberries had healthful properties, on the basis that they taste so foul they must have. Probably. But here's a clue, health-nuts: there are plenty of healthy foods that don't actually make you gag.

Register reader spots flying car

An eagle-eyed Australian reader of The Register has spotted a flying car on Google Earth. Nice

January 23, 2006

The Disappeared

Kristine Kathryn Rush's The Disappeared is the first in a series of novels set in the milieu of her novella "The Retrieval Artist."

Now, I haven't knowingly read the original novella, though it's on my list of things to do, but I was attracted to Rusch's writings when I read "Diving into the Wreck" in Asimov's magazine.

The Disappeared combines two genres, really, because it's a police procedural with a science fiction backdrop. It's an absolutely cracking premise: imagine cultural relativism and multi-culturalism to an nth degree, whereby humans are obliged to abide by the decisions of multi-cultural courts to pay for the consequences of crimes committed against aliens on alien planets, and the police have to enforce those laws and decisions.

For example, commit a crime against one species, and the courts may rule that your firstborn belongs to that species. Your choice: don't have children, or try to disappear, witness-protection style, and start a new life with no connection to your old. In another instance, your sentence might be several years on an alien penal colony. Disappearance agencies spring up, arranging for people to shed their old identities and live under a new name, somewhere else. But what happens if that agency turns out to have a corrupt employee, willing to sell your new identity to those with the original warrant? And is it really corrupt, when what the agencies are doing is illegal?

It's all good stuff, and Rusch keeps the picture complex. Your sympathies lie both with the helpless fugitives, who in some cases were merely high-spirited youngsters, or didn't understand the laws they broke or the offence they caused; and with the cops who are obliged to enforce the laws they have no liking for - themselves in fear of accidentally crossing the line. Even the aliens are not portrayed as wholly evil - ruthless, perhaps - as they try to see justice done.

There are another 3 novels in this series, with two more on the way, according to the author's web site.

Chess Fever

CJ has been playing chess at the after school club. She didn't really understand the full rules (it's amazingly complicated when you think about it), but I saw no reason not to encourage her in this, because if nothing else it might help her with one of the three Rs.

I knew there was a chess game included with Mac OS X, but there was no "absolute beginner" setting, so I downloaded Sigma Chess, which does have one.

I set it to Novice level 1 and set the computer's playing mode to kamikaze, thinking that might give her some chance of winning.

The problem is, I don't want her to get discouraged because she can't beat the computer. She might be able to best another 8 year old, especially if they're not really following the rules. I knew I couldn't teach her, because beyond the basics I'm completely crap at it.

Still, Friday night, I sat and played the computer on those settings, to see how hard it would be. To my amazement, I managed to beat the computer 2nd game in. I was left with just my queen and 4 prawns, but I managed to trap the opposing king into a corner, from which there was No Escape. I cannot describe to you the feeling of triumph.

James May goes to Norway

From the Telegraph: what to do if we ever get a cold winter:
"As I write, I'm wearing the usual pants/T-shirt/socks ensemble, plus thermal long johns and vest, a fleece, my normal jeans, and then a big woolly jummy, some more socks, Gore-Tex over-trousers, an SAS-style survival jacket, a fur hat and two pairs of gloves. Before you dress in similar fashion, remember to remove the car keys from your trouser pocket, and go for a wee-wee."

When you (should) know you're being insulted

Simon's post below about the prince among men who was his teacher reminds me of something I wanted to say about Channel 4's nasty comedy drama Shameless.

My wife watches it; I don't like it. When the mot recent series started, the opening scene was of the main character pissing in a urinal. Gross enough, but they made it worse by offering a "urinal's eye" view of the event. So the opening scene was of someone figuratively pissing in the audience's face.

It's like a challenge from the Yeah-No people. How much can we insult the audience, how far can we go, and people will still watch this shit?

January 22, 2006

All in a weekend's work

Many years ago, I went round Roy's gaff and recorded a song I'd just written (when I was still smarting from what had inspired it). That was 1992, ish. It's okay Val, I'm over it now.

I was cleaning up my iTunes library Friday evening and came across the individual mono tracks from the portastudio - which Roy had sent on a CD a few years ago. At first I didn't know what it was, but when I remembered I thought it was probably a decent little song, in the end, especially when you no longer feel the actual pain. The old (cassette 4-track) recordings were hissy and noisy, the tempo was too slow, and my harmonica was out of tune, so there wasn't a lot to be reclaimed.

I thought I'd try recording it again, so I scribbled the words down - the chords were easy. And that's what I did this weekend. Here's a quick 'n' dirty mix of what I ended up with after I recorded loads of bits and then took 50% of it away.

Only a Week (MP3 128kbps)

What struck me, as I was doing it, was that the bit I enjoy doing most on all my recordings in the organ. Shame I can't play, eh?

January 20, 2006

Funny Old World

Strange to think that in all the time I've been a Mac lover, Mac user, Mac Moonie, they've been considered an irrelevant pimple on the arse of the IT landscape. They still have a minute market share, in terms of sales, and I've never been sure how that translates in terms of users*, but it looks as if 2006 is going to be huge for them: Apple a 'big mean cash machine' - analysts.

Problem is, of course, these are the same analysts who called Apple a basket case in 1996, wrote it off as a company, and caused its shares to drop through the floor as rats deserted the sinking ship.

Now they have an operating system that's nowhere near as different as the old one was in terms of its look and feel, and now they're moving onto exactly the same hardware as the vast majority of PCs, and because Windows has had such bad publicity with regards to viruses and spyware, everyone's getting excited about them.

It's a sign, I think, that the market is finally maturing past yah-boo posturing, as people wake up to their choices and realise the difference they can make. Internet Explorer, the dominant browser in the world, is on the slide. It once commanded around 93% of the Mac market, but end of this month it's dead on the Mac. And on the other platform, people are waking up to superior experiences. One of these days, on-line banks etc will realise that this is happening.

Few financial analysts would have believed that Netscape, in the form of Mozilla, would make a comeback. None of them thought that the Apple of Gil Amelio could command the column inches and headspace that the Apple of Jobs and Ives now does. So now they're all saying the sun is going to be iPod coloured and the Mac is back, I think we have to take it with a pinch of salt.

For some of us, it never went away, of course.

*Recently, a publishing group sent us a bunch of their older Macs for storage before disposal. They've just replaced them all with new. In the IT world, they're supposed to be around 3 years old, but they were much older than that. Some of them were models from '98 and '99, others from 2000 and 2001. That's longevity. My previous two Macs are still being used, by the people that I gave them to. That's a kind of market share that doesn't get recorded in sales figures.

Free legal advice - worth the price you pay?

While we're on the subject of getting free advice (see Simon's N T hell post below), does anyone know what the legal status of pastiche and homage is?

Obviously, something like Mona Lisa is out of copyright, but what happens if you pay homage to something more recent, like a famous album cover from 1973, say?

The internet is no help, because there's a kind of moral panic about copyright issues and service providers etc. are likely to err on the side of caution, reinforcing the views of the corporate lawyers who threaten to sue fan fiction sites, lyric sites, tab sites etc.

But if you take an artwork - famous album cover, say - and change it to a large degree (replace one element with another, use slightly different colours), so that you're obviously not representing it as the original, but as a pastiche of the original, can you get sued?

Reluctant phone user seeks likeminded service provider

I just ran through a little wizard thingy on the BT web site, aimed at price-comparing their services with some of their rivals. Their argument being, you'll be surprised how competitive we really are.

Ha ha. They turned out to be cheaper than just one other provider on their list, which they presumably chose very carefully from the most expensive competitors.

See the problem begins when they ask you how many calls you make a week. For me, the correct wording is, how many calls do you make a month? The fact is, I make as many calls in a year as many people make in a day. I will phone my dad every few months if my wife holds a gun to my head, and one occasionally needs to deal with call centres if one absolutely has to, but other than that, the phone is about as useful to me as an electric butter knife.

Incoming calls are as rare. And my phone at work has been trained not to ring much. Anyone calls, I tell them it's not my department. My mobile goes two-charges-per-single-use, on average.

My wife hardly ever uses it. She speaks to her parents in France once a week, but that's because they phone her. She'll occasionally get involved in a long call with a gassy colleague or former colleague, but she's not particularly gassy herself.

It's funny how, for years, we all had the option of mail order shopping over the phone, but it was only when it got nice and impersonal with the internet that we all went mad for it.

I actually just wish I could go back to writing letters to people. That was fun.

Communication is all about habit. Blogging is a habit. Conversation is another. I miss conversation. The only person I ever really talk to at length is Roy(dog), and I only see him about twice a year. If off peak rail fares rise by as much as they say, it might not even be that often. I might as well sew my mouth shut.

Daddy Talk

I'm sure my youngest will forgive me for talking about her toilet habits.

Didi still wets the bed at night. Last summer, we tried to train her, but it was a complete disaster. You can cope with changing the bed once or twice in a week, but twice a night? You run out of sheets, towels, underwear, and pyjama bottoms. And Pampers Care Mats, which are a boon.

So we gave up, and tried her in these new fangled Pampers that instead of feeling totally dry, give the child a "wet sensation", which is supposed to be part of training her to wake up and notice.

They seemed to be working, and he had several dry nights, but then we started to suspect she was getting up in the morning and peeing in the nappy instead of bothering to go to the toilet. You know how it is when you're young: no time for things like that.

So I decided we ought to try again, on the theory that she was dry through the night.

The result? Complete disaster, and we've run out of sheets, towels, underwear, pyjama bottoms, trousers, care mats, patience.

Aaaaaggggh! We never had this trouble with the first one! I'm completely at a loss.

January 19, 2006

Judging a Book By Its Cover, a Film by its Title, a Pork Chop by its Wrapper

I find that you can rarely go wrong in life when you judge books by their covers. Anything featuring a detail from a classical work of art: avoid. Anything featuring space, planets, spaceships, fantastic vistas: buy immediately. Anything with embossed gold lettering: avoid. Anything with a dragon: hide.

And so on.

I do the same with movies, based on their titles. The Constant Gardener, for example, sounds like it might be something to do with Rosemary and Thyme, that cutting-edge detective series on ITV1. It sounds like something my mum might like, if she was still alive. It sounds like a Radio 4-listening, Late Review-watching, Radio Times Free Previewing wet dream

But I'm probably all wrong about it (it's my hobby), because it's based on a Le Carré thing, which I didn't know until just now. So it might be quite good, or not, but the title puts me off, and the thought that I might meet people like my mother if I went to see it.

I was trying to think of other films you might think are rubbish, based on their titles, but which turn out to be quite good.

I thought The Shipping News would be tripe, and the fact that it had that old ham Kevin Spacey in it made me even more sure, but I quite enjoyed it really. Andrew keeps lending me films that I quite enjoy, though I can't remember what any of them are called, or what the actors are called.

But anything with "Warrior" or "Sword" in the title: it's going to be rubbish, isn't it?

Listening to, Mostly

Simon has the copyright on "mostly been listening to," so this is my version.

I haven't played music in my car much, lately. Sometimes you need a break from it. I have instead engaged in positive self talk and listened to Radio Bloke.

Positive self-talk has paid off in the following ways:

1. I found 55p outside the shop down the road last week.

2. I won £10 on the National Lottypede

3. I found another 5p outside the shop down the road today.

The shop and chip shop down the road are frequented, on some days, by Young People from a technical college. These people have a certain threshold, below which it is not considered worth the effort to bend down and pick up a coin you have dropped. Even for 50p, it is not cool to bend down in front of your peers. I wonder how high the threshold goes, and wonder if it might, one day, stretch to a pound.

Ker-ching, is what I say.

Anyway. This week in the car:

  • 1, 2, and 3. Trisha Yearwood: Jasper County; Sara Evans: A Real Fine Place; Faith Hill: Fireflies. All 2005 releases from Top Country Singers. They're all okay. Ms Yearwood, as previously noted, has the most class; Faith Hill is a tryer, for which she should not be knocked; and Sara Evans' production sound is a little on the shrill side, even without a headache. The opening track, "Coal Mine," is a particular stinker, and should have been left off the record. For her part, Ms Hill should have steered clear of "Mississippi Girl."


  • 4. The Wallflowers: Bringing Down the Horse. This is a great record, and I wish I'd bought a proper CD instead of wasting money on compressed iTunes versions. The lyrics are pretty good; Jakob Dylan's voice is pleasant; and "One Headlight" is a modern classic.


  • 5. Ricky Gervais podcasts, volumes 6 and 7. This is the world's most popular podcast, apparently, so you don't need me to tell you about it. The first one was very funny, the others, not as much for me. I don't tend to watch things like The Office and Extras. I find them a bit cringeworthy, like Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, back in the day. Gervais sitting round with Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington remind me of the boys at school. They weren't the school bullies, but they were a bit of a clique, and they did use to pick on people, about the same things, over and over again. People would get landed with something, like a theme tune or stupid name, and they would have to put up with it for years, learn to love it in some cases. They didn't pick on me, particularly, but I did find them deeply unattractive. One of the ironies of the Gervais podcast is that he frequently makes a fool of himself whilst making a fool of Karl. Explaining, "People who live in glass houses..." for example, he explained it incorrectly. Which is a kind of Super-sized irony, if you think about it.


  • 6 and 7 - Home made compilations. One of them was on good guitar music, which we blogged about a long time ago; and the other was one in a series of snapshot moments, stuff from CDs I have bought in the months leading up to the compo. I tend to scribble Serenity on them, and a number, so I know what they are. They're not me picking favourite tracks, or best tracks, but fair-to-middling tracks that deserve more listens than the whole album would get. Sometimes they work really well, like this one. There wasn't much on it I would put on a "best of..." compo for a friend, but in the collection works better than the sum of its parts. As such, it was probably the best thing I listened to all week.


  • 8. Vince Gill - Next Big Thing. Now, I'm going to have to do a cut-down version of this one, or put a few onto a Serenity compo, but by the time this reached track 17, I was ready to kill myself. Gill's smooth, soulful voice makes for pleasant driving company, and his fine guitar playing is especially in evidence on this, but 17 tracks in anyone's company is enough to make me suicidal. T O O L O N G ! ! ! Still it is worth a cut-down version, and the 11th track, "From Where I Stand" is a beautiful example of the genre of song in which the singer says, "Thanks for the offer, and I'd love to, darlin', in any other circumstances, but I just can't, because if I did then I wouldn't be the kind of man you'd make that kind of offer to, if you see what I mean."

    "From where I stand / There's a golden band" etc.

Konica-Minolta Lays an Egg

This is a bit of a shocker. After their merger a couple of years ago, Konica-Minolta have now announced that they're abandoning the photography market, apart from continuing to make digital SLR systems for Sony.

Presumably they've licenced their industry-leading anti-shake mechanism to Sony as well.

This seems to be part of the bigger picture of complete panic that set in following the advent of high-megapixel camera phones. Once Carphone Warehouse started selling more consumer digital cameras than Jessops, the writing was on the wall for the low end. Both Olympus and Nikon have previously announced that they're "concentrating on SLRs."

I'm part of a deeply conservative minority who would rather have separate devices. I'd rather not rely on one battery to support phone/music player/camera, and I'm serious enough about wanting to take a lot of photos that I'm willing to carry a separate camera with a spare battery to boot.

I think it's right that serious camera manufacturers shouldn't try to chase the happy snapper market, but they did it anyway, while the going was good.

I was thinking about this with regard to cars the other day. Most cars are built on platforms, so that a Golf/Passat/Beetle/Audi A3/A4/Seat Leon/Skoda Octavia share many of the same components and underpinnings. The differences between the cars are largely cosmetic and are really about the way they make you feel.

James bought an Audi A3 because it's a classy-looking car, and a bit less common than a Golf. On the other hand, I'd have bought the Golf, because - for the same money - you'd have got more. When you buy a luxury brand, expect to pay luxury prices for all the bits you get as standard with the non-luxury brand.

A Saab 93 Wagon will cost you around £5000 more than the equivalent Vauxhall Vectra, on which it's based. Audi make you pay a lot to get things like aircon, electric windows in the rear, and comfortable seats. The lesson is, don't look at the entry price, but one somewhere in the middle, to see if you can really afford it.

Now, the digital camera market has been a platform market, with most cameras built around Sony electronics. The key differentiators were the quality of the lenses, and the software that actually ran the cameras. But whereas platform cars are all carefully targeted at different parts of the market; and whereas a platform typically lasts 7-10 years (with one facelift) before replacement, happy-snapper digital cameras were all targeted at the same market, and were replaced with astonishing rapidity.

Camera manufacturers come from a background of being able to make a thing like a lens or body and then keep selling it for years and years and years. Once software enters the equation, however, the development cycle speeds up, and the demands of consumers become clamourous. With new models being released every few months, camera manufacturers began to see that the money they invested in R&D wasn't being returned in profit before the models were obsoleted. What they should have done, a few years ago, was step back and slow down. But capitalism is inherently wasteful, so they all continued competing with each other, in spite of the lack of profits, and kept releasing new models.

But the problem was, a lot of the new models were actually worse then their predecessors. 8 megapixel cameras, on the whole, do not take better images than 5 megapixel cameras. In fact, apart from increased file size (and increased ability to crop to a small area), the pictures were noisier. Consumers noticed, and sales slowed down.

The manufacturers want to go back to making things that would last a long time, like lenses which are separate from the camera. And they wanted to cater for a market that was willing to pay a premium - the SLR customers, who clearly don't mind carrying around a great big lump instead of a dinky little pocketable model.

It's very easy to make an SLR body, chuck in some Sony electronics, stick a lens on the front and call it macaroni. You can, in fact, offer the same body/electronics and a cheaper lens, together with a slightly crippled version of the camera's software, and presto have a new "budget" model.

Konica-Minolta were hurt - badly - by being too slow to market with a digital SLR; and then when it came out, it was too expensive compared to new budget models from Canon and Nikon. So they were screwed, and they've jacked it in and given the business to Sony. It's a shame, because the anti-shake technology they took so long to develop is really, really, excellent.

The lesson - with all software projects - is (as Steve Jobs said) that true artists ship. You have to release a version 1.0, and you have to postpone features for version 2.0. Konica-Minolta had an installed base of analogue SLR users who were waiting for a digital model that would accept their lenses. But a lot of them got fed up of waiting and went and bought a Nikon D70, instead.

Anti-shake, good as it is, could have waited for version 2.0.

January 18, 2006

Life's Little Extras - 2006 Model Year

Your Life S model
  • Eyes with lash and brow trim°
  • Wax-treated hearing
  • Dual Function nose
  • Multi-function mouth
  • Limbs colour-matched to torso°
  • 3-speed gearbox - walk, jog, run
  • 3-year anti-myopia warranty on eyes
  • 14-year anti-balding warranty on hair
  • 12-year anti-paunch warranty*
  • Opposable thumbs
  • Redundant 5th digit
  • Self-repairing skin
  • Vague feeling of unhappiness

Additional on SE model
  • 14-year anti-myopia warranty
  • 21-year anti-balding warranty
  • 27-year anti-paunch protection*
  • Anti-grease skin and hair
  • Fully functional 5th digit
  • Enhanced bone structure
  • Fully-formed feeling of unhappiness

Additional on Sport model
  • 4-speed gearbox -walk, jog, run, sprint
  • Skin-covered musculature
  • Jumping and swimming modules
  • On-board stats computer
  • 35-year anti-paunch protection
  • Fully-formed lack of self-awareness
  • Hand-eye co-ordination computer
  • Spatial awareness sensors

Options
  • Academic pack £15,000
  • Anti-myopia pack for academics £73,000
  • Humour pack £35
  • DIY pack £44,000
  • Musician pack with perfect pitch, co-ordinated hands and fingers, and maths co-processor £42.56
  • Writer pack - discontinued for 2006 model year
  • IT pack £39
  • Anti-shock limbs for Sports model £32,000
  • Romance pack £1.99
  • Blonde pack £6.99
  • Blogger pack - 2 for 1p






°For colour choices, please see page 93
*With diet an exercise as described in Manual

More on McKeith

From The Observer Food monthly. I laughed out loud at this:
"A cursory glance through her books reveals that she is no scientist. I opened You Are What You Eat at random, and read the following: 'Floating stools that will not flush show a liver imbalance.' Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's hospital, London, points out that: 'it is impossible to diagnose medical conditions from looking at a normal brown stool.' Even a persistent floater? So it seems."

To clarify, floating stools that will not flush show a plumbing imbalance. Some toilets are better designed than others.

Lisa Links

Lisa offers a couple of links that might interest the Gillian McKeith fans on this blog, mentioning no names, dog.

I know you love her for the scatology more than anything, but still.

That difficult second episode


First episodes are hard to do well, because there's so much to do in 45 minutes, and you need to hook the audience on the storyline and characters as quickly as possible.

So I forgive a slightly ropy opening episode. It's the second one that should really draw you in, and give you a real flavour of what the show will be like.

The second Life on Mars was excellent, I thought. Now we've accepted that he's back in '73, for whatever reason, we can get on with the social commentary (it's a powerful drama with a lot to say about crimes, communities, and police procedures), the character building, the thrills and spills, and - even - the scary bits.

There were a couple of excellent scenes in the second episode - a conversation with the girl on the BBC test card, and a bit where his 2006 self crashed on life support and his 1973 self saw all the lights go out and the doors close (like the opening sequence of Get Smart, was it? Or The Man from U.N.C.L.E?).

The second Surface was a good'n, too, because this show has clearly learned the lessons of Buffy and the X Files, and is going for laughs as well as scares. They played with scale in this episode in a really clever way - starting with the cute, baby monster captured by a schoolkid (like a miniature, amphibian, dragon), showing us just enough of its mama - dissected in a lab, leaving a dinosaur-sized skeleton -, and then finishing with a Jaws spoof moment of pure, jaw-hitting-floor hilarity, as an absolute monster rises up from the deep and swallows a whole fishing boat.

Top stuff.

There can be only one...


Five live eh? Having had nothing to say for a while I'll take the opportunity for an easy post.

1. Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band - Hipsters, Flipsters, Finger-poppin' Daddies!

If you've never heard this album go out and buy it immediately. It begins with a demented compere announcing the Ram Jam Band who immediately launch into a frenzied instrumental medley which peaks with The Beatles 'Day Tripper' as the audience go beserk. Then Geno comes on and you get the audio equivalent of a riot - you're in the court of Geno now and he loves you like you love to scream.

For many, Geno is a poor mans Otis or Percy but Geno and the Ram Jam Band piss all over these so called soul greats with an energy and dynamism that puts them to shame.

Its the sound of being down the front, of jostling shoulder to shoulder with your peers, of being a bit pissed up and rowdy but everyone is on your wavelength. Its the sound of grabbing a girl you don't know but you just had to dance with. Its the sound of stamping your feet and chanting 'GE-NO! GE-NO! GE-NO!'.

Fuck Dexys homage bullshit - get the real thing.

This album is my top five all in one. Its the first album on before I go out and its the first one on when I get back. Its the band I wish I was in and a scene which I'd have loved to have been part of.







Management By Headfuck

This will make Simon choke on his tea.

Yesterday morning on the radio, they were talking about some management style survey and asking, if your boss was a football manager, which one would he be?

The idea being that the successful ones all have different styles. They claim "emotional intelligence" for Jose Mourinho (which should have read "sackloads of cash"), "screaming and throwing things around" for Fergie (which is a little unfair!), and so on.

And I was saying to the guys at work, I couldn't think of any manager who was quite like one particular boss we know, who is renowned as a complete head-fucker whose chief characteristic is that he will never lose an argument. Ever. That means, if he wanted you to change something and you knew he was wrong about it, he would stand over your desk talking and talking about it - with all the spurious and bogus arguments he could come up with - until you caved in. And you did cave in. Eventually, you learned that you could never win an argument with him, so you just gave in for a shorter discussion and a peaceful life.

Brilliantly, when it all went wrong, he rewrote history so that it was all your idea and he said all along it wouldn't work.

You think I'm exaggerating, but I am not.

So we were talking about this, if he was a football manager, which would he be? And James (genius) said, "He'd sit everyone down and convince them they should be playing cricket."

And that's it. If he was managing Manchester United, they'd be playing cricket inside 6 months.

I'm still chuckling about the accuracy of that, 24 hours later.

Cresta Run

It was a bit Twilight Zone on the motorway this morning. My preferred speed is fair-to-middling, so I'm usually in the position of - as you might expect - overtaking a number of slower vehicles, and in turn being overtaken by all the Busy and Important people.

This morning was weird for two reasons. First of all, it was like I had a magic force field around me, and nobody got in my way and slowed me down. Which meant I was able to maintain the same, steady speed (apart from the 40 mph bit in the roadworks) for the entire length of my motorway journey. Slower cars would pull over long before I thought about braking or lifting.

The second weird thing was that, from Junction 19 to Junction 26 - which is 40-50 miles, around 40 minutes on the road - not a single vehicle overtook me. Not in the roadworks at J20, when I set the cruise control to the 40 mph speed limit and just rolled along, unmolested, and not after that, either, even on the hill after J21a, which usually sees a comedy queue forming in the outside lane, as all the B and I people vie to get past each other.

I was listening to The Wallflowers, which may have had something to do with it.

January 17, 2006

phone stash


phone stash
Originally uploaded by doglas mccake.
i got a walkman phone last november and was depressed ever since because it's not compatible with macs. so it cheered me up* to get hold of a pc and finally load some songs on. this many, albeit at a shitty compression rate.

* (c) salman rushdie

cyril fletcher


mangas
Originally uploaded by doglas mccake.
man-gas? a trendy clothes shop in the city of london called man-gas? are they sure?

Stellarium Astronomy Software

How utterly fab is this? Stellarium Astronomy Software is a free GPL software package that uses OpenGL graphics to render the sky as-it-is-now, and you can zoom in and fast forward through time to see the day/night sky changing. Turn off the atmosphere and you can see what the sun would look like without it.

Zoom in on galaxy M37 and spot the alien civilisation.

Fast-forward to the end of 2007 and you can see the bit where a comet hits us and the world ends.

Superb. Available for sad-sack Linux users and something called Windows (not sure if that's spelt right) too.

bored

is there a song with "thursday" in the title? i've got the other days of the week covered.

My Childhood Playground

I've been playing with Google Earth, and went to look at the house I was born and grew up in, which looks like a bit of a building site, close-up.

My old house is at the top of the picture, with the railway line running below it. Over the railway and I was on the Blow's Downs, including the old chalk quarry, which was the spring/summer/autumn playground for me and my family and friends. In the middle of what we called the chalk pit was the Bull's Head, a great big boulder of chalk on top of a knoll, which is now mostly eroded to nothing. You can see the paths worn into the chalk, the same ones I ran up and down.

On the far side of the chalk pit, bottom of the picture, you could sit and look down on that part of town, or slide down the steep-sided paths on your arse.

Irony

I just got an email from Boden with a link to a survey about their catalogue, and what I think about it - including a question about what I think of the models and the model captions.

Ha ha.

Needless t say, I let 'em have it with both barrels. And then reloaded and let them have it again.

The Beatles At The Hollywood Bowl on Official CD Format Petition

To my dismay, I discover that the Beatles at the Hollywood bowl has never been available on CD. I foolishly sold my vinyl copy at a car boot sale some time ago, so I can't even do a transfer. Domage!

Here is a petition
for us all to sign! Doesn't work in Safari, but does in Mac Firefox.

Future History

Something I read in the James May column on hybrid cars set me to thinking. He ends his article on the thought that, the sooner we use up all the oil and get it done and dusted, "the sooner real engineers and physicists will be forced to come up with something better."

This is very interesting to me, because it is an example of the kind of future thinking that you could characterise as robust and optimistic, which is in direct opposition to the sky-is-falling crowd who demand most of the media coverage of science.

The headline in yesterday's Indie, for example, was Environment in crisis: 'We are past the point of no return,' on top of a gloomy story about how James Lovelock thinks we're fucked now and it's too late to do anything about it.

I've always believed that modern science is essentially untrustworthy simply because of the way in which is is conducted. Which is not to say that I'm an anti-darwinist or something like that, but it's a fact of life that science is only conducted by those who have the funding to conduct it. So much is obvious. It's another fact that funding is not easy to come by, and that it tends to me gained by those who make the "best case" for it.

Unfortunately, the "best case" doesn't mean anything as obvious as a good argument, or a well-presented hypothesis. Best case means loudest voice, most effective use of wind to put up a politician's arse. That's for public science. In the private sector, of course, "best case" means "greatest potential source of profit."

Which leaves the rest of us wondering, because, quite clearly, if you plan to make your living doing scientific research, you've got to secure funding. And for some, this will mean following the latest trends and fashions, and joining in with the "environmental lobby", because that's where the money is.

Meanwhile, we still don't know what could happen, and there are any other number of possibilities for the future. What did James May mean by "real engineers and physicists", for example?

I believe he was drawing a distinction between touchy-feely scientists like Lovelock, who hypothesise something almost mystical, like Gaia, and who essentially rely on huge computer models to predict causes and effects. And what do we know about computers? Yes, they're rubbish. We also know that it is impossible to model the complex system of our Earth's climate, even with the biggest supercomputing cluster you can buy.

What might happen.

1. Drastic drop in temperature in our corner of the world due to change in Gulf Stream flow.

2. Higher sea levels caused by melting ice-caps and higher temperatures (but see 1)

3. Radical changes in flora and fauna caused by changing temperaturess (see 1 and 2)

4. Oil and gas run out, and before they do so become exceedingly expensive

5. The world manufacturing economy changes due to 1, 2, and 4, and returns to a simpler, more locally-based, model.

6. Complete break down in law and order, society, system of government, current moral/social values caused by 1-5 above.

All of the above is based - largely - on the most pessimistic predictions, and some of it can be mitigated by:

a. Nuclear option, providing we have a secure source of plutonium or whatever, and come up with a satisfactory way of storing and disposing of waste, and protecting installations and materiel from terrorist nutters

b. Alternative fuel option - wind/solar/biomass - providing the manufacturing economy (5) can sustain the production of solar panels, batteries, generators etc., all of which require supplies of raw materials and energy (see 4 and a).

So. What did James May have to be optimistic about?

Well, the robust optimists have always believed the following: when we need to, we will come up with a solution.


Science Fiction writer Larry Niven, for example, has always maintained that - when things get bad enough - the ingenuity of the human race will see them through, as we come up with HUGE solutions to HUGE problems. So big that they boggle the mind. Like, for example, coming up with a way of moving huge lumps of matter in the solar system into new orbits. Or turning all the matter in the solar system into a giant ring around the sun for everyone to live on. Dropping a comet onto the moon to provide a water supply.

On a smaller scale, current research into genetics and nanotechnology could hold solutions to many problems. Genetically engineered trees that grow incredibly fast, so we can use them more effectively as bio-fuel. Genetically engineered crops that will grow where they currently cannot. Genetically engineered people, who can live longer and lead more productive lives.

Nanotechnology that can be injected into the blood stream to cure diseases and enhance our abilities. Small, tabletop, manufacturing units that can nano-engineer anything we need from raw materials. Vastly improved efficiency in solar panels and battery life/storage capacity, enabling us to capture far more than the 1% of the sun's energy that all life on earth currently manages to grab. That's right: 99% of the sun's energy just pours into space.

There's more. Anti-gravity engines that revolutionise transport and allow us to travel, cheaply, to nearby planets to mine and colonise them. Ramjet engines, that use interstellar hydrogen for fuel, and allow us to travel to nearby stars.

Cold fusion reactors, allowing us to generate almost unlimited amounts of energy from sea water.*

A lot of the above might seem like crazy talk, science fiction, which of course it is. But none of it is necessarily impossible, and if you don't think that there are plenty of people experimenting with nanotech and genetech right now, then you haven't been paying attention.

The message from the optimists is, instead of wringing our hands and complaining about SUVs, we should be cracking on with the research. Three things: genetech, nanotech, and cold fusion, could solve all our current problems.

But, of course, not without risk. We're all scared of genetically modified beasts roaming the hills and killing our chickens. And then there's the famous grey goo effect, which is the fear that small nanobots will self-replicate themselves until everything becomes a big ball of grey goo.

Finally, as well as all of that, there's always the great deus ex machina of First Contact, the friendly aliens who will share their advanced technology with us, showing us how to travel faster than light and terraform other planets. Watch this space.

*Well, not really sea water - but one component of it, hydrogen, in its heavy isotope form of deuterium

January 16, 2006

top five live albums

i'm not big on live albums, but if someone held a gun to my head i would choose these five:

1. live take no prisoners - lou reed
2. live '69 - the velvet underground
3. live at max's kansas city - the velvet underground
4. fragments of a rainy season - john cale
5. live at the old waldorf 1978 - television

James May on... Hybrid Cars

If it's Monday, it's time to sneak a look at James May's latest entertaining column in the Daily Telegraph, in which he ponders the hybrid car and what it all means.

[Y]ou need to try the most fashionable of hybrid cars, the Toyota Prius, in which an animated graphic display on a dash-top screen shows the path of energy and the function of each part of the system at any one time. It really is a most engaging divertissement, and if you're lucky you may achieve enlightenment before you drive into the back of the car in front.

I actually quite like the Prius. I like the styling and the neat, airy interior. I even quite like driving it and, in a perverse way, I quite enjoy the challenge of that on-board video game, which also rewards you with a sort of points system for economical motoring. It's an interesting car. However, in its widely acclaimed role as the saviour of humankind, it strikes me as complete nonsense.

Now, I've been looking at the Prius, as I think about what I might or might not get as my next car, and my main interest is in its fuel economy, which is as high as 67 mpg, if you believe the figures, which you can't. You think "lower running costs", except you don't know how much the fancy-pants engine will cost to service, and I bet it's not cheap.

67 mpg (imperial, not US, gallons) with unleaded (because it's cheaper than diesel), is pretty darn tootin'. But according to the BBC top gear site, on their long-term test, they got more like 40-something, which is not so good. In fact, it's crap, if you're used to getting around 50 mpg with a diesel car. Also the Prius looks horrible, I think. It looks like the Nissan Primula (joke). I still like the idea of whispering around town on electric-only, and knocking over unwary pedestrians, and avoiding any congestion charges that get imposed. But still.

If you read the post below, you'll see that we're all quite enthusiastic, really, about the post-oil economy, and what it might mean in terms of lifestyle and working hours. So it's silly, really, to be saving fuel, when it would be better to use it all up as quick as we can. James May concludes,

The sort of people who champion the hybrid car are those who would say that burning petrol and diesel is a bad thing, that the emissions muck up the climate, drown polar bears and give people diseases, that the oil business causes wars, corrupts the global economy and is at the root of corporate imperialism etc etc etc.

So why, then, are they trying to eke out the world's oil? Surely the solution is to buy an old Bentley, fill it with petrol and burn the stuff as quickly as possible.

The sooner we do that, the sooner real engineers and physicists will be forced to come up with something better.

Rullsenberg Rules: On books

Lisa starts the great debate, after Marie had questioned the utility and desirability of the Sony e-reader gadget.

My dream job: two shops, side by side, with a friendly walk-through link between, one selling quality genre fiction outside the half-dozen authors/titles you see in the chains and the other selling guitars and instruments, offering friendly and enthusiastic advice in a non-snooty and non-snotty way.

All imbued with the smell of Illy coffee coming from the Gaggia bean-to-cup machine.

Top Five Live Albums

Oooh, ooh, Simon requested this below, and this was relatively easy for me, since I don't tend to buy many live albums.

The live album should be a documentary, as much as anything, capturing something special, if possible, but certainly a snapshot of a time and place in history, regardless of the quality of the music. If the music is also good, so much the better.

5. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live at Alpine Valley, East Troy, Wisconsin, 1984. Early Born in the USA tour bootleg, before it'd really dawned on anyone how huge Bruce now was. For me, this is a nice boot with a good atmosphere, and finds him on the cusp, leaving behind his early, more intimate shows with their long stories, and before the act was really packaged and formulaic. Favourite moment: Thunder Road, the bit he does on the bass notes of his guitar after the line, "I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk...."

4. Bob Dylan Live at Budokan. 1978 document at the end of the long, long Rolling Thunder tour, finds Dylan playfully changing just about every song in his set, with reggae versions, waltzes, slowed-down versions... Not everything works, but it sounds great. Favourite moment: Dylan saying, "Here is an unrecorded song. See if you can guess which one it is..."

3. Keith Urban - Living Right Now - Cheating a bit, because this is a live DVD, but I bought it for the music, and it's the real thing. Urban's performance is from the end of 2004, and it's a cracker. Favourite moment: completely cheesy, but lying flat on his back to play the riff to "You Look Good in My Shirt".

2. The Band - The Last Waltz. They may have done better live work, but this document, on film and on record, shows a versatile and talented group of musicians able to make anybody - even Neil Diamond - sound good. Favourite moment: Rick Danko singing "It Makes No Difference," utterly sublime.

1. The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. When I was younger and didn't know the facts, I thought we'd been swizzed to only get two sides of live music from the whole of the Beatles at their peak, but then you realise that they only ever played 25-30 mins, so this is it. Two concerts, from '64, and '65, at the peak of their popularity, before drugs and Jesus, before Yoko and beards. Screaming girls, 3-track recordings, but still sounds pretty decent. Favourite moment: Lennon getting the words wrong in Help! and carrying on through his laughter - the audience couldn't hear anyway!

Top Telly - news for the goggle-eyed

There's so much new stuff on at the moment that it's hard to keep up with, so here's a roundup.

We've already covered Invasion and Life on Mars.

Surface, which is about some kind of strange marine life (the monsters look like artist's impressions of Nessie) looked quite promising, though an awful lot happened in the first episode, so I'm afraid they're going to run out of plot. According to the Radio Times, we've seen the first of 11 so far, and 11 is suspiciously like a number you might get if something was cancelled halfway through. That said, the first seasons of Buffy and Seinfeld were very short, so maybe the big networks are just more conservative.

Anyway, the premise is that Something Big and Strange is lurking in the deep deep depths of the deep blue sea, but that something has caused it to come to the surface. OR it arrived from another place: an Invasion-style meteor shower suggested the latter. Between Invasion and Surface, I think that people who fall asleep in front of the telly (mentioning no names) are going to get very confused. Political Correctness score? 3/10 for having one, minor, light brown-skinned character.

Sleepwalkers was something different. Researchers who are no longer attached to a University (hints of a scandal at Stanford) have discovered a way of synchronising dreamers' deep REM cycles (oh, they've discovered a deeper form of REM sleep, too), which means that they can enter people's dreams. For, er, you know, research purposes. Who's paying for it, I don't know. Anyway, apparently this means they can talk to people who are in a coma, or help people solve psychological problems. One of the sleepwalkers is an expert in dream symbolism, and another one is, er, a twat.

First episode, they help an African American pilot with a mysterious illness - 10/10 for political correctness, because they then ask him to join their team. Qualifications? Not required, apparently. Anyway, it was all very cod-horror, not suitable for the under 10s, and I'm not sure how it will pan out, because horror clichés (this week: the shadowy figure without a face) are a bit dull.

The OC, ER, and Smallville all kicked off again. I probably won't want The OC, because the "soundtrack album available soon" which constantly plays under/over the dialogue gets on my nerves. ER is still top, because Maura Tierney is still in it, but we'll see how it goes. Sally from 3rd Rock from the Sun makes an appearance in the 3rd episode. Smallville still has Kristen Kreuk in it, but I mainly watch to see how far they push the envelope of the Superman back-story.

Half-hour programmes hardly seem worth an appointment to watch, but new comedy My Name is Earl on Channel 4 is a good laugh. Jason Lee plays a ne'er-do-well who wins $100k on a scratchcard, loses the card, and then decides to put right all the bad things he has done in life. It's blue-collar comedy in the tradition of Roseanne and Grace Under Fire.

This week sees new Desperate Housewives, new House, and a new British SF thing on ITV1, Eleventh Hour, starring Patrick Stewart. But because it's British it's only 4 episodes, so not a major life commitment. The schizophrenic Crossing Jordan is on Tuesdays instead of Thursdays (as it was before xmas - I call it schizophrenic, because sometimes it's as good as a funny episode of The X Files, and sometimes it's kinda pants), and there's a load of other stuff, which I can't possibly get around to watching, unless someone wants to offer me a full-time job as a TV critic. There's one night of the week, I think you could easily enjoy watching something at 9 pm on any of - no exaggeration - 6 channels, possibly more.

Mac and Cheese Controversy

I was going to do a "your questions answered" today, but there didn't seem to be much point, as it was the usual round of "joanne lees b r e a s t s" and "how to pronounce epiphone" and the Renault Clio ad etc.

One person was searching for a recipe for haddock soup, so glad to oblige. And I want to relate that to the hilarious controversy over at Slate Magazine about a crappy recipe on the New York Times web site for macaroni cheese.

I wonder how many other recipes are regularly downloaded that are, in fact, pants?

There's always a clue, I think, when a recipe tries to help you avoid doing something that you might consider difficult. People who have trouble getting dough to rise will search for a recipe for scone-based pizza. Scone-based is how my mum used to make it, back in the day, and it was what we regularly had for Saturday tea when Doctor Who (Jon Pertwee) was on (my mum didn't have trouble getting bread to rise, but she was short of time). It can be quite nice, but I actually think it's harder to do well than the bread-based sort.

A personal bugbear is the soup recipe that either doesn't involve starting off with a bit of oil and garlic/onion/leek as a base or doesn't include stock. I had a terrible recipe book that had loads of soups in it where you just added water, and every single one I tried was awful. There are a couple of recipes that work without onion/leek/garlic, but they're few and far between. For example, a nice fish soup with fennel and potatoes can be overwhelmed by the onion, because the delicate flavour of the fennel - although I got away with an onion with the fennel in my smooth smoked haddock soup, which was more of a everything-from-the-fridge kind of recipe.

Anyway, making macaroni cheese without having to make a roux: give it up, or buy a ready meal, if you're that hopeless.

A roux requires patience, or wiles. Even the best cook can get it wrong occasionally. I've seen my sister whizz her béchamel in a food processor to remove lumps. My personal trick is to pre-warm the milk in the microwave, so that I'm always adding warm milk - it binds with the roux quicker, and speeds up the process a lot. And I buy small packets of flour for sauces, which I think works better than plain old, er, plain, too.

January 13, 2006

Fingers very much crossed

It's been a long time, but I'm hopin' and a prayin' that I will finally see the back of the little Polo I've been driving since my Passat was smashed by a lorry, back on December 1st.

This Polo 3-cylinder 1.2 is an absolutely shite little car, neither nippy nor economical, which are the two things you want most from a small car. It's flabby, skittery, scary, and expensive to run. How expensive? Well, I've been hoping to get rid of it for the past few days, so I've not been filling the tank, something you have to do every couple of days anyway.

Wednesday night, close to home, the reserve fuel light pinged on, so I stopped at a BP station to put some in. I arbitrarily decided to put in £20-worth (£20.14, matter of fact), which is, y'know, just over 20 litres, especially at BP prices. The fuel gauge showed it about 3/4 full.

Anyway, that was Wednesday. Thursday night, close to home, again, the reserve fuel light pinged on. I'd driven between 160 and 170 miles, one trip to and from work, and it seems incredible but it had slurped up £20-worth of petrol. Which means it's been costing me that much every day to drive it to work: £80 a week, because I work from home on Fridays.

How much does it cost in my Passat? Diesel is more expensive, but I generally only have to fill it once every 4 days, which means around £50 a week. In other words, the "economical" so-called city car costs £30 a week extra.

Which is before you get to how fucking scary it is to drive on the motorway, especially in the wind and the rain. Or how hard it is to drive in traffic, because of the high biting point on the clutch and the brake pedal being about an inch higher than the accelerator.

Boden Rage

I was just glancing through the Boden Spring 2006 catalogue, wondering idly how long it would be before the red mist descended. On page 7 I asked myself, was there ever a time I could have pulled it off, the herringbone jacket, the pinstripe linen jacket?

I think not. Clothes are uncomfortable for me, an endless battle against things riding up and sticking out. Jackets are a great source of puzzlement. I leave the house in the morning: no jacket required, as Mr Collins once said. A jacket in the car is an encumbrance, bound to be uncomfortable, bound to get horribly creased against the seat back. I get to work: no jacket required. Too fucking hot, for a start, the dull thudding heat of Chinese air conditioning, the temperature of the office regulated by the most insufferable moaning old bat, the one who ejects a machine-gun laugh at the end of every sentence.

Walking around the streets of a city with a friend, you might wear a jacket, depending on the time of year. Something to hold your keys and wallet. But what time of year? Oh, yes, Spring. And of course, the models in the Boden catalogue are all the kind of people who have loads of time to walk around city streets with friends. Work? What's that? Is that what my great-great-great-to=the=power-of-grandfather did before we got lucky?

Page 9. Red mist descends. Tirian. Is that a name? In science fiction, perhaps. Tirian. How is it pronounced? Like something off the Shipping Forecast, or like a newly-discovered planet? It could be the name of a new Toyota model, yet another thing you don't know how to pronounce. Toyota Celica: is is Selika, Kelika, Kelisa, or Selisa?

Page 11. Tirian sits in a deck chair that looks too small for him, holding a newspaper upside-down, wondering if his fingers are getting all inky, wondering which moisturiser will be best to remove the ink stains. He looks into the lens of the camera, loving it, loving himself, fallen leaves blowing through the space between his ears. In the background: a country house. Beside him on the floor: a pristine clean, empty, unused coffee cup. Tirian can't stand: rude people. How fucking original, you worthless dog-egg on the face of this world.

Page 21. Robert (no! is that a name? etc). Looking like Tirian's heavier-browed brother, showing the camera the crow's feet round his eyes, the lines that read: knows how to have a good time. Robert can't stand: queues. You know, it never occurred to me, how awful it is to have to wait your turn behind people who haven't taken any handsome lessons. Robert is wearing a shirt with a pattern of vine leaves and looks like a plonker, which is exactly how I'd feel in this shirt.

Page 33. Kevin, who doesn't understand the question, leans awkwardly away from the breath of Carrie, who is wearing a selection of Boden womenswear. You'll have to take their word for it though, because she could be buck naked for all you can see: her right arm and left hand, her face. Kevin is looking at the camera with the same fixed grin he has on pages 24, 28, 31, 35, 39, 47, 51, and 55. But his expression speaks volumes: are we done yet? On page 24, he and Carrie sit together on a fence in a middle of a field. They have with them a hurricane lamp and a tea-light candle in a glass orb, just in case. One page 31, he stands, barefoot, hands in pockets, while Carrie sits, pretending to laugh, holding an empty and clean coffee cup. On the wall between them are three clocks, all telling a different time.

Robert. (I wish I could shag: Carrie.)