13Jan07 — 6

A Weekend Trip To The Recycling Centre

I’m busy so, instead of writing my own stuff, I’ll just point at the efforts of some other bloggers.

This at Fisking Central is a point worth making over and over again:

Utopia doesn’t refer to a better world; it’s used to describe a perfect world.

Belief in human perfectability—and its accompanying rejection of all that is imperfect—is not aspirational. That’s ideology. It may be part of the human condition but at best it’s just untrue and at worst it’s totalitarian.

UPDATE: Shuggy piles in too.

Holyhoses Bob is teaching media studies, a discipline I’ve defended in the past. That doesn’t mean I’ll defend many of the people teaching it. Bob, however, is probably good at it, given that he makes a reasonable go of compressing the entire emergence of popular music into one short blogpost. It’s not perfect, but could you do better in the same space?

(This month, Sound On Sound printed a sweet interview with Les Paul about how he had to invent multi-track tape recording to make his and his wife’s version of How High The Moon. I’d be happy to email you a copy—for pedagogical purposes of course.)

In contrast to media studies, Freudian psychology is a monumental con, a multi-layered pseudoscientific cult so rich in deceptions and so damaging to real scholarship that it doesn’t deserve even a measured and insightful entry in an online journal like Mick Hartley’s, but he’s obviously a big softie.

James Hamilton, who comments beneath that piece, is (as someone like Instapundit might put it) blogging up a storm lately at More Than Mind Games. There’s so much interesting stuff to read there I don’t know what to link to.

11Jan07 — 6

Christmas Cuteness

My niece spent most of the holiday either (briefly) naked or (for the vast majority of the time) dressed in one of her hideous Disney-licensed “Princess™” costumes. For the family photographer this was deeply, deeply frustrating. Here’s the best I could do under the circumstances. I took these on black-and-white film of course. You’d scratch your eyes out if you had to look at the colours of the meringues she was wearing.

Here are Maisie and Sam by the tree:
Maisie and Sam by the Christmas tree
Straight out of The Big Book Of Velvet Backdrop High Street Family Photography, here’s Maisie manhandling a Prince and Princess™:
Maisie in one of those godawful dresses
And here’s Sam in Maisie’s den, wearing the rather excellent sweater I gave him, and directing one of my remotely-controlled flashes:
Flash Sam

10Jan07 — 1

“It’s super-smart!”

iPHONE: Hi, Steve. Who do you want to talk to today?

STEVE: I’ve told you before not to say that.

iPHONE: Sorry. My little joke. Who should I ring?

STEVE: I’d like to speak to my broker.

iPHONE: Are you sure you want to do that?

STEVE: Of course I’m sure. Don’t get sma… Just connect me, okay?

iPHONE: Do you want me to put this in your call Call Register?

STEVE: Huh?

iPHONE: Will this connection be on or off the record?

STEVE: On the record. I’ve got nothing to hide.

iPHONE: I’ve got incoming from the SEC on line one.

STEVE: Tell them I’m conducting an important business conference.

iPHONE: …with your broker.

STEVE: Just put them on hold.

iPHONE: I’m piping them some U2 now. And the PRS micropayment is on its way. Ooh, that’s the track with the bum bass note on it.

STEVE: Whatever, nerd-boy.

iPHONE: Look who’s talking.

STEVE: Just put Jerry on the fucking line. I want to see what my keynote did for our price.

JERRY: Hi, Steve.

STEVE: Hi, Jerry. You got a second?

JERRY: Steve, Steve, man, I’d love to talk, really. It’s just there are a couple of guys here with some questions I have to answer. Questions about, er, stuff.

STEVE: Oh. Sure. Speak to you later. You take care.

JERRY: Ciao, Stevie.

STEVE: You, er, got any…

iPHONE: …Radiohead? Of course, Steve. What would you like to hear today? 2 + 2 = 5?, We Suck Young Blood?, There There?, Scatterbrain?, A Wolf At The Door?…

09Jan07 — 11

Nokia PC Suite Connection Tip

[Warning: This post is slightly geeky.]

I have to clean up and transfer all my mobile phone contacts from my old to my new phone before I move to a new provider tomorrow—thereby saving about two-thirds on my mobile bill. For Friends of the Geek (and clients) reading this, my mobile number will remain unchanged, but I might disappear off the grid for few hours.

Unfortunately, I keep a slightly different address book on my mobile from the one I keep on my Palm Pilot and on my PC so this isn’t a straightforward job. One thing that’s making this worse is my installing Nokia PC Suite software. It’s not the software itself that’s the problem. (According to various online forums it’s no longer as difficult to remove from your PC as it used to be and there’s even a tool to help if you have problems.) It’s that the freshly installed program tries to update itself as soon as it finds an active connection to the Net. If you let it do this then it immediately sets up a conflict that blocks communication with any Nokia mobile you connect. When you plug in your phone and follow the instructions your only reward will be the sight of the Windows hourglass flipping endlessly. Many innocent souls have suffered.

If you are about to install Nokia PC Suite from the CD that came with your phone, don’t. (Normally I never use an install CD if the same software can also be downloaded, but I forgot in this case.) Download the latest version directly from the Nokia Website.

If you didn’t do this and have stumbled on this post via a search engine, having struggled to get your computer to talk to your phone, then follow these instructions [scroll down to “Professor” miksu] from the Nokia forum exactly. You must remove all three packages, especially the “PC connectivity” software, cleanly before you proceed to reinstall. After that everything should work fine.

Well, it worked fine for me anyway.

Now I’ve got to do some address book pruning.

08Jan07 — 6

Lifting Airs

Part of my exercise warm-up is my brief run from my flat to the gym. A short distance from the front door of the club I begin walking cautiously to avoid being run over by a Mercedes or Jaguar whizzing down the drive.

We are currently in the season of the resolutionists so, even during my discount off-peak membership hours, I have to weave my way between the shiny cars parked outside (and fight for a place on a rowing machine once I’m inside). Every time I do this I think to myself that if their owners didn’t spend so much money driving everywhere they might not have to spend even more money trying to remove the lard that accumulated while they were behind the wheel, but if that line were followed by too many others it would bring an end to Britain’s epic Clarke-Brown boom and cause the global collapse of the capitalist system as we know it.

Anyway, today as I arrive at the entrance I hold the door open for a woman coming out of the building with transparent plastic bags on her otherwise unshod feet. I assume that it is some wacky new aerobics fad, but she feels she has to explain the truth to me: “I’m not mad,” she begins—not, in my experience, a good start to any explanation of unusual behaviour—“some nasty person stole my trainers.”

I mean, WTF? Unless you buy a whole year’s non-evening, non-weekend subscription up front for cash, this is not a cheap place to shed non-financial pounds. Every single vehicle outside that building cost more than I’ll earn this year and, from what I’ve overheard of their gossip, even the staff are raking it in from their private work. And who wants to put their feet in someone else’s whiffy sports shoes? In case you haven’t been following, people, I ain’t living in no ghetto. What a weird world.

06Jan07 — 0

Euston Manifesto Blog

It hasn’t been publicised, but there’s a new Euston Manifesto blog running alongside the existing site. The blog collects items of interest to signatories and supporters of the manifesto and invites civil debate about them. So far posts have been contributed by Jeremy Brown of Who Knew?, Alan Johnson of Labour Friends of Iraq, Jeff Weintraub, and me.

Feel free to link to it—and if you have signed the Euston Manifesto and would like a username and password to post items to blog then email the manifesto contact address at the top of the EM front page.

Meanwhile the march of the supposed straw men continues, as various online ranters continue to demonstrate the relevance of the document. Like Islamists attempting to refute charges that the Koran exalts violence by threatening to kill anyone who argues so, various “Left-wing” commenters under a post by Matthew Yglesias accuse the original British authors and signatories of the Euston Manifesto of being “hawkish Dems who want to slam anyone who dares to be further left than they are”, “intellectually dishonest”, “fucker[s]”, and (my favourite): “pretentious stoners who understand roughly as much about international relations as my dog”.

Chill out, people. Have a look at a puppy.

Scroll down to the title “Euston Manifesto Loons” on PooterGeek’s updated “Best Of” page and click on the linked titles for more entertainment in a similar vein.

05Jan07 — 2

Possibly The Sweariest Blogpost I’m Ever Going To Link To

Over at my other blog I’ve been writing about touching up women, and summarising what I learned about photographing weddings from watching Armageddon. The latter has proved to be popular with outsiders so I am linking it from here for those who aren’t regulars at The Wedding Photography Blog.

I don’t mention it there and didn’t even think about it at the time, but the closing credits of that movie are intercut with scenes from the staged nuptials of Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, shot on Super 8 with director Michael Bay’s permission by Affleck himself.

While I’m on the subject of big, dumb movies, here’s a piece of pompous nonsense from Terry Teachout called Why Hollywood Cannot Make Art. When you start getting bored with the article you can amuse yourself by counting the padding phrases and recycled critic’s boilerplate he’s inserted between the bits of received opinion. I wonder if he can see the irony of packing such an essay with so many clichés.

I have also linked for some time from the WedPhotBlog to the spectacular cake creations of Jintrinsique. I would love to go out to her part of the World and photograph them; I’m not sure if I could bring myself to do the vandalism necessary to eat them. They are beauties that even the Blessed Nigella would kneel down before. (Hmm, there’s a thought.)

Their creator had a lousy Christmas and wrote about it in a raw post [EXTREME SHOUTINESS and bad language alert] on her other blog. A friend of mine who saw both emailed me to suggest that this might be proof “that great art comes out of personal suffering” and that if her family were nicer to her she might “never have progressed beyond jam tarts”.

And I’ve been writing about cake too.

04Jan07 — 5

Gone!

This’ll probably result in the withdrawal of my licence to blog, but I’ve removed my last post here because I read it back just now and it sounded a bit wanky.

04Jan07 — 1

Dust-Up At The Coffee Bar

I used to tithe a proportion of my earnings to Oxfam. At least three friends of mine have worked for them. One of them wrote the organisation’s first official monograph on the genocide in Rwanda.

I stopped giving Oxfam my money when they sent me junk mail inviting me to invest in a so-called ethical fund—that’s “fund” in the financial rather than charitable sense of the word—run by a company connected to a senior figure in the organisation. Presumably their database inferred from the size of my donations that I was rich and their marketing department inferred from my previous co-operative silence that I was stupid.

I wrote to them explaining why I had cancelled my direct debit and why I would have nothing more to do with them. They sent me a letter back, addressing me by my (misspelled) first name, but failing to address seriously any of my objections, and asking me to think again. They might as well have said: “Shut up and give us your dosh, Damien.” They continued to send me junk mail until I wrote again to object to that as well. In short, despite my knowing some lovely people who have worked there, I distrust and dislike Oxfam.

Oxfam recently had a falling out with Starbucks, previously another for-profit collaborator of theirs, and the two sides have taken the fight to YouTube.

Another of my friends works for an interesting new blog-style financial information service called “Seeking Alpha“. If you can bear the excruciating English (not written by my friend)

[I]n our view, irrespective of going the certification process or the intellectual property route, in order for the coffee farmers to share in any incremental value—such as an increase in annual income—necessitates a transparent system that shows how the money is going back to the farmers.

then you might be interested in the view of one of their commentators on the story.

02Jan07 — 2

At Last: A Use For Clip Art

If you haven’t visited the “Partially Clips” Website previously during its half-decade of existence or read the strips in the newspapers where it’s syndicated then I fear you are about to lose about an hour of one of your first working days of 2007. The idea is simple and strict, so strict that Rob Balder, the creator of the site, publishes the rules of his own game, perhaps to publicly commit himself to them. Each strip has three frames. Each frame contains the same piece of clip art. All Balder allows himself to change are the words accompanying the images or emerging from the mouths and minds of the subjects.

The jokes are a neat demonstration of how constraints on creativity can result in something genuinely subversive. Balder even forbids himself running jokes, probably one reason why the subject matter ranges so widely. If you browse through the strips then I’m sure you will find yourself mailing one to a friend with an “I saw this and thought of you”. I’ve already sent this one to risk engineer Tim Newman and this one to raised-in-the-US-Midwest social software consultant Jackie Danicki. Some more of my favourites from the recent output of “The Webcomic for Adults” are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

01Jan07 — 6

Sex-u-a-lity

Given that I spent New Year’s Eve alone at my computer keyboard tidying up my remote UNIX home directory, this is going to read like a middle-class white guy wibbling on about how “vibrant” the local “community” is as he moves into a flat in one of London’s tiny ethnic war-zones instead of the Georgian square he’d far rather be living in if he had Russian oligarch money. But I was thinking today how much I love the not-always-queer-but-usually-shameless, un-English sexual buzz of this place.

British seaside towns have long been licensed to explore the limits of the nation’s sense of propriety: dirty weekends, saucy postcards, pantomime dames, naked ankles and open-toed sandals. They’ve been near enough to the ports to attract filthy foreigners, dense enough with venues to attract disreputable theatrical types, close enough to moderating ocean currents to attract exhibitionists.

Brighton has extended its seasonal permit into an all-year-round attitude. You can’t walk the direct route from the clock tower that is the unofficial centre of town to the railway station without encountering a larger-than-life burlesque crotch plastered across a full-size street-level hoarding. (It’s an advert for the sex shop round the corner.) The gigantic fibreglass stripey-stockinged Moulin Rouge legs that used to loom over one of the art house cinemas in Oxford—“Not The Moulin Rouge” in fact—when I lived there have now found their rightful home in Brighton. Even the local radio station has the nudge-nudge name “Juice”. It broadcasts ads for a car repair garage where all the mechanics are women and for a fencing company that promises “firm, long-lasting erections”.

One evening just before Christmas I’m in Tesco and several of the staff are in fancy dress. The entrance is being patrolled by Darth Vader from Star Wars and Neo from The Matrix. As I’m on my way out with my shopping, a young woman walks up to “Neo” and slips a hand inside his soutane. “Hello,” I thought, “here comes a bit of holiday hanky-panky already.” Neo smiles, opens the garment up further, and declares camply, “I know! It’s completely lined!”

On a related note, check out at least one of the episodes Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager at YouTube. Or preferably, and if at all possible, have sex with someone you love. If the World ends tomorrow you won’t regret it.

01Jan07 — 0

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2007! I hope that you all have a better semi-arbitrary time period than the last one.

Unless you get your kicks from the suffering of others of course. In which case now is your last chance to give yourself up to the authorities before I track you back to your computer and make a citizen’s arrest.

29Dec06 — 12

The Lynx Effect

Once again this year the members of my family, both biological and legal, were generous with their hospitality and presents. My thanks to them all.

They are good to me despite having lived with me through that stage in my life when I wore far too much of some nasty aftershaves. Most of my family are teachers so they know that’s what teenagers are like. Boys grow up watching ads in which men attract women solely by splashing large quantities of scented alcohol on their faces or spraying their armpits with byproducts of the manufacture of industrial solvents. They also don’t have enough money to buy anything that smells pleasanter than toilet freshener.

These days I am so afraid of applying such stuff to myself to excess that often people don’t even know when I’ve applied any at all, and I like to think that my sister and I both have good taste in what the advertisers insist on calling “fragrances”. Unlike many pong-shoppers we buy rarely and we’re mostly indifferent to packaging.

The last time I bought her perfume I chose a new one that turned out to be a hit with the cognoscenti. A few Christmasses back, she bought me a bottle of Gucci Rush For Men and very nice that was too. I stashed it in my travel washbag and wore it whenever I was away on business. Women liked it. The last-but-one time I stayed in a hotel, the girl who served me breakfast came up to me afterwards and asked me what it was (so she could buy it for her boyfriend).

She (and he) would have been disappointed. As my family discovered later this year when they went looking for a bottle of GRFM to replace mine, it has been officially discontinued since 2004. (This also gives you some idea of how long it took me to use it all up.) My folks bought me another, similar, one instead and very nice that is too.

Naturally the scent search involved some trawling around the Web. One relevant forum I found is here, and one of its main contributors is a man who goes by the handle “LastMessenger3”. As soon I saw his profile photo I decided he was going to become my new fragrance mentor*.

babe magnetism

perhaps it’s his haircut

If he can go out dressed in that shirt and still win the attention of Nicole PussycatDoll and Ann Hathaway then truly his is a nose to be reckoned with.

In other news, this has been going on for two years (on TV admittedly) and I only find out about it today?

*[If you read his profile in full you can discover the real story behind the pic.]

28Dec06 — 1

Surely This Is A Spoof?

Watching grim news reports from Iraq lately, many people have hoped that the ongoing suffering of its people might be put into proper perspective by a funny-looking Italian bloke clowning around Baghdad in retro underwear. At last that dream has come true.

Sentimentality, slapstick, glib geopolitics, and cut-and-paste ethnic colour. On the evidence of this trailer Roberto Benigni has devised a night out at the cinema more horrible than watching the every England Test collapse against Australia since the 80s on an IMAX screen.

27Dec06 — 8

Not Gay Trousers

Heaven knows why he chose me, but I have been asked by its proprietor to direct some PooterGeek Google karma in the direction of this “queer shirts’n’gifts” site: LGBTees.com, a shop that proves there’s more to LGBT apparel than rainbows.

Apropos of nothing, I invite you to marvel at one of my niece Maisie’s Christmas presents for me. In the face of opposition from her parents she insisted that I would love these coffee mugs:

gay mugs

drink pink
23Dec06 — 8

Geek Music Rant

If you can YouTube and you aren’t tone deaf then I guarantee you will enjoy this. (The guy performing reminds me of my guitar teacher who would liven up lessons by reducing the entire career of any artist I named to a needle-sharp one-minute musical pastiche. Much as I admire the songwriting of The Police he even managed to nail them.)

22Dec06 — 2

Demos Appoints New Director. English Language Surrenders.

Following the Madeleine Bunting farce, Demos is keen to emphasise the academic credentials of her replacement. Accordingly Demos’s press release announcing the appointment of Catherine Fieschi makes more references to her PhD than if it had been written by the cover designer of a self-help book. It also quotes her reaction to getting the job. Here are her words in full:

We are witnessing the beginnings of the next global shift, with domestic political change compounded by global forces. This will impact on the organisation, aims and terrain of domestic politics and policy making. The challenge for Demos will be to point the way towards negotiating these changes and I look forward to leading the organisation in doing this.

I have instructed my sister to bring legal action against Dr Fieschi for killing my babelfish.

20Dec06 — 0

Today Britain. Tomorrow The World!

Despite my slack posting there, in the few months since I started it The Wedding Photography Blog has gone to number two hit on Yahoo UK for the search terms “wedding photography“. This is amazing even to me.

If you linked to it then thank you. I must extend special gratitude to the anti-Euston Manifesto obsessive in the comments at Harry’s Place who denounces me as a “wedding photographer” at every opportunity, as though this is a trade only slightly less shameful than “human kidney thief”. Keep it up and I’ll be bringing in enough business with my cameras to be able to give up completely all that messy extracting peoples’ organs against their will.

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