04Sep06 — 4

Two Answers To Questions You Didn’t Ask

My darling readership has solved two PooterGeek mysteries.

Remember the “hair guitar” version of Pachelbel’s Canon? This New York Times article [PDF] tells the tale behind it.

A couple of weeks back, on the way back from the site of a wedding reception, I managed to get myself stuck in one of the few actual undulations in the “landscape” of the Fens. I’d like to say that this

another inventive low-speed Pooter manoeuvre

was the result of a crazy, Dukes of Hazzard-style, 50mph handbrake spin, but it was, in fact, my failure to complete all three points of a clumsy, slow, first-and-reverse turn-in-the-road that required a local farmer to rescue me later with a JCB digger. As it happens, the first person to drive past me was the farmer’s nephew. No inbreeding jokes, please.

Anyway, Tanya, the lovely bride at the wedding, sent me a link to the story behind the giant pig I previously saw on a hillside.

04Sep06 — 5

Kid Beyond

A couple of times in the past I’ve linked to snippets of multi-part vocal harmony [MP3, 770kB] here. Thanks to digital audio workstations like the marvellous Sonar and audio interfaces like this, I can record myself singing the various parts of the arrangement, overlay the harmonies, set them in an artificial space, and create my own Gospel choir. This kind of texture is part of the sound of the music I make with Richard Brincklow.

Unfortunately, without an actual Gospel choir, it’s impossible for me to recreate these harmonies live. Last week I wandered over to the Website of the company that makes part of my recording set-up to see if there might be some way to synthesize the rest of me live. There I watched this video [requires Quicktime] of some of the most amazing beatboxing I’ve ever heard. Stick with it past the murky but brief introduction. Fortunately for my envy levels, Kid Beyond isn’t much of a singer—but that’s a bit like saying Mark Knopfler isn’t much of a singer.

31Aug06 — 1

The Future Of Darfur And The Future Of The Left

Because of a couple of gremlins over at the Euston Manifesto site we’ve accidentally been turning people away from applying for tickets to our meeting next Tuesday evening in London. It’s free and there will be three speakers on the subject: “Darfur: An Urgent Case for Humanitarian Intervention”. Follow the link to email us for tickets.

This is probably also a good time to point out that, what with the end of the holidays, there is a lot more content on the Euston Manifesto Website than there has been for a few weeks, including Social Democratic Futures, a space for essays and extended responses about the future of the Left. If you have something to say about that or about any of the concerns of the manifesto then write in to Alan Johnson whose address is given at the foot of the introduction. And please, people, stop sending us your profound thoughts as horribly formatted Word documents; HTML, plain text, RTF, anything but Microsoft Word!

31Aug06 — 2

The Channel Is Narrow But Deep

On my way to have my teeth checked yesterday morning I was listening to BBC Radio 4. Woman’s Hour was recounting the forgotten history of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The best bit was when one of the experts recited the original French words to the tune of the nursery rhyme and reminded us of how big the difference is between us and them.

Here’s the childishly simple English text of the first verse:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!

And here are the subtitles to the grainy black-and-white French existentialist original:

Oh, Mama! I would tell you
The cause of my torment
Papa wants me to reason
Like an adult,
But I say that sweets
Are worth more than reason.

30Aug06 — 6

How Free Markets For Talent Work, An Explanation For Talentless Market Freeloaders

Over the past couple of weeks there’s been a crop of stories in the media in which employers bleat about the “shortage” of trained scientists and the “shortage” of literate and numerate employees. As with most of these perennial news items—I’m sure most outlets now have ready-made Word templates so their journalists can bang them out over and over again with the minimum effort—I’ve dealt with this one before.

But, just for the sake of the surplus of economically illiterate managers and directors in Britain, here’s an explanation in terms they might grasp. If I go to my Porsche dealership and offer a salesman 500 of my securely-printed pounds sterling in return for a shiny red car then he will laugh at me heartily and move on to deal with another customer. This is not because there is a “shortage” of new Porsche Caymans. This is because I am not offering to pay enough money for one; I am offering enough money for a decade-old Citroen AX.

26Aug06 — 7

Every Cloud

I was sitting in a waiting room yesterday. As always, I couldn’t resist reading one of the women’s reality rags—almost as appealing as discarded copies of the Daily Mail on a Tube train. Real magazine rewarded me for my defying public mockery with this lovely headline, neatly balancing the ghoulishness, shrill optimism, and bathos that characterise the genre:

MY SISTER’S BRUTAL KILLING INSPIRED MY BUSINESS PLAN

17Aug06 — 10

Turning World

I’m smart enough to appreciate just how much smarter than me my friends are. As I always say, talent recognizes genius. Talent should also recognize its own limits. I’ve reached that stage in my life when I’ve had to accept that I won’t be able to do the things I dreamt of doing when I was a kid, but, like a drummer in a heavy metal band, I still get to hang around occasionally with people who are doing them: getting published in Nature, inventing wonderful things, making the World a better place. I’ve now reset my sights on the modest aim of getting paid enough to take beautiful pictures that I can afford to keep a roof over my head. Stay tuned to see that target revised downward in the third quarter of 2007.

This brings me neatly to Blaise. Remember his work on Gutenberg and movable type? He’s married to Adrienne, author of one of the Nature papers. He recently sold out his start-up company to Microsoft and personally collected a large chunk of the eight-figure selling price (that’s eight figures whether you count it in US dollars or sterling). If, like me, you can’t get your head around the practical personal meaning of such sums, at least this video [requires Microsoft Media Player of course] might help you get your head round his latest brilliant creation.

On the subject of making money from photography, posting has been thin here lately because I have been on a small business course. It’s going to get thinner because I therefore have lots to catch up with, including the output of a job where I shot more rolls of film in one day than I’ve ever done before. Sorry, peeps.

15Aug06 — 3

My Kind Of Loser

Al Gore seemed to have been engineered by a mad scientist to become President of the United States of America: born in Washington DC to a former senator, elite education, lots of practice being Vice-President to one of the more distracted actual Presidents, George W. Bush for his opponent, tall, good hair. How could it have gone so wrong?

What’s even stranger is that Gore’s subsequent plans looked on paper to be rather more improbable.
“No, wait, man, hear me out: It won’t just be me on screen for two hours, standing behind a lectern, telling people the World is going to end; there’ll be, like, PowerPoint slides with graphs on and, er, videos of people drowning and starving and shit.”
With a pitch like that they still turned up in their thousands.

His latest solid lemon of an idea? A D-I-Y TV station where even the ads for Sony are made by complete amateurs. How they laughed—just like they laughed when he invented the Internet.

[via Fark]

14Aug06 — 3

Randy The Vampire Slayer

It has long been a given in my life that Aston Villa, the football team I “support”, is mediocre—not completely rubbish, not great, just financially secure and chronically underachieving. The man widely believed to be responsible for this long-running dullness, the club’s chairman “Deadly” Doug Ellis, has now agreed he will “step down” and allow the club to be taken over by an American billionaire with the soap opera name of Randy Lerner, although I won’t believe this until a metaphorical wooden stake has been driven through Ellis’s heart and his metaphorical body has exploded in a crimson bloom of Hollywood pyrotechnics, showering the Holte End in still-glittering particles of metaphorical ash.

The problem now is that there is a real possibility that Villa might become good, good enough for me to pay money to see them play, good enough for me no longer to be able to make jokes at their expense, perhaps even good enough for fans of other sides to hate me. To avoid these unpleasant consequences then, I might have to downgrade my football terrace alert level from “low” to “undead”.

11Aug06 — 3

Sex And Sensitivity

The Wedding Photography Blog was picked up, via Design | asides, to feature in Designers Who Blog, but I didn’t mention it here when it happened because my friend Fudge said the photo of me they used makes me look as if I’m just about to sneeze. Now I’ve got over this, you can see it too.

Damian leaning against a whitewashed brick wall
“A- ah- ah-…”

By recording the warped fabric of the wall behind me, the published banner that incorporates this photo reveals the power of my reality distortion field. This is appropriate now because, as a “designer who blogs”, I’ll have to wear a roll-neck sweater and use a Mac. [I’d better get over to the WedPhotBlog tonight and post something or the ongoing silence will become embarrassing.]

Fudge also txted me to say how sad she was for shameless sex-blogger Girl With A One-Track Mind that she had been outed by the Sunday Times. Shrewdly, GwaOTM has got herself a sympathetic interview in the Guardian today. There, she and the article’s author, Zoe Williams, attack the “new” sexual prudery. This is ironic since that the same section of the same newspaper provoked me to write this about the “mainstreaming” of the Playboy bunny. Here’s a great quote from The Girl herself that’s practically a précis of the last 12-month’s worth of posts in the PooterGeek “Sexual Politics” category:

She is really trenchant on the sorry-arsed, calorie-counting era that the Bridget Jones fixation ushered in. “Without attacking the writer, when I flicked through that originally and saw that there was all this obsession with weight, I just didn’t relate to it. I know so many women focus on that, but it just isn’t a priority for me. And I draw a correlation between being sexually uptight and certain eating disorders. Because, literally, they can’t let anything pass their lips. They can’t enjoy anything, I can’t imagine them enjoying sex. I can’t count the number of friends I’ve heard saying,’I’d rather be underneath in bed because then he won’t see how fat my stomach is.’ That’s the last thing you should be thinking about while you’re having sex!”

“It’s not coincidence that when you look on any shelf in the newsagent, [at] all the women’s magazine covers, everybody is either too fat or too skinny. Jesus, can’t we think of anything else as women? And all the men’s mags are ‘fuck this bird!’ For God’s sake, the guys are sexualising, and the women are having control issues with food. It’s just obscene.”

She laughs in the face of chastity as a virtue. She thinks women’s magazines are touting ideas that are honestly dangerous to young women.

It’s not just over matters of public politics that Lefties these days ally themselves with religious reactionaries; it’s over the personal and sexual, for example in this uncharacteristically Victorian piece by wardytron over at Harry’s Place recently. (It was another couple of illiberal essays by Harry himself that provoked me to write the follow-up to my original Playboy bunny article.) As Jackie Danicki put it when linking to wardy’s contribution:

“Oh, I do like this: A self-described leftist (one I’ve met and liked, as it happens) going on about how ‘we’ should make it difficult to get hold of ‘pornography’. In what bizarre universe is this guy ‘liberal’ while someone like me – who is strongly pro-gay marriage, pro-easy availability of pornography, against the stupid drug war, and stridently anti-authoritarian – is often described as ‘conservative’? If he’s a liberal, I’m a Prada handbag.”

Bobbie Johnson asks a good question about anonymity, but my problem with The Girl is that she has destroyed other people’s sexual privacy without their consent. There’s nothing immoral about enjoying sex, but the unauthorised kiss-and-tell is ethically one of the lowest literary forms.

I admire public figures who, like Ted Hughes, remain quiet in public about what happened in private between them and their former lovers despite others’ spiteful and ignorant speculation and, no doubt, the temptations of cash offers from the papers to reveal all. I hope I would have the strength and dignity to keep my mouth shut if one of my ex-es talked about our personal affairs to the press or wrote about them in a book. This would of course require me to have achieved something that made me worth writing about and then to have had sex with someone, so I should be safe for a while yet.

10Aug06 — 1

Lighten Up!

Over at Drink-Soaked Trots, frustrated holidaymaker Eric objects to the pre-emptive arrest of the alleged terrorists:

“This all seems a counter-productive effort really. I mean actually arresting them before they actually carry out the attack may alienate these oppressed young men and further radicalise them. Not to mention that their civil rights have probably been infringed in the process of the investigation.”

The Freefall Research Page carries useful advice for those who might be inconvenienced by our taking a more sensitive approach to wannabe mass murderers:

“Much will depend on your attitude. Don’t let negative thinking ruin your descent. If you find yourself dwelling morbidly on your discouraging starting point of seven miles up, think of this: Thirty feet is the cutoff for fatality in a fall. That is, most who fall from thirty feet or higher die. Thirty feet! It’s nothing! Pity the poor sod who falls from such a “height.” What kind of planning time does he have?

“Think of the pluses in your situation. For example, although you fall faster and faster for the first fifteen seconds or so, you soon reach “terminal velocity”—the point at which atmospheric drag resists gravity’s acceleration in a perfect standoff. Not only do you stop speeding up, but because the air is thickening as you fall, you actually begin to slow down. With every foot that you drop, you are going slower and slower.

“There’s more. When parachutists focus on a landing zone, sometimes they become so fascinated with it that they forget to pull the ripcord. Since you probably have no ripcord, “target fixation” poses no danger. Count your blessings.”

10Aug06 — 5

Running Rings

Driving back from a job recently, I passed a giant pig carved, crop circle-style, into a hillside planted with cereal. Well, I think I saw it, unless it was fatigue causing me to hallucinate. I hate to put a dent in the excellent Mick Hartley‘s belief that the medium of the crop circle is untainted by monetary considerations, but I think the planet-sized porker was an advertisement for something; I didn’t want to take my eyes off the road for long enough to find out what. Everything else he writes makes sense:

“I posted a while back on surrealism, and how to the English that sort of thing comes naturally: we don’t need to philosophise about it, and write manifestoes. Just so with crop circles. They’re quintessentially English. They embody what much art nowadays can only dream of: they’re creative, inspiring, mysterious, ephemeral, and exist totally beyond commercial interests. It’s possible – and I hesitate here, but it must nevertheless be said – that the makers never even went to Art School.

I’d ascribe one other quality to crop circles that is lacking in most contemporary British art: they are (or were) genuinely subversive. Their delicious Englishness shows up graffiti artist Banksy for what he is: the art business equivalent of a rich white pop singer acting out a fantasy of being a poor black man.

09Aug06 — 14

Superman

Having popped out a couple of twins, Israeli bloggess Gloria Salt is back. Via the comments on her most recent post, I stumbled upon the output of “nationally syndicated Libertarian columnist and author” Vin Suprynowicz. Via his commentary on the war in Lebanon…

It’s typical for those who crave peace to try compromise and appeasement. These rarely work, merely emboldening the aggressor. What works are tanks and really big artillery pieces and stubble-faced G.I.s doing the thankless job of winning the war 50 yards at a time.
…
[W]ars usually do resolve these issues — if one side is allowed to fight to a decisive victory. It’s just that the pink petticoat gang shriek hysterically and threaten to faint dead away when confronted with the reality of how real wars really end.

Someone raises a white flag, and promises to fight no more if only you’ll give the survivors some food and water and stop burning them out of their holes. Many of the conquered women marry the conqueror’s soldiers and move home with them, giving up their native dress and learning to drive Buicks.

…I clicked through to read that Vin has written a book called The Black Arrow:

The portals are everywhere, now. Scanning for weapons, for drugs…No getting out of line.

The people had forgotten how to fight back. There was no one to show them how. Or was there?

When she first saw him he was silhouetted against the moon, a black stallion rearing up to claim all he surveyed.

Her heart slowed in her chest, then. There was a strange keening in her ears that she knew was not of this time or place, but of the other world. It was a vision she was having, a waking dream that would haunt her, drive her in ways unexplained.

In the dark o fthe city’s night, whenever the weak or oppressed cry out in pain or fear, a quiet footfall can be heard on the roof, he owlshadow passeth before the moon. The twang of the bow, the quiet gasp of feathered death … The Black Arrow lives.

The Black Arrow is a tale of sex and violence; freedom and fertility; rebellion and revenge. With lots of rock ‘n roll.

Vin looks like this:

Vin Suprynovicz has a tache
08Aug06 — 8

Po-Mo Pomes

I’m planning a technical how-to about writing lyrics so I’ve been doing some background research. During meals I’ve been swotting up on my villanelles and my anadiplosis and my recurrence from a copy of Jeffrey Wainwright‘s Poetry: The Basics that I picked up at the library. It’s informative and an excellent read.

At the start of one of the chapters he quotes Private Eye magazine’s spoof teenage poet E. J. Thribb’s Lines On The Return To Britain Of Billy Graham:

My view is
Far too complicated
To explain in a
Poem.

That’s not just funny; it’s rather good.

And I’d never seen it before, but George is almost certainly familiar with Edwin Morgan‘s Siesta Of A Hungarian Snake:

s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs ZS zs zs z

07Aug06 — 6

My Old Job Wasn’t Like This

I’m booked to shoot a Sunday wedding on an island in the Thames. Unsurprisingly this address confuses my sat nav. When I met the couple there in advance to case the joint, I travelled on public transport with just one camera. Driving is a different matter. I get within a few miles and then do a lot of noodling around asking for directions. No one has anything nice to say about sat navs.

Eventually I ask a man in a basketball vest and shorts who’s taking his dog for a walk by the river. He insists on getting into my car and guiding me through the Kingston one-way system because there’s no way he can explain how to get about it in words and because he’s going in that direction anyway.

So there’s me and my camera gear, basketball man, and a pit-bull terrier in a hatchback navigating a vehicular maze. He was right: there’s no way he’d have been able to explain this. Basketball man is an ex-DJ. En route we have an interesting conversation about the advantages and disadvantages of Emulator-X sound sampling hardware, and the dog behaves immaculately. I drop my native guides off about a mile from the venue and continue on alone to find a side-street to park in.

Despite my diversions I’m still early (so early in fact that I will later be told that I can’t take the ferry out until the previous wedding party is well out of the way). Even so, as I leave my car, I spy two women in summer dresses getting out of a little convertible. “Are you going to X and Y’s wedding?” I ask.
One of them answers the question with a question: “Yeah, do you know the way?”
I’m on foot again now and recognise the neighbourhood so, ironically, I do.
“Yeah, I’m the photographer. I’ll show you if you help me carry a couple of bags,” I offer with a smile.
“Okay, but only if you give me your number.”

“I’m a scientist” never had that kind of effect on women.

03Aug06 — 2

Mad Choons

Yesterday evening, while I was eating me tea, I had the Cambridge Folk Festival on the radio. Luckily I wasn’t paying too much attention to the introductions so I had no advance warning of Salsa Celtica‘s “signature blend of big-band Latin dance music with Scottish accents”. They’re tight as a Highland midge’s nether parts and utterly mental, but when you’re listening to their music it makes complete sense.

03Aug06 — 11

Dead Trees

“If our readers thought we put climate change on our front pages for the same reason that porn mags put naked women on their front pages, they would stop reading us.”

–Ian Birrell, The Independent

They’ve certainly stopped reading, Ian, though I suspect this is because your rag has become what someone neatly described as “the Daily Mail for people who recycle” and you no longer seem interested in collecting factual information—“news gathering” as some newspapers call it. Putting naked women on the front page might be your last hope.

[Note: this post is not in the “Pseudoscience” category because I think all theories about climate change are pseudoscience, but because the Independent is happy to publish pseudoscience about climate change and many other things.]

02Aug06 — 8

Blonde Biology Babe

So obvious I didn’t think of her, though she probably refuses to self-identify as blonde: Hot Wheels Helena!

Helena poses on a punt
Babes Of Biology No. 3: Miss July
[click to enlarge]
Helena grins
Helena has a PhD in biotechnology and her interests include killer bugs and driving quickly but very, very safely. If she wins Miss Biology 2007 she’d like to travel around the World as an ambassador for her favourite charidee.
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