The idea that there’s Someone Up There watching over us? Or even just that there’s Something that surrounds us and penetrates us, that binds the galaxy together? Sadly, it’s bollocks. But it’s nice to be able to say so in public.
01Feb06 — 5
31Jan06 — 1
Public Sector Search Watch
Today I had a visitor (apparently) from a machine in Brent Town Council’s offices. He/she came looking for “fat young girls”. In connection with which of that London Borough’s administration’s published Objectives do you think the individual responsible was making such an enquiry?:
- Supporting children and young people
- Attain, retain and develop excellent staff
- Increasing household recycling in Brent
31Jan06 — 2
My Life!
As at least one of my Jewish friends will testify, it was during my years living in a North West London flat with a caricature of a Jewish grandmother for a resident landlady (rather than my time in the kosher house on Osney Island) that members of the Global Conspiracy stole my brain and replaced it with a positronic bagel, radio-controlled from their HQ beneath the White House lawn. So you might not find this story of Pashmina’s quite as amusing as I found it. Then again, I laughed like a drain.
31Jan06 — 3
Too Cheap To Check
Apparently it costs too much money for publishers to fact-check the non-fiction they produce:
Last Thursday, publishing-industry veteran Nan Talese was excoriated on television by Oprah Winfrey for publishing James Frey’s 2003 “A Million Little Pieces,” a bestselling memoir about the author’s struggle to overcome drug dependency that he has since admitted is partly fictitious.
But on Friday morning, Ms. Talese walked into 22nd-floor offices in Midtown Manhattan to a standing ovation from her colleagues. Soon afterward, she received a call of support from Peter Olson, chief executive of Bertelsmann AG’s Random House Inc. publishing arm.
“I’ve gotten more than 500 emails over the last few days, and the overwhelming majority have been supportive,” says Ms. Talese whose imprint, Nan A. Talese, is part of Random House’s Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group.
Indeed, many members of the publishing industry have rallied around Ms. Talese and Random House, saying that they would have published “A Million Little Pieces” as well and could have been duped just as easily. Unlike journalists, publishers have never seen it as their purview to verify that the information in nonfiction books is true. Editors and publishers say the profit-margins in publishing don’t allow for hiring fact-checkers. Instead, they rely on authors to be honest, and on their legal staffs to avoid libels suits. “An author brings a manuscript saying it represents the truth, and that relationship is one of trust,” says Ms. Talese.
One of the best things about ‘Blogging is that it demonstrates over and over again that effective debunking of lies and the lying liars that tell them usually takes a skeptical outlook and about five minutes’ use of Google. (There’s also, of course, the requirement for modest linguistic competence and tech-savvy, but let’s not get too ambitious too soon on behalf of the metropolitan media in-crowd.) Perhaps the biggest problem many editors have is that they are happy to believe any old crap that will make them money or fit their pre-sketched world-view. Here’s a link to the Daily Ablution.
Other nonfiction authors say the James Frey incident illustrates that publishers in general are devoting far more resources to marketing books than editing them. “There’s less editorial process now, dramatically, compared to 25 years ago,” says David Halberstam, author of “The Best and the Brightest” and numerous other titles. “All the money goes into marketing to get books onto television.” He says that publishers’ desire to get authors onto broadcasts like Ms. Winfrey’s has even changed the type of book that publishers want. “A fiction writer can’t do that, but a memoirist can,” he says.
“A Million Little Pieces,” which was Oprah Winfrey’s book club selection for October, 2005, has more than three million copies in print in North America. After the book’s veracity was challenged earlier this month, it went back onto hardcover best-seller lists and continues among the top best-selling paperbacks in most retail outlets.
Mr. Frey said on the “Larry King Live” that he and his agent initially shopped “A Million Little Pieces” to other publishers as a novel and were turned down. In an interview, Ms. Talese said that she was never told that the book had been offered originally as fiction.
Richard Pine, a partner in the New York literary agency InkWell Management LLC, said that presenting the book as fiction to one publisher and nonfiction as another is “highly questionable ethics.”
[via Slashdot]
30Jan06 — 7
‘Blogger Chokes To Death On Self-Pity
“Rebound congestion”: it’s another of those bland bits of medical jargon, like “cerebral contusion”, that give no hint of the actual discomfort accompanying their referents. “Rebound congestion”—roll it around your mouth and then imagine waking up from a nightmare of smothering only to find that you really are suffocating and that your last sight on this earth will be a wall full of Post-It notes itemizing uncompleted household chores, and that you will die, not in the loving arms of the inexplicably beautiful offspring of a former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, but in the limp embrace of your Zippy hot water bottle cover.
Nigella
Zippy
I’ve (again!) had a cold recently and I foolishly chose to try to suppress its symptoms for an evening with a “powerful decongestant”. This is something I normally avoid, precisely because of rebound congestion: the extreme and chronic expansion of nasal linings that follows the withdrawal of said decongestant. Not since the last time I broke my nose and spent a fortnight pulling red-black clot casts of the inner surfaces of my nasopharynx out of my face have I experienced such a comprehensive feeling of being bunged up.
Yes, girls, I am a whiny boy with a minor, self-limiting viral infection of the upper respiratory tract.
30Jan06 — 2
Lost Link
A ‘Blog that links to PooterGeek recently published a post about the way commenting on other people’s ‘Blogs always goes horribly wrong and drew an amusing parallel with an everlasting ice-skating disaster. I was going to link to it today, but even my Jedi googling powers have failed me. Can anyone help?
UPDATE: Rob’s found it.
29Jan06 — 2
Lazy Hackwork Continues To Attract Payment
I’ve written before here about how Armando Unfunnucci‘s consistent inability to raise a laugh with his “humorous” Guardian column used to bond me with complete strangers on the Tube. Now he’s returned, replacing decaying homophobic bore Richard Ingrams on the back of the main section of The Observer. Today his closing flourish of wit was to invent a public statement by Menzies Campbell denying that he is or has ever been a Liberal Democrat.
The possibility of a joke along these lines flitted across my mind for about fifteen nanoseconds last week—just long enough for the shame that I had allowed something so weak and obvious to crawl its benighted way out of my subconscious to provoke nausea. Reading Iannucci’s version of such a terrible gag, I was overwhelmed by mirth in a way I hadn’t experienced since the day last summer when I collected a parking ticket outside a wake.
28Jan06 — 12
The American Disease
I would happily sign the Economist‘s editorial today on US healthcare myself (but for that paper’s irritating misuse of the word “America”). Many ‘Bloggers with an unthinking fetish for “market solutions” would do well to give it and the associated special report a scan:
[N]owhere has a bigger health problem than America. Soaring medical bills are squeezing wages, swelling the ranks of the uninsured and pushing huge firms and perhaps even the government towards bankruptcy.
…
America’s health system is unlike any other. The United States spends 16% of its GDP on health, around twice the rich-country average, equivalent to $6,280 for every American each year. Yet it is the only rich country that does not guarantee universal health coverage.
…
In the longer term, America, like this adamantly pro-market newspaper, may have no choice other than to accept a more overtly European-style system.
To quote this week’s Normblog profile:
What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > That instincts or feelings trump facts. They don’t—get over it.
28Jan06 — 12
Anti-Social Behaviour: Theory And Fieldwork
Yesterday I had an excellent evening of argument. I spent it contending that, since our emergence, we human beings have been, for plausible biological reasons, fundamentally aggressive and suspicious of visibly different members of our own species. In reply it was argued that our behaviour towards others has been characterised by altruistic tendencies and trade. I contended that our mutual altruism varies in proportion to our genetic relatedness and that you only trade once you have a surplus—and humans spent large chunks of their prehistory on the edge of starvation (which is, incidentally, why so many of us are now fat). As often, I spent a lot of the evening being accused of taking a dim view of humanity. This is true, but it doesn’t mean I’m pessimistic about the future of Homo sapiens or, indeed, wrong. One interesting attack on my position came from someone who had spent a long time observing animal (especially baboon) behaviour: it doesn’t make biological sense for animals, however aggressive, to bother with actual fighting; males competing for territory, mates, or status just wave their antlers/claws/penises at each other and the one with the smaller weaponry backs off, thereby sparing a lot of bloody expense. So, even if we were aggressive in our distant past, it probably didn’t lead to as much bloodshed as I or 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined.
As if to make our points for us, as I was walking from the station to my home at about one in the morning quietly minding my own business, one of two pissed chancers took a lunge at me. I made a reflexive lunge back and turned to face him, not noticing the third member of the gang, trailing behind them. “Wanna make something of it?!” Aggressor Number One shouted from a safe distance. “Yeah.” Naturally he retreated. At that point, Knuckle-Scraper Number Three readied himself to have a go too. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, squared up to him, and greeted him with a cheerily dismissive “Fuck you.” He also backed down and scuttled off to join his mates. Once they were out of range my original wannabe attacker jeered, rather more quietly, “Suck my big white dick, you Argentinian bastard”—thereby illustrating for students of English the differences between “moron” and “oxymoron”, and between “precision” and “accuracy”, and showing that, for bullies, three-against-one isn’t safe enough.
Shave your head, join a gym, stand your ground. It’s worth it just to see the chav runts scatter.
(I think this outcome means I now have foraging rights over another two blocks of Brighton & Hove.)
27Jan06 — 8
Dancing About Architecture
To celebrate my (late) discovery earlier in the week of the Dr Who theme remix site I offer you a chance to participate in PooterGeek’s toughest end-of-the-week challenge yet: The Instrumental Transliteration Tournament. Inspired by the Whovian musicians’ model I give you three examples:
Dr Who
EEEEEeeeeeeaouuuuw
WHOO-eee-OOO [bumbly-bum, bumbly-bum, bumbly-bum]
WHOO-eee-OOO [bumbly-bum, bumbly-bum, bumbly-bum]
Nee-naw nee-naw
Nee-na Naw
Bumbly-bum, bumbly-bum, bumbly-bum, bumbly-bum
The Twilight Zone
[as transliterated by DJ John Peel]
Mingle-mangle
Mingle-mangle [bwwarrr]
Mingle-mangle
Mingle-mangle [bwwarrr]
The Archers
[as transliterated by comedian Billy Connolly]
Tumpty tumpty tumpty tum
Tumpty tumpty tum, tum
Tumpty tumpty tumpty tum
Tumpty tiddley tum
Beethoven’s Fifth
[as transliterated by everyone]
da da da DUM
[see also this discussion]
Sadly, I suspect that wraps it up for easily recognisable conversions. But, if you know better, now is your chance to bask in global admiration.
By the way, this sampled orchestral version [MP3 3.3MB] of the Dr Who theme is rather swish.
26Jan06 — 4
Scandalum Magnatum
GEORGE GORRAWAY MP: Yes, m’lud. That is indeed myself, naked before one of the sons of the Rightful Ruler of that noble yet tragically violated Arab nation, attempting to excite his flaccid member by gently stroking its tip with my moustache whiskers, whilst simultaneously drowning two screaming Kurdish orphan children below the surface of the crude oil filling the inflatable garden pool in which I am kneeling. But the comedy antlers that appear to be attached to my head in that photograph were added later by means of digital manipulation with a computer software such as Photoshop!
ROLAND BUTTOCK QC: Members of the jury, at this point I would like you to pay close attention to Exhibit F: one pair of comedy antlers, festooned with decoratively folded Quality Street™ chocolate wrappers. Mr Gorraway, have you ever seen these antlers before today?
GEORGE GORRAWAY MP: I have not, sir.
ROLAND BUTTOCK QC: Have you ever worn these antlers?
GEORGE GORRAWAY MP: I have not, sir.
ROLAND BUTTOCK QC: I realise that this may seem an unusual and undignified thing to require of you in full view of this court, but could I ask you, Mr Gorraway, to place these comedy antlers upon your head?
GEORGE GORRAWAY MP: If it pleases the court, m’lud, I will do my best.
[THE CLERK hands the antlers to GORRAWAY. GORRAWAY perches them on his head. Within in seconds, however, they begin to slide off.]
ROLAND BUTTOCK QC: Members of the jury, as I am sure you can see, the addition of such accessories to the fine, dare I say “gorgeous”, brow of the Right Honourable gentleman immediately robs him of a vital fraction of the seriousness and, dare I say, “respect” with which we, as members of the public, would normally credit him.
It is clear that by attempting to associate Mr Gorraway with such headgear, the editorial staff of the Torygraph newspaper sought to diminish Mr Gorraway’s stature, both within his constituency, where he does so much important work for the local community; and in the wider world, where he is so prominent a statesman.
As you cannot fail to have noticed, the antlers do not fit.
[There are gasps in the court.]
GEORDIE VOICEOVER: It looks like George might have yet again completed his challenge successfully.
ROLAND BUTTOCK QC: If the antlers do not fit, you must acquit! I mean, in the face of such a compelling demonstration of the falsity of this once-trusted newspaper’s reports, I contend that you have no choice but to find against The Torygraph and for the plaintiff, Mr Gorraway.
No further questions, m’lud.
26Jan06 — 2
Out Of The Valley Of The Slackers
The number of visitors to PooterGeek is tightly coupled to the number of you sitting bored at your work computers. Christmas Day is the annual low-point for traffic here, when the score dips below 200 unique visits and 300 page views in a day. As the holiday unwinds the stats climb gradually back up to normal (with notches for weekends and outages, e.g. 14Jan06–15Jan06):
This time the greater traffic has also increased the level of spam so I’ve upgraded Spam Karma, the software that keeps it (mostly) at bay. Please let me know if you have any trouble adding your comments, or if you notice dodgy submissions about Tamiflu and online casinos that I haven’t spotted.
26Jan06 — 6
We Must Be Told The Truth About Primitive Knob Jokes
All English comprehensive school desks must by law be engraved, somewhere on their surfaces, with stylized representations of human primary or secondary sexual organs. Why is it whenever some new prehistoric cave art is uncovered it’s always men with spears pursuing unfortunate savannah ungulates? Why do they never find badly-drawn pictures of genitals or breasts on the walls, even though, for example, early Britons were happy to carve enormous erections on hillsides?
Here’s a picture of a cloud.
26Jan06 — 3
Being There
Responding to the unusually early death of actor Chris Penn, Squander Two writes about acting—and explains much of my problem with (British) theatre:
If only Sean Penn were anywhere near as talented as his brother, his films wouldn’t be so irritatingly tedious. Cintra Wilson’s right: truly great acting is something you don’t even notice. That’s the whole point. The moment you notice the acting, the acting has failed. That’s something Sean Penn has never understood. Chris was a master.
(While we’re on the subject, Tom Cruise blew Dustin Hoffman off the screen in Rain Man. Same goes for Ethan Hawke, Denzel Washington, and Training Day.)
25Jan06 — 5
Know Thine Enemy
I was going to post the following when it first appeared on Jonathan Derbyshire’s ‘Blog. Norm’s post today reminded me that I hadn’t.
Derbyshire makes a point that even militant atheists should concede:
As Jeremy Waldron makes clear in his remarkable book God, Locke, and Equality, the principle of human equality articulated in the Second Treatise, which he says with good reason is just about the best worked-out "theory of basic equality … we have in the canon of political philosophy", is an axiom of theology. It is, says Waldron, "the most important truth about God’s way with the world in regard to the social and political implications of His creation of the human person". (Nietzsche thought the same, incidentally, which is why he was sceptical of the principle of equality, and of the related notions of pity and compassion.)
Now, of course, the challenge that Locke and Waldron set us is whether secular sense can be made of the principle of equality and of the idea that each human life is inalienably precious … [I]t is simply ahistorical to deny that our (liberal) conceptions of equality and human dignity have Christian antecedents.
And Christianity might have had a thing or two to do with the emergence of proper science as well.
(These kinds of argument are also reminders to believers that there are at least as many species of skeptics as there are Christians. For example, Norm belongs to the United Polite Front Of Atheism; Ophelia Benson and Richard Dawkins do not. But even Dawkins is more polite about fundamentalists than fundamentalists are about everyone who disagrees with them. Norm is also a glass-half-full atheist; my glass is leaking. On average, atheism makes you unhappier than you ought to be and, ironically, (evolutionary) biological science provides some support for this view. I am convinced that humans are wired to believe. Contrary to the popular misquotation, when you stop believing in God you stop believing in all sorts of things. Sometimes I have to make a special effort of concentration just to keep the electrons in my left arm from dematerializing.)
25Jan06 — 0
70s Revival Continues
I overheard two of the staff in Maplin today complaining that they had had to change the price on some piece of consumer electronics twice in one day. We live in the noughties now so both changes were decreases.
A Chinese factory employee probably figured out some way to make ten of of whatever gadget it was in the time it used to take her to make six. Then, a few minutes after this productivity increase had rippled down the supply chain, her supervisor gave her a new widget stamper that could stamp out two widgets at a time instead of one. Two weeks later a British mobile phone shop employee could use the hypothetical value of his Barratt home on the edge of Brighton & Hove to secure, at a very reasonable Annual Percentage Rate, a loan that now enabled him to buy three-and-half pairs of MP3-playing sunglasses instead of two. By the time his house has been repossessed he’ll be able to buy ten pairs (that also play videos) for the same price—hypothetically.
25Jan06 — 0
Notable
Lorretine has a Moleskine fetish.
25Jan06 — 6
Beware!
Yesterday evening, two random girls from Lodz phoned me up up to teach me Polish. [Hello, Alice and Monika.] Yes, about three years after everyone else, I now have Skype. But the Linux client doesn’t work properly for me (surprise surprise) so you’ll have to catch me on one of those rare occasions when I’m running Windows or email me in advance to invite me over to the Dark Side so that I can talk to you.
The Windows version works beautifully though. My first tip to anyone who hasn’t yet tried this modern telecommunications marvel is: don’t leave it on in “Skype Me” mode with your profile showing or you will immediately be contacted by Central European females who are probably young enough to be your daughter—and as a result you’ll never be permitted to take up a teaching job in the UK.
For some of the people reading this that’s not going to be a very effective deterrent, is it?
24Jan06 — 3
Ignoring A Stamping Child
I don’t agree with a lot of what she says, but I think Mary Madigan at Exit Zero has a very interesting angle on Iran:
What should we do about Iran? We should do nothing.
Seriously. When a belligerent little foaming-at-the-mouth nation shouts about nukes, they expect us to pay attention to them. This encourages other belligerent little foaming-at-the-mouth nations to do the same. So let’s not.
Imagine no reaction from the US; no attempts to appease Ahmadinejad; no threats to bomb, no threats of invasion, no sanctions. Maybe we can give them a gallic shrug. After all, Chirac is already doing the job of jumping up and down and shouting, a nice role reversal.
Iran’s bellowing doesn’t even deserve a shrug. We’ve been playing nuclear poker for more than half a century and we’ve walked away with the pot every time.
24Jan06 — 4
Listening For A Calling
I’ve cited one of Paul Graham’s long essays before. Even when I disagree with them they are brilliant and deceptively simple. This one isn’t about being a nerd; it should be of interest to everyone (who is lucky enough to be well educated and living in the comfortable West). It’s about finding a job you love. Read it all. Here’s a choice snippet:
A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell “Don’t do it!” (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it.
Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
23Jan06 — 13
Spastic Wog
Via Tim comes this fun piece by Jeremy Clarkson:
Wog. Spastic. Queer. Nigger. Dwarf. Cripple. Fatty. Gimp. Paki. Mick. Mong. Poof. Coon. Gyppo. You can’t really use these words any more and yet, strangely, it is perfectly acceptable for those in the travel and hotel industries to pepper their conversation with the word “beverage”.
There are several twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. And the biblically awful “gift”. I also have a biological aversion to the use of “home” instead of “house”. So if you were to ask me round to “your home for a nourishing bowl of pasta” I would almost certainly be sick on you.
But the worst word. The worst noise. The screech of Flo-Jo’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re hungover, is “beverage”.
I have only one quibble: the worst word in the English language is not “beverage” but “executive”. If any product or service comes prefixed by the word “Executive” I will not pay for it on principle. Not only is it calculated to appeal to a sort of sad 80s “aspirationalism”—“the board’s with me; the bank’s with me; I’m going it alone”—the word is a self-embedded lie. Today an “executive” is someone who does not execute. By the time you have been promoted to such a level, you no longer do anything. Worse, only in football are the people who do do something (because they are talented enough to do it) paid more than the executives who tell them to do it (because they can no longer do it themselves).
David Hepworth has a telling piece in today’s Guardian that describes some related workplace phenomena:
For the benefit of readers not working in the magazine industry, the masthead is the page which carries the names of a title’s staff and their job titles, although it means something different in newspapers. This advertisement of prestige is not provided in other media and in recent years it has grown in direct proportion to the ego involved. In old-school titles the masthead was often hidden away somewhere near the crossword.
In modern fashion magazines, on the other hand, it can occupy more than a page, an indication of how important it is to the staff. It’s unique for being: a) written by the editor; b) examined closely and regularly by the mothers of staff; c) a telling indicator of a magazine’s life stage.
It starts with the editor, which is fair enough. They probably wrote it. The habit of putting the editor’s PA next is an importation from the status-obsessed world of women’s magazines and sends out the message that the second most important person around here is the one who answers my phone.
Clustering around the top will be managing editors and executive editors. How they got there we never know but the thing they have in common is that they used to be editors and can read a budget. There are deputy editors, only distinguished from assistant editors by the fact that they arrived first.
There are creative directors, too important to be mere art directors who are too important to be mere design editors, who lord it over one young man with a Hoxton fin and a hangover who does most of the actual layout.
23Jan06 — 1
Watch Out, Keef
I may have given the impression during the existence of this ‘Blog that I am something of a nerd, but I’m telling you, people: you haven’t lived until you’ve pulled up outside the best hotel in town in a written-off car with the front bumper howling as it scrapes on one of the tyres; handed over the keys for a valet to park it; and set off for an evening at a boxing match with two hot chicks—a blonde on one side and a brunette on the other, naturally—followed by drinks until the small hours.
Anyway. No one was hurt; I’m back home in one piece; and my car is a cube. If anyone’s looking to sell a Lotus Elise, I think my time has come. I never went looking for a mid-life crisis, but since one has been forced upon me by the government (and underwritten by your taxes) I might as well go with it and share its pleasures with you all. I’d already signed up for the hair loss and the tortured reflection upon my role as a man in society today, but I intend to substitute Abs Of Steel for the beergut and a menagerie of computers and musical instruments for the family of mystified dependants. There is also an ongoing vacancy for the position of my PA.
Because I have a lot of things to sort out today, and I will be doing them all on foot, there’ll be nothing new here until this evening. Catching up, I notice that Norm has been on excellent form this weekend. This post in particular is a delightful attack on a widespread strain of idiocy, with a great punchline. And the Nick Cohen observation he draws attention to matches exactly something I was saying over my little weekend, er, break to someone who writes for one of the finest publications on the planet. It is far, far more depressing to see one of your friends adopt the language of pseudo-scholarship than it is to see them get Jesus. At least you can argue with an evangelical Christian.
20Jan06 — 2
Philip Mountbatten: Comedy God
You must pay attention to the adverts on BBC Radio 4 over the next few days. They are running one that sets a new standard in bathos—and proves that at least one stratum of society is impervious to the “reality” media’s will-to-emote. It starts with a dramatic re-enactment of the last communications from the radio operator of a stricken warplane unable to land on its parent aircraft carrier. We then hear a noise which I presume is the the plane plunging into the sea. The voiceover announces with breathless urgency:
“Radio 4 re-introduces the Duke of Edinburgh to the airman he helped to save during the war.”
There is a pause before we hear the voice of The Queen’s Consort himself, sounding exactly like he’s greeting the third-time winner of the Biggest Potato competition at Balmoral Village Fete:
“Helleau. Vereh nice to see you agehn.”
20Jan06 — 5
What Kind Of A “Spam Filter” Have I Got Here?
Yesterday evening, the normally pretty rigorous Spam Karma allowed a comment to be posted to PooterGeek that purported to be written by someone going by the name of “penis enlargement”.
19Jan06 — 5
On Seeing And Not Being Seen
Film continues to go the way of vinyl [big image]. Just days after I told you lot that I had bought another Minolta film camera, Konica Minolta announces that it will leave the camera business all together.
The camera I take with me everywhere is one of the smallest 35mm SLR cameras Minolta made. Male reviewers both raved and ranted about it. It’s amazingly flexible, dirt cheap, and has a solid metal body; but the controls aren’t suited to big hands. I keep it in a little rucksack that my sister bought me. With fast film in it I can take street shots like this one without being noticed, but, as I was rambling to a friend on the phone the other day, the real masters of this kind of photography go completely retro and use rangefinder cameras, of which the most famous are those made by Leica. They aren’t just small and light; they’re amazingly quiet. But you really need to know your stuff to handle one of them with confidence. There are also photographers who are skeptical about the claimed advantages of going old-time.
The guys on this site, however, do know their stuff and do believe the hype. They make their case with some lovely galleries of magical images they capture with their anachronistic tools. This, for example, is a beauty, but some of my other favourites [note that links might be slow to respond] are here, here, here, here [Not Safe For Work], here, here, here [Not Safe For Pete Townsend], here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
I went looking for 1600ASA black-and-white film in the “Photographic” section of eBay today, and my search pulled in twelve hits. One of them was film for sale. One was a collection of “1600 Amateur Girlfriend/Wife” photos on CD.
18Jan06 — 14
The Good, The Bad… And, Er, That’s It
As part of a once-in-a-lifetime, two-part breaking of my PooterGeek “No ‘Bloggers’ Memes” rule I answer Eric‘s challenge:
“I nominate Normblog and Pootergeek to list two films they like that most people don’t…”
but I do so in my own way:
Independence Day fails on almost every level as a work of serious cinema; but as a continuously compelling parody of disaster movies it towers like an Olympic high-jumper in a creche—yea, higher even toward the heavens than Airplane!. This is, remember, a film that begins with REM’s It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) playing in the background and contains egregiously crude examples of almost every major minority stereotype known to mainstream Hollywood: the eccentric Jewish scientist; the screamingly camp homosexual; the swaggering, wisecracking black action hero; the drunken trailer-trash alien abductee; the noble family dog, the stripper with a heart of gold; even the long-believed-dead, stiff-upper-lip, what-ho! English fighter pilot and stripey-shirt wearing member of la Résistance. (I think at some point in the global holocaust someone religious regains his long lost faith as well.) But it manages to cram in some of the most audacious scenes of large-scale destruction ever rendered, one of the best chase sequences of all time, and a few excellent and unarguably intentional jokes.
The film everyone else thinks is good but I think is rubbish is The Piano. It’s pretty to look at, but the script is Mills & Boon with pretensions. It’s soft porn for nice girls who think God will never let them have their own Aga if they dare to take the sexual initiative: “Ooh, only by reluctantly allowing the wild native man to ravish me throbbingly will I be able to continue my music lessons!” The whole movie is, people, a tragic waste of talent.
Once I have filled in some remaining blanks I will attempt Norm’s “Seven by Seven“.
18Jan06 — 0
Japanese Zoo Breeds Pathetic Snake
TOKYO — Gohan and Aochan make strange bedfellows: one’s a 3.5-inch dwarf hamster; the other is a four-foot rat snake. Zookeepers at Tokyo’s Mutsugoro Okoku zoo presented the hamster — whose name means “meal” in Japanese — to Aochan as a tasty morsel in October, after the snake refused to eat frozen mice.
But instead of indulging, Aochan decided to make friends with the furry rodent, according to keeper Kazuya Yamamoto. The pair have shared a cage since.
Reports that the reptile’s cardboard dwelling had previously been lined with old copies of The Independent are yet to be confirmed.
18Jan06 — 2
The Ubiquitous Sweaterman!
Have you ever had that experience when you’re quietly browsing a public library and you (foolishly) strike up a conversation about one of the books on display with one of the other regulars—a slightly intense-looking middle-aged man in a sweater—and you gradually realise you are engaging with someone from the other side of the reality/fantasy interface?
Oh, it’ll start innocently enough:
[points at copy of The Magus] “It’s really not his best, is it? But it does seem to be very popular with a certain type of reader. Every time I got irritated with it I took a disgraceful pleasure in the thought that hordes of obsessives wrote to him, demanding to know its ‘true meaning’.”
Mr Sweater will latch his staring eyes onto yours with the desperate gratitude of a man who has spent a decade being avoided by other human beings. Then he is off:
“It’s about the manipulation of perceptions. It’s about the veil of so-called experience, the veil They draw across our eyes. Life isn’t as simple as it looks on the surface, you know. Everything we read and watch is manipulated in the interests of the Eurocrats and the military-industrial complex…”
And at that moment you wish you were talking to a Bob Dylan otaku about the rumours of post-production overdubs on the notorious Autumn ’05 Ohio concert so-called bootleg.
Anyway, here’s an interview with Robert Fisk:
AB: Why has the US invaded Iraq? Is it for oil?
RF: Well, if the national product of Iraq was asparagus, I don’t think we’d be there, would we? So oil is part of it. But it’s also about power. Last year I was on Highway 8 investigating the murder of a Red Cross worker. As I was talking to an Iraqi family, the road started to vibrate and we could see this huge infantry division coming towards us. Apache helicopters hovered overhead a convoy of m1a1 Abrams tanks, armored vehicles, lorry after lorry with concrete and thousands and thousands of troops, all wearing shades, rifles pointing out the side like porcupines. I sat down on the side of the road in the muck with this family and tried to understand what it meant. Four and a half, five hours later, the convoy was still passing by.
It dawned on me that 2,000 years ago, a little to the west, I would have been sitting on the road watching a Roman legion pass, feeling the vibrations of the centurions’ feet. And I realized that if you are the only superpower, like America, you need to project power. They’re essentially saying, “We will march over the lands of Sumeria and Mesopotamia, and we will go there because we can.“
It’s worth comparing the collected content of his answers with the tribute to the great man that I wrote last year.
17Jan06 — 1
Gratuitous Cuteness
She’s only three years old and he’s only three months, but you can tell from one look in his eyes that a terrible realisation is already dawning on Sam: like his uncle, he will become known as the “The One Whose Sister Is A Model”.
[click to enlarge]
17Jan06 — 2
Birmingham School Of Art School
Excuse me, sir?
Yes?
I’m here for the life drawing class.
Blimey. No one else is.
Yes, I noticed that. Are we going to start anyway, sir?
Why are you calling me “Sir”?
You are the life drawing teacher, aren’t you?
I prefer to think of myself as an creative facilitator, but, technically, I am, yes. Why don’t you call me “Jez” like everyone else? Or “bastard”, like Pierre does?
Pierre?
Well, his real name’s Nigel, but since he formed Sartre’s Tears he’s been insisting that everyone calls him “Pierre”.
Are we going to start drawing soon?
Well, you can if you want, but wouldn’t you rather be down the corridor taking advantage of the screen-printing equipment to design the flyer for your first shambolic live gig in a basement club supporting Septic Nipple?
Sorry?
Or maybe at some hip inner-city hairdressers getting half of your head shaved? Your hair’s pretty boring.
What’s my hair got to do with anything? I came here to learn to be an artist.
Don’t you mean “artiste”? [strikes pose, adopts yodelling Mockney accent:] “It’s a godawful small affair! / To the girl with the mousey hair…”
Stop it! Stop it! I don’t want to be a singer in a band! I just want to do commercial illustration.
Dreary-Snooze McYawn! Where’s your ambition, square-boy? With the right image and half a dozen chords you could conquer the World. One day you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile / And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife!
I just want to study hard, go home to eat my tea and read a book, and then, when I graduate, get a steady job drawing happy couples embracing each other in front of designer-furnished riverside apartments. I don’t want to clock-watch for six hours then put on eyeliner and run off into the town centre with a Penguin Modern Classic sticking out of my pocket, to drink absinthe and plan “multimedia happenings”.
[curls lip] T’ain’t no big thing / To wait for the bell to ring!
Gah! [storms out]
I love the sound of you walking away, you walking away / I love the sound of you walking away, walking away, hey, hey!
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