16Jan06 — 1

Time For A Petition?

I was recording in Richard’s little studio the other day and he showed me some scenes from a short film he’s doing the music for. (His initial ideas sound excellent and the short not only looks good, but stars Someone Famous Off Telly.) Populated by children’s toys as his and Kate’s home is, I had to say the following to Rich over lunch:

“If you ever have to do a horror movie, promise me you won’t use a tune played by a child’s music box in the soundtrack.”

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking was received.

16Jan06 — 4

Yes And No, Jackie

Jackie is of course right to be disgusted with Alastair Campbell admitting that both he and the Prime Minister are clueless about computers. She is wrong to make any connection between this and their being employees of the state. Many senior managers in large UK organisations, both public and private sector, are incompetent because once their employers exceed a certain size their own performance becomes so uncoupled from the performance of their institutions that they might as well spend all day playing golf. Imagine someone at a large British company saying this sort of thing to one of its staff:

Yes, David, you and I both went to Durham together, you are as fluent in Managerese as Gavin in Personnel, you always pay your round when you get pissed with us on conference trips, and I very much appreciate the way you covered for me with my wife when the embarrassing business with Lesley blew up, so, normally, you’d be a shoo-in for a place on the board. Sadly, however, your IT skills aren’t up to snuff.

It is, as usual, about snobbery. Knowing how to use IT might result in the same kind of step up in personal productivity that learning to touch-type would, but typing’s for girls and computers are for nerds. Even hardcore, abstract, computational theory is narg* work. (“CompSci” is a still a term of abuse at Cambridge University.) Advancement is about “leadership”—and anything else we on the remuneration committee can think of that’s beyond objective measurement.

There’s also a connection between that kind of attitude and the most successful manufacturing centres in Britain being run by overseas management, but the US, for example, has its own problems. There’s a reason why anyone who’s worked in an American office recognizes the computer-illiterate Pointy-Haired Boss.

*[Not A Real Gentleman]

12Jan06 — 6

The Children Of Barney

He’s not badly behaved; he’s just got an oddly coloured chakra:

Indigo children were first described in the 1970’s by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.

In “The Indigo Children,” Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.

[thanks to Claire]

10Jan06 — 0

But What Do You Do All Day?

Sorry about the thin posting so far this week. I’ve been busy.

Surprisingly, considering it covers those strange games Americans play, there are items in The Onion’s sports review of 2005 that even Brits can find funny. I missed their “World’s Emotionally Strongest Man” report when it first appeared last September:

During the show’s premiere, a two-hour special titled “Manhattan Blowout,” competitors put their bodies, minds, and spirits to the test in events ranging from the brutal grind of “Enduring Quietly As She Takes Her Hard Day At Work Out On You,” to the agility-straining “Throwing A Last-Minute Surprise Party For A Despised Mother-In-Law,” to the ultimate combination of strength and finesse, “Helping Her Over The Death Of The Cat That Always Hated You.”

and check out this cool piece of ‘Shopping.

07Jan06 — 2

Julius Ginga

GINGA

I could be well moved, if I were as you:
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:
But I am constant as the Commons Bar,
Of whose true-fix’d refreshing quality
There is no fellow among vintners.
The streets are linéd with unnumber’d pubs,
They are all fine and every one doth serve,
But there’s but one in all doth serve me best:
So in the world; ’tis furnish’d well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion: and that I am he,
Let me a little show it, even in this;
That I was constant liquor should be banish’d,
And constant do remain to keep it so.

MINGA

Oh Ginga!

GINGA

Hence! Wilt thou lift up Prescott?

DAVIES

Great Ginga!

GINGA

Doth not Vinceus bootless kneel?

TEATHA

Speak, hands for me!

TEATHA first, then the other conspirators and VINCEUS wave small white plastic knives at GINGA in a vaguely threatening way. When GINGA looks down to see what they are doing they hide the disposable utensils sheepishly, but VINCEUS is a bit slow.

GINGA

Et tu, Vinceus! Then home, Ginga, to talk
With Her Indoors over a pint—or twelve.

Exit GINGA to spend the more of the weekend with his family.

06Jan06 — 1

Running It Up The Flagpole To See If Anyone Salutes

Okay, people. I’ve got a new business model here. It’s very Web 2.0. It’s very post-marketing. Here’s how it goes: “entrepreneurs” who’ve set up per-pixel advertising Websites pay me money per letter to add their comments to the others from all the other dollar-millionaire wannabes who’ve already left theirs behind on my Alex Tew posts. I think it’s got legs.

06Jan06 — 1

Fiction/Truth Distinction In Danger

I’d just like to point out that my preceding post was in no way a fishing operation, intended to elicit appeals from “fans”; I just sat down at the keyboard at midnight with the radio on and really couldn’t think of anything weirder than the actual news. In fact, earlier in the week I came up with what I thought were two outrageous scenarios to play with and realised that one of them had already happened.

Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones are too old to get into their own gigs.

06Jan06 — 9

Goodnight All

I do a spoof in-prison Saddam Hussein custard endorsement and within days the Guardian is reporting that Saddam’s tailor can’t keep up with the demand for his courtroom “look”. I write a fake Guardian article complaining about better educated students graduating to vote Tory and the same newspaper follows it up by reporting on hardening attitudes towards welfare amongst graduates.

The BBC Radio 4 Midnight News has just led with the revelation that Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy has been drinking too much, fairly closely followed by the appearance of George Galloway on Celebrity Big Brother.

I don’t know if there’s anywhere left for me to go with this satire thing. The world has gone DVD crazy and my Website is a Betamax cassette factory. It could finally be time for me to buy a television set and retire from ‘Blogging.

05Jan06 — 2

David Speaks

A lot of people have accused you of being a sort of “Blair-lite”. How would you respond to that? Apart from anything else, how do you feel about Mr Blair as a person?

Yah, well, y’know Tony was really rather good about my taking over the Conservative Party. He sent me a congratulatory letter and even gave me a charming present: a pot plant thing. Bit like a marrow. Said it had a lovely scent so it would be nice to have in my bedroom.

And, y’know, since it’s been growing in there I feel like a new man. At least that’s what my wife says. [Laughs stiffly.] I don’t find myself worrying so much about decisions any more. I think what we have in Britain and in the Party now is a kind of collective—communitarian if you will—way of thinking. Almost like we’re tuning into the voters’ shared mind. And I like what I’m hearing. Determined and bold. Caring, but resolute. Hope for our children. A New Conservative Party for a new century. Forward not back.

I think with our new NHS policy, for example, people realise that there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’re not going to hurt them.

Once people understand, they’ll be grateful. I remember how Thatcher and I fought against it. We were wrong.

Y’know, politics in Britain has changed almost overnight. The Conservatives have been asleep for a long time, but we’re being reborn into a new world.

Here, I’ve taken a cutting for you and put it in a fresh pot. You don’t need to water it much. You don’t need to do anything.

04Jan06 — 4

Killer Bug Ate My Leg

The Five Stages of Athlete’s Foot:

Day One: “Ooh dear, that’s a bit itchy.”

Day Two: [takes off sock] “Ewww! It looks like some alien life form is gnawing its way through the flesh between my phalanges. Must pop along to the chemist tomorrow and get something for that.”

Day Three: “Hello, NHSDirect? Yes, unfortunately it appears that one of my toes has become detached and I was wondering if you could tell me how best to pack it up to take to the hospital. Damn. I know left it here somewhere…”

Day Four: “Okay, we don’t have any weapons on board [points at schematic hologram], but if we can drive it up towards the loading bay with these makeshift flame-throwers we should be able to force it out of the airlock on level seven.”

Day Five: “I say we nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

03Jan06 — 5

MTA Update

Kelly Brook is extraordinarily beautiful, but, as anyone who has seen her on TV knows, she’s not going to dazzle you with an informed précis of neo-Kantianism or a layperson’s account of the interesting physical properties of the fullerenes. Because of this you can admire her in the abstract, like the Taj Mahal, say, knowing that if you’d ever met her at a party your eyes would have glazed over about fifteen seconds into your first conversation.

Marvel here as she glows like a screen goddess from the golden age of Hollywood in one of Reuters’ “in pictures” stories. She is pictured opening Harrods’ sale with my brother-in-baldness Billy Zane and proprietor Mo.

Strikingly, the piece describes the best-selling bikini calendar hottie as “British actress Kelly Brook”. Hmm. Naturally I couldn’t resist checking out her CV at the IMDB. There, her breakthrough cinema role is listed as “Beautiful Woman in Painting” in that classic sequel Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

03Jan06 — 2

Penny For A Cup Of Chai?

As a fellow member of the middle-class unemployed I can also testify to the horrors radio agony aunt Anna Raeburn described so “movingly” yesterday in the Guardian. Very recently she found herself jobless, without even so much as a rich husband and a poorly-paid but glamorous career in the media to rub together, and thrown into a dependency on state agencies:

“It was hideous. Hideous. The whole thing. Horrible,” she recalls now. “Every time I went in, I had to go through this whole routine: ‘Who are you? What is your name? Are you married? Do you have a partner? What is your date of birth?'”

Luckily for Anna and me, this year, as part of an appeal organised by BBC Radio 3, a choir of orphaned West African amputee children will be doing a sponsored singing tour of Europe to raise money so that people like us need never suffer that kind of humiliation again.

03Jan06 — 1

Cognitive Dissonance

On the front page of educationguardian the headline is “Segregation, 2006 style” as

“Figures on the ethnicity of students in higher education show a disturbing racial divide amongst universities”

Inside the cover, Trevor Philips, Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, complains about the “institutional racism” that keeps
blacks “students of African-Caribbean heritage” out of the “holy trinity” of Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial.

Meanwhile, on the “Opinion” page of the same section of the newspaper, Philip Beadle objects to any hint of selection by ability in government policy because it’s, er, well, like “more right wing than Stanley Matthews”, man; and the real educational segregation—selection by house price, by social class, and by school fee—rumbles on, undisturbed.

02Jan06 — 2

Oh Poo

I found out just before Christmas that I’ve been turned down for that SciArt grant I was applying for. This is not exactly a surprise, but I’m still not happy about it. Thankfully, my family took my hint when I told them and I didn’t have to endure a Christmas of them looking at me in that way and asking me what “my plans” are. I have spent the past three years making plans about my future that have turned comprehensively to dust, sometimes even after I’ve had actual positive letters of confirmation in my hand, occasionally so spectacularly that I have found myself laughing out loud at the extraordinary ability of Defeat to leap out from deep within the oesophagus of Victory, so my New Year’s resolution is to make no plans of any kind whatsoever. I’ll do what I do. If it works out then I’ll tell people about it; if it doesn’t then I’ll write a wry ‘Blog post about it. Either way someone wins.

So for the next few months I’m going to carry on with my experiments in photography and music, but I won’t be performing any experiments in biology or computing. On which note, I recommend that you check out “A Fibrillin-1-Fragment Containing the Elastin-Binding-Protein GxxPG Consensus Sequence Upregulates Matrix Metalloproteinase-1: Biochemical and Computational Analysis” when it appears later this year in the super soaraway Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. It’s got it all: striking imagery, deep mystery, and great plots—Ramachandran plots.

01Jan06 — 4

So, Farewell Then, John Simpson

It passed me by because I was busy participating in a traditional British lemming trundle along a motorway*, but, now I have had a chance to catch up with it, I think I have just read John Simpson’s final serious news report. It is in many ways a frightening document; I am afraid on his behalf. Apart from the factual content that we have come to expect from the BBC even at its most feeble, it breaks metropolitan media convention in so many ways that I wonder if he composed it for a bet whilst under the influence of alcohol. Note the last-Friday-before-Christmas timestamp and wonder what kind of post-partying regrets will flicker across his face when Matthew Parris turns up on his doorstep wearing an ankle-length leather raincoat and bitchslaps Simpson with the matching gloves before agents of the W1 Stasi take him away to an “asylum” somewhere in darkest Peckham.

For Simpson to write plainly throughout was risky enough, but for him to set the mutinous title—“Saddam’s trial is not a farce“—in the simple declarative was a stroke of death-defying boldness. Once into the body of the text our dissident voice shakes the very damp course of British journalism by deploying adjectives and adverbs proportionately: the evidence against Hussein is “graphic and terrible”; the judge is “polite”. But there is something far more daring to come: in summing up, Simpson begins by threatening to reach a reasonable judgment—Barzan al-Tikriti “comes across as a brute and a bully”—and concludes by actually doing so:

“If the judge treated Saddam more roughly, he would seem like a martyr. The fact that he does not is a sign of success, not of failure. “

Once they’ve lobotomized you and let you back out into the community it’ll be some dodgy “human interest” slot for you on Radio 4, Simpson mate. You’ll be emoting breathily for housebound old dears about the “heart-wrenching dilemma facing Julie and her terminally-ill child” or the “stark contrast between the chaos of the ongoing civil war around them and the seemingly boundless warmth and generosity of the Fiskistani people themselves” with the Michael Buerks and the Feargal Keanes of this world.

Our loss will be Mrs Trellis‘s gain.

*[During every official holiday the inhabitants of this damp island take the national sport of queuing out onto tarmac, often combining it with that other native pursuit: shopping. The bastards.]

01Jan06 — 1

Here’s To A Better One

And thank you to the members of SIAW and everyone else for reading and commenting in 2005. Have a wonderful 2006. Cheers!

I’m still suffering the last of my cold and I’ve just spent New Year’s Eve trying to work out how to use FL Studio 6’s new mixer. I didn’t even notice that midnight had passed until two minutes after the hour, but if you listen carefully you can hear the fireworks going off in the background when I tested my newly acquired knowledge by recording this [MP3 455K]. What a geek. Talking of geeks making music…

“YOU CAN CALL US AARON BURR FROM THE WAY WE’RE DROPPING HAMILTONS!”

31Dec05 — 5

Lessons In Pop Culture (Re)learned This Christmas

  • Clean-cut “youf” operatic quartet G4‘s cover of Radiohead’s Creep is either a crime against music or a post-modern deflation of passive-aggressive indie rock whining. I’m not sure which, but either way I am worried that my sister likes it and that I can’t think of a good reason why she shouldn’t.
  • “Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?” should be subtitled “…Including This Book“. Imagine two boring blokes from your year at university sitting in a pub, pissed and rambling away to each other in an attempt to make each other laugh and you’ve got some idea of the level of the tired “observational” “alternative” “comedy” packing its alphabetically ordered pages. I wouldn’t put that sort of feeble crap on PooterGeek—and that’s saying something. Interestingly, though, this book is unfunny in exactly the way that Charlie Brooker is funny. He manages to write about the same sorts of things, but his writing prompts snorts of amused recognition and is genuinely quirky and insightful—rather than, well, shit.
  • Take That recorded two-and-a-half very good pop songs—which is as much as a manufactured pop group can hope for and sufficient justification for their revival tour.
  • The Big Sleep has dated to the point at which it is now uncomfortable to watch—but Lauren Bacall’s appearance in the same film hasn’t.
  • iTunes for Windows is still as horrible as I remember it being last year. Why should people have to wrestle with such a frustrating interface just to listen to and copy music they legally own? Why isn’t there a big button that says “rip CD to MP3s on my hard drive”? Why can’t people just plug any old device into a USB port and copy a song? Why? Why? Linux notoriously sucks at multimedia and device driver support and yet I can still do these things trivially on my own machine—and the necessary software is completely free. Gah! Talking of braindead digital media rights management, ladies and gentlemen, I give you The New Yorker!…
  • Digital cameras still suck, but less so.
30Dec05 — 3

A Gift-Giving Warning

Last year or the year before, following a request on PooterGeek for you lot to suggest somewhere I might buy a bridge computer for my dad for Christmas, I ordered one for him from DreamDirect. DreamDirect is an evil chimera of The Gadget Shop and SAGA magazine: apart from selling fine handheld bridge computers, their business is pushing shonky electronic gewgaws to the free-bus-pass demographic.

Normally I would only get spammed by DreamDirect once a month, but Christmas has been here and, like all retailers, they pretend that the Twelve Days of Christmas run to rather than from the twenty-fifth of December. Every day there’s another email bulked up with HTML promoting another piece of geriatric-friendly tat. One day it’s battery-powered heated gloves. Another it’s an “antique-style” gramophone. I await his’n’hers quartz-controlled Viagra dispensers that go off once a week and then play Sailing By after a timed delay.

Anyway, if you ever find yourself buying anything from them, first: think again, and second: don’t write your email address on the order form or the same will happen to you—not that they have my private email address; it’s just my twisted curiosity prevents me from cancelling the throwaway one I gave them two years ago.

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