04Nov04 — 0

And So To Bed

Why do people take hallucinogenic drugs, when sleep deprivation is so effective and cheap? I actually jumped back from the counter in the spotlessly clean local fish-and-chip shop this evening because I thought I saw a rat crawl near my feet. Sitting up all night to get strange kicks would deprive the posh user of the inverted glamour of consorting with members of the underclasses, though. Yesterday’s waiver still applies: I take limited responsibility for any weirdness on these pages.

04Nov04 — 2

Dub Be Good To Me

Thank you to the people who were nice about my music. I’d just like to point out that Barry W, who I swear I have never even heard of before, was scarily perceptive on all fronts when (after being nice) he typed:

“It had a real film soundtrack feel to it – I saw a bus leaving town in the American Midwest for some reason. Rain. Sean Penn or someone of that ilk. Bass was a bit heavy though. (though maybe that’s the fault of my computer speakers)”

One: my usual collaborator is Mr Media Composition. He wasn’t involved this time, but he’s probably influenced me into making more “cinematic” music.

Two: The working title of the piece, when I only had chords and a snippet of melody was “Lord of the Rails” because it sounded like to me like it was going to turn into something gospelly about a long journey.

Three: it wasn’t the fault of your computer speakers; the bass was indeed heavy because I mix on quite gutsy speakers and, on first drafts, to tend to boost the bass until the master sounds nice on my embarrassingly bass-light car stereo. (You should have seen the look on the salesman’s eyes when I walked into the car sound system shop with my shaved head and hoodie and asked for something for my hatchback, “but not too woofer-y”.)

Anyway, here’s a mix less likely to rearrange your internal organs [UPDATED AGAIN 12Dec04]:

03Nov04 — 0

Unfreeing Markets

Catastrophic irony failure: yesterday’s You And Yours on Radio 4 juxtaposed an item about Eliot Spitzer’s deliciously successful strike against price fixing in the US insurance industry with one about how a local authority in the Taunton area wants pubs and bars in the area to introduce a “minimum drink price” scheme to reduce binge drinking. Presenter Liz Barclay actually gave a government official a hard time about the DTI’s reluctance to help them set up a cartel. It’s reminiscent of the BBC’s cluelessness in the face of differential ticket pricing for football matches—now an example in one of the Anonymous Economist’s graduate courses.

03Nov04 — 3

My Excuse

Yes, I’ve been away for a couple of days, making music. In the past, bands I have sung with have banned me from writing songs on my own, because, without a collaborator to keep me in check, mine all sound like the work of Lenny Kravitz armed with a thesaurus. Working alone for the first time in years I have produced a three-minute pop song you can dance to. I’m playing the few real instruments as well as doing the singing. I hope it’s nothing like Lenny; it certainly contains no big words and, despite being called “Blood Won’t Run Away”, has nothing to do with Iraq or terrorists. If you are interested, you can listen to a rough mix in the following formats:

UPDATE: compressed rough mixes now replaced with these:

03Nov04 — 0

The Drugs Don’t Work

Thoughtful James Hamilton might come by to say something about this one. The Economist this week has a fascinating piece [subscription only] about the decline in suicide rates in the UK. No one has a sure explanation for why the numbers of men and women killing themselves in Britain have declined by tens of percent in the past ten years, but The Economist has a go. In the process of speculating about the cause of this pleasing phenomenon, it manages to be funny:

“Clifftops like Beachy Head (pictured above) have never been quieter”

“British women have struggled to find an appropriate way out since toxic coal gas was phased out in the early seventies”

I’m not sure if the humour is always intentional. For example, the author expresses puzzlement that male suicides are down at the same time that marriage rates are falling.

Prozac is dismissed. The author concludes that it’s likeliest that the safety Nazis and gun-controllers who people (especially instinctively libertarian ‘Bloggers) love to criticize should take most of the credit for saving lives. It’s not just the UK’s adoption of natural gas; the cleaning up of exhaust emissions and the rationing of paracetamol tablets seem to have contributed to the overall improvement. Unfortunately more old-fashioned suffocation methods are coming back into fashion as a result.

Before I dropped out of medical school, and as teenagers are wont to do, I contemplated suicide on a few occasions. One was some weeks after a psychology lecture in which it was pointed out that an effective way of overcoming suicidal feelings was to plan out the act in some detail. Perhaps this kind of visualization is meant to fill your head with unpleasant images or give you something practical to do to take your mind off how hopeless you think your life has become. Either way, I grabbed the Butlins box in which my medicines were stored—the box was a souvenir of a family holiday in Skegness and used to contain toffee, I think—I flipped through a pharmacology textbook, and I sat down at my desk. After plugging in my body mass, sex, and the dosage of the tablets I worked out that I didn’t have enough painkillers to erase the agony permanently. Grim laughter made a nice change from self-pity, and I didn’t seriously think about killing myself for at least a fortnight.

Anyway, all of this is just an excuse for me to point out that Cambridge students are stupider than Oxford students.

31Oct04 — 4

You And Whose Army?

I could rant for England on the subject of the Common Agricultural Policy, but I can’t seem to get very worked up about the European Constitution. This might be stupidity on my part, but what exactly would happen if, after we’ve signed it, a future UK government just refused to accept some part of it (not that there’s anything much new there that we—or rather past Conservative governments—haven’t signed up to before). I mean, what would they do about it? Would Belgium engineer a mass killing of the Celts? Would France arrange for a member of our royal family to have an unfortunate road accident? (Certain) members of the Eurozone can flout the so-called “Growth and Stability Pact” without so much as a slap. If someone can tell me of a sanction with real bite that the constitution’s co-signatories could impose on us for breaking with that agreement, I’d love to know about it. I’m genuinely curious. I wouldn’t want to our nation to find itself in the gunsights of Italy’s mighty naval fleet.

30Oct04 — 1

My Twelve Pence Worth

Screw the polls. Screw the pundits. Screw Osama. I’m sticking by my prediction that Kerry will win, not that I can enter Norm’s competition. I’d bet about twelve pence on John Kerry becoming President of the United States of America. I also want Kerry to win, but not very much.

Here’s The Economist expressing a similar sentiment and offering a justification that I would agree with in parts. Here’s Oliver Kamm mysteriously losing his grip on English again as he backs the incumbent and cites an “almost irresistable [sic]” reason to support George Bush. (Like I said, Kamm’s wrestling with his dark side.) Yes, a Bush win would upset all sorts of appalling people, but I’m not sure how upset Michael Moore would be. Not only has Dubya helped Moore to become a very rich man, he’s helped him to keep more of the money he has accumulated.

28Oct04 — 7

My Gay Trousers

My friend Leasey told me today that she and her girlfriends are going to take me out “on the pull” to a place where repetitive beats are played and alcoholic drinks are served. She has ordered me not to wear my “gay trousers” lest the straight women think I am not interested in them. Apparently my gay trousers are one of several pairs of black ones I own and their gayness should be obvious to me. I have not worn the leather chaparajos since the unfortunate incident in Glasgow, so she can’t mean those, but she has promised to explain.

UPDATE: If anyone comments that they believe they too might have some gay trousers, but they can’t be sure because the garments are in the closet, it will now no longer be an original joke.

28Oct04 — 2

Mutual Backslapping

The ‘Blog Abbreviated To SIAW has written nice things about me recently, but I would have enthused about its accurate summary of the BBC’s celebrity-based current affairs presenting anyway:

“[Kirsty] Wark, in her usual not exactly self-effacing way, frequently interrupted both to summarise their remarks, put words in their mouths and generally make sure that they remembered who the real star of the show is. This is the state of “current affairs” coverage on the BBC these days: a nonsensical question directed, by a canny businesswoman who dabbles in TV presenting, at two “experts” drawn from the usual tiny North London pool, both of whom share her very narrow, very conventional left-liberal world view, had nothing to say that just about every likely viewer of this particular programme wouldn’t already have heard, and arrived at their utterly pointless answers to her question by spouting a lot of pure speculation that sounded, if you closed your eyes, like the tuppenceworth thrown in by any old opinionated guest at a dinner party or loudmouthed drinker in a pub.”

If you search Google Groups for me, you will only find a handful of messages. One of them is this one, that I wrote to the legendary, local cam.misc in 2001.

27Oct04 — 2

Puddy Tats: Monsanto’s Stormtroopers

When the subject of British public attitudes to genetically modified organisms comes up at Genome Campus breaktime conversations I tend to make two standard contributions.

I rail against the “Frankenfood” hysteria of the UK tabloid press (not to mention the bloody Archers) that has all but prevented a rational debate on the subject.

I advance a corollary of my Shiny Things theory of human civilization. Briefly, Shiny Things Theory updates the Guns, Germs And Steel environmental, technology-based view of the development of human societies. No one is going to uninvent modern telecommunications tomorrow. Given even tiny trickles of information flowing inward, any state that is insufficiently free to furnish a large enough proportion of its inhabitants with shiny things is unstable. This is why people streamed over the Berlin Wall: they wanted shiny oranges, shiny VCRs, shiny Mercedes, and, er, shiny denim jeans.

The relevant corollary of this is that, when a shiny thing becomes available in another nation state, if it is sufficiently shiny and other free governments are sufficiently concerned about their stability, they will tend to make the same shiny thing available to their own people too. The shiny thing that will enable GMOs to go global is the genetically modified pet. Monsanto and other companies interested in persuading Britain to adopt GM technology should do everything they can to help American start-ups to develop technologies like hypo-allergenic pets and pet cloning. The sentimental animal-loving Brits will ultimately roll over at the prospect of glow-in-the-dark fish and cutesy-wutesy-widdle Labrador puppies that stay looking like puppies for their entire lifespan. You can hardly complain of the dangers of growing GM wheat if you share your flat with a GM cat.

[This might be an appropriate time to reveal that PooterGeek is fifth highest hit on Google for “decline and fall of western civilization“.]

27Oct04 — 0

Future News: November

Live from next month, more of “Pooter’s Futures“:

The Middle East

The body of one of the militants believed to have been responsible for the bombing of the Hilton hotel in Taba on Egypt’s border with Israel has been washed up on a bank of the river Nile near the Egyptian town of Aswan. When challenged about the discovery, a spokesperson for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad admitted that, whilst the Israeli government was “satisfied” at the death of the suspect, they were not involved in any way with his killing. The body was found with two ninja flying stars-of-David embedded in its temples and its feet still partially encased in melting blocks of halva.

UK Politics

Conservative front bencher Boris Johnson remains in the custody of extremist Liverpudlian nationalists who seized him from his bicycle during his “Grovelling Apology 2004” tour of Liverpool, made following the MP’s remarks about the city’s “victim culture”. A group calling itself the “Scouse Liberation Army” released a photograph today showing Mr Johnson kneeling between two of its operatives, their faces obscured by Russell Athletic hooded tops. Boris Johnson himself was dressed in an orange shellsuit, his distinctive blonde hair now set in a tight corkscrew perm. The SLA say they will only release Mr Johnson if their demands are met. These include a call for the return of Brookside to Channel 4 and the halting of the Labour government’s planned reform of incapacity benefits.

Popular Music

Doctors revealed today that veteran Radio 1 DJ, John Peel, who died at 65, should in fact have survived until the age of 88. Because of a misreading of a maternity ward bracelet label, Peel’s life—widely acknowledged to have been marked out by his invention of prog rock, reggae, and punk—was set to run at almost one-and-half times its correct speed. Apologising on behalf of all staff at the Queen’s General Hospital, Liverpool, a spokesman pointed out that the flip side of Peel’s premature death was that, during his career, he had remained, on average, about ten years ahead of his peers in spotting musical trends. He added, “Sorry about that, but, even speeded up, his record was pretty good. Here’s one by the redoubtable Throbbing Gristle.” Simon Bates is 107.

26Oct04 — 1

Too Little Too Late

“Sony launches music players with MP3 support”

There’s a headline to put alongside “Microsoft acknowledge importance of Internet, release Explorer Web browser”; Sony have also been years too late, but they don’t have a monopoly they can use to crush the opposition anyway. Perhaps they can take advantage of the 80s revival instead and release a portable MP3 player that looks like an early Walkman.

25Oct04 — 4

Football Follow-Up

As predicted, Ruud is getting his comeuppance and, also following that post and the associated commentary, Football365 has a round-up of the varied press on the Biggest Game of The Season So Far. In response to the commenter who complained that Arsenal had been doing so well because “premiership teams oil themselves up and bend over the table” for them, I have to cite the example of “my” team of mid-table mediocrities, Aston Villa, who piled in and scored a cheeky early goal against them on their own ground just a week ago. They still stuffed us.

25Oct04 — 2

Private Education

On page 3 of the Cambridge Town Crier there is a half-page advertisement with the following heading:

THE PERSE SCHOOL

A sixth form school with a notable academic record and a wide range of extra-curricular activities

On page 5 of the Cambridge Town Crier a news report begins:

“A female teacher at the Perse School, Cambridge, has quit her job after a relationship with a former pupil.”

Whoops.

24Oct04 — 3

The Big Match

They certainly weren’t irresistible today, but Arsenal, at their best, still astonished. There were times when they made Man Utd look like an infants school team in midfield; shame they couldn’t finish anything. The simple truth is you can’t afford to make a mistake like Sol Campbell did at Old Trafford. Man U’s talent and sheer will have rendered Arsenal vincible again, but Ferguson’s team aren’t quite good enough to win the title. I also think the FA will have word or two to say to Mr van Nistelrooy about some of his behaviour when they review the video.

[I watched the game in the surreal surroundings of Cambridge’s Jubilee pub, lined up at the back with three other black guys, an Asian, and a wall full of pictures of Diana Spencer. We passed a variant of the Tebbit test, I think: the presence of a “support-anyone-even-Arsenal-against-Man U” reflex is a strong indicator of being a loyal Englishman.]

24Oct04 — 11

Too Much Too Young

It’s time for the Razzies to start presenting an “Orson Welles Award” for film careers that have had the steepest fall from an early peak. [Michael Brooke will be round here in a minute to tell me off for caricaturing Mr Sherry.] Apart from giving film bores a truly interesting challenge (choosing Madonna for Worst Actress every year can’t be that hard), the Orson Welles Award would give a valuable publicity boost to talent in the toilet. For example, I’d like to nominate Sean Young who appeared in what is widely regarded as one of the most influential and well made films of the last thirty years—Blade Runner (1982)—but has since been seen (if that’s the right word) in movies whose titles read like they belong on the cv of Troy McClure. Anyone who keeps a straight face all the way to the end of this list must work in video distribution:

Let’s pray that one of her latest, In The Shadow Of The Cobra, extricates itself from the legal problems currently preventing its release. It could finally save her career from ignominy. Then again, there’s always Ghosts Never Sleep.

24Oct04 — 16

God Bless Islington!

George W Bush in front of the American flag

Dear British Guardian Readers

I cannot tell you how grateful I am to be able to write to you on White House notepaper. I cannot thank you enough for your cruciate support in our country’s recent presidential election. When my colleagues used to show me cuttings from the opinion pages of your newspaper, the cartoons, and the letters you wrote to the editor, I could not understand why you hated me and my fellow Americans so much; your Prime Minister Blair is a such a good friend—whiney maybe, but a good friend. I am embraced to admit it now, but I thought you that your views about Iraq and Afghanistan, about the War on Terror, about the environment, and about the members of my administrontium were “rubbish”.

Since you won Ohio for me with your reverse psychology letter-writing campaign I have realized that I was blinded by my ignoramus of British sophistication. Jean, my international media adviser, has studied in your fine country and visited it many times. She told me that your writing style is “a model of English irony”. She said that this meant that what you say and what you mean are very different. So all along you wanted me and Dick to win! I feel like a dumb monkey.

Thank you again. I get The Guardian delivered every day now, but I know that I should read everything in it the other way round. I like Seumas Milne.

Love

W

p.s. Jean has just read this letter over and tells me that I have mastered this irony thing just fine.

23Oct04 — 4

A Good Newspaper

It’s lucky that the Tory party is so comprehensively crap at the moment because its house journal, The Daily Telegraph, just gets better and better. As Backword Dave demonstrates almost every week, even people who object heartily to The Telegraph‘s politics and are embarrassed by its other readers take it because it is still a good newspaper.

Today’s Telegraph has the usual excellent news coverage, including a provocative story about the money Whitehall wastes on consultants (at least we don’t have to pay their pensions) and a superb front page picture that says more about the private life of the Foreign Office’s recently sacked representative in Tashkent than perhaps he would want. The magazine draws our attention to a talented figurative artist who died young and profiles an influential teacher of scriptwriting who has never had a movie made of his own work. Even the Telegraph‘s sworn enemies concede the quality of its sports coverage and the paper does a good job on tomorrow’s crunch football match. The opinion page of the main news section carries two essays. One of them is about the US presidential elections and world terror and the other is about Bridget Jones. I disagree with both, but they are well-made and and dotted with insights. Unless I am reading research by someone in the same field or reading the work of someone I can’t stand, I feel unpolluted admiration whenever an article gives me an “Oh, yes, that’s true—I’d never thought of that before” feeling. I can’t remember the last time the corresponding sheet of The Guardian had that effect on me.

The Torygraph could never be good enough to persuade me to see Michael Howard for anything other than the shameless, shallow, populist incompetent that he is, so I don’t think there’s any danger of my being seduced into joining the Dark Side by it, but I am almost tempted to start buying a daily newspaper again in the week. There’s been a discussion about the decline of British newspapers over at Chris’s place.

21Oct04 — 0

Checking In

Just to let you know that I am still around, but probably won’t be ‘Blogging much before the weekend. You could always read a book instead. Or go for a walk.

19Oct04 — 3

Bermuda Short

Pharma-‘Blog Black Triangle made a brief reappearance a few days ago.

‘Blogger conspiracy theories about proprietor Anthony Cox’s absence have blossomed, not least of all because he is notoriously the author of this Internet phenomenon. I haven’t the time to do so, but I am sure PooterGeekers need little help from me in making the connection with this recent story and this recent story. Not to mention this woman

who works for one of the military-industrial complex’s biggest players. The truth is out there.

18Oct04 — 1

Too Busy To Fisk

Apparently “Sudan’s Darfur” is “‘safer than Iraq’“. I’d been wondering where those millions of Iraqi refugees had gone to. I think Sudan’s Foreign Minister, Mustafa Osman Ismael, makes everything clear to Europeans when he says that “the international community should leave the complex ethnic politics of Darfur alone” because…

“This is an African problem—it needs an African solution.”

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