All hippies must die (Led Zeppelin are great)

I’ve just discovered Led Zeppelin. I know this sounds ridiculous. How have I managed to go through life without listening to any Led Zeppelin? I’ll tell you how. At school there was a guy in my study who was learning to play the acoustic guitar, and, you guessed it, Stairway to Heaven was played very heavily. I now realise that he enjoyed massacring the opening bars to Babe I’m Gonna Leave You too. It also goes without saying that he couldn’t sing, and even if he had been able to sing whatever tortured wail emanating from him would be nowhere near Robert Plant. I don’t know why he bothered. He also broke the tip off my penknife blade when he tried to pry some amp lead off that guitar and then didn’t own up which is almost as bad as putting me off Led Zeppelin for seventeen years.
I can’t think of a worse introduction to a band. I mean it doesn’t help that this guy dressed like Jimi Hendrix and had bona fide hippies for parents. He didn’t wash either and actually attempted to test the urban myth about unwashed hair cleaning itself. No, it just gets greasier. All in all it was a bad scene. Ever since I have studiously avoided all things Led Zeppelin but embraced Pink Floyd which is pretty much from the same kind of thing. So one lot did heavy metal and the others were progressive rock but they were both pioneers in their fields and both had a similar approach to album production, that albums should be listened as a whole and not broken up into singles.
Led Zeppelin 1 is fantastic. I’m not going to attempt to review it as a) I’m crap at reviewing music and b) it has been reviewed about a million times and one more opinion stating how great it is will not be remotely enlightening. As for being crap at music writing. There’s only so many ways I can say, hmm, that’s a great sound before I’ve got 700 words saying stupid stuff like ‘I really like that bit where the drum comes in and then there’s a gap for one beat and then a funky bass starts up and then the song really rocks’. If you really need to know how good Led Zeppelin 1 is then I suggest you buy it or download it. I’m no purist so I’ll be buying the remastered version as there’s nothing more irritating than bass distortion due to crappy production. Take ‘You Only Live Twice’ sung by Nancy Sinatra. It’s a brilliant song but I bet you can’t find a version which isn’t distorted to hell and back. And not clever distortion either. No, they buggered up the recording plain and simple. It distorts on the soundtrack on the dvd and its all wrong on the official Bond compilations.
Where does this leave me?
Bad production sucks
Led Zeppelin are great
All hippies must die

Long Way Down: In each episode...

In each episode,
Ewan will say 'amazing'
Charlie will question why the world is such a horrid place
Ewan will mention his tedious wife
The tour manager chappie will mention their schedule
The tour manager chappie will mention team building
Ewan will say that it was really great to be in a team
The swiss cameraman will be onscreen for 1 second
They will visit a UNICEF project
They will profess to how lucky they are
They will whinge that they are riding their bikes all day
Each country is amazing but they're only there for 2 days
They will camp once a week - and stay in luxury hotels for the rest
They will fly at UNICEF's expense to each UNICEF camp as to ride there would be 'dangerous'
At the end of each episode they might have to turn around because of an insurmountable obstacle
At the end of each episode someone will fall off a bike 'next time'
Nobody will mention that it has become apparent that their schedule is painfully tight
Nobody will mention that Long Way Round was considerably more challenging
Nobody will suggest that this rich boy's beano is a cynical ploy to sell shedloads of DVDs, CDs and books at Christmas

I don't like bars anymore

I prefer pubs. I should be more specific - I don't like London bars. They're overpriced and full of pretentious wankers. I was in one called Lonsdale in Notting Hill on Friday. To be fair it wasn't such a bad place, the service was good and the cocktails were very good. Now that I think about it, £23 for 3 drinks is about right. So it was a pretty good bar all round. I think it just grates that it is Notting Hill and not Soho or something. Still a pretentious place. It somehow feels like a sham, which is a good name for a bar.
I never really feel comfortable in a bar. At least they're not smoky anymore but they are invariably packed, with huge queues, overflowing toilets, toilet attendants, and ear blisteringly loud. Bars only seem to get better the more intoxicated you get, which doesn't really say much about them. Pubs are far better. There you can actually talk to people which is what I want to do when I go for a drink.
I've got a friend who only goes to bars and hates pubs. I'd rather go to pubs and never to bars (at least not locally, not when popping out for a drink). Its proving hard to find a compromise with her, but if nothing else, Notting Hill has more than its fair share of good locals though they're becoming harder to find.

Amazon's CEO Launching the Kindle

Book Burning

Amazon have just launched a new e-book reader in the US in a vain and doomed to failure attempt to get people to ditch the paperback. Its never going to happen as the advantages of a book over a gadget are almost too numerous to mention. I mean here's three just to start with.

1) Books are cheap
2) Books are virtually indestructible and even when they fall apart they can still be read
3) Books don't need batteries

The hardiest test for any form of technology is the beach test. Sand is annoying to humans so think of the consequences on delicate circuit boards. The only technology I've seen that had any semblance to being beach proof was the Sports Sony Walkman, and rubber seals aside even this ended up with sand in it. Luckily it was mostly mechanical so that didn't matter. So my requirements for an e-book would be:

1) Sand proof
2) Water resistant (including salt water)
3) Impervious to sunlight
4) Can be used as a pillow/sun shade
5) Suntan cream proof
6) Will be undamaged by dropping.

Though they try, as it stands the paperback book is unbeatable. Perhaps they should be targeting commuters who might like the prospect of automatically downloading a newspaper with the addition of video playback. A paperback sized iphone if you will.

Buying games and never finishing them

Why do I buy games and never finish them? I'm not alone on this one as it can be applied to just about any item that you repeatedly buy but never use. Take CDs. I buy them, rip them, then lose them on my mp3 player. I found an LCD Soundsystem album this morning that I've listened to half of about 9 months ago. So what's behind this prolific spending? I think it comes down to materialism. To further my denial of the tedium that is my life I spend more and more of my disposable income in the pursuit of that gratification received when you buy something you've been wanting for for ages. Its no fun when you can afford any game of your choice but this doesn't stop me.
So the problem is: too much money, too much time, dull job that I don't care about, humdrum life.
My solution: bury myself in new toys in a desperate but ultimately fruitless effort to satiate my desire for something interesting.
I suppose I could be whoring instead but somehow half-finished games are more fun and less dangerous.
Result - games that need playing (that I can remember):
Xbox 360:
King Kong
Far Cry Instincts
PGR4
DiRT
Tomb Raider Legends
PC:
Supreme Commander
Company of Heroes
Dawn of War
Bioshock
Tomb Raider (the new one)
Neverwinter Nights 2
HL2
C&C 3
and those two lists are soon to be joined by Mass Effect and Crysis.

Call the Health and Safety Inspectors!

I just suffered a freak accident involving a Muller yoghurt. My plastic spoon snagged on the base of the pot and flicked half a teaspoon’s worth of yoghurt directly into my left eye! This is freakish for two reasons:

1) My eye was half a foot away from the pot
2) I wear glasses

You may not know this, and I sure as hell didn’t until 10 minutes ago, but yoghurt in your eye bloody hurts. It may come down to flavour. Who knows, mandarin always tastes a little acidic. I had to leg it out of the room and now I have a bloodshot eye.
I may write a letter of complaint to Muller and see what response I get. Injured by yoghurt indeed.

The Outlook is not good

I just looked up lung cancer on the NHS Direct website as I know next to nothing about it. This was in the diagnosis section:

"The outlook for people with lung cancer is not good. Only 20% of people are alive one year after being diagnosed with the disease, and only 8% survive for five years... Although lung cancer is only one of several serious diseases caused by cigarette smoking, it is often the most distressing because it is almost completely preventable."

It sounds horrible.

The Pineapple in question

Killer Pineapple

I've just had a run-in with a pineapple chunk. I like pineapple but it does bad things to me, normally a tummy ache. This was somethings else. I put a particularly large chunk in my mouth and as I munched it a huge amount of juice came out. This juice seemed to fall like a fructose rapid onto the gum that covers a wisdom tooth at the back of my mouth with a sensation not unlike a hot needle. Indeed it was like I'd poured some Alien acid blood in my mouth so much so that I was convinced I was bleeding. I'm not, but it bloody hurt.
Time to bite the bullet and call the dentist. I've been putting it off for 6 months...

Giving up smoking Part 2

I’m trying to give up smoking again. I’m using a different technique this time. Last time I went straight from fags to the patches, and I didn’t reduce the need for nicotine at any point. Well that didn’t last for long. Why bother using the patches when you can smoke and smoking is more pleasurable than patches? A twisted logic but a logic nonetheless.

Here are my new techniques:

Steady reduction in nicotine:
This time round I’ve gradually reduced the amount that I smoke day by day halving that amount. Yesterday I had 3, the day before 6, so today I shall have one although the aim is to have none. This way I’ve reduced my need for nicotine.

Not enjoying cigarettes:

Remember you weren’t enjoying them so don’t start again
They were damaging you and you know it
Don’t forget the FEAR of the unknown

Distracting the Crave:

Rather than craving cigarettes I’m aiming to crave the patch.
Chewing gum – industrial quantities
Putting on weight – seems to be de rigeur

The Positive Side

One day at a time
Self-discipline – you’ve had too many years of not caring how much you smoke, how about a time of reasserting that control you once had
You don’t smoke weed anymore so why are you still smoking tobacco?

Yeah! We Made It!

Long Way Down

Some people seem to have a problem with the rich going off and enjoying themselves and then filming themselves enjoying themselves and then selling this to Joe Public as some kind of anathema to their crushed dreams as they sit in an office wondering where their lives have gone. Why live like that when you can watch Ewan McGregor and Charley Borman piss off round the world on motorbikes. If I had the time, money and inclination and if I knew that I could sell a dvd, cd and book of me doing it, I'd do it too.

What I resent is the pretence that they're going by themselves when in fact there's this huge film crew and they've this tight schedule and all in all its treated like the shameless cash cow that it really is. Hey, it’s a shameless cash cow but there are ways of making it less obvious. A longer schedule for instance. 1 week to go through Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. If it wasn’t for the fact that they’ve already had a trip of a lifetime in the first series I’d be thinking that Ewan’s calendar is somewhat busier than perhaps Charley’s is. And then there’s the contrived conflict of Ewan bringing his wife along. It was like it was inspired by Spinal ‘Dobly’ Tap. And the ‘just dropping in on the Motoguzzi factory’. With our camera crew.

You see there are three big differences here:

1) Series 1 really was a great journey

2) Series 1 was on Sky 3 and Series 2 is on BBC2

3) The Long Way Round DVD an unexpected runaway success.

And the upshot is this. Ever been on a guided tour when there wasn’t enough time to see anything as you were hustled on all the time. That’s what this is. Tunisia in one day, Libya in two. Its just annoying now.
Should you be tempted by the book, don’t. My brother read the first one: Long Hard Slog. Here’s the Guardian’s take on the second one:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/digestedread/story/0,,2206031,00.html

Gordon Ramsay's new tv show

Gordo has a new tv show. Its dead clever. In it he takes a tired restaurant which is going to the wall and then he turns it round purely through the use of the word fuck and before you know it its the best fucking restaurant in the fucking world. Wait a second, how many fucking series of fucking Gordon's Fucking Kitchen fucking Nightmares have there been? Fucking Gordon Ramsay has fucking set me fucking off now.
On last night's edition yet another restaurant was dying a slow death and then leatherface turned up and before you know it Ramsay was fuck this and fuck that, and that's a fucking disgrace and that's fucking disgusting. He then left the kitchen and started banging on at the owner about the fucking crusty knickers on the fucking paintings. Then the owner to his credit told Ramsay that he had crossed a line and that he should fuck off and take his film crew with him.
The only sad thing is that Ramsay didn't fuck off but came across as such a fucking prick that I fucked off.
It was, as the saying goes, a fucking disgrace.

Youtube boast off the back of Amstrad

As if from nowhere a video I posted last week on Youtube has had 24,200 viewers in 6 days! It is currently the 31st most viewed video (UK) this week, and the 6th most linked, 10,021 links (UK). My previous best had been 1,900 views of a video of my plane landing at Heathrow. That had simply amused me that there are so many plane-spotters out there. I'd taken the video as the flight had been interminable.

The Amstrad video can be found on Cnet in an article entitled "Top Ten laughably bad tech ads", where 10,000 of the views have come from.

Should I be pleased with this? In the great scheme of things it means bugger all, but on the other hand my alter ego dmt has finally registered in the blogosphere. So yes, I'm chuffed.

How to do a Screengrab

So you want to do a screengrab? Here's how:

1) Choose screen

2) Press Ctrl + PrintScrn

The pc saves the exact image of your desktop

3) Go to Start>All Programs>Accessories>Paint

4) Once Paint is loaded press ctrl+V (paste)

5) With the crop tool - the top right hand tool at the top left of the screen - select which image you want.

6) Once you've made your selection press ctrl+c (copy your selected image), then ctrl+n (for a new window) then ctrl+v to paste it into the new window.

7) Then manipulate image to make it seem like you were watching The Bill - see below.

Live TV online

Above is a screen grab of ITV's website. You can now watch ITVs 1, 2, 3 and 4 online on a live stream. You can only use this feature through Internet Explorer 5.5 or above as it uses DRM. When I did the screen grab the video image of 'This Morning' didn't save. I cheated and took a screen grab of The Bill on Youtube and then copied it into the player above right to give an approximation of what it looks like. Unlike Youtube which really suffers because of the compression used, ITV's picture is really very sharp. You can also detach the player so that it runs in Windows Media Player on your desktop. Could prove very handy for the rugby.
Its free and you don't have to sign up and register, though you probably have to be in the UK.

Its the end of the world as we know it...

...and I feel fine

Further to my previous rage against the green machine, I’m slowly but surely not caring about the environment anymore. Its not like I’m going out burning tires for fun or pouring oil on wetlands. Its just I’m no longer concerned if I leave my tv on standby, nor if my phone charger is never taken out of the socket. I’m being defeatist I’m afraid. Al Gore chatted a lot of crap in his film, but I was interested in his treatise about Greenland and what happens when the ice melts. He didn’t mention the earthquakes. It now seems that Greenland is melting faster than predicted, and that the glaciers are moving at an astonishing 1 metre a day. Sorry, I just reread the article. The ice is moving at 2 metres per hour!

Now try telling me that by switching off all the dvd players in the world that that will somehow slow the speed of the melting.

Facebook vs Google

No posts for a long time so I thought that I should do some. I haven't been posting as I have either been pissing about on Facebook of blogging on the Guardian websites, neither of which is really that constructive.
Right then. From today Facebook is starting to make everybody's profiles available on Google. This means that in a month's time, when the project is complete, you'll be able to google "Your Name" and find out all about anybody. Not strictly true as the google result will just be your name and photo, but should the searcher have a Facebook login then they can delve deeper.
Of course what this really comes down to is how restrictive your security settings are. Do you even know where to find your security settings? (They're in the privacy bit of your profile).
It won't dampen my addiction to Facebook, unless I get a new job. I'll make a point of getting a job from someone who isn't my friend so they can't see how long I'm on it for. Of course they could google this blog but at least they'd need to know the name first...

Curb Your Enthusiasm

My brother, who lives in China, has just returned for his annual 10 days in the UK. This time, as part of his aid package from the Orient, in amongst the knock-off dvds is an absolute gem, the 5^th series of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I often wonder what exactly it was that I did when I lived in Sydney. Yes the Olympics were on when I was there, although inexplicably I didn’t go to any events. The opening night was fantastic as I remember. I had a job in a bank in the middle of Sydney – St.Georges Square – and it was a dull job which earnt me money, and I lived in a house with 9 others, two dogs and lots of cockroaches, but it only cost me $60AUS per week, which is nothing. I wasn’t short of cash. I made some good friends too, an Irish girl and a Glaswegian guy, and now that I really think about it, I smoked an inordinate amount of weed. I went to the odd bar too, and the odd beach. I went to Manly, and Maroubra and Byron but Sydney beaches were weird affairs. The sea was dangerous with really big surf which is crap for swimming and the sand was packed with lots of people which all in all is a far cry from Thailand. Back to the subject, so I smoked loads of hydro which our next door neighbour usefully grew and sold to us. And when we all came in from work, Seinfeld would be on tv, and we’d all watch it, and it was one of the funniest tv shows I had seen. I used to watch Sex and the City too but I can’t remember why.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is absolutely brilliant. It follows Larry Sanders, who wrote Seinfeld, go about his daily life in LA, and it plays out in a pseudo reality-tv fashion. Poor Larry has such a terrible time. In a Woody Allenesque manner he goes through life getting angry over the most insignificant things, whilst being surrounded by gruesome people, and while having the worst luck in the world. And its not like the people that upset him so are even that bad. They seem to me to be entirely normal in a Californian kind of way. Its just he sees something and it upsets him, and he’s not entirely rational and then circumstances are rarely in his favour. So in two days I’m 10 episodes in. That’s how good it is.

No.3, the Psychopath and top billing

Its ok, I'm mad

From Russia with Jaws

I watched Jaws on tv at the weekend. Amazingly I watched it on itv and there were hardly any advert breaks – I counted only one in the last hour. That’s beside the point. Its huge fun that film, but one of those films I wish I had seen at the cinema first time round, rather than on tv. It must have been pretty scary stuff. The thing is, is that like Star Wars it the supporting cast that I like the most. After years of Star Wars I suddenly realised that R2D2 is the best character. And in Jaws, its not Brody (Scheider) the police chief or the shark (“Bruce” – apparently named after Spielberg’s lawyer), or even Hooper (Dreyfuss) but it is Quint (Robert Shaw) that steals the show for me. ‘From Russia With Love’ was on on Sunday night and there he is again as the hitman out to kill Bond. This time he’s a younger fitter assassin with that Ayran look that Spectre (or was it Smersh?) were so fond of. The picture shows him next to No.3 (!) Rosa Klebb, she with the venomous spike in her shoe who is dealt with by the until then completely useless but stunning Russian honeytrap. Bond’s line: “I think she’s had her kicks…”. Shaw’s character has a name in this film but it doesn’t really matter who he is, other than being the ruthless silent psychopath who kills anyone that crosses him. Shaw’s undoing is not unlike that of David McCallum’s in The Great Escape. His use of language betrays him – Shaw’s expression of calling Bond ‘old man’ is, even in 1963, an outmoded expression.

Skip forward twelve years takes us to 1975 and Jaws. Shaw has certainly lost his looks, but the murderous look is still in his eyes. He looks half dead too, which could be due to make-up and the rigours of filming on and in the sea with a shark that became known as ‘The Great White Turd’ due to its inability to do anything other than sink. Quint (Shaw) only turns up in the latter half of the film, when Brody charters him to go out and hunt down the Great White which has been so successfully savaging Amity Island. One of the most celebrated scenes of the film is when the hapless hunting party are comparing scars, and Hooper points out a scar on Quint’s upper arm. Quint than recounts this horrific tale of the sinking of his ship the USS Indianapolis at the end of WW2 and then being in the water for 3 days with 1100 men being viciously attacked by sharks, and at the end only 300 being rescued. Its already been well established in the film that Shaw is the old seadog, Brody as the landlubber and Hooper as a rich college kit with lots of toys but no sea-sense. What this scene does is provide an insight into the gleam of madness in Quint’s eyes. I’m sure that if I had read Moby Dick and would be able to draw some kind of comparison with Ahab. But I haven’t so I can’t. What I can say is that Quint makes this film for me. He’s unhinged for sure, but he knows what he’s doing, which now I think about it could be applied to both Hooper and Brody too. So then Jaws in 4 words: Killer Shark, Mad People.

Worry

I’ve been lucky in life, not having very many worries. Some people go through life wracked by worry as some are natural worriers and some are naturally unlucky. The expression that you make your own luck can not be applied to all people as there are some less fortunates who are prone to poor luck. I wonder if they worry? Or maybe they are fatalistic or perhaps cynical enough to realise that their poor run of luck is life’s way of having a laugh at them, and that they in turn can derive some kind of black humour from it. I would hope that they would be able to laugh at their continuous runs of misfortune.

So one goes through life without worries, then some really serious worries come along and you realise how meaningless and trivial your everyday concerns are. I find that just as themes and film have plot runs so too does life. Films may well be predetermined in a way that life is not, but there are plots that run through both, and in life these plots are opened up, I find, in a series of revelations and slow dawnings. Not unlike a film then, except luckily life lasts longer then films. An example of this is ageing. I’m 32 and I had a mini-revelation last night that I’m nearly mid-way through my life. This revelation came as a response to my thoughts on mortality. Life, as with everything has its peaks and troughs, and you can be going along quite smoothly then all of a sudden a spanner of particular evilness is thrown in the works, and what is most alarming is that this spanner seemingly appears from nowhere, although on reflection there are always little insidious sign of the approaching nightmare. I have two uncles on my father’s side of the family, and one of them is days away from death. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer about a month ago after suffering kidney failure and was given 8 weeks to live. It turns out that he hasn’t been well fro some time. You see, he was quite distant from the family having cut himself off about ten years ago. There’s no need to go into details as families are funny things, and though I don’t feel devastated I feel some guilt at having not gone and visited. His hospital is in Sherbourne which is about an 8 hour return trip from London. I was going to go and visit him with my brother when he comes over from China but it seems he won’t live that long.

That’s a weird thing, that someone won’t live that long. That this time in two months he’ll be gone forever. He’s had his troubles in life and I know now that not only is he philosophical about the turn of events, but that he is now apologising to those that he has hurt during his life. But though he cut himself off from the family, the family have been to see him, and are still with him now. It is just terribly sad and my father, who stood by him and supported him is terribly upset by it all, more so than even he thought he would be.

I’d got my head around this element of mortality. That a swift sudden death is a better way to go than a lingering painful decline from cancer. I’d made my peace with this concept, and so it was that I emailed my brother yesterday with the sad news that this uncle was now on a push-button administered morphine drip and that this is the final stage of palliative care.

Then came the second piece of devastating news and the stimulus to the very long collection of words. One of my cousins rang last night and told my father that his second brother had collapsed at the weekend and was now semi-conscious in hospital with a ‘growth’ around his pitiuary gland. This gland is at the top of the spinal column where it connects with the brain and is about the size of a pea. What this growth is, we don’t know but anything happening in the body that causes a collapse is not a good thing. The test results are due back today.

And so I come back to worry again. I find that it comes in waves. Here I am sitting at my desk at work, not having done any work at all as I can’t seem to concentrate at all. You may wonder how it is that I am still able to write, but it is like having an entirely one-sided conversation. Still, it is making me feel marginally better by distracting me. This worry comes in waves. One minute I’m completely ok and working on something or doing whatever it is that I normally do and the next is like that dreadful feeling of butterflies before an exam or almost like the waves of panic that I get in the underground sometimes. I then have to sit back and look elsewhere as I can not concentrate. Twice this morning I’ve felt like making my excuses and going home for the day. This morning I was asked to swap desks for the day and I felt close to tears at this. And I have it now. I feel something rising at the back of my throat and I find myself staring into space. I’m not looking at anything and I’m trying not to think of anything. I know what this feeling is. It is dread. It is akin to that fear of some of the teachers at school, or of bullies. It’s the fear of the unknown.

I’m going to go for a long walk at lunch and see how I feel after that. I’m expecting a phone call from my father about the news. The longer that I don’t get that call the more I’m drawn into the conflict of ‘no news is good news’ versus ‘there’s been no news, this is bad news’. And somewhere in the middle is the quiet voice of moderation but it is losing its battle right now.

I thought that writing would make me feel better – it usually does – but its made no difference.

Work out your carbon footprint!

The government have just set up a flash-happy website with an almost cuddly carbon calculator to help you increase your ever burgeoning guilt over destroying the environment with every breath. Pedantically speaking it should be the C02 Footprint as we don't actually have a problem with too much graphite or soot.

I was pleasantly surprised that my footprint is small at some tonnes (or whatever) and that my annual travel in a plane completely outweighed all the benefits of recycling et al. There aren't any outright hints on what a carbon footprint is, and how it matters and indeed if it really matters at all.

I like tests though and this is a wonderful inclusive pc test where nobody is right and nobody is wrong, and it has pretty colours and never once shows you the consequence of producing too much carbon (dioxide).

The Best Website in the World

Holy Moly is, with Facebook, how I get through the working day keeping hold of my sanity. They do a mailout on Friday afternoons without the pictures.

A Really good album

I bought this at the same time as that Calvin Harris pap. Its a great album. Calvin could learn something about how to make music by listening to this. The Guardian said that it was the Chemical Brothers' best album since Surrender. Surrender was a good album and I'm only on the second listening of this one but its really enjoyable.

A pretty moderate album...

I bought this the other day from Virgin thus earning myself a stamp (see below). He didn't create disco. What he did do was take a catchy hook and repeat it for 4 minutes without introducing any new sounds. Its a bit like the really moderate tracks on Daft Punk's first album which start off really well then never go anywhere and turn out a bit dull. I bought this off the back of seeing him (on tv) at Glastonbury, and on reflection his 'Acceptable in the 80s' song wasn't particularly inspirational but I thought I'd give it the benefit of the doubt.
Its not a particularly good album.

R.I.P. Fopp

I’m genuinely saddened by the closure of Fopp as it was my favourite music shop. I work near the Tottenham Court Road ‘Flagship’ shop and every day there is a little gaggle of people furtively trying the doors or just gazing forlornly into the darkened ‘pantheon of the £5 punt’. Where will I buy my £1 books? Where will I go to spend £20 on five or six completely random CDs? Is there no justice in the world? HMV I would gladly see closed. Not only is it the B&Q of music retail right down to the warehouse setting it is also too expensive. Worst of all they have no loyalty scheme. Fopp induced loyalty because of not only the price, but also the range, the marvellous décor, the music, the whole ambience. They had no loyalty scheme apart from having a great shop. HMV have no loyalty scheme and have a shite shop and deserve to go buy bust. Problem is that if HMV do go bust they’ll drag Waterstones down with them.

Virgin have a loyalty card where for every tenner you spend you get a little stamp, and for every ten stamps ‘earned’ you get a tenner off your next purchase. Economically it makes no sense as invariably things are priced 50p below the tenner threshold and you end up spending more just to get an extra stamp. But I keep going back for more.

And for the last word from Fopp:

'It is with great regret that we announce the closure of Fopp.

Our store chain is profitable, well regarded and loved by our loyal customers and staff. However we have failed to gain the necessary support from major stakeholders, suppliers and their credit insurers to generate sufficient working capital to run our expanding business.

We would like to thank staff and customers for their support over the past 25 years.'

I Feel a Campaign Coming On

I feel a campaign coming on, a campaign to tell the world about the truth about Global Warming. The truth is that ‘we don’t know’. We have our suspicions but nothing is certain. I think I may well scream if I read another report stating ‘likely consequences’, ‘possible temperatures’ and all the other vague adverbs around. In amongst all the crap that comes into my work inbox a really good one dropped by the other day with this link, which I should stress is a draft:

http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4007935

I don’t expect anyone to read all this, it being a policy paper. The interesting part (the bits I have read) is Part 1, the introduction to Global Warming. It gives a good overview of what its all about. I’m attempting to write a critique of part of it as someone has requested I do. The bottom of page 18 is really annoying me. There’s an inference that the author suggests should be ignored which I think is rather important.

I’ve just been scrolling through this document and it really is rather interesting. So the introduction has a sentence that makes me irate, but later on Page 22 there’s a rather frank statement regarding the rise in sea levels. Observing that sea levels have “risen by between 10 and 25 cm over the last century” the author asks, “How much of this anticipated climate change can be averted by reducing greenhouse gas emissions? The short answer is ‘some, but not much’”. Even if we achieved the targets set by the non-ratified Kyoto Protocol it would, “reduce future global warming by at most 0.2C.”.

I had never realised that Kyoto was talking in fractions when we’re thinking of whole numbers. 2C warmer is the 22^nd Century scenario. And that’s if we reach the Kyoto target by 2010. The other thing I learned is that warm oceans take up more space than cold oceans of the same mass. Not something I ever thought about, but we’re predicted to have lots more warm water in the future.

So the name of my new party is, “We’re Too Late – Even the Government Says So”.

Time to start building an Ark.

On a lighter note

This is cited as the Worst Music Video ever, but I think that its the best. Introduced by the Jazz Club presenter from the Fast Show its a classic slice of Finnish pop from the 1970s or 80s. The lead male looks not unlike He-Man with a medallion before his 'I am the Poweeer' moment. I think he was called Adam when he wasn't his alter-ego. The lead girl is a bit Kylie before she met Michael Hutchinson and learnt new ways of enjoying the world. The dance troupe are something else altogether.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPnGPIMUnus

I’m bored with Climate Change

Before I start I’ll say, if you haven’t already noticed, I'm a cynic and a pessimist. I’m a cynic because I live in London and the place breeds cynicism. I’m a pessimist because it means that I’m never disappointed. I’m not really a pessimist but I’m more pessimistic than I am an optimist.

Being bored with Climate Change is a very off message comment. I almost feel ashamed saying (writing) it. Its old news now except it’s the kind of news that just won’t go away. Come to think of it it is recorded in the newspapers but as it isn’t even new news how can it be described as news? Still, that isn’t my gripe with it. Here are my Climate Change gripes:

1) Seen it, heard it, experiencing it

Haven’t got the t-shirt but when I buy a hemp one I’ll let you know.

2) Its too late

What’s too late? We’re too late. The scientists are too late.

3) Human Nature can’t be changed

We all know that wars are bad and yet we carry on having them. Through history one of Man’s many defining achievements has been his affinity with war. Its something that we do a great deal of, its something we do well, its something that some of us enjoy a great deal, and we as a collective whole make a great deal of money out of it. Somewhat perversely it also provides the catalyst for our greatest inventions and entertainment. To fight amongst ourselves seems to be human nature.

So for this fight against Climate Change we’re expected to draw together as some kind of homogenous non-competitive happy family and say ‘no’ to C02, to curtail our industrial growth (I’m looking at you China and India) and say ‘yes’, the planet’s health is more important than modernity and all that defines modernity? As part of this mass pissing on bonfires we’re also expected to change radically how we carry out our daily lives, turning our backs on our entire history – no more ‘me, me, me’ and instead ‘oooh, save the planet’.

And we’re expected to do this preferably in the next 8 years (UK government) and at most by 2020. I need to check these target dates, and those of the beached whale that is Kyoto.

We’re also meant to do this in an environment which is changing rapidly around us, where fuel prices are going through the roof, and fresh water is becoming a scarcity whilst there’s going to be a big problem with the saltier stuff.

4) We’ll war before we tackle the environment

Frankly I reckon there will be a war before that happens. The good news is that we’re well practiced at war. The bad news is that it isn’t really the answer this time. It’ll help decide who controls the natural resources that are most important (I’m looking at you freshwater), but in the big picture we’ll still all be screwed. Just for the record, I reckon that the war will start somewhere in central Asia and will involve the stans, Iran, India and Pakistan. It’ll be to do with limited water resources as there are only two major supplies in the area (Himalayan meltwater and the Caspian Sea and the rivers that flow from it), and a whole swathe of countries depend on them. And if climate change is going to continue the way it is predicted then these resources are going to be radically reduced.

5) Climate Change is a 21^st Century Millenium Bug

i.e. its all a load of crap. Climate Change (CC) is all a bit of a cult. Dare to say that CC is a myth and that nobody really knows and you’ll be slated as some God-fearing intelligent design believing Texan oil megalomaniac, which is absurd. There is so much supposition in all these dire warnings of what ‘might’ happen in the future if we don’t mend our ways. Articles are full of ‘may’ and ‘could’ but nobody ever says ‘we don’t know for sure’ as that would cast doubt on their findings. And might it not be the case that all these pronouncements of the imminent green holocaust are only coming about because nobody has ever bothered to investigate this part of science before?

Denouncing Climate Change is a Thought Crime.

6) Solar Flares

Blame it on the Sun. The sun is getting hotter, and all the other planets are getting hotter, so it stands to reason that that is why we have global warming. I have absolutely no evidence of this as I have done no research on it but it sounds like a good argument to me. Of course I’ll do some research and probably find out that Exxon sponsored it and then I’ll be torn between the inter-galactic answer and the no less partisan Friends of the Earth conclusion.

7) The need to fear

Its good to be scared: we thrive on it, except we’re a bit short of things to be fearful of. We’ve had in the last century: War, Nazis, War, Communism, lots of wars, Terrorism, Globalisation (how quaint), Millenium Bug, Terrorism, Environment.

[Aside: notice how the anti-capitalist anti-globalisation movements collapsed when we realised that a) we liked the internet and b) cheap stuff comes from China]

We now need to be scared of the environment. How else are the mega-corporative military industrial complexes going to foist new exciting green ways of driving cars. Look, it runs on bio-fuels. No more being nasty to the environment. Hope the factory it came from was green and powered by sustainable sources. Robots do need a lot of electricity.

8) The Earth has a blowing hot and cold cycle

It gets hot and then it gets cold. When it gets hot things dry up, and when it gets cold it gets icy. Not much we can do about it. Maybe this should be slotted in the inter-galactic category.

9) Carbon Footprints

Not something that Father Christmas leaves on the carpet but the big new phrase. I’m terribly worried about my carbon footprint but I allay this fear by fastidiously recycling my newspapers and taking public transport. The irony is not lost on me that my recycling is carted off in a great big diesel powered truck and put on another great big diesel truck and taken to the coast where its put on a great big heavy fuel powered ship and carted off to China to be turned into loo roll in a great big factory powered by a great big coal burning power station and is then put on another great big heavy oil fuelled ship and chugged all the way back to my loo roll holder via more diesel powered trucks before being wiped on my bum, flushed down the loo, processed in a nuclear powered filtration place before being chucked in the sea.

And I only take public transport as I don’t have a chauffeur driven Mercedes to cart me to work and if I could afford a Mercedes I would probably instead have a Hummer just so I could sneer at all the other less fortunates stuck in the bus all thinking what an oil-guzzling bastard I am whilst conveniently forgetting the energy expended in making sure their bums were kept clean and their consciences clear.

Conclusion

We’re screwed. Its too late, we’ve missed the boat, and even if we hadn’t missed the boat (which by all accounts we’ll be needing) we would still miss it. There is no way in hell that we are going to achieve the targets we have set for ourselves. This doomsday scenario that the eggheads keep on telling us is incoming will happen, and will happen when they say it will. I just don’t have faith in the human race changing its ways before it is too late. This opinion doesn’t even take into account the opinions of most of the big industrial nations. China is starting to think seriously about its polluted water-ways and lack of drinking water but play this off against the new coal power station it builds every week and the resultant industrial revolution it is undergoing. India too has a rapidly expanding economy. That’s just two countries that are expected to stop right now and think of a green way to do it. I mean come on, its just NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Oh, and if does all turn out to be as threatening as a circus clown (subliminally frightening but overtly harmless) by then we’ll all be tootling about in electric hover mobiles with wind vanes on our heads and at least we’ll be greener, and no harm can really come from that…

Chuck Norris: Before the Beard

Giant Car Bumper Cock

Too much text

There's too much text here, so here's a picture. I googled 'silly picture'.

Coffee without sugar tastes of coffee

Bit of a revelation this: Coffee tastes really good without sugar. Amazing! The best instant that I've found is M&S Fairtrade Cafe Gold which really truly smells like coffee and tastes like coffee. I know I'm getting old now. I like mustard, I like coffee and I don't like sugar (as much as I used to).

Star Wars geekery

There's a Star Wars exhibition opening in London tomorrow for 6 months and I can feel myself being drawn inexorably towards it. I just know it will be full of Phantom Menace crap and stupid merchandise that I will just have to buy. I think a Yoda mug will do. I'm sure George Lucas will try and sell me the new version of Star Wars where they're all in drag except Chewie who's had a Brazilian. Same plot and special effects though.
Peep Show on tonight. Quality.

Rumsfeld Poetry

Why I don't like poetry:

It rhymes, it has iambic pentameter, its written in a stupid way without sentences which makes it harder to read - the only way to read Milton's Paradise Lost is to read it like a normal book without all the verses.

When poetry is recited the reader sounds all maudlin like their cat has just been run over and they're trying not to cry.

I can never remember poems.

They just... irritate me.... But still, here's some stuff from Donald Rumsfeld which works better when written in verse. This I can handle because I know who he is. Poets I can't handle because I don't know who they are. Neither do they. That's why they write poems:

(Lifted straight from Guardian Online)

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

A Confession

Once in a while,
I'm standing here, doing something.
And I think,
"What in the world am I doing here?"
It's a big surprise.

May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times

The Situation

Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.

Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

Clarity

I think what you'll find,
I think what you'll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.

And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.

Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

Glass Box

You know, it's the old glass box at the
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's

And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But

Some of you are probably too young to remember those
Those glass boxes,
But

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

Dec. 6, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

Firefox add-ons

One of the best things about Mozilla Firefox are the customisation aspects. There are some real beauties in amongst the crap. These are all for Firefox 2.0 – go to Help>Check for Updates to get the latest version.

Then go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ to find these:

Fasterfox: Noticeably speeds up page load times
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1269

Google Preview: This is excellent. It inserts a preview picture (thumbnail) of any given page next to the text description in google.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1269

Customize Google: This removes the adverts from Google and as the name suggests gives you far more options for how Google works than google does.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743

PDF Download: Throws up a box when you click on a pdf icon asking if you want to save or not. Very useful at work.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/636

Webworld

Twitter

Web 2.0 cheerleaders are seeing www.twitter.com as one of the big new things. I signed up to it to see what it was all about and I’ve got to say that it really is completely pointless and not only that but not even interesting or fun. I suppose that it is like some kind of location specific real-time social networking site. You sign in, choose your picture then there’s an email box with a question, “What are you doing right now”. My last post was “Cancelling this pointless program”, then my message appeared with a “posted 5 seconds ago” next to it in a long list of other twitterers’ ramblings on what they are doing. I heard about it through http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/ which is a 3D modelling site associated with London University. They heard about Twitter as there is some way of joining Twitter up with Google Maps and then being able to see the location where people were trittering from. This was the initial attraction but I couldn’t get that to work. You can probably see how quickly the novelty wore off.

Joost

I reckon Joost is going to be the “Next Big Thing” so unless you subscribe to HolyMoly or read the Guardian geek pages on Thursdays you might not have heard about it. Holy Moly summed it up best. It is Sky Digital on your PC for free. Yes, it is online TV with no fees. Unlike YouTube I see that Viacom have just signed on to supply material. The guys behind Joost are the guys who created Kazaa (the peer to peer software) and who then went on to write Skype which they then sold to ebay for a crazy amount which is how they must have financed Joost.
I can’t say that I’ve actually used Joost a great deal due to time constraints but it has a great interface, is really user friendly and seems to have some good channels too.

Swingball close-ups

James Brown plays Swingball

Wow, this looks fun!

Swingball: Not much fun

I found this 1970s swingball instruction manual. See how the happy families are enjoying the thrill of swingball. What I particularly like is the picture in the bottom right corner. Two kids in school uniform playing in a cold rainy field in a caravan park which, by the look of it, is closed for the winter. And is that the Godfather of Soul James Brown at the middle bottom?

From a Bygone Age

The one and only Bobby Davro, from a time when he would go head to head with Russ Abbott!

Its the white trainers and the toothy grin that does it for me

Eighties sexpot


Surely these bears are ill advised

Note the hint of 'a bit of length' just peeking to the right of his neck. He's a pretty smooth kind of a guy.

I'm sure our celebrities are far more media-savvy now but there was a time it seems in the mid-eighties when the cheesy pose was the be all and end all of publicity. Nothing quites beats the addition of a hand-scrawled signature, and with an insincere 'With Love' homily... well, what can I say? I found these nuggets in the attic this bank holiday weekend. Father Christmas saw fit to pass them on to me quite some time ago somehow knowing that I would one day truly relish their true beauty.

(This being blogger these pictures will either appear above or below this post. There was a time when I had worked out this idiosyncracy but I can't quite be bothered to experiment today. No, they've appeared above).

Evening Standard

You know those Evening Standard boards that tell you the headlines. Perhaps they might entice you in to buy the new 'quality' ES rather than reading the free one with the same news. Anyway the print on those boards. Look how its hand-crafted by skilled craftsmen. Except its not. It might have been one day but its printed now. Look closely - all the 'a's and the 'e's are the same. So that pisses me off every time I see one. Its like, we'll pretend we're the old ES that had news and a Stop Press column on the back page and the wrong angle. But we're really the new massively loss making ES with no news about London and plenty of crap about women's fashion.
One more thing about the boards. The message on them is always negative. Often its negative and fatuous. Often it is not news either.


Then there's the freesheets. That Murdoch one is preferable to the Associated News one only because the typeface is easier. They're both shite. What really irks me every evening when I get off the tube there's some poor chap in a silver cagoul proffering me with this shitty excuse for loo roll. I don't want to be nasty to him but please leave me alone. If I wanted to read it I'd pay for it.

Rant over.

Thailand last year

I took this panorama last year thinking that one day I would find the software that could stitch it together. Turns out that Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 has something called PhotoMerge. Its pretty cool.

Cool Posters on the way to work this morning

Google

The be all and end all of internet searchery...

Its not you know. Have you noticed how so much of google is advertising? At the same time have you got this feeling that Google are slowly insidiously taking over the world? That's because they are. So they've got Google Earth – which is great – and Google Video/Youtube, and Gmail which isn't as good as Yahoo! Mail, but they're no better, they've got Flickr. They've got Blogger and Sketchup too. That Google desktop manager. I installed it on my work pc but I wouldn't put it on my home one. Its a security risk. It indexes your files to make it easier for you to find stuff, so far so what. But where does it put the index of your files? On a Google server that's where. I know its only an index but still, I wouldn't knowingly give my bank statements index to the world's biggest search engine to keep safe.

There are search engines called meta-crawlers. I don't what that means, I imagine that sand people live in them, or worse. Meta-Crawlers are dead clever. Instead of just looking on one search engine when you type something in, they look on all of them at once. There's metacrawler.com This searches Google, Yahoo!, MSNSearch and Ask. The problem is that it tends to throw up the top 10 most popular choices from each site at the same time, which means there are lots of identical results.

But there's a very old free program that I hadn't used since 2001 called Copernic Agent. Here it is. This searches 10 of the biggest search engines, except Google, then filters everything nicely for you.

As I do lots of research as part of work, I'm finding loads of stuff that just isn't on Google.

Very handy.

9/11 End of the Conspiracy

My work has been a little dull of late which means I’ve been spending more and more time perusing the internet. Of course being in a work environment means that I don’t have free reign, and so I have to stick to sites I regard as work safe – the Guardian and Wiki and so on. I also have to steer clear of video and pictures. Today there was an article regarding the every growing 9/11 Truth Movement, the BBC documentary demolishing it last Sunday night, and an internet film called Loose Change which has been viewed 4.7 million times on Google Video/Youtube.

Personally I think that the whole 9/11 conspiracy things is a load of bollocks. I accept that there are lots of weird coincidences and some proof which seems pretty convenient and that the US response at the time was frighteningly cack-handed. If you don’t know them, the main conspiracies are that:

1) The twin towers were brought down by a controlled explosion

2) WTC 7 (a 40 storey building that collapsed later in the day) was brought down by a controlled explosion

3) The Pentagon was not hit by a hijacked plane but by something else – a cruise missile.

4) United 93 was shot down.

5) 4000 Jews were told to not to go to work that day

6) and so on

I had a good look into this, and luckily being the cynic that I am I managed to extricate myself from the quagmire of supposition, misquotes and selective evidence before it completely drowned me. And why? Anyone with a brain knows that using the internet to self-diagnose a personal illness is madness. Similarly, the internet is the biggest game of Chinese Whispers ever. Yes there are reputable sites and reputable news sources, but in the same breath there are all the rantings of the insane and righteous and believers ad infinitum. To think that by using the internet of all things to glean any information for anything so un-cut and dried as 9/11… that’s how easy it is – I almost went on a rant there out of the blue on the random rantiness of the internet.

My point – it almost got lost there – my point is this:

1) Governments are completely inept at just about everything they do. We have the Civil Service and they are fucking useless. So any suggestion that Bush and Cheney and Co could organise something like that is madness.

2) There have been no whistle-blowers from a cast of thousands

Enough of my ranting, here’s the evidence:

Conspirators:

http://www.911truth.org/

http://www.loosechange911.com/

People with too much time on their hands

Against

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

Everybody else. Not the nutjobs.

A 9/11 Conspiracy Post from The Grauniad today

... The conspiracists seem to have an alarming amount of faith in their government. Considering their record at governing the US and Iraq to all intents its been one cock-up after another. And yet these inbreds apparently organised 9/11 and kept it secret all this time. Governments in general are absolutely hopeless at just about everything they do.

As for 9/11: So What? So George Bush organised 9/11(do you realise how stupid that sounds)? Or was it the Military-industrial complex? Did it have something to do with JFK's murder, the Mafia and Roswell? Maybe Anna-Nicole Smith found out the truth and was murdered!

But come on, we all know that the BBC documentary was paid for by Halliburton and Mi5 wrote the script. It too was a conspiracy, a conspiracy to cover-up the other conspiracy to expose the cover-up of the first conspiracy, or was there a conspiracy before that?

Finally, were the Embassy Bombings and the USS Cole blown up as part of a conspiracy by the neo-cons to get Clinton out after Newt Gingrich failed? And were the Madrid and London bombings instigated by the CIA to prove that Al-Qaeda really do exist? Or they were just copycat killings right?