Planet Afterlife @ Seldo.Net

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I’ve had a few ‘run-ins’ with Rachel Stevens. The first was when I was doing work experience at a radio company in 2003. She was doing a series of ISDN (high tech interviews) with radio stations around the country from a base in London. I looked after the desk and at one point had to run out to get her a takeaway chicken salad from Pizza Express. Next, I worked at a music promotions company who were doing the digital PR for ‘Come and Get It’. She came into the building to do interviews and signed me a couple of bits in including the above and a promo of the album which was sent out in a proper case and everything but with a black & pink sleeve. Finally, I reviewed her album for the BBC convincing them to make it album of the week across the BBC reviews system which made me very happy! It’s quite interesting to look back at writing from 4 years ago, which seems quite a bit more stilted than it is these days.

Anyway here’s the brilliant ‘Negotiate With Love’ that still sounds as bang on today as it did back then. It still irritiates me slightly that the lyric is ‘Whatever happened to me?’ rather than the much more heart tugging ‘Whatever happened to we?’.

Kudos to the brilliant XO London and MuuMuse for putting one of my favourite albums back in mind and Adem with an E for writing about it.

By trixie at 20:09PM

Winner of week’s strangest press release goes to Juliette Lewis who has somehow been roped into performing as part of the Get Loud in Libraries campaign. Last time this happened I think it was Mr Hudson involved pre autotune days when he was called … & The Library. That kind of made sense. This time, they are sending Juliette to Morecambe Library.

For those non Lancashire people amongst you, I am not exaggerating when I say Morecambe is the bleakest place I’ve ever been. I quite like bleak places, I’m from Blackpool after all – but Morecambe takes it to a whole other level. There is no one there, everything is shut down and the only thing to do is stand next to a statue of Eric (not actually from) Morecambe.

I took my housemate as part of a Lancashire road trip last January. Here’s what it looks like – click the pics to go large for full depression. Picture 3 nearly made me cry.

By trixie at 06:35AM

There has been something of a backlash from the gay community recently to the Obama administration. Like many other groups of Americans who supported Obama for their own reasons, they have been disappointed at his inability to do everything they wanted in the first six months of his presidency.

First came complaints that Obama was doing nothing about Don't Ask, Don't Tell while good soldiers had their careers destroyed. There's no denying that further delay of changing DADT will result in more injustice, but we are five months into a four-year term and there has been a global financial meltdown to take care of. I'm not saying I wouldn't be happier if he hadn't taken care of it already, but nor was I expecting him to.

Then, much more seriously, came a brief from the Justice Department that defended the loathsome Defence of Marriage Act. This is a much more serious transgression, as although the Justice Department is technically obligated to defend all existing law, in reality that defence can be flexibly defined, and this was no weak-willed defence -- it made tired allusions of gay marriage opening the door to polygamy and other nonsense*. Many gay people felt betrayed, and I was personally shocked to hear that kind of language coming out of the Obama administration, however indirectly.

Yesterday, at a much-reported speech commemorating the Stonewall riots, Obama gave an unambiguously strong defence of gay rights, getting some quotable lines in early, like "There are unjust laws to overturn and unfair practices to stop," which seems aimed at both these issues. Later he was much more explicit:

And I know that many in this room don’t believe that progress has come fast enough, and I understand that. It’s not for me to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half century ago.

But I say this: We have made progress and we will make more. And I want you to know that I expect and hope to be judged not by words, not by promises I’ve made, but by the promises that my administration keeps. ... We’ve been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration.

Pausing to point out that he did what was within his direct control by extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees, he then took on DOMA specifically, including that brief:

I’ve called on Congress to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act to help end discrimination against same-sex couples in this country. Now, I want to add we have a duty to uphold existing law, but I believe we must do so in a way that does not exacerbate old divides. And fulfilling this duty in upholding the law in no way lessens my commitment to reversing this law. I’ve made that clear.

He then mentioned his commitment to the Matthew Shepard act and a new law that would guarantee health and other benefits to domestic partners, as well as rescinding the ban on entry into the United States by HIV-positive persons (a policy so ridiculous that many people are amazed to hear it even exists). Then he took on DADT:

And finally, I want to say a word about “don’t ask, don’t tell.” As I said before — I’ll say it again — I believe “don’t ask, don’t tell” doesn’t contribute to our national security. In fact, I believe preventing patriotic Americans from serving their country weakens our national security.

Now, my administration is already working with the Pentagon and members of the House and the Senate on how we’ll go about ending this policy, which will require an act of Congress.

... I know that every day that passes without a resolution is a deep disappointment to those men and women who continue to be discharged under this policy — patriots who often possess critical language skills and years of training and who’ve served this country well. But what I hope is that these cases underscore the urgency of reversing this policy not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it is essential for our national security.

Essentially, this makes explicit what I had assumed was his position on gay rights: important, but not worth blowing political capital on so early in the game. He has to get healthcare out of the way and fix the economy. I don't want him concentrating on anything else, even my rights, until those two are under control.

* And what would be so bad about that, anyway?

By at 03:00AM

Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t want to be Blair Waldorf? Here’s Leighton’s first proper release as a pop star teaming up with Cobra Starship for ‘Good Girls Go Bad’. It’s been knocking about for quite a while but the video has just come out today – I’m slightly concerned that she doesn’t seem to have much rhythm but I’m hoping that’s a youtube sync issue!

Love the xoxo text message!

By trixie at 19:46PM

So today @rands linked to the world clock, a cute little thing that counts various numbers up and down, like food production, population, illnesses, pollution, and energy. One of the numbers Michael pointed to in particular was the "oil depletion timer": 14,776 days of oil left. Only 40 years! Far off -- but not that far off! Scary! Ooo! Peak oil!

I call bullshit.

So here's the thing: I come from an oil producing nation. And for as long as I can remember, we've always had "only 30 years of oil left". Here's a graph of Trinidad's oil production since 1980 (source):

What would you expect the graph to look like over two decades for a country that only had 30 years of oil left? A steady decline? A ramping up and then a sudden fall? Some sort of bell curve? Instead, this graph actually looks very like another graph (source):

In other words, we produce more oil when it is more profitable to do so. That's not a government decision, that's an oil company decision. And its those same oil companies who decide when to go looking for more oil. That's why, 20 years after the first time I heard the statistic, we still have more than 30 years' worth of reserves left. And so does the world. Proven world oil reserves have been rising for a decade. We only go looking for more oil when we're beginning to run low, somewhere around the 30 year mark.

I'm not saying that the world has enough oil to last forever. I'm also definitely not saying that relying on oil as an energy source is a good idea. I'm just saying that we have lots and lots of time to sort it out.

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By trixie at 11:04AM

I’ve not really written much about faltering pop starlet VV Brown over here. I think I took against her from the start because she showed up 45 minutes late to an interview with my friend and didn’t apologise. I showed up 55 minutes late (UNINTENTIONALLY) for an interview with the bloody amazing Raygun a few weeks ago so I now feel less angry towards her. I like her hair, I think she’s gorgeous, I feel like she might chuck herself off a building though at any moment sometimes when reading her twitter which is a bit worrying, and I adore playing ‘Crying Blood’ each week at Popstarz. It’s a proper classic pop song that should have been a brilliant one hit wonder if nothing else. As oppose to most of the pop blogosphere I think ‘Shark in the Water’ is an nice, adequate song but hardly something to be screaming about.

Now I’m highly unlikely to start banging off promo blogs for commercial things, but as part of a perhaps blooming fashion career, VV has designed some ponchos for Orange for use at Glastonbury. The photos are amazing, mainly because she looks like a pumpkin. This is all I need to be amused. Actual proper info over here.

By trixie at 13:51PM

Over the last 10 weeks i’ve been indulging in a bit of singing lesson action. I like Singstar a bit too much so James sent me on a group course at City Academy. It’s been quite fun, but our teacher has put together a really anti Talia set of songs. So he’s been making us sing Angels, Mr Brightside, Wonderwall, Blame It On the Boogie, Faith etc. Maybe it’s just because I am extremely overexposed to these songs but I was hoping for a bit of a mixture with some standards, bit of musical theatre etc rather than full on rock/pop else I would have picked the rock / pop course!

Also we have to sing over the CDs rather than with sheet music which is driving me slightly mental. This is probably bang on what the casual ‘beginner’ student wants for an after work course, but I think it’s rubbish because you can’t see how long the notes or meant to be or yadda yadda yadda. I probably need to find a little old lady with a piano.

Anyway the final two lessons have us doing our own choice of song. I only remembered this 20 minutes before the lesson started so went with Another Suitcase In Another Hall as I know all the words (obsessive listening in 1996) and No Doubt Don’t Speak which I’ve always wanted to sing but decided in the car was way too hard. Next week I can do Another Suitcase again but wondered if anyone had any suggestions for something more exciting?

I am secretly hoping someone goes mental and shows up with ‘Vision of Love’

By trixie at 18:48PM

My friend Wilfried has a lot of family in Iran and is understandably worried about them right now. He recently called his uncle there and transcribed the conversation he had describing the situation in Iran, the elections, the protests, the violence, and his thoughts on the future of the country.

He originally posted this on his site, but it's collapsed under the load so I am mirroring it here.

The following is a rough conversation outline I just had with my uncle, who lives in Tehran. Sorry for the readability and grammar, I haven't had time to proofread and clarify yet; just wanted to get this out there in its most raw form. Draw any conclusions you'd like.

Italics = me

Rest = uncle

"tell me whats going on with the election"

Iranian people wanted the following aims

1. bring steps towards democracy

2. want to have good and free relation with entire world (incl US)

3. searching for Peace, are people who want peace with neighboring countries

4. want progress to have better situation and position

5. these are all aims which have been told by mousavi & karroubi & rezai

- we are told from these people that they are going to govern peace, good relationship with other countries, to bring peace to the country, to bring progress, and have good relations with even israel and the united states, and also they wanted to end, and have good relations to palestinans and not give economic support to terrorists in the palestinians.

these are their aims. those candidates told them 'we are going to do this'

but after the election, near 50 mil people have gone to election

- we are all sure that most votes have gone to mousavi

- we were sure he would win with more than 26+ million

- we found that mr ahmadinejad had 6-7 million. was backed by government and supreme leader

- reality is its like a coup de'tat, you see?

"tell me about the protests"

- when people have found out their vote hasnt counted, people reacted in good and democratic matter. went out of the house and had gatherings in different streets in tehran. all of these have been filmed and are on YouTube and Voice Of America (VOA).

- It is going on and on. it doesn't seem to stop.

- Every day, the people against mousavi have demonstration, of course.

- mousavi has demonstration today at 4-6pm in tehran. at azadi street @ revolution square. I think they will have some speech about the way and future of these demonstrations

"have you seen the demonstrations personally?"

- yes, i have seen them personally, but i didnt dare to go into them personally. there are too many army people there. they are very rough in their actions."

"they are violent?"

- thats right. they hit people with electric batons and want to make people fear them.

- In our own place, ekhbatan, 500k people (situated south west of tehran), we see the demonstrations during the 9pm-10pm (or 11 or 12) every night. they shout that "we want our vote" and "we want our president" and "we don't want this man, ahmadinejad" and "down with the dictator/down with ahmadinejad". Also, I witness some attack with the army with the people, where they knocked people and broke many windows between 2AM and 3AM both saturday and sunday night).

- Now we are waiting for the time of monday's demonstrations.

"just batons and tear gas or guns too?"

- we hear firings, but are told people are not the targets, that theyre not targeted.

- we heard news from shiraz that one univ. student was killed. am going to look at other media to confirm because our own media filters everything.

"what do you think is going to happen?"

- I think this is the kind of reaction people have. they have reached the conclusion that they cant live with this situation. that they want their country to progress, peaceful, to have good relations with other countries, and not to interfere with internal relations of other countries (palestine, iraq, etc). and we are serious about these things. we don't want to interfere. we need to have good relations with all the countries. until now we have no good relations with them. i am one of them who have voted for mr mousavi. all those who have voted for him, wnat that he fulfilles these object[ive]s: 1 - good relations. 2 - stop economic help to terroristic action. 3 - peace. 4 - progress, industrial and scientific proposals, and these are the main things that these people want... and they are going to follow their wantings. they are going to follow their needs.

- at the present time, the people are going to hear from their leaders[/candidates]

"so you think theyre waiting for the leadership to define what the next few days or weeks are going to look like?"

- yes exactly, absolutely, they are going to out their goals, and they want to have their own candidate presented as the president of iran, and i think we as people of iran will not stop to have our desired goal that is having mr mousavi as president

"even if mousavi becomes prez do you think the surpreme leader is going to allow change to happen?"

- of course we can't predict what will happen, but this is a process that has started already. I think the rate and fate of progress will reach the final point of democracy. i think people want and are willing to sacrifice all their lifes, and even much more than that. i cannot predict. we don't know what will happen. but just now we have confronted with this situation, that the supreme leader has very definitely interfered with the vote of the people.

"are you implying there may be some kind of change in the entire leadership of iran?

- i cannot see this is a process that we are just at the beginning or even the middle. we have to go and continue to see the process. it may be that the surpreme leader may bend to the will of the people. i think this is probable.

"you do think it is probable?"

- yes, maybe, but not too much. maybe 10 or 20%. and this depends on the behavior of people, for them to decide upon their own future and fate. but really the past history has shown us that this is very improbable. *laughs uncomfortably*"

"Some people here are concerned that the outcome may only strengthen the hardline/surpreme rulers' rule, and/or that israel will try to take advantage of this."

- absolutely thats right. ive heard that, and ive heard that some people in israel are very happy that ahmi has come back to power, and maybe that gives them some reason to have an attack. the thing is, we dont want these things. we dont want war. we want change. the same thing has mr obama stated, we want change, and we have demonstrated that we need and we want change to happen.

- also i wanted to add something else. i think our leader mr mousavi is against any violence, and i think they have selected kind of a policy that is very very similar to the policy of mahatma ghandi, the policy of anti-violence. he reached the desired conclusion as did dr martin luther king in the united states, in his way of leadership. the same thing i see in mr obama, the same thing we see in nelson mandela. and this will work, and we are with it. and i think the demonstration of those opponents of those of mr mousavi will be totally anti violence and against violence. the thing is all the intellectuals in the country, as are mousavi and korrabi, are for peace and want to stop interference in the other countries affairs. they have adopted the way of nonviolence, to keep going and to follow and to continue the process of this voting and this, to some extent, revolution.

"so you would think of this as an attempt of revolution?"

- yes, i think this is a step towards it

"one last thing - have you heard of the riot police being from lebanon"

- of course not yet. i have not heard anything about them bringing any lebanese police. i doubt it, but i am going to ask those people in khermanshah, and i will contact you.

"if you do hear anything about it, please let me know"

- i will tell you.

- at last i want you, and all those that are in the way of truth, that please inform the people of the states, whoever, that this time the iranian people want to half good relation with all the countries, and all the poeple. and this should be very clear for the american people that they shouldnt judge the iranian people as terrorists, or those who want to be in not a good way of living or thinking. actuallly, we are going to have democracy in all its objectives.

- i will inform you any news i have, including that which you are looking.

"Tashakor, Khali mamnoon"

-Ghorbonet beram, khodafez

By at 16:38PM

In an attempt to infiltrate every single bit of pop music out there, I am now adding the title of digital plugger to my wares. Together with my friend Jude, with whom I worked at digital agency Outside Line many moons ago touting McFly and the forgotten brilliance of the Love Bites (best launch party ever), I have set up XOXO promotions. Yes I am a mega gossip girl fan but I think the name also helps pass forward the idea that we love pop music and we want others too also. In any case, we better be considered for Leighton Meester’s forthcoming campaign. (n.b. our website is currently a holding page till it goes all fun & poppy!)

Setting up the company, Jude and I were keen, maybe in a fresh faced naive way, to only work on acts we actually love. I don’t want to run round telling people something is amazing when it’s blatantely not. I want to just carry on shouting about an amazing piece of pop I would do of my own accord. So to start us off in a brilliant way is new Jive signing Daisy Dares You. Daisy is scarily 15 and although I’ve not met her yet, I think I might feel like a bit of a granny with the mighty 12 years I have on her. She’s from Essex and makes fun, bouncy, DIY sounding pop music. Everything is in very early demo stages at the moment, I don’t even have snazzy photos to throw at people, but I’m very exciting to hear what she comes up with and be there from the start.

You can hear 4 demos on her myspace page – ‘No 1 Enemy’ is the one that first drew me in with it’s unexpected cameo from J2K. ‘Talk About The Weather’ is perfectly fitting her age as she tells the tale of meeting a boy she fancies over an increasingly manic piano riff, while ‘Next Few Minutes’ takes a darker approached juxtaposing cute sounding vocals with a menacing ‘tick tock’. Basically it is gagging for a Doctor / Rose bit of epic, heartbreak filled unofficial youtube action. Can someone make it happen?

Anyway to wet your appetite, here is a self titled track ‘Daisy Dares You’. It’s fun, it’s bouncy and the more I listen to it, the more I jump around the kitchen while cooking.

Download Daisy Dares You – Daisy Dares You [MP3]

By trixie at 13:56PM

My google reader is so full up of blogs I want to read but I’ve been trying to move over to another RSS system so I make a conscious effort as I’m missing out on lots of amazing pop.

Le Kid is one such gem. Introduced by Don’t Stop The Pop, it’s one of those songs that your mates who used to go to Tenerife in the summer holidays would come back singing, and then it would go on to be a catchy UK chart botherer until gloomy November.

It’s very upbeat and pop and has elements of Can’t Speak French, Mambo No 5 and another song I can’t quit place. It’s the chorus though – can you get it? It’s written by some massive Swedish pop gurus and the video contains some fabulous ‘dry’ synchronized swimming. As Popjustice put it, it’s what would happen ‘If Alphabeat weren’t quite so obsessed with Shoreditch…’

‘Telephone’ over on their myspace is even better.

By trixie at 05:57AM

I don’t know how to write about this without being mean. It’s shot in a mean way but actually what he says is quite sweet. It looks atrocious but quite impressive.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Only in Blackpool.

By trixie at 17:56PM

Last night I went to see Beyonce live. I like Beyonce. I’m not mental on her, but I knew she’d be able to pull off a pretty good show.

OH MY GOD. I am not exaggerating when I say I might as well never go to a gig again. NOTHING is likely to beat last night. 35 songs, about 10 costume changes, flying, mad amazing dancing, an all female band, extravagant video bits. My favourite gig ever was Robbie at Knebworth but save the size of the queue to get out of the car park, it was nothing on Beyonce. And then there was this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I was about 17/18 I was a massive George Michael fan. My best friend Joanne and I used to listen to Ladies and Gentlemen NON STOP at sixth form despite not actually knowing most of it when it came out. It soundtracked us learning to drive, doing our A Levels, everything. I saw him live a couple of years ago at the LIVE 25 tour but from right at the back of Wembley. This time we were realy close to the stage and it was the best surprise ever. Just before launching into ‘If I Were A Boy’, Beyonce did a little bit of the beautiful ‘One More Try’ which seemed really random and then a costume change later there he was. I seriously just stood open mouthed screaming for the entire song. Beyonce’s almost ‘Outside’ outfit was perfect, the video screens made them look like they were in a properly 80s video and this should so be re-released as a duet.

10/10

By trixie at 07:26AM

"So, how was your week?"

Oh, you know... I had a tough deadline, a couple of boring meetings, and the supreme court upheld that a plurality of voters could deny me my civil rights in the country that calls itself the Land of the Free... the usual.

So fuck you, voters of California. The rest of the country is rapidly falling into line, and by 2010 it'll be you and fucking Mississippi looking like hateful throwbacks.

By at 14:53PM

It's no secret to anybody that I'm a huge fan of Twitter. As a man with an insatiable desire to know everything in the universe as fast as possible, Twitter is like having ESP: I know what everyone around me is thinking, and if I want to, I can hit Twitter search trending topics and find out what everyone is thinking about. I think it's a service that's already hugely useful and has tremendous potential.

So I get a little annoyed, now that Twitter is going crazily mainstream, being used by everyone from Oprah to the CDC, when people misunderstand what Twitter is, and what it's for. Some of them are aggravatingly stupid ideas, and yet are blithely echoed around the mediasphere. So here's my top ten things that Twitter is not.

1. The new email / the new telegram

Only a total idiot would think that Twitter was an attempt to replace email, and you'd have to be an idiot from the early 20th century to think it was an attempt to replace the telegram. The combination of these two idiots is Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who interviewed the Twitter founders in the most astonishingly belittling and hostile way while entirely missing the point. Pleasingly, she has already been excellently parodied, so at least some good has come of it.

2. A tool for self-absorbed hipsters (well, maybe it is)

Another quote from Dowd's inane article described Twitter as "a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls". The excellent Twouble with Twitters parody also touched on this idea: that it's the place for vapid navel-gazers. Now, I'm not going to deny there are a bunch of idiots using Twitter this way, especially people who follow Twitter's own instructions for using the service (see later). But if having annoying people using your service makes it a service exclusively for annoying people, then that's a problem shared by every website in the world. Twitter is what you make of it.

3. Worth $1 billion

The hilariously unreliable TechCrunch sparked off a massive hubbub the other day when it claimed Google was in late-stage acquisition talks with Twitter. After being slapped down by everybody with any actual knowledge of the situation, they shamelessly followed up by claiming that Twitter's founder Evan Williams wouldn't sell Twitter for a billion dollars. Not that anybody had offered a billion dollars, and not even that Evan said so. Their source was just some guy who knew Evan and said "dude, he wouldn't sell Twitter for, like, a billion dollars".

4. Private or even secure

There have been multiple stories about Twitter accounts being hacked. Even the admin accounts of the people who run Twitter have been broken into more than once. The solution here is not oAuth: the solution here is recognize that Twitter is a web service with laudable flexibility and openness, and with openness comes vulnerability. Accept this, move on, and for the love of god don't attempt to use it for anything important like sending money.

Oh, and sure, you can set your account to "private", but then almost none of the fun mashups work. Turn that off, and remember to treat it like your blog: don't say anything you wouldn't like spread around and archived forever. This is the web, and Twitter is no different in this respect.

5. The new Google

I confess I am partially guilty here, having said on Flickr that Twitter is the new search, and indeed I think Twitter has a huge opportunity in real-time search, as evidenced by how incredibly useful the Twitter/Google search mashup plugin is proving to be. But real-time search is supplementary to web search, not competitive with it, so those who claim that Twitter is a Google alternative should try searching Twitter for the name of the Brazilian prime minister in 1926. Twitter will not replace Google, it will be used by Google (and Yahoo!) -- and maybe incorporated into them, if anybody gets around to actually offering Ev a billion dollars.

6. The new Facebook

This one seems like it might have more legs on the face of it: they're both social networks, right? They both are primarily built around the idea of a "stream" of updates from your friends, too? Surely Twitter is the new Facebook?

Sure it is, as long as nothing you ever want to say to your friends is more than 140 characters long. To me, Facebook is an identity repository. You link up to everyone you know on there, and whenever you want to contact them, you can get their phone number and their current email address straight from there. It's a great way to share party photos and find old school friends. I'm not abandoning Facebook for Twitter, but they're not the same animal.

Of course, a lot of people disagree with me, including Facebook themselves, who are furiously remodeling themselves after Twitter over the loud protests of users who liked it the way it was. Facebook was genuinely innovative with its "news feed", aka. a stream of updates just like Twitter, but as soon as you've added everybody you know, the news feed gets unmanageably noisy. They tried to address this with filters and whatnot, but in the end it's just too complicated and way, way too closed off. Twitter's strength is its openness, and Facebook is not -- and should not be -- willing to give up its strong privacy model. Unlike Twitter, Facebook *is* relatively private.

7. The new blogs

This is another one where you can sort of see where people are coming from. A lot of people who used to blog now tweet instead (and a bunch of them tumble instead, too). Twitter is instant, broadcast, and short. That suits some people's writing style perfectly, and that's a good thing. But Twitter is no more going to kill blogs than television is going to kill movies -- sure, it will mean there are less blogs around, but the blogs that disappear are the ones that shouldn't have been blogs to start with.

8. A competition

Sites like Tweetrank (briefly), Twitter grader and Twitterholic all take the only two visible metrics on twitter -- number of followers and number of tweets -- and turn them into a game. Sure, that's diverting and everything, but some people have got the idea that getting more followers is the "goal" of Twitter. By far the most famous example is the Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN race to 1,000,000 followers, enthusiastically promoted on all sides and a big part of the blaze of publicity that sent Twitter completely mainstream at the beginning of this year (for web services and political candidates alike, you know you've arrived in middle America when Oprah gets involved). Having followers is nice, but it's not the goal. And while we're talking about Oprah...

9. A celebrity communication device

This is the weirdest misunderstanding of Twitter I've heard, and the post that inspired me to write this one is this thoroughly bizarre ramble by Dave Winer about how some random media company will get a celebrity to promote their own "Twitter-like" network and promote it on billboards and somehow this will mean there will be many Twitters. Let's be clear: celebrities started turning up on Twitter once they heard it was getting popular. They didn't make it popular in the first place. It got popular because it was useful.

10. A service the answers the question "what are you doing?"

And the final culprit in not understanding what Twitter is for are Twitter themselves, who still ask "What are you doing?" at the top of every page. Have you ever read the tweets of somebody who genuinely answers this question? "Just woke up", "going to work", "having lunch", "really tired". Dull, dull, dull, and a lot of the parodies of Twitter harp on this aspect. So let's be clear: this is a terrible way to use Twitter. Twitter is not what you're doing, Twitter is what you're thinking.

What Twitter is for

Twitter is like friend ESP, a portable zeitgeist. It lets you know "what's going on" by telling you not what people are physically doing, but what they're thinking about, planning, reading, watching, paying attention to. You can tap into what your own social circle are thinking about, and if you use Twitter search, you can find out what the twitterverse as a whole is talking about, or filter it down with some keywords to what they think about a particular topic, be it a presidential debate or an ongoing sporting event. Because Twitter is so short, so quick, so instant, and so easily disseminated to mobile devices, it's the closest thing we have to direct brain monitoring. And that's incredibly useful. No service has ever before been convenient enough and widespread enough to capture this data, and it does it in real time. We are just beginning to see the potential of this entirely new data source.

Don't get confused

This "Twitter is the new..." concept is central to a lot of misunderstandings of Twitter, and probably underlies all of the ones I listed above. Twitter is not the new anything. Twitter is nothing but the new Twitter: that very rare thing, an entirely new genre of service, like blogs, social networks, and way back in the day, portals all were. It's its own thing, and trying to analogize it to some other service is as useful as calling airplanes flying buses: sure, they sort of look like buses with wings, but that doesn't mean you use them the same way.

By at 13:37PM

I am looking forward to Outside Lands, yes indeed.

By at 05:23AM

I dunno why this popped into my head a minute ago, but it did. There have been a few times in my life when I've seen something and been absolutely sure that what I was seeing was love.

The first one that I can remember is easily fifteen years ago now. It was around Christmas, and my family and I were on vacation in Tobago. As was our habit in Tobago, we had gone for a walk at sunset on Turtle Beach and then, as was equally habitual, repaired to the beach bar there for rum punches (or a coke in my case, being twelve). The hotel was laying on entertainment for guests, and there was a sound system and DJs just setting up. The song "Lady in Red" by Chris de Burgh came on. It's an awful, saccharine song, but at some point in the lifetime of my parents they had developed a semi-ironic attachment to it as "their" song. As soon as he recognized the song, my father got to his feet and asked my mother to dance. And for a few moments, they did, despite the fact that there was no other dancing going on, or even a dance floor. It was their song, and they wanted to dance to it. Whenever I think about the relationship my parents have, that cheesy little moment is what I remember. It's how I know my parents love each other, one of the rocks to which my life is anchored.

The second time that comes to mind I remember because I was so surprised by it. It was another family vacation, again in Tobago. My brother and I had gone to the pool to meet the rest of the family, and as we arrived his girlfriend at the time, now wife, was just getting out of the pool, climbing the ladder as he approached. She was looking her best; tanned, relaxed and happy. She got to the top of the ladder just as we reached the edge of the pool, and my brother gave a little start, and stepped back half a pace, saying "whoa!" before stepping forward again to kiss her hello, literally taken aback by how beautiful she was. This reaction was so uncharacteristic of my brother that it took me a few seconds to work out what he had been reacting to. My brother, always so cool, was so deeply in love that he couldn't contain his reaction. It was a side of him I'd never seen.

I'm sure there have been lots of other times when I've seen a couple in love and not noticed; but when for some reason I think about love, these two little moments are the ones that come to my mind as the definition of the word.

Update: corrected artist for Lady in Red, it's not Julio Iglesias.

By at 04:19AM

I started to write this a couple weeks ago, and then forgot about it. Better late than never, eh?

Over at TechCrunch, Brian Solis has a post about blogs losing their authority on Technorati to what he calls the "statusphere". It's based on an observation that Technorati's "Authority" index of blogs, which is based on incoming links to those blogs, has remained largely unchanged over the last few months, but the number of actual links measured has been dropping sharply. His conclusion is that authority is moving away from blog-to-blog links to other sources -- like Twitter, Facebook, and others.

I couldn't agree more, and I think in fact he doesn't go far enough. This isn't just about blogs. This is a sea change in the measurement of authority, relevance and popularity of online content, and the company that should really be worried isn't Technorati (which was kind of screwed already). It's Google.

Google's single, gigantic, all-powerful insight that saved and changed the web and the business of web search is this: the importance of a website can be measured by measuring how many the other sites link to that site, and how many link to them, ad infinitum. That's PageRank: like all the best ideas, it can be explained in a sentence or two but is enormously powerful. It is even relatively easy to implement a first-pass solution but it is very, very difficult to perfect.

PageRank has never been perfect, and the cracks are beginning to show. People are demanding more and more accurate and real-time information. Conversation moved from websites to blogs, and is now moving from them to even shorter, faster forms like tumblogs, twitter, and Facebook shared items. All the while, there's been a steady tidy of information moving in email and instant messages that is also poorly indexed.

Pure-web PageRank is losing its claim to be the real authority on the relevance of information. This is a market opportunity. To usurp Google's place as the way people find information, you have to use PageRank as just one piece of the puzzle. You have to find a way to index email, instant messages, social network activity, twitter feeds, SMS, phone calls -- all the ways we share content. You need to meld those together to form a new authority. There are signs that Google wants to do all of these things, but nothing practical has emerged yet.

But the day of a unified information authority is a way off. The more immediate opportunity is that of real-time search. Google's news search covers only things that news outlets cover, and only as fast as the relatively glacial newspaper organizations can publish it. Their blog search is no faster than blogs. Twitter on the other hand can find things that happened just a few seconds earlier, and more importantly Twitter's trending-terms tech can tell you what's happening right now without you even needing to look for it.

There are signs that Twitter is beginning to work this out, although the pace of change within the company given its size is pretty slow -- one wonders if they really are just sinking everything they've got into staying up and scaling to their ever-growing user base. If they don't do it themselves, somebody else is going to start indexing the twittersphere and they'll blow this enormous opportunity. (Note, however, that I'm not going to trot out the old "this could be their business model" chestnut. Twitter already has a business model.)

My point? Well, it's a blog, so I don't need to have a meaningful conclusion, but I guess it's just that the world of search is due for a big change, and Google may be unprepared for it.

My Technorati Profile

By at 14:59PM

Update: faced with a firestorm of criticism, the Express has pulled the article, but you can still find it in Google's cache.

Update 2: better yet, an enterprising blogger has found Paula Murray's Facebook page and written an insulting and misleading article about her based on it. Turnabout is fair play! I do hope her journalistic reputation is forever stained.

To whom it may concern -

Regarding your recent article on the children of Dunblane 13 years later:

This is a disgraceful, embarrassing and shameful story -- for the Express. Faced with having to find something to write about a story dead for 13 years, Paula Murray has lazily decided to trawl Facebook for details, rather than attempting to speak to any of the children themselves, none of whom are quoted for the story or given a chance to defend their semi-private profiles. Instead we are given a piss-poor collection of thoroughly ordinary quotes that could have come from the profile page of any teenager, carefully selected to try and portray these kids as toughs and louts.

Never mind that children who went through such trauma at a young age should be expected to act out in later life. Never mind that boasts of drunkenness and sexual prowess are the staple of conversation of all 18-year-olds everywhere. Instead of any real reporting, any real insight into what it's like to be a survivor of tragedy at a young ago, we get a quote from the sweet old grandmother of one of the dead children, thus given immunity from the teenager her own grandchild might have turned into -- doubtless because the parents and grandparents of the children still alive are so deeply grateful simply that the children are still around to misbehave that they refused to give Ms. Murray any usefully damning quotes.

This is a disgusting, offensive article for which your paper should apologize, both to the children of Dunblane and to the public.

Yours sincerely,
Laurie Voss.

Hat-tip to Adrian for pointing me to this article.

By at 07:06AM

I apparently take long showers. In my family I'm famous for it. I've never been clear whether this is because I really do take too long, or if my family are just worryingly slipshod in their personal hygiene. In order to help resolve this question, I present below a minute-by-minute log of my typical morning shower. Please compare and contrast to your own ablutions in the comments.

0:00: shower begins
0:01: start hot water running
0:05: scald hand, overcompensate with cold water
0:10: much fiddling to find correct tap positions
1:00: water now at right temp
1:01: begin getting hair wet
2:30: water finally penetrates to scalp
2:31: enjoy feeling of hot water
3:00: consider current state of personal project
3:10: resolve to do more work on personal projects
3:11: enjoy hot water more
4:00: find soap
4:05: soap face, ears, neck
4:30: inspect face for acne, by touch
4:40: be briefly irritated that one still has pimples at 27
4:45: rinse face, ears, neck
5:00: adjust shower head to direct water away from self
5:05: soap arms, chest
5:30: complicated maneuver to soap back
5:35: realize age is robbing arms of flexibility for this maneuver
5:40: be mildly depressed at this realization
6:00: soap groin, butt
6:15: briefly wonder about size of penis relative to world average
6:20: soap thighs, feet
7:00: worry about falling over on soapy feet, hitting head, dying alone in shower
7:05: consider own mortality, life achievements
7:10: resolve to do more work on personal projects
7:15: readjust shower head, begin rinsing body
7:20: consider tricky design problem in latest personal project
10:00: realise track of time has been lost
10:05: step out of shower, find watch, check time
10:30: relieved, step back into shower
10:31: hair has got too dry. Re-wet hair
10:50: debate whether there's enough time to shampoo
11:00: apply shampoo
11:15: employ vigorous head massage in superstitious belief that this prevents baldness
11:45: begin rinsing shampoo
12:30: consider conditioner
12:35: note for 1000th time that same brand shampoo and conditioner bottles are different shapes but equal volumes
12:36: wonder for 1000th time if this causes tesselation problems when packing
12:40: become briefly irritated by memory of lies in shampoo commercials
12:45: mutter to self that "up to 50% more shiny" is meaningless drivel
12:50: apply conditioner, more head massage
13:30: begin rinsing conditioner
15:00: become irritated at way conditioner never seems to rinse out properly
16:00: give up on getting all conditioner out of hair
16:05: forget that face has already been soaped
16:10: repeat face-soaping procedure, inc. acne inspection and irritation
17:00: get idea for blog post
17:05: start trying out interesting phrases for blog post, talking to self
19:00: realise track of time has again been lost
19:05: get out of shower, begin towelling hair
19:50: complete towelling hair, towel rest of body
20:00: shower complete.

By at 12:44PM

Last year Christian think-tank Theos argued that because most of us know the Easter story, therefore most of us literally believe in the Easter story.

From the same people who brought you this unfathomably crap interpretation of their own, agenda-ridden research, now comes a sparkly new survey on the public attitude to evolution.

Or so say rubbish science journalists who didn’t even bother to look at the research, blindly trotting out their own version of the Theos press release all round the internet today.  (You’d think science journalists would be the one kind of journalist most likely to do their fucking job and go and look at the so-called science, but no.)

The research never actually asked people a fair, balanced question about their belief in evolution, defined simply as a process of natural selection.  Oh no.  Do you want to know what it actually asked them?
What the actual survey actually asked about evolution was two separate questions, one on “theistic evolution” and one on “atheistic evolution”.  The latter definition and question read:

Atheistic evolution is the idea that evolution makes belief in God unnecessary and absurd.  In your opinion is Atheistic evolution: [and then the choices]

Just confusing the two separate issues of a/theism and evolution was obviously going to result in weird answers from the start, especially since they don’t even bother to spell out simply what the actual theory of natural selection says or associate it with either view.

Moreover, when people were being asked to assent to “atheistic evolution” they weren’t just being asked to assent to evolution-minus-God, they were being asked to assent to the view that evolution necessarily implies that there was no God.

Now, I think that evolution is true and I think that belief in God is unnecessary and absurd, but I still might well have said that “Atheistic evolution” as defined in this survey was probably not true, because I don’t think that one does necessitate the other.  Evolution has nothing to say about the origin of the world, for example.

Answering this survey, I might well have been waiting for a third, good, neutral statement of evolution before I plumped for it.

Worse still is the interpretation which Theos then puts on this already flawed data.  Having found probably even lower levels of general assent to the theory of evolution than we should want and expect – and would get if we asked better questions – they go on to conclude (in their press release) that the hopeless confusion we’re all is the fault of atheists:

Unfortunately, he [Darwin] is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause. The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution.

“Darwin has become caught up in the crossfire between creationists on one side and certain public atheists on the other. It’s a battle in which everybody suffers.”

That’s right.  Who’s to blame for Creationism and ID?  Is it the proponents of Creationism and ID?  No.  It’s atheists!  And why should we blame the atheists, Theos?  Well, because they conflate Darwinism and atheism giving people a false choice between the two, says Theos. Oh, right, I get it, exactly like your survey cleverly demonstrates by doing exactly that?  Um, yes, yes that’s what we, um, intended, says Theos.

Of course, there are a whole bunch of reasons why Darwinian evolution is associated with atheism.  This isn’t a story about evolution getting “caught in the crossfire” between warring fundamentalist theists on one hand and marauding atheists on the other, as if Richard Dawkins (doubtless the intended ring-leader of the “public atheists” mentioned) has single-handedly warped a theory which was otherwise neutral with regard to God.  The reason evolution is associated with atheism is because prior to Darwin the church said quite emphatically that God created the Earth and all living things in seven days.  During the bronze age!  Religion got caught with its panda’s thumb up its giant red arse on this issue, forcing them ever since to either dig in and become full blown fundamentalists, or to pass off centuries of previous heretic-burning as a crazy, mistaken, drunken game, because they didn’t really literally believe in Genesis, no, no, it was an allegory all along.  For something.

The dawn of evolutionary theory is the great naturalizing moment of the last two centuries.  It completely reversed the way we had to think when trying to explain the construction of living forms.  It blew away the need for design, and a designer, previously the greatest single argument for the existence of God, with an idea of simple beauty and devastating cogency.  Atheists didn’t manufacture a wargame here – if anything it was the vicious response of religionists in Darwin’s own time which show exactly why so many people regard evolution as literally bringing the riddle of life back “down to earth”.

But none of this means that when you ask people about evolution you should imply that they have a choice between “theistic evolution” and “atheistic evolution”.  That’s just bollocks.

Theos is basically attempting to do exactly what it pretends not to be doing.  They are accepting that it’s not okay to be a biblical literalist, but also trying to blame anyone who expresses both atheism and evolution for other people’s confusion and ignorance, thereby leaving “theistic evolution” as the only option on the table.

Well, no, damn it!  We must be free to express the fact that evolution leads us to thinking about life in a naturalistic way, without being branded some kind of intellectual warmongers.  Being free to say that evolution is part of our atheism is like saying that Galileon cosmology leads us to thinking less anthropocentrically about the nature of the universe; and like saying that Newton leads us to think that maybe there is a coherent underlying structure to the universe, which is not interfered with by capricious deities.

Theos point the finger.  But they are the ones shamelessly playing games with science.

By Bob at 16:17PM

So, I have now moved to London.  I started moving in a few weeks before Christmas, and now I live here in Highbury, just round the corner from Boris Johnson apparently, and right in the corner of Highbury Fields.  Which makes my flat sound grander than it is.  I live in just one room.  But it’s a nice room with wooden floors and I have a large kitchen (big enough to have a dining table and sofa in it) which I share with three friendly housemates.  My own room is too hot.  The stupid underfloor heating seems to be on all the time whatever I do with the thermostat.  There’s a door right onto the kitchen so I sometimes get disturbed at night if someone wants to make a curry at three o’clock in the morning.  And there’s something else.

There’s something else lurking.  Like a living thing.  But alien. There’s something else in the room.

It is electricity.  Static electricity everywhere.  Far, far too often I become a sort of involuntary, miniature Thor.  In a particularly powerful shock which I was half-prepared for I could actually see the white bolt of electrons discharging as I touched my chair leg.  I get shocked from the wardrobe door handles and the door into the room and from my chair.  The other day I somehow even took the charge with me all the way to work and electrocuted a colleague.  But by and large it only happens in the room, and only this side of Christmas, not before.
So I am trying to solve the puzzle like a sort of rubbish, less-motivated Columbo.  I have done careful research by reading the page “Static electricity?? HELP” – a veritable compedium of advice compiled by the delightful Mamasource.com (”Connecting  moms in your community”.  Don’t laugh. This is a valid source of scientific advice.  And getting electorcuted every five minutes isn’t unique to child-bearing women.)

Now, according to “Static electricity?? HELP”, multiple factors may come into play in the build up of electrons about my person. Footwear, synthetic clothing, synthetic carpets, dry air, dry skin…

The first thing I thought was that possibly the slippers I got for Christmas were causing the problem, perhaps rubbing on the carpet;, except that I don’t have a carpet, I have a wooden floor, and even when I remove the slippers and walk barefoot I still get shocked.  I thought perhaps that the wheels on my chair were generating static somehow as I slid about the room; but switching to a stationary chair has not helped – in fact I just seem to ground myself on its metal legs all the time.

I have not tried rubbing my clothes with a damp cloth ever half hour!  But then, I change my clothes on, well, almost a daily basis, and this seems to have no effect.  The fact that the heating is on all the time means the room is hot and therefore presumably too dry — and I’m sure this must be exacerbating the problem.  But I have tried drinking lots and lots of water to keep my skin hydrated, but this just means that I get shocked on my way to the bathroom.

I have been wracking my brains to think what else is new, what else could have started the static build-up since Christmas.  And only one thing remains.

Over the Christmas break I got lazy and let my facial hair grow.  My goatee has expanded into a face-girdling bear mask.  It’s still quite stubbley, but this means it’s all bristles and fur, not unlike a synthetic carpet!

Could it be that the furriness spreading outward from my chin is somehow rubbing on, like, the really dry air and generating all the static?  Every bristle a miniature lightning rod?

As Sherlock Holmes wrongly said, ”When you eliminate the impossible, whatever you have left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Anyway, I need to solve this riddle soon before I accidentally discharge my unwanted superpower into my computer and wipe out my harddisk.

By Bob at 11:01AM

The most amazing thing about the Atheist Bus Campaign is that, by and large, the internet has responded good-naturedly.  Obviously, there are lots of critical comments, and even outright nasty comments.  But given the topic (religion versus atheism) the ratio of good comments to bad comments is astoundingly positive.  You’d expect the nasty to comments overwhelm the pro comments, but they really don’t.

What is the case, though, is that – both back in October when the British Humanist Association re-launched the Atheist Bus fundraising appeal, and today now the buses have officially hit the roads – many, many people comment on use of the word ‘probably’ in the phrase “There’s probably no God”.

A few people comment that they like the ‘probably’, because it’s a bit funny-sounding and casual and not quite as churlish as the alternative: “Fuck off, there’s obviously no God”.  However, most of web 2.0 commenters are critically-thinking freethinkers and (god bless ‘em, I’m one of them) we’ll stick our two penneth in whether you like it or not, and there’s a valid philosophical point to be raised that since all knowledge is ultimately conjectural anyway, we shouldn’t have to qualify every metaphysical statement…  Yadda yadda yadda.
But there’s another category of ‘probably’ criticism, perhaps even the most dominant strain in the Atheist Bus-commenting culture-virus.

Numerous articles (just one example) are not merely offering a philosophical objection to ‘probably’, but outright crowing over it, implying that anyone who supports the campaign must be a wavering, quavering agnostic of the most wishy-washy variety.  Journo bloggers and commenters all over the place are writing to the effect that use of the word ‘probably’ beams a glaring light through the thin veil of our bravado; even as the slogan was concocted somewhere behind Ariane Sherine’s omni-smiling face, she must have been telepathically absorbing the doubt and existential angst of every hedging heretic and every iffy infidel up and down the land.  So the detractors argue.
This is of course tosh.

As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, if he uses language – with reference to religion – which is less harsh, less personal, less cutting, less rhetorical, than the kind of language you can read all the time in trashy magazines, restaurant critics’ reviews, political debates and so on, then he is nevertheless reprimanded for being a hateful miser who doesn’t understand basic human emotion. He regularly receives far harsher, more personal, more cutting, more rhetorical counter-attack against his relatively nuanced criticisms than his words could possibly deserve.  Religion engenders a peculiar kind of wailing pedantry against us (happy millions of) non-conformists.

Snide attacks against the word ‘probably’ in the Atheist Bus Campaign are another example of this language which – because it happens to be remotely critical of religion – is held to an absurd, pedantic standard, by people who know better under almost any other circumstances.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Imagine, for example, an analogous criticism made against the Alpha Course’s latest adverts.  These were run all through 2008, at least across London, far more widely than the Atheist Bus Campaign will ever reach.  These adverts asked, “If God did exist what would you ask?”
Now, I can imagine lots of criticisms of these adverts.  Like “Why did you leave a big, white, empty space underneath which was ripe for hilarious graffiti, you muppets?”

But imagine for a moment that someone, somewhere, made the following criticism of this advert.  Imagine (it will be difficult, but try) that they might mean this criticism seriously:

“Ooh, looks like they don’t really believe after all!  Ha ha, their faith must be fading away.  Look! – their slogan is in the interrogative form!  They must be seriously doubting themselves.  Ha ha… I am so clever.”

I think everyone – whether inclined toward being an atheist bus passenger or an Alpha Course attendee or anywhere in between – would recognise such a criticism, immediately, for the infantile, pointless pedantry that it was.

“If God did exist…” is conditional.  “There’s probably no God…” is qualified.  Other than this the entirely comparable in terms of being a kind of staged equivocation.  Given the context of mass-appeal marketing, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone why that is the case.  Only the latter slogan, though, is lumbered with the cuckcoo criticism that it is actually a signal of failing confidence.
Not that the bus campaign should really need defending from the rather sad, weird criticisms of ‘probably’ that have dogged it, nevertheless here’s the best statement I’ve seen – from Ariane Sherine herself – of why ‘probably’ makes sense, and what might be hoped for from greater public understanding of the humanist position.

By Bob at 18:16PM

My third blog at the Worcester News is all about how daft the annual spate of new stories on the topic of Christmas being banned is.  How this myth persists and gets re-invented every single December — despite the millions of fairy lights bedecking thousands of buildings, the tons of wrapping paper taped around billions of pounds worth of presents, the millions of Christmas turkeys consumed around most dinner tables in the UK — is beyond me.

By Bob at 08:14AM

America

Britain

In triumph, and redeemed, American has united behind a president whose race differs from the majority of Americans, a president who promises change, and who does not hide his intelligence or his power. Inspiring.

We, in Britain, have got behind an old man who can’t dance.

The legend that is John Sergeant rivals Robin Hood for his anti-authoritarian riposte to Aunty Beeb.  Armed only with his lack of coordination and an expression perpetually hovering between bemusement and curmudgeonliness, Sergeant has single-handedly (or two-left-footedly - haha) unmasked the charade that Strictly Come Dancing is strictly about dancing.

It has actually been quite a success story.  A warm story.  The public conspired, depending on your view, in order to support the weaker contestant, or because they recongised something of their own flawed dance steps in the old duffer, or even because they wanted to make a national TV program less saccharine by forcing upon it an arse-backwards plotline so surreal that Monty Python could have invented it.

But there are always left-fielders, and some commentators are just more lateral-thinking than others.  One in particular has been lateral-thinking about the John Sergeant voting pattern so long and hard, that his opinion now originates from somewhere near the planet Mercury.

According to Justin Thacker, “Head of Theology” at the Evangelical Alliance, if you voted for little Johnny, then you are a selfish egotistical relativist who hates God and rejects the whole concept of objective truth!

“How does Justin Thacker know my innermost secret motivations?”, I hear you ask.  Well, Justin Thacker has a very good argument.  First he asks why people would possibly vote for Sergeant.  Justin Thacker knows it can’t be because Sergeant is a “soap star” nor because he’s “good looking”, because Sergeant is neither. (Bloody nice of you, Justin.)  Justin Thacker rejects that it could be Sergeant’s “wry sense of humour” or his “certain charm” or even “the great British tradition of supporting the underdog”.  No.  It can’t be any of those things.  Justin Thacker knows the best theory is that people wanted to “spite the judges”.  Okay… And do they want to spite the judges because the judges were mean to people?  Or because it would be a bit of a joke to get one over on them?  Oh no, Joe-public, I’m afraid not.  Your spite runs much deeper than that, and you know it.  And Justin Thacker knows it.  Listen to Justin Thacker.  Justin Thacker has privileged access to what you were really thinking:

The reality is that in our individualistic, consumer-driven age, the reigning Zeitgeist loves individual autonomy over public authority. We can’t bear the notion that there exists some external, objective standard against which things should be measured – whether in respect of dancing or morality or anything really. Rather, we want to be King, and all authority must rest with us. So, we get to be the arbiters of what’s true or false, good or bad. The idea of being held to account by some absolute standard is one that rails deeply against our current mode of thinking. Hence, we reject it whenever we can. It’s not necessarily that we think the standard is a bad one, we just hate the idea of there being one at all.

Watching TV with Justin Thacker must be a really fun night in.

Sounds about right, though, doesn’t it. You probably didn’t realise at the time, but you voted for John Sergeant because you hate the concept of truth! It’s so obvious now.  When you picked up the phone you were thinking; “Objectivity? Correspondence theory of truth? Pah! I’m going to vote for John Sergeant.  That’ll show them theologians, trying to force their concept of a mind-independent external reality on me.”

Justin Thacker’s most wise inferences know no bounds.  Believe it or not, the following sentence directly follows the above quoted passage:

Given this, it’s no wonder that the Christian gospel has a hard time being heard.

Yep, God hates the nation getting together to watch people doing lovely dances, because it exacerbates their hatred of objective truth, and the Bible is objectively true, and if they stay in watching light entertainment together as a family then people will miss their Saturday night Bible classes, damn it.

If Bruce Forsyth would only lead us in prayers at the start of each episode that would be fine, I reckon - but every week Justin Thacker tunes in and… no, still no worshipful obedience to the Lord.  Who does Bruce Forsyth think he is, an entertainer?  All this light-hearted community of enjoyment is antithetical to Justin Thacker’s God.  God would rather you read Leviticus at the weekend. Because it’s objectively true. Justin Thacker knows.

There’s no build up to this next complete non sequitur by the way.  You might not be able to see how it follows from the previous statements, but Justin Thacker is better able to grasp the subtle logical connections between things than you are:

For whatever else it is, it [the gospel] involves humbling ourselves before the creator of the universe and acknowledging that he is Lord, not us, that he is the only Rightful Judge. The problem for us, though, is that on that day when we stand before him there won’t be any public popularity vote to rescue us. Simply the Judge and us.

Is it me, or does the leap from Stictly Come Dancing to the FEAR OF GOD THAT YOU WILL EXPERIENCE ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL JUDGEMENT DAY BEFORE BEING CAST INTO THE FIRES OF HELL, imply that Justin Thacker might be taking it all a little bit seriously?

Justin Thacker obviously knows all about “public popularity contests”, of course.  Himself a true fisher of men, he insults pretty much the entire country. You don’t like Justin Thacker’s Truth? Then you must hate all truth! And this abstract philosophical hatred of truth controls you even when you’re watching Strictly Come Dancing.  Next you’ll be telling Justin Thacker you liked Bagpuss when you were young!!!  Justin Thacker won’t like that.  Justin Thacker is horrified.  There were no cats in the Bible, you bloody infidel.  And that means that every time you watched Bagpuss, that was another nail in Baby Jesus’s crucifix.

This whole pile of crock, coming from the “Head of Theology” at anywhere, is insane.  I mean actually mad.  I mean, just for starters you have to admire the take-out-my-brain-and-mash-it-into-a-loaf-of-unleavened-bread craziness of the twin line of reasoning that Thacker’s argument is based on. Firstly, that the judges on Strictly Come Dancing are in themselves comparable to The Literal Arbiters of Objective Truth, and the British public (consciously or unconsciously) think of them exactly that way.  Secondly, that the Lord God is merely the divine analogue of a judge on a Saturday night entertainment show, basically just passing out aesthetic condemnations on the inhabitants of His universe (”Hmm, your day was quite productive, mortal, I really believed your heart was in it, but you only managed one small charitable act, and hardly a pirouette in sight the whole day. 3 out of 10.”)

Some people just hate a feel-good story — in this case about how the public can unite behind a bumbling old man — if that story doesn’t even remotely involve Baby Jesus.  Justin Thacker’s mind boggles; however comical or warm the story may be, if it doesn’t have Baby Jesus in it then how could it possibly not be EVIL?  (I wonder, by the way, how many of the Sergeant-voters were Christian?  On Thacker’s argument you’d expect the good Christians, who all value truth so much unlike the rest of us, to vote diligently only for the best dancer. Because of course it would be un-Christian to feel, you know, what’s that word, compassion, for the contestant who dances like someone’s inebriated granddad.)

Judgement Day:  For your atrocious theology, your plain bad manners, and for having no sense of rhythm, Justin Thacker you are awarded… 1 out of 10. You are the weakest theologian, now please leave the house.

By Bob at 08:12AM

So, I’m technically homeless.

Well that’s not quite true.  In fact, it’s even worse.

I am now “living with my parents”.  It’s just like Failure to Launch, except my version is called Limping Back to Port.

Actually that makes it sound much worse than it is.  Housemate Suzie and I were both looking to move out, so we ended the tenancy in Worcester and I simply haven’t found some place to actually go and live, yet, so I’m only temporarily at the ‘rents.  Also, when I’m at home, I’m cooked for and mum does all my laundry.  So it’s pretty nice really.  Well done, mum.

Anyway, I’ve been commuting from Worcester to London at the start of each working week for eleven months now.  So despite the return into my life of the pleasant homecooking and the big TV in the nice middleclass village, I’m still scrabbling through the online services looking for a livable-in room in London.  I’ve seen a place with a carpet so stained it looked like a colony of rabbits had been left to breed and urinate all over it, before being individually crushed, their corpses subseqently rubbed into the threadbare weave.

I also found another place which was lovely (no dead-rabbit carpets), occupied by the live-in landlady and her sixth former son, and I decided to accept it.  But then the live-in landlady said she had reconsidered the situation; I would have been their first male lodger and she felt anxious about it.  On hearing news of this disappointing retraction, my temporary housemate/mother tried to console me.  She said:  “Oh.  Never mind.  She was probably just worried about paedophiles.”

There are no words.

In other news… Shortly before all this, 10 days before our year one anniversary, in fact, the girlfriend and I broke up.  Not for any of the normal boring reasons (loss of love, irreconcilable future plans, having an affair with some other woman’s avatar in Second Life, etc etc) but because she went travelling, and — part of me still can’t believe this is even true — she is now somewhere in the lower reaches of the Himalayas.  A lot of friends have said how sad or difficult this must be and how they can’t even imagine how horrible and tragic it must be.  You know, helpful things like that.  But I think — I hope — that we both have something of a bit of a “humanist” attitude toward it.  We only have so much time on the earth and being oriented towards an impossible goal — trying to pretend that a relationship is a relationship when you’re thousands of miles apart for months on end — probably isn’t going to help anyone.  We were great.  Things were good.  And there is always change.

Anyway, this all adds to an overriding feeling of the surreal I have at the moment.  Two weeks ago I was personally ranted at by a B-list celebrity (a household name) who said some awful things I can’t repeat.  It wasn’t a nice experience, but it was a fairly unique experience!  Yesterday I gave a talk to the South Place Ethical Society telling them rationalism isn’t what they think it is.  It felt great to dig out some of my Karl Popper, and tell them that in trying to justify what they believe they were actually terrible rationalists.  I love confronting people with the counter-intuitive consequences of Popperian rationalism.  And I’ve been living on couches and in “pods” half the week for nearly a year.  I’m more comfortable living out of my rucksack than most people are sitting in their front rooms.

Life is strange, is what I think I’m saying.  But I’m sure it will settle down a bit once I find a place to live down here and actually go back to the same place in the evening once in a while.  I love change, but if everything changes all the time it’s very difficult to focus on anything.

By Bob at 13:25PM

There’s nothing intrinsically sinister about the title above, but probably a lot of people would interpret it somewhat negatively.  It illustrates the point that too much fear can make harmless situations overly suspect.

Last week a self-described “old man” wrote a letter to the Worcester News about how he felt about being suspicious in the park.

When my wife Joan died in the spring of 2006 we had been together for more than 62 years. One of our joys since moving to Barbourne was a stroll in Ghelevelt Park looking at wildlife and children playing on swings or splashing around in the paddling pool enjoying innocent fun.However, since becoming a widower, the park has now become out of bounds for old men like me. Why?

It has become very uncomfortable to sit in the park and enjoy the ambience of the place, owing to the weird knowing looks I get from young mothers with children.

I wrote back.

H A Kendall’s story is very sad (September 29) and he is honest and brave for speaking out.

Obviously, we must accept that diligence is due whenever we consider adults with responsibilities over children, and anyone taking advantage of any vulnerable person is to be abhorred.

But due diligence has been greatly over-inflated if a widower cannot sit in a park without receiving accusing looks. If the parents Mr Kendall mentions cannot imagine any reason beside sexual predation for why an old man might want to sit in a park, then their imaginations have been horribly warped. There is a climate of fear which affects not just old men in parks, but younger men, teachers, passers-by, even relatives of young people.

On a train last week a girl of about five started talking to me. I think the presence of my Nintendo DS broke down the social barrier!

Perhaps some of the looks we received across the carriage were, in part, due to surprise that two strangers should hold an open conversation on the tube at all, let alone an adult male returning polite enquiries from a child who is unknown to him. But that doesn’t fully explain the prolonged glares and my own absurd, fleeting sensations of danger.

Parents should worry about their children, yes.  Concern is understandable, yes, especially in a climate where sexual predation and sexual abuse are discussed more openly.

But people should realise that, in a sense, nothing sexualises children more than if we are constantly thinking of them as the potential victims of sexual predation.

Also… the music debate rumbles on, in the hideous form it has reached.

By Bob at 08:41AM

This increasingly unfocused, largely-syndicated-from-the-Worcester-News, hotchpotch mind-dump of a blog that I call Bob: Popper’s Troll-man Thing, now has a little brother over at — you guessed it — the Worcester News website.

See Bob’s Worcester News profile which should come complete with a short bio some time soon. My first post is “At Somerset House” and here’s a short extract:

I’ve never liked crowds. It’s not that I’m claustrophobic. I just hear “crowd” and I picture grey-faced suits stacked up on escalators closer than dominoes. Or I feel the crushing collective narrow-mindedness of a Nazi rally. And there’s something so sycophantic about a throng of gig-goers gyrating at the feet of some short-burning star, something so obsequious even about fans at a public lecture gushing as they line up to get their hardbacks John-Hancocked by the latest, greatest celebrity intellectual.

I had wanted to coin the term ‘celebrillectual’ for the end of that sentence but it didn’t quite fit.  There were no other hits on google for it though, so I really did invent it.  So I’ll coin it here instead: ‘Celebrillectual’. There, I just coined it.  It means anyone a bit famous for being at least a bit clever, but how famous/clever are two cumulative factors so that if you were really clever but only a celebrity to a particular niche then you could still be a celebrillectual, while if you were very famous but not really very clever then that could count, too.  But obviously some times these thigns go up and down together, where people are only a bit famous (for exampel if they’re only famous in the UK but not the US then that’s rubbish) and also they’re only clever in a narrow or not very academic way.  So at one end of the scale you’d have, like, Carol Voderman, Trevor McDonald, and Johnny Ball. Then up the top there’s folks like Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky.

It will probably be quite a long time before my Worcester News blog has anyone classify me as a celebrillectual.  In fact it probably disqualifies me because even if I was really, really famous in Worcester, I’d have to be very, very clever to compensate for my relative lack of fame.

By Bob at 08:10AM

By M at 21:11PM

The vivisection debate rumbles on.

Obviously, in between trying to develop medical technology via vivisection, scientists should wherever possible work toward replacement development processes.  There is a complex cost-benefit equation, here.  How much time can we spend speculatively developing new ways of testing and developing medicines without non-human animal test subjects, when any such effort may be at the cost of actually developing cures right here and now?  Assuming that greater and greater theoretical understanding, computer modelling and so on, could eventually replace all animal testing, that’s great.  But right now that’s not the reality, and I don’t want to die of something potentially curable, because rather than using vivisection now we held off in order to develop a theoretical model, when actually tests which killed some mice might have achieved the same results.

I don’t get how people who are against vivisection can cite, as someone in this ongoing newspaper debate has cited, the study of human corpses as one of the viable alternatives to testing on animals.  I’m not denying that autopsy is sometimes a good way of understanding a disease.  But the point is that there would be many more human corpses to study if animal testing was stopped today.

Anyway, here’s today’s letter in the Worcester News, unedited text below.

Apparently, despite being subject to continual assessments of efficacy and benefit, and despite being conducted under multifarious laws and codes of ethics ensuring rigorous review, the truth is obvious to H Handy (Letters, 8th September).  Vivisection is “archaic” and completely unnecessary.

In saying so, Handy contradicts three independent enquiries in the last five years (the House of Lords Select Committee, the Parliamentary Animal Procedures Committee and the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics) which all found that animal testing was scientifically sound and worthwhile.  (Despite this, anti-vivisectionists continue to call for “an independent enquiry” as if none had ever taken place.)

The Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to researchers who used animals 71 times in the last 103 years.  Is the Nobel Prize committee hellbent on rewarding fruitless and unethical research?  H Handy must think that they are.

Handy asks us to imagine all the pain that laboratory research animals endure.  And allow me to agree that we must indeed accept this.  Just as surely as we should thank the veterans of just wars, just as we should be aware that each turn of the ignition key brings flooding and destruction ever closer, we should be aware that many of our medicines and medical procedures come to us at a terrible price.

But if H Handy can ask us to imagine the animal suffering again, I must ask one more time that we summon in our minds the would-have-been suffering and deaths of millions of people from, for example, smallpox if it had not been eradicated by 1979 (300-500 million died before 1979 in the 20th century alone).  Multiply out that hypothetical unnecessary suffering by the numerous other diseases and conditions cured or alleviated through animal research, far sooner than they could have been by conducting all research via human autopsy and the like.

No one said animal research was an intrinsic good in its own right.  No one said it was flawless (no research is). But vivisection is, by far, the lesser of two evils.  And that makes its pursuit an ethical imperative.

One final point.  H Handy is right that research animals themselves never (or only very rarely) benefit by the research.  However, it is worth pointing out that animal testing has resulted in numerous drugs and procedures which are used routinely by veterinary surgeons, day in and day out, to the benefit of pets, farm stock and wild animals the world over.

By Bob at 07:24AM

Remember the Bishop of Worcester basically saying that music pretty much gets its power from his favourite god?

Apparently, “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

Which is of course true - he is entitled to say that.  But that’s completely besides the point, isn’t it.

Some people can’t stand any criticism [Worcester News, 3 September 2008, unedited version]

At the moment it seems like every time someone hears a criticism they don’t like, rather than either taking it on board or offering a counter-argument, they instead react as if someone is trying to actually ban them from holding their view.  It seems to be a defence mechanism.  People would rather say, “Hey, I have every right to my opinion,” than to actually think about the criticism offered against their opinion.

John E Iebole (August 22) notes that “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

I didn’t say the Bishop wasn’t “entitled” to say anything he likes.  I’m not a censor.

But there is a world of difference between having the right to say something on the one hand, and being right in saying it on the other!

The Bishop had said (August 13) that “music has the power to move human beings deeply because it speaks … of the God who created us.”  I expressed that his statement felt to me like an over-confident gardener erecting a fence across a public footpath.  Music is a near-universal aspect of the human condition and associating it with monotheistic beliefs which we do not all share is a kind of metaphysical territorialism.  In other words, I said I didn’t like what the Bishop said.  In didn’t say he wasn’t “entitled” to say it.  Basically, Mr Iebole simply failed to address my points in any way.  Rather (probably without realising it) he simply threw up a completely irrelevant decoy about “entitlement”.

One further point, Iebole says he sensed “some anti-Christian barbs” in my letter, then he points me at the Bible!  Again, this kind of attitude seems to be nothing more than an attempt to shut down honest debate.  Just because I make a criticism of something a Bishop said, does not mean I’m “anti-Christian” in some kind of prejudicial way.  We hear much worse, much more personal criticisms than mine made in other domains (politics, theatre reviews, school playgrounds) all the time.  It is only the domain of religion which is so protected from debate that even a mild rejoinder is insinuated as a kind of hate speech.

That’s one thing I’m afraid you’re really not entitled to: you have no right to be protected from perfectly legitimate criticism.

This prompted a reply from one Linda Roberts who, frankly, I think just didn’t really read what I said.  So I wrote back again, published today.

Misunderstood for the second time [Worcester News, 15 September 2008, unedited version]

For the second time I am misrepresented with reference to the Bishop of Worcester’s comments on music.

Linda Roberts (10 September) believes “the Bishop of Worcester is correct in saying the playing of sacred music in church brings us closer to God.”  Well, okay, but this was very clearly not the part I objected to.

What I objected to was the further implication that all music, whether designated “sacred” or otherwise, derived its power from God.

Roberts also says I should “temper my views” and my “ways of expressing them”.  This is unfair.  Yes I was voicing a criticism (a mild philosophical criticism at that!) but unless you think religious representatives are exempt from criticism this shouldn’t be a problem in itself.  And if my words seem harsh, it’s probably just that religion is so often protected from normal standards of commentary.

Finally, Roberts expresses sadness that I “cannot experience” mystical feelings induced by church music.  Ms Roberts, there’s really no need to feel sad for me. Different musical genres appeal to different people, and there is probably plenty of music that I appreciate, even profoundly, which you would appreciate less.

By Bob at 13:15PM

Various reasons. I’ve been busy at work, busy at Glastonbury, busy flying around various European countries. The usual. My absence from the blogosphere has not helped by the fact that Facebook has recently been giving me that quick fix of Internet-based broadcast expression but with a lot less effort than is required to actually sit down and write something. But it’s time to stop the rot.

For once, I’ve had a weekend that I actually want to pen something about - and enough time on a slightly grey-looking Sunday evening to do so. Last weekend was all about G’s birthday weekend, too much Pimms and recovering from the effects whilst paddling around Chichester harbour and beyond in a vessel clearly not designed for such purposes but which worked surprisingly well.

This weekend has been similar, but with the Saturday festivities and socialising having been moved 40 miles south down to Brighton and the Sunday paddle consisting of the slightly more challenging 18 mile Maidstone to Tonbridge marathon, the latter having been completed in 2 hours, 48 minutes and 26 seconds (though estimated to be some three and a half minutes short due to the closure of the river at the last portage ).

Brighton was good. Sufficiently different from the last time round, a scary five years ago. There was still plenty of Park-based fun, the rather gusty yet still utterly fantastic beach - where fish and chips were eaten - a little bit of drinking, and plenty of meeting new people. My pictures are about to go on FB, which though no doubt missing a large part of the evening after I trundled back off to London I must say I’m still rather happy with.

Next time it won’t be so long

By Will at 12:51PM

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

By will at 10:58AM

People often ask me: "Rik, why on earth do you buy all that rubbish from the Oxfam bargain bin?" But that's another story.

What I want to talk about is when people ask me "Rik, where does a guy like you listen to music from these days?" After all, when you're an ex-teenage rave freak, used to work as a student DJ, have more than a passing interest in all things synth, and own a Jive Bunny album without shame, where do you go to satisfy that nagging urge for new music?

Well, the answer is that for a while, I didn't. Instead, I revelled in the warm neon glow of Radio Nigel. With the help of Nigel (run by a bloke called - wait for it - Steve), I rediscovered the 80s.  Contrary to those "party classics" that immediately spring to mind, there's actually a lot of "forgotten" 80s music out there that's actually not terrible. Martika, anyone? The Other Ones, New Order, Wang Chung, Murray Head, The Assembly? I could go on, but I'd rather you tune in.

And slowly but surely, you make your way back into the land of the living, to find artists like Rex The Dog, Tepr, datA and Trademark keeping the dream alive, albeit with a 21st Century twist. (Who knew that the Human League were still touring, by the way? Blimey.) But where can you, the poor impoverished reader, find and listen to all these people before buying an album or three? Simple. Pig Radio is your friend. Merely visiting their website will guarantee your face is flushed magenta with excitement, and that's even before you wrap your ears around the eclectic mix of new new things that burst forth from their playlist.

Finally, I know I'm about a year late, but this has been making me smile all week. Whatever happened to the Hardcore Cleaning Sensation?

By at 18:24PM

(This isn't the blog post I was planning to post, but I thought I'd throw this up while it was fresh in my brain.)

This is the second time recently that someone I know has remarked about how Thunderbird is worse than Outlook Express. It was an odd enough coincidence that I thought it worth a quick mention.

Now, I've used a fair few mail clients in the past - Pine (mmmm) and Netsc(r)ape Messenger, for example - and I used to be an Outlook user, of both the Express and "proper" flavours,. Conversely, I was glad to see the back of it. The Express version felt fragile and flaky (not to mention its Swiss cheese-like nature), and the full version was too enterprisey. I just wanted to do email - surely it's not too much to ask! (Eudora at the time wasn't free.)

Mozilla Mail was my next stop of choice, and it struck the balance far better for me. It was, however - like the Mozilla Suite in general - suffering a bit from the all-in-one clunkathon syndrome, and you did get the impression that it could have been more, well, alert, and generally a bit better than Netscape Messenger. Mozilla had the same idea, and smashed it all into bits, which brings us circuitously to Thunderbird.

I like Thunderbird mainly due to it's Ronseal-like qualities. Simply, it's a solid, no-nonsense mail client. It reads mail and newsgroups*, and it does it well. Since version 2 in particular, it's had decent filtering and search capabilities, and it's uncluttered and responsive. It even integrates with Google Mail so you can avoid using their hideous web interface.

What is Thunderbird "actually quite poor" at, then? Well, it's not crap at reading mail, that's for sure. It is quite poor at having flowery email templates. (As a rule, I don't use HTML email, so that's fine by me.) Against Outlook, integration with other services is poor. There is an integrated Calendar plugin, but it's not finished yet. But then again, the same goes for the free version of Outlook, and there's no changing that at all.

Steve mentions a "memory leak" which I thought sounded interesting, so I left my copy of Thunderbird running for a while. It's been sitting there for quite some time at around 82MB (I've got some big .msf files), and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Thunderbird for sure has a larger memory footprint than Outlook Express, but I'm not yet convinced it leaks memory in the same sieve-like fashion that Firefox does**.

So... thoughts? What else is Thunderbird rubbish at? No doubt there's more, but I'm not awake enough to remember. Comments appreciated!

*If anyone does that any more, that is.

**Yes, I know that's not really a memory leak; it's the tab caching being enthusiastic.

By at 22:31PM

It's going to be a busy month, really. Turnmills is closing down, so I'm off to see Mr Ferry Corsten play there in a couple of weekends time, accompanied by a plethora of people named Steve. It should be pretty good, but there's always the problem that the headliner DJ is always on at about 4am, by which time you're invariably too shagged out to stay awake, let alone dance enthusiastically like a loon.

Also, I'm going to be leaving these urban shores to head back to the balmy rural paradise of home during the Easter weekend, which should make for a nice break. I have a fair inkling that what I'll be doing will include at least this:

Mix in some Six Nations matches, a birthday lunch or two and some mates visiting from back home, and suddenly the old Moleskine is practically brimming with appointments.

Right, I'm off to do some late-night flat-scrubbing. If I get back in time, I'll blog about some of the software stuff that I've been looking/hacking/swearing at recently.

By at 19:32PM

I'm writing this blog entry from something really quite shiny. Yes, after all this time, I've finally bitten the bullet and bought a new home PC. A completely new one, rather than my usual tactic of cobbling together any old electronics to produce some semblance of a working system, replacing any item that's completely knackered with one that's merely slightly broken.

Now, for the first time in a long while, I'm the proud owner of a PC that:

• Has a PS/2 keyboard socket that's not inexplicably broken and doesn't prevent the mouse from working when anything's plugged into it
  
• Has a soundcard that doesn't arbitrarily stop playing sound and crash the whole system
  
• Is running an Operating System that doesn't date from 1999
• Doesn't have all of its drives held upside-down in using gaffer tape
• Can reboot without randomly losing at least one harddrive when starting back up
• Doesn't have a non-working floppy drive stuck in it because it won't come out
• Has a proper case that's not fallen to pieces, or been dropped countless times
  
• Doesn't have the speed and urgency of a snail in treacle
  

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.

By at 13:52PM

After all this time, I've finally got past the stage of just thinking about blogging something here to actually doing it. Quite an achievement, considering the size of the interim period in which I've done, frankly, bugger all.

For the first time ever since this site started, for example, I didn't wish all my friends Merry Christmas from here on Shinypixel. So for that I apologise, but then again given the amount of texts that I sent out over Xmas and New Year, I don't think I missed many people. (If I did, then... bugger.)

To continue in the usual vein of posting stuff that I've knocked up, here's an extremely rushed flyer for something that I produced in December:

Now, the more astute among you might have noticed that the 14th December wasn't on a Saturday, nor the 15th on a Sunday. How could a stickler for perfection such as myself make such a stupidly obvious mistake (and not notice until a whole day afterwards, no less)? Cast your eyes toward the right-hand side of the flyer, and squint a bit. If you still can't read it, then here's a translation: Flyer whipped up the morning after the office party by a seriously hungover DJHC.

And damn, was it a good party.

Before I bid you adieu, with fleeting yet teasing promises about exciting events to write about in future - that flashy-looking CD compilation in the top-right corner of the page, for example - here's an excerpt from some code which I'd written last week late at night, forgotten, and found again just moments ago before deciding to write this blog:

// Any one X needs at least 7 Ys to work as my extremely
// dodgy code doesn't seem to work with less. No idea why.
// Maybe it's because I'm coding it at 2 in the morning while
// listening to Phil Collins.

// *sigh*

See ya around!

By at 17:20PM

I've finally managed to get some free time. Well, free enough to start blogging again anyway. As luck would have it, there's another Hardcore Lives! day-long online beats-fest on to keep me company. I'd recommend that you tune in too if breakbeats are anywhere near your cup of tea.

The pbligatory lovely flyer - as designed by PennyCrayon alter-ego - is spammed below.

Click for a larger flyer, and here's that link to tune in again, just to rub it in a bit.

By at 08:13AM

Am I the only person not to have picked up on this already? Suddenly half of that last book makes a lot more sense.

JK - you’ve surprised me. And I certainly don’t agree that Harry Potter is “ruined forever”. What terrible views to have.

By Will at 11:20AM

Found on the bottom of a pack of Salmon fillets this evening:

Allergy advice: Contains fish

Sometimes I wonder what the world is coming to…

By Will at 14:58PM

This is a great example of why I love free software - with the latest version of GNOME out the door, Evolution now helpfully warns you if you try to send an e-mail containing the word “attached” or similar but neglect to actually attach a file to the message.

Is that not the kind of simple, yet brilliant feature that when you hear about it makes you wonder why nobody’s thought of it before? Amazing.

By Will at 16:22PM

The irony that when you have lots of blog-worthy things to write about you never seem to find time to do just that has been commented on many times before in conversations with friends. More worrying though is when you don’t even seem to be able to find the time to read other peoples’ musings anymore. And I guess I’ve kinda got out of the habit of doing both of those lately.

So yesterday I invested some of my remaining time off in setting up a whole bunch of subscriptions on my Google account. Their Reader has a few too many bevels and waaay too much baby blue for my liking, but at least I can access it from any of the three computer accounts I regularly use and should I get that fed up of it I figure I can always export the feed list list to something else - so long as it can read an OPML file.

I haven’t even added half the feeds I want to yet (since the process is a little cubersome in Firefox), but I’ve already managed to get back into quite a few blogs that I haven’t read regularly in a little while.

It’s nice to catch up. So today I’ve discovered (via John Dale) that Warwick’s new VC seems much more down-to-earth that the last guy, and that Amazon’s MP3 download service is apparently open for business - with pricing particularly attractive to those of us lucky enough to be living in a country that’s not headed straight for a recession ;-).

Who knows - at this rate I might even have Planet Afterlife working again soon. But don’t hold your breath.

By Will at 16:39PM

I read this evening that Apple have once again resorted to blocking third party software from accessing the song databases build into every iPod.

Last time it was over Real cracking their DRM and I didn’t care so much given that I can’t use most of their proprietary-ware anyway, but now Apple have completely broken the main Linux-based library used by the fabulous Rhythmbox and Banshee, amongst others.

What I find most sad is the fact that the changes they’ve made - involving some kind of checksumming built into the latest iPod firmware - serve no useful purpose whatsoever other than to limit the ways in which consumers can use their own players.

That Apple would spend engineering dollars in order to make iPods less useful - arguably completely useless to anyone using Linux - is appalling. But not surprising to anyone who’s followed their moves in recent years.

I was seriously considering buying an iPod up until yesterday. I’m certainly not any more.

By Will at 17:55PM

Keeping the Photoshop fingers in business in my spare time, here's the latest Hardcore Breaks/Old Skool/Jungle night I've done a flyer for:

By at 10:03AM

Like the infamous Norwegian Blue, I'm only sleeping.   Summer's traditionally that time where you're meant to be outside enjoying things rather than sitting inside plumbing the depths, pouring your innermost thoughts into some tiny text box and its perpetually blinking cursor.

So yeah, maybe next week when I've got some free time I'll wipe off the dust and clear out that backlog of blog drafts I've got lying around.  

In the meantime, these guys are great. 

By at 05:37AM

I'm going to be spending some time listening to this all-day old-skool and nu-skool extravaganza today. It features some of the most popular DJs from the new hardcore breaks underground scene that I've mentioned before, and is likelt to be more exciting than most Sunday afternoons, for sure.

If any like-minded individuals fancy stopping by and joining me on IRC or just the stream, please do!

(Click image for a bigger version)

By at 08:14AM

Glastonbury flew by. I have to go to work tomorrow but my mind is still stuck there in that rain-soaked field. I can’t describe what happened there in words - it was just magic.

Specific Things That Were Good included:

• The rain - I’ve not seen that much water drop out of the sky in a very long time. It really started teeming down as The Who played last night, but I don’t think anybody really cared
• The wonderful Dame Shirley Bassey - proving that she very much still has what it takes.
• Making a flag! And making sure that Ricky from the Kaisers noticed it when he came down to meet-and-greet the crowd. That’s mine in the middle of the shot!
• The food - we’re not talking gourmet by any stretch, but all things considered I’ve not eaten badly at all over the last five days.
• Cider, beer, vodka and coke and G&Ts. Not that pear cider though - I’m staying away from that one in future.
• The people. And their unrelenting determination to keep on going despite everything.

I am officially no longer a music festival virgin. Go me.

By Will at 15:27PM

On Apple.com’s new look-and-feel, discovered via Laurie.

First thoughts: it looks like someone’s just found the Colors > Invert menu item in Photoshop. Is black really back in again? I thought we’d seen the end of back of white-on-black text, banished along with circa-1998 websites and MS-DOS windows. Sure, it looks different from the old design, but not vastly so and I’d actually say it’s a step back in terms of the nice minimalistic look they previously had going on.

Their news ticker is neat, although it looks rather similar to our own.

Overall I give them seven out of ten - but only because it was so good before, they haven’t changed it that much and their small army of graphic designers seem to be able to make anything look good. Even if it is in black.

By Will at 18:35PM

As Seldo noted last night (and I was too tired to blog about), Safari has been released for WIndows. Shame it doesn't work - it does this on both of the PCs I've tested it on...

Ideas? 

By at 04:59AM

Well done Mr. Eavis - this year’s line-up looks amazing. Now can I have my tickets please?

By Will at 02:34AM

I hate having colds. That is all.

By at 06:09AM

By at 07:12AM

Today we posted the details of two new openings that we have at Alfresco up on the web site. We’re looking for a web manager to take over my current role managing the main site and associated infrastructure, and other person to look after our various internal systems. Both great opportunities, but admittedly I’m kinda biased there.

If you’re interested, send us a copy of your CV and a short blurb to careers at alfresco dot com.

By Will at 12:29PM

By at 08:18AM

Here's a little something that I've had a small hand in (full credits are here, though I'm not on them). It's a fanzine that's currently being distributed with new releases and orders being taken in the burgeoning Hardcore Breaks music scene.

"Hardcore Breaks? Whazzat?" I hear you cry. Basically, it's a revival of the breakbeat-lead hardcore sound of '93-'95 (before it went all 4-to-the-floor and descended into shitness), except with 21st Century production values, a huge sack full of Old Skool samples and a friendly scene attitude.

Apologies for image size, but as a bonus you can read it straight from the blog.

Some related links if the idea of nu-old-skool gets you pumped:

• Hardcore Lives!
• hardcorebreaks.com
• nu-rave.com (yes, I know... but it's not that nu-rave... don't mention it)

By at 09:10AM

Last night I dreamt that I was singing All Around My Hat with Maddy Prior (from Steeleye Span) while chasing her runaway shopping trolley around a Sainsbury's car park.

Just as the shopping trolley disappeared under a car (!), Cliff Richard appeared from the sidelines and began singing a song entitled Knickers Between Us. It's probably just as well that I woke up as he started.

What could it all mean?

By at 08:33AM

On the front cover of his recent, bringing-sexy-back album, Justin Timberlake is pictured, foot through mirrorball. On Sunday morning, I went one better, actually discovering parts of such a mirrorball implanted in my forehead.

It was Will’s birthday this weekend, and it all started with the vodka soup. Vodka soup is what happens when you don’t leave vodka jelly long enough for it to actually become, well, jelly, and when said soup is additionally approaching 50% proof. Anyway, it started there, and continued with the cheap wine, and the Bacardi, and gin. But despite at one point there being nearly every conceivable alcohol type in attendance - we managed to spot Baileys as being absent - this wasn’t one of those get-mashed-and-fall-in-a-ditch parties so beloved of students and tramps everywhere. This was much more classy: there was granny racing and impromptu karaoke.

It was excellent to see everyone, and on Sunday, there were bacon sandwiches and a walk in the park. But not before the glitterball / forehead incident: I dimly remember a game of gay disco catch, before falling asleep surrounded by vodka soup.

By Matt Elton at 10:15AM

I haven’t written about music for a long time, but not because I’ve stopped liking it or stopped listening to it or whatever (although my boss did take the stereo away from my office, the fiend.) I’ve become addicted to a number of new and exciting things instead.

Firstly, David Bowie. No, seriously, David Bowie. Despite growing up around a lot of 1970s music - parents’ generation, natch - it all tends towards the classic / prog rock end of the spectrum, which I always found kind of clunky. So I’ve always wanted to get into Bowie, because it’s one of those things I was sure I’d like. Y’know, all artful and electronic and atmospheric.

The one Bowie song that I’d heard - other than the obvious standards - was a bizarre, downbeat number called “Art Decade”. It was a track on a magazine covermount around the time ‘chill-out’ music was the new black, and I remember it standing out (along with “Solid Air” by John Martyn). It’s entirely instrumental, and pretty much all in a single key. But it’s incredibly atmospheric - nocturnal and brooding with just the right amount of creepiness. Inevitably, because I love my music to be both atmospheric and creepy, it stuck with me, so last month I finally got around to buying “Low“, the album it was taken from.

The album itself is intentionally this huge dichotomy - the first half’s a series of perky, succinct rock numbers, which whilst I’m sure sounded cutting edge at the time, now sound dated. (Still, some are still pretty striking - “Sound and Vision” is one of the most catchy songs I’ve heard for a long time.)

The second half consists of four pretty much entirely instrumental songs, including “Art Decade”. What’s really interesting about this ’side’ of the album is that you can really hear the origins of a lot of contemporary electronic music - particularly bands like Goldfrapp. And I don’t know whether it’s because I knew Bowie recorded them in East Germany before I heard them, but they are definitely evocative of some kind of grinding, impoverished state. Hurrah. Now I can go to art school.

The second thing I’ve really got into recently is The Flaming Lips. I already owned Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, but if possible I like the follow-up, At War With The Mystics, more. Initially, I wasn’t sure - it seemed a little less tuneful, and kind of all over the place - but the more you listen to it, the more you get out of it. There’s actually a whole load going on you don’t realise at first, and once you make sense of that, it all starts to blossom and expand in your head. The album contains a staggering amount of memorable tunes - often one after another in the same song. I also bought an earlier album, “The Soft Bulletin” which, whilst not quite in the same league, does have “Waitin’ For A Superman”, possibly one of my favourite songs ever. This month.

In the next month: John Mayer, Justin Timberlake, and the Scissor Sisters. Hurrah!

By Matt Elton at 11:16AM

Today, brain empty, stomach full, has been a lot like many other days in the past.

If a day is so similar to another that it’s just a Xerox, that you’re just circling, is there any point it having existed? Else you’re just filling time. Wasting heartbeats.

A clever man recently told me to get a pen, write on the nearest available surface where you want to be. I mean, really really want to be. Less physically than emotionally, though I’ve seen no evidence to say that the two aren’t intricately linked. This man went on to say that you have to write that at the top of the surface and then, very near down the bottom, you write where you are today.

Today I’m just circling. Today, I worry that people think I have lost direction.

And then, on this nearby surface, you have to draw in the stages from the bottom to the top. Work out conceptual ladders. Move from point A to point B. Connectthedots.

And then, on this nearby surface, you have to stop your life sliding into shit. You have to provide yourself with structure, and discipline. You have to forget the past and reason with the future.

By Matt Elton at 08:29AM

So here’s what’s scaring me this week.

The way I see it, the gap between how we see the world and what it’s really like is getting wider all the time. All the people that predicted the world would carry getting on ever smaller as people talked on mobile phones, watched each other over the internet and then flew out for visits, well, they were only part right.

Thing is, I know a lot about the world. I only have to turn on the TV or look at a newspaper and it’s right there, all the poverty and the fundamentalism and the madness. I know it exists, and I know what my opinion of it is. But my ability to interact with any of it - to do something about it - well, that hasn’t got any greater. So I have a good deal of theory, but very little practice.

So there’s other things I turn to. There’s the lifestyles of the rich and famous to keep me occupied, to keep my mind busy. I’m every bit as much a noise-aholic as the next person: fill my brain with static, white noise, and hopefully it’ll shut out the other stuff that’s going on. We make our own celebrities for sport: we entertain them just as they entertain us. When we’re done with them, we discard them. Pete and Nikki on chatshows, talking about their relationship: aaw, that’s sweet. They’re part of our little media-generated society — and bored now.

So stuck in the void between not being able to help and aware that much of the rest of it is inconsequential distraction, what’s the best thing to do? Buy into the entertainment, or go mad feeling inconsequential outside of it?

By Matt Elton at 11:05AM