Image: elmada.
Jon Gaunt, Sun columnist and presenter, has been sacked after using the N-word (no, the other N-word) during an interview with a Redbridge councillor.
Non-news, in a lot of ways. This kind of thing happens every five minutes to journalists who write material that’s ill-thought-out enough to make it into The Sun.
What is fascinating is the astonishing level of manifest unthinkery that Mr Gaunt is renowned for. In an idle moment (possibly my first this week) I Googled around him, over him and under him, and discovered this breathtaking piece on the subject of what a shining example of dynamic feminism Sarah Palin is. Ending with the frankly tear-inducing line “And, for the record, if I wasn’t married, yes I would.”
Bless.
Tags: jon gaunt, journalism, news, sarah palin, sun
I’ll keep this short, because I haven’t been as organised as I need to be to fit everything in.
This post is about how it’s important to get organised, so you can fit everything in.
I’m still not very good at it. And now it’s important, because I have two part-time jobs and one of them is my Career.
Changes in perspective:
1) When you have plenty of free time, relaxation is something that just kinda happens. You let it all hang out, you fritter the hours away and then it’s the end of the day and you’re in an almost Zen-like state of catatonic languid couldntgiveatossery. This is very much a First Year Undergraduate student thing. It’s not something you can afford to do when you’re working to the best of your ability. You have to schedule relaxation. You have to plan it in. Otherwise, it doesn’t happen and your work suffers.
2) The most important jobs always take longer than you expect. I thought this might change as I got older, as I got more experienced and hard-working (*internal helpless laughter*). This is Bad Logic. What happens is your expectation moves accordingly, so you always underestimate how long a job takes in a highly relative sense. It’s like playing a sport as fiercely as you can: you always end up exhausted, even though you perform at a higher level of fitness.
3) There are different levels of relaxation. If I’ve been writing hard and I come away from the laptop, sit down and play a computer game or watch a film or surf the ‘Net, I’m not recharged (type 1, we’ll call it). If I come away, sit with a book for an hour, or go for a run, or do some yoga, or have a caffeine nap, I am recharged (type 2).
(In fact, power naps are vital. This last week I’ve been working fulltime up at the University, and since it’s only 10 minutes away and I get an hour for lunch, I’ve been coming home and napping for 20 minutes. On Friday I stupidly left my USB stick with keys attached in the computer at work, which I only discovered when I arrived home at lunchtime - so no nap, and I felt blunted all afternoon).
I work, I come home, and then I work, and then I sleep.
This isn’t efficient - or fun.
I understand that now.
Another consequence is I’m not giving myself enough time to blog in here. And since this kind of blogging is relaxation of a level somewhere between type 1 and type 2….I need it, dammit.
So more soon, when I’ve ironed these wrinkles in my lifestyle out. 
Image: thejerk.
Last year, I wrote about how wonderful Chinese students are.
For the geographically challenged, I drew a map illustrating how China covers 28/30ths of the world’s surface, home to some 80 trillion people or 99.998% of the Earth’s population (if you’re wondering, the same proportion of the remaining 0.002% is made up of Americans).
It’s not surprising that there are many Chinese students in Britain. Like moths to a flame they’re drawn to our education system - which is still the best in the world (we know this from comparing the grades and later careers of our Chinese students with those studying in other countries). They come to experience Western culture, to experience Western food and exciting new Western lifestyle problems, such as Chinese Takeaways, TV Licenses and Xbox Elbow.
Chinese students are deeply successful people. This is due to a number of important factors in their general culture-psychological makeup:
1) They don’t leave their essays until the last minute. In Chinese culture, this is the equivalent of holding a dinner-party and serving low-grade British Chinese Takeaway, complete with that special “cat smell”. Chinese students plan ahead. If for some inexplicably unnecessary reason they resort to cheating, their work is of unmistakeable “ high quality“. Compare this with the attempted essay deadline deferral I tried to wing during the second year of my Archaeology degree with a hand-written note from Tony Robinson. A Chinese student wouldn’t have made such an error.
2) They don’t make noise in libraries. British students will play music, have parties and play the I Know A Song That Will Get On Your Nerves game. They’ll test out eBay-acquired handguns and wander up and down the aisles with leafblowers. They’re generally unquiet. But for the average Chinese Student, quiet is the perfect vacuum for his or her mind to propagate in. Because they’re deeply not noisy, they hear and process every vibration of the air within 50 feet. If you put a blindfold on a Chinese student, they can still navigate around because they can hear the noises that everything makes. Even things like feathers and marshmallows. They’re deafening to a Chinese Student.
3) They’re polite. Chinese Students are even more polite than the British. They’re even more polite than Canadians. You absolutely cannot be offended by a Chinese Student, it’s like trying to hold water in a sieve. In the presence of a Chinese Student, any Westerner will be reduced to feeling like a crass, obnoxious, blustering oaf with a voice like an M1 Abrams loosing off a round. Chinese Students are deeply calming, like whale-song or the smell of toast.
So that’s why this country’s education system needs Chinese Students. But today I discovered another reason.
4) They induce Food in student supermarkets. This evening I had some pork, pickled ginger & noodle soup, and it was delicious. I bought it in the University supermarket that’s near where I work. Now, University supermarkets have but one remit: sell what the students want. Simple economic fact. And in Britain, that means selling alcohol, cigarettes, pens, pirated DVD boxsets, chocolate, condoms, 10mm ammunition, forged passports, C4 plastique, lockpicks and Xbox360 games. Chinese students want none of that: they just want Food. So for the first time these surprised supermarkets find themselves in the food business. British students experiment and discover that if they line their stomachs with food first, they can drink more - and suddenly business is booming.
It’s a cultural Renaissance.
Tags: china, food, humor, students, university
I had it all planned out, this weekend. I’ve got loads of work to do. And this weekend would be the How. It would be my salvation - my USS Nick Of Time appearing out of a wormhole / fog-bank, all guns blazing. This weekend was my Excaliber, my Stormbringer, my Magnum 45. (Punk).
And then around Friday lunchtime, I got a cold.
First sign: curiously manic upbeat sense of wellness.
Explanation: this is what your body does to really, truly hammer home your misery in a welter of all-too-recent contrast. You feel Remarkably Well because a day later, you’re that much more aware of how Miserably Decrepit you’re feeling. This is because where you’re concerned, your body has a rich and bottomless sense of humour. In short, it’s a bastard. Your body isn’t a temple: it’s a total bastard. It’s Sergeant Hakeswill, Captain Sobel, Baron Danglars, Emperor Commodus, Vladimir Harkonnen and other famous misanthropes, masquerading as you - just waiting for an excuse to bring you a cartful of fresh, steaming misery.
Of course, it’s all your own fault. You didn’t keep it happy. Or, it just felt like being unhappy. It’s hard to tell which - that’s the way it is with complete bastards.
Symptoms: firstly, someone emptied around 40 gallons of quick-set concrete into my head. Then they strapped a burning tire to the front of my face. If you’ve ever been filled with 40 gallons of concrete and had a burning tire resting on your face, you’ll know that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Oh, I know, it’s just a cold, but here’s the thing: colds are subjective. It’s like when you stub your toe hard. If someone says “oh, it’s superficial, temporary, a simple nerve reflex” when you’re hopping around, you’ll treat their comments in a subjective, disappointingly short-sighted yet oddly satisfying way, such as flooring them with a right hook.
Cure: not for the faint-hearted. In fact, I’m not recommending this to anyone. I’m merely recording it. What you do is this.
1) Vicks Vaporub or equivalent.
2) Painkillers.
- Take painkillers.
- Half an hour later, take Vicks or Vicks analogue (I’m using Tiger Balm), scoop out a nice dollop, and smother it all over your reddened, agonised nostrils.
- The next ten minutes will always be a blur, apart from the occasional memory of kneeling on the carpet, praying for death. Later in the week, neighbours will ask you what the screaming was, or your housemates may inexplicably announce that they’re moving out. Don’t worry: this is normal.
- When you come to, hopefully at home and not in hospital or in a mental institution, you will find that your symptoms have subsided and your bronchial tubes feel as sweet and clear as Plato’s idea of a mountain stream. Tears of joy will run down your little face. Some of them will touch your nose.
- More screaming here.
- Later, the endorphins will kick in and you may feel Godlike. Again, this is normal. Try to behave as you normally would, desisting from standing on the roof while trying to control the weather with your mind, or attempting to bend the laws of gravity to your whim, or psychokinetically stop your housemates as they pack their belongings into their suitcases. It’s all false. You still have a cold: it’s just bypassing your awareness, diverted by chemicals and a level of agony beyond the limits of your nervous system, which has temporarily popped out to lunch. You’re not immortal, you’re not Peter Petrelli - you still have limits. You could bite into a Pop Tart and not feel anything, but it would still melt half of your head. Be warned, be wise, be vigilant.
- I don’t know what comes next. Not yet. Oh god.
Image: gee
President-Elect and Frank Sinatra impersonator Barack Obama (image: Joe Crimmings).
Well now.
That was quite fun. I stayed up most of the night, flicking between the New York Times and the BBC News maps (the former more detailed; the latter more prescient), watching a dismaying amount of Americans voting Republican before the map started turning decidedly blue and the race was won. I paid for it the next day, throughout which I felt like my brain had been replaced by a damp towel, but it was worth it. Frankly, politics in this country just isn’t as exciting at the moment, Swingometer or no Swingometer.
And now, the aftermath. In the wake of McCain’s truly terrific concession speech, his team moves quickly to disassociate itself with The Madness of Queen Palin, who allegedly had her own concession speech in her hands before she was given the red light. Let’s hope it’s leaked.
As for that other guy - well, he’s got his work cut out. His environmental promises for example - although they’re inspiringly forward-thinking, they’re also scarily ambitious. And the foothills of an economic recession is a hell of a place to start fulfilling them. The world will watch with interest.
When the powerful 20/20-hindsighted binoculars of historians sweep back down the avenue of history (or something like that), it often becomes clear that politicians are smarter and more rounded people than is generally held. The current UK PM Gordon Brown apparently has a sly wit - you wouldn’t think it from any of his speeches. Ronald Reagan was apparently one of the sharper tools in the shed, contrary to his somewhat bumbling public persona. (It’s even possible this was manufactured deliberately).
However, I do not expect future historians to look back at George W. Bush and see anyone other than a breathtakingly dim man fuelled by gung-ho warmongering rhetoric and ill-informed xenophobic fanaticism.
(Don’t ask me for my real opinion of him. You can’t handle it).
His replacement is a great speaker, oozes charisma, looks like he could beat you in a sudden sprint, and wants American politicians to get on with the job they’re supposed to be doing. If I’d been in Grant Park in Chicago on Tuesday night, I would have cheered as well.
Tags: election, mccain, obama, politics, sarah palin
Talking about, wouldjabelieve, hat and coat racks.
Back soon.
Tags: blogging, furniture, web urbanist, writing
1) New job. At the University of York. With perks (library access, for one).
2) New job is part-time: pays the bills, leaves my mornings free to write. Thus day-job and writing career in perfect balance.
3) BBC suspends two contracted comedians who I rank among the least funny in the business.
4) Rediscovered how toasty-warm my long blue woollen Corporate-style trenchcoat is.
5) Discovered an amazing faux-Italian dish that can be made using a single Fish Finger.
6) I like being in a world where people can do things like this.
7) Found a £5 note and 10 Euros under the bed.
However, there is no 8. There’s an Anti-8 - which is that I’m horribly behind with everything. So you’ll excuse me.
(For now).
Mike’s Gaming Friends:
Oh you have to see Fallout 3 in action. I mean, it’s just such a radical departure for Bethesda, the whole in-your-face FPS kinetic head-exploding vibe on top of their usual roleplayery. It’s this year’s Bioshock. Speaking of RPGs, Fable II is apparently everything Lionhead have been promising in their previews - which is certainly a first. (Newsflash: Molyneux Conquers Hyperbole Problem). It’s the Month Of Sequels! Far Cry 2 is out, and we’re still reeling from Crysis. Not enough hours, mate! I see Sid Meier’s gone and remade Colonization too, just to give you a break from blowing stuff up. So what are you up to at the moment?
Mike:
Well, I discovered the coolest thing in the other day: if you shoot a line through your own base, you get protected from incoming Space Invader fire and you can still shoot back! Genius. Do you know if I’m the first to spot this?
Mike’s Gaming Ex-Friends:
That’s…really great. Daddio. Well, mustn’t linger. Laters.
That’s how I feel sometimes, anyway. I follow Quittner’s Rule: Always Buy Last Year’s Technology (reasons: it’s bug-free, it’s at least 50% cheaper and there’s no queue). Only problem is, it’s turned into Sowden’s Rule: Tend To Buy Technology Half A Decade Old. And I’ve just upgraded my PC’s wheezing, spark-spitting graphics card to a lofty, mighty GeForce 6200 (256MB), which was absolutely the mutt’s nuts back in 1948. (To be fair, it’s made a hell of a difference with my existing games. Which I won’t tell you the names of).
But I’m happy. And that’s the main thing
(Slight hitch: recently acquired Career Path and raison d’etre preventing me playing games seriously. Sorry about the French, but apparently if you’re a properly literary writer, you quote French all the time, even where the English phrase is shorter and more succinct. Failing to do so is a real social coup de grace).
Image: jon a ross
About 2 months ago, I was a’foolerin’ with the look of my blog (and I will be further a’foolerin’ with it very soon). One of the things I did was banish the pointless Blogroll division between the categories “Folk” and “Blogroll”.
Those nice little hard-working demons in the depths of my blog popped their heads up to say Don’t Worry, The Contents Of Both Categories Will Be Merged.
So I went ahead and deleted “Folk” - and it soon became clear that I’d lost maybe 15-20 links to various blogs and websites. How many exactly? I didn’t know, because I’d lost those links. Gnn.
Added to which, I’ve been kinda absent from the blogging community recently - yes, blogging here, but no, not popping by elsewhere (which is Not The Way To Do Things Honourably).
So - if I used to link to you, and suddenly you see that I’m not linking to you, it’s definitely not because we’ve fallen out. I mean, you might have fallen out with me for not calling by more often - fair enough - but there’s no hard feelings on this side of the fence. Promise.
I remember TV show theme tunes. It’s something I’ve known about for well over a decade. I’ve made it a party trick - “challenge Mike”. If I hear a TV show theme tune more than twice, I can whistle it again, even if I don’t hear it for another 10 years. Usually starting on the correct note.
This happened tonight, while I was watching a rerun of “Spender”, a (surprisingly good) Jimmy Nail BBC1 detective drama from the early Nineties. The last time I watched it was when the last episode aired on the BBC, in 1993. Tonight, after 15 years, I whistled along with it, note for note, opening and closing credits.
There must be something I can do with this “talent”.
It’s usually no fault of the actors. It’s hardly ever anything to do with special effects, lighting, makeup or music. It’s all down to the writing. When a previously resplendent TV show starts emitting smoke and curls away into the darkness, it’s a tragic thing, because it takes all that talent down with it - it devalues, dilutes and drags everyone a few steps back when all they want to do is run.
Now, I’m a science fiction geek. But one who will happily stand up and say that 90% of television science fiction is drivel. None of it can hold a candle to the best in printed speculative fiction. It’s not a genre that ages well, and I think that’s a sign, right there, that generally speaking, scifi needs to get its act together (because good fiction is timeless). I think it is getting its act together, but it’s a horribly slow process. It still goes so very wrong, much too often.
Here’s a few examples.
1. Earth Final Conflict (1997)
Alas, how this one hurts. If there’s two shows where I wept the day they ploughed into the tarmac, it’s this one and Heroes (see below).
Earth: Final Conflict was a Canadian show running until 2002, taking one of two unfinished Gene Rodenberry scripts and turning it into a new show (the other became Andromeda, the overwrought Kevin Sorbo affair that wanted to be Babylon 5 and unfortunately succeeded). EFC was two shows. There was Season One. And there was everything afterwards. No - this isn’t just my bias at work here; it really was that distinct. Season 2 opened with a new main character and an entirely new tone. Why the new lead? Because Kevin Kilner of Season One allegedly walked out when he saw the new scripts. If so, I sympathize.
But it all looked very promising at first. The time is the near future, and a la Alien Nation, we are suddenly not alone. The Taelons (or “Companions”) bring a message of peace and seem keen to uplift the human race to a more equal footing, slowly and steadily. It seems to good to be true - and suspecting it’s just an alien crock, a number of wealthy, hard-bitten freedom fighters form an underground resistance movement dedicated to worming out what’s really going on.
Enter William Boone (Kevin Kilner). Working as a police officer, he is asked to be the bodyguard of the head Taelon. He refuses - following which, his wife is murdered. The Taelons then repaint the bodyguard role as a way for him to call on their resources to find the killer. The Resistance contact him and claim the Taelons did it to manipulate him into their hands. Naturally, he accepts. The bodyguard position would normally involve having a piece of technology implanted in his head that entirely slaves him to the wishes of the Taelons. Thanks to the Resistance, he is implanted with a defunct model which allows him to keep his individuality, while he fakes blind obedience and loyalty to his new masters.
Problem is, Boone doesn’t trust anyone. And this is the crux of what makes EFC so special: it’s all grey. Characters don’t fit neatly into pigeonholes, and their cards are always hidden from the viewer. It’s all about Boone, picking his own way through the middle of all this ambiguity and half-truth, suspicious of everyone’s motives. It’s a plot fuelled by mystery and revelation, where supposedly good people do bad things and vice versa. Familiar?
But let’s not paint it in too bright a hue. EFC was a late ’90s scifi show on a modest TV budget - so it often looked tacky (if oddly effective). It had its share of duff standalone episodes (a remarkably lame one set in Ireland late in the first season springs to mind. Please, all TV shows: if you’re going to set an episode in Ireland, use Irish actors. Ditto Scotland). But the core of it was all about a unfolding plot arc, a mythology, a jigsaw puzzle where at the beginning, all you have are bits of sky. This approach is working brilliantly for Fringe - which admittedly is doing a far better job of it.
(Image: DVD Times review of Earth Final Conflict season one).
EFC also made some terrific creative decisions - such as dispensing with handguns in favour of the alien equivalent, a living weapon that wraps itself around the user’s arm and bonds with his or her nervous system (above). When the host gets angry, the weapon charges up (and it turns out that the host gets angrier a lot more often - key plot twist). Weirdness abounded - and benefitted from a distinctive, sometimes haunting musical score - relying on strange, lilting voices, Middle Eastern instruments and a lot of percussion overlaid with a conventional orchestral soundtrack. Very definitely, shades of the new Battlestar. You can watch the opening credits here (completely with cheesy voiceover).
Let me nail my colours to the mast: if either Ron Moore or Joss Whedon - or another TV writer I have the utmost respect for - announced that Earth Final Conflict was going to be remade in the spirit of the first season but with a grittier, more HBO sensibility, then I would do anything and everything I could to be involved somehow, somewhere. Anything.
Because the core concept of Earth Final Conflict is terrific. It isn’t about aliens - it’s about human beings, and how they might react to a sudden, massive delivery of technology and power. It looks past Independence-Day apocalypse scenarios and asks the much more important question “how would we live with it?” If something came along and promised the end to all our social, political, medical and environmental problems, what would we do for those who offered the means of achieving these things? Hell, what wouldn’t we do? Yet do we really thrive when everything is made easy and accessible for us - or do we need the challenge? ( Here’s what I think).
Season 1 DVD boxset available from Amazon here.
2. Farscape (1999-2003)
Ah, Farscape. How this show polarizes people. In the Aye corner, shouts of “anarchic post-modern plotting”, “plot arcs to die for” and “Claudia Black in leather”. In the Nay corner someone’s yelling “farting muppets”.
Astronaut John Crichton gets shot through a wormhole and ends up at the other side of the galaxy where everything is as mad as forks. The show lasted four seasons, and like Firefly, the premature termination of its story prompted enough of an outcry to lead to the commissioning of a feature-length conclusion ( The Peacekeeper Wars). There’s no denying its popularity, and its cult status.
But it’s a cult scifi show, not a mainstream one - for a number of reasons.
Image: Muppet Central Articles
- Firstly, muppetry. (Yes, a Henson was involved in production). A lot of people couldn’t get past the rubber aliens, now matter how creatively they were assembled or filled out with CGI.
- Secondly, there was a lot of what I like to call gurnery. Gurning is the art of contorting your face in a comical way, most notably by pulling your bottom lip up until it covers your nose. Ben Browder (Crichton) did his fair share of actual gurning, but that’s not what gurnery is. It’s a manifestation of silly, farcical, not-funny-enough, sloppy, ludicrous writing which pushes everyone to out-overact each other. Despite a strong cast with acting chops in abundance, the scriptwriters plagued them with gurnery.There were entire episodes of gurnery.
During the first season, I liked how Farscape was flourishing. It had an unique texture to it - weird, imaginative, grotesque and unashamedly daft. There was nothing else like it. But no matter how interesting the premise, a show is made or broken by its scripts….and the second season’s were weak. The snarky, witty edge that had shown through here and there in the first season was barely in evidence. The cliffhangers didn’t hang you off a cliff. The gutwrenchers didn’t pull at your innards. Oh, and they introduced some guy with a glowing face who kept on appearing and disappearing for no apparent reason other than the writers occasionally needed a whining killjoy in the middle of a good, fun argument.
Then season three happened- which was a good thing. But by then, the show had taken a different direction, just as creative as I’d want but less edgy, less driven, less truly dark. To me, the first season felt like it was really going somewhere - and season three felt like it had gone somewhere else instead.
3. Heroes (2006 - present)
You know it. I know it. The Heroes that excited us so much in the first season, the slow, deep character development, the delicious sense of impending doom coupled with everyone being drawn into one last-ditch effort to save the world…?
That’s gone. The second season raised our fears. The third season is confirming them. It’s making Lost’s most meandering, directionless plotlines look like The Great Escape. It’s very difficult to keep up with everything that’s going on, partly because there’s too much going on, but mainly because we just don’t care enough to try. This is what I wanted to happen. It didn’t.
Heroes, I mourn you.
Tags: earth final conflict, farscape, firefly, heroes, scifi, tv
Image: GreenPuttyInMyArmpit.
I’ve been a tennis ball for the past week. My mum has been ill (suspected salmonella), and since she has a house to run that includes 4 dogs, I’ve needed to come home to look after her while she recovers.
That recovery has been sporadic.
Last week (*boing*), I cycled to my mother’s house in Hornsea for a long overdue flying visit. After deciding not to cycle back to York until my legs were strong enough, *boing*, I went back to York on the bus last Wednesday.
Friday morning. Phone call: my mum was very ill - could I come back to look after her? I *boinged*back to Hornsea. And looked after her for the weekend.
Still ill. At this point I’m sweating a bit - my absence is starting to get awkward back in York, job-wise. But she seems on the mend, so I gather my stuff yet again and *boing*, I’m back to York. Arrive early evening yesterday. I’m tired and I want some lazy food, so I order an Indian takeaway. I open all my mail and fan it out over the bed.
The phone rings.
*Boing*.
My mum’s gone into hospital, after passing a lot of blood. Her neighbour D. kindly sets off to York, picks me and my suitcase up, and drives back to Hornsea. And here I am.
Today - at Hull Royal Infirmary, the surgical consultant, confirmed that all was well and that her body was acting the way it should to heal itself. So now she’s back home (getting ready to go for her three-times-a-week dialysis treatment).
And I’m free to *boing* to York again - only to *boing* back sometime very soon to collect my bike and ride it back to York.
It’s been the world’s largest game of tennis, with the Wolds as the net, and lots of coffee playing the part of Robinson’s Barley Water. And if I’d done all of this to-and-fro-ing in a straight line, I could be in Paris by now.
Barmy.
Liking Keane in public is a difficult thing. I’ve never managed it.
No matter how their poppiest, most anthemic hits have wormed their way into British culture until the most misanthropic and sour-faced among us (hiya) find themselves whistling Somewhere Only We Know in the queue at the bank, as other people back away. If you’re between the ages of 21 and 50, saying you like Keane is a little like admitting you’ve got every Mike & The Mechanics album, or like being at the pub with friends when Status Quo comes on the jukebox and turning to them to say “yeah - now we’re rocking” without a shred of irony. (This once happened to someone that someone I know knows).
Fact is, many people view Keane as an extraordinary example of a band who have recently gone downhill without having ever been uphill in the first place. It’s wildly unfair, but there it is. Personally, I rank individual songs very highly (Nothing In My Way, Bad Dream etc.), think Tom Chaplin is a great singer and have a generally middling opinion of both their previous albums. Keane - they’re alright.
Perfect Symmetry is Keane’s attempt to change their sound. (Maybe they were sat in the pub one day and one of their songs came on and someone said “Yeah - now we’re grooving!” and everyone else fell about. Who knows). They’ve gone for an ’80s sound, with synths coming out of the wazoo. The sound is fun; sometimes it works nicely, as in the clearly Bowie-influenced Better Than This. It’s not offensively bad. It’s not ColdEnoPlay, but neither is it a post-apocalypse Pet Shop Boys gig.
But the lyrics?
In the words of the review at The Guardian:
Some of these lyrics like to think they’re soaring, except they have all the aerodynamic qualities of a combine harvester. Some of it’s wincingly horrid.
“We are just the monkeys,
Who fell out of the trees,
We are blisters on the Earth.”
- Pretend That You’re Alone.
To use a popular word at the moment: fail. (Barring 2 tracks).
Since I’m rather busy, here are a few things I’ve written in other places, about…
- Chairs with Buttocks (And Other Features)…
Back soon (to answer comments and e-mails).
Tags: ecosalon, weburbanist, writing
Whenever I go anywhere new, I keep an eye out for information boards, so I can smap them.
Smapping is the process of taking a digital photograph of a map that you won’t have access to later, except if you take a snap of it.
My first smap was of the Durham train station ‘You Are Here’ glass-encased map.
Smapping also works nicely with maps and guides that other people want to take away and read.
At first sight, squinting at a tiny digital camera screen might seem a frustrating and fruitless exercise - until you remember that you can zoom in, making the map detail many times larger than real life if need be.
(Of course, if you don’t speak the language it’s in, more detail might not help you too much).
Smapping also works for taking a record of something you want to read later.
The main disadvantage is that your smap runs on batteries. So take plenty of them.
The final reward of being a compulsive smapper is that your photographic record is stuffed full of automatically-gathered facts and figures to work into your diary write-up or post-holiday bragging.
Theoretically, it’s also more of a first-hand information gathering exercise…
Just don’t forget who the originals belong to!
(All maps property of map illustrators/sponsors, as displayed).
Tags: cumbria, greece, hadrian's wall, italy, map, maps, north york moors, rome, smap, travel, walking
Well, it’s like this. I’m in love - with my bike. We’d made eyes at each other for years now, occasionally spending the odd sweaty week together here and there (the occasional moment of panic when we discovered a puncture).
But now - it’s the Real Deal.
And I want to celebrate it, next year, around summer-holiday time. I want to proclaim my love, shout it from the rooftops, bounce up and down on Oprah’s sofa, write sonnets and throw flowers.
But instead, I’m going to go for a slightly-longer-than-normal bike ride.
Image: Listen Missy
Tags: bicycle, bike, biking, britain, england, john o'groats, land's end, roads
Today I did this.
(On my bike).
It included the highest point in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
Bit tired now.
Damn fun, though.
Image: Google Maps.