| Friday, September 28, 2001 |
 | So this is my terminal. When a call gets routed in, it gives me a brief overview of the product or service, the opening sections of the autoscript, an iconic list of the skills required for dealing with the call (although, of course, it checks my personal profile before routing anything to me, so it won't ever be anything I can't cope with), and the current rollover count.
Kevan is seeing the future, and it works to win. Top stuff on the UpsideClone.
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| Meanwhile, it's good to know that, even in the heart of despair, even in the very teeth of crisis, normal, everyday folks can still find the heart to devote themselves to acts of pure-breed bastardry.
To reach Muslems with the gospel you must first shake their faith in their religion, Islam.
Niiiiice.
And, just in case it be forgotten, let long the name of Starbucks, which allegedly charged emergency workers at the WTC for water then refused to confront the fact, live in our hearts. Good work, team.
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| Last night I had the strangest dream.
Which, like all other people's dreams, was actually pretty dull when related. However, I would like to state for the record that any dream involving dreaming that you have woken up is always going to end badly, especially when you find that your bedroom has been stripped of its wallpaper (in some ways a good thing, given that the wallpaper in question is fucking revolting) and your possessions are neatly crated in one corner. Shudder.
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| "So...is Athena the godess of olives? Or of all antipasti?"
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| "In the movies, when the president says, 'It's war,' that usually means the good part is just about to begin," said hardware-store owner Thom Garner of Cedar Rapids, IA. "Why doesn't it feel that way now? It doesn't feel like the good part is about to begin at all. It feels there's never going to be another good part again."
It's curious - this week, The Onion doesn't really seem to be very funny at all.
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| Tuesday, September 25, 2001 |
| As an early birthday present to myself, I picked up a CD copy of American Thighs last week. I'd almost forgotten how much about half of it rocks, which is so hard. All hail shouty girl groups, especially as I combined it with my first Sleater-Kinney album. And yes, actually, I have been under a rock. Want to make something of it?
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| You've got all those other things, I've just got this one thing
Which, in the case of the Dagorhir boys (via Ben), is dressing up in tunics and belting each other with rubber swords.
Twats. We had a crowd like this in Oxford - the Wychwood Warriors - who were apparently constituted entirely of fatbeards. Overweight hairballs doing metallurgy, and others who had graduated but still hung around like a bad smell, presumably in the hope that their one female aquaintance, an Arthurian History enthusiast with sideburns called Edith who spent a lot of time on the Internet, would eventually fuck them.
"Yesterday's fun today". Even a moment's thought might have made them consider that standing knee-dep in mud trying to hack people's limbs off wasn't fun yesterday. It was war. Which is not fun.
"You've only read Lord of the Rings. We live it."
a) Yes, because it's a book. You read books. You, specifically, read books with dragons on the front cover and nothing else, you lip-moving wanker. There is no particular greatness in "living" a book. "You only read American Psycho. I live it". "You only read Portnoy's Complain. We live it". Not good things.
b) No you don't. You live lives of social and sexual failure, leavened only by weekends when you get to wear cassocks and feel briefly virile and potent before quaffing mead and having Tolkein trivia-offs with your fatbeard chums.
Nothing but hatred.
Still, great line from their rulebook. "The dead may not speak to the living at any time".
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| Monday, September 24, 2001 |
| Alas, Vaughan has misunderstood me. The point was that, while confessing not to understand postmodernism or existentialism, he also suggested that, really, they were not worth the time and effort understanding would require in any case. Thus, "what I don't know isn't knowledge".
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| One of the gifts I received on my birthday, inevitably from an inhabitant of Brighton, was a collection of organic foodstuffs. On the Tube back to my place on Sunday, weak with hunger and hangover, we cracked open the ethical chocolate and scarfed away.
Have you ever been punched on the nose? No, go on, you must have. Along with the dizziness, the nausea and the pain (none of which, thankfully, accompanied the eating of this chocolate bar), there is the taste of rust, salt and oily water gathering just above the roof of your mouth as the sinuses rupture and blood drips into every inhalation. Inexplicably, a sensation precisely mimicked by this particular, presumably iron-rich chunk of chocolatey goodness.
I can see the adverts now - "Try the great taste of running your tongue over the space left by a recently-lost tooth over and over again!"
The other fascinating thing about the journey back was myself and a friend getting into a brief chat with a very attractive woman sitting opposite, who joined me in astonishment that my companion's youthful experience of the "found a peanut" song had been limited to the first line repeated over and over again, thus omitting the entire narrative of it being moldy, eating it, going to heaven and so on. This would, we both concluded, have been really annoying. Just hearing about it having happened fourteen years ago was pretty annoying.
Point being, we sadly did not have time during this brief pre-London Bridge exchange to ask why she was carrying with her a slim, wood-backed full-length mirror. The probable answer, I know, would have been that she was transportng it from one place to another, probably a place of trade to a place of living. But would it not be marvellous if, cursed as she was with those healthy, well-planed English good looks, she had to carry with her a full-length mirror at all times as a kind of geas, lest her reflection escape her forever.
Or that she was just very, very vain indeed.
"No. I just like to have the option of looking at my own person at all times, it being far more prepossessing than any other feature, human or natural, of this journey."
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| Thursday, September 20, 2001 |
| Topics of conversation covered in conversation with Matt and Katy on Wednesday night (not an exhaustive list).
The fact that there is a scan somewhere on the Internet of an uncorrected proof of an Argos catalogue before a dog's big cock was photoshopped out of it. An abstract image library that begin with Z. A hairless wombat with very red feet.
The possibility of a Transformers: The Movie party.
Blue Imac-styled underwear in stiff, frosted plastic, which you clipped on. Silver chip forks on Firebox, which I first saw in a exhibition of decadent art in the Jerwood Gallery two years ago. Scary babies with no eyes.
Nine foot tall remote-controlled Easter Island heads with glowing eyes. High-pressure electric pumps. Shit poems. The fact that Argos (again) will engrave a photograph of your choice onto a medallion, and the possibility of sending them an extreme penetration shot to test the truth of this claim.
The Nokia 8210, which apparently vibrates upwards rather than sideways, and is thus found lodged in more body cavities than any other mobile phone. The advertising possibilities thereof.
Hogwarts being Christchurch College, and the Quidditch field being Tom Quad in close-up, and several Tom Quads in long shots. The clock in Tom Quad, and thus in Hogwarts, having two minute hands.
A cock with more than four minutes of latitude in width.
Girl/boyfriend/ex-girl/boyfriend top trumps, and what their categories would be. Tell us.
Playing an audio file of a thunderstorm during a thunderstorm.
Dumping your boyfriend through your weblog. During a thunderstorm.
Leaving a cock in your mouth just too long.
What Vonnegut, Coupland and Palahniuk have said about 9/11.
Timequake as metametabook. The end of the word in twisted glass and steel in Life After God.
Essays on the complexity ceiling (the point at which the complexity of concepts becomes too great for general comprehension) and the epistemology of price.
Barnado's - a charity that solicits money for children so horrible that their parents, who are biologically conditioned to love them, can't be fucked. That was Matt, I'd like to point out.
The power of webloggers and the acceptance of CSS.
The metonymic bridge and its relationship with dirk and donkeys.
"As We May Think" by Vanavar Bush and the origins of the Internet.
Ted Nelson, Baudrillard and Hypertexts.
And an idea so horrible that we cannot share it for fear of getting lynched.
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| Wednesday, September 19, 2001 |
| "Each man is free, each man is a god. Each man is free, each man is a god..."
"Yes, each man is free.....FREE TO DIE!"
Puma Man is one of the greatest things in the universe. Without it, we are all poorer. All hail Donald Pleasance! All hail!
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| And, on a related topic, why exactly is the Zombies' classic She's Not There among the list of songs to be removed from playlists? And why do these lists never make any sense whatsoever?
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| Tuesday, September 18, 2001 |
| A double-take moment. This Slate article talks about "the new war", as one might "the new album" or "the new fragrance" - a new and particular expression of an old and understood concept.
"The new war" is what the name Neoptolemus means. Son of Achilles, killer of Priam. Who inherited his father's armour, and levelled Troy and its royal house in it. The "new war" was a savage one, without respect for age, home or divinity.
Neoptolemus, for what it's worth , was also known as Pyrrhus, for his red hair, which is also the UK title of "An Arrow's Flight", by Mark Merlis, in which Neoptolemus is a male stripper in a fusion of the ancient and modern worlds, a kind of queer Arcadia. Read a passage here. You can probably imagine what Philoctetes' never-healing wound comingles with.
It's a mess of associations. Old woundsand open sores. Achilles' heel. Poisoned arrows, topless towers and the fall of cities. The manifestations of illness and wars of elimination. Dialogues of power and helplessness. And in the end, blood. Innocent, fresh and, most of all, bad.
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| OK, back on the scab-picking. Mildly astonished over here by this from Ev, who quotes this paragraph from Wired:
"...one of the most striking things about the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York was the outpouring of outstanding Internet coverage from ordinary citizens."
IMadmittedlyveryHO there were quite a few striking things about these events to tick off before we look at the astonishingly quality of webloggers' responses, many of them concerned with fucking great buildings falling down and people dying. You know, just for myself.
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| Monday, September 17, 2001 |
| The cut out'n'dress paper doll is one of the fundamentals of any good woman-child's or androgynous younger brother's upbringing. It was all in the thin card, baby. No magazine for girls was without the opportunity to fold, spindle and mutilate. Alas, a difficult era of emancipatory struggle seemed to have put the kibosh on these delicately-powdered incitements to wildly inappropriate colour schemes.
Proves how wrong I was. Along with Quantum Leap fan fiction and dogsex, the dress-up doll has experienced a new lease of life on the Internet. I discovered this when a random connection took me to this oh-so-chichi dress-up punk girl doll. And there my descent into Hell began.
Oh, sure, you get the old school. Dress up Natalie Wood, say. Or the teen-aspirational - make your own pop star (although technically speaking this is more like an exquisite corpse than a dress-up doll). But, just as the Natasha Henstridge unofficial fan page leads inevitably to chickswithgourds.com, so the world of computerised fridge magnetising swiftly becomes a cold and menacing place.
Dress Dubya. Dress Gary Coleman. Dress the blue baby as a WWF wrestler. No, I have no idea why. I think it comes of listening to Slipknot. Sorry, I mean Slipknot.
And, most horrible of all, the Texas Health Department brings us keep the devil child free of chiggers.
Help me.
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| This is a test - it looks like I have fallen off the GBlogs updated list again. This is becoming habitual.
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| This astonishing, inspired tribute to the joys of primitive Atari hand-held American Football games comes from Chad Matchett, victor in the Hand-Held Football Game Fan Fiction Competition at X-Entertainment.
HANDHELD FOOTBALL ROCKED MY FACE
I used to play handheld football.
It was my only toy.
I played it all the time.
Handheld football rocked my face, handheld football
rocked my face, handheld football rocked my face.
Mattel makes great toys.
Rock'em Sock'em Robots is a great toy.
Handheld football is the best toy.
Handheld football rocked my face, handheld football
rocked my face, handheld football rocked my face.
I liked the bright red lights.
Move up, move down, move forward.
Touchdown motherfucker!
Handheld football rocked my face, handheld football
rocked my face, handheld football rocked my face.
Rock Over London, Rock On Chicago...Lays... You Can't
Eat Just One.
Beee-ootiful.
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| One of my key sources for background material is Slate, which is providing useful reportage and info at the edges of the main news. For example, what exactly is threatcon delta? What does the Lebanese Daily Star have to say? Or the American press?
The information available is spiralling wildly out of control.
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| What would happen in London? I'm fascinated by the comment that BT reserve the right to charge for the use of emergency communciations lines. It seems so...inapt.
Meanwhile, the US has yet to rule out nuclear retaliation. Which is entirely understandable. But ever so slightly scary.
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| Wednesday, September 12, 2001 |
| Question. How exactly does one react to the news that a pair of jet planes have smashed into the World Trade Centre. If you're Matt, you call me to get updates gleaned from Barbelith and news radio. If you're my sister, who lived in New York City until last year, you call me because the news sites are down and Norwegian radio sketchy on details. If you're Joe, you get evacuated from your building and promptly move to a bar about 100 yards away to drink off the shakes.
And if you're me you join him there, drink as fast as you can with various friends and acquaintances and a TV constantly replaying the same moments in the corner of the bar - probably of every bar - then go home and sit, checking names off as "I'm OK" emails trickle in, and shuddering.
This is just too big. Meg's description of her reaction - thinking in terms of films - is highly relevant. Because the sense of incredulity is the same - the thought that in real life, this vaguely possible event would be forestalled somewhere along the way. I remember standing on the top of the World Trade Centre, fighting vicious winds, staring out over New York, and now the possibility of that experience no longer exists, and neither do however many thousand people.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
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| Tuesday, September 11, 2001 |
| The Tao of Dan. Knowing the right thing to say is a precious gift, and a rare one. However, time can usually be saved by eliminating "I was born to lick your face" from the list of possible options right from the start.
Although I did go through a face-licking phase. In the run-up to my finals, I discovered that I found licking the face of a medical student called (let's say) Dave to be very therapeutic. Calming. Soothing. How I discovered this I have no idea.
Regrettably, the same effect was not felt by Dave, who was really quite perturbed by the whole thing. With the result that I often had to trap him in a room with only one exit, while singing the "licking your face" song, before pinning him to a wall and....well, licking his face.
On reflection, I'm really not sure that the interests of society were served by this. Yes, it helped me to a servicable degree in philosophy and the classical languages. But it may well have scarred for life a man who about now will be emerging into the world with an array of sharp, pointy things and the blessing of society to use them on others.
Who's the "winner" there? Who "wins"?
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| Friday, September 07, 2001 |
| The comments here really sicken me. I'll grant that Star Trek was interventionist, idealistic liberal twaddle. I'll grant that it was stuffed to the gills with dangerously naive (and now totally discredited) 1960's leftist ideology. God knows I'd never let my children watch that kind of crypto-socialist propaganda. It was, simply put, a transparent attempt by the liberal-controlled media to indoctrinate Americans with Stalinist/feminist/racialist (Uhura did *not* belong in a white crew, I'm sorry -- her inclusion is sheer unmitigated racism of the highest order) ideology and destroy our moral and cultural heritage. Nevertheless, William Shatner is a decent and honorable man and it sickens me more than I can say to see his name dragged through the dirt by these morons. Please, people, a little rationality and common sense wouldn't come amiss here.
When right-wing fuckwits launch into defences of William Shatner on kitsch websites, the results are really very strange indeed. I mean, who is this dingleberry? How much does it really sicken him? Is he very sickened indeed, or does he just have very little capacity to express his nausea?
Twat.
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| Although Dancing Bears has one of the more contrived titles in recent memory, it's a lot of fun - a knockabout political comedy with some fine lines, and a cast of lovable monsters. I enjoyed it enormously when I saw it on Thursday, before the flu-fog descended, along with Joe, Catherine and Tom, who got £2 off for being a card-carrying member of the Conservative party - perhaps the first time it has ever been an advantage.
Check out the flyer here.
Oh, and if you are free on Sunday, and enjoy multi-disciplinary dance/music/comedy/theatre evenings, why not hit 93 Feet East on Brick Lane at about 7:30 to see the Lab. It's ambient entertainment, based around lots of small acts to be enjoyed while you sit, drink, chat...kind of like performance sushi, and there's always something there to love - I still get the giggles when I think of the magic act...
I'll be there, brainflu permitting. How about you? Tell me. If you are going, you can get a discount by printing out the flyer here.
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| Although Dancing Bears has one of the more contrived titles in recent memory, it's a lot of fun - a knockabout political comedy with some fine lines, and a cast of lovable monsters. I enjoyed it enormously when I saw it on Thursday, before the flu-fog descended, along with Joe, Catherine and Tom, who got £2 off for being a card-carrying member of the Conservative party - perhaps the first time it has ever been an advantage.
Check out the flyer here.
Oh, and if you are free on Sunday, and enjoy multi-disciplinary dance/music/comedy/theatre evenings, why not hit 93 Feet East on Brick Lane at about 7:30 to see the Lab. It's ambient entertainemnt, based around lots of small acts to be enjoyed while you sit drink, chat...kind of like performance sushi, and there's always something there to love - I still get the giggles when I think of the magic act...
I'll be there, brainflu permitting. How about you? Tell me. If you are going, you can get a discount by printing out the flyer here.
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| First, the Earth stopped turning relative to the sun, and the moon parked itself on the dark side, a little outside the umbra.
The Americans and part of the Pacific were permanently in the light, in the end. Slowing and stopping took the best part of a hundred years -- a century of storms and monsoons, but the weather eventually settled down into a different pattern as these things do. We never had a chance to find out whether the system was stable however.
Second, the Sun began to grow.
"Ted. Lost the gut."
"I'm wearing a girdle."
"Thought so. Nice bra, too. End of the world again, then?"
"Yeah, yeah, bwa-ha-ha-ha."
Basically. The world is ending on the UpsideClown, and Matt is here to tell us about it.
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| Thursday, September 06, 2001 |
| Strange things to think about, much less post on a web site: film roles which Christian Ricci has failed to land. Although any serious thought suggests that she would probably have been utterly wrong for Lolita, massively improved both Batman and Robin and Romeo and Juliet, although not enough to make them actually good, and Titanic would have driven her out of acting for ever. So, all for the best, probably.
Although doing Rose in Titanic in the style of Wednesday Addams...
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| I actually went online and said, "I realize that this has shocked a lot of people, and I've made a mistake by trying to shove this lifestyle--which is embraced by, maybe, at most, 10 percent of Americans--down people's throats. So I'm going to take it back, and from now on, Willow will no longer be a Jew."
Well, thank fuck for that. Joss Whedon irons out the one fault in an otherwise flawless programme. Oh, by the way, don't read this article if you don't want to know how Series 5 ends. It kind of leaps out at you.
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| Wednesday, September 05, 2001 |
| Crumple zones, pop-up bonnets, exterior airbags - an increasing amount of a car's value was being dedicated to minimising pedestrian injury, to benefitting an individual who had contributed nothing towards the purchase of the vehicle.
"Crumple zone" is one of the most evocative phrases in our language, and it's just the beginning for Kevan and his pet lizard, Upsideclone.
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| This is the modern world. The front page of the Guardian has a picture of a child being ushered into school as a line of soldiers hold back a baying crowd of the type who give loyalism such a good name. The child is holding a Powerpuff Girls lunchbox. Out of shot, a hastily-reconvened Huggy Bear play "Her Jazz".
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| Monday, September 03, 2001 |
| These are the knickers that your mother warned you about. The ones that only the sluttish girls wore with their white leather skirts hiked up around their waist, with the porn pants draped around their white leather pixie boots. Time have changed (those pixie boots are seen in all the best Hoxton bars now) but attitudes haven't. And there lies the thrill. The utter badness, naughtiness and sluttishness of these beauties make them more forbidden than hedgehog abuse.
The UpsideClown is alive with the sight of Porn Pants. I have seen Geroge's porn pants, and truly they are mighty. Killer nails, too. Worship her.
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| I'm fucking tough and big. I could prolly kick the living shit out of you and your dads(who would be all speaking german right now if it wasn't for us Americans- cause I know you shit talkers are all British). You get this impression of me as being ignorant, and since I just said I was rather big that means I'm dangerous. One day I'm gonna be a big famous filmmaker(or promoter) and I'm gonna have to cash to travel. You all saw "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" you know how this story ends...
Remember, kids, by no means all Americans are like this. Regrettably, the empty vessels tend to make the most noise. And become President of the United States and thus by extension leader of the free world.
Oh, fucklizards.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I hereby suggest that the President, Vice-President, Senate and Congress of the United States of America are dissolved (in acid), and replaced by an emergency executive made up of Brooke, my friend Jane, Kristen Hersh and, hey, Freddie Prinze Jr. Because he's so damn winsome, and it will keep the men quiet.
Extreme situations require extreme responses. You know it makes sense.
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