| Tuesday, August 27, 2002 |
 | A rather eerie article on Slate today, which effectively highlights the strange position of the British on Hotmail - sharing a language but not a culture. Adrift in the Atlantic, if you will. However, one thing I definitely do want to see is the transportation of mascots to other companies after the one they had been advancing has folded. Apart form anything else, recyclable mascots would lead to a massive reduction in the effort expended by our overtired, overstressed marketeers.
Plus, I want to see the Churchill nodding dog and Homepride Fred together and fucking to shill condoms.
"Nod harder, bitch!"
You know it makes sense.
On a related topic - selling pizza? Don't advertise with a rat. Just sayin'.
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| Monday, August 26, 2002 |
| My first response to Matt's discovery of the top 50 Sexy Cartoon Babes was much as you would expect; a kind of anthropological interest tempered with a healthy dollop of fear. That was, until I realised how progressively more exercised I was becoming at the scandalous omission from the ranks of Judge JB from the short-lived and ill-fated Bravestarr
I mean, really. Really really. Sensible clothes that cover her entire body, heels not so high as to make walking impossible (especially in a sandy area like New Texas and oh my God I actually said that), a few convenient and utilitarian pockets...this is a woman who had really given some thought on how to prepare for an attack by the evil Tex Hex. Not like the shower at Castle Greyskull, who must have spent their entire defense budget on bikini line waxes (and that was just for He-Man).
Plus, as the representative of law and order in New Texas, she has to be pulling down a pretty solid paycheque. Life may be cheap on the frontier, but so are property and furniture, so it ain't all bad by any stretch of the imagination...
I need help, don't I? Still, at least I don't fancy a mink with breasts...
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| The long weekend has been insanely long - five days, which is longer than a fair few holidays I have had.
I know I should have achieved more. But time spent in bed is rarely wasted. Besides, two days in Brighton and going out with Matt, Ben, Andy, followed by a momentous decision on Saturday can't be all idleness...
Although if I hear the entire dialogue track from the trailer to The Comedian repeated one more time, I am going to arse myself to death. With a shovel.
Anyway, yes, momentous decision. I've been going through some changes in the last year. I've learned a lot about myself. About love. About pain. About the dangers of putting spray cheese canisters up your nose. And, as we reach the end of that long, strange ride, I am realising that it's time to make a change. Time to change something in my life.
My name is Dan, and on Saturday afternoon, encouraged but by no means coerced by the lovely Anna, I bought a pair of jeans.
I know, it seems so strange, so wrong. Smoky campfires on the Yukon trail. Cattle-wrangling. Combining stonewashed blue jeans with an Esso tiger T-shirt for a night of violence in Loughborough town centre.
And yet. And yet. Compared to my usual range of Trousers from the Future(tm), and the array of overlapping security features, airbags, glove compartments and utterly pointless little Helmut Langisms, they are just so comfy. Plus, they are at least one step back towards having a black wardrobe.
I was talking to somebody on Thursday who pointed out that there were two basic goth aetiologies:
1) "You don't become a goth. You're born a goth, and then it's just a question of how soon you can get the lifestyle."
2) "One day you look around your wardrobe and think 'Gosh! I no longer have any clothing that isn't black."
I seem to have been doing the exact reverse of (2). Where at 16 my clothes were a tenebrous treat, I have strayed so far into muted colours that the good old days of never needing to check what matched what when, why and with whom seem a distant dream. Well, god damn it, I'm going to take it back. I'm going to take it all back. And pray to God I don't end up looking like the ginger Simon Cowell.
Where's a good place to get back in black? Tell me.
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| Wednesday, August 21, 2002 |
| And speaking of sex, the BBC releases details of its Autumn schedules, claiming the cultural high ground with a Pop Idol knock-off. I am, however, very excited about the possibility of a new series of Judge John Deed. Oh yes.
No, I've never actually seen it.
No, I very much doubt I will see it.
However, it was described to me in tones of wonder by my dear friend Chris, who explained with eyes a-gleaming, "It's about a judge, Dan. A maverick judge who's not afraid to bend the rules. Which is to say, a really really shit judge."
I do feel for the new writer though, who boldly pronounces without immediately apparent irony, "drama is about stretching cosy assumptions to breaking point and finding something worthwhile with which to replace them." This just underneath the revelation that guest stars will include John Sessions and Donald Sinden. That sound was Capitalism browning its trousers.
Sounds rock-tastic.
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| Tuesday, August 20, 2002 |
| The sound gallery is now open. Rock news for lovers of bleeptronica and opening doors everywhere. I have such a crush on Delia Derbyshire, which is so wrong for so very many different reasons.
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| I have no idea if Resonance Radio is any good, although it certainly has a darn ambitious mission statement, but will fiddling with my oh-so-dinky pocket radio on the way into work, I discovered that they have the best hold music - lots of lovely clangorous bells and intermittent half-moaned chanting. Quality. And very calming, in a mad sort of way...
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| Monday, August 19, 2002 |
| Fleeting thought for the next series of 24:
I'm public servant Jeb Bartlet, and this is the longest day of my life.
In which crusty but lovable POTUS Jeb Bartlet swaps gunfire with international terrorists while dealing with sinister machinations from the VP's office. With bullets.
What? You never noticed that these Sunday night neighbours have the same initials? Both ended at the same time? Are played by members of acting dynasties? It's the way forward.
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| Being an anaemic physicist type, Matt" fails to realise that with just a small child and an abandoned building site, anywhere can be Diggerland.
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| After a hot, grim, bad news sort of a weekend, what I think the nation needs is a drunken rag-n-bone man in a feather boa and a mutton-chopped Marxist who wants him to die. The strange case of Steptoe and Son sounds like must-see TV, and as such I will, of course, miss it because I'm out.
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| Wednesday, August 14, 2002 |
| It must give Roger Rees, whom you may remember as Ambassador Lord John Maybury in The West Wing, a little chill to see his IMDB bio mention the horribly wealthier John Hurt and Alan Rickman in the virst first sentence of his IMDB bio. IMDB can be cruel.
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| My desperate need for downtime over the last couple of days has led, among other things, to rediscover the absolute absence of joy of televison, the drug of the nation, feeding ignorance and causing radiation ect ect chis chis. After a surprisingly promising Monday, in which Six Feet Under was followed by Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, which I lasted about twenty minutes on before being overwhelmed by the realisation that American universities really will accept anyone who'll pay them, a fact far more offensive than la Chong's backpipe bonanza, yesterday offered a cruel reminder that, despite lovely lovely David and his new-found slutdom, despite even Ben's heroic excavation of the A-Team Concordance TV is basically evil and shit.
The Newsnight article on Ayn Rand devotees in the Conservative party was kind of cute (followers of a right-wing, free-market evangelist and nutter finding a home among the Tories? Not exactly ravens leaving the tower of London, it must be said), especially as I was watching it with my Ayn Randy flatmate. But then...the horror, the horror.
Channel 5. Inevitably. A programdevoted to attendants of a conference for amputee women and the men who desire them. Sweet shit.
Please, don't misunderstand me. I am not for a moment suggesting that amputees should not enjoy life, love and all the bounties that the world has to offer. Not a whit.
However, this was the account of an occasion designed for stump fetishists to turn up and try to shag amputees. And the wry observation by one of them that, nice as it is to be desired and among people who shared their experience of life, "these guys" did frequently seem to look upon the women as "a life support system for a stump" seemed horribly, horribly true.
This asssertion certainly sat slightly uncomfortably with one of the potential stump-grinder's claim that "we're just normal guys". As indeed did statements to the effect that, although he was not sexually attracted to men, he was for a while sexually attracted by male amputees, because they reminded him of female amputees, and that at times one of these normal guys had regularly entertained sexual fantasies about hacking off women's limbs, while another used to go to disabled sports events and hide in the shadows. I know Paul McCartney's been taken, but there has to be another option...
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or the motel or wherever, a particularly unprepossessing beardy lardbucket (who seemed very proud of having been the one who succeeded in breaking open the festive amputee pinata despite the advantage of having legs) explained, punctuating with the most horribly incongruous girlish giggle in history (including Hitler's), that he didn't think it was fair to marry and have children when he would be likely to leave his wife and shack up with an amputee instead. But he does want children. And he really does want to shove his cock up someone for home love means never having to hear the words "spread 'em". So, since a woman of his age would not be a very good bet for childbearing, he is looking for an amputee woman 10 to 20 years his junior. He didn't seem to have got much past "two ovaries, three limbs" on his like list.
Well, good luck there, Spankie. Don't let the fact that even the ones who can't run can still end their lives rather than submit to your advances get you down.
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| Anna's tale of seeing Miki Berenyi (well, ok, it's not really a tale. More of a statement. If she had actually been seeing Miki Berenyi, I for one would call that a tale) has cast me into a hazy netherworld of memory. Was it just me, or was there a point when every single sensitive young fellow in his mid-teens not passionately absorbed in the gentler arts of manlove held an enormous candle for the red-haired angel of shoegazing? Which means, in turn, that Orbyn must at the time have been even more of a locus for obsessive young men who have difficulty talking to girls than she is now.
If such a thing is possible.
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| Vaughan has shattered all my dreams about ITV Nightscreen:
isn't it just Teletext pages with music? Didn't they used to do Jobscreen, which was much the same thing but with jobs? And Pornscreen, which was much the same thing again, but with really blocky-pixel pictures of softcore pornography?
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck! This is an incredible disappointment (except possibly the bit about Pornscreen, which makes me strangely content). It's just "Pages from Ceefax" with a swanky name?
I was expecting a programme designed with the greatest possible care, as a reward for those who had beaten the end-of-level baddie that is ever going to sleep ever, where provincial French chefs produce without fuss meals the beauty of which would make Jamie Oliver look yet uglier, while a panel led by Derrida and Simon Armitage discussed the upcoming TV and occasionally took time out to share facts so whimsical and yet so perfect that you had a little smile on your face for the rest of the day. Instead pages from arseviscerating Ceefax. Or, more precisely, shitting fucking twatting Oracle.
I tell you, it's no surprise that there are more murders now than there were during the Blitz. Or words to that effect.
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| Sunday, August 11, 2002 |
| ITV Nightscreen, which I have missed in my latest bout with insomnia, is described as:
Guide to ITV programmes and films on the small screen, plus recipes and facts.
Wow. Metatelly of the first order. Has anybody ever seen this and lived? What's it like? Tell me.
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| You know the bit in Dawn of the Dead (a sequel, incidentally, that is in with a decent shout of being better than the original. See also The Evil Dead 2 which, in a spooktacular coincidence, was also titled "Dead by Dawn") where a group of zombies, having returned to the mall as a place they dimly recall in what is left of their rotted cerebella as a place they were happy, are being carried up the escalator but no longer have the grey matter to process getting off it, and just fall over as they reach the top? Note that we use the term "grey matter" here to mean "smarts, moxie, intellect", rather than just matter that is grey, more than most humans of which zombies tend to possess, through a) having grey skin and b) eating brains.
Well, in the Virgin Megastore on Thursday I got an eerie sense that I was about to have similar brain-sucking issues. People were riding the escalator up to the first floor, and then freezing in place as soon as they laid eyes on the big screen showing "The Fellowship of the Ring" on the wall in front of then, before stumbling awkwardly off the escalator without taking aforementioned peepers from the hot Hobbit action in front of them and shambling to a better vantage point. The urge to grab them by the throat and yell "you've already seen it eight times, elfcocks" was drivne back into my chest by fear for my oh-so-comestible flesh.
Plus, the sudden horrible realisation that, betweeen the crowd all wondering as one whether the sequel would be better and the teenage girls beating the tar out of each other on Dead or Alive 3 behind them, I actually am my weblog.
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| Tuesday, August 06, 2002 |
| Sequels tend to always be worse than the original. There are obvious exceptions such as the Back to the Future series and of course Star Wars.
Gerard actually advances a fairly complex question here. Back to The Future 2's superiority to Back to the Future is at best debatable. Although louder and wider in scope, and inarguably more ingenious in its capacity as a metamovie - a sequel that reprises not only the characters and action but the temporal space occupied by its predecessor - the lack of the same emotional bonds between the characters and the reliance on effects over sharp scripting leaves the question open.
None of this changes the fact that Back to the Future 3 was an experience of an unpleasantness comparable to having your penis flensed and the resulting pulpy sack of fleshsquash then vigorously rubbed between two sharks (whose roughened, skin-splitting epidermis is, we have established, either very scary or, being reminiscent of the protective spines of a hedgehog, actively deleterious to scaring activity). Although it is also, technically, a sequel, being sequential, to Back to the Future.
Star Wars is another and yet more complex question. For, although there is a strong and well-supported case that The Empire Strikes Back is a better film than A New Hope, with improved scripting, better characterisation and more and better effects, which make up for or even complement the darker tones and the absence of the sense of wonder that permeated its parent,
Return of the Jedi essentially sucks bantha cock. Until the bantha begged for mercy. Including 10,000 years for it to develop language and the concept of mercy. And yet, this is both a sequel to the far superior Empire Strikes Back, and the perceptibly superior A New Hope, sequel being, as you smart kittens all know, being from the Latin sequor, I follow.
Then we get to The Fandom Menace and Where are the Clones? There should be Clones...., and it gets yet more difficult. These are more painful to watch than one's entire family being gang-banged by ewoks, including and indeed placing much to the fore your dead granny. Artistically and in real chronological terms, they are manifestly sequels, but they preced in terms of the timeline of the fiction they inhabit not only their direct predecessor but also the two predecessors of that direct predecessor.
In many ways, Gerard has, in his cute, vole-like way, unearthed a puzzle for generations to come.
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| Monday, August 05, 2002 |
| Meanwhile, picking up our Zane Whelan thread from earlier on, attempts to stop America's children from being on drugs become progressively more...well, more on drugs, really.
How Neil Patrick Harris avoids the demon Weed.
Watching my post-Doogie career, such as it was, descend faster than ever did my balls into obscurity and meaninglessness, with occasional moments of seemingly infinite possibility - well, all right, a cameo in Starship Troopers - being dulled almost immediately in a pile of Movie-of-the-Week slurry, eventually being reduced to impersonating Paul Digitaltrickery at children's parties to make ends meet.
That's my anti-drug.
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| Thursday saw me as one of about five men in the crowd to see Patti Smith at the Concorde 2 in Brighton (Concorde the First apparently turned out to be a firetrap. This seems to happen a lot in Brighton. I think it's a form of natural selection). She did all the old favourites - "Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sun Shine In", "Living in America", "You Belong in Rock and Roll", the works.
She was also wery complimentary about Brighton, telling the enthusiastic crowd that she plans to retire there, write a book and dedicate it to Graham Greene. I was vaguely hoping to get reports back that at the Union Chapel she told the assembled masses that she was going to come to live in London, write a book and dedicate it to Martin Amis, but no such luck. I hate it when people maintain the integrity of their integrity...
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| Intermission:
Yay! Latiny goodness from Ben. We have the news in Latin, also and inevitably available on an RSS feed.
The news in Latin I remember fondly from my schooldays, when I would tune the big hi-fi in the drawing room into Radio Finland, and listen to the two cheerful presentresses (who were quick to remind you that they were speaking from "Helllllllsinki!") set up the week's news for those who linguam Latinam habent, without ever once explaining why the Hell they were doing it.
And, once you have got the hang of that, try PERL in Latin. For perhaps the smallest interest group ever.
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| So how was your weekend?
Mine was long, primarily - I took advantage of some time off to head up to George's birthday party thing in Brighton on Wednesday evening, which was fun but did rather reveal the fundamental problem of George. Essentially, every birthday signals a mad dash towards Thundercats and Power Pack merchandise, of which there is a finitude. Said finitude is further circumscribed by the intrinsic quality of diminishment contingent upon any given successful purchase. So you end up with George receiving issues 1-12 of Power Pack for the second time. That's like being hit by comic book lightning twice.
Although at least it provided yet another chance to goggle along with the adverts in comic books of the 80s, from the well-intentioned if dreadful (Spidey's tips on sexual abuse) to the depressingly sure-footed in terms of their target market. (Charles Atlas courses, acne cream, and the high-sugar snacks that no doubt generated the desire for both).
One for the plus ca change department, incidentally. Presumably in the pursuit of a government handout, Marvel Comics included a mini-comic in their general fare a year or two ago in which a rebellious cub reporter for the Daily Bugle fell under the spell of teen idol Zane Whelan, whom you could identify as a bad lot by his hemp-leaf T-shirt. Zane, it turned out, was a "phony", using stage contacts to simulate bloodshot eyes (one of the moral guardians of the USA's more peculiar articles of faith is that marijuana turns your eyes pink. I think they may be mixing it up with Gamecube), and then Mysterio got involved and blah blah fishcakes don't do drugs. Nice. I look forward to the Marvel Special Event this year when the Incredible Hulk beats the tar out of Woody Harrelson.
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