Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Edinburgh - Terror City One

Watch me as I buy into the whole viral website movement.

I am very happy to live in Edinburgh, home to the festival, to culture and to neds...  We're an awfully safe city, in the main, although I daresay that Lothian Road on a Saturday night is not the place to go spilling anyone's pint.  But I am delighted to bring shame upon my hometown with this snippet of delight:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8796986960357876824&q=fight+in+Edinburgh

Basically, it's a fight (just off the Royal Mile, I think).  One bloke - who we shall call the "right raj wee wide-o" manages to achieve stalemate with about four others by sheer willingness to keep punching in the face of overwhelming odds.  Two girls manage to make things far worse - as is their job in such situations - and then our hero loses the plot and initiates blue-on-blue casualties with traffic signs.  As soon as he does that - lamping one of the mad wee wummen - he brings down the righteous wrath of some very large but previously uncommitted neutrals upon his head.

For any schoolkids watching, we see excellent use of improvised materials here, and thoroughly capable use of the wild-flailing manuevre that is key to so many successful four-on-one defences.  A nice touch is the discarding of the primary participant's top for extra "ah'm mad, me" credibility.  But taking down your girlfriend's mate with forty kilos of flying plastic to the head is definitely a schoolboy error.

My one argument is that this is Edinburgh, so the allegations that Buckfast is involved is almost certainly a vile calumny upon the monks who make it.  I suspect the wicked hands of Messrs Smirnoff and Daniels at play, here.

Commentary is by the bemused American with the camera.  At least he's not at risk of getting shot, so he seems rather relaxed.  Well worth listening to with the sound up...

Domino Toppling in Oblivion

Back when the Guinness Book of Records was sufficient in itself to power a half-hour of weekday-evening, post-school must-see kids' TV, my favourites were always mad, compulsive-obbsessive types who had set up hundreds of thousands of dominos, ready to topple.  Apart from the vague hope that one of them would, like the colonel in Bridge Over the River Kwai and reluctant to see the destruction of months' of work, dive in front of his creation, weeping, and scream "no, I will not see it die!", I was impressed by the Mousetrap(TM)-type ingenuity of the creations, involving designs of flags and words, and occasionally incorporating non-domino elements to annoy the purists.

Anyway, to the awesomeness which is Oblivion, someone has added that finishing touch: virtual domino-toppling.  See it at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyHiIeBsc9E

It has dominos, swords cutting ropes, crystal balls running down wooden tracks, and corpses all being used as part of the mechanic.  At last: a useful (emergent) purpose for in-game physics engines.  You certainly missed out on the cadavers when Norris McWhirter had a hand in things.  Let alone the use of classic Nirvana songs (although, thankfully, not one of Nevermind's more overplayed ones) as soundtrack.

I suppose the big advantage of the virtual version is that, before trying it out, you can save the game.  Then see it happen again and again.  And not end up with a terrible, anti-climactic finale as featured in the Bravery's recent video "An Honest Mistake".

It's just not done like that!!!

Dennis, in my office, is American.  No doubt a representative of the CIA given to compiling reports on our commercial secrets for the Langley Hivemind, he occasionally takes breaks from snooping around the subject of petroleum-bearing geology in the Forth basin to bedazzle us with his glamourous foreign ways and his quaint, colonial spellings of "colour" and "valour".

Today, he announced that in the run-up to the World Cup, and after several years in Scotland, he was going to take up "soccer" as a hobby.  Who, he asked, was a good team to support (preferably, he noted, a London one who wins a lot of stuff)?  He suggested West Ham (thus betraying an ignorance of the game that will serve him well as a Manchester united Fan), Arsenal or Spurs.  Apparently Chelsea are out for this Reagan Democrat due to the Russian links.

Arsenal or Spurs?  To translate for the US audience, that is the equivalent of saying "Mets or Yankees?"  It's like "Celtic or Rangers" or "Inter or AC Milan".  Like physicists say (shuffling awkwardly) when you ask what was around before the big bang: it is not a meaningful question.  If you don't have an opinion already you can't just pluck one out of the air post facto.  And saying that Scottish clubs are out of the running because they're useless may be painfully accurate, but still unpopular for a man in Edinburgh.  not a sign that he intends to become a season-ticket holder.

I suspect that if he picks a team, and they get demoted, then he'll change.  I don't think, to be fair, that he'd deny that for a second.

Do I support Greenock Morton because of our glorious tournament history (never won the top division, Scottish Cup Winners once, 60 years ago, first round exit to Chelsea in European Fairs Cup 1968)?  No.  I was landed with them and that's that.  A few miles south and I'd have been a St Mirren fan, which is far worse, so at least I can be grateful for small mercies.  I don't complain, I just knuckle down to rainy Saturday afternoons in the cowshed shouting abuse at our centre-back pairings and preparing myself for the inevitable end-of-season collapse.

It's quite simple.  As Frank Skinner said, if you want to know what football team to support, you need a map of where you were born and a ruler.  Closer inspection reveals that Dennis (born in New Jersey) is blessed with a choice between Yeovil Town, Swansea, Stranraer and Plymouth Argyle.  That's plenty of leeway.  Take your pic.

As another colleague, Jaime* (Notts Forest, man and boy) said: "Essentially, you get what you're given, not the one with the best synergy with your personal values..."

Edit: Latest Update...  Dennis has been prevailed upon to take a speculative punt on perennial under-achievers Newcastle United.  He says he will "see how they do in the first couple of games, then decide".  I am not certain that he quite gets it, yet.  If he ever let slip to the Toon Army that he was supporting them on a probationary basis, the very best he could expect would be ridicule.  In the meantime, we are training him up on insulting yet amusing chants casting aspersions on the parentage, cleanliness and pharmaceutical leanings of Maccas and Smog Monsters (supporters of neighbours Sunderland and Middlesborough).

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*On discovering that I get 750 unique visitors a week, Jaime would like to offer his sofa for sale.  Apparently, it's "red, and I don't like it very much.  The wife liked it and I buckled".  So perhaps it would suit the single lady.  Any reasonable offers, will deliver.

A la Recherche de Temps Perdu

As mentioned in my last post, I picked up two Johnny Cash albums at the same time as Angels and Airwaves.  I just tried to listen to them and couldn't.  I had to stop after a few tracks.

The problem is not any lack of quality, or any distaste on my part.  I haven't listened to old Johnny Cash tracks for a very long time - as opposed to his American series of recordings, where he did unbelieveable things to tracks by people like Depeche Mode or Nine Inch Nails.  I love his voice, and his cover of NiN's Hurt was what made me pick up the guitar again after a long break.  The video to that, with June watching him (both would die within months), is terribly touching.

The trouble is that memory thing.  When I was a little kid - nine or ten I think, but I've been wrong before about this manner of thing - my grandfather had a Vauxhall Viva.  Built in Britain, it was a downright horrible car: vinyl seats and a soft suspension, though I'll allow that I didn't notice any of this at the time.  But one of the faults was that it swallowed a Johnny Cash cassette and wouldn't let it go.  It would play it those 24 minutes or so (no auto-reverse in those days), but that was your lot.

My grandfather must have spent hundreds of hours tinkering with that car up in his garage, and I don't think there were many parts he couldn't fix.  But whether it was a reluctance to tinker with a sealed box of electronics, or just an unswerveable liking for the Man In Black, he saw no need to fix the Johnny issue.  I must have heard that tape hundreds of times, on the way to visit aunts in Sorn or Catrine or Muirkirk, or travelling to picnics at the Bridgend Burn, or off to the Glen to walk Mac the Dug, the latter hound wisely escaping the repetition by standing over me on the back seat and sticking his big, boxer's face out the window.

I've heard some of the tracks since, on enough occasions to dilute the effect: I Walk the Line for instance. But listening today to Folsom Prison Blues, Ring of Fire, or He Turned The Water Into Wine for the first time since those hundreds of listenings, two and a half decades ago, I was transported back to the back of Mauchline Papa's car, raspberry canes flashing by to the right and crab apple trees to the left as we head over the back road to Sorn.

This shot to the hippocampus won't last.  If I use it up, the experience and richness of the memories will go.  Like memories prompted by photographs, the recollecion will increasingly become one of the reproduced image, and less that of the moment itself.

Angels and Airwaves Review

I got my hands on Angels and Airwaves' debut album (as well as remastered versions of Johnny Cash's classic prison concerts at Folsom and San Quentin, because leaving a music shop with only one CD is something I cannot do).  The band is Tom Delonge's new post-Blink 182 project, together with members of The Distillers, The Offspring and Box Car Racer.

Quite apart from the obvious and distinctive link that is Delonge's voice, the sound is very obviously a development of the Blink 182 sound.  These songs are continuations of the process that was already underway with Stay Together for the Kids, I Miss You and Down.  You can, in fact, sing Blink's Always along to most of the Angels and Airwaves single Adventure.  Scoring is big, the orchestration full of synthesisers - more obvious than the guitars for much of the album - and lavish.  Girls in particular will love this.  And because, as my Boys of Summer post made clear, I am a complete girl in these matters, so do I.

The other obvious comparison is to Box Car Racers: there is a resemblance to the atmosphere, pacing and subject matter of I Feel So, All Systems Go or (particularly) There Is, but the orchestration, again, moves the guitar away from centre stage and replaces it with more dominant synth sounds.  This also leads to less concentration on melody, per se, and more on the chordal structure of the songs.

I am interested as to where the influence of the Distillers and Offspring members is.  maybe they just fancied a change?  There does sem to be a very obvious split at the moment between the stripped-down sounds of bands like The Rakes, Felix Da House Cat, The Young Knives, Be Your Own Pet, and the more heavily produced route that Angels and Airwaves have gone down.  Both have their attractions, and this is certainly an extremely listenable album: I enjoyed listening to each song the very first time.

You'll notice I'm not mentioning particular songs that much.  That's the downside.  The pacing and orchestration are fairly universal, and while I wouldn't go quite as far as calling it one-paced, if you ilke or dislike the singles, you'll feel the same way about the whole thing.  The sound of each track tends to follow a certain pattern: a prolonged, instrumental introduction (usually fairly restrained in nature), followed by a sudden explosion into a massive, rich, layered sound that races on, building bigger and richer for the rest of the song, with a fairly poignant lyric.  Forcing myself to pick out tracks, first single The Adventure is particularly strong, as is It Hurts, a Blink-esque exploration of a relationship past its sell-by, delivered in an uncompromising second-person form.  A Little's Enough is an uplifting sort of spiritual (lyrically: in no way similar in musical form to a spiritual, though) for its time, and contains some of the most interesting lyrics, expressing a tension between perceived, personal spirituality and religion that speaks to a very common dynamic amongst the most likely audience demographic.

While we're on the caveats, there's not the humour of Blink 182: there is a place for more serious lyrics, and A&A certainly do that here.  just don't come here for a return to What's My Age Again?  I suspect Delonge made this album to escape that pressure.

I like reviews that say "if you like these, you'll like this album," or "if you like this album, how about these?"  So here are a few things it sounds or feels a little like:

Oceansize, Heaven Alive
Team Sleep, Ataraxia
The Secret Machines, Alone, Jealous and Stoned
The Wonder Stuff, Mission Drive
The The, This Is The Day

And now for something completely different

From the sublime to the ridiculous.  I'm not a fan of the Eurovision song contest, and haven't watched it since 1999 (having realised, yesterday, that my entire dating system for the late 90's was a whole year out, I am not confident of this) or so.  Well, to be honest I didn't watch it then, either.  I was just in the company of those who did.  I seem to remember spending the evening playing pool badly and speaking to a variety of complete strangers in a provincial pub, while frequently being told to shut up throughout by my companion for the evening (why do so many posts start with me dissassociating myself from subject matter?).

Anyway, I am delighted that some Finnish band who look like a cross between Gwar and a glam version of Slipknot won it.  When it comes to metal, nobody does ridiculous with a straight face like the Scandinavians - just look at the Norwegian death metal scene - and although I haven't heard Lordi's song, I am sure that it follows in this great tradition.  In any case, presumably there will be some more variation for the next few years, as people realise that bucolic, local ballads (nil point magnets) and over-produced, gay-friendly, europop dance tracks are not the best way to win.  The music still won't be good, but I look forward to equally sanitised, unconsciously comedic pastiches of supposedly edgy genres.  Perhaps next time will see some Kraftwerk-esque minimalists from Germany competing with the finest Maltese exponents of the emo genre and a peerless pack of polished, polite Polish punks.

I had high hopes for Croatia's internet-friendly Severina, and I am sure that her discardng her dress in true Bucks Fizz fashion was appreciated on a certain ironic level by those with usenet access. But Britain, despite a laudibly brave effort from the backing dancers in the costume stakes, was as awful as ever.

And no, I didn't watch it.

The Boys of Summer

Those who know me in a passing way, or only in a particular context, tend to have certain preconceptions about me.  If you play rugby (or hockey, or football, or touch rugby, or bl*ody Monopoly, or just about anything competitive) with me, you may nominate me "person most likely to get a four week ban".  If you work with me, you may remember the odd, erm, heated exchange.  I can't pretend to be wholly ashamed of this behaviour, either.  Who wants to be tame?

Anyway, those who know me better are painfully aware of a deeper, far more unpleasant trait.  I am a sucker for emotional manipulation.  I love romcoms, be they 1940's The Shop Around the Corner, or 2005's Hitch. I cannot go and see films with sad endings, which I can, fortunately, detect a mile off (no Crouching Tiger for me, thanks).  They affect me for hours, or even days.  My favourite songs are very, very often poignant either in form (Hoobastank - The Reason, Massive Attack - Teardrop) or in association (The Cocteau Twins - Blue Bell Knoll).

There is a point to this narcissistic self-indulgence.  It leads me to name - to assert - the greatest pop song of all time.  I know what you're thinking: something safe by the mid 60's Beatles, perhaps?  Dylan?  Or maybe a deliberately provocative choice: the Death in Vegas/Iggy Pop collaboration Aisha or the Cure with A Forest?  Maybe The Undertones, or the Clash, or Nirvana will get a nomination for a bit of alternative credibility?  Or someone unheard of, just to assert my musical alpha status?  Team Sleep's Ataraxia would do there.  Or even just a ridiculous piece of fanboism from my own tastes like the Smiths' How Soon is Now? or Faith No More and the Boo Yah Tribe's Another Body Murdered.  Ho ho ho.

But no.  I think the finest pop single ever released is Don Henley's The Boys of Summer.  It's not my genre, nor my era, nor is it specifically associated with any great event in my life.  It's not the sort of music I usually like, and it has been murdered in a variety of unfortunate ways by later, lesser artists.  But in structure, melody and lyrical content it is simply the perfect pop record, and the real, underlying meaning of the song is universal.

The 16-bar, minor key intro is distinctive and built around a beautifully simple, syncopated figure in threes, but is later subsumed into the song proper, being restated fairly intact between each chorus and verse (played twice between second chorus and third verse) with a hint of adornment in the later playings - a gesture towards a guitar solo.  The chorus itself shifts into a major key, giving a sense of release each time and serving to lighten an essentially down song.  You wouldn't know from a quick listening, but this is one of the saddest pop songs outside the godlike Rolf Harris and his track Two Little Boys*.

The sadness is hidden in a simple yet subtle lyric.  An initial listen might leave you thinking that the song is about the end of summer.  That is certainly the theme of the first verse:

Nobody on the road
Nobody on the beach
A feeling in the air
That summer's out of reach

But at the end of that verse is a link to the theme of the next: "I'm driving by your house, though I know you're not home".  The second verse does, indeed, seem to be singing about the girl he loved - and who he clearly still loves - but who he has lost somehow.  A pop song about losing a girl?  Not great in the novelty stakes.  But again, the hint to the larger theme is there near the segue into the second chorus.  What sounds like a relapse into normal, tedious pop cliche ("...but I don't understand what happened to our love...") is, in fact, key to understanding not just the third verse in turn, but in fact the whole song.

Despite being standard, 4/4, 16-bar pop, nonetheless it is the case that - outside of the choruses - most of the song is dominated by a three-against-four rhythm.  The threefold figure is repeated in the verse structure.  And the theme of the song is decidely triune in nature.  This use of threes in music has a long heritage: just look at the sonata form: exposition, development and capitulation.  You can even shoe-horn this song into a sort of sonata structure, with the exposition comprising a first and second group (although the transposition is not between the normal tonic and dominant).  The codetta is missing here (but appears near the end of the song), but it is not a universal element in any case.  The development and recapitulation are repeated here, of course, but that was traditional before 1780 or so, and if it's ok for Beethoven (in the Appassionata Sonata) then it's ok for Henley.  Pushing the parallel further, there is even a slow introduction (actually the tempo is maintained throughout, but the guitar line is distinctly slower in pace than the rest of the intro) and a lengthy coda which restates the main theme while emphasising the sub-dominant

I knew those years of musical study under Alex Keith weren't entirely wasted.  Whether he was ever so sure is another matter.

Returning to the lyrical theme, the first words of the third verse are the pay-off:

Out on the road today
I saw a deadhead sticker on a cadillac
A little voice inside my head said
"Don't look back you can never look back"

This verse is about the loss of the late 60s and 70s world that Don Henley identified with.  Again, as with the second verse, there is no need to be specific in the identification here, since the song works just as well with the Ataris' lyric of seeing a Black Flag sticker (although a BMW would, if it scanned or rhymed, be more approriate to that age group than a Caddy [edit: Ack.. I totally forgot when writing that that *I* drive a BMW.  Noooo....]).  The values of rebellion, of the rejection of mainstream norms and the assertion of a new and different, better way all pass with time, in the face of material wealth and mundane security.

The chorus ties this together, with the first couple of stanzas each time concerned with a simple act of imagining of the girl, while the second half of the chorus is concerned with asserting that the singer's love is beyond the passing nature of what he describes elsewhere: summer ends, the girl goes, the world itself passes, but his love for each remains unaltered, despite the fact that he knows "those days are gone forever, I should just let them go"

This unifies the song as a whole. I don't think Henley was particularly writing a song about summer ending, girls leaving or the seventies passing.  I think he was simply writing about loss, and the difficulty of accepting that loss despite its inevitability.  As put by another songwriter with a gift for evoking this sense of inevitable loss:

As all things must surely have to end
And great loves will one day have to part**

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* Colin Harvais, who I went to school with, would physically shed tears on hearing Rolf's magnum opus.  Seriously.

** Billy Corgan, The Smashing Pumpkins, Muzzle.  In many ways, I prefer Corgan's defiant version of loss - "my life has been extraordinary, blessed and cursed and won", but the song as a whole, while I love and identify with every line, is not as tautly written nor as universal as Henley's.  It is a little sixth-form-self-indulgent at times.  But Corgan is undoubtedly a master of the crafted one-liner: "Wrap me up in always, and drag me in with maybes"

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P.S. This reminded me of a song I know I liked but cannot really remember.  Does anyone remember a song from about 1999-2000, possibly black and white (certainly false-coloured somehow) with the band in a car in the sea, heads just above water-level?  The sea may be sped up while the band might move real-time.  I'm not terribly sure about this, am I?  Kinda rock-ish, though not metal as such.  Occasional MTV2 play.  And it's not the Stereophonics, nor is it the Cure.

Barca!

I was one of the few people I know who both wanted and expected Barcelona to beat Arsenal tonight in the Champions' League Final.  Since my own Liverpool couldn't, I was delighted that the excellent Larsson proved the difference.  The incisive Henry aside, Barcelona were clearly superior in every area bar set pieces (where, interestingly, there was far less of a gap than expected).

But listening to the devotedly skewed viewpoint of the commentators was kinda wearing.  This was not a case of English commentators backing an English team: as ever the English elements of the team were having to rein in the worst of the fawning excesses perpetrated by my fellow Scot, Andy Gray.  Gray could not see that the referee had to send off Jens Lehmann for clearly grabbing the ankle of Eto'o as he ran past, potentially to score.  He could, quite legally, have allowed the goal for Barca that he chalked off and gone back to send off Lehmann (who I have tended to dislike, but whose dignified post-match interview rather won me over).  But Gray's suggestion - that he be yellow-carded "for the good of the spectacle" - would have been a nightmare for next year's referee: players, realising that the rules are applied less stringently in champions' league finals, would have entered the next one aware that anything short of impaling their opposite number in the old Romanian style, skinning him alive and feeding his raw, filleted toes to his gagging, wailing children would lead to a kindly shake of the head and a stern but fatherly admonition from the officials.

And the fury at this clear implementation of the laws of the game was balanced by admiring laughter at Eboue's blatant dive at the other end, which led to the Arsenal goal.  Had this been perpetrated by Johnny Spaniard, there would have been howls of complaint and a litany of comparisons between the honest northerners and their perfidious southern neighbours.  The first Barca goal was clearly onside, and unanimously called as such afterwards by the studio team, bur Gray was as partisan as ever and simply asserted throughout, in the face of plentiful video evidence, that it was offside.

All in all, I thought it was a fun, competitive final, in which both sides did themselves credit.  Nowhere near the level of last year's spectacle - the greatest final ever - but enjoyable as a tactical contest.  Arsenal scoring first was good for the game, as the better attacking side had to come forward onto them from then on.  Henry and Ronaldinho were less dominant than expected: the former was inneffectual with his last touch, while the latter was marked out of the game, while believing he could still run through the aassembled hordes of attendant Frenchmen.  Unfortunately for Henry, his misses proved sufficient to decide the game.

In Country Ah Shau Valley 1967

Leech-infested water, sheer cliffs in the middle of the jungle that you didn't see 'til you were in touching distance, sleeping three hours a night in a scraped-out hole that only served to gather the constant f*cking rain, all day spent humping sixty pound packs up seventy degree hills with some dien cei dau ell-tee trying to get us killed crossing swamps most ricky tick due to the 140 varieties of poisonous snake that pass for wildlife and ti-ti to listen to all day but the sound of Charlie shelling Ripcord...  Man, I loved the Ah Shau...

OK, I am so easily distracted.  I was supposed to be performing the hideously tedious job of uploading the pictures from last weekend's vacances en masse, but I'll just end up stealing Sandy and Lesley's (which are better than mine) in any case.  So I ended up playing at "what would I have looked like in 'Nam?"  This was the best I can do.  I admit it's just a lightly filtered crop of one of the pics in the gallery, but I like it.  Black and white just looked weirdly like I was wearing blackface, what with the camo stick.  At best, it looked like something from the video for the old track "Nineteen".

I think that there is some sort of a career there for me.  Not soldiering, obviously: my impulse control is too poor and I would end up on the front page of the Sun bringing shame on the regiment, the country and the family name.  But maybe some sort of make-up artist.  A big, manly one, obviously.

Adventure Breeds Adventure

If you learn languages, it is easier to learn more languages.  In fact, if you learn, it is easier to learn.  People who become comfortable with what they know, with their surroundings, with their ritual de lo habitual find themselves in a self-reinforcing cycle of stultification and suffocation that I have feared for decades.

Anyway, the relevant, specific element that just struck me is to do with music.  Not that long ago, I was terribly depressed at the thought that I might have heard all the songs I would ever truly love.  Laughable, I know, but I had an iPod with thousands of tracks, and had spent dozens of hours finding tracks I knew I wanted.  I seemed to possess an unimaginably large number of songs - far more than even in my 12" single-collecting days.  And add to this that my friends all had their comfortable tastes and favourite genres, outside which they rarely stepped.  Even the ostensibly adventurous ones did their exploring within lands that were distinctly of the past.

Now this sounds corny, but it took the death of John Peel to change that.  There, I thought, was a man who didn't remain still or compromise.  And I started buying albums by bands I'd never heard.  I listened to more XFM and watched more of MTV2's 120 Minutes Taster.  I tried out random playlists on yahoo messenger, and recommendations on services I bought music from.

And oh, but it worked.  I think the last time that I was this into music, this experimental... the last time that I was this open to new listening experiences, to musical adventure was probably when I was 17 or 18, when I learned the first tranche of bands that influenced me (The Smiths, The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy, The Fields of the Nephilim, Public Enemy and so on).

The Boards of Canada have given me Dayvan Cowboy: a beautiful piece of psychedelic trippiness that provokes a real, emotional response in me.  French-Canadians Buck 65 offer Devil's Eyes, a mixture of hip-hop, jazz and rock.  Sigur Ros give me the haunting, driving Glosoli.  And the whole of Takk... if it comes to that.  I could go on and on: The Secret Machines, Be Your Own Pet, Thrice, Panic! At The Disco, Serena Maneesh, White Rose Movement, The Futureheads, The Young Knives, Arcade Fire, The Killers, Colder, Plan B, Felix da Housecat, Hot Chip, The Ataris, Hoobastank...

This week the Raconteurs released their first album.  Next week it is Tom Delonge's new band, Angels and Airwaves.  I have the first already and I really cannot wait until the second.  I am excited as once I was for Strangeways.

Even in this small, safe way, by choosing the riskier option, by trying something new, my life has become measurably better.

But I still hate Coldplay.  May I never change in that.  If I do, tears of bubbling pitch will stream down my face, and my dark work will begin.  I will open one of my six mouths and sing the song that ends the Earth.

Ouch

I had to write a couple of pages longhand yesterday, without the help of a word processor.  Well, I didn't have to, but Times New Roman seemed overly impersonal for the rather tricky subject material.  It struck me very soon that I don't do this writing thing very often any more.  Like, as in pen and paper.  My hand was in cramp by the end of two sides.  My writing was illegible from years of desuetude.  It was, realistically, impossible to correct the bits I was unhappy with without starting from scratch: something I particularly disliked as, when I write, it is a cycle of corrections and iterations that can be seen on this site if you catch posts early in their life.  Such was my real, physical discomfort that I realised, after sealing the envelope, that I had numbered a sequence of four "points" 1, 2, 3, 5.  I have reason to believe that the recipient will call it part of a fibonacci series.  Then I even sent it to the wrong address.  Like, a completely different streetname.

It doesn't help that I have previously broken the fourth and fifth metacarpals (not to be confused with the terribly fashionable metatarsals in my foot, though I've done one of them, too) on my right hand a couple of times, on both occasions throwing incompetent punches in rugby games.

I think I should give up on handwriting things now.  I maintain real, ongoing correspondences on a more-or-less regular basis with about a dozen people, of whom only one really appreciates paper as opposed to email.  Even she prefers printed rather than handwritten.  Even I like sending emails best because of the immediacy of pressing "Send" as opposed to getting a stamp, stealing an envelope from work and then finding a postbox (if I procrastinate a day I will do so for a month).  And if you get emails from me (and a great many people do, on one occasion or another), here is a little thing you might not have known: I like emails because I can bcc myself on everything I send.  I have a complete copy of my correspondence, scattered across half a dozen hard drives and in a couple of large boxes, since about 1990.

Anyway, my writing was always horrible, and I switched to an all-capitals style at eighteen just so that people had a chance of reading it (my father, who stuck with cursive script, has writing that would stun a doctor into awed reverence of its degeneracy.  Horrible stuff that looks like an oscilloscope of a particularly faint heartbeat.  I always pitied his secretaries).  Anything more than 1000 words and I think I might well prove incapable of continuing.  If I keep studying for this third degree, I am bound to run into an exam sooner or later, and that is going to hurt.

Interview From Hell

I love this one: a story on the BBC's own website about Mr Guy Goma, who turned up at the BBC for a job interview for a data cleansing position and was asked, in reception, if he was Guy Kewney (Kewney being nigh unto a bearded god to me since I first read his Personal Computer World news pages in about 1982 or 1983).  On saying that he was, he was shown to his interview.  Which, unfortunately, was not the one for the job, but was a live interview on the BBC News 24 channel on the Apple Computers vs Apple Music legal case.

Apparently Mr Goma was confused as to the interviewer's line of questioning.  At least he didn't lie about working for both companies and then criticise his previous employer, which is how most job interviews go.

The link above has a video of the (mercifully short) interview.

I saw that

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=keith+harrison+endie&meta=

Knowing who that was as I do (a very distinctive IP address supplied by a company I used to work for on, well, designing their IP security from the ground up - I know where they cut corners... ), I am flattered, obviously.  And not just to discover that I'm not the only person in Edinburgh who uses those criteria.  But then I am notoriously vain.

Edit - Confirmed... the place of work (BoS) was the giveaway, mon chef.

Later Edit - Looking at these entries in the IP log led me to spot a far more interesting set of site accesses, from somebody a mere few hundred metres from me, judging from the router address and IP allocation.  And what intriguing search criteria.  Haven't seen that for a while.  Well, well, well...

Wilfully Obscure

So, you're happily walking into work - the route varies but today it was a rare foray up Dundas Street's western side - listening to Penny Arcade's podcast talking about the Wii, when someone wanders up and hits you with a baseball bat, full in the face.  Not in an unpleasant way, granted, but it still leaves a boy disoriented and a little dazed for the rest of the journey.  I can hardly remember anything after internet guerillas siezing nintendo.com...

Honestly, it's like myspace here.  I'll be posting song lyrics next.

MMO Games that didn't make the cut

At the moment, I am playing Eve Online and World of Warcraft.  I admit that the latter is a pointless clause: of course I play WoW.  It's a default position for MMO gamers and you only need to make reference to that one if you are opting out, to say that you don't play the game.

But WoW has been losing some of it's power over me recently, so I interviewed three other games.  An ancillary reason for doing this is that I see the need to have something else to do during the population explosion which will follow the Burning Crusade expansion for WoW in a few months' time.  That will not be a pretty experience, and I have no wish to be committed to spending my days sitting in queues, waiting to access a server behind 18 months' worth of resubs.  There will be new servers, of course - I'd be unsurprised by a 25% increase in the Euro server numbers - but everyone will be one of the two new races.  I may join one just to play a human or a Tauren, out of a sense of perversity.

Anyway, I tried three other games: Eve Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and City of Heroes.  Eve Online, obviously, I have already discussed.  It made the cut.  The others didn't, and I unsubbed from each, for different reasons.

Dungeons and Dragons Online was, for me, the greater disappointment.  I've hinted at the source of my dissatisfaction already, as well as writing about some fairly positive experiences.  But in retrospect the game has flaws that happen to mesh with my own idiosyncracies.

The game needs grouping.  You will not be able to play past the intro section of D&DO if you don't like grouping.  I don't just solo: duo plenty, but I tend to dislike grouping with the same people again and again.  I am anti-social that way: it means small talk and downtime.  I am the person that doesn't mind pick-up groups.  But I lack the social will to place myself in positions where I have to respond to socialising.  I prefer guild chat where I can slip in and out of the discussion as and when it interests me.

D&DO didn't let me start adventuring as soon as I logged on the way WoW does.  there was always that barrier of finding a group, and it could take ages.

I disliked the controls and interface for D&DO a lot.  Most people found it counter-intuitive.  You may wonder how I can be so sweeping, but you just need to stand in a tavern in D&DO to see people trying to use the right mouse button to intereact with people and things, and instead swiping with their sword.  There is a lot of slashing and cutting going on.

So with crappy controls and a substantial block to enjoyment in the only-adequate grouping mechanics, I dropped D&DO.  The world was nice, the graphics rather good, the physics fun, but 'll wait togo back until they have fixed the annoyances and padded out some solo stuff.

City of Heroes was the opposite experience.  A short and well-structured tutorial got me into the game.  I always felt like there was something I could do immediately.  Character design was awesome, the control system unexceptional but unobtrusive, the world a bit weird but hey: how do you design a normal-seeming world with hundreds of superheroes running around.

The internal comic-based fictions were well-maintained, even down to things like patches being issues.  The sidekick system was a stroke of genius.  There was no real block to getting into the action except or some rather annoying running around town, which could at least be punctuated by punching bad guys.  Missions were fully instanced, which I liked.

But I dropped CoH like a stone, within ten days of starting.  Pretty much because it was boring.  The gameplay is so incredibly repetitive.  The textures for the instances are well done, but there are only half a dozen types: you were in a warehouse, a lab, an office or a few others and each was just a semi-random variation on the same building blocks.  Great for low-cost random content generation, but I needed more variety.

It was also very, very easy.  I'm not claiming to be Ian M. Banks' Player of Games, though I know how to build a viable character with a quick scan of the system.  All the same, I have no idea what death looks like in CoH.  Never been close.  The same goes for Eve Online, I admit, but that is because it is so ridiculously easy to die there that I take huge care all the time not to do dumb stuff.

The only time it got harder was when I grouped with someone else of my level.  The instances scale to your party, which I dislike here just as I do in Oblivion.  It is immersion-breaking.  Worse, it punishes you for grouping, just as it does for putting preparatory work in by doing "side-quests".  Of course, in scaling difficulty, all the diku-Muds punish achievement, but asking for help from a mate shouldn't see a magical and sudden increase of greater than 100% in the resources of your enemies.

I suppose if you want a semi-turn-based bash-em-up with an endless procession of baddies then CoH is the game for you.  It bored me senseless.

Concert - Give It A Name Festival

The day after the Streets, my week of live music continued with a trip to Manchester for the Give It A Name festival at the Manchester Evening News Arena.  This was the second day of the second year: last year's was help at the Alexandra Palace in London, and was a logistical disaster.  This year was split over two days and two venues: Earls Court Arena in London and the M.E.N. site, with the line-up playing one day in each.

Obviously, my shredded throat had not healed within 12 hours, so the entire occasion was once more underscored by pain and discomfort.  But I couldn't sleep anyway, so getting up at 7 and driving a few hundred miles for a gig was as good an idea as anything.  Anyway, in order, here is what I remember of the bands:

2nd Stage - Taint - As good as any medium-hard metal lineup from South Wales I have heard.  Which, obviously, comprises a set of one: Taint.  They were fun, and more accomplished in both musical and performing terms than many of the acts that came afterwards.  A 25 minute set on a small stage let them appear too big for their space, which was far better than having trouble filling their slot.  Glad I heard them, and I expect to see them on MTV2 or Kerrang! in time.

2nd Stage - The Honorary Title - A band from the same north-eastern US scene that the bigger bands represent, and they seemed a bit dragged-along in their wake.  The music wasn't quite right for the setting nor the context.  Odd vocals.  Meh.

Main Stage - The Bled - I was going through a painful episode at this point, but The Bled opened up well and I really rather enjoyed their set.  Not unusual stuff in any way, but throroughly competent with a real touch of Iron Maiden that didn't go wrong with this crowd.  I might have sung along in bits if the effort wouldn't have made me faint.

2nd Stage - Paramore - This lot were musically ok, but really annoying with constant references to the upcoming big hitters.  The second stage crowd in general were guilty of this, but Paramore really kicked it off big-time, using their biggest rawk accents.  "So you guys are gonna hear some f*&king amazing stuff.. what about My Chemical Romance, huh?".  Again and again, just because it got a high-pitched cheer each time.  Paramore were only the second worst for this "we are the omegas" behaviour.

Main Stage - Underoath - Not quite as good as The Bled, but still driving metal that more than filled a thirty minute set.

2nd Stage - Drive By - My favourite of the second stage shows.  By now, however, I had discovered the palliative powers of pints of Tetley Extra Cold when applied directly to the inside of a sore throat, so my critical faculties were probably fading a little.

Main Stage - Panic At The Disco! - The booking for this festival was done just at the time PATD! released their album, and putting them fifth from top of the main stage was a substantial underestimate of their popularity.  The auditorium would not be this full again before headliners My Chemical Romance, and the audience was bouncing with excitement.  A lot of those present (including myself) were apparently here mainly to see this set, and if the booking were done for next year they would clearly be one of the two headliners.  Anyhow, their stuff went down a lot better than I had thought it might: it's rather art-metalish in places with a lot of experimentation that I thought might not come across well to a largely teenaged audience.  Not so.  One of the few four-pieces in the show, but one of the biggest sounds.

2nd Stage - Men Women & Children - I don't know why they hired a tribute act for this festival.  This was clearly massively influenced by Morris Day and the Time.  Jay and Silent Bob may think that MD & the T are the biggest band in the world, but I don't, and neither did this crowd.  Lots of cookie dances and audience participation.  They've been supporting PATD! recently on tour in the UK, and they reminded me why I tend to skip support acts.

Main Stage - Thrice - This was the surprise hit of my evening.  Thrice were excellent, and I fully intend to pick up some of their stuff.  I'd heard - and liked - a couple of singles of theirs, but I preferred their album tracks that they played.  Just a hint of the slightly trippy edge to metal that the Deftones or Tool provide.  Cracking.

2nd Stage - Billy Talent - I think these were a relatively local band, maybe from Liverpool?  In any case, they were mince. Terrible.  Intensely boring, and trying to make up for it by being louder than everyone else.  Also, the Tetley Extra Cold was finished so I had to drink Carlsberg.  A low point, at times little more than a dreary successions of "shout-outs" to the rest of the bill delivered in a fake New York accent.

Main Stage - Atreyu - Ha ha very funny.  More coordinated dance moves and guitar cliches on stage, including a cheerleader-esque pyramid of guitarists.  Did they have, like, 7 or 8 members?  They used to wear identical suits and stuff, but want to protray themselves as serious now.  Seriously shown up by bands like Thrice or Taint.  Not that the younger portion of the crowd cared: competent, disposable party-pop rock.  I imagine that they did exactly what the organisers hoped they would: fill forty minutes and get the crowd bouncing again.

Main Stage - The Ataris - Good fun.  You know what you're getting with the Ataris.  I get the feeling that they're kinda destined to bounce along beneath the glass ceiling, doomed never to break through into mainstream chart success, but amongst younger metal fans they're jusifiably popular.  I don't own any of their albums, nor did this persuade me in the way that Thrice did, but I was looking forward to their forty minutes, and I wasn't dissappointed.

Main Stage - My Chemical Romance - There is only a year or so of success separating MCR from the Ataris or Thrice, but it shows.  There's nothing like knowing that the auditorium is full of people there to see you to lend you an air of confident professionalism.  MCR worked the crowd, belted out a taut 50-minute set that went through their last album with relatively few deviations (no Headfirst for Halos being the resident MCR fan's complaint), and left the place impressed.  I think i'd prefer to see them in a less constrained format, and when I hadn't listened to other bands for 8 hours, but good stuff nonetheless, and a huge hit with their legions of extremely homogenous, white, 16-year-old, skinny girls.

The contrast with last year's disaster was notable: manageable queues, sensible temperatures and copious soft drinks.  The venue was busy but coped.  The tactic of selling the tickets at an unbelievably cheap thirty-five pounds for nine hours of music seemed jusitified when one saw the turnover in the merchandise and concessions stands.  A great way of picking up a few new tastes in bands.

Concert - The Streets at the Corn Exchange

I don't often leave concerts early.  Nor would I have departed this one before its allotted three score minutes and ten, but for idiocy on my part.  Having procured, for myself, a substantially painful throat infection and a dose of flu, I decided that the best thing would be to run it off, and turned up to play rugby against two touring sides on Saturday.  I was convinced by team-mates - wisely, one might suggest - that this was unwise.  Rather less medically sound was the decision to referee the three forty-minute games instead.  Two hours of running around did me no harm.  Two hours of shouting left me with a shredded throat and a tendency to cough up blood that would have made Keats pack in the poetry business and head for the Arizonian desert.

So I left just before the encores of this one, after three hours of sipping pint after pint of iced water, many brought manfully from the bar by the Mighty Cornholio.  Understand that this review might be a touch jaded as a result of such an unpromising background.

The support act, who I think were called Sway, were kinda fun.  They worked the crowd, maintained a good level of banter, and gave it their all in a London wide-boy way.  Not original as such, and unlikely to impact the charts any time soon, but solid stuff.

I'm always uncertain how to refer to The Streets.  I picture the band as essentially The The-ish in structure: one man (Mike Skinner in this case) with guests, session musicians and effects technicians brought in as needed.  But Skinner had a full band here, with guitar, bass, keyboards and drums as well as a second vocalist.  The mood was kinda party-ish, the instrumentation heavily emphasised, the take on the set rather funk-influenced.  Skinner and his fellow vocalist (whose voice was far more powerful, and tended to dominate) arrived wearing white t-shirts under structured, 80's jackets with the sleeves rolled up.  Very Crockett and Tubbs.

My problem with the event is that Skinner's poetry is, or rather should be, the whole point.  At his best - and his best is very, very good - he is just talking about utterly mundane events and observations that leave the listener saying "yes!  I've been there too!".  So it is that Could Well Be In speaks to every bloke who has ever sat there, pretending to listen to a girl while thinking "she's playing her hair.  That's a good thing, isn't it?  Or does it mean she's bored?":

I saw this thing on ITV the other week,
Said, that if she played with her hair, she's probably keen
She's playin with her hair well regularly,
So I reckon I could well be in.

Similarly, Blinded By The Light is as fine an evocation of a terrible night out, separated from friends, mashed, desperately trying to get bars on the phone as I can imagine.  It helps that the everyday familiarity of the events is set against an achingly gorgeous sample, often with a three-against-four juxtaposition of rhythms that underlines the two levels of the lyrics: the narrator thinks he's getting too worked up but actually we know he has no idea how bad things really are.

Skinner, better than any other hip-hop artist I can think of, is able to persuade high-school dropouts to listen to spoken-word narrative and observational poetry.

All of which seems a long way from the concert, but here's my point: there is no point coming to see an essentially lyrical work if the sound system muffles those few words that can be heard over the band.  There is a reason that the recitative form is played out against a backing of one or two instruments and no other vocalists.  The words are the thing.

So as a performance by The Streets of their stuff, it kinda sucked.  No longer the stripped-down form of the boy from a bedroom in Birmingham, it became a funky party sound which kept an uncritical crowd of chavs and neds bouncing along in delight.  Skinner and his new playmates played along, slipping cocky musical references to the Arctic Monkeys, the Pussycat Dolls and others into their act, letting slip that Rachel Stevens was his would-be target in his latest, jokily confessional single.  But, ultimately, the sound system's lack of quality and the poor balance from the sound desk let him down.  I'm glad I saw it, but the best thing was that it persuaded me to get back to the CDs in a quiet room.

The next day was the Give It a Name festival in Manchester.  More of that anon...