Archive for June, 2006
I am Richard and Judy
Haven’t done this for a while - a quick round-up of reasonably interesting books that you may or may not like.
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First up: A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil, by Christopher Brookmyre. He’s been described as the Scottish Carl Hiassen but up until now I’ve always smirked rather than belly laughed at his stories. This, though, is superb: it starts with some particularly inept criminals and then goes into flashback to talk about the characters’ schooldays. I suspect the school stuff is the book Brookmyre really wanted to write, because it’s incredibly well observed and “oh my god, my guts hurt” funny.
Next up: Lifeless, by Mark Billingham. He’s one of the UK crime pack’s current stars and while all the cliches are here - misunderstood, depressed cop; gritty urban setting; lots of violence - the story itself is clearly fuelled by anger. Unfortunately I can’t tell you what Billingham’s angry about without giving away a key plot point, so here’s the headline story instead: somebody’s kicking homeless people to death and DS Thorne goes undercover to catch the bugger…
Stuart MacBride is the latest Scot to join the crime pack, and his publisher clearly reckons Logan MacRae could be the next inspector Rebus. Cold Granite and Dying Light are both set in Aberdeen, and while they’re largely by-the-numbers police procedurals (no bad thing - I’m addicted to the things) with fairly chaotic and rushed endings, they stand out because of the spectacularly nasty nature of the crimes - especially in Dying Light, which is really, really nasty. Dying Light’s the better of the two, although I’m not sure it’ll make much sense if you haven’t read Cold Granite first: there’s not much character development in the second book.
There’s no neat way to segue into the next two: for no apparent reason I seem to be on a gender studies tip at the moment, so I’ve recently read Self Made Man by Norah Vincent and Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy. The former describes how Vincent spends a year disguised as a bloke to find out what makes us tick, and the latter is a look at the way “empowerment” has come to mean “pretending to be a porn star”. Self Made Man is a little cliched - one of the places Vincent goes is a strip club, which might reflect the lives of *some* men but certainly not all of them - and Female Chauvinist Pigs feels a little unfocused, but they throw up more than enough interesting ideas and arguments to make them worthwhile.
Total Broadband
I’m quite impressed by BT’s Total Broadband service, which gives you 8MB broadband, a wi-fi phone, 250 minutes per month of BT OpenZone Wi-Fi access and if you go for the most expensive option at £22.99 per month, the Fusion service that turns your mobile into a landline when you’re at home. I nearly ordered it, before spotting the bandwidth limit: the most expensive offering gives you just 40GB per month - fine for your average home punter, but not for your humble demo-downloading, ISO-burning, huge zip file-chucking technology hack. Boo.
Scotland the brave
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A disabled man is dragged from his car and beaten up in Aberdeen, and a seven-year-old boy is attacked by an adult in Edinburgh - simply because they were wearing England shirts.
Scots politicians (warning, includes swearing)
If it didn’t mean moving away from family and friends, I’d move out of Scotland and go somewhere sunny. Seriously.
Mr Eugenides prints a story from the Mail on Sunday:
Scotland is set to become the first country in Europe to ban alcohol for under-21s as part of a radical shake-up of licensing laws. The controversial crackdown would also see all members of the public limited to only four alcoholic drinks per visit to a pub or club.
Presumably that four-drink limit doesn’t mean four bottles of wine.
As The Devil’s Kitchen puts it in his inimitable way:
I have been spending some time in Glasgow, a city in which you are not allowed to smoke inside public spaces and you are not allowed to drink outside in public spaces. And, from January, all pubs will have to adopt plastic containers instead of serving drinks in a glass. What the fuck is going on?
This country is leading the way in nanny-state, illiberal, totalitarian bullshit; it’s time to get the fuck out.
A bit later…
The daft glass ban has been shelved: it seems that after an “11th hour climbdown” by officials, the compulsory use of plastic glasses will only apply in venues open after midnight and in places with a history of “glassing” attacks.
And another thing…
It’s bad form to rant and rave without offering an alternative, so here’s mine: why don’t we take the radical step of, y’know, enforcing the laws we already have? Like the ones prohibiting the sale of alcohol to underage kids, or the ones about being drunk and disorderly in public, or the ones prohibiting the sale of booze to people who are completely and utterly pissed?
Fake Plastic Trios
There’s a nice wee article in today’s Guardian about Hope Against Hope, a band on Myspace that was offered a gig by Alan “I signed Oasis, me” McGee:
The difference is that Hope Against Hope are a scam, a spoof indie band “with no talent whatsoever” invented by Q magazine in order to prove that the Rupert Murdoch-owned site is now just another cog in the older industry phenomenon of hype.
Fascinating and disturbing
The camera never lies, but here’s yet more proof that what appears in print often bears little or no relation to what was actually photographed. Brian Dilg is insanely talented, but his description of a Ralph Lauren job involving a child model has made me utterly depressed:
This is a good example of some very tricky retouching for a very picky client - Polo Ralph Lauren. In addition to making the clothes fit better, they decided they wanted the blouse to be short sleeved. I ended up photographing an adult woman’s arms and compositing them in, as well as extending the background considerably. I was very proud of how I made the lean, muscular adult’s arms plump to to match the girl’s body type, but Polo asked to have them made skinny, just as anorexic as adult models.
Via Metafilter
The ten most tech-savvy rock stars
According to Business Week, they are:
Franz Ferdinand, because Sony released a Franz MP3 player
Neil Young, because his album appeared online a week before release
Bono, because Motorola makes a RED version of the SLVR phone
Chuck D, because he saw the way the MP3 wind was blowing
U2, for lending their name to an iPod
Prince, for releasing a major album online back in 1997
David Bowie, for running his own ISP
Moby, for campaigning for net neutrality
DJ Danger Mouse, for the Beatles-sampling Grey Album
Lupe Fiasco, because T-Mobile put two of his songs on phones in advance of his album launch
OK, Business Week’s a business magazine, but their most tech-savvy musicians are largely “musicians with tech-savvy marketing departments behind them”. I’m surprised they haven’t included Gary Glitter for his extensive knowledge of the JPEG image file format.
Science finally catches up with my lifestyle
For many men, a finding by Oregon researchers sounds too good to be true: an ingredient in beer seems to help prevent prostate cancer, at least in lab experiments. The trouble is you’d theoretically have to drink about 17 beers a day for any potential benefit. And no one’s advising that.
Allow me to introduce good news part two:
Drinking coffee could reduce the risk of alcohol-related liver disease.
A US study of 125,580 men and women over 20 years found a 22% reduced risk of developing alcoholic cirrhosis for each cup of coffee drank per day.
Naked Civil Servants
Prescott’s a lightweight, if this BBC story is anything to go by:
Civil servants on Tyneside are under investigation amid allegations staff romped around naked in offices and had sex in toilets.
One person at the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) in Newcastle has been sacked after officials began an investigation.
The antics emerged after some members of staff were caught on CCTV cameras.
The RPA is part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and administers millions of pounds in agricultural payments to farmers.
The agency said it was investigating claims that staff leapt naked from filing cabinets, had sex in office toilets, held break-dancing competitions during working hours and fought in a reception area.
Burns night
There I was: sitting in the pub, minding my own business, when my leg started to burn. I hadn’t dropped a cigarette on it (smoking ban, remember?), nobody was using a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays on it, and it was safely esconced in a pair of jeans. Nevertheless, my leg was burning.
Off to the bogs I trotted, and sure enough, my leg *was* burning. A bit of skin on my thigh, roughly the size of a 50p piece, was showing all the signs of a pretty nasty sunburn - but it hadn’t been in the sun. It was, however, right next to my pocket. The pocket where I keep my burny things!
Actually, I don’t keep burny things in my pocket - just keys. So it had to be something on my keyring - either the little LED torch, or the glow in the dark tag I bought from The Register a few years ago (it’s radioactive, but El Reg promised that it’s perfectly safe - like the glow in the dark dials on a watch). Neither of them seemed to be hot, but when I took them off the keyring and got rid of them, the burning stopped.
I’ve still got the burn (and it definitely *is* a burn, not a scratch, not an insect bite, not chafing from an errant car key), but I’m none the wiser about the cause. Maybe it was acid leaking from the battery in the LED torch, or - more worryingly - maybe there is a hairline crack in the luminous tag, and it somehow managed to give me a radiation burn. It’s all very mysterious.