Archive for December, 2007
Hard hitting journalism from the Evening Times
The Evening Times does it again: fresh from its hard-hitting campaign against people who park too close to schools, it’s now naming and shaming the very worst criminals in Glasgow. No, not the gangsters. No, not the drug dealers. No, not the people traffickers, the smugglers, the counterfeiters, the murderers or the robbers. It’s bravely going after the hardest of the hardcore, the scariest of the scary, the toughest of the tough. Litter louts.
Blimey, another year’s nearly gone
As ever, magazines are doing their review of the year thing and I feel inspired to follow suit. Rather than a “what a year that was, eh?” thing, though, here’s a quick list of things I’ve really liked or been let down by this year.
Books: Mr Biffo, David Quantick and Charlie Brooker made me laugh so hard I probably damaged internal organs, and judging by the way Mrs Bigmouth has been laughing like a drain “Mommies Who Drink” is a hoot too. As always I read about 200,000 crime novels, of which the latest Ian Rankin was the most reliably entertaining, and I loved Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace. Although by “loved” I really mean “was utterly freaked out by”. Which also applies to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Music: Obligatory Radiohead joy aside (Reckoner is jaw-dropping), the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration was wonderful despite my hatred of Robert Plant’s voice and my loathing of music that sounds vaguely country. I bought all the Talk Talk records I’d already bought several times already, rediscovered the joys of The Big Dish, was let down by a rather anodyne Sugababes album (what a great first single, though!), discovered Regina Spector about a decade after everybody else and danced very badly to pretty much everything Timbaland has had a hand in this year.
Springsteen’s Magic was an unexpected old-school delight, Mark Ronson’s version of Valerie is one of the most joyous things I’ve heard for ages, Girls Aloud’s Tangled Up was worth buying for Call The Shots alone, and the reissued Joshua Tree reminded me why I used to really love U2.
Tech: Both Vista and Leopard fell into the “glad I have ‘em, could live without ‘em” category, DRM didn’t quite die - although the signs are encouraging - and I had to eat my words about the iPhone, which I thought would be a pile of crap but which I - rather shame-facedly - love dearly despite the lack of 3G. I was also wrong about the Apple TV, which I was very excited about pre-release: it seems as if Apple lost interest in it by the time it actually came out, and it’s become a technological footnote rather than anything more exciting.
FARK, Flickr and PopJustice remained brilliant, Facebook walks the line between fun and being really, really annoying, Newsgator/NetNewsWire/iPhone Integration is better than sliced bread and Logic Pro is God’s own music software. Of the big stuff, the scariest stuff happened (and will continue to happen) in the world of privacy.
Games: Halo 3, too short. Timeshift, predictable but fun enough. Bioshock, flawed but great. Still sod-all decent stuff for the Wii. Orange Box is great value for money, but Half-Life 2 Episode 2 frequently feels like Space Invaders (the antlions in the tunnels, the striders attacking). And not in a good way. Crackdown was a hoot and is well worth tracking down second-hand on eBay. On the PC I loved the Minerva mods for Half-Life 2, but the much-hyped STALKER bored me to tears when it wasn’t crashing.
A major annoyance for me was the increasing focus on online gaming, which means the single player bit of any console game can be completed in about six hours by an inept gamer like me. That probably translates as three seconds for anybody that’s any good. At 40-odd-quid per game, that’s hardly value for money.
The interesting/depressing thing about gaming this year was its increasing resemblance to the film industry: blockbuster-driven with months and months of hype and overly excited previews, with reviewers being outflanked so their words don’t appear in print or online until a terrible game’s hit the top of the charts. Never mind the quality, just look at the first-week sales. A lot of very bad games made a great deal of money this year.
Also depressing was the repeat of last year’s Wii bundle bastardy, where retailers took advantage of Nintendo’s inability to make enough consoles by forcing desperate punters to buy big bundles of crap. They’re doing it again this year.
On a happier note, Eurogamer’s featuring some excellent games writing and the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog has quickly become a favourite bookmark.
Magazines that I don’t write for: EDGE and The Word were ace as ever, although the latter is teetering on the very edge of the abyss where Uncut and Mojo live. Empire seems to have found its mojo again, Q’s better than before - less list-y, with proper writing again - although I’m now old enough not to care about 99% of the music it covers, and Car magazine remains a work of art with superb writing to boot.
What about you, ladies and gentlemen?
Still no cure for colic (but there are a few things worth trying)
One for the parents and parents-to-be: one in five babies gets colic, which typically develops at about two weeks of age and hangs around until twelve weeks before disappearing as mysteriously as it arrived. Nobody really knows what causes it, but if you’ve experienced it (or are currently experiencing it) you’ll know how hellish it is.
For the uninitiated, colic is defined as inconsolable crying for three hours, three times a week, for a period of three weeks. That three hours - and in many cases it’s more - isn’t three hours on and off; it’s three hours of constant, heart-rending, teeth-grinding crying that you cannot do a single thing about (babies have two distinct cries: there’s crying, which is awful, and there’s full-on colicky bleating, which is an incredibly upsetting noise. If bad people don’t use recordings of colicky babies in their interrogations, they should).
It’s not fun, it usually starts in the evening and ends in the wee small hours - in other words, when you’re at your most tired and least able to cope with it - and having done quite a bit of looking into it I’m not surprised to discover that the rates of post-natal depression among women with colicky babies skyrockets. Sites that suggest colic is entirely the mum’s fault for not thinking positively enough don’t exactly help.
As I’ve mentioned, nobody really knows what causes it but current thinking is that it’s a collection of various different factors. However, for what it’s worth I can recommend four things that really do seem to make a difference:
* Lactase. Some babies have difficulty digesting lactose, which is present in breast milk and formula milk alike. There’s an enzyme in their guts called Lactase, and its job is to break down lactose; unfortunately before 12 weeks some babies don’t produce enough because their digestive systems are still very immature. For those babies - and baby Bigmouth appears to be one of them - putting a few drops of lactase in each feed can dial down the colic so instead of three hours of constant crying, you get 20 minutes of yelling, a ten minute break, ten minutes of yelling… it’s a vast improvement.
Downside? it isn’t cheap. The main brand, Colief, is £10 for a teeny tiny little bottle that’ll last you about four or five days. Then again, two quid per day to reduce colic is a bloody bargain.
Incidentally, that doesn’t mean the baby has a lactose intolerance. That’s very rare, although judging by the shelf space supermarkets devote to soy formula lots of people clearly think their kids are intolerant.
* Slings. Carrying your little bundle of joy around in a sling seems to reduce colic. I’ve no idea why that should be the case, but it really does seem to work. The difference can be dramatic - it doesn’t guarantee that every night will be colic-free, but it means that a bad night is a relative rarity. As a bonus, slings also act as hands-free kits for kids so you can get on with other things, such as popping speed to keep you awake and drinking insane quantities of alcohol to improve your mood.
* Driving. Getting your little darling into the car and heading out just before colic o’clock can postpone the onslaught, and if you’re lucky reduce its duration to boot. And it means you get out of the house.
* Wireless headphones. Sometimes a colicky baby can’t be comforted at all, and all you can do is keep the baby close until the episode ends. Wireless headphones mean at least you can watch telly in the meantime.
As ever, your mileage may vary. I’m just sticking this up here on the off chance Dr Google brings a parent here rather than to one of the “it’s your fault for not being cheery enough” sites.
The world’s most stupid widow
Mr Biffo gives his considered judgement on the “dead, amnesiac canoeist” story. I’m in tears here.
Let’s put so-called psychics in prison
Charlie Brooker isn’t just there for the nasty things in life. He can be educational too: if it weren’t for his column, I wouldn’t know about the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951, under which psychics can be jailed.
Unfortunately there’s a flaw in the law, which is presumably why only five or six people have been prosecuted under it: you need to prove that there was an intent to deceive for financial gain. So if you genuinely believe that dead people talk to you, or can at least lie convincingly about it in court, you can get off scot-free.
The good news? The act’s being killed and brought under new consumer protection law from April 2008. As Downing Street says (in response to a petition demanding the FMA be updated):
Although the average consumer would arguably not be misled by a person who claims he is able to contact the dead, such conduct would still be unfair under the CPRs if it deceives the average member of (i) the group to which it is directed, or (ii) a clearly identifiable group of consumers who are particularly vulnerable to this type of practice.
Unlike the Act, there is no requirement in the CPRs to prove an “intent to deceive”. This means that where practices are aimed at vulnerable consumers or average members of particular groups, it should be easier to take action against fraudulent mediums than under the Act.
The CPRs will be enforced by both civil (injunctive) action and criminal sanctions.
Going after individual psychics is probably overkill, but what about the pushers - the psychic TV networks, the magazine publishers, the premium rate phone operators and their ilk? If these businesses made their money by broadcasting video of the ill, the grieving and the desperate being happy slapped they’d be in the dock before you could finish calling them bastards. But riffling through the wallets of the ill, the grieving and the desperate? Well, that’s just dandy.
Come on, let’s put the lot of ‘em in prison. If they’re really psychic they can get their dead pals to break them out again.
Radiohead are touring, tickets on sale now
Tickets are on sale now for Glasgow, Manchester, Dublin and London plus a few dates in mainland Europe.
Porn: the money’s shot
The pornography industry hasn’t done too badly out of the internet - until now, that is. The smut business is in trouble, according to Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com:
Three years ago, 80 percent of Vivid’s income came from DVD sales. Today, Hirsch puts that number at about 30 percent, with the rest coming from a fragmented range of sources: subscriptions to Vivid.com, pay-per-view TV, internet video-on-demand, merchandising, and mobile-phone deals. Domestic DVD sales are down 35 percent this year alone. His revenue is flat, he says, but that’s mainly because he’s been cutting costs. Within five years, he claims, DVD sales will be close to zero.
…Few industries, if any, figured out e-commerce faster than the adult-entertainment business, and online DVD sales soared as a result. But Web 2.0, the catchall term for the crush of user-driven startups that have emerged in the past few years, has left the porn industry’s biggest players scrambling to keep up. For the first time, technology is hurting Big Porn. “Everyone was excited because they thought the internet was going to affect our business in a positive way, and it’s been the opposite,” says David Joseph, the founder of Red Light District. “It’s been a little scary.”
Worth reading (and smut-free).
[Via Metafilter]