Archive for January, 2008
Eels book in “brilliant” shocker
Things The Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett (E from Eels) is one of the best things I’ve read in ages. Some of it’s very, very sad. And some of it is like this:
During the ‘with strings’ tour one night in Germany, a concertgoer calls out “YOU ARE BORING!” between songs. He’s German and wants to rock. We play him a Scorpions riff, but it isn’t enough.
ID cards: Scots screwed again
A superb post by Mr Eugenides on the ever-entertaining ID cards scheme: if you’re in Scotland but don’t live near one of just 11 processing centres, you’re stuffed.
The true insanity of the scheme is demonstrated most starkly by the fate that awaits the good people of Orkney and Shetland – some 40,000 souls in all. There are apparently to be no processing centres for ID cards on the islands – any of the Scottish islands, as far as I can see – and so every single inhabitant of Orkney, Shetland and all the others is going to have to go to the mainland to be registered.
The nearest centre is in Wick, which is nearly 200 miles away from Shetland. But it’s not too difficult to get there. From Shetland’s capital, Lerwick, simply hop on a ferry to Kirkwall in Orkney (7 and a half hours), then it’s a short bus transfer to Burwick (45 minutes), a ferry across to John O’Groats (45 minutes) and another bus to Wick (about an hour). But make sure you don’t show up at lunchtime; there’s usually a queue.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to fly this plane… INTO THE SUN!
I bet this was a hoot for anybody scared of flying:
The co-pilot of a Heathrow-bound plane had to be dragged screaming from the cockpit while suffering a mental breakdown.
Horrified passengers watched as he was pinned down by crew members and a passenger who was a member of the Canadian armed forces during a struggle in the main cabin
He began yelling, crying, swearing and “invoking God” as the Air Canada 767 flew over the Atlantic.
The Audi A4 ain’t no Apple
I’m fascinated by cars, and while I barely have enough cash to put petrol in my own one (an increasingly knackered Saab) it doesn’t stop me from daydreaming. Hmmm, a BMW M5 or an Audi RS4? That kind of thing. So there’s nothing I like more than being able to help someone who really isn’t into cars look at cars. I get all the fun without having to actually stump up the cash to buy a car, and I can persuade Mrs Bigmouth that the money I spend on car magazines is actually for a reason. Result!
So recently I’ve been comparing mid-range saloons - BMW, Lexus, Audi, Saab, that sort of thing. And by any sensible criteria the choice came down to two cars: BMW 320d and the new Audi A4 TDI, both of which cost roughly the same for the right spec (metallic paint, leather, some toys but not too many, etc). Given that I’ve always hated Beemers and loved Audis, the answer was obvious.
Until I looked at them.
The new Audi A4 is a cracking-looking car, but it’s trying just a little bit too hard. The word that kept popping into my mind was “PlayStation”. Electromechanical parking brake? PlayStation! Unncessarily jutting front spoiler? PlayStation! LED running lights? PlayStation! And so on. There’s something very fourteen-year-old-boy about it. It’s a good-looking car for sure, but it just feels as if it’s trying too hard. It feels like a top-end Dell. Lots of bells and whistles, but still a bog-standard PC (well, Volkswagen) underneath. Nothing wrong with bog-standard PCs (or Volkswagens), but when you’re paying the big money you want to feel a bit special.
And the BMW? It’s a Mac. Where the Audi’s interior is overdesigned, the BMW is designed. The former is a bit “explosion in Dixon’s” while the latter is much more restrained. Where the Audi exterior screams “look at me! Look at me!” the BMW doesn’t try too hard to attract your attention. Where the Audi has a high-tech handbrake, the BMW has a normal one. And just like a Mac the BMW is a little bit smug, and a little bit pricey, but you know that if you had one you’d be delighted that you’d bought one, and when you start mucking about with engines, options and the like you realise that actually, with the BMW you get more car for your money, and it’ll cost you less in the long run.
Nobody will ever let you out of a junction, mind you, but at least you’ll be happy sitting there.
Do I like the writing because of the words, or because of the writer?
One of my great ambitions is to meet PJ O’Rourke (although I’m sensible enough to know that it’s an ambition that must remain unfulfilled. It’s not because I’m scared he won’t live up to my expectations; it’s that I have the amazing ability to make a complete and utter tit of myself at the slightest opportunity, to the extent that it’s a miracle I ever leave the house), one of my favourite writers. However, I’m trying to decide whether of late it’s his words I like or the sound of the words. Because I’ve seen him on TV and heard him on radio and in audiobooks, I can’t read his stuff without hearing him deliver it.
It’s the same with (unintended Guardian pluggery ahoy) Stephen Fry’s tech column, Jon Ronson or Charlie Brooker. Moving away from the Graun, it also applies to anything written by writers I’ve got drunk with; motoring writers I’ve seen on TV; people like Ian Rankin who come across as decent types and so on. So for example I love James “Captain Slow” May’s writing, but I wonder how much of that is the actual words he writes and how much of it because I’m amused by the doddering, fogeyish persona he has on TV.
Does that make sense?
I get it with authors too, good and bad. Time for another example: I’ve kind of gone off James Ellroy of late after seeing him in a documentary, because he seemed a lot less tough and a lot more creepy than I’d imagined him in my head. Conversely seeing something with Kurt Vonnegut many years ago reinforced the image I had in my head, and I suspect it made me like his writing even more.
Do you get that? Do you find that you enjoy things in a different way once the writer has been revealed? If a commanding writer came across as an arse on TV, would you develop a dislike of the books, or do you screen out that stuff? Could you enjoy, say, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road if you saw him interviewed and thought he was a tit? Does a public persona put you off someone’s writing immediately the way the very thought of another Ben Elton book or musical makes me want to buy a gun?
Dog hair. It’s a mystery!
Things I think about when I should probably be doing more sensible things instead: how is it an average-sized dog can shed about 400Kg of hair in a 24-hour period, yet remain exactly the same size?
It’s a mystery!
Russia/Estonia cyberwar “bollocks”
A few months ago The Guardian reported an apparent cyberwar, where Russian hackers attacked Estonian systems. It was picked up by various outlets, and formed the jumping-off point for an information warfare feature I wrote for PC Plus. Turns out the war was no such thing. As Charles Arthur puts it:
one has to say that downsizing has hit warfare. For the latest on that attack is that it was done by one kid. In his bedroom. In Estonia. And he’s
Estonianer, perhaps Russian. (I await a definitive parsing of his name.) According to InfoWorld, a 20-year-old Estonian student has been fined for the attacks
Thankfully for the cyberwar feature, experts saved me from looking like a complete arse over the Estonian thing:
Were the [Estonian] attacks cyber-terror? James Lewis doesn’t think so. The former diplomat is the technology and public policy programme director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS, www.csis.org), the US think-tank whose advice regularly informs US domestic and foreign policy. “There’s a fair amount of exaggeration involved in all of this,” he says.
The bulk of the feature looked at US claims of Chinese hacking attacks, and ended:
Lurid tales of cyber-attacks paint China as the techno-villain in a new kind of Cold War, but it’s possible that such stories are being exaggerated for political means, to boost particular departments’ budgets or to encourage, motivate or recruit hackers to launch their own attacks on China.
Are we being paranoid? Possibly. However, most of the information we have on the attacks, their nature and their origins comes via the government, the military and most of all, the security services. Disinformation and propaganda are forms of information warfare too.
That’s the tough thing about cyberwar stories: by their very nature, you have to depend on what governments and other agencies tell you, and what various expert analysts can suggest. As this case shows, it can be a while before the truth emerges - assuming it is the truth this time, of course. Heh.
Daddy, what does kerb crawling mean?
There are *loads* of giant billboards around Glasgow right now warning kerb crawlers that the cops are after ‘em. Which should make for some interesting conversations between parents and the kids who see the posters.
Unnecessary detail in a news story
Opening sentence of a story on the Evening Times site:
A sex beast raped a 16-year-old virgin while he was on the run from jail.
OK, they’re going for emotive, but what relevance is the victim’s virginity? Would the crime be less severe if she weren’t a virgin?
A masterpiece of Daily Mail writing
No, I mean it. This is the Daily Mail doing what it does best, reporting on an alleged internet suicide cult:
A wild child who surfed her way to suicide and ‘virtual immortality’
The secret life of Natasha Randall was laid bare on an alarmingly candid web page.
At the click of a button you could discover her likes and dislikes, study revealing photographs, chat to her online and find out who wanted to have sex with her.
Yesterday that page became her virtual headstone.
…But equally disturbing is the possibility - voiced by police - that young people may regard “virtual immortality” as the ultimate in cool.
To an adult unfamiliar with the peer status that celebrity on the web can create, it might sound unlikely. But a few minutes spent browsing Natasha’s page on “bebo”, one of the leading social network sites, would horrify most decent parents.
…Her invitation to potential on-line friends includes a questionnaire that poses only four questions before it asks: “Would you have sex with me?”
Then it descends into areas that should never be accessible to any juvenile with a fake email address, which, incidentally, is all it takes to join bebo.
Likewise, some of the replies she receives are unrepeatable here. A parent might reasonably question why T-Mobile, MTV, Ugg Boots and Capital One credit cards choose to be among the advertisers whose products flash up on the site.