[tv] The Big Issue reports on what Gripper Stebson did next. ‘At that point, the tabloids swooped, offering the reporter who ran the story vast amounts of money to lead them to Mark. They promised to give the actor even bigger sums if he let them tell his story their way. Mark wouldn’t talk and the Press Gazette ran a story about the reporter Raj Johal’s principled refusal to reveal Mark’s whereabouts, despite the bank notes being wafted in front of him. After shaking off the newspapers and magazines, Mark decided to speak to The Big Issue instead. Between mouthfuls of chicken biryani he jokes about his ‘disappeared’ status. “I’ve always known where I’ve been – apart from the odd lost weekend,” he says.’ [Related Links:TV Cream on Grange Hill]
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[music] Guardian Unlimited profiles Tim Westwood. A profile? It’s a turkey-shoot! ‘To the half million British fans who listen to his weekend shows on Radio 1, he is, quite simply, Westwood: the face of hip-hop. The white face of hip-hop. Straight outta Lowestoft, son of Bill, the late Bishop of Peterborough. No, make that the white, faintly wrinkled face of hip-hop, complete with transatlantic intonation and studied lexicon of mad skills and hot goddamn beats. Better yet, the white, faintly wrinkled, public-school-educated face of hip-hop, in his bright red van with his name painted on the side.’
[comics] Luke follows up on Eddie Campbell’s struggles with Australian customs and apparently gets an email from the great man himself for the trouble… ‘I find it laughable and more than a little worrying that I can go down to my video store and rent Slumber Party Massacre II: The Driller Killer with no worries at all, but an intelligent, well-researched work rooted in history is banned. Something’s wrong here, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of censorship in Australia.’
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[fuel] Guardian Unlimited compares and contrasts the real 1930s Jarrow Marchers with the farmers and hauliers behind the fuel tax protesters. ‘The contrast with the self-employed hauliers and farmers, running the campaign for a 26p cut in fuel duty, could scarcely be starker. Although some of the farmer activists have been hit by the slump in agricultural prices, evidence of other fuel protest organisers’ prosperity can be seen in BMWs, Volvos and Mercedes parked outside their meetings. Protest leaders include Nigel Kime, spokesman for British Hauliers Unite and owner of a ÂŁ2m haulage firm; Derek Mead, protest coordinator in Somerset, who owns a 1,600-acre dairy farm; and Derek Lynch, who owns a Kent haulage business.’
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[reading] Something Happened by Joseph Heller: ‘I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just plain nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out towards me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime.’ [I’ve attempted to read Something Happened many times in the past but always got smothered by Heller’s / Slocum’s prose. It’s just to much. I’m hoping that by posting this “recommendation” I’ll find the will to finish what I suspect is a brilliant book… ]
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November 3, 2000
[weblogs] Woo-Hoo! Tanya’s back. From I Hate Music on Manic Monday by the Bangles: ‘There are six other obvious words which rhyme with Monday. Sunday is one. Funday and Runday are not. Oh and Suzanna Hoffs can wipe that grin off her face. This burning isn’t an eternal flame, but it lasts long enough to incinerate your shortarse winsomeness.’
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[comics] Warren Ellis talks about children and comics… ‘This has all been kickstarted by a conversation on my message forum. An intelligent and kind woman gave out comics as treats to little Hallowe’en trick-or-treaters. (Our street was full of children drenched in burning lighter fluid and someone yelling “Trick, you little fucks! Trick, I say!” Sounded like me, but I’m sure it wasn’t.) (This is something many of the Forum members did, by the way.) (Gave away free comics, not squirted children with lighter fluid and chucked lit matches at them.)’ [Related Links: Warren’s Message Forum]
[news] Wonderful stuff… Pravda’s view of Britain — British Society at a Crossroads: Police start to carry guns. ‘Unfortunately, there is no turning back. As the police force arms itself with Walther P990 pistols and Heckler and Koch MP5 rifles, the marginal elements will arm themselves with sub-machine guns, creating a spiral of violence which can easily spin out of control, if it has not already. The violence in modern societies is unfortunately the norm, rather than the exception. The drugs trade is the symptom, but not the cause, of this social cancer. The cause is an inability for people nowadays to enjoy simple values, work for the community, cultivating themselves and others in a spirit of human solidarity. Solutions for this tragedy would be a welcome topic of discussion’ [Related Links:BBC News story]
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[burchill] Julie Burchill is still on form… ‘”Home” is where the people we love are. And once they’re gone, no cooking smells, stencilled borders or roses around the door will make it home again. It’s time we stopped kidding ourselves otherwise, put down our mindless implements, stopped our endless fidgeting and enjoyed our loved ones while we can.’
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[politics] The Sunday Times discovers evidence of cocaine being snorted within the Houses of Parliament. ‘At least the myth has been destroyed that if people start out on a soft drug, they end up on heroin. That they end up on the Tory front bench is not an enviable fate, but it is not quite as bad as lying in a gutter with a needle sticking out of you.’
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[reading] My Dark Places by James Ellroy. ‘It went bad from there. It went bad with self-destructive logic. It went bad slowly. The voices came and went. Inhalers let them in. Liquor and enforced sobriety stifled them. I understood the problem intellectually. Rational thought deserted me the second I popped those cotton wads in my mouth. Lloyds called the voices “amphetamine psychoses.” I called them a conspiracy. President Richard M. Nixon knew I murdered my parents and ordered people to stalk me. They hissed into microphones wired to my brain. I heard the voices. Nobody else did.’ [My Dark Places is by turns, a stunning, brilliant and above all a disturbing book. I read it first in 1998 and since then I’ve read it at least once a year… Certainly in the top five books I’ve ever read.]
[weblogs] Dirk shows us the fundamental interconnectedness of all weblogs… ‘Captainfez.com contains a weblog. Duh.’ [via Plasticbag]
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November 6, 2000
[mobiles] Nishlord provides an exciting new service for self-important people with mobile phones. ‘NISHLORD.COM’s WAP (or whatever the fuck it’s called this week) service is different. It actually gives mobile phone users the information they need – a constant reminder of what an annoying cunt they really are. Whenever the moment arises, a vital message informing you that no-one, absolutely no-one, is the slightest bit interested in what you have to say, ever, will flash up.’ [via Meg— sorta]
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[weblogs] First posts from weblogs. Number 1 in a series…. Barbelith… Tom starts as he means to go on…‘I am unemployed, almost completely out of money, single and love-free, my flat is a disaster area and I can’t seem to get a handle on the redesign of Barbelith. Still, mustn’t «KVETCH».’
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[radio] Media Guardian takes a look behind the scenes on the BBC’s Today Programme. ‘The corporation has whole armies of executives whose job it is to fret about the output. One old hand said to me, after a piece I did about Mo Mowlam and her problems with Downing Street: “Very interesting. Very controversial. Are you sure you got your facts right?” They worry about politicians. But they particularly worry about the press. Each morning, huge piles of cuttings arrive for each executive, containing every mention of the BBC over the previous 24 hours. Papers are regarded with unhealthy reverence. They are seen as founts of all wisdom when they break political stories and, far too often, criticism of the corporation leads to anguished meetings.’
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November 7, 2000
[pictures] An image of Piss Christ — which I’d never seen. I was expecting something a bit more extreme and blasphemous to be honest… ‘Medium: Esoteric medium’
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[politics] Guardian Unlimited covers the brains behind Bush. Scary. ‘Olasky also believes that liberal journalists have “holes in their souls” and practice “the religion of Zeus”, which came as something of a surprise to the east-coast press. “What could he mean?” they wondered. Frank Rich, a veteran columnist at the New York Times, and one of those accused of having a hole in his soul, said: “He still hasn’t told me whether the religion of Zeus goes in for Bar Mitzvahs.”‘
[science] I have two brains… one in my stomach! How cool is that? ‘This ‘second brain’ is made up of a knot of brain nerves in the digestive tract. It is thought to involve around 100 billion nerve cells – more than held in the spinal cord. Researchers believe this belly brain may save information on physical reactions to mental processes and give out signals to influence later decisions. It may also be responsible in the creation of reactions such as joy or sadness.’ [via Bloglet]
[reading] Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Train ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson. ‘On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning.’
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[politics] Media Nugget of the Day covers the US Presidential Elections. ‘Any way you cut it, 2000 will go down in history as a classic.’ and the Onion — Bush or Gore: ‘A New Era Dawns’‘”My fellow Americans,” a triumphant Bush or Gore told throngs of jubilant, flag-waving supporters at his campaign headquarters, “tonight, we as a nation stand on the brink of many exciting new challenges. And I stand here before you to say that I am ready to meet those challenges.”‘
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[tv] Anne Robinson: “Matt you are the weakest link. Goodbye” ‘My nadir came in round six, when – even though I had answered all my questions correctly – I was chosen for elimination by my two remaining rivals, the Sun and the Express. A tabloid conspiracy. Now it was my turn to endure the “walk of shame”. Even though I had performed the best in that round, Annie turned to me and declared: “Matt, you are the weakest link.” Compounding my sense of rejection, she turned away even before she got to the final, mocking “Goodbye!” At the losers’ interview, I was asked how it felt to be voted off despite having been the strongest. “It’s a travesty of justice and an insult to my intelligence,” I complained.’
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[politics] BBC News covers the presidential election between Nixon and Kennedy in 1960: ‘The campaign became an increasingly dirty one, with mud-slinging and accusations of dirty tricks on both sides. The Kennedy camp uncovered a story that Nixon had regularly attended parties with prostitutes at the Florida home of his friend Bebe Rebozo. They were about to release the story to the media when they found out that Kennedy had also been a party guest.’
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[weblogs] Another first post from a weblog…. LukeLog kicks off with… ‘Well, it’s happened. Thanks to the exhortations of Meg, I’m now a bloggin’ machine. Git on up! So this is the first post. Welcome to my *tiny* world. Next stop? I’m moving to more refined digs soon.’
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[reading] Books Unlimited interviews Chuck Palahniuk. ‘For Palahniuk the male protagonists of Fight Club are human spirits in revolt against the deadening destinies society that allots them. Many of his friends are teachers and, like teachers here, they often com plain that education is increasingly about schooling children for niches rather than educating them to create their own place in the world: “They’re taught to accept the world the way it is. I felt that all of my schooling was to get me a good corporate job so I could be a good corporate citizen, pay my taxes, live politely and then die.”‘
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November 11, 2000
[comics] Bugpower provides a link to a fantastic in-depth interview with Alan Moore. ‘Like, I’d have sworn that my interest in Jack the Ripper started in 1988 but then when my mum died and we went through her house, we found a big suitcase in which there was a load of old books and comics and things that I’d had when I was a kid, including two or three centrefolds from The Sunday Mirror, which were dealing with Jack the Ripper and I’d obviously clipped them for some reason. I didn’t remember doing it but obviously I’d had an interest in Jack the Ripper from the age of about twelve or thirteen. So I guess that these kind of themes, these ideas, they probably run all the way through our lives like a kind of developing music, that the basic kind of chord patterns are there right from the beginning, probably, but they just become more elaborate, or more penetrating or more deeper.’
[politics] The Thrill of Agony and the Victory of Defeat[?] The Observer covers what happened next as Gore prepared to concede the election to George Bush…. ”Circumstances,’ he said, once through to the Governor of Texas, ‘have changed. I need to withdraw my concession until the situation is clear’. ‘Let me make sure I understand, Mr Vice-President,’ said Bush. ‘You’re calling me back to retract your concession’. ‘There’s no need to get snippy about it,’ said Gore. Bush replied that his brother Jeb was the Governor in charge of the Florida ballot. Gore’s voice retorted: ‘It may surprise you but your younger brother is not the ultimate authority on this.’ ‘Mr Vice-President,’ said Bush’s voice, ‘You need to do what you have to do.”
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[reading] Jurrassic Park by Michael Crichton: ‘”But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control like a fatal illness. We do not concieve of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us,” Malcolm said, “that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way”. Malcolm sat back in his seat, looking towards the other Land Cruiser, a few yards ahead. “That’s a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true.”‘
[listening] Yesterday I listened to Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald for the first time in years… ‘Riding on the current trend for Acidy sounding tunes, Voodoo Ray charted back in 1989 rising to number 12. Very distinctive with it’s simple bass line, hypnotic vocals and 808 tinkles.’
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[news] No News is Good News… interesting interview. ‘There are examples on almost every single news programme you ever hear or see on TV or radio. What truly interests these programmes is death and suffering, and the wider the scale of it, the more they’re interested. They ignore ninety per cent of the world unless something spectacularly violent or unpleasant happens there, like a ferry disaster or disco burning down, or something like that. But those are really just hors d’oeuvres. What they really like is something they can wring a lot of juice out of, which means something that happens closer to home. The Dunblane Massacre was the ultimate news-journalist’s wank-fantasy. It had everything — violent death, suffering of the innocent, enormous amounts of emotional pain. Everything they love to linger over and rub our noses in while they wank themselves to orgasm after orgasm of fake sympathy and self-righteousness.’
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November 14, 2000
[comics] In the DC Universe Election 2000 has been decided… Lex Luthor Wins!‘Bruce Wayne, CEO of Wayne Enterprises, went on record saying: “I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him; there’s something rotten in Denmark.” Wayne would not elaborate on Luthor’s alleged involvement in Scandinavian domestic affairs, and refused requests for further comment.’ [via Ghost in the Machine]
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[movies] Guardian Unlimited interviews Joel Schumacher about his new film Flawless. ‘”Well, my friend David Geffen always says, ‘The devil is the one who comes with the biggest pay cheque.’ And I say to him, ‘You ought to know.'” And what about him? Has he ever felt that he sold out, sold his soul even? “Only on Batman and Robin. There was simply too much pressure, and that breeds fear and conservatism. I was in merchandise meetings with Walmart and K-Mart and McDonald’s, and you’re being told to make the film more ‘toyetic’, which means you can sell toys off the back of it. That was the only time when I felt that the box office was more important than the story.”‘
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[distractions] Very useful: ‘Where are the cats?‘ in various lauguages…. German — ‘Wo sind die Katzen?’ or Japanese — ‘Nekotachi-wa do ko de suka?’
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[blogs] The New Yorker article on weblogging is on the web… ‘One day, I met Meg and Jason for breakfast. Jason, who is twenty-seven, is tall, with short hair and sideburns; he was wearing jeans and a Princess Mononoke T-shirt. She ordered a tofu scramble and soy latte, he had real eggs.‘
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[distractions] UK Gangsters and Hardmen Webring. Dave Courtney: ‘I drove to Woolwick station and said to the geezer behind the counter, “can I have a return ticket, please?” “Where to, guv?” he chirped cheerily, so I shot back with my best puzzled look… “back here, you daft bastard,” I said and marched out, chuckling my nuts off.’
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November 16, 2000
[internet] Questions are being asked about the public WHOIS database…. is it right that names and phone numbers are freely available on a globally accessible database if you register a domain-name? ‘Names, e-mail addresses, postal addresses and telephone numbers for more than 24 million domain names are stored in databases called Whois. The information is available to anyone with an Internet connection. It’s like a global phone directory — without the option for an unlisted number.’ [via Slashdot]
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[turkey shoot] Matthew Parris provides brilliant insight into the House of Lords as they discussed reducing the age of consent for gay sex to 16… It’s like something out of Royston Vasey… and it costs us 31 million pounds a year to pay for this group of inbreds and idiots: ‘The Earl of Longford insisted that homosexuals “should not be condemned”. The Earl (94) illustrated what he meant by not condemning: “homosexualism” was a sad disorder, he said, like schizophrenia and chronic alcoholism. Seduce a girl of 16, he added, and that was a dreadful shame. But seduce a young man and he would “become a rent boy”. Lord Selsdon said that he had “eaten the private parts of a green monkey”.’ [Related Links: BBC News Story, Transcript of the Debate, link via the ever dependable Blue Ruin]
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November 17, 2000
[comics] Warren Ellis talks about the early years of 2000AD. ‘I started reading it when it began, just about a week after my ninth birthday, in 1977. Available in every newsagent’s in the country. The cover and back cover were colour. So was the centrespread. The rest of it was black-and-white, all inky on pulp paper. Your hands used to get sooty if you re-read it too much. The ink was so badly fixed that you could lift entire images off the page with Blu-Tack. There’d be five stories in each issue. JUDGE DREDD was in there every week, of course – it got the colour centrespread as well as the three or four pages that followed. At least three of the four other stories would be episodes from serials. Usually, one of the stories was a “Future Shock”, or one of its variants like “Time Twisters” – a self-contained science fiction short, usually with a hard twist in the tail.’ [Related Links:2000AD Links Project]
[weblogs] Don Hon’s Blogtrumps. Collect the Set! Jason Kottke vs. Matt Webb‘ Hair is actually blue as it is travelling faster than light and therefore blueshifted. Can travel in time.’
[comics] The full script of Sam Hamm’s Watchmen movie adaptation is online. ‘EXT. LIBERTY ISLAND – THAT MOMENT – DAY — as a LUMINOUS BLUE-SKINNED GIANT, SIXTY FEET TALL, wades through the harbor and steps up onto the island. He stares in dismay at the demolished statue . . . like a modern-day Colossus of Rhodes wondering what the hell happened to his date. Meet the last — and most powerful — member of our happy band: DR. MANHATTAN. Down below, THE COMEDIAN and SILK SPECTRE — battered but intact — are crawling out of the wreckage. The COMEDIAN looks up at the huge blue figure looming over them, and shakes a gnat-sized fist. COMEDIAN: ASSHOLE! WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?!?’ [via Haddock]
[reading] The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. “My left shoelace has snapped just before lunch. At some earlier point in the morning, my left shoe had become untied, and as I had sat at my desk working on a memo, my foot had sensed its potential freedom and slipped out of the sauna of black cordovan to soothe itself with rhythmic movements over an area of wall-to-wall carpeting under my desk, which, unlike the tamped-down areas of public traffic, was still almost as soft and fibrous as it had been when first installed.”
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November 19, 2000
[first post] New first post… not.so.soft starts up earlier this year… and the design actually lasts three whole months… Amazing. ‘7.2.00 I don’t think I’ve ever really counted myself as a fan; I just like what I like. Although, now I come to think about it, I did go through a phase of thinking that I could marry a certain pop star. Hey, I was eleven. (If you want to know who it was, tell me why you need to know and I’ll see…)’
To add some meat to the bones of my lazy meta-blogging I chatted with Meg on Friday about her first post, not.so.soft and redesigns… ‘That’s not actually the first weblog post ever, though – there’s a text file somewhere for half of january – but february was the first attempt at designing it. And although my blogging style has changed enormously since I began, that first post eerily echoes forward to a lot of what I do nowadays – I make a statement, provide a link, relate it to me and then ask for feedback. The difference now is that people actually write to me when I prompt them to – and I love it. :o)’
[wtf?] British tabloids are reporting the Queen wrung the neck of a wounded pheasant with her bare hands… ‘”Under the headline “The Killer Queen”, the Sunday Mirror published photographs which it said showed the Queen putting the bird out of its misery at the end of Saturday’s first pheasant shoot of the winter at Sandringham, a royal estate in Norfolk. “She killed the helpless creature with her bare hands while watching Prince Philip and guests blasting birds from the sky,” the Mirror’s tabloid stablemate, the Sunday People, said in its report.’
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[comics] Peter Bagge in Suck: The Most Resented Woman In America. ‘I was barely even aware of Miss Hawaii (or Angela Perez Baraquio, to be exact) during the preliminaries, though she certainly made a good impression when it counted the most (“She turned her GLOW BUTTON up a notch,” our resident pageant/hair expert commented).’
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November 20, 2000
[comics] Long, fascinating interview and profile of Warren Ellis from PopImage. ‘And yeah, I think I do suffer a backlash in terms of personal regard – it really doesn’t affect the sales, sales continue to go up, whatever I do, which if anything probably indicates that the comic fans who hate me the most are insincere swine and buy the shit anyway. [Laughs] I mean, it happens all the time. When I was back on HELLSTORM I’d get these letters from hillbilly Christians who live up in the mountains, they’d say “YOUR COMIC MAKES US HURL. WE BUY IT EVERY MONTH”. I’ve actually got that letter at home from these hillbilly Christians who were genuinely sickened by the work, and bought it every month to be sickened. And that’s the comics fan.’ [Related Links:warrenellis.com]
[underground] Guardian Unlimited has a revealing portrait of what it’s like to work for London Underground written by an insider. ‘The only behaviour, apart from rudeness, that can be safely relied upon is acute stupidity. Almost everyone who travels on the underground seems to be braindead by the time they reach the station. People constantly come and ask where to go to get the train and are then surprised to be told to go down an escalator. Sometimes they walk out of another exit back to the street. Even if there are only two platforms and two escalators, no questions are too humiliating to ask. Some ask where the Southern line is, so they can get back to where they came from that morning! There is no reasoning with these people, who take their right to be cretinous as God-given, and when the odd sarky remark slips out all hell breaks loose.’
[mp3 tech] News about the long awaited WinAmp 3 starts to surface… ‘3.0 features Winamp’s most advanced playlist mode yet. Instead of a long list of songs within one playlist, users will be able to view all of their playlists easily with just one click. Songs will be listed on the right-hand side of the playlist window, along with their respective length, album name, artist, and so on.’ Oh… and here is an apparently better MP3 decoder for WinAmp 2… MAD plug-in. YMMV.
[comics] Media Nugget of the Day covers Watchmen. ‘In this bleak vision of America, the influence of costumed crime-fighters has kept Nixon in office, whipped Vietnam into shape easily, and brought the world to the brink of Armageddon. Writer Alan Moore began this novel as a reworking of the Charlton Comics heroes of his childhood, transformed it into an operatic dark-comedy of super-hero archetypes, and ended up with a chilling commentary on cold-war America.’ [Related Links: Alan Moore Fan Site]
[quote] ‘Zola called it documentation, and his documenting expeditions to the slums, the coal mines, the races, the folies, department stores, wholesale food markets, newspaper offices, barnyards, railroad yards, and engine decks, notebook and pen in hand, became legendary. At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature we need a battalion, a brigade of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.’ — Tom Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” November 1989, Harper’s.
[thatch] Guardian Unlimited asks: Where were you when Thatcher resigned? Ken Loach: ‘I was in a car going back to a flat we’ve got in Chiswick. I remember it must have been how people felt at the end of the war – street parties and people singing songs to a piano in the street. I knew the malign influence would carry on, but there was a wonderful feeling of caps in the air.’ [Tedious Autobio: Where was I? 1990. I was… twenty, living in Portsmouth, and a student. It was about 9.30ish in the morning and I was having a long relaxing shower. One of my flatmates banged on the shower door and shouted: “Hey Dazza! Thatcher’s resigned!” I started to shuffle a happy dance (it was a small shower) and sing Morning Has Broken at the top of my voice.]
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November 23, 2000
[history] Guardian Unlimited interviews Lady Mosley wife Oswald Mosley, the leader of British Fascists during World War II. ‘On October 6 1936 Diana and Mosley were secretly married in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room. Hitler came to the wedding and gave her a photograph of himself in an eagle-topped silver frame. I asked her where it is now. “I put it in a parcel in a bank when the war began because I thought it might hurt people’s feelings.’
[history?] UK Blogs discuss the ten year aniversary of Thatcher’s resignation… NotSoSoft, Blue Ruin and Wherever You Are. ‘I was really too young to have experienced exactly what the Thatcher years were like for myself, though, so to me she seems like some mythical beast. With her teeth drawn, I hope.’ — Blue Ruin. [Some other links: yet another great Steve Bell cartoon on Thatcher and Blair — The End of the Affair, and a once famous Thatcher impressionist — Steve Nallon’s website.]
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[the great unknown] Deathbed book a first for China: ‘In this passage, Mr Lu recalls an idyllic trip with friends 20 years ago to the lower Yangtze valley, a peaceful swath of countryside at the time, where heavy rain kept them stuck for several days. A local girl looked after them, listening quietly as they talked about poetry and the world and drank local wine with dried beancurd. Mr Lu was captivated by her innocence and purity, but was too shy to go any further. Now he muses on what might have happened if he had stayed and married her. “What would I be now? Maybe a teacher in the town’s primary school?” He wonders too whether he would have contracted the cancer. “Is life like a chess competition, where with one wrong move we change the result completely?”‘
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[comics] Amazon.co.uk picks their ten best comics… It’s no surprise that Watchmen is Number 1: ‘Imagine a future where Nixon is still President, America won the Vietnam War, and the nuclear clock stands at five minutes to midnight.’
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November 25, 2000
[king] Guardian Unlimited profiles Jonathan King. From the Guardian: ‘King classes veteran TV presenter Jimmy Savile [sic] as one of his closest friends – they have known each other for 25 years. Savile [sic] once said of him: “He’s a sabra. A sabra is an Israeli fruit that’s prickly on the outside and all soft and lovely inside. That’s Jonathan King.”‘ [“Savile” should be spelled “Saville”. Interesting spelling mistake from the Guardian.]
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[comics] Warren Ellis writes about his adventures at Garth Ennis’ Stag Weekend… ‘As indicated by other people in previous editions of this column: comics are a first love affair, the one that sinks its teeth into you and won’t let go, because of its freedoms and its glories. The sex is great, but everything else is shit. And I’m reminded of a quote from Neil Gaiman: “I stopped doing comics because I wanted it to continue being fun, I wanted to continue to love and care for comics, and I wanted to leave while I was still in love.”‘
[mobiles] Great article about how awful mobile phones are… ‘What is it about these things that makes us so obedient, and so oblivious to that which lies outside them – such as actual people? I once asked a man who was bellowing into a cell phone in the coffee shop in San Francisco why he was talking so loudly. A bad connection, he said. It had not crossed his mind that anything else mattered at that moment. Like computers and television, cell phones pull people into their own psychological polar field, and the pull is strong.’ [via Guardian Weblog]
[comics] Eddie Campbell has published the first chapter of From Hell online. ‘Now, meself, I come from a working family. We vote Tory, always have done. The working class don’t WANT a revolution Mr. Lees: they just want more money.’ [via Lukelog]
[weblogs] Tom starts his redesign of Barbelith… ‘Over the next couple of weeks, you can expect several weblog-style columns provided by regular contributors to the Barbelith Underground concentrating on interfering in things that don’t concern us, spouting ludicrous ideas that no one believes in and working for the transformation of the world into a place where there is passion, magic, energy and change.’
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[celebs] A list of the Top 50 Celebrities of the 20th Century. Unsurprisingly Keith Chegwin is number one… ‘Hyperactive television presenter, whose finest moment was undoubtedly “Cheggers Plays Pop”, the seminal 1980s quiz show aimed at children. Cheggers would question several obnoxious kids, who were split into teams – a typical question would be “Which member of Spandau Ballet hibernates during the winter?” to which the correct answer is, of course, vocalist Tony Handley.’
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[books] Books Unlimited has the first chapter of Naomi Klein’s No Logo available… ‘And so the wave of mergers in the corporate world over the last few years is a deceptive phenomenon: it only looks as if the giants, by joining forces, are getting bigger and bigger. The true key to understanding these shifts is to realize that in several crucial ways – not their profits, of course – these merged companies are actually shrinking. Their apparent bigness is simply the most effective route toward their real goal: divestment of the world of things.’
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[morrison] Magic for Mutants — Grant Morrison’s column on his new website is well worth checking out… ‘Corporate entities are worth studying. They and other ghosts like them rule our world. So…figure out why the Coca-Cola spirit is stronger than the Doctor Pepper spirit (what great complex of ideas, longings and deficiencies has the Coke logo succeeded in condensing into two words, two colours, taking Orwell?s 1984 concept of Newspeak to its logical conclusion?) Watch their habits, track their movements over time, monitor their repeated behaviours and watch how they react to change and novelty. Learn how to imitate them, steal their successful strategies and use them as your own. Create your own brand, your own logo and see how quickly you can make it spread. Build your own god and set it loose.’
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November 30, 2000
[hst] Hunter S. Thompson on the US Elections… ‘There are rumors in Washington that Gore’s most trusted advisors have sealed him off so completely that he still firmly believes he Won. … Which is True, on some scorecards, but so what? Those cards don’t count. … George W. Bush is our President now, and you better start getting used to it. He didn’t actually steal the White House from Al Gore, he just brutally wrestled it away from him in the darkness of one swampy Florida night. He got mugged, and the local Cops don’t give a damn.’
[think really different] The LC Cube‘Apple’s new G4 Cube inspired me to produce a similar machine, and this is the result – the LC Cube. It even has a vertically mounted floppy drive which spits out disks in the same toaster-like fashion as the G4 Cube. The LC Cube is built around an LC II logic board I salvaged from the rubbish heap of a Mac wrecker. It sports a 16MHz ‘030 CPU and has been maxed out to 10MB of RAM. The front panel has an illuminated electric oven-style On/Off switch and a hard disk activity LED’ [via the Master of Old School Apples]
[politics] Why I am Eating all the Pies by Chancellor Gordon Brown, MP. ‘I have eaten all the pies. Or rather, I have eaten as many pies as one man can safely eat. The other pies I am saving for later on, in my freezer. To the uneducated man, this may seem greedy. But I can assure you it is not. It is, in fact, essential to the well-being of Britain that I eat as many pies as possible.’ [via Interconnected]
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