linkmachinego.com
10 March 2001
'I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell.'[comics] Eddie Campbell discusses Finishing From Hell…. ‘Eight years! 500 pages. Must be the longest single work Alan’s done on both counts. The astonishing thing is that he had the whole thing planned from the beginning. All the reference photos for the epilogue were shot in 1988. When Alan phoned me to offer me the gig he gave me a rundown of all the chapter titles, including prologue and epilogue. I don’t think he changed any of them as we progressed, although for a brief time ‘Blackmail or Mrs Barrett’ almost became ‘The Harlot’s Curse’. Any extra material that came to mind was fitted within the existing chapters without changing the total pattern, or structure. That word ‘structure’ sums up what Alan does best in all his work. In From Hell the structural idea behind everything is the architecture of time’ [Related Links: On-Line Preview of From Hell, Buy From Hell]
[comics] I can’t recommend this comic enough…. Berlin by Jason Lutes. ‘Jason Lutes has set this captivating story in Germany during the twilight years of the Weimer Republic. Placing them against the backdrop of the real events of the time, Lutes has created a cast of fictional characters with a particular focus on the lives of two individuals, Kurt Severing and Marthe Muller. Following these people over the course of five years leading up to 1933, Lutes meticulously documents their hopes and struggles, and the dark shadow history has cast over their lives.’ [Related Links: Ordering Information, Preview Pages of Berlin]
9 March 2001
I'm free![tv] Old BBC interview with Louis Theroux‘…Weird Weekends rested on the tremendous generosity of the Americans – they love British people, and don’t regard Britain as a threat. I’m actually half American but I have an English accent, and I capitalised on the reservoir of kindness and goodwill towards the British. I interviewed the Aryan Nations in Idaho, an ultra-extreme, radical right group, who talk about how there’s going to be a race war, and have swastikas all around their church. They wouldn’t let an American in there to interview them, but because I was British the guy let his guard down and talked about how much he loved Are You Being Served?’
[globalisation] Delhi Calling. Call centres go off-shore — when you call your bank or mobile phone company you may well be talking to somebody half-a-world away. ‘Each computer screen shows Greenwich Mean Time and the temperature in the UK, in case a staff member feels the urge to reveal that India is enjoying yet another day of blue skies and sunny weather. “We find showing new staff videos of Yes, Prime Minister is particularly effective,” says Raman Roy, Spectramind’s sleek, pipe-smoking chief executive. “They get a two-hour seminar on the royal family. We download the British tabloids every morning from the web to see what our customers are reading. We make our new staff watch Premier League football games on TV. And we also explain about the weather, because British people refer to the subject so frequently. It is a science,” he adds, proudly.’
8 March 2001
[monkees] Think Diffident. Nice profile of ex-Monkee Mike Nesmith (the one with the wool hats and sideburns)…. ‘The news media, it’s true, sticks to Nesmith’s Monkee-ness like gum on a go-go boot. Never mind that Nez helped invent MTV and country rock, that he published a novel and pioneered a home-video distribution business, and that he cut 13 post-Monkees albums and produced cult film classics like Repo Man. And never mind that Nesmith – who could choose to be as ostentatious and narcissistic as the next gazillionaire rock star – instead carries on the philanthropic traditions of his mother, Bette Graham, the inventor of Liquid Paper typing-correction fluid.’
[budget] Steve Bell on Gordon Brown’s Budget…. ‘The Poor Box’. Simon Hoggart’s sketch of the Commons yesterday: ‘The Tories were thunderstruck by the chancellor’s boast, as if their entire air force had, so to speak, been destroyed on the ground. Michael Portillo looked utterly miserable. Oliver Letwin and Francis Maude seemed positively distraught. Ann Widdecombe’s eyes bulged alarmingly, as if her corsets had come to life and were squeezing the breath out of her. Michael Ancram, the normally ebullient party chairman, gave the impression of a man who has just detected a ferret climbing his trousers, north towards his Y-fronts.’
7 March 2001
[apple] Rip, Burn, Mix. If you’ve got the time or bandwidth… a great Apple TV commercial. [via Scripting News]
[HTML] For some reason I’ve made LMG HTML 4.01 compliant. It’s not that hard… at least not on a page this simple. Does it break any browsers? Let me know.
6 March 2001
[comics] Chick Comic Theater does some amusing analysis of Jack Chick’s best work: Don’t Try Suicide, What Do You Expect In A Town called Sodom?, Rock Music…Inside Satan’s Boombox, Dungeons and Dragons…Geeky Pastime, or Gateway to Hell? ‘…if I’m not mistaken, that demon on the right side of the bed is whacking off! I feel sorry for Lance’s Mom. Not only does she have to discover her dead son swinging like a Pinata, but she’s got to clean up the unholy demon spew from his bed, too.’ [via Venusberg]
[expletive deleted] BTopenworld CE insults Net users ‘A senior exec at BT has slurred the good name of British Net users describing their online activities as a “passive and sometimes rather weird kind of entertainment”. BTopenworld CE, Andy Green, delivered his insults during a debate organised by the Parliamentary IT Committee (PITCOM) on the White Paper on the Regulation of Telecommunications.’ [via Digitaltrickery]
You get that bus out, Butler![tv] The On The Buses Drinking Game… God forgive me… I’ve always liked On The Buses. I’m a child of the 70’s… I have no taste. From the Amazon review: ‘There was always something faintly dirty about On The Buses–and not just the humour, which was simply more of the polite strand of “blue” that British audiences had come to expect in the mid-1970s. It was the whole look: grey and miserable. And the setting: a dismal suburban bus depot, and an equally decrepit family home. Or perhaps it had something to do with Olive, and her lank greasy hair, and the knowing leer of Jack, Stan’s lecherous fellow conductor and partner-in-crime. A working-class comedy, one step up from the Beckett-like squalor of Steptoe And Son, it starred Reg Varney as Butler, a larrikin bus conductor with a hopeless romantic track record, and Stephen Lewis as “Blakey”, the inspector who tries valiantly to bring him undone.’ [Related Links: Blakey On-Line]
5 March 2001
[weblogs] This is interesting… Neil Gaiman is updating a journal about a new book via Blogger and Warren Ellis is doing a what strongly looks like a photo blog…. [via Blogadoon and WEF]
[politics] Guardian Unlimited wonders… Why is the Labour Party so Dull? ‘After almost four years in power, with the largest majority in Labour’s history, and the Conservatives empty of rival ideas, all the prime minister had come up with was another cautious summary of the Third Way. Taylor is rather ruder about it: “The ridiculous, fatuous claim that a mild form of Christian democracy represents a new politics . . .” His smooth, media-ready voice rises with the disappointment. Without sounding terribly regretful, he adds: “I’ve fucked my peerage.”‘
[moz] The death of Diana predicted in Morrisey’s music‘Morrissey’s lyrics to THERE IS A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT from THE QUEEN IS DEAD concern: two people on a date at night in the city driving in a car fantasizing about getting killed in a car crash gripped by fear in an underpass. Over a decade later we have Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed: two people on a date at night in the city driving in a car getting killed in a car crash in an underpass.’ [via Barbelith Underground]
4 March 2001
[bomb] Metafilter discusses the bomb at the BBC (with a contribution from me). There are also some postings from Dave at Brainsluice and Vaughan at Wherever You Are. From my posting on Metafilter: ‘As a friend of mine said about a previous bomb explosion in London… ‘This is far to close to home’. I use the White City Tube station and main entrance to BBC Television Centre every weekday to get into work … the servers I administer are about 5 floors above where the bomb exploded… ‘
[lmg year zero] Well…. it’s LinkMachineGo’s first birthday. Come sit with me a while… as I bouce the little tyke on my knee and it farts and burps out a years worth of favorite links…

March 2000: A favourite quote of mine from Grant Morrison’s Animal Man: ‘What’ll it be next? Choice extracts from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations? Trotting out the Nietzsche and the Shelley to dignify some old costumed claptrap? Probably. Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who’s dreaming who?’

April: I wonder: Would you get baptised just to please your dying father?

May: Barbara Cartland dies…. and I do a few link tributes to the mad old bitch…. ‘Men have always made a fuss of me. I still have several admirers who send me jewellery and chocolates. So I must be doing something right’ – aged 96.

June: There are certain things that a simple man from Norfolk should not be exposed to…. I see Keith Chegwin’s knob on TV. Meg from NotSoSoft provides a photo… from then on I will get four or five referrals a month from Google about… Keith Chegwin Nude.

July: A classic quote from Preacher: ‘I mean look at me: My head looks like a penis, I’ve got one leg, one ear, one eye, and my cock’s been replaced with a rubber tube.’

August: I wonder about the important things in life: How many degrees of seperation between Blakey from On The Buses and Kevin Bacon? ‘I’ll get you Butler!!’

September: I play My Name is… Frank Butcher.

October: Nishlord sums up Paula Yates: ‘Some of us are born great. Some of us achieve greatness. And others have a pop star’s cock thrust upon them.’

November: The desperate search for meaningful content continues…. I begin to rip off quotes from various authors‘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.’

December: Christmas pictures of Ann Widdecombe and her cats — Pugwash and Carruthers! ‘Goodness gracious, what is that? It’s Mr. Pugwash, my black cat. Goodness gracious, are there others? Yes indeed, my cat Carruthers.’

January 2001: A long weekend expressed as links…. Friday: Blog, Oxford Street, Selfridges, Starbucks, Marks and Spencers, MyHotel, drink, Move on to Soho — more drink, Japanese food, drink, back to MyHotel, drink, cab, home, Try to Blog… too pissed, Sleep. Saturday: Badly hungover, 4 * Nurofen + time = feel better, hungry, read Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl?, Eco, Sexy Beast, Blog, Sleep. Sunday: Blog, More Powers, Cast Away, National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation, Baddiel’s Syndrome, Blog.

February: Darren’s Circumcision — I have a rather Disturbing Search Request.


Thanks to Chris, Phil and Andy. LMG Year One starts here…
3 March 2001
[the last link] Ending the first year of LMG on a high… Check out Bjork Remix Web. Simply amazing music…. I’m listening to the Magical Mystery Man Mix of Big Time Sensuality… [via Memepool]
[comics] Pow! Wham! Permission Denied! According to Lingua Franca DC Comics rountinely deny reprint permissions to academic writers which write about Batman’s sexuality… ‘DC’s rejection of York’s request fits an apparent pattern of resistance to gay interpretations of Batman. In 1991, Routledge published an anthology titled The Many Lives of the Batman, which includes an article on Batman as a camp icon. Permission to reprint art was denied. In 1993, The New Republic ran a satiric cover cartoon in which Batman and Robin exchange terms of endearment. DC immediately asked for, and received, an apology.’ [thanks to John at Linkworthy]
2 March 2001

Back of a beermat - because sometimes LMG needs a random image and to remind me of a weird Saturday...
[puke] Louis Theroux remembers his greatest vomits.‘This, I realised, is the paradox of the puke: that it is a provocative act and yet at the same time utterly involuntary. It’s like Tourette’s Syndrome made physical. I wanted nothing more than to be in bed with a cup of sugary tea and yet here I was instead staging weird, almost avant garde actions, spraying the walls of my friend’s parents’ toilet with regurgitated carrot.’
[a-team] Mr. T vs George W. Bush. For no reason at all… the voiceover on the opening credits of the A-Team… ‘In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. They promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.’ [via GLITTERDAMMERUNG!]
1 March 2001
[life] Things fall apart — The Guardian looks at the complexity of life in Britain in the aftermath of the train crash yesterday‘Complexity is the world we live in. People still think it isn’t. People still think that when they go to a supermarket and buy a pound of meat it’s exactly the same thing they used to do 30 years ago when they went to a shop up the road. In no respect is it the same. The meat has gone through the hands of 75 different people. It might be a French sheep, slaughtered in Belgium, butchered in Germany, part sent to Saudi Arabia and part sent here. I blame the training of today’s managers. They’ve not been trained to think about robustness and stability. They’ve been trained to think about efficiency. Efficiency, to a modern manager, means that every conceivable component is just about to break down.’
[hutch] Louis Theroux meets David Soul… interview from The Idler. ‘What do you want to be in life? I want to be happy, I want to be happy, I want to be happy, I want to be happy! You push push push push push. Happiness, it seems to me, is you kick back and you say “I’m happy!” It’s not something that you make, it’s something that you realise, that you come to. And it can be in a moment, it can be in a relationship, a day or a lifetime, but we’re not always happy, so why do you try to be happy? It’s trying! Trying! Pah! Don’t!’ [Related Links: Everything I ever needed to know I learned from Starsky and Hutch]
28 February 2001
[comics] Queueing up to make superhero movies. It went under ‘WTF?’ a couple of months ago but Ang Lee *is* going to do a Hulk Movie‘…the allure of the Hulk’s irradiated tantrums for Ang Lee appears less clear-cut – until you recall just how unlikely the idea of such a subtle director making a martial-arts movie once sounded, and how sublime the results turned out. Indeed, many of the motifs of Lee’s films find an echo in the story of wide-eyed scientist Bruce Banner struggling to control his over-sized inner child. For a start, there are the strong female characters (in this case, Betty Ross, daughter of the US general intent on eliminating the Hulk); and the indifferent hand of fate as the hapless physicist finds himself increasingly consumed by his strange powers. Most persistently, there is the creeping sense of isolation; or, as the Hulk himself once put it, the knowledge that where he walks, “he walks alone!”.’
[distractions] Apocamon – The Final Judgement. Play Pokémon with characters from the Bible’s Book of Revelations… ‘All contents copyright © 80 A.D. St. John the Divine. All rights reserved.’ [via clog]
[tv] Sympathy for the (Jersey) Devil. Salon looks at the start of the third series of The Sopranos… ‘…the first season’s cunning plot architecture rested on the clash between Tony’s patriarchal mob world and his matriarchal family world. At work, Tony was a virile thug; with women, he was soft. His mother pushed his buttons, Carmela nagged him to be a modern, sensitive father and Melfi forced him to get in touch with his freakin’ feelings.’
27 February 2001
[comics] Tintin in Thailand — a complete set of scans from the “lewd” comic strip which “shocked Belgium”… [via lukelog]
[tv] Revealing portrait of Esther Rantzen in the Independent… ‘When she appeared on In the Psychiatrist’s Chair in 1993, Anthony Clare asked her: “How would you describe yourself?” “As a human being, do you mean?” she replied. “Well,” he said, with concern, “what else are you, Esther?” “A series of functions,” she answered. This is a woman with no inner life. Despite being so conscious of her image, Esther Rantzen is not the least bit introspective. “Introspection is a very narrow landscape for me,” she has said. “I don’t turn my attention inwards.” As a result, she doesn’t always see beyond the surface of the effect she is trying to create so as to discern the impact she’s actually having.’