Blue Man Sings The Whites

You know the best thing about being English? It’s that our patron saint is a bloke who was canonised for fighting a flipping DRAGON. It’s a rare and beautiful thing for a country’s saint to so perfectly capture the national character.

Specifically, the character of a self-aggrandising, hopelessly transparant bulldunger.

Because that’s England’s role in the twenty-first century. If the global community were a bar, England would be the beery loudmouth sat in a corner pummelling anyone unfortunate enough to wander into range with shaggy-dog stories of the outrageous and fantastic things he did when he was younger, painfully unaware of how needy and pathetic he sounds. We’re the fatuous git with the bloodshot eyes and gin blossom who so routinely inflates the tales of his past glories that he’s come to believe them himself. We’re the sort of person who pines openly and obnoxiously for The Good Old Days when he was Somebody and young people had respect and you could say what you liked about the birds and the darkies and the fairies without the PC Brigade turning up to cart you away.

England is the Pub Bore Of The World.

This is part of what makes the World Cup so special. Seeing every third house and car decked out with the flag of St. George, to see the country so fervently celebrating the non-existant acheivements of a lying git is a sweet, sweet thing. It’s a nice little reminder that even while the American fundamentalist right wing continues to preach hate in the name of the Prince of Peace, England’s still got a thing or two to teach the world about doltish, unthinking irony. And if that truth’s not worth a bit of chest-thumping tribalism I don’t know what is.

So, you know. If the England football team could see their way clear to extending my state of weary ambivalence by squeaking past Slovenia tomorrow, I wouldn’t object overmuch.

Sorry so long without a post but hey, it’s not like you’re not used to frequent inexplicable losses of signal from this direction, is it?

Here’s a measure of how eventful and thrilling my life’s been in the time I’ve been away: I’m seriously considering trying to re-watch my entire DVD collection. In alphabetical order. The drawbacks I can see to this plan are a) it would would mean watching Alien, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection then Aliens, and b) it would mean watching Batman & Robin.

Anyway, some stuff that’s been great that I’ve discovered in the last three months:

The latest Metric album (especially Gold Guns Girls). The latest Raveonettes album (especially Heart Of Stone). Moon. Mount & Blade. The latest Yeah Yeah Yeahs album (especially Dragon Queen). The Incredible Hercules. Drag Me To Hell. The Sounds (especially No-One Sleeps When I’m Awake). Castle. Lloyd Doyley’s first ever senior goal. Forza Motorsport 3 (especially after finally working out how to use the XBox steering wheel I got for Christmas last year and has been lying shamefully unused since because of my general hamfistedness. Turns out I just needed some patient tutoring. Actually, one sentence of impatient tutoring. Actually, just my wife saying “You’re turning that wheel like you’re driving a hugging clown car”). The second series of Being Human. The second series of Newswipe. Pretty much everything Gail Simone’s written for DC Comics, especially her brilliant brilliant work on Birds Of Prey, Wonder Woman and Secret Six. The Answer Me This podcast. Lego Rock Band. Snow. Oh, and the iPhone.

Some stuff that’s not been great in the last three months:

Champions Online. Work. The Doctor Who Christmas special. The end of the best coverage of any sport on UK telly as Channel Five show (probably) their last Yankee Helmetball game. The Digital Economy bill. All car insurance ads in the history of all things, ever. Flash Forward. The iPhone’s battery life when you’re playing games on it.

So yeah. Alive and reasonably well. Further updates to follow. Eventually.

This stuff makes me angry. Then it makes me sad. Then I read the comments and it makes me angry again.

Looking at the story with an ignorant outsider’s eye, the first second and third paragraphs seem to sit uncomfortably together. One of the jurors states that the convicted man should be put to death because the Bible tells us that’s what should happen to murderers. But the juror also says that he believes in the death penalty over life imprisonment because locking someone up is too expensive. Doesn’t that seem a little bit… I don’t know, like he’s trying to have it both ways? In my experience, doing what’s morally right is very rarely the easiest solution to a problem. Generally that’s what morals are for, aren’t they? To stop us taking the most ruthlessly expedient road? Don’t know. Obviously the writer is quoting the juror selectively, perhaps his position isn’t as suspiciously self-supporting as it seems in the story. Perhaps I’m just looking for a problem, looking to pick a fight, seeing self-deception where it isn’t there because the notion of state-sponsored murder based on a selective reading of a 2500-year old text is so utterly incomprehensible to me. It’s repugnance squared.

I appreciate that it’s monumental arrogance for a staunch atheist to try and interpret the Bible for a believer but hey, monumental arrogance is a close personal friend. So: wasn’t this “eye for an eye” stuff supposed go out when Jesus arrived with Bible 2.0? Wasn’t love, forgiveness and turning the other cheek his MO? How is it that headbanging fundamentalists go out of their way to dig up obscure parts of the Old Testament to take to their hearts but miss the really big, really important, really cool stuff that’s said over and over and over in the Gospels? Why do people fixate on, f’rinstance, what folk choose to do with their reproductive organs rather than the notion that the only way into heaven is to love your neighbour?

To put it bluntly, why is it that people who believe that the Bible is the literal truth, the literal word of God, always seem to choose the wrong literal words to believe? Yes, the Bible is the product of many writers over a long period of time and is somewhat self-contradictory in places but the overall tone and message of the New Testament is pretty consistent. So why do so many people pick out the nastiest, most close-minded, most spiteful and stupid parts of a book that in the main asserts that your first and most important duty to God is to be excellent to each other? What am I missing? Can somebody explain to me how it works, because I honestly don’t understand. Particularly given that I can barely think of a single Christian I’ve ever personally known that I wouldn’t describe as a good person. Faith is a good thing. Yes, it needs to be kept out of science classes and public health policies but it’s brought far more light and beauty into the world than stupidity and ugliness – you only need to look at the Sistine Chapel or read Paradise Lost or hear Bird In God’s Garden to realise that. I’m just having problems squaring the circle here.

The answer, of course, is that the idiots and hatemongers are a tiny albeit loud minority. But then I read a story like this which states that 80% of a sentencing jury on a murder case “introduced biblical notions into the jury discussion”, and I start to wonder if “biblical notions” is a phrase that does not mean what I’ve always thought it meant.

Hello you! Sorry I’ve not posted in a couple of months. I appear to have completely forgotten how to write.

This appears to be a combination of two intermeshing and not terribly interesting causes. The urge to write generally comes from stuff that evokes passion in me one way or the other – things I really love or things I really hate. I’ve now spent some time in a vague background state of general listless mopey fedupness that’s kind’ve turning down the volume on everything. It’s a bit like being a character in Battlestar Galactica.

Compounding the problem is my Godawful writing process. A regrettable combination of nitpicky perfectionism and mediocre talent means that my writing is incredibly stop-start. I have an enormously hard time moving past a sentence or a paragraph I’m not 100% happy with. I’ve just spent five minutes deleting and re-writing that last one, f’rinstance. Yeah, I know.

The result of this is that I’ll often start an entry, hit a problem and instead of moving it and coming back when the rest of the piece is done it ends up being a road-block that stops me dead, particularly – and here we hit where my general ennui enters the equation – if the idea I’m writing isn’t one that’s burning in my brain and won’t rest till it’s escaped. Above this entry in the Word doc I use for drafting blog posts I’ve currently got 10-50% complete musings on Civ 4, mental list weirdness, the Rock Band games, Once, fat stroke fat acceptance, Escape To Victory and parkour. In each case I’ve clonked into a roadblock and been unable to get around it.

So anyway. Sorry so long no content, and sorry that I’m breaking my duck with sorry-for-myself limp lettuce-leafery. Hopefully (ir)regular service will be resumed soon.

Not being remotely patriotic has its advantages. No, you don’t get to feel unearned and unjustifiable pride in those achievements of your fellow countrypeople with which you had nothing whatsoever to do. However, you also don’t have to feel ashamed when the other folks crammed onto a slightly shabby island in the North Atlantic with you do something deeply stupid and nasty. Thus, valuable emotional energy that would have been taken up with misplaced guilt and shame can instead be used for working up appropriate levels of embarrassment and contempt.

Here’s part of the problem, though: if you’re an average, reasonably rational human being who’s naturally concerned about the current political, social and economic climate but doesn’t believe the solution is to lock up all paediatricians  and to Send Back Where They Came From anyone darker-skinned than David Dickenson, exactly who is there for you to vote for? With the three main political parties melting together into a centrist mass of well-scrubbed near-indistinguishable charisma-free talking heads who’ll say absolutely anything to get elected it’s hard to generate much enthusiasm for any of them. And that’s assuming you don’t share the general understandable yet ever-so-slightly hypocritical outrage at the state of MPs’ expenses.

(After all, you could take the opinion that everyone was doing it, that it was basically an accepted perk of the job. And I don’t know about you, but the sort of person who’s got the chutzpah to claim for having their moat cleaned or a wooden duck house on expenses is precisely who I want representing my interests. Scruples are all very well, but when it comes right down to getting things done give me the devious git with the nerve of a burglar over the choirboy. Not meaning to excuse or play down the general shabbiness of the whole expenses scandal, but some of the weeping and wailing that’s followed it seems just a little hysterical and fundamentalist. After all, Let He Who Is Without A Purloined Pad Of Post-It Notes Cast The First Stone.)

The Green Party have always been the traditional beneficiaries of the middle-class protest vote, but personally I can’t in all good conscience put my cross next to a party who veer dangerously close to being anti-rationalism. Banning animal testing, banning stem-cell research and throwing more NHS money at alternative and complimentary therapies are policies that speak of a mistrust of science, of a worrying degree of influence from headbanging hardcore ley-line botherers. Which they make no bones about of course, and is absolutely fine if that’s your bag but for me it’s a complete deal-breaker (ladies). Making sure the current ecosphere survives is a Good Thing to believe in, absolutely, but the only way that’s going to happen is by applying our wonderful, miraculous evolved monkey brains to the problem.

Being able to turn up at the polling booth and place our cross for None Of The Above would be nice, but doesn’t address the major issue that somewhere, somehow, we do actually need to find some people to run the country. So what we need is a Fourth Way. We need a party without the Flash Harry sliminess of the career politician, but also without the baggage or true-believer scariness that comes with the one-issue candidates.

Friends, Britons, countrymen – what we need is the Nerd Party.

The advantages of electing nerds to office are many. If you accept that power is inevitably going to corrupt, it’s a good idea to vote for folk who’re only going to be corrupted in ways that are a) harmless (No Child Left Behind The Current Generation Of Consoles, changing the national anthem to Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley) or b) entertaining (several hundred million quid of taxpayers’ money blown on a Boeing 747 and a giant conveyer belt to settle things once and for all). Having computer-literate politicians would go a long way toward preventing the habitual costly chaos that results every time a government department tries something IT-related that’s more complicated than reading its email. And it would mean an end to having to doll out a second-house allowance to facilitate MPs attending the House of Commons, because the Nerd Party would be entirely happy to telecommute. In our pants, most likely.

In fact, we could likely ditch the Palace Of Westminster altogether in favour of an entirely web-based solution. The Forum Of Commons has a nice ring about it, n’est-ce pas? It’d be a far more efficient way of debating the issues of the day than the current one-subject-at-a-time, one-person-talking-six-hundred-sitting-there-waving-pieces-of-paper system. And just think how much more difficult it would be for a government to backtrack from its positions or promises if the opposition had instant access to everything that had ever been said plus a “Quote This Post” button.

The more I think about this, the more I’m convinced it’s the way forward. After all, so long as you keep clear of their pet subjects nerds are generally clear-thinking folk who don’t attach any stigma to seeking the counsel of the better-informed, which is exactly the sort of attitude that we want from our leaders. Of course, if any major policy decision hinges on which Terminator film is the best we’re looking at weeks of increasingly long-winded and vicious infighting followed by the collapse of Western civilisation, but that’s a chance we’ll have to take.

Vote Nerd in 2010. Together we can be made of win!

Re: The darkly hilarious interview on Radio 4 this morning in which BNP leader, holocaust denier, new Member of the European Parliament and all-terrain tosspot Nick Griffin declared straight-faced that white folk are now second-class citizens in Britain:

“Alright, apart from the House of Commons, the banks, the police, the European Parliament, the media, the Cabinet, the armed forces, the Civil Service, teaching, the House of Lords, the City, the social services, journalism, the Church and 94% of all management positions – what is there left that white British people still control?”

Payday, and a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of gadgets. Specifically, a proper NAS enclosure and a suitably beefy SATA hard drive to replace my ageing and slightly flaky LaCie Ethernet Mini disk. Because nothing says “Bank Holiday Weekend” like hours spent fiddling with media server software and transferring video files.

Here’s my sparkly new Seagate 1.5TB disk, still in its immediate packaging – a rather groovy inflatable lilo-for-ants arrangement, as it goes.

And here’s the box it arrived in.

Half the fun of ordering things off the internet is receiving parcels through the post. It’s like getting a present, a little workaday Christmas. And Roy Wood and I are in total agreement on that subject. So it’s nice to see Dabs going out of their way to give their customers that little extra frisson of thrill. That old ”Single Pair Of Socks In Enormous Elaborately-Wrapped Package” gag is always a killer, innit?

For your consideration – the full and unedited instructions included in the cheap-o-clone XBox 360 headset that arrived yesterday.

HEADPHONE MICROPHONE

FEATURE

• Promote the on-line community experience of the X-Box Live of the unprecedented in history, let you draw up the strategy with member of team, the interference opponent or while play favourite game with the friend chat.
• You can make serve to record for friend or family and stay the speech message through the free X-Box Live letter, can also replace telephone and good friend contact.
• Open loudly to adjust the small voice, make experience personally the most vigorous game career to make possible.

INSTRUCTION

The microphone strengthen the function and can carry on regulate, obtain the best sound quality.

The supplementary volume control and muting switches allow the customer to regulate the headphones volume or cut over the mute appearance.

The microphone of lowers the speech control that the noise function promotes the game to respond to and provide the pure speech exchanges.

Reducing in weight of, the wear type desigh brings the more comfortable usage experience.

The ear Micheal with put X-360 hand handles or the X-box lead-in hand handles of X-box very easily and directly.

Handy, because I’ve been looking for something to replace my good friend contact for ages.

On rare occasions I’m accused of being just a little arrogant.

(Pauses for sounds of shocked disbelief).

Some people labour under the misapprehension that I’m incapable of seeing anyone’s point of view but my own, that I will generally respond to the assertion that it’s not possible for an opinion to be wrong with “Of course an opinion can be wrong. You’re in the process of proving it. Besides, if you held the opinion that gravity had stopped working and the moment you step ouside the door you’re going to float up to the ionosphere, that’s empirically and certifiably wrong. Stop wasting my time with this wishy-washy, well-on-the-other-hand, everyone’s-opinion-is-worth-the-same, walk-a-mile-in-the-other-fellow’s-shoes, being-right-isn’t-the-be-all-and-end-all claptrap.” 

In reality, this is only true ninety, maybe ninety-five percent of the time tops.

Obviously most of the time only a fool or a lunatic would disagree with my position – that anyone who can hear Higher And Higher by Jackie Wilson without smiling needs to be removed from the gene pool for the benefit of future generations for example, or that Jeff Sinclair was a far superior commander of Babylon 5 than Smilin’ John Sheridan. However, there are many, many (actually, not that many) subjects that I’m perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that my stated position could potentially be wrong and the rest of the world might be right.

For reference, please find below a full and complete listing of those opinions that may under the correct circumstances be negotiable:

• Seinfeld isn’t funny.
• The three best films directed by a Scott brother are, in order, Blade Runner, Top Gun, and Alien.
• Gladiator is at least an hour too long.
• The Lord Of The Rings trilogy is at least four hours too long.
• Street Fighter II is boring.
• And so is Halo 3.
• Deep Space Nine wasn’t that bad. Certainly better than Next Gen.
• Johnny Mnemonic is better than the last two Matrix movies.
• Poison’s “Flesh & Blood” is one of the five best albums of the eighties.
• Teen Wolf has one of the five best final scenes in cinema history.
• Kebab pizza is lush.
• It’s A Wonderful Life, but it’s a rubbish film.
• Led Zeppelin’s music is by and large ponderous, self-indulgent tosh.
• Battlestar Galactica is filled with hateful characters and takes itself way too seriously.
• Independence Day is filled with awesome characters and takes itself not even slightly seriously.
• Playing king-three suited is lucky.
• The Pylea story arc at the end of Angel’s second series was terrific fun.
• Supporting more than one football team after the age of 9 is an indicator of weak moral character.
• Rocky III is the best film in the series.
• Empire Strikes Back is the worst film in the series, if you take the natural and sensible position that Episodes 1-3 didn’t happen.

Obviously, should you hold a dissenting position on any subject not covered   above then I regret to inform you that you’re completely incorrect and should adjust your thought processes accordingly.

You’re welcome.

I hadn’t been to the Royal Air Force Museum in the better part of twenty years, and the fact that I’d never taken the boys there before borders on unforgivable. This sorry state of affairs was rectified at the weekend, with a happy afternoon spent wandering around assorted airbourne purveyors of destruction, death and misery.

I particularly enjoyed getting a close-up look at an English Electric Lightning. Like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, the Lightning has features that are a bit odd or even offputting taken in isolation – the over-under engines, the beer-belly fuel-tank, the strange positioning of the missile hardpoints just below the cockpit, the big wide stupid chin and hamster cheeks, the over-wing drop tanks, the air intake around the nosecone, the weird lips - but the overall effect is stunning. The Lightning looks like the designer dropped a paper dart on the table and said “Tell you what. Let’s make one of those fly at Mach 2.”

As you might expect given the gap between visits, there were a number of changes and additions to the last time I was there. Getting to walk right under a Vulcan bomber was a highlight, and one that really brought home the sheer monstrous size of the thing. The fact that it even got off the ground boggles the mind, it’s quite literally bigger than the whole row of three terraced houses that we live on. Flying it must have been like trying to pilot a medium-sized Baptist church. Of doom.

My favourite addition was the brand new Milestones Of Flight hanger, though – a light, airy space filled with aircraft of varying degrees of historical significance. One of the first things you see as you enter the hall is an extremely cool juxtaposition – a Bleriot XI monoplane of the type used to make the first crossing of the English Channel and the RAF’s current state-of-the-art fighter.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Between the year 909 and the year 1009, technology advanced from the sword all the way to the slightly fancier sword. Between 1909 and 2009 we’ve gone from a machine that’s basically a big t-shirt wrapped around a couple of cheap photo-frames with some bicycle wheels lashed on the bottom and an engine that we’d laugh at if it were powering a scooter, to the Eurofighter Typhoon. We’ve gone from the Model T to the Bugatti Veyron. We’ve gone from candlestick phones and manual switchboards to the Internet. We’ve gone from TS Eliot to Dan Brown. We’ve gone from workhouses to child labour in the Far East. We’ve gone from cities choked with smog to impending global environmental cataclysm.

Sorry, sort’ve lost where I was going with that toward the end.

Still – crikey, Charlie. The acceleration of technological progress, the sheer pace at which humanity is churning out life-changing innovations staggers me. In less than a century, we’ve gone from 37 minutes to fly the Channel to less than a minute. What on Earth (or beyond) do you suppose we’re going to manage in the next hundred years?