Spot the Frenchman / Notre Dame
July 29th, 2007 at 23:01

One of the games we’ve been playing today is “spot the Frenchman”. By “we” I basically mean “me in my head”, but its quite an exciting and probably borderline racist game. The best person I saw was a short Parisian woman wearing a red beret, smoking a cigarette with it hanging out of her mouth to the extent that she was gripping the very end of it with her teeth. She was squawking something incomprehensible in a language that is permanently an octave higher than English.

We went into central Paris this evening and had a wander around and saw a lot of people eating in restaurants and drinking in bars, which I guess is what you’d expect. There was a man playing an accordion on the Paris Metro. It felt very French. We ended up bumping into Notre Dame cathedral, which is pretty good.

Its visually very impressive - the effort gone into building it is ridiculous, with it all being intricate carvings and old-timey people, that sort of thing. One thing that bothered me once it was pointed out was the asymmetry: all of the flying buttresses in the world can’t make up for inconsistent arches. As you can tell, I’m quite the architectural expert.

We’ll probably go and have another look at it at some point, so I’ll hopefully be able to blog more in depth then.

Paris out!

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Paris: Day 1
July 29th, 2007 at 15:55

We’ve just got to Paris after a long train journey. Its quite exciting being in France, as its just like being in Britain, but slightly different. For example, the font and kerning on road signs are slightly different, and everyone speaks a weird nonsense language in place of English.

The journey was mostly flawless, apart from a couple of moments.

On the Eurostar, I went to use the toilet. After using the toilet I attempted to wash my hands - I pressed the button on the sink expecting water to come out - instead, it covered my hands in soap. I then pressed the other button on the sink, and it produced hot air… Where was the water? I went back to my seat half-assuming that it must have been some sort of gel that combines both the soap and the water parts, only to discover after another passenger pointed it out that for some inexplicable reason, the sink was operated by a foot pedal. It was a bit embarrassing.

When we got to Paris and had to negotiate the Paris metro. We spent around fifteen minutes faffing about with a ticket machine like only awful foreigners can, only to buy the wrong tickets. It’s slightly embarrassing walking up to a ticket barrier, confidently putting your ticket into the machine, carrying a couple of large heavy bags, only to walk into an immobile turnstyle. The woman at the ticket desk was quite dismissive when we asked her “what le fuck?” - she pointed out that our tickets were only valid from tomorrow. This wasn’t a problem with our translation, as it was written in numerals… we just didn’t know what day of the week it was.

But we’re in the hotel now and we’re trying to figure out what to do this evening. The other looming problem is that despite booking a triple room there is only two beds. I’m going to have the bunk bed I think, and JD and Fundar will have to share. This isn’t only to make it less weird, but it means that if the bunk bed collapses under our adult weights, my face won’t be crushed.

More soon.

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Paris. AFK.
July 28th, 2007 at 15:42

Tomorrow morning, I’m going on holiday! I’m going to Paris for five days with my friends JD and Fundar - who you might remember from the video of when I went to London.

Obscure blog in-joke: The French is going to meet The French.

The reason my friends have such ridiculous nicknames is because they are all called James. I’m half expecting passport control to think we’re taking the piss.

I’m not entirely sure what to expect though. Hopefully there won’t be too many awful foreigners. I realise that the culture in Paris is slightly different to the UK, so I’m going to try and integrate myself by shaving my head and draping myself in a union jack cape for the duration of the trip - they’ll love that.

I’m not entirely sure what we’re going to do in Paris yet - if you’ve got any suggestions for anything cool we could do post a comment below. I don’t think the other two are too enthusiastic about my idea to try and incite a new revolution by demanding a maximum price on bread - and they think my calls for the fourth estate to get seats in the Senate is ridiculous. This is probably still more plausible than my original plan for a European adventure though: I wanted to take the ferry to Normandy on June 6th and prove how easy it is to invade Europe using only a Ford KA.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to blog whilst on holiday. I’m hoping it’ll be rather a lot - the hotel has wifi, and I’ll probably be taking my laptop. Who knows… you might even get video blogs?

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Women are creationists
July 27th, 2007 at 23:09

I’ve just had a thought, which could lead to a revolution in scientific thought. I think I’ve figured out why women are inherently irrational beings, always complaining about feelings and shouting down their opponents in arguments when they’re being proved wrong through rational argument and scientific fact: they’re actually creationists.

Arguing with a woman is like arguing with a particularly angry brick wall - you’re not likely to make any progress towards winning because women can shout you down, and even weak women can cry and make you feel bad about you proving them completely and utterly wrong. Whereas two men arguing can resolve their differences in a matter of seconds, a woman, like a creationist, is capable of holding a grudge for a long time: Galileo theorised that the solar system was heliocentric and pissed off the Church. Being irrational, the Church held a grudge against him for 359 years- only deciding to talk to him again in 1992. Just a shame he was dead, really.

I guess scientists may claim that I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here, and that all women and creationists have in common ancestor. Maybe they’re right - but this would merely add credibility to my ground breaking observations that there is a link between the two.

The principle of Occam’s Razor states that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one. And I can’t think of a simpler explanation. Sure, you might try and “debunk” Occam’s Razor with countless examples of it being wrong, such as Newtonian Vs Einsteinian physics or whatever, but if physics were true, then why is “God did it” the simplest explanation for the origins of life? So Occam’s Razor is obviously correct.

Also: circular reasoning is the simplest explanation for the point I’m trying to prove, so that’s valid too.

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The Simpsons Movie
July 25th, 2007 at 22:39

I went to see The Simpsons Movie with Katy today. When I first heard they were making it a couple of years ago, I approached it with a similar level of caution as I did Die Hard 4, but as time grew closer to release day, having seen the trailers and so on, I set my expectations ludicrously high - it was apparently written by some of the earlier writers after all. They were mostly met.

It was 84 minutes long but didn’t feel like it was long enough - there were a number of plot lines that felt unresolved, such as Abe Simpson experiencing the “prophecy” in church (I’d have liked a pseudo-scientific explanation rather than the assumed supernatural one), and I got the impression that the ‘Lisa has a boyfriend’ sub-plot could have been explored in more depth - as could ‘Bart prefers Flanders to Homer’. These latter two would make excellent stand alone episodes of the series but they felt underused in the film. I wonder if Lisa’s boyfriend will pop up in the series now? And Homer’s pig for that matter - they didn’t resolve that either.

As I’m a big Simpsons nerd, here are some minor quibbles with an otherwise decent film:

President Schwarzenegger (not Wolfcastle) - previously the Simpsons has always claimed that the current real President was President, and would retcon the timeline appropriately - or perhaps more accurately, exist on a floating timeline. A fictional President is most definitely a break from the norm.

They also appeared to be retconning Homer and Marge’s marriage - Homer and Marge’s wedding video features at one point, yet it doesn’t look how it did in the series. The first time they got married in a casino - but Marge actually divorced Homer in one episode and they remarried in their own home. So I’m not sure where this wedding video came from, but then again, continuity has never been the Simpson’s strong point. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show when he had Matt Groening on mentioned that Homer is supposed to be 38… and he met Marge in high school, but Bart is only 10.

(Obsessive compulsive) fans will also know that the layout of Springfield regularly changes to suit the plot, but there was a truly atrocious example of bad continuity when early in the film it shows the Church and Moe’s being next door to each other, when only a few minutes later it is shown to be on the edge of the area covered by the Dome the EPA lower on to Springfield… and Moe’s has vanished.

It was a really good film though - tonnes of excellent gags. To name one, the blackboard gag at the start: “I will not illegally download this movie”.

I would: recommend it. Even if you are lining Rupert Murdoch’s pockets.

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Ska Trek
July 25th, 2007 at 02:01

I have recently entered into a bet with my friend Fundar. He has played the trumpet for a number of years and back when we used to go to school, it was him who played The Last Post every year in the Remembrance Day assemblies.

It became a running joke between us that he couldn’t actually play the Last Post very well, and so he has finally challenged me to a bet. He bet that I couldn’t play the Last Post better than he could.

As I’m the sort of idiot who takes a stupid conversation in the pub too seriously, I’ve accepted his challenge, and so intend to learn the trumpet. So I don’t clog up this blog with stuff about trumpets, I’ve started a blog to track my progress. Assuming I don’t give up tomorrow (likely) it should be pretty good - and I’ll have plenty of video footage from which to make a training montage.

Hopefully, towards the end of August, we’ll be having a big Last Post Off, in which we will go head to head in the trumpet equivalent of a rap battle, in order to determine who is the better player. This contest will be judged by our friend JD.

Click here for my special trumpet blog!

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The Next Great Invention
July 24th, 2007 at 01:15

I wonder when the history books are written, what will be the great inventions of the modern era? When future archaeologists are piecing together the remains of our society after the inevitable nuclear holocaust, what inventions are they going to single out as pivotal and important to 21st century technology? Who will be remembered as the next Babbage? The next Edison? The next Berners-Lee?

Unfortunately, I think its fairly unlikely that it’s going to be me - aside from being little more than a distraction from humankind’s pursuit of knowledge, writing drivel tends to have a limited shelf life. Especially when you have as many awkward pop-culture references forced in as I do. Its why nobody finds Love Thy Neighbour funny anymore. The same applies to Fred Basset… then again, maybe he was never funny.

Even if on the off-chance my writing on here does survive for hundreds of years, no one will read it in the way I’ve intended - it’ll be used by English teachers to torture kids with. Children will have to write timed essays over-analysing everything I’m saying, and describing how I foreshadow towards later events in my work. (Spoiler: the last word in this blog entry will be ’stuff’).

So I sort of wish that I’d gone down the career path of learning how to make stuff. Useful stuff - like what an engineer might make. I could have pioneered a new type of bridge and opened up a new passage to India by building a bridge all the way there. But no, I strangled my engineering talents at birth and stamped on its bloody corpse. Its a shame, as I’ve had some really good ideas for things that haven’t been invented yet, but I’m not capable of making them myself.

Why hasn’t anyone invented a GPS PDA, where you can set up a “to do” list with co-ordinates of where you need to do them? If the PDA detects that you’re in the area, it could make a noise to remind you to do something. It’d be tremendously useful for non-time sensitive things like “remember to buy that CD” when you’re in the vicinity of the town centre, or “remember to get your watch fixed”. (The latter wouldn’t be time sensitive because you’d have no way of knowing what the time is, obviously).

On a similar note, how about an in-car GPS system with an “I’m picking people up” mode, where you can put in the locations of everyone who’s going somewhere with you, and the destination where you ultimately want to be, and it’ll guide you on the most efficient route to all of your friends and the destination. Who knows… this could save literally minutes of time maybe. I think I’m just slightly obsessive-compulsive when it comes to efficiency.

Why isn’t there a social networking website where your profile is a bit like a Wiki, and your friends, but not yourself, are able to edit your profile at will to try and describe what you’re really like? In fact, I’m surprised this isn’t already a Facebook application.

And here’s an idea for a Wiki that I’m too lazy to make: whytheyrebastards.com, which is basically like a sensationalist version of Knowmore, listing reasons why you should hate certain companies or people. It’d be dead good, and useful reference for when you want to slag something off on an internet forum.

I’ve also had a great idea for a new TV innovation. When TV was invented they were little square things. This was then improved and they got a little bit bigger, then in the 90s, Widescreen suddenly became the in-thing. It’s all well and good being able to see extra at the sides of the picture… so why can’t we have more picture at the top and bottom? The next logical evolution would be Tallscreen TVs - all you’d need is a couple of inches on the top and bottom of the picture. They could make it, say, three quarters of the width tall. It’d be excellent - I can’t believe anyone hasn’t thought of it.

I wish I was an inventor so I could make this stuff.

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Crucible - Maybe Reality, One Day
July 23rd, 2007 at 21:39

The Crucible have a new single out… Who? Yeah, I hadn’t heard of them either until this morning when their PR company sent me a free CD - so I’m obliged to review it. As I’m an ethical blogger, here’s a disclosure:

Disclosure: I was sent the CD for free by the PR company.

Maybe Reality, One Day, is the sort of song that’d make incredible background music for the film 28 Weeks Later. The quiet and atmospheric “Oh no everyone is dead or a zombie” bits, not the zombie attack bits. You sort of get a post-apocolyptic sense of futility when listening to it. I’m not sure if this was the intention.

There’s a guitar, and there’s some drums, and they’re played in time together - which is basically how music generally works. In this instance, its done in a nice way - the noises each instrument make compliment each other and the song seems to build up momentum. It reminds me of the Million Dead song The Rise and Fall, in that sense- only it lasts a mere five minutes compared to Million Dead’s epic fourteen.

The vocals suit the song. Slow and drawn out, the chap singing sounds a little bit like Morissey, although at least an octave less arrogant.

What’s the song actually about? I’ve no idea but it all sounds a little bleak. I had to listen to some jaunty ska chords afterwards to cheer myself up.

The B-side song, Bubble Tea is a bit more upbeat. Its gentle - not James Blunt gentle though, thankfully. I’ve got no idea what its about… presumably the beverage bubble tea, unless the title is a clever play on words or a satire of some socio-political issue or something. I don’t know.

The third track on the single is the radio edit of the first song - its been cut down by a couple of minutes. The whole CD is just over fifteen minutes long, which I’m pretty impressed by, as that’s usually half an album for the stuff I listen to.

Over all, I think its alright, not bad. A pleasant tune. Bit of a shame that Arthur Miller doesn’t play the drums in the band, but then that wasn’t very likely anyway. Official rank: 7/10.

I think the less said about my proper music critic abilities the better.

(If you’re a company, why not send me some free stuff? I’ll review it on here and it’ll be great fun.)

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New Layout!
July 23rd, 2007 at 02:23

Notice anything different? I got tired of looking like everyone else, so I’ve updated my blog’s layout.

If you’re reading via RSS, now would be a good time to click in to see what I’m talking about.

There’s no major changes besides what you can see - they’re entirely superficial. I’ve basically bolted on a Batmobile-style fin, put some neons underneath and added some of those hubcaps that make it look like the wheels are still spinning when the car is stationary. Underneath all of the plastic tat its still a Fiat Punto inside.

I’ve arranged everything into neat boxes to satisfy my obsessive-compulsive ordering desires. I’ve also boosted up the font-size of posts - although this is mainly for selfish reasons. I run a 19″ monitor at 1280×1024 that’s set quite far back on my desk, so it makes easier for me to see. I quite like the bigger font as it makes me feel more important. Like I’m shouting my opinions at you and you’re being forced to listen.

What do you think? Why not post a comment and tell me - that would also be useful to check whether comments are still working. If anything isn’t, drop me an e-mail on the address above.

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Political Metrics
July 22nd, 2007 at 01:20

Politicians have always had a problem attracting young people. If you’re a boring old fart who’s idea of an exciting evening is discussing the finer points of the Private Finance Initiative or the latest movements in the Hungarian interest rate, then young people are going to think that you’re the most irritatingly tedious person alive. Its why politicians go out of their way to explain why they love the Arctic Monkeys.

But how can we judge a politician’s popularity with the ‘yoof’ of today? I think my friend Michael and I have stumbled upon an exciting new way to take metrics on just how popular politicians are: Facebook groups.

(Readers! If you have a Facebook account, it will massively enhance the rest of this post - it’s like having digital telly and press red. You’re able to pointlessly switch over from Tim Henman losing at Wimbledon to a couple of nobodies on Court 4 battling it out.)

On Facebook, you have the ability to create and join groups where you can discuss common interests or state your allegiance with a cause. Whilst this is invariably sickeningly studenty topics like “Fun House Appreciation Society” or “Bring back the Crystal Maze” (if that were a manifesto commitment the party would be practically guaranteed victory), there are some political groups too. And I think the groups say a lot about politicians. Here are some examples:

Lets start with someone obvious: the Boris Johnson appreciation society has over 12,000 members.

‘Stop David Cameron… his lies make baby Jesus cry‘ has 1200 members. Meanwhile, he has 62 members in his ‘appreciation society‘, although to be fair, there are a number of pro-Cameron groups so the membership is probably fairly fragmented.

One of the more bewildering groups is the (brace yourself for this) David Davis Appreciation Society. W..W…What? David Davis. Really. It has 40 members.

Tessa Jowell has exactly seven fans. Charles Clarke has an incredible ten.

The group “Iain Duncan Smith, I love you“, generously calls IDS “only slightly inept”. The man who thinks that tax cuts will heal deep personal problems and cause less marriages to fall apart has only three fans. This is pretty pathetic when you consider that Alistair Darling’s eyebrows alone have exactly 24 times as many supporters.

‘Michael Meacher‘ for PM. Two members. One of them is… Michael Meacher.

‘Hazel Blears depreciation society‘… 151 members. ‘Hazel Blears - what a fox‘… 20 members. Telling.

There are 3,500 nutcases who ‘appreciate’ Margaret Thatcher. The Anti-Thatcher league only has 640 members. Damn.
‘Ruth Kelly is shit and should resign‘ - 16 members. ‘Sack Ruth Kelly‘ - 21 members. ‘I support Ruth Kelly‘ - er, 2 members.

George Osbourne has 102 fans and 94 anti-fans. Which shows that there is something slightly wrong with the world.

So what does this prove? Some people like politicians and other people don’t. What a revelation.

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