Homeopathy: Does it work?
April 16th, 2008 at 16:56

(RSS readers may have to click back to the original article to see this)

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Life immitates Art
March 25th, 2008 at 14:47

Last Summer, my friend Katy and I went down to the Natural History Museum in London and made a stupid video, where I pretended to be a creationist, and went around, “debunking the science”. If you didn’t catch it, take a look:

I thought that my video was far too ridiculous - but remarkably, some commentators on YouTube (and indeed GodTube) took it seriously. As if this isn’t mad enough, it turns out that some creationists have stolen my idea. Check out this video below - they’re totally ripping me off - but unlike me, they’re totally sincere:

The horrible thing is that its better than my video. There’s so many great lines - I wish I’d thought of them…

• “How do you know?”
• “I come here for facts, not somebody’s fantasy”
• “Its called circular logic”
• “Its a good fairy tale”

I know when I’ve been beaten.

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Weakest Link Highlights Video
March 4th, 2008 at 19:48

Here’s a video of all of the bits of me from The Weakest Link. I’ll expand on this with commentary and stuff later.

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Lets go fly a kite…
February 24th, 2008 at 18:51

…or attempt to, anyway…

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State of the Union: Highlights
January 29th, 2008 at 19:21

What’s that? You like it when idiots on YouTube rip-off the Daily Show’s tried and tested “splice reaction shots into clips of speeches” formula and package it shambolically? Excellent:

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2007 in Review
December 21st, 2007 at 00:57

Being a blogger, I sit on the periphery of the media village. Whilst I still toil away, churning out a few hundred words here, a stupid video there, I’m still one of the normal proles because I lack three key ingredients of being a proper media personality: credibility, popularity, and respect. This doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t fall into the lazy journalistic trap of filling up the end of the last couple of weeks of the year with a look back at what happened. So, er, here’s look back at my 2007.

Yes, this is the most self-indulgent video ever made. And yes, I did spend time making a musical montage consisting of clips of me. That’s how egocentric I am.

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The Damned
December 5th, 2007 at 17:14

I went to a gig last night. No, wait, don’t scroll down! Its not one of those blog entries - there’s actually a story attached to this! I went to see veteran punk band The Damned with my dad (with whom I’d been to see the Sex Pistols a few weeks ago). I reasoned that I like punk, and I like my dad… what could possibly go wrong?

So the first of two support bands finish their (terrible) set and I ask my dad who the next band are. Casually as anything, he tells me that they’re a bunch of strippers.

“What the fuck, dad?”

Needless to say, it was going to be literally the most awful and awkward thing in the world. So I spent the duration of the “act” browsing the internet on my snazzy new phone, trying to forget that I was with my dad, technically watching what is apparently described as a “burlesque” act.

It wasn’t entirely seedy - well, sort of, anyway. It was compared by a piano-playing woman with an irritating voice, which she used to emit sub-Norton innuendo interspersed with dreadful songs. She also had a glove puppet of a sheep.

It was terrible on so many levels.

It reminded me a lot of when you get TV personalities who are inexplicably famous for being fun characters, despite not actually being comedians. Like Ant & Dec or Vernon Kaye - have all of the enthusiasm and bravado required for their job, but negligible actual talent.

Terrible.

Luckily, the actual band, The Damned, were pretty good, and inadvertently hilarious. Despite being arguably the originators of punk, they did the most un-punk thing and got a member of the audience ejected for throwing his drink at the stage. Excellently, thanks to the magic of technology, I got most of this incident on film - check out the video below. Things kick off about 30 seconds in when you see some liquid enter the screen from the left. The keyboardist, Monty Oxymoron, goes mental. The security had to restrain him, as you’ll see on the video. He then spends the remainder of the song drying his keyboards:

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Natural History Museum
August 10th, 2007 at 23:17

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Paris Video
August 4th, 2007 at 21:52

You may complain about the sound quality, but Paris really does have an awful mono background white-noise going on all the time. It also has very little narrative structure, although I believe the Mayor is trying to tackle that with some reforms.

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Paris: Day 2
August 1st, 2007 at 11:06

I can’t believe how much we did yesterday. We must have seen almost everything in Paris, apart from perhaps the inevitable suburban riots and unionised Frenchmen doing some actual work.

Our first visit of the day was to the Arc Du Triumph, which is surprisingly massive. Its in the middle of a gigantic roundabout that has approximately fifty lanes of traffic and no road markings. I think Parisian roundabouts work on a system where by you filter on to the roundabout whenever, and it’s a free-for-all as you fight for survival. Luckily, we didn’t have to cross the road to get there - there was an poorly lit underpass full of tourists.

Next up, we walked down the Champs Elysee, which was full of some very expensive looking shops - not the useful kinds of shops though, as they all looked like women’s clothes shops. We stopped for some food near to a man who was standing about whistling tunes in the style of pigeons. He was trying to hawk some sort of bird whistle, so played a number of recognisable tunes in (pun-alert!) pigeon English. JD, ever the obvious tourist with his ‘Paris’ t-shirt, shorts and sandals, was taken in by this and bought one. I haven’t seen him use it yet, although they’ll be a YouTube video when he does.

We continued down the CdE, meandering through one of the various jardins that are invariably actually the roof of an underground car park, passing the seating that had been set up for the Tour de France. I think we went past the Elysee Palace, but I’ve really no idea - there were some fancy gates, so they must have been in front of something important.

At the bottom of the Champs Elysee is the Place de la Concorde, which is where two hundred years ago they guillotined the Royal Family, and set in motion the chain of events that would lead to not only the American revolution and republican democracy around the world, but a boom in sales for guillotine salesmen.

From the PdlC, you get the most incredible view. The French National Assembly on one side, the Louvre on another, the Arc De Triumph and the Grand Arch de Defence and the Eiffel Tower. This was also surrounded by what was probably the most dangerous roundabout in the world. In the middle, rather than have a guillotine set up, just in case the French Royal Family try and organise another rebellion, there’s a big Egyptian Obelisk, which is incredible to look at. It’s surprisingly big and covered in hieroglyphics. I would give it 9/10.

We kept walking in the same direction through the jardins and ended up in front of the Louvre. Its a massive building and visually very impressive. Sitting outside, we wondered whether or not to go to the Louvre, the busiest, biggest and most famous art gallery in the world. The consensus amongst the publique generalé seems to be “tsk, you can’t see it all in day” “you’ll never get in because its always busy” “it takes ages to see the Mona Lisa”. Even so, we decided to go in with only four hours until closing time - on the basis that none of us are art critics and there’s going to be a lot of “filler” material, we’d only need a few hours. So we went in.

At about three o’clock in the afternoon on a monday, the queue was incredibly short. We couldn’t have queued for any longer than two minutes. First of all we did the most obvious thing and went to try and see the Mona Lisa, just like every other tourist ever. It had its own sign posts.

The Mona Lisa has glass in front of it, and it is mounted on what I assume is some sort of security device. There were hundreds of tourists all standing around trying to push their way to the front to see it - although its not like they hadn’t seen it before. It was quite surreal, as no one could give a damn about the other paintings, yet get the one from the Da Vinci code on the wall and everyone is dying to see it.

It was pretty good though - someone said to me that seeing it is exciting because you’re seeing something so famous, not because of the actual artistic ability, which were distinctly average. I’m sure Da Vinci’s use of light in paintings was revolutionary at the time, but these days we have photos that do much the same thing.

The other wing of Louvre, over the other side of the courtyard was practically empty (slight exaggeration). The best thing it had to boast was a load of old Persian carpets and Islamic pots. One thing it did have were some old timey Mesopotamian statues - they were incredible.

The Louvre was pretty good - much better than the Tate Modern, in that the paintings actually looked like the things that they’re supposed to be.

We left the Lourve via the secret underground shopping centre - which had a Virgin Megastores underneath the lovely jardin above. Which was a bit bizarre if you were expecting the grave of Mary Magdalene instead.

Aprés the Louvre, we went to Monmatre, which is the location of the Sacre Coeure, which is basically a massive church built by French aristocrats to “expiate the crimes” of the socialist-commune government. Its on the top of a massive hill - to get to the top you can take a funicular - which rather than being merely a tourist gimmick, is actually marked on the metro map and is compatible with metro tickets.

At the bottom of the hill there appears to be some con-artists in permanent residence. Apparently the scam is that they go up to tourists and tie a piece of string around their fingers… and sell them the string. And probably try to pick-pocket them at the same time.

The inside of the church was pretty predictable: it was basically a bunch of Catholics being wrong, but they were happy so we left them to it. The view from the top of the hill gives you an ace view of the Paris skyline.

Next, as it was getting dark, we went to the Eiffel Tower and incredibly, seemed to get lucky with the lines again. We only had to queue for about half an hour, which is pretty good when you consider that everyone you talk to about the Eiffel Tower who has usually been there tends to recoil in horror when you tell them you just want to look at it, because there’s so many tourists that the tower isn’t even reflecting or emitting enough photons to be seen properly without flickering.

We went to the second floor on the basis that it wouldn’t be as expensive or busy as the top. Perhaps the most startling revelation is that it turns out that I appear to suffer from vertigo when being really, really high up. I’m assuming its because you’re not behind a sheet of glass and theoretically you could fall. I mean, if there were an earthquake that throws you over the high barriers.

The view was incredible you could see everything. The most surprising thing though was the cost of a Coke there. I was expecting a “grande” Coke to be 330ml and cost about half a million pounds, yet it turns out that the Eiffel Tower’s definition of large is approximately the same size as a cinema Coke. Not bad value, really.

After getting down from the Eiffel Tower it was just after midnight, and we had to act fast to catch the Metro - which finished running at half 12. After faffing about for about 15 minutes trying to find the metro station, we got on a train to find people playing music on the train. It seemed very French. It wasn’t until they went around afterwards begging for money that it because obvious what their hidden motive was. Here’s a video:

We arrived at the Latin Quarter to find the most incredible thing: a dance battle. Just in the street like - there were a group of people with a stereo and two men trying to out-do each other at dancing whilst a sizeable crowd watched. It was a bit embarrassing as one bloke was shit hot doing flips and spinning and wearing a jaunty hat, whilst the other was just a bit rubbish.

We made our way to a Jazz Club that JD and Fundar wanted to go to. There was some sort of “swing” band on and they played the sort of twenty minute long songs you’d expect at a jazz club. The barman also had the ability to throw glass bottles around a catch them.

We stayed there until around half-two, when we caught the night-bus home. At 3am. In the centre of Paris. It was a bit scary.

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