Month: March 2003

I just noticed that we are the second search result in Google (of “about 718,000”) for the string “Creative Writing Magazine” (although again, there’s no guarantee how long that will be the case).

Excellent… I was just looking through the Paste Magazine log files (don’t ask – slow day at work) and I discovered that there is a real boxer called “Robert Allen”. A middleweight apparently. Yesterday someone did a search on him in Google using the string “boxer robert allen”. The top search result for this is Atmospheric Anomaly. Perhaps not what they were looking for.

Try it for yourself (although there’s no guarantee that it will still work when you do if they have updated their database by the time you read this).

So it’s that time of year again. Don’t get me wrong, overexposure to Lenny Henry, people in baths of baked-beans and dubious office comedy aside, Comic Relief is generally a good thing. The only reason I mention it is the fact that I had the misfortune to watch one of the episodes of “Celebrity” Fame Academy earlier this week. [Tellingly, the official title for the show doesn’t even actually include the word “celebrity”. Is it just me? I didn’t even recognise some of these people, and the ones I did were definitely of the lower alphabet variety. That bloke that was on Hollyoaks years ago, for example].

Anyway, it goes without saying that it was another one of the worst pieces of television I’ve seen in ages (sort of reminded me of that Channel 5 Saturday evening karaoke thing with Suggs on it actually), but I suppose you can forgive them as it’s for a good cause… one bit really stuck out though. They were going through the results of the phone vote and they said that that it had raised £90,000 for Comic Relief. All very good of course, until you see the small print when they put up the phone numbers: “Calls cost 40p, 25p goes to Comic Relief”. A quick bit of maths tells me that, yes, it may have raised £90,000 for charity, but that means they had 360,000 calls, so it also “raised” £54,000 for BT… which seems like an awful lot to me.

The next day I’m in the car and Radio 1 is on, and they have some text-in competition for Comic Relief where the text costs you £1 in addition to your normal text costs, of which only 70p actually goes to the charity. So the mobile companies get an extra 30p on top of what they would get for a normal text, er, for doing what exactly?

People! Stop it! Stop phoning in to Fame Academy! It doesn’t matter if Paul Ross or that tit from the kiddies soap gets voted off. No one cares. More’s the point, why not give the 40p you would have spent on phone calls – or multiples of 40p if you are inclined to do this regularly – directly to Comic Relief (or any other charity for that matter)? They’ll get more money that way.

And don’t, whatever you do, buy that Gareth Gates record.

Some people from “Richard and Judy” are filming at work today. It’s going to be on the show tomorrow, part of a feature on “Medallion man” makeovers. Some of the guys here have volunteered to be given said makeovers (which from what I can tell seems to amount to 70s afro wigs and flares).

Of course, if you can’t watch, maybe you’d like to punch them in the face instead.

Your choice I guess.

[UPDATE: This wasn’t actually on when they said it would be. Apparently it will now be on next Friday (the 14th)]

Someone sent me this earlier, it’s from yesterday’s guardian:

“Sky News, meanwhile, remains cripplingly self-effacing. ‘Of course, you the viewers can have your say on Saddam’s long-range missiles,’ claimed a presenter on Friday. ‘Just press the red button…'”

That sort of reminds me of something I saw the other day on one of the shoddy cable channels we get. It was a trailer for a documentary about the conflict in the Gulf in the early 90s. The trailer finished with the following, rather unfortunate, (or perhaps prophetic) comment:

“‘The Gulf War’. Starts Wednesday at 11…”