New Toy
This is my first post on my new laptop, which arrived this morning. It’s very cool; I have a new toy!
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Month: October 2003
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I can’t believe I missed this, but the archive of what happened when The Barefoot Quack, er, Doctor (who dispenses laughably daft new-age advice in the Observer magazine every week) went online on the Guardian’s website on Tuesday this week is possibly the funniest thing I have read in ages.
That’s questions like: “Of what, exactly, are you a doctor? Also, I know two people with Multiple Sclerosis. Should they massage their kidneys clockwise or anticlockwise? And what is the correct chant?”
And: “I’ve recently contracted syphillis. Do you have any exercises to cure me of this affliction ? Oh, and I have a friend with full blown AIDS. Would acupuncture help ?”
Even better is the fact that, according to Private Eye, the Observer had to send round the following internal memo:
“The Barefoot Doctor is online on Tuesday to answer questions of healing and health. Safe to say, he isn’t proving wildly popular and the questions are just a tad aggressive.”
The memo then went on to implore Observer hacks to redress the balance: “If some of you could take time out to ask a rather more benign question, then you’ll probably feel better for it.”
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I’ve been quietly contemplating the passage of time this week, what with it being my birthday yesterday and all. The big celebration, of course, will be on Saturday (you are coming to the pub, aren’t you? It’s a better pub than it is website, I promise).
26 might not be the rock star death age or anything, but it seems, to me at least, to be a significant step nonetheless, what with it being definitely closer to 30 than it is to 20. At 25 I could cling vainly to the notion that I was still part of that all important 18-25 “youth” target market. Alas, that is no longer the case.
No longer eligible to enter Pop Idol, or buy tickets from STA Travel, this week I renewed my Young Person’s Railcard for the last time. Even worse, yesterday we all had to fill in a survey at work and I had to place myself in the 26 – 35 age group. It’s all downhill from here, isn’t it?
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Reliving my childhood
Last night we went to see Finding Nemo, the latest release from purveyors of anthropomorphic kids-films-that-adults-like, Pixar. It was reassuring to see that we weren’t the only people there who had forgotten to bring a small person with them (although given that this was a 9pm showing, not altogether surprising).
I was also amused by the reactions of a woman a couple of rows behind me, who could be heard gasping several times at some of the more, er, dramatic moments.
Still, seeing a kids film last night doesn’t make me feel any less old today.
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Home taping is (still) killing music
I’m wondering if I should be worried about the fact that a student in the US is being sued under the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) for publishing a paper on the Internet telling people how circumvent CD copy protection using the complex method of pressing the SHIFT key, given that I proposed a similar technique back in July. As this week’s NTK points out, the European equivalent legislation, the EUCD, comes into effect in just a couple of weeks, having been passed by Parliament last week:
“The final implementation, signed off by Parliament last Friday (yes, we missed it too), now makes time-shifting TV shows only legal “for domestic use”, bans practically anything else, and puts the DMCA-like clampers on breaking copyright protection.”
Oops. Well then, if you happen to purchase a CD that breaks the Red Book standard (and therefore isn’t technically a CD at all) by employing copy-protection that is ludicrously easy to cicumvent, and foolishly want to listen to the thing on your PC, well, it wasn’t me that told you how to do it. Honest.
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Sadly, I’ll be off on the other side of the world, and won’t be able to get involved in Tim Ireland’s plan to chase Bush out of the country next month, but should you be in possession of a posterior and a disliking for the bumbling one, then you may wish to have a look at the details of the planned protest: “Bare Your Bum at Bush“.
UPDATE. It’s also worth mentioning this (non-satirical) site, where you can send a message of thanks to Tony Blair for the steadfast support he has offered to the US over the past 2 years. Apparenly every week the website will be printing out your messages of thanks “on paper” (as opposed to, er, parchment or gold leaf I presume) and sending them to 10 Downing Street. I thought I’d send him a message of my own (reprinted below). Perhaps you’d like to send one too?
Now that the war on terror has been comprehensively won, the terrorists are defeated, Iraq is liberated, peaceful and safe, Afganistan stable and properous, Israel and Palestine at peace, Al-Qaeda defeated and disbanded, Osama Bin Laden and Sadam Hussein captured, North Korea and Iran disarmed… I can sleep easy in my bed knowing that the world is safe once more. We have nothing to fear from the terrorists, as they will surely never attack us again now, and it’s all thanks to you Tony.
You, more than any other have done your bit for world peace. Surely a Nobel Prize can only be a few short months away (shared, of course, with the great President George Bush).
By standing by America when the rest of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of this world (ungratefully) stood up for their principles, you have shown that it is only by killing as many of these nasty people as possible that they get the message (and if a few thousand innocent civilians get in the way, then, darn it, we just have to accept that as the price that they have to pay for the good of us all).
Thanks Tony! Thanks man! You more than anyone have made the world a safer place!
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I read my London News Review on the tube into work this morning, possibly in the vain hope that the other people in the carriage might think I’m cool and interesting and at the forefront on some new magazine publishing phenomenon. I’m not sure anyone even noticed.
The magazine is excellent, though, and I will definitely be subscribing, although I am slightly disappointed to see that Richard Herring has recycled one of his old Warming Up entries for his column (that is, assuming he actually knows he has a column; maybe the chaps at hanging day were running a bit short of material and just copied it off the web and didn’t tell him).
Still no news on their launch party. It’s gone from happening “in September” to “the second half of October” to “around the launch of issue 1”. If it’s more than 36 days in the future I won’t be too happy…
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David Blaine tucking into a big plate of chips
I feel it is utterly in keeping with the mindless banal tedium of the exercise to report that we thought about going to see chubby-faced David Blaine in his little box at the weekend.
But couldn’t be bothered.
Instead, I filled my desire to see magicians doing daft/outrageous/insensitive stunts in an effort to impress by watching fellow ex-Bristolian Derren Brown not shooting himself on “live” TV. Actually, for all the hype, the show was quite entertaining. Brown is certainly an excellent showman. Despite the fact that we all knew that it was probably a trick, and wasn’t actually live anyway, and therefore could not have resulted in his gruesome death and some very messy camera lenses, there was still a genuine tension in the air in our living room when he came to pull the trigger repeatedly with the gun at his temple. Making it look like he had messed the trick up by firing one of the empty cylinders away, then pretending to need time to compose himself before firing one more empty one at his head and then the real bullet away from his head was a particularly inspired move.
Now that chubby Blaine has done the pretend starvation thing (some news feature I saw the other day pointed out that he hasn’t lost much weight at all and suggested they might be switching him for a double in the dead of night – so if you see a shabby, dark-haired, unshaven chap wearing a nappy in the Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse tucking into a plate of chips you’ll know why), I just wonder where this is all going to end.
Seriously, what’s next? David Copperfield parting the Red Sea? Paul Daniels being crucified and then rising from the dead?
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Look…
