Month: February 2004

I was in the post office at lunchtime today, and while I was waiting in the queue, I was watching this big TV screen in the middle of all the counters. Most of the time it was just going “Cashier number 4 please…”, but when it wasn’t doing that, it would show information about all the things you can get in the post office (don’t worry, I’m going somewhere with this…).

The reason it caught my eye was that when I first looked at it, the screen said “Did You Know? February 17 1930 marked the first flight by a cow flew in a plane. The cow was milked during the flight, and the milk was parachuted into St Louis.” Bizarrely, as soon as anyone watching had had time to digest this important flying cow-related fact, it was all “you can get your passport processed at the post office, and don’t forget to get your foreign exchange done here too…” It wasn’t like a series of “fascinating” facts or anything (I watched for a good 10 minutes while I stood in the queue after that), nor was it a “this day in history” type thing, given that today is the 27th, it was just one utterly random piece of information about a flying cow. Why? Did someone put that information in there just for me? Am I supposed to be remembering this stuff for some date in the future when it’s going to come in handy?

I almost considered taking Damien Rice up on the offer he made about a quarter of the way into his Brixton Academy gig on Saturday night. It had been a strangely dull gig up to that point, and this was the first thing he actually said to us, as yet another song ended in protracted feedback. At that point, I hadn’t noticed anyone talking–later on he said that there were probably a lot of “new” people here, and that if this was what being popular meant, he’d rather play somewhere smaller next time, so maybe he’s used to some kind of reverential silence at his gigs, or perhaps we weren’t applauding quite vigorously enough–but after he had made a big deal out of it, it became noticeable that he had completely lost the back third of the crowd. Perhaps asking your audience to leave, and then telling them you don’t want them there, isn’t the best way to win over the crowd.

The frustrating thing was that there were flashes of brilliance to his performance, but for every good five minutes, we had to stand (quietly) through twenty minutes of dull, dreary rubbish.

The best part of the whole gig was when his cellist came back between the main set and the encore to sing and play a stunning solo performance of Seven Nation Army on her cello.

She got the biggest cheer of the night, naturally.

Earlier this week, I was mocked at home for reading a book about punctuation (Eats, Shoots & Leaves, natch, the Schott’s Miscellany for writers) instead of mindlessly watching Sex and the City and the Brit awards. Anyway, just to prove that it does matter, I feel it only appropriate to link to this article about how the judges ruling on whether San Francisco should continue to allow gay marriages have thrown out the conservative proposition to ban them because of a misused semicolon:

“‘I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal … That semicolon is a big deal,’ said San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren.”

Too right. Anybody who thinks it doesn’t matter has obviously never been in a room with a team of professional writers. I once had an argument about bulleted lists that listed for weeks.

I notice Yahoo! has just dumped Google’s search results… nice to see that in their new database Paste appears (for the moment at least) twice in the top ten results for creative writing magazine. But that’s nothing. We all know that the real search engine optimisation paydirt is with brain surgeon’s salary (first and second places! absolutely no useful information about how much brain surgeons get paid! result!)

I think I might have blogged about The Brits last year. This year they’d certainly learnt one lesson from that exercise in paint drying observance, (no alcohol=dull ceremony), but other than that, it was more of the same old rubbish as every other year. I don’t know why I watch it. Like some kind of addict I just can’t help myself, but it always leaves me wondering why I don’t remember the last year of music quite that way. The choices are always just so safe.

I think Busted getting Best British Breakthrough Artist probably marks some sort of nadir even for the Brits (at least the Sam Fox/Mick Fleetwood debacle had comedy value). There’s only one of those four words I’d even remotely agree with, and it isn’t Best, Breakthrough or Artist. (What exactly are they supposed to have broken-through? It must be awfully hard to get radio play when you only have major-label backing, a svengali-style manager and a team of publicists on your side…)

And the performances–Simon Le Bon not quite getting the high notes on Wild Boys; Busted (them again) doing Teenage Kicks by numbers, and little Jazz elf Jamie what’s-his-face and that sub-Norah Jones woman with the cheapest-looking TV advert (ever) massacring The Cure–were a bit too much to take.

And at one point there was supposedly going to be some sort of collaboration between Outkast and Beyonce. In reality, Outkast (no doubt reeling still from the news that, actually, you shouldn’t shake it like a Polaroid picture) came on and played their hit song, and then left and on came Beyonce to play her hit song. At no point were they on the stage together. That’s not a collaboration; that’s two people playing their own songs one after the other.

I’m sorry, I just struggle to believe that Spinal The Darkness, Busted, Daniel Bedingfield and Annie Len Dido are the best things in British music at the moment. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs if it’s true.

This morning I found an album on my MP3 player that I have never listened to, only to discover that it’s really good. It’s Stephen Malkmus’s debut solo album. The funny thing is I can’t remember where it came from. Maybe the download fairies left it there.

Every time I start to think that I might have run out of things to blog about, I have a weekend like this one (when I was both sworn at in the street and asked to leave a pub for doing nothing more than trying to buy drinks).

But first things first. On Friday night, we celebrated Sally’s quarter of a century by dragging a whole bunch of people out to the pub. It was an excellent night out (as far as I remember), at least after we had relocated from what was formerly one of our favourite pubs in the area. In the spirit of the New York bloggers who were asked to leave the bar in which they were having a party in similar circumstances, and retaliated by Googlebombing it into becoming the worst bar in NYC, I’ll now be referring to the Barnsbury as the rudest pub in Islington.

We’ll probably never go back to the rudest pub in Islington again now, after they told us they needed their table back at 8.30 because they were too busy, we’d have to leave, and no, we couldn’t buy any more drinks, actually, not even if we stood up. After we’d moved next door to the infinitely friendlier Prince Regent, and secured a large table, the remainder of the evening was wonderfully entertaining, and ended, for Sally and me at least, at the Medicine Bar on Upper Street. Apparently there was dancing, but I barely remember it and I’m not sure exactly how I got home.

Most of the rest of the weekend was quiet by contrast, especially given Sally’s double-whammy birthday/valentine’s combo on Saturday, but extremely relaxing.

Then on Sunday night, we went to see the Jack Nicholson/Diane Keaton OAP-Rom-Com, Something’s Gotta Give, which actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, and worthy of mention for a couple of reasons. First, there seemed to be an awful lot of “please don’t bootleg this film using a video camera” type messages before it, which is rather quaint and only slightly ironic. After all, who would ever want to bootleg a film using a video camera when everyone knows you can get a DVD-quality rip of a screener copy–if you’re that way inclined–off the Internet (or your friendly neighbourhood Oscar judge)? Secondly, I wonder if it really means I’m too far gone if I spend half the film obsessing about the fact that, when Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton have a conversation over AOL Instant Messenger, they seem to have the screenshots the wrong way round, with the icons on her nice little iBook looking distinctly like they were grabbed off a PC, while his part of the conversation on his Sony Vaio laptop looks like it was done on a Mac?

On the way home we were stopped by a chap who told us that his van had run out of petrol, and did we have a quid. Which was rather odd, thinking about it, given that I’d probably be asking for directions to a petrol station, or something, in those circumstances, (and I’m still not entirely sure what he was supposed to be doing with the pound if we’d given it to him–can you buy a can of petrol for a quid?) When I apologised and explained that I didn’t actually have any money to give him (we had just walked out to the cinema, and were walking home; not anticipating any petrol emergencies, I didn’t have my wallet), he actually audibly called me a “lanky streak of piss” as he was walking away. An excellent insult, I’m sure you agree (and one that I haven’t heard since I was about 11) but one that I still have trouble understanding. Like the daft I’ve-run-out-of-petrol-can-I-have-a-quid story, he really hadn’t thought it through, had he? We were some distance away by the time I realised what he’d said, and unfortunately the best come-back I could manage (in what I now realise was maybe my squeakiest, scouse-est voice) was “hey, calm down mate”. I still can’t believe I actually said it.

All in all, an excellent weekend.

Much as I love my new shorter commute, it does create one small problem: I no longer have enough time to read the whole paper on the way into work. By this point in the week, and this one is no exception, I have usually acquired a large pile of unfinished Independents, and more often than not compound the problem by picking up Thursday’s Guardian, if only for Online, and Bad Science. This week, to make matters worse, a bumper crop of books that I ordered online weeks ago have all turned up. Frankly, the chances of me actually managing to finish reading Vernon God Little (or even starting Brick Lane) aren’t really looking good now that I have yet more reading matter at my disposal (most of which I have added to the ever growing list in the sidebar). I’m quite prepared for the last of them, Q, to be crap, but I couldn’t resist buying the “cult, historical novel” purely for the comedy value of the Italian anarchist collective responsible for it having chosen the name of the former Watford (and briefly AC Milan) striker Luther Blissett as their pseudonym.

In other news, inspired by Rob and Angel’s recent name-related postings, here’s the definition of my name from the Kabalarian website:

Your name of Matthew has created a most expressive nature, idealistic and inspirational, driven with a strong inner urge to be of service in some way that would uplift humanity as a whole. However, there is a tendency to assume too heavy a burden of responsibility for others, which leads to worry and undue concern. People with problems are drawn to you as they recognize you as one who has understanding and gives not only sympathy and comfort but provides also some constructive advice or assistance. You have a generous quality to your nature, but you must guard carefully against giving more than you receive or you will find yourself doing without because you have helped someone else.

Dingo Stole My Baby (My Amazon thinks I’m emigrating)

I love getting Amazon recommendations. I appreciate their attempts to do something clever with their user data, but in my case, preferring as I do to get most of my books from real shops, and my CDs and DVDs from cd-wow and play, I actually shop there so rarely–and when I do, it’s often to purchase presents for people–that their recommendations are always laughably skewed towards the randomness of my occasional purchases. On purchasing a kitchen applicance from them over the weekend, I found the following list of recommendations attached to the confirmation email. Are they trying to tell me something? (must be that Rolf Harris boxset and boomerang collection I bought the other week, or something)

Recommendations for your next visit:

– Australia: A Biography of a Nation by Phillip Knightley

– Getting into Australia: The Complete Immigration Guide to Gaining Your Visa (How to S.) by Matthew Collins

– At Home in Australia by Peter Conrad

– Australia : Journey Through a Timeless Land: Journey Through a Timeless Land by Roff Smith, Sam Abell (Photographer)

– Bug Australia: The Backpacker’s Ultimate Guide by Tim Uden

Surrounded by fools…

Sometimes I struggle to find the words to describe the incompetence that seems to permeate the customer service industry in this country. After last week’s unpaid rent debacle, when it turned out that our landlord didn’t really want any money off us after all, HSBC took it upon themselves to set up a second standing order to the landlord on a random date (today) and give them some extra money. 20 minutes of shouting at the customer service representative later, they agreed to reverse the payment. Hopefully, that is. We’ll see if it comes back tomorrow.

I should be thankful–at least this time I was talking to someone who could speak English fluently. Last week, on the other hand, I had to struggle to communicate with one of their staff who was quite obviously at a call centre in India. Now I don’t have any problem with the principle of outsourcing this sort of thing, as long as your customers don’t notice the difference, but if you have to repeat everything you say to the person on the other end of the phone very carefully (and only notice that he’s put the wrong payment amount in because you happen to have your Internet banking client open in front of you, as I did) then that’s not exactly a seamless switch, is it? If anybody ever tries to tell you that the customer won’t even know that they’re speaking to someone on the other side of the world, then they’re quiet evidently talking complete rubbish (although I suppose you could argue that the service is just as poor regardless of which call centre you get).

Much as I love the new flat, it does rather seem like everything has been unnecessarily complicated–from getting a phone installed, to getting the landlord to do simple things like furnish the flat and fix the vent so that the smell of smoke from the downstairs flat doesn’t waft into ours every time they light up.

Is it just me? Why does everything have to be so much more trouble than it needs to be?