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Sunday, May 31, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Caught by the Fuzz
Filth, Fuzz and Flatfoots
Police officers have more than their fair share of nicknames … the Filth, the Rozzers, the Bizzies, Flatfoots, the Boys in Blue, Mr Plod ... but where did these names come from? Who was Old Bill? Why are police officers Pigs, Bobbies or Cops? And are they really Fuzzy?
There is a written reference from 1811 to 'china street pigs', meaning the Bow Street Runners, the first proto-police officers. A popular pastime was to 'floor the pig and bolt' – to knock the officer over and run away.
In 1829, the newly formed London Metropolitan Police picked up the nickname of 'Peelers' after their founder, Sir Robert Peel. Thankfully, this soon fell out of favour and they became 'Bobbies'. Well, it's better than 'The Roberts'.
The name 'Fuzz' may have come from the early officers' large beards and whiskers but is more likely derived from common street slang when 'fuzzy' meant unmanly, incompetent or soft.
'Cop' and 'Copper' both come from the verb 'to cop' meaning to seize or get hold of (which in turn evolved from the Latin capere, which means to catch or capture). The term first appeared in print in 1846. It is definitely not an acronym of 'constable on patrol' as nearly all acronyms date from the 20th century.
The origins of the term 'Old Bill' are less easy to nail down. Among the most popular of the various competing theories are:
The name was arrived at by associating the police with The Old Bailey law courts by way of the music hall song 'Won't you come home, Bill Bailey?' It has nothing to do with Klingon-lookalike comedians.
Many moustache-wearing police officers looked like the cartoon character 'Old Bill', a wily old soldier created by Bruce Bairnsfeather. Old Bill appeared dressed as a Special Constable on wartime public information posters with a caption that started with 'Old Bill says …'
The original cars used by the Flying Squad had registration plates bearing the letters BYL.
Foreign slang words for the police include Bears, Jacks, Dog Catchers, Po Pos, the Barney Fife, Scuffers, La Chotas, Poulets, Omars, Snuten, Bängen, Pekkas, Bullen, Woodentops, Grünmütze, Titheads, Spassbremsen, Fun breakers, Sorte svin, Flics, Poggu and Donut Digesters.
Foxes and Fingerprints
The 'Twin Foxes' – the unimaginatively-named Albert Ebenezer and Ebenezer Albert Fox –were born in Hertfordshire in 1857 and at birth were so similar that their father tied a blue ribbon around the arm of one and a red ribbon around the arm of the other. But the ribbons soon got mixed up and, until death, neither of the Foxes was ever quite sure what their proper name should be. They grew up to be notorious poachers and petty thieves who, between them, notched up over 200 convictions. However, they often escaped justice by providing each other's alibis. They also made frequent claims for compensation for wrongful arrest, claiming that the wrong brother had been arrested. As reported, tongue-in-cheek, by the New York Times of February 9th 1913: 'For years they have borne these mistakes in silence. But now the soul of each burns at the thought of the injustice done to his brother'.
Sir Edward Henry (Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 1903-1918) used such cases of incorrect or difficult identification as an argument for throwing out older discredited fingerprint systems. Instead, he advised the use of a new system developed by the Indian police officers Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose. It became known as the Henry Fingerprint Classification System after its sponsor and was introduced to British policing in 1901 along with a national fingerprint identification bureau. The system remained in use until the 1990s when computers allowed for even more complex and accurate matching systems.
Fuzzy Firsts and Lasts
1830 - PC Joseph Grantham becomes the first police officer ever to be killed on duty. Three years later, the so-called Coldbath Fields Riot in Grays Inn Road, London result in the death of PC Robert Culley. However, during the subsequent trial, those involved were acquitted of 'justifiable homicide' because of alleged excessive force used by the police. A small trophy, the Culley Cup, was presented to the jury by the defendants.
1858 – The first British police van - a horse-drawn lockable cubicle – comes into use. These quickly become known as 'Black Marias'. Allegedly, the name commemorates a large, fierce, black hostel manager from Boston, Massachusetts called Maria Lee, who would frequently wade into the fray to assist her local police in conveying violent drunks to the station. Sailors brought stories of Ms Lee's exploits to the UK.
1863 – In the mid 1800s, drunkenness was the primary cause of police dismissal, and in 1863 year alone, the services of 215 officers were dispensed with. The offending officers' lack of sobriety is perhaps understandable when you note that 50,000 Londoners died of cholera in 1849 due to drinking dirty water. However, that hardly excuses one PC Cleares' behaviour when he was found drunk and 'absent from his beat and asleep with his head through a pane of glass in a greenhouse.'
1868 – The last public execution takes place in the UK. From now on, the only people to die in front of audiences would be comedians.
1898 – After PC Baldwin is murdered in Kingsland Road, there are calls for the police to be armed. Over a hundred years later, it still hasn't happened. Bureaucracy. Tchah.
1910 - Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen becomes the first person to be arrested as the result of electronic communication. After allegedly murdering his wife, Crippen attempted to flee the UK on a ship bound for Quebec, Canada. The captain of the SS Montrose suspected that he had some wrongdoers on board when he spotted some 'unusually affectionate behaviour' between a passenger called Mr Robinson and his son, John. Further observation convinced Captain Kendall that the boy was actually Ethel le Neve, Crippen's mistress, in disguise. Both she and Crippen were on Scotland Yard's most wanted list and their descriptions had been widely circulated. Kendall used the wireless to voice his suspicions to the ship's owners back home. Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew was immediately put on a faster boat, the SS Laurentic, and was waiting in Quebec to arrest Crippen and le Neve as they disembarked.
1915 – The first female police officer, Mrs Edith Smith, is sworn in at Grantham, Lincolnshire.
1919 – The Flying Squad is formed. Their name comes from the fact that they were mobile and could be deployed very quickly, plus the fact that their first two Crossley cars were formerly owned by the Royal Flying Corps. Their nickname of 'The Sweeney' derives from the Cockney rhyming slang (Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad). The opening credits of the 1970s TV series The Sweeney featured a fingerprint. This belonged to Pamela Green, a model and pioneer of nudist films. The credits were created by her partner, photographer Douglas Webb who, during the Second World War was an air gunner during Operation Chastise - the famous Dambusters raids.
1952 – The Kray Twins, Ronnie and Reggie, become two of the last prisoners to be kept in the Tower of London. They were banged up for refusing to do their National Service.
1967 – The Metropolitan Police HQ moves into a 20 storey office building on New Broadway, near Parliament Square. The original Scotland Yard was neither in Scotland nor in a yard. It was a building in Great Scotland Yard, a small side-street off Whitehall. Little of the original building remains as it was blown up by the Provisional IRA in 1973. In 1890, police headquarters were moved to purpose-built offices on the Victoria Embankment. This became known as New Scotland Yard. During the building of this new HQ, a woman's dismembered torso was found buried. She was never identified. Then, in 1967, the whole kit and caboodle was moved to New Broadway.
The name travelled too … so, technically, the current building should be called New New Scotland Yard.
Carry on Constable
England and Wales have 43 police forces between them. Scotland has eight. Before the creation of the police, the role of peace-keeper was performed by privately-funded watchmen and thief takers. Then, in 1737, George II began paying some of these watchmen with tax money, thus sowing the seeds of a government-sponsored police. By 1828, there were policing teams in 45 London parishes, all publicly funded.
The word 'police' was borrowed from French but was not popular at first, which is why many of the earlier forces used the word 'constabulary' which hinted at elected parish constables rather than some kind of foreign oppressor.
The word 'Constable' is from the Latin comes stabuli (count of the stables) and originally meant the person who looked after the horses of the gentry and royalty. Later on, constables also took on responsibility for armaments. While watchmen were used in the city, constables administered the law in the countryside.
The first proper police force arrived in 1800, with the arrival of the City of Glasgow Police. The Royal Irish Constabulary appeared in 1822. Then, in 1829, the Metropolitan Police Act was passed by Parliament, allowing Sir Robert Peel to found the London Metropolitan Police.
I've Met the Met
When they were founded, the Met's original establishment was 1,000 officers who policed an area within a seven-mile radius of Charing Cross. London's population was then less than 2 million.
Today, the Metropolitan Police Service employs 31,141 officers, 13,661 police staff, 414 traffic wardens and 2,106 Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), and covers an area of 620 square miles and a population of 7.2 million. That's a population density of 4,540 people per square km. One in four are from an ethnic minority and 300 different languages are spoken. The population swells during the working day as commuters and tourists flock to the city. 471,400 commuters arrive daily by train and 29,000 by car. And 27-30 million tourists visit London every year.
In 1847 London saw 14,091 robberies and 62,181 people were arrested. In 2007, London saw around 37,000 robberies and over 200,000 people were arrested.
It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.
It is an act of treason to place a postage stamp bearing the British monarch upside-down.
In Liverpool, it is illegal for a woman to be topless except as a clerk in a tropical fish store.
Mince pies cannot be eaten on Christmas Day.
In Scotland, if someone knocks on your door and requires the use of your toilet, you must let them enter.
In the UK, a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants, including in a policeman's helmet.
The head of any dead whale found on the British coast automatically becomes the property of the King, and the tail of the Queen.
It is illegal not to tell the tax man anything you do not want him to know, but legal not to tell him information you do not mind him knowing.
It is illegal to enter the Houses of Parliament in a suit of armour.
In the city of York it is legal to murder a Scotsman within the ancient city walls, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow.
Taken from The Strange Laws of Old England by Nigel Cawthorne (with thanks to the QI Elves). 'I've Met the Met' sticker circa 1984.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Boris - good enough!
Yesterday, there was a two page spread in the Mail about a good friend of mine called Jan Szymczuk. Known as Boris to his mates, he was (and still is I guess) the UK's foremost forensic illustrator. He's recently retired but he spent nigh on 30 years doing those pencil drawings of bad guys you see on TV - sometimes by hand but also by computer using 'e-fit' software (what we used to call photofit). With recent developments in the Maddie McCann case centred on just such a picture (not by Boris), he was asked to demonstrate how well the system works by doing three drawings of a suspect based on interviewing three witnesses. The feature - typically negatively headlined by the Mail as 'Call that a likeness? It's criminal!' (yawn) - was not too bad, all things considered. What it demonstrated, despite the reporter's every attempt to find fault, was that Boris is very good at his job and that all the police can do is create an image based upon witness testimony. And it's amazing how poor that can be at times. The heat of the moment, the adrenaline rush, can skew perceptions. As an example, here's a picture that Boris created of me a few years ago (when I wore specs), based solely upon the description of a witness - a lady in his office who'd met me very briefly
As you can see, it's not a photographic representation of me. But it would probably be enough to jog someone's memory if they saw the picture on Crimewatch the night before. I suspect I'd have had a knock on the door a few days later.
If you want to read the feature, it's online here. I actually went and bought the paper so I could keep the clipping. The whole event made me feel a bit dirty. But, luckily, I was able to sneak through the tills by concealing it inside some gay porn.
Boris's website is here. He's really very good.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
I couldn't skip over these could I ...
Getting ahead in advertising
It's curious how trends come and go in advertising. On TV there's a positive menagerie of CGI meerkats, pandas, squirrels and frogs advertising everything from lawn treatments to crisps. Even Mr Muscle has turned from a speccy wimp into a pixelated muscle guy who rescues badly-dubbed archetype housewives from the horrors of a blocked sink. But CGI is hugely expensive and in this time of credit crunchiness, will we see a scaling back of budgets? Does that explain the giant heads?
I wonder what's next?
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Not just a cabinet of curiosity ... a whole museum
But this blogpost is not a hollow boast about the famous people I've met. It's about celebrating the fact that the BBC still makes shows like this. In many ways, the Museum of Curiosity is a sister show to TV's QI. The obvious link here is John Lloyd who created both shows. John has an enviable CV; back in his early days as a radio producer he created the News Quiz - still running to this day - and shows like The News Huddlines and Quote Unquote. He also co-wrote two episodes of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy with his best friend Douglas Adams and, later, the two of them collaborated on the book The meaning of Liff. Moving to television in the 1980s, he gave us Not the nine O'Clock News, Spitting Image and produced all four series of Blackadder before creating QI. Most recently, John co-wrote The Book of General Ignorance with John Mitchinson, which has sold over a million copies and is the fourth bestselling book in Amazon's history. Surely, with that kind of history, it's no surprise that when he and producers Dan Schreiber and Richard Turner pitched the idea for the radio series to the BBC, they got the green light? Surprisingly, it's never quite that simple.
Nicholas Lezard in The Independent on Sunday wrote: 'I try to envisage the pitch. Imagine if you or I went up to the Head of What Goes Out at 6.30 on Radio 4 and said: "It's a show where we ask guests to bring along an item of interest for us to put in an imaginary museum. They get to tell us some anecdotes, and we make the odd quip." The Head of What Goes Out at 6.30 on Radio 4 puts the tips of his fingers together and says: "Is that it?" "Well, basically, yes." "And will your guests be famous?" "Well, we thought for the first show we'd have Brian Blessed, who is an enormous pain in the arse but undoubtedly very well known; a comedian not too many people have heard of like, say, Sean Lock, and then we'd have a completely off-beam choice, perhaps Richard Fortey, who is a world expert on trilobites and a member of the Royal Society." This sounds a bit mad, no? As I said, if you or I pitched this idea we'd hardly have time to eat our free BBC biscuit before being shown the door.'
But I'm so glad that it was the BBC who looked at this pitch. I'm not going to rant on about what a brilliant institution the Beeb is as people like Stephen Fry and David Mitchell have done so much mor eeloquently than I ever could. But the point they make is that the licence fee system allows these types of risk to be taken. If the BBC was driven solely by demographics and popular vote it would be nothing but soaps, reality shows and the occasional televised execution of a paedophile. The very fact that it doesn't always have to bow to these pressures means that it can make programmes for 'minority' audiences; people from smaller communities within the UK or people with specialist or unusual interests. As Stephen Fry once wrote. 'You know when you visit another country and you see that it spends more money on flowers for its roundabouts than we do, and you think … coo, why don't we do that? How pretty. How pleasing. What a difference it makes. To spend money for the public good in a way that enriches, gives pleasure, improves the quality of life, that is something. That is a real achievement. It's only flowers in a roundabout, but how wonderful. Well, we have the equivalent of flowers in the roundabout times a million: the BBC enriches the country in ways we will only discover when it has gone and it is too late to build it up again. We actually can afford the BBC, because we can't afford not to.'
Sage words.
The Museum of Curiosity is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Mondays at 6.30pm and is repeated on Sundays at 12pm. Official website is here. Blog is here. And they're on Twitter @curiositwitty.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Steve Martin's best gag in 20 years
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Announcing the first ever Twitter Musical!
Trolley, madly, cheaply
A Shoperetta written by Twitterers: @stevyncolgan, @ewarthale, @redmummy, @igoneill, @catronator, @wisecur, @mangowe, @angpang, @canuckuk, @mrslard, @karacornflake, @janedebond (have I missed anyone?)
The plot so far ... Welcome to BESTCO – an average supermarket in an average Northern town. The unfortunately named Mr Mac Staffbaiter runs a tight ship and dreams of one day becoming an area manager. All he has to do is avoid any kind of industrial hassles for one more week...
But then, a row erupts over new signage for the tills. On one side – those who are happy with the grammar of 'five items or less'. And on the other, those who insist it should be 'five items or fewer'. The staff are split. Tempers flare. Battle lines are drawn. Mac has no choice but to shut the store. Can anyone end the feud? Meanwhile, across the grammatical divide, Benny and Kelly - from rival groups -meet and fall in love. They arrange a tryst at the deli counter. But they are seen by Kelly's on/off boyfriend Beef McLintock, ambient section manager and a 'five items or less' kind of guy. He bashes Benny over the head with a saveloy and locks him in the freezers ...
Scene 1
View of a supermarket storefront - BESTCO. Customers are waiting outside. The doors swish open and Mr Mac Staffbaiter, the manager, emerges.
Good day to all around this county,
Come in, partake you of our bounty ...
The set opens up to reveal the interior of the supermarket. People are bustling around, busily preparing for the customers who rush inside.
Open the doors, let the selling begin
Polish the goods, every pack, jar and tin
Tidy the trolleys and throw back the gin
Our store is now open for you!
Weigh out the cheese, slice up the bacon
Tidy the aisles and shelves ready to take 'em
Let the tills ring with the money we've taken.
Our store is now open for you!
He dances around the aisles, greeting shoppers and chatting to staff.
Fill up your carts, let the spending go on
'cos shopping's like life - when it's gone it's gone!
Put the scallops on ice, set your price guns on stun!
Our store is now open for you.
Welcome my friends, let the buying begin!
Please swipe your card with the stripe facing in.
We're open 'til Midnight so spend like a King
Our store is now open for you!
My name is Kelly, I serve with a smile,
Check your change, sir, and chat for a while
As long as my boyfriend will let me – he's vile.
Beef McLintock saunters past, smiling cheesily.
Our store is now open to you.
They swarm in and out and they get in my way
As I clean up the filth and debris of the day
On to Aisle Five where some brat's done a pee …
Our store is now open for you.
My heart belongs to Kelly from the deli,
But I am on the fish and rather smelly.
As I'm slicing up the meat I see her face all soft and sweet
I go tingly in the belly when I spy her from my deli …
Condoms – you get two whole packs for five pounds
Perfect if you like to put yourself around
That Kelly got caught with her mouth wrapped around …
Our store is now open for you.
All kinds of creams and chlamydia tests
To ensure your vagina is feeling its best!
Wish I could remember when I used it last …
Our store is now open for you.
Do you, do you, do you need a bag?
Do you, do you, do you need a bag?
You can buy any item that you care to see
If you buy one, maybe you'll get one free!
You'll need more than a card to show your loyalty
Our store is now open for you!
Price checks and price cuts and two for one deals
We're here to sell you your readymade meals
You can't live without us – we've got you by the … beels.
Our store is now open for you.
The store is now open for you!
Enter Beef McLintock, lothario, loverboy and ambient goods manager. He is wearing an apron with a strategically placed logo – 'May contain nuts'.
I am the king of everything that keeps at room temperature
My life is just a single tepid excellent adventure
With cabbages and celery, potatoes, leeks and cucumbers,
I am the very model of an ambient section manager.
To be continued ...
There's nothing more creative than a bunch of strangers arsing around on the web is there?
More soon!
The Soundtrack of my Life
So I thought it might be fun to pick 10 albums that capture, in a nutshell, my personality. Nutcase more like, I hear you cry (That joke appears courtesy of Monty Python (c) 1975).
My earliest memories of enjoying music are inevitably bound up with my parents' tastes. There was a lot of their record collection I didn't really like - especially the 1950's rock and roll stuff - and they were oddly lacking anything by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. But they did have lots of stuff by The Kinks and the Beach Boys. I loved Village Green Preservation Society and Pet Sounds from Day One and still do. Pet Sounds is one of the greatest albums ever made as far as I'm concerned and God only knows may well be my favourite song of all time. It was the multi-layering of the vocals, the richness of the musical textures that fascinated me. Ray Davis's quirky and very British lyrics appealed to me too. While I also loved The Mamas and the Papas, Andy Williams, Glenn Campbell and other US imports, they didn't quite grab me the way that the Beach Boys and Kinks did.
My dad was also fond of classical music, mostly of a Baroque nature, so I was exposed quite early to the likes of Bach and Albinoni. I still enjoy a lot of classical music and J S Bach remains a firm favourite. But I also grew to love the huge and powerful choral works exemplified by my second choice, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. But not just any old O Fortuna will do I'm afraid. I've heard many recordings over the years but this performance by Andre Previn and the LSO is unbeatable in my opinion.
The next big influence on my life was folk music. Growing up in Cornwall in the 1960s and 70s, there wasn't a lot of live music around unless you liked male voice choirs or strange beardy men in Arran sweaters with twigs in their hair singing songs with 'twelve-month and a day' in the chorus. But despite this handicap, I loved the songs themselves. I liked the way that they told stories and I soon became a fan of singer/songwriters generally and particularly female singer/songwriters who always seemed to go that little bit beyond superficial in their lyrics. Consequently, I still listen to a lot of folk, particularly modern interpretations by people like Jim Moray, Seth Lakeman, Bellowhead, Cara Dillon, Eliza Carthy and the sublime Karine Polwart as shown below. The title track of Faultlines sends shivers down my spine every time I hear it. However, I still love the traditional stuff and Martin Carthy, Maddy Prior, Capercaillie, Christy Moore and their ilk occupy a largish chunk of my hard drive.
I must also mention Kate Bush who has had a huge influence on me. I actually heard the very first ever national radio play of Wuthering Heights while in an art class during my A levels. David 'Kid' Jenson introduced the song and I completely fell in love with it. The woman is a genius and her finest work is surely Hounds of Love.
It being the 1970s, I was also very much into progressive rock. In much the same way the vocal richness of the Beach Boys, Kate Bush and others was grabbing me, so was the virtuoso twanging, tweeting and plinky-plonking of such prog superstars as Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, Steve Hackett, Thijs van Leer and Ian Anderson. My entry level to prog was Genesis and particularly the staggeringly beautiful Trespass album. But then, along came Selling England by the Pound and I was hooked. Soon I was listening to Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Peter Gabriel, Jethro Tull, Steve Hackett, Camel, Focus and UK. Their 'concept tracks' and massive soundscapes are still a guilty pleasure to this day and anyone who says that prog is soulless, unemotional pomp really should listen again to a Genesis track like Looking for someone or the last five minutes of Awaken by Yes. Wonderful, wonderful epic music. To represent this era, I've chosen Yes's Close to the Edge, arguably their finest work and with its gatefold sleeve art by the incomparable Roger Dean, it typifies the very best excesses of prog.
Also emerging from the 1970s are two bands that I consider the finest and probably most underrated bands in British rock history - 10CC and XTC. Sadly, most people only know them for their 'novelty singles' such as Making plans for Nigel, Sgt Rock, Donna or I'm Mandy, fly me. Listen to the albums and you'll soon see that these singles are hardly representative. What makes both bands so special is the quality of the songwriting. You never know where the next track is going on a 10CC or an XTC album. I've chosen The Original Soundtrack and Skylarking as my examples. The Original Soundtrack begins with the humorous mini-rock opera Une nuit a Paris - nine minutes of interwoven themes and more tunes than you'll find on any three Coldplay albums put together. This is followed by the groundbreaking I'm not in love and a sextet of songs ranging from the singalong Life is a minestrone to the high camp of The film of my love. Skylarking, meanwhile, is a tribute to everything that is summery and British. Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding take us from Summer's Cauldron, past clouds of buzzing insects, through memoirs of smoking dope, clandestine meetings with loved ones, riding bikes in country lanes and Summer showers, getting married, worrying about money and dying, and the final plaintive Dear God; an angry letter from a child railing at the Almighty for all of the injustice in the world. It is a slice of everything that puts the Great in Great Britain and a contender, in my petty view, for the greatest album of all time.
I kind of missed Punk. It didn't impact on us down in west Cornwall. The Sex Pistols were done and dusted and Sid Vicious was dead before I even got to hear Never Mind the Bollocks ... but once I did there was no turning back. I moved to London in 1980 and it was a great time for seeing new bands. The Pistols had reinvigorated the music scene and nothing I have ever seen since has matched the raw energy of seeing bands like The Pogues, The Stranglers and The Damned playing live on stage. My best friend Huw reminded me yesterday that he'd actually sat on the stage at Middlesex Polytechnic in Hendon as a young and unpretentious U2 had gone through the set that would become their first album. I had to include the Pistols.
Punk eventually gave way to the New Wave and the New Romantics, all of which was a bit silly and left me cold. All except for Adam and the Ants who I thought were superb as they camped up the whole genre and turned out some cracking tunes. But from the ashes grew a strain of clever, brilliantly constructed pop from the likes of The Cure, Toyah and Tears for Fears and this in turn gave us the joy of bands like Curve, Cocteau Twins and Massive Attack all of which I am very fond.
Then along came Britpop and the likes of Oasis, Blur, Pulp and many others. I have many happy memories from seeing these bands live but my favourite among them all was the criminally under-valued Echobelly. As far as I am concerned, they have never written a duff tune ... and I can't say that for most bands of that era. It's hard to chose a favourite album in their back catalogue but ON was the LP that turned me 'on' to them, if you'll pardon the pun, so it seemed the best choice.
In writing this blogpost (at last) I've noticed several themes emerging from my choices of music: highly textured musical soundscapes, female singer/songwriters, 'underdog' bands that don't do as well as some of their contemporaries, virtuoso musicianship and experimentation. All of these come together in the form of Björk Guðmundsdóttir. I fell in love with her voice when Bjork was still lead singer of the Sugarcubes but her first solo album, Debut blew me away. Every album since has surprised, delighted and confused me and that's the joy of it. She refuses to be bound by convention, categorisation or even musical instrumentation; the album Medulla was performed almost entirely by using the human voice. Her finest work to date is, in my humble opinion, Vespertine. Beautiful, smart, challenging. It's everything I want from my music.
All of which bings us bang up to date. So what am I listening to currently? It's usually over on the right hand side of my blog. At the moment I'm enjoying Tale to Tell by The Mummers, Ladyhawke and St Vincent's new album Actor.
It's been so hard trying to whittle down my musical tastes and influences to just ten albums. That's why it's taken me so damned long. I could produce a list as long as a gibbon's arm of bands and artists I like that I haven't even mentioned ... like P J Harvey, Radiohead, Arcade fire, Arctic Monkeys, Burt Bacharach, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, Ian Dury ... see what I mean. I'm at it already.
So, have you got ten albums like this? Blog me in a year's time ...
When one thing leads to another
Tuesday May 12, 2009
Joined Up Thinking by Stevyn Colgan
If you've ever visited Wikipedia and decided to follow the hyperlinks from one piece of "essential" information to an even more "imperative" gem but then, strangely, ended up back where you started, then you have a lot in common with Stevyn Colgan. He is the master of the trivial, the collector and cataloguer of the forgotten and inane - but no matter how worthless and unnecessary the information, Colgan has the knack of making it all sound intensely fascinating.
Joined-Up Thinking is to information what "six degrees of separation" is to people. Colgan's tongue-in-cheek theory proposes that everything on this planet is connected to everything else. In "Round One", for example, he manages to find a connection between the number seven, Isaac Newton, rainbows, Pink Floyd, The Wizard of Oz, and, of course, Shakespeare. Other rounds feature everything from Dr Who and Star Trek to Prince Charles and Robert the Bruce - if you've heard of it, chances are that Colgan has not only logged and labelled it, but also tied it to something else you thought completely unrelated.
He connects each piece of his trivia puzzle in a concise, chatty, easy to follow, even logical, manner. This free-flowing style does not, thankfully, lend itself to pause and evaluation, but does allow for a great deal of chuckling and chin-stroking. This is the sort of book that you will read and then spend the next month or so scratching your head and wondering just how it is, exactly, you know that avocados are poisonous, that indigo is really just a shade of violet, or that Wilma Flintstone had two maiden names, Pebble or Slaghoople, depending on which episode you watched, or that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair owns a telephone that resembles a Harley-Davidson.
You've read the information, encoded and assimilated it, and now you are recycling it - everyone loves kernels of wisdom, especially those that allow you to appear knowledgeable or humorous - and Colgan's do.
What Colgan has really done, here, is to take a rather absurd yet highly intelligent and addictive parlour trick, and delightfully repackaged it as an easily consumed diversion. He traverses everything from high art to popular culture in an insightful, colourful and highly readable fashion.
Steve Scott
How kind. I always liked Kiwis.
The other other book prize
The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais
Fantastic. Here's the full story reprinted from The Bookseller magazine.
The annual award presented by The Bookseller magazine went to the book written by Professor Philip M. Parker and published by Icon Group International after an internet poll of six books. The winner received 32% of the vote.
Philip Stone, charts editor for The Bookseller, said that the book "is a fitting champion given that today's public are more aware of green issues than ever. It highlights an area that, perhaps, we are all guilty of ignoring as we push our trolleys down supermarket aisles".
The custodian of the prize and diarist for The Bookseller, Horace Bent, said: "Given that three times in the 21st century the public have crowned somewhat vulgar titles the winner ("High Performance Stiffened Structures", "Living with Crazy Buttocks" and, most recently, "If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs"), I assumed either "Strip and Knit with Style" or "Curbside Consultation of the Colon" would pick up the 2008 award. But I'm thrilled the public steered clear of smut and bestowed the 'odd title' prize on Professor Parker's worthy winner".
Although 'The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais' was a clear winner, the book is a controversial choice, as Professor Parker did not write the book, but instead used an automated authoring invention, which produces titles on the basis of internet and database searches.
Below are a full list of winners over previous years.
1978 - "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice" by various authors.
1979 - "The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution" by Barbara Sherman Heyl.
1980 - "The Joy of Chickens" by Dennis Nolan.
1981 - "Last Chance at Love - Terminal Romances" by various authors.
1982 - "Population and Other Problems: Family Planning, Housing 1,000 million, Labour Employment" by various authors.
1983 - "The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling" by A. I. Tselikov, G. S. Nikitin and S. E. Rokotyan.
1984 - "The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History, and Its Role in the World Today" by Anne Wilson.
1985 - "Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts" by Donald L. Wilson.
1986 - "Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality" by Glenn C. Ellenbogen.
1987 - No award given.
1988 - "Versailles: The View From Sweden" by Elaine Dee and Guy Walton.
1989 - "How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art" by Kathleen Meyer.
1990 - "Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual" by Pat Califia.
1991 - No award given.
1992 - "How to Avoid Huge Ships" by John W. Trimmer.
1993 - "American Bottom Archaeology" by Charles J. Bareis and James W. Porter.
1994 - "Highlights in the History of Concrete" by C. C. Stanley.
1995 - "Reusing Old Graves: A Report on Popular British Attitudes" by Douglas Davies and Alastair Shaw.
1996 - "Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers" by Derek Willan.
1997 - "The Joy of Sex, the Pocket Edition" by Alex Comfort.
1998 - "Developments in Dairy Cow Breeding: New Opportunities to Widen the Use of Straw" by Gareth Williams.
1999 - "Weeds in a Changing World: British Crop Protection Council Symposium Proceedings No. 64" by Charles H. Stirton.
2000 - "High Performance Stiffened Structures" by IMechE (The Institution of Mechanical Engineers).
2001 - "Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service" by Gerard Forlin.
2002 - "Living with Crazy Buttocks" by Kaz Cooke.
2003 - "The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories" by Alisa Surkis and Monica Nolan.
2004 - "Bombproof Your Horse" by Rick Pelicano and Lauren Tjaden.
2005 - "People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It" by Gary Leon Hill.
2006 - "The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification" by Julian Montague.
2007 - "If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs" by Big Boom.
Why aren't the hills alive with the sound of new music?
This is just the latest in a long line of West End shows that simply draw together the songs of a particular artist or band and slap a kind of story over the top to link them all. It started with ABBA's hugely succesful Mama Mia and Queen's We will rock you! but has, in recent years, spawned similar shows 'featuring the music of'' Take That, Frankie Valli, Frank Sinatra and many others. And, having seen a few of them, I'm left with an overwhelming urge for an original new musical.
Call me old-fashioned but I think that this is lazy, cheap theatre. The public has a huge love and appetite for musicals; look at the recent success of Hairspray and the revivals of Oliver, The Sound of Music, Joseph and Grease. We love them. Mama Mia was a massive movie last year as were the film versions of The Producers and Hairspray. But none of these were new shows. Hairspray was the musical version of a previous John Waters film. The Producers, bizarrely, was a film of a stage show musical of an earlier film of a stage show musical! At least they had the benefit of some original songs however. But where are the new Gershwins, Lloyd Webbers, Lerner and Loewes, or Rogers and Hammersteins? Hollywood, Broadway and London's West End used to churn out these fantastic shows to meet public demand. Just think how many classic musicals were produced during the 1940s to the 1960s. There were the big production numbers like The Wizard of Oz and Singing in the Rain. There were the smaller but equally brilliant rom-com musicals of Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe and the like. Later, we had the 1970s and early 80s triumphs of shows like The Rocky Horror Show, Grease, Les Miserables and Little Shop of Horrors. We also, incidentally, had the delicious cycnicism of Richard Curtis's 1989 film The Tall Guy which revolves around an attempt to stage a musical based on The Elephant Man (and called Elephant!) But what do we have now? Where's the originality? As we've travelled through the 1990s and into the 21st century it seems to me that theatre has taken the same shoddy path as television - stack 'em high, sell them cheap. It's Tesco theatre.
First came a wave of musicals based upon Disney films like The Lion King and Mary Poppins (Disney, to its credit, has always at least employed good songwriters to produce original new music). Then, just as television became an endless round of reality shows, rubbish docusoaps and cheap 'Top 100' type clip shows, the theatre created the clip=musical using a bunch of old songs. Many didn't even have the decency to try doing something new with the music like Baz Luhrman did with Moulin Rouge or Bob Carlton's clever and funny Return to the Forbidden Planet show.
It means that we've dumbed down the Musicals medium and I fear for its future. And I can't see where the next generation of Musicals will come from. Andrew Lloyd Webber has dominated the West End for two decades but it's not because there's a lack of good writers out there. It's because it's so hard and so hugely expensive to put on a new show. Spamalot came and went but at least had the backing of a Python which gave it some weight. Imagine if you or I had pitched it? Jerry Springer: The Opera was a work of near genius in my opinion but it so outraged the kind of Daily Mail reader that hadn't actually seen it but jumped on the band wagon (see Ross, Brand, BBC etc.) that it was soon doomed to leave the stage.
So what does the future hold? Sadly, more of the same I suspect. We'll see more reality TV shows finding new talent with which to re-launch old franchises. We'll have more 'musicals' based on the old song catalogues of artists and bands in their twilight years. What we really need, however, is some kind of facility whereby new shows can be offered a place on Broadway and the West End ... and let the public vote for their success by buying tickets. I yearn for some originalty. I crave a new West Side Story or My Fair Lady. Or I may just write one myself and climb aboard the lazy gravy train. I know ... how about a musical based on the songs of The Smiths called Heaven Knows I'm Miserable now? It opens with William (this charming man) whose girlfriend is in a coma and needs money for an expensive life-saving operation so he puts his hands in his gloves and hangs a DJ ...
Dear blimey, no.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Templars, Titters and Thieves - The week in pictures
It all began with an invite to watch the first episode of the new series of QI being filmed. Great fun. The guests were Sean Lock, Sandi Toksvig and Bill Bailey who it was wonderful to meet at last. As an unexpected bonus, I also got to meet John Hodgman, regular 'resident expert' on Jon Stewart's Daily Show in the USA and also the voice of Dad in the new animated film Coraline. We got on very well. I got on too with Neil Gaiman and Derren Brown who were invited guests like me. Neil was proudly wearing his Blue Peter badge but I quickly deflated his ego by pointing out that I had a gold Blue Peter badge myself. Oh yes. Fantastic. Derren Brown and I spoke for only a few minutes ... but I woke up at 3am believing that I was a duck.
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Awkward Family Photos
A Flood of Nonsense
"It's all true", he said. He waved the book at me. "Every word. It's all true."
"Is it", I said, smiling benignly.
"Every word. This is the word of God given to Man. Do you read your Bible?"
"I don't own a Bible", I said. "I'm an atheist."
He looked at me and smiled. I can't quite put my finger on the expression I saw in his eyes but the closest I can get is smug. He looked smug, as if he'd suddenly thought to himself 'I'm better than this chubby chap' or, more likely, 'Aha! A chance to get a convert!'
"You should own a Bible", he said. "Everyone should. Whether you believe in God or not, he's there and he's watching everything you do."
"And I'm sure you believe that", I said, "But I don't."
I returned to reading my book which, incidentally (and appropriately), was Thirteen things that don't make sense by Michael Brooks, in the fervent hope that my silence would signal an end to the conversation. It didn't.
"Don't you worry about your immortal soul?" he said.
"No. I don't have one as far as I'm concerned", I explained.
"That's a terrible thing to say", he said.
"Not a bit of it", I said. "I am just a big old bag of atoms with a beard. The particular arrangement of those atoms led to me. When I die, those atoms will fall apart and be redistributed and, in time, parts of me will be parts of other people, animals, plants, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the very Earth itself. It's a beautiful, elegant, recyclable system. Why does there need to be anything beyond that?"
He looked at me again and waved his Bible.
"It's all true! Every word is true! You should take note and ask for forgiveness!"
Thankfully, we then pulled into Wembley Stadium train station and he got off. He did get me thinking though ... while his faith was strong, did he really believe that every word in the Bible is true? The thought stayed with me all day.
Then, last night, I was an invited guest at the filming of Episode 1 of the new series of QI at the London Studios. Stephen Fry was on fine form, as were the panellists. The subject of the show was animals beginning with G. Inevitably, mention of giraffes led to discussions about their curiously long necks and evolutionary theory. During the course of this, Creationism was discussed and my mind drifted back to the conversation on the train. Later, in the Green Room, I kicked off some discussion about the story of Noah's Ark and related the story about the strangely intense locomotive evangelist I'd met. All of which led me to scribbling down a series of notes about why 'every word (in the Bible) is true' is a nonsense. That's the kind of thing I do.
If you believe the absolute literal 'word of God', as contained in the Book of Genesis, Noah was told that the world was wicked and corrupt and that God planned to flood it and destroy everything. My first question therefore is ... why a flood? I mean, if what you're trying to do is clear the world of evil, why not just make all the bad people explode or melt or something? It would be a powerful message to the rest of humanity to behave itself, wouldn't it? A flood seems to me an unnecessarily slow and cruel method of genocide. Plus, it's a bit haphazard. Someone is bound to have built a raft or clung to a log. And what about all of the fishermen and other boat owners? Hell, you could build your own boat in 40 days and 40 nights while the rain is falling. Secondly, there's the question of guilt. Why drown all of the innocent 'living things that moved on the earth'? What have they done wrong? And were newborn human babies and young children really who God was talking about in his 'all the people on earth had corrupted their ways' speech?
Anyway, putting all of that aside, let's look more closely at the story of the ark itself. Noah was told to build an 'ark of cypress wood (...) 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high'. That's a pretty specific build but, I guess, if God can make a universe designing an ark the right size would be a doddle. So, 450 x 75 x 45 gives us an internal cubic capacity of 1,518,750 cubic feet. Can you fit two of every species on the planet within that space? Assuming an average of one cubic foot per 'living thing' as an average (remember, we have everything from bull elephants to bacteria on board), and we need a minimum of two of each species, that means we can store around 750,000 species. Oh dear. Science has already identified 2 million species. And it is speculated that there may be as many as 100 million species. One conservative estimate says that there are 350,000 different species of beetles alone. And, as if this were not problem enough, the Bible actually says that Noah was to take 'seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth'. So there would be even more space needed.
Of course, I'm making an assumption here that we haven't included storing the 79 different species of whale. Nor the other sea mammals. Nor the turtles, sea snakes and marine iguanas. Nor the 20,000 odd fish species. Oh, and all of the corals, sponges, medusans, crinoids, molluscs, crustaceans and other arthropods that live in our lakes, rivers, ponds, seas and oceans. Actually, now I think about it, Noah must have accommodated them. If the world was going to be flooded with rain water, that would have had a huge impact on the salinity and chemical composition of both fresh and sea water. I have a suspicion that so much brackish water would have killed most aquatic species. Noah must have had an aquarium deck big enough to take two (or seven) of everything ... including a couple of blue whales of course. Otherwise, where did all of the underwater life we have nowadays come from?
And we haven't even touched on the subject of how Noah actually built the ark and how he managed to avoid being lynched by all of the lumberjacks, nail makers, carpenters, shipwrights, animal wranglers and tar makers he planned to leave behind when the rain started. However, let's put all that aside. Let's say that he somehow managed to build the ark and to pack all of that lot inside it. Noah's problems weren't quite over yet. Firstly, there's environment to consider. Some animals need cold environments, some need heat. Some are nocturnal, others diurnal. Some need the moist humidity of leaf litter or rain forest, others scorching desert. Creatures live in a bewildering variety of caves, drays, burrows, nests, setts, holes, tunnels and, occasionally, other creatures. How would this be arranged? And how would parasites be accommodated? Someone or something would need to carry the various types of fleas, ticks, mites and lice. And let's not forget the pubic lice in that list. Most troublesome of all, where would you put the venomous creatures? Or the vampire bats? Or - good grief - the woodpeckers, woodworms and death watch beetles? They'd be a bloody liability.
The parasites would have food by living on a host, but everything else would need food and water too don't forget ... and that raises yet another huge issue. God said to Noah, 'You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.' Imagine the storage problems and the complexity of sorting out the dietary requirements for 100 million different species. And what would the carnivores eat? They can't eat the other animals as they're needed to repopulate the Earth. Could Noah have used Quorn instead (Quorn is a protein made from fungus. Are fungi counted as plants or animals? And what about bacteria and viruses and germs generally?)? The vegetarian animals would need a lot of food. Just one elephant will eat 200-440 lbs of food per day. And, presumably, as God was planning on destroying the entire surface of the Earth, they'd also need to take lots of living plants on board to be planted out when the waters subsided. I just hope someone was keeping an eye on the locusts. All of that food and water would eventually be processed and would reappear in the form of faeces and urine. Just imagine that job; clearing out the bodily waste of 200,000,000 creatures, sometimes several times a day.
We have to assume that Noah checked every animal for pregnancy as it came aboard as space would be tight and new births discouraged. Otherwise I'm not sure how he'd have coped with the short gestation times of some species. The ark was afloat for 150 days. The average pregnancy of a rat is just 22 days. Some other rodent pregnancies are even shorter. Many insects can produce a new generation every few days and they often have thousands of offspring at a time. How would Noah have dealt with the population increases? And what if an animal died or fell sick? Did he have a vet on board? I don't remember it being mentioned. Would he have chucked a single remaining animal over the side? After all, one giraffe is pretty pointless keeping if its partner is dead and God has destroyed all the others. Is this what happened to the unicorns?
For five long smelly months the ark bobbed about with Noah and his extended family (wife, three sons and their wives) desperately trying to cope with the eating, drinking, shagging, pooping and peeing of 200 million living things. All this as they scratched at their own bed bug, flea, mosquito and lice bites. And the noise! How did they sleep? Whatever the answer, 150 days later, God caused a wind to blow and 'the water receded steadily from the earth'. To where exactly? And how much water are we talking about? Dr Marty Leipzig has worked it out and it's 4.525 x 10 to the ninth cubic kilometres (4.525x1009 km3) Or, to put into a more sensible number, 4,525,000,000,000 cubic kilometres (if you want to see how the figure was arrived at and much, much more, visit his site here). Over 40 days and 40 nights, the rain would have fallen at an average rate of 5.5 inches per minute - that's means the water gets six feet deeper every 13 minutes. He also usefully points out that if we are taking the Bible literally and all of the Earth was covered, that would include the highest mountains such as Everest and K2. The temperature of a planet flooded so quickly to that kind of depth would rise by something like 1800 K or 1,526.84C (that's 2,780.33F) in which case water could not exist in a liquid state and Noah and all his animal chums would just be so much steamed meat.
So, if we stretch our credulity to accept that up to this point 'every word is true' ... what of the aftermath? If we imagine that all of that water was able to recede, what kind of a world would Noah have faced? It would be a place deep in soft, silty, salty mud; a place covered in the wreckage of villages, towns and cities; a place of great pestilence stacked deep with the corpses of billions of dead people, plants and animals. Thanks to God, only two of each kind of beetle, fly, rat or other scavenger was left. Their task was hopeless. They stood no chance of clearing up that kind of a mess. There would be no food other than what was on the ark and most drinking water would have been polluted by salt or decaying corpses. Disease would be endemic and deadly and the weather system would have been thrown into chaos. Into this sad new world stepped 500 year old Noah and his wife. He may have been a bit old to sire any more children himself so it was up to the three boys, Shem, Ham and Japheth and their wives to repopulate the world. We are therefore asked to believe that it is from these six people, and in only a few thousand years, that the four billion white, black, oriental, arabic, mediterranean, inuit, oceanic and other peoples of this world are descended. Incidentally, in doing so, they changed physical features, body shape and skin colour to suit their environment and therefore, with delicious irony, quite splendidly prove that Darwin got it right.
So there you go. As I've said so many times before, I have no beef whatsoever with religion or faith. What I do have a real problem with ignorance and inflexibility. Fundamentalism is the very worst kind of wrong. The Bible is a splendid book full of allegorical stories told in a way that suggest to people how best to live their lives. But it was written by men not God. It's full of inconsistency and paradox. In some places, God is Love. In others, particularly the Old Testament, he's a wrathful, vengeful God that slaughters the innocent and demands murder in his name. He also admits his own failure, which is not what you expect from a supposedly Supreme Being. By creating the Great Flood, he was destroying his own creations, the in-bred descendents of Adam and Eve who swarmed over the Earth, committing evil acts and sacrilege. They were rubbish creations. What kind of a deity makes that kind of fundamental mistake?
Fundamental. Mistake. Two words that sit very well with each other.
Patently, and obviously, the Bible is not meant to be taken literally, word for word. That's just madness. So, when and if I ever meet that man on the train again, I'm going to tell him so rather than listen to his blinkered and uninformed pronouncements.
Or I may just pop on my i-pod and sit in a different carriage.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
The Sound of Swine Flu
The amino acid sequence within Swine Flu hemagglutinin FJ966952 looks like this:
Each letter corresponds to one amino acid. So if you attach a sound to each value and then set it to a 3/4 time, you get music. Zielinski explains it like this: 'Amino acids with side chains that are neither aromatic not aliphatic control the piano and organ: the nine non-hydrophobics the piano, and the four hydrophobics the organ. The three amino acids with aliphatic side chains control the low synthesizer, while the four with aromatics control the percussion.' Simple really.
So now you can hear what Swine Flu sounds like.
I've adopted it as my ring tone.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
A Guest Blog
This Twitter Thing
I signed up to this Twitter thing a few months ago with an 'oh all right then' attitude, expecting to come away with a 'who cares?' conclusion. A few months later I'm dipping in the Twitter stream daily. So here it is, my love letter to Twitter. The things I wish I'd known when I started and my take on what it's all about.
With its 140 character limit, Twitter's a hostile environment to the boring, dominating or waffling. As it's on the internet, it attracts the tech savvy. As a public space (anyone can read your updates) it also asks you to be a bit brave. So to be on Twitter you're already my kind of person. But what do people on Twitter do?
Talk. Imagine a dinner party where a few mouse clicks changes the seating plan to put you in the middle of things; your definition of 'things'. Antarctic researcher, fashion designer, photographer (currently in Afghanistan) and ordinary soul who shares your humour, there's your table for tonight. And you can change it at any time, click, click. Eavesdropping, chatting across continents, making an exit to *put the spuds on*, and absolutely no need to brush your hair.
And yes, with Twitter's list of trending topics, you actually do know there's an earthquake, plane crash or a new baby for Jamie Oliver, long before it's reported on the networks. What's more, you can locate and read the tweets coming from the centre of breaking stories. It's supreme rubber-necking.
So are you interested? Then go sign up.
This blog is not about the mechanics, though. If you want to know them, put some pertinent phrases into Google. I'm cutting to Twitter's oohs and ahhs.
But one quick tip. Move away from the Twitter website to applications like Tweetdeck or Tweetie as early as you can. Why struggle with a Walkman when someone's invented the iPod?
Following some Twitterati
I'll tell you what I did. We all start with the celebs, so go ahead. A good place to make sure you're following the real ones and not the fakes is www.valebrity.com. But amazingly, celebs can be dull and not interested in you at all. Shocking, I know.
We also start with people we know in real life. Like any party, it's nice to turn-up with your gang. For many,Twitter replaces text messaging and adds a new fission to office banter, with a whole new way to delegate. I frequently send a tweet to @ashog (who works five foot away from me) to put on the kettle on. Once you're following around 50 Twitterers, you'll understand why I find Facebook a ghost town.
But how do you find and follow normal yet wonderful people you've never met? A quick search will show you who's tweeting right now on your current obsessions. Coco Chanel, Arthur Rackham, Mad Men. It's like shaking a snow globe and up they float. Pick a few (not just the pretties), look at their Twitter pages and read a few tweets they've done. If they tickle your fancy, click follow.
But don't just stick with your kind of nerd. Cast the net wide. Take a gamble. And look at Trending Topics too to see who's talking about the latest thing. Within a few days of following someone, you'll know if they're for keeps. If they are, plunder their list of people they follow for more goodies. If they're not for you, un-follow and shake the snow globe again.
And don't forget to throw in some quality news feeds too, with my pick being @bbcnews.
You'll also want to follow The Names. Brands, governments, charities, football clubs, festivals, museums… Twitter's full of organisations attempting to hang with the cool kids. As a copywriter it's fascinating to watch them sign-up and set out their stalls, with sites like www.mytweet16.com letting you snoop on anyone's fledgling tweets. And they can really get it wrong.
Have you ever been in a day of meetings and broken for lunch to find someone still doing meeting talk? Corporate language, only one topic (them), only one opinion (theirs). That's corporate Twitter at its worst.
People follow Names to hear their latest, of course, but they also want to see personality and charm. They want to venture off topic because that's fun. They want to see a Name ask questions and listen to answers. To loosen the tie. No on wants a 140 character brochure.
Movers and Shakers
The next Twitter challenge is finding the movers and shakers (not slebs) who link to the best of the web as it breaks, and are often at the heart of fascinating, fearless debates that then make the headlines. How? Explore a trending topic that excites you, and you find a lot of tweets coming from one source. Hmm.
Your Followers
To plump-up your follower list, you have to follow and tweet yourself. Shake your Twitter booty. Follow back with a generous spirit,; block the spam and anyone you find offensive.
And if someone does not follow you back right away, relax. They may need you to strike up a few conversations (do an @ reply to their tweet) before they notice your wonderfulness. They may simply not want to follow you: that is allowed.
Once you've got around 100 good followers, you've got a 'hive mind' to ask stuff. Any kind of stuff, and you'll be amazed at what comes back.
Twitter for the Copywriter
But for the copywriter Twitter has extra appeal. Making your point within seconds is what copywriting has always been about, so for me Twitter's a trip to the writing gym.
I follow a lot of professional writers, and people who simply write well, and love to see what they do with so little space. And I love the instant feedback. When you watch a tweet skim (being re-tweeted over and over) it sharpens your instincts for what excites. And when a tweet sinks without a trace, you also take note of what bores.
The fly in the ointment?
Not everyone's a darling, or course. There are people you won't find exciting on Twitter, oh yes, but you know what, you just don't follow them. And rude people? Try blocking.
And like anywhere else, there is spam. People trying to gate crash the party wearing a sandwich board. Did they think we wouldn't notice? But avoiding them is so much easier than in real life.
Once you've been baptised in the Twitter stream, you feel a need to write a blog on how great Twitter is. I must get round to doing that. And after that? Well I'm now hunting down Twitter's cabinet of curiosities; pages and applications that are blowing me away with their creativitiy. But that's a whole other blog. I'll let you know.
You can find me on Twitter @Angpang.
Angela Montague is freelance copywriter. This feature first appeared on Sarah Lamballe's Copywriter Blog.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
I was born on the least interesting day of the year
But what about my birthday - August 11th? Which luminaries were born on the same date as me? Hulk Hogan, Steve Wozniak, Enid Blyton, Alex Haley and comic artists Dik Browne and Jim Lee. It's not what you'd call a bumper crop is it? I can only assume that if you travel back to the point of conception - around 11th November - there was nothing to celebrate and quite a good night's viewing on the telly.
At least I'm among artistic, creative tpes. And Hulk Hogan.
Maybe we should paint our landfill sites?
Ms Watson, a second year student, said: "I was experimenting with the whole concept of illusion but needed something a bit more physical to make a real impact." She was given the Skoda Fabia from the breaker's yard at local firm Recycling Lives. Owner Steve Jackson described her work as 'amazing'. "When I first saw the photos I was convinced it was something which had been done on the computer," said Mr Jackson. "But when you look more closely you see the effort and attention to detail she has put into it. It is just amazing."
Source: BBC News website
The tuck stops here (Part 2)
Brother Andrew and me circa 1967. Note skinny me.
Once I turned Sixth Form and there was no mandatory sports, I gave it up as swiftly as possible. The one exception was swimming but I always saw that as more fun than competition anyway. And it was the one place where you could guarantee meeting girls that had almost no clothing on. But even that stopped when Helston swimming pool sank. Absolutely true. They built the thing at the bottom of the town on the old boggy flood plain where once the Cober met the sea. One day, the staff came in to work to find a big crack in the deep end and no water. The walls soon began to list dangerously as one side sank into the ground. They had to demolish it eventually and now it's a public park.
Once I'd joined the police, the misery of sports came back temporarily. Hendon was pretty physical at times. We had to jump over horses and bounce on trampolines and run around race tracks. We had to climb ropes, a truly useful skill for the street cop whose suspect makes their escape by kite. If you started slipping on the rope, the instructor would beat your arse with the end. In those pre-Health and Safety days, we climbed at least 15 feet above the hard floor of the sports centre without safety nets or bungees. We swam too. Hendon had an Olympic-sized pool and we spent many hours jumping into the water in pyjamas to rescue rubber-coated breeze blocks from the deep end. Those who couldn't swim were labelled 'wanky wonders' for some reason and floundered around in the baby pool until they didn't drown any more. It should remind you that this was 1980 and things like this simply don't happen any more. But it made me pretty miserable at the time, as did 'milling'. This was a controlled aggression exercise where we'd be paired up with the person closest to us in height and mass and thrown together into a boxing ring to slug it out. For two minutes, we were required to shuffle about, bop each other on the chin a few times and keep a lid on our anger. At the time, I couldn't see the point of it. It's only now – years after they stopped doing this at Hendon because it could be construed as bullying – that I see the worth of it. I've survived nearly 30 years as a cop without once ever losing my temper despite intense provocation at times. Sadly, I see cops losing it more regularly these days and I wonder if a bit of milling at the start might have helped them. It taught me restraint. And it also taught me not to catch an ex-army boxing champion on the nose with my glove. He retaliated more by instinct than intent, I'm sure. I wasn't in a position to analyse the event. There was a bang, some darkness and then I woke up with a thumping head and the trainer shouting for me to be taken to the medical centre for a check-up. Talk about a glass jaw. One punch and I was unconscious. But at least I wasn't angry.
Me in Bath last month. Note pin-head on huge body. This needs sorting.
Since then, I've joined a gym twice and in both cases all I ever seemed to meet were narcissistic neo-Nazies in gym vests who, for some reason, always thought I wasn't trying hard enough when I was slogging my not inconsiderable guts out and my heart was hammering like Vulcan's forge. So no more. It's long, long country walks for me. Maybe a bit of cycling too. And plenty of gardening. This year I have a whole raft of new fruit and vegetables to cultivate and I'm looking forward to eating them all later this year.
In moderation of course.


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October 7-11, 2018
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Allen Conway is a Practice Lead Consultant for Magenic (www.magenic.com) that is an advocate of web and Microsoft .NET technologies both professionally and personally. He enjoys the challenge and creativity behind software engineering and hopes to give back to others in the community by speaking and on this blog at http://www.allenconway.net.
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Prison Planet
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
If you needed more evidence that "toning down the rhetoric" is a euphemism for 'shut up and obey big government,' this should do the trick. Leftists are only interested in "toning down the rhetoric" of those that disagree with them, while they are free to engage in violent death threats against public figures.
RELATED: Establishment Ignores Violent Rhetoric From Eco-Leftists
RELATED: "Toning Down The Rhetoric" Means Obeying Big Government
This article was posted: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 6:17 am


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Many people in Texas think of Fiesta as a time of over-the-top colorful traditions that lure people from all over to San Antonio.
But there is one event locals and diehard fans know and love that challenges tradition, all for a great cause. Cornyation, created to satirize the more formal Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo, has gone from a tiny underground event to a major fund-raiser that has given more than $2 million to HIV/AIDS charities over the years.
In her new book, Cornyation: San Antonio's Outrageous Fiesta Tradition, Amy Stone documents the history and evolution of this event. The San Antonio Current talks to Stone about a book that's been fifty years in the making. Read more.


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My niece bought a coffee shop last month.
The previous owners had allowed me to sell my local history book in their gift store so I stopped by this week to restock.
I ran into a high school class mate. We decided to do coffee Saturday morning.
Saturday, as I sat at the main table, I was concerned I was sitting in someones chair.
"Not to worry," they said.
One of the regulars, (Jack) is a plumber. I've seen Jack around town for 40 years. He was heading to work on a water heater after he left the coffee-house.
My classmate asked me to guess how old Jack was after he left…I guessed 80 only because I knew he was about my dad's age…
Jack is 88. He has the energy of a man 20 years younger. Now think about it for a second. On a Saturday morning Jack was installing a water heater for someone. I thought I was doing good to be at the coffee shop on my day off by 7:30. 🙂
My dad used to say "The word retirement is not in my vocabulary." Another one I've heard him say is, "Do what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life…" Those little ditties were being lived out in front of my Saturday morning in the person of Jack.
I am still reading John Muir His Life And His Letters And Other Writings. I started using the highlighter. The guy was a poet.
Came across another nugget the other night. He was telling a friend goodby….
He wrote:
"I don't envy you. You'll have a hard time keeping your heart light and simple in the midst of this crowd of madmen. Instead of the music of the wind among the spruce-tops and the tinkling of the waterfalls, your ears will be filled with the oaths and groans of these poor deluded, self-burdened men."
Reading that admonition by Muir to his friend, confirmed for me yet again this impulse to keep my heart light and simple in the midst of life.
Yes, sometimes I wished I had a little more wiggle room when it comes to finances. If I had the option, would I rather spend my life making lots of money in a job I hate with the goal of someday slowing down and enjoying it, or make a lot less and enjoy myself now.
As a firstborn, formerly driven workaholic, I can now take a nap without shame. (That is no small feat.) I no longer hear the voice of the old German taskmaster who lives in my head. I know he's still up there, but he no longer in charge.
The old German.
And on an almost unrelated note. We had a crop failure this year with the apples. (we have a small orchard of about 100 trees) In June we had a nasty hail storm. The apples kept forming but 90% of the crop was severely blemished. Still OK for cooking, cider, etc. but not marketable.
2017 hail damaged apple
Had two different Amish families come and pick some for cider. I know they probably thought I was nuts to just give them away…but hated to see them go to waste and I was darned if I was going to deal with snarky comments.
I would rather give them away or let them rot.
…"keep your heart light and simple, in the midst of this crowd of madmen…" John Muir
Later! DM


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text: The recent headline that Cape Town is to double the size of its Convention Centre reminded me of a recent trip to the Design Indaba and the hair-raising, and dangerous, crossing which hundreds of visitors to the Centre were forced to make across Lower Heerengracht on the way from parking to the centre. The poorly thought through walking access on the streets outside the CTICC stood in stark contrast to the South African creativity on show inside it. Public spaces like those on our Foreshore are both unfamiliar, unwelcoming and unsettling. Access routes which welcome international visitors to the CTICC will be something that the new Convention Centre management will be forced to apply its mind to. I would love to see some of the creative thinking that went into the Stadium access also be applied to the CTICC. This aerial mock-up shows just how close the CTICC is to vast tracts of land in the Eastern Foreshore where there is lots of space for parking. Better still the CTICC is, surprisingly, on the doorstep of the station. It just appears further because pedestrian access between the two has been at best ad-hoc, and at worst neglected completely. The CTICC development provides an opportunity to really implement some "liveable" streets design in the Foreshore and to give pedestrian accessibility in the City the priority it deserves.


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Teenage boys being stripped naked and tear-gassed behind bars breaches just about every fundamental principle of human rights law, the Human Rights Commission boss believes.
And you don't need to be a human rights lawyer to know it, Gillian Triggs says.
Ms Triggs believes CCTV footage of the abuse has been seen before and the key test of a seven-month royal commission into NT youth detention will be accountability.
She predicts there's "every chance" senior ministers will be recommended for prosecution, particularly if it's revealed they knew of abuse inside centres including Don Dale.
"This is well known," she told Sky News on Friday.
"Quite obviously, you don't need to be a human rights lawyer to view that footage and to say that is breaching just about every fundamental principle of human rights law you can think of."
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Friday brushed off criticism his government didn't consult with indigenous leaders or the opposition on the terms of reference for the royal commission.
He insists the right balance was struck to ensure the commission is effective.
"The terms of reference are broad but not so broad as to make the inquiry an endless one," the prime minister told reporters in Sydney.
Labor is upset about a lack of consultation saying there's scope for a broader inquiry and a second commissioner with an indigenous background.
Ms Triggs also wasn't consulted about the terms of reference but says that's a trade-off for its speedy establishment.
"Of course we're very pleased about it," she said.
Commissioner Brian Ross Martin was also forced to defend his appointment after reports his daughter worked as a justice adviser to the NT attorney-general during the period being examined.
"It is my daughter's memory that during the period of her employment with the NT government, she had no involvement in the NT child protection or child detention systems," he said in a statement.
His daughter's former job was disclosed prior to Justice Martin's appointment and he is satisfied it does not compromise the independence of the commission.
Justice Martin, the former chief justice for the NT, also denies his close contact with the territory legal system could cause a conflict.
The inquiry was sparked after the ABC aired footage of young boys stripped naked and held in solitary confinement.
The videos also showed one boy shackled to a "mechanical device" chair before being left alone for two hours and another tackled, lifted and hurled across a room.
Mr Turnbull promised the commission would be the highest priority for his government.
"I said we would get on with it speedily and we have," he said.
Acting opposition leader Tanya Plibersek revealed the prime minister had spoken with her on Thursday after the terms of reference had been set and after the commissioner had been selected.
But she said any suggestion the government had consulted with the opposition were false.
Mr Turnbull had indicated the terms of reference could be amended if necessary during the inquiry.
"I am disappointed that that's the attitude. I would have thought it would be good to get this right the first time," Ms Plibersek told reporters in Brisbane.
The commission is due to report its recommendations by March 31.


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As someone working in arts marketing, one of my favorite discussions revolves around what defines art. What gives art its value? What art is worth preserving and perpetuating as part of our cultural heritage and what should be allowed to collect dust in the archives? And should the marketplace be the deciding force? That said, as much fun as this discussion might be with my colleagues or those with advanced degrees in art theory, I find it most enlightening to listen to everyone else– the uninitiated, so to speak. Those are the discussions that have most profoundly shaped and continue to shape my own personal opinions on these questions. So, with this in mind, I take particular interest in the ongoing debate about whether video games qualify as "art."
My personal reactions to this question are simultaneously:
–Of course.
–Well, not really.
–Eh, who cares? What is "art" anyway?
–If so, I can feel a lot better about a LOT of time spent in front of the PS3.
However, it may be important to ask this question for a few reasons:
- The NEA has started funding a few video game projects (like a Henry David Thoreau themed game), which calls into question whether video games fall within the NEA's scope and whether increasingly dwindling funds should be allocated to support an already popular medium.
- I'm sure there are a lot of video game designers (as well as writers, actors, scorers, etc.) who'd like the validation. (And frankly, deserve it.)
- It's a good exercise for artists, administrators and fans in building our cases for our cause.
Screenshots from Tori-Emaki from the PS3 Playstation Eye
(Disclaimer: Before I go any further, let me be clear– I'm not a gamer. I have played my fair share of video games on anything from the Commodore 64 to consoles like the Xbox, but my knowledge of the canon is slim and I claim no insight into the finer subtleties of the field.)
In the debate, an article which stood out* was that of Hilary Goldstein at VentureBeat: 5 good reasons games are not art. His piece suggests the gaming industry shed its inferiority complex. His gracefully articulated reasons:
- Art is bullshit.
- Games go beyond art.
- Sports don't need to be art.
- For the people
- Who cares?
While I agree that the gaming industry needn't fret about it (Goldstein's 5th point), his other 4 points lose me entirely. Therefore, I'd like to address each one. Let's start with:
1. Art is bullshit.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time I've heard that before. (Truth be told, my own boyfriend– a low-impact gamer**– couldn't help but chuckle when an article expressing frustration at modern art– written, in fact, by a disenchanted graduate student of art– was circulating around Facebook.) Nevertheless, Mr. Goldstein's statement dismissing the entire field is bold and unwarranted. He relates a recent visit to the MOMA, where he was surrounded by a scene of baffled, but blithely accepting patrons. He suggests that "most people want to be told what is and what is not art rather than make that determination for themselves." While there's some truth to that statement, it's as if he's never been to a restaurant in which he tasted something he kind of liked, but couldn't quite pinpoint… only to have the unique flavors of something interesting emerge as the recipe's ingredients are revealed to him. Or a good glass of wine, for instance… the price or the label doesn't necessarily make it more worthy (people are fooled in blind tests all the time), but if asked, a sommelier can define why a '61 Cheval Blanc is valuable. It's up to you to agree… or not. Now, I'm not suggesting there aren't some lemmings in the art world, but the poignancy lies in the intersection between the art establishment, those who are convinced art is bullshit, and everyone else. (Or alternately, those blurred lines of subjectivity may be the very punchline!) Goldstein continues to say, "Art of this nature is often defined for the consumer, not by the consumer." Interesting. I'd say Goldstein must have been snoozing through the "intent versus effect" lecture in his college art appreciation class, but he's not mistaken that "meaning" can trip up even the most frequent gallery-goers and be simultaneously absent from the most popular works. (<–No, that is not a potshot at Thomas Kinkade.) But if he thinks that point doesn't also apply to the gaming world, I'll just pass on his personal email address to the 60,000+ former fans of Mass Effect 3 who are stomping their feet because Bioware won't change the ending of their video game. Let's move on to his 2nd point…
2. Games go beyond art.
Goldstein says: "You don't just read or watch a role played out for you; you become that role. In a game, you have constant influence on what's happening. Even the most linear of games is still altered by when you choose to jump." He's not totally wrong there. Historically, there are communal and interactive aspects of the theatre (and many performing arts) which have been lessened with time and with the aesthetic persuasion of figures like Wagner. Yet, if he believes the choice to jump in a platform game invariably trumps the very visceral interaction that frequently occurs between audience and performer, he's sadly mistaken. (And frankly, needs to get out to more theatre.) Is the conclusion to K.O. Chun-Li more significant than that feeling you get when you and 1,500 of your fellow theatre-goers are on the edge of your seats in a theatre quiet enough to hear a pin drop? (And how that electricity can affect a performance!) I imagine any of the most popular comedic actors of our time– you know, the ones that wouldn't be caught dead in those artsy plays or films– would be quick to correct Mr. Goldstein in his assumption that the theatre isn't interactive. The only thing he gets right in his assertion is that, yes, video games are different.
3. Sports don't need to be art.
Oh, indeed. Though… they can be artful, as Goldstein reveals. But in describing the drama of sports, he almost perfectly describes the parallel drama of the art world. He says, "Sports fans know who talked smack about whom, who has a history of blowing it at the end of games, who is overpaid, who's a cheap player, etc." Are we talking about the scuttlebutt at Art Basel Miami? The latest auction at Sotheby's? Or Damien Hirst? Perhaps. Thus, we're merely engaging different audiences. And before anyone argues that there's a difference in economics (i.e. the every-man sports match or the elitist art fair), I'll very quickly direct you to the average salary one receives to throw a ball around. (No offense, Tim Duncan– I still love you.) Or the amount of public funds used to build sports stadiums. Sure, sports don't need to be art. Sports, as opposed to art, continue to be fed to our children in school through well-funded programs, and there will be sports audiences for generations to come. That's pretty cool, if you're into it.
But on that note, I'll make a little admission here: Earlier today, a colleague in the office randomly exclaimed, "Wow! A photo on the Houston Texans' Facebook page has 591K Likes." And I couldn't help but audibly grumble. Yes, it was in jest… and yes, it turns out the 591K Likes were for the page, not just one image (which is far more reasonable). But my reaction is symptomatic of the "us against them" attitude engendered by our battle for popularity, attention, and validation. To the contrary, we should celebrate the pluralistic world we live in, which allows for a crowded stadium and at-capacity theatre on the same downtown block. It doesn't have to be a culture war! And by the same token, Goldstein needn't dismiss art to validate gaming. Ironically, the Smithsonian has warmly accepted video games into its dominion to be presented alongside more traditionally-accepted forms. (See 'The Art of Video Games' at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.) I love what their guest curator, Chris Melissinos, has to say on the matter:
Video games are an amalgam of what we consider to be traditional art. Within video games we see illustration, narrative, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, and all of these things conspire to create a form of art whose output is greater than the individuals parts. It is has never been a question that video games would be in art museum; it was at what point would we see them.
But it's worthy of note that the "snobby" art institutions Goldstein is railing against are far more accepting of "video games as art" than he credits them.
And for the record, I wouldn't have grumbled if it had been announced that a Rockets' image had 591K Likes… I prefer basketball. I understand basketball. My valuation of either sport is, after all, subjective. Which takes me to his 4th point…
4. For the people
Goldstein: "Games are for the working class."
I don't even know where to start with that comment, aside from suggesting it does a disservice to arts patrons, gamers, and working class families alike. I suppose I can begin with the economic issue:
- Cost of video game: Range of $20-60 (For argument's sake, we'll use an old edition of World of Warcraft on the low end and Call of Duty on the high end.)
- Cost of an Xbox video game console: $300 (Or even higher cost of PC/Mac etc.)
That means you're out $320+ in order to play a video game. (Yes, I realize the console provides hours upon hours of game-play, as well as the option to play multiple games, but the up-front costs may still be an economic barrier for some.) Alternately:
- Cost of ticket to the Houston Symphony: starting at $35
- Cost of admission to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston: $10
- Cost of admission to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston or the Menil Collection: Free!
A side by side comparison suggests that gaming isn't necessarily the ultimate budget entertainment. So, is Goldstein defining the "working class" from an economic standpoint? Or is he merely suggesting that working class folk are simpletons? Is it important that video games only be a form of escape? If that is indeed what he's suggesting, I think he's selling everyone involved short. Talk about killing any aspirations of gaming facilitating education, interconnectivity, and creativity…
(I remember the first time I saw City Glow during the Red Hot: Asian Art Today from the Chaney Family Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. I remember thinking it was fantastic, but that it would be so much more fun to control the film… like a video game.)
Honestly, it wasn't necessary for me to spend several paragraphs picking apart Goldstein's piece when Helen Han from 8Bit Envy sums it up so well in her rebuttal, Critic Circuit Hububs about Video Games as Art – Forgets Everything about Actual Art:
Goldstein completely loses me towards his concluding point, which is as follows, "If games were recognized as being equal to an Oscar winner or the National Book of the Year, would you experience them differently? […] It certainly shouldn't matter what a bunch of non-gamers think about anything in gaming. Pity them for not being able to enjoy the things games have to offer — true immersion, social connection, and emotional gratification." That actually sounds like he's describing art. In fact, if taken ad hominem against other media already considered art, it remarkably sounds like a plea for a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
However, if we make a case for video games receiving NEA funds– as Han points out, "public funding is the first step in not only gaining real creative good, but for more opportunities for diversity in the creative process"– recipients from traditional fields should think heartily about why they receive those funds. Let us all stand at attention. While I am supportive of the NEA's decision to fund some video games, it is an interesting move to support a field that has traditionally been commercially viable, particularly when traditional forms are suffering more than ever. (Granted, I realize the NEA is funding projects outside the commercial model.) Nevertheless, I think it underscores the imperative to be good stewards of the public dollars we receive and careful guardians of creativity, diversity and all the lofty goals for the public good which may be side-effects of more popular media and entertainment, but don't lie at the very center of their purpose.
As for whether video games are art, I leave it up to the viewer. Goodness knows, I'm not qualified as arbiter. However, I do know I'd go to bat for the artistic and creative value of games like Little Big Planet any day. And I do know that I'm going to have a LOT more time to myself to attend "snobby" art events in 5 days when Diablo III is released and my boyfriend disappears. As they say, game over.
* Every day, I receive a newsletter from Thomas Cott (Director of Marketing for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater) in my inbox. And each day, Mr. Cott compiles a series of articles and blogs around a particular theme pertinent to the artistic field. I mention this only to credit him with aggregating informative, insightful, and inflammatory opinions to which I geek out daily… and it is one of these newsletters which inspired this post. (I present you with Exhibit A.)
** A "low-impact gamer" is anyone who spends more than 5, but less than 20 hours a week playing video games and who is socially adept. I made this term up.