I didn't get where I am today by blogging instead of working!

Another bleak and grinding week at work is reminding of my all-time office hero, the put-upon everyman whose increasingly absurdist reactions to his dreary existence culminated in a naked faked suicide attempt, only for him to return as his own long-lost cousin, become a millionaire selling grot and set up a commune.

Reggie Perrin. You da man.

Based on the books by David Nobbs, the TV series starred the superlative Leonard Rossiter as Reginald Iolanthe Perrin.
Not only did he have to cope with drag of commuting to his crummy job at Sunshine Desserts but, once there, had to face his barking mad, cliche-crunching, metaphor-mixing boss, CJ ("I didn't get where I am today...") and his sycophantic toadies, Tony Webster ("Great!) and David Harris-Jones ("Super!") along with his saucy secretary Joan (played by Nadia Popov off of Rentaghost, y'know...). Back home, aside from his long-suffering wife, he had a crypto-paramilitary brother-in-law, Jimmy ("Bit of a cock-up on the catering front") and other nutty family members to drive him to wage a surrealist fight against what passes for normality.

Just thinking about him and his attitude is helping me cope!

P.S. There's an Indian vegetarian restaurant in Plymouth called Veggie Perrin's.

P.P.S. The Prisoner. Related? Depends on the way you look at things, really.... ;o)

400 years later...

Today's squizz at the excellent Londonist informs us of a BBC News article covering the story that, 400 years after the event, the descendants of Gunpowder Plotters and Royalists (the Duke of Northumberland whose ancestor was the plotter Thomas Percy* and The Marquess of Salisbury who is descended from Robert Cecil**, one of King James' ministers) are meeting for a handshake of reconciliation.
Aaah. Bless.
Still, it's a nice PR fluff-type reason to kick off the start of the 400th anniversary celebrations of the Gunpowder Plot - the attempted religiously-motivated terrorist attack on the seat of UK government in 1605. Now that's worth getting the sparklers out for...

Fantastic resource on the build-up, details and aftermath of the Plot on the BBC History website, here and The Catholic Encyclopaedia gives it's tuppenceworth, too. Burke's Peerage looks at the (titled) protagonists, here.


* The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil was a three-time Tory PM; his spawn have continued in the British Conservative political tradition, as this Wikipedia article on the 7th Marquess shows. The joys of inherited influence...

** Why not read the poetry of Thomas Percy?

RIP

Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide.

I suppose it never got weird enough for him.

Failed weekend

After shooting my mouth off to all and sundry about the cultural glory that was to be my Friday off, I f**ked it up.

Thursday night to Cargo, to see Cursor play at the Resonance FM bash.
Got blattered on cider (this cider, to be exact) throwing the plans for the next three days off kilter. I thus abjectly failed to make any of the exhibitions I blogged about. That annoyed me on so many levels I can't even begin to think about it.

This led to a childishly depressive malaise whereby I hurled the rest of the weekend down the pan out of pique and went on something of a bender. The hostelries that I spent most of the rest of the weekend in were The Gaucho Grill off Piccadilly, T.S. Queen Mary moored by the Embankment, Pitcher & Piano near Trafalgar Square, The Slug & Lettuce in Borough High Street and The Bedford in Balham.

We'll draw a discreet veil over the details....

Positive and negative

Michael Howard, leader of the British Conservative Party, wants medical tests performed on immigrants, specifically on non-EU migrants, for tuberculosis and HIV. Much talk of the drain that immigrants are placing on the National Health Service.

This one's going to run for a while, methinks. More from the BBC, here.

The whole debate (as usual) appears to show the politicians making as much political hay as possible without giving us anything so troubling as detail. Also the spectre of racism is leering over the whole discussion.

The problems with this idea are immediate - Dr John Moore-Gillon appeared on Channel 4 News last night (and he's been quoted in most of the media reports on this issue. Popular chap), stating that TB can remain dormant for months, years, even decades and casts doubt on the effectiveness of TB screening. In his paper on TB vaccination, he writes "the assessment methods are 50 years old, and little importance is afforded to discovering new diagnostic techniques or more effective vaccines." But there ain't many votes in that is there?

The racism aspect is also being touted about. "Why non-EU immigrants?" etc. I don't believe we will know for sure unless the policy is implemented. I'll be satisfied it's non-racist if I see all the Australians and New Zealanders who come to live and work in this country (without getting abuse off of the Daily Mail) queueing up for their tests with other migrants.
Of course this might not happen if the tests are limited to people from high-risk areas. The area most often referred to as high-risk for HIV in the media is sub-Saharan Africa. So all the South Africans who live and work in London will have to be tested before they enter the country? Yeah, right...

The 'Labour' government, instead off attacking this as too right-wing, announce that TB is already screened for and such policies may be part of their possible next term as well. This New 'Labour' manoeuvre of splitting the difference as opposed to challenging the right-wing with a left-wing attitude is well covered by Martin Jacques in this Guardian article. For perspective, Martin Jacques used to be the editor of Marxism Today. His old mates seem to dislike him.

Seems that issues like this will be dominating the run-up to the General Election.

Get cultured

This Friday has been booked off to absorb some high culture and fine art type ting, in order to give me something to talk about when I meet people at parties. Other than "do you have any more wine?", "where's your toilet?" and "if I said you had a beautiful body, would you give me some more wine?"

Front-runners are The Design Museum with its Design of Information exhibition. Frankly, any show on the history of information design that includes a bit on the great Harry Beck, will get me going.

Having missed the Encounters exhibition at Vic & Al's Place owing to brutalising hangovers on most weekends, I'm determined to get to The Turks Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (lovely website, that). Not only does it cover the Seljuks and Ottomans, it also covers the Uighurs (geographically Chinese, ethnically Turk) and Turco-Mongol society, too. Ace.
For background, check out Anahita's Know Your Turks! article at her excellent website.

The final contender is Turner Whistler Monet at Tate Britain - a sort of Three Tenors for Impressionism. Aside from the obvious merits of the artwork on display, some interest has been revived in the Whistler versus Ruskin 1878 libel case.

In brief: The Grosvenor Gallery, at its first exhibition, showed Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. The critic John Ruskin wrote of it: "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face".
The furious Whistler sued him for libel. Paintbrushes at dawn.
Sir John Holker, the Attorney-General for England & Wales, appeared as counsel for Ruskin, Edward Burne-Jones was called as a witness and the case assumed massive public interest, with the protagonists actually debating the subjective worth of the painting and the nature of abstract art in court.
The verdict was fairly damning both ways, judge and jury making it clear what they thought of the whole business.
Ruskin lost the case - but Whistler was awarded only one farthing in damages and no costs. Gutted.
Jonathan Jones has a very good Guardian article on it.

(Buy an 1878 farthing on eBay, here - one day left for bidding)

I wonder if I can do all three exhibitions in one day...?

Expensive weekend

After wasting everyone's time waxing lyrical about Nathan Barley in two posts, I went out on Friday night and forgot to tape the first episode. Pah. When's it coming out on DVD?
The Londonist reviews it.

On the bright side, I ended up on a minor pub crawl around Kentish Town with some pals (including Inane) who are looking to buy a pub lease in the area. We were scoping out the competition, so it was market research, really...
Covered the Assembly House, The Bull & Gate and the Abbey. First two were good; the third (where we ate) was a bit godawful - cramped seating, bench-table height ratio made for tricky eating and it's generally pricey. And my burger and chips came on a block of wood as opposed to a plate. It's enough to make you vote UKIP.
Shame, though. When I was nine years old, if someone had brought me burger and chips on a bit of wood, I would have hooted and hollered with delight and promptly demanded all my meals (including soup) on slabs of tree-trunk. If it had happened when I was nineteen, I would have immediately identified it as a restricted hardwood, organised a sit-in to protest rainforest destruction and had the place shut down. And now aged twenty-nine, it just annoys me. Hope it doesn't happen when I'm thirty-nine. I'll probably smash myself over the head with it. I digress...

More drink when I got back home (stupid Scattergun), crashed out at about 3.30am. Got rudely awoken at 7.00am by the local accredited representative of Her Majesty's Royal Mail brandishing a parcel from Foyles. No Christmas box for him. Turned out to be Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, so it wasn't all bad. It's shaping up to be a good read.
Pottered about in the usual dazed and confused fashion but managed to catch some of Midsomer Murders, so the day wasn't wasted.
Scooted off to meet Nomen Luni at 43 South Molton Street nr Bond Street- one of the more achingly trendy joints I've been to of late. We lowered the tone quite badly.
The upstairs bar was hired out, the very nice looking downstairs bar was simply not open and the ground floor where we ate and drank was festooned with boxes of Weetabix, children's drawings and Whizzer & Chips and Dandy annuals. Hmm. The food was wonderful, overpriced and came with an automatic 12.5% service charge. Ouch.
Then to Buttoned Down Disco to shake my booty like a mad thing to lovely tunes. Great fun. Left at three. Took a while to get home. Not so much fun.

Awakened fashionably late on Sunday, to find that Cursor had returned to the flat after his gigging tour of St Petersburg and environs. He brought me a couple of Russian Sherlock Holmes DVDs - details here. He knows me too well...
They're a series produced by Lenfilm for Soviet State telly from the late seventies to the mid eighties and still extremely popular in the CIS. It is assumed that all English people eat porridge for breakfast, simply because Holmes (Vasily Livanov) and Watson (Vitaly Solomin) do in these adaptations. They are extremely good programmes - well worth picking up if you like your Sherlock - and Solomin's Watson is terrific.

Popped out to Marks & Spencer for a bit of shopping, to find that they have brought out a range of meals called Gastropub.
Right, that's it I'm definitely voting UKIP...

Valentine's Day

Hey, hey - it's the day of lurve on Monday. Time to wrap your loved one in a warm embrace, say "gimme some sugar, baby", shower their up-turned face with a thousand burning kisses and let your passion lift your hearts and souls.

Or cry into your pillow and try to console yourself with the thought that the cowing bitch could have gotten run over by a Nº 12 bus in the three years since you split up. F'rinstance.

Stuck for ideas for cards and gifts this year?

Try this: http://scottish-romantic-gifts.com/ for that certain laird or lady in your life.

Or for those special e-cards, try here.

Perhaps you have conceived an undying passion for someone and they don't know it? Find out their address from 192.com and hang around their house, so they know you're interested.
Also check out http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/ - maybe you can worm your way into their social group and get near them that way.

Or have you acquired a stalker yourself? Maybe Valentine's Day has brought things to a cliamx for them, their sad, pathetic fantasies crowding their head because God told them you would be together? Info from the police, here.

Happy Valentine's Day!

XXX

Chinese New Year - 新年快樂

It's Chinese New Year. The Year of the Rooster.

Or it was. Recently. Or maybe it's a few days time.

I don't know - I have trouble enough with this culture, without giving a fig for anyone else's...

However, I am always a sucker for a bit of mystic Eastern mumbo-jumbo (as opposed to boring Western mumbo-jumbo ie. Jonathan Cainer, Russell Grant, Mystic Meg etc.)

Being born in 1976 makes me a Fire Dragon.
Rock. Hear me roar.

This appears to mean a copasetic year for me, according to this profile.

It states that I should:

"keep a low key". G flat for the next twelve-month, then
"expand and promote whatever I am doing". More blogging? OK.
"beware over-work and exhaustion". Sorry boss, I'm a dragon so I have to sleep 'til ten.
and I'll have "plenty of romances". Get in, my son!
"If you are single, consider marriage". Whoa, easy there, Confucius. Let's not rush it, eh?
It finishes with "your romances are illusive". So, my romances are going from being sporadic to being fictional? Triffic.

From spin to sting

A thirteen year old financial crisis involving Britain's ignominious departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism is suddenly front page news again after documents sent from HM Treasury under the new Freedom of Information Act to the Financial Times regarding a request for papers, somehow arrived at the BBC.

Black Wednesday.

Apparently, it cost us taxpayers £3.3 billion.

It also made the canny George Soros, a rather rich man.

The actual documents are here. However, some of the pertinent information has been held back for security reasons. Yeah.

The Conservative Party are angry - intimating a sting operation to discredit their fiscal track record. The Guardian have several articles on the story, including that crusty old noise-pot, Norman Tebbit, bitching about it. John Major weighs in too, evaluating what happened. See here for Samuel Brittan's thoughts on it from last year.

The FT have plenty to say on the subject - interestingly their print edition reads as if they were saving it for a special report but their hand got forced and they had to write it up for immediate publication.

Aside: y'know there's a band called Norman Lamont?

Antiquated in-breds rule OK

Charles, Prince of Wales is to marry his long-time squeeze Camilla Parker Bowles.

Anyone interested in this story, its constitutional ramifications and what this means for the monarchy - please stop reading this blog, as your sort aren't welcome here.

Ex-Twat speaks...

More on Nathan Barley...

Neil Boorman, formerly of Shoreditch Twat, weighs in on the merits of Nathan Barley (see earlier post. Seems I didn't stick the Twat link in that post for nothing) in an article for The Times.

Do you think he's bitter cos he satirised those arrested development new-media types already without a prime-time show on Channel 4? Nah. Cast aside such unworthy thoughts. He had a late-night show on Channel 4.
More credibility, y'see? 8o)
He seems to miss the point, though (when he's not listing impeccable credentials from his CV). From the trailers, the programme seems to be lampooning anyone involved in that scene who take themselves far too seriously.
Sorry to break this to you, Neil, but I think that's you.
You're better than this, son.

Mind you, the last line of the article could be somewhat disingenuous. A series like this could markedly increase the ridicule factor of consumers when confronted with things like this and this.

Science for today: "How long is it?"

Pay attention, class:

Welcome to the wacky world of M-theory (the theory formerly known as string). Based around the attempt to fit Einstein's general theory of relativity into the classical world of particle physics, it replaces particles with strings. These strings (depending on their state) appear as different particles.
This has given rise to a number of string theories, unified as M-Theory.

Check out the Official String Theory Website. It's not clear who's published this, but the list of luminaries involved makes for impressive reading. Many of them popped up in Channel 4's The Theory of Everything.

Don't be shy - I've kept the links nice and simple....

Weekend down the tube

Been meaning to show you one of the better sites on t'internet, The Cartoonist, for a while now and here's the perfect opportunity - a post on the London underground song with recent interview and little movie.

The song has been floating around for a bit now now and two young doctors behind it have created an album - all money raised goes to Macmillan Cancer Relief. Buy, buy. Then stick it in a ghetto blaster and play the song in a tube station. Or hand out copies to buskers for them to practice and play.

All of which reminds me - passing through Piccadilly Circus Underground station yesterday, I checked out a neat, amusing and nicely done art project, The Gold Card Adventures by Ellie Harrison, based on the distances travelled in a year on London's wonderful public carriage systems and where they could get you abroad. It's well worked out, the postcards are rather nifty, and anyone who spends that much time obsessively recording and manipulating data from something like public transport travel times gets a gold star from me....

The day before, sloped out to Exmouth Market to hook up with Inane, Anglepoised and Nomen Luni, amongst others, to hang about with and talk rubbish. Topics covered were: the style implications of wearing 2 shirts; if one could acquire information by eating it, what would happen if one ate alphabet soup; monkfish; male /female designated facilities not being clearly marked and leaving one to work out the right door from silly pictures and colours; snagging; a gents toilet in Arkansas, USA that has an en-suite pool table room with referee; the early oeuvre of Depeche Mode, Ministry and Lawnmower Deth; pub and bar design; packets of cigarettes that cost £17; et cetera.
First time I've ever actually been to Exmouth Market to stop, look around and peer in shops, as opposed to walking past it or through it. Used to wander that way a lot when I was going through speech therapy. It's an OK area, if a little too clean and self-consciously cobbled, you know what I mean?
Eye caught by Clerkenwell Music - good little shop with varied selection (although disgraces itself by having a little stand with such bands du jour as Coldplay, Travis, Keane, Snow Patrol, Razorlight, White Stripes, Vines - you know the section of the music appreciation Venn diagram I'm talking about. Yeah.) Picked up a Best of Temptations CD (worth buying for Ball of Confusion, Get Ready, I'm Losing You, Ain't Too Proud To Beg, alone. Just remember to skip My Girl. Yuck.) and Tea For The Tillerman by Cat Stevens. Sweet.

Grabbed a bite to eat at Little Bay - lovely food and, pre-7pm, the prices are lower so it's a bit of a bargain. Became fatigued and had go home early, owing to Friday night out with a couple of work colleagues in Strada, here (looks like they're branching out. Pizza Express, beware. They might be pricier but they're a lot nicer.) This of course means I didn't stay in on Friday as planned. Sigh. Still, there's always next Friday to be good...

Da Vinci Cod

Last night's telly featured The Real Da Vinci Code, a witty and concise debunking of the fantasies lying behind such tomes as The Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood & Holy Grail.

Personally, I blame Erich von Däniken...

Tony Robinson (he of Time Team and, remember, Blackadder) travels the world to uncover some of the hoaxes and half-truths behind the books that so fascinate the sort of people who never grew out of playing Secret Seven in the garden shed.

I think he makes it clear that these people have been taken in by mis-readings and well-planned cons, as opposed to being engaged in active deception themselves.
And it's not a crime to be credulous.
Although I think it is a crime to produce a novel that (whatever its factual provenance) is written is a piss-poor and slap-dash fashion. Ahem.

Robinson' travels take him to, amongst other places, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Israel and the intricate and beautiful Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, Scotland.

The documentary touched on some genuinely interesting factual issues, specifically that of the Nag Hammadi documents, found by Muhammad Ali al-Samman in 1945 near the village of al-Qasr in Upper Egypt; more here.

It also used clips from an all-time favourite film, Monty Python & the Holy Grail. Nice.
Am picking it up forthwith on DVD.

What sort of Grail Knight are you? Or read the script. Or the original pre-shooting 1974 script.
Exactitude. I like it.

But you can take it too far. See here. Oh my God. But then I was actively searching for it which probably makes me an accessory after the fact. Tut.

Telly

Stop Press - Good televison programming is back!

Much cheered by the new series of Look Around You on BBC2 last night - best described as a spoof on 70s and 80s science and education programming. That might not sound promising to you but trust me, it's a gem.
Eschewing the "Schools and Colleges" style of the first series (look that up in your TV Cream front page if you can't remember. There will be a test on the links at the bottom), they've gone on to lampooning the early days of Tomorrow's World with the second.

The ever-informative and well written Londonist has this post on a new series, Nathan Barley, starting next Friday on Channel 4.
OK, here's the credos - looking good, it's a collaboration between Chris Morris (Blue Jam, Jam, The Day Today and Brass Eye etc.) and Charlie Brooker (TV Go Home, part of Zeppotron).

I note from the trailers, that Richard Ayoade who played Thornton Reed in the rather good Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is in that mix. Favourite quotes of Reed's:

"If he gets word of this, my arse is grass and he's got a lawnmower."

"I'd rather be dead and rained on!"

"I beg your pudding?"

"You've got a face like the proverbial."

Y'know he did law at Cambridge?

More: Excellent article on Nathan Barley from Warp Records with general info and introduction to the set-up, here, with more links to WarpFilm / Chris Morris work.

Two words. Watch it.

Also: Shoreditch Twat. Related? You knows it....