Pete Ashton's Weblog

Ok, the Mohammed cartoons. As Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter puts it, "probably the biggest international news story with cartoons at its center in the history of the medium" which makes the relative silence on the issue from comics nerds, who have over the last couple of decades been rabbiting on about the power of cartooning and the effectiveness of the medium in communicating ideas, somewhat ironic methinks. Here we are with half the world in uproar over a bunch of gag cartoons and everyone's gone silent.

(At least I haven't noticed anything, but granted I'm not exactly in the middle of the comics community at the moment, so maybe I missed Team Comix getting all vocal on this issue. Feel free to point me in that direction if I'm wrong.)

But still, this is the comics/cartooning medium, of which I'm on record as "caring a bit about", and the world of religion, of which I'm on record as "thinking a bit stupid", so it should be pretty clear cut where I stand on this.

Except it's all a bit complicated. Unfortunately the cartoons (which if you haven't seen them already are on this page about 2/3 down) are kinda shit. Not only that but they were published in what I understand to be a right-wing newspaper on a par with the Express in a country which doesn't have a particularly good track record on dealing with its darker-skinned immigrant population. Parallels can be drawn with pre-war caricatures of Jews in Germany along with the depictions of orientals in 1940s American comics. There's no place for this kind of thing and it deserves to be shouted down.

(Although it must be said that the "Stop! We've run out of virgins!" one is kinda funny.)

On the other hand, the argument that these cartoons shouldn't have been printed soley because they depict Mohammed and for no other reason is... well...

Religion, eh?

I mean, you've got some seriously meaty issues here. Racism, tolerance, imperialism, terrorism, war, economics... But the thing that gets people out there setting fire to embassies (and let's not forget the importance of an embassy in political terms - you might as well invade the country itself) is the visual representation of a man who some people believe to be a prophet.

I'd like to think these cartoons were just the spark that set off a powder keg that has been ignored for far too long. A handy scapegoat for both sides that avoids the bigger more complicated issues, rather like chat rooms being blamed for paedophilia and heavy metal for teenage suicide. I'd like to think that, but unfortunately I think this is a case of stupid bigotry meeting stupid religion and we're just going to have to reap what has been sown.

Here's a simplified example. If Muslims (or more accurately people living in the Middle East in countries that are predominantly populated by persons of the Muslim faith) were to object to these cartoons on the basis that they're racist, inflammatory nonsense then they'd have to put their own house in order and stop printing the same about Israel but objecting on the graven images of Mohammed basis means they can avoid that. On the other hand the Europeans avoid the cancer of racism in their countries by citing freedom of expression, neglecting to remember that with freedom comes a shitload of responsibility and doesn't include shouting fire in a crowded theatre.

Idiots, the lot of them...

[Update: Wikipedia on the controversy including the cartoons themselves. | The Comics Journal message board where comics luminaries swerve around the point a bit, only occasionally hitting it.]

Third week at the courier depot completed. Physical state: tired, not wrecked like last time but certainly not godlike. Slight twinge in my back but nothing serious (touch wood). Cycled two days out of five this week, partly to avoid exhaustion and partly because it's really quite bloody cold out there and while I'm not a fair weather cyclist by any stretch it's just not healthy getting sweaty for an hour in freezing conditions. Further to that I've had the snots all week, which has been pleasant. But enough of my relative well being, fascinating as it must be.

Today all the temps got a phone call. You know that scenario where migrant workers in the southern United States are digging a ditch by a freeway and the charge-hand drives up in his pickup with a list of names of who will be coming back the next day? It's a bit like that only it's all done with mobile phones. Polish Rob was the first to get the call before he'd even arrived saying he wouldn't be needed next week. Soon after I got the call saying I would. Which was nice, if a little fucking awkward. Rob was a gentleman about it despite the fact that he'd been there three weeks longer than me and is by far a better box lugger than I. He called me "old man" the other day when my cold was affecting my 3D Tetris skills which was weird and possibly marks some kind of milestone in my life, but I digress.

Rob's a funny one. Like I said, he's one of the many (millions of, apparently) Polish migrant workers in the country at the moment thanks to the country's recent joining of the EU. I remember back when I lived in east London (circa 2002) getting a night bus home and being surrounded by Slavic voices and since the East End has always been the first port of call for immigrant communities it's not too surprising that pretty much every industrial job I've done over the last 6 months has had a Polish guy or two working there.

On the whole I've gotten on with them. Like many immigrants (and I'm aware I'm generalising horribly here but please bear with me - it's either this or I qualify every statement extensively, or just write nothing at all) they're hard working, friendly and shockingly over qualified, which probably explains why I get on with most of them. For example, one guy I was working with at an office supplies dispatch warehouse was wearing a Linux t-shirt so we got talking about open source and computers and stuff which inevitably turned to me asking why he doesn't get some computer related work, with him inevitably replying that his English wasn't good enough for the entry level jobs but that he was trying (and working on his English).

Rob didn't seem to have any particular skills but he had a plan. He was taking English lessons during the day (which continued during our conversations with those awkward questions about how the language works to which native English speakers just shrug because they don't know - it just does, somehow) and working at night, trying to save up enough to get a driving license so he could get a better job so he and his girlfriend could settle down and raise a family. Only he wasn't getting enough steady work to pay for the driving lessons and his relationship with his girlfriend was pretty rocky. And he was tired all the time.

And now he's been told by the gaffers at the depot that, given the choice of four temps from the agency they'd rather not have him. Which, amongst other things, meant the parcels were not gently stacked in the truck this evening.

What's interesting, if that's the right word, is the choice of temps consisted of a white English guy (myself) a black guy, an Asian guy and a Polish guy. I'm as native as it gets in this mongrel nation. The black and Asian guys are probably 3rd generation. Rob's been here for a year at most. Can you see what I'm getting at?

I can only speak from observation and I wouldn't give much weight to my opinions but it seems to me that in the years since I first did the industrial temping game in my early 20s the black and Asian workforce has become a lot more integrated, a least at the manual labour level. In 1994 or so I worked at a factory where the factory floor was entirely staffed by Asians in red hats supervised entirely by whites in white hats while the dispatch area was white only. There was no movement between departments and the whole place stank of some kind of institutionalised apartheid. Conversely in most of the places I work now you'll find a full spectrum of Asian, African, Caribbean and white workers mixing at all levels from shop floor drudgery to lower management (upper management is still the preserve of the overweight middle-aged white man but that's a whole 'nother issue). While I'm not denying the frequent racism that does exist in this country this does strike me as a glimmer of hope for the future.

Except, of course, for the Poles. They're at the bottom.

Ooh, it's a meme, this time from Meg who had a special request for the first one.

Forty Four (or so) jobs I've had (roughly in order since 1989):

• Assistant, Chemist Counter, Boots, Saturdays
  
• Building site labourer
  
• Toiletries factory staffed predominately by middle aged women "with mattresses strapped to their backs".
  
• Bookseller - Hatchards, Winchester (Xmas temp)
  
• Bookseller - Athena Bookshop, Southampton
  
• Bookseller, Dillons, Winchester
  
• Reprographics assistant, Mail Boxes Etc, University of Birmingham
  
• Bookseller, Dillons, Birmingham
  
• Bookseller, Waterstone's, Birmingham
  
• Bookseller, Waterstone's, Cheapside, London
  
• Bookseller, Waterstone's, Charing Cross Road, London
  
• Bookseller, Waterstone's, Leadenhall Market, London
  
• Labourer, Organic Farm, Isle of Wight
  
• Food prep, Kitchen, Otterbourne
  
• Chambermaid, Winchester
  
• Cable Puller's Mate, Winchester
  
• Refuse Collector, Banbury
  
• Car factory, Banbury
  
• Office drone, Airline, Birmingham
  
• Cold-store warehouse, Thatcham
  
• Box lugging, Rubery
  
• Mail room, Bank, Birmingham
  
• Building a fake house, NEC, Birmingham
  
• Fly-tip clearing and litter picker, Birmingham (all Birmingham from here-on)
  
• Delivery driver's mate
  
• Tampon Factory
  
• Giant Otter, sea Life Centre
  
• Marshall, Bike marathon
  
• Pharmacy Stores, QE Hospital
  
• Quality Control, car factory
  
• Production line, car factory
  
• Catalogue warehouse
  
• Dog food warehouse
  
• Assembling large metal doors for lockups
  
• Tyre warehouse
  
• Quality control, Landrover
  
• Inspecting doodads for excess solder
  
• Leaflet delivery
  
• Self-employed website designer
  
• Odd job man (mainly garden work)
  
• Office job phoning people to see if they're dead or not.
  
• "Fine art" dispatch warehouse
  
• Car park attendant
  
• Parcel courier depot
  
• And many more that I've forgotten about or didn't blog at the time...

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• Casablanca
• Gross Point Blank
• Blazing Saddles
• god, I dunno... I'm kinda stuck here...

Four places I've lived:

• Singapore (1973-1979)
• Croydon (1985-1989)
• Winchester/Eastleigh (1989-1995)
• Birmingham (1995-2000, 2003-date)

Four TV shows I love (though I don't actually watch TV...):

• Battlestar Galactica (So much better than it should be)
• Buffy/Angel/Firefly (DVD box sets in one sitting)
• Spaced (if a little too close to home...)
• The Crow Road

Four places I've been to on holiday:

• Fuji (some time in the 70s during a typhoon)
• West Texas
• Guernsey
• Robin Hood's Bay

Four of my favorite dishes:

• Fried Breakfast in a Cafe
• Peanut Butter sandwich (optional extras: Chocolate Spread or Banana)
• Christmas dinner with all the trimmings
• A raw vegan meal prepared by my mate Helen that didn't look like much but which was delicious and filled me right up.

Four sites I visit daily:

• Guardian
• Wikipedia
• Flickr
• MySpace (for my sins...)

Four places I would rather be right now:

• Here in the summer
• Visiting my mates Dave and Ruth and their babies in Alyesbury
• Up a mountain with a thermos of tea
• In a field with a shovel and instructions to dig a big hole for no readily apparent reason.

Four bloggers I am tagging (though they shouldn't feel obliged or anything):

• Steve M
• Anna Mondo
• BSE *bing!*
• Ben Silentwords *bing!*

Photoshop is a great program but it's also an enigma. So many tools and not a clue as to how they might work. Thankfully you don't have to worry about them if all you want to do is crop, resize and save, which means you never actually get around to figuring out what they do until someone points it out to you.

I reckon I can't be alone in my relative cluelessness regarding Photoshop but I have, over the last four years, figured out a few things related to making photos look better and so I'm going to tell you about them.

Just to reiterate, I am not a professional, I'm probably wrong and you should always consult a doctor before embarking on self medication for major illnesses.

I'm getting one of those backlogs of things I think are going to take lots of time to write about but probably aren't but even though I rationally know this I keep putting off writing about them and they mount up, so here's a summary of the last few days for you to skim.

Friday. What happened on Friday? Oh yeah, my bike, which I've had for a little over a year now, got its first puncture last week and I fixed it but it didn't hold so I bought a new inner tube but when I put the wheel back on it wouldn't sit properly and eventually, after much faffing and tea, I notice a ballbearing had gone missing somehow from the spindle-wotsit and of course I have no spares because I've never had to fix this bike to this desgree and the nearest bike shop is a bike ride away and the bike has no wheel, and it's 4pm and I need to cycle later on tonight, so a brisk walk to Halfords (pausing briefly to take a photo) where they don't have my ballbearing in stock but after a few seconds pleading if they might have one in a jar of random bits out back the chap finds a spare set which he lets me have gratis and once again the staff of Halfords Selly Oak win my admiration and thanks.

And then, having fixed the bike to a satisfactory level, and noted the similarity between how a bike when fixed will never be quite as good as a new bike in the same way a JPEG when tweaked can never be corrected back to its original quality, followed by my noting how tediously geeky that comparison is, and having had some food, it was off to the Jug for the Misty's Big Adventure Xmas gig which was superb and wonderful and which I shall write about in full later. This was followed by a Balti in Moseley village with Shaun and Kats which was satisfactory but we really should have gone to Ladypool Rd and it was stupid of me not to.

The Balti meant I got home late and having lots of photos couldn't resist checking them and uploading a few so I got to bed about 2am, rising at 7.30 to go to the car park, deciding that I couldn't face the horror of the bus so I cycled, what with the bike being all fixed and everything, and it took 45 minutes to get to Solihull, quicker than the bus, arriving slightly exhausted but in a much better mood than usual. The car park was busy, as expected, but rather tedious with nothing exciting to report - lots of lost tickets and a few issues with the barrier - but I made a couple of quid from abandoned trollies that people couldn't be arsed to wheel back and that always brightens the day. One advantage of the car park is it's above a supermarket so I was able to pick up a couple of bottles of wine and some brandy butter for Xmas, except I left the brandy butter in the fridge so won't be able to enjoy it until New Years Day, but it'll be worth it.

And then another 45 minute ride home to be greeted by a reasonably full living room of people getting ready to set off to Doug and Sara's pre-Xmas party/gathering/thing, so a quick shower and snack-food dinner (we have a tremendous collection of snack-food right now) I joined the throng for a very enjoyable few hours of beer, nibbles and chats.

Xmas Day and I was awoken at 9am-ish with the offer of tea which seemed like a good enough reason to get up. We did the Xmas morning stuff, mooching around the living room watching Aardman animations videotaped on Xmas days past, until it was time for the Andy's to go to their respective Xmas day venues. Matt turned up for a bit and we set off on our bikes to his and Marv's place for the rest of the day. Dinner was meatballs in sauce, which seemed a bit wrong at first but worked out perfectly, followed by the Xmas pudding I'd made a few weeks previously from Jez's recipe and it was also perfect. Then we went for a walk around the parks of Kings Heath which are much nicer than I was expecting having only seen them from the road. And then we watched Doctor Who which was, as you'll probably be aware, bloody fantastic, so much better than TV at that time deserved to be, and bodes wonderfully for the 2nd series. And then we drank wine and beer and played a driving game on the Playstation, opting not to bother with the actual game but to just play a version where you have to drive into an intersection and crash as spectacularly as possible, which we did again and again until midnight-ish by which stage I decided I was far too drunk to cycle home, given the trouble I was having walking to the garden for a smoke, so I crashed on the sofabed.

Boxing day started with fried chipolatas and scrambled eggs after which I figured I'd better head off else I never would, and I had this vague idea I might get some stuff done, but was distracted by the 24 season 3 box set sitting in the living room so I worked through eight episodes before Andy and Celeste got back when I had to stop as they were only 2 episodes in, but Celeste had a Bruce Springsteen DVD where he performs and dissects his songs on stage so we watched that and it was very enjoyable. After that I figured I might as well crack on with 24 for a bit before bed so I did, getting through another 12 episodes by 5am. Ouchy. But very good stuff. Utterly bonkers and over the top, which is how I like my US TV.

Tuesday I got up very late in the afternoon, finished off 24, finally sorted and uploaded the photos from the Misty's gig, watched Doctor Who again thanks to BitTorrent and quite possibly enjoyed it even more (and for the record I never cared for Doctor Who ever at all) and, um, here we are.

Wednesday... Looks kinda frosty out there...

One of the most thrilling responsibilities of my job as car park attendant (weekends only) is checking the stairwells. I'm checking these for blockages, specifically in the form of teenagers who will use this space for "hanging out" away from the eyes of adults. On my first day I was also informed that shagging had occurred in that very stairwell and was given the impression that this sort of disgraceful activity was a regular thing, but as the weekend passed and I found nobody in there at all, let along anyone contemplating carnality, I began to suspect maybe this was a slight exaggeration. Understandable, really, in that nothing exciting tends to happen in a multi story car park so the story about discovering under age sex was bound to become legend. Especially as there appeared to be only one story and the details were somewhat fluid. Last weekend it was three guys and a girl, this weekend only two chaps were involved. But the punchline remained the same: Car park guy: "What the? Okay, move along now" (or words to that effect). Shagging lad: "Can you wait 'til I've finished mate?"

So on my first day I was gingerly opening the door, wondering what the hell I would do if I stumbled upon such a scene but soon it became part of the routine. But then, on Saturday afternoon, I approached the stairwell to hear voices, so I took a deep breath and entered, whacking the handle of the door right into the back of a teenage girl. Oops. But then what did she expect leaning against a door like that. I was greeted by about nine teens, the girls all dolled up like Lolita and the boys looking quite shockingly ugly, like teenage boys tend to do. Fags and a bottle of Bacardi were being shared and I felt a little sorry for them since this was obviously the only place they could go to share their fags and drink their Bacardi without being bothered. But it was my job to move them on. Initially we had a stalemate with the girl moaning about her probably bruised back and me just standing there, wondering how I was going to shift them, until I realised I was wearing a large fluorescent jacket and therefore represented authority. Plus my being there kinda ruined the whole hiding from adults thing so as long as I didn't leave them I'd win. Eventually, after apologising to the girl and explaining that this was an exit and couldn't be blocked, they asked where they should go, and I was slightly flummoxed. Where could these kids go? I glibly suggested a park bench or bus shelter and a couple of them took the lead and left, saying thanks on their way out. Thanks? What was that all about? I was expecting to be sworn at and maybe subjected to some spit. But then these were Solihull teenagers after all.

First up, I figured out why I dislike traveling on the number 11 bus so much. (You'll recall this is the Birmingham Outer Circle bus route which trundles around the suburban sprawl of this great city in a little over two hours, if you're lucky.) It occurred to me while coming home that I've never seen these busses bunched up in groups of two or three, a common occurrence with routes in and out of the city centre, and then I realised why. They stick to a very strict timetable which seems to assume the worst. This means they are rarely late but the flipside is that when traffic conditions are good (which they usually are when I travel thanks to my early starts) they have to slow down to make sure they're not early. The usual tactic to prevent rampant earliness is to stop for a few minutes at key bus stops, which is kinda irritating when you're in a bit of a hurry, but this isn't enough for the 11 so the drivers meander along at a speed not dissimilar to a motorised wheelchair, lending an air of endless purgatory to the occasion.

So anyway, having been offered and turned down numerous jobs when I was ill, some of which were pretty keen and in one case terrifically local, I of course had nothing last week and was getting somewhat desperate. December is always a dry time for industrial temping (the factories shut down for Xmas so the supply chain grinds to a halt) and if I'd thought things through I would have worked solidly through October and November and done GDFAF now, but I don't think things through because spontaneity is good and I am stupid. But I finally got the call from Wide-Boy Tim at the agency with some work and somewhat amazingly it's a job I've never done before. For this weekend and every weekend up to the new year I shall be a car park attendant in Solihull.

Possibly the best thing about the job is the jacket. As you know, I've become something of an aficionado of high visibility clothing and have acquired quite a collection of waistcoats, but I've never worn a jacket quite like this. You probably know the sort - a large padded waterproof jacket commonly worn by persons working in out-door traffic related activities that don't involve a lot of movement. I'd suspected they might be warm but never imagined how comfortable they are. It's like wearing a perfectly tailored duvet, snug but not restrictive, large but not balloon-like and quite sleekly cut. At the end of the day I put on my own padded US Army issue extreme cold weather parka and it utterly paled in comparison. I covet this coat. I need this coat. Unfortunately it's got a huge Solihull council logo on the back so even if I do manage to "acquire" it I can't really wear it in public, but they do sell them at the army surplus store. That said, I was told to write my name in it so when the job is over, who knows...

My job is to support the full time guys during the busy pre-Xmas period. Part of their job is to walk around the car park checking everything is okay, taking abandoned trollies back, checking for lost property and looking disapprovingly at badly parked cars. Probably the main job is just to be a bright yellow presence, deterring the criminal element and making the place seem less like an abandoned concrete maze. Meanwhile the other guys deal with jammed ticket machines, lost tickets and other ticket related traumas, of which there are a lot give the state of most of the customers.

It quickly dawned on me that a multi-story car park central Solihull allows you to experience people at their worst as they move from driving to shopping. Driving turns people into impatient maniacs for whom every second has more value than life itself. Shopping turns people into arrogant tossers who are under the delusion that the world revolves around their solipsistic ego-centric arseholes. And the delightful 1970's decaying concrete environment of the car park offsets this quite nicely. So a one-way system is seen not as a means to ensure smooth traffic flow while keeping pedestrians safe but as an irrelevance, while areas not designated as parking spaces are seen as parking spaces with no thought as to why they might not be designated parking spaces. And the maximum speed limit would appear to be about 30mph.

My induction was somewhat customer oriented, as everything appears to be these days, so on my first few rounds I made eye contact and smiled but was greeted with so much sour-faced bemusement that I gave up and just ignored everyone, which wasn't hard as they were ignoring me. Of course the hi-viz does turn you into invisible street furniture which might explain it but my colleagues expressed similar sentiments about our customers. This, by the way, is why you rarely get good customer service in shopping centres. It's not that the staff are bad people or poorly trained. It's that shopping centres bring out the worst in people and when you're subjected to this day in day out your armor is up and there is no benefit of the doubt. Customers are the enemy and will crush you with their words if you give them half a chance.

Thankfully I wasn't on the receiving end of any of this because my job was simply to walk around the car park every half hour and drink tea. Which, while potentially boring, is actually quite interesting because I'm really getting to know every inch of this car park. It's the sort of public space that people don't generally dawdle in and I'm getting paid to dawdle so I'm seeing it in a new light. I took along my old camera - the compact point'n'shoot with the broken battery lid held on with wire - and am taking photos. So far they're nothing special but I'm hoping by the end of the month I'll have uncovered something, or at least painted a picture of a car park that not many have seen before.

Oh, and I did get to tell someone off today. On one trip I noticed a car parked where it wasn't supposed to be and I sighed, tilting my head to one side as I stared at it, wondering how someone could possibly have thought this was an okay place to park. On my next round the car was still there but someone was walking towards it. I approached her with a smile and told her how wrong she was. She expressed confusion and launched into a long and somewhat surreal explanation of how she thought this was okay because somewhere else was okay which I brushed aside and, after telling her not to worry about it (we don't issue tickets or anything like that) told her her quite sternly not to do it again, which felt really good. With a grin on my space I went back to the office and proudly announced that I'd got one to great cheers from my associates in car park attendance. Unfortunately she was the only catch. I really wanted to get that tosser who parked in the disabled bay without a badge. I mean, what is it with people?

Multi Story Car Park set on Flickr which will be added to over the month.

I was trying to remember when I last did a real zine and without digging them all out I think it was around 1998, so today was rather momentous as I printed out and stapled (with my dusty but trusty long-armed stapler) the very rough draft of the GDFAF zine in all it's 44 page glory. Mainly this was so I could check the layouts I'd done on the computer actually worked on paper but I was also getting impatient and wanted to hold it in my hands, no matter how unfinished (and in the case of the last seven pages unwritten) it was.

As expected, the whole experience is kinda strange. Firstly it's interesting how web-based my design thinking is these days. I've structured the reviews as one long flow of text rather than making each post an individual item, which works because that's how they were presented in the first place. Originally I tried breaking them up but it just felt wrong. I've also inserted the photos in the same manner as the posts with each band having a photo at the point where they're talked about. Again, this works but it does mean the layout of each page isn't consistent and is probably something I'd have avoided back in the day.

Another weird thing has been going back to DTP. Back in the 90s the most advanced I got was using WordPerfect to lay out the text in columns leaving spaces for the images which would be stuck on with glue later. Now I'm using the Apple Pages package for the whole thing and producing a PDF (using the excellent CocoaBooklet to paginate everything properly). Again, it's really strange coming at this from a web design perspective. The whole concept of objects not flowing with the text is really odd along with the fact that inserting or deleting a sentence will mess up all manner of things further down the document. And there are some limitations to Pages that I can't find a way around (not helped by Pages being a fucking stupid name for a program when it comes to Google...). In fact, unless I'm just doing it all horribly wrongly I'd say Pages is not a robust DTP package by any stretch of the imagination. It's very user friendly but that's probably its downfall. But I also suspect a lot of this is me really wanting to just print out the text and break out the glue.

And then there's the photos themselves. My zines were usually about comics so the artwork was easy to get down to stark black and white for photocopying but my gig photos tend towards large patches of colour, usually red, so I have concerns about the zine being populated by black rectangles. Some experimenting did reveal the Halftone Pattern filter in Photoshop which is pretty crude but seems to do the job, though I'm not overly happy with seeing my lovely hi-res photos reduced to the resolution of a cameraphone. But then I am going for that photocopied zine aesthetic...

The weirdest thing, though, is how long it is. 15,000 words doesn't seem that much when you're scrolling in a browser but spread over 35 pages it's most impressive. I look at it and think "I wrote that".

I may have gotten my zine bug back.

00:45

Get home from Actress and Bishop to empty flat. Put on washing including combats and jumper which are suffering from 14 gigs worth of sweat and smoke.

01:15

Andy and Alex come home. Chat for a bit.

01:45

Put out washing to dry

05:00

Finish writing and post up GDFAF #14. Feel a bit of a headache coming on plus a sense of adrenalin drop now it's all over.

06:00

Photos uploaded to Flickr and I'm feeling knackered. Go to bed.

06:30

Can't sleep. Realise headache is because I got up a couple of hours before the gig and had a couple of pints to celebrate. In other words I am having that kind of mini-hangover people get in the afternoon after a mid-morning drink.

07:00

Get up. Have sandwich and take some paracetamol. Decide to stay up and potter around before having a snooze later on.

08:30

Andy gets up. Chat.

10:00

Empty veg scrapings and teabags in compost heap. Discover my DIY compost heap has fallen over. Disconcerted but not too worried as have ordered a proper compost bin. Notice new fence has been put up which explains it all. Pick up spilled compost by hand which isn't a problem as it's all frozen.

11:00

Have "supper" - pesto and pasta. Realise I've pretty much run out of food after the fortnight.

12:30

Feeling a little tired. Check with flatmate that he's not planning on using the living room and crash out on the sofa, the idea being it'll be easier to get up from than my bed. Set alarm on mobile for 15:30.

13:00

Kept awake by the Saturday afternoon performance of the Bournville Carillon playing Greensleeves.

13:30

Just as starting to doze off, woken by mobile ringing, which I've left on other side of room to force me to get up. Sister calling to check I'm coming to Banbury this evening to see her play in the Banbury Symphony Orchestra. "Did I wake you?" Mum will have my ticket for tonight's performance. Tell her I'm getting in about seven.

14:00

Alex phones for Andy. Go get Andy.

15:30

Alarm goes off. Reset for 16:00

16:00

Alarm goes off. Don't reset. Also don't actually get off sofa.

17:00

Andy wakes up me. Realise I have one hour until my train to Banbury leaves from central Birmingham.

17:20

Showered and changed, but having had no tea or food, I'm on my bike. Buy ticket from Bournville station to avoid queues but cycle on into town.

17:45

Cycling up Hurst St I realise I've missed the train from Moor St but can get the one from New St.

17:53

Virgin train pulls into to New St. Platform. Conductor assistant bloke thing points me to the far end of the train to put my bike.

17:54

Door for compartment for bikes is locked. Put bike in "vestibule".

17:55

Am informed by lady (in a very nice red motorcycle jacket as it happens) that I can't leave bike there. Will have to take it to other end of train.

17:56

Am shouted at for cycling on platform. Fair enough realy.

17:57

Bike is on train. I'm on train. Sit down.

18:03

Train leaves.

18:20

Decide this day is fucking insane and therefore good blog fodder. Start thinking of a post with time stamps and short pithy descriptions of what's happened.

18:40

Fall asleep for a few minutes.

19:05

Arrive in Banbury. Carry bike out of station (lot of stairs) and cycle to church.

19:07

Look for cafe to get tea and food but being a small town everything is shut except the pubs.

19:10

Banbury has a major shortage of iron railings around the Horse Fair area.

19:20

Find the sole cycle parking bars in the area and lock up. Roll fag.

19.25

Meet mum outside church. Ask people at desk if they have any tea. No, but there will be refreshments during the interval. Any tea? No, but there will be soft drinks. Coke? No, orange juice.

19:30

Concert starts. Very nice. Nearly fall asleep during first piece but manage to stay awake.

20:30

Interval. Orange juice kinda does the job. Stay awake during second half thanks to some loud Tchaikovsky. Getting very hungry.

21:15

Concert ends. Back to sister's house for tea and pizza.

22:00

Am asked if seeing my sister playing violin has made me want to break out the trombone for the first time in over a decade. Confess I'm thinking about it, but mainly to see what it sounds like when amped through Andy's guitar effects pedals.

22:40

Feeling much better after tea and pizza, leave sister's to catch last train. Am offered a lift by friends of hers who have a big car but decline as it'll be quicker for me to cycle.

22:44

Arrive at station. That was quick. Wait for train. Start getting cold.

23:04

Train to Birmingham pulls in. No cycle compartment and no big luggage areas to put bike. Rest bike against door and check each station to make sure it isn't on the platform side. Train isn't heated. Get colder.

00:14

Arrive at Birmingham Moor St. It's very very cold indeed. Start cycling but don't warm up. In fact my legs get colder, which is very strange.

00:45

Get home having cycled through a substantial amount of frost. Lock up. Make tea. Have sandwich. Warm up. Check computer.

01:30

Go to bed.

05:30

Wake up after only four hours sleep. Hmm...

06:30

Decide to get up and see how the day progresses. At least I'm back on relatively normal time now.

08:00

Have massive fry-up breakfast using the remains of my food.

08.45

Start dealing with the massive backlog of email from the fortnight.

09:30

Start writing this post. Have to check in seven year old HTML book for how to do definition lists.

09:57

Finish writing this post. Decide this sort of post probably shouldn't become a regular feature.

The amusing thing about that Tumble/Rambleblog entry was the reaction on a couple of blogs, namely Jamie and Marv, expressing confusion that this apparently new thing was, well, it was just blogging, the sort of blogging they and to be honest most people do. Which is quite understandable but you have to bear one important thing in mind.

The sort of people, and I include myself in this category, who get excited about this sort of thing are, generally speaking, tossers. In fact the Americans have a term for it: "circle jerking", which I believe is the practice of a bunch of blokes sitting in a circle getting so excited about something that they all have to masturbate furiously. It's not a nice image, I grant you, especially as we're talking about blogging here. So you should always remember that when people who have been blogging for a long time, usually about blogging, talk about blogging, they can frequently be ignored, or at least patted on the head in a condescending manner.

What the whole Tumbleblog thing is really about is actually quite simple. These people, when they started out on their wildly successful blogging careers, just posted a load of shit on their blogs like everyone else. But then this great illusion of weblogs being the next big thing, storming the barricades of respectable society with their revolutionary new ways (boy, that does sound familiar [cough]comicscirca1989...) they began to write "properly" treating their blogs as publications, taking great care over what they wrote and giving everything proper titles with their complicated content management systems and so on. And now they look back on those freewheeling days of freedom to just write rubbish with nostalgic dewey eyes. If only they could just write whatever they wanted without worrying what their readership (read: ego) thinks.

But as long as they clearly delineate between their grown up sensible blog and this random rambling then they can! And because they've spent the last five or so years living in the neologism garden they shall give it a new name and all will be well.

The rest of you, just carry on as before. Nothing to see here.

Anyway, I haven't had a chance to start up my Fartleblog or whatever but I have been practicing. Check out the tumble-quality of these three:

Another thought on the sw**ring thing that always bugs me (if you're going to swear then fucking swear already!). Sometimes putting asterisks in your curse can be acceptable when you want to give the impression of muttering it under your breath in exasperation.

Fireworks are here again but they're not bothering me this year. Last year they were going off in my neighbours gardens and exploding outside my window shocking the shit out me. This year they're in the distance and no bother at all. Ah, suburbia, how I don't miss you...

I was once asked what the indications were of being "grown up" and a new one came to me today - when your parents reach sixty years of age. Paternally this happens to me next month (7th Nov if anyone wants to send a card) with Maternally following next September. They will have free bus passes. This is odd. (This indicator only works if your parents had you in their 20s, I feel.)

"Google's rival Gmail service had created confusion and uncertainty amid potential clients of his firm, said Mr Smith."

Apparently a couple of firms who didn't register gmail.com are disputing Google's use of the term because they were using it first. Full story here (via), but what really interests me is that quote. "Confusion and uncertainty" was being created by Google's move and this is a terrible thing, for where would we be if all companies and businesses were allowed to create confusion and uncertainty all willy nilly?

Well, for a start we'd be shopping. My tax rebate came through last week and I've been doing some shopping, mainly for techy things like batteries, a USB 2.0 card, DVD-Rs, that sort of thing, and it's been a nightmare. Do I need DVD-Rs or DVD+Rs? (-Rs are preferable but I went with +Rs.) Will this USB card work in my Mac? (Yes with a 3rd party driver that the manufacturers don't link to on their site.) Is £8.99 a high price for rechargeable batteries? (Yes, but I'd bought them by the time I realised this.) These little things that shouldn't be a problem and on their own aren't really all add up to an experience not too dissimilar to a state of confusion and uncertainty.

And it's not just on the high street - online can be just as bad. Having spent an age tunneling though the catalogue at Dabs for the right memory card I was so relieved to have finally made it through the confusion and uncertainty that I didn't notice they still had my old address on file and thanks to their incredibly efficient system it was dispatched within minutes of my pressing the big button. Unfortunately their incredibly efficient system is efficient because they don't have any communication with their customers at all and so can't cancel or alter an order, so it's going to Kingstanding. At least there's no confusion or uncertainty about that, just a big fat pain in the arse.

There was one point of victory in Halfords where I popped in to gaze at the bike stuff and find out what they charge for a safety check (£10.99) - I was approached by a young chap talking 10 to the dozen about saving me £50 on my next purchase. I tried to stop him but he kept going until I held up my arms and sternly announced that if he didn't shut up I would never buy anything from this shop ever again, at which point he did shut up and walk away. It's a real shame as most of the assistants in that branch are good helpful people.

Perhaps the worst example was the in-store radio at PC World pushing anti-virus software in a tone that seemed to imply we'd all die a horrible death without it, but that's not too surprising.

So creating confusion and uncertainty would appear to be standard procedure amongst companies these days. I can't see that Google has done anything particularly unusual in that regard, especially as they appear to have done so unintentionally unlike most retail outlets.

In 1999 the cartoonist of some note Ed Hillyer did a comic called End of the Century Club. The second volume, Countdown opened with a big party celebrating the demise of Margaret Thatcher - ding, dong, the witch is dead, and all that. Reading it I reminded me of that legendary day on November 22nd 1990 when she resigned as Prime Minister. I was at 6th form college at the time and the school was torn between the majority dancing with joy and a the minority stomping around with indignant horror, that their glorious leader could be betrayed in such a fashion. But regardless of how you felt about the woman (and it's safe to say I was happy to see her go) you couldn't help be affected by her. For anyone who came of age prior to or during her reign (and it was a reign) Thatcher and all she stood for is a powerful focal point.

And at some point, probably fairly soon, she's going to die.

I have to say I'm not chomping at the bit to dance in the streets but I'm very curious to see what does happen when she passes on. There really hasn't been a public figure that evokes such strong feelings of loathing since Thatcher. Yes, people say they hate Blair but their hatred always seems a little bit shallow, like they really want to hate him but there isn't much there to hate, and it just reflects badly on the wannabe hater. Pity him, dislike him, worry about him, yes, but such a strong emotion as hate? He doesn't really deserve it. Thatcher, however, she was someone to hate. She reveled in it. And I wonder if those emotions will still be strong enough when this old lady shrugs off her mortal coil. I wonder if level-headed people who pondered Edward Heath or shrugged at Lady Di will find their fists pumping in the air when it happens. I wonder if pints will be raised and Billy Bragg songs played in jukeboxes throughout the land. Or has enough time passed that memories been softened and since the young people don't really know what she's about it doesn't really matter in this day and age.

Part of me (I'll admit, a fairly significant part of me) really wants there to be some kind of spontaneous celebration, not so much to piss on her grave as to reaffirm to our glorious leaders that whatever the long term benefits of her rule (and I accept, grudgingly, that there may have been some, even if the costs were somewhat high) a part, possibly a significant part of the British public weren't too happy about it and still bear a grudge.

But it's still kinda weird. There's "Thatcher" the icon, there to be loved and despised as you see fit, and there's Margaret the old, frail woman. Is it socially acceptable to still hate her after all these years?

I guess we'll find out sooner or later...

I've been lucky recently to have been presented with a number of books for free, sometimes as no-obligation gifts, sometimes with the not-so-subtle implication of an online mention or review as payment in kind. And as long as I like the book I'm cool with that. The problem is I'm really awful at getting around to writing the review and that makes me feel guilty, so I'm going to try and rectify that from now on.

The ACME Novelty Library is a collection of material from Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Library comic, bringing together everything that isn't already collected in Jimmy Corrigan or Quimby the Mouse, along with strips that ran in The New Yorker and other periodicals. Stretching over about a decade this includes the Big Tex, Tales of Tomorrow and Rocket Sam strips along with the preliminary strips for Rusty Brown, his next graphic novel, and the naked Super-Man. Also included is all the text pieces, mock-essays, spoof adverts and a selection of papercraft models from the comic. These have all be resized and re-laid-out over 114 oversized (15" x 8.5") pages

It's somewhat intense. In fact it's incredibly intense. Having read most of these strips in small chunks over the years, seeing them all condensed in one volume is almost too much, so much so I'd say you can't read this in one sitting. It needs to be dipped into, preferably not before bedtime.

This being somewhere between a sketch-book and a complete work it's a bit of a ragbag assortment of single page strips with the general themes being tragedy, pointlessness, hopelessness, despair, quiet horror, nostalgia, self-loathing and obsession with a healthy dose of self-depreciation throughout. It's rather like being smashed in the stomach with a wide variety of beautiful sledgehammers, so lovely that even as the wind is crushed from you and internal bleeding becomes critical you can't help but notice the delicate craftsmanship of the handle and the perfect symmetry of the hammer head.

I like this comic a lot.

Of note to Ware aficionados are the Chalky White strips which originally ran in the New Yorker and which readers of ACME might not have seen before. I recognised them from somewhere but they were still fairly new. Following on from the disintegration of Rusty Brown, his "friend" Chalky gets married to a similarly doughy lady and has a child, Brittany. These last strips, contrasting the gentle naivety of Chalky with his rebellious teenage daughter are almost too painful to read, packing an incredible punch for a mere seven pages of material.

This book comes highly recommended to people who enjoyed Jimmy Corrigan or who are curious about innovative, yet depressing, comics. You should be able to find is most decent bookshops as it's published by Jonathan Cape with the ISBN 0224077023 at £16.99. Or, of course, discounted at Amazon.

So, then... Doonesbury...

The thing is, I don't really have a problem with The Guardian dropping Doonesbury. Change is change, newspapers are newspapers, it happens all the time. Sure, it's a bit of a shock, losing one of the few newspaper strips in the English speaking world that actually has some intellectual and political bite, but it's their prerogative. But being something of an aficionado in these areas I was curious as to why. What had prompted them to drop it? What processes does a newspaper editor go through when considering the removal of a comic strip?

When it was revealed the strip was dropped for space reasons, well, I found myself bordering on the apoplectic. Which is, y'know, so unlike me. At least I think it is.

Fact is, for me this isn't really about Doonesbury. It's about how the comics, and for that matter editorial cartoons, are treated by newspapers. Generally they are looked down on as filler, not having the weight of words or the artistry of photography. If space is an issue then the first thing to go is the funnies, and sadly this is often understandable because the vast majority of newspaper strips, especially in the US, are utter shite. But that's another issue.

The Guardian, however, has a long standing reputation as a publication that understands the value of its cartoons. Not just in the way it values its recipes and crosswords as valuable hooks for regular readers, but as an art form. Steve Bell, Posy Simmonds, Steven Appleby, Kate Charlesworth and many others have or had long stints in the paper and many British cartoonists such as Jonathan Edwards and Tom Gauld get regular work there. Their coverage of comics and graphic novels has of late been pretty good not just giving lip service but running long excerpts by the likes of Joe Sacco. And of course there was Chris Ware winning that First Book award a few years back. When it comes to the national media The Guardian is a friend of comics.

But what really galls about this decision is that having spent so much time and care crafting what is, in my opinion, a wonderfully designed newspaper, the comic strip they've been running for something like 25 years has been dropped with such myopia because the design wasn't quite thought through to the final pages.

In their defense, the feedback department has been very rapid, addressing the issue by 1.30pm and getting that admission of dumbassitude by three. At this moment a good eighty people have sought out this post and registered their opinion. So, as they say, all is not lost.

But the fact that this happened in the first place, the fact that The Guardian of all papers felt it was fine to casually shit on a comic strip, that pisses me off.

Related: Over in US Land, Tom Spurgeon picks up on the shitstorm.

In other news, I'm really impressed with that front cover. So it's not all gripes and moans.

Update: G2 editor just posted a comment to that massive thread. Doonesbury will return next week with a catch-up page on Friday. I'll post his admission of defeat in the comments. By the gods things move fast in this internet age!

Just has the weird experience of delivering a cup of tea to my flatmate Andy G's room to discover he's listening to my podcast completely of his own volition. I mean, I know people do listen to it but to actually be there in the same room... it's just kinda wrong and nice at the same time.

Anyway, speaking of flatmates called Andy, Andy Zoop pushed a book, Elmet comprising of poems by Ted Hughes with photos by Fay Godwin, into my hands the other day. Part of Andy's big thing, which he umbrellas under the label "Zoop" (hence the Andy-identification moniker), is examining not urban decay in itself but how the history of an urban environment exposes itself through it. I think. It's all quite complex and fluid and based around a fair bit of poetry, an art-form I've never been able to get to grips with. I can deal with an avant-garde non-sequitur comic strip but a five line stanza is just ink on paper to me.

As part of this exercise Andy goes out walking in old areas of Birmingham, the Jewelry Quarter being a favourite haunt along with patches of brownfield sites that are stuck in limbo before their inevitable regeneration, and had taken some photos but wasn't happy with them, it not really being his thing. having looked that the Plinth gig photos he strayed onto the rest of my photos on Flickr and evidently liked what he saw, particularly the canal photos with their mix of rusty metal and lush greenery.

In short, he's commissioned me to go take photos. There aren't any specific instructions other than where to go. He'll then look through the shots and pick some to write about, hence the Elmet book where Hughes reacted to Godwin's photos with poems. (That's not to imply we're in the same league by any means, but it's a good reference.) Today was my first, well, assignment, I guess - a patch of wasteland that's been used for flytipping somewhere in Selly Oak (no, I won't tell you where it is - it's a secret).

It was a quite different experience, taking photos for someone else, even with completely free reign to do what I wanted. At first I was a bit cautious, trying to put myself into Andy's POV, but this soon became pointless and I went in the other direction, considering everything that caught my eye as a potential subject. What really struck me were the patterns that emerge as things are dumped and then smashed and decayed over the years. I don't like to pose things at the best of times but it was completely unnecessary here. There was a distinct order to the chaos and a real beauty in the details.

I took seventy photos in total and while I'm pleased with them I really felt I was just scouting the area, not really getting into the details. A few more visits will have to be made. That is assuming Andy's happy with the shots so far. He hasn't seen them yet...

You can see the pick of the photos here.

A storm had been threatening all day and when it hit there was a massive thunderclap, like the sky had been torn apart. A few minutes later chum Matt phoned to ask if I'd just had a tornado tear through Bournville. Nah, I laughed back, just a thunderstorm. Stop exagerating! Um, they had in Moseley. He was walking through the streets as he talked, trees had been uprooted, houses smashed up, debris everywhere and, oh, Jez's house had been hit. Broken windows. Not secure. And they're on holiday.

I left a message for Jez and Nat, jumped on the bike (remembering to take my camera of course) and sped over there with a sense of chidlish glee. This was going to be cool. As I entered Moseley there was no sign of damage. Turning down Forest Road there was a bit of a traffic jam and then at the top of Church Road a makeshift police barrier blocking traffic. Uh oh. I passed through this and was suddenly confronted by the kind of eerie calm that happens after mild devastation. Trees in the street, leaves and tiles everywhere and people milling around looking dazed. Though not too dazed to take photos. Although that might just been a coping mechanism. When confronted by something really odd, take photos of it. I know that's what I did.

After a bit I knocked on Matt's door. He'd been at home when it happened and said everything went dark and he saw stuff flying around that he thought were leaves but which turned out to be tiles. Being American he has an instinct for dealing with this kind of thing so he shut all the doors and stood in the hallway while the tornado hit. I, of course, would have opened the windows for a better view so it's probably a good thing I wasn't there. He'd only had one window broken by a flying tile. He was very lucky. In fact Jez was very lucky. A house two doors down (which I inexplicably didn't photograph) had its whole roof torn off.

I finally got through to Nat and got hold of their keys from a neighbour. They had 17 broken windows, about six of them completely obliterated. The entire ground floor was covered in glass including all the kitchen work surfaces. It seems the tiles had been shot through the windows like cannonballs. While it's obviously not nice to be away when your house is attacked by nature it's a good job they weren't at home. I have this image of the kids playing in the living room as the tiles and glass hit them at 100mph and it's not a nice picture.

Since Matt and I just had to keep and eye on the place we figured out a rota and I set to work clearing up the glass because what else can you do? The clearing thing seemed to be a common reaction as everyone in the street automatically started sweeping up the debris. From kids to pensioners, everyone was picking up stuff and creating large tidy piles of branches, wood and tiles.

Police response was very rapid, but then there is a station about 100 yards away. Fire engines were also there pretty sharpish as were the council tree surgeons with their tree-shredding machines. In fact most of the debris and blockages were cleared by the time I went home at eight.

As news spread via the word-of-mouth vine it emerged that the tornado had run from Kings Heath down to Small Heath so this was only a fraction. I texted ex-housemate Sam, who works in Small Heath, and she replied thus: "We were driving in it! Nightmare, bins and trees flying, buildings down, cars with trees in!" And there was I in Bournville getting all excited about the guttering overflowing...

In all a very odd afternoon. I thought it was going to be cool but it's was just wrong and rather confusing. Of course it wasn't a really bad tornado and I'm sure those from other countries will be scoffing at our over-reaction to a little bit of severe weather, but this kind of shit isn't supposed to happen here. Birmingham weather is notoriously mediocre and boring - it's either raining or it's not raining. A fucking tornado is just utterly discombobulating.

Updates: Matt's posted his tornado report.
This is the house two doors down from Jez that lost its roof

I've been hanging out on the Birmingham (not Alabama) Freecycle group for a couple of weeks now and it's been fascinating watching what get offered. Here's a selection of things people were going to throw away but decided to offer to the world first:

Mini hover mower
Mothercare Baby Bouncer seat
Hiking, walking and Men's Health magazines
Bathroom suites (yes, plural)
Professional punch bag
High quality 35mm camera
Jaz external disk drive with 6x 1GB removeable disks
Psion 5 handheld computer
Various bike parts
Free range rabbit ("dead but fresh")
Electric Juicer
Acoustic guitar
Ring binders
Wharfdale speakers
Pine cot and mattress
Pine bedroom furniture
Joystick
Dozens of size 8 shoes
Dog guard for a Citreon ZX car
30 Quarry tiles
Typewriter
JVC hi-fi stack system with speakers
photo developing equipment
phone
Single bed
TDK Palm-to-Ericsson connection kit
Scanner
Two pairs of jeans that husband is now too skinny for, originally cost £4

A couple of things I've been interested in have gone really quickly. Most things get snapped up within an hour of being posted (except the typewriter for some reason) so while it might not be ideal for getting hold of specific things (if you want it you can guarantee others will too) Freecycle looks to be a keen way of getting rid of stuff fast.

Folk can also post Wants to the list though unreasonable requests are frowned upon. Some of the more interesting ones I've seen with tantalising tastes of backstory:

Really old garish carpet ("size wise i need enough to wrap a body in! please believe me, i'm actually not a psycho, my friend is...making a film...wait... oh this goes from bad to worse...")
Solar-powered / wind-up radio ("I'm going camping to the Lakes in a few weeks time, and it dawned on me that I was going to miss out on my favourite past-time -- listening to the radio!")
Weights ("vinyl or iron")
Wrecking bar ("I need a large crowbar, called, I believe, a wrecking bar. Does anyone have one occupying valuable shed space, which they don't use, please?")
Paving slabs any amount and hardcore ("Having had great success in finding greenhouses/glass and a trailer I could now use some slabs and hardcore to make a base for my large greenhouse on my "goodlife" allotment. Any quantity considered")
Show window dummy ("485 squadron Air cadets (Harborne) are looking for a dummy to use for training new cadets the "art" of keeping their uniform in good condition.")
Toilet (white) ("A friend is after a white porcelain toilet to replace her old one which she broke recently by dropping something on it.")
Composted Manure ("Our garden soil is the pits, the builders have ruined what was once fertile farmland. We live in CV7 and can collect.")
Terracotta pot feet ("kicking around...")
Bird cage for Cockatiel ("Its just a male on its own called Billy however we are moving and he's currently in a home made box after being moved back into the house from an avery in the garden.")
Engineering bricks ("It is a little known fact that every house has a small pile of bricks in the garden. There is no reason to presume that any two piles of bricks are going to be identical this means that someone, somewhere will have a pile of approximately 150 clean engineering bricks. If this is you, and you live within about a 20-30 mile radius of Redditch then I'd like to hear from you")
Blankets, towels, dog bed ("Just rescued a Border Collie from Birmingham Dogs home. Could do with more old towels for wet days, and also blankets for back of car/kennel/bed")

I hope I've demonstrated why Freecycle is such an international success story. Yes you're helping others and reducing reliance on landfills by redistributing unwanted things around the community and that gives the requisite warm glow, but just watching the Offers and Wants stream through is endlessly entertaining. I fear I may get hooked and subscribe to Freecycle lists in areas I don't even live in...

Perhaps the greatest source of irrelevant intolerance (as opposed to intolerance that makes people want to kill other people) is, as far as I can tell, food and the way it is eaten. While I am, on the whole, an "eat anything as long as it's edible" kind of guy there are certain lines which cannot be crossed. Skimmed milk is one. It's not milk - it's white water that smells mildly of milk. Sugar in tea has recently become another. It's very odd, since quitting in March I've become something of an anti-sugar fanatic. Occasionally I make a cup for someone with a couple of spoonfuls and it just seems wrong. It's all I can do to stop preaching at them on the error of their ways. And butter is stupid and the world should wake up to the fact that margarine is far superior because it spreads without fucking up the bread.

There's a pattern developing here - these are all things connected with breakfast which even for a culinary retard like myself is a constant and important part of the day. It's a ritual and rituals are very important. I've been thinking about rituals quite a lot recently. It sprang from a pub conversation about why drugs are consumed in very specific and orderly ways, from the heroin tea-spoon to passing the joint to the right (or is it the left, I forget...) through to drinking beer out of pint glasses. But what really interests me are the little rituals that seem inconsequential but which are utterly sacred, such as how tea is made or the order in which one gets dressed.

For example, one thing that really brings out the irrational idiot in me is washing up. I have an utterly anal method involving washing, rinsing and stacking which cannot be changed. When I see someone not rinsing a plate or stacking the dishes and pans in an inefficient manner I feel a small but significant tenseness in my shoulders. This might spring from washing up being one of my regular chores as a child, especially as for a few years my sister was too young to reach so it was my domain, but that's no excuse. It's petty and stupid of me and it's not like I even like washing up, as many ex-housemates will attest. It's just one of those things.

So, the question is, what are your idiotic rituals that you dare not speak about? Things that bug you even though you know you're just being a twat?

And so it was off to the Edgbaston cricket ground (which while very close, isn't actually in Edgbaston), home of Warwickshire County Cricket Club (except Warwickshire really starts a significant number of miles south), for my first even major sporting event, watching the Warwickshire "Bears" play the game of cricket against the Worcestershire "Royals". My gang for this trip were Jez, who know all about the game and gives a shit, Matthew, who also knows all about the game and gives a shit, Matt, who, being American, knows all about baseball and is intrigued about cricket in a way only expats can be, and The Bean, who being five years old was being indoctrinated into this strange world of sitting in the rain watching tiny men move a ball around a field by his father.

I knew jack-shit about cricket and could not care less. At best I was expecting a few hours sitting in the evening sun drinking beer with my friends. As the clouds covered I was praying for rain so we could all go somewhere less full of fat men who like sport (a paradox that never ceases to surprise me).

Entering the arena my ears were greeted by very loud and incredibly cheezy music, which was something of a shock. I was expecting something out of a Powell and Pressburger film, something more bucolic, as Jez suggested as I struggled for the word. This was all kinda hyper.

Suddenly at 5.30 the teams were on, and they were playing, really fast, and not wearing white. Turns out this was a Twenty20 game, part of a wider tournament, wherein the teams have just 20 overs each to score as much as possible, and which has to be completed within three hours (I think). After each score of 4 or 6, and whenever someone is out, the veryloudspeaker blasts out a 10 second clip of some corny but apt popular music tune. And play moves very quickly.

Apparently this is a cynical move by the cricket gods to get the general public interested in the game. The long, tedious matches still take place but these are the ones that bring the cash in. Matthew told me the players don't really take them as seriously, treating them as an enjoyable knockabout, and the stakes aren't so high. Meanwhile the public get a short but intense burst of cricket without having to invest a week or utter tedium.

I have to say I really enjoyed it. As the balls crossed the boundaries I was punching my firsts in the air and singing along. Towards the end it actually got a little tense and as the rain moved from the steady drizzle to actual rain I felt no desire to leave. Maybe the three pints of overpriced sickly-sweet lager helped, I dunno. Plus you could smoke on the stands, which I wasn't expecting, and that helped. I also understood everything that was going on, partly I suspect because they weren't invoking any complicated rules, just bashing ahead with the next bowl, the next over.

I don't think I'll be making a regular thing of this, but heavens! Cricket is not shit! Who'd've thought it!

(Here's a match report which I read thinking "ah, so that's what was going on!" while still not really understanding it.)

So, I asked Mark as we walked out of the cemetery, did you feel a sense of personal catharsis?

Not really, said Mark. Me neither, said I.

Funerals, as has no doubt been said before, are quiet odd things. They provide a space for ritual, a place to do what needs to be done in the company of others. A focus point. And probably many other things. But while they have these defined procedures and structures, they're really about emotions, and those are so much harder to predict.

In a perverse way I'd been looking forward to Andy's funeral. I'd put my feeling of being lost and confused down to not really being in the middle of things, stuck up here in Birmingham while those closer, physically and emotionally, were dealing with it as a group. Not to say I envy them in the slightest, please don't think that for a minute. I was just looking for an explanation. I was expecting, hoping, that by being with others who were feeling what I was feeling, who knew him in aspects of the way I knew him, that I would have some kind of emotional moment to break the numbness, probably involving crying or something.

But I didn't.

Okay, I nearly did. Having queued up for what seemed like hours to write in the condolences book (there were a good 200 people present) I suddenly realised I didn't know what I was going to write, so I wrote a short note to Andy himself, and a brief moment happened. It's perhaps interesting that this happened when I was on my own with everyone else keeping a respectful distance.

What I realised, though, was that while I'm really glad I went and while it was really good to be with other folk and talk, however stiltedly, about Andy, this is something I need to deal with myself, slowly, over time. And once I realised that I felt a lot better.

Maybe it was cathartic after all.

Too hot to work today so I decamped to the sofa to sarcastically watch Tim Henman play really badly for a bit and then play slightly better and win getting everyone all impressed as they temporarily forget that it's a first-round match that against some unknown kid that he should have walked, but even though there's probably a better match on BBC2, possibly even one with ladies grunting attractively, you still have to watch it for some perverse, masochistic reason. Dr Zoop joined me and we were sniggering away at the somewhat surreal commentary when the commentator, I know not his name, uttered this gem:

He rushed off like a robber's dog

And we laughed and laughed like drains. The rest of the match was half spent trying to figure out exactly what the origins of that phrase was (do robbers generally have dogs when in the act of robbing? And if they are required to rush, where to exactly?) and half waiting for him to top that, but nothing was forthcoming.

This isn't strictly a Colemanball since they on the whole make some kind of sense. This is just random bonkers, and all the better for it.

If the heat continues I will be watching out for more of these. If you spot any, feel free to comment.

Also, is it me or are the camera men getting more obsessed with sour-faced pretty blonde posh birds in low-cut tops? Nothing new, I know, but combined with the slo-mo closeups of Henman's undulating thighs it all felt a little porn-y for a Tuesday afternoon.

It's been an odd few days, to say the least. The great thing about the internet is information can be communicated immediately, but the flipside to that is that information can be communicated immediately. Within hours of Andy R's accident I, and many other people, knew about it. And then we waited to hear more. And waited. To her immense credit Jenni did a courageous job of keeping us informed but there was only so much she could do. I went to bed that night dreading the morning, half wanting to jump up and keep checking online and half wanting to just hide from the unthinkable, except it was all I could think about.

In the past you'd hear news like this after the event. Now you live it in real time from a great distance. The combination of being involved yet utterly powerless is horrible. Other than reporting the news in the areas where people who know Andy might see it, I couldn't articulate what I was feeling. It was all so glib, my reaction so inconsequential, and worst of all, there was no firm basis on which to react. Writing this now feels so selfish and utterly pointless, but I need to do it, so it is selfish.

Andy is currently in limbo. He's unconscious and will probably never wake up. If he ever does he will be a shadow of the man he was. His daughter Sophie wrote "He's, in effect, dead." Which is true - he'll never be the man he was and that is just fucking awful - but he's still breathing. Do we write the obituaries now? Do we mourn him? Should we mourn him while he's still technically alive? What tense do we use for him now?

Am I beating myself up over these specifics because I just don't know how to deal with this?

Despite it being one of the most gut-wrenching things I've ever read (I was flinching all the way) I'm grateful to Sophie for writing what she did. She did an important thing by drawing that line.

My favourite recent memory of Andy was at the Ladyfest Birmingham festival last year. He'd come up with a couple of friends and was crashing at mine, so I popped down to catch the end of the show. The gig turned into a cheezy indie disco and I watched this 40 year-old man in his trademark skinny-fit t-shirt bopping away in the midst of a predominantly female studenty crowd, thinking he really shouldn't be able to get away with this, but he fits in perfectly. He combined the boundless enthusiasm of a teenager with the wisdom of a sage.

Last night I went to a party. It wasn't a big party, more a gathering really, but it was at a student house and had a bonfire. We sat around the fire from 9pm to 4am drinking beer and then tea and talking about all sorts of stuff, some of it deep, some quite inconsequential. I didn't talk about Andy but he was there. I think it was the sort of small but important thing he would have approved of. Just sitting and talking and coming away with, as he once put it, batteries recharged.

It might seem odd to some, but I think the best tribute to Andy is to just keep carrying on. To create, discuss, play, be alive and love life for all it's oddness and essentialness. It seems to be a normal reaction to this sort of loss to feel the need to do something but Andy was someone who endlessly did something, who delighted in people doing something.

There are a couple of biggish examples of doing something in the pipeline. Andy and Sophie were planning a "music etc." festival in Dalston for October which looks like it'll go ahead, while something will be happening at the Caption small press comics convention next month which Andy had been involved with since its inception. For the latter I'd like to suggest dedicating the exhibition to him with work like Jeremy's Get Well Soon strip, effectively having a place to remember him that doesn't overshadow the event, since the enthusiasm Caption tends to generate is a tribute in itself.

And that's how I'm going to try and deal with this. Just keep on going, feeding off the enthusiasm of others and giving it back many-fold, like Andy did.

Jonathan Assistant sends a meme my way, which is nice as I was starting to wonder if I'd ever get one of these memes sent my way. That music one just passed me by completely. In fact, I think this is the first time I've ever done one of these which goes to show you can blog for years and there are still new challenges, new adventures. This one is about books. For the record, I'm leaving comics out of this cos that's a whole 'nother medium. This is strictly fiction.

Total Number Of Books I've Owned
Ooh, hundreds if not thousands. I used to be a bookseller and that generally means one acquires books without even trying. That said, I've currently only got about 80 or so after a number of clear-outs. The other side to having been a bookseller is I don't put quite so much value on books as physical objects - it's the words that count.

The Last Book I Bought
That'd be Kafka on the Shore, the most recent novel by Haruki Murakami. I've nearly finished it and it's terrific.

The Last Book I Read
Prior to the Murakami, that'd be Super-8 by Craig Smith. When you get sent a book by your mate that's been published by some teeny little press skepticism about the quality abounds, but it's a really good book, telling the story of four normal teenage lads in the early 80s who go on a canal-boat holiday. Lovely observational stuff.

Five Books That Mean a Lot To Me.

The Wind-Up Bird Chonicle by Haruki Murakami is a really huge book that's quite daunting, especially as nothing seems to happen for the first 150 or so pages. And then suddenly, without you noticing, everything kicks off and your brain explodes. Very difficult to describe exactly what this book is about but it's somewhat perspective-changing and highly recommended.

The Crow Road by Iain Banks was my favourite novel when I'd just turned 20. Not so sure I'd rate it so highly now, but at the time I really identified with it. Of note is the TV adaptation which, unlike so many adaptations of novels, was pretty much accurate to the story, characters and feel of the novel.

The New York Trillogy by Paul Auster kinda sits next to the Murakami in the life-changing stakes. This was probably the book that taught me what fiction was capable of in that it's eminently readable and exiting yet also incredibly experimental and philosophical. Also worth checking out is the comics adaptation of City of Glass (the first in the trilogy) by Paul Karasik David Mazzucchelli.

Stone Junction by Jim Dodge is a somewhat obscure novel that only booksellers, and fiction buyers at that, really know about, but it deserves to be more widely read. It's a speculative account of underground America, brought to life as the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws who do crime but for a higher moral purpose. It's one of those novels you really wish was true, as well as being a fun read.

Finally, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon is just brilliant. I was drawn to it because of the comics connection (the title characters are comic book creators in the 40s) but it's about so much more, tying in the Jewish immigrant experience, the notion of myth-making and the practice of stage magic. Above all it's wonderfully written with characters you can fall in love with.

Special mention to Underworld by Don DeLillo, mainly because I was so proud of myself when I finally read it. And then I wanted to read it all over again.

Hmm. All written by blokes with an emphasis on big fat American literary novels. Ah well.

What is the correct terminology for passing this on? I see "batton" used quite a lot but I rather like the image of jumping out of a bush, waving my hands around and shouting "Aha! I meme you!" like some tragic live-roleplayer with straggly hair and a late-breaking voice. And a pointy, yet mournfully bent, hat. So, Marv, Garen, Matthew, Craig and Jeremy, I meme you!

(Names picked somewhat randomly, should you feel slighted, and while I tried to strike a gender balance it doesn't appear that way as the girls are trading as boys. See if you can guess which are which.)

I can moan for a very long time about Virgin trains, specifically the trains Virgin use for their "replacement Inter-City" service rather than the company in itself. The chairs are too rigid, the arm-rest by the window doesn't raise so you can't curl up and sleep, and those massive toilets with the disconcerting electronic lock that somehow make the entire carriage stink of disinfectant.

But they have got one thing right - the Quiet Zone carriage. Oh, how I love the Quiet Zone. Such a remarkably good idea - a place where the misanthropic can escape the endless turmoil of society's seeming obsession with talking loudly about nothing. Until recently the Quiet Zone would occasionally be invaded by an illiterate moron who cannot comprehend the existence of an area where phonage is not permitted, but my journey down from Birmingham to Winchester on Monday was 100% quiet. Either I got very lucky or a sea change has happened. The Quiet Zone is now respected by society at large.

Now, you might be thinking that the Quiet Zone is relatively new creation brought about by the irritation of the mobile phone, but it's not. It actually has a historical precedent in railway transportation. Younger readers may not believe this, but at one stage you could smoke on trains. There was a whole carriage dedicated to smoking. The seats were usually dirty, the air stagnant and the general ambiance rather off-putting, but beyond the advertised bonus of being able to smoke while trapped in a metal tube for hours there was a distinct advantage.

Ordinary people stayed the hell away.

From the platform they'd spy the empty seats on an otherwise crowded train and think their luck was in, but on entering the acrid smoke would hit them and they'd back off, taking their self-obsessed self-interested selfishness with them. Parents were the best - they'd drag their brood along the length of the train looking for that elusive four-seats-free booth and on entering our nirvana would loudly declaim it to their children as if we were lepers, before moving on only to discover all that lay ahead was first class so they had to struggle back though our midst with their tired brats and large arses. And we sat there with our expanse of empty seats smugly smiling to ourselves, safe in the knowledge that, for the period of this journey, we were free from such nonsense. Of course such wonders could never last and with the excuse of cleaning bills (like we cared!) the smoking carriage was banished, never to return.

Smokers have been demonised by right-thinking society as anti-social idiots passively spreading cancer with their filthy habit and, unlike the obese, having the audacity to look cool in the process, all of which is fairly justified, but belies the fact that other than the actual smoking thing, smokers are generally nice people to be with. Why this is, I'm not really sure, though I have some ideas which maybe I'll try to articulate in a future post, but the fact remains that, ratio-wise, where smokers are gathered you'll find more nice, easygoing people than elsewhere.

Now, the folk in the Quiet Zone of the train weren't overtly friendly. Given the nature of the thing they're pretty quiet and kept themselves to themselves, but it still felt like a home I hadn't visited for a long time. Quiet Zone people - you are the new smokers. And that's a huge compliment.

As you might have heard, Apple are apparently going to start sourcing their chips from Intel who have traditionally built chips for Windows-based PCs. On the surface this is incredibly boring news unless you get excited about such things. As long as the damn thing works who cares what's under the hood?

However, according to Leander Kahney at Wired's Cult of Mac blog, it's a little more interesting that it first appears. It seems Apple are interested in the new Pentium D chip which has copy protection built into it. With this in place Apple can approach Hollywood and develop an online movie store whereby people can download movies and watch them via their Macs, either directly off screen or piped through to the TV or however Apple decides to allow.

And even if the shift to this new chip is seamless (which it appears it might be) it's mildly annoying because it means when you buy a new Mac it'll be crippled at a fundamental level. You can see signs on this with the iTunes / iPod setup where it's made difficult to copy music within it. Flatmate Andy can listen to my music over our network but he can't access the original files from within iTunes. Similarly I can't plug his iPod into my Mac and copy the music over. That said, I can give him direct access to my music directories and can use a third party piece of software to decode his iPod so it's not the end of the world. iTunes might be crippled but it's possible to bypass that. With this crippling build into the hardware itself there will be no bypass.

Now this is merely an annoyance and if you don't like it then just don't download the movies in question, but what's worrying me is that future media software from Apple will be designed with this DRM crap as it's priority. I wouldn't be surprised if "iFlicks" or whatever doesn't play AVI files, the predominant format for p2p sharing, rendering them pretty useless for anyone who doesn't want their files crippled with DRM.

(Aside - I'd be quite happy to pay for unencrypted downloads of TV shows and movies. BitTorrent is great but it does tend to get choked and the choice available is pretty mainstream. If the TV studious could work out how much each viewer is worth in terms of advertising and set up a paypal-style honour system I'd be happy to stick a quid or so in for each episode of Lost I've watched, so there's no reason I can see why a pay-per-view members only BitTorrent service run by the studios distributing DRM-free files wouldn't work. Piracy will always happen to popular stuff but plenty of folk are willing to pay for it, as long as it's not crippled with DRM)

More to the point, this marks a subtle shift in the nature of what a computer is. Currently you can do pretty much anything you want with a desktop computer if you have the skills and time to do so. This sort of hardware based copy protection turns the desktop computer into something resembling a microwave oven. Yes, you can program it, but not much. Certainly, most people using Apple products don't have the desire to do pretty much anything with them, but taking away that potential just to please a industry that doesn't understand that its future is changing is just dumb.

Apple kinda got it right with the iTunes / iPod setup. They never publicise that you can use it with all your existing CDs and all the music you downloaded from p2p systems but everyone figures that out pretty quickly. The iTunes Music Store, while relatively successful, it's really just a trojan horse to stop the music industry complaining. The DRM is very weak (just burn a CDR and rip it back) and any crippling is pretty easy to circumvent. The record industry thinks everything is okay while the rest of us get on with our lives.

But this new hardware crippling, I just don't like it. We'll see to what level it does cripple the Mac and the influence it has on Apple's software releases and hopefully it won't be that huge, but I suspect it will prove that you can't get into bed with these short-sighted fuckers without getting corrupted.

Somewhat amazingly I'd never read any of Frank Miller's Sin City comics. Well, maybe one issue many years ago but I certainly wasn't familiar with them. Kinda odd really since he's one of the main figures in American comics that pushed the envelope at a high profile during the 80s and 90s. But no, other than his Batman books (which are probably the only Batman books worth reading because they're both not really about Batman and all about Batman) and the (under-appreciated) Ronin I haven't read much of him.

But of course I know all about Frank Miller and what he's done. I know how he took the flagging Daredevil comic (he's a superhero but he's blind!) and introduced influences from Japanese warrior manga like Lone Wolf and Cub bringing a dramatic dynamism to the somewhat staid 80's superhero genre. I know how he tried to reduce everything down to it's essence stripping away unnecessary details to emphasis the point of whatever he was doing, something every cartoonist should be doing. He's someone who pushes the boundaries artistically, but also politically and socially, and who really understands where comics have come from and what they're capable of. There was a joke around the late 80s that he was the only person in mainstream American comics doing anything interesting who wasn't British, he was that good.

So not having read the source material yet being fully aware of where it was coming from I went to see Sin City today. An hour or so in I glanced across the packed cinema and the audience seemed to be stunned as if they were irresistibly drawn in to something they could not comprehend. What the hell was this thing?

I tell you what it wasn't. It wasn't a comic book movie in the generally accepted sense. Miller was channeling noir fiction with Sin City, from the high end Chandler and Hammett to the low-end schlocky pulps. The symbolism and archetypes he's playing with are not what you'll usually find in comics, which is why he makes interesting comics.

It's worth bearing in mind that the most exciting thing about the comic book medium is that you can bring pretty much anything into it. The underlying grammar, while complex in execution, is simple and flexible enough for the artist to fly off in some utterly unique direction while still staying comprehendible. Of course most creators don't bother with such hard work in the same way that most novelists don't bother to write innovative literature, but when they do it's really quite exciting because it happens on so many levels.

So what people watching Sin City are seeing is a film directly adapted from a comic that was unlike any other comic around at the time which sucked in noir fiction and cinema stripped down to it's pure essence. Since noir is a relatively unexperienced genre these days, especially in such a pure form, it's no wonder they're baffled. But a straw poll of those who've seen it says they like it. A lot.

There's another aspect to all this that I think might be relevant. Comics can be quite subversive and powerful when done properly. This might explain why so many mainstream comics are shite - if they weren't then someone might notice again. A good comic book gets into your brain in a manner quite different to a novel or movie. It's a very personal experience that involves a fair amount of work on the reader's part making connections between those panels. The best example outside of comics is how a murder taking place off stage or out of shot is so much more chilling than one explicitly depicted. Comics use this technique on every page in a myriad of different directions not only between panels but within the artwork itself. The creator gives you a bunch of pictures and some words laid out in a way to guide you through but you fill in the gaps. Comics is all about the gaps. Look at Peanuts - it's just perfectly constructed gaps.

A lot of this made it into Sin City, which might seem odd because it's a very in your face movie, but that's part of the power. I'm still not sure how they did it but that movie sucks you in, not through the flashy effects (which I stopped noticing about 10 minutes in) or the acting (admittedly not all the cast could carry the dialogue but those that did were mesmerising) or the plot. In fact all the obvious aspects of the film are pretty irrelevant, which really pisses off the critics because that's all they can grasp hold of. It's the gaps, those subtle tricks you don't notice that burrow into your brain and make you part of the movie, not by dragging you violently by the lapels but by subconsciously involving you.

Given that Sin City is a film with no morally redeeming features it's quite a trick to bring your audience in like that and like I say I'm really not sure how they did it, but I'm pretty sure it came from having Frank Miller on board. Give someone who really understands the subversive power of comics the tools and guidance to make a top quality movie and you know you're going to be in trouble of the best kind.

A couple of somewhat disparate articles got me thinking this morning. The first was a quite bad piece of journalism in The Times, Comic Contempt, which uses the film version of Sin City to paint all comics fans as woman hating losers. It's barely worth criticism and I was ready to just ignore it but then I read Martin Currybet's response to John Harris' piece in the Guardian attacking the very premise of the BBC's In Our Time's Greatest Philosophers Vote. At first Harris seems to be right - philosophy really doesn't lend itself to a popularity contest and there is something vaguely worrying about the BBC's obsession with lowest common denominator popular polls. But as Martin says, he's missing a somewhat critical point, possibly even making that most basic of philosophical mistakes - the category error (as always when I talk about such things I should add that it's been a long time since I studied philosophy and even then I didn't quite get it all straight). To quote Martin: "it isn't the vote that is key value here - but that the interactive web content will outlive the programme (even if you download the podcast of it). I think having an online resource gathering together academic argument on the significant contributions to thought of the twenty leading nominees is a useful thing for the BBC to be doing." For someone who is curious about philosophy but doesn't know where to start, such a resource would be very useful and would put them on the road to actually being able to read Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche or Popper without their brains exploding.

So, other than that one article is attacking the braining up of the dumb while the other the dumbing down of the brainy, what's the connection? It's something I'm seeing a lot of lately, not only in the mainstream media but across the opinion-obsessed sections of the bloggernet. The writer is annoyed by something and without really trying to understand it writes a piece that on the surface looks to be pretty solid. But because they haven't bothered to spend a few hours or days really thinking about it, their piece is no better than a rant - one person's opinion that preaches to the converted and makes them feel good about themselves while annoying the rest in such a way that actually backs up the opinion. "Of course they disagree! They're idiots!"

The philosophy angle is interesting because most of those major thinkers didn't actually write that much. A few books of note on the whole before an early death from syphilis after a life of isolated misanthropy tended to be the rule. They would spend months on one idea, thinking through every possible angle and taking it down to the most fundamental points. Hume famously spent a very long time pondering the existence of a shade of blue that he hadn't personally experienced which might seem daft but it was fundamental to his thinking about empiricism (again see previous disclaimer) while the great father of it all, Socrates, said "All I know is that I know nothing" and built up from there.

None of them were bashing out 1000 word articles every few days that asserted that they were right beyond all reasonable doubt, and yet that's what nearly every writer seems to be doing right now. It's very rare that you'll come across a piece of writing online or in a printed periodical that comes close to this sort of depth, mainly because it takes a very long time, would have a limited audience and doesn't pay well. On top of that, not being 100% certain about your opinions and beliefs is suicide in todays intellectual world. I'm longing for the day when someone in a position of power goes on Newsnight or Today and says "to be honest John/Jeremy, I really don't know the answer to that. I suspect it's a very complex issue that would require a lot of serious thought and even then any conclusions would be tentative" and for John/Jeremy to come back with "fair enough - we'll ask you again when you come back from your three month retreat".

Coming soon - why your opinion is worth shit, but that's not a problem as long as you realise that.

I'm writing this after a few beers mainly because I know I won't write it when sober and that doesn't mean it's anything particularly soul exposing - I've been at this game long enough to know when not to blog when drunk. No, this is tedious meta stuff that my sober self would normally just let slide by like the easy going chap he is, but walking back from the taxi (always get out of the taxi with a fifteen minute walk ahead of you - it gives you a chance to think and not be quite so rowdy when you get in, plus you save a good 50p of so) it occurred to me that I need to address this. It also occurred to me that I wouldn't address it tomorrow and that I'm not so drunk that my sober self will hate me in the morning. Although he'll no doubt correct any obvious typos that occur.

Background first. A week or so ago the Blogebrity list appeared on the scene, attempting to give some substance to the "A-list" joke that has been going around blog-land since there were enough blogs to justify such a concept. I took a look and, after seeing I wasn't on it (yes, of course I checked), gave it no more thought. Then the lovely Mike of Troubled Diva put together a list based on Technorati data detailing the most linked UK weblogs. Again, I wasn't listed. About now you might be thinking I'm about to indulge in some sour grapes, given that I've been blogging now for five fucking years and have never even scraped one of these lists, but I'm not. Simply put I look at these lists and I don't recognise a good half of the blogs on there, if that. And I've been paying attention. I'm interested in blogging and all that it can do, yet I'm not aware of a significant chunk of what are apparently the major forces in this scene.

And I'm putting my ego to one side here. Really. When I was walking back home tonight I looked at my silhouette on the pavement, a skinny bloke with his head misshaped by his hooded top, and was struck by my insignificance. And, since this might be taken out of context, I should add this wasn't some major revelation that put me in my place. I'm just some guy, like every other blogger out there (guy in the non-gender-specific sense).

The fact is that these things are wonderfully relative. On the same day the Blogebrity list appeared Andy Luke posted this somewhat embarrassing endorsement of me. I was going to just let it go, but it illustrates a point really nicely. As far as Andy's concerned I'm as A-list as it gets. While I might be looking to Andy Baio and Matt Haughey for inspiration, Andy's looking to me. That doesn't mean Andy is living in some closeted world where he doesn't know what other great stuff is out there, no matter how much I might think so. As far as he's concerned, I'm a major source for him online, and for him and, as far as I know a number of other folk, that's a good thing.

So what's my point? Ah, I dunno. Am I trying to strike some kind of balance on the whole blog popularity thing while also being a teeny bit pissed off that after five fucking years I still don't get to play with the big boys, even though I've never bothered to even audition for that league? Yes, there is an element of that - I am human after all - but there's something else, something that's beyond the A-list bollocks and the linky-lurve stuff.

Remember that I look at these lists and don't recognise most of the blogs on them. I've always been of the belief that there isn't a single "blogosphere". There are as many blogsopheres as there are bloggers, all overlapping and changing every time someone logs on and sticks a link on their site. You can aggregate them and come up with statistics and yes, some will be more influential than others, but for each individual those stats don't mean shit. It's not an isolationist thing, more an illustration of how wonderful this whole bloggernet environment is. A good blogger is someone who points you to things you hadn't considered before, not just links but ideas, notions and experiences. And that blogger does not function alone. By the very nature of the medium they are getting links, idea, notions and experiences from others who in turn are doing the same thing, and those others can be on or off line.

Yes, I do get a lot of my stuff from the usual places, but I suspect what I consider "the usual places" might not apply to others who are looking in different directions. And that, as I start to sober up and think it might be a good idea to get to bed before I start to regret writing this and delete it before posting, is probably my point. Everyone I link to is, at that moment, "A-list" in my book. That individual link is, at that time, more important than anything else. It will fade, probably quite quickly, but when I saw it it was the most important thing, something that I felt the need to share with others.

And that's possibly why I keep hacking away at this even though I know I'll never reach the glory heights of blog stardom. If I can give one or five or ten or fifty or a hundred people something interesting to read or some neat link to follow then my job is done. The fact that I'm not alone in doing this makes it all worthwhile.

Right, time for bed. If this has turned out to be just a drunken rant of stupidity them my apologies.

(I couldn't squeeze it in relevantly but Meg's recent post Nostalgia isn't what it used to be is worth a read since she did used to be the Queen of the UK blog scene back in the day. Like I say, not strictly relevant but it did get me thinking...)

[Update: A sober reflection]

Every so often you stumble upon something on the web and wonder "what mad fool is this?" as you gasp at the enormity of time and effort they've put into some massive archive of stuff. It so happens that I know one such mad fool. He's a very good friend of mine. Annoyingly his name is Andy, like so many of my friends, and doubly annoyingly he refused use his real surname, or any surname at all. When in the mid 90s he appeared on the small press comics scene, which already had more than its quota of Andys, he was given the name Andy Konky Kru after the title of his comic. Since having a rather odd pseudonym is not that weird amongst cartoonists the name stuck and no-one thought any more of it. But Andy didn't just do cool little comics, he was also something of an academic, holding forth in debates about the origins and minutiae of comic strip art and backing them up with a somewhat encyclopedic knowledge base.

When Andy discovered the internet he did what a lot of people did and started cataloguing it. But being Andy he was incredibly focussed, concentrating on cartoonists he thought were good (he can be very specific about this) and looking for examples of early comics, early for Andy being pre-20th century, an era when most people don't think comics really existed. Of course the internet is a cruel mistress and despite his blinkers the tunnel of information was infinite and ever changing. The huge lists of links Andy would painstakingly produce and send to mailing lists would quickly go out of date as link rot set in, but Andy would go back and update them again and again. And these lists were huge things. Andy would present them to you and you'd feel obliged to visit every site, which of course you didn't so you felt a little guilty. But when you needed a reference to some cartoonist or publisher the lists pretty much always gave you a quality pointer.

Link rot was starting to bug Andy so, since I'd given him a directory on BugPowder to host the lists, he started posting the images he'd found directly on there so they couldn't disappear. Alongside this he started scanning and uploading samples from his early comics archive running from prehistory to 1900 which began to dominate the site, plus some samples of his own (excellent) comic art. Jez and myself just left him to it and were somewhat astonished one day to discover he'd used up over 100mb of space, back when 100mb on a website was a hell of a lot. Bear in mind these are generally not huge files. He was very conscientious, compressing the jpegs as much as possible and only uploading the essentials, but even so we quickly checked BugPowder's capacity, concluding that we were okay but that Andy had to slow the fuck down, which he did, but even Andy slowed down is still a force to be reckoned with.

While I appreciated what he was doing I must confess I never really got it, putting it down to Andy's somewhat obsessive nature. The site got some good plaudits but they tended to be from other obsessive comics historians. At the end of the day we could accommodate his work and it was obviously good work. People I respected raved about the site and that was good for BugPowder if nothing else. I finally fully got what Andy had achieved at Caption 2004, the annual convention for us small press and art comics types. With an laptop powered OHP display and a large piece of pipe (photo) Andy talked us through his history of comics and I, along with everyone else in the audience, was rapt. Beyond any embarrassment I felt for not noticing this earlier I was immensely proud of what Andy had achieved here. He, of course just shrugged it off but I was struck by the realisation that he hadn't just collected a bunch of images and stuck them online - he'd created a huge narrative that meant something and taught something new the rest of us high-brow comics nerds who thought we pretty much knew it all.

That's not to say he's not an obsessive loon. One look at his directory with it's thousands of carefully named files but no subdirectories confirmed that. Each of the hundreds of HTML files was carefully hand coded and cross referenced with no database backing it up. I toyed with the notion of automating it for him but it was so huge and complex I quickly abandoned that idea. The methodology behind its creation lay in Andy's brain alone. Us mere mortals could not comprehend it.

However, Andy's page had become something of a ball and chain for BugPowder. Currently the site lives on a server that is very cheap with lots of space but not overly reliable. Or rather it's reliable if you're prepared to keep up with updates and changes. If you just leave it be it'll occasionally b0rk big time, as happened the other week. We could move to somewhere less techy / more reliable but the issue of hosting Andy's increasingly massive subsite always put such notions on hold. Andy had mentioned that his uncle had a mass of storage available to him but he didn't want to change the URLs from BugPowder and since we were happy enough staying with the current host for now nothing more was thought of it.

That said, when BugPowder went down the other week a lot of people noticed, and the majority of them were looking for Andy's stuff. So to cut a (very) long story short Andy now has his own site at AndyBleck.com (No, this isn't his real name. I'm one of only two people in comics who knows his real name and I've toyed with killing Mardou to reclaim my exclusivity in that regard.) All the images have been moved to his uncle's site while the HTML pages are mirrored, pretty much, on his new site and on BugPowder. Nothing major has changed on the surface but we're now pretty much free to move BugPowder should be want to.

The whole process of uploading everything allowed me to accurately quantify exactly what Andy has built here. There are 5,369 images weighing in at 396mb. 3,185 (240mb) of them are history related sitting on 645 pages. These took 12 hours to upload. In his defense this has been built up over many years but even so!

Do have a look at Andy's site. It's a marvel to behold even if you're not interested in comics. Start off with the Early Comics Archive where each thumbnail takes you to a readable page of comics. If you fancy something a little more academic, check out the Speechbaloons in Comics and Evolution of Speechbaloons pages (the former being comic-specific, the latter looking at art generally). There also Andy's big find, Lenardo and Blandine, a comic from 1783 which blew the "first ever comic" stakes back a good 75 years. Andy's old linklists still survive in a slightly reduced but still comprehensive form here along with his selection of 90 Comics Without Words featuring mostly contemporary cartoonists. The first two issues of his tiny A7 anthology Flickermouse are online along with his own minicomics Konky Kru, Mumpitz, Unspanned and some of his more abstract works. Then there's the main focus of his creative output these days, the Realistic Drawings (for want of a better term). These really need to be seen in their full size glory and there are so many of them but this is a personal favourite. Finally there's his photography, the "best of" selection is here though there are many more, along with some sculpture and related abstract pencil drawings.

Phew!

Armando Iannucci has a new TV program coming out soon so he's doing the rounds of the broadsheets being interviewed and writing those sorts of articles that people who have new TV shows or books or whatnot write, usually taking some aspect of modern life and taking a contrary position regarding it to make a biting comment on society.

Iannucci's effort in this circus, That's Enough Entertainment, Thanks, written for the Daily Telegraph, is not, as it happens, a bad piece. I was expecting some thin-brained expansion of a stand-up routine that I could easily demolish, but annoyingly, and to his credit, there is some good thinking hidden under the laffs here.

That said, he brings up something of a bugbear of mine - the horror of the overflowing iPod to illustrate the problem of choice fatigue.

"Having all music in their pocket, they find it more difficult to be entirely satisfied with the track they've chosen to listen to. The urge to flick is greater across multi-channel TV, not necessarily because the programmes are bad, but because logic dictates there has to be something even better somewhere else."

I'm a little rusty on the specifics but as I remember it Plato (or maybe it was Socrates via Plato) had this metaphor about how people deal with knowledge. Imagine a cave where someone is chained up so he can't move. All the can see is a blank wall onto which are projected shadow puppets animated by a flickering fire. As far as the chained victim in concerned this is reality because he can see nothing else. Everything about the world can be explained by him in terms of the shadows. Now, say the man is unchained and allowed to walk around the cave. He sees the static models and discovers how the fire animates them. And then he discovers the entrance to the cave and sees the outside world in all it's infinite glory. As I remember it (and it has been a good decade...) the man gets scared and chains himself back up.

But what bugs me about this is that we've been dealing with absurd quantities of choice for quite a while now. It's only since we've been able to accurately quantify it that people lose the ability to cope. My mum recently asked me that common question about the 11,000 mp3s on my computer that would run for 40 days non stop. "When do you find the time to listen to it all?" she exclaimed. I pointed out that thanks to her previous career as a singer and her partner's previous career as a conductor the mass of vinyl classical records they own was probably equivalent, not to mention the many shelves of sheet music and orchestral scores that line the spare bedroom. Does she look at this and wonder when they'll find the time to listen to it all? Does she realise that she'll probably never listen to a decent chunk of it ever again and dispose of it? Of course not. The fact that it's there and available should she want to is what's important.

Or to put it another way, you don't walk into a public library to which you have complete and unfettered access, and exclaim "how will I ever find the time to read all these books!"

I remember way back, circa 1992 or so, when the notion of "information as power" first came to me. I would keep newspaper articles and photocopy bits of information from the reference library about whatever it was I was fascinated by at the time. In retrospect I never actually did anything useful with all this information but I was convinced that in order to survive in this modern age the accumulation of information was vital. As the internet started to come into our imaginations this notion became more widespread. Imagine being able to access all the information in the world in seconds! People will become empowered! It'll be the dawn of a new age!

The problem is that people aren't trained to deal with all this stuff. They've suddenly been unchained from the cave where everything was black and white and have been thrust into this arena where you have to make critical judgments about everything you experience, and it is everything. It's no small wonder that many people just stick to a few forums or blogs and effectively ignore this wealth of wonder out there - it's just too much hard work to apply their critical faculties to all this new stuff. And that's not to say they're spoon-fed drones or anything, just that this is a quite different arena.

That said, I don't think the incessant quantification helps matters. The emphasis on choice implies that the user has to actively chose all the time from a range of options that no-body can deal with. Five thousand songs, 200 online newspapers, fifty millions online radio stations. Given this enormity you're more likely to stick to your FM radio and newsagent with the occasional trip to a small branch of HMV so you can get on with the more important aspects of being alive.

Seasoned web users figured out long ago that the only way to deal with the enormity of the web is to set it up so you don't have to be bothered. Either stick to your own niche or let others do the aggregating. Check your feeds and when you've read them all then that's it. Once the internet that you can be bothered with has run out, the other fifty-thousand billion pages might as well not exist. Keep everything in manageable packages the parameters of which you have specified otherwise your brain will explode and you'll never read anything.

So Iannucci is sort of right. Given the infinite amount of stuff out there it's pointless to pretend that you can experience it all, but I think it's wrong to not be bothered and just ignore it all. You just need to figure out the best way to filter it, and that way will be pretty unique to you.

But what really narks me about Iannucci's piece, the part where he's gone all glib-stand-up-routine, is that he can be bothered. The reason he never watched the Sorpranos and all the other "must-see" programs he lists is because he's busy making his own TV and radio shows. Since, by his argument, he's just adding to to the infinite pile of entertainment, what's the point? The point is that it's worth creating this stuff for the same reason it's worth seeking it out. Communication of ideas, be it entertainment or hardcore academia, is what makes us human.

There's quite a lot to all this. Probably a book's worth. Maybe if there's enough interest I'll try and expand on bits of it in future posts. Or maybe I won't bother.

I've been cycling for a little over six months now and feel somewhat inspired to write about it. Specifically about cycling in North Birmingham. When I bought my first bike last October and started cycling in a city for the first time in fifteen years I was a little cautious, especially in Birmingham which is the UK's motor city. Everyone drives here, doubly so in the more industrial north. There are no real cycle lanes to speak of other than a few token gestures from the council which are of no use to anyone so I'm sharing the roads with cars, lorries and a shocking number of white vans. I figured I was going to more at risk than most so I plastered myself in hi-viz reflective clothing and put my life in their hands. Still, if I did die at least I'd saved a lot of bus fare money.

As it turns out I've had exactly one near miss and that was my fault for dawdling on a roundabout. More to the point, the van that "nearly missed" me merely slowed down and honked at me repeatedly. I wasn't exactly in danger - just being an annoyance. Other than that, nothing. And it's not like I've been avoiding the main roads. It's just main roads up here. Not having anything to compare it to I figured I was just riding sensibly (I used to ride a motorbike and had defensive riding pummeled into me by other bikers) and being very visible.

I was therefore somewhat surprised when I read this post on Honeypears' LJ where Heather reckons that her florescent jacket had made her more of a target in Glasgow, and double so when Jeremy commented that she wears a minimum of reflective clothing when cycling in Oxford. Glasgow I imagine is kinda like Birmingham though I don't know for sure, but Oxford is cycling central. That said, I remembered Jeremy and Damian (another Oxford cyclist) telling me horror stories about biking around there, describing it as some kind of war zone. And cycling in London really is a war zone of mythic proportions. But north Birmingham is nothing like that. I wonder why?

The first theory is that there are quite a number of blokes around here who wear hi-viz jackets. Being an industrial area the hi-viz is pretty much the uniform for someone who has a physical, sometimes dangerous job. When you see a bright yellow jacket it's likely to be on some hard-nut geezer who would twat you if you looked at him funny. And because these chaps tend to live in this area as well as work here, folk treat them with some respect. Not because they're likely to twat them but because they do important jobs like refuse collection and roadworks and there's an awareness here of what that involves. I get treated much better in shops when I'm wearing a hi-viz. I don't think that'd happen in, say, Winchester.

The other theory is that there just aren't any other cyclists around here. I tend to ride very fast and I'm always surprised when I overtake another rider. I can do a ten mile trip and not see another bike. If I'm not the only one locking up at Tescos it's something of a shock. So when cars and trucks see me on the road it's something they don't see everyday so they take extra precautions. In a cycle-heavy city like Oxford all the drivers are used to bikes and have built up prejudices against them, but here they've got nothing to go on. Add this to the notion that I might well be a hard-nut and they keep out of my way, giving me some respect even.

It'll be interesting to see whether this still applies in south Birmingham which is more studenty, less industrial and more libera-middle class, yet still has a lot of cars.

(Having thought about this for ages I was prompted to write it after reading Currybet's piece on buying a bike which while not relevant does have a very funny Kraftwerk joke)

When I was younger, growing up in Croydon during the late 80s, I didn't feel particularly patriotic. As ever the reasons are complicated by the naive idiocy of youth along with a hefty dose of nihilism but one of the main reasons, or at least the reason that still stands up to scrutiny, was that people I didn't like tended to be patriotic, ergo I wasn't patriotic. Thatcher covered herself in the Union Jack for a start, and then there were footballs fans. There wasn't some complicated socio-political thing going on - I didn't like the Tories and I didn't like football. Since the teenage way of expressing your distaste with something is to reject everything everything associated with it, I rejected patriotism.

Then when I was 16 I went to the States to visit my dad for the first time in years (messy divorce, ask me another time) and I remember being very aware of my Britishness, which isn't hard as Americans, and particularly Texans in my experience, are endlessly fascinated by us. As, I should add, are we of them. But anyway, I started noticing things about me, things I liked and things I believed in, that could only be explained by the country in which I grew up. Did this make me patriotic? Is there any real difference between identifying with things this country had infused me with and loving this country?

Skip forwards a fair number of years and bring the internet into play. Since it's inherently untrustworthy and full of errors, one has to develop a system of filtering in order to get the most out of it. Who has written this? Who linked to it? Who links to the person who linked to it? What else do they write about? What communities to they belong to? Why should I listen to them?

Another way of sorting it all is to make snap judgments based on appearances, just like in the real world. I'm guessing the what we're looking for when we do this is someone who is kinda like us. So since I'll be holding myself in very high regard when judging others I'll be looking to see if they write well in a slightly self-depreciating, witty and insightful manner, read what I consider good books and comics and listen to what I consider decent music, have their own domain rather than a LiveJournal or BlogSpot blog, have designed their site themselves rather than using a default template and, this is probably the most crucial point, provide a well constructed full RSS feed for their blog. And then they turn out to be a twat, but I digress.

Possibly the most important thing in this woefully inaccurate judgment game is where they're from. The areas of the web I tend to surf around tend to be dominated by Americans, usually from the States with a decent smattering of Canadians. When a British voice pops up on, say, MetaFilter, I notice it and pay attention. Conversely when I discover that some blogger I had assumed to be British due to their dry wit and effective use of sarcasm turns out to be a Yank I feel a palpable sense of disappointment. Similarly, when British bloggers win US-centric awards or get published by US based publishers I feel proud of them.

I even go so far as to consider some Americans honorary Brits which I'm sure would weird them out if they knew or cared about it. Maybe, if I'm not the only one who does this, we should start a directory or poll of honorary Brits from the western colonies? I wonder if they'd consider it a compliment or not...

It goes hopefully without saying that this is all very stupid of me. At the end of the day it doesn't make any difference where someone is from as long as what they're doing is good in some way. The beauty of the net is that I can have a communication with someone on the other side of the planet as easily as I can with someone down the road. So why, even though I know it's idiotic, do I do this? Could it be the net has made me more patriotic than I would have been otherwise? Does exposure to a wider range of "others" make you more protective towards those who are more like you? All I'm doing is whittling it all down to something manageable, but why on this criteria?

It's an interesting one, I think. Xenophobia and racism usually comes about in communities that don't have any contact with or understanding of people outside their self-contained and self-sufficient little world. This is different to becoming more aware of people outside your physical community, but how different? I don't think other cultures and countries are worthless but I do give people, ideas and notions from my country more weight and importance. How does this differ from the flag-waving BNP moron down the street?

What I think I'm driving at is can I be patriotic and not be a wanker?

Many many years ago, in the dim and distant days before weblogs, back when having an email address was kinda cool except you only knew a couple of other people with email addresses and they were your mates who you met in the pub anyway, I did a zine. Actually, I did many zines, but one of them was a review zine called Strands. After the first issue, which contained reviews of small press comics by a number of different people, I announced that the next one would just be by me and would review all sorts of things. As an example I said I would review cigarette papers, which at least one person took as a cue to take the piss. In the end I didn't review cigarette papers in the second issue but I did write an article for the University paper comparing all the different brands of Rizla available, the premise being that by the time the smoking student reched the third year they could no longer afford the Marlboro Lights of their fresher days and might need some guidance as to their next step. It was never printed and a few years later, by chance and out of context, I met one of the editors who told me they thought it was a joke that they hadn't printed due to sensitivity over drug issues. It wasn't a joke and it wasn't about drugs. I was being serious.

Generally I prefer the Rizla Blue, a "fine weight" paper that has enough support but doesn't give the harsh burning flavour of a Red or Green. However, while stocking up with baccy at the Co-op I noticed a box of Silvers, previously only available in jumbo not-really-for-joints-honest size but here in perfectly legitimate rollups format. Since the Co-op has consistently refused to sell regular Blues, forcing me to brave the teenage chavs outside the off-license, I asked for a bundle.

A few years back Rizla experimented with Whites. These were an interesting variety having the same weight as a Red but with teeny tiny perforations which made for a smoother smoke. I liked them a lot as while they retained the rollups advantage of not burning away in the ashtray like a normal fag they didn't tend to go out as much as your standard paper. Also, the perforations made gripping the paper during rolling easier, a plus point for the novice. Unfortunately Rizla never rolled them out (as it were) to newsagents so you could only buy them at not-really-for-joints-honest establishments and eventually they vanished (though they're still featured on the website, which is intriguing). Whether the same will happen with the Silvers remains to be seen.

My verdict then. They're a lovely paper, very translucent but still quite firm. In fact more resistant to tearing than the blues, which is a little odd for something so thin. The texture is closer to tracing paper than the average paper which makes for a curious cigarette, especially once lit when any moisture in the tobacco evaporates and sinuous tobacco is made highly visible. This dampness isn't as pronounced as it could be, but it does encourage the bitter taste to travel past any roach or filter you may have included moreso than the blues. This is a major negative point as it leaves something of a bitter aftertaste on the lips. As for the burning any difference is hard to detect, possibly because any reduction in burning paper taste was negated by the bitterness flow. It's also interesting to note that the Silver has pronounced ridges running along its length, similar to other 'speciality' papers Rizla has experimented with in the past, which might explain the slightly faster burning rate I'm noticing. I think these lines are to ensure an even burn, which they do well, but the speed issue needs to be examined in more depth. Actual rolling is a breeze. While I haven't experimented in damp conditions, the tracing paper consistency does seem quite resistant to fingertip sweat (in a strange contradiction to the moisture absorption during burning - perhaps they're actually watertight and the moisture is rushing up towards the mouth rather than escaping through the paper?) and a nice tight roll around the roach / filter is achieved with ease. This may also be to do with those ridges. Also of note is how the paper comes out of the packet flat and doesn't do that annoying curling-over-itself thing that Reds and Blues tend to, although these packets are fresh and after a few days in the field they may start to exhibit this symptom. Again, further testing is required.

[Update: A non-critical but rather annoying design flaw has become apparent. After removing a paper from the packet it is customary to hold it in the light to ensure the gummed strip is showing, thus preventing the unfortunate mistake of rolling the cigarette backwards. The Silvers have a watermark with the Rizla logo embedded in them, but when the gum is facing the users the logo is reversed, thus creating a slight cognitive dissonance. Sloppy.]

In conclusion, a good effort and aesthetically a lovely paper, but I think I'll be sticking with Blues on the basis of the bitterness. For those who don't roach or filter, and who therefore do not mind or even enjoy the bitter taste of tobacco on their lips, these would definitely be a go-er.

I'm worked with some strange characters over the years, but this guy took the biscuit. It started on Tuesday. Two of the regulars had called in sick, one with a toothache, the other with "swollen feet". One of the replacements was Keith. He seemed nice enough, if a little chatty, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Because he was so chatty we got his life story, and here it is.

About 18 months ago Keith met a Romanian girl. I'm not sure how, but he did. They fell in love and she moved over here with him. Thing is, she was a girl of expensive tastes, always wanting jewelrey and the like and demanding to stay in expensive hotels. She also had a family back home - her brother and mother - who needed money because they were poor. A new bath to replace the tin they washed in, that sort of thing. Keith, because he was in love, obliged. A few months later he went over to Romania and was greeted by a lovely house with a luxury bathroom. Other things didn't quite add up and he went to the police. They showed him mugshots of the girlfriend, brother and mother and told him he'd been had. The brother was her pimp. They were sucking him dry.

When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to drink water from the hot tap. The logic being that while the cold water in the kitchen came directly from the mains the hot water had been sitting in the tank in airing cupboard and wasn't exactly fresh. Good advice, especially to a kid who's thinking this whole hot water through a tap thing bypasses the need for a kettle when preparing warm blackcurrant juice.

And like many of the things you're told as a child, you never bother to question them until sometime in your adulthood. Regarding the hot water drinking thing this happened to me the other week. I was in a hurry and figured I'd clean my teeth while in the shower, something that had never occurred to me before. I remembered my mother's stark warning about letting hot tap water anywhere near my throat but figured as long as I didn't swallow or anything I'd be okay, plus we have a combi-boiler so the hot water is as fresh as the cold.

The thing is, when I did this I noticed my teeth were much cleaner than usual. Which makes sense when you think about it. Washing things in hot water is way more effective than in cold and with my tea and cig consumption rates I need as much cleaning power as I can get.

So the question is, does anyone else clean their teeth using the hot tap?

And so Jason Kottke has announced he's quit his job and is going to try blogging full time for the next year and, since he's like an A-List blogger with seven years service, those who care for such things sit up and take notice. It's an interesting one mainly because he's not really doing anything out of the ordinary with his weblog. It's about as tradblog as it gets. Most of the blogs that have made it "big" have done so because they've got a theme or a gimmick or they're replicating some "normal" media thing in a blogging format, but Jason's just blogging. Can he live off this? And if he does manage it, does it mean anything?

As usual I think it's been blown out of all proportion. And I can kinda speak from experience because I did a similar thing a couple of years ago. When I quit my job and went to live on a farm for three months I was taking quite a risk. Admittedly my situation at that moment meant the risk didn't feel that great but I needed help to do it, from friends driving the van that took my stuff into storage to my mate letting me borrow her room for a few weeks (thus saving rent money) to my family letting me stay with them rent-free when it was over, and many other favours small and large from many other people. I couldn't have done it without them and I'm eternally grateful. And it strikes me Jason is doing the same thing, only whereas my network was based around my chums in the real world, his is based around a blogging community. Note the a blogging community. That's important.

So often in this cyperspatial world of ours people confuse the pseudo-personal with the public. Understandably, because it's all so terribly blurry, but confuse it they do. Jason Kottke may be the uber-blogger with the most hits but even though he has millions of readers he still only has a limited number of actual friends, and it's those, the people who actually give a shit about whether he eats or not, who will help him achieve his goal. It might be nice to think that in our lovely interconnected internetty world strangers will help strangers, but they tend not to, at least not in any reliable monetary sense. But you can pretty much always rely on your friends to help and support you in your crazy decisions, because, without getting all soppy, that's what they're for.

So to the folk decrying Jason as an egotistical wanker, you're kinda missing the point. He's got this idea, that maybe the blogging medium can be something more than it current is without resorting to commercialisation, and he wants some help giving it a go, raising a pot of cash that will see him through it. And given the number of people he knows and, more importantly, has helped, who understand what he's doing and why, I think he'll reach that target.

I'm not one of them, I hasten to add, but if a good friend of mine had an interesting idea for a project that required he quit steady employment for a while, and if I could help in some way, chances are I would.

And that's kinda the problem with this experiment. If it works and he is able to support himself through patronage then it'll only prove that Jason Kottke is able to support himself through patronage. Yes, he'll have developed a system by which to do it, but in order for it to work for you you'll need to have a large established network of friends who understand what you're up to and are able and willing to help. Maybe what you need is years of consistent work in the medium and a reputation for being a nice guy who tends to give more than he takes. Maybe that's what the haters are so pissed off about.

Following on from this...

Marv asked: "When you get out of the shower, which part of your body do you dry first?"

When I was a kid someone, I think my grandma, told me I should dry from the top down, because if you work from the bottom up your wet top will drip onto your dry bottom (as it were) meaning you have to start over again. So I start with my head, move down my arms, then torso, then groin area and finally legs and feet. This is not some obsessive thing, just a habit built up over 25 or so years. On a tangent, it puzzled me for years why my towel ended up soaking wet and needing a good radiator or ventilated space to dry out while the towels of the various females I've shared an abode with just end up mildly damp and can be hung anywhere, and since I haven't shared towel drying space with a bloke for ages I could never be sure if it was a gender difference or something I was doing wrong. I tried drip-dying for a minute or so before engaging the towel but that made no difference. Then it suddenly flashed into my mind that, as a bloke, I'm kinda hairy while women, on the whole, aren't. Bingo.

Jez asked: "When did (or will) you consider yourself to be a "grown-up"?"

There are probably loads of times when I've come to a realisation that I'm "grown up". A recent one was last year when I was walking down to the local shops and had to pass through the gang of Chavs that hang out at the Circle. (And yes, I know Chav is a class-based derogatory term but in this case it's 100% accurate, trust me on this.) At first I was nervous, flashing back to when I was a teenager and would have been threatened by such youths, but then it occurred to me that, at 33, I was old enough to be their dad, which explained why they were ignoring me. I was a grown up and therefore beneath their notice.

That said, I don't identify at all with my peers who have proper careers, families and the like. (Yourself excepted for some reason, Jez) and often feel like I'm living a different life to most 30-somethings. Sometimes this feels like a legitimate alternative existence but sometimes I do feel somewhat immature. Usually the former, I'm glad to say. When I get around to Brendadada's question about being an Uncle I'll expand on this. On the whole, though, the fact that I often realise I'm a grown up probably says a fair bit abut whether I really am or not.

Brendadada asked: "Sameyness in shops, they way people dress, the cityscape, anything samey. Hmm?"

On the whole a bad thing, but you've got to be careful. Remember the village theory. As human beings we evolved in small communities but in the last few hundred years we've started living in massive ones. The way we cope with this is by stereotyping and categorising things until they become familiar. So to jump back a couple of paragraphs, when I see the youths at the Circle I lump them all into the "Chav" category and think no more about them. Actually, this happened last week. When I went to the tedious not-transistor checking job I recognised one of the temps from somewhere but couldn't figure it out. He definitely recognised me though and it turned out we were working at that Tyre factory I moaned about and that he was one of the principle baboons that were pissing me off so much. But here he was on his own, chav-wise, just me, three African guys and the supervisor. Now, he's still an idiot but we've been talking during breaks and he taught me some card games and stuff. He's now an individual human being in my view rather than a stereotype. And I don't think I was wrong to judge him in that way back then. I just don't have the capacity to treat every person as an individual and there has to be a cut off point.

You can take this theory to pretty much anything you experience in life. Shopping centres, for example. I hate shopping centres. They all have the same shops none of which have anything of interest to me and the layouts and ambiance I find oppressive. But there are people for whom these environments are very attractive and they can spot the nuances and differences between the shops. Okay, I'm stretching this one a bit. Howabout comics? I know my comics really well and can judge the relative merits of comic art on many many levels, but most people will judge it on really basic criteria such as "readable", "nice" and "pretty" with the general conclusion that it's all a bit samey because they're just not used to looking at it in a critical, deep way. And that's fine. A little frustrating, but fine. I'm the same with clothes. Or potatoes. A potato is a potato in my book, but an expert in spuds would be horrified at my ignorance.

On the whole, then, when it comes to groups of people I'm very cautious about saying they're all the same. There are similarities but even with a room full of goths each one will be an individual. Of course, when it comes to the commercial realm it can be a problem. Take, for example, Waterstone's who I worked for for years. For years bookselling in this country was the antithesis of samey but as Waterstone's became a massive corporate presence they started consolidating their business bringing in elements of sameyness. Which is not a bad thing in itself, but they continued to put over this image that they had massive range and were not all samey. Which was a lie. But to the average punter the range still seemed impressively large, which is understandable. A drop from 10,000 titles to 5,000 might be obvious to a seasoned bookseller but to someone who reads a book a month it's not noticeable.

Anyway, not as clear cut as you might think this one...

More questions please!

So I'm doing the most boring job ever but it's okay because I get to listen to my mp3cdwalkman and time kinda passes quick-ish but boy is it the dullest. Quality checking these little things that look like transistors, metal cylinders with two prongs coming out of the bottom, thousands upon thousands of them. The job lasts all week. S'money.

And so thankfully my mind starts to wander. A Pixies track comes on my "random selection of good tunes" mp3cd. It's "Where Is My Mind" and it's rather top. But is it their best track? Probably not, but what is? Can such a thing be decided, especially by someone who doesn't think the Pixies ever released a bad song ever? And even if it can't, does that make it not worth a try?

I haven't done an extended and excessive weblog-based music-related postage session for, well, since ever really and maybe it's time I did one. I shall discover, through rigorous comparison and debate, which is the best Pixies song. But how? What structure should this investigation take?

I could pick out my favourite ten or so tracks and compare them, but that would leave out the others which might have slipped through the net. Howabout a Wimbledon table system where my faves are given "seeds" and distributed amongst pools of, say, four tracks which play off against each other go forward to an eventual final. But there's too much dependent on the luck of the draw and the non-faves (or should I say, lesser faves) would be at a disadvantage.

The only way to go is to play each track off against ever other and do a tally. Picture one of those mileage charts you get in the front of road atlases. One of them. A quick look at iTunes suggests there are 60 tracks from the albums and b-sides (that many?) which means we're going to have 3540 play offs.

That's a lot. More than I thought, actually. But let's continue and pretend it's viable.

So I'm thinking this could be a new project and that I could get other Pixies fans involved, the only criteria being you have a not dislike any of their songs. Each week two songs go up against each other, "Bone Machine" vs "Debaser" for example, and those willing and able send in their arguments for and against. The winner gets two points, the loser none and if it's a draw, one each.

And then in ten years time we'll know which Pixies song is the best.

You think it's a go-er?

Okay third day, I think? Is it Wednesday?

It's strange - the day just seems to go by and you can't quite tell what happened but something must have because you're tired. Not much I can say about the phenomena that will add to the knowledge base but hey, I understand now. Not that I didn't understand before but I have experience of the weirdness that is a day with babies.

We did have an interesting morning today - a trip to the local play group at the church where many mothers and the odd dad brought their many children to mix in one room. This is apparently a good idea. For me it was a kind of hell with cherries on top. All these parents, either knackered from baby duty or horribly keen and eager - all nice people, don't get me wrong, but something about the situation made me not want to be there. Since I had to be there to keep an eye on Isobel (Lucy was busy with Spike) I decided my best role would be to stick close to her since she had a better knowledge of how these things worked than I. So I followed here around as she pushed her walker-thingy and we played with plastic food and stuff. Later we decamped to a box full of random toys and were attacked by a young girl of, god, I dunno, three? She was talking and could count and stuff. She kept picking up toys and giving them to me, which was cool, but then she picked up a house and gave me that, and then started putting animals and stuff in the house. What was weird was how comfortable she was with me - there was no stranger-danger or any of the analytical stares I usually get when first meeting a toddler. I was accepted as one of them, presumably because I had such great toy-box-fu or something.

Anyway, we escaped from play group in something of a daze (it was the first time in a while Lucy had been there and she hadn't quite acclimatised either) and after lunch I was starting to feel the effects. We managed to get the kids off to sleep eventually and I lay down on the sofa and promptly fell asleep. Only for 15 minutes or so before the door went with another visitor. The kids slept for ages though, which was cool. Later, while playing with Isobel, I discovered that beating up toys elicits laughs, especially causing grief to the bright orange giraffe.

And this, by the way, is as coherent as I get. I am enjoying it, though - don't get me wrong. It's just... blimey!

Google are, by all accounts, making shedloads of money from their AdSense program, which is, of course, interesting since they've recently opened it up to a much wider base of websites. When it started I would never have been able to host AdSense ads but for the last few months I have been. And in January I passed the minimum revenue whereby I can get paid. (I decided not to get paid just yet though as they're "looking into" other ways of making payments other than the current US cheque (sorry, check) of which my bank would take a hearty chunk out of so I'm waiting for them to introduce PayPal or something, but I digress.)

What's not been so widely reported, though, is how Google are essentially profiting from bad search results, "bad" here being quite a lose term and not meant to apportion blame to Google exactly or to the users who don't fully understand how to search, but meaning where the page indicated as giving the information requested plainly doesn't.

I get a lot of traffic from Google, so much that it renders my stats pretty much useless. This happens partly because I have good PageRank (for my sins) but also because there are many many words on this site and the chances of those five words you searched for appearing somewhere scattered in one of my monthly archive pages is often quite high.

So, Google sends someone here and they're disappointed. Maybe they're intrigued by my sparkling wit and acrobatic verbiage, but they probably haven't solved whatever problem it was they were searching for. (Of course, sometimes they do, and that's great, but often they don't, and that's my point).

So, I have two classes of readers. The first is my regulars, you lot who actually read what I write most of the time and understand it within the context of the blog. If any of you have ever clicked on an AdSense ad in the archives I'd be surprised since they tend to be as detached from the spirit of this blog as can be. Then you have the rest, those thousands upon thousands who've come here by mistake, who didn't want to come here in the first place and are now wondering where to go next. They're the ones who, occasionally, click on the ads, and they're the ones who are generating a small amount of cash for me and a large amount of cash for Google.

I'd imagine the same process happens on the Google search pages themselves - if the results are useful then you're going to use them but if they're bobbins then you'll check out the sponsored links on the sidebar. Is it not interesting that when Google gets the job done properly it makes no money but when it fails it generates an income?

This isn't a criticism by any means. The ads are probably useful as a last resort, since they're generated using the same algorithm that sent that searcher to my site to begin with, and they're probably the only way of generating income for Google so I don't begrudge them at all. And I don't mind them aesthetically, unlike the ads on Yahoo which can only really be surfed using Adblock. I just think it's interesting.

When I was taking my month off blogging in December I started Podcasting, as you might have noticed if you saw the box on the right hand column suddenly appear. Podcasting is just a fancy name for putting together your own radio show and sticking it on the net and how it's suddenly, well, exploded is probably being generous but let's say "risen in profile" with this fancy new name is a combination of utopian geekery and a lowering in technology barriers. Pretty much anyone can put one together and getting one out there isn't as hard as it might have been.

Though you wouldn't necessarily think so if you read the Endgadget guide to Podcasting. Admittedly Endgadget is aimed at people who like to take the scenic route and there's nothing wrong with that. But here's how I do it with a Mac running Panther using the basic iLife applications that come with it. In other words, very simply and for free.

As you may have heard, an mp3 blogger has been cease-and-desisted for hosting mp3s on his server. It's happened before but this time he's in the UK so it's a little closer to home, although his hosting service is in the States, so I guess that's moot, although the letter sent to his host was from a London address - it's all so complicated in this global world...

This is another long post in which I look at the concept of gated online communities and speculate how moves like this might make such an environment the essential norm. I think it's interesting but your mileage may vary.

Right, since I'm stumbling in blogblock land temporarily, time to dust off that story I promised you about the utterly absurd job what I did just before Christmas. It's a long one, I warn you.

Today I had fun exploring the minor specialist bus routes of Birmingham. This was not a planned activity - it just kinda worked out that way.

I'm currently working at the Land Rover factory in Solihull. I don't usually name the places I'm working at but given the size of this place to say "car factory" and "Solihull" and expect to remain obscure is pointless. This place is huge, about the size of a small town. Imagine the largest urban industrial site you can think of and triple it. This is bigger. And other than that I'm slightly reticent to talk about it. They have a quite aggressive no-photos policy there so I don't think they'd take too kindly to me rambling on about how the production line works online. So instead I'm going to talk about my bus journey.

To get there I usually take the number 57 which winds it's slow way up through Small Heath and along the Coventry Road. This morning, however, a bus was sitting at the stop in Moor Street with the number 850 on the front. I've not seen a bus numbered in the 800s before and other that being as curious as you can be about a strange bus at 6.45am having had only four hours sleep, I just assumed it wasn't for me. Then I noticed the destination, which of course I can't exactly remember now, but it was definitely "Works something". There are many strange place-names in Birmingham (Nechells, Washwood, Gilbertstone, Queslett, Tat Ban and the quite fruity Walmley Ash, to picks some at random from the A-Z) but nowhere called Works. Could it be a special service timetabled to coincide with the starting of a new shift at the Land Rover factory, rather like those extra busses that don't run in school holidays? It could indeed, and so I got on it (with some trepidation as the driver was visibly very tired and might have been just saying yes to get me out his hair before driving me to some other Works on the opposite side of town). The funny thing is, there were only four people on the bus. It took exactly the same route as the 57 only it stopped at the factory gates which are about a mile from the terminus of the 57, so I'm guessing a 57 had just departed taking everyone else on it. On the plus side it was a really old bus which meant it had radical things like leg room and relatively comfortable seats. I shall try and catch it tomorrow if only to find out what the destination is called.

The end of the day is always a challenge as you try and figure out where you are in relation to the entrance. Since the plant is basically a mile long stretch of huge anonymous grey warehouses (the largest half a mile long) surrounded by loads of roads that twist and weave, getting your bearings is kinda impossible and the last two times I'd been there it'd taken me a good 20 minutes to get off site. Today I got a lift from a co-worker, a genial chatty bloke, who dropped me and another co-worker off at the entrance. On the wrong side of the plant. A mile away from the bus stop. As the crow flies (remember the windy roads).

However, all was not lost. We spotted a bus stop and tried our luck, which appeared to be in. Here was another Works-specific terminus for the somewhat randomly numbered A6 service. This one is a bit more regular, running mornings and afternoons from the plant to Solihull then on to Kings Heath and was, again, a really old bus. It wound a long route through the housing estates around the plant before suddenly appearing in Solihull town centre which I'd forgotten was so close. Two more busses and I was home in a little over two hours. I do try to limit my working in Solihull as much as possible.

I've been thinking about basically ripping off Diamond Geezer and taking a ordinary but odd bus journey somewhere in Birmingham and this could be the perfect filter through which to do it...

I've been thinking a lot these last few months about all this temp work I've been doing for the last year and a half, usually in the form of "why the fuck am I still temping after a year and a half?" I seem to be in something of a groove at the moment - bills need to be paid so I temp, but to actually go and get a permanent full time job (or even a permanent part time one) just seems a leap too far. But I do think that's what I need for a bit. We'll see how this develops.

Today was, somewhat tediously, another of those "what the fuck am I doing here?" days. I was sent by the agency to a tyre warehouse in Aston to assist in the unloading of a large delivery of tyres. Interestingly they not only wanted someone who could physically unload tyres from a truck for eight hours (which I can, however unbelievable people who knew me a couple of years back might find that) but also someone who was a bit "switched on". This was odd because most of the other people who worked there were idiots. Utter morons.

And as I'm standing there watching these baboons exist in front of me, I'm thinking back to this time last Spring when I had a fair bit of temping under my belt, wondering if it's just me getting less tolerant or if I seem to be working in places where the full timers really are offensively stupid. And looking at it as objectively as I can, I don't think it's me.

Thinking about it a little more I remember that, on the whole, the agency didn't get me much work close to home for the first few months. I'd often be working in the centre of town or at the NEC or somewhere in the South or East that required two bus journeys. Then, last summer, I started getting work on the industrial estate near Perry Barr, which wasn't so bad as the people who worked there came from all over. Just lately though I've been getting work very close to home, and home, as you might well know by now, is Kingstanding, and for a quick primer in all that is Kingstanding I refer you to this and then this, with the rider that while it isn't actually that bad there's a hell of a lot of truth there. Okay, it is that bad. When the National Front sticker you noticed on a lamp post by the bus stop (so not exactly out of the way) is still there a week later perfectly intact, you know there's something ugly going on under the surface.

The difference between a factory in Banbury (where I worked for a bit in 2003) or the rest of Birmingham and one down the road is stunning. Only when you've been in the same warehouse as the miscreants who live around here for a day or two can you really understand the frightening truth behind the ever-so-amusing term Chav and realise that it's all true. All of it.

But I'm digressing, and meandering, and I apologise, unless you like that kind of thing, which I do when others do it, but I understand if you don't.

Actually, if you do like this sort of thing I heartily recommend Billyworld. He's a master, and I mean that in the best possible way.

But I have to get to bed. Got to be at a car factory in Solihull tomorrow for 7.30am. At least I know the people there won't be utter gits, which is something.

(Oh, the tyre warehouse was in Aston, which would invalidate my point were it not that when the biggest idiot of all asked me where I was from and I said Kingstanding he replied "Kingstanding's cool" and I knew, right there and then, where the day was going.)

My Christmas had an extra twist this year as my sister, Lucy, was forecast by her doctor to give birth on December 25th. There's a margin of error of two weeks so from mid December onwards the family was on alert, every text message quickly flipped open, ever phone call speedily answered. And because this is my sister, who is like me in ways that are diametrically opposed so if you picture my eccentricities and flip them in a metaphor mirror she'll take it very personally and not talk to you for a while, it wasn't just that she was going to have a baby. Oh no.

This happened last Tuesday, but so did something else so I wrote about that instead. Even so, it's worth recording.

It occurred to me tonight that this is my first proper Halloween for quite a while. Last year it fell on a Saturday and I was in the pub and previous to that I was living in areas where there aren't many families, and if there are they tend not to let their kids out after dark to go knocking on strangers front door. Currently I'm living in suburbia, real suburbia with families and everything. They do things differently here.

At about 7pm there's the first knock on the door. I open it to see three short people in masks wailing "trick or treat". Rather surprised I pop into the kitchen, realise we have nothing resembling candy, and drop some shrapnel from my pocket into their bags. Ten minutes later another knock on the door, another three short people in masks and the rest of my shrapnel has gone. Total outlay: about 67p. And it's kinda cute, bringing back memories of when I used to do this as a kid. But I now have no money (I doubt they'd change a tenner) and no sweets. I could give them some mini-comics but I suspect their parents wouldn't really approve so I'm a little stuck.

I pop up to Sam's room to inform her of my dilemma and am slightly taken aback by her hostile, somewhat Scrooge-like approach to the whole event. As the evening progresses I start to understand why as our door is knocked again and again. We don't answer, Sam on principle, me because I have nothing to placate these tiny demons and the implicit threat of a "trick" seems best dealt with by the illusion of absence rather than a pleading of poverty. Added to this the knocks are getting heavier, the murmuring voices deeper. These are not sweet little kids any more - these are the teenagers, the morally lost, socially dispossessed gits who hang outside the off license letting off fireworks.

I'm reminded again that I generally want nothing to do with the local community of Sun reading idiots and their cold-eyed offspring. I'm reminded that while my house is decent, my housemate cool and my rent cheap I really don't like living in this area, not so much that I feel the need to leave any time soon, just in the way that I feel I have nothing in common with the residents.

In other news the first absurd Christmas decorations went up on our street last week. Come December every other house will be plastered in the tackiest of tacky flashing lights and Sam and I will laugh, regaling each other with sightings of aesthetic atrocities. But the laughter disguises a fear that there is no irony here, no knowing winks. There's something else afoot, something I will never understand or comprehend.

I'm loading a pallet onto the shrink-wrapping machine and the radio news catches my ear. I turn to the guy in the booth. You what? "Some people are going to be pretty upset about this" he says. Yeah, me being one of them. As Teenage Kicks starts it's unexpected stint as most playlisted song of the day I find myself slightly stunned, unable to compute this information. He'll never broadcast again. I'll never hear his show live again. Kids discovering music now and in the future will not have his guiding voice. It's over and it's too early, far too early.

I continued my work in a daze, making little mistakes and bumping my pallet truck into things, as it sunk in. I sent a couple of text messages to people I guessed hadn't heard and got bemused replies. Is this a wind up? A little later some guy is singing raucously along to Teenage Kicks obviously oblivious to why it's being played. That phrase, "some people are going to be pretty upset about this" is flowing through my mind. I'm probably the only person in this warehouse who's affected by the news.

I can't remember when I first heard his show. It was probably around 1989. I was 17, had just discovered The Pixies and was making up for some seriously lost time music-wise. Up until then my music taste had been pretty terrible, growing up in Croydon and listening to Capital Radio. As I moved to Winchester Radio One moved to FM and became my chosen station. At the time he was playing music in trios. A guitar track, a dance track, a world track, a guitar track and so on. I loved the guitar stuff, hated the dance stuff and was bemused by the world stuff, but I stuck with it. Soon I came to tolerate and eventually love the whole show, which is kind of the point.

Throughout the 90s I tended to be the only person in my immediate group of friends that listened to him. As time has progressed this has changed as when that identification is made one tends to have made a friend for life and this evening nearly every weblog I read has a post like this on it. I don't think he has fans as such or followers. Rather he made a certain frame of mind acceptable and this, I think, is his real legacy.

In fact I'll go out on a limb and say it's not really about the music. The music is a conduit for something else, something quite intangible which I think comes down to that fucked up sense of juxtaposition he imposed on us. He made having an open mind cool, which is saying something when you think about it. Once you'd accepted that you could listen to every form of every form of music and appreciate it on its own merits then you could apply this to everything else in life. Any form of creative endeavour is worthwhile. The fact that someone, anyone, is doing something different and interesting becomes vital.

On the whole fans (for want of a better word) of him tend to be sensitive folk who just want things to be nice, who feel beaten down by the relentless enforcement of mediocrity. He not only provided a place on the radio for us to retreat to, his spirit encouraged others to do the same. Every small club, fanzine, website, setup of any description that implicitly encourages people to just do stuff owes him a debt, and they know it. The generation, generations really, that grew up with him learned something important and it stuck with them. We're the ones who smile when we see enthusiasm, who know that there is so much more to life. We're the ones who get it.

John Peel, thank you.

This week I'm working in another warehouse. Warehouses always fascinate me. They're basically really big metal tents erected in car parks which lorries drive into. The lorries, which thunder past you when you're cycling to work, suddenly seem really small. In fact everything seems really small. It's really hard to conceive of anything else being in a warehouse other than forklifts, pallets, wire cages and other miscellaneous things to do with the distribution of goods. I often look at a room and think how I might live in it or turn it into some kind of studio or gallery or something but a warehouse is just on such a massive scale that anything normal, anything to do with living, just doesn't fit.

Anyway, again I'm doing a job which sits on the periphery of the consumer society. This time it's the arse end of catalogue shopping where the returns come in and are sorted before going back to wherever they come from. The lorry's that make the deliveries come in with bags full of stuff from three major catalogues (and their subcontracted clients). These nicely correspond to three social stratas of society. The first is pretty lower class and accounts for the minority of returns. The second is kinda lower-middle and has a fair number of returns. The third is of the classy middle class high street variety, the sort where if someone said "where did you get that shirt" you'd say "oh I got it from catalogue" with a slight sense of pride. These accounted for the vast majority. Either this third catalogue has a massive market share, and to be honest I don't know but I suspect it doesn't, or its customers are quite happy to abuse the returns policy and game the system to their own benefit.

So the poor abuse the benefits system, the rich abuse the tax system and the middle class abuse the retail system. All are as bad as each other but the middles do produce a lot of waste (plastic packaging, trucks on the road, my time).

I'd been put off paying for music from the iTunes Music Store and it's not because I'm a skanky music pirate or anything. Okay, I am a skanky music pirate who tends to only buy stuff he can't get for free, but that's not really an argument against paying for digital downloads. The problem I had was with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system, called FairPlay they load onto each track which essentially limits the number of computers the track can be played on and prevents it being converted into another format such as mp3. It's actually not as bad as some DRM systems but it's still more restrictive than buying an actual CD. In short, when you pay for music from iTunes you don't own it. You've licensed it to play only in iTunes on five different computers and, more critically in this day and age, only on the iPod. Should Apple go out of business and not be able to authorise any new computer you might buy, that music is then lost. If the tracks cost pennies then this wouldn't be a problem but they're charging about the same as HMV. So screw 'em.

(Sidenote - while checking up on what the iTunes DRM actually is I came across this gem: "Sharing is intended for personal use only.")

That said, I was pretty sure there was a way around this. You can burn a normal CD from your DRMed tracks and then rip it as unrestricted mp3s. All I needed was a reason to actually buy something from iTunes to check this out. Thankfully my good friends Dave and Anita sent me a £10 iTunes voucher for my birthday and eventually I found something I wanted. I signed up and downloaded the album, which was a painless and efficient process, and burned a normal CD, the sort that plays in most stereos, directly from the "Purchased Music" playlist the store created for me. This then appeared in the sidebar as a normal CD with all the track details intact. I imported it in mp3 format and sent a few tracks to Dave to see if he could play them. He could. The DRMed tracks were then moved off to a separate directory and my music collection remains DRM free. And the end result is I'm a lot more likely to buy stuff from iTunes now. All they need to do it add all those obscure and deleted albums I'm wanting and everyone will be happy, but that's another post for another time.

Extra time: about five minutes. Extra cost: a 30p CDR. And people actually bother to crack this?

GMail invites seem to have reached the tipping point in that everyone's offering them, or at least they've made it into my social circle at last. I have some. Let me know if you want in. I have had an idea (inspired by the conversation in this Slashdot post) of setting up a Gmail account, sending some mp3s to it, giving the login to selected friends and getting them to send mp3s to it as well. We can share music and comment on it (by replying to the emails with the mp3s attached) in total privacy with no legal implications. You may hear from me soon...

I'm again having a small case of writers block, the main issue being that I want to write about stuff in great detail but don't think I have the time to do so properly. Of course most of the things I want to write about probably only need a few paragraphs but my perception is that they need more and in the world of writer's block perception is everything. So to try and sort this out I'll just write the abstracts. I may well take these further one day:

LiveJournal wins: In which I, an avid non-user of LiveJournal, consider the options open to the modern blogger-to-be and come to the unlikely conclusion that LJ is the best of the bunch, which surprises me no end.

The end of temping?: In which I suggest the possibility that I may be about to stop working for the agency. I'm taking next week off and then staying at my mum's for a fortnight helping out with hallway redecoration. After than I'm seriously thinking about a retail Xmas in the book trade, if they'll take me. There are many reasons for this, the main one being I really really want to have an intelligent conversation with someone at work and I've found my social skill have become somewhat fucked over the last year. And the novelty wore off ages ago.

A visit to IKEA: in which I recount my adventures in bookcase buying at everyone's favourite household lifestyle warehouse with Sam's mum. Tales of mutual support and impulse-buying avoidance abound but the story is slightly ruined thanks to our good planning. Tuesday at 6pm is the best time to go as it's nice and empty. Instead I may recount the last time I went to IKEA on a bank holiday Monday.

Carnet De Voyage: In which I review Craig Thompson's new travel-comic which, while self-indulgent, over priced and utterly unsuitable for the general reader, I loved to pieces. Speculation follows about what this says about my tastes and whether such judgments about self-indulgence are valid criticism when joy is to gained by raw self-expression. Conclusion points people to his major work to date, Blankets, with a hearty recommendation despite Andy R's misgivings about its immaturity.

My failure in gardening: In which I recount my depression on discovering only one carrot came up and the slugs ate my courgettes. Resignation that I haven't got the interest or will to grow stuff and that I should just stick to killing things in the garden instead. Quite a short post this one.

The mystery of upload/download choking: In which I ask why, when I have 100kps capacity on my broadband connection, does the following happen: I'm uploading, via BitTorrent, at 20kps, the maximum permitted. While this is happening my downloads crawl at a pace that makes dial-up look fast, despite there being a good 80kps free. Restricting BitTorrent to a 5kps or so works but the question remains.

Alias and Angel: In which I admit to having watched all five seasons of Angel and the first two of Alias in the last couple of months. Witness my struggle as a ponder whether or not to talk about them on the blog in fear that I may turn into the kind of blogger I pity. What will the outcome be?

Flickr: In which I finally get off my arse and get a Flickr account, discover it's rather good actually and recommend it to you. I haven't actually done this yet so even the concept of this post is speculation, but I'm pretty sure this will be the result. Mention of how I was convinced that Flickr is a good idea based on discovering that Cal Henderson is on the team behind it as director of web development, explanation being that Cal was one of the prime movers in the early UK blogging scene coming up with aggregators, update lists and the like, and even was involved with B3ta at the beginning. I met him once and he seemed like a nice chap. Speculation about why this is important in deciding to go with a certain photo hosting service follows.

And that's just the posts I can remember wanting to write. Some of the above may be expanded upon in the future - feel free to vote for in the comments any that really intrigue you...

Overheard at work yesterday: "If things don't change they'll stay as they are", which made me smile. Reminded me of the Glenn Dakin (triffic cartoonist) saying "If you weren't here you were somewhere else."

Any other good ones in the comments please.

The proposal to tax people for not recycling enough comes at an interesting time for me as, for three weeks and for the first time in ages, I'm living on my own as an active consumer. Normally, with Sam here, we don't produce a lot of rubbish, usually filling maybe half a bin-liner a week depending on circumstances. Yes, we recycle paper glass and tins but the paper-box takes a good month to fill while the glass and tins only need to be taken to the tip every couple of months at least, and even then it hardly seems worth it. However, I was shocked to discover that in one week I personally produced enough rubbish to fill a carrier bag. I've been at home most of the time, eating normally and not making any special effort to economise (if anything I've been on a bit of a splurge since the rebate came through) and my refuse is minimal. And I'm not saying Sam produces a lot - she doesn't. It's just I produce fuck all.

Now, I have the advantage over most of the people complaining about this new "tax" in that I've actually work on refuse collection and seen how much waste most people from all social groups produce. Your upper-middles are the worst but they're all pretty bad. The council I was working for, Cherwell in Oxfordshire, had just implemented a new system where collections were fortnightly, one week paper, tins and plastic, the next everything else. Naturally some people were outraged as not only would they have to go through the terrible task of sorting their rubbish into two separate wheelie bins but if they didn't their everything-else bin would fill up too quickly. As it happened both bins filled up too quickly, both big enough that you can get inside and pounce out surprising your mates with a waterpistol. But I'm digressing.

My point, which I'm trying to make without sounding smug and probably failing, is that the tax should not be seen as being for people who don't recycle but as a tax on people who produce too much waste. Recycling still costs money and uses resources and one of the reasons it's not cost effective is that there's more stuff being recycled than the market can cope with. People should be encouraged to drastically cut back the amount of rubbish they produce and if a tax is the way to do it then fine.

Maybe I'm an extreme example in that through financial necessity I've trained myself not to buy stuff for the sake of it and have moved away (not completely) from pre-packaged food and maybe it's different when you're running a household with kids and little time, but if I can manage to produce a carrier bag in a week then it's possible for a house of four to manage on one or two bin-liners, isn't it? It can be done and amazingly you'll save money in doing it.

As for the fly-tipping problem, I don't have an answer to that other than most rubbish is collected from suburban areas where people don't fly-tip on the whole. Illegal dumping is something small businesses and the like do. If people find separating their rubbish too much hassle they're not likely to want to go to the trouble of sneaking out in the middle of the night with a carload of excess trash. Yes, there'll probably be an increase but the savings overall on processing less garbage should cover this (and make it more likely that I can get a job clearing fly-tips again, which was the best job I've ever had, ever.)