Film Is Fun

I've been editing camcorder footage of my band's ill-fated attempt to record music on a canal boat. I've discovered two things:

1. Making films is really fun.
2. No bugger is going to want to watch this one.

Well, I might watch it now and again, and the rest of the band will probably quite like it, but that really is it. Unless we ever get famous, in which case the fans will love it. I discovered the band Eels today. I mean, I knew they were good and that I'd probably like them if I ever sat down and listened to an album, but now (like, right now) I am sitting down and listening to an album and, whether it's truly great or not, it's certainly right up my street. Like Grandaddy - probably not great but just my thing. Nothing much else interesting to say. Can't usually type while I'm listening to music, especially on headphones, and tonight is no exception.

Things To Look Forward To

Soon it will be Monday. Oh well. To counteract my feeling of impending Mondanity (no, that's not a word, but I like the way that it sounds like 'mundanity', making it more appropriate than the more obvious yet still presumably non-existent word 'Mondayness'), I present myself with...my list of things to look forward to.

Thursday November 29th - Get paid
Monday December 3rd - Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' discbox arrives
Thursday December 6th - Meet up with band on canal boat
Tuesday December 25th - Christmas
Monday December 31st - New Year's Eve
Friday January 18th - Quit job
February the somethingth - Leave continent and don't return until bank account empty

Felt the beginnings of a long-term bad mood brewing today, so dug out my emergency copy of The Shawshank Redemption. I try not to over-use this particular video for fear of diminishing its uplifting effect on my mood, but was happy to find it worked well today. More immediate alternatives to Shawshank for producing the same effect are the YouTube clips of Man United winning the 1999 European Cup or David Beckham's free kick against Greece to send England through to the 2002 World Cup finals, both in injury time. A more drastically cheery film would be It's A Wonderful Life, but this actually tends to move me close to tears and luckily I haven't ever been forced to use it for mood-adjusting purposes - I think I'd have to be dumped by Scarlett Johansson via a text message in the aftermath of a World Cup final defeat by Germany, on penalties, possibly accompanied by my cat being run over, to warrant a cheering-up of that magnitude. Have you watched it? It really is that heart-warming.

Tonight I am listening to early Weezer and a variety of Leonard Cohen. It's been a while since I bothered to post anything other than text, hasn't it? Well, here is a photo of me sitting on my bed, watching The IT Crowd on DVD - evidence that I could do with a haircut.

A Thought

Wouldn't it be cool to watch a vending machine dispense snacks from every one of its little coiled dispensing things simultaneously and continuously until it was empty? We're so used to seeing these machines vend one item at a time that I think it would really blow one's mind.

Hung Up

I can't stop listening to Radiohead. It's a problem. In the same way that Christians might struggle to comprehend a world without a single all-knowing, all-powerful God, so I struggle to make sense of music if I can't define one band as near-perfect. I know that I shouldn't see different bands as better or worse than one another, only different, but I'd be lying if I said that is how I view music. It helps me if I can believe that somewhere between OK Computer and Kid A was a theoretical perfect album, and In Rainbows was a very good attempt at realising it. It annoys me when magazines or websites make lists of the best albums or bands of all time and don't put Radiohead at number one. And yes, this is a very silly way of approaching music, but I can't help it. It doesn't stop me listening to other music and loving it, but it makes me feel more comfortable to maintain that there is one best band and that it is Radiohead.
I like this idea because it means my band, who like to rip off Radiohead for whole sets at a time, are probably heading in the right direction, and also that if we keep getting better, one day we will supersede Radiohead as the world's greatest band. Einstein didn't pull his theories out of thin air (insert Brownian motion joke here?) - he based them on the ideas of people like Newton, who had been the Radiohead of the scientific community of the 18th century. Or 17th. Or something. I dropped history in Year 9.

Oh

That wasn't supposed to happen. I'm not sure I can bring myself to type about it, but I certainly can't think about anything else. England will not be playing at Euro 2008. But at least this means Scott Carson won't be playing at Euro 2008. Nor will Wayne Bridge. I can only speak in short sentences. I am exhausted.
The one ray of sunshine - Jose Mourinho, England manager? He's the bookies' favourite.

Views On The News

Today I shall be passing comment on the notable events of Tuesday the twentieth of November. Well, not all of them. Two of them. Firstly...

Someone has lost a CD with a bunch of people's bank details on.
(Yes, I should write headlines.)
If you couldn't be bothered to click on that link, let me fill you in: the personal details of 25 million people were put on a CD by HM Customs...and now no-one knows where this CD has gone. Or something like that. The point, or at least my point, is that everyone appears to be blaming the wrong people for this. So far, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems have both given the government something of a bollocking about this, not to mention the flood of hatred towards Labour from the direction of the BBC's 'Have Your Say' pages. Apparently the missing CD is further proof that this government is incompetent and not to be trusted. It has been described as 'the last straw'. It is, without question, yet another colossal example of Labour being rubbish.
Hang on...what? I'm pretty sure Customs wasn't an invention of Blair's or Brown's. I'm also pretty sure it isn't staffed exclusively by members of the Labour party. Ergo, I'm pretty sure it's illogical to blame even an admittedly huge screw-up by employees working 'at a junior level' on the government of the day, however much you dislike them, because I see no reason why this wouldn't have happened under the Tories, the Lib Dems or the Monster Raving Loonies. I'm sick of this attitude of everything bad being the government's fault. Firstly, it's annoying to me because I think this government has done a lot of good things (yes, many bad things too, but that's another story), and I don't like the assumption by negative eejits that they've been one big disaster. Secondly, there's the Homer Simpson effect. Remember when Homer blew up the church with a home-made rocket?
Marge: This is the worst thing you've ever done!
Homer: You say that so often it's lost all meaning.
Well in this metaphor, Homer is the government and Marge represents every silly little opportunist looking to have a moan. And just to be clear, the blowing up of the church represents a very bad deed which the government may yet commit which we will be incapable of adequately condemning because Joe Public has used up his whinge allowance. Now onto another, more important story.

England! Football! Wembley! Tomorrow!
Illogicality annoys me, as I think I demonstrated in the first half of this post. Why then, do I not care about the following? Because Russia lost to Israel, England aren't that crap after all. It doesn't bother me because I'm just too excited about England qualifying. Let me set you a scene - a tired young man sits in a deserted pub in Cornwall, watching Matt Le Tissier talk on Sky Sports News about an England match the young man has just missed because the pub doesn't have the right Sky TV package. The man is drenched in beer because he slumped tiredly onto the bar at the final whistle and knocked over his almost-full pint, rubbing salt into the wound of the 2-1 defeat by Russia that left England staring failure squarely in the face. Many weeks later and this same man, again lacking the requisite Sky channel, is in his bedroom listening with tense excitement to Radio Five, who are commentating on the closing seconds of Israel versus Russia. It's one all. We are deep in injury time. A draw will make England favourites for qualification, but a Russian victory will all but eliminate us from the competition and it's Russia who are attacking. Israel are dead on their feet, they have nothing left to give. The crowd noise reaches a crescendo as the commentator shrieks, on the verge of breaking every heart in England, but no! It's hit the post! And suddenly, Israel are on the break - no, surely not...YES! GOAL! ISRAEL HAVE WON! IT'S ALL OVER! Oh, the man was me, by the way, and I hope I have demonstrated the depth of emotion he has been subjected to during this qualification campaign. He deserves to see his team go through. You know, I've rather lost my thread. The point of this whole post was that I wanted to show the England team I would pick for the final game against Croatia tomorrow (well, today now, I've passed midnight whilst writing this). My team is:

Robinson

Richards Campbell Lescott A. Cole

Beckham Barry Gerrard J. Cole

Crouch Defoe

That is all.

Counting The Days

When I wake up, it will be Monday. I mean, it's Monday now but that doesn't affect the accuracy of my first sentence. The point is, it's the start of another week at work. I don't hate my job, but it's hard to get too excited about taking credit card payments all day (unless fraud is your bag), so I certainly look forward to mid-January when I'm planning on knocking my job on the head and doing something exciting until my stack of hard-earned money (that's quite a satisfying cliché when you're talking about yourself) dwindles to the price of a ticket home from whichever country I end up in.
So anyway, what I wanted to do with this post was to get a statistical breakdown of the time I have left until work is over. Let's say I finish work on Friday January 18th 2007 - this basically gives me two months of work from today, or to be more accurate, 61 days (I think). I reckon this works out as nine five-day weeks, so that's 45 days of work. Man, that sounds like a lot. That's 360 hours. Weirdly, that doesn't sound so bad. Plus knock off a couple of (paid?) days for Xmas and that's even better. Perhaps a couple of extra days of holiday wouldn't go amiss to sweeten the deal. Perhaps going to bed earlier than this on a work night would make me happier at work.
Gah.

A Rant About People Who Rant

Have you ever been on the 'Have Your Say' section of the BBC News Website? Try it - it will make you sad. It will make you sad because when you see the most popular comments, you will realise they are all written by arses, and if these arses are in any way representative of people as a whole, then people as a whole are an arse. Based on these forums (fora), I would suggest the collective noun for humans be officially changed to 'arse-whole'.
Admittedly, the reason I instinctively think these people are arses is because their views on the world differ from mine, but I have had many a pleasant and stimulating conversation with nice people whose views differ significantly from mine, so I tend to discount this instinct and look for other reasons why these people suck. A lot of the people who post comments are clearly not the sharpest tools in the box but, again, this is certainly no reason to call them an arse. However, I believe people should have some sense of the intellectual level on which they operate. I, for instance, know that I should not attempt to participate in discussions about advanced mathematical concepts such as tensors and string theory, because my degree taught me that I'm just not clever enough. Sad as it may be, I think a lot of people should take a similar line with climate change - they should realise that it's over their heads and not attempt to wade into the discussion, guns blazing, armed only with the knowledge that climate change is bad and they don't like it.
Take this example from today's discussion:

The "Greenhouse Effect" is still a theory, even after 40 years of publicity and research. Why is it still a theory and not a fact? Because scientists cannot predict weather more than ten days in advance let alone 100 years in advance.

What about the melting of the glaciers? They have been melting for the last 6,000 years.

What about the rising sea levels? Research shows that sea levels have risen only in mm.

The FACT is that global warming is part of a natural cycle of the Earth.

Atif Darr, Bristol

Right, let's go through this point by point and try to pin down exactly why Atif is an alabaster retard (Mighty Boosh reference there in case anyone missed it).

Question: Why is the Greenhouse Effect still a theory and not a fact?
Answer: Because that's how science works - as you put a theory through more and more rigorous tests, it becomes more and more likely to be true, but while you can disprove a theory, you can never prove it. The theory of relativity, for example, is not fact - it's a theory, hence the name.

Stupid statement: Scientists cannot predict weather more than ten days in advance let alone 100 years in advance.
Flaw: Well, no, they can't say for certain whether it will be showery with sunny intervals on a given Tuesday in the year 2107, but that's slightly irrelevant since the theory of Climate Change states that the climate will change because of human activity. I could have come up with the theory of Weather Change, a theory that states that in the future, the weather may be different from how it was today. Weather and climate are two subtly different things, Atif, and I suggest you learn what they are before attempting to form opinions about them.

Oh, and the thing that most pisses me off about Atif's comment - his capitalisation of the word FACT in his final sentence, in that 'aha, you see, I am right' kind of way. Except... he has used this capitalisation to emphasise a final sentence which no-one is denying. Yes, global warming is part of earth's natural cycle. Who said otherwise? The point is that we humans may well be accelerating the process. Oh, sorry, Atif did actually address this point by quoting an irrelevant statistic and using the infallible phrase 'research shows'.
I guess there are two things that really annoy me about Atif's post and the many, many, many others like it. Firstly, having spent four years of my life learning just how meticulous scientists are when it comes to even the tiniest field of research, and knowing how much work I had to put in to produce a final dissertation that wasn't even anywhere near the standard of work accepted by scientific journals, it feels like something of an insult when people like Atif treat science as this set of statistics that you can pick from to back up your point, like a GCSE English essay where you go through a book looking for quotes to support the title of your essay, which you came up with on a whim and can't be arsed to change now because it'll feel like a waste. Yes, you probably can quote a bunch of passages from Romeo and Juliet out of context and persuade a sympathetic teacher to give you a C minus for your coursework about how Romeo actually fancied Mercutio (which may well be the case, I didn't pay much attention at school), but that doesn't mean you can do it in the real world when you're talking about complex science. And yet you can, and people take you seriously, which brings me to me second and perhaps bigger annoyance - Atif's post was the most popular in the discussion. Of the five-hundred-and-seventy-six comments published so far, this blatantly flawed bollocks was the comment where most people thought 'yes, here is a man who knows what he's on about'. But he bloody doesn't! If we are the most advanced species on the planet and we're still stupid enough to hail Atif "Smeg-For-Brains" Darr as having written the best comment in a sample of over five hundred people, how come the other animals can even walk?

I'm not sure how coherent all that was, but I think the comment was enough on its own to demonstrate why I'm annoyed. Briefly, to put things in context, I have two main opinions on climate change:

1. As a bit of a socialist, I hate the fact that corporations will do nothing to prevent climate change, if it is happening, unless there's something in it for them, and I hate the fact that petty right-wing people paint the whole situation as a left-wing conspiracy - peer-reviewed science papers can't hide political agendas in falsified results because they'd get found out when someone tried to reproduce the results. It's not a bloody conspiracy so play fair and debate this properly you greedy capitalist arses.
   
2. As a scientist (well, a guy with a physics degree), while I'm not yet totally convinced of the scale and speed of climate change, the overwhelming consensus seems to be that we are causing something to happen and it's bad - if this is the case, why is no-one doing anything? What are we waiting for?

Yes, I know my science and politics got a bit muddled there but I think I explained my stance. Wow, this post is long and a bit serious for my liking. Better stop now.

Aftermath

It has now been a good couple of seasons (think it was April) since my band "released" its début album. While all student bands around us were playing gigs and gathering followers, we were stubbornly sitting in cramped bedrooms with crackly, broken jack leads and cheap Dutch lager, hunched over guitars and laptops and microphones, banging our heads against walls and our sticks against drums because we had a vision. We didn't want to leave university with just a memory that we had once been in some sort of a band - we wanted physical proof.
After many, many months of occasional effort, we did something that deep down I'm not sure we believed we would ever get round to doing, and finished the album. It was proper album length, with proper artwork and came in a proper jewel case. To the casual observer, it was a proper album. But. It was shit.
No-one could put their finger on exactly why it was shit, but it was. Was it the fact that we just looped recordings of our drummer playing a couple of bars for most of the tracks, making recording a lot easier but sucking the soul out of each song? Was it the flat, lifeless vocals? Was it the dodgy mixing? Was it the lack of any stylistic consistency? Was it the sheer over-indulgence of a band who were so fascinated by overdubbing that any melody was drowned out by a synth-rock mush? I think it's a safe bet to say it's some combination of these factors, possibly with a few more thrown in.
A couple of months ago, my uncle played me an album his band had recorded at college in the seventies. It was pretty well-recorded but the main thing I liked about it was that it sounded like a proper band who enjoyed playing together. My band's album sounds like we've recorded it one instrument at a time, which we did. The thing is, recording a bad first album is a great thing, because unless we're complete muppets, we're not going to make the same mistakes again, and considering how many mistakes we made on the first one, surely a lot of the second will be bang on. Of course, it's perfectly possible that we are muppets who will make exactly the same mistakes again, and there's also nothing to stop us making some brand new and exciting mistakes that we never even thought of. Perhaps you should wait for album three.
P.S. Sad but true fact - I'm such a pessimist with the band that I have an outline of a plan in my notebook for our eighth album, because I'm not sure we'll be very good until then. Half-decent ideas prompt me to pick up a guitar and force out a song, but high-concept genius ideas end up on the 'album eight' page of my notebook.
P.P.S. When I say notebook, I mean like an A4 pad with pages, not a laptop. Seeing as the laptop is basically the successor to the original notebook, I find the name 'notebook' a very silly choice. It's like calling people apes or calling a whiteboard a blackboard. Then again, there's a certain elegance to this system. I like the fact that there is one Dalai Lama, one Pope, one king/queen etcetera. Perhaps this should be extended so that, for instance, Ryan Giggs would be called George Best and Thom Yorke would be called John Lennon. I wonder who I would be? Presumably most people, me included, would just be named after some unremarkable dead guy who happened to have a similar personality. Perhaps there could be some sort of renaming ceremony at, like, twenty-five? You know, some age when you're old enough for your personality to be pretty much set. Then if the system got properly established, in a couple of hundred years time it would be a sign of rebellious artistic arrogance if you kept your birth name beyond the age of twenty-five because you felt you were no-one's successor but were somebody completely original. I, for one, think that if this system had become part of the culture, I would feel those who bucked it were prats, because no-one is unique. You know your mate who you think is one of a kind? He's not. You just haven't met enough people. Even by my standards this post has lost its way, or at least forged an interesting cross-country path through nettles and brambles and cow-shit. Really, I should end this here.

An A-to-Z of Things I Like

Ale
Beatles
Cats
Dumplings
Elegance
Football
Gravy
House
Internet
Jazz
Kayaking
Lego
Mountains
Newton
Oceans
Pangea
Quiet
Radiohead
Simplicity
Taoism
Ultraviolet
Vortices
Wales
Yes
Zen

Yes, X is missing, but I felt 'xylophone' was a cop-out.

Rip-Off

Touch wood, I've never been ripped off too badly. I can't think of a time when I've bought something, got it home, then realised I've been done. This is partly because I'm very tight and check everything on the internet to find the cheapest price, but that doesn't stop me from feeling sorry for customers (read 'victims') of Wants second hand shop in Exeter.
Since last year, I have been the proud owner of a second-hand guitar amp. It's loud and heavy and complicated and could be mistaken by the untrained eye for an expensive piece of equipment. It contains all sorts of digital cleverness and it's hard to find a part of the unit that isn't adorned by at least ten billion flashing red LEDs, making this amplifier the ultimate meat in a sandwich between a naiive, excitable, guitar-playing window-shopper and a devious, unprincipled second-hand electronics salesman. I'm glad to say the aforementioned customer was not me - by the time I went into Wants on the occasion in question, I had already bought this amp. I know this because I remember thinking ooh, that's my amp - I wonder how much they're selling it for?
My first fear, that I had been ripped off when I bought mine over eBay, was allayed immediately - I had paid a lot less than this, but surely this couldn't be right; they were selling this amp for £350! Oh, sorry, the exclamation mark doesn't mean anything to you yet because you don't know how much the amp is worth. Well, let me set the scene. The amp in the shop had two dials missing, which immediately triggered alarm bells because my one seemed pretty indestructible. Given the level of abuse the amp must have taken to lose two dials, you would certainly put the price for this one somewhere under the price of a brand new amp, but then you're not a devious, unprincipled second-hand electronics salesman, are you? If you are, I've heard there's a new fad called not being a dick - you should try it some time. Anyway, for your information, the price of my amp, brand new, would have been £190. The price of mine, a pristine, second-hand-but-never-gigged model, the only damage to which was the array of horrible nu-metal guitar tones with which the previous owner had dirtied the amp's memory bank, was...£110. So, just in case I haven't milked this enough, which I'm not sure I have, let's recap. A fundamentally identical amp to mine but in worse condition was on sale in Exeter for over three times what I paid for mine, and nearly double the price of a brand new one.
But this isn't the saddest part of the story. The saddest part of the story is that when I next went in the shop, the amp had gone. I'd love to believe that it was gone because Trading Standards had stopped by and taken the amp away, or that someone had walked into the shop one day and, having pointed out the obvious and honest mistake in pricing the amp, had bought it for the £90 it was worth. Thing is, I don't believe that. I think someone bought it for £350, and that makes me sad.
Actually, there are two even sadder aspects to the story. The first is that I didn't point out to the proprietor just what an arse he was being. The second is that, when I'm playing some mean blues with a creamy distortion and a touch of delay through my twin 50W speakers, I feel a bit smug.

Tea Gone Cold

Just found a cup of tea I'd forgotten about from forty minutes ago. It was half full, which is annoying, because that's quite a lot of tea. See, it's not always the optimist who claims a glass (or mug) is half full - I could have reasoned that at least the cold mug of tea was already half empty, so it wasn't such a waste. I like the fact that I like tea. Like my passion for (or, more accurately, tolerance of) folk music, it makes me feel like I belong in this country, like I have an identity. Real ale, that's another thing. And queuing, I'm great at queuing.

Travels: The Planning Begins

Until tonight, I was apprehensive about the almost-imminent fun half of my gap year because my plans were aimless in the extreme. Now, however, I'm still mildly apprehensive but also quite excited. After a conversation with a friend in a similar but less advanced state of disorganisation, we have decided to team up and have picked a start destination of....New Zealand. After that it's anyone's guess, but it's good to have a starting point. Yes, I'm aware that this information is not interesting to anyone except myself but this is not one of those posts that you can read and will thereafter be enlightened in the ways of life - this is a post for me. It helps me to write stuff down (or, you know, type it), so that's what I'm doing.
So, THE TRIP so far (very, very roughly):

• New Zealand
  
• Australia
  
• Canada
• USA
• Iceland

You may look at this list, as I have, and think that it appears to be a list of English-speaking countries with a weird one tacked on the end for the sake of diversity. I was trying hard not to notice this, but now that I've mentioned it it seems too late not to analyse these odd choices. Basically, I struggle to see how I could visit the first four of these countries without having a good time. The fifth one is on there because whenever I see Iceland on TV, it looks desolately beautiful, as if it were the image in God's imagination when he made North Wales, but couldn't quite do it justice. That sounds like a dig at North Wales, but it's not. I love North Wales. I digress. Yes, I have picked four English-speaking countries and if these five countries represented my whole trip, people would probably say 'um.......that wasn't very adventurous, was it?', and I would look all hurt. But....perhaps instead of breaking it into five like that, I should break it into four like this:

• Australasia
• North America
• Iceland
• Some other place TBC

That list's only half English-speaking (providing I don't pick South Africa or Eire or somewhere for my last one) although admittedly, if I do it in that order, the people I encounter won't stop speaking English until I've gone most of the way round the world and am not far off the coast of Scotland. The truth is, although it appears to be the law for gap-year students to visit Thailand or India or South America, I'm not really sure I want to - I think it's that simple. I like to know vaguely what I'm going to be doing when I get somewhere, and in the places on My List, I do know. I realise that seasoned travellers are probably shouting at the screen because I've missed the point of travelling, but I am not a seasoned traveller - I'm a shy bloke who wants some guaranteed fun. I'm sure I'll still have lots of adventures, and remember, the list isn't final...

Things To Do In Birmingham - Part 1

Welcome to my new occasional series: Things To Do In Birmingham. So far, I can heartily recommend The Yardbird jazz club. I know that people who watch live music a lot say that it's the only way to watch music, but usually they're wrong, what with albums being great as well. Except for jazz. There's nothing really wrong with recorded jazz, but the experience is enhanced so much when you see it live that I'm either going to stop listening to jazz on my hi-fi or I'm going to start going to more jazz gigs.
Right, typing that paragraph has brought something to my attention. Regular readers may recall that recently I was moaning about my fingers going all soft and me not being able to play guitar as much as I'd like. Well, after an enjoyable jam with my cousin on electric guitar today, I have just found a blister on my right index finger. What has happened to me?!
Damn, this isn't an interesting post.

Comparison

I'm feeling nostalgic and a little bit sad, yet also strangely hopeful. Before I started writing this blog, I had another one, bits of which I've been reading tonight. It differed from this one in many ways: this one has capital letters, this one makes an occasional effort to be mature, this one holds back on the swearing, this one doesn't need to be kept secret...and yet this one doesn't chronicle a fun life. It doesn't record the thoughts of a naiive amateur rockstar student who throws caution to the wind - it records the thoughts of a whining arse of a Master's graduate who is living at home. Gigs and after-parties have been replaced by folk clubs and tea. Reckless nights out have been replaced by driving to the pub for a coke. Mornings have stopped being a theoretical concept, while females have become one.
But this is good.
I already knew I was miserable, but now I have a focus for my travels. I remember the feeling I want to recreate, and if I can't figure out how to be reckless and young with a passport and five grand then I should probably send back my degree with a note explaining my dumbitude. Yeah, that's right, I made up a word. That's the sort of thing a crazy 21-year-old would do. He wouldn't give it a second thought, he'd just do it and then look at you with a rock 'n' roll expression, as if to say "Yeah? What are you going to do about it, Mr. Dictionary?". Oh, I forgot, I'm not there yet - still in boring mode and have work tomorrow. but sod it i'm going to rebel and not put any cApItAL LetTeRS @ ALL in this sENTence. And yet I did anyway! What?

Fate?

God doesn't want me to play guitar. That is all I can surmise from the fact that my renewed interest in furthering my skills on said instrument has coincided with what medical professionals probably don't call 'bathfinger', but I do. My fingertips have started going all soft and flaky, to the point where I had to use a couple of plasters to play acoustic at an open mic set the other day. Normally I'd just shrug and pick up my Telecaster or sit down at the keyboard instead, but Jools Holland chose this week to introduce me to Kaki King, a wonderful guitarist whose technique requires vigorous use of every finger and thumb on seemingly every part of the guitar. Below is a video of her being far too good for her own....good.



I'm all about showing off on the guitar after a couple of pints and something like this would be a nice addition to the standard beer-bottle-slide routine.

London Buses

I'm writing this post, in the same way as many of the others, mainly for myself. I'm trying to think of careers that I might like, and I'm brainstorming criteria for such careers. In no particular order:

• No shirt and tie. I value scruffiness - even my current job, which allows me to wear Vans and a hoody, feels a bit stuffy to me because of the no-jeans rule.
• Not having to talk to the public. I've tried changing, but I think I'll have to live with the fact that I'm shy and don't like people until I know them. Ideally, my upcoming travels abroad will transform me into a bubbly, outgoing person, but probably safest to assume not.
  
• Not working for the man. I'm not necessarily looking to save third-world babies from melting ice-caps or anything, but if I could avoid the more obviously evil corporations it would be nice.
• Time off. Stating the obvious, perhaps, but holidays are nice.
• Involving music in some way? OK, this feels like the extra search term you put into eBay that you know is going to wipe out any chance of a result, but sod it, I can hope.

I'm sure there was more, but I'm tired. I didn't go to bed after the lost post. That was silly. Work tomorrow innit. Before I wrote this list, 'teacher' was top of a very short shortlist. It has now cemented (or perhaps pritt-sticked) its place there, possibly because I subconsciously let that particular career guide the above bullet points (apart from number one - I don't think teachers can be too scruffy, but it's a different ethos so I'll except it). Still very, very open to ideas though.

Formats

In the future, I think you'll be able to identify the era in which you grew up (or "the era up in which you grew"?) by how you like your data. Me, I'm a cassette and video man. A few years later and I might have formed a bond with CD and DVD for albums and films respectively. I hope, though, that this isn't the case and that I am not just blindly drawn to nostalgia, because I believe I have a good reason for my choices:
Tapes and videos may not have had the best quality in the world, but the quality was good enough. Even now, when I watch a video, I don't think "thank God for DVD, this quality is awful". No, in fact, I don't think about the medium at all, which is a good thing. I hit 'play', fast-forward through the logos and things, and then forget about the fact that what I'm watching is now considered obsolete technology. When I watch a DVD, on the other hand, I get myself all riled up. For starters, I can't skip the crap at the start - technology means "the man" can force me to sit through a variety of copyright messages that I make a special effort not to give him the satisfaction of reading, followed by a logically flawed short film about downloading in which I'm asked: "You wouldn't steal a car, would you? So why would you steal a movie?". "Well", I reply to no-one in particular, "I might download a movie because, unlike a tangible, physical object such as a car, a movie is simply information that can be copied without erasing the original". Yes, it's still illegal because I'm getting something for free, and it's probably not morally wonderful, but the comparison with car theft just doesn't work. Damn, I've gone all tangential - back to the problems with the actual DVD.
Once I've finished fannying about with unskippable pre-movie rubbish (I include over-elaborate menu screens in this), I start watching the actual movie. For a while, I'm impressed by its visual sharpness compared to my preferred format, but soon the rented (ie. scratched) DVD begins to skip and I stop caring about how clear everything is because however clear it is, it's still bloody unwatchable and I don't remember this being a problem with videos. The worst case was a recent film in which the plot built steadily to a presumably beautiful, emotional climax that lasted about two minutes - the two minutes that were rendered unwatchable by a scratch. Of course, once we hit the scratch, the player got very confused and stubbornly refused to rewind and have another go. Cue the off-and-on-again treatment for the wretched machine, followed by a navigation of the movie via the menu's 'scene selection' utility - a utility which helpfully gave away the ending with pretty preview pictures of each scene, including the one after the one in question. If you had mentioned the beautiful sharpness of the image to me at this point, I would have shown you the beautiful sharpness of a kitchen knife to the belly.
Perhaps I'm taking something of a subjective view of this, but to me a video is centred around providing you with the film - the thing you wanted to watch when you bought or rented it. You hit play, you watch the film, the film ends, and however much you bash the video about in between, the same thing will happen next time.
Of course, the format is actually perfect. Why sell films on chunky, reliable, expensive-to-produce videotapes that will last forever when you can knock out lightweight plastic discs for next to nothing, wait ten years until a slightly higher resolution format appears and everyone's original copy is scratched to buggery, add some pointless gimmicks like commentary or a making-of film, call it a 'box set' and sell them the same bloody thing again? Genius.
However, just imagine for a minute that we lived in a perfect world, a world in which stuff was good. Imagine a slim plastic square, roughly the dimensions of a CD box. A protective flap guards a digital connector. You insert the plastic square into the player. When the flap is lifted inside the player, the player can connect to what is inside the plastic square, which is....technology. It doesn't matter what. Some kind of memory. The point is, this plastic square format can keep getting better - you just brief the engineers to fit as much memory as possible into the box. So far, two problems solved: no need to change your player every time the film studios decide you need more pixels and no easy way of damaging the data. Next, instead of putting unskippable crap at the start of the movie (and this is the really clever part, so pay attention), you.....don't. You just don't. Radical, I know, but perhaps in ten years when blue-ray and HD-DVD are declared obsolete, the powers that be will realise that my idea is what everyone really wants. But it's not about what we want, is it?

Epilogue: Crikey, that was quite a long one. I was going to have an early night but the anger just flowed. An issue that didn't seem to fit into the rant was that I hate the way we're being brainwashed into paying for music downloads that are nowhere near CD quality. Music should be uncompressed and the internet just isn't fast enough for that yet - hold your horses, download industry. Oh yeah, sorry for my bad use of single and double quote marks - I'm pedantic as hell about some areas of English, but for some reason I've never understood quote (or quotation?) marks, and I felt like I used them a lot in this entry. If someone could explain, I'd be most grateful. Finally, it's late so I haven't read through what I've written. I bet it makes no sense. On a personal note, my life is very boring right now, which is why I'm reduced to talking about data formats. As soon as something interesting happens, I'll let you know, unless lots of interesting things happen, in which case I'll be far too busy doing interesting things to sit on the internet alone, typing things for strangers to not read. BED.

Best Of

This blog isn't very exciting, visually. I'm happy enough with the colour scheme but I could do with a few more photos and videos. Ooh, I just thought of a fun thing to do: since my taste in music seems to have changed a lot over the years, why don't I make a list of what I think was probably my favourite band in each year of my life? I see no argument against this. Motion carried...

This list is chronologically vague but also at least vaguely representative of my taste. Also, check out my video-embedding skillz!

1984 (birth) to 1989: Only dimly aware of music
1990: Michael Jackson
1991: The Simpsons (no, really, they were good - check out the video below)

1992: Bryan Adams
1993: John Denver
1994: Simon and Garfunkel
1995: Babylon Zoo
1996: Dodgy
1997: Oasis
1998: Talvin Singh
1999: Moby
2000: Show of Hands (prefer other songs but couldn't find a decent video)

2001: The Beatles
2002: Simon and Garfunkel
From this point on, I had a student loan and a fast internet connection, so I have allowed myself two bands per year to represent the increased amount of music I was experiencing.
2003: King Tubby / Taj Mahal
2004: Pink Floyd / Yes
2005: Grandaddy / Bright Eyes
2006: Radiohead / Leonard Cohen
2007: Bob Dylan / Guillemots


If I was the sort of person who ever put any effort into anything, I'd make a compilation CD with all these bands on. But I'm not. The interesting thing about this list is firstly that it very closely follows the style of songs I've been writing over the past few years, and also that it shows an alarming lack of interest in anything beyond rock and acoustic music. I sense 2008 will be a jazz and classical year.