Kill Me Now, It's The Turner Prize Again

Check out the BBC website to see this year's Turner Prize Hopefuls.
I was also shortlisted in error, when I left a hoover, some pans and an old set of nested tables out in the front yard for the council to collect - and a fox shat on them.

And why is it that so many journos and commentators will still insist on saying things like "controversial works" when it's abundantly clear the words they're actually looking for are "a load of old toss".
I wanted to upload a picture to go with this post, but merely looking at the choices almost gave me a full-on bloody Anger-Stroke, so you can do without.

Thought For The Day

"Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis,
so long as they make the workers pay."

Lenin

As an aside to that - a long aside - one thing that I've noticed a fair amount of on newspaper and news websites is that whenever comments are posted by people (quite rightly) bemoaning the bailouts and get-out-of-jails being flung at the bastards that got us into this mess - which to the untrained eye seems little short of actually rewarding the fuckers - there are invariably a bunch of ripostes which essentially ask "Well what would you do?".
What kind of question is that?
The point that these utter 'tards clearly seem incapable of grasping is that those of us so violently offended by the bailouts know that we should not be in this position in the first place and should not have to take it upon ourselves to sort out what was such an inevitable shitstorm.

The ignorance and/or arrogance of these people is almost beyond belief...
Almost everyone I know has been living in a state of growing concern and outrage over recent years about unrealistic lending, irresposible lending and borrowing, and the utter unsustainability of it all.
How is this all somehow a mystery to the *experts* who got us into all this? (and their comment-board apologists?)

Rothko Now On At Tate Modern

The Tate Modern's Rothko Exhibition has opened; it's on till the beginning of February 2009.

Pavlov's Cat

Lifted shamelessly from Private Eye.

Reminds me, though...

For the full story on Pavlov's Cat, check out this gem from Eddie Izzard, below...

Apple Rewrites History (In A Good Way)

(*NERD ALERT :: RISK OF DROWSINESS)

I've always had a problem with the "History" in a web browser. Too linear, too uninformative - and too drawn out if you happen to visit a lot of websites (if you're as big a geek as I am...)
Thankfully Apple seem to have cottoned on to this if a report on the Apple Insider website is anything to go by.

They've decided that a far more visual diagram (possibly a tree diagram) against a timeline (see the outline proposition from the patent application above) would make a better model that every browser's current standard which is no more than an unstructured and unmanaged list in purely chronological.
It's a great idea and one that appears to be destined for implimentation in their Safari web browser (which is available for both Macs and PCs).
Given that the report is based on new patent filings (from January and April), you have to wonder how far off this may be.
But a big thumbs up from me... Great to see that the "Think Different" ethos is still alive and well in Cupertino.

"Urgent Secret Business Relationship"

Hilarious 'Nigerian Email Scam' spoof by poster Martin04 on the Guardian website.


Dear American:
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
Yours Faithfully
Minister of Treasury Paulson


A few more typos and a ludicrously unlikely Yahoo address and it could be the real McCoy...
Superb job. How many hours before Bush decides this is actually a pretty good idea...?

McFly: You've Got To 'Hand It' To Dougie

McFly...
Bless 'em...
They really should spend a bit more time on music and less on, er... ahem, "exercise"...
Find out how little Dougie risks some serious RSI and possible blindness with his 4-a-day habit.



Enjoy this interview, courtesy of Holy Moly

The News Quiz Is Back

Radio 4's excellent News Quiz returns after its summer break tomorrow night at 6.30
As well as listening live (or to the Saturday repeat) it's also available as a podcast from iTunes.

The Burning Question About The Android Market

A piece of brilliant smart-arseiness on the MacRumors forum, discussing Google's new "Android Market" (their version of the iPhone's App Store basically...) - Click on the image to get it full-size and readable. It's worth it.

The Wonderful Mark Steel

The ongoing shitstorm in 'The City' naturally provides the wonderful Mark Steel with plenty of ammo for a typically cynical, hilarious and impassioned column in today's Independent newspaper.
Includes stuff like this:

The total amount of city bonuses for the last year, it turns out, is £12.6bn. Which is more, apparently, than the nation's entire budget for transport...
Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI, said the bonuses are "a very effective way of motivating employees". In which case it's a good job the rest of the country's workforce manages to get motivated without a £12.6m bonus or hospitals would be full of frail old patients squealing: "Can you change my sheets dear, I've had an accident," and the nurse replying: "Four million quid or you can do them yourself."

Click here for the full article...

It's Officially Autumn

...And another piece of sort-of related news to tip you into some kind of seasonal-affected depression is that today - two weeks earlier than last year - the world (that's *us* basically) will have consumed all the natural resources the Earth will provide for this 12-month calendar year. We're building up "ecological debt" from there onwards.

Find out more here...

Cool iPhone App: Wine Pad

One of my current fave iPhone apps is Wine Pad, which is a nifty notebook for logging all kinds of details, notes and ratings for wines you're checking out.
Given that I've been checking out quite a few (largely Spanish reds) recently, I've got to know the app pretty well.
Whilst it lacks a nice global touch like a big fat searchable database of wines, or at least broad wine reference information, it certainly does what it say on the tin in terms of letting you note all kinds of details - colour, varietals, region, taste, price... loads of stuff - as well as give star ratings, so you can always refer to your notes wherever you are and have with you a list of wines you know you like.

Click here to go to Wine Pad on the App Store...

Hobbs End Is Only The Beginning...

The mention of Hobbs End tube station (from the film and TV serial "Quatermass and the Pit") in the article linked below about the London Underground roundel's 100th annivarsary art project sent me scurrying on a quick and ever-so-slightly-nerdy search for other fictional tube stations.
Wikipedia reveals the following...

▪ Bloomsbury – 1934 film Bulldog Jack.
▪ Camden Road – Appeared in the film The Gentle Gunman.
▪ Charnham – TV soap Family Affairs.
▪ Crouch End – 2004 film Shaun of the Dead (in a deleted scene included on the DVD).
▪ Duchess Street – featured in the 1932 Jack Hulbert film Love on Wheels.
▪ Hanover Street – 1979 film Hanover Street, starring Harrison Ford.
▪ Hickory Road tube station – in Hickory Dickory Dock, Agatha Christie novel.
▪ Hobbs End – 1957–58 BBC serial Quatermass and the Pit and the 1967 film version.
▪ Lewisham, Ladywell, Edge of the World and Catford – LWT comedy series End of Part One.
▪ Museum – 1972 film Death Line. (+ in PC games Broken Sword 2 & Beneath a Steel Sky)
▪ Park Street – 1948 film The Passionate Friends.
▪ Queen's Arcade – Doctor Who episode.
▪ Rumbaloo Line – Tube line in Joan Aiken's children's book, Arabel's Raven.
▪ Sun Hill – Long-running ITV police drama, The Bill.
▪ Vauxhall Cross – 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day.
▪ Walford East – BBC TV soap Eastenders.
▪ Wells Lane – BBC Spooks Series 5
▪ Winchester – The book Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs.
▪ World's End – BBC Doctor Who episode "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" (1964).


Also, there's a good page on LU tube stations (fictional and non fictional) in TV and film here...

100 Artists Celebrate 100 Years Of The Roundel

More info here...

Honestly...

The undisputed winner of “Ironist of the Week” - despite the fact the week started only hours ago - surely has to be Labour leadership pretender and pipsqueak in chief, David Milliband.
Over the weekend (in his marathon run of around a dozen meeting speeches at the party conference... nothing to do with ingratiating himself with lots of different groups in these feverish times for the party...) he has said that Labour needs to be honest - even about Iraq - and follows this up with the fabulous soundbite that “even though Saddam Hussien tried very hard to convince us he had weapons of mass destruction, it turns out he didn’t”.
As stabs at honesty go, that falls pretty far wide of the mark.
In the sense that it’s utterly dishonest.

As you are so clearly in need of a reminder Mr Milliband, Saddam actually did the complete opposite and tried very hard to convince you that he *did NOT* have such weapons; so did all the various independent international weapons inspection teams. It was you, your PM and other shitwits like you that chose to deliberately ignore all information and intelligence grounded in reality and make up your own to justify the occupation and plunder of Iraq.
Please look up the definition of ‘honesty’ before spouting crap like this.

Better still, just sod off.

Random Pic: Centrepoint

Just a pic taken yesterday beneath Centrepoint, next to Tottenham Court Road tube station, whilst waiting to meet up with composer Keith Johnson to discuss the brief for a website documenting a 'musician in residence' project he's working on at UCL.

Sunny :)

New Minichamps Magazine

As well as the usual advance listings, the Minichamps website currently has a really nice magazine for download, which includes and interesting article comapring an old model release (the McLaren MP4/12 - in both 1/18 scale and 1/43 scale - with the MP4/22.)

You can download it by clicking here...

Enjoy :)

Putting F1 Behind Me...

After the best part of a year-off from my F1 websites - kimistuff.com and antdavidson.com - I’ve finally reached the sad conclusion that it’s time to close them down.
I have tried to “come back” to F1 during this season, but really can’t bring myself to like it anymore. I used to love it; god knows I’ve watched it for years and years. But now I just hate the sight of it, and can’t ever imagine liking it again.
Bright side - seeing Kimi finally become World Champ as he so richly deserved, and also seeing Ant Davidson actually on the grid (though sadly in a back-of-the-grid team when he deserved much better).

Anyway, having discussed it with the other admins who’ve helped me run the sites over the years, I’ve finally made the decision to shut them down at the end of the season.
There’s plenty of downloads on them, so I’ve put up a note to all the forum members alerting them to this and giving them as much time as possible to take any downloads and other content they want.

Although it’s sad, they’ve been great places to be, and I’ve made some great friends on them - some of whom are now on Batifans.com for example and who I’ll continue to be friends with. I'll also continue to be happy for Kimi and Ant in whatever successes they may have, and will continue my interest in F1 diecasts (mainly historical).
And some of my writing on the subject - specifically from the weekly "Motormouth" column I used to write for Teletext - remains online and can be found here...
But for the sport itself, and for the sites I built to accompany my passion, it's over.
It’s been a great ride, but it’s finally reached the end.

Stealth Cat

Mac OSX 10.5.5? Meh...

Yesterday's OSX update from Apple was a bit of a non-event really; very much under the hood and invisible improvements and fixes.
And "improvements". Again very little to notice and too many references to "improved reliability"... so, er, bug fixes basically.

Not going to whine too much as any update tends to be a good thing all-in-all (s long as it doesn't break anything) but I just felt a bit *Meh* at not having any cool new features show up.
Probably says more about what a spoilt bunch of bastards some of us are ;)

"Rivercity" is now online

Photograph: © Matthew Sowerby

I’ve finally put RIVERCITY online.
It’s a dark novel - basically a smart read involving some grim murders, conspiracies, the supernatural, a bunch of history and philosophy and a film-noir styling.
I actually wrote it years ago - 1997 - which feels like another life now! But it’s had a number of drafts and I also reworked it into a film treatment.
Having said that I’ve not really done enough with it and it’s spent the last few years languishing on the Mac and remaining unread.
I figured that, in the absence of any deal for it, I might as well just put it out there in its entirety and for free.
If you want to go and read it then click here...

It’ll be interesting to see if revisiting it and tidying it up for putting online will re-ignite work on some other unfinished writing projects...

El Grumblio

Why do *ALL* of the Learn Spanish podcasts and audiobooks teach you how to order a bloody coffee with bloody milk, and why do *NONE* of them teach you how to have any kind of meaningful discussions about life or sport or something?
Why????


Oh - and it's Café con leche by the way...

iPhone Screengrab Trick

Having been used to doing "Shift Apple 3" for screengrabbing on my desktops and laptops for years and years and years, I was pleased (but a bit surprised in a way) to find out from Cult of Mac that Apple allow you to screengrab your iPhone too...
Dead easy of course.
All you do is hold in the "Home" button (that's the round one below the screen) and click once on the "Power" button that's on the top of the phone. Don't hold it down, just click it the once, and you'll hear the familiar camera shutter noise, and if you then go to the "Camera Roll" part of the camera where you store photos you've taken with your iPhone, you'll find the image there.
And then you just import it into iPhoto.

A Few Of My Friends

Why I Support Alvaro Bautista

As well as recently finding MotoGP to be, by and large, a lot more fun to watch than my ‘favourite’ sport - F1 (which has become an ever-more boring, redundant procession covered in the most inane and infantile fashion by TV and other media... phew, rant over...) - I also found that quite often 250cc and 125cc are more exciting than the top class.

Racing, overtaking, mixing it up - second after second, corner after corner - race in race out.
And when I saw how Alvaro Bautista rode 100%, totally committed, fearless, balls-out, and yet still with a degree of maturity that allows him to find limits and to cope with misery as well as victory, I knew I’d found somebody I really wanted to support.

I also reckoned that Alvaro - or ‘Bati’ to use his nickname - deserved better coverage in the English speaking world though... his official website was (and still is at the time of writing) entirely in Spanish, and nowhere was there a proper fan forum.

I got in touch with Tamara, who I’d come to know via a LiveJournal Bati group, and suggested we build a proper bunch of sites; full-on professional ones that would cover off all the basic information and download needs of fans and also a really cool forum. We now both run these as well as our own blogs in a network of connected sites that pull in many hundreds of thousands of visits each year and have a draw on fans in over 120 countries.

It’s been worth every single bit of effort - and there’s been an awful lot of effort, believe me - and if you fancy a quick sneaky peek at the sites, then here they are:

alvarobautista.co.uk
batifans.com
alvarobautistafanblog.com

Day To Remember

Had an angiogram at St Thomas' Hospital on the 5th.
Went well, but the wound is f*ing painful.
All the staff in every department that were involved were awesome - fantastically friendly, efficient and reassuring.
And Alan and Jane, bless 'em, came and picked me up to take me home.
An important day for me to remember really, and so the scribble on the 'hand plaster needle insert thingy' seemed an ideal subject for the camera :)

Say Hello To Denver

Our new black smoke tabby Maine Coon. Bless...

He's a bit bitey....