29 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Somewhere, in between the setting up of photostreams and random gibbering (and gibbing), I've been going for not enough long runs.
Those few I have made it to have been in frantic preparation for some 26-mile madness coming up at the end of November, and I'd be heartily grateful if you took both a moment and your parents' credit card to give some money to Medicins Sans Frontieres via this handy page I've set up in honour of my poor, poor knees.
All in a good cause, even if that cause is premature chronic lumbago.
PS Comments containing the word "Paula" will automatically be blocked by my spam filter.
28 October 2004.
Inspired by .
More Flickring, this time of the more conventional kind - a selection of photos I took the other week in Berlin (plus one I snapped here), with a set of pics shot at the architectural brainscrewer that is Jewish Museum by Libeskind. Plenty of info on the picture titled Map, if you click on it, plus more on the captions of the others.
In order not to confuse doorbell fans (which still continue apace), I've created a new stream under a different name here - I'll probably use this one for Barcelona photos etc as we go.
I'll also add it to my feedburner URL as soon as they implement feed splicing - which their excellent customer response service tells me will be soon(ish). Until then, it just has the doorbells and the blog, as before, for you RSS users over here.
27 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Jon laments the (hopefully temporary) disappearance of the complete stranger commenting on his blog, forgetting that Trackback might still work and allow complete strangers to comment via their own media. (Those without blogs not being complete, naturally.)
A good opportunity for you all to wade in is to join his post-Peel search for those elusive people in the public realm to whom you'd stand a pint - and who would be pleasurable company during it. This is not (necessarily) a space for heroes, merely those who fit his entirely reasonable four-point list:
"(a) a decent, essentially good person, (b) a person good to be around, (c) defiantly themselves and (d) in the public realm"
Public realm is entirely down to your own definition of course. Personally, I'd add Neil Gaiman, Brian Johnson RIP, Sir George Martin.
These are the kinds of people who would humour your questions but swiftly ask you about yourself in a way that you'd really feel that they meant it.
27 October 2004.
Inspired by .
There are far better quotes over here regarding the passing on of everyone's fantasy uncle, but there's one that even Popped Clogs' unusually sober tribute missed (second from bottom on this page):
John Peel: [In those days, as a young man] I just went at it [sex] like a bull at a gate. That's all I thought about. Getting my end away. Germaine Greer taught me a valuable lesson about that - and made me think about that aspect of it.
Joan Bakewell: What was the lesson?
John Peel: Well, I knew her as a friend. She was someone that I liked and admired. I found her most entertaining. And she decided to do, to me, and to other men, what men traditionally did to women, in that they would presume on their friendship and simply push it a step too far. I actually found myself saying that, actually, I like you too much, Germaine. I don't want to do this. And, really, she just made me, really. It was a very valuable lesson. I thought, yes, Oh shit, So that's what it's like.
Ah yes. So it is.
26 October 2004.
Inspired by .
The driest voice in radio and probably the nicest guy too. Champion of the small band and wrangler of Home Truths, John Peel is no more. A vital piece of teenage years - mine and about everyone aged 13-45's - has sadly passed on.
(I'd rather like to buy a copy of the soundtrack to his memorial service tho.)
26 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Things are, if you even thought it possible, getting tougher for Cubans with the announcement that US dollars are to be made illegal. Somewhat bizarrely, sterling, swiss francs and euros aren't. (For Cuba's reliance on the US dollar, see my article for the Big Issue earlier this year)
It strikes me that there's a few probable reasons why this is happening.
1) To make people actually want the convertible peso, which currently no-one does (they don't trust the government not to devalue it). This could in fact be so that the government can then devalue it.
2) To allow the money changers and banks to scam a better commission - currently the convertible peso is 1:1 with the dollar.
3) To piss off Cuban exiles.
4) Castro has significant shares in Thomas Cook bureaux de change.
I'm no economist (ok, I have an A-level, but I'm not sure I'm qualified to practice or preach), but points 1 - 3 seem about right.
25 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Charlie Brooker's column in The Guide last week seems to have got a lot of people in a froth - so much so that he's had to apologise.
What's slightly odd is that The Guardian has also removed the piece from its website.
The fuss is about his end line, a slight remix of something I saw in graffiti on the streets here last year (top left).
But, having printed the (unusually political and possibly libellous) piece, they've now expunged it from the online archives rather than just, say, adding the apology at the bottom of the piece. "Some readers were offended," they seem to be saying. "So just in case, we've taken it out."
Which, as a Guardian reader who wants to make up his own mind, offends me a bit, too.
(I got hold of it from elsewhere and can email it to anyone who missed it, if you ask nicely.)
24 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Forget your football and your World Series. The game of the moment, my friends, is Roller Hockey. It's everywhere here, though that may have something to do with the fact that Catalunya was allowed to participate as a separate entity in the World B championships (ie division two) in Macau - an event which they duly went on to win yesterday. "I reckon we might lose about five or six nil," said the England manager Carlos Amaral cheerfully beforehand, before proving himself entirely correct. (The England team, unlike the Catalans, are not well-funded professionals.)
It was significant that beloved Albion was the defeated party, as the UK's historical split from the sum to its parts in the sporting arena is a significant part of the local seperatist argument for splitting off from the whole. Only in sport, you understand. For now.
But England never plays against "Great Britain" - a match that Catalunya could face in the World A championships next year, if they're drawn against Spain. That is, if they're allowed to compete, for their existence as an international roller hockey team is only provisional, with industry body FIRS to give a final ruling in November.
Whether or not roller-hockey will join speed-skating, korfball and women's futsal (five-a-side indoor soccer - look it up) in allowing the region its representation, it seems we've not heard the last of the very lengthy Catalan anthem in weird minority sports. Which probably means that Grandstand will be featuring them very soon.
22 October 2004.
Inspired by .
"I vowed that if I ever had the opportunity to do something about it, I would."
Via Haddock, the kind of speech from Barbara Roche (Hornsey & Wood Green, Lab) that actually makes you think that politicians aren't so bad after all.
(Counterpoint)
22 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Those who know and love me will appreciate my feral howling at this week's best New Yorker cartoon.
19 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Online fame is a strange beast. I'm always surprised when it coincides with someone I know in the real world. Such as when the Bible of all things thoughtful and unusual Metafilter crops up with this post today about a quiet young fellah who comes into our small office sometimes to plug in his iBook.
He also designed the best looking of the very cool special edition trainers. Oh, and one time in the office he left behind this and this to decorate our walls, too. The map one is 2.30m x 1.80m, which covers an exceptionally ugly blocked doorway rather nicely.
19 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Technology: providing the cure for its own disease.
Meanwhile, the secret cult continues.
19 October 2004.
Inspired by .
This is not a huge surprise but is also a reminder: the internet archives everything, including frivolity. Others, be they employers, friends, family or law enforcers, will use this some day.
Which may not always be a good thing - my teenage years are in boxes in the attic for a reason. Thank goodness LiveJournal wasn't around then.
The result? Google ranking, like memory, is something over which we mere mortals have no control. And it could inadvertantly turn you into Dorian Grey in the minds of anyone looking for information on you in the future. You are what you're googled, and in the order it arrives.
Which means that chronolgy is no longer the ordering system for the people. It has been surpassed by "priority".
(not quite sure where this is all going, but in the spirit of the last post, I thought I'd jot it down)
19 October 2004.
Inspired by .
GraficEurope was quite something - and a big improvement on last year's event in BCN. (As Nick Richards has pointed out, I seem to be travelling so much that I now refer to cities only by their airport codes. I'll come to my thoughts on Berlin in a day or few.)
As the conference organiser herself pointed out in an excellent article last year in Eye magazine, "Many designers are brilliant communicators – when teaching or writing, pitching or designing. Only some are brilliant speakers." And so it inevitably was. It felt sometimes like a portfolio slideshow. Powerpoint, you've struck again, damn you.
However. Some speakers did truly engage the topic and make you think; for others, the brilliance of their previous work at least meant that we left the talk with something, even if it all could have been Googled. But who's to say that we would have done?
Here, styled a la Matt Jones, are some link-strewn notes I may find useful later.
More...
16 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Just because I'm over here (and it's flipping cold), that doesn't mean the doorbells haven't continued apace over here.
In case, you know, you'd been forgetting.
05 October 2004.
Inspired by .
Online news today.
Firstly, that the Magazine Design Weblog from Weblogs Inc seems to be raving about a very nice thing (if you haven't got your copy yet, you don't exist, blah blah)
Secondly, today is the launch of SpainMedia.com, a very shiny site containing the sardonic reports of those in a position to know what the big media in Spain keeps forgetting to mention, due to conflicts of interest, fear of lawyers, etc. Kind of like Indymedia without the dreads.
Anyway, observant readers will notice that, among the syndicated feeds on the side, sits this very blog. Further observation by those who hope that this will herald a new dawn for this blog, discussing more serious topics such as Spain, Spanish politics and Iberian critiques, will lead to them being severely disappointed.
04 October 2004.
Inspired by .
‘I'll see what an ordinary English girl, without credentials or money, can accomplish’
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography's Life of the Week is the bowel-loosening story of Dorothy Lawrence, the first woman to try and be a front-line journo - and the only woman to end up in the trenches of WW1.
Her story's here, along with more info and a photo of her in her female garb over here. I wish she had been allowed to report. Gender be damned - that girl had more cojones than me.
Next task: finding a copy of her book...