No More Page 3 and the Tabloid Monstering of Lucy Meadows

Oh, I used to have a passion for blogging. I used to churn out writings all hours of the day on all topics that bubbled up, from the state of my jobbies, to the vagaries of the UK jobs market. I used to think it all meant something, that it was gently prodding my readers and society in some positive direction.

But as I've grown older, and faced the trauma of unemployment and just plain getting on with life, its all faded away. I no longer have the passion to write.

Other people do.

I still read blogs, I still click on links on twitter, but its all like a sheet of tracing paper has been placed over it all, its all opaque. Its less meaningful. Its just plain wrong.

Moments ago the member of parliament for West Bromwich East, Tom Watson re-tweeted a link to the No More Page 3 campaign's blog.

At this point I should point out that I don't buy The Sun newspaper, and when it is the only newspaper lying around in the canteen at work, I skip past page 3. Although, I fully appreciate that it is the most popular newspaper in the UK and that it arguably represents a centrist political viewpoint.

Anyhoo, the thrust of the No More Page 3 campaign blogpost seems to be that if only The Sun newspaper stopped publishing photos of topless women on page three then 13 to 16 year old girls wouldn't have their skirts lifted by teenage boys in the queue at the school canteen.

I think this is foolish. There's plenty of nudity and objectifying women in every other newspaper and magazine. The are plenty of websites that offer nudity for free.

Stopping page three will do nothing to stop teenage boys lifting girl's skirts.

Why are schools tolerating sexual abuse in their canteens? Why aren't teachers and headmasters disciplining teenage boys and educating them in the acceptable ways to behave in polite society.

What makes a 16 year old girl think that banning a page in a newspaper will change the behaviour of teenage boys? Its just so tenuous that it astounds me.

Does the member of parliament for West Bromwich East actually agree and believe that if The Sun newspaper stopped printing titties in their newspaper then it would affect the behaviour of teenage boys? Does he actually think this?
Does he really think that cause and effect work like this?
Is this really the sort of belief that the residents of West Bromwich East want in their representative in parliament?

I spent most of this morning investigating the tabloid monstering of Lucy Meadows. There's a variety of petitions out at the moment lobbying for the Daily Mail to sack their columnist Richard LittleJohn.

At this point I should point out that I don't buy the Daily Mail newspaper, and on the rare occasions where I have the opportunity and inclination to read it, I usually skip past the columnist pages. Although I do appreciate that its the second most popular newspaper in the UK.

I'm still unclear as to what degree Richard Littlejohn monstered Lucy Meadows. He wrote a column about her, but the press intrusion that she complained about wasn't about opinion pieces, it was closer to home. She wrote a series of emails to a friend as follows (source):

I was lucky to have a supportive head, but I think I’d have done it here regardless as I couldn’t put it off any longer and I have family and financial commitments as well. The guidance I’ve had from the trans community has been generally sound and very much appreciated, and I’d like to be able to say I’ve given something back. I suppose the best way for me to do this would be to educate the people around me and children at school – I am a teacher after all!
[...]
I know the press offered parents money if they could get a picture of me.
[...]
I became pretty good at avoiding the press before Christmas. I live about a three-minute walk from school so they were parked outside my house as well as school. I’m just glad they didn’t realise I also have a back door. I was usually in school before the press arrived and stayed until late so I could avoid them going home.
[...]
[M]any parents have been quite annoyed with the press, too, especially those that were trying to give positive comments but were turned away.

Richard Littlejohn isn't a reporter, the sort of intrusion that Lucy was talking about seems to be the work of people like:-

• Lisa Woodhouse from The Lancashire Telegraph
• Stuart Pike of the Accrington Observer / Manchester Evening News
• James Tozer and Nazia Parveen the Daily Mail's northwest correspondants.

I see no petitions calling for these people to be sacked.

Even if Littlejohn's career did meet an untimely demise, then Lisa Woodhouse, Stuart Pike, James Tozer and Nazia Parveen would still camp on people's doorsteps, and wait outside their places of work, and hassle parents for photos and juicy details. At no point in their line of work would they think, "I better not do this, remember what happened to Littlejohn". That isn't going to cross their mind, ever.

Here's a picture of Stuart Pike, and presumably his wife Alia Pike, that I grabbed from his Facebook page. How much guilt does his feel for the death of Lucy Meadows? Is he wondering if he'd done something different, Lucy would still be alive, the pupils of St Mary Magdalen's School in Accrington wouldn't be mourning the loss of a popular teacher.

This is Lisa Woodhouse from the Lancashire Telegraph, I ripped her photo from her twitter account, although for a journalist, she doesn't tweet much. I can't find her on Facebook, so I'm guessing she's got something to hide.

This is 30 year old Nazia Parveen from The Daily Mail, I ripped her photo from twitter. She was named Young Journalist of the year in 2011, when she worked at the Lancashire Telegraph. Her prize for being a young journalist was £500 and a week's work experience at The Daily Mail, presumably they liked her work.

Anyhoo, my point is, that rather than tenuously going for trophy heads on spikes to change behaviour and society, people should be going for the people who commit the offences.

If 16 year old boys are abusing 16 year old girls, then discipline the specific 16 year old boys rather than signing a petition about a page in a newspaper.

If tabloid reporters are hassling someone to the point of suicide, then have a go at the tabloid reporters who are doing the hassling, rather than signing a petition about a page in a newspaper.

*** UPDATE1 *** 24/03/2013 13:44
Just to be sure, I used twitter:-

Eagerly awaiting a response.

*** UPDATE2 *** 24/03/2013 15:17
Looking through other tabloids for reporters who may have monstered Lucy Meadows, I find that in The Mirror, reporter Steve White reports Lucy Meadows's death with the headline "Nathan Upton: Sex-change teacher found dead at 32".

Its a little unclear why Steve White is referring to Lucy as Nathan, when the main thrust of the story, of both the sex change and the suicide, is that Lucy wished to be referred to as Lucy, not Nathan.

The Lovely Eggs - The Lexington 04-Feb-2011

Its 3am Sunday morning, I had a big mug of coffee before I went to bed and I can't sleep, so I'm going to rant and rave and review a gig I was at on Friday night.

There's a dark shadow over east London, and its up to me to bring light to the area, its my job, I am the light bringer, the illuminator, I illuminate, I am the illuminatus.

Earlier on Friday I was at work, at my desk, and I snapped, the bureaucracy was getting too much, too frustrating, ticking boxes and filling in forms and deadlines, instead of making London's street's safer, saving lives. Some woman is going to be waiting for her husband to come come, waiting and waiting and he's not going to make it, casserole dish clatters to floor when the voice on the phone tells her what happened. Some bloke waiting outside a cinema for his date, who's he's fancied from the other side of the office for weeks, to arrive, dreaming of that first kiss, he's going to be waiting in vain. Some old duffer heading home after a week's hard labour at the works, never reaching his destination. All because I'm doing sodding paperwork for paperwork's sake.

Christ, I have a degree in manufacturing, speak half a dozen languages, can run 25K in one go, play guitar and have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Manchester, Glasgow and London indiescenes 1995 to 2011, and I'm stuff doing sodding paperwork.

I've lost something.

I always felt awkward at gigs, lonely, on my own, but this is different. Well, its the same as the last couple of gigs. I've lost something.

Looking back at my writings and verbage over the past 17 years, I used to churn it out. God, the shite I was writing, I had a passion, its was complete nonsense, but I had a passion, there was fire. Not any more. If it was turgid before, its worse now.

Despite feeling lonely at gigs, there were people with me. In Manchester Nosni, Zee, Roz, all the people at Flyer shows, Jim Bean, Timbo, Sap. Then in Glasgow, the first time round with Rab, Nick, Faye and Cleggy and the early Bowlie kids. The in round two, Alan, Adam, Martin, the whole Note and Sleazys scene.

But now, in London, I've lost something. Am I just old? I'm missing something, its gone.

Sure, I see Bob UnderExposed, nodding recognition, and I stand two and a half metres away from Nik from Moustache of Insanity, but its not the same. I'm in a room full of strangers.

Sure, I'm seeing bands that I've seen half a dozen times before in countless guises. The first time I saw The Lovely Eggs was on the train to my first Indietracks, they were playing to about three of us in a carriage. I didn't quite know what to make of them, but they were full of love. And there was history too.

Cos Holly was in Angelica, way back in the day, who did "Teenage Girl Crush" and "Why did you let my kitten die?", god knows if I saw them in the Manchester days, but I definitely saw them in Glasgow, I reckon twice, maybe three times. Flatmate Faye reckoned she knew them from school in Lancaster. I remember seeing them play the Art School, somewhere I still have photies, then one time I saw them at Ladyfest at the old 13th Note on Clyde Street. I was stood at the bar, next to Manda Rin from Bis and Faye's brother was up visiting too. I think I even did my old 'Wonderwall' shout. I remember these things clearly, I still had a soul in them days.

Its a White Light club night at The Lexington, probably related to the old White Heat club night at Madame Jojos in Soho, Matty with a moustache is the DJ type person. I definitely still had whatever I've lost back when I went to Madame Jojos. Dananananaykroyd were playing, I saw big Duncan and Wee Susan from Glasgow, and it was okay.

About an hour before I had my rant at work, I was ploughing through paperwork, frustrating building up inside, head in my hands and a colleague from across the room started at me with what's wrong, a guy your age shouldn't have his head in his hands on a Friday afternoon, you should be living it up, the weekend's about to start, etc.

I've lived it up, I was there then. Look, here's my achievement badge, 584 gigs, 32 years of age, from The Boardwalk, to The Admiral to The Lexington.

And I'm stood two and a half metres from Nik from Moustache of Insanity, wondering where Andrew Bulhak is. Also wondering whether I should have brought along my missus or a friend who doesn't like gigs. That's it.

I'm reading John Robb's The North Will Rise Again, about the Manchester music scene 1976 to 1995, and I'm looking at the scene before me through polarised 3D specs. Is there a scene amongst the crowd at The Lexington? Are The Lovely Eggs here as part of that, hallowed guests from on high? High priestess Amelia Fletcher ministering the flock?

Am I here at all?

Is this just telephoned in from my flat, I'm hiding under the bed, scared to come out, exhausted after trying too hard? or not hard enough. Where are people I know and talk to?

Why aren't they here wearing whatever twenty-first century faces they have?

There's this timeless scene in my head, a paradigm, NPL in Glasgow, its dark outside, yellow streetlights, people from bands and other gigs walking the same way. When I get inside, there's a seat the first table, Jef and Gill are there, Adam's on the dancefloor, Andy Diamond too, other friends off of the internet in the near corner, friends I'm scared of talking to on the other side of the dance floor, Alan will be along later. Lots of drinks, plans and schemes, foolish ideas followed through and then a drunken stagger home.

But its not like that here. Occasionally there are echos and shadows and smokey reflections, like Hawthorns in Bolton in 1997, but its not like that here.

I drink three bottles of Tiger, enjoy Tender Trap and The Lovely Eggs songs, try to shrug off moldering resentment of something I can't quite put my finger on and head back to Walthamstow.

Money lost in the BP disaster

I caught the arse end of a tweet this morning, and having not done a ranty blogpost in a while I think it lit my fuse.

From: @mrrichclark
Sent: 29 Jul 2010 08:09

RT @BrandRepublic What could the money lost in the BP disaster buy? http://ht.ly/2i4Ff #oilspill #bp <--- A whole country, wildlife haven

sent via web
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/mrrichclark/status/19809766881

I love stats and figures and graphs and stuff, but this brings the taste of ash to my my mouth.

Oil is great, its what makes the modern world go round. You can either have lots of men working in the fields growing crops to feed their families, or just one man driving a tractor running on fossil fuels, whilst the other men design HTC Desire touchscreen smartphones.

I see disasters like the Gulf Oil spill and the Exxon Valdez as part of the package, part of the risk and consequences we accept if we want ubiquitous touchscreen smartphone.

If you want to do away with oil, then chuck away your phone and get back to the fields, and if your crops die, you starve.

Sure, its not a black and white thing, you can tighten up legislation to reduce the risk of such disasters, but that like squeezing jelly. It'll put up the price of oil just a little, so that other sources of oil become more cost effective, such as biofuels and tar sands, but with them comes a whole raft of different problems, like pollution and energy efficiencies. These in turn you can tweak with legislation, which in turn puts up the price.

If the government tightens up controls too much, the oil companies will just break the law, or drill for oil elsewhere with less restrictive controls, or employ less scrupulous subcontracts. As long as we want our ubiquitous touchscreen smartphones oil companies will find a way, its completely unavoidable.

If you accept the package, you accept the inevitability of disasters, the best you can hope for is a decent regime that clears up the mess, an insurance fund if you will, that whenever a disaster occurs, can suck up the oil, hose down the seagulls and get those affected back to business as usual as soon as possible.

Such an insurance fund would need to be huge and inevitably funded by the oil companies. But the get their money from selling oil to us the punters who want smartphones rather than working in the fields.

But here in the UK, about 70% of the cost of fuel at the pumps goes to the government, not the oil companies. The government that legislates to control the risk and is ultimately responsible for clearing up the mess.

Which bring me back to that tweet, and the phrase "money lost in the BP disaster". Whatever money is "lost" to BP, it originally came from the consumer, and on the way the government took more than double that. If the disaster cost BP $30billion, the government has taken $60billion.

If there is to be an insurance fund, don't we already pay for it? Sure, it would be nice if there was a specific pot of gold set aside, but that's just office admin.

When the government started bailing out banks the other year, I saw a similar infographic and possibly a blogpost from Tim Worstall going through what that many billion would buy. Things like the International Space Station or writing off the debts of third world countries, and so forth.

But no, the guvmint chose to bail out banks with money that didn't actually exist. The UK government essentially took out loans to be paid back "in the future" to not pay for third world debt or cool stuff like space travel, but banks.

The government have got far more of our money than BP, we handed it over in good faith for them to spend wisely on making the world a better place.

The money BP get as a cut is exactly the value of the oil to them, otherwise they'd sell us something else. In the UK in return for £1 we get about 30p's worth of oil and 70p's worth of the government making the world a better place.

That's the package, 30p of ubiquitous touchscreen smartphone and avoiding work in the fields and 70p worth of government spending.

Having finally clicked on the tweet's link to Brand Republic I see they're using the loss in value of BP due to the oil spill, which amounts to $100billion, and lists items such as the following:-

• A new home to replace all 275,000 homes lost in hurricane Katrina
• An iPad for all US college students
• 10 years clean water for each of the 884,000 people without access to it

Anyhoo, its all pish. At any point the UK or US government could, at the drop of a hat, take out a loan to buy any of these things, to make the world that much of a better place.<

But they don't, cos they know as well you do, that such gestures would lead to riots, fighting in the streets, buildings on fire, crops left unharvested, starvation and death.

**UPDATE**
I can't let it lie, every time I click post and walk away some more rantin' goes through my head.

How about this? Instead of paying £1 for petrol and getting 30p of oil and 70p of government spending, you could pay 30p for the same amount of petrol and keep the other 70p in your pocket and then spend that 70p making the world a better place by your own design. Rather than relying on the government deciding who is worthy of their largess, you can choose for yourself whether to give the money to charity, to buy clean water in far off lands, propping up dictatorial regimes, or hosing down seabirds or giving iPads to US college students and making Apple exactly the same amount richer.

I mean really, this lost BP money couldn't have been spent on anything else, there was never any plan to do things on that marvelous shopping list, no plans that have now had to be cancelled due to the oil spill.

Back home, I have these huge credit card debts racked up from a period of unemployment, and I really want an Xbox 360 Elite, my debts equal the cost of fifty Xbox 360 Elite, that's the scale of my disaster. So I can't afford an Xbox 360 Elite. If I somehow came across the money to buy one Xbox 360 Elite, I wouldn't buy one, I'd pay off a fiftieth of my debts.

If I came across enough money to buy forty Xbox 360 Elites, I still wouldn't buy one cos I still have more debt than money to buy an Xbox 360 Elite.

Strangely, even before I'd racked up the credit card debt I didn't have enough money to afford an Xbox 360 Elite. There were other more pressing things to spend the money on, like getting my car serviced, rent, food, flowers for my attractive young ladyfriend, and propping up a small fraction of London and Glasgow's indie music scenes.

Actually, I could, at any point just get an Xbox 360 Elite with my said credit card, whether I have the money or not. The fact there is a huge oil spill or outstanding debts has little bearing on whether I get it or not.

Sleepless and frustrated

I was up late last night, and then had a restless and fitful night. I had a piece I needed to finish writing, precious little time during the day when it wouldn't come. Doubt and uncertainty with the finished article.

Always doubt and uncertainty with finished articles. I'm tearfully grateful when certainty arrives.

Someone finally read my film treatment the other day, it was such a relief when they confirmed my doubts and uncertainties, I was grinning for hours.

Its just the awkward fraction of the autistic spectrum I inhabit. I could have just not bothered writing anything, written it off as another thing I'd planned to do, but didn't. It sure would have saved time and effort and made the world a nicer place.

But my head doesn't work that way, when there is an intention or a plan to do something right away then I feel the need to do it. That's normal right? Or no? The willingness to sacrifice the plan, that frustrates me.

Something that still plays on my mind even after many years was when I was helping a friend move from Glasgow to London. We'd hired a van and I figured if we drove at x miles an how, we'd get to London in daylight, and it would be easy to unload and have the job finished. The trip would use this much petrol, and cost this much money. But now I think should we have stopped more on the way, for lunch at a Little Chef, dinner at Watford Gap and who cares if we arrived at 2am and put off unloading til the next day? The journey would have been more pleasant, more relaxed.

Maybe we'd still be friends today, if we'd stopped at the Little Chef, abandoned the plan and loosened my embrace of the plan.

Anyhoo, about the frustration. I'd read a stack of blogposts, all during the week. Freakishly fast sprinter Usain Bolt can't run in the UK for tax reasons, under the UK government's tax regime, he'd be paying more in tax than he'd earn. Its a familiar story for the super-successful. I remember read that for years the Rolling Stones couldn't play in the UK because the tax and the costs would be more than they could make from the concert, regardless of how much they charged for tickets, the costs and tax would mean they'd make a loss. Government policy dictates the Rolling Stones tour schedule.

Elsewhere in the blogs was coverage of Vince Cable and the LibDems proposals for a graduate tax. I might have misread, and right now on a train, hammering this out on my blackberry, graduates would pay an extra 9% tax on their income, to pay for the ever increasing cost of further education.

Firstly, I'm sceptical of why the costs of further education keep increasing, what are they doing differently? Are the universities incapable of keeping costs down? Why does is cost proportionately more to educate a student now than it did ten years ago. Sure there are more computers, but entry level computing costs the same now as it did even twenty years ago, £300 for an Amstrad CPC, £300 for a crap desktop PC, £300 for ahalf decent netbook/laptop.

I'm not expert, but is it cos there are more university students now. That was some damn fool idea to get 50% of folk through university. Society doesn't need that many graduates, the population isn't smart enough for that many graduates. Everyone with an IQ of 101?

Or is it that further education costs more cos primary, and secondary education isn't educating enough, so now universities are have to teach people how to read and write, do addition and subtraction, derivatives and integration before they can start the meaty stuff of rocket science, particle science, manufacturing engineering and media studies?

I digress. Some spectacularly successful people didn't go to university and some did. Alan Sugar didn't. Anyhoo, at the top of the pay scale, high earners are going to be paying their 50% income tax, plus another few % for national insurance, say 10%, I dunno. But then some of them are going to be forking out 9% on top of that. Paying almost 70% in tax if you pay by the rules and neither avoid or evade tax. Its hardly an incentive to work at all.

Lower down the pay scale, a university degree is less of a benefit. You'll have half the people in the office are university graduates and half got where they are today by the hard slog of working on the shop floor, streets typing pool and getting promoted. These folk are all going to be doing exactly the same job, the same amount of effort day to day. Yet under a graduate tax system, half of them will be taking home less money for their labours.

The Daily Mash had it right with "the harder you work, the more you're taxed".

Some newspaper story earlier in the week about a Somalian family with seven kids who've been put into a huge £1,200,000 house in Kensington. Jesus Christ could they not have been deported to Hull and gotten a bigger place at the fraction of the cost to the taxpayer.

Mark Wadsworth can wade through the arguments for and against social housing and how in this case its just transferring money from the hardworking employed through government and a brief stop in the bank accounts of the residents and then into the pockets of the rich private landlord. Redistributing wealth upwards.

I was thinking, shit if I hadn't worked so hard in school and university and a succession of office jobs, I could be unemployed with seven kids in a huge expensive house.

Not only that but I often hear of families, living in accommodation paid for by various benefits who manage to run up arrears by not even paying the rent to the landlords, instead the money is spent on other things, fags, phones, plasma TVs and holidays abroad. I choke on my cappuccino til it comes out of my nose.

As an aside, during writing this I have now arrived at my destination, a pleasant bar in Camden. Last time I was here it was called the Oh Bar, now its called the Blues Bar. The barstaff, whilst friendly and helpful, don't remind me as much of the barstaff at the 13th Note in Glasgow like they did in the Oh Bar. There was one who looked like a b-movie Cameron Diaz, she is absent now.

Every blogger's favourite former ambassador was writing about slavery the other day, how folk work hard and forced by threat of violence to pay taxes to subsidise those who don't work. Those who chose not to work. The employed are the slaves now.

It was weeks ago that I came upon the realisation that I'm slaving away for forty hours a week to pay people who are getting more for free in benefits that I earn in a five years or something. It just seems a bit unfair.

Why more laws? Why more taxes?

That Somalian family in Kensington were offered other, cheaper places but turned them down. They didn't like the cheaper places.

Its a familiar story. This sense of entitlement from those who reside on benefits, that they are somehow entitled to free housing of their chosing.

Not me. I left home at eighteen to go to university hundreds of miles away, staying in halls of residences and flatshares with friends. The flatsharing continued after graduation. And as my friends peeled away for marriage and job elsewhere, I too left. I arrived in London with nowhere to stay, an afternoon on gumtree.com checking out different places within my price range soon found me a complete shithole of a flatshare which I tolerated for a few months until I found friends with a more pleasant flatshare.

Whilst I've always wanted a place of my own, with a garden and woodchip wallpaper that I put up and painted myself and walls lined with shelves, I know I can't afford it and so that's going to have to wait.

Not so for the unemployable who live on benefits, they expect the provision of their own houses, they demand it. Stamping their feet, and threatening to spawn. No thought of paying for it themselves or building their own route to the house of their dreams.

Its a minor bugbear of mine, the 'waiting lists' for social housing. Anyone can get on the waiting list, it would be really nice to get a nice house for free. When Camden New Journal says there's a waiting list of 18,000 people, I think is that all, there's only that many people who'd like a nice house for free?

So my solution to the ills of the nation is an income tax threshold of whatever the living wage should be, and then 40% tax, scrapping VAT and national insurance.

Or even just scrap National Insurance and make it so everyone has to get their own private medical and employment insurance scheme. Like you have for car insurance, the government doesn't run that, so why should they for health and employment. The voluntary charity sector can fill the gap for people who didn't insure themselves. Somewhere there will be a charity that judges even the worse case of self-neglect as worthy.

Its all bullshit this. Like Behind Blue Eyes, I look back at the city on fire and acknowledge my proxies. I'm not a high earner, nowhere near 50% tax, judging by my pay packet I earn so little I pay 17%. And my univeristy costs were paid off a long time ago. I escaped the benefits trap months ago, other than jealousy these issuesdon't concern me.

What frustrates me in reality is the huge credit card debts I ran up in my last tranch of unemployment. That's my own fault, I should have moved out of the expensive flatshare and found a cheaper shithole one instead of claiming Housing Benefit. I should have gone straight to Office Angels instead of the Job Centre Plus.

That's all in the past, now I just need to pay off my credit card. At the current rate I should be debt free by 2016. Sooner if I stop spending money on other things.

It not the folk who live on benefits or the government's tax regime, its just me spending, its entirely within my control. I can whine for days but its all bullshit.

Yesterday I bought a load of presents and for myself a new pair of shoes. Its debateable whether I need new shoes or not, where to draw the line, can I afford it or not, are the old ones a detriment to my employability and social or not.

No point even debating it. On Friday night I could have stayed in and not spent but instead I went out for a meal and then pints and pints, costing about the same as the shoes.

Even today, right now as I sup my second cappucino in the Blues Bar, ist cost me about the same. Could have stayed in my flat and not spent anything.

Sitting here in Camden cost me £3.20 for the train to Euston, £3.20 for the train to Camden, £5 for a couple of coffees and then maybe £3.20 for the train back home , that's 0.14% of my credit card debt.

More than getting over my creditcard debt, I really want an Xbox 360 Elite. Not some shitty red ring of death Xbox 360 Arcade, but a decent Elite with 120gb hard disc, that will play both new games and second hand original Xbox games like Warriors and Project Gotham Racing 2 where you can drive round cities like Edinburgh, Stockholm and Moscow. This Xbox 360 Elite will cost me around £150.

New shoes = Friday night out = 1/6 of a Xbox 360 Elite

My credit card debts = fifty Xbox 360 Elites

I'm a smart cookie. Sometime ago the computer I had that ran Quicken Accounts died a death, but recently on my wee netbook I wrote me some home finance personal household accounts software in Perl. I rule. It does neat graphs showing income and expenditure. How much and what proportions I spend on rent, my car, going out and pointless shit. I can easily see what spending needs to be reined in. And how to rein it in is all under my control, any reason not to is bullshit. I can reduce travel costs by moving closer to where I work, I can lower my communications costs by getting rid of this phone. I could live off rice and baked beans to cut down on food, or just sleep in my car to reduce my rent.

But I don't, for I am that Somalian family, stamping my foot, demanding this lifestyle and turning down the cheaper options.
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

The impending doom of 6Music

When I first heard about the impending closure of 6 Music I was somewhat saddened, they're one of the few stations to play tracks from my beloved Plimptons, and half the indiepop band whom I religiously follow. But on the other hand I rarely listen to 6 Music.

After reading reactions and comment online I realised that I was part of the music industry, I only wanted to keep 6 Music as a means to promote my own interests, rather than cos I liked listening to it. I was The Man, the enemy, in the wrong.

So today I read on Sharpey's Opinion piece

that the station itself is not as important as the content it carries – if Radios 1 and 2 were more like 6Music, we wouldn’t actually need 6Music any more.

And aye, that resonates, I only used to listen to Radio 1 for John Peel, Radcliffe and Riley, DJ's who are long gone from Radio 1 in it's pursuit of the younger listener who I imagine enjoy being shouted at.

Whenever I listen to the radio these day's its in my car, and its Radio 4, everything else sounds like just indeterminate noise.

This youthiness of Radio 1 isn't the state of British culture right now, its just the whims of the Director General, it could go any way if he wanted it to.

Faulty CaterCheck 3 Thermometers

I did resolve as a New Years Resolution to "crush my enemies mercilessly", and now at last I have found an enemy, namely the CaterCheck 3 thermometer from Comark.

I feel a little bad writing this blog post, the designers and engineers don't deserve this. Maybe they work incredibly hard for very little pay, designing the waterproof enclosure, the circuitboard, the display layout, spending weeks testing it, before a manufacturer elsewhere assembles hundreds, or thousands on a production line, minimum wage or lower workers spenind days hunched over their workstations, soldering and screwing them together. Or maybe its all automated, barely improved since version 2, the designers and engineer's role having evolved into the innate Dilbert-like cubicle existance, surfing the internet aimlessly for hours avoiding the being caught by the boss's, collecting their adequate paycheck every month, not quite appreciating how lucky they are.

I'm going to assume that this blog entry is going to figure quite highly in the google results when you try searching for "CaterCheck 3" and although I'm procrastinating, this is about how failure-prone they are. If it makes you feel any better, this blogpost may also serve as a googlewhack tripwire, someone in the management chain here, investigating faulty units will find my blog, read my previous moany blog entries and after very little investigation and ruminating, I get dismissed from my job.

These thermometer probes are used in the catering and food production industry, at my factory we have a dozen or so of them, they're probably very popular. And they knacker.

We start off with loads of them, working fine and a few weeks later only two work properly and those are the one's I use every day.

The screen is blank, it doesn't switch on. Or the display fills with characters then goes blank once more.

On closer inspection, there's condensation on the inside of the screen. Blotting the battery compartment shows that its moist in there too.T

Maybe my colleagues have been misusing them. Dropping them in waterbaths, or leaving them on radiators. It is quite a moist and humid environment in here, its kind of understandable.

But very frustrating.

Drying out the stack of faulty CaterCheck 3 units doesn't work. Opening up the battery compartment and using blotting paper then replacing the batteries, that doesn't work either.

I've tried unscrewing all the screws I can find but that doesn't open up the casing, so there's no drying out of the moisture in there.

The one month failure rate here is about 80% and sure there's probably warrantees and a service plan that gets them fixed, but its still incredibly frustrating.

That feeling of helplessness, that these thermometers, so vital for our paperwork and statutary obligations, that they fail so quickly and are impossible to fix with a screwdriver and absorbant tissue.

Maybe there's a better model that is more resiliant? I dunno, its not my call to spec out and order these things. I just have to use them. I just have to wade through and ever-growing pile of faulty units to find the one that works, to do my job.

Almost getting a job

Hmph, on reflection that blogpost a few hours ago about not being to get a job wasn't quite an accurate reflection of reality. I did get an interview and half a day's trial work quite early on in my unemployment, but I walked out of it.

It was for a face-to face marketing company, the folk who go door to door getting people to sign up direct debits to charities, the Red Cross and Oxfam and so on.

After spending four hours ringing doorbells, my mentor chap managed to sign up one person, an old lady who gave up £5 a month out of her pension. Her memory wasn't so good so we had to rifle through her kitchen try to to find her bank details and something with her postcard on. It was however remarkably easy to get her to sign off the disclaimer that we'd explained everything clearly.

I felt sick to my stomach and couldn't face having a job like that.

Admittedly the whole face-to-face charity direct debit thing did sit comfortably in my mind. The charities get better return on investment for their marketing activities. They get three times as much money donated from face-to-face marketing than from TV advertising and collection tin rattling. So they waste less money on marketing and have more to spend on their charitable activities.

But that was months ago, and its not so clear no more.

See the government seems to think that its goal is to extract as much money as possible from the people of the UK. They seek to take ever more of our money. How the government spends it is unclear, somewhere in Whitehall there is a furnace which all our taxes get chucked into.

Not all of the money gets incinerated in the furnaces of Whitehall, some of it is redistributed to charities, or fakecharities as some would have it.

Don't get me wrong, I honestly believe that the government do need to redistribute some money to charities. Prostate cancer charities get far less money than breast cancer chairties, despite equal numbers of deaths, tits have better PR, government needs to be blind to this.

But maybe too much money is being taken out of the control of the people who earn it, they have no choice how its spent. The government chose or the charities chose.

Spending money is a really cool thing. Its a concrete transaction. When you spend ten pounds you're getting something in return that's worth exactly ten pounds. You might just be buying a whole load of marketing bumf and a really cheap artefact, but its still spending, and its your choice.

But when you give money to charity or to the government, its not spending. You don't explicitly get anything back. Maybe a warm fuzzy feeling inside, and a bit of security, and the knowledge that somewhere at the other end of the charity 'good' is happening.

But then when you read stories about the RSPCA sending staff on loads of junkets, or the BBC's excessive staffing of Glastonbury, or this business with infertility therapy, I'm thinking, perhaps too much money is being handed over.

Too much money is extracted from people who earn it, and then used for 'excessive' purposes. This isn't quite what we had in mind when we handed the money over.

But in a lot of cases, we have no choice, they money gets handed over. Taxes, licence fee, and bullying old ladies into signing up to direct debits.

Its not quite that the money is being wasted, or the idea of furnaces in Whitehall burning it all, but just that the earners aren't quite getting what they thought they were for all the money handed over.

Anyhoo, me I pay no income tax right now. What I mostly pay is VAT and petrol duty. My credit card company takes a big chunk of money from me every month in interest, which is fair enough, I am in debt to them.

Have I even made a point here?

Taxes should be cut, charitable spending should be cut, the BBC should be downsized, the retirment age raised to seventy-nine years and eight months, and building planning permission rules slashed.

Houses cost about £60,000 to build, maybe £100,000 for a nice one, anything you pay more than that is marketing or supply and demand problems. Costs purely in bureaucracy and admin.

And finally... a Wii

I fucking hate Wii's.

I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt, but after a weekend of playing on one, I fucking hate them so much.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

So a year ago, I had this spectacularly successful porn blog, 'Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes', and I had a job which gave a regular source of income and the old Bowlie chatroom was still in operation in the evening. When I asked around about what games console I should spend my earnings on, I was urged to purchase a Wii.

Whole-heartedly urged, by Rosie Rabbit in Bowlie, and the great mob of voters in a poll on the Naked Chicks site, they all urged me to get a Wii over a PS3 or XBox 360.

And no after a weekend playing Rayman Raving Rabbids and Sonic/Mario Olympics on my own, I have to say, loudly and with certainly, I fucking hate the Nintendo Wii.

Its the most frustrating and tedious games console I've ever played in my entire gaming career, it is not fun.

All who recommend such things to me, don't know me at all, or have very poor judgement and depth of perception.

From this moment on, I shall never play a Wii of my own volition.

Sure if I find myself in a room with people playing on a Wii, and having fun, and one turns to me and asks if I fancy a go, I shall shrug and say "m'okay", but other than in circumstances of that ilk, I shall refrain.

And if anyone ever asks my opinion of Wii's I shall start swearing.

Fucking hate GAME shops so much it hurts

How can I express my anger and frustration with GAME in a constructive manner? They're a bunch of shitting cock nipples, the lot of them, and I strongly feel they ought to go out of business as soon as possible.

In bullet-pointed form here are my main issues

• No cheap X-Box360's in stock despite boxes on shelves
• Tried to sell us one that was £60 more expensive
• Sold us a Wii with party games and only one controller

We are people of limited funds, so price is an incredibly important issue when it comes to purchase decisions, so the cheapest XBox360 was £119.99 compared to £149.99 for the cheapest Wii.

Also the XBox games were better, they had Beautiful Katamari, and Portal and Project Gotham Racing all going cheap. Extra controllers were only £8. It too ages but eventually we decided on our purchases and approached the pay counter.

The woman scanned barcodes and scurried off to an unseen storeroom and we waited. About ten minutes later the other sales chap took a phonecall from to back and told us that they didn't have any cheap preowned XBox 360s left in stock, but they could sell us one of the more expensive ones.

Sixty quid more expensive. 50% more than the one we'd chosen.

At this point I started seeing red and in my imaginary dreamworld went batshit crazy and razed the entire shop to the ground.

On a similar note, elsewhere on the internet we find out that the newly elected mayor of Doncaster will be unable to cut funding for the town's Gay Pride parade and unable to axe the council propaganda rag, and unable to cut translation services. The chap may be a fuckwit, but he did win the election the constituents presumable chose him because they agree with his manifesto. The electorate looked at the very specific items on his manifesto and the vague platitudes on his rivals and decided that he was the candidate for him. Regardless of the inner workings of the council and the services currenly offered, the people spoke, and they chose him. But alas, their vote is in vain.

So instead we emerged from the GAME shop twenty minutes later, having been sold a cheap Wii.

They'd sold us the basic package, which was another mistake on their part becuase there's only one controller, only one person playing at a time. Which might be okay for some games, and some games consoles, but for the Wii, with Rayman Raving Rabbids and Sonic/Mario Olympics, its a fucking disaster.

They're party games, specifically designed to be played with your friends, with more than one person playing at a time. Games which you are racing and competing against the other players. Except if there's no one else playing because you've only been sold one controller, you find yourself stood in the middle of the room on your own, trying to get the character on screen to win a sack-race on his own, throwing your arms in the air trying to get the character to jump at the right time.

Those fucking cunts at GAME must have been laughing their asses off when we left. Those absolute bastards. Vermin of the video game selling community. If there was some kind of fascist organisation dedicated to exterminating people who work in video game shops who sell shit games and console bundles to the unsuspecting public, I would wear the uniform and jackboots and join that organsation and vote for them in the European Election.

Our Health and Safety shame

Via Samizdata, from The Times

A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them. The woman screamed: “Please save my kids” from a bedroom window and neighbours tried to help but were beaten back by flames and were told by police not to attempt a rescue.
...
“There were lads with aluminium ladders who wanted to get to them but the police were shouting, ‘Stay away, get out of the yard.’ They were saying, ‘You have got to wait until the fire brigade gets here.’ Michelle was standing at the window banging on it – we all saw it – and shouting to save her kids but the police were just below her pushing us out and telling everybody to stay away.”
...
A South Yorkshire Police spokeswoman said: “The senior officer in charge is confident we handled this incident as professionally as possible. In a situation like that you could end up with more deceased bodies than you had in the first place.”

The behaviour of the police kind of reminded me of what happened at the 2002 Mecca Girl's School fire in Saudi Arabia where the polis prevented rescuers from entering the build for fear of coming into contact with women

It has been claimed that Members of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), also known as Mutaween, would not allow the girls to escape or to be saved because they were 'not properly covered', and the mutaween did not want physical contact to take place between the girls and the civil defense forces for fear of sexual enticement, and variously that the girls were locked in by the police, or forced back into the building.

Back in the UK The Samizdata piece goes on to cover the Watts Memorial / Postman's Park:-

The memorial was set up by a Victorian artist, George Frederick Watts, to commemorate those who died saving others. It consists of hand made plaques each bearing the name of a person who sacrificed his or her life and a brief citation. Very quaint they are, with their crowded lettering with the extra-large initial capitals and little swirly plant motifs and curlicues in the corners. Even the names are quaint, laboriously given in full. Police Constables Percy Edwin Cook, Edward George Brown Greenoff, Harold Frank Ricketts and George Stephen Funnell are among them. I wonder what PC Percy Edwin Cook, for instance, who perished when he "Voluntarily descended high tension chamber at Kensington to rescue two workmen overcome by poisonous gas" would have made of his successors in the South Yorkshire force.

Co-incidentally I was reading about Postman's Park earlier today on Caroline's Miscellany. Those who died saving lives are remembered more than a century later.

George Funnell, a 33-year-old ex-soldier turned police constable, was on his beat in Hackney when he noticed a fire in the Elephant and Castle pub on Wick Road. After raising the alarm, he rushed into the burning building: the landlady and two barmaids were still inside. First he brought out the landlady, then one of the barmaids. Now burnt himself, he nonetheless went back in for the third woman.

PC Funnell reached the woman, and directed her to a back door. However, he himself was overcome by the heat and smoke. The woman escaped into the street, but by the time rescuers reached Funnell he was unconscious and burned on the face, neck and arms. Eleven days later, on 2 January 1900, he died of his injuries.

The inquest jury commended Funnell and his colleagues for gallant behaviour. The Society for the Protection of Life from Fire gave awards to those colleagues; during the ceremony, Mr G B Fordham commented that "he died the death of a thoroughly brave and sincere man" giving his life for three women who were strangers to him. Funnell's funeral was attended by several hundred police officers and firemen, as well as local people. A memorial committee was set up to support his wife and two children. His memorial plaque reads:

GEORGE STEPHEN FUNNELL - POLICE CONSTABLE - DEC 22 1899 - IN A FIRE AT THE ELEPHANT & CASTLE, WICK ROAD, HACKNEY WICK, AFTER RESCUING TWO LIVES, WENT BACK INTO THE FLAMES, SAVING A BARMAID AT THE RISK OF HIS OWN LIFE.

Beware the snivelling creatures that Health & Safety has turned us into.

Disc

At the Blondon Loggers meetup last night there were a couple of speakers talking about how to encourage comments and search engine optimisation, interesting stuff. I've had a mixed experience of blogging myself and I ought to scrawl something about it here.

I've had several blogs in the past few years, I can vaguely remember drinking in the Crnrvn in Glasgow and Idles explaining this blogging thing. I'll try to list the blogs in chronological order...

• manc_ill_kid
• Glasgow Indie Eyespy
• Glasgow Indie Eyespy blog
• Hot chicks from obscure indie bands
• National Novel Writing Day
• Last Night From Glasgow
• Ivan Lendil Music
• Last Night From Glasgow Indie Eyespy
• In Lieu of Bowlie
• Naked Chicks on Post-it Notes
• Ill Theatre
• Londonly
• Naked Pigeons on Post-it Notes

Its a a small minded bag of titles using a combination of noun, adjective, location, that's my signature.

Of all of those blogs, the naked chicks site is the most popular, well, I mean it gets the most hits, as opposed to people saying, hey that's really nice, in which case Last Night From Glasgow is the most popular, it had videos of bands playing gigs in my bedroom. Great idea, not very successful.

For each of the sites, its very specific about what it is, personal blog, music video blog, gig review blog, etc, and in terms of traffic they all follow the same trend. It starts off as s ecret, no hits for the first few days, then bumpy spikes, and after three months its reached a plateau, with occasional spikes of a hundred times as many hits as usual, before dropping back to a fractionally higher plateau.

For traffic, its a mixed bag

• personal blogs, they get around 500 hits a month if I've been particularly evil,
• music blogs, they get 1000 hits a month, no one really gives a crap about crap bands unless I make up lies about them,
• naked chicks blog, it gets around 60,000 hits a month

The other week there was this petition promoted by the UK centre-right political blogs, about ten sites posted about it for a couple of days, and after a week the petition had mustered 25,000 signatures according to the 10Downingstreet website. I tracked it and did a wee graph showing how interest waned. If you read this blog often, you'll know that about a week later BoingBoing covered one of my videos. BoingBoing is the fifth most popular blog online according to technorati. My video got about 25,000 hits from them.

If you want to promote something, coverage on BoingBoing is equal to the massed ranks of the UK centreright political blogs. By way of contrast and scale, a video on my naked chicks site is worth 300 hits.

Woo, 25,000 hits for a video, impressive? No, not really. Last year I did an animated video that got about 250,000 hits in a day and 500,000 hits in a week. Thats halfway along the third row of the chessboard. The thing is, it didn't count. 500,000 of those hits don't compare to the 25,000 political signatures in the UK, cos that half a million was half a million of porn hits from all over the world.

Quality and relevance counts, and I don't mean in terms of search engine optimisation. That always seems like selling out, smacks of desperation that dilute the signal to noise ratio, like cheating. What kind of traffic do you want on your site. The folk who find my personal blog find it from searching for my name, not because they were searching for something I was writing about*, people who find my music review sites find it cos they are looking for those bands, not because there are other sites writing about those bands, but because there's only me, no one else at the gig is writing about it, SEO is irrelevant if there's no competition.

So what about naked chicks on post-it notes. Whilst I've lost count of how many naked women on draw post-it notes sites there are out there**, mine is the most dedicated to its specific niche. Over the months I've pleaded, begged, bribed and bullied my way to integrity and links. It is an unstoppable mission to get as much traffic as possible, just to demonstrate I can, by my own means.

Remember the other year there was a book called "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" and it kicked off this whole genre of grammar books and people moaning about wee niggly things. That was a women who just decided to write a book and it caught the zeitgeist and got its own section of Waterstones. Likewise, the whole MisLit genre of books, some moany former child abuse victim wrote his book, months later it had taken off and now its a section of Waterstones. How much disbelief do you need to suspend for me to have my own naked image on post-it note section? Just next to the check outs, but before the novelty book section.

So what now? I think I've reached the edges of what's possible online. The next step is getting offline, and thats a variety of possibilities including, but not limited to, freesheet coverage, Sunday supplement coverage, quirky website slot on BBC radio, exhibition in Shoreditch. And all the time me staring wide eyed at the screen thinking "oh dear god, she's going to see this and kill me, or worse, never speak to me again. Oh dear god, what have I done".

There's this bit in one of the first Terry Pratchett books where they do a change the world spell, which grows and grows and alters the world in a small way to make the narative work. Whilst magic isn't real, or if it is that it's merely technology folk don't understand. What I need to do is make the media more accepting of pictures of naked women. Thats not difficult, it just takes a couple of prods. Is naked chicks on post it notes so different to covering The London Naked Bike Ride, or Dr Sketchy's, or the naughty page on ShinyShiny?

*Lie!! if you search for Facebook IQ test, you get it
**You doubt me? Here, here, here, here, here, here

The one thats shameless, shameless

Went to London Bloggers Meetup.

Arrived on my own without usual meetup companion Aref-Adib and as a result sat on my own in a corner for the first half hour or so, scribbling notes about the sponsored goodie bag.

Berocca make vitamin drinks and engery tablets, the goodie bag contain a fine branded glass (about 400ml), one branded biro, a tube of the Berocca effervescent tablets (orange flavour) and a pad of branded post-it notes.

I'm sceptical about the effervescent tablets, one side of the pack says "Taking more than your recommended daily intake may be harmful", the other side of the pack says each tablet contains 860% of your recommended daily allowance of some of the vitamins.

It is a fine branded glass they provide and the branded post-it notes make my mind boggle at the possibilities. But the warnings and information on the packaging are a bit ambiguous. Its like if a pack of razor blades says how sharp the blades are and then warns you against cutting yourself.

Anyhoo, Jaz and Lisa both recommended taking the stuff, so I have done. The fizzy bubbly goodness has burnt my lip, but I think the goodness will do as a surrogate breakfast for me tomorrow morning. It is orange flavour so I think it counts as one of my five daily portions (along with two cups of coffee, bacon roll and microwave meal).

I am well healthy me.

Met the following bloggers:-

Andy from the marketing blagger
Chris from qwghlm
Andy from Distributed Research
Jure from Zemanta
Lisa from u-handbag
Krista from Londelicious
Julius he's an event manager
Jaz from ShinyRed
Tom the Flashboy from The Metro

Also I think I glanced at:-

Carmen from Green is Not a Colour
Annie from the Going Underground
Peter Marshall from My London Diary

Success and agony

eeep, With google adsense abandoning me when I was barely up to $60, they only pay out at $100 intervals, so I had to seek other sources of revenue. By selling ad space directly to the selling folk, I can make $1/week, or if I up my prices who knows. Got the first payment yesterday. Skipping round my room think who I could spend the naked chick millions on.

Injured cheek is getting annoying. Depending on which side I lie on when I'm in bed, woke up in howling agony several times. Face is now hideously disfigured and my speech has been affected, sounds like I'm trying to chaw a whole pack of gum when I talk.

Sleep also disrupted by early morning text messages, but hey ho, I guess it comes with the territory of being the sort of person folk call in times of need and loneliness.

Still craving company and afflicted by crippling loneliness. Possibly going on the London Eye this evening with Rowan Just Joan and boyf. Would prefer warm hug and someone to tell me that beans on toast ought not be the best meal of yer week.

Failed attempt at being.

Its mostly guilt that brings me to Barden's Boudoir tonight. Sure I could claim to be a big fan of Arthur and Martha, but that would be doing a great disservice to Sharon from The Gresham Flyers who spent the best part of an hour working on me last weekend.

Since I've known half the people in the room for half a decade, but save the merest glimmer of recognition from the girl on the door, it counts for nothing. What I get, I have to get myself, like my damned fool plan to have one of the most popular political blogs in the UK, on a whim, because I can.

My car's parked just down the way, this is my first time in Stoke Newington, well, the first conscious time. A mob of locals came yahooing down the street as I locked my car, I swear one was packing heat. I'm only quite sure I'm not some kind of split personality serial killer, avenging some half-imagined crimes of the past, but sometimes I wake up in strange placed covered in blood that isn't my own.

Arthur and Martha on stage, halfway through AutoVia, my favourite song of their's, alas it the final song of the set. 'Arthur' seemed to be rocking out a little more than usual.

Summer festival appearances should be good.

I don't know if I was actively trying, maybe it was just going through the motions, I stood at the front, as near to the speakers as possible without people thinking 'he's standing as close to the speakers as possible', but I didn't hear any of the second band, save the blistering shards of an epic guitar solo and people clapping. Instead, I was in another place.

It was like in geography class or some MRPII meeting, slipping out of consciousness. Faces of girls I'd loved and any tenuous connection they had with the band before me. Memories of seeing them there or photos of the scene, glimpses like from a passing car, from too far away or the wrong side of the room. The stabbing shards of seperation, of missing something very important, of helplessness, of fate and damned bad luck.

Even in my slipping out of lucidity, I knew something was wrong and sought to guide my stream elsewhere to Manchester and Bolton and married life, anything away from the hell I occupied.

But it didn't quite work, the stabbing shafts of reality and it all comes back to east London cutting through. The here and now, crushing on what once was, or what I remember of it.

Even the reaffirming terrible truth that what I remember isn't the same as what actually happened.

The memories are wrong, incorrect, I know that for certain. But they are still the memories in my head, crystal clear, as though it was yesterday, last week, last year or a decade ago. The memories, soured by the truth.

Where the hell are the toilets in here?

I think I saw Das Wanderlust at Indietracks, but I can't for the life of me remember what they sounded like, and it would be unfair to judge them on tonight's performance considering it was mostly "imagine that last song sounded great" on the grounds that the singing girl had lost her voice, and the one song where DJ Waz played the 7" and the mimed along.

There were people behind me who wouldn't stop talking.

If asked what did I think of the evening, in an imaginary conversation with some vague acquaintance who happened to ask, I think in order to improve my quality of life I should have gone to the My Sad Captains single launch instead. I can barely control what goes on in my head, providing rope to hang myself was never going to be good and a better tunes would have been nicer.

Maybe that's unfair.

I think I've made many bad life decisions. I can't quite pin-point any of them, where or when.

Except climbing out of an eleventh floor window in 1997 and deciding to climb back in.


The oddest thing, after the bands I slouched out of the venue to scribble notes in my car, and as I drove away, I wanted to kill myself even more.

Spam me if you dare

I got a few emails this morning from an internet acquaintance, via last.fm. They were both invites to a club night, I gather when you create an event on last.fm, it gives you the option to send out invites to specific people, with a personal message.

Two identical messages.

Now, in the email, the part labelled 'personal message' wasn't a personal message, it wasn't to me, it was write as if to a crowd of people who'd all been along for the ride. I was almost tempted to round up a crowd of people to all read the email at the same time, but didn't. Emails are individual things.

Sure when you write them, you could be addressing a crowd of people, but when you recieve an email, there's no crowd, just you and your inbox. I don't like being addressed as a crowd, twice, when its just me.

I'm pretty shy outwith the internet, I stand on my own at the back. If I really make an effort, if I try really hard, I get over my shyness. If someone holds my hand and walks me through, then its not so hard. But most of the time, I stand on my own, take it easy, and don't bother.

I'm not a crowd.

I got another spam email this morning, it was pretty amusing. Some chap using a Scottish Power email address was sorting out his own gig spam system and sent about three hundred email address and names to all three hundred addresses. Pissed off as I already was with my phone and from being impersonally spammed at, it took me a few second to send a reply to the Scottish Power chap, trying to extort money from him in return for not signing up all the email addresses to every porn spam site I could find and doing a reply to all.

The chap didn't pay up, but learnt an important lesson about how to use the blind carbon copy email protocol and not to use his work email address.

Now, back to the two spams from an internet acquaintance via last.fm. On one of the popular internet messageboards I frequent, they'd also posted an advert about the event. Messageboards, you can address a crowd there, because they're generally open access, many people read the same message, as a crowd, many people can comment to it and see what other people have written. Its a different thing to email.

Unlike BillBones-esque random dunno who these chumps are but I'll try to yell at them until they listen to my damned Superman band, the internet acquaintance had a vague idea who they were addressing, what sort of people would read it, and maybe some specific people who would read it. Maybe, in the words of the heart-shaped creature on my shoulder, its not too much of an arched eyebrow sideways leap of fancy, to assume that the internet acquaintance knew I'd read it.

So why bother sending the email gig spam too? This combined effort doesn't make me want to go to the club night.

Its not just the overloading of spam. I am a person, I exist in real life, I have feelings and emotions and a crazy eratic personality. I've spent the past twelve months going to as many indiepop, anti-folk, mates in bands, comedy, ukulele, tweepop, psychedelia gigs as is humanly possible. I wrote about it too. It was mostly a lonely lonely road.

Standing in the same room as the same people listening to the same music, filled me with crushing feelings of loneliness. Seeing the same people at all the shows and knowing I could never talk to them, and they would never talk to me, all we have is the shared experience of gazing at the same band.

Of course this is bullshit.

I know this, and you, if you follow this blog and the one before it, know its bullshit. But sometimes I feel that way, most of all when its a bandless club night. The last record-playing club night I can remember going to was the NPL just before New Year, I hung about with the Drive Carefully crew and the Plimp clan, my circle interacting with the Glasgow Bowlie set. But even so, my nerves got the better me, the girl was in the corner of my eye, and I fled. Back in my car, four hundred miles, quaking all the way.

Spam is yelling, spam from friends is insulting.
Looking me in the eye, or holding my had and saying "hey are you coming to this?" I will follow to the end of the world. Christ, Nos hasn't been in The Loves for five years and I still go to every show.