Go forth

Slight lull in posting, due to the heat-induced apathy as my brain melts like an afterburner-mounted Milkybar. Incidentally, that’s a confection which is apparently particularly suffering from the ban on television advertising of sweets to children, since adults aren’t exactly a target market. A Cadbury’s Flake can be pushed by a slow-motion naked babe in a bath; all the Milkybar can rely on is a speccy kid acting out cowboy fantasies before using the sweet as a bribe to make friends. Besides, Milkybars are just wrong - they’re the chocolate equivalent of the white dog poo you used to see around.

One of my regular haunts is Photoshop Disasters which documents catastrophic examples of inept image editing. This recent post is one of my favourites – either the housing crisis in America has meant people are moving into doll’s houses, or Godzilla has let his pet dog out to play.

I’ve seen my fair share of badly edited property photos, typically when someone’s added a lovely blue sky but forgotten to fill in the gaps where it shows through the branches of trees resulting in a horrible white halo like a severe case of arboreal dandruff.

The worst I’ve personally seen far transcends that though. Some years ago a client advertising in the magazine I work for sent through a scan of a photo that they’d obviously decided needed a little touching up. And by touching up, I mean cutting – with scissors and the trembling hands of a long-term alcohol abuser – a giant picture of a deer from another photo, and physically sellotaping it to the lawn in front of the house.

Imagine a collage made by an excessively hyperactive five-year-old in remedial class; a massive stag looming over a puny farmhouse, held back from the brink of a destructive rampage only by the wodge of tape clearly sticking it to the picture.

I don’t think the property sold - giant deer phobia is more common than you’d think.

The time has come for me to start growing my own little carbon footprint to add to the stampede of tracks conspiring to turn our bundle of rock, water and gas into a sweaty armpit of a planet.

I need to buy a car.

We’ve run out of space in the office where I work, to the point that we could only squeeze more people in if we divided a floor horizontally in two and solely employed dwarves. So it looks like a move is in order, and it’s unlikely to be within the 15-minute walk I currently enjoy.

Plus, while I’ve managed to get away without a car up till now, I’m now playing badminton twice a week at halls a fair distance from my home, and it’s also probably time I stopped relying on friends to taxi me around the country.

The thing is, though, since I passed my test over ten years ago, I haven’t driven at all. Unless you count Grand Theft Auto, but I’m pretty sure that mounting the kerb at 93mph, scattering pedestrians like bowling pins and then somersaulting into a taxi hasn’t yet been added to the Highway Code.

Unfortunately, since life doesn’t have save-game points to cater for bad driving, this means that all the money I saved in the past by not owning a car is now being used to pay for refresher lessons. And I now feel like I’m seventeen again, which in normal circumstances would be pleasant but in this case serves only to remind me how much about driving I’ve forgotten. My first session demonstrated that my driving is as rusty as I imagine the car in which I first learned is now. That mirror, signal, manoeuvre mantra is now repeating itself in my sleep.

Once all this is over, I’ll be in the enviable position of being to sink a significant proportion of my earnings into a tin box with wheels for the main purpose of transporting me to the place where I earn that very money. It’s all a bit cyclical really.

For a variety of reasons, I can’t really explain on a public web page the full origins of the epic list that follows. It’s the collected efforts of myself and a couple of friends from work inspired by a certain former workmate and that’s about as much as I can say. The truth is stranger than any fiction I could concoct.

So in the meantime, imagine if every film director in the world was an inveterate alcoholic, plagued with visions of the demon drink wherever he or she went. I’d like to think that it would result in the following great canon of movies. And yes, we did get a bit carried away.

The Man with the Iron Flask
Miller’s Crossing
Lush Hour
Special Brewster’s Millions
Finding Wino
Air Budweiser
The House of Flying Lagers
Summer Alcoholiday
Summer of Sambuca
James and the Giant Peach Schnappes
Hot Fizz
Bar Trek
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Firewater
Glenmorangie Glen Ross
The Thin Red Wine
Rosemary’s Babycham
Blackthorn Down
Rum Lola Rum
Dr Pernod
Meths in Venice
Snakebite on a Plane
Mr & Mrs John Smiths
The Thomas Corona Affair
The Secret Hoegaarden
Blame it on the Bells Boy
Becks, Lies & Videotape
Bacaardi to the Future
Eternal Moonshine of the Spotless Mind
Whisky Business 
Schindler’s Pissed
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Cobra
Liver Let Die
Educating Margarita
Turner & Hooch
Driving Pissed Daisy
Dude, Where’s My Carling?
The Silence of the Lambruscos
Hock, Stock and Two Empty Barrels
Falling Down
Midnight Rum
21 Drams
The Bourbon Supremacy
There’s Something About Sherry
Mead in Manhattan
Divorcing Jack Daniels
The Buckfast Club
Cognac Air
American History 4X
Tequila Mocking Bird
Days of Thunderbird
The Bottle Collector
Top Gin

Feel free to contribute additions to this eminently pointless list…

I can’t be the first to think of this, but in the nothing-is-sacred world of commerce – this Bible brought to you by McDonald’s and why not try our new Happy Clappy Meal including two loaves, a filet-o-fish and regular fries – Wikipedia should surely be open season for the insidious and brightly coloured tentacles of marketeers. The whole site’s just begging for some serious product placement. Who cares about paying a million for Will Smith to wear your trainers as he fires hot lead into the faces of a thousand baddies when you could get a picture of your sweatshop’s finest output in front of everyone who searches for the history of footwear on the world’s favourite made-up internet encyclopedia.

You’d have to be a bit subtle though, which is not always the advertising industry’s strong point. I’m not talking about slapping a big can of Stella in the lager entry; that’s so obvious it’d be ripped down by the community in the time it takes to drink twelve of the aforementioned cans, start a fight, and copiously vomit kebab-meat down your shirt. I’m not even talking about a history professor sneakily adding his own book into the ‘Further reading’ appendix on the Battle of Agincourt.

For example, take a look at the ‘Battery‘ entry. That’s just itching for a good quality cutaway diagram of a domestic battery. Now, there wouldn’t be any suggestion of a logo or a brand name but, should the battery in that drawing just happen to be coloured black at the bottom and copper at the top like a certain well-known make, there’s arguably at the very least a low-level psychological tweak going to happen.

Some products are easier than others - Guinness and St Patrick’s Day are already intertwined so it’s easy to get away with mentioning the black stuff in the relevant entry. But did you know that in Japan, Kentucky Fried Chicken is associated with Christmas, to the extent that some families apparently make advance reservations to guarantee their bucket of miscellaneous bird bits? I’m sure there’s someone at chicken-central with the responsibility to ensure that particular nugget of information doesn’t get removed from KFC’s Wikipedia entry.

Sport is an easy one - have a look at how detailed the equipment lists are for the top tennis players. I’d be surprised if those weren’t carefully massaged by marketing departments. But they’re missing a trick on the generic sport pages; an artfully not-too-professional-looking photo of an attractive sportsperson clad in Nike might well slip through the net to influence those looking up their chosen activity.

There’s opportunity for some carefully orchestrated and underhand counter-marketing too. Car manufacturers - is your competitor’s well-built but ugly car selling rather more than you’d hoped? How about uploading a picture of that car on their entry, making sure that your own better-looking smug-wagon is clearly visible in the background for comparison. Fashion labels could dig out photos of their rivals’ occasional disastrous mistakes to sabotage the relevant pages. It’d be like the effect Jeremy Clarkson had on the sales of denim.

Eventually the situation will degenerate into a cold war of marketing, as PR firms retain a host of scattered agents to perform surgical strikes of secretly inserted information which conspire to promote ally companies and undermine the opposition. Or maybe that hidden conflict is already upon us and there’s a reason why Wikipedia’s Renault page is stuffed full of terrible pictures of ugly cars or that the handbag/purse entry is headed up by Burberry.

It’s late on Friday and I’m in a foul mood.

I’ve been in a limbo of waiting all evening, standing by to hear a time and place to meet up with friends in town, only to finally find out the details so late in the evening it’d be pointless for me to head out. I hate waiting for anything, times ten when that waiting is for nothing.

Thus, foul mood.

I look to counter this by turning to something that makes me happy: music. I’m going to be unrepentantly unoriginal here and use the old blogger’s trick of setting my iPod to shuffle and writing some drivel about the first five songs that come up. I get to look clever and cultural while boring you with my musical tastes.

And yet the moment I try to do this, my little white box of music defies me - out of 4061 individual songs stored in a miracle of magnetic alignment, three out of the first five random choices are not only by the same artist, but from the same album. Evidently the universe is against me in a multitude of tiny ways.

Let’s try this again. I just wish there was a legal way I could link to mp3’s of these tracks.

1) Tightly Wound by The Pineapple Thief - from the album Tightly Unwound

An incredible and little-known band, The Pineapple Thief have grown on me hugely over the course of their albums. They seem to have been loosely categorised as prog-rock, the dread term that has mainstream music critics racing to make stupid jokes and dismiss the genre because that’s what they think their readers want to hear. Quite aside from the critics being wrong, so is the claim that the Thief are prog. There’s bits of early Radiohead in the mix, and an initial impression of simplicity that turns out to be much more complex than you expect. I find listening to the Thief to be intensely calming.

My copy of this has been signed by the whole band. I don’t know why a scribbled name on something makes it feel more important as an item but it does.

2) I’m Yours If You Want Me by Chris Thile - from the album How To Grow A Woman From The Ground

This is the man who made me buy a bluegrass mandolin - his playing is astounding in both his solo work and as part of Nickel Creek (not to be confused with the world’s most arse-clenchingly generic rock band, Nickelback). Even if you think you don’t like country/bluegrass it’s worth giving some Thile a try. Here a single voice and mandolin conspire to send shivers down your spine before a double bass and harmony vocals surface briefly from the depths halfway through the song. I’ve got Jools Holland to thank for introducing me to Thile when Nickel Creek appeared on Later… Despite having many years of experience playing the guitar, my skills haven’t transferred to the mandolin enough to even attempt the sort of things Chris does.

3) Too Sick To Pray by Alabama 3 - from the album La Peste

Another band I first saw on Jools Holland - playing this particular song, as it happens – Alabama 3 are probably best known for the title song of The Sopranos. They seem to just randomly incorporate musical styles from every neck of the woods, making them a country-rock-dance-gospel-electronic-rap-pop smorgasbord that somehow avoids the perils of aural indigestion. La Peste is their most downbeat album, showing a little less of the humour they’re known for, but retaining their unique style. Despite the name, Alabama 3 are from Brixton, but you’d never guess it.

Honey in the Rock, another song by the band, has possibly my favourite female vocal in any song, period.

4) Suicide Lover by Paul Gilbert - from the album Burning Organ

Any song that starts with the couplet She was the first girl I ever kissed / How was I to know she was a terrorist can’t be all bad. Paul Gilbert is a serious guitar god who manages to funnel his playing into some incredibly catchy, compact, and often funny rock songs. Only a couple of weeks ago I saw him live at the London International Music Show where just he and a frequently misfiring CD player managed to blow away the performances of most of the other performers.

5) First Breath After Coma by Explosions In The Sky - from the album The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place

I listen to a lot of purely instrumental music, much of which is post-rockiness like Mogwai, Mono and Sigur Rós. For many people it’s an acquired taste - the pleasure is far from immediate. I’ve heard Explosions In The Sky described as U2 without the vocals and stretched out to triple the length; with their chiming guitars and prominent rhythms it’s a pretty fair analogy. The joy comes from the slow build-up to a musical climax. When I saw them live, at the culmination of their set a guitar amplifier burst into flames and a puff of smoke drifted across the room - a fine way to end given the band’s name.