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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 26 August 2002
[music] Hit Charade — the problem with the music industry … ‘Since 1980, the mainstream music industry has only consolidated: Five companies control CD sales, MTV owns a multi-channel music-TV franchise, and a single company, Clear Channel, dominates both the concert business and Top 40 and rock radio. Ironically, if unsurprisingly, the biz has suffered from its near-monopolistic control. Short-sighted labels and tightly programmed radio have bolstered the success of certain styles and performers but prevented anything fresh from breaking through.’ [via Sore Eyes]
25 August 2002
[diana] ‘Now, about that passport…’ — interview with Mohamed al-Fayed …‘Chester puts his head around the door again, to suggest his boss’s imminent appearance. “What you must please remember,” he says, with profound delicacy, “is that Mr al-Fayed is still very much a grieving father, and this is the fifth anniversary of the death of his son. He will no doubt among other things give you his thoughts on Prince Philip and, taken out of context, to some unsympathetic ears, some of this may make him sound like a bit of a ranting lunatic… But you must understand he cares very deeply about these things…” I promise to bear it in mind.’
24 August 2002
[words] The Julie Burchill Random Recycler … ‘I must say there are few things that irritate me more than the car-crash that is her private life with no old-school network a drag queen made bitter by a real woman’s breasts.’ [via Sashinka]
[war] Notes from a Suicide Manual — excerpts from a Kamikaze’s cockpit reading … ‘At the very moment of impact: do your best. Every deity and the spirits of your dead comrades are watching you intently. Just before the collision it is essential that you do not shut your eyes for a moment so as not to miss the target. Many have crashed into the targets with wide-open eyes. They will tell you what fun they had.’
23 August 2002
[comics] Chapel Hellion — profile of Get Your War On creator David Rees … ‘After Sept. 11, as the news became grimmer, readers may have noticed Rees’ officeworkers growing progressively more erratic. Allusions to alcohol and drug consumption peppered the strip, limning the depressed, ennui-drenched state of a “nation in crisis.” When one officeworker asks another how he’s “enduring his freedom,” his friend responds: “OK, I guess. I drink myself into a stupor every night. I can’t get out of bed because I’m afraid of what I’ll hear on the radio. My daughter is still wetting her bed. And I’m supposed to fly to Chicago for a meeting on Thursday.” “That’s what I like to hear!” responds his interlocutor, in a Prozac-induced haze.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
[gambling] Hacking Las Vegas … ‘In Las Vegas, the casino has the right to bar anyone it wants. (Atlantic City has more “civilized” rules: The casinos can’t bar card counters, however they can annoy and harass them with constant shuffles, dealer changes, and other countermeasures.) Individual card counters who follow Thorp’s system and succeed quickly find themselves first unwelcome and then extinct: In gaming parlance, they’re dinosaurs. By the early ’70s, the casinos had overcome their initial panic. They had learned to identify and contain the enemy. So the enemy did what every good enemy does: It got smarter.’ [via Kottke]
22 August 2002
[blogs] Haddock Blogs — All the Haddock Blogs in one place … ‘Surprisingly little was written on DMT.’ [Related: Azeem, blackbeltjones.com, Builder of Stuff, Dreadberry, Iamcal.com, Interconnected, Malbec, Oblomovka, Overmorgen, plasticbag.org, Technovia, Webslog, Yoz Grahame’s Commonplace Megaphone]
21 August 2002
[sex] The Son Also Rises — amusing update on the 30th Aniversary edition of the The Joy of Sex …
‘Even 30 years after it was first published, the Joy of Sex begs many questions. On pages 114-5 of the latest edition, for instance, there’s a man astride a woman’s buttocks with his hands pressed into her shoulders. The helpful description of what’s going on follows. “She kneels, hands clasped behind her neck, breasts and face on the bed. He kneels behind. She hooks her legs over his and pulls him to her with them.” With me so far? Let’s go to stage two. “He puts a hand on each of her shoulder-blades and presses down. Very deep position – apt to pump her full of air which escapes later in a disconcerting manner – otherwise excellent.” Intriguing stuff. Why would she be pumped full of air? Just how disconcerting is the escape of air? Should we have the emergency services on standby? What tools should they bring? ‘
[web] PageRank: Google’s Original Sin — interesting view of what’s wrong with Google. ‘… PageRank drives Google’s monthly crawl, such that sites with higher PageRank get crawled earlier, faster, and deeper than sites with low PageRank. For a large site with an average-to-low PageRank, this is a major obstacle. If your pages don’t get crawled, they won’t get indexed. If they don’t get indexed in Google, people won’t know about them. If people don’t know about them, then there’s no point in maintaining a website. Google starts over again on every site for every 28-day cycle, so the missing pages stand an excellent chance of getting missed on the next cycle also. In short, PageRank is the soul and essence of Google, on both the all-important crawl and the all-important rankings.’ [Kinda Related: Googlegate]
20 August 2002
[tv] The Dirty Truth — the inside story on Steptoe and Son. ‘…the two actors’ real-life relationship was [..] bizarre – and even more fraught – than their on-screen one. Wilfrid Brambell was gay and an alcoholic, notorious for his outrageous behaviour (on one infamous occasion he exposed himself to a woman at a party). He routinely told adoring fans who met him in the street to “fuck off”. Harry H Corbett was a womaniser who hated his role in Steptoe and died a bitter and disappointed man. When Steptoe finished in 1974, Corbett loathed Brambell. Within three years, the feeling was mutual.’
19 August 2002
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[blogs] Living in the Blog-osphere — Steven Levy on weblogs. ‘…most coverage of the so-called Blog-osphere (the name given to the collective alternate universe consisting of all active Weblogs) seems to focus on A-listers like pundit Andrew Sullivan, gadfly Mickey Kaus or former MTV veejay Adam Curry. Even the various computer-generated lists that purport to probe what’s happening on Planet Blog don’t go beyond the 10,000 or so most popular ones, rated by the numbers of links to and from the various sites. But the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives.’ [via Scripting News]
[books] Meet the Parent — interview / profile of Tony Parsons. ‘…Man and Boy seems unstoppable – it does that very rare thing, it reaches people who don’t normally buy books. The trouble is that when Parsons talks about it, there is no glimmer of the vision thing – he sounds almost like Jeffrey Archer, harping on about his sales figures. So, back to my original suspicion. Did he sit down one day and see the Nick Hornby bandwagon rolling past and think ‘I’ll have some of that’? Did he decide, cynically, hackily, to switch from smartarse to sensitive?’
18 August 2002
[war] The Search for Osama bin Laden … ‘CIA officials have highly reliable reports that al-Qaeda’s leader managed to cross into northwest Pakistan and is hiding in or near the city of Peshawar, where he commands the loyalty of local tribes and is protected by thousands of armed men. Bin Laden has managed to elude capture by one of the largest concentrations of special-operations forces, airpower and satellite surveillance ever mustered. Blunders at the U.S. command level, lack of coordination between coalition partners, poor intelligence and the unreliability or outright treachery of local allies have contributed to the failure, which now threatens to unleash civil war in Pakistan as al-Qaeda gears up for another attack on the United States.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
[tv] 24 Dreaming … ‘Right now, prawns are plotting to send love letters to a loud albino. My window and leg are raging, and salads that I work with may be rudimentary. I’m Federal Agent Jack Bauer, and this is the most minty surfboard of my life.’ [via Sore Eyes]
17 August 2002
[mobiles] Cell Biology — the Washington Post on mobiles phones and swarming … ‘The very fabric of their time has softened. Remember arranging to meet at a specific time, like 8 p.m., at a specific location, like Connecticut and K? Forget it. The new hallmark of squishy lives involves vaguely agreeing to meet after work, and then working out the details on the fly. A time-softened meeting starts with a call that says, “I’m 15 minutes away.” It’s no longer unforgivable to be late, as long as you’re in contact.’
[tv] The Long Day Closes — Media Guardian on 24 as the last episode is screened on BBC2 tomorrow … ‘To say that Jack Bauer has been having a bad day is like dismissing the second world war as a little local difficulty.’
16 August 2002
[war] Mock Cyberwar fails to end Mock Civilization … ‘We’ve seen cities immobilized for days by natural events like blizzards, the severest of which are often accompanied by power and communications breakdowns, financial inconveniences and failures of emergency response teams to function, and yet life goes on. Human beings simply aren’t as fragile and narcotically-dependent on state authority as the government desperately desires them to be. We shift for ourselves rather well for moderate periods of time when the infrastructure of state paternalism lets us down and the life-giving commercial heartbeat flatlines. People are remarkably good at solving problems, both individually and in small ad-hoc groups. Thus we survive earthquakes, floods, blizzards, depressions, epidemics, hurricaines, foreign occupations, famines, plagues, slavery, volcanic eruptions, sustained V-1 and V-2 bombing campaigns, and the like. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be here now.’
[blogs] You’ve got Blog — another ancient article (2000, from the New Yorker) about blogging … ‘Because the main audience for blogs is other bloggers blogging etiquette requires that, if someone blogs your blog, you blog his blog back. Reading blogs can feel a lot like listening in on a conversation among a group of friends who all know each other really well. Blogging, it turns out, is the CB radio of the Dave Eggers generation.’ [via plasticbag.org again]
[memo] This Afternoons Events in the Restroom — a classic email from Internal Memos … ‘I understand from some of you that my recent indecency related arrest in Thailand seems to have clouded your judgement to illegal acts. Let me warn you that I am innocent and will prove so soon. This does not mean the office is a free for all.’ [via Haddock]
15 August 2002
[blogs] Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man — old (2000) profile of Jorn Barger … ‘…Barger felt something was missing — a context for his postings, some frame of reference that would fill in the contours of his Net persona, now badly fragmented across the boundaries of his various newsgroups. His Web log, in the end, was born to fill that need. It was conceived less as the quality news digest it has become (frequented by thousands of the Net’s most knowledgeable) than as a portrait of Jorn Barger, rendered in the medium of his own daily, unexpurgated curiosities. ‘ [kinda via plasticbag.org]
[books] Pullman Lays Down Moral Challenge for Writers — Philip Pullman discusses morality. ‘…his real bugbear was with the “propensity of human nature” to use politics or religion to set up one unquestionable truth – “it could be the Bible, it could be the Communist Manifesto” – and to then knock down all that went against it. “This is what I am against. Not Christianity, but every religion and fundamental organisation where there is one truth and they will kill you if you don’t believe it.”‘
14 August 2002
[blogs] Tom reconstructs We’ve Got Blog … ‘If you were interested in reading – but uninterested in paying for – the collection of articles printed in the book We’ve got blog (which includes an introduction by the esteemed Rebecca Blood), you may be surprised to realise that almost all of the pieces within it are freely available on the interweb. And don’t worry – most of them are just as interesting online as they are squirted onto paper.’ [Related: We’ve Got Blog]
[911] The Mystery of Flight 93 — The Independent’s view on the unanswered questions and conspriracy theories surfacing about Flight 93 … ‘Everything is speculation — that is the problem with the story of Flight 93. And unless the US government reveals more of what it knows, provides a detailed account of the last 10 minutes in the life of Flight 93 and the 44 people who were aboard, there will not only be scope but sound reasons for the conspiracy theorists to continue to speculate as to what really happened in those last few minutes before the plane plunged into the earth; to cast doubts on the soft-focus legend that the traumatised American public has seized upon so gratefully.’ [Related: Mefi on Flight 93]
13 August 2002
[lizards] David Icke’s Media … ‘I do read the Daily Mail, because its politics stink. In fact, so much so that I have to read it at arm’s length with a peg on my nose.’
[comics] This is Information — a page from Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s 911 Tribute comic-strip …
 ‘This is what Entropy looks like. Not much Energy. Not much information. The Kinetic Energy bound up inside the structure is released with its collapse, a single Pulverising Burst. Complex information is reduced to dull simplicity. Rubble, for example contains little information it all looks the same. This could be London, New York, Baghdad, Belfast, or Kabul. Or Anywhere.’ 12 August 2002
[bb3] The voice of Big Brother — interview with the narrator of BB3 … ‘”Chickens.” It is quite a thrill. Say it again, I ask. “Chickens.” For some reason, this pleases me no end. As an added bonus, he continues in familiar Geordie tones: “Day 44 in the Big Brother house.” I clap my hands. I am having a conversation with the voice of Big Brother. And I can see his lips move.’
[comics] Comic-Book Confidential — Mark Millar dishes up loads of gossip about comics … Now I wonder who… ‘The freelancer who indulged in a little cyber-sex with a reader (the transcript of which is now doing the rounds in the female comics community).’ is?
11 August 2002
[food] Grease is the Word — Nigel Slater makes Elvis Presley’s Fried-Peanut-Butter-and-Banana Sandwich … ‘I have known about this sandwich for years but felt that, along with deep-fried Mars bars, monkey brains and fugu fish, this was territory that I did not wish to explore. The fact that the peanut butter was sometimes mixed with strawberry jam, and that the whole heart-stopping snack was then fried in butter, put the seal on it. Still, what the hell. It can’t kill me. So here I am, standing in the kitchen, debating whether this legendary recipe really is the crack cocaine of the sandwich world, and whether I am going to get out of this alive. I so want to just say no, but I like bananas, have a sneaky fondness for white sliced bread, and absolutely adore peanut butter.’
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