[mp3 tech] Frequently asked question on the Winamp forum… How do I burn an audio CD from my MP3’s?

[eastenders] An Eastenders scriptwriter discusses the problems of introducing a new family in a long running TV soap. ‘To make this predictable universe work on the screen, you need characters who are relatively stable (even if they are unstable). The writers and the viewers buy into a myth that people aren’t particularly complex, that the full range of their feelings and actions can be revealed in a few hours on the TV. And a quick, visible way of revealing characters is to mirror them in their occupation. Thus we have Pauline Fowler, long-suffering drudge and matriarch. What better job than folding pants all day in the launderette? Or Peggy Butcher – tough but fun-loving and gregarious. So she runs the pub. But what attributes spring to mind when we think of Italian restaurants? Fond of pasta, perhaps? Permanently overworked? The job never provided an easy route into understanding the di Marcos’ characters.’ [Related Link: Eastenders]

[comics] BBC News takes a look at Ralph Steadman and his most recent work for children. ‘Steadman says his latest work has the same “wayward spirit” as Fear and Loathing – despite being aimed at a very different audience. “Little.com is different because I’m not so malevolent in it,” he adds. “A children’s book is small world that is large enough for a child’s mind at bed-time.”‘ [Related Link: ralphsteadman.com]

[books] News Unlimited wonders if Nick Hornby can write a sucessful new novel from a female point-of-view. ‘At his best, Hornby mines a seam that unites far more than it divides: the scary business of growing up, of putting away childish things, and of the struggle to become a fully-formed human being who can have relationships with parents, children, lovers, friends. So why is it any surprise when he decides to explore matters from a different angle in a work of fiction?’

[not this life] Preview of the new dot.com drama on BBC2 called Attachments which has a website which is part of the story. ‘Attachments centres on the efforts of Mike and his wife Luce to transform his new music website, seethru.co.uk, from a bedroom hobby into a viable internet content business offering news, reviews and gossip. Frazzled dot.com executives will recognise the couple’s struggle to secure venture capital funding without having to give away too much control of their fledgling company. Those lower down the new economy food chain will be able to identify with an internet start-up office divided along content writer versus techie versus programmer versus designer social faultlines. They will also recognise the long periods idled away playing computer games and emailing mates, punctuated by short bursts of frenzied, work-through-the-night activity as deadlines loom.’ [Related Link: seethru.co.uk]

[weblog html meme] Must… resist… temptation…

[books] Guardian Unlimited interviews Luke Rhinehart aka George Cockcroft author of The Dice Man ‘Originally he had seen the dice as a way of breaking down some of the habitual stiffness he disliked in his own character: ‘I was a shy, uptight sort of guy in my teens and early twenties, and tremendously driven to succeed, get A grades and so on, and I did not like either of those characteristics one bit…’ He had the notion that by rolling a dice to make decisions, about what to read, where to go, how to react to people, he could bring risk into his life, which he otherwise seemed naturally indisposed toward. In this way, he hoped, he could turn himself into someone else.’

[savile meme hoax] Excellent, compelling reading — a HOAX transcript of out-takes from Have I Got News For You between Ian Hislop, Jimmy Savile and Paul Merton. If only it were true… [Related Links: Hoax Confirmation, Tsluts, the Savile meme spreads]

[comics] Dylan Horrocks Sketchbook — a couple of intriguing pages covering his latest work — the 1000 page Atlas.

[adrian mole] Adrian Mole on Nick Bateman: ‘I have been brutally betrayed! I feel humiliated and sick! How could he have told such terrible lies to me over the past five weeks? I admired him so much. He was the type of man I would have liked to have been myself. He was a man who could cope with adversity (the death of his young wife in a car crash). A man who led other men (an officer in the Territorial Army). He was also a healer (like Jesus), and a reiki master to boot.’

[burchill] Julie Burchill takes a vast mental leap in Guardian Unlimited and draws parallels between self-pitying Radiohead listening males, the poor performance of boys compared girls at A-Levels and GCSE’s and “certain self-pitying” paedophiles. ‘But male self-pity is not always funny; sometimes, it serves as an excuse for the most loathsome sorts of behaviour. A handy catch-all cliché that the ivory-tower-dwellers among us have been dishing up in an attempt to turn popular feeling against those appalling oiks in Paulsgrove (my God, I bet none of them has even read one Julian Barnes novel!) is, “The abused, in turn, abuse”. This is, rather, one of the silliest and most easily disproved of modern myths. Some 90% of abused children are women; some 90% of child abusers are men. If it was really true that “the abused abuse”, then 90% of all child abusers would be women, wouldn’t they?’

[simpsons] The Evening Standard meets Matt Groening. “I haven’t figured out whether comedy is truly healing or whether it’s merely a bandage on the wound. It is momentarily cathartic but then you see comedians who are great on stage and depressed afterwards. Basically, we all want to be loved. Maybe my secret is that I can’t ask for it directly so I ask for it through a cartoon. ‘Hey, please love my cartoon, while I’ll just sit over here.’ If they go ‘heh, heh’ maybe that means they like me a little, too.”

[america] Oh dear… Polly Toynbee gets a shower of Hate mail from the US… ‘You are nothing but an intolerant American-hating bigot. You can’t stand the fact that America is so rich and powerful while you live in a pathetic third-rate country that is of no significance at all. I see no reason why America should pay any attention to the whining, pissing, shitting, moaning and groaning of a bunch of idiots like you. The rest of the world has no right to expect us to share our wealth with it. It is our money, not the world’s. Bush will win in November. I hope when he wins you have a stroke and it kills you and all your fellow Eurotrash die from shock as well. America Uber Alles! Fuck the world!!’

[grant morrison] A scan of an early Grant Morrison comic strip — Gideon Stargrave. Originally published in 1978 in a comic called Near Myths. “Are you Gideon Stargrave?” “As often as possible, but you know how it is these days.” [Related Link: TimeMachineGo]

[madonna] Enough! Julie Burchill has a right dig at Madonna in todays Guardian Unlimited. ‘In the annals of bad records, this one has legs – it is very conceivably worse than the Birdie Song, Aga Doo and the last Phil Collins combined. Some books, songs and films really do make you believe that the chief ape in “Planet of” was right when he maintained that human beings were lower than chimps: Music is one of them. Give 1,000 chimps access to recording equipment for 100 years and they would not, could not, produce anything as boring as this castrated, truncated funk. Who in the name of God could summon up the motivation to walk into a record shop, enunciate the words, “Please can I have Music by Madonna?” and put their hand into their pocket? Beats me.’

[jesus wants me for a sunbeam] Which of your favourite celebrities is an atheist or agnostic? Find out at the The Celebrity Atheist List. Garth Ennis: ‘I’m an atheist, really. But everyone seems to think I’m some terrible lapsed Catholic who suffered the worst of a Catholic upbringing and had the crap kicked out of him by nuns and monks. In actual fact, I’m not Catholic, and I never had any kind of direct religious upbringing at all, although I was exposed to the inevitable religious influence that growing up in Ireland will give you.’

[comics] Nice on-line comic — Bobbins. [Links: Start of the Strip, Amusing – A Tribute to Stanley Kubrick :) ]

[comic] Transmetropolitan — website covering the comic of the same name…. ‘Transmetropolitan follows Spider as he harasses people with the ugly, painful truth until they are practically driven insane, fill their pants up with defication wrought of abject terror, or simply kick his ass. Then he writes articles about them.’ [Related Link: Warren Ellis]

[jesus loves you] Good Lord! Christian sandals with Jesus Loves You written on the soles! “As I was thinking of more ways to reinforce goodness, God instructed me to cut out an old inner tube and glue the letters SUSEJ SEVOL UOY backwards onto the bottoms of sandals. When I was finished, it was raining. I walked outside and up onto a dry wooden deck and left JESUS LOVES YOU all over the deck. It was awesome, and I knew this was a wonderful new way to spread the good news.” [via ChrisH]

[big brother] Charlotte Raven on the social debt we owe to Big Brother. ‘The annoying thing about all of this for those of us who stick with popular culture in the lean times as well as the good, is that dilettantish tendency to gather up all the glory without putting in the hours. If you haven’t sat through six months of crap EastEnders, I don’t see what gives you the right to come in for the Christmas episode and talk about Tiffany’s death as if you cared as much as we did.’

[chegwin porn!] My referrer logs tell me that many people come to LMG to look for naked pictures of Keith Chegwin… which always makes me laugh. Apparently he’s refusing all requests to show clips from the gameshow he appeared nude in again and according to BBC News a video of the program is about to be released which he will make a hefty profit from. LMG will link to the video as soon as it’s available. :) [Related Links: Channel 5 criticised in Commons, Original LMG posting, Original notsosoft posting]

[big brother] Guardian Unlimited covers how Nasty Nick’s departure from Big Brother helped converge TV and the internet. ‘But if the convergence between the internet and TV isn’t to become a collision, these media need to work together. Being big on the internet doesn’t necessarily mean that TV viewing figures will decline. Viral marketing? Bollocks. Call it good old-fashioned word of mouth. Internet page impressions went through the roof and boosted, not hindered, the TV audience that night. If the content is compelling enough and production teams plan well, the internet and TV can feed each other. It is the viewer who wins.’

[god is dead] Guardian Passnotes profiles Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘Didn’t he love his fellow man? No: “Many too many are born. The state was devised for the superfluous ones.” Didn’t he regard women highly? No: “Goest thou to woman? Forget not thy whip.”‘

[comics] OPi8 interviews Brian Michael Bendis. ‘It’s so funny because you never see people at movie theatres go: Well, I won’t go see a Warner Brothers movie. I won’t be seen in a New Line movie. Only in comics does this happen and I am challenging some of my readers to get over their snobby selves, as far as that goes. Because I am not a genre snob. People are sometimes surprised that I love Spider-Man. I don’t mention it or it doesn’t appear that I would, but I adore him! I love the Spider-Man of yesteryear and that’s what they’ve asked me to write. There is no genre or style of comic that I won’t read. I only want my good comics. If anyone’s kicking ass on a comic, no matter that it is about, I’ll buy it!’

[tech] Danny O’Brien takes a look at the rise and fall of Netscape. ‘At the end of the credits in the original Mozilla was a quote from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: “All human actions are equivalent … and … all are, in principle, doomed to failure.” Well, maybe. But we have to keep on trying, don’t we?’

[movies] The Observer interviews Joe Eszterhas on the movie business, politics, Sharon Stone and Bill Clinton. ”Politics has become entertainment,’ says Eszterhas, ‘and entertainment has become politics. Betty Thomas, who made Private Parts and Dr Dolittle, said that comedy in Hollywood was now “funny moments with liberal inserts”, and that is right, because Sixties liberals and political correctness have taken over the industry. And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives – they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet. Meanwhile, politics is about getting a candidate in front of the public as a star, politics as rock’n’roll, politics as a movie.” [Related Link: Eszterhas at IMDB]

[books] A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers digested at Books Unlimited. ‘Toph is my laboratory. I can fill his head with my music, my books. He is one lucky, lucky guy. But he’s my problem, too. I mean, looking after your eight-year old brother is all very soulful, but how do you find the time to shag? When I’m not with him I worry someone’s hacking him to death and when I am, I just wish he’d fucking disappear and let me live my life.’

[[comics] Fandom reports that there is no sign of any detente between Alan Moore and DC Comics in the light of a 15th Anniversary edition of Watchmen. ‘”Regarding the Watchmen products, any renewed relationship with DC is not anything that people should be placing any hope in at all,” Moore told Newsarama. “I can tell you that right now, I’m having nothing to do with the Watchmen project – I completely disown it. I’m not at all interested if there are any more toys or anything at all comes out, and I shall not be cooperating with the project in any way.’

[big brother] Guardian Unlimited asks: Where were you when Nick was kicked out of Big Brother? ‘The playwright Dennis Potter once explained that he had decided to write for TV rather than the theatre because only television offered the possibility of a “common culture”: one in which people of all classes and generations experienced the same event simultaneously and talked about it the next morning.’ [Related Links: Nick Bateman Appreciation Society]

[photo] Image of Cary Grant taking LSD. ‘Patient Cary Grant. From a vision, a tough inner core.’