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Updates/News from AmericaWeblogSaturday, September 15AMERICAI’ve been quiet whilst the events of this week have slowly started to sink in. Trying to process all the horrific things I’ve seen, heard and read since Tuesday has been almost impossible. The sheer weight and volume of suffering and emotion is simply overwhelming. Taking it all in, grasping its true size, is something I’m not really capable of doing. I don’t think anyone is really. We’re just not wired to deal with things on this scale, not properly anyway. A lot of people have been saying that Tuesday’s events have changed the world. Some people have derided that sentiment or dismissed it as wishful naivety. I disagree. I feel that the world has been changed because of this, at least from a human perspective. I don’t think there are sufficient words to convey the long term effects and repercussion that this will have. Daily life will return to some semblance of normality but it won’t be the same. Lives, buildings, will be rebuilt but we can’t put the world back together the way it used to be. It won’t fit anymore, there are pieces missing, people missing and there isn’t anything that will fill those gaps. Sitting here, thousands of miles from America, it would be easy to write this off as just an America problem, as something too distant, too detached from my life to affect me. I can’t do that though. The distance is immaterial. This hasn’t directly touched me but many friends and co-workers have been effected by having friends and loved ones working or living in New York and Washington. I heard too many stories of hours spent on the phone and the net trying to track people down. They were lucky, finding their loved ones to be safe, but too many people haven’t been so fortunate. To dismiss this as something that is just hurting people ‘over there’ is being blindly ignorant of the world we live in. Cambridge has a large foreign population of tourists and students, many American, and I saw people crying or being comforted on the street on Tuesday afternoon. This has also shaken a lot of people who have no connection to America. On Wednesday I saw something that brought the reach of these events into focus. I was waiting for a bus when a plane flew loudly overhead, something far from rare, and I saw people stop what they were doing for a moment to watch the sky. A lot of them had a look of instinctual fear in their eyes. So where do we go from here? We should tread very carefully because the way in which the world reacts to this will be a defining moment of our times. We must be cautious and not allow vengeance to be confused with justice. Those guilty of theses atrocities must be brought to justice but an ill thought out response would most likely result in the deaths of a great many civilians and very few terrorists. Too many innocent people have died already. The monument to their lives must not be built from the bones of other innocents. POSTED 9/15/2001 11:56:32 PM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ] Friday, September 7DREAM DATEOut of rather idle curiosity [ plus my nefarious addiction to silly tests ], I took the Buffy Dream Date quiz and it turns out that my “Dream Girl” is Willow. Fine with me as she’s easily the most attractive person on the show and would probably be the most interesting if it wasn’t for the slight handicap of being a fictional character. I was slightly disappointed with getting Giles as “Dream Guy” though. Sure, there’s the intelligence, erudite humour and love of books but it still feels like I’ve been cheated. I guess he’d always have coffee though and that’s got to be worth something. Plus he’s not that twat Riley either. [ link shamelessly pinched from Meghan ] POSTED 9/7/2001 12:03:27 AM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ] Thursday, September 6SEVEN DAYS, SEVEN GLIMPSESA delicate, beautiful orchid in the middle of a dull brown office desk. An overcrowded afternoon bus full of new school uniforms, shouting and talk of ponies surely headed for the glue factory. Zen purity, kung-fu masters and a 90% Cyan spot colour. Porn star hair coupled with a slick business suit on a Monday morning. Pop stars which look like genetically engineered fuck-toys dancing listlessly, careers half dead by the end of the video shoot, smelling their own extinction on the breeze. An overlooked coffee cup beside my computer, all liquid evaporated away to leave a dirty brown Mandelbrot stain in the bottom of the cup. “He went grocery shopping and bought £40 worth of cheese and a bottle of Pepsi. Can I eat at your house tonight?” POSTED 9/6/2001 11:45:14 PM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ] Thursday, August 30HOTEL THOUGHTSI've never been in a hotel in my life. It's such a common, mundane thing but I've never experienced it. My only points of reference as far as hotels go are films, books and TV. It seems so familiar to me but I know that all my impressions and expectations are just second hand distillations of the things I've seen or read. In my mind, cheap hotels are like the one in Wild at Heart and every expensive hotel room bears a striking resemblance to those featured in James Bond films. I know I'm wrong but I'm just working with the only information I have. There will certainly be things which surprise me when I finally get to stay in a hotel but I know roughly what to expect: key-card entry systems; single use soap, shampoo and toothpaste; mints on the pillows; an overpriced mini-bar and all the pay-per-view porn a lonely businessman's wrist can handle. I know my first night in a hotel will be a strange experience and that the anonymity and impersonal nature of the room will probably be unsettling. I once read something about staying in hotels that described them as perfectly neutral zones, places where you can lose yourself in the best and worst ways. I’ve been thinking about this because everyone around me - friends, relatives and co-workers - seems to be returning from or leaving on holiday at the moment. They’re spreading out, checking in and chilling out across the globe right now or telling me how wonderful it all was. I’ve heard about rooms in nameless Vancouver dives filled with mysteriously stained sheets and vortexes of flies and I’ve heard about air-conditioned paradises in Singapore. Now I want to hear a hotel story from you. It doesn’t matter whether it’s about random elevator assignations in Europe, underworld encounters in the Far East or a dark night of the soul in the American Mid-West – I want to hear your best hotel story. POSTED 8/30/2001 11:40:46 PM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ] Wednesday, August 29PURITANBefore I go and try to rescue a couple of hours sleep from what's left of this night, here's a rather good H L Mencken quote for you: Puritanism — The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. [ More Mencken can be found here and Bartelby has a huge number of quotes available if you search for his name. ] POSTED 8/29/2001 03:52:05 AM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ] RETURN/COUNTERPOINTI’ve barely touched the net in the last thirteen days apart from the odd hit and run grab on my email. Instead, I’ve been busy back in the real world having something disturbingly similar to a social life. I’ve been hanging out with friends in general and one friend in particular whom I hadn’t seen in around two years. It’s been good and surprisingly it never degenerated into long bouts of reminiscing as usually happens when you haven’t seen someone for such a long time. Rather than go through a chronicle of all the things that have happened since I last posted, I’ll just give you one event. Counterpoint What is the accepted social protocol when you hear you’re neighbours having sex? And, more to the point, what is the accepted social protocol when you hear your friend’s neighbours engaged in what sounds like a championship bout of lovemaking? I was pondering this particular social dilemma on Saturday night as I stood in my friend’s back yard smoking a cigarette around three in the morning. As far as I can tell, there are three possible responses to this situation: 1 sneak quietly back inside the house and wait for them to finish; 2 shout encouraging comments at them in a gruff voiced version of a cheerleading squad; 3 ignore them as far as possible and continue with the conversation you were having before you heard them. Option 1 is the typically pathetic British response when confronted with sex. Christ, sometimes I wonder how we manage to continue as a nation when half the population seems to run a mile if sex is mentioned let alone when they’re confronted with the reality of other people doing it. Anyway, it’s no smoking in my friend’s house so I had to stay outside. Option 2 is just cruel and also distinctly sociopathic in nature. Unexpected audience participation is quite likely to prove distracting and has a high probability of eliciting a violent response. So we continued talking with the sound of fervent rutting acting as a strange counterpoint to our conversation. In the same strange way that a bar will go totally silent the very moment you say something strange or embarrassing, they managed to hit a peak every time the conversation paused. I can’t remember the exact conversation but it went something like this: It wasn’t the best vampire film ever but it wasn’t that bad. The guttural coital moans of my friend’s neighbours are probably the most enthusiastic response that John Carpenter’s Vampires has got to date. On the other side of this social dilemma is the question of what to do when you realise that people are listening to you having sex. Again, there seems to be three courses of action available. You can stop and wait for your audience to go away. Yeah, right – how many people are going to do that? Not many. The one exception is if you realise that it’s your parents who could be listening and then a rather swift shrinking usually makes continuing something of a moot point. Unless you’re a very sick puppy that is. Of course, you have the option to just carry on as you were but the most common response has got to be the third one: play it up for all it’s worth. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re guaranteed to do it at least once. You’ll be there giving it you’re best porn-star vocal performance whilst you both stifle your laughter [“You’re laughing at them, aren’t you honey? Right?”]. Then there's the follow up activity if you've got a repeat listener [ neighbour, college flatmate etc. ] where you and your significant other pretend to be having sex just to wind up your listener, giving it the banging the bed against the wall and full-on porn-star moaning treatment. Then, whilst you trampoline on your bed, you'll catch each other's gaze and share the silent question Why are we pretending to have sex when we could be doing it for real? You know where it goes from there. POSTED 8/29/2001 03:24:53 AM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ] Thursday, August 16WOAH-OH-OH-OH, CAMOUFLAGESome times the world seems to conspire to fuck with me the whole day long. Does anyone remember the pop song Camouflage by Stan Ridgway? Probably not but I do because I’ve had the chorus stuck in my head. I haven’t heard the song in years but I’ve had this: Woah-oh-oh-oh, Camouflage running through my head every five minutes all fucking day for some unknown reason. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been the whole song but it was just this chorus looping over and over in my mind. By mid-afternoon the lyrics had become detached from their original context [ a Vietnam War folk tale ] and had assumed a cross-dressing, well endowed motif. You can find the full lyrics to this 1986 journey into The Twilight Zone here. I left work earlier than usual, having taken a painfully short lunch break, and stood at the wonderfully placed bus stop just outside of my office. I waited patiently, knowing I’d got out the office a few minutes before it left the bus station. I waited some more, guessing it must have got held up in traffic. Then I waited more. Forty five minutes waiting later, having been driven slowly mad by the Camouflage chorus, a bus turns up which is going to my home town. Climbing aboard, I ask the driver if he knows what happened to the earlier bus I wanted to catch. You’re on it he told me. Fuck. It turned out that the legion of cunts which run the bus company had decided it wasn’t necessary to actually give him a bus to drive along the route. Surely that’s a rather basic error to make when running a bus company? They must be related to whatever inbred idiot fuck decided it was a good idea to install super strength heaters on every bus which can’t be turned off except by stopping the engine. Actually, considering the state of the service, that probably wouldn’t impact the timetables a great deal. An hour later I melted my way off the packed bus, having resisted the urge to grab the wheel and end it for all of us when I found my headphones to be irreparably fucked in one ear, and walked to my house, thankful for the one redeeming moment of the day when one of my co-workers decided to buy us all ice-creams. Some days are best written off. POSTED 8/16/2001 12:43:25 AM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ] Tuesday, August 14QUESTIONS PLUS ANSWERS MINUS PURPOSE1 > Open up your CD player, what's inside? 2 > Look in your VCR, is there a movie? 3 > If there happens to be music playing right now, what is it? 4 > What are you wearing? 5 > Look down, what's the first thing that catches your eye? 6 > Turn on your TV if it's not on already, what network is it? 7 > Look out the window, what's the weather like? 8 > If you were to hit redial on your phone right now, where would it call? 9 > Say "hello?" out loud, did anyone answer? 10 > What are you planning on doing next as soon as you get offline? [ via Bob and his itchy pants ] POSTED 8/14/2001 11:24:51 PM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ] VINTAGE LAMPI received a particularly nice email today from Kimberly who is one of two people that run Vintage Lamp, which I would recommend you take the time to visit. The design is really rather good and I found the content particularly endearing, especially the bio pages for Kimberly and Aisleen which are quite amusing. The other thing which is quite surprising is that they're both sixteen years old. I now feel rather old. So, to say it again, go visit their site. If some of the images fail to load when you visit the site, don't blame them because it's not their fault. One of their hosts has a rather weird file accessibility limit in place which means that files may not be available at various times of the day. If you can't get everything to load then go back at a different time of day and things should be fine. POSTED 8/14/2001 11:00:02 PM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ] FANTASISTOn Sunday evening I went to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within with a group of friends. I was cautiously optimistic about the film before seeing it. I knew the animation was amazing from the trailers and it really delivered throughout the film. There were some incredible scenes and several moments when you have to remind yourself that you’re looking at computer graphics. The one concern I’d had about the film before I went to see it was how well the Final Fantasy creative team could make the switch from writing game plots to film plots. For me, the film’s plot felt slightly constrained and left me with the sense that the creative team wanted to let loose but were unable to because of the time limitations. The Final Fantasy series is well known in the gaming world for its epic storylines and it was quite surprising to see its creative team produce something so straight forward and, being honest, average. I never expected a storyline on the same epic scale as the games but I had expected something with a little more depth and character development. If you’ve played the games then you’ll understand me when I say it was like coming in on the story just before starting the final disc. Despite this, I would still recommend seeing the film. The plot wasn’t awful and it compares quite favourably with many blockbuster Hollywood action/adventure films. If you go see it in that context then you should have a good time. You should make the effort to see it in the cinema because it really makes the quality of the animation stand out. Watching it at home will just give you the weird sensation of watching a really long cut-scene from a computer game. [ Look, I know this isn’t the best film review ever written but at least I managed to steer clear from the obvious jokes linking the film’s title and the fact that we all went for drinks afterwards. ] POSTED 8/14/2001 12:40:59 AM BY PAUL [ LINK ] [ COMMENT VIA EMAIL ]
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