Category: Random

So by way of a change of pace, here are some pictures of mountains and clouds. They were taken (much like last year) from the plane from the UK to California.

Another unexpected joy of this trip so far is the unfettered bad-quality weblogging I’m doing. I’m using the site as a jotting diary of my time here, and I’m dropping in all these little references to things that will hopefully make it easier to remember what happened in years to come. I’m not worrying too much about sentence construction, I’m not fussing over the shape of an argument or anything like that – and as a result this feels the most fun it has in a couple of years. I don’t know how useful it is of course, but it’s definitely nice to have a beak from more serious industry-related writing. Assuming anyone will want me back when I’m done, of course…

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Dan Hill about clothes. My contention – that everyone in the world should wear the same clothes because then we’d stop making spurious assertions about people’s integrity and value on the basis of what bloody T-shirt they wore. My other contention – no adult human being needs any more than two pairs of shoes and those that claim otherwise are in some way mentally depraved.

This latter story – such as it is – is relevant for two reasons. Firstly because I tried to buy some clothes today and secondly because I tried to buy some shoes today. I was unsuccessful on both counts. The shoes that I needed to replace last year at ETCon are still firmly on my feet. And I have no new clothes of any sort. I do however have an enormous pile of stuff from the Apple Store and a desperate salivating urge to go back and blow another £200 on a new iPod. I only wish I could claim surprise at this turn of events…

The other great thing that happened today was that I got to have lunch with Christopher from filchyboy / chronotope / safer sex. We went to a little Mexican place where they fed us about five tons of food for about twenty pence and talked about familial relationships, children, expectations, socialising and meeting people through the internet. Altogether a very pleasant couple of hours that I look forward to repeating at some point in the future.

The only bad news (other than me cleaning out Apple of course) was that I was supposed to go with Kerry to the Viper Rooms this evening, but am too bloody tired to move out of my comfy chair. So – more likely – I shall instead mess around with Garageband for a couple of hours and then have an early night…

So I’m being churlish of course – you give a taxi-driver a written-down address on a piece of paper and you would of course expect them not to have heard of the large region of Los Angeles where things like the Sony Pictures Lot are located. I mean you’d obviously expect that right? That would be normal. And then you’d expect them to spend about ten minutes while driving very slowly typing the address into their GPS / map thingy while looking confused. And then of course you’d also expect them not to be able to read an American address and take you to completely the wrong place. And then – of course – you’d expect them to bitch not-so-very-quietly to themselves about how you actually told them to go to the wrong place and that it wasn’t their fault, when in fact all you did was give them the bloody address written down on a piece of paper and frantically gesture at it while saying, “This is where I’d like to go please! Thank you very very much!” And then you’d expect to get into a huge row with them in which you say, “For God’s sake, you ludicrous man! I gave you the bloody addres on a piece of bloody paper. The address was written down by an American. It’s written in exactly the format and style that you’d expect it to be in. It’s even in a large bloody font! So why the hell are you shouting at me about giving you the wrong bloody address!”

And then – of course – you’d expect to still pay then $50 for a $20 cab fare because it simply wouldn’t occur to you that when a cab driver made an obvious mistake they’d still expect you to pay for the whole journey and not apologise or anything. And of course you’d give them a tip. Because it would be rude not to…

Anyway… Little taxi-bastards aside, Los Angeles is already proving tremendously good fun. At this point, I’ve done very little though – just spent a little time hanging around with Kerry, had beer and tequila in his office and watched the 100th episode of Angel. Shortly we’re going to visit his ex, Sean, and at that point we shall have Tacos. Everything over here remains kind of beautiful and kind of monstrously tacky at the same time, but at least there’s lots of sky, which matters to me. The flight was – unsurprisingly – good for sky, and we went over Iceland and Greenland again and just like last year I took far far too many pictures of the ice-flows, mountains and seas.

But the most important thing of all is that I’m not in bloody London! I can already feel my frantic and jellied-up brain shudder a little and let out the tiniest little gasp of relief. Should Kerry actually permit me to sleep at some point during the next few days I should be nicely fresh for ETCon. In the meantime, in my few remaining off-moments, I plot the death of taxi drivers and think about visiting the Apple store…

Looking at my passport photo, I’m suddenly gripped with a fear that they won’t let me into the country, followed by a massive burst of misery at how badly I seem to have decayed over the last five years, followed by a massive sense of my own mortality and of the inevitable and steady decay that I can expect until death. God I’m depressed.

One more day of work. One more day and then I’m off… Off to Los Angeles for a few days of R&R before ETCon starts. I can hardly wait. I had to wave goodbye to Mr Webb today, who’s flying off one day before me, and it nearly killed me. I don’t leave the country enough, I think. And I certainly don’t have enough adventures. So excited I might actually burst. PS. If any LA webloggers would like to meet up at short-notice and/or any companies/organisations are interested in having a chat around social software / personal publishing stuff, then feel free to e-mail on the usual address – tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org or leave a comment below.

By the way, just in case you’re surprised by how cheerful and non-violent I appear to be about the current political / BBC situation, rest assured that it’s all a big act but that I don’t really think I can write about it while I work for them. That is all. Move along.

Brief one this: So I’m watching Contact on television and there’s an advert for Pantene shampoo. And the voice comes on – the deep pounding “buy me” voice of the professional voice-over artist – and he says ,”Pantene makes your hair not just once – but twice as shiny!” Can you imagine that? Can you imagine how awesome that must be? I mean something that makes your hair once as shiny is clearly pretty good (given how important the advert made it sound), but this is way way beyond once! This is like twice! That’s like once as shiny two times over!

Can someone explain to me how an advert can present “once as shiny” as somehow something pretty awesome that only Pantene can beat? I mean, wouldn’t hair naturally be once as shiny? If it wasn’t – that would be a problem, wouldn’ t it? I mean if your shampoo made your hair 90% as shiny, then wouldn’t it gradually and eventually decrease in shininess every time you washed it? Wouldn’t it eventually come to absorb all light? Maybe that does happen in very poor places where they can’t afford proper almost-once-as-shiny-making shampoo. God how confusing that must be for people at night. It would hurt your eyes eventually, wouldn’t it? And wouldn’t it make people’s heads really really hot after a while? Frankly the thought’s so scary that I’m now scrabbling around for a shampoo that guarantees me precisely 100% normal shininess and not a single millionth of a percentage either way. If it’s not precisely once as shiny, I don’t think I want to go near it…

Font for post-its remains Coates.ttf as made with Fontifier.

This will only mean anything to readers in the UK, and only cinema-going readers at that. Just before the trailers are shown at Odeon cinemas there is often an ident designed to get you into the filmgoing spirit. This advert resembles an explosion of what appear to be out of focus sparks or fireworks. It’s pretty cool. I can now tell the world that the music that accompanies it – music which always gets Cal and I wiggling along approvingly – is by Pete Rodriguez and is called “I Like It (I Like it Like That)”. The song can be found on this album and no doubt is circulating on various peer-to-peer networks. I thank you.