So how the fuck do you find a flat in London that isn’t stupidly expensive. I mean seriously. How the fuck? I’m sorry to resort to swearing but I’m already sick of this process and it already feels like it’s completely not ever going to happen and I’m going to be destitute and miserable. I’m so angry I could kill everyone in the world.
Two things I love about my Apple products. 1) I can wake my computer from sleep and after a few hours I can ask, I wonder how long it’s been since I rebooted my baby… And I can check by going to Terminal and typing ‘uptime’ and it tells me: 12:40AM up 6 days, 15:17, 2 users, load averages: 2.52, 2.67, 2.53. Six days. That’s really nice. First OS I’ve ever had that could make a claim like that. 2) Because today for the very first time I pressed the central button on my ipod while a song was playing and suddenly realised that you can easily skip to any point in the track you’re on just by using the jog wheel. I bet everyone else knew that. But still. It’s really cool.
It’s at times like this when you really wish you had a digital camera. I went to see a flat today in Mornington Crescent with a friend of mine, and was so horrified and depressed by what I saw that I needed an extremely stiff vodka and tonic. Imagine a room ten feet by twelve feet on the top floor of a crumbling building where not even the banisters are stable enough for you to put any weight on. Stick a bed in this room. Give it a view over the back of some crumbling estate. Add low ceilings, a bathroom big enough to fit a bath in, which they apparently did in the thirties and a kitchen that fits into a cupboard. Imagine the most depressing site you’ve ever seen in your life.
I’ve lived in a lot of places in my life. Some haven’t had paint on the walls, some have had damp walls behind the bed. But none have been as soul-destroying as this place. There’s no way I could do it. And this is where we find ourselves – in a world where people in London have to be earning forty or fifty thousand pounds a year before they can afford to get a mortgage and where the average wage in London is around half that. And where you pay over £500 a month for the privilege of living in a hole in the ground.
How come I keep seeing adverts for flats suitable for single women and none that are suitable for single men? And even when they’re not specified as such, how come I keep getting told when I ring up the landlords, “No, sorry, it’s for single women only,” with a tone of voice that suggests that if I ring again, they’ll call the police…?
The lady at the hairdressers yesterday said that the receeding temples look was really hot at the moment and that all the young guys were having their heads shaved in that pattern. But I think she might have been humouring me.
An e-mail I sent to Channel 4:
Dear Channel 4,
I watched “The Truth about
Gay
Animals” and frankly I was appalled. I’m a gay man in my late twenties
and I
was actually looking forward to the program, but it turned out to be
the
worst kind of rubbish I’d ever seen. It completely disgusted me. The
fact is
that there’s a really important issue there. It’s all to do with
whether or
not homosexuality is perceived as something that happens in nature or
whether it’s a purely human thing – a thing of choice, of ‘morality’
rather
than something that happens cross-species.
It may be a facetious thing to have to argue, but a lot of people
around the
world still believe that homosexuality is an unnatural practice
perpetrated
by the godless and the evil. Whether or not there is any evidence for
different sexualities in other species cuts over issues of sexuality,
issues
of morality, issues of genetics, issues of society, prejudices of
science.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Scott Capuro in my eyes looked all the way through it like he was bored
and
frustrated out of his mind and spent a good proportion of his time
being
cruel to people from previous generations who were taught that gay
people
were disgusting and evil. The people he was being cruel to – although I
think personally that they should probably know better – were
nonetheless
clearly trying to be as nice as they could, even though they clearly
felt
uncomfortable.
I was actually EXCITED by the prospect of this program, that it was on
at
all! I thought it would be an interesting insight into scientific
prejudice,
origins of sexuality and the like AND have a few laughs in it. All in
all
the best kind of documentary. But in the end, I turned off about 2/3rds
of
the way through in disgust. There was NOTHING to redeem it in the parts
I
saw. And I was essentially offended by it. I have even written to
Channel 4
to complain! I mean – I love Channel Four!
But this made Channel 5 look enlightened.
The debate continues… Which is the side to be on? Is it Ninja or Pirate?
What happens when the Plastic Bag is finally consigned to history’s landfill. Will the world’s antipathy have been rained down on it so hard that the name itself will live through history in infamy? In which case – excellent – no problems there – I can keep the domain name cheerfully! But what if it becomes a name lost in history? What if in two years time no one has even heard of them. People forget so quickly. I know – after all the barbelith was a perfectly cromulent word for ‘happy fun place’ merely three weeks ago… But today, no one has the slightest idea what it means…
I don’t know what’s more terrifying frankly – that the European Union are considering an eye-bleeding new logo to represent themselves with, or that the logo resembles almost exactly an eye-bleeding site I’ve just built for the BBC‘s intranet… [also BBC News]
So what will be in the next release of OSX? A build-in chat app for one (although I’m not sure that’s strictly useful any more), SMS-messaging via Bluetooth phones, a map interface to Sherlock, AI-based spam filtering in the Mail app, an upgrade to Quartz to speed up rendering times. Plus – spring-loaded folders, graphics-tablet functionality, network software, Quicktime 6…. I’m drooling already…