Category: Random

According to a TV show I’ve just been watching, the Beatles’ song “And Your Bird Can Sing” was a dig at Mick Jagger’s relationship with Marianne Faithful. If it’s true, it’s too wonderful for words – and has completely reinvigorated that song for me. But although it’s extremely entertaining, I can find no evidence for it on the internet. Please let it be true… Please!

Tell me that you’ve got everything you want
And your bird can sing
But you don’t get me
You don’t get me

You say you’ve seen seven wonders
And your bird is green
But you can’t see me
You can’t see me

When your prized possessions
Start to wear you down
Look in my direction
I’ll be round, I’ll be round

When your bird is broken
Will it bring you down?
You may be awoken
I’ll be round, I’ll be round

You tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is
And your bird can swing
But you can’t hear me
You can’t hear me

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… If you’re cold and you are shamed, lying naked on the floor, then bloody get up and put some clothes on. I have a sneaking feeling that might help things a little…

Pub-rock kittens sing Independent Woman – another meisterwerk by Joel Veitch. The kittens have previously performed such epics as Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, Fell in Love With a Girl by the White Stripes and John B’s We Like the Music. Kittenmania sweeps the globe…

For the last two or three years, I’ve had Wired.com as my default homepage. I find that I glance through the main articles every time I open a browser window, and that this keeps me essentially up to date with most of the must-know goings-on in tech, net and science news. I never buy the magazine. I’ve cited the site as an example of the very clearest web production, with unobtrusive branding, clearly formatted articles and a good sense of how to write for the web.

None of this is likely to change… but despite their redesign, not because of it. That’s not to say that it’s bad – because it’s not. And when all the errors around the place were fixed (the permanent horizontal scroll-bar on Mac IE 5 that is the consequence of a 100% width div, the frequent SSI errors, the weirdly formatted advertisement tag that you can’t quite tell is intentional or not), then it’ll look classy and will be fairly usable.

But there’s still stuff that seems strange. We’re still stuck with the bloody terralycos bar, which looked roughly out of place on the old design and looks mind numbingly terrible on the new one. There’s major navigation / advertising creep, pushing the content full feet down the page. The colour scheme – ice blue, black, white and lime – screams retro-tech, but it also screams ‘cheap use of the colour-invert feature in Photoshop’. The advert, which has grown inhumanly large, sits really uncomfortably on the page.

And most importantly, the place where they put the actual content seems to have been shrunk and de-emphasised radically – with all the emphasis (and an unnecessary amount of space) dedicated to the fluffier aspects of the site. A more cynical man might connect that change of emphasis with the incredibly limited amount of articles currently on display…

A few days ago I was startled by this chart of homocide and suicide statistics across the world. It’s a surprisingly difficult chart to interpret – the disparities between regions are extraordinarily large and only really lend themselves to suggestions of massive cultural difference.

For example, in the Americas for every 100,000 deaths – 19 are homicides and eight are suicides. In Europe, on the other hand it’s the opposite story – many less homicides (eight) and many more suicides (19). The Western Pacific and Australia is littered with suicides but has an almost non-existent homicide rate, and it seems that the Eastern Mediterranean is the least violent place to live – less than thirteen people out of every thousand die violent deaths – from both suicide and homicide. And men world-wide are more likely than women to die both at their own hands and at the hands of others.

But where are such differences coming from? Is the lack of homicides in Europe an effect of strong gun laws? And if so what is the reason for the high suicide rate? Is it a factor of comparative comfort of living or is it instead that those who die from homicide in the UK would find themselves pursuing a violent death in the US?

I had lunch with Cal, which isn’t unusual. I’m always having lunch with Cal. Like almost every day. Today – on the way back to the office – we saw poster after poster for filmic obsession Donnie Darko – flyposters, mainly. I peeled it from the side of a phone booth and stuck it on my chest as we walked down the street. It’s by my desk now.

I’m so excited I may well burst. The net’s full of Darkorama at the moment – from the thread on Barbelith. to the audiogalaxy article, right through to the find out which Donnie Darko character you are quiz. I should get paid for the amount of promotion I’m doing for this film. If you’re out there 20th Century Fox, I still really need an iBook.

And four days after I e-mailed pretty much everyone at Salon about the appalling lack of journalistic skill evident in the repeated mis-spelling of “Labour” (the political party, not the noun) in their transcript of Bill Clinton’s speech in Blackpool, they still haven’t fixed it. Here are some examples again:

“Bill Clinton electrifies a British Labor Party conference with a more sweeping vision for global peace and progress than the current president has been able to muster.”

“Former President Bill Clinton delivered the following remarks before the Labor Party Conference in Blackpool, England, on Wednesday.”

“New Labor, this government, has not allowed that dichotomy to occur in Great Britain. “

But if you look carefully, someone’s got it right in the caption of the image at the top of the page – “Former President Clinton speaks at the Labour Party annual conference in Blackpool, England, Wednesday”. If you would like to remind the news team of Salon that basic fact-checking remains an important part of their jobs, then feel free to e-mail: news@salon.com, Joan Walsh, Ed Lempinen, Eric Boehlert, King Kaufman or Michelle Goldberg.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to know precisely which Members of Parliament didn’t bother to respond to their constituents? Like – say you ran a service that helped people fax their MP, and you added a feature that let people say if they’d had any response fourteen days afterwards… And then you collated it into a big table of performance data? And then you found Iain Duncan Smith, Peter Mandelson and Boris Johnson at the bottom of it? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Empire reviews Donnie Darko: “On a shadowy, non-existent street in Weirdsville, USA, first-time writer-director Richard Kelly lives next door to David Lynch and Greg Araki. In order to keep up with the neighbours, he has crafted his own magnificently bizarre hybrid of suburban paranoia and apocalyptic teen angst… Although this feature debut is a little lighter and less artfully obscure than David Lynch’s best work, Donnie Darko is nevertheless a mini-masterpiece that marks the arrival of brave new talents in Gyllenhaal and Kelly. Cult glory surely beckons. Five Stars.”

The TV show’s up before the site is, although it seems the site is appearing before my eyes. I’ve only watched about half an hour of it – I mean, proper television came on and I had to turn over. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, Fame Academy has come to television. And already I have a favourite, Ainslie is a fluffy little star in the making. Although he can’t dance for shit.