Toy of the morning is labs.google.com, which is where the arch search engine appears to test out all kinds of natty little gizmos that it hasn’t fully developed yet. My favourite toy is Google Sets – where you type in a few words and it tries to guess other things that belong in that set. For Example: You type in ‘Tony Blair’ and ‘George Bush’ and you get back Yasser Arafat, Russell Crow and Tiger Woods. That would be the set of ‘publicity hungry people’ then…
I may have a flat. This is tremendous news. It’s a little place in Maida Vale for one person. It’s got a little sitting room. It’s got a little bathroom. It’s got a little kitchen. It’s got quite a big bathroom. I’m just waiting for my references to go through, and if they do go through then I can move in next Saturday.
A cheer for the Rebels? A hiss for the Empire? Perhaps no more. Perhaps no longer.
Ten things you could do at 1am to stop you being bored (dedicated to James Cronin):
An endless amount of work awaits me in Marylebone, but I can’t go in until I’ve heard about whether man and wife flat-stealers have declared their endless love for my little flat around the corner. If they’ve bailed then it’s all mine. Mine, I tells ya. Otherwise…. So all the work in the world will have to wait just a few more minutes. Maybe half an hour or so. And in the meantime I’ll stay here and play with my OSX mini-app of the day: World Clock Deluxe
So I decide to put an offer on a flat and everything seems to be fine, and then the woman rings up and says that she got it wrong and the place had an offer put on it yesterday afternoon and that they might go for it instead and it’s very frustrating and at times like this I think mind may well snap.
I’m up, showered and on the net by eight am. I was awake before seven. And I don’t have to be at work before one. Why am I up? Because I’m nervous. Why am I nervous? Because I’m going to have to commit to a flat. Why does that worry me? Because I haven’t finalised a job yet. Why have I not finalised the job yet? Because I’m being pulled in two directions at once, and each day the pull from one direction or the other seems to increase or slacken off.
Today on Barbelith, Fortunate Son: In 1999, James Hatfield’s book, Fortunate Son was published and almost immediately taken off the shelves amid revelations that its author had once been imprisoned for attempting to hire a hit-man. The book, amongst other things, alleges that George Bush Senior arranged to have his son’s conviction for cocaine possession expunged from the records. In May 2001, a month after Fortunate Son was republished, Hatfield’s body was found in a hotel room. What is the story behind the story of Fortunate Son? Gavin MacDonald investigates.
Thought of the day: Careless writing costs blog-readers. Is there such a thing as acceptable losses? Can you reclaim a site for your own idling agenda after it’s gone so completely mainstream?
So I went to see Star Wars this afternoon with Cal and Nick and frankly we were very impressed. That’s not to say we couldn’t gripe – because god knows we could – the dialogue is as bad as it is in all the other films, the plot (such as it is) is swamped by episodic diversions, some of the characters aren’t doing what they should be doing (when did Obi Wan get so bloody lame and were Mandalorian Warriors all as naff as Jango Fett) and the whole thing could have been twenty minutes shorter (and each individual episode within it – particularly the battle scenes could have been correspondingly shorter as well). But despite all this, it was really not a bad film at all.
Of course the horror of the event is that before it had even started the nostalgia kicks in. You think you’re going to be immune, but you’re there in the cinema and the 20th Century Fox drum-rolls sound and then the Star Wars music kicks in and the logo appears and you’re ten again, Star Wars forcibly inserted into your DNA – your reactions as formulaic and robotic as if you were a puppet on a string. Which a lot of men around my age must feel like to be honest. And as you sit there, you’re always overwhelmed by hope, expecting it to be shit but unable to accept that it will be.
But even stripped of decades of obsessive love, this is still a film that you can actually enjoy. There’s action and drama and interesting and well-designed aliens and a real look and feel that inspire you to want to believe, and much less offensive ethnic stereotyping and a few (mostly but not exclusively ill-judged) jokes and Yoda…. Well, Yoda kicks butt…