Category: Random

Now with permalinks. I have been resisting this trend for quite some time now, because it would expose my weird habit of continually adding to an individual entry. I have used this technique to keep a certain amount of logical flow on a page, and to keep important entries that I make in a day right up at the top. But now, alas, no longer. The other reason I have resisted these things is that I have this horrible feeling that barbelith is beginning to look cluttered. Things are just not where they are supposed to be, and there is too much colour pollution in my beautiful serene web/site/pool. But hey. That’s a matter for another day…

Come on now kids, play nice…

Does anyone want to buy me a computer? In my two months of homelessness, I have used net cafe computers only. And now I finally set up my own computer and it seems like I have stepped back about eight years in time. I don’t think I can handle it. The most terrifying thing about it is how much I dislike it being a PC. I have been a PC user for nearly ten years now. TEN YEARS. I made all those Mac jokes about how they were crappy and shoddy and boring and pointless and ugly. And now I find myself desperately pining for the sexiest G4 on the planet. I mean just look at it. I can’t stop drooling!

It worked for k10k.net – they’ve got Apple sponsorship – so why can’t it work for me? I’m a shameless prostitute. I’ll have myself tattooed with the Apple insignia. I’ll do anything, goddammit… So this is a blanket call to the world out there: –

Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me an Apple G4
My friends all have PCs
I don’t know what for

I’ve built many websites
But now I’m in awe
Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me An Apple G4

God! I finally took the emode “What is your true colour” test that has been cycling around the blogs, and it came out with this, which is a bit of coincidence if you ask me:

“Vibrant and charming, ORANGE is the color of your personality.”

New blogs proliferate like some form of weird fungal infection on the net. There never seems to be an end to it (good). And along with blogs come blogmemes – viral ideas attached to the fungal media produced by relatively disease free human beings. The blogmeme of the moment is a design feature – the dotted-line. After the relative success of barbelith orange, I will come out and say that dotted lines will be the only thing to be seen in this summer. That’s so a good look…

My comments about language (yesterday) seem to be echoing around the net with some speed. In the course of the day I have written a very apologetic e-mail to Tracy for using her as a launch-pad for what is clearly a much larger rant, been chastised for criticising American culture as low-brow (never my intention), been introduced to the regional variations of dialect in Newfoundland, been agreed with by a New Zealander and told I am naive by someone else. Here’s a selection of the best comments that have emerged in response to my ravings:

Matthew Rossi: “When you just assume the rest of the world exists to become more like you, you don’t need to worry about things like [culture]. America is a monster. A bastard born out of deformed magecraft and naked opportunism, it rolls over other national identities like the Cohort of Julius Caesar meeting Vercingtorix. Bastard confident, a great big engine that chews up shit and blood and hate and spits it out all over the landscape.”

Prolific: “I was taught by mostly Brits and Americans in a teacher training college in Utrecht. Oddly, there were none of the ‘my English is better than yours’ vibes there, perhaps because these were language teachers. We were told ‘adopt an accent, any accent, be it American, English, Welsh or Irish. It will help you sound more convincing.'”

Kitsch Bitsch: “I can most wholeheartedly agree with Tom when he says that the worldwide awareness of American vernacular far excedes the average American’s awareness of regional versions of the language.”

Daily Doozer: “I don’t want to get into a nasty argument about cultural imperialism and the proliferation of American media. I don’t want, particularly, to talk about any perceived or real damaging societal effects. Personally, I think that at the moment I’m a typical student and I’ve completely lost faith in capitalism (and it’s probably a phase I’ll go through before I become a corporate lawyer).”

LEWD, the London Elite Weblogging Detachment that I alluded to a few days ago is beginning to come together. Or at least it seems likely that it is – people seem to have been rather flummoxed by my complete lack of contact details. Sorry to not so soft, LEWD blog #1. Daily Doozer is also trying to start some kind of IRL weblogger meeting, which I am more than up for. Perhaps it can become the basis for WXW1 (West by West One), Katy’s idea to compete with those American chappies and their SXSW.

Dull weblogger? Take a life altering pill and become more vibrant and throbbing. Continuity.nu was the only site that picked up on my challenge to spice up a blog, and even then, well:

“There are a few [weblogs] that are genuinely dull.” Thanks, Tom. Webloggers all over the world are now thinking, gosh, I hope I’m not dull.

Just for fun, and because I am terribly proud of (most of) them, here are a few buttons I recently designed for timeout.com:

Oh and one last thing! Mark! What on earth are you talking about?

“I had a randon ICQ message the other day, asking me what kind of shampoo I use. Stupid question, right? But the more I’ve thought about it, the less stupid it became. I *KNOW* people by their scent. If Tom was to use Herbal Essence instead of my suspected Head and Shoulders, he’d be a totally different man than I thought him to be.”

The scariest thing is that I actually don’t even know what shampoo I use. At the moment I am stealing odds and ends off my flatmates. That could mean anything. Particularly as I don’t have a sense of smell. I could be dousing myself in a great big girlie “flowers and ponies” kind of shampoo. Ick. Gross. Note to self: Go To Boots. Buy Shampoo. And Shaving Cream. And Light-Bulbs.

Referrer logs reveal that yesterday, Barbelith was visited by 666 people. This unholy convergence of number and anti-establishment content leads me to conclude that I must be the anti-Christ. This is quite frustrating as I have enough to do already. I just don’t have the time. I am going to a wedding tomorrow (working on the assumption that at some point ever I will get my arse in gear and organise it). In the meantime I have to organise a working phone system, the disposal of two double beds, the repair of a boiler and the installation of cable television. Bringing about apocalypse will just have to wait a little longer…

There aren’t that many weblogs talking about the riots in London on May Day. I had decided initially not to talk about them (I thought everyone would be at it), but as time has passed I find the subject more and more interesting. I would love to see more commentary from people though – if anyone sees anything good, e-mail me on tom@no-spam-please-barbelith.com. In the meantime, read other webloggers: KitschBitch, BlueLines, Grim, Blorg and Ed’s Weblog.

I’ve had a few comments about my post yesterday about the daubing of the Cenotaph. They tend to say that there are legitmate targets for protest who have transgressed morally (one person included Churchill in that list) and non-legitmate targets which include the Cenotaph. I have been thinking about this at length and I have come to a few conclusions.

• Morality
  If one can make moral choices about who we wish to protest against, then some people will think the Cenotaph is a legitimate target. If we can understand that they might decide that it is such a target then we can’t be horrified when these sentiments become actions. You can make moral statements about the war, the glorification of people who die for state sanctioned causes, the ascription of moral superiority to one side or the other etc etc etc. Let’s take this argument to it’s most (ludicrously) extreme to see if the need for a symbol of mourning for people can ever be “desecrecrated” in a moral fashion. If there was a monument in Trafalgar Square for SS Officers and Hitler then people would feel totally justified in putting graffiti on it. But these officers died too, often for a cause that they believed in and in which we don’t.

• Glorification of War
  One person who e-mailed me talked about how the Cenotaph was as much a symbol of the futility of war as one could reasonably hope for. I’m just not sure that I agree with that. Does a war movie in which everyone dies doing something “heroic” make a statement about the futility of war? The Cenotaph seems to me to be as much a way to make a political war movie as it is about commemorating the people who actually died. In fact – I doubt that it is possible to do one without the other.

• Why these things happen
  But all this, as far as I can tell is off the point. As I said yesterday – I wonder how many of the demonstrators were actually trying to make a point like this. I suspect remarkably few of them. Instead I think that they wanted to stick two fingers up at the world. I want you to try to imagine that you are a middle class parent living in a semi-detached house with your wife somewhere comfortable but dull (like Norwich). Now your child is starting to rebel, she’s horrified by the uninspiring paths that she sees her life evolving into – the world that she lives in is designed to make things easier, more comfortable, less challenging and totally unthreathening. So she starts to shoplift, vandalise telephone boxes, experiment with dubious substances. WHAT DO YOU DO? Do you spank her, punish her, call her filthy names and throw her out of your house? Of course not. You want to find a way for her to achieve what she wants from life, to find the happiness, the stimulation, that she needs. “Staying Out Of Trouble” is no longer a suitable lifestyle choice.

• Informed Objection
  And that is where this whole idea of informed objection collapses. There are more frustrated people in the world than there are political ones. There are more crushed aspirations than there are passionate politicians. And the girl who aspires to doing SOMETHING (ANYTHING) knows very well that at some level, at some times, the battle is more against the structure that says “this is right”, “this is wrong” than it is against either the right or the wrong things themselves…

A blog based around Haiku? Who would have thought such a thing was possible. Haiku the Blog proves that it is. I’ve been quite bored today, so I have been trying to remember an haiku that an old flatmate of mine and I wrote a few years back. We were awfully proud of it:

Waiting is a game
Not a very good one though
Like Monopoly

In Cluedo they die
Like in Agatha Christie
But not of boredom

And lo did the Onion say something very funny, and verily did I blog it:

Clinton Consults Surgeon General On Behalf Of Friend Curious About Homosexuality
WASHINGTON, DC–President Clinton spent several hours behind closed doors Monday with Surgeon General David Satcher on behalf of an unidentified friend who is curious about homosexuality. “As a favor, this friend of mine asked me to ask the Surgeon General a few questions,” Clinton said. “This person said he’s had some funny new feelings lately, feelings he doesn’t feel comfortable talking about, so he was hoping I could ask for him.” Clinton said Satcher assured him that the feelings his friend is having are “completely natural.”

Katy has been talking about the Anti-Capitalist Riots that happened in London on May Day:

“I don’t think even the sensationalist news reports quite prepared me for what I saw:essentially the aftermath of pure carnage. I’d expected to see looted shops, broken glass, and a lot of mess, but it really was shocking to see the Cenotaph, a memorial to Britain’s war-dead, daubed with graffiti. I’m all for free speech, and I think demonstrations can be very effective when they’re conducted well – but the desecration of these commemorative landmarks just revolted me.”

I’ve been thinking about this since the events actually took place, and although I have yet to wander around the areas concerned, my feelings on the event and its aftermath in the press are anything but clear.

I saw a piece in The Sun today which suggested that a vote for Ken Livingstone was a vote for “THEM” (them being the people who “defaced” the Cenotaph). I saw the word “EVIL” bandied around in a couple of places as well, and a general horror of people not honouring the honoured dead of our country – the same “evil” people who gave us Churchill with a green mohican, and who daubed comments on the memorials of people who gave their lives in World Wars.

But what actually is the problem? Is it that they parodied Churchill? Is it that they don’t appear to care about “war heroes”? Because if this was written down and placed in a magazine or on a website people wouldn’t get anywhere near as irritated. Is it then just property damage? It doesn’t appear to be that either, because you don’t see any news reports focusing on how evil you must be to deface a MacDonalds.

Instead it seems that people have invested a symbolic value in the objects themselves – the Cenotaph and the statue – that these material products are the actual feelings of a country made manifest – turned into stone. But is that really such a big deal? Is it really any more appalling than writing anti-war statements on a phone box?

As I said – I can’t make up my mind – I just don’t know what I think about it. But one thing seems clear to me. Many (most? all?) of these people aren’t protesting about capitalism. They’re not aiming towards a more noble ideal (Communism? Socialism? Social Democracy? Liberal Democracy? Anarchy?) – instead they are products of a dissatisfaction with the way contemporary society limits and belittles the individual.

Their protest is a reason unto itself – an expression of freedom. It’s an aggressive freedom certainly, a non-communitarian freedom probably, even (possibly) an unworkable, impractical, EVIL freedom – but it’s freedom nonetheless. It’s punk with a cover-story, rebellion with a pseudo-cause. And such spirits will continue to erupt, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.