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An afternoon's MP3 playlist: Michael

An afternoon’s MP3 playlist:

Michael Jackson – “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough”, B*Witched – “Hey Mickey”, Jamiroquai – “Deeper Underground”, Britney Spears – “Oops! I did it again”, David Bowie – “Boys Keep Swinging”, Grace Jones – “Pull Up To The Bumper”, Death in Vegas – “Dirge”, Lauren Hill – “Doo Wop (That Thing)”, PJ Harvey – “Good Fortune”, Tom Jones & Stereophonics – “Mama Told Me Not To Come”, Menswear – “Daydreamer”, Ben Folds – “Rockin’ the Suburbs”, EMF – “Unbelievable”, Limp Bizkit – “Rollin'”, Madonna – “Music”, David Bowie – “Let’s Dance”, Depeche Mode – “I Feel Loved”, Prince – “Raspberry Beret”, Nancy Sinatra – “These Boots Were Made For Walkin'”, Daft Punk – “Superheroes”, Charlatans – “Love is the Key”, Daft Punk – “Da Funk”, David Bowie – “Modern Love”, Ike and Tina Turner – “Nutbush City Limits”, Spice Girls – “Who do you think you are?”, Dockers – “To Vuo Fo L’Americano”, S Club 7 – “Don’t Stop Movin'”, New Order – “Blue Monday 88”, Weezer – “Crab”, Hole – “Awful”, Salt n Pepa – “Push It”, ABBA – “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”, Primitives – “Crash”, Death in Vegas – “Aisha”, Blondie – “Maria”, Smiths – “How Soon is Now?”, Destiny’s Child – “Bootylicious”.

Now answer me this – am I a cool hipster with a hint of trash or a trash glamster with a touch of cool? I can’t decide, I really can’t….

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More evidence, if evidence were

More evidence, if evidence were needed that Metafilter’s Matt Haughey is a god among men.

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Religion

God as plot device…

One of the more interesting quizzes I’ve taken recently examines the logical consistency of one’s beliefs about god. I’m a staunch atheist, and have been for over fifteen years now. My ideas consolidated around the time I was Christened in fact – essentially against my will at the late age of thirteen.

To me ‘god’ seems such an implausible idea – like a spacial anomaly in Star Trek – something that fulfils a plot function, but seems a bit of a cliché the three-thousandth time it’s used to explain why something unexpected happens. People have so much need for a god figure to provide a sense of purpose to life. I don’t know if I’m happier for not having a purpose – but I don’t think I could have any self-respect if I secretly believed my purpose was a placebo but went along with it anyway.

The quiz tells me that I’m essentially very consistent in my views about god. In fact it only criticises me in one area – and I actually think it’s wrong to do so. The quiz told me, “You’ve taken a direct hit! You said earlier that God doesn’t exist and you claimed that if she does not exist there is no basis for morality. Therefore, you are committed to the view that there is no basis for morality. But now you say that torturing innocent people is morally wrong. But if there is no basis for morality, then you cannot rationally say of any act that it is morally wrong.”

It seems to me that morality is a more noble achievement if it is wrought than if it is given. Just because there is no one to judge us at the end of our lives, does not mean that we don’t feel the need to be judged? And if there are standards to judge us by – even standards we just decide to judge ourselves by – then does it matter where they come from? … whether they come from biology, or from society’s inculcation of belief, or from the spread of virulent memes. As long as we’ve fought to clarify our beliefs, as long as we haven’t simply believed what we have been told, as long as we’ve struggled for consistency and clarity and to do what we believe to be best, then why can’t we call that a man-made morality to be proud of – and not less proud of because it’s in defiance of a godless, arbitrary universe – but more proud that we have been able to create meaning of some kind for ourselves in the midst of total darkness.

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On Thursday night I went

On Thursday night I went to see Ocean’s Eleven. The film is amazing, Don Cheadle‘s accent is offensively bad. The whole cinema groaned whenever he came on. First “The Limey” and now this… What did England ever do to Steven Soderbergh!?

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History

A brief history of the Western World…

One day Mesopotamia is assembled out of bits of twig and mud. It is one of the first places we see the ‘Indo-European’ language group that will split off into India and Europe forming the basis of most Western languages. The first written work of ‘fiction’ will be “Epic of Gilgamesh” – Mesopotamian critics give it ‘One Thumb Up’. Egypt turns up in North Africa. Everyone surprised. While that’s going, Greece gets it on – and lots of separate city states turn up. Athens becomes worlds first democracy then thre’s a big war with (I think) the Spartans and then another big war with the Persians (although it could be the other way around and one of them might not have happened). Xerxes was Persian. Herodotus wrote about him.

Then Alexander the Great decides he wants to rule the world and goes a bit nuts bringing Greece, Persia, Egypt, Middle East etc. etc. etc. under his big rule. This is called “The Hellenistic Period”. Finally the Romans turn up. They are boring arseholes and no one likes them. But being very organised they build roads everywhere and conquer most of Europe but become gradually corrupt and stretched too thinly. And the Romans ended up being Christians which is kind of ironic considering how many Christians they used as lion-chow. In the end, Goths come and beat them up. Which is not as amusing an image as it sounds.

Then there are dark ages for a very long time in which most of civilisation sucked arse. Civilisation is left to mad monks hoarding books in dodgy cold monasteries in places like ‘lindesfarne’. Things gradually get better and
monarchies get better organised – the two are not directly related. Technology gets better – someone invents venereal disease and pointy sticks again. Which is a relief as a lot of people thought pointy sticks had been lost when the Romans went nuts. A little bit later, lots of Europeans go and beat up the Middle East in the name of Christianity. Over a thousand years later, the Middle East remains pissed off. Everyone in Europe gets snotty with everyone else in Europe and there are big fights. Sometime around here people decide that science isn’t complete horseshit (very gradually and mostly in Italy).

European people send out people to colonise the world and send dodgy missionaries with them who introduce the world to the Catholic Church and syphilis. Which is nice. Except some of the people they meet don’t want the Catholic Church or syphilis, so they get killed and stuff. Particularly in South America, North America, Africa, the Antipodes and the bits of Asia that hadn’t invented pointy sticks yet. Then England goes all Protestanty which no one is particularly thrilled about. Particularly not the Irish who get in a snark with Cromwell.

America gets all snotty and declares independence. No one cares. It is a dumb country. Americans have wars with themselves for a bit. No one cares. It is a dumb country. Europeans have more wars with each other. No one cares. They’re used to it. Freud is born. There are a couple of world wars. Someone invents cool things like planes and electricity and moon rockets. Some of these people are from America which is no longer a dumb country but a fucking scary country. Russia is also a fucking scary country for a bit, but then they let MacDonalds in, so we quite like them now. And on the seventh day Joss Whedon created Buffy.

THE END (OF ALL HISTORY AS LONG AS YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT CHINA, THE MIDDLE EAST, THE CRUSADES, SOUTH AMERICA, MOST OF ASIA, THE COLONIAL STUFF AND PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING ELSE).

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Random

I just did a quiz

I just did a quiz at the Guardian designed to figure out how much money you should be earning – it works it out by assessing your IQ. At the end of the test the quiz asked me what I was doing with my life. The quiz told me I was wasting it. And, in fact, that I should be earning about £60,000 more a year than I seem to be at the moment. More annoyingly the instructions for the second round of questions made absolutely no sense at all. So I just answered the same for all of them and hoped for the best.

You tell me – do these instructions make any sense? “Does the second shape differ in some way from the first shape? Or could the second shape be the same as the first shape?” The possible answers are “Could be” and “no”. Is that ‘No the second shape does not differ from the first shape?’ or ‘No the second shape could not be the same as the first shape?’ or is that ‘The second shape could be different from the first shape?’ or ‘The second shape could be the same as the first shape?’ – whoever wrote the quiz was a bit dumb if you ask me. Now, where’s my £75,000 salary?

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It's Valentines Day – are

It’s Valentines Day – are you lost and lonely? Well then it’s a terrible shame that I didn’t do this earlier. Because I’m considering selling a date with myself over the net on ebay. Would you like to buy me for a meal and some stilted conversation in Central London? Sometime in the first week of March? Then keep yourself glued to your monitor…

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Random

Look at my graph! It's

Look at my graph! It’s a graph about the Oscars! It’s a graph with no point. All of these links go through to the same graph!

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Film

Twenty years of Oscar nominees…

Every year I look forward to the Oscar nominations – I like the excitement of finding out who has been put up for the awards. I love the sensation of complete astonishment when great films are ignored and ludicrously over-acted twaddle wins. I love the Oscars because sometimes they’re so very right and I love them more because sometimes they can be so very very wrong.

This year has been the first year when I have looked at the nominations for “Best Picture” and struggled to find a film that I think deserves to be there. But how to account for such a phenomenon? My first assumption was that it must have simply been a terrible year for movies in general. With such a motley selection of candidates available, what hope was there that they’d be able to find – let alone vote for – a truly great film.

But how likely is that to be true? There are any number of alternative possibilities. Firstly that they chose the wrong films, secondly that they chose the right films and that my taste is simply getting worse. And behind this are the larger questions – are the films that get nominated for Oscars today worse than the ones that were nominated ten or twenty years ago? Is there a pattern to the quality of film-making that we can track through the Oscars?

Enter a totally redundant project – the compilation of some figures about how good or bad the Oscar nominees had been over the last twenty years. I would see, or be damned, if there was any discernable pattern. And in seeing this pattern – “A Beautiful Mind”-style luminous in the world – perhaps I would see if my suspicions about this year’s nominees were correct. Or perhaps, “A Beautiful Mind”-style, I would find that I had been living in a world of horrible unreality and an insane lack of judgment.

Over many minutes I decided on a campaign strategy. My comprehensive research (to take place over a boring afternoon before Countdown came on Channel Four) would involve:
– 1) Going to the IMDB.
– 2) Finding all the films nominated for “Best Film” over the last twenty years.
– 3) Adding together all the nominees ‘user-ratings’ for each year.
– 4) Plotting them on a graph.

Not brain-surgery, I think you’ll agree. And hopelessly unscientific – we have no control group, nothing to compare them to… But interesting nonetheless… What will this reveal about our relationship to Oscar movies or indeed our relationship to the cultural products of other times? I can tell you right now that it will reveal nothing. But it remains fun to speculate about what it might have revealed had it not been such an immediately and obviously flawed experiment. And now the graph….

On the left we have the combined score of all the films released in any given year (the years are plotted on the bottom axis). Since all IMDB user-ratings rate out of 10, the range of potential scores for any given year is 0-50 points.

But what are we to make of these results? It seems that quite contrary to my initial expectations, the films that have gained Oscar Nominations have in general increased in quality over the last twenty years. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that all you can deduce is that people have very short memories and rate contemporary movies more generously than older ones. But that still can’t account for the horrific drops in quality in the mid and late-eightees…

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Something wonderful from ObscureStore today:

Something wonderful from ObscureStore today: Thomas Ray Mitchell suffers from several psychiatric conditions that include a violent reaction to the words “New Jersey,” “Wisconsin,” “Snickers” and “Mars,” said his attorney, Maria Luisa Mercado. In a statement to police after the March 9, 1999, shooting of Barbara Jenkins, Mitchell indicated that he had wounded her with three bullets from a .38-caliber pistol because she was about to say “New Jersey.” [link]