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Periphery of an up and coming sociopath
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| Make do and mend |
[09 Nov 2009|10:11am] |
I want to sharpen some knives and a pair of shears - looking on the internet the nearest place I could find to do this was in High Wycombe. Then I did the thing of thinking of the old Oxford standbyes that do everything: Boswells and Gill the Ironmongers.
I haven't actually asked in Boswells but Gill the Ironmongers do send stuff away for sharpening. It only goes twice a week though (on Mondays and Thursdays) and takes a week to be done. Does anyone else know of anywhere in Oxford that offers a knife- or tool-sharpening service? I'll be asking in Boswells later but don't imagine it's quite their sort of thing.
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| 11/09/2009 |
[09 Nov 2009|08:00am] |
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http://www.ellerbisms.com/?p=347 
Hey guys, so we’re moving flat the end of this week so updates may be a little sporadic as we’ll be without the internet for a week from the 16th. Best thing to do is check my Twitter to see what’s happening. Exciting times are afoot!
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| Charlie Brooker | Hell isn't other people. Hell is buying washing machines from other people |
[09 Nov 2009|09:03am] |
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/09/charlie-brooker-washing-machines Why does such an apparently simple task inevitably turn into some sort of horrific Kafkaesque nightmare? As a child, I never pictured the adult "me" journeying to other planets and having a fantastic time of it. Instead I pictured myself dying in a nuclear inferno. The future me was a screaming skeleton decorated with chunks of carbonised flesh and the occasional sizzling hair. Not really someone you'd have round for dinner. Still, at least my premonition suggested I'd live an exciting life, albeit a short one. The reality is less spectacular. I never pictured myself as I was last week: a fully grown adult: alive, yet slowly losing the will to live while attempting to buy a washing machine from a high-street electrical retailer. Let's be clear about this. Buying a washing machine is not the stuff dreams are made of. It's not a device you're going to fall in love with. It's a white box with a round mouth you shove dirty pants into. Hardly a new member of the family, unless you're a troupe of extreme performance artists. Buying a mobile phone is easier than buying a washing machine because some phones have the decency to look ugly, thereby simplifying the decision-making process. Washing machines all look the same. Some eat bigger loads or have a more complex array of pre-wash options: whoopee doo. Some doubtless perform better than others: I wouldn't know. Bet it's all a con. Bet there's only one type of washing machine in the world, and they're all shipped from the same warehouse in slightly different packaging and sold at randomly generated prices. I buy washing machines the same way I order wine in a restaurant: avoid the very cheapest on the basis that it'll be nasty, avoid the second cheapest on the basis that it's probably even worse, avoid the expensive options at the top of the list on the basis that they can't possibly be worth it, and wind up randomly picking something from the middle instead. Just to make you feel even more uncertain about buying one, they don't have proper names. Once you strip the familiar manufacturer trademarks away, all you're left with is a meaningless series of model numbers chosen specifically to confuse you. Did you order a BD4437BX or a BD3389BZ? Face it: you have no idea. Ring up to place an order and it sounds as if you're discussing chemical weapon formulae. This is why buying a washing machine never feels "real". If you walk around Battersea Dogs Home, brown-eyed puppies with names such as Timbo and Ookums softly yelp for your attention. Walk around Comet and you're confronted by a wall of emotionless monoliths with incomprehensible names. And that's just the staff!!!!!??!!!!?! I got caught in a high-street retail delivery trap recently; one of those Kafkaesque scenarios in which you pay for something on the basis that it will arrive at a certain time, only to find out it won't, and soon you're sucked into a spiral of helpline calls and telephone keypad options and complaints and counter-complaints until eventually you realise that you're both in a loveless relationship; needing each other, hating hate each other, revolving for hours in a weepy embrace, listlessly kicking at one another's shins. But this time something new and modern happened. Shortly after one of our bitter rows, while waiting for them to call back, I went on Twitter (yes, bloody Twitter) and angrily compared the Currys electrical retail chain to the Nazis. The next day a mysterious message arrived with a number for me to call; this turned out to belong to one of their heads of PR, who'd spotted my outburst and tracked down my contact details. It's a bit embarrassing when you find yourself talking to someone high up in a company you've loudly and publicly likened to the Third Reich only the night before. Fortunately for me, she was polite and savvy enough not to mention it. Instead she quickly sorted out my complaint, which is the closest I've ever come to feeling like a VIP, or Michael Winner. Nice for me, annoying for anyone reading about it who hasn't been afforded that kind of treatment, ie, you. Perhaps, if I was principled, I'd have yelled "I demand to be treated as a regular customer!" and slammed the phone down. But I didn't. Still, if buying a big boring box from a big boring shop is a harrowing experience, isn't it time retailers were honest about it? There's no point in pretending to be fun, happy-go-lucky institutions. We're British. We know the truth and we can handle it. Dixons is running a campaign describing itself as "the last place you want to go", which is meant to be a clever reference to its low prices (ie, go and look at it in Harrods, then buy it from us), but effectively describes every electrical retail chain I've ever visited. Someone needs to go further and launch a chain called Shambles, where all the familiar shortcomings are actively promoted as part of the "experience". The staff wear ironic dunce caps and vulture costumes; if you want to actually buy something, they walk to a stockroom 10 miles away in a neighbouring county to check its availability, methodically harass you into taking out five-year cover using a subtle combination of CIA "extraordinary rendition" psychological techniques and unashamed sulking, then arrange for it to be delivered at 7am by a surly man who'll arrive 10 hours late on purpose, deliberately bring a BD4437BX instead of the BD3389BZ you ordered, attach a magic hidden "hobbling" device that causes it to malfunction immediately before the next bank holiday weekend, screw your partner, scare your kids, wreck your life, and break wind on your doorstep as he's leaving. All of which is heavily advertised as an integral part of the service. It'll be miserable. But at least you'll enter the transaction with your eyes wide open.
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| Charlie Brooker's Screen burn |
[07 Nov 2009|12:05am] |
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2009/nov/07/charlie-brooker-screenburn-gary-glitter 'I assumed the Glittercution would feature dry ice, disco lights, and a hundred party poppers going off as his neck cracked' Don't know about you, but sometimes I can't sleep at night for wondering what it might be like if Gary Glitter were executed. I just can't picture it in quite enough detail for my liking. Would they fry him? Gas him? Or pull his screaming head off with some candy-coloured rope? I can never decide, and it often leaves me restless till sunrise. Thank God, then, for The Execution Of Gary Glitter (Mon, 9pm, Channel 4), which vividly envisions the trial and subsequent capital punishment of pop's most reviled sex offender so you don't have to. I can't believe what I'm typing: this is a drama-documentary that imagines a world in which Britain has a) Reinstated the death penalty for murder and paedophilia, b) Changed the law so Britons can stand trial in this country for crimes committed abroad, and c) Chosen Gary Glitter as its first test case. It blends archive footage, talking-head interviews with Miranda Sawyer, Garry Bushell and Ann Widdecombe, and dramatised scenes in which Gary Glitter is led into an execution chamber and hanged by the neck until dead. He's not just swinging from a rope, mind. The Glitterphile is all over this show, like Hitler in Downfall. There are lengthy scenes in which he argues with his lawyer, smirks in court, plays chess with the prison chaplain, weeps on the floor of his cell, etc. Visually, we're talking late-period Glitter, with the evil wizard shaved-head-and-elongated-white-goatee combo that makes him resemble a sick alternative Santa. It would be funnier if they showed him decked out in full 70s glam gear throughout, being led to the gallows in a big spangly costume with shoulder pads so huge they get stuck in the hole as he plunges through. I assumed the Glittercution would feature dry ice, disco lights, and a hundred party poppers going off as his neck cracked. But here there's not so much as a can of Silly String. This is a terribly serious programme. Yes. It's illegal to laugh at this, see; it's not a comedy show, but "an intelligent and thought-provoking examination of the issue" which "confronts viewers with the possible consequences of capital punishment in the UK". There's going to be an online debate afterwards and everything, which should help clear up all our thoughts about the death penalty. Let's face it, none of us really knew where we stood until we were "confronted" by the sight of Gary Glitter staring wretchedly at an expectant noose. It really crystallised things, y'know? Before, I always thought of hanging as an abstract, faraway event existing only in ancient woodcuts or the minds of passing clouds. This makes it so much more real. My sincere thanks, Channel 4, for the searing moral clarity I've been granted. By the way, is the real Gary Glitter going to be taking part in that online debate thing afterwards? That'd be awesome. What with this and the previous Killing Of George Bush drama-doc a few years ago, the Channel 4 family is establishing itself as the home of thought-provoking celebrity death fantasises. Now they've whacked a president and strangled a paedo, what next? How about a two-hour drama-documentary that wonders what Britain might look like if al-Qaida attacked the Baftas? Lots of detailed close-up slow-motion shots of bullets blasting through the ribcages of absolutely everyone off Coronation Street, that kind of thing. It'd really kick-start that debate about terrorism we're all gasping for. Perhaps it could solve it altogether. Or what about a mini-series showing what'd happen if you kidnapped a bunch of newsreaders and X Factor contestants and kept them on a remote island and glued masks on their faces and fed them LSD and MDMA for two years until they started killing each other and rutting the corpses and shoving bits of blunt stick in their eye sockets and howling at the sun? That'd help society explore its relationship with authority, celebrity, identity, controlled substances, sex, violence and sticks. And God knows we need to. Help us, Channel 4. Guide us. You're our moral compass. You're our only hope.
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| Born on the 5th of November... |
[05 Nov 2009|11:01pm] |
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It's customary of me (to, for those who've known me a while, a probably quite tedious extent) to draw attention to this song on this date... criminally underheard, it's one of my favourite songs of all time and really should have been a huge hit (I drunkenly rambled on at Fruitbat of Carter on that very subject one night in Brixton, to my embarrassment), so I use the date in its title as an opportunity to say to people "OI! LISTEN TO IT!" I'd never seen the video before looking it up on Youtube this evening, though, which is nice. Anyway, enjoy, because it's awesome :
Carter USM - Born on the 5th of November
But if you don't like the song, then at least I can say Happy Flux Capacitor Day!
Originally posted at sebpatrick.co.uk. You can comment here or there.
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| Recycling batteries |
[04 Nov 2009|07:44pm] |
We've been through this before, I know, but I can't find it in the archive: what shops in town will take old batteries for recycling/safe disposal?
Thanks!
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| Ellerbisms 15th August 2009 |
[02 Nov 2009|08:00am] |
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http://www.ellerbisms.com/?p=336 
Aaaaand we’re back. Again. Sorry for the abrupt hiatus, needless to say the schedule will be a bit wonky over the next few weeks, though saying that there will be another strip this Thursday so make sure to check back for that.
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| If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one to hear it, can Carter-Ruck ban all mention of the |
[20 Oct 2009|08:39am] |
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/19/charlie-brooker-super-injunctions Super-injunctions raise a worrying question: what else don't we know? Hitler could be alive, and in negotiations to present the Radio 1 breakfast show The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday 20 October 2009 The column below stated that lawyers representing Trafigura – the oil-trading company involved in a toxic waste dumping scandal in west Africa – had secured a fresh injunction to ban reporting of a parliamentary question on the subject. This was inaccurate: rather, the company's lawyers, the firm of Carter-Ruck, claimed that an existing injunction prevented reporting of a parliamentary question.
As you may have noticed, there was a bit of a kerfuffle last week involving this newspaper, the House of Commons, the oil-trading company Trafigura, law firm Carter-Ruck, Private Eye, toxic waste, Twitter, and a mysterious alien entity known as a "super-injunction". What may have struck anyone with zero interest in media law or basic human rights as a bafflingly dry story was in fact a significant victory for freedom of speech. The irony is that, having won the freedom to explain what happened, "explaining what happened" stretches language itself to its limit, thanks to the presence of the aforementioned "super-injunction" – a legal weapon so profoundly confusing it has the power to warp reality itself. A super-injunction is an injunction that prevents you from telling anyone that an injunction exists. If taking out a regular injunction is like putting a gag round someone's mouth, whipping out a super-injunction is the equivalent of putting a gag round someone's mouth, then pulling a bag over their head, tying them to a chair and stealing their phone so they can't text for help. Or to put it another way: if a tree lands in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? No one knows, because thanks to a super-injunction we're not allowed to report the existence of the forest. Super-injunctions are supposed to protect the privacy of an individual. Let's assume, entirely hypothetically, that someone steals a laptop containing mucky candid photographs of Rodney Bewes and tries to flog them to the tabloids. Before they can print them, an understandably furious Bewes slaps the papers with an injunction preventing publication. Now, at this point it would still be possible for a paper to run a story explaining that Bewes was taking legal action to prevent the publication of racy private pictures – which is still extremely embarrassing for poor Bewes, a much-loved and respected comic actor who doesn't deserve this kind of leering intrusion, even in a hypothetical scenario. Wish I'd picked Kelvin MacKenzie instead, to be honest. Anyway, all is not lost if at this point Bewes takes out a super-injunction preventing anyone from alluding to the details of the first injunction. This makes the story effectively disappear altogether, thus maintaining Bewes's dignity, not to mention the sanity of the picture desk. The very most the press can do is run a nonsensical story saying: "There's something we're not allowed to tell you, but we can't tell you why." That's effectively what the Guardian did last week, except that there was no beloved actor, but rather a whopping great multinational company accused of dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast, following which a lot of people got rather sick and more than a little upset. In an apparent bid to save face, the company instructed its lawyers (Carter-Ruck) to sail up and down the media coastline, knowingly dumping toxic injunctions. Eventually they went completely berserk and issued a super-injunction preventing the Guardian from reporting a parliamentary question about one of their previous super-injunctions. This was too much for common sense or modern technology to bear. Private Eye printed the question, the Twittersphere went bonkers; soon everyone knew about it, and Trafigura's name was toxic mud. In terms of corporate PR, it was about as effective as appearing on the GMTV sofa to carve your brand name on to the face of a live baby. Anyway, the Trafigura debacle is one of the very few occasions where the cloaking device of the super-injunction has actually malfunctioned, leaving the hovering mothership visible, which raises a worrying question: what else don't we know about? Literally anything could be going on. Like the mysterious "dark matter" that scientists believe makes up a huge percentage of the universe, an entire alternative reality could be thriving just over our shoulders. Dean Gaffney might be made of staples. Hitler could be alive and well and currently in negotiations to present the Radio 1 breakfast show. Kellogg's could be raising an army of the damned and declaring war on Norwich. How many other "invisible" stories are out there, shrouded by thick legal mist? God knows. But he's not allowed to tell you. And never mind super-injunctions – are there other kinds of injunction we don't know about? If you slap a super-injunction on top of another super-injunction, do you get a "hyper-injunction" that makes it illegal to even think about protesting? Can someone get an injunction that prevents your eyes from accurately telling your brain what they're looking at, so half your field of vision is pixelated out? Can you ban reporters from using the alphabet? Come to think of it, are there any additional letters of the alphabet we're not allowed to know about? There could be hundreds. Millions. What worries me is that all this meddlesome injunctioneering could soon threaten the fabric of reason itself, causing a black hole of logic that sucks everything in the universe through to neverwhere. For the sake of all mankind, I sincerely hope that in future, any corporations trying to cover something up would do the decent thing and simply start strangling journalists and bombing their offices. Same results, less paperwork. Dead men tell no tales. And even if they try, Carter-Ruck can probably issue a gagging order that follows them into the afterlife and kicks their larynx off its hinges.
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| Movember |
[01 Nov 2009|07:41pm] |
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So, yes. Since I was already shaving my (not-so-lustrous) beard off on the 31st October in order to do this, it was pointed out to me that it might be an idea to use my newly-clean face to sign up for Movember, an initiative in which fellers spend the month of November growing a moustache and raising donations to help fight and raise awareness of prostate cancer. So that's what I've done. My plan is to grow a Rufus Hound-esque handlebar moustache (although it won't come out as well as his, naturally - a pale imitation is the best I'm hoping for), and if you'd like to make a contribution (or just laugh at me) you can find my donation page, upon which I'll be regularly updating my profile picture with my progress, here.
Thanks in advance for anyone's support!
Originally posted at sebpatrick.co.uk. You can comment here or there.
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| Charlie Brooker's Screen burn |
[31 Oct 2009|12:05am] |
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2009/oct/31/charlie-brooker-screen-burn 'Pants Off Dance Off's strippers are real yelping, whooping, I'm-mad-me irritants' I don't want to claim I predicted the state of modern television in its entirety almost a decade ago or anything, but around 10 years ago I wrote a website called TV Go Home filled with satirically exaggerated programmes, many of which have come frighteningly true. Here's the latest example. In its TV Go Home incarnation, "Masturbation Minefield" was a pornographic game aimed at lonely male viewers: a show which consisted of rude footage (such as a naked dairymaid bending over) randomly interspersed with profoundly unerotic imagery (such as an extreme close-up of Ian Beale's eye staring straight through the centre of your soul). It was a lo-fi interactive challenge: could the viewer achieve climax during the "rude" bits without being put off by the "unerotic" bits? A puerile idea, but there you go. At least it wasn't real. I lie. Pants Off Dance Off (weeknights, 11pm, Viva) is essentially Masturbation Minefield with one or two tweaks. The premise is as simple as its intended audience: ordinary members of the public dance to music while taking their clothes off. It's a striptease show. But, lest they be accused of peddling sordid pornography, the producers have cunningly included enough "mines" to ensure that only the most determined psychopath could possibly manipulate their way to fruition. First of all, the strippers themselves are self-avowedly "zany" types: real yelping, whooping, jumping-up-and-down-and-clapping "I'm-mad-me" irritants. Not only is it impossible to get turned on in their presence, it's impossible to assign them any human emotion whatsoever. If, instead of stripping, the programme depicted them being injected with sedatives and shovelled out of the back of a C-130 Hercules flying 20,000 feet above the Nevada desert, it would actually be easier to masturbate to. Next, neatly sidestepping accusations of body fascism, they've chosen a wide variety of figures from both sexes. Fat ones, thin ones, hairy ones, ones whose faces are so disturbing they look like Steve Buscemi with Bell's palsy pressing his nose against your bathroom window … all human life is here, apart from anyone you actually want to see naked. Occasionally they'll feature a Chippendale type or a lapdancer, but to stop this being arousing, they'll make a little window pop up, in which the next stripper (inevitably a 64-year-old man with a nose like a thumped glans) dribbles something about how they can't wait to show you their bum. But they're not finished yet. There's still an outside chance you might be excited by the occasional shot of exposed flank, so just to nail that possibility to the floor and stove its face in with a jackboot, there's a kerrr-azy joke-filled voiceover yapping away in the background, which outstays its welcome at the first syllable. It's not very funny. In fact, if they replaced it with the soundtrack to one of Michael Buerk's 1984 Ethopian famine reports, wailing children and all, there'd be 30% more laughs. Finally, they've cut out the actual nudity. Yes, you read that right: THEY'VE CUT OUT THE ACTUAL NUDITY. Instead, every time someone actually takes their "pants off" (which, after all, is the entire purpose of the show), the action freezes and a URL pops up to protect their modesty. In other words, they're encouraging their audience to stop watching the show and go online instead, which must make the channel's advertisers very happy. The website, incidentally, doesn't contain uncensored stripteases either. But never mind! I'm told you can find footage of people actually taking their clothes off – and occasionally doing racier stuff, like kissing – elsewhere on the internet. In summary: Pants Off Dance Off takes the concept of striptease, and removes both the "strip" and the "tease". That's not a show, that's a vacuum. Worst of all, it's not even amusingly trashy. It's a load of energy expended for nothing. Just like masturbation itself. But less noble.
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