Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ian Hislop vs… Tom Waits?!

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You learn something new every day… there I was last night watching Have I Got a Bit More News for You and nearly falling asleep when the show ended and the announcer announced that Mark Lawson was now interviewing Ian Hislop on BBC4. This woke me up – I’ve long been a fan of Hislop in his role as editor of Private Eye and HIGNFY stalwart, but Lawson’s interviews are always worth watching (with the possible exception of the one with Phil Collins, which I think sent me to sleep). The next hour was great fun, Hislop chatting affably about his childhood, how he got started in comedy and satire, his run-ins with the legal system and his now some 20 years on HIGNFY. Best of all though they showed a clip from his first ever TV appearance in the early 80s, which I’d never seen before – no less an interview with Tom Waits, another of my all-time favourite people. The pairing in fact seemed so unlikely that I had to check I wasn’t mis-hearing when Hislop uttered Waits’s name – I thought surely he’ll correct himself in a moment and say it was some other Tom (not that I can think of any other Toms right now, but even so), but he didn’t. Here is that fateful encounter:

It’s not great quality but basically Waits is plugging his new album (not sure of the date, possibly Rain Dogs?) in his trademark mumble-slur, and Hislop tries to get him to speak up. ‘Plug it a bit louder,’ says Hislop. Waits looks round to check he heard him right, realises silently that he did, and growls ‘I’ll plug it in my own damn way!’ Hislop gets no help from the audience or his other guests (rightly so), and in the Lawson interview concedes he thought Waits might thump him…

All excellent stuff. In the meantime the Lawson – Hislop interview can still be seen on iPlayer.

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Wolfram Alpha – “it’s as important as Google”.

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The BBC reports today on Wolfram Alpha, "the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.

"The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.

"The 'computational knowledge engine', as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year."

Not to prejudge it or anything but my gut feeling is it can't be *that* good because it's named after its inventor. Think of the great internet successes such as Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter… all names chosen to describe the *service*, not to honour the guy(s) who came up with it. Even the web itself, as Stephen Fry once pointed out, could have permanently contained a reference to its creator Tim Berners-Lee with the prefix 'tim' (standing for 'The Information Mine') instead of the good old 'www' that we have all come to know and, er, love. But it didn't.

Anyway, I'll be keeping an eye on http://www.wolframalpha.com/ over the coming days…

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Mandelson following fake “Brown” on Twitter. Who’s going to tell him? Not me :)

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Peter Mandelson is now on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lordmandelson

(Check out that modest user name!)

One of the people he's following appears to be Gordon Brown: http://twitter.com/RHGordonBrown/followers

But, could that Gordon Brown be… a fake??? http://twitter.com/RHGordonBrown

I wonder if someone should tell Peter, who says at http://twitter.com/lordmandelson/status/1189885663 "it's the best I can do to get the hang of Twitter"?

Nah, me neither 🙂

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Virgin Media now giving no choice over TV on Demand

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The following is the text of a letter I’ve sent today to Guardian Money:

This morning I got up and as usual put on the Cartoon Network channel for my children on our Virgin “TV Choice On Demand” service. Instead however I got an on-screen message saying I had to pay to subscribe to this service. This seemed to be a fault, as TV Choice On Demand has been included in the “medium” TV, phone and broadband package I’ve had with Virgin for the past 20 months. I rang to report the fault but was told that in fact Virgin had now decided – at no written notice – to withdraw TV Choice On Demand from the medium package, for which I am paying £28 per month. An “upgrade” to the XL package (i.e. to the service I was getting until yesterday, albeit with some extra channels thrown in) would cost an extra £7 per month for 3 months rising to an extra £17 per month thereafter. When I complained, I was all but told I should be grateful for having had the TV Choice service free for the past two years, when in fact what Virgin are now doing is charging me the same monthly fee for fewer services. Although I feel this is unfair, I may not have minded quite so much if I’d been given adequate notice and therefore a real “choice” in the matter. Ending a service overnight so that your kids are suddenly prevented from watching their favourite cartoons unless you fork out more is sharp practice of the lowest order.

Yrs etc.

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April fools

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This week’s April Fools’ Day is already starting to look like old hat (my excuse for not posting on the day itself being that I was in London – working, not protesting, although sympathising with most of the protesters, while thinking it was a shame that Barack Obama’s first visit to the UK couldn’t have been more of a celebration).

Even so, my favourite was the Guardian’s story that it would no longer be available in print but only on Twitter, with every story compressed to 140 characters. This included its 188-year news archive: “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?” The claim that “Currently, 17.8% of all Twitter traffic in the United Kingdom consists of status updates from Stephen Fry” may well not have been a spoof, and the paper gets extra marks for its combination of the Guardian and Twitter into “Gutter” and then with WordPress into “GutterPress”.

Later in the day the Guardian also published a useful round-up of April foolishness (I didn’t spot the upside-down YouTube pages, probably because every time I tried getting on to YT on Wednesday my T-Mobile broadband blocked it with its new content lock feature which I had to unlock by entering my credit card details – quite why YT content is classed as dodgy I don’t know).

My second favourite fool was the BBC’s item on the rising cost of tea, which, being the BBC, was so well done (or just so conservatively done) it was frighteningly plausible. The only other “may actually be true” candidate I spotted was a report on a comparatively obscure website that the Leonard Cohen songs Suzanne and Bird on a Wire were coming soon for the Guitar Hero video game (maybe next year I’ll remember to do a spoof combining the game with my version of Hallelujah and call it Ukulele Hero).

I’m sure there were many more but that’s all I saw. Oh, and apparently over at SA4QE there was something silly about a new dating service for Russell Hoban fans called SA4QrelatE, but I shouldn’t imagine too many people were taken in by it…

Andrew Motion: life’s hard on the front line of middle class England

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I’ve always found Andrew Motion one of our more boring poets, to be honest, but his comments in Saturday’s Guardian about his experiences as poet laureate are particularly dull. I don’t think less of him for not going to Iraq and Afghanistan, but I do find it disingenuous for him to say the reason he didn’t write about the wars was because nobody ‘encouraged’ him by flying him there. Bush and Blair never had much encouragement from their domestic audiences but that didn’t stop them from airing their opinions whenever possible. And if Motion had felt the poet laureateship cramped his style he could always have quit while he was, er, ahead. Just lie down and have another Lemsip, Andy.

EDIT: Actually this is a bit unfair. Motion did write two poems in protest against the Iraq war, which can be found linked from the abobe Wikipedia page. I just thought his remarks were a bit daft – if he’d really wanted to go out there surely it could’ve been arranged…

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Putting Private Eye right on Twitter and the internet

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A couple of weeks back I emailed a letter to Private Eye about two items that appeared in their issue number 1230 (the one that’s just gone off sale). I have now received a reply from ‘The Ed’ saying ‘Thank you for your letter. I am sorry not to publish it in Private Eye.’ So as not to lose this essential correspondence, here is my letter, slightly edited for clarity.

Dear Sir,

At the risk of appearing in Pedants’ Corner, the Stephen Fry Twitter column in this issue is wrong in a number of ways.

You only use the @ sign when *you* are addressing another Twitter user, not when they address you. So I was confused to read in Fry’s twitterstream ‘@Wossy’, expecting this to prefix a typically erudite Fry remark directed at Jonathan Ross, when it was actually a knob gag from Wossy to Fry. Next time just drop the @ sign for remarks sent to Fry by other Twitterers and only use it when Stevie tweets at them. Or better still, do the world a favour and drop Wossy’s knob.

Also, a couple of tweets are longer than the maximum 140 characters allowed by Twitter. The one about ‘Getting stuck in one lift may be considered a misfortune; getting stuck in two lifts starts to look like carelessness’ is actually 153 characters. (Sad, aren’t I?)

Finally, the whole thing is back-to-front, as on the real Twitter the most recent tweets appear at the top of the page, not the bottom. That said, your version is designed to be read by humans, which Twitter frankly isn’t, so that’s actually a vast improvement on the original.

Twitter aside, there also appear to be some misconceptions in the ‘Telegraph twits’ article on page 7 of the same issue. You don’t ‘surf’ ‘popular internet search keywords when writing copy for the online edition’, you just ‘use’ the terms or ‘include’ them. One ‘surfs’ the web as a whole, i.e. to find out information. In any case, criticising this behaviour as an example of the dumbing-down of journalism is more than a little naive in these days of the information superhighway. If you don’t include relevant keywords in your online content, then people won’t find it – it’s as simple as that. It only becomes dubious if you contrive to include terms which have nothing to do with what you’re actually writing about – for instance if I were to gratuitously insert the keywords sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in this paragraph. Then again, it wouldn’t make any difference, as your letters don’t go on your website.*

I’ll shut up now.

Yours etc.

* This one is going on mine though 🙂

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Writers ‘hate writing’ (non-) shocker

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There’s an enjoyable piece in today’s Guardian in which nine authors comment briefly on whether they actually like writing or not. It makes reassuring reading for anyone who’s ever tried to write anything longer than a postcard. Hari Kunzru, not in my experience known for modesty, admits here: ‘there are the pitfalls of self-disgust, boredom, disorientation and a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hysterical self-congratulation as you fleetingly believe you’ve nailed that particular sentence and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of clichés that no sane human could read without vomiting.’ Which is, in a word, succinct.

Will Self, by contrast, loves every bit of the writing process: ‘most seductive of all [is] the buying of stationery’. I used to enjoy that part of writing as well, at least until computers came along and killed the need for pens and Tippex. Then again, I still get a rush of excitement looking at a nice blank notebook whenever I’m in Smiths or Rymans. For anyone who shares this particular fetish, here are some pictures of blank notebooks.

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Having mixed feelings over the Goodwin pension debacle

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Gordon Brown is getting all uptight at ex-RBS chief Sir Fred Goodwin’s decision to keep his massive pension, despite the bank’s record losses of umpteen billion.

While Fred is undoubtedly an odious whelk, I can’t help but think that Gordon has got things out of proportion. Sure a £16m pension pot is an outrageous amount, but it’s a drop in the ocean in terms of the banking bailouts and the general economic crisis.

Gordon’s explosion is all a smokescreen. The PM’s ire would be far better turned on himself for permitting characters like Goodwin to prosper with such catastrophic results for the past decade.

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The man who gives a dinner party to strangers every week

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I was trapped on a long train journey the other day and picked up one of those free papers that I love to hate – you know the ones which you see everyone on the train all reading at the same time, and when you finally succumb and pick one up you can’t find any actual news in it. This one though had an interview with a guy called Jim Haynes, who has hosted a dinner party at his flat in Paris every week for the past 30 years, and anyone who calls (or emails) to book can attend, even complete strangers. Everyone chips in towards the cost of the food and Haynes claims he’s only had one dodgy guest in all that time. His website is slightly odd and (as he admits) self-indulgent but he seems a fascinating guy. Next time I’m in Paris I think I’ll look him up… 🙂

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