Friday, April 29, 2005

THIS TIME IT'S PERSONALISED

What is the point of the personalised number plate again? I mean, they're all different anyway. Spelling out an approximation of your name using a wonky 4 and a 1 in place of the L - is it really worth the effort just so you can find your car in the multi-storey? Try remembering where you parked next time.

Batman's very precious about his stuff, have you noticed? He doesn't drive a car - he drives the batmobile. Remember when your Mum used to stitch a little nametag in your coat in case you lost it on the field trip? This is what Batman is doing here.

And he doesn't just restrict himself to the batmobile. In the batcave he has the batcomputer, the batseat, the batcopter parked next to the batboat, and on and on. The strange thing is, he's the world's greatest detective. So, if somebody were to steal, say, the batplane, you'd like to think he'd be best equipped to find it.

Batman: "Waitaminute, this R's been written in with tipp-ex. This isn't the Bart-mobile. It's my missing batmobile!"

Thief: "And actually, sir, my name's not even Bart."

Batman: "Dang! The devious criminal mind at work."

Thursday, April 28, 2005

THE COMA QUESTIONS

Falling into a coma is a lot like extreme sports. You close your eyes for, like, a second, suddenly you wake up in a strange place, an unspecified amount of time has passed and you've no idea how you ended up there. If they could somehow fit snow in there they could take comas to the Winter Olympics.

I guess the strange part of waking up from a coma is you never know quite how long you've been asleep. It seemed like just another night's sleep to you but everyone around you is acting like it's this big deal. You're like, "What? I just woke up. What is with everyone?" When you fell asleep you were normal, when you wake up you're the same person but everyone else is from the Twilight Zone.

Whenever anybody wakes up from a coma on TV they always ask the same questions. "What year is this?" "Who's the President?" "Who won the World Series?" Sometimes the doctors come in and they ask the same questions to the patient, which is odd. If a doctor leans over your bed and asks you what year it is you can pretty much see why he couldn't wake you from the coma in the first place. He's been awake these past six years and he's asking you what year it is? He probably didn't graduate at the top of the class.

It must be disappointing to learn you were only in a coma for a week. You'd be lying in the hospital bed asking the coma questions and your heart would sink, wouldn't it?

"What year is this?" "2005."

"Who's the Prime Minister?" "Same guy."

"What did I miss?" "Nuthin'."

You'd still be "the coma guy" though, you know? People would come up to you and ask how much things had changed since you were last awake. You'd lean against the bar, looking bewildered as the landlord points out that you've not handed over enough money. "Five pounds and two pence is it? Man, the last time I was in here it was £4.98. I can’t seem to connect with your modern world - it's all so alien to me. Maybe I was in that coma just too long... "

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

ANOTHER GENERAL ELECTION LOOMING

Voter apathy is always a big issue around election time but, well, who cares?

Changes to the British voting system mean that this year a limited number of prisoners will be allowed to vote. Apparently, there is a growing campaign proposing that denying prisoners a chance to vote is an abuse of their human rights. I'm guessing that being murdered is also an abuse of one's human rights, so maybe there's a trade-off there.

The prisoners who are getting to vote this year are the part-timers. These are the convicted criminals who go to jail for three or four days a week but are allowed to spend the rest of their time at home with their families. That's an interesting concept. You're forced to spend a set number of hours each week somewhere you don't want to be, doing stuff you'd rather not do, pushed around by people you don't much like, but the rest of the time is your own. That's pretty much all full-time employment is.

I'm not sure what crime you have to commit to get the part-time sentence. I guess it's a half-hearted crime. Like, robbing a bank but only taking the small bills, or fraudulently overpaying on your tax return. And if you're their prison officer you're actually putting in more time at the prison than the criminals. That's got to be tough.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

THE SIMPLE LIFE

You realise it can’t have been that long ago that there were just the twenty-six letters with no order whatsoever. People were filing the A stuff next to the Q stuff and some of the X stuff was at the front while other bits were after the Js. I guess one day the supervisor came in and started having a go at the staff because the files were all over the place and he couldn't find anything. Or he was trying to find someone's address and couldn't remember the name of the book with all the streets in it. Suddenly, there's a project team set up trying to come up with an order for all this stuff.

Because, when you actually think about it, alphabetical order is pretty random. The vowels are all over the place, most of the unpopular letters are at the back but the Q's marking the two-thirds point there beside the far more popular choices of P and R, and that U, V, W thing is just plain sloppy. If you take a good, hard look at the alphabet you get the impression it was put together by two guys by candlelight with twenty-six scraps of paper and a crate of cider.

Once those two guys had settled on alphabetical order they then had to sell it to the rest of the world. Surely, this was the best marketing campaign in history. Who hasn’t heard of the alphabet? Who doesn't know what order it comes in? And in these days where we're being sold internet holidays and ebanking with terms like myholiday and mymoney - the alphabet guys make that look old fashioned. I mean, you don't ask whether a child knows the alphabet - you ask if little Jenna knows her alphabet. "Yes, I know my alphabet," she replies proudly, before reciting it in that order we've all come to embrace.

And while language is endlessly evolving, the alphabet has stayed in that same rigid order. Nobody has remodelled, revamped or relaunched the alphabet. It's like they got it right straight out of the gate.

Do you think they tried out a few different alphabetical orders on the public first? Was there, like, the YBC and the ABP to begin with? You know there'd be market traders stubbornly clinging to the old alphabetical for a while. "Yeah, this here is your TGF dictionary - this is the old imperial alphabet, from before we went ABCric to conform with Europe last year. Man, that ABC stuff is just... I dunno, I can’t get to grips with it, y'know? An' all the words have gone up, you notice that?"

Monday, April 25, 2005

THE SPIN CYCLE

Do you want to know the one thing that really separates men and women?

Cartwheels.

Seriously, you see any woman under the age of forty outside on a sunny day and I guarantee that she is thinking about doing a cartwheel, has just finished thinking about cartwheeling, or she will be thinking about cartwheels any second now. That is, of course, if she's not already spinning on her hands in mid-cartwheel when you pass her. You see a man outside on that same day and I can pretty well guarantee that he is not thinking about doing a cartwheel.

This is the female psyche. Women associate good weather with performing cartwheels. No one knows why - they just do.

"Sure is sunny today, Hannah!" "Yes, and I've just got to be upside down for a second, second-and-a-half."

I don't think that there's anything wrong with a good cartwheel, let me add. If you feel the urge to balance on your hands for a second you go right ahead, spin away. Psychiatrists, however, are paid thousands to make these sorts of observations. Wait 'til I get a deal for my book - Men are from Earth, Women are, also, from Earth. Then we'll split the psychiatrists from the klowns.

Friday, April 22, 2005

THE ART OF THE SECOND CONVERSATION

Do you ever find yourself having the same conversation with the same person and wondering why? Generally it's with someone you don't know much about - relatives you don't see very often, maybe your employer or your friend's brother. At a wedding you'll find the same aunt is telling you about the same thing as she did when you saw her at the couple's engagement party nine months ago.

Somewhere into that second sentence you realise you're back on the same path but, like getting on the wrong train, it could be a while before it stops and you can get out and turn yourself around. By that second sentence you're pretty much committed to going through with the conversation, whether your travelcard's valid or not.

Wouldn't it be easier if we all carried a little tape player around? When you reach that point where you know you're having the same conversation with the same person, you can leave the tape running and they can carry on without you. "I'm sorry, we've had this discussion before." >PLAY<

Of course, they might pull a dictaphone from their pocket and say "Oh, now I remember." >PLAY< Then you can leave both tapes running while you get back to the buffet.

Which is a great plan until your batteries run down. Then you'd have to get back into that conversation whether you want it or not, just kind of nodding and waiting for pauses in the tape for your interjections. "Is Krusty talking to himself?" "Nah, his batteries ran out."

Thursday, April 21, 2005

TRAPPED IN LIMBO

Is limbo dancing really dancing? As far as I can see all they're doing is ducking under that pole. The music isn't really fooling anyone, is it? Even though there's music playing, there still doesn't seem to be much of the dancing going on.

"Look, walk under this low pole. You're dancing."

In limbo-world short people are the best dancers.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

THINK SMALL

Some people go all out to create a miniature park right there in their back yard. They have the little stretch of grass next to the tiny patio, the bird table, the tiny pond with two carp. And they squeeze into the two-seater garden bench and admire the whole thing stretched out before them, no bigger than a parking spot for a family car.

That two-seater bench is crucial to the overall exercise, I feel. It provides the illusion that this is a park. The trick is to get a bench that doesn't take up much room but still provides the feel of a bench.

This is why I admire those people you see on the news who build a model village in their back garden. They spend years laying railway tracks and modelling little people to wander around the intricate, tiny shops. These people started with the two-seater bench and wondered if maybe they could get something smaller. Other people look around their own back gardens and wonder if they can organise some kind of fountain arrangement in the corner - these guys are trying to work out flight paths for the model planes at the model airport. While their neighbours are trying to create the illusion of having a park right there in their back garden, these guys are working out the garden boundaries for the houses that back onto the park.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

THE SLEEPER

When you are too tired to sleep, they say you must be overtired. Overtired - beyond tired proper, in a netherworld of whatever comes after tired. Imagine - too tired to sleep? How can this happen? I've often felt too tired for work, too tired to go out, too tired to stay awake... but too tired to sleep? How can this be?

What it boils down to, I think, is that everything in nature is cyclic. Nature likes cycles to keep everything ticking over, moving along, in its correct place. The Earth rotates in a cycle, you've got cycles for the tides and cycles for the seasons. Wherever you look in nature, there's something going through some kind of cycle. Nature gets to June it figures - hey, time to start that Summer thing again. Seven o'clock in the evening, Nature decides it's about time it started to get dark.

Sleep is another of those cycles. Sometimes you go to sleep the same as everyone else, then you wake up and it's three in the morning and your brain is racing. This is when the sleep cycle starts spinning too fast - you get thrown off and suddenly you're awake and sleep is rushing away from you. If you're lucky, your friends hold the fire exit open and you can jump right back in for the rest of the show. But if you don't catch it in the next two minutes, the sleep cycle whizzes out of reach and you've no chance of catching it again until the next showing at maybe 4.30. Then you can get your hand stamped and they let you back in.

You never hear of animals suffering with insomnia. Because, when an animal gets up in the middle of the night it's called nocturnal. Who's to say that they're not nocturnal at all - maybe they just have a lot on their mind? Those owls always look plenty twitchy, my friend.

Monday, April 18, 2005

THE SUBSTITUTE BENCH

Superman has powers and abilities that are far beyond those of normal men. Not, you'll note, slightly beyond those of normal men, but far beyond. Superman can stop three natural disasters, halt an alien invasion and speed-type the whole thing up as an article for the Daily Planet in the same time it took you to read this sentence, all without breaking a sweat. He can bend steel in his bare hands, change the course of mighty rivers, fly faster than a speeding bullet and, occasionally, turn back time to remedy a poor movie plot point. In short, he can do pretty much anything.

When his cousin Supergirl was introduced to the world, there was a scene with Supergirl and Superman flying through a tickertape parade in Metropolis, while a crowd member shouts, "It's Supergirl! She's just as good as Superman!"

"Just as good". Not "better". Not "preferable". Simply "just as good". So, if Superman, who can do pretty much anything, is dealing with something in outer space, Supergirl could step in to handle your earthbound crisis. If you have a disaster involving shoes or lip gloss, Supergirl would be a safe bet to turn to for help. Otherwise, really, Superman has the job covered. And if he doesn't have it covered now, he'll use that turning-back-time trick to cover it later.

To really spell out how unnecessary a character Supergirl was, somewhere in the 1960s she started sharing Superman's Fortress of Solitude. She got her own wing of the fortress where she would store her trophies. She even had her own door for a while...

... It's a Fortress of Solitude.

Not a Fortress of Share-itude. It's the one place where Superman goes to be alone, away from it all. Superman's there, a six pack in the fridge and some b-movie DVD he's borrowed from Batman, and suddenly Supergirl is doing the vacuuming, or she's watching "What Not to Wear" so he can't use the super-television.

Supergirl shared the same abilities as Superman - flight, super-hearing, super-strength - but my favourite of her powers is super-ventriloquism. In the comic books, she would use this to contact Superman from across the globe and arrange a rendezvous in outer space, unknown to the people around them. During the lean years of the 80s, when Supergirl fell out of favour with comic book audiences, I believe she fell back on her super-ventriloquism for an act in Vegas...

"Do we have anyone in the audience from Texas? Wooo, yeah, I see ya! How about anyone from Kandor the Bottled City? Anyone?"

Friday, April 15, 2005

SAFETY MATCH OF THE DAY #1

Real Madrid versus the Real Ghostbusters.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

SOMETHING FOR NOTHING

If you spend three minutes at a tube station in London I guarantee you'll spot somebody trying to skip their fare. Not to say that there's anything admirable about fare evasion, but you can kind of understand it from 13 year olds - this is their act of tiny rebellion, and the threat of being caught is half the point, I guess. But when I see these guys who are in their twenties, thirties or even forties and they're still trying to get away with it, I mean - come on!

You're a grown man and you're ducking your head back and forth at the wrong gate like a crazed chicken, hoping it's not manned by a member of staff and everyone is watching you on the CCTV feed anyway - yeah, you're sticking it to "the man"!

When there's a train crash do they check people's tickets before they rescue them? Because, you know, it's people like me who paid for the fire extinguishers and the safety glass in the windows and that one-way radio thing. And why do train operators always go on about the one-way radio like it's something special? I have a one-way radio in my house - I call it: a radio.

Perhaps that's the way to stamp out fare evaders. Have a promotional campaign explaining that if you're in a train crash and you don't have a valid ticket they're not going to save you. You'd see more people paying their fares if they could guarantee a railway disaster before you board.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

SMILING STAN

The bathroom features a wealth of danger. I think it was on an episode of the A Team that I first learned that mixing different household detergents could create an explosion. Bleach and bath cleaner? BOOM! So long, Colonel Decker's pursuit team!

Just now I am coming to the end of a tube of toothpaste, and I started wondering whether mixing toothpastes could have the same effect. Mixing two innocuous cleaning products can blow up security doors for the A Team - why not toothpastes?

One day you're cleaning your teeth and... BOOM!

"Hey, have you seen Stan in accounts lately? Man, what happened to his face?"

"I hear he mixed Maclean's and Colgate."

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

THIRD PERSON, SINGULAR

Nobody sounds comfortable when they say their name aloud. You can have the most normal, innocuous name in the world - as soon as you say it out loud it becomes some alien tongue you don't have the anatomy to pronounce correctly. "The namezzz on our planet aren’t like yourzzz, hu-man."

Like dialling your phone number, saying your name aloud is, by and large, the domain of the people around you. Unless you are Doctor Doom, Mohammed Ali or schizophrenic, the chances are that you don't need to say your name aloud very often.

Because people have such trouble saying their own names aloud, when called upon to do so most people will either go formal, because the "first name, surname" combination is a complete, freestanding block of speech, or they'll offer the friendly shortening ("Ken") or nickname ("The Kenmeister"). But the ideal way around the problem is to get someone else to say your name aloud when it's time for the introductions. That way you've avoided the awkward name delivery problem, and the rest is profit.

I believe that this is where the formal introduction began. People were struggling so much introducing themselves they asked the butler or maitre d' to do the job for them. And when that got too expensive most people switched to phones with caller ID.

Monday, April 11, 2005

"I'VE MADE A LOT OF SPECIAL MODIFICATIONS"

Of all the changes that the 1997 Special Editions brought to the classic Star Wars saga, none is more frowned upon than the added suggestion that Greedo shot first.

Back in the original 1977 cut of Star Wars (Episode IV), Han Solo was a rogue, a mercenary, the kind of guy who lived by his wits. The kind of guy who, in short, shoots firsts and asks questions later. And we all loved him for it. The laconic smirk, a blast from his laser pistol, and a brief acknowledgement to the bar tender - "Sorry about the mess!" - as the smouldering corpse of bounty hunter Greedo collapses to the cantina table. That is what Han Solo was all about.

And then came the 1997 re-release, with a few new tweaks on old favourite scenes, and suddenly Greedo gets a quick shot in before Han's blast fries him, removing Han from the category of cold-blooded killer, something which apparently never sat right with creator George Lucas.

The trouble is, for many Star Wars fans, the original scene defined the character of Han Solo. With a pull on his trigger and a muttered apology to the bar tender, Han Solo laid all his credentials out before the audience.

The rejigged Greedo scene has become infamous, forming the source of much heated debate in Star Wars circles and almost universally despised as an unnecessary and detrimental change to a perfect scene.

Somewhere in the bowels of Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilm's mighty special effects department, some poor putz is sitting there reading all these movie reviews and fan letters and message boards that say, without exception, what a terrible thing this new Greedo sequence is, and that employee is thinking to himself "I did that!" With a brush of his lightpen and some coding of the texture engine, this poor guy poured his heart and soul into making it look like Greedo shot first. Maybe he paid special attention to the lighting of the scene, the way the effects originally looked, how people reacted, all to make sure Greedo's extra laser blast - HIS extra laser blast, really - looked like it belonged. And when he finished that scene he probably patted himself on the back, smiled at the finished scene and thought, "Man, I just contributed something really special to the Star Wars saga."

And then he saw the reaction to his scene. Poor guy. He's turning straight to the Dark Side.

Friday, April 08, 2005

SYNAPSE

Watched "Rabid", directed by David Cronenberg, a few days ago.

When I was young I thought that "Rabies" were baby rabbits. Later, at the doctors I saw a terrifying poster showing an X-ray of a human skull with the word "Rabies" emblazoned across it, and I learnt it was a dangerous medical condition.

Even now when I hear the word "rabies" I do a quick mental shuffle of those images - cute, fluffy bunny rabbits; human skull x-ray - rabies.

"Rabid" was pretty good, but I preferred Cronenberg's "Shivers".

Thursday, April 07, 2005

FOR EVERYTHING ELSE - THERE'S MASTERCARD

MasterCard advert currently on TV - a young woman makes her ex-boyfriend jealous when she turns up at a wedding. Voice over:

"Dress - £100...
"Lipstick - £12...
"Bath oils - £3...
"The look on your ex-boyfriend's face when he sees you - priceless!"

Every time I see this I mentally add my own voice over:

"Dress - £100...
"Lipstick - £12...
"Bath oils - £3...
"Your obsessive, stalker behaviour - priceless!"

Thanks, MasterCard. Please never date me.

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

TORICAL

"What would you like to listen to today?" - BBC radio advertising campaign slogan.

It seems that advertising is heading down the same route as greetings cards, where they are "left blank for your own message". Am I supposed to answer the questions posed? Is that how this is supposed to work?

"What do you want to watch?" - current Sky TV advertising slogan.

If you're so interested in what I want to watch, Sky TV, why don't you come over and choose something from my DVD shelf? No? I guess you're too busy running a TV station. Which is really the important thing - it shouldn't matter what I want to watch, what should matter is what YOU are showing. Tell me that, give me some clues - stop plastering London's billboards with pretty photos from under the sea and fill that space with pictures of what you have to offer - new Simpsons, some Star Trek franchise, whatever. Thanks.

As we enter the digital revolution, broadcasters are getting jumpy. They're all scared we're about to turn over, watch something else. So they try not to commit to being any one thing. The catchphrase right now is "TV-on-demand". The dream is that a broadcaster can pipe anything you want, any time you want it, straight to your goggle box.

So, "What do you want to watch?" Doesn't this remind you of when people at school would say "I'll be your best friend"? They didn't really know how to stay friends with anyone, so they'd just say "here, take my toys, steal my money, eat my sweets, burn my house down - just so long as you will be my friend."

Maybe Sky should start advertising "We can do anything you like, I don't care - just so long as you'll stay a while."

Forget TV-on-demand. Let's go back to the iron-rule-dictatorship style of broadcasting and make people work a little for their entertainment. That show you wanted to see was on last Tuesday at 8 pm. What? You missed it? Yeah, well hard luck, pal. Commit yourself or don't bother because we're NOT repeating it on another channel in ten minutes time or later in the month. You've missed it. And there's no chance of a DVD release so don't even ask, okay?