Year: 2003

This article from yesterday’s Independent makes interesting reading: 20 Lies About The War.

As has been widely reported, AS Byatt this week criticised the Harry Potter books, wondering why so many adults were fanatical about them.

Byatt said: “It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.”

For me, one of the strongest indications that she may be correct in saying that would be the story I read in the copy of the Daily Star that the guy next to me on the train was reading this morning. The basic thrust of the article was something along the lines of “snobby author thinks you’re thick but she’s wrong”, backing this up with facts like a comparison between the sales of Possession and the Potter books, as if sales have anything to do with literary value.

Personally, I never really bought into the Potter thing, and reading some of the first book recently did nothing to change my mind; I find the whole thing rather depressing actually, but I don’t want to drag up the old “it’s just a children’s book” argument here. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with reading a children’s book; the problem is if that’s the only book you read, which somewhat negates the “but it gets people reading” argument, but I digress.

Anyway, I continue to be amazed by the sheer number of people reading the massive new book. Everytime I get on the train and think that no one is reading it, I look up the other end and sure enough someone is. I mean, I struggled to cart Underworld around for weeks, and that’s nothing compared to the Rowling’s huge hard-backed yellow opus.

So, in honour of Richard Herring’s number plate game (for he, too has seen through the Potter lies), I propose a new game: the Harry Potter game; it’s open to anyone making regular train or bus journeys across any major city in the UK (or further afield I suppose). The object of the game is to see how many people you can spot on any given carriage of a tube/train/bus reading the book at the same time. I think my best so far is 6. Can you do better? Answers on a guestbook or the back of a stuck down email…

Oh, and you’ll need a flask of weak lemon drink.

Wow. Six months after I started this thing, I have reached post #100. Not that there is anything particularly significant about that. It is not as significant, for example, as the point that I will eventually reach at some stage in the (distant) future where the database space allocated to Paste Magazine is all used up, and I have to stump up the cash for some more storage space (or find a different service provider).

It is a nice round number, however, and it’s rather like the fact that there’s nothing particularly significant about reaching, say, the year 2000, given the way the Gregorian Calendar came about, apart from the fact that all the numbers change, you have to get new chequebooks that don’t have 19 pre-printed on them, and the media spend months convincing impressionable Americans in the mid-west that they need to stock up on duct tape in case the computers all self-destruct the moment the clocks change. Anyway, to mark the occasion, I think it’s time for a good, old-fashioned, rant.

I have the vaguest memory, way back in the distant past that was the 1980s, of watching Ben Elton’s TV show (this when he was still “cool”, before Maybe Baby and all those shabby musicals). For some reason I remember only two of his routines, and they’re both about transport (I wonder if this reveals something deeply wrong with my psychological make-up; the inner trainspotter clambering to get out, perhaps).

One routine was the “double seat, double seat, got to get a double seat” running-for-the-train one (for some reason, thanks to this early childhood memory, I still think (adopt Ben Elton voice) “why do they put them on here, they are completely empty” every time I walk past the first class carriages at a mainline station to get to standard class).

The other routine I remember was a response to some new Tory road building initiative. It was quite a well thought out piece that used a metaphor that was something to do with rubbish bins that ultimately made the point that you can widen the roads all you like, but it doesn’t solve the problem. In the end, you just end up with a jammed 6-lane carriageway instead of a jammed 3-lane one.

Unsurprisingly, it looks like he might have been right, with the announcement of a £7BN road-widening scheme to tackle congestion. It’s all very well trying to appease the road lobby with this kind of stuff, but people have to understand that it’s never actually going to solve the transport problem. Like Ben said all those years ago, you just end up with a road twice as big that’s jammed with traffic. Alistair Darling even admits that it is “only a temporary solution”, although he seems quite happy to spend the money anyway, even though the roads are probably going to be totally congested again before they are even finished.

So why not put that £7BN towards improving the shocking state of the public transport network, and actually try to make some kind of long term difference to the underlying problems of the UK’s transport infrastructure? Perhaps if public transport actually represented a real alternative form of transport that was quick, comfortable and efficient, as well as being better for the environment, you might actually be able to convince people to leave their precious cars at home and use it. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to go throwing our weight around in the Middle East quite so much in an attempt to keep the oil going for a few more years. If we carry on like this, though, we are going to run out very soon.

And then we really will be going nowhere.

One of my colleagues posted this lyric on her weblog the other day:

Are you thinking/of telephones/and managers/and where you’ve got to be at noon?
You are living/a reality I left years ago/It quite nearly killed me.
In the long run/It will make you cry/Make you crazy and old before your time.

Seems rather appropriate, somehow.

On an entirely unrelated note. I’m sitting here at work listening to Christian O’Connell’s excellent XFM breakfast show (the other day he said that he’s just signed a new two year deal, which might just keep me getting up in the mornings). Anyway the following exchange made me laugh out loud (so much so that said colleague, who sits behind me, actually turned round to see what I was laughing at):

Christian: (as David Gray’s “Dead in the Water” fades out) I was just thinking, it’s just as well we didn’t play this one this time yesterday, when we were chatting to Michael Barrymore.
Chris Smith: What, doesn’t he like David Gray?
Christian: No, I think he’s more of a musical fan. Show tunes…

I’m sorry, it’s been a long week.

Nice to see from this month’s logs that Paste Magazine is now one of the top 3 search results for headache information. Already this month someone has stopped by to read Rob’s story while searching for information about migraines. I do wonder if it helped, but it raises some interesting questions.

All the other search results are clearly more suitable if you want to find out how to cure that headache, so was this person actually looking for stories of pain rather than advice on cures, or were they just clicking indiscriminately because Google told them to?

And if you have got a headache, surely a trip down the shops for some Nurofen might be a more appropriate course of action, rather than turning to Google, however fantastic it might be. Hmm. It does rather remind me of the old Onion story: “Local Man Uses Internet for Everything”. Sadly that is not archived on their website; the closest related link I could find was this: “Internet Opens Up Whole New World Of Illness For Local Hypochondriac“. Then again, maybe that is appropriate.

Last night I listened to The Bends for the first time in absolutely ages. It reminded me of the first year at Bristol. I must get round to learning to play Just properly again sometime. Then we followed that with OK Computer, which reminds me of working in the states in summer 1997 (being asked to play Karma Police on the guitar for the fifteenth time). I had already fallen asleep (I blame the wine) before Karma Police came on, and I woke up, almost a whole album later, as my mp3 player on repeat got back round to Exit Music (For A Film).

This morning I went looking for those links and couldn’t leave cd-wow without buying something, so I picked up Lipstick Traces (you may wish to go to the official manics website to enter the competition to win wristbands to their HMV instore gig next monday) and Punch Drunk Love on DVD.

A heart that’s full up like a landfill/A job that slowly kills you/Bruises that won’t heal
You look so tired unhappy/Bring down the government/They don’t, they don’t speak for us
I’ll take a quiet life/A handshake of carbon monoxide
No alarms and no surprises/No alarms and no surprises/No alarms and no surprises
Please

The other day I talked about work here, which is something I never normally do. Something else I don’t normally do is write about anything too personal. I’m not sure why, but I suppose I don’t feel I want to give too much away in such a public space. This may be my self-indulgent little corner of the web, where I like to presume that anyone actually cares about any of this stuff, but I make the rules, and I usually prefer not to reveal anything about myself that you don’t already know.

Today I am going to break both of these self-imposed rules (at least until I reread this at some unspecified date in the future, realise what a load of self-obsessed toss it is, and decide to delete this post).

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about work recently. The last week or so has been pretty awful, and it’s not just the post-festival blues. I am starting to wonder if I made the right decision in moving jobs. When they offered me this job, I couldn’t decide what to do. Of course, I used to moan about Micromuse as much as the next cynical bastard, just as I had complained about RiverSoft before that (usually when the threat of redundancy loomed), but when they offered me this job, I just wasn’t sure what to do. I think the problem was that I was comfortable at Micromuse. I knew the people, I knew the job, and I knew exactly what I’d be doing for the next so many months. However much I might have moaned about it, or about certain colleagues, at least I knew exactly what I needed to do and I totally understood the technology that I needed to write about.

When I finally decided to take the job it was because I thought I was too comfortable there and I wasn’t being challenged enough, but now I wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off staying put. Now I realise that I don’t know anything at all.

Yesterday was just awful. A completely pointless and unproductive day. I had been asked to write this new document, based on an existing document, by extracting the information and reformatting and restructuring it. Despite the poor quality of the original document, I tried to complete this task and sent it back to the guy I was working with, hoping that it satisfied his ideas about what the new document should be, but then he sends it on to his manager, who has a whole set of different ideas about what was needed. Eventually I get this thing sent back to me with 68 different comments on it (and it’s only a 35 page document), all of which involve further restructuring, and most of which seem to contradict each other (i.e., the first comment will tell me to put such and such a section first, then the second comment will tell me that this section really needs to be the first thing in the document, and later in the document another comment will tell me that this section absolutely has to be the first thing I talk about). I don’t understand what I am supposed to be writing about, I don’t have enough information to do it, the goalposts keep moving, and I don’t think I can do this, I really don’t. I used to think I was good at my job, but now I wonder if I could ever do it at all, or if I was just somehow bluffing it.

Then I start to wonder what I am going to do with the rest of my life. Can I really do this for the next 40 years? And if not this, what would I do? I don’t really have any other skills. I guess I always thought that I would do something with my life, but now I’m not so sure. Ok, so maybe recording that hit album was always a bit far-fetched, but I always thought I might finally write my novel or something. But I really don’t think I have the conviction, or the time, let alone the talent or inspiration.

In the end I gave up on the document when it got to 6pm yesterday, as I just wasn’t getting anywhere. I took it home with the intention of reading it on the train, but couldn’t quite bring myself to and I ended up just going home and getting an early night. I watched a bit of TV, worked out the guitar chords to “Just Another” and “For Nancy” and tried to get to sleep early while listening to the pumping bass coming through to my room from the living room.

So what do I do now? I can’t leave a job so soon after starting it, even if I could find something else. I suppose I have to just turn up everyday and pretend I am enjoying it. But what’s the point?

Actually, don’t answer that. Maybe it is just the post-festival blues. Normal service will be resumed shortly, with a succession of left-leaning political links, comedy, thoughts, observations and obsessive rantings on indie guitar music.

Oh so, rather depressingly, another week stretches out before me. It’s 10 am already and I haven’t done anything yet. I’m exhausted. As usual, I need another weekend to recover from the last one (which I needed to recover from the one before that). On Saturday I was playing chef (and DJ) at Sal’s barbeque. No reports of food poisoining so far, so I guess we can call this one a success. We certainly drank plenty of beer, judging by the bulging recycle bin full of empty cans outside her house this morning.

After successfully calling Federer’s straight sets win in the Men’s singles final, we rounded off the weekend by seeing one of my current favourite comedians, the excellent Ross Noble, at the Open Air Theatre.

I don’t normally talk about work here, because it’s really quite dull, but the last couple of days have been rather trying. People keep moving the goalposts on me on every task I need to do. The problem, I think, is that everyone likes to think they can write documentation. Everyone has their own ideas about what is right and they all think they can do a better job than you.

I can’t wait for the weekend to be here, to be honest. In the meantime, I had to dig out this old chestnut to remind myself that it isn’t just me.

“The biggest lies in technical writing”

As I finally got the chance to wash four days worth of mud, sweat and sunscreen off my smelly post-Glastonbury self yesterday, I had a chance to reflect on another fantastic but over-all-too-soon festival weekend. Now that the true horror that is being back at work has firmly set in, I feel it’s time to write about it.

I’m not sure if it was my best festival ever, but it was pretty close. From the moment we settled in to our cracking camping spot (just up from the pyramid stage) onwards, (this after a helpful steward told us that that part of the campsite was “full”, and we sneaked up behind the property lock-up tent to find that it was not) everything just worked out brilliantly.

We saw and heard some cracking bands. Since getting back, I have already picked up The Thrills and Polyphonic Spree albums (and I have Pete Yorn’s “Musicforthemorningafter” on order from play – his cover of She Bangs The Drum, “for Manchester”, was one of my musical highlights).

The rain also held off for the most part, which is definitely a good thing given my personal lack of proper preparation. And as we discovered on Friday lunchtime, there’s only so long you can watch the Inspirals go through the motions while sitting outside your tent on top of a plastic bag and under an umbrella.

For almost the whole of the rest of the weekend, the sun shone brightly and I was suitably burnt as a result (and am now rather tanned, as I was surprised to discover yesterday when I finally got a chance to look in the mirror for the first time in several days).

Oh and I…
Drank a lot of cider, and vodka.
Heard Radiohead (whose new album has finally started to grow on me) play Fake Plastic Trees, Street Spirit, and Lucky.
Heard the Manics play Take The Skinheads Bowling.
Heard Moby play Creep
Saw Wayne Coyne drenched in the usual fake blood, surrounded by furry animals while beach balls bounced around a joyful crowd.
Very much enjoyed the Polyphonic Spree in the warm, fading, Saturday afternoon sunshine (the perfect combination).
Wondered where Pete Libertines Docherty was.
Remembered being 18 while Supergrass ran through their hits.
Can’t believe I’m back at work already. Is V festival really the next thing I have to look forward to?