Year: 2003

On the subject of those search strings (again): Paste is now the number one search result for the string brain surgeon salary.

Wonderful.

Fantastic. Check out The Idler magazine’s attempts to find the crappest towns in the UK. I particularly like the description of Southport:

“When Morrisey wrote “Every day is like Sunday”, you get the feeling that he had just spent the afternoon in Southport.”

Having recently spent the weekend there, this is rather apt, I think.

I just noticed that we are the second search result in Google (of “about 718,000”) for the string “Creative Writing Magazine” (although again, there’s no guarantee how long that will be the case).

Excellent… I was just looking through the Paste Magazine log files (don’t ask – slow day at work) and I discovered that there is a real boxer called “Robert Allen”. A middleweight apparently. Yesterday someone did a search on him in Google using the string “boxer robert allen”. The top search result for this is Atmospheric Anomaly. Perhaps not what they were looking for.

Try it for yourself (although there’s no guarantee that it will still work when you do if they have updated their database by the time you read this).

So it’s that time of year again. Don’t get me wrong, overexposure to Lenny Henry, people in baths of baked-beans and dubious office comedy aside, Comic Relief is generally a good thing. The only reason I mention it is the fact that I had the misfortune to watch one of the episodes of “Celebrity” Fame Academy earlier this week. [Tellingly, the official title for the show doesn’t even actually include the word “celebrity”. Is it just me? I didn’t even recognise some of these people, and the ones I did were definitely of the lower alphabet variety. That bloke that was on Hollyoaks years ago, for example].

Anyway, it goes without saying that it was another one of the worst pieces of television I’ve seen in ages (sort of reminded me of that Channel 5 Saturday evening karaoke thing with Suggs on it actually), but I suppose you can forgive them as it’s for a good cause… one bit really stuck out though. They were going through the results of the phone vote and they said that that it had raised £90,000 for Comic Relief. All very good of course, until you see the small print when they put up the phone numbers: “Calls cost 40p, 25p goes to Comic Relief”. A quick bit of maths tells me that, yes, it may have raised £90,000 for charity, but that means they had 360,000 calls, so it also “raised” £54,000 for BT… which seems like an awful lot to me.

The next day I’m in the car and Radio 1 is on, and they have some text-in competition for Comic Relief where the text costs you £1 in addition to your normal text costs, of which only 70p actually goes to the charity. So the mobile companies get an extra 30p on top of what they would get for a normal text, er, for doing what exactly?

People! Stop it! Stop phoning in to Fame Academy! It doesn’t matter if Paul Ross or that tit from the kiddies soap gets voted off. No one cares. More’s the point, why not give the 40p you would have spent on phone calls – or multiples of 40p if you are inclined to do this regularly – directly to Comic Relief (or any other charity for that matter)? They’ll get more money that way.

And don’t, whatever you do, buy that Gareth Gates record.

Some people from “Richard and Judy” are filming at work today. It’s going to be on the show tomorrow, part of a feature on “Medallion man” makeovers. Some of the guys here have volunteered to be given said makeovers (which from what I can tell seems to amount to 70s afro wigs and flares).

Of course, if you can’t watch, maybe you’d like to punch them in the face instead.

Your choice I guess.

[UPDATE: This wasn’t actually on when they said it would be. Apparently it will now be on next Friday (the 14th)]

Someone sent me this earlier, it’s from yesterday’s guardian:

“Sky News, meanwhile, remains cripplingly self-effacing. ‘Of course, you the viewers can have your say on Saddam’s long-range missiles,’ claimed a presenter on Friday. ‘Just press the red button…'”

That sort of reminds me of something I saw the other day on one of the shoddy cable channels we get. It was a trailer for a documentary about the conflict in the Gulf in the early 90s. The trailer finished with the following, rather unfortunate, (or perhaps prophetic) comment:

“‘The Gulf War’. Starts Wednesday at 11…”

Ticket prices for Glastonbury keep going up. According to the official site, they are now going to be £105 plus booking fee. Funny, after the license was approved they said they’d be the same price as last year (£97). About a week later this went up to £100, and now it’s £105… Tickets don’t go on sale for another month, are they just going to keep going up at weekly intervals?

Maybe Thom Yorke asks for a massive rider…

I went to see “The Hours” this weekend. Cracking film, definitely recommended and worthy of its inevitable Oscar success. The acting, in particular, is superb. As a resident of South-West London, however, two things particularly amused me (unintentionally so). In the film, Nicole Kidman plays Virginia Woolf, living in Richmond in the early 20th Century, struggling with suicidal tendencies and writing “Mrs Dalloway”.

At one point she sends one of her servants off to London to buy ginger, telling her that if she catches the 12:30 train, she’ll be there around 1. Nice to see that, in 80 years, the trains haven’t got any quicker.

Later on, she argues with her husband about the fact that they are living in Richmond, where she feels trapped and suicidal, and not London. He counters that it was precisely to save her from herself (the voices, etc.) that they moved away from London to the relative peace of the suburbs. There was some laughter in the cinema when she gave her response to this (I was watching this in Clapham), and there’s surely a missed opportunity that this didn’t make it onto the posters around here: “Given a choice between Richmond and death”, she explains, “I choose death.”

I’ve been to “Edwards” in Richmond on a Saturday night before now. I think I know what she means.

So I watched the Brit awards last night. Funny, I thought 2002 was quite a good year for music, as there are so many decent bands around at the moment, but apparently I was mistaken. No, it appears that Will Young was the best new act to come out of this country last year (so to speak – sorry that is an appalling joke isn’t it?).

All in all, it was perhaps the dullest ceremony in recent memory. [I mean what, exactly, is the point of getting a celebrity – maybe even one you’ve flown half way around the world – to introduce the nominations if all they are going to do is wander up to the stage and literally say just the three words “The nominations are…”]

Apparently the major labels that run these things have no interest in promoting any of the genuinely exciting bands around at the moment; they’re only interested in trying to shift a few more copies of “A Rush Of Blood To The Head” and then trotting out a curiously goateed Tom Jones to try to flog a few copies of the recent album that absolutely no one has bought.

All that, and there wasn’t even a Jarvis Cocker-style incident to write about. Jees, even the Chumbawamba/John Prescott water-throwing non-incident would have done. Bring back Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood, all is forgiven…