Month: April 2004

We did watch a fair bit of telly while we were in the States, and occasionally I even managed to persuade Sal to stop watching another slice of E! True Hollywood Nonsense. On one of those rare occasions, we happened to stumble across a paid political advertisement on behalf of the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign. These things always seem very odd to my eyes–the Party Political Broadcasts we see over here seem rather quaint and polite when contrasted with the kind of mud-slinging that goes on over there.

This particular one was a straightforward attack on John Kerry using a series of negative quotes about him that had been taken out of context from all those shabby right-wing papers that Al Franken writes about. It started off by attacking things like his war record (President Pot, meet Mr Senator Kettle, surely), and calling him “a waffler who blathers”, but what really stuck with me was the final quote that the ad built up to, their ultimate weapon against him:

“John Kerry has been described as being more liberal than Bill Clinton”.

Only in America could “liberal” be an unquestionably dirty word. Presumably to your average American it’s just a synonym for un-American left-wing commie scumbag. Or something.

Funnily enough, on a not-entirely unrelated name-dropping note, we spotted Jeff Kennet, former Australia Liberal Party member and Premier of Victoria (he of the Shed) drinking with his model son, Angus (Sal was rather more excited about this than me, for some reason) and other family members in the pub in Fulham last night.

Things is, though, that in Australia the word Liberal means the exact opposite of what it means in the US, they being the party of anti-socialist policies, privatisation, deregulation, corruption and tax cuts. Hmm, now who does that remind you of?

The combined joys of jetlag and having to return to work immediately have so far prevented me from writing a proper account of our recent holiday in New York. I feel compelled to do so now, though, if only because if I wait any longer I will be reduced to simply posting a copy of my credit card statement by way of describing the events of the last week far more accurately than my increasingly fragile short-term memory ever could.

[Case in point: on Tuesday, shortly before we left for the airport, we ended up randomly wandering around the part of the Meatpacking district in which we had spent our Saturday night (if only because Kim Cattrall’s character in Sex and the City once fell down a delivery hatch up the road). If we hadn’t found ourselves back there, then we would have had to wait for Sal’s credit card bill (on which she happened to have paid the cover charge) to come to find out the name of the club (Lotus, apparently) in which we had spent the highly drunken latter part of the evening with a couple of friendly locals who we’d got chatting to in another bar a few streets away.]

Anyway, I think it’s fair to say that we both thoroughly enjoyed ourselves on the trip, although we were somewhat disappointed that our early celebrity spotting (as mentioned previously) proved to be the exception rather than the rule, although Mike Contre-Attaque himself, (as the French can’t stop calling him), did go some way to disproving the old adage about celebrities being a lot smaller in real life than you expect (although maybe there is some sort of inverse relationship when it’s horizontal size you’re talking about, I don’t know). Perhaps he hasn’t tried that low-carb beer (I mean really…) that is advertised all over the place.

We didn’t bother with any of that Atkins nonsense either, preferring to fill our time (when we weren’t sightseeing, celebrity spotting, shopping, or watching trashy celebrity documentaries on E!) by consuming vast quantities of food, either in the lounge (because we couldn’t get a table–if only I’d read this before, it all might have been different) of a swanky uptown pan-Asian restaurant (complete with a giant Buddha that had apparently had to be airlifted into the building), or in countless breakfast diners, or a bizarre Mexican restaurant off Times Square (the only thing we could find open at the time) where the non Smoking policy was only casually respected, the other customers were all slightly threatening looking young guys, and the jukebox was strictly Mariachi music and authentic Mexican Pop (we beat a hasty retreat when a chap with a box full of minidiscs and a microphone looked like he was about to start a performance).

What else? Well, we went to the top of the Empire State Building, wandered Central Park, caught the free ferry to Staten Island, went to at least one location used in the film Ghostbusters (thanks Dave), shopped for Von Dutch clothes in the Village, (almost) filled an entire 128MB memory card with photos, saw the excellent Good Bye Lenin! at a small cinema in SoHo, sat on the steps of Sarah Jessica Parker’s fictional house, ate cupcakes outside the Magnolia bakery, explored the wonders of the village and the meatpacking district (some parts of which are still not completely gentrified and therefore juxtapose smelly warehouses with shops selling Stella McCartney’s clothes and Manolo Blahnik’s shoes). Oh, and we saw a crazy dancing man at Victoria station on the way there. And it doesn’t get much better than that.

I’ll be writing a proper entry about our New York adventures when we get back, but for now, I couldn’t resist posting a quick update from the impressive interior of the beautiful beaux-arts New York Public Library on 42nd and Fifth. If only to add it to the mental list of “places I’ve blogged”.

So far, we have been having a fantastic time–we’ve done our fair share of sightseeing, eaten plenty of great food and taken advantage of the fantastic exchange rate (and Sally’s doing that even more so in Macy’s as I write–I can’t imagine why she would prefer to do that then saunter round one of the best libraries in the world, but there you go). Oh, what else? well, we’ve been shopping in thrift stores on Staten Island, followed Michael Moore and an entire NFL team (who weren’t together, I might add) around the edges of the ground zero site, seen a movie being filmed in Central Park, (as well as countless news crews wandering the streets), and I haven’t been asked for ID (in the fabulous no smoking bars) once. I must be getting old…

If you were wondering what to buy the stalker in your life, then why not give them the ability to track your every move with this new service from 192.com that tracks anyone’s mobile phone to within 100 metres for just a fiver a month (oh how I wish that someone with a sense of humour could have seen fit to price it at 19.84 a month…)

I was heartily impressed by Sal’s ability to fall asleep yesterday evening during the zombie romantic comedy Shaun of The Dead (wonderfully housed on the InterWebNet at romzom.com). Those leather seats and footrests at the fabulous Electric cinema are mightily comfy, but it’s still no mean feat to nod off, however briefly, while a woman is being impaled on some garden furniture and Dylan Moran is having his intestines removed by a gaggle of marauding Spaced fans dressed as zombies.

There was no chance of me falling asleep, though, as I was thoroughly enjoying the film (positive reviews having already prepared me for the shock of it being a half decent British comedy film), and regarded the plush leather upholstery/red wine combo provided by the Electric as a bonus, rather than an aid to slumber. What a lovely cinema–I don’t think it will be the last time we go there.

Being a bit of a geek, I spent an hour or so yesterday setting up an RSS feed for the weblog. It’s something I have been meaning to do for ages now, and although I’ve got a few little things still to iron out, it does validate, and there’s a link on the left if you want to pick it up for your RSS reader of choice. Please let me know if you notice any problems with it and I will try to sort them out.

For those of you who don’t know what RSS is, Ben’s description is pretty good. As he says, it’s a way of wasting time on the InterWebNet really efficiently: You download a special “reader” application (and there are many free ones to choose from), or choose a web-based service (like www.bloglines.com), point it at the RSS feeds from all the sites you like that have them, and, er, that’s it. The reader software automatically checks the sites and tells you when they have been updated, so you don’t have to keep clicking refresh.

My spam email seems to be getting ever more bizarre by the minute. In what I presume is an attempt to defeat bayesian spam filters, the spamers are filling their emails with random obscure words.

I just got a mortgage approval email with the subject heading “Re: bellicose voluble”, which almost sounds like it might be a google-whack (it’s not though), and my bulk mail folder is stuffed full of messages with subject titles like “rogers augustus dysplasia narcissus stature asuncion albuquerque” (which you can almost, but not quite, sing to the tune of the King of Rock and Roll) and “sap wool pageant finale liquefaction splash camille dangle dusen”. They might get past some spam filters, but do the spammers honestly think that people are likely to open these emails?

Ah well, at least it provides a distraction–I like my Friday afternoons to be nicely surreal.

As the updated reading list on the right of the screen will testify, I’ve been buying books again, even though I haven’t finished reading the last lot. Which is odd really, as I only went out last night to go to Sainsbury’s to pick up bread rolls and toilet duck (which might in itself sound odd, but at least I knew that my shopping selections would be safe from Richard Herring-style checkout assistant scrutiny, as it wasn’t a Local Sainsbury’s for Local people). I didn’t actually need to go past Borders to get to the supermarket either, so I can’t even blame them for drawing me in with their tempting 3-for-2 offer. No, I had to make a conscious decision to go past, and THEN I got drawn in by their cunning placement of two books I wanted to buy on a table by the door with lots of little 3-for-2 stickers on them. And it would just be rude not to buy them and a third book I didn’t want, cause, like, the third one is free. And how can you turn down a free book–you can’t can you?

Suppose you made a huge mess of the ticket selling arrangements for a major hypothetical music festival, and subsequently discovered that your woefully inadequate hypothetical ticketing system had issued hundreds (or thousands?) of duplicate ticket orders to unsuspecting ticket buyers. Suppose you then discovered that despite the entirely fictional event having officially “sold out”, you were left with a huge number of cancelled (and therefore unsold) duplicates.

Would you:

(a) publicly announce that there were still tickets available for the event, causing an unholy scramble for tickets, and overloading your system. Again.

(b) quietly sell off the remaining tickets on your website without really telling anyone?

Entirely unrelated links

Official line: There will be no further issue of tickets. Duplicate orders have been cancelled and returned to the system and have all now been sold. Any further returned tickets and duplicate orders will be absorbed by outstanding needs.

Unofficial official line: http://www.seetickets.com/glastonbury2004/

I don’t want to dwell on this non-news story, but I happened to click on the link to this story entirely because of the headline: Loos: ‘Becks Made Me Feel A Million Dollars’. For a split second I really wanted this to be an article about some literal money-stroking fetish, so I was very disappointed to discover that she was just trotting out a trite cliche. The revelation in the story also isn’t going to have me rushing to Sky One to watch the interview tonight. Apparently he made her (metaphorically) feel a million dollars by feeding her “strawberries for breakfast”. Wow: fruit! If that isn’t the lifestyle of a multi-millionaire playboy, I don’t know what is.

“He brought in some fruit and started feeding me strawberries,” she said in the exclusive interview.

So shouldn’t the headline really be Loos: ‘Becks Made Me Feel £1.59 ($2)’?