Author: Matt Armstrong

Shameless link-whoring

Regular readers may wish to skip today’s post, as it’s little more than a shameless commerical plug:

I’ve been helping out some friends of mine, Sam and Tina, who run a wedding video filming business, Satin Weddings. I’ve been trying to optimise their (very pink) website so that it gets a bit higher up Google’s search results. I’m just linking to it here so that the feisty little Googlebot, a regular visitor round these parts, has a bit of a shufty (considering that the site was previously entirely constructed in un-indexable Flash with no keywords, anything is an improvement). Go, Google, go…

Funny. I think I’ve heard this before… Oh yes, it’s this I’m thinking of, isn’t it. Another victory for reasoned debate, then.

Set yer alarm clocks, kids: Tickets for this year’s Glastonbury festival go onsale at 8pm on Thursday 1st April (although it might be worth checking nearer the time if last year is anything to go by–when they quietly changed the date to the day before, had around 3 people answering the phone line and ran www.aloud.com on a ZX Spectrum).

I notice that the NME report on this story (here) says that “tickets go on sale at 8pm on April 1 2004 and will only available through the telephone ticketline 0870 830 2004 or through a link at the official festival site glastonburyfestivals.co.uk.” That’s funny, I wonder why they don’t mention that www.aloud.com will be selling tickets. It couldn’t be something to do with the fact that www.aloud.com is the website of an EMAP publication, and thus one of IPC-published NME’s major rivals. Surely not…

Angel and Jon came over to visit us last night, and they accompanied Sally and I on our second trip to the world of randomness that is the Hemingford Arms (don’t forget to close that window now!)

This time we sat in a different corner of the pub, further away from the comedy vaulting mannequin, but in a suitable spot to inspect the dangling accordions, assorted stuffed animals and classical statues with anachronistic headgear.

As well as offering me the chance to bump into the poshest person I knew at Bristol, someone I hadn’t seen for probably 4 years, navy Hugo, briefly released from his Plymouth-based submarine captivity, the pub also unexpectedly provided us with a short but challenging pub quiz. Our score was respectable, but didn’t trouble the leading teams. I think I will be back to try again.

Afterwards, I was slightly drunk. Which might explain the two stolen pint glasses in our kitchen this morning, and also the vivid dream I had in which I conceived an entire advertising campaign for digital radio to be shown on the BBC.

– Play penguin baseball (hitting them lower down so they bounce and skid along the ground seems to be the best strategy). My best score so far is 302.2. [UPDATE: Actually I prefer this version, which appears to be much easier. I can get 536 on this one].

– The Onion: Yee-Haw! My Vote Cancels Out Y’all’s!

– The Shorter State of the Union

– The list of 10 Mistakes Writers don’t see is very good. I’m probably guilty of most of these on this blog at the very least.

– I won’t be publishing my pitifully low score on this quiz, but it’s worth doing anyway.

– Finally, the design/content mixer is very good. Except I tried to mix www.pastemagazine.org/rob.php with www.pastemagazine.org/matt.php and it made my head explode.

It’s not what you say…

This article in today’s Independent made me smile. According to (Tory chairman) Liam “Dr” Fox–presumably having a break from judging Pop Idol (I know)–the Conservatives won’t be bothering with any of that liberal positive discrimination nonsense: “[he insisted] his party would select candidates on merit alone and not because of their colour or sex.”

Dr Fox said: “For a meritocratic party to be effective it must be minority-blind. For us it does not matter where an individual comes from, who his parents were, or the colour of his skin.”

…as long as he is male, though, presumably?

Hounslow Plane crash?

I’m intrigued by a sudden spike in traffic to the site from people Google-ing for hounslow plane crash, and air crash hounslow. Has somebody dropped a 747 onto the Treaty centre since I’ve been away, because I’m sure I would have heard about that, or is it just because the BBC recently repeated their shabby disaster documentary The Day Britain Stopped? (something I wrote about here)

Five Angels for the Millennium

We went to the Tate on Saturday to see two excellent installations. The ongoing Weather project, as I’m sure you know, is that huge sun in the turbine hall. There’s something utterly wonderful and childish about lying on the floor of the hall looking up at the mirrored ceiling reflecting yourself and everyone else back at you. We spent a diverting half hour or so watching other people messing about and generally acting like children so they could watch themselves in the mirrors. Most were content to make shapes, (and personally I felt Sally and I were just an L and P short of a Beatles) but my favourites were the two guys in front of us pretending to run round in circles–and over hurdles–by lying on their sides and making leg movements. Perhaps you had to be there.

Even more enthralling was Bill Viola’s Five Angels for the Millennium (note comedy misspelling of “Millenium” [sic] on Tate website). It’s a video installation in a pitch black room showing five slow-motion reverse footage videos of figures diving into (or out of) water. I was dragged into the room by people who had been there before without really knowing what it was. Stumbling into the dark room, Sally I had to turn round and leave again, but on the second attempt we managed to shuffle in and find a spot to sit down and watch. The five video sequences, backed with ambient sounds that culminate in the sound of the water breaking when the figure finally moves through it, are utterly mesmerising. Just as you think nothing is going to happen, the figure appears from the water, arms outstreached.

And, as your eyes adjust to the darkness in the room, and you begin to see everything around you clearly, there is the added attraction of being able to mock the misfortune of others by watching newcomers shuffle cautiously into the room and each other (as you did earlier).

Now we are One

With the impending first anniversary of my blog on Tuesday, and this being my 200th post (yes, really), I thought it would be appropriate to pause for a moment of gentle reflection.

In February 2003 (the earliest month for which I still have statistics for the pastemagazine.org domain), we were getting a daily average of 28 visits* a month. This has risen steadily over the course of the year to a current daily average of 87 visits. In terms of pure hits*, we’ve gone from a monthly total of around 4 000 to nearly 15 000 last month. Sure, it’s not going anywhere close to the bandwidth limit, and a fair few of those hits and visits are just the Google bots relentlessly crawling over the pages on an almost daily basis, but it’s still a nice rise, and it would be fair to say that the blogs are largely responsible for that increase (given that the rest of the site is mostly unchanged from a year ago).

If you stumbled across the site and/or blogs and stayed, then hello to you. Perhaps you searched on in via “brain surgeon’s salary“, or “bmg copy control” (Psst: Just click Cancel or hold the SHIFT key when you insert the CD… It’s that easy! I probably should keep quiet about that, or I presume my lawsuit will be in the post now that the BPI plans to start suing downloading grannies et al.), or maybe one of the more unsavoury search queries I discover from time to time nestling in the log files along with your IP address (if you ever thought that the Internet is an anonymous medium, then you couldn’t be more wrong), although if that is the case, I suspect that you didn’t stay for long. Or maybe you’re an old college friend/lurking reader, ex-housemate, work colleague, or Australian. In any case, if you like (or dislike) what you read, do leave a comment. It’s nice to know there’s someone out there, at least.

* dull explanation of terms: “hits” means the total number of page requests sent to the server, so if you come to the site and click on 5 different pages, which include 3 images somewhere on them, that counts as 8 hits; “visit” collates together all the pages you click on within a 30 minute period, so those 5 pages and images count as 1 visit.