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We continued our recent tour of the West End’s finest cinemas this evening, by heading out to yet another free film screening. This time, it was Ocean’s 13 at the Cineworld in Haymarket. I was actually rather looking forward to this one. Not, of course, because I wanted to see how they’d managed to stretch a thin premise onto a third film, but rather because we saw it being filmed when we were in Vegas last year. So I was eager to see how that scene where Al Pacino walks into a bar at the Bellagio ended up on the big screen.

Al Pacino! Now there’s a celeb spot: sadly the best one I could manage today was Marcus Brigstocke, who walked past me looking a bit lost while I was waiting for Sal at Piccadilly Circus. (Oops, sorry, I’ll come up with a haiku later…)

I wasn’t quite prepared, however, to be accosted on the way in by security who demanded to search our bags. Cue a rather nervous moment while we worried that they might confiscate our ice creams. But no, they were actually looking for film pirates. As we did have any of them hidden in our bags, we were allowed in.

A little while later, ensconced in our seats and with our magnums in hand, one of the security chaps–a slightly intimidating, beefy, old school east end gangster type–addressed the audience to warn us against attempting to record the film.

“These”, he said, brandishing what looked like a pair of binoculars, “are night vision. I’ll be watching you, so make sure your mobile phones are off. I don’t want to be hauling any of you out of the screening because you’re texting your mates.”

“We’re here as security on behalf of the film company. They don’t want this film being leaked before it’s released”, he added, by way of explanation, before heading to the back of the room to stand around looking a bit menacing.

Blimey. At the free Time Out screenings a nice American lady gets up and tells you to enjoy the film. It’s not quite the same, is it?

And I don’t know why the film industry always harps on about people videoing films in cinemas: surely most of the ones that leak onto the internet are really screeners sourced from people inside the industry. And why would I want to video the film when I can find a torrent to download just by typing “Ocean’s Thirteen torrent” into Google (look: I just did and I found one in less than 2 minutes). Oh, I’m sorry, did I say all that out loud? Of course: all leaked movies have been taped in cinemas by terrorists. And home taping is killing music.

Oh, and it was nice to see that Cineworld and Warners have their priorities right: the sound cut out on at least 6 different occasions during the film. At one point we missed at least 5 minutes of dialogue. Mr Anti-Piracy, who had only a short while earlier been ostentatiously scanning the crowd with his night vision, stood impassively, doing nothing until the sound came back.

I almost felt like going up to the manager on the way out and complaining that the poor sound quality had really messed up that pirate recording that I was trying to make. But as I hadn’t paid any money that I could demand him return, it all seemed a bit pointless.

Oh, the film? Well, I’ve cleverly circumvented their hardcore security measures by escaping from the cinema with the contents of the film in my head: if you’ve seen either of the first two, then you know what to expect. Clooney and his mates have a bit of a laugh, and the good not-really-bad guys all triumph in the end. There’s a weird bit at the beginning where Eddie Izzard pops up, acts a bit badly, and promptly disappears, not returning for the rest of the film (almost as if his later scenes all ended up on a cutting room floor somewhere). There’s some moderately funny lines towards the end, and some awful gags at the start. It’s all, you know, a bit predictable, but perfectly passable. The sort of film that would make a perfect inflight movie. (I’ll have the chicken, please, and red wine, thanks).

And it made me want to go back to Vegas. A lot.

[The “Pacino walks into a bar” bit did indeed make it into the film, about an hour in, where he goes to the Gaming Expo event to buy Bernie Mac’s funny domino game. I almost jumped up and down shouting “I saw that! In real life!” but I was a bit scared that Mr Security might mark me down as an undesirable and throw me out. So I settled for quietly tapping Sal on the shoulder and smiling.]

Much crowing in the Sindie today about their “new look”. Not that you can really tell. I picked up the paper outside the tube on the way back from the pub last night–there’s still something that gives me a childish thrill about being able to buy tomorrow’s paper today if you’ve been out in central London on a Saturday night–and I was disappointed to see that it looks very much like their old look (although it did confuse the old fella manning the paper stall, who studied the front cover intently for at least five minutes looking for the price until I pointed out the giant “£1” written in a big red circle…)

The only really noticeable change is that, in what clearly appears to be an attempt to connect with teh interwebs, a key word in each story is printed in some almost illegible grey colour and underlined. I thought this was a printing error when I first saw it, until the appearance of similar terms throughout the paper confirmed that this is indeed an attempt to introduce some kind of hyperlink: I’m sure this seemed like a great idea in the design meeting, but perhaps someone should have pointed out that you can’t actually follow a hyperlink off a printed page. And perhaps a better strategy of connecting with teh interwebs would be to sort out your piss poor website.

They’ve also gone in in a big way for the whole “have your say” approach that seems to be ubiquitous in the British media these days. I hereby predict that the hyperlinks will last for two months at the most, and I look forward to the whole thing being roundly slagged off in this week’s Private Eye.

Oh, and their new look unfortunately hasn’t seen an end to their laughable Wi-Fi health scaremongering: page six informs me that Julia Stephenson (“The Independent’s Green Goddess columnist”) has disconnected her Wi-Fi, “on the advice of her naturopath”. Elsewhere, concerned readers have apparently been removing their Wi-Fi connections in droves: “There is not enough information available on the subject. I don’t want to take any risks. You just don’t know what all this technology in the home is doing to us.”.

I’m sorry, but given that there’s no actual evidence that there’s any health danger in using a Wi-Fi connection, I find myself firmly in the Ben Goldacre camp on this one, and I might have to consider switching to The Grauniad. Actually, I’ve half a mind to write a satirical health scare article of my own about the risk of getting cancer from copies of “The Independent on Sunday”. Of course, there’s no actual scientific evidence that newsprint is carcinogenic and can be absorbed into the body by handling copies of “The Independent on Sunday”, but until those scientist boffins can prove that “The Independent on Sunday” doesn’t cause cancer, I demand that these newspapers be pulled off the shelves of newsagents across the country, where they are within the reach of–gasp!–children. You just don’t know what all these “newspapers” in the home are doing to us. Won’t somebody, somewhere, think of the children?

*

UPDATE, 08-Jun-2007: I missed yesterday’s indie, but apparently Stephenson’s been at it again.

She actually uses the word “boffins”, before finishing with the following glorious rhetorical flourish:

“At one time scientists assured us the earth was flat and that mercury, asbestos, the atomic bomb and cigarettes were harmless. Today many assure us that GM crops, mobile phones and pesticides are safe. Yet history must surely advise caution before we rush headlong to embrace all that technology has to offer.”

Um. No. I don’t think so…

“At one time scientists told us… the atom bomb [was] harmless”? Come off it. This is a parody, right?

I have succumbed. Just a few short weeks ago I was slagging off Rob and Jim for doing the Facebook thing, but as of two days ago I have my own profile.

Partly, this is because of a very clever move on Facebook’s part: you can’t look at anything on the site unless you have your own profile. I can decide that I can’t be bothered with micebass just by looking at the ugly world of anti-design hell that it is (and I can’t see the appeal of using it to pretend to be friends with famous people, and don’t have a band to promote), but I can’t draw any conclusions about Facebook unless I join.

Now that I have, I see that it’s a bit like myspace, but without all the ugly background colours and the unsigned bands. And while there’s definitely something addictive about trying to find and add as many of your friends as possible, I’m fairly sure that the novelty of that must wear off after a while.

So what exactly is the point of Facebook?

If you wanted a blog, why not just get a proper one? If you want to upload your photos, why not just do it on Flickr (or one of the many alternative photo sharing sites out there)?

And why do they keep trying to get me to give them my email password? They claim that they will use this to log into my email account and download my address book, so that they can tell me if anyone I’ve ever emailed is also on Facebook, and maybe that is all that they will do with it. But that’s not the point. There’s no way in the world I’m going to give up my email password to anyone other than my email provider.

Are people really that lax about security that they will give up this sort of information to anyone who asks?

Perhaps they’d like my bank details as well so that they can login and check my balance and link me up with people on similar incomes… They already have my date of birth, and there’s space in your profile to complete your address. Maybe I should add my mother’s maiden name too?

Anyway. I’m signed up: why not add me as your “friend” (if I don’t add you first…)

Just a thought, but do Virgin Atlantic really think that Loose Change (complete with shot of the burning twin towers in the seat back magazine) represents appropriate content for their “in-flight entertainment”?

My, how times have changed: ten years ago I clearly remember (also on a Virgin flight as it happens) watching the Eurovision episode of Father Ted, from which four key words had been quietly edited out of the bit where Dougal says “Er, they all died, Ted, in a plane crash”. Then, a few years ago, I watched Donnie Darko on a trip to somewhere or other: in this case, it would have been pretty impossible for them to remove evidence of planes not always staying in the air, but they did provide a handy note in the magazine: “this film contains scenes involving a plane crash that some viewers may find disturbing”.

No doubt on my next trip they’ll be showing the Final Destination trilogy, with audio channels showcasing the best of Buddy Holly, Glenn Miller, and John Denver…

Anyway, I watched the 9/11 conspiracy thing on the way back from Cuba this morning. It was, quite clearly, nonsense, but more of that later…

And more of Cuba, too, which was fantastic. And I have 1.5 GB of photographic evidence to sift through and upload to prove it too. It might take a while.

So glad to see that Sal’s bank has signed up for some kind of efficient anti-fraud system. And they’ve clearly tested it so well: booking flights online last night, we were redirected to a third-party site to sign up to the “Verified By Visa” program, and then, somehow, we ended up here:

It’s the sort of thing that gives you faith that your money’s in good hands…

So, the Camden Crawl then. I snuck out of work early and found myself in Camden just after five. I waited for Sal just up the Kentish Town Road, close to the wristband exchange (my suggested meeting place of just outside the tube having been vetoed on the account of there being “too many weirdos there…”; of course the Camden of twenty meters away is refreshing crazy-free). As I waited, a steady stream of young indie kids, fresh off the production line with their tight skinny jeans and porkpie hats, wandered past in groups, each excitedly checking the lineups that they’d just collected. Hanging around in Camden makes me feel old.

When Sal finally turned up, and we too had collected our wristbands, free CD, lineups, and complimentary bag of promotional tat, we popped into the nearby noodle bar to grab something to eat. As we munched through our noodles I sorted through the bag of flyers we’d been handed to determine whether any of it was worth keeping. Amongst the promotional items within was a small NME badge, on which the paper’s logo is set against a union jack background. My, how things have changed.

Noodles consumed, and a couple of tigers later, we headed round the corner to the Electric Ballroom to catch the first act of the evening, selected purely on the basis of being the only thing on so far (As we passed the tube I noticed that teh kids were already queueing at the Underworld, presumably to see Foals, even though they wouldn’t be on for another hour; maybe they knew something we didn’t.)

Anyway, instead we saw “indie singer-songwriter” Kate Nash. Slightly entertaining, even though she’d clearly been signed by a record label desperate for an indie Lilly Allen. The first set of the night out of the way, and with a firm “no queues” policy established, we set off up Chalk Farm Road for some random crawl action. Sal wanted to go somewhere we’d never been before, so we opted for The Cuban Bar in the market, where a bloke with a Yorkshire accent mixed us Mojitos beneath posters of Che and Cuban flags. The band, when they eventually played on the small stage in the corner, were ultimately forgettable, but did boast a lead singer who looked uncannily like Stephen Mangan (he of Green Wing fame).

Where to next? We’d already made the decision to head towards Koko for the end of the evening, so we decided to head back along the high street (after a brief diversion via Lock 17, which instantly failed our “no queues” policy with a line that snaked around the courtyard in anticipation of who knows what). I’d decided that I would see anything, regardless of the band’s name or type of music. I only realised that this strategy may have been a mistake when we found ourselves in The Oh! Bar: it was only after we’d bought drinks that I noticed the Kerrang logo on the walls. Oh! Dear. Well, how bad could “Flood of Red” be?

We stopped just long enough to down the remains of our pints and for me to take a couple of photos, and scampered, the first song barely half over…

After a brief detour via The Purple Turtle (where I rather enjoyed the unusually-titled Untitled Musical Project), we headed for a busy Koko, where we watched first Tom McRae, and then The Charlatans from a prime vantage point just above the DJ booth (which is now covered over, thus, preventing any Mani-asking-Sal-for-a-light style shenanigans like last year).

And that was that. Just time for a Woody’s kebab, and then home. Same time next year?

Just a quick one to apologise to anyone who might have popped in this morning for the usual fix of sarcasm and cynicism and found themselves not at www.pastemagazine.org, but instead at www.pderoode.com. Or indeed at any one of these sites (or indeed several others):

– www.martinshakeshaft.com

– www.cliftoncoffee.co.uk
– www.d-log.info

Our hosting company, Freedom2RunAReallyShittyService, in their infinite wisdom, appear to have decided to randomly serve up one of the other sites on the same server instead of this one.

Perhaps they were trying to tell me something.
Or perhaps they’re just utterly incompetent.
You decide.

I know that the “isn’t it funny how the media always over hype how quickly an event sold out” thing is one of my key themes, but I’m quite amused by some of the coverage of this year’s Glasto ticket sell out. For example, here’s the indie’s story: Log on, sell out: Glastonbury tickets go in just 90 minutes

Which is funny, obviously, because tickets went on sale at 9AM, and I definitely remember buying ours at 10:43, which would mean they were definitely on sale for more than 90 minutes.

Oh, but what’s this half way down the article:

“They had all gone by 10.45am, it’s brilliant,” said Mr Eavis. “We had 250,000 people queuing to get through at any one time.”

That’s odd, isn’t it: 1 hour 45 minutes isn’t the same as 90 minutes, is it? Let’s ignore for a minute the fact that it was only the standard tickets that had sold out by around 10:45, and that some of the 22,000 combined ticket plus coach tickets were definitely still on sale well past 11 (when I posted my previous blog, for example, at 11:17 there were definitely still tickets on sale), but I wonder how the indie can have made that mistake?

Is it because they can’t add up?

Or will they just lazily reprint any old press release that gets sent to them (changing the odd word here and there) even if there’s a really obvious contradiction or error in that press release?

Surely not…

Oh. It turns out they aren’t the only ones…

The Telegraph: Tickets for this year’s Glastonbury festival were snapped up in 90 minutes, a record for the ever-popular event… Tickets costing £145 went on sale at 9am this morning and were sold out by 10.45am.

Metro: Tickets for this year’s Glastonbury Festival sold out in a record-breaking time of just 90 minutes… By 10.45am a record 137,500 tickets had been snapped up for the festival

The Sun: TICKETS for the biggest ever Glastonbury Festival have sold out in a record-breaking 90 minutes. Thousands of music fans were left disappointed after a record 137,500 tickets were snapped up by 10.45am – less than two hours after they went on sale at 9am.

The Times: Tickets for this year’s Glastonbury Festival were snapped up yesterday in the record-breaking time of 90 minutes. Music fans swamped the event’s booking telephone line and website after they went on sale. By 10.45am 137,500 tickets had been sold for the festival, which returns after a year’s absence to its Worthy Farm home, in Pilton, Somerset.

[Although there’s something rather ironic about the fact that the only major UK newspaper I could find that hadn’t reprinted this mistake was the Grauniad: Glastonbury sells out in two hours.]

Of course there will be resales, but gosh, that was a bit close: up at 8AM and couldn’t get near the See Tickets site even an hour before this year’s Glastonbury tickets went on sale, then it was F5 all the way until I finally got through at about 10:45… and by 10:55 the main order page was saying that the regular tickets had sold out (although when I last checked they still had some of the 22,000 coach package tickets that were part of the deal agreed at the licensing hearing last week).

I won’t be totally comfortable about it until the confirmation email arrives, but that was about as close as it has ever been.

Interesting system they were running this year as well: they’d restricted the number of connections available to http://www.seetickets.com, which was mostly timing out or redirecting to a “Busy” page, but I noticed fairly early on that you could at least get the first page up quite easily if you tried https://www.seetickets.com (i.e., the secure site) although sadly attempting to get to the booking form itself via https just redirected you back to http.

So I mostly spent the two hours when I was trying to get my tickets watching Firefox tell me it was:
“Connecting to www.seetickets.com…”
“Waiting for www.seetickets.com…”
“Connecting to busy.seetickets.com…”
(and then it would timeout trying to retrieve the server busy page, which is perhaps somewhat ironic).

But once you were through to the actual booking form, you were basically guaranteed tickets, because it redirected onto the secure site, which was only serving pages to people who had been able to get a booking form up, rather than having to serve pages to everyone who was hitting F5 and hammering the server. I guess they have learnt their lesson from 2004: it might be deeply frustrating for anyone who can’t get near the site, but at least they then had the server capacity to process the transactions of the people who had got through.

[Well, I would say that, I got tickets…]

Well then, it’s that time of year again.

I’m sure I’ve done this calculation before, but here are some figures:

– Following this week’s licence approval, the total festival capacity has been increased to 177,500, of which 37,500 will be for festival workers, 5000 will be day tickets for the Sunday for local residents, and 135,000 will be regular tickets sold through http://www.seetickets.com.
– On top of the ticket charge of £145, See Tickets will be collecting £5 per ticket in fees, plus a £4 charge per order for delivery.
– £5 x 135,000 = £675,000. Given that this is just one of the many events they sell tickets for (so it doesn’t have to pay the full annual cost of running their servers and manning the phone lines) that’s not bad at all for a couple of week’s work. And something to think about should you find yourself staring at a “Service Busy” page at some point on Sunday morning and wondering why a company in the business of selling tickets for major events doesn’t have enough capacity to deal with lots of people hitting their servers at the same time…

In other related news, I notice that the NME tell me that Emily Eavis has managed to convince Pete Doherty to play Glasto for £100. Well, I imagine that Doherty will do pretty much anything if he needs a hundred quid urgently to, um, buy something…

UPDATE: …and I notice that the NME have now compiled their own list of the lineup so far. Their lineup is “in alphabetical order”, but they’ve put all the “The” bands under “t”.

Ah. Bless.