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I just picked up the new Elbow album, Cast Of Thousands, on which I sing. And there I am on the middle page of the sleeve, between Matilda James and Matt Arrowsmith.

Ah. Fame at last.

Orange jacket bloke at entrance to V2003 arena: You can’t bring that in here [points to 2 litre plastic water bottle in my hand]
Me: Why not? We brought it in yesterday. [This is true]
Orange jacket bloke: Well you must have hidden it or something. [This is not true]. You can’t bring that in here. If you look on the back of your ticket it says you can’t bring more than 1 litre of water in here.
Me: Why not? What do you think I’m going to do with a large bottle of water?

Orange bloke: That’s not my problem, there’s plenty of water inside.
Me: Yes. That we have to pay for. That’s why we just queued for 20 minutes at the campsite’s only tap to fill this one up.
Orange bloke: There’s plenty of taps in there [This is also not true. But I didn’t find that out until much later – it hadn’t been a problem the previous day because we’d been able to take in our large bottle of water – after searching for the first aid point (that we only knew about because Rhys had earlier found it) for a good half an hour, during which time we were sent the wrong way by at least 3 orange blokes who had no idea where there was free water (or were under the misguided impression that the arena was positively drowning in taps, if you’ll excuse the pun). The free water/first aid point was conveniently hidden behind the dance tent in an empty corner of the arena field. Without signposts. Funnily enough the stalls selling small bottles at £2 a go were highly prominent.]

The first thing that you have to remember about the V festival is that it’s not Glastonbury. Budweiser is £3 a can. You have to queue to buy beer tokens so that you can then stand in a bigger queue to exchange those tokens for warm, fizzy beer. Don’t like Budweiser? Or Virgin Coke? Sorry, well you won’t be drinking anything else. You also won’t be taking any of your own food or drinks inside. You can buy hamburgers that taste of plastic at “high-street prices” inside instead (although I’m not quite sure which high street it is that sells small burgers for £3.50 a go). Interestingly, you can take in as many drugs as you need to; I saw enough coke being snorted over the weekend to coat most of the £10 notes in London. Presumably it’s ok to take that in because there isn’t a stall inside selling Virgin-branded drugs at several times the going rate.

As I said yesterday, though, once we got over the blatant profiteering and silly rules, it was still a great weekend. The Super Furries were probably my band of the weekend (they played The Man Don’t Give a Fuck and Herman Loves Pauline), but I also enjoyed seeing Ash give one of their better performances, as well as The Cardigans, The Coral and Shack (although Mick Head’s vocals were worryingly off-key in places, and he was babbling incomprehensible scouse inbetween songs). The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, even though I’m not a particularly big fan, provided a suitably large end to the festival.

Now I just have to deal with the dreariness of being back in the real world. Again.
I might be able to wash regularly and not have to queue to get near a bathroom, but I think I’d still rather be at the festival. Still, at least it’s a short week for me as I’m off on holiday on Friday.

I’ll probably be writing something a bit later on about this weekend’s excellent V festival (sorry Rob, ‘fraid you missed a goodun) with only a slight rant about the outright extortion (£3 a beer and your only choice of beer is Budweiser? come on…), and the generally poor organisation/silly rules enforced by jobsworths in orange coats. For now, though, I will mostly be drinking coffee and trying to do some work.

You may want to have a look at these:

– Statesman or Skatesman? Warning: includes photograph of Maggie Thatcher on a toboggan.
Not Photoshopped.

– Photographs of the New York Blackout.

Today, I am reliably informed, is “Fair and Balanced” day on the Internet. In response to the decision by the (un)fair and (un)balanced Fox News to sue a US satirist for breaching the trademark they claim to hold over the English-language sentence “Fair and Balanced” (he’s about to publish a book called “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right“), people all over the world are creatively using the words Fair and Balanced all over their sites today.

Part of me suspects that this whole thing might have begun as some massive publicity stunt, but it seems like an appropriate topic to post here, as it fits rather nicely into my recent theme of mass Internet-related action (cf. Amazon reviews and flash mobs).

My only concern is that it might take longer than one day to googlewash Fox out of the search results altogether…

Links: Neal Pollack (who started this), some fair and balanced websites, Google search for “Fair and Balanced”.

I love the Internet. Just a few short minutes ago I was putting together my fantasy football team for this year (at Pete’s insistence). Failing to think of anything particularly witty for my team name (despite the comic potential of picking Man United’s new American goalkeeper Tim “Tourettes” Howard). The best I could come up with was to call them the “Hot Shot City XI”, if only because I didn’t have enough characters to call them “The Song Hot Shot City is Particularly Good. XI.”

Then, Pete mentioned that he had actually read the lyrics to the mighty “Hot Shot City”, and they are every bit as fantastic as we all expected. It was only a matter of time before Kazaa came up with the goods, and I finally got to hear it for myself.

Frankly I don’t know if I will ever be able to listen to popular music in quite the same way again. Hasselhoff pushes the boundaries in a quite remarkable way.

The handclaps are particularly good.

Hot shot city on a saturday night
We’re gonna party down until the morning light
Hot shot city on a saturday night
We’re hotter than rock’n’ roll
She’s burning baby in my soul
Check it out, check it out

The ability to construct proper sentences (and don’t even think about paragraphs) seems to have deserted me today, so, continuing an occasional series of my own, here are some thoughts for the day:

– It appears that I am not the only person to notice the striking resemblence Chelsea’s mysterious Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich, bears to Jimi Goodwin out of The Doves.

– [Listening to Jerk It Out by The Caesars]. Damn, I’m going to miss Teachers again tonight.

– Times must be tough (#2 in an occasional series): the bass player from Ocean Colour Scene is selling his bass guitar, signed by Paul McCartney, on ebay. No bids so far.

– You should read this.

– You should buy this. £5 well spent, I hope, and you get to join me at the swanky launch party full of media-whores and E-list celebrities (probably).

– V2003 is this weekend. After the months of anticipation and excitement that led up to glasto, this one’s crept up with little more than a wimper. It’s just not the same, though, is it? [sample quote from the information on the offical website, which kind of sums up the type of festival it is for me: “You can bring water into the arena… [but] not more than 1 litre in size. If you are ill or pregnant and need to take in more water please ask a steward to contact their supervisor for permission to do so.”] I don’t even know who’s playing, and I can’t be bothered to spend too much time at the official website, which so shabby that they can’t even achieve top search result in Google for their own festival. Says it all.

– Oh, but there is some good news. I think I see a chink of light at the end of the tunnel (in the new year maybe – assuming it isn’t a train heading towards me), following a very interesting chat with an old colleague at lunchtime. I’m just biding my time…

The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator is just fantastic:

“Every time you display this page, you are automatically participating in the Monkey Shakespeare project. Your computer is put to work to simulate a number of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters, and each page typed is checked against every play Shakespeare ever wrote!”

The current record is the first 6 letters from “King John”. So far, those monkeys have been typing away all day weekend, and frankly, I’m getting tired. I’m running out of bananas, and you can’t move in the office for whooping primates. And the best they have come up with to date is a pathetic four letters from Titus Andronicus. Pete managed to beat my monkeys in a few short hours by getting to five letters. Grr…

Maybe I should set them an easier challenge. I wonder how long it would take them to write something off Looking For-Best Of David Hasselhoff. Hot Shot City, perhaps.

There’s an article in today’s Guardian’s that talks about a new craze called flash mobs:

“Python-esque street theatre events organised by email. Big crowds of strangers suddenly materialise at a predetermined location, act out a series of actions and then melt away, leaving bystanders bewildered and amused.”

There are some examples, like the large group of people who turned up together at a department store in New York, stood around discussing a pile of carpets and then left shortly afterwards. In an event in San Francisco, “hundreds of people spun around in circles like children”, and in Dortmund, “a mob invaded a department store and everyone ate a banana.”

That’s just fantastic. I think this appeals to me in much the same kind of way as the fake Amazon reviews I was talking about yesterday. People just collectively deciding to do something just for the hell of it.

Even better, someone has suggested a new twist: the Antimob, where the exact opposite happens (everyone stays away from a designated place):

“In Antimob, we all agree not to be at a certain location for a brief period of time. If all humanity participates, the sudden ghost town appearance of a place like Grand Central Station or the Motor Vehicle Bureau in Chicago will be stunning. Antimob requires little of its participants, so that billions of people, without even knowing of the non-event, will be participating in this first example of non-performance art.”

The only problem is, if no one turns up, how will anyone know it happened?

The other week’s NTK newsletter conatined a link to a fake camcorder review on DOOYOO (“…therefore, i choose to give this product a mediocre rating, mainly because of reliability issues”). You might think that’s amusing, but it’s no match for the unquestionable king of fake Internet user reviews:

Looking For-Best Of David Hasselhoff, as reviewed by the customers of amazon.com.

I first saw this over a year ago, and I’m pleased to see, from a quick return visit, that it is still going strong. Not only are there now 690 reviews for this album, but can it be that there is only one copy left in stock? Surely not!

“6 people recommended Walter, the Farting Dog in addition to Looking For-Best of David Hasselhoff [IMPORT]
5 people recommended Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean instead of Looking For-Best of David Hasselhoff [IMPORT]”

Genius.

I’m amused to read that someone is finding angel’s weblog not by remembering the URL, but by searching google for things like “accidentally snapping her head off her body”, “accidentally snapping her head off”, and “snapping her head off” not accidentally.

Apart from worrying about the fact that there are just a few too many results for the non-accidental head-snapping search result (the Internet once more proves to be a scary place), I think there is definite mileage in this. There’s no real need to have a catchy URL – if you could even get one these days – all you really need to help people find your website is an easily-remembered English phrase and Google.

Funnily enough, only the other day I was talking to Pete about this, and he told me that, rather than remembering the URL for this site, he just sticks brain surgeon’s salary into google. As Paste Magazine proudly occupies the number one search result for said phrase, it’s much easier for him to find us with than using the URL. We achieved this result without even trying as well – I might start using the phrase randomly and see what happens (without the apostrophe, we are languishing way down in second place, so something must be done about that for a start).

The whole brain surgeon thing started, for me, as a bit of a joke – it was just one of those random search strings that kept showing up in the logs (and continues to – already this month a significant portion of our referrals have come from people looking for information about this fascinating topic). The phrase originally appeared on this site in this story, and some time later I put together a page about some of the random search strings that were causing people to stumble across the site. Now, bizarrely, the original page has dropped out of the google results altogether, and it is the pages talking about the fact that we rank unusually high for a search on something wholly inappropriate that show up when we get the top result.

At the same time, we’ve dropped down to fourth in a search for creative writing magazine. That’s probably a fair reflection on the amount of new creative writing that’s going on around here these days, though.

If you can’t bookmark the site, then some of the other strings that you might like to search for to get back here include:
– ralph nader suing ali g

– kings of leon copy protection
– top 20 crappest towns
– serving fuckwits. Thanks, again, to Pete for sending me that one in an email entitled “Paste Magazine: Serving Fuckwits”. Seems rather appropriate somehow.

Then again, maybe I should buy a new catchier domain name. This site provides a list of English-language words that are still available as domain names. I notice that www.off-key.com, www.self-indulgence.org and www.low-end.com are all currently available.