Warning: Oxygen Level Critical

Outside the sky is a swirl of greys that are turning darker by the minute. The torn bin liners caught on the barbed wire are flapping slightly in the breeze, whereas earlier they were still. I find myself staring out at this mess of corrugated iron, spiked grey fencing and stained brickwork as I drift into another reverie.

The startling truth comes to me all of a sudden and somehow it doesn't seem real – I realise that I could have sat at my desk and gone to sleep for the past hour and nobody would have noticed a damned thing. These thoughts were fuelled by the radiator on full blast and the fact I had failed to switch on the air conditioning, leaving my senses dulled and my eyelids drooping. This is a testament to the old wisdom – if it's warm during the day you can't stay awake, but if it's warm during the night you can barely get to sleep.

There aren't any warm nights this time of the year, though. Just endless days trapped behind bars in a stuffy ground-level office on a grim site regularly looted by crazed trespassers, who come in at night to steal huge chunks of metal from the transfer station from under the noses of the 24 hour security. (A bloke with a torch, it would appear)

But however attractive the idea of being paid to sleep is to me, I could only know that I had this opportunity in hindsight. Besides, chutzpah would only get me so far if they spotted the duvet.

To hell with it. My mood is downbeat and ponderous, something only a stiff drink will dislodge. I spent a pointless day in London yesterday in a state of mild intoxication, and even the train journey was bearable with a hip flask by my side. So I'm counting the minutes now until five, barely able to touch the pile of work in my in-tray.

How many people are thinking the same rotten thing at this precise second? Ye gods, what a thought. Are we all doomed in a job market where there are no more waves to ride…too much competition from too many graduates, too few chances to gain good experience, and too little hope left in a country where nobody in their twenties can buy a house, get a decent job or make their mark in a national media drowning in its own baby-boom smugness?

Yikes. I was fairly happy when I started this. Now I'm feeling spooked. Jesus, what now?

Hobbits Are the Least of Our Worries

A strange couple of days in the news – many things have changed suddenly and unexpectedly, and nobody seems to know what any of it means. Some of it -- such as the Red Sox's victory in the world series and Robert Kilroy Silk's monumental UKIP implosion -- is good and feels right…but most of the news this week is steeped in unholy confusion.

Yasser Arafat is seriously ill, and there were pictures this morning of his helicopter being surrounded by a mob of people, which soon moved en mass across the tarmac towards a plane bound for Paris. Arafat was somewhere in that solid mass. Hell, this is how conspiracy theories start – was he in there at all, or had they substituted his frail form for the leering corpse of a clown whilst he himself dashed like mad across the border? Of course not, but there are many people who would benefit from such bug-eyed accusations, especially when there is no obvious successor to Arafat. The whole Mideastern situation has reached a weird time for everyone – even Ariel Sharon has been making moves that have caught everyone by surprise.

The confusion over all this has left people howling at the moon, guessing wildly at a future beyond anyone's control.

'"Whatever will be, we are seeing Arafat being sidelined. A new situation has been created that could be for the better or worse," said Yossi Beilin, an Israeli politician and ex-peace negotiator.' – Detroit Free Press. (full article)

Stranger still, the evolution of the entire human race has been put into a new perspective with the discovery of a new diminutive species of human who lived up to 12,000 years ago, but the newspapers seem more taken by the fact one of the unearthed skeletons was nicknamed Hobbit by the responsible scientists. Some people are already beginning to put two and two together, thinking they have finally discovered the truth behind Anthony Worrall Thompson.

The future of several English football clubs is fluxing like mad – both Leeds and Manchester are wallowing in a fetid swamp of takeover speculation, whilst an increasing handful of lower league clubs are desperately fighting to stay afloat long enough to remember what the hell their division is called nowadays. Most sports stories now are so focused on the boardroom that a simple, honest match report seems like a breath of fresh air.

The Scottish parliament is indulging in playground spats, the EU is in turmoil on the day of the new Constitution signing… Only one song remains the same – the US election is as tight today as one, two and three weeks ago. Which means the eye-gouging and hair-pulling is boiling over whilst the sound of early voters marking a cross on their ballot papers is being increasingly drowned out by the sound of lawyers furiously rubbing their hands together.

October is the foulest month of the year, but this year it is also becoming the strangest. Anyone trying to make sense of the news this week has set themselves a challenge of absurd proportions, but I wish them well. It makes far more interesting reading than the alternative – endless newsprint wasted on bad weather stories that turn up at the slightest hint of falling pressure and then sit there and fester for weeks like a national coldsore. So, by all means, bring on the unholy confusion…there's history to be created.

John Peel Dies

Extremely sad news.

Jesus, I'm at a loss what to write. This is devastating - his contribution to music over the years has been incalculable and he always came across on the radio as the nicest bloke imaginable.

Nobody else on mainstream radio at a half-decent time of day ever played such an endlessly fascinating, diverse and occasionally maddening bunch of records...his show towered for miles over all those idiotic stations who claim to play "today's best music mix" whilst their station directors stand over "music" with their cocks in their hands, laughing as they relieve themselves all over it. And now these ugly parasites have won their last battle...our champion has gone. Rest in peace.

Diesel Fumes Rise Over Transport Thinktank

"Rival bus operators should be allowed to collaborate on local timetables and tickets to cut waiting times at bus stops, according to the government's transport thinktank… they could thrash out timetables with local authorities that provide regular intervals between buses." – The Guardian. (full article)

Allowed to? They should be forced to. Provided that they also put legislation in place to cap already staggering fares and force the bus companies to collectively serve the whole damn city and not simply the plum routes. But the thinktank misses one important point; most places in Britain do not have a situation in which healthy competition drives each company to keep fares down and improve their services. One company always dominates simply because there are a small bunch of massive operators -- First, Stagecoach etc -- who have irons in fires all over the country. They have overwhelming clout and can set fares to suit themselves. In Sheffield, First has one major competitor -- Yorkshire Terrier – but the former company dwarves the latter by a massive factor, so the big boys have been able to create a network to suit themselves. New legislation resulting from the thinktank's ideas will not cater for this.

There is a larger issue about full public transport integration, but I wouldn't wish that discussion upon a dead donkey. The concept of this government reigning in the ugly brutes who run these major transport companies and generally favouring Joe Commuter over big business is laughable. And just thinking about it gives me a headache.

Fighting Fraud with Fraud

Should the focus be on mobilising non-voters or to stop fraud amongst those who do? The prevailing wind currently blows for the former since both parties are willing to make the mother of all messes in their attempts to tease out victory from the ranks of the new voters...they are leaving the mess to be mopped up later, safe in the knowledge that politics is not a sport...their gold medals, once won, can never be stripped from them. (This is betting without Nixon, of course, who did the political equivalent of dangling his medals in front of Autolycus, King of Thieves, shouting "Go on then, you pansy! Just try and take them! Betcha can't, you worthless bag of scum!" And before you knew it, whoops...)

So which is better? A high voter turnout or total fraud prevention?

"The unexamined belief that an ever-higher rate of voter registration is a Good Thing has met its limit in...Ohio. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2003 estimate is that in Franklin County -- Columbus -- there are approximately 815,000 people 18 or over. But 845,720 are now registered." -- George Will, Pittsburgh Trib-Review. (full article)

An interesting statistic, but hold on. "Unexamined belief?" Are the two things, then, mutually exclusive? The problem he alludes to is that efforts to stamp out fraud has a detrimental effect on voter turnout - and what the hell, eh? But it means that many of these drives to stop fraud are either so draconian as to make the final result hopelessly unrepresentative or focused entirely on preventing subsets of the other side from voting. This is fraud by another name, so maybe the mobilisation trip is simply the lesser of two evils, especially when suppressing new voters would work overwhelmingly in one party's favour.

"Ohio - the next Florida?" -- Howard Fineman, Newsweek. (full article)

All the US needs is a large and powerful body of genuinely impartial people to oversee each and every part of the election from the top down to the groundroots, and never mind the present effete system. But I suspect there isn't such a beast in these grisly times.

But why is this discussion even being had? The whole point of the election is for the entire country to elect its president. Whole sections of society cannot be wiped off the page because the shadow of potential fraud is present. And those who argue otherwise must remember that many efforts to avoid the ugly scenes of 2000 have frequently been undermined by the very people who claim to oppose fraud.

"Creating another election ripe for dispute was hardly the intent when our elected legislators passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002...Although they passed the act, Congress and the White House were slow, perhaps recklessly so, in setting up the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to implement it." -- Bill Saporito, Time. (full article)

So whatever happens, whether the Biblical flood of new voters turns out to be worth it for either party, everyone appears to agree that there is going to be one hell of a mess to clear up on November 3rd. High voter turnout and fighting fraud are not mutually exclusive concepts, but it seems that there are a significant number of people who have a vested interest in portraying them that way.

Polluted Waters and Ugly Reflections

The screen wobbles and we flashback to mid-afternoon on Friday October 8th. A man in a cowboy hat has sent the entire office staff into a crazed panic. Terror is stalking the corridors. Shutters are being closed and blinds are being pulled.

Somebody shouts "Lord Allen's here!". I glance up and notice one of my colleagues diving under his desk. But his actions are premature - the man in the cowboy hat is on site but has been unable to breach the building itself. He bangs on the door again and again, and when he tired of this, he stalks the perimeter and taps on windows.

Now Geoff has gone to the door and is raving, Basil Fawlty style. "We're not in! Go away, there's nobody in here!" he bellows, whilst others giggle nervously behind their blinds. A combination of Friday afternoon madness and genuine fear at the prospect of being collared by this twisted freak has brought the office to a standstill. The word is that his personal hygiene curdles milk at fifty paces. I pray I never have the chance to confirm this.

"We need to put a notice on the window," somebody suggests. "Owing to unforeseen circumstances, we're all dead." I nod my approval and consider stacking up boxes in the window.

In the next office Geoff is peering under the blinds. He reports that the man in the cowboy hat has entered the other office across the car park. But there is a new problem... somebody's making a break for it! They need to get to the other office on some last minute business. The horror is palpable.

"Don't! He'll follow you back in!" screams a colleague whilst toying with the photocopier. But the mist is beginning to rise, and soon the word comes that the man in the cowboy hat has given up and left.

What is going on here? This man, I am told, comes around every Friday afternoon. But here's the rub. He's not an employee, a customer or a contractor. He just is. And nobody can bear to talk to him, so why in the name of all that is holy does he come? For the scenery? Every day we deal in nothing but crap, thousands of tonnes of life's useless, malodorous detritus...so you will appreciate we're no tourist attraction. The only one who can answer these questions is the man in the cowboy hat, and I don't see a queue forming to ask him.

"You're my heroes," Sharon says. "Closing the blinds and leaping under desks...I couldn't have survived without you."

A strange comment on a strange day. The man in the cowboy hat hasn't been back since that day a couple of weeks ago, but it is not my problem and never has been. Soon I will be leaving this office for good, and will reflect on my time there as unnecessary but financially useful. I have been existing in a holding pattern until I had the money to escape.

Perhaps I will also consider why every office seems to think of themselves as slightly crazy, a bit bonkers, a barely contained seething caudron of quirkiness. The simple fact is everybody in the country is unhinged, and every morning when they enter work they carefully pack away their personalities into a holdall, shove it under the desk and only retrieve them again come 5.00pm. But it's still there, trying desperately to get out. Any time the office's mask slips and something weird happens, those holdalls explode and, like Pandora's Box, all the bad craziness emerges and darts and swoops about, over chairs and under desks, teasing the cabin fever out of everyone until the whole place is gibbering and laughing like asylum inmates.

Occasionally someone gets this strange electricity in their brain and it won't leave. They become pariahs to the game of repression played by each office worker against their will. And soon enough they begin to turn up every Friday afternoon wearing a cowboy hat and smelling overwhelmingly of milk. Are we to pity these deluded fools? Or draw the blinds and leap under the desk?

Either way, I'm leaving soon and I won't be back.

Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004

"Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart -- which is more than even the president's friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him." -- Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone.

Full article

Bad Kettle

I am fairly low down on the financial food chain, which means I have never had time for expensive gizmos and gadgets. Until the Kettle King 3000 came along, that is.

This baby does everything you could ever want from a kitchen appliance and more. Made of three alloyed metals, none of which would have been invented had NASA not gone into space, this silver monster has more flashing lights and switches than a Star Trek bridge. You can programme it not only to filter limescale, but also to moisterise your water if it is too dry, dehydrate it if gets too wet, and order more water from the Internet when you run out. It is not only cordless but powerless – it boils water through the application of powerful magnets and crystals. And it even has a removable drip tray at the bottom so you can be confident that your hot water is low in fat. It remains the only kettle personally approved by both Mystic Meg and George Foreman.

I should have been happy. But when summer rolled around and my thoughts turned to cold drinks on the veranda, the Kettle King 3000 began to mope. At first, I couldn't be sure…did the kettle rotate away from me on its base when I entered the room? Was it deliberately splashing me when I poured out cups of tea? Was it the kettle that put a dead fox in my bed? Questions, questions. It was absurd, and I chalked it up to paranoia.

Until it began stalking me at work.

I suspect it was jealous of Katey Kettle, the slimline model I was using in the office. But one day I found Katey bound and gagged with a threatening note wedged in her spout. Things had gone too far, and in the end I smashed the Kettle King 3000 to bits with a lumphammer. It was a mercy killing.

But now every time I spill coffee down my shirt I remember the Kettle King 3000 and shudder.

Remember, you could be next.

An Autumn Cultural Snapshot

A list of the stuff I'm currently devoting attention to:

TV: Six Feet Under
Magazine: Private Eye
Radio: Mixing It (Radio 3), John Peel (Radio 1)
Book: Hunter S Thompson – The Great Shark Hunt
CD: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Abattoir Blues
DVD: Shogun Assassin
Web: US election ones
Theatre: Er…
Opera: (That's enough culture)

Sometimes I worry. However much stuff they put out there on the stage, on the screen and on the shelves, I am unwilling to engage with nearly enough of it. And this despite telling myself I am open-minded and liberal, and to hell with those who view anything other than guns, sport and lager as some kind of useless malady that affects the weak and the lame. Fuck it, I am not content with most things because they are dull and repetitive, and I believe that anything that does not change will die. If I had the guts I would throw out any video, CD or book I had kept on the shelf for more than a year, and I would replace each cultural corpse with a live one.

No, that's wrong. That’s not a question of guts. It smells heavily of making a point and ignoring the reality of the thing. It's not just a financial issue. Hell, I enjoy re-reading stuff; and half the time I have forgotten the thing from the first time round anyway. You cannot grasp a book first time round…even Spot the Dog has its subtle motivations and undercurrents that only reveal themselves on later readings. Those lift-up flaps hide more than just a big red ball. Which is probably why the poor sod is down the vet's in the first place.

Okay, this is rubbish. I haven't got a point to make and I'm obviously trying to find a slip road off this infernal motorway of gibberish. And before I torture that metaphor into submission, I'm out of here.

Bulletin from the Audio Desk

As much of a fan as I am of John Peel's show show on the "nation's favourite", his holiday stand-ins this week have been impressive.

Underworld on Tuesday, despite sounding like they were ripped to the tits on something strange and overpowering, put together a coherent and exceptionally listenable two hours. On Wednesday, Siouxie Sioux chose a magnificent selection that threw together all-time classics, explosive album tracks by well known artists and some wonderful obscure songs. And last night, Robert Smith of the Cure took over and, whilst I have only heard some of it so far, it's all good.

All three stand-ins took the time to spin a few tracks by artists who influenced them musically, and there were some interesting links. Both Underworld and Siouxie Sioux played stuff by Brian Eno, the ambient pioneer, whilst the equally inventive David Bowie turned up on both Wednesday and Thursday night.

This reminded me of a few years ago when I applied for a job in a music shop and the application form wanted me to list five of the most influential albums of all time. It seems like a difficult question initially, but simply turn on the radio and read a couple of interviews in music magazines and you realise you already know the answers. The hard part is attempting to justify the answers with embarrassing pseudo-intelligent muso bullshit that would cause Paul Morley to hunt you down like a dog and slice you in two if he ever read it. But in a way it was kind of fun. In the end I remember that among my choices were Nirvana, Velvet Underground, Brian Eno and Godspeed You Black Emperor (I forget the final one). The first three were just a matter of regurgitating the same old facts and pointing out that they are influential because every bugger under the sun with a guitar and a head full of lyrics says so. Simple. Let the thing speak for itself.

The latter, though, was a true test of my bullshitting ability – GYBE have not been around long and they've only done 3 albums to date, but their influence among well-known artists is presently slight. However, they're a music scene unto themselves, and there's a million minor bands across the world who are started to cite them as an influence. Okay, this is resulting in an epidemic of point-missing aimless instrumental rock, but it does point to a much larger future appreciation of the band.

Yikes. I've tumbled into exactly the kind of bullshit I was talking about. And again this post has gone on far longer than I expected. I have to wrap this up. It's eleven o' clock, the view of industrial detritus outside is hurting my eyes and I desperately need a coffee. Hell, what I need is a warm duvet, a bottle of 12 year old Bowmore and the tape recording of last night's Robert Smith. But those things are notoriously hard to source in a waste management company, so instant coffee it is.

No Pine Wine Racks for This Old City

Crap towns, great towns, cutting edge towns…Jesus, who comes up with this stuff? How can you pinpoint which bunch of houses huddling together in a valley for warmth is better than all the rest? The one who spends the biggest percentage of their budget on cultural pursuits? The one with best ratio of suburban detached houses to huge estates of council flats? Or the town with the bolshiest head of tourism and PR?

Most of this stuff comes from people who lived in a bad hovel somewhere and need to vent spleen, or from people who mistakenly think that they're part of a burgeoning scene because they know a friend of a friend of someone who just opened a gallery in some city centre back alley bolthole. As for myself I wouldn't dream of comparing Sheffield with its counterparts, but I do know how much the place has changed in the last ten years, and mostly for the better. I'll leave the details for the Rough Guide.

It must be noted that there are some increasingly voiced frustrations, however. The clubbing scene has been increasingly poor in the last couple of years, and one (Element) has even been thrown to the wolves over some terrifying gang war problems. There are notable exceptions, such as the Tuesday Club, a night put on by one of the Universities (I forget which). And the live music scene is reasonably healthy, even with the closure last year of the Barfly.

Shopping in Sheffield remains poor. Again, this kind of thing is best left to the guide books, but city centre shopping is dull and the Meadowhall shopping centre clearly traded its soul upon completion for a handful of magic beans. Only Devonshire Street has any genuine verve. And as if symbolising all that is conformist and homogenised about modern shopping, Starbucks has just opened in the city centre. It is the first one in Sheffield outside Meadowhall. When I first noticed it was there the rain was pouring down, and as my gaze was averted I stepped in a small puddle. A little mud splashed upon my shoes. No wonder so many people hate the chain.

Conversely, I am decidedly pleased that when Ikea attempted recently to build a branch of their garish store near Sheffield, they were sent away with a flea in their collective ear. The place sickens me, and I do not know why. Perhaps it because...it just ain't much good, really. Anyway, mention their name to me and I can't help but remember when someone told me that whenever he was dragged to the place by their other half he would sit in the car singing "fuck you I won't buy a pine wine rack!" to the tune of...well, I expect you can guess. Sums it up for me.

On an aesthetic level, many buildings in Sheffield have recently been torn down or are about to be; and when they come down, for one glorious moment we look around us and take in the large expanses of sky and distant hills…only for a larger and more leering building to rise from the rubble and ruin the view. It is happening between the gloriously refurbished Peace Gardens and the attractive Winter Gardens, it is happening on London Road with the old ugly TC Harrison building, and it will soon happen when the Yorkshire Gray pub in the city centre is torn down for a nice, profitable 'mixed development'. Many of these new buildings will be very useful, but it does sicken the heart when you realise what a terrible thing it is when every chink of sky, every view longer than a street is obliterated by another hyper-expensive block of new city centre apartments. Still, that's the price of profit. Er, I mean progress. Trebles all round!

I may be moving away in a few weeks…then I will see if I miss the place. At the moment, with the returning students giving the place some life after the miserable sodden summer, I suspect that I will.

Lost in the Blizzard

The Electoral Vote Tracker presently shows an even split between the candidates, with Bush on 192 and Kerry on 188. Most remarkable is the massive 158 votes that could be taken by either side. Despite the masses of speeches, scraps, insults and howls of protest flying around, nothing can penetrate the suffocating uncertainty that is coming to characterise the election. Both parties have thrown up equal amounts of dust and every day we hear of something new that could swing the election, some way of making inroads into the jumbled pile of uncertain votes.

Today, according to the Boston Globe, the new uncertainty lies in the hidden intentions of a million voters in six states who can legally register to vote on the actual day of voting itself. Much of this kind of thought is a product of commentators wishing fervently they actually knew what the hell was going on in the minds of undecided voters…nobody is even close to knowing for sure what will go down on November 2nd. The one certain thing is that the day won't be short of controversy. The trouble lies in the fact that any potentially accurate predictions of that controversy made now will get lost in the blizzard. Take one possible future; if the election came down to some kind of computer failure in Florida that resulted in an artificial Bush victory and a democratic howl of outrage…governer Jeb Bush would stand there on the stage and say "well, they would start accusing us of corruption now that they've lost, wouldn't they?" And half the country would bang their heads on the wall. "But we pointed out this could happen ages ago," they would say. "And you did nothing about it. Nothing!" And that would be that. Boom. Tough shit.

Whatever happens, the uncertainty means that many veteran commentators are ultimately going to have to eat crow. Hell, so what kind of a chance does that give the rest of us? Do we simply hurl the television out of the window, muffle the radio and burn the newspapers to avoid it all for the next week and a half? Easy enough here in Britain when it's not our country on the line, but for those in the battleground states where election adverts are spewed endlessly into their living room as they grow increasingly nervous of the rest of the world glaring their way…the truth is, it would be easiest for them all round if they simply lied to the pollsters – and wouldn't that be a great scene, if the entire undecided population got together, faced the press and said in a collective deadpan voice "Actually, we're all going to vote for Nader." And then sat back and watched the fireworks with a grin.

Maybe not…nobody would be that twisted. But anything's better than this uncertainty.

Grunts...Twenty-First Century Style

Watching the Vietnam-based film Tigerland last night, I recalled a time several years ago when I spent a happy few weeks devouring war films left, right and centre. What has always fascinated me about the best films of this kind is that they are more effective at portraying horror than the horror genre itself. The best a slasher flick can do is to render the viewer dizzy at the thought of the tortures on screen being applied to their own frail bodies. But to instill the Fear into the quivering watcher for ninety full minutes, not by using blood-splattered cleavers and toxic sewer babies, but by making them nervous of entire governments, nations, the institutions whom we rely on to survive day to day…it's an impressive feat when accomplished properly, and in extreme cases can reduce the paranoid viewer to a terrified, gibbering wreck.

Tigerland wasn't that kind of film, though. It was more concerned with pursuing the familiar angle of painting a sympathetic portrait of some fast-talking maverick who bends the system and busts a few officious noses. Stick him in a few boxes, see how he reacts, and meanwhile we sit back and cheer as he bashes his way through a platoon of authority figures and arrogant thugs, whilst befriending the weak and the meek. We don't care about the meaning of the war so long as Sergeant Shouty gets quipped at.

Well, that all sounds rather negative. So let us redress the balance…the film was well constructed, well acted, visually appealing, and gave its cruel, dry sense of humour a free reign. Is it even worth mentioning that, in some bizarre way, it reminded me of Top Gun? Perhaps I'm being disingenuous, but if you dump the love interest angle in Top Gun, the two films do resemble one another superficially. The training of military recruits. The maverick who comes out on top. The bug-eyed rival. The shirtless grunts trading insults in barracks. The buzzing of a control tower in a big shiny plane.

That last one isn’t true, clearly. In fact, the analogy does tend to crumble on close analysis, and I don't even know why I started it. Filmmaking in the eighties and filmmaking now are different beasts, and you would never get the intense earnestness of Top Gun's perfect hero in today's more knowing and sophisticated world. Top Gun is pure Hollywood – Tigerland is low-budget and gritty. But despite each film's military setting there's no horror in either film, more of a sense of giving the male audience its satisfaction – a boy's own situation, involving laying an arrogant enemy low, a bunch of cool explosions, and a few tits thrown in. Even though I enjoyed the ride and the scenery, Tigerland remains vaguely unsatisfying.

If you have read any previous posts, you may have guessed by now that the intention of this post has been lost again here; it wasn’t to review the damn film. But the thing is written now and I have always been frightened of second drafts. So do I bite the bullet and give the film a rating to somehow validate the review?

No. I go and put the kettle on.

Click.

Ten Million Simultaneous Cups of Tea

Like anything else made to be noticed, advertising is a beast with a loud rour and blunted claws. Advertising is business, and most of the good stuff comes not from a desire for artistic immortality or a genuine desire to amuse, but from the cold knowledge that there are particular target markets who require this good stuff before they drop their guard and buy the damn thing.

But not all target markets are savvy ABC1's who flatter themselves immune to commercial persuasion. Most advertisements are simplistic and dull, the purpose of which is not to entice you to go out right now and buy this wonderful new doodad, but rather to maintain brand awareness – if you decide to change your electricity supplier, you go for the one whose sponsorship of the weather has pissed you off for years. You don't just immediately leap into bed with the Alabama Magic-O-Power Concern (calls terminate in Sri Lanka) because a breathless telephone call promises low, low prices and a free smoking monkey for every new customer.

So there is a certain level of "will this do?" in the industry, as there is in every other industry. And none so much as the abysmal and ubiquitous battle of the sexes advert that now seems to make up fifty percent of the time between programmes. Every advert follows the same template. One half of a relationship is shown conforming to some gender-based activity (watching football, shopping, whatever), and then the other half of the relationship say or do something to make their partner look stupid. The squashingly insulting nature of this drivel is enough to drive a man to leap savagely at the television, squatting on all fours with their eyes pressed against the screen, bellowing "in the name of all that is holy, split the hell up! You hate each other, and every poor bastard around you who has been forced to live with your endlessly smug one-upmanship knows it! Get off my screen before I beat you like a gong!"

Or perhaps instead prompt a weary roll of the eyes and a reach for the remote. But you get my drift.

The bottom line is that the idea must work, or it would have long been hauled off to the knacker's yard and shot. But who are these people? Who in the name of hell finds this stuff amusing? They're out there, and probably being flung about in their own wretched whirlwind of romance. Get the suckers when their guards are down… before they return to earth with a bump that shatters their sense of optimism for good.

Alternatively, hire Peter Kay. That seems to work.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Is the US election going to be close enough for a horribly familiar explosion of legal squabbling to decide the outcome again?

Florida:
"In Broward, long delays and massive confusion marred the start of early voting as the remote system at nine polling sites collapsed, making it impossible to electronically confirm voters' eligibility." – Seattle Times. (full story)

"A federal judge in Miami meanwhile started to hear a lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO regarding as many as 10,000 other instances around the state where voter registrations had been rejected because of missing Florida driver license numbers, Social Security numbers or because residents did not check off a box that they are not convicted felons." – Sun Sentinel. (full story)

New Hampshire:
"Employees at the clerk's office chatted with each other about the rampant voter fraud among students and about how the state attorney general might have to intervene." – Boston Globe. (full story)

Colorado:
"There is an initiative on the ballot that would divide the state's electoral votes between the candidates according to the percentage of the vote that each candidate gets…Unfortunately, the writers of the initiative made it retroactive so that it would apply to the current election cycle. This opens it up to a legal challenge. " – Seattle Times. (full story)

Mother of hell. But all the journalists in the world all shouting at once won't be able to stop these legal quagmires from screwing with the result, short of Dick Cheney himself being photographed whipping some young democrat voter to death on the steps of the polling booths. Any hope of being allowed to unearth the unpleasant truths behind the foul unreality was crushed in 2000 when Florida was ordered by the Supreme Court to abandon its manual recount, and to hell with democracy – perhaps a fitting way of announcing to the world what the next four…or eight…years would be like under Bush.

Five Miles Under the Booker Radar

You are immediately surrounded by bestsellers when you walk into the average chain book store. The publishers have paid thousands of pounds to get within spitting distance of the shop door, and naturally they can only lavish this cash on what is going to sell. So it is easy to forget what a miniscule fraction of books in existence this represents until one day you find a book on your desk at work entitled "Nitrification Inhibition in the Treatment of Sewage".

This book has been a healthy lender at the local college libary since 1998; except for the whole of 2000 when it wasn't borrowed once. This is worrying...perhaps Britain's sewage was particularly uninhibited that year. I would hate to think that the nation's turds were dancing on tables and making arses of themselves in public. (That's betting without ITV's Club Reps, of course.)

Yikes! There are over a thousand listed books on amazon.co.uk when you search on the word "sewage". More intriguingly, the sidebar points me towards a video called Sewage Baby. Now let's see..."Flushed down the drain at birth, and denied the basic love that was rightfully his, this is the tale of the termination that went horribly wrong..." You can almost smell the Oscar nominations.

Ah, but why assume the worst? We need the counsel of someone who has watched this possible classic. So we turn to the reviews: "Boo! rubbish!" comments one reviewer. "I've had more fun popping spots."

I was supposed to be writing about that terrible book sitting on the desk beside me, but the lure of these dire horror films is strong...simply pick a particularly nasty little word from the dictionary and throw it between the rollers of Amazon's search box.

Let us run through a brief example. Predictably, "brain" has a fairly conservative return on the search box. Doctor Who, Pinky and the Brain, Trap Door...but half way down the list I find the frankly eyebrow raising "Topless Brain Surgeons", and perhaps better still, "UFO Encounter - Maybe You Don't Believe Because They Messed With Your Brain". I see they've retained a sense of healthy scepticism with the word "maybe" there. Presently it languishes at 23,661 in the sales ranking. Perhaps aliens have messed with the chart to suppress the truth. Yes, that's probably it. Hey, what's this scar at the back of my head? I never noticed that before...

Fingers Burnt in a Foreign Fire?

The Guardian frequently talks sense and their US election coverage has been informative, but what the hell were they thinking here? At the time of announcing this campaign several days ago I imagined the entire readership staring in disbelief at the paper over breakfast, mouthing "Jesus" to themselves as they tried to take it in. I suspect I was right.

My reaction then and now is to assume they knew precisely what they were doing, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they had planned space in the G2 supplement for the avalanche of furious responses well in advance. But why would they mount this whole campaign? Surely the traditional PR battle hymn that there's no such thing as bad publicity isn't at work here? On the other hand, roping in a bunch of celebrity thinkers and public-eye academics to write some of the letters tends to bear this out.

The idea that this is nothing more than an exercise in chest-beating and attention seeking is worrying, and the fact this campaign attracted the condemnation of many US newspapers means it will likely end up causing more harm than good to Kerry's chances. And being perceived as arrogant in both countries is hardly going to help reverse the Guardian's falling sales figures.

But let us not get carried away here. Sure the Guardian will enjoy wallowing in pariah status for a few days, and perhaps there are deeper reasons to be mined from their strange mistake, but once the dust has settled we'll look back on it as just another election footnote with no lasting impact. If three highly charged 90 minute slanging matches between Bush and Kerry can't swing the election either way, a bunch of hectoring letters sent to a small town in Ohio certainly won't.

The Fear

"God, there's so many polls. I mean, it's like you could just be obsessed with focusing on that rather than the reason to support somebody." – governer Jeb Bush.

Ah, the polls. The online newspapers hum this morning with the latest, conducted by Gallup and which puts Bush in an eight point lead (52-44), taken after the third debate. What are we to make of this? Are the debates destined to have been Kerry's last victory, fading in the mind of voters who have been constantly beaten around the face with the Republican message of fear: "the bastard will raise your taxes"? Putting the Fear into people has been a hallmark of Bush's administration, and their ball-bustin' experience in this field since 2001 may be paying off in spades in these unhinged final days before the election.

However, the reality is what you want to believe from a bunch of numbers cooked up in a less than rigorous way. Kerry has won the most newspaper endorsements… Bush's approval rate has slipped below 50%… Kerry leads Bush by 10 points in 13 key states… the what-ifs are overwhelming, and perhaps unimportant when the election may end up turning on whether, on polling day, Iraq is visibly imploding or not. The Republicans have counted on many voters not comprehending some uncomfortable realities about Iraq, and if in the next couple of weeks the veil is torn away, Kerry will be walking six feet off the ground and Bush will be lying six feet beneath.

Vaguely insulting or disturbing political manoeuvring?

The White Noise of Modern Complaints

There have been an increasing number of news stories of late that feature people complaining that they were caught for minor crimes. The majority of these have been related to driving - speeding, cars driving and parking in bus lanes, cars using bus and tram "gates", and so on. Additionally, the wailing and gnashing of teeth was deafening in a recent story in which a crackdown on litter in Sheffield resulted in people...shock!...getting caught and fined for breaking a law.

In these stories there is a continual white noise of petulence and pomposity, and this bothers me for reasons I cannot fathom. Drivers have long been so self-absorbed that they believe that buying a big car also buys them some kind of immunity. And their belief that by ignoring various minor laws they are issuing a rallying call to all drivers to stick it to the man is all the more laughable when their actions simply results pissing the rest of the traffic off just to shave twenty seconds off their journey.

This has to stop. So please, stop commiting such pathetic crimes. If you're going to shaft the highway code and hump the bylaws until they bleed, commit something worth committing. And remember not to piss away your dignity when you are pulled over by some condascending quota-chasing plod - don't run screaming for the nearest hack. We must face an important fact; there's no outlaw chic in using a bus lane to get to that left turn quicker, folks. Instead, why not jump on a Harley, swerve across several lanes of traffic, jump the curb, narrowly miss a line of nuns returning to the convent, before smashing over a pile of crates and returning to the road, screeching across in front of a 4x4 and flicking off the ugly mother behind the wheel? Then maybe I'll give a damn about your story when you have to pay your £50.

And let's lay to rest the big argument that says police should be doing other things than enforcing minor laws that are actually just exercises in raising revenue. The answer to this argument lies in the word "law". It's a law. A law it is. Don't break the damn thing if you're just going to bitch about having to pay a fine. In fact, fuck it, let's change the penalty for parking in a bus lane to being publicly horsewhipped. Hellish and draconian it may be, but it would make travelling by bus occasionally tolerable, and make for great street theatre when stuck in traffic.

The fact I don't drive myself is, of course, entirely unrelated to the above views...

Actually, this was never meant to be focusing on driving. I was thinking more about the unbearable level of whining about minor things that seems to be filling up the news in these times. Here's the truth...nobody gives a damn about your Bad Day. You got caught. Tough shit.

And then there's Grumpy Old Men. The first series was entertaining. Having a go at the absurdities in life that seemed designed to befuddle the older gentleman was fun to wallow in for half an hour, because we could emphathise and shout "me too!" at the television. But the second series, which ran for four weeks recently on BBC2, had metamorphosised into a month-long Daily Mail editorial. And, at the risk of screaming off on the second tangent in one paragraph, the amount of people claiming common sense as the panacea for all ills is becoming seriously excessive. Next time you see a news story in which an angry moron is arguing that it is "common sense" why such and such is correct, replace the words "common sense" with "my opinion that I haven't thought about and can't back up with an argument that nevertheless several other idiots who haven't really thought about it agree with". And then go around to their houses on a Harley and trash the place, before trapping them in the basement with their children screaming and wailing, whirling a chain around your head and threatening to rip out their lungs.

Not really. But I'm hungover, the sky outside is bullishly overcast and it's time I got some lunch, so I'll have to leave that thought hanging in the air like a bad smell and indulge in a rather abrupt end to this post. There.

Staring West as the Waters Rise

No distance is comfortable these days. Watching the US elections from this side of the Atlantic makes it clear that some dangerous waters are rising, so the amount of coverage on our own screens and in our papers comes as no surprise. A few weeks ago before the televised presidential debates, many of us were resigned to a Bush victory. Liberal newspapers in America whose editorials reverberated with optimism were sparse. But then something happened. What a difference some prime-time exposure makes…

I feel no desire to go into a deep analysis of the debates and their success in endearing Kerry to a sizeable percentage of undecided voters; there is nothing useful I could add to the acres of coverage. (An earlier flick around the Internet left me feeling depressed when I realised just how staggeringly little I know about the election build-up so far.) However, Kerry's reversal of fortune has galvanised those of us who relish the thrill of the chase rather than the short sharp hit of victory…an inevitable Bush victory would have made for a stiflingly dull October – indeed, as would a Kerry shoo-in, but at least the gloom would have been a product of the tedium of inevitability rather than the overwhelming depression of having to wait four more years for the petulant child-president to be evicted.

A cursory glance at the campaigns makes it clear how the priorities of the campaign engineers, along with the journalists covering those campaigns, are only just beginning to coincide with the priorities of the average voter in the swing states. The key to winning will not rely on impressing media hacks on the subject of Iraq, but will be to prevent any single issue from antagonising too many undecideds. Interviews with these "uncommitted" voters have repeatedly shown that a single domestic issue such as gay marriage will often be crucial in changing their mind, and never mind the overwhelming focus on foreign policy. Most people seem uncomfortable with the what-if questions, such as whether Kerry would have handled the war on terror differently. Rather, they feel happier when concentrating on how their immediate future is going to bear out, particularly in the areas of health, education and taxation. All things nice and close to home.

So this all gives the candidates a firm shove towards the middle ground, unwilling to offend; witness Bush emphasising a newfound "compassionate" conservatism in the third debate as they discussed domestic issues. Bush and his advisors know not to make any rash moves before the election lest the beast turns on him and devours his entire rotten administration whole.

Okay, so perhaps I'm making stuff up and stating the obvious here. Frankly, attempting to make sense of the facts, opinions and misinformation swirling around in the media whirlwind is giving me a headache. So far I have found that by combining analysis from the more sober American newspapers and some to-the-point information from the news wires (Associated Press, Reuters etc), a reasonable picture can be built up.

In the meantime, ignoring the recent polls that put both candidates on equal footing, a democratic pessimist will enjoy watching the figures being crunched here (requires Flash), an interactive map of voting intention. With the Republican leaning states in red, the whole damn thing resembles a severed boar's head dripping in blood. And if Bush wins in November, that would be an apt motif for the feelings most of the world will be experiencing. (see the Guardian) But for now, sit back with a glass of single malt, turn up the radio and watch the waters rise.

Post One

Okay, we should get the disclaimer out of the way first. This thing you see before you exists as little more than a test for my own commitment, and should not be interpreted as anything else. God knows there are enough worthless web pages out there; this one simply differs in that it's not supposed to have any readers.

Too much? An attempt at pre-empting criticism? Perhaps, but to hell with that. Let the thing speak for itself.