At the Sign of the Potter's Wheel

Well…we seem to have intermission conditions imposed on us here. Which is timely because, nine months and seventy thousand words later, this thing has become difficult to write.

Most of the things I want to say are like playing cards that I attempt to assemble into some kind of structure, only for the whole damn house to collapse. Normally I would wave it away with a simple “to hell with it” but this time the problem is persistent and difficult to ignore. Even my introduction today is rotten because it breaks the largest rule I have imposed on myself…so we will cower in the shadow of this intermission and hope nobody asks any awkward questions.

I still have time to write at work but the writing can only reflect what I am thinking about and being exposed to at the time. And my recent thoughts have not been ones about which I feel like writing. Trivial thoughts, thoughts about my future, uncomfortable thoughts about bombs… the ground here is not fertile.

Ah, to hell with it. We can shift this blockage if we try hard enough…I just need to hold my nose and blow hard, ignoring the sound of blood vessels bursting in both ears…

The true purpose of the intermission, though, is to accommodate the holiday I have coming up, and perhaps a couple of weeks off will keep the fire from going out…or at least keep a candle burning in the window. In the meantime we will use intermission conditions to our advantage, to forget about current affairs and making points, and just throw a list or two around.

Hmm, well, what about the rules I mentioned earlier? Perhaps this would be the time to twirl the lasso and rope the bastards in. Starting with…

1. Most importantly this is an ongoing collection of plain and simple writing. The act of “blogging” is irrelevant; it is a means, not an end. Therefore, posts about weblogs, “blogging” and the “blogosphere”, or posts containing nothing but internet links, have no purpose here.

2. My intention is to approach writing each post like an article or a feature. This is not a diary, unless I have a point to make that happens to utilise the form.

3. There are already too many identical swear-filled rants on the Internet. I am not going to fake anger for the sake of it.

Well…that was hastily cobbled together from the scraps that exist in my mind. But the irony here is perverse. I have never written this ruleset down before because I cannot post the damn things without breaking the first rule…and I know what I want from this exercise without needing to set it in stone.

Standing to attention the whole time, though, wearies both body and mind…a little time spent at ease can do us all the world of good. Even so, I cannot shake off the feeling that, after posting this, I will wake up the next morning feeling cheap, dirty and used. Still… at least Chlamydia is out of the question.

Indeed, but something still feels wrong. Even allowing for the freedom we have under intermission conditions I feel that I am letting in daylight on whatever thin shards of magic exist in this place. So we will finish with a quick cultural snapshot before going to ground.

Book: The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. A famous book in Hollywood for its daylight / magic interface, but a useful glimpse into the structure of mythical storytelling. Initially it seems to prescribe a straightjacket to your stories, but it draws on a deep well of classic mythmaking that makes sense and cannot easily be dismissed.

TV: House, starring Hugh Laurie. A show that Hugh Laurie towers over so imperiously that any faults crumble to dust in his shadow. He can even do the accent.

Film: I went to the cinema a few weeks ago to see a screening of Chungking Express. Groundbreaking in its time and still gripping and charming today. Nevertheless, I rarely feel the urge to sit in a cinema these days…this is less to do with the films and more to do with my own comfort.

Magazine: Private Eye, to which I now subscribe.

Live Music: People Like Us at the NFT last Friday, part of the NFT Optronica season. PLU was the first of three acts performing an audio / visual set that evening, and presented an amusing and inventive blend of cultural detritus pasted together to form strange collage landscapes…ski villages burning in the background as a ballroom couple dance on stage in the foreground, trombone players spitting beams of flickering red light from the ends of their instruments, sound engineers building robots that sing through a vocoder…great entertainment and accompanied by Vicki Bennett’s usual blend of wonky cut and paste music.

CD: Ye gods! I have not bought a CD in months. This is chiefly down to…

Radio: Broadband has resulted in online radio taking over my music habits, particularly the BBC’s Listen Again function. At this exact moment I am yet to catch up on more than eight hours of programming I have earmarked for listening. Best of Jazz, Mixing It, Andy Kershaw, The Blue Room x2, 6 Mix, old episodes of radio comedy, and others. This year I am squeezing every last goddamn drop out of my licence fee.

And relax.

Valley of the Dells

With the arrival of a few cardboard boxes yesterday, a strange and unbelievable had happened. After waiting for half a year I finally had a new work computer. I was going from having the worst machine in the company – running on Windows 95 and sounding like a washing machine every time the hard drive was access – to one of the best.

Now, the very existence of new IT equipment has the same effect as sending off an all-users email promising a free porn bonanza. So it came to pass that the rest of the company began sniffing around my office like dogs. They had picked up the scent of the impossible and could scarcely believe that I had managed to outfox the IT department… in the sense that I had been given the correct tool with which to do my job a mere six months late, the cunning bastard that I am. But their oohs and ahs began to blacken my mood so I shooed the dogs from my door, clutching the mouse protectively.

The IT department had tried every trick in the book to procrastinate long enough to ensure that the computer could only be delivered sometime after the sun explodes. But their failure was sealed when one of the IT staff themselves broke rank some weeks ago; she saw my old laptop and became instantly affronted at the mere sight of such a black relic. Her reaction was the same as the wolf in the old Droopy cartoons when he opens yet another door to find the dog staring up at him dolefully…and Droopy turns to camera and says ”I do this to him all through the picture”.

Now that she had been sufficiently offended she became a champion of the machine’s replacement campaign. The others in the department fell like dominoes… but their eyes, their eyes! In their eyes there was a look of fury, an understanding that I was a kind of superthief, but unlike Raffles I was no gentleman.

So it is almost a shame, then, that I am leaving in a week and a half. Almost.

In every company there are people who throw up dust every time something essential needs to be done…be it purchase basic office equipment or comply with sensible health and safety. They should have their hair ripped out. The budget is, of course, king here, but the reasons these people give for not doing their jobs are never financial. They are suspicious and petty and quite incredibly wrong.

The irony in this company is that for every minute a train is late, the company is fined fifty pounds. A minor delay at one end of the line can build up to a fine costing many thousands of pounds…and we have people dedicated to ensuring we can prove that we did not cause the delay. New processes put in place by the people here have reduced these delay minutes by a massive amount, saving the company tens of thousands of pounds. But this saved money disappears somewhere. The budget cupboard remains bare; we reap no harvest despite sowing more seeds that ever before.

So fuck them, fuck them when they say there is no money, because there is money. We need to do our jobs properly so that the company runs efficaciously and efficiently. They are cutting off their own hands by not allowing us to do them properly. They are idiots and their useless kind are replicated throughout every industry in the world. This is not a new thought, of course, but it is nevertheless sobering to have it spelt out in front of you with such naked disregard for basic fucking logic.

But my new computer is very nice, so they have bought me off for now. The revolution can wait for another day… once I have left.

The Slight Whiffs of Rover

Somewhere in Longbridge, a chink of metal catches the sunlight. A husk, a burnt out shell of a once-proud automobile sits in a field and sighs to itself in an indecent act of anthropomorphic bollocks.

Indeed…the last decaying relics of car manufacturer Rover are being sold off after its well-publicised collapse last April. It is the latest useless seesawing in this ridiculous saga and nobody believes we are coming out of this with any dignity or respect for the motoring industry.

Rover’s assets will reportedly go to whoever puts forward the business plan with the most clip-art of cartoon stick figures being dynamic, but this does not mean the situation is straightforward. The competition has been surprisingly intense, which means the bidders involved deserve further scrutiny. This is not an act of suspicion… surely nobody would buy Rover with the sole intention of destroying the business whilst awarding themselves massive bonuses. Capitalism would not allow that to happen, being made of feathers and treacle an’ that.

The bidders are as follows:

Rupert Murdoch

"Strewth, what I really want is for a fair bidding process," said the billionaire tyrant. "Which is why I've installed one of my sons on the selection board who will make damn sure the verdict is fair and balanced. And, coincidentally, my nationality is now officially Longbridgian. It's the only way we can have a fair sense of competition. By which I mean that I own a monopoly."

Murdoch's critics have complained that the roads will be a more dangerous place if he buys Rover. "Yeah, it's true that all my cars will drive on the extreme right. But it's only to balance the outrageously uncompetitive way the BBC drives on the left. And if Tony Blair complains, I'll get the Sun to photograph Euan on the toilet."

Derek Trotter

The second bidder to announce his intention was Mr Derek ‘Trot-Boy’ Trotter.

“Bonjour, plonker, during the war,” he told us, yesterday.

Derek ‘Del-Man’ Trotter has, in fact, bid for the company repeatedly in the past. “We can confirm we’ve seen the bid many times, generally around 8.00 on a Friday, and each time it seems to get less funny,” said a spokesman from bid overseers PricewaterhouseCoopers. “But the bit where the executive summary falls through the bar never gets old.”

“Cushty, luvvly jubbly, three-wheeled van,” added Derek.

Donald Trump

"Rover's sale has underlined the existence of a market in second hand car manufacturers," Donald told us. "The whole area is totally unregulated and dangerous for the entrepeneur. Last time I bought one I discovered the factory was just two ends of a Reliant Robin factory and an Austin factory welded together. It fell to bits within the week, killing hundreds. Mercifully, I couldn't be blamed because I'm very rich and important."

Donald announced his intention to bid yesterday, but doubt soon filled the air like stale cigar smoke.

“I don’t like the idea of being attached to something so decrepit and unloved but I’m sure I can turn things around,” said Donald’s hair. “Now, what was that about a car manufacturer?”

Jose Mourinho

With Steven Gerrard having signed on for another year at Liverpool, this has left a hole in the Chelsea midfield that Mourinho needs to fill as soon as possible. At a press conference he announced his intention to bid for Rover.

“What we’re looking for is an elderly wreck that hardly ever starts and keeps crashing, but we don’t think Microsoft Windows would be…”

At this point the sycophantic laughter from the assembled journalists drowned him out.

Later, the press conference ended in chaos when Mourinho tried to tap up the tea lady’s tits. “I deny everything,” he said. “It’s a coincidence she happened to be there, and besides, it’s somebody else’s fault that I did it. Er, can we just get the fine out of the way so we can get back to fawning over me?”

JR

“I…arrrgh!” said JR. Too late, he’s been shot.

A Scramble for Gravitas

“We could sit around here all day, talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches...”

Quite. Every time you stand up you risk being decapitated by another brick been thrown from one opinion leader camp to another, and as London settles down after the attacks more and more people believe they, uniquely, have the angle on the terror threat. So we need to throw a few bricks ourselves, and it may result in falling victim to the same crimes of which we accuse others. This will be kept to a minimum, but without bending the rules here all we would gain from this exercise is an entry for an encyclopaedia.

Many people who are throwing the bricks take their reasoning from whatever favourite bucket of shit that person has been relentlessly stirring for years. In some cases it is for political capital...see George Galloway for details.

The US media’s right wing, of course, has more bricks in its hands than anyone. Today the Guardian reports how the US media have reacted with deep self-regard, claiming that the US is at threat from London’s supposed laxity towards immigration. They call the city Londonistan, a term that sounds like it is covered with the filthy fingerprints of Richard Littlejohn. The blurring here between people from a different religion and extremist terrorists is a twisted thing to behold. Meanwhile, Littlejohn himself throws up his hands and continues to call for all darkies to be boiled alive like wot their ancestors did to the brave pioneering white man back in the year fourteen piggledy-honk.

But to hell with those people; it is in their nature to gibber and quack like elderly ducks. They are idiots and do not know better.

Other people should know better and it is this group we will focus on. This group is ignoring everything else in a gleeful rush to snort their derision at how the media reacted to the events. And they now stare at a spreadsheet on their computers and tot up the points they scored against their imagined enemies, because this is the total that matters, not the death count or other such little numbers.

The bombs went off just six days ago, whereas the criticism from many quarters has inferred that the media has been wallowing in overreaction, speculation and page-filling for months. There has been exhaustive analysis on everything from the future of terrorism in England to the role of webloggers in the aftermath...all within those six days. It is describing the tower from the inside without ever having been out the door. Some of it is just media-on-media wankery; and perhaps this is exactly the kind of getting back to normal sense of “business as usual” we should be striving for... But most newspapers have kept it factual and this has been helped by the speed in which the police investigation has progressed. It is a problem of perspective; the time since the bombs has stretched into a perceived infinity, and the information, analysis and reaction contained within that time has been overwhelming. Single comments made on the day itself are highlighted and seen through the same snide lens as reflections made after days of consideration. This is ridiculous and the perfect example of hindsight smugness.

The coverage has not been perfect by any means; just as we would expect. A fog of darkness now hangs over the columnists of many newspapers; the sheer weight of newsprint involved here has tipped the scales from pride to self-congratulatory nonsense. The scramble for gravitas has been deafening at times. At first, the pride and defiance of being a Londoner was a necessary thing to express. This was essential to restore the self-confidence of the city. But many writers took it too far, not adding to our understanding over the event but simply competing to have the last word, to make the cleverest speech. Every time a conclusion was reached, it was smugly brushed to one side by someone who wanted to get people nodding in awed agreement at their ability to beat others to the real heart of the matter.

One of the big criticisms was that the pride expressed explicitly or implicitly states that other cities may have reacted in a different manner. Furthermore, people in other cities, such as Baghdad, have to survive this kind of shit every day. These things are true to some extent but ignore the point and goals of the actions involved. People were not reacting with positive self-reflection as a cunning tactic to show up Johnny Madrid or Johnny Muslim. The bombs genuinely caused chaos and panic, and the implications go beyond the fifty deaths and several hundred injuries. The mistake is to mix up hypocrisy of compassion – where it only matters when your own countrymen are killed – with the emotional and physical bond that ties a city together. Some comments were hysterical and ridiculous but what the fuck do you expect when, an hour previously, fifty innocent people were blown to bits a mile from where you are working?

Of course, a sober and objective examination of how we can improve our reaction (not our opinion) to such an event is always welcome, from emergency service training to timely information dissemination in the aftermath. Masturbatory clever speeches on the other hand do not help. Yes, we are lucky to live in a country that allows free speech, blah blah blah... but do not expect a round of fucking applause for your half-arsed efforts. And that includes me.

May Contain Nuts

The third battle was the most intense. We were attacking and as the battle began the defending force were sited on the other side of the river. Above all they would be protecting their bridges from our troops, and I decided that a rapid assault from the front would be strategically brilliant. If this was the army I would be promoted for sure, I thought.

I ran dead centre down the slight incline to safety behind a massive tree. It then dawned on me that the way this was set up, the attacking force had positioned themselves in a wide 270 degree arc around this very tree.

I was shot in the face five seconds later. Tch.

Pain exploded just below my nose and I felt warm liquid trickling into my mouth. I returned to our team’s safe zone; once there I lifted the mask partially from my face and spat out a satisfyingly big glob of orange paint. I noticed then that the masks had loads of small holes around the nose and mouth... this is the price you pay in paintballing for being able to breathe.

The safe area is where players who have been shot come to life in the space of two minutes...cheg on, Jesus. During my two minutes I discussed with a team-mate how this game was far more intense than the first two “capture the flag” games.

“When this game started we were up against a solid wall of paintballs being fired,” I said. “That was fucked up.”

“Yeah, this one feels like being in a warzone,” he said. ”Cool, isn’t it?”

Indeed.

Before you are allowed to play paintball you must sign a waiver. This covers the nature and obvious risks of the game, and the one most of us focused on was the clause that stated that you accepted that could get hurt during the games.

‘Could’? Will. Everybody knows that you will be hurt and if you do not believe that tumbling into a ditch in a rain of paintballs to retrieve a flag will cause any discomfort then you deserve to get shot in the arse at point blank range whilst bending over to tie your shoelace. Well... had the warden not specifically forbade this. Nevertheless, signing your name in agreement does nothing to assuage the nerves of the more fearful player.

Yet this was not the clause that became important on Saturday... We also signed our names to agree that we understood that paintballing is a physically demanding game that demands a certain level of fitness. The 15 stone-plus members of our group smiled weakly at this but soon went back to discussing with glee where it would be most painful to get shot (apparently on the top end of the fingers where the nail overhangs). I laughed off the clause, struggled into my camouflage gear and duly armed myself.

It is now two days later and I can barely walk. On that one day I caned every muscle in my body and I believe I even grew new ones especially so they could start aching. Fucking hell.

The problem is that nobody takes a disclaimer seriously because the ones we normally see do not apply to us. In a theme park when a rollercoaster warns you against riding whilst pregnant, you snigger amongst yourselves and pat your beer belly knowingly. Part of this is because the disclaimers seem obvious...riding the corkscrew whilst pregnant taps into every mother’s fear that the foetus will be catapulted out at the first hump into the nearest vat of candyfloss.

But to hell with disclaimers when paintballing is so much goddamn fun. And to hell with its image as an exercise for corporate team bonding in which demure Joan from Accounts discovers a whole new side to herself as she ties the boss to a tree and pistol-whips the hell out of him. That is the official Comedy Line in this matter and it is wrong.

And ye gods, should I feel a sense of twisted exhiliration when I am being shot? And so soon after the baleful and chilling reality of the bombing on Thursday.

It would be tedious for me to ramble on too long about this, so I shall highlight the salient information: we won. We whipped their arses, although the contest was close. We may have been the team with the fat bastards, but they had a group of teenage girls among their number. It all balances out in the end.

Afterwards we compared bruises...one guy had been shot a third nipple that he paraded with pride, but for the most part the bruises were confined to the arm and the back. I received just two minor bruises due to my advanced skills that lie in the field of, er, lying in the field. Most of the balls seemed to bounce off me...I was lucky. Later in the evening we got drunk and wandered around the town centre and watched news of Birmingham city centre being evacuated on a silent television. We went back to the house and went to sleep, and when we woke up the room erupted in cries of pain and flatulence. It had been a good weekend.

Descent

9.30am: Hear announcement that the entire tube network has stopped running. Major power failure. The office are not sympathetic...it’s only the tube.

9.45am: Hear talks of people covered in blood and soot...Liverpool Street and Aldgate East seems to be hit bad...

10.00am: Only two tubes remain stuck in the tunnels. We do not know if the trains have collided.

10.15am: The public address system now says that all tubes have been suspended and all buses too. The news websites are blaming power surges but my manager tells me that there were four bombs...BBC London are appealing for eye-witnesses but no speculation.

10.20am: Reports of a bus exploding...people capturing this on camera phones...smoke and flames coming out of the back. Serious injuries reported...no fatalities yet but this thing seems to be spiralling... Many train operators are disrupted, although we are not affected here except for an increase in security and a horrible cloud of fear enveloping us all.

10.25am: Scotland Yard now calling the power surges “multiple explosions”. The quality of information released to the media is morbidly interesting.

10.30am: All the phone networks are jammed. I have not brought my phone to work today.

10.40am: All mainline train services are being stopped from coming into London...this includes us.

10.45am: The two trains at Aldgate East are still stuck.

10.55am: Now the news are saying three bus explosions – ye gods.

11.00am: Fucking hell. I am told there are fatalities from the bus explosions.

11.30am: We are evacuating the station.

2.05pm: Our staff are back into the station and the report is that there were two suspicious packages, but neither of them turned out to be for real.

3.00pm: BBC London has reported more than once that our station has reopened to the public. This is untrue.

3.15pm: Passengers are now being let into the station. The atmosphere is muted.

3.30pm: Trains are slowly beginning to run from here again, so I am going home. What a terrible fucking day.

The BBC's report on today's events is here.

A Bad Day To Bury Good News

“...thorough analysis, genuinely concerned citizens and factual information have more impact than free ice-cream, boatloads of hired lobbyists and outsourcing threats" -- Jonas Maebe, Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. (source)

Today the focus of the news was on the Olympic bids...and it will be for the next few days. But we must not let one piece of news be buried under the breathless “we never doubted the Olympic committee for a minute” stories and photographs of attractive young girls wearing few clothes dancing in Trafalgar Square.

This news can speak for itself: “European politicians have thrown out a controversial bill that could have led to software being patented.” (source)

An article (here), written before the surprise ditching of the bill, gives us a glimpse of the fury the bill provoked. It points out that “Nobody who actually writes or cares about software supported this directive, but nobody in a position to stop it cared about software except as a cash cow, or cared about its producers except as ever-ready battery hens to be intensively farmed.” The same site responded initially to the bill’s destruction in the article linked in our initial quote, above. (And just who the hell are the ‘Campaign for Creativity’, mentioned in the article and who supported the bill? Just the thought of this makes my skin blister.)

This, folks, is a rare victory and we must cherish it... although one drop of acid can be found in the well. The bill was not dropped because they realised it was fundamentally and malevolently wrong; it is far more likely that it was politically inconvenient to give in to the lobbyists; they realised that not all the bill’s opponents were as toothless as they may have expected and could potentially cause them grief later on. This is the case for many decisions we hear from the courts, be they favourable to us or not.

Whatever the reason, though, a small cloud of gloom has now been lifted. The software industry can remain a forward-looking and innovative bunch of enthusiastic and knowledgeable geeks, rather than decline into a castrated and effete colony of code slaves run by obscene CB-toadying bastards who stuff fifty pound notes into their ears.

Jumble Sailing

Okay...I have limited online access from here and so we must blunder our way through a furtive jumble sale of politics stolen from the pages of the BBC. Sadly our involuntary convention still applies...I throw this together in the daytime but have to squeeze it into the internet many hours later.

Hmm, jumble sale...I like that. A little tweaking and it shall be our title for today, and we also get to reference a marvellous Clearlake song for no reason whatsoever.

Hoonapoloser

Commons leader Geoff Hoon has suggested compulsory voting – a well-worn boot and many politicians have put their foot in it over the years.

"We need to get people more engaged in political processes, to explain, to take through the argument from the local level," [Hoon] told BBC2's the Daily Politics. "The idea of having a debate about compulsory voting is to get that engagement ... these are my ideas, my thoughts." -– BBC News.

Again we see the problem leap out at us with flames pouring out of its head and a million klaxons wailing...compulsory voting would not tackle any of the problems that caused voting attendance to drop in the first place. Forcing the percentage of non-voters down would be a nice little plaque on the wall, a pleasing statistic to bandy about in the Commons tea room; meanwhile, millions of people would text in their “none of the above” vote and continue to be disillusioned.

Looking at a few reports on this, that point has already been made many times in response to Hoon’s suggestion. From the BBC story itself, works and pension minister Mr Plaskitt said "If the voters are drifting away from participating then they are actually telling us something about the offer that all the political parties are making to the electorate and they are telling us they are not satisfied with that."

Ah, but this does not argue against the suggestion, merely the reasoning behind it. Compulsory voting is neither an idea we are comfortable with nor something that is easy to dismiss without making vague noises about democracy and human rights. We are adept at bending democracy into meaning “let us do what the hell we want”...anything that avoids any kind of responsibility in a system that is defined as government by the people. Yet this is not an argument in itself for bringing in compulsory voting...merely an observation that we should not dismiss the idea in our usual lazy manner.

BLAIR 2 WIN HE IZ FIT!!!11!!!1!

Hang on, let us go back a few paragraphs...text message voting? This is a subject that raises its head repeatedly but upon examination proves irrelevant in the scheme of things. It would not lead to a rise in voting because there is no chance of a live feed of two ministers fucking in a jacuzzi. Security disasters aside, though, it would be a convenient thing to have, if hopelessly confusing for everyone over the age of 40. The smart money is on the beleaguered old gentleman being too frightened to send in a text message in case he switches on the television and hears his vote being read out by Ant and Dec.

The Image of Don Foster

When a man steps forward and publicly announces that a particular somebody should give a sum of money to charity, the world always spits out its coffee in disbelief and derision. And into this bleak arena, step forward Don Foster MP...

Bunch of Savages in this Town

"The G8 is going to focus on really important issues and to be quite honest I'm not going to disparage anybody." -– Tony Blair.

Jacques Chirac has been saying things. But leaving aside the fact that Tony Blair needs to work on his verbosity to make his case more efficaciously, this story is five inches away from being an irritating non-story. We all understand and make allowances for Chirac’s insane descent into a puffed-up, boorish nutcase. What gives the story legs is the company Chirac was keeping when he made the jokes. The thought sends a chill down the spine. Do our leaders always gather together and sneer at our expense?

Surely not. Tony Blair for one does not seem the type to wallow in such wretched jokes, or indeed any kind of genuine and unforced japery. He has no sense of humour these days and there is little about which to laugh. He is a prime minister and nothing else; it is inconceivable to even imagine him as anything else but the man who presides over us in his fog of conviction and belief. When he finally steps down he will disintegrate into dust with a loud poof and we shall never see him again, until the next time we empty the vacuum cleaner.

Unless...well, with ex-president Clinton striking up a rum old golfing friendship with George Bush senior in recent months, perhaps Blair will scuttle off to the lair of Margaret Thatcher and spend the remainder of his days lying at her feet and waggling his little legs in the air.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

“Not every act has benefited [from Live8], however. Pete Doherty's former band The Libertines saw sales of their Up the Bracket album drop by 35%.” -– BBC News. (source)

Thirty Seven?

To hell with politics. Before we end this thing, my earlier use of the phrase “bunch of savages...” reminds me of two beautiful things. Not only will Clerks shortly be coming out as a three DVD release (region 2), but Kevin Smith is shooting a sequel provisionally called The Passion of the Clerks. To most fans this news is a year old and they will be weeping pointedly at my ineptitude, but I have an excuse; I'm not even supposed to be here today. When I found this all out last night I found myself infected by the chaotic spirit of Blakey from On the Buses as I told all and sundry “this has made my day, this has.” Indeed, I am still smiling between the affected grimaces. Just let us hope that Smith has the good sense not to put a plot in the thing. Anything else would be wrong.

That New Metro Science Brief in Full

Introducing the Metro’s exclusive new science section to keep informed all you time-poor, cash-rich urbanites too long starved of intelligent and digestible information about science, nature and technology on your way to work.

Wow! Black Holes!

Eminent sciencepersons yesterday revealed a whizzy fact about the cosmos in what we live in. “Black Holes”, which are really massive spheres of a dense material called “Gravity”, do not just stay still and suck in huge wodges of matter (aka “Space Stuff”). They actually move about around the big expanse in what we live in...and there could be one in our very own galaxy, the Milky Nebulus! The middle class immediately started a campaign to get it relocated to a poorer galaxy where “the locals won’t notice because they’re some kind of space monkeys, or something.”

Here’s a really whizzy diagram of some red balls orbiting some blue balls to prove everything we just said.

“Space is really big”, giggled Doctor Katie Price.

Whoo! A Funny Equation!

Boffins this morning came up with an equation that proved people were genetically disposed to buying products from Nike. The equation, which we’re simultaneously mocking and thoroughly publicising, is really short and was formulated especially for a press release sent out by Nike to all tabloid newspapers.

“It’s real mathematics an’ that!” said a Nike Spokesbot between oil changes earlier.

Woah! Round Earth!

A bunch of dappy braniacs today told us exclusively that the world in what we live in is spherical. Our diagram of a blue ball orbited by a little red ball demonstrates the intricate physics and complex forces involved.

“It’s not flat or nuffink!” giggled David Beckham, eminent worldologist who spoke to us this morning from his laboragorium in Spain. “An’ that.”

Whee! Big Explosions!

A load of French geeks in white coats who are really socially inept today announced that they had built the world’s biggest doughnut-shaped tube for science an’ that, in the French town of Haw Haw Haw!

“It whizzes loads of small things around that whack into each other, and everything!” giggled Professor Doctor Gillian McKeith, who is a very important actual scientist and everything. “The resulting explosions make us know stuff about fundamental... whoops, too many syllables... I mean really simple basic things that when put together form the world in what we live in.”

She went on to express lots of very serious stuff about science that used equations an’ that! “Buy my book or you’ll die of foodlessness!” she added, blushing as she hid her modesty behind a tesla coil.

Bugger Me! It’s Unlimited Power!

Some girlfriend-less sub-human weirdos who live with their parents announced today that they have completely and utterly solved the problem of nucular fusion (aka “Magic Energy”) last night in a really really long meeting that went on for hours.

Our diagram of a red ball hitting some blue balls shows the processes that are involved in some way or other, simplified because we weren’t listening to what the astrologist we phoned earlier told us.

“Our whizzy new nucular fusion power house will be ready to go within, ooh, ten days,” said someone whose name we’re not telling in case somebody follows this story up. “We have the blueprints here in our special safe and we’ll be building it tomorrow on top of a really big hill where the sun shines and the bunnies play twenty four hours a day. From this power station we will be able to generate a billion trillion gillion hellawatts! That’s probably enough power to destroy Hiroshema a thousand times over, or summat!”

In Tomorrow’s Mega Sciencegasm in Metro, we examine what the forthcoming hosepipe ban will mean for Madonna and Guy Ritchie, we look at how Brownian Notion applies to jiggling norks, and the latest research on climate change is peer-reviewed by Nasty Nick from TV’s Big Brother.