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º February 26th-March 4th 2001
Sunday Hessian or burlap?
Saturday Link-meme
Friday Scarey
Thursday Death-tolls
Wednesday Lust
Tuesday 60 years too long
Monday Low-fat Tuesday
º Sunday 4th March 2001
Interesting timing of the Beeb bomb: I'd have thought twenty past midnight (the time of the alarm call) on a Saturday evening was just about the worst time to garner news coverage, what with all the papers just starting to distribute their final editions and the tv schedules settling into auto-dross mode?
Oh, but five hours away, across the Atlantic....hmmm.
Hessian or burlap? Blowjob or blow job? Wintry or wintery? Neil Gaiman's blog on the joys of proof correction. (You didn't know he had a blog? Where have you been?) (You don't know who he is? Oh.)
I like 'I just type...', and not just because Ian has the same name as me, or because he's a writer too. Reading him today in Netscape 4.07 , I assumed that he (like me) has found himself criticised for the length of his posts.
In a clever strategy (aimed, no doubt, at those whose attention span is stretched by the cooking instructions on a carton of Pot Noodles) each of his paragraphs is set in a successively smaller font size.
So that the longer he goes on...
...the more like a bat-squeak he becomes.
Cute, eh?
But no; checking it out in Explorer 4.5 reveals it's not clever at all - just Netscape being stoooopid. (Can't tell why without access to his stylesheet, but it may be to do with not using /P end tags. And-or using font size="-1" rather than concrete point sizes?)
On a related note: what is an appropriate emotional reaction when somebody (not Ian) writes to you pointing out that you've inadvertently included their strap-line in the name of their blog on your (barely public) links-list?
And how should that reaction change when (having taken the time to change said links-list) you realise that your correspondent doesn't link to your blog anywhere, at all, ever?
º Saturday 3rd March 2001
Surreal image of the week: "Giving birth is like a vase of beautiful flowers." - Juliette Binoche
Cal asks what everyone thought but no-one dared say:
"We've been wondering lately, why it is that although we get good blog linkage, we rarely get permalinks. Looking round the UK blog list, we can see that quite of few of them have a list of other blogs, and this site rarely features, although we know the owners of those blogs read [insert your blog's name here]. Is there something about our site which discourages permanant linkage?"
(That's why I keep my links up my sleeve.)
To answer another of Cal's questions: the term 'meme' was first coined by Richard Dawkins; I thought everybody knew that, heh.
º Friday 2nd March 2001
Thanks to all who suggested amendments to the death-toll. A massively revised list, with approximately 70 hot-linked entries, is now available here. Any more suggestions?
We are not amused.
Scarey or what? This is what I would look like if I ever got round to shaving my head. I think I look like the love child of Peter Gabriel and Neil Tennant. (Well, maybe 'child' is not quite the right word).
º Thursday 1st March 2001
I hope I'm not the only person who, when confronted by the news of the death of at least 13 people in yesterday's train crash, paused for a moment to wonder how that death toll ranked in the history of disaster...(an extended version of the death toll list that originally appeared here is now available here).
º Wednesday 28th February 2001
When two books in a row describe sex in the 'Alaska Sauna' near Waterloo Station, it's time to wonder if something's going on.
Now, despite its raging snobbery and a cast made up entirely of hearty Sloanes and effete dancers, I tried very hard with Smile Please (see below) and I more or less made myself like it by the final pages: harmless enough, after all.
Until, that is, I started reading Lust by Geoff Ryman.
Michael, a gay research scientist with an unsatisfactory sex life, sees his gym instructor at Waterloo station: "There, on the platform, with fifteen other people, Tony pulled down first his tracksuit bottoms and then his clean white briefs. The Cherub stood still and exposed, his bovine thighs and brown pubic hair on display...Then Tony sat down on the platform, and rolled onto his back, sticking the perfect bottom into the air, like an animal about to be spayed...'Fancy a portion?' the Cherub asked?" And then he disappears.
Understandably perplexed, Michael eventually works out that he has the ability to conjure up any lust object, living or dead, for his private delectation. (He knows he has to fancy them for it to work because Mother Teresa won't come through.)
As the book progresses, Michael pursues the idea of pleasure with a mix of celebrities and people from his past. With help from Lawrence of Arabia, Tarzan (a wow at parties), Billie Holiday and Alexander the Great on the one hand and men from the gym, a girl from school, a friend who died of AIDS, and (crucially) his father on the other, Michael discovers that desire is a complex affair.
Smile Please and Lust have certain obvious similarities. Both are set in contemporary gay London, both are very witty and both are plainly inspired by a degree of wish-fulfilment in the author, a motive that would normally furrow the brow. The quality that separates them, I think, is moral intelligence.
The hero of Smile Please doesn't get what he wants because, it seems, people are beastly (especially to fat snobs). Ryman's hero gets all that he wants and more, but has to fight to be happy with it, dealing with his demons as much as with his 'Angels'. In Smile Please, gays hold the cultural high ground with effortless ease (and the rest of you be damned). In Lust, being gay is a highly problematic affair (especially when your lover is Pablo Picasso).
Michael has other problems as well: his job involves experiments with animals, he's hung up on his father, he's impotent.
Writing that's as frank as this can make you wonder if the author is highly courageous or merely arrogant - especially when you learn that in his day job Ryman is a government information ubergeek (currently at the Cabinet Office). I've met him a few times in that capacity, and whilst I certainly know arrogance when I see it, I think I also recognise true courage.
The bravery, intelligence and sensitivity with which Lust steers Michael through his tortuous moral learning curves sets this book head and shoulders above anything else I've read this year. As with his 253 (set on a tube train), Ryman takes a trite initial premise and weaves magic from it: adult magic at that. More power to his pen.
Bona to varda your indulgent old ilk: Stephen Glover, defending Field Marshal Montgomery from accusations of covert homosexuality, fondles his memories of old school masters in yesterday's Daily Male Mail - "The boys felt something close to love for them but only as one might do for a cherished and indulgent uncle. Sex was no part of it. Of course there was the occasional homosexual teacher, prowling about with gaunt and anguished features, but such men were readily identifiable and of an entirely different ilk."
Meanwhile, a must-have for the next sauna-visit: JellyBath.
Nuff said:
- The man on trial for shooting Jill Dando attends court carrying a Bible,
- The farm at the heart of the foot and mouth epidemic fed its pigs on left-over school dinners,
- All six of the giant pubic lice sold for £100 each in the Millenium Dome auction were bought by men.
The quiz? Oh. They lost. Again. By half a point. Again.
º Tuesday 27th February 2001
Three answers that might figure in tonight's Pop Quiz (but won't):
¶ Donny Osmond
¶ Pure and Simple
¶ Her lawyer
There are photographs from last Friday's blogmeet. No, I am not going to link to them: I look as if I've been drinking in Soho for too long. About sixty years too long. The only consolation is that David looks even worse, like both the subject and object of a child-maintenance order. And yes, the bomb should be going off on somebody's server just about...now.
º Monday 26th February 2001
I have revised and extended the books section of These We have Loved: a few more books, a lot more links.
Really, it's so unfair: there's Dave and Iain and Scally, in Sydney, and Jonno and Richard, lovers in New Orleans (with their friends Chris and John), and what do we have to look forward to? Not so much Mardi Gras as plain old Low Fat Tuesday. (To be followed, no doubt, by Bad Hair Wednesday.)
Ah well, here are some carnival webcams to keep you entertained on a grey day in your grey office in grey London: New Orleans, and Sydney. (There ought to be something for Rio too, but a long and exhausting search has turned up nothing so far, grrr.)
After seeing my-dear-just-everyone at the Vauxhall, really wanted to go to 333 for their new just-like-the-old-LA night. But, oops, too drunk, too tired.
(Seem to recall a feverish dream framed as a blog, but I remember only two entries: "..since the guy that I shagged on the train from Halifax has just met the guy that I shagged on the train to Cardiff" and "Yes: son of water-pistol man!". Hmmm, answers on a postcard.)
If they truly want to recreate that old London Apprentice feeling, I hope they remembered to install:
- the moth-eaten banquettes that left you with your head level with your knees and your arse on the floor
- the fearsome halitosis on the attractively goony skinhead barman
- the little seventy year old man who looked like a retired newsagent and who always seemed to be having the best time of his life
- CJ
- the theatre of erotic testosterone-fuelled tension aka the pool table
- and, of course, the toilets, nuff said.
Gays in the military, yes indeed: seems Field Marshal Montgomery had a bit of a thing for 12 yr old jailbait. I was Monty's trouble?
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