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º January 29th-February 4th 2001
Sunday Woof
Saturday Imax
Friday Plastered
Thursday Crazy old dyke
Wednesday Mandy's moan
Tuesday Pyroclasticly-speaking
Monday Link me you bastard

º Sunday 4th February 2001

I find Israeli politics pretty fascinating at the best of times, but I've been concentrating especially hard on the tv coverage lately, ever since I first noticed Ehud Barak's young bodyguard. Look out for him: woof woof woof.

º Saturday 3rd February 2001

The first Imax presentation I saw was To Fly at the Smithsonian and that was, err, over twenty years ago. And fifteen years or so before that I remember my dad taking me to see How The West was Won, which turned out to be the last of the true Cinerama films. So, hey, I'm no stranger to the cheap thrill of immersive cinema.

Somewhere along the way, behind my back, Imax went 3D. But I also recall disliking Kiss Me Kate (not on its first run, I hasten to add) so expectations for last night's visit to the bfi London IMAX to see Cyberworld 3D were not especially high. Flying goblets, hoorah.

The building itself, set in the ruins of Cardboard City, is pretty unimpressive inside and the introductory spiel by what looked like a trained sixteeen year old was frankly alarming. (Thank you for pointing out that the screen is really really big - we blind people don't get out to the cinema that much.)

Then followed a portentously-voiced introduction to the auditorium itself, complete with strategic spotlighting, which reminded me of nothing so much as the The Wonder of Stereo LPs my father used to proudly play on our first stereogram.

After some forgettable trailers, The Voice announced that we could now put on our 3D headsets*. (Some embarrassed fluttering from the audience at this point from those of us who'd been wearing them anyway, and frowning, assuming them broken.)

The credits began with a couple of cartoon clowns chasing each around a cartoon stage and, sure, it was kinda 3D. The title came up and the clowns started juggling the individual letters and - whoooooooah! - suddenly there's this big blobby A rotating three inches from the end of your nose!

Cyberworld is a short collection of eight computer generated animations, most of them quite old but now 'repurposed' for 3D (largely, but not entirely, a matter of rendering existing models through a stereoscopic virtual camera.) The shorts are held together by a conceit about a Virtual Galleria under attack by bugs - big clumsy primary coloured cartoon bugs, at that.

Harold Pinter it's not, a perception confirmed by the dialogue given to the hostess, "Phig the sassy cyberbabe", trying for Valley Grrrrl and missing by a mile. She looks pretty good though, and the Galleria itself is hugely vertiginous - a good match for the auditorium whose seats are very steeply raked.

If you're an animation-freak, you may know some of the shorts already (and certainly the out-takes from Antz and from The Simpsons) but they were mostly new to me, all except for the over-familiar particle-animated Pet Shop Boys Liberation video.

Some pieces are better than others, most notably REZN8's "Tonight's Performance" whose confident visual style has just two minutes to establish itself before the plot required it all to break back down into wire-frame, subject to attack by bugs.

I forget what happens to the bugs at the end of the piece - I guess they died horribly yet comically - but it really doesn't matter. This is not Great Cinema.

It is, however, and without a doubt, a Great Experience. You'll enjoy it. Take soft drugs, take some friends and go see it next time it's showing.

(*"Headsets?! Oh please! They're just big goofy plastic spectacles," I thought. Later I read that they really are much more than that - infra-red synchronised shutter switching and all. But then I saw these on a dweeby fan-site and changed my mind. We didn't get these. Feh. Sometimes big goofy plastic spectacles really are just big goofy plastic spectacles.)

º Friday 2nd February 2001

Damn. Ms Minky has been to Les Trois Garcons. (Yum! Duck giblets!) And I haven't. Dunno about 'a bit out of the way', though - it's fifty yards up the road from the glorious Arnold Circus, and the semi-notorious bandstand (itself the terminating point of a ley line that starts at St Martin's-in-the-Fields. Apparently.)

Apart from watching Charles Young arrive in the latest episode of the increasingly-addictive West Wing and finishing off transforming twenty paper-based decision trees into hyper-linked image-mapped page-suites, any spare brain-space I've had this last 24 hours has been jointly devoted to attempts to debug my central heating system on the one hand and digest last night's XMetaL training session on the other.

On balance, understanding XMetaL is the easier of the two tasks, though the simultaneous leap from a Mac to a PC doesn't exactly help, and it's annoying to find the mimic-browser mode disabled. Working on training machines with monitors that do not have enough screen-estate to comfortably accommodate several overlapping windows doesn't help either.

Still'n'all, I think I understand what's supposed to be going on; now we just need time to develop our own little way of doing things: practise, practise, practise. (And find some Windows keyboard shortcuts, hopefully: why mouse when you can finger-dance?)

That's quite enough dweeberie for one day: tonight, I'm going to go out and get plastered.

º Thursday Ist February 2001

My Mandy moment was partly inspired by talking to Jonathan about l'affaire at the Pop Quiz on Tuesday. Apparently, the (stoopid, pathetic, silly) article in the Guardian claiming that it was all about Mandelson's proto-closet-sexuality has spawned a whole spew of letters to the paper, climaxing (if that's the word I want) in a letter from Julie Birchall.

"Typical hag-ridden publicity-bitch behaviour" I thought (somewhat hypocritically). But now I've changed my mind. Anyone who faxes Camille Paglia to say "Fuck off you crazy old dyke" gets my vote.

[I nicked this link from:tim@sink]

My Mob nickname is "The Funny Moustache" - which kinda sorta makes sense given that today I am driven by a strange urge to stick my tongue up Jerwin's cute little ass. I guess that makes me a Pretender.

No, no, Dave - He/She/They are minkered; I am shlightly the worsh for wear.

So farewell blogger? Or onward and upward to better things? (These pages are hand-coded so it's relatively academic to me. Still'n'all, vision-death is always hard.)

[I nicked this link from:meg@notsosoft]

º Wednesday 31st January 2001

Late shift at the Dick and Strumpet last night. I hate late Tuesdays, especially with all those Irish in. But duty calls, so I wash me bits, shove on a fresh shirt (Brazilian ironing, can't beat it), work up my nicest smile and get stuck in.

Fat Ali was in, all "drinks for my new young friends please barman" as per. I stayed up my end of the bar and let The Boss serve him: life's too short. No sign of Poncey Piers, which is probably just as well - the crowd's excitable enough already.

Sometime around 10, Norma NoMates catches my eye. "Peter?" she says, all innocent like, "what's this about you telling Piers as how Ali's got a hard-on for him?" Well, you can imagine, she got one of my fierce stares for that one.

A gaff full of drunken Irish rent-boys, the Guinness needs changing, and The Boss with his rag on about the re-furb, and I'm supposed to remember who said what to Miss Poncey Pisspot two years ago? I don't think so, girl!

Bit later, I'm bolting a quick treble voddy out the back, and I can hear Arty Crafty Chris mouthing off in the Snug: "...categorically deny...not the slightest truth..." What's she on about this time, the soppy cow?

Anyways, come closing, I'm stacking the drip-trays and The Boss asks me to come into the orifice. "Take a seat, Peter" he says, so I know something's going off big-style - the last time I sat down in here was when he got on his high horse about Geoff paying my rent. And the less said about that evil queen the better.

I swipe a pile of colour-charts off a crate and take the weight of me lallies, thinking "stock-take, aaargh, he's done a stock-take" and he goes: "Norman says he spoke to you earlier and you denied taking an interest in our Asian friend's, er, pursuit of a certain, um, person."

Meaning Piers Pisspot, of course. But I'm stumped, me. Like, who gives a shit? You could hang curtains off of the slack on Piers's knicker-elastic, everybody knows that, specially if there's money in it. And what the fuck's Neurotic Norma got to do with it? "Search me, Boss," I say, all Miss Innocent Fumble-Brain.

"But Mike says he distinctly remembers that you told him to ask Piers if he was, ah, interested," says The Boss, all squinty-eyed. Now this really floors me. I mean, when did Mike become Mr Memory? She'll not remember what pill she's on half the time, let alone what happened last week, let alone last year.

"Don't think so, Boss," I say - but I give a little shrug, like. Noncommital, that's the ticket.

"Peter, I don't think I need to remind you how much money Ali spends here at The Duck and Trumpet," he goes on. "And with the relaunch coming up and everything...it's not as if this is the first time we've had cause for concern as per your probity." Probe my arse, I'm thinking and then it hits me! The fuckers sacking me!

And that's it! I'm shit-canned, laid-orf, services no longer required, good-bye, best wishes, don't call round again. Again!

Well, fuck 'em. Fuck the fucking whole fucking lot of them. I'm off back to Mum's. Hartlepool may be a shit-hole but at least you know who your friends are.

Intriguing instance of blog/meat last night: if I can't be the one to initiate it, maybe I can be the first to mention it?

(And, sorry Peter, you're by no means the only one to hold a British Institute of Innkeepers National Licensee's Certificate round here, ha.)

[message timed at 00:03:10 31/01/01]

º Tuesday 30th January 2001

David was puzzled, as was I, by what Meg wrote about apostrophes. Now I realise it's something that was discussed at the sub's desk on Saturday, where I decided both are correct.

It depends on the context: an apostrophe for the saint's day, no apostrophe for the day on which cards are sent. (In which case, hating Hallmark as we do, I guess we incline towards the apostrophe.)

A neat little story (about how stories are never neat).

Last week's Weasel column (on the back of The Independent Weekend Review) mines content out of that old, old favourite: tv ads and how nasty they are. The columnist cites the Fiat Punto ad, with the car escaping the wrath of a volcano, and then goes on to mine even more content by complaining that an internet search for 'pyroplastic' only turned up a dozen or so references.

"How did we manage in the days before the internet?" he concludes, sarcastically.

A letter from John Gribbin in today's Indy, however, says that he should have been searching for 'pyroclastic' with a C, not a P, concluding "That's the trouble with computers - they are so literal."

So far, so neat: a columnist complains about his internet search; a correspondent explains he had the search term wrong.

But in fact a Google search for 'pyroPlastic' reveals six dozen entries (admittedly rather less than the 20k entries for pyroClastic), and at least one of these entries leads to a definition of the difference between the two words.

So I dropped a note to the letters page of the Indy, as you do:

Sir: Further to your correspondent's embarrassing revelation that the Weasel has confused 'pyroplastic' and 'pyroclastic', I find that a search (at google.com) effortlessly directs me to an entry (at askme.com) explaining that "...pyroplastic is seemed be always be associated with glass and fine pumace and pyroclastic refers to the explosive expelation of volcanic rock glass and lava." (sic, sic, sic)

The next time the Weasel decides to dismiss the internet as a source of information, perhaps he should first choose a better search engine.

So far, so neat(ish): a columnist complains about his internet search; a correspondent explains he had the search term wrong, another correspondent suggests that if the columnist had persevered with his search he wouldn't have messed up. But wait: it gets even less neat.

Just then, my computer crashed. I lost all of the first draft of this entry. Bum, bum, bum. And bum again. But hey, it's true: a computer crash is God's way of demanding a rewrite. Because, whilst waiting for the machine to reboot, I scanned the Weasel column and noticed, with horror, that he was right: the eruption he was talking about was definitely pyroplastic, with a P. So the correspondent was wrong. And so was I. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Spitting hot dust, I have rewritten to the Independent, changing my final par to read:

Given that the Weasel specifically refers to a 'tidal wave of superheated dust' it seems likely that he was in fact correct in his terminology (if not in his dismissal of the internet as a source of information).

I don't guess they'll publish it (any more than the Daily Telegraph published my letter complaining about their description of the Admiral Duncan as a place "frequented by homosexuals").

So: not at all neat: a columnist complains about his internet search; a correspondent explains he had the search term wrong, another correspondent points out that the columnist was right all along.

But hey, look how much content I mined out it. I should have my own column - call it The Ferret (like a Weasel, but longer?).

º Monday 29th January 2001

Some people just don't get it, do they?

You forsake the pizza you've promised yourself all the way home and go out into the freezing night to spend £20 and 40 minutes cabbing it into town to save someone from the consequences of their own folly...and they don't even link you!

(Still, it's nice to know I'm good for something more than merely knowing about car-parks...)

That's better. (I am not the Earl of Lichfield - but I played one on television once.)

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