BNL

Woo, and indeed Yay. While I know I should be cutting back on my gig tendencies ( I’ve only currently got about 8 on the agenda… ) I still have a few bands where it’s a certainty that I’ll see them advertised, and just go. One of those is Barenaked Ladies. I’ve seen them three times before, and they’ve always been excellent. I got an email yesterday from ticketline, telling me that they’re playing Manchester Apollo on Wednesday 5th May – and I’ve now got a ticket! Yay!

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Madrid

Oddly enough, I find it quite hard to express my opinions about things like the Madrid train bombs. I wasn’t writing d4d™ at the time of September 11th, and probably wouldn’t have said much about that either – or I’d have probably said something highly contentious about the planning, and the probable effects. I feel much the same with Madrid and the images coming from there – it’s horrendous, but I can’t bring myself to join in a chorus of shock and horror.

Obviously I’ve heard of Eta before, but I couldn’t tell you thing one about their history, objectives, or motivations. On a selfish/solipsistic side, I didn’t know anyone in Madrid, so there isn’t the personal affect there either. (and yes, for the pedants, the word ‘affect’ is the one I wanted, not ‘effect’) Yes, the events themselves are terrible, but they’re also almost certainly counter-productive to the aims of Eta, and that’s what I find most disturbing – that these 180+ lives have been extinguished for no good reason whatsoever. The only real “justification” for the event is that it’s now focussed the world’s media on Eta and it’s so-called portfolio.

The BBC has a further piece wondering who’s to blame? There’s going to be a scapegoat for this, for sure, but at the end of the day it can happen all too easily. This is where the US is still discovering problems – sure, they’ve pretty much closed the door on airline terrorism, but they’ve focussed so much on that one avenue, but this bombing could just as easily have happened on Amtrak, or anywhere else the public can go. At the end of the day it doesn’t need exotic plots or weaponry to perform acts like Madrid, or September 11th – all that’s really needed is some explosives (or even just a handgun) and believers people determined to carry out the actions to further their cause, no matter what it is.

We can’t protect ourselves against fanatics, we can’t spend our entire lives paranoid that these events might occur. They’ll happen, time and time again, because the only alternatives are thought-police, or a public utterly caged and under control, where every single movement is tracked. Blair can pledge to go on fighting terrorism in every corner of the world, but it’ll ultimately be unsuccessful – the terrorists will wise up to the various methods used to track them, and will find new ways to circumvent them. Small cells will still be able to put together events like Madrid – I don’t think there’ll be anything on the global scale of September 11th for a while now – with little communication needed outside the cell. And that’s where things like Echelon, GCHQ and the like also ultimately fail – because in a group of three to five organised individuals, there’s little to no need for extra communication. If those people have never raised their heads into the view of the authorities, then they’re not likely to even be under surveillance.

My prediction is that the Madrid bombs will be found to be caused and planned by a small cell from Eta, all people that have never previously been associated with terrorism. Their neighbours will say “they were nice quiet people, we never thought they would be involved in something like this”. That, of course, is if they’re ever found – something I have my doubts on.

World Domination

It had to happen. I’m now the proud owner of Twadge.com. No idea yet what I’m going to do with it, but yes, the domain is mine!

Bwahahahahahahaha!

150,000

I’m not sure exactly when we went past the 100,000th page (turns out it was October 6th ) impression, but the 150,000th was registered on the 9th March. How pleased am I?

Retrograde

Back at the end of September, I bought a Three phone – a Motorola A920 to be exact. This week, I’ve quit the contract, and gone back to a 2.5G phone, the Nokia 7250i.

While I liked the Motorola, the Three network itself is utterly shonky, and the way they’ve crippled the 920 is nothing short of a sin. If it had been allowed to do what it was designed for (i.e. a high-speed access phone, capable of rendering most sites through it’s Opera mobile browser, with Bluetooth and infra-red as standard ) then it would’ve been fine. Instead, Three decided to cripple the Bluetooth and IR, ringfence the internet access to solely their content, and turn a potentially stunning phone into an utter sack of shite.

That’s not to say that the phone didn’t have its problems too. The battery life was abysmal (roughly a day between charges, even if only left on standby) and since Christmas it’s needed rebooting at least once a day. Quite simply, an utterly unacceptable state of affairs. But – and this is worth pointing out – when it actually worked, the A920 is a stunning bit of kit.

For now though, I’m going to take this “backward” step. Backwards to a phone that works, that has a standby time of close to two weeks, to a network that, while shite, is still better than Three. We’ll see how things go.

Weirdness and Obscurity

Over the years, one of my favourite authors has been a not-overly-well-known writer, Jack O’Connell. He’s not written anything in about four years now, although there was supposed to be something in the offing back in 2001. I’ve been a fan of his work right back to the first novel, “Box Nine”, then through “Wireless” (my personal favourite), “Skin Palace” and “Word Made Flesh”. All deeply strange, and based around the fictional American industrial town of Quinsigamond (the town doesn’t exist, but the name does.), O’connell manages to construct not just a place, but the entire history of it, the areas, the stories behind individual landmarks and buildings, and also major events that have affected Quinsigamond, such as a pogrom in the city of Maisel (again, to my knowledge a fictional location) which brought a great number of emigrés to the town. In addition, he has an obsession with language and communication, with spoken word (in Wireless and Box Nine), visual shorthand (Skin Palace) and the written word (Word Made Flesh) and the ways it works. Intelligently written, and conveying ideas far beyond the scope of a simple “noir” novel

On a different scale, I’ve also always loved the music of Yello. Formed in 1979 in Zurich, they’ve been recording albums ever since, including last year’s “The Eye”. Every album has felt like it could be the soundtrack to a film – the album holds themes together, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so, but it’s always there, the feeling that the album is more than just ten or twelve tracks plonked together on a disc. There’s a storyline, a set of events portrayed, and done in a way that some would class as “avant garde”, others as “way ahead of their time”.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been re-reading O’Connell’s “Word Made Flesh“, the novel that I’ve always found to be the darkest and most impenetrable of the four novels. It’s a novel about insanity, obsession, the written word, the Maisel Sweep, and many other subjects besides. It starts with a breathtaking description of a man being skinned alive, and just carries on from there. However, because I’ve mainly been reading it on the bus while commuting to and from work, I’ve also had the MP3 player going, and that’s been playing Yello’s “Motion Picture” album – and the two have converged into almost a working mental film. Very very strange, and also somehow very moving.

Bizarrely Proud

In other news (and because I haven’t mentioned them in a while) I’m strangely chuffed to come up #2 in Google for “how shite are united utilities?“. (The answer, by the way, is very. I even ended up doing some work on their “Green Energy” section, and yes, they’re definitely shite.

In the more surreal searches, an AOL search for “irregular heartbeats in hockey players” manages to find d4d™, as does a Yahoo! search for “brownfield munitions risk” – not sure what that’s about, but there we go.

I’m sure there are plenty of other surreal searches that end up here, but they’re the ones my strange brain noticed today.