I could imagine watching football like this. Lots of people describing it to me, and some other people commenting on the descriptions. I suspect pithy, evocative twittering is going to be a valuable skill for journalism2.0.
down
This was on the till in a hardware store. I like the now embedded assumption that a new computer will just cause problems.
mysteries and puzzles
If you're only an occasional New Yorker reader then get yourself to your local magazinery and get this issue. There's some marvelous stuff in there. Gladwell on Enron, Denby on the future of cinema, Gopnik on watching and thinking about football.
I especially like the idea Gladwell talks about - the difference between a mystery and a puzzle, not thinking about that distinction causes a lot of the arguments about the efficacy of market research.
phones, the slow train and the modern antiquarian
I was playing with BuddyPing just after Christmas. While we were driving back down the M4. BuddyPing is a way of sharing where you are via your mobile, based on your proximity to a cellphone tower. So I idly pinged them on some anonymous strip of the motorway and got this response:
Water Orton? It immediately reminded me of a Flanders And Swann song - Slow Train (though I think the definitive version is by The King's Singers). Slow Train is an affectionate lament for the railway stations lost through the Beeching Cuts, it lists a bunch of eccentric and evocative English place names; Millers Dale, Kirby Muxloe, Mow Cop, Scholar Green, Midsomer Norton, etc which instantly take you back instantly to a pre-motorway connection to place which I, for one, have never actually experienced but still like the idea of.
It turns out from pinging buddyping that celltowers have similar names, on that single stretch of motorway I passed Widney Manor, Bishops Tachbrook, Ambrosden, Ludgershall, Waterperry and Loudwater. All great names that could have found a place in Slow Train. At first glance this seems wrong and counter-intuitive. Cell towers lurk at the far edges of the popular imagination as dark, probably malicious, impersonal things. Yet they're not that different to railway stations; communications technologies plonked down on the landscape but intimately connected to and dependent on that landscape. That tower/station has to be there if the whole thing is going to work.
What buddyping accidentally does is reveal the antique landscape beneath the technology, something that presumably the phone networks have little interest in, but which is actually quite powerful. It's not a geographical connection in the click-here-for-the-nearest-dry-cleaner sense (or the this-yellow-sticker-points-to-something-digital sense) but it's a reminder of the communities which have lived in and created the landscape we whizz through.
I suspect this is on my mind because I've been reading Unmitigated England and England In Particular
as half-hearted research for IDOTO. (Why are these books always just about England? Don't they have the stamina to cross any borders?) England In Particular's subtitle is 'A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular and the Distinctive' and it's written by the folk behind Common Ground, a noble group, but one I suspect that has little affection for mobile phone towers. Maybe they should reconsider that, maybe there's an opportunity to reconnect to localness via cell technology in the same way there was via the railways. Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian is concerned with even more ancient connections but already has its huge database of megalithic sites integrated with Google Earth. I'd love to feel a connection to The Modern Antiquarian through my k800i. Maybe the mobile phone will become some kind of psycho-geographical dowsing rod. Anyone want to sell that idea to Orange?
crossover
There was a CSI crossover episode on 5 last night - Vegas and Miami - I love a crossover. I think my favourite was probably Homicide and Law And Order. Or The Practice and Ally McBeal.
I wonder why more programmes don't do this. Particularly those from within the same production entity. Why weren't there more interactions between the people of Camberwick Green and Trumpton? This only really started with Chigley, probably for cost-saving reasons. And why wasn't their more inter-agency co-operation between Spectrum, International Rescue and WASP? One would have hoped more joined-up world-saving would be possible by 2065.
I like the way it suggests a bigger fictional world and it's obviously something programme makers like to do - and they're seeing opportunities to do in other places. I wonder why more brands haven't done this? Or have they and I'm missing something?
musical tribe
Here's a good little programme from the BBC World Service's Who Runs Your World? series, looking at various Musical Tribes around the world. Some of the content is a little obvious ('goth is associated with the colour black') but it's still good to hear a diverse bunch of voices talking about their own lives. And, because it's the World Service there's a more global perspective than most media outlets provide.
fat man running
So Jonathan wrote this on the Love blog, and I commented with a little challenge, and a day later the above arrived in an email and now we're locked in a spiral of 10K madness which will presumably end up in two fat bloke heart attacks.
This is what I like about all this social media, internet of things, connected worldy shenanigans that's going on. It is of course theoretically possible that he and I might have done this without the nike+. We might have agreed to run 10Ks and compare times with stopwatches and postcards. But, of course, we wouldn't have done. The web/email stuff makes it quick and simple and the nike+ device lends a feeling of third-party verification. Obviously it would be possible to cheat it (I'm thinking I'll lend my gear to Paul if I have to) but cheating would be harder than not cheating.
What I need next is some device that'll allow asynchronous remote verification of competitive eating attainments. That I'll win.
Let the games commence.
in praise of idle
Sometimes I'm very proud to be British. This post-Christmas / New Year period has been one of those times. Because clearly, no-one can be arsed to go back to work. Most of the people at the coffee morning yesterday hadn't been back to work yet. The Guardian describe is as The Great British Skive with tons of businesses staying closed between Christmas and New Year and many not opening again until January 8th. (explanation of skive)
The Federation Of Small Businesses bleated that "The country will take some days to crank up again. We have stiff competition from China and India and if we are all away until the 8th there is an impact." Though if the competition is stiff enough to be impacted by our holidays then we're screwed already.
I was thinking about this myself this morning, wondering if I'd gone back to work yet. It's hard to know when you work for yourself and work from home. When do you go back to work? I've been answering emails and answering the phone the whole holidays, does that mean I've not stopped working yet? (I shall be listening to this to find out.)
I thought about it even more when I heard this extract from Tom Hodgkinson's How To Be Free. (The audio is only up for a week.) He pointed out that Merrie England was called that because it was a very merry place, he reads a list from Ronald Hutton's Rise and Fall of Merry England which makes it clear that before the reformation the whole year was chockful of feast days and holidays. Until the bloody puritans came along. And: "the tragedy of the 19th century was that Western man came to see himself, first and foremost, as a worker."
I think the Great British Skive isn't just a momentary aberration. I suspect it's part of a re-balancing going on in UK society, re-considering the relationship between work and life. This is partly because the economy is doing OK and we're, relatively, fat and happy at the moment. But I think it's a thing. Worth looking out for anyway.
coffee with badges
The Breakfast Club, nice and calm before we arrive. Coffee was really nice this morning. A bunch of new people, some old faces, and great chat.
Since The Breakfast Club always have nice badges I thought it'd be nice to make some coffee morning ones. So there they are. There were 20, I gave out 15 this morning, there are 5 left. This makes them exceeding rare. Expect to see them making record money on ebay shortly.
First to arrive was Sarah, who, for some reason I failed to photograph. And she very kindly brought be a gift from China. It's a Buddah box, but not one of the beautician/eno-oriented ones imported by canny Germans and filled with ambient tinklings. This one is an authentic, from-the-temple-type-device full of your actual chanting. It's brilliant. Thanks Sarah.
Actually, I know now why I didn't photograph Sarah, it's because she was sitting next to Dipti and I did shoot Dipti but then we both agreed that it wasn't a flattering picture so I deleted it. And then I forgot to do another. Sorry. Anyway.
So here's Andrew and Adil.
Ian, Tony and Rana. Note the jumper style that's clearly de rigueur with planner/researcher types.
Tony and Rana again, with Tim.
Rana has been mysteriously replaced with Stevie.
Last, but not least, Paul and Charles. We also had the very regulars Paul and Henry but you've seen their pictures a thousand times, though I was excited that Paul brought his yo-yo. I was delighted but flustered by all the new people so I might have missed someone, or got a name wrong, or missed a link, sorry if that's happened.
The conversation ranged too far to be reported here, from whether 2007 would be a lucky year and if it was surely it would be lucky for everyone and would that therefore count as incremental luckiness for any one individual, to how great the Science Museum is. And all sorts of stuff in between.
Really nice to see you all. Same time, same place, next week.