Bon soir, mes amis. This is a quick note to publicise a new web site that I’ve built for a friend of mine, Amrik, who needed one in a hurry, so to speak. His new record label, Baby Foot Records, is home to a few young, French bands from the so-called French Rock Explosion scene or stable or whatever people more hip than me call such things. They’re pretty good and are being covered on various UK radio stations this week and in the coming months – hence the need for a web site to be published in a hurry. I’ve enjoyed working on this urgent project, producing results very quickly – my preferred modus operandi. And I’ve particularly enjoyed practising my French. And, yes, even though they call computers ordinateurs they really do call it le world wide web, which amuses me more than it probably should.
“This isn’t good or bad. It’s just the way of things. Nothing stays the same.” (Anon.)
Hello. Bored with the design of my site, I spent fifteen minutes today hunting around for a new template and chose this one for several reasons. First—and most complex—I quite like it. Second, it seems to suit the frivolous nature of the miscellaneous bits and pieces I occasionally publish here. Third, I was discussing with various colleagues today the idea of “the fold” in relation to designing for the web. The idea of the fold is of course highly relevant and important when designing for paper; one must or should or might at least consider getting one’s salient points set out on the part of a document where the reader looks first – above the fold. But the idea of the fold is irrelevant when I can if I want, and probably from time to time shall, publish—on Twitter and/or Facebook and/or in e-mails and/or on an advertisement on the side any one of the “social media” Clapham omnibuses and bandwagons that travel the interweb in large numbers these days—links to articles that would otherwise never make it above any fold, virtual or otherwise. So I thought I’d introduce not a fold but some long grass beneath which to conceal my questionable content. And I shall let my site’s visit statistics tell me whether the “fold” is relevant and real on the world wide web. My guess is that it will be shown not to be.
And fourth, and most importantly, I fancied a change and this design made me think that maybe one day, not necessarily this year, but maybe at least at some point this decade, the cheerless, unencouraging weather might improve, and become something approaching warm, sunny and cheering. Stranger things have surely happened. We shall see.
The Yule-tide celebration and those of the more recent and more institutionalised superstitions that have subsequently and unoriginally laid claim to this time of year have always provided a really good opportunity to enjoy a holiday at what in the UK is always, at the very least meteorologically, a cold, dark and brooding time of year.
It’s also a very dodgy time indeed musically. While being expected to believe and accept all sorts of laughable and absurd theological fairy stories, people are also apparently required to suspend any judgement or taste they may have about what their ears are telling them about the world around them and the sounds its inhabitants ought to be capable of making.
By way of wishing you, my discerning friend, a happy Yule-tide, I humbly offer the following tunes as an antidote to the festive-musical lobotomy to which I know you shall refuse to succumb.
River, by Joni Mitchell. This just manages to be a Christmas song while also looking back somewhat dolefully on a lost love and the need of escape. The song contains an occasional and very subtle refrain of the tune from Jingle Bells.
Anyway, the next seriously badass, Yule-tide ditty is John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Happy Christmas (War Is Over), which was and still is simple, true and utterly and brilliantly subversive. This song is an easy target for the festive-lobotomy gang, which proves its worth even more, if that were necessary. All those monotheistic superstitions must have been kicking themselves when their silly-hat brigade—their various popes, chief rabbis, ayatollas, Ronald Macdonalds and what-have-you—finally heard this lyric and realised its moral righteousness, its simplicity, and the error of their ways in prosecuting and/or sponsoring conflict to bolster their own interests.
Third is the pure, festive genius of Fairytale of New York by the Pogues (with the late, great Kirsty MacColl). The wonderful lyric depicts a scene from, in the words of Jeffrey Bernard, an “aim-low-and-miss” life that surely makes us all so very grateful for our own, no-doubt idyllic Yule-tide celebrations and the companions with whom we choose to spend them.
Happy <insert preference here> and very best wishes to you for 2010. I’ll see you then.
Last night was the night of the dreaded Work Christmas Party. Ho, ho, ho. Etc. I’m feeling slightly smug today at work owing to the fact that I seem to be one of only a few in the building who managed to avoid waking up with a hangover. Having stuck to drinking cooking lager all evening I am an uncharacteristic beacon of good sense. Anyway, and more interestingly, many of my esteemed colleagues may take at least some amusement if not exactly solace from a simply lovely description, by my favourite writer, of what it can sometimes feel like—so I’m told—to have a hangover.
“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
I’ve recently enjoyed building a web site for the business of a friend and ex-boss, Eddie Cheng. Eddie is now semi-retired but is the resident bon viveur and owner of Bottles & Cooks – a food and drink social network dedicated to discussing all matters epicurean and bacchanalian. In Eddie’s own words his “main interest is wine, rugby, food and cricket (in that order)” and his new business enables him to celebrate items one and three on that list, although one of his reviews on Bottles & Cooks also mentions JPR Williams. Anyway, I shall enjoy following the conversation on the new site and I hope that you do too.
www.bottlesandcooks.com
This paragraph contains a bit of chat about the technical aspects of the site (a gentle warning to those readers who like to skip that sort of thing …). The site is based on WordPress although for this site I’ve actually had to get my hands dirty and write a bit of code to provide a few bits of bespoke functionality. Each of the main three sections—”Ask Eddie”, “Restaurants and pubs” and “Shopping experience”—is based on a WordPress category, but in order to create custom templates for each category I had to replace the theme’s category template page with a simple controller that sends the user to one of several custom template pages depending on what category is being viewed. I used the geo-mashup plug-in, which uses Google’s mapping API to tag articles geographically, to provide the geographical, map-index of articles. To ensure this could be easily extended, for example by adding more and more local maps as data accrues, I again actually had to write some code, in this case not changing anything in WordPress but adding some new functionality. At present there are only some areas of the UK represented on the locations index page; as articles are written and tagged for other areas of the country or indeed anywhere else in the world the relevant map-indices will be added (without any more code needing to be written).
Bottles & Cooks encourages users to contribute to three, self-explanatory sections – “Ask Eddie”, “Restaurants and pubs” and “Shopping experience”. The site also features integration—these days de rigeur—allowing users to share items on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook et al. All items posted to the site are also tweeted by @bottlesandcooks in case you wish to follow on Twitter. Users may also subscribe to the RSS feed, via e-mail and via various other means. Thus far most of the content has been provided by Eddie, but once the site is launched I hope the content will start to pour in from keyboards far and wide with tales of epicurean joy and woe. I have had the pleasure of working with various enthusiastic gastronomes over the years, and I hope that three other previous bosses—Clive, Bertrand and David—will have some well-informed and interesting contributions to make to Bottles & Cooks. As I enjoyed working for Eddie when we worked at Yell I have once more enjoyed working with him on this site, albeit using a very different decision-making and project process from that used at Yell.com.
Anyway, cheers and bon appetit – and good luck Eddie with your new venture.
I am very proud of my friend, Juliet Howland, whose debut album “A promise of return” is released for sale on 6th September. On that date I shall add a link to where you can buy the album. This evening a number of friends are attending the launch party. I’ve never been to an album launch party but I imagine that at some point we’ll get to see Juliet climbing atop of one of the amps and smashing her guitar or cello in to the drum kit … or something along those lines. This is folk music, after all, and there are certain standards one expects.
There’s some information about the album at Juliet’s web site. What it doesn’t say on those pages is how proud of Juliet are all her friends who’ll be there tonight, applauding—as she smashes her instruments—the fact that while having a busy “day” job as an actor she has found time to exercise some of her other talents, playing guitar, piano and cello and writing and singing lyrics that are populated by stories sketched with sensitivity, wit and charm.
Here’s a video of the artist chatting about the album with its producer, Rob Seals. There’s no mention of smashing any instruments; I guess she’s keeping her powder dry.
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released yesterday after Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, made what was surely not only a brave but also the right decision to release the alleged terrorist on compassionate grounds. The Libyan has terminal cancer and the Scottish authorities have shown compassion to an individual who has shown none to others, allowing Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi home to die and to be buried according to Muslim ritual. In doing so Kenny MacAskill has risen above the calls from the US political establishment, made, of course, in the usual, dishonest fashion on behalf of “the American people”, and from the political right wing in the UK, that the prisoner should have been forced to die in gaol, that vengeance and sending a firm political message are paramount—that compassion is a luxury we cannot afford—in tackling global dysfunction. Something about one’s ability to turn the other cheek springs to mind; a number of people in the US bible belt would no-doubt be able to help me to quote that more accurately and explain the Christian virtue with greater understanding of and commitment to its principles.
Assuming that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi’s conviction, which was until his release yesterday being appealed against, for his part in an atrocity was correct it is completely understandable that those affected are angry at the decision, but it is also appropriate that yesterday’s decision was made by an impartial institution. Whereas in some cases Muslim law encourages the counsel of the victim and/or relatives of the victim when considering how to punish a criminal, in UK law the exclusion of those close to a crime from the process of meeting out punishment is embodied in its principles and its process in spite of constant attempts of the media and politicians to undermine the integrity of that process.
The showing of compassion by the Scottish legal system will no-doubt continue to be presented by many in the west as showing “weakness” were “strength” is required, and of being insensitive to the plight of the Lockerbie victims. In my opinion the decision to act with integrity and show compassion to one who has shown none to others will be appreciated politically by the Muslim world, will be seen as the kind of engagement in to which Obama spoke of entering before he became US President, and that without even trying to—absolutely as a side effect—will come to be seen as an important political step in improving east-west relations. MacAskill’s is no political act of appeasement; it is a human act of integrity, strength and compassion.
One of the aspects of working life that I really, really loathe is the feeble-minded misuse of language that business people in general and marketing departments in particular these days assume to be acceptable. Every time I read about such-and-such company’s “philosophy” or am told about the “learnings” that can or could or should be taken from something-or-other I die a small death – as does our mother tongue. Why is it that words such as “philosophy” incorrectly appear when the misuser is actually looking for “approach”, or solecisms such as “learnings” have been invented and are now regarded as de rigueur in the business world when we’ve had the perfectly good word “lessons” available to us all along? My guess is that such misuses, along with truly horrible and stupid cliches involving people actually thinking *outside* boxes—when the hell did anyone ever think inside the bloody things?—were invented with the intention of bestowing on the misuser some sort of gravitas, or of lending a concept or product or whatever some sort of extra allure on account of its having not just an approach but also a “philosophy”. Ooh, impressive! The actual effect is of course the opposite; such lazy misuse suggests nothing other than a lack of energy or effort or will to bother to try to be imaginative or even correct with one’s use of language. It is depressing and horrible. Please do not lazily discard your rubbish in the wonderful landscape of our language; please pick it up and put it in a bin and then close the lid.
This clip, which I posted on Facebook the other day, amuses me more than it probably should. My old geography and sports teacher, a dry and phlegmatic Yorkshireman called Malcolm Milne, used to employ the title of this post in superbly withering fashion, as in “nearly good, Stafford”. Seeing this video clip made me think back with affection at Mr. Milne’s oft-used assessment of his pupils’ efforts.
The voice of frustration in the crowd displays a more gallic directness with the nearly-man of this race, shouting at his blunder “putain”, which literally means “whore” but in this instance is probably short for the similarly hard-to-translate “putain de merde” which has a literal meaning that I shan’t repeat here but roughly equates to something Anglo-Saxon along the lines of “bloody hell” of “effing hell”.
Anyway – please consume and enjoy. Nearly good, monsieur …
I was talking to a colleague today about mobile phone etiquette. Apparently cinema-goers in Antigua have no qualms at all about answering their phone while watching a film. They obviously have never seen this pre-film public information broadcast before, which I think is pure genius and was playing at Austin’s fantastic Alamo Drafthouse movie theatres over the Christmas and New Year period 2008-9. The quality’s not great, as I recorded it surreptitiously during one of my and Mel’s many visits to the cinema during that period.
The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.
So sad that a young Oldham player had the game at Anfield (no-doubt highlight of his career so far) ruined by some mindless loser on the Kop08:25:07 PM January 07, 2012from webReplyRetweetFavorite
