Anyway, please have a look and a listen at www.babyfootrecords.com

Baby Foot Records est arrivé. Bon chance …

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.

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.

Cheers -

D.

“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.”

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, 1954.

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.

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.

Good luck to you, Juliet!

Please click here to purchase Juliet’s splendid album.

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.

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.

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 …