A request to computor component designers.

Just our of interest, do you people have some award ceremony with prizes for things such as:

Best Design for inaccessable Motherboard battery

or

Most user unfriendly socket on a motherboard

Let me know, wont you.

Jonny Midas

Yeah…I’m Jonny Midas and this, as they say, is my story…

It started yesterday morning, no big bangs, bells, whistles or flashing lights, no, I was just thinking I wish those DVD’s I ordered online would come today…and there was the postman ringing the doorbell. Now, nothing clever about that is there…but then I pop to the supermarket to pick up a few bits.

Strange places supermarkets, they always play music that sort of fits the mood, don’t they? They reckon playing a bit of classical gets shoppers to buy dearer wine. I, usually, stick a bit of ambient stuff on my MP3, but today…I didn’t have to, never heard a supermarket playing tunes like that before. So, I am hoping they have got that olive and sun dried tomato pasta sauce, they never have that, always sold out. but, boom! Just had a delivery, got as many jars as I want, nice.

Then at the checkout, well, there’s this girl who works there, drop dead gorgeous, so I’m thinking…wonder what she looks like naked and…Phoom! There she is, not a stitch on! ‘course I can only see her top half which, it has to be said, should be more than enough for any red blooded bloke but, well, I’m wishing she’d stand up, well you have to, don’t you?…she has to reset the weighing thing, up she gets, oh yes. I’m on a roll now, can’t get nakedness out of my head, the bunch of girls from the art college buying smellies, all nude, the other two check out girls, not bad…I’m wishing like mad now…oh my days, that cute receptionist from the doctors, only five foot in her socks, not that she had any on, stretching up to get something off a high shelf, bless her….then I clap eyes on me Gran an’ Grandad…he’s bending over the chest freezer and she has a medium size courgette in her hand and a look of intent on her face, it looks like some bizarre cryogenic experiment gone horribly wrong…I have to get out quick for a breath of fresh air. I’m standing there wishing I had asked the checkout girl out on a date. She comes running out to me. I had left my crab paste in the rush to exit and she ends up asking me out!

By the way, the crab paste? Chill cabinet not pharmacy department.

Everything man, everything. That evening I do the lottery, win the jackpot, marry Tracy the checkout girl in Vegas, hit the casinos, win, win, win. In fact, sometimes I wish to lose just to keep the casino management from getting too suspicious.

Well, I could win, spend, and win again the next day. Anything I wished for and it was mine. The checkout girl and me, the marriage didn’t last. She gave me all I wished for but it got boring after that. Anyway I could have whoever I wanted, supermodels, popstars, the girl next door, the girl next to the girl next door. Anything and everything, all I had to do was just think it.

But after a time a man gets dissatisfied with a hedonistic lifestyle with no responsibilty, every carnal desire fulfilled, houses, cars, boats, every pleasure a thought away so after thirty three years of living the dream I decided it was time to do something useful with my gift.

Cured all the world’s diseases, poverty and hunger, child mortality, developed a new source of renewable energy and environmentally friendly supermarket carrier bags that you could open without having to rub them with your fingers, well, I felt it all started in a supermarket and I like to give something back.

All this caused serious over population, the bags didn’t, but the rest did. So then I had to wish for successful colonisation of other planetary systems, trust me to leave out just one little word…peaceful . It brought us into conflict with other life forms, so I had to then wish that everyone could just live in peace and harmony.

And so it went on. One day I just sat myself down and wished I had stayed in my home town with the girl from the supermarket. There’s the sound of a key in the door…”Hello Love”, she says, “You fallen asleep infront of the telly, again?” She sits down next to me and I say “Do you know, Trace, I wish none of this Midas touch stuff had ever happened”,

“What stuff?”, she says.

I was Jonny Midas and that was my story.

21st Century Boy

Hollow tongue politicians and vacuum mouthed advertisers. What is worse? Flaccid lips dripping untruths or the barren absurdity of speech devoid of idea, concept, grammer, intelligence or art. Fourth rate drama with pitiful exposition, history altering and bending facts to fit until they snap under the pressure of creating puerile entertainment for the distraction of the ignorant and easy satisfaction. Morons dribbling over the spewings of idiots, where quality is rideculed, honesty rejected, second best accepted and ability turns away dejected. This shining jewel that once sent its language, explorers, artists, soldiers and prospecters, now a babble of tiny miscreants txt speek wid dey’re fumbs pasting their essays from misbegotten websites and grubbing ancient tombs. Kings come and leaders go, Dark Ages replacing the Golden Light. Men who died on the Normandy sand so you can throw your fast food box onto a shit stained, gob smacked, vomit trodden brokendown, dug up pavement. Discarded, disregarded, hard to find an answer amoung the myriad retarded. Words are absurd.

Catweazle, Clarkson and a man on wire

Just a few connections and conclusions I drew watching a few things yesterday. Firstly, Catweazle on DVD. This was a childrens’ programme first aired in 1970, a meander down Nostalgia Street for me, back to my own childhood, though I must have seen it when it was repeated a few years later. I was struck by the innocence and the freedom. Apart from the young lad Carrot befriending a weird, old bloke which would probably be enough for it not to get made these days, Carrot just jumped into the back of an old open top car, no seatbelt and then suggests Sam the driver goes off for a pint while he waits before driving back! I am not condoning drink driving, it is just the naive, innocent freedom of it all.

Later I watched Man on Wire about the French guy who high wire walked between the twin towers in New York in 1973. To get in to organise and set up they posed as workmen, office workers and journalists, creating false documentation and ID cards…can you imagine that now? They would be whipped off somewhere for questioning and have the almost impossible task of convincing the authorities they were not planning an attack. The DA at the time just said that if he did what amounted to a bit of community work all charges would be dropped. He was more than happy to do so and that was that. It seemed a finer world back then. The saddest thing was seeing the opening ceremony for the towers with a speech along the lines of them being a symbol of harmony, to bring the world together. Poignant when one considers the tragic circumstances that brought them down.

Finally, I saw the last five minutes of a programme I don’t watch: Top Gear. It had Jeremy Clarkson driving an Aston Martin and mourning the fact that because of world economics and environmental concerns such cars would soon be a thing of the past. I do not agree with most of his attitudes, tearing up the environment in a gas guzzler is a pretty selfish way of living but I do agree with his sentiment, that a sense of adventure, of fun, a spirited approach to life does seem to be lacking in our over controlled, safety conscious and secure no risk low risk culture. Not a culture that breeds free spirits like the Man on Wire.

Everyone is a (medium format) photographer.

A while back I posted my opinion that “photography” did not exist anymore: Link. Just as an addition to that, I have recently seen a 10 megapixel camera for £99.00. This “recognises” up to sixteen faces, selects the best inbuilt programme mode automatically and does just about everything for you.

The size of image that a 10mp digital camera will give you is no longer a rival for 35mm but places medium format potential in your hand, something that was not an affordable option for me when I was working as a photographer. Now that is available for less than £100, the trouble is that most people now working in photography have not got a great foundation of photographic craft, a shame given the equipment now available.

Started to write haiku poems

I remember an English teacher, the brilliant Mr Morris introducing us to this form many years ago. Recently, I have become interested in the structure and brevity of the haiku. To write something in three lines with strict restriction on metre is a real challange and a joy to attempt.

My attempts can be seen on the haiku section of my Grail Questing blog.

The point(lessness) of this blog

The fact that I have decided I will not be pursuing a scriptwritng career but choose to walk away from art of all kind to pursue other directions renders this blog pretty much obselete, taking into account how long it has been running and the utter lack of comment that it has attracted, no one will mourn this fact. I do intend to continue writing for my own pleasure, so maybe the blog will just change a little in focus.

So, what else is hype?

Well, in a nutshell most, if not all of it. Referring to a recent post concerning the way the news covered the Swine ‘flu epidemic…remember that? You really need to think about how hyped news is becoming. As Brooker said it is less about facts and more about opinion, but facts are facts (debatable), but who is expressing the opinion?

U.K news, the reality of reality TV

Ok, let’s hope the swine ‘flu doesn’t become a pandemic slaughtering millions, but I bet the news hopes it does, they are beside themselves to inject as much drama and hype into this as possible. Even if the 160 or so deaths in Mexico are as a direct result of ‘flu, it is 160 in a population of 100 000 000. As tragic as each death is on a personal level, statistically you have more chance of winning the lottery this weekend than dying from the ‘flu.

The news, however, wants to engender a state of panic, with their “what if” scenarios and even at this stage the news readers are at a level of hype completely out of proportion to the facts. What happens if this does become more serious? Where do the news readers go from the level of doom they already occupy? Kate Silverton tearing her hair out in clumps live on the 6 0′clock news or some poor reporter blowing his own brains out on a live feed into the studio because it’s all got a bit too much?

Reported on the news today was the number of suspected deaths related to polution levels in London; a few thousand in one year, reported matter-of-factly, no panic, hype or insanity. You do the maths. News should not be about “what ifs” or as Charlie Brooker pointed out, about opinion. It should report facts.

More people die each year putting their socks on in the morning than have so far died from ‘flu, which is why I am typing this barefoot…It’s just too dangerous to even contemplate pulling on a pair.

A great scriptwriting blog…

…and a whole lot more. A real source of information and inspiration and one I am adding to my blogroll.

Click here