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Sunday, September 30, 2007

Over at the O2

I forgot to mention, I saw the artist currently known as Prince at the O2 Arena. I wouldn't say I am a particular fan of the purple pop pixie, but it was a very enjoyable show, especially as we were in Row F on his side, so we were 10 metres away from him, and some of songs worked great live. You don't have to be a fan to admire the talent and watching him play Purple Rain close up was great. Seeing someone who can play, compose, sing, dance and entertain with genuine charisma made for a terrific night out. During one of the instrumental breaks from the brass section (who I thought were excellent), one of the players said something along the lines of "this isn't a computer, this is real musicians playing real music". Quite.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

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Saturday, September 22, 2007

A rock in an ever-changing world

I have decided that the relentless, grinding incompetence of South West Trains is actually a comfort. Every time I go to the station and discover total chaos, it makes me feel at home and reminds me that we haven't been taken over by pod people from outer space during the night. Yesterday they outdid themselves. For unfathomable reasons, Woking Borough Council decided to waste large amounts of public money building a canopy outside the train station. The building work had become a permanent fixture -- I think it's been running something like a year late -- so I was literally astonished to turn up at the station and discover it finished. Not as astonished as South West Trains apparently, because their newly reopened ticket hall had only one open ticket window and no ticket machines at all. Presumably their scenario planning exercises had never covered the incredible contingency of customers arriving hoping to get on trains. The queue was so long I knew I would miss the train (and probably the next one as well) so I went over to the revenue collection officer (ie, the guy waiting to sell tickets to anyone caught getting off of incoming trains without a ticket). Despite the fact he was doing nothing, he wouldn't sell me one. Nor would he let me cross over to the other platform where there were working ticket machines. I had to go back out of the station and under the tunnel to the other side. Needless to say, I did miss the train.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

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Friday, September 14, 2007

Culture vulture

Someone gave me a ticket to a lecture by Naomi Klein at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank. I felt that I was overdue for some cultural stimulation -- and I'd caught her being toasted by Diane Coyle on the Today programme earlier in the week (which will undoubtedly feature as a sinister incident in a Klein book) -- so I went along to hear her expound on her book ""The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". The central idea of the book -- I deduce from the lecture since I haven't read the book, probably won't bother now -- is that the CIA did some experiments on shocking people into regressing so that they could be come "blank slates" to be written anew and that radical capitalism looks for countries shocked so that they can rewrite them into supporting the free market liberalism of Milton Friedman et al. It seems a superficial thesis, and if it shows anything, it shows how little contemporary "left" opinion is connected to real politics. The evening began with a short film made by the guy who made "Y Tu Mama Tambien" (which, as an aside, I have to say is one of the few genuinely erotic films I've ever seen) with some animations about the CIA torturing people intercut with stock footage of 9/11, the miner's strike and the Chilean coup of 1973 (which is the sort of Year Zero of the book). Then Naomi spoke about the topic, then there was a discussion with a moderator and some questions from the audience (including one guy who wondered if Henry VIII's excommunication from the Catholic church might be an example for her to consider).

She's a very good speaker, naturally, so she held my attention for quite some time before I realised that I wasn't really following any narrative thread and had lost the plot of her central thesis. It took someone much cleverer than me, the moderator Madeline Bunting, to put her finger on the problem. In the discussion that followed the talk, she said (I paraphrase) that crisis and opportunity are tightly bound and that politicians always see crisis as opportunity, and that sometimes they will be politicians that you (ie, Ms. Klein) agree with, and sometimes they won't be. That's pretty much it.

The most interesting remarks came, as they always do, in the question & answer session. Naomi was talking about the Asian tsunami and said that in one country -- I didn't pick up which one -- people worked together well immediately after the disaster but that things fell apart when the government arrived to take charge of the reconstruction and the aid agencies arrived to infantilise the population. I would have thought that this would have been entirely in accordance with the predictions of Hayek and the rest of the "Chicago boys" as she called them.

One of the questioners said something like "all the people here agree with you so how do we get the message out of the room to the public" or something like that. I thought to myself: "agree with what"? That Iraq is a mess? Sure. That Mrs. Thatcher was re-elected in 1983 because of the Falklands War? Couldn't say, but it's not obvious. That Allende would have been better for Chile than Pinochet? How should I know? (Although I have to say that the only actual Chilean that I've ever asked about this told me that Chile was a good country now because of Pinochet, so I don't know what to believe.) All I know about Allende is that he thought that homosexuality was a pathology and that gay men could be cured by operating on their stomachs.

I enjoyed the evening, though. I shall make more of an effort to go along in the future, although probably not in the near future.

.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

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14th September 2007

I don't believe it. I literally don't believe it. Well, I do believe it now that I've taken a picture of it. Our local Co-Op has started displaying Yuletide goods, three-and-a-half months before Christmas day.

The seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

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Wednesday, September 05, 2007

A happy ending!

BA's useless web site was driving me to distraction again. I tried to book some flights but everytime I pressed the "pay" button -- after typing in loads of family details which are not stored in a cookie until payment is confirmed -- the system hung up so I was eventually driven to phone them. I was only on hold for about 20 minutes this time, and the woman I spoke was at east efficient. But if you book on the phone they make you pay extra so I complained and -- ta da! -- I got a refund on the telephone surchage. A minor victory, but worth broadcasting.

I finally, after all of this messing around, and after spending god knows what on their 0870 number which wasn't reimbursed -- I know, I've broken my resolution to refuse to do business with companies without an 800 number -- I look back in to manage my booking, sort out the seats, type in contact number, press the button to print the boarding passes and get

useless_ba_web

I don't think BA is having much luck with IT. It's as if they've outsourced it to the people make tax credit systems for the government and that sort of thing. On a very long and dull flight to Singapore yesterday, I was heartened when I turned on the in-flight entertainment to find that it was a new video-on-demand system with loads of movies and TV programmes. Great. I went to the menu. There was a brief flash of something about welcome to Windows Media or something and then... it didn't work, naturally. In fact, it didn't work so badl that the cabin director who was dealing with with the complains from hundreds of extremely bored passengers came on the intercom to explain that (in true Windows fashion) his control console had crashed as well, so he couldn't anything. Still, I'm sure version 3 will be serviceable.

Lucky I had my iPod, and even luckier that I had the audio cable with it because in my room at the Grand Hyatt in Singapore they have a great innovation. The desk that I'm typing at has a VGA connector so you can project your laptop screen on to the big TV in the room as well as audio inputs so you can listen to your laptop, iPod or whatever through the speakers in the room, even in the shower. Brilliant.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

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