John Walker's Electronic House

I don’t really have anything much to say about this, other than that it’s great, but I paused Cherry Lips by Headlights on YouTube and it looked incredible so this is a picture of it. And if my one celebrity reader is still reading, this band steps into the space Rilo Kiley left after their last album was so horrible. The video’s below.

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A number of people suggested to me after the disgraceful embarrassment of Derren Brown’s lottery Event that this may be part of his building up to something. That he may have gone in this direction for a reason, with the intention of a big reveal at the end of the series.

I wasn’t convinced. His act has always consisted of performing regular magic tricks with the current vogue of mentalism patter over the top. His act has always been about the grand misdirection of stating his effects are achieved through suggestion, hypnotism, and other baloney, while quietly palming the card. He has always implied that there’s something scientifically verifiable about all manner of woo-woo bullshit, while proclaiming his wishes to denounce woo-woo bullshit. This hypocrisy just seemed to reach a new, grotesque depth with the lottery episode, promoting utter rubbish like automatic writing, and talking complete and utter nonsense about statistics.

But then this week’s episode, so stark-ravingly stupefying, has gone some way toward convincing me that these optimistic people might be right. Because at one point this evening Brown uttered the words, “the energy”.

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I know, I know, I witter on about Derren Brown far too much. And I’m going to repeat myself here. But I feel as though I’m circling around the plughole into which I’ll finally plop down with exactly what I want to say about the man.

I’ve gone on before (but a long time ago) about the difference between a magician tricking you, and lying to you. But to quickly reiterate: Magicians aren’t telling the truth, clearly. If I tell you I’ve written a prediction in an envelope, or that I’m producing a ball from your ear, I’m tricking you. It’s not true. But you know that. You know that I’m not psychic, hopefully you don’t believe that anyone is psychic. In fact, the very worst outcome imaginable would be for my trick to legitimise the conmen and charlatans who will steal your money. So instead we enter into this contract. You know I’m not going to tell you the truth, and you’re going to be okay with that. However, this opens an interesting door. How big a lie can I tell?

Say my trick is to know the word someone in the audience is thinking of. If I tell you that I’m not using a stooge in the audience, and I’m using a stooge in the audience, is that okay? The effect is very impressive if I can appear to somehow know the word an unwitting audience member is thinking of. It’s rather extraordinarily less impressive if I can know the word my friend and I agreed on before the show. So we seem to have a rule in this contract that says that while I’ll deceive you, trick you, I won’t openly lie to you about the conditions of the trick.

Now, clearly magicians do. Lazy, tedious magicians do this all the time. But I think most people agree that if they learn this is how a magician achieves his effects – says he doesn’t use camera tricks but does use camera tricks – they lose all interest in them. So we have this muddled set of rules. They’re impossible to pin down, but crudely it’s, 1) the audience agrees to be deceived, and 2) the magician agrees to not tell specific sorts of lies.

Derren Brown has made his career out of exploiting the ambiguity of this. He spins these patters about influencing people’s minds, conditioning, and suggestion. It’s all patter to disguise doing what I think is a perfectly ordinary magic trick. Which is fine, whatever, who cares? It’s a neat way of achieving a great effect.

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A new Rum Doings, and it comes with a warning: Nick Mailer is a very, very bad man. What should have been a perfectly nice discussion of interesting matters descends into an explosion of libel and offense. Some people may find some of the content a tiny bit naughty. I can only apologise, hold my head in my hands, and beg for your forgiveness. He’s out of control. He’ll be going to prison alone.

Not under discussion in episode four is whether we should stop funding the BBC with a license fee. More under discussion are the fine Murdoch Family, the ecclecticism of Radio Three, the RSPCP, annoying habits of Cub Scouts and the introduction of New Rules concerning the use of Wikipedia on The Now Show. Have we mentioned The Now Show before? Really?

To subscribe to the podcast click here, or you can find it in iTunes here. To download it directly, right-click and save as here. I forgot the id3 tags. I’ll fix that later.

We’re delighted by how many people are listening. We’ll be astonished if they continue listening after this episode. But we’d love it to be more. Please email, IM, tweet and blog about there wherever you can. It makes a big difference. Get us linked or mentioned on some giant site – we probably deserve it.

It’s a third episode of the Rum Doings podcast. This week the topic not under discussion is: Are exams getting easier?

Topics that do get discussed include preferred forms of alcohol, the tricks behind sleeping on planes, the nature of cruising, hypermobility syndrome and other medical conditions. Nick (and Nick alone) attempts to win the legal attention of one of the richest men on Earth, then we’re very rude about poor Rick Astley. Find out whether all South Africans are evil, and whether there’s a left or right wing left to enjoy.

To subscribe to the podcast click here, or you can find it in iTunes here. To download it directly, right-click and save as here.

Thank you so much to so many people for kind and encouraging comments. We’re getting close to kind and encouraging numbers of people listening too. But not quite. If you enjoy it, or hate it and want others to agree with you, please email, IM, tweet and blog your interests. It makes a big difference. If you’re a very famous person, do it very publicly, so we are inundated – it’s okay, Nick owns the hosting service.

Any fully qualified medical practitioners want to diagnose what the blithering crikey is going wrong with my hand?

It’s been doing it for about a month now, and it’s getting MORE POWERFUL. To the point where it moves my thumb against my will. I’m thinking something like when Ash’s hand gets possessed in Evil Dead 2, but I’m not a proper doctor.

Episode 2 of Rum Doings is up. This week the topic not under discussion is “Whatever happened to good old fashioned manners?”

What is instead discussed includes puns in other languages, the horrible quality of commercial radio, extensive discussions of the tricks behind homeopathy, and can you be proud of collectives?

To subscribe to the podcast click here, or you can find it in iTunes here. To download it directly, right-click and save as here.

Please let us know your comments below, and if you enjoy it, tell others. The more that listen, the longer it will survive.

Obviously what you were thinking was, “There aren’t enough podcasts around at the moment.” The more astute would be thinking, “There aren’t enough podcasts with John Walker in them.” Fortunately in whichever circle of this diagram you fall, rewards await.

With my good friend Nicholas Mailer, a podcast was recorded this weekend – called Rum Doings – with one aim in mind: to not be on topic.

Something Nick and I have often felt when listening to favourite podcasts, radio programmes, or even television programmes, is that the best bits are always when those participating go off the planned topic and start rambling in surprise directions. It is always received with great disappointment when the host pulls everyone back on track. So the idea behind Rum Doings was to see if it was possible to begin with a topic in mind and then see how quickly it can be abandoned, and indeed forgotten. It seemed to go well. In episode one we didn’t discuss why Claire Fox should be fired from Radio 4’s The Moral Maze.

There is no particular theme. Nick’s primary goal was to not discuss videogames, which makes his extensive discussion of Star Glider a bold move. Also discussed is how to win at Countdown, why the letter Q has got above its station, and how to write music with sine waves. Amongst a great deal else.

You can listen to the programme via this link here, or get the mp3 directly by clicking here, and when it finishes tunnelling under the iTunes concrete walls I’ll link to that too.

As this is the first episode, and as we’re doing this without the launchpad of an established site or mag, we’re going to rely on word of mouth/rampant linking. So if you feel the compulsion, please blog/tweet/IM/scrawl the URL on toilet walls as much as you can. If enough people are interested, we’ll carry on. Let me know what you think below, or write it on a brick and throw it through my window.

Thanks to Stuart Campbell’s reminding me about 1993 tonight, I’ve come over all nostalgic for the time. Hence the following meandering, mostly aimless reminiscences.

People’s favourite era of music is usually more about the time of their own life than the relative merits of the music at that time. Of course, no one believes this to be the case, instead arguing that no, the music at that point was just a great deal better than it is now. Except in my case. The music in 93/94 really was a great deal better than it is now.

It isn’t, of course. 93 to 95 was responsible for the peak of Take That and East 17. They were the years of the boy bands. My sister, two years younger than me, celebrated these times with music so awful the wallpaper would bubble and peel off the walls. But for me they were the years where I changed from an idiot 15 year old with no taste in music whatsoever into an idiot 16 year old with a tiny sliver of taste in music. Which is entirely thanks to Mark Radcliffe.

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I’ve recently seen a few episodes of a BBC quiz show called Eggheads. Not being a watcher of daytime TV, it’s a programme that’s passed me by for the six years it’s been on air. But via the magic of iPlayer I discovered it as one of the suggested alternative programmes after my weekly watching of University Challenge and Only Connect.

Obviously there’s not much to say about University Challenge that hasn’t been said ten thousand times before. Perhaps the most interesting aspect for me has been the change from a programme where I stare in amazement at how much the contestants know, to worrying for the future of our planet by how little they know. I should stress I still know far less than they do, but my expectations for what a university’s four chosen representative students should know has gone up. I also have some quite strict rules I would bring in to prevent 60 year old contestants currently studying for their ninth PhD from appearing. It’s flat-out cheating. Having forty extra years, 200% more life, than most contenders is completely imbalanced. Logic would suggest you just have a team of aged professors currently studying for extra qualifications. So to prevent this, when I’m in charge I’ll either institute an age cap of 30 (thus discriminating against myself as much as anyone else), or a maximum combined age for a team that would force them to have children on the team if they picked an old fogey.

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