John Walker's Electronic House

Thursday night wasn’t good to me. I’d been remarkably lucky on Wednesday, flying to Seattle, going straight into the developer’s offices after getting off the plane, then wandering the town finding somewhere to eat, and heading to bed by 10.30pm (6.30am in my head). The likelihood of the first night in America is waking up around 5am, because your brain, as tired as it might be, is certain it’s 1pm and it’s ludicrous that you’re still in bed. Wednesday night/Thursday morning I woke up at 3.30am and was a bit disappointed. Then fell back asleep until my alarm woke me up at 8.30. Amazing – 10 hours sleep.

So Thursday was spent in the offices, followed by dinner with a few lovely people who worked there, and then back to my hotel. I had a lot to write before my flight home, leaving from the hotel at 4pm Friday. 4000 words needed to be written, and I had figured I’d do some Thursday night, and as much as possible on Friday. But getting back to the hotel Thursday evening, I was already exhausted, and went to bed at 10.30pm again. I set my alarm nice and early so Friday could be all work, and fell asleep by about 11. And then woke up at 1.30am. I rolled back over to go to sleep, but that didn’t happen.

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Obviously the standard of journalism on the BBC News website has never been that stellar, but at least once a week you’ll find a piece that’s just so awful you rightly become more suspect about everything else they publish. While it’s tempting to forgive them due to their current campaign to sneak in many naughtily ambiguous headlines, and increasingly irreverent captions, it doesn’t quite address the rubbish that gets slung up in response to half-interesting stories. For instance, this drivel about Enid Blyton.

Blyton was an absolutely fascinating woman – a terrible, noxious individual whose spite was targeted against anyone who might cross her path, including one of her own daughters. She was intriguing tabloid fodder in a pre-tabloid age, who was also generating children’s books at a rate of one per fortnight.

Pullman’s comments in the BBC piece are absolutely spot-on – she was a terrible writer with no skill for prose – but for one thing. Not only did she write books that compelled her target audience to keep turning the pages to find out what would happen next as Pullman says, but she captured a spirit of adventure like no one else. Not out of great crafting, but I suspect because of the lack of it. There was something pragmatic about her delivery, where elaboration on a description would be a waste of time when she could be moving on to the next incident. It makes the books laughable to read as an adult, but for a kid it was perfect. Who cares what kind of blue the sea was. It was blue, and the children were going to swim in it, inevitably discovering a cave and overhearing a conversation between some smugglers. Pullman’s an interesting example – his books are beautiful. Compellingly crafted and riveting. But that was for me as an adult. I’m fairly sure as a kid I’d have been horribly bored by his descriptions of Oxford, just waiting for a bear or witch to finally show up.

The BBC story came about because of the publication of The Famous Five’s Survival Guide, which they describe as, “a reunion of sorts for the four young sleuths and Timmy the dog.” A reunion “after a 45-year hiatus.” And this is why I’m cross. Certainly this is not a matter of great import, but it’s absolutely empirical proof that not a glimmer of fact checking is perfectly acceptable at the site, no one needing to bother to researching a story before writing it. Exactly how hard would it be to have looked on Amazon for Famous Five books, to instantly discover that there were many of them written in the 1980s? Er, not very hard at all.

Or to remember that there was a TV series made of the Blyton books in 1978? And another one made in 1996?

Oh, and what about the choose your own adventure Famous Five books? Were they written in the last 45 years? All fourteen of them. Oh yes, that would be during their terribly unpopular 1980s. A hard decade for the five of them.

The piece is just one man’s poor memory of things he might have read about the books. It’s a mess of ignorance, published on one of the world’s most popular and trusted news sources. Of course it doesn’t matter a great deal in this isolated case – it’s about that dreadful old racist’s storybooks getting another reinvention. But it would be nice if the person employed to write it knew that it was “another”. Or had bothered to check. I mean, I got all the way through this without having to check Wikipedia, but for hoping to find a link for the choose your owns at the end there. Had the BBC stumbled upon this little known site, they might have spotted them too.

Poor.

1) I’m an uncle again! My sister just had her second, a girl called Sarah. That’s her in the picture below. The first picture of over four hundred thousand. That will be taken today. And every day. I swear there are about three photographs of me under the age of four in existence. If you rifled through the photos of someone born in the last couple of years you’d have a flick-book animation of their entire life. Let-alone the videos. If it’s embarrassing when your parents dredge out the couple of sepia-toned polaroids of you now, just imagine the fate of today’s kids in eighteen years when their mums project the video of that time they ate their poo in the paddling pool on the living room wall. Anyway, hi Sarah! Welcome to Earth.

2) This:

At the end of a long day, Dexter likes to sit down with a mug of coffee and watch some TV.

Not watching it makes you the worst sort of pariah. There’s something for everyone, so long as what you want is a cavalcade of nonsense and confusion, presented by grinning mannequins speaking a language they learned that morning, and a collection of songs from another dimension where ABBA and The Cheeky Girls bred the entirity of humanity. And if that’s not what you want, then I don’t want to know you.

France made the rather enormous mistake of entering a really excellent song. Naturally it stood no chance, and not just because the majority of Eastern Europe voted for Russia in a desperate plea not to be invaded and/or have their gas cut off. Decent songs are to Eurovision voters as cow manure is to ice cream toppings.

It’s a song so good it’s been stuck on loop on my computer this morning. By Sébastien Tellier, apparently produced by Daft Punk (according to Stu, who has listened to it about 39 times more than I), and in a break-out move for France, isn’t a tedious French-language misery-ballad sung by one of France’s few grotesque women. Instead it’s what would happen if Jarvis Cocker fronted the Polyphonic Spree. Accompanied by bearded-lady backing singers. It’s perfect and joyous and real. Watch it again and again:

The other highlight was certainly Bosnia-Herzegovina with what I have named, “The Washing Line Song”. Much more in the spirit of being a bonkers Eurovision song, it then went a step higher by having the most fantastic piano backing. If Sigur Ros did children’s parties.

I’d link to Spain’s, for its proper batshit insane song about other dance crazes, including excited cries of “ROBOCOP!”, but I can’t find a version from last night, and I feel most of the magic would be lost without the English subtitles.

Meanwhile, buy Tellier’s album here!

I still haven’t written about Cloud Cult’s new album, Feel Good Ghosts. For this there is no excuse.

Graham reminded me today by linking me to this excellent Wall Street Journal article about the band, and the live painting during their performances.

Feel Good Ghosts has been looped on my mp3 players, both portable and on the computer, for a ludicrous amount of time. It’s one of very, very few albums I can listen to multiple times without growing tired, and in this case, a ludicrous number of times. Last year’s Meaning of 8 was similarly worn through, and Feel Good Ghosts shows little sign of losing my interest.

A lot of the songs on recent albums are dealing with the death of lead singer and song writer Craig Minowa’s two-year-old son. (His mother was Connie Minowa, one of the band’s resident artists as well as Craig Minowa’s wife). But rather than a cloying query of whether they’ll met up in heaven or whatnot, these are much more involved explorations of the subject, often so obsfucated that you’d never make the connection without the prior knowledge. Instead the swelling, exploratory tunes tend to focus more on celebrating life, and mourning the notion that one could stop celebrating life.

They are defiantly ecologically thoughtful, ensuring their tours are carbon neutral, and all their CDs are entirely recyclable. The WSJ comments,

“The group had to put up about $15,000 to have its most recent CD pressed and packaged, which cost the band 93 cents per CD. That’s more than double the typical rate because Cloud Cult insists on using non-toxic inks and recycled packaging instead of standard plastic jewel cases.”

Most importantly, they are entirely independent, and self-funded. They’ve had offers from record companies, but have turned them all down in favour of maintaining their principles. That behaviour alone deserves support, let-alone when they’re one of the most stunning bands currently producing music. Their music can be bought here.

There’s a couple of new videos to accompany the new album. They’re here:

When Water Comes to Life:

Everybody Here is a Cloud:

And here’s a ludicrously cute video of two kids singing along to Meaning of 8’s Pretty Voice.

My favourite song on the album, Story of the Grandson of Jesus, isn’t available anywhere, so you’ll have to buy the album.

Ben Goldacre points out a wonderful moment in last night’s Newsnight, where Paxman introduces a clip about “Brain Gym“. This is some utter bilge being taught in primary schools where children are encouraged to wave their arms around in such a way that the electrical circuits in their bodies connect balancing the left and right halves of their brains… Oh good grief.

You can watch the clip by following this link, which you really ought to. It starts about 21.30, unless you’re Stuart Campbell, and then it starts last Tuesday.

What I most want to share is the interview with the inventor of Brain Gym after the report, in which Paxman is at his sneery best.

Paxman: You say in your teachers’ manual here when you talk about hook-ups that they connect the electrical circuits in the body. What exactly are these electrical circuits please?

Paul Dennison: Well it’s my opinion that we are electrical, that we do have circuits and connections, and when we bring our energy to the midline, to the central point, we are breaking out of the reflex to go from one side or the other to bring things back to the centre where we can be calm and relaxed.

Pax: You say that it’s your opinion that we are electrical, Mr Denison. Are you medically qualified?

PD: No, I’m not medically qualified. I’m an educator. But I study and read and uh. The uh. There are studies to show that we do have electrical… acupuncture and other procedures are based on the fact that there are electrical circuits in the body. And we are building on the shoulders of these people who have been doing these things for thousands of years.

Pax: Is the fact that you’re not medically qualified explanation enough for statements in this teachers’ manual of the kind that “processed foods do not contain water”, which you know is apparent nonsense.

PD: Uh… So the… We’re interested in helping children and these things work and we explain them the best we can and we are going to edit the manual and rewrite it and we appreciate your help and helping us point these things out. [obscured by Paxman] to the best of my ability to help children and help teachers have a context to why they are doing the movements.

Pax: But if your manual can contain idiotic statements like that, is there any reason to believe anything else in it?

PD: I do believe those statements are true and I will prove…

Pax: You believe processed food contains no water do you?

PD: I had a context for that statement meaning that pure water is more immediately active and available to the brain and that I’m not attached to either, but that was the explanation I had at the time.

Glad that’s being taught in schools then!

I detest April Fool’s Day. It’s a vile and stupid tradition that essentially boils down to, “Telling Slightly Plausible Lies Day”, rendering all news sources utterly useless, and entirely contrary to their purpose.

“HA HA! I wrote something that could be true but isn’t, and YOU believed it!”

Yeah, er, well done. That’s lying. You’re a liar. Shut up and go away.

However, it seems I can be swayed by good CGI. Screw you, BBC, that’s quite good.

(I also don’t mind that the two decent cartoon sites (and Questionable Snoretent) have mucked their URLs about – that’s not lying, just being daft).

I took these pictures ages ago, and then completely forgot about them.

I was in town with my sister, and she was paying for parking. I took the opportunity to put my gloves on my nephew, Wil, and then laughed until I hurt. Crappy phone pics, but click on them for a larger version. It’s officially the funniest thing ever.

It’s always fun when decent internet memes first start to spread. It’s much more fun when those making them are professionals with a budget. Although, as ever, Kevin Smith manages to disguise his budget beneath a veneer of laziness. Which is perfect. Stealing the X is fucking Y idea, he cleverly promotes his next movie, Zack And Miri Make A Porno. Thanks to Steph for the link.

Be warned, this is full of naughtiness. Your mum would be cross if she heard it: