John Walker's Electronic House

It’s official.

“Your tutors join me in offering congratulations on being awarded a First Class Degree. It represents the culmination of a great deal of hard work and effort, which has been justly rewarded. I hope that your future plans will be equally successful.”

Tee hee.

“great deal of hard work and effort”

Snigger.

You can call me Mr First.

This morning I did something I haven’t done voluntarily for six years. I went to church.

Clearly, working for churches for the last six years means that it’s not exactly unusual, but to go because I chose to, rather than because I was obliged to, is apparently quite a different thing.

So that was good. Anyway, the RULE of going to a new church is that you have to stand around looking lost to see if people will come up and say hello, or if they are all evil, self-enclosed Nazis. I’m pleased to report that they weren’t Nazis. Of course, if they were Nazis, then I wouldn’t have had to say the same things about myself ninety-seven times, while people feigned interest that I’m a freelance writer (I always say “writer” instead of “journalist” because when you say “writer” to customs officials in America, they don’t lock you in a jail cell for the whole of eternity, and it’s best to be in the good habit).

Of course, their interest was always piqued at one point. I would say:

“Yes, I’ve just finished a degree in youth work and theology, and so now I’m working out what I want to do next. I’m concentrating on the writing at the moment, but there’s a project in Bath that I’m interested in setting up.”

What they would hear was:

“Yes, I’ve just finished a degree in youth work and… [YOUTH WORK! YOUTH WORK! HE DOES YOUTH WORK! HE COULD DO OUR YOUTH WORK!] …in setting up.”

But that’s not what I brought us all here to talk about this evening. Instead, it’s about how really quite impressively rubbish I am at talking to girls. And at the same time, how I’m absolutely the greatest person at it ever.

After the service, deliberately standing around looking lost again, but this time deliberately looking lost near a girl who looked over the age of 20 without being married (the Great Auk of church congregations), there was an awful moment when it changed from a new guy waiting to be talked to by people, to two people trying to look at each other without making eye contact, while each fought an internal battle of whether they should just bloody well say hello. I won/lost, and spoke.

We swapped degree information, she explained that she’s re-submitting one of the modules this week that she didn’t pass last year, and I suggested that she must be feeling very relaxed. She said that that was the problem, and that she had just bought Sims 2 and was playing that inst… [SHE PLAYS COMPUTER GAMES! SHE’S A GIRL, AND SHE PLAYS COMPUTER GAMES! MAYBE SHE WILL MARRY YOU THIS AFTERNOON] …wasn’t enough RAM in her computer. I told her that when fitting it, you have to push down so hard you think you’re going to crack the motherboard, and the ground beneath the computer. She laughed… [I MADE AN ATTRACTIVE GIRL LAUGH WHEN TALKING ABOUT RAM! I’M POSSIBLY THE GREATEST MAN EVER IN THE WHOLE HISTORY OF ALL TIME!] …about how PC World was a dreadful place to buy anything, so she was getting it from the internet. I asked what she was going to do with her degree in Auto Mechanics and German [WHAT ON EARTH KIND OF DEGREE IS THAT? I MEAN, SURE, YOU JUST FINISHED A DEGREE IN YOUTH WORK BUT COME ON – HOW DO THEY POSSIBLY? WAIT – SURELY YOU CAN MAKE A JOKE ABOUT THAT “VORSPRUNG DIRCH TECHNIQUE” OR WHATEVER IT’S CALLED – THAT CLEVERLY COMBINES THE TWO IN A BRILLIANT WAY] …”so a joke about vorsprung durch technik would be appropriate then?” [DAMN JOHN, YOU’RE CLEVER – YOU MADE IT IRONIC THAT YOU WERE EVEN SAYING IT] “…a pound for every time someone said something like that…” [DAMMIT] “…thought about joining the army for a while, but then changed my mind.” “Was it the shooting innocent teenagers that put you off?” [WHAT THE HELL? WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING? SERIOUSLY, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?] “…four years of study and three years of service that did it.” “So the shooting teenagers bit was fine?” [GOOD GRIEF MAN! ARE YOU UTTERLY OUT OF YOUR MIND? YOU WERE SO GREAT WITH THE RAM THING, BUT WHAT IS THIS?] “…not thinking about that prevented it from being a problem.” [AM I SAFE? DID I REALLY GET AWAY WITH SUGGESTING THAT SHE DOESN’T MIND THE IDEA OF MURDERING TEENAGERS?] …how we would see each other again in a fortnight, and said goodbye.

By writing this, what I’m ensuring is that were the moment to occur when we both fell for each other, she would then discover this blog entry, and immediately think, “He wrote about me on a website read by 150 strangers? Man, that was close.” And never see me again. But of course, it’s important to ensure my everlasting lonely misery, and to make sure that I’m insured against the danger of any chances of happiness.

With a wave of laziness that can only be brought on by having fought in a war, I’m going to describe the last week and leave you to attach the right photos to the events by opening this link in another tab. (And if you’re still using Internet Explorer, then open this link and slap yourself until it starts bleeding).

I went to Poland this week. Flew from Heathrow at OH MY GOD O’CLOCK in the morning (the hotel generously decided to opt out of my 4.15am alarm call, but thankfully enough distrust had been developed to set my mobile alarm as well after actually having to have a real argument with a repulsively rude man on the reception when he tried to charge me for a pre-paid room, ignored everything I said, ran the battery down on my mobile phone after proving too stupid to operate his own telephone, and then lied to me about not being able to take my Switch card, eventually getting his manager who immediately told him off for being an idiot and fixed some issues. But this got so out of control (not the argument, but the uselessness of the hotel) that the Nice Man looking after us had to come to the hotel that night to shout at them, whereupon rather than charging all us innocent scabbing hacks for our own rooms, they instead charged the Nice Man’s company twice for everything. And so on. Do not stay at the Park Inn, Heathrow. It is shit).

Arrived in Warsaw, put on a coach, driven to an airfield, and put onto a 12-seater bi-plane. This offered an hour of being shaken about in a manner that was at first very exciting, and then for the last 50 minutes extremely boring. Land somewhere in the north of Poland, and am then piled into an open-topped, open-sided, open-everything 1940s army jeep, and driven at a hundred thousand miles an hour along dirt roads for ages and ages. This was entirely brilliant. Someone comments, “There’d better be a 4-star hotel at the end of this road”. It was better. A couple of beautiful buildings, one being our hotel, the other being where they hid the Xbox 360.

Evening comes, and we’re off in the jeeps again (driven by men in US WW2 uniforms) to visit some WW2 bunkers nearby. We stop along the road as a large branch is across it. The journos in the front vehicle got out to move it, which was the moment the camoflaged Nazis burst from the woods, shot our drivers, and then forced us all to get out the jeeps. Rifle-butts shoved in our backs, we were pushed and “SCHNELL! SCHNELL!”d along until we were split into two groups and, er, given guided tours of the bunkers in which Hitler had stayed for a long stretch of the Second World War. An astonishing place, including the building in which the failed attempt by a brave Nazi officer to assassinate Hitler had taken place. A pleasing lack of health and safety meant we were allowed to climb the iron rungs onto the top of the bomb-blasted remains of Hitler’s main bunker and explore the remains of the machine gun turrets and so on.

Fortunately some more American soldiers turned up and killed the Nazis, so we were able to get back to our lodgings for a fine bbq feast and campire apples-on-sticks roasting.

Next morning, up nice and early to visit some more intact bunkers in the next ‘town’ along. Poland is a pretty poor place. Warsaw was a sad sight – derilect buildings festooned with brand new advertising hoardings, Capitalism having raped and pillaged its way through the city, leaving its foul graffiti across the walls. The moment we left the city, it was just farmland for as far as we flew. Around the area we were staying, a ‘peasant’ lifestyle seemed the norm, tiny self-sustaining communities impossibly far away from anyone else. It was a strange feeling of decadence combined with utter weirdness to go hurtling through such places on an off-road army jeep.

We reached the site of the bunkers, explored them, walking through the warren-like corridors, and then went for a short walk down a river to see the astonishingly huge U-boat lock that remains almost entirely complete. It’s quite odd that Germany has destroyed so much of the Nazi’s constructions in order to move on from a difficult past, while Poland has kept the works of their invaders intact. I think the Polish decision is wise. To have it there, in front of you – to be standing inside the buildings Hitler lived in – it’s chilling, hideous, and impossible to pretend didn’t happen just recently. Those incredible buildings of engineering accomplishment and terrible evil don’t let the Second World War become as much a part of history as schools would have you believe, shelved up alongside the Romans, the Middle Ages and the Spinning Jenny. Instead it’s something that happened only 60 years ago, and damn well could happen again if we ever get complacent enough. Let the ugly concrete stick up on the beautiful land, crooked teeth to remind us of where things went and could go again.

There was some sort of distraction where we were made to play some game or other in the afternoon, and then the evening saw a ludicrous and enormously fun jaunt on the top of a vast behemoth of an amphibious tank thing, charging around tracks not nearly wide enough for the caterpillar tracks at tremendous speeds.

I was nervous about a WW2 themed trip to Poland. It could have been in terrible taste. And while I’m sure some of it could sound as though it had been, it never felt that way. The Nazis were portrayed by a dedicated group of young Poles, who were involved in re-enactment socities, their equipment authentic, and their knowledge immense. One lunchtime was accompanied by a 30 minute lecture on all the equipment they had with them, meticulously explained. The subject matter was taught to us, rather than used as a form of entertainment. And while being ambushed by Nazis is always going to be a bit… odd, it was impossible not to allow yourself to consider that this happened so recently for real, and to feel that fear.

I’ve played on an Xbox 360 and you haven’t.

Ner.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4192218.stm

“But residents of Alabama and Mississippi asked to stay where they are.”

Of late, I have found myself consuming television programmes at an astonishing rate. I don’t watch television ‘live’ any more. I’ve still not got around to tuning the four channels we’re capable of receiving into the new television. This has two excellent results:

1) I don’t watch anything I don’t absolutely want to.
2) I don’t see television commercials.

This means I miss out on the social phenomenon of, “Have you seen that new…?” to which my answer is inevitably “no”. It also means that no, I haven’t seen Lost, but of the twenty or so minutes I’ve seen of two separate episodes (standing in the doorway of Landlord Hicks’ room, witnessing it on his TV) it appears to be the hideous mutant child of The O.C. and Celebrity Love Island. I’m told by all who breathe that I’m wrong…

Not seeing adverts has a peculiar effect. I’ve not watched TV as God intended for well over a year now, and in that time I’ve been freed from the expectation of being advertised at, which has led me to become acutely aware of when it continues to happen to me against my will. If I’m so repulsively stupid as to sit in front of ITV1, then I should fully expect and indeed deserve to be subjected to screeching suggestions that I blame my scraped finger on the inventor of walls, or which is the latest and only socially acceptable way to remove the especially stubborn stains. That would have been my decision, my invitation, and indeed my indoctrination – it ensures I’m perfectly used to commercialism, and dulled to it. But when that imbecilical cord is severed, each commercial invasion becomes a violent slap around the face. Every bus that drives past ordering me to wash my hair, or billboard suggesting I change my car insurance today, or cretinous commercial radio station advert imposed upon me in a shop, or instruction about where to develop my photographs from a hot-air balloon passing overhead – slap, slap, slap, slap. It’s inescapable, but at least I’ve started noticing it.

And yet, I’ve recently found myself enthralled by wondrous television of all genres. Purchased on disc, or via the wonder of bittorrent, the joy of sharing television programmes, mostly unavailable on DVD, and freely given to viewers by broadcasters via their digi-ariel-o-center. I have recently finished devouring the exceptional Carnivàle – an exquisite series, each of the twenty-four episodes paced as it wants to be, not interested in your short attention span or short-term memory. Each is a visual extravaganza, coloured to perfection, alive in dust, vicious in horror. Intelligent, violently powerful but never powerfully violent, and mature with its HBO-based freedom. Comparisons with Twin Peaks are inevitable, mostly because it owes its existence to Lynch’s masterwork, and partly because it also stars the exceptional Michael J. Anderson, but it has so much more of its own to offer. Where Twin Peaks invested impossible horror into the understandable world of a soap opera community, Carnivàle embraces everything you already knew must be wrong about the travelling fairground, and asks it to play a part in the ongoing battle between Good and Evil. The eulogy “too good for television” is getting thrown around too easily now, in the US culture of hasty commissions and premature cancellings, and places the focus in the wrong place. Television, as a commercial enterprise, is stupid because it is forced to reflect its audience. Carnivàle’s survival into a second season was testament to Television’s occasional battle against that mass stupidity in those watching. It was, in fact, “too good for viewers”.

Battlestar Galactica has surprised me. When all who had watched it spoke with enthusiasm, I had assumed they meant that it merely wasn’t as awful as the original series, nor as pathetic as Star Trek. Finally watching the first half of the first series, I’ve realised that it’s something completely other. It’s a really fine science fiction series, heftily dark, cleverly honest, and deft with its aversion to cliche. And I hear season two is even better – a surprisingly strong claim.

But my real enthusiasm lies in something apparently so much simpler. In the last two months, I have fallen entirely and wholly in love with Scrubs. A whole other post is required, and inevitable, to explain the depths of why I feel so passionately about something ultimately so trivial and temporal. I have always loved sitcom as a format, capable of so much that any other medium falls short of in one way or another, and in Scrubs, Bill Lawrence has absolutely captured those strengths in an utterly perfect way. Four seasons, 91 episodes, and not a hint of waning, but instead is only stronger. It is the only comedy in history to have usefully survived more than one season after the introduction of a baby. It marries two central characters without a hint of the usual collapse that follows such a writing shift. It proves there is no need for a laughing audience, and four seasons in it further underlines this in its extraordinary ‘sitcom’ episode, proving the level of pantomime the addition of a “live studio audience” cannot help but impose. As early as episode four of the first series, it had me in tears, already powerfully empathically involved with its cast, and years of episodes later it still has the capacity to not only surprise, but move me to painful sobbing with its honesty. If it weren’t for the works of Garry Shandling, it would not only be the best sitcom of all time, but the bravest. Of course, It’s Garry Shandling’s show and The Larry Sanders Show still tower menacingly above all else in glorious majesty. But Scrubs can claim a very proud and honourable third place.

In summary then: television is great, as long as you don’t actually ever watch one.

Despite describing himself as a neophile, Martin Coxall has only just started his own blog. In fact, in a grotesque display of bandwagon-jumping, it seems that a slew of luddites from that dreadful place have all suddenly discovered the internet’s most OLDest MEME. It’s not pretty, and by the LAW OF THE INTERNET, 90% of them won’t continue posting after three weeks.

Hopefully, however, Martin will continue, as, comma, his pillow talk is of the finest quality. Do be careful though – he is a gay.

Charity has uploaded the excellent comic Something’s Wrong, drawn by Charity, and written by Kieron.

Something’s Wrong is the book that made me realise Kieron’s really actually quite good at comics. Careful writing means the minimum number of words carry the maximum volume of plot, offering apocalypse through the eyes of believable love. It also makes him a big girly-girl with no penis. (Sez the ‘man’ who draws bunny rabbits).

Part of rebuilding the site has involved playing around with new WordPress plugins and other such hideously geeky frippery. The most exciting part has been trying to find a statistics pack that will indulge the ego in every desired manner.

A doffed hat of respect to WP-ShortStat, for being extra-double-fun, and showing nearly everything one could ever want to know, all in one window. This has led to Jim’s, Kieron’s and my discovering that we’re actually far more popular than the evil lying liars at rubbish-don’t-ever-use-it Extreme Tracking had ever let us believe. We’re great. About three times as great as previously believed.

But I am greatest of us all, despite possessing only a fraction of their fame and popularity, because I hacked the php of the plugin to tell us even more fascinating information about how damned loved and handsome we really are. I’m enormously proud of this achievement, knowing absolutely nothing of php, nor indeed any programming language beyond how to make the border flash while stringing swearwords down the screen in Spectrum BASIC. Perhaps the so-called gifts of the Holy Spirit have finally caught up with the times, and rather than causing pointless, self-indulgent, incoherent babbling at the front of cold buildings, ‘tongues’ has allowed me to understand words of any programming language. Like a modern day Peter, I shall gather the crowds of oddly smelling programmers around me, and speak unto them words of truth in mySQL, PERL, C++, PHP and XML, and they will take my message to the massives. However it occurred, whether by divine intervention, or my own inherent awesomeness, I managed to get the thing to report unique hits in the weekly box, rather than non-unique. Yes, to your knees, mortals.

However, my own brilliance could not have been quite as utterly brilliant as it currently is, were it not for the help of some slightly less brilliant people. Richard Cobbett was his usual astonishingly patient and heroic self as I whinged and complained at him while he was working, calmly fixing things that I don’t begin or end to understand. And Martin Coxall was a statue of marvellousness, leaping in to rescue me from server-level damage, and rewriting the rest of the internet until it was compatible with my site.

To these men I raise a glass of orange squash, and toast their genius.

Rocketbilly Redcadillac.

People stop and look when a Cadillac goes past. It catches the eye. It’s a big old beast of a car, ridiculously greedy on the gas, but it still represents the authentic elegance of a bygone era.

Daftest game in a long while requires least daft review in a long while. If you’ll ignore the first bit.