John Walker's Electronic House

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.

Well here we are then.

Updating WordPress from 1.2 to 1.5 turned out to be a bit more of a haul than expected. It also demolished all that had gone before, including the fine Mr Richard Cobbett’s lovely CSS. Not having a clue how to get it back, I decided it was time for a change.

And in changing, I appear to have caught up with a number of things.

– First off, there’s now titles to entries. Not a huge deal, but it makes navigation much easier. I’ve only bothered to title the stuff that appears on the front page.

– Then there’s Categories. This means if you’re looking for, say, a review entry, it’ll be much easier to get hold of. I’ll go back through at some point and file the older posts.

– And after a few pesters recently, I believe I’m now RSSsy. Still no idea what this actually is, but I do seem capable of it.

Huge thanks to Martin for all the help and patience and fixing of mistakes this evening. Do let me know any comments or criticisms about the new look. I’m going to fix the “boring” – Kieron Gillen, 2005, banner soon too.

I went to see a GP on Friday, after finally growing fed up of the constant pain in my left little finger. For the last few months, I have found that bending my left elbow at all causes pins and needles to build in the finger instantly, and if the arm is not frequently straightened fully, it quickly becomes painful. Obviously when writing, and indeed when existing at all, the left arm needs to bend halfway down, so this is rather irritating.

I also decided it was about time to try again with my right knee, which if not clicked about once a minute develops a horrible ache. This is the bane of my life, meaning I spend about 25% of my time ensuring I have enough space to straighten my leg to feel the satiating click. Pub tables are frequently peaked under to find a route through which the limb can stretch, planes and trains need to provide me with aisle seats if journeys are not to be absolute torture, and I will try to go to the cinema at off-peak times so that I can put my leg over the chair in front. Indeed, sat at this desk where I spend half my life, my right leg is not underneath, but sticking out the side so it can be frequently clunked into submission. It’s funny how all this fuss has become something I live with, to the point where I’d forgotten it was a fault worth addressing. I remember mentioning it to a GP once when a teenager, and he said, “Yes, it clicks. I don’t know why,” which was just fabulous. I think I grew resigned to it then.

So Friday’s visit about the increasingly uncomfortable elbow afforded me the opportunity to mention the knee as well. The idea that they might be connected, for reasons I cannot fathom, had never occurred to me. The doctor dismissed RSI immediately, and recognised that it was something in the elbow plucking at my ulna nerve – the nerve that provides feeling in the little finger, and half of the ring finger. He held my elbow and then bent and straightened my arm, feeling the clunk with each straightening. And then suddenly his interest appeared piqued. He took hold of my fingers and bent them backward. This is no terrible thing – my fingers are able to bend backward until they are parallel with the back of my hand – it’s quite disgusting for the uninitiated, but a source of novelty joy for me. The fingers on both hands are able, without aid, to bend backward far enough to appear as if… oh, it’s much easier if I just show you.

The natural backward-curve. About half a foot away from the stuff in the background, despite looking as if it’s resting on them.

The extent to which my fingers can bend back on themselves. Loses nothing in the flattening of a photograph : )

But this has only ever been a pub trick – a way to scare the squeamish. My fingers do all manner of other disgusting tricks – the knuckles so adequately demonstrated as bending equally in both directions in the photo also bend disturbingly on the x-axis, meaning my hands can sort of fold in half lengthways as well. This is brilliant for reaching inside Pringles tubes and similar, as they bend in half to become cylindrical. This is, I think, far more disgusting when wobbled about in front of people. Which is what it’s really all about. In fact, the even joints in each finger bend amusingly, allowing me to contort my hands into all manner of awful positions. And the backward cupping makes for a neat trick while juggling.

So the doctor was bending my fingers about, and then asked me to lie on the bench and began trying similar experiments with my legs. Now, I’ve always been able to put my toes to my mouth – a common enough trick amongst flexible girls, so something I’ve never thought much of. I can get my heel to my forehead, in fact, but have little use for this. Again, it never occurred to me that this might be at all unusual in an overweight male.

And then he called me “fascinating”. Something with which I’m sure people would be hard-pushed to disagree. It turns out I have ‘Hypermobility Syndrome’.

This means little more than that most of the joints in my body don’t know when to stop. And it’s of little cause for concern – it generally cures itself with age. But at worst, it can cause secondary arthritis, and with the trapped ulna nerve, and the accompanying pain, I’m being referred to a rheumatologist for Experiments.

It’s a funny thing, how what you’re used to is what you assume to be normal. I remember once my mum exclaiming in disgust at how my toes were pointing upward with my feet flat on the floor – just a normal fiddly thing for me. I ignored it then. And it’s only this weekend that I’ve learned it’s not normal for your wrist to bend past a right angle from your arm in either direction. Mine always have – I just thought all of them did that. And as I write this, I remember explaining to a chiropractor how if I didn’t click the vertebrae in my neck like this, “CRACK-ACK-ACK-ICK-ACK” and like this, “CRICK-ICK-ACK-ACK-ICK-ACK”, about once an hour, I get nasty headaches. He said to me looking slightly unnerved, “You’re neck isn’t meant to bend that far.” For some reason neither of us thought any more of it.

I asked the doctor if perhaps I ought to be in the circus. He didn’t think it was necessary. But I realise that were my back to demonstrate this ability (and it doesn’t to any interesting extent (so for all you foul people who were thinking that, no, absolutely not)) I would probably qualify as the “Indian Rubber Man” of days past.

So now I look forward to discovering what other joint-based things I can do that others can’t, and add them to my list of new-found super powers.