Rants Archive 2004
A Last Word?
OK, I'll try to make this the last time I go on about John Peel.
But the man was a towering presence in the lives of many of us, and
it's only now really coming home to me what a huge chasm there is in my
cultural life now there will be no more programmes, no more sessions...
...and no more Festive Fifty, either, although Peel's own
view of that might have been one of relief, so much work did it
involve. Oh, Radio One are going to do one anyway, hosted by the
unknown club DJ they've got in John's time-slot now, but it won't be -
can't ever be - the same.
(Just for the sake of the unknowing: the Festive Fifty was
a chart, compiled from the votes of listeners, which listed the
favourite fifty tracks of the year, be they album tracks, singles, or
pieces from the many Peel Sessions broadcast during the year. So now
you know)
I've decided to to a sort of chart of my own, but in it I list
fifty tracks which I associate very strongly with John Peel. They are
all tracks I heard on his show, and which I would have been highly
unlikely to hear anywhere else (with the odd exception).
I've called it the Final Fifty, and you can see it here.
I corresponded with The Man a few times (more frequently in the
last three years, after I got on-line), and was always quite moved that
a man with so much to do would take the time to reply (something which
was S.O.P. with him, judging from the comments I've seen around the
place since his passing). The first time was in March 1987, and I've
included my letter (in which you can see what an crawl-arsing bastard I
was) and his brief, but entertaining, reply. This I'm sure he typed
himself (he must have been really hammering the keys, because the other
side of the paper is like Braille!).
Click on the image below to see them.
Single File!
Thanks once again to LadySonnet for
a link to another amusing quiz.
Which one are you?
The End Of All Songs?
OK, let's get this into some sort of perspective. The sky has not
fallen, and the sun will probably rise tomorrow.
So why do I feel so devastated at the death of someone I'd never
met?
John Peel, probably the greatest DJ in the history of radio, died
on Monday night at the age of 65. He suffered a heart attack at the
hotel where he was staying in Cuzco, Peru. He leaves his wife, Sheila
(who was there with him on an eagerly-anticipated working holiday),
sons William and Thomas, daughters Alexandra and Florence, and grandson
Archie.
He also leaves behind a gap in the world of radio which none today
could possibly fill. In the age of demographics and the fear-laden
ethos of "we'll try this for a couple of weeks and, if it doesn't
work, we'll pretend we never broadcast it" which has flowed over
music radio like the outpourings of a gigantic corporate cess-pit in
the past few years, there is simply no room for presenters who put the
music first - any kind of music. As such, this is truly the end of an
era.
I won't go on - I did that in a piece elsewhere on this
site on the occasion of his 65th birthday less than two months ago.
Which only makes today's news all the more shocking.
I heard it during the afternoon. When I came home from work, I
didn't bother to unpack my shopping or take my coat off. There was only
one tribute possible: I went over to the hi-fi and played The
Undertones' "Teenage Kicks". LOUDLY. I somehow don't think I'm
the only one to have done that today.
I find it impossible to compose my thoughts and feelings into any
sort of sense (even by the limited usefulness of that word on this
site), so I'll say no more, other than:
"A teenage dream's so hard to beat"
And you never really did reach puberty, did you?
Goodnight John.
With love, gratitude and grief.
The Judge
Plucked From The Gale
I was standing at the kitchen window late on Sunday afternoon, when
I saw that there was a flower on the rose bush next to the shed.
I must admit that I've been neglecting the garden of late. I'm very
busy on a major redecoration project.....sorry, that sounds like a load
of corporate crap. I'll rephrase it at once in human language...I'm
very busy redecorating the house from top to bottom after the central
heating went in last month.
Anyway, there was this rose, a deep red rose, on the top of a very
long stem (the bush has long stems so that it can see daylight over the
long grass). It was being battered by the wind, which was increasing
towards gale force. One of its lower petals was already hanging down
limply, and it was only a matter of time before it blew off and was
joined by the rest of the bloom.
Something made me uneasy about this prospect. I don't know what it
was - I'm usually an 'Oh well, that's the way of the world' sort of
bloke. The more I watched this, the more annoyed I became at the
thought of this howling wind trying to dismember something so beautiful.
After a minute or two I couldn't stand any more of it, and there
was nothing for it but for me to go out into the back garden and snip
the flower off. I brought it back indoors, filled a tall glass with
water, added a pinch of caster sugar to give it some limited
nutritional value, and placed the rose in the water. It's there still.
It'll still fade and die, of course, as must all living things
(which is why I'm more sentimental about things than people - I
might expand on this point sometime). But I feel as if I've done
something good, something worthwhile, in saving a thing of fragile
beauty from being raped by the south-west wind. Although I can't help
but wonder: some particularly fanciful people claim that plants scream
when you cut them. Did the rose bush shout, "Oy! I need that, you
bastard!" when I severed the bloom? I'm glad I'm not so sensitive
as to be able to find out.
Dogged, I Call It...
Here, especially for Mr Roger T. Saurus of British West Hartlepool,
is a gratuitous reference.
"Well, strap me to a tree and call me Brenda!"
Year's End
It's twelve months today since this site was first hurled into
cyberspace.
It started out as a great adventure: gee, I'd be out there!
People would read my opinions! Perhaps it would lead to bigger things...
Well, no. Not really. I can't say that magazines and newspapers
have been beating an electronic path to my portal promising me untold
opportunities. Well, I can say it, obviously, but it would be difficult
typing it with my fingers crossed.
One thing I have learned is that there are so many personal
websites out there, so many blogs, that it is all but impossible to be
heard in the general background noise radiation. Perhaps I should think
myself lucky that this site (and it's Welsh-language sister at www.ybarnwr.me.uk)
get
about 80 or so hits a month. After all, what great secrets do I have to
impart about the running of the Universe? What philosophy do I have
which keeps me looking young and acting so cheerful? In short, what the
f&^* makes me think that I should be regarded as essential reading
for any well-connected bien pensants out there?
It's all vanity, when it comes down to it.
Still, I've learned other valuable lessons from the past twelve
months which I might as well share with you.
First off, I hadn't fully realised quite how much work is involved
simply with keeping a website up-to-date. It's not enough simply to
have an idea, you have to be able to present it in a coherent fashion.
It helps if you can be interesting and/or entertaining, too. At times
during this past year, the effort involved just in doing that has been
frankly too much and so the site has drifted without updates for quite
a period. This almost certainly deters people from returning to it. I
mean, you probably know yourself that if you visit a site after a gap
of, say, a month and find that it still has no more on it than the last
time, you're likely to draw the conclusion that the webmaster has
either died, lost his hard drive, or lost the will to carry on. I know
I always took that view before I started all this.
Besides which, there's the issue of material in any case. When I
began to plan this site (yes, I did plan; I know it doesn't
look that way, but trust me on this), I looked forward to airing my
opinions on anything and everything. No-one and nothing could stop me,
I thought.
Except that it's mad to think that you can have an opinion on
everything. I don't have an opinion on Doritos, for example,
because I've never knowingly eaten one; I can't have an opinion on
whether BMW's latest model outshines its nearest competitor, because I
can't drive; even on weightier matters, I am still constrained by my
own lack of knowledge of a particular subject (yes, I know it doesn't
stop journalists, but they're paid for it). If there's one
thing I have nightmares over (apart from discovering a really dreadful
spelling mistake after I've uploaded the page), it's giving public
displays of my own ignorance. How can I be interesting, entertaining or
even just coherent on subjects where I can't even tell what my
own opinions are?
And one more lesson which may be of value to anyone reading this
who's thinking of setting up their own site in the future: Don't
try to be so ^%!*ing clever! Oh, when I started out, I had big
ideas about how this site was going to be so visually stimulating, so
entertaining in its presentation; and all this despite the fact that
all I had was Front Page 2000 and a small amount of experience in
developing a web system to enable me to roam around my own personal
filestore without having to go through Windows Explorer or having 715
shortcuts on my desktop.
When I'd finished, I thought I was so smart! So much so that after
I'd uploaded it I asked the inhabitants of alt.fan.pratchett for their opinions
and sat back waiting to bask in the warm thermals of approbation...
...only to find myself getting a cold blast of withering criticism
right up me kilt. It was like an appointment with my Diabetic
consultant (I'm diabetic that is, not him). That is to say,
everything I've been doing is wrong, and putting it right would take a
lot of hard work and would detract quite markedly from my joie de
vivre.
"Get rid of the Dynamic HTML!", they cried. "Animated
.gifs? À la lanterne!". "You can't read used hyperlinks
if they're purple on a black background!".
And so on. Crestfallen, I took the point. the DHTML went
straightaway, all other animations followed it shortly afterwards, and
I changed some colours. It took me a further six months before I got
the navigation system in any sort of shape or style though.
But the lesson had been learned: nobody loves a smartarse, and it's
often better in these things not to show what you know. I have now
become a convert to the idea of legibility being more important
on a website than technically showing off. A useful lesson.
So, now Year Two begins. Where did I put that copy of "Needlessly
Complicated Java Scripts For Pleasure And Profit"?
Still Here!
Yes, I know it's been quiet here of late. There's a reason for this.
I'm an idle bastard.
Well, OK, there are other reasons. One is technical, in that I was
trying to sort out a problem I was having with pages uploaded to the
server, whereby they were emerging incomplete at that end. Sorted that
now, though, thanks to some guidance from my fellow-voyagers on the PlusNet Forums.
The other reason is that I am now back at work after an absence of
four months. For the second winter in a row, I was struck down by a
crippling lack of energy and an inability to sleep at night (although I
slept like a sloth during the day-time).
Last year, I put it down to stress, and put my improvement after
four months or so down to simply having been away from the office for
long enough for that poison of modern employment to have been fully
eliminated from my system.
But then it happened again at the end of last October, a year to
the day after its first manifestation. I resigned myself to a brief
period of recuperation, but found that things did not get any
better. Indeed, after mid-December, they got substantially worse.
From just before Christmas on, I found that I could get to sleep at
night, sleep for anything up to one hour, and then wake up. Trying to
get back to sleep was a failure, and led to my lying awake all night. I
would then get up for breakfast at about 7.30 - 8.00 a.m., and then go
back to bed. I would then have no difficulty in sleeping for about five
hours, waking up sometime around 1.30 p.m. This, of course, ensured
that the same pattern would repeat itself the following night, leaving
me increasingly zombified.
I mentioned this on alt.fan.pratchett,
where I'm often to be found, as a way of apologising for inflicting on
the group a series of puns so appalling that not even an ITV comedy
would consider using them.
One of the responses I got was from a friendly entity known as Nebula,
who said, "Have you thought about Seasonal Affective Disorder?"
Seemed to me like a weird idea for a career move, but I was directed to
a website (www.sada.org.uk).
I thought, "Hmm, those symptoms look familiar". So I did a bit
more research, consulted my doctor and went for a solution.
This meant buying a lightbox. Well, the alternative was to spend
three hours a day standing in front of the chill cabinets in our local
Sainsbury's. If you ever find that you need one (and you're in the UK),
I can heartily recommend National Light Hire Company.
They are easy to talk to, they listen to what you need and will sell or
hire the equipment at very reasonable prices.
Although I'd already started treating myself, simply by not
going back to bed after breakfast and thus getting as much daylight as
possible, and that this had already had a huge benefit, I found that
using the lightbox for about 30 minutes each morning at breakfast
helped me tremendously. So much so that I went back to work on March 1.
Of course, now I haven't got so much time to update this site...
Who In Middle Earth Am I Now?
This is who I've landed with this time:
Monkey Goes To Mars?
In the light of George W. Muppet's latest wish, these lyrics from more
than twenty-five years ago seem appropriate:
The Return Of The Thing?
Well, everyone else is going on about Tolkein. I've just finished
re-reading "Lord Of The Rings", and if you're very unlucky,
I'll post my thoughts on it here at some point.
In the meantime, it seems I'm a Numenorean, according to this:
brought
to you by Quizilla
(Thanks to Lady Sonnet for the link from her livejournal)
