Interference

It's been a funny few days, hasn't it? According to yesterday's Mirror, Hutton leaked (hopefully not in Tescos or anywhere embarrassing), and then in the afternoon the skylight directly above my head at work followed suit. During a hailstorm. Many a dandruff joke ensued.

Then things got worse: our neighbours decided to have a stadium-rock party starting at about midnight, so three of us decided to have an impromptu sleepover in Ben's room, furthest from the racket. This morning I slipped over spectacularly outside the house and now all I want is some normality and some sleep, please. Anyone else having a weird time of it at the moment?

In other news, I made some pretty linklog archives whilst listening to Hey Ya by Outkast and Underneath The Stars by Kate Rusby. Go and play with them!

This is a passenger announcement

There's something about travelling by train at this time of year that's uniquely enjoyable. The rest of the world - poor fools - glide across entire continents in their sleek metal cages, streaking from Aachen to Zurich in less time than it takes for a cup of coffee to reach drinkable temperature.

While they're blindly turning up on time and conducting their foreign lives in a meticulously regulated day-to-day stupor, English windbags complain incessantly about our own creaky, lethal counterparts. And, as always, they're missing the point. Train travel in the rest of the civilised world may be reliable: that's precisely the problem. It's boring.

We're in a new golden age of travel, with all the romance, adventure and unpredictability that this entails. Trains and stations aren't just the means for getting from one place to another; they're destinations in themselves. And that's got me wondering. Why aren't they marketed as such?

For example, I'd be happier if the train operators came clean, and started publishing glossy brochures advertising day trips on muggy, overheated Virgin Voyager trains: 'a tropical climate, but without the skin cancer'. Whenever a train reaches its destination too late, leaving passengers stranded somewhere like Didcot Parkway for five hours, with just a little thought they could lay on entertainment. I'm talking Maori tribesmen, dancing a welcome dance, or Chinese shadow puppeteers, or just local pissheads slurring, stinking and throwing glasses at people. All it takes is a little thought.

As we spend more and more of our lives in stations, we might also come to expect that more of them should be lived profitably in these worlds-between-worlds. I'm envisaging schools, hospitals, libraries, and mosques on trains, just to keep everybody occupied. Yoga classes, nightclubs, introduction agencies, pottery workshops, even funeral parlours. And then one day, the whole country might be filled by trains parked permanently at stations, trains that never go anywhere, because everything you'd ever want to see or do are already on them. You wouldn't ever have to leave your own home town.

It's a beautiful vision.

iTunes Registry

iTunesRegistry.com is an amazing site if like me you're a bit nerdy about music and like statistics about what you're listening to. The principle is very simple - you upload an xml file containing all the songs you've imported into iTunes. It will then come up with a whole host of interesting information about what you listen to, how you rate different genres, a 'diversity' rating and such like.

I haven't been using iTunes for a particularly long time - indeed the majority of tracks in my collection haven't been listened to through it yet, but here's my profile anyway:

Last Import: 2004-01-18
Tracks: 3,580
Artists: 657
Genres: 114
Diversity Rating: 3.5455
Total Time: 10.72 days
Total Listening Hours: 2.65 days
Avg Track Length: 4.31 minutes
Avg Rating (excluding 0-star): 56.84 /100
Number of Ratings: 335 ( 9.4 %)

My description:

"You appear to like rock the most, with The A.M. your favourite, which is weird since you've spent more time listening to Radiohead yet you have more Smiths than anything else (in this genre). Bjork is your favorite overall artist."

The World Would Be Better If... (Part I)

Dear Mr Gates,

I didn't receive a Christmas card from you this year. I sincerely hope all is well. I hear you're up for a Brit Award! You must be mortified.

Since your software is constantly nagging me to send you reports about everything I'm doing, I thought I'd drop you a line to tell you about a feature I'd absolutely love to see in the next version. I've included a graphic below.

Hope you like it.

Lots of love,

Simon P

P.S. I thought that cover song you did with the Kumars from No. 42 was brilliant!

Sunday morning internal dialogue

Good: 'Look! It's sunny! Perfect jogging weather! Go go go!'
Bad: 'Yeah, but look at those fluffy clouds on the horizon... might be a storm...'
Good: 'Little bit of rain never hurt anyone! Get your trainers on!'
Bad: 'But think about this rationally. Your lungs have turned to mashed potato and your legs to christmas puddings over the holidays. If you go running you are going to be in serious P-A-I-N'
Good: 'All the more reason to go and get rid of this lard from my body...'
Bad: 'And I thought one of your new year's resolutions was to renew your enthusiasm for Operation Fat and put on some goddamn weight, lanky boy!'
Good: 'Well...'
Bad: 'Go on. Take the trainers off. Go downstairs and have some nice chocolate spread on toast'
Good: 'OK, maybe just one slice...'
Bad: 'Step away from the trainers...'
Good: 'Maybe I'll go later... mmm chocolate spread.... mmm...'

[to be continued...]

Designer psychosis

BBC News has been getting disproportionally worked up about Channel Four's 'Shattered' in the last couple of days.

Amazingly, depriving people of sleep is 'like treating them with medication that will make them psychotic'.

As the networks vie to outdo one another, it seems that the BBC have presented us with a veiled mission statement for the next generation of Reality TV. I predict a makeover programme, where five screamingly camp pharmacologists try to improve the self esteem of a dowdy, slightly tubby, recently dumped bystander, by pumping him full of designer neurotransmitters until he thinks he's Adonis and forgets how to read and write.

Instant pharmaceutical charisma: you read it here first.