You wouldn’t dismiss all of ‘art’ or ‘science’ (or at least not easily or seriously), but the cultural, historical and social elements of the most popular sport in the World (and its global celebration) are okay to be sniffy about it seems. It’s disrupting your television viewing, or making your surrogate living room a little too busy for your liking, and that’s reason enough.

But, dismisser of “the football” is that the root cause? Because you seem to associate the sport with the event, the event with the supporting, and the supporters with a conflation people you don’t much care for.

Because not all football supporters are racist, boorish, loud, suntanned, drunk or even English.

And not everyone will be “supporting”.

Some will be watching, sharing, discussing and enjoying the best players in the World — playing for once without too much financial imperative and on a fairly level playing field (no transfers, no buying success). It can be beautiful.

Football exists not only as a sport, but as a metaphor and conduit for society. Ignore if you will, but don’t dismiss. It’s not clever.

Because “hailed a success” just means that someone said it, not that anything actually succeeded. Often the person doing the hailing is the organiser, minister, councillor, officer or administrator responsible. how convenient.

I wish I had the time to check for actual success every time the phrase comes up, or the technical nous to make it happen automatically – it would make a great failcamp project. For now I’m contenting myself with a little Google News search for the phrase, so I can giggle at the most outrageous collusion.

From the graph it seems that success peaked in 2004.

The Birmingham Mail covered this exchange on Pete Ashton’s blog, which is good — it’s a story. To sum up, an advertising company working on behalf of the Rep Theatre were using reverse graffiti, they — mistakenly one would assume — used it on a monument (that it’s a monument isn’t immediately obvious, if you don’t know Brum), Pete pointed it out, they apologised.

What annoyed me was the way that the Mail’s report worked — it is so dumbed down as to be wildly wrong in a couple of places:

“A BIRMINGHAM theatre’s unique way of advertising with jet aqua sprays to create ‘reverse graffiti’ has left them in trouble.”

Unique? Let’s see what ‘unique’ means :”existing as the only one or as the sole example” — while reverse graffiti might be still thought of as fairly new, it’s not unique, not even for Brum – here’s an example from 2007 of BRMB using it:

Later on in the article they tell us that Pete “writes a blog on Birmingham” — he doesn’t, he writes a blog on whatever stuff he wants to, including publishing pictures of himself dressed as a cloud. Maybe that’s why they don’t link to the blog, give the URL, or mention that the whole incident played out on the blog (instead they imply he’s talked to them - he hasn’t).

All media outlets have a style, but lowering the standard of discourse so far that it becomes factually inaccurate? Yes it happens all the time. Everything has to be “new” and “difficult to understand”, and “frightening” — so people never think that they should go off and find something out about things, never think that maybe there’s stuff they’ve missed, never think that they can go off an have their own thoughts.

Is it because they still blindly assume they’re the only place people get information from? Or do they really want to keep people stupid?

[EDIT: I'd just like to point out that this post isn't about not linking or crediting internet sources (gwad knows we've all been over that one), but about the terrible tendency to simplifly things to the point of incorrect. Whatever the process, reverse graffiti isn't unique, Pete doesn't write a blog about Birmingham — leave these two bits out the story is better.]

[EDIT the 2th: My point is that I know what's correct here, because I know of Pete's blog, and have seen the development of the reverse graffitti thing and —  while neither are important in themselves — it begs the question, what else do the media get wrong that I don't know about? Maybe some really important big things. I worry.]

Veggie not shrinking, of course. And just so you can see how much the meat ones do shrink:

My thing was very basically a “geo-stumble upon” a way to attache geo-data to the wealth of exsiting web content that doesn’t have it. Easy to use, but mainly building up a huge bak of useful data that people could do cool stuff with. Not local search, but “geo attention“.

Here’s what I submitted, in case you are interested — I think this would be a very good idea, so in lieu of me being involved in making it I’d like to throw it out to anyone who might:

Technically the idea is to make recording your “geo-attention” of a site as simple as possible — just one button click when signed in (using existing services: fireeagle/skyhook/google latitude etc to record location). Your profile can then be used to recommend sites based on your interests and location, you share your attention data, “friends” share your geo-bookmarks.

Maybe the grey V-necked jumper and cream chino market has fallen into fast decline. I blame those bloody schools that sell sweatshirts with logos on, and men over 40 who think they have any right to wear anything other than cream chinos and lightly-checked shirts under their car coats. Sweatshirts for small children? Children who — at least used to — run around all day in states of high excitement, think of the olfactory organ headmasters and governors. Maybe that’s the reason kids aren’t as energetic these days, they’re too afraid of wet patches under the arms of their grubby blue jerkin things.

So, no I’ve not been into British Home Stores. I have, however, been past the outlet on New Street in Birmingham this week. At first I thought the shop had closed and been taken over by one of those ‘anything for £5′ shops, those boils on retail that blast awful chart ‘rnb’ at you as you hurry past (and who said they could use ‘rnb’ as a genre? R’n'B is early Stones, early Who…). But no, the management of the venerable BHS have decided to employ the lowest market tactics available. They’re not competing on price, quality, ambience, or heaven forbid ‘cool’. No.

They’ve employed someone to shout “come here, come get your luveryly V-necked school jumpers and cream chinos”, and not in a chirpy cockerny market stall way either. A dull monotone hawker skulks out of sight, drawling about “store credit cards” — the mating call of the terminally feckless shopper — through a PA too small to do the job in anything more than buzzing compression.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Bhs, you may as well pack up now.

Monty Python — or the realisation that humour didn’t need to be dumb at least.  It’s probably the ‘Marxism Today‘ sketch that helped me decide that there we no barriers between “high” and “low” culture.

That has lead to me annoying the hell out of people I’ve been in bands with, and made my writing a mess of references that only I would get all of – but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Grammar School — grammar school taught me a lot of things.  Some, like atomic numbers are only useful in quizzes and particle physics (of which I do very little). Some,  such as my firmly held beliefs about how wealth and influence is handed around, have proved very useful indeed. Some, such as how it “taught” me to be uncomfortable around women (by being a boys school) weren’t so much use. But being an outsider, poorer, from a different area to my school and most of the boys there, made me able to do stuff on my own — to start stuff that was interesting and to form networks around that. Spectrum fanzines, then music and football ones were things I wouldn’t have got involved with had I been “popular”.

Bad Wisdom — Bill Drummond and Mark Manning’s book (know now as ‘The Lighthouse on Top of the World, since the second book in the trilogy came out). It’s a mess of fact, fiction, rumour, lies, spunk and shit. It’s probably my favourite book.

Birmingham in the 80s — there was very little to do in Birmingham in the eighties. Actually, I’m sure that there was very little to do in Britain in the eighties, particularly outside of “normal trading hours”. The “very little to do” lead me to be the sort of person that creates stuff, that doesn’t stop at having an idea but does it.

The Manic Street Preachers — before the internet, the only way you found out about new things was through your friends, but that took ages. One quicker was was the music press, but while you might find out about bands from, say, Simon Price — the real cultural horizon expander was the stuff that bands were into. This was of course, back when bands were into stuff. These days the music press just covers the latest conveyor-belt stage-school “indie” nothings beloved of Blair’s 50%.

The Manics, and yes we’re talking up-to Holy Bible era Manics, spewed working-class intellect like no other band before or since  — yes it was partly six-form iconogrpahy, Ché, Plath, etc, but for a young boy mistakenly taking science classes it was a valuable in to the world of culture. And self-harm, and military fatigues as fashion.

What made you weird?

Normally cat food shows a picture of a happy energetic looking cat on the front (which is odd as there aren’t pictures of humans on the front of our food) something like this:

Go-Cat is quite an established brand, they’ve been using this boo-alike for some time – he looks springy, bright-eyed and desperate to eat those crunchy cereal things.

Contrast that with the cat on the supermarket own-brand food:

Sad, longing and somehow not looking forward to the chunks or the gravy. Even the gourmet cat is affected by the black dog of depression. The ennui of the pedigree:

He’s also a little out of focus. It’s catching, this poor kitten cant even rouse the enthusiasm (despite New & Improved Recipes) to list his head towards the noms.

It might be the case that cats getting no-frills food might not be quite as pleased when it’s mealtime, but you’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to get a snap of one that was getting salmon filets, grinning from ear to ear and purring like a well-tuned engine?