Great piece of writing, about t one of the abiding images of the 1984 miners strike – "Guardian photographer Don McPhee's picture of a picketing miner facing up to an officer. But what happened to the two protagonists?". There's also a bit about it on Inside Out, BBC1, 7.30pm 24/2 in Yorkshire, if it appears on iPlayer I'll post a link. – The miner and the copper.
Tea Fu is the ancient art of persuading others to make you a cuppa.
Most often practised in dwellings, the Tea Fu master will use psychological tricksterism as tea always tastes better when someone else has made it. The true master will also attempt workplace Tea Fu.
I’ve made a little twitterbot (using twitter search, yahoo pipes and twitterfeed) that searches for people who tweet “X has made me a cup of tea” or “X has made me a cuppa” and then tweets them back in the style:
Anyone working in advertising is welcome to pay me loads to either take the idea and build a TV campaign around it, or to build a viral site where people can record their office-based Tea Fu.
The other thing we used to do, instead or at the same time as making books, was testing out the capabilities of Flash — by making things like this: Read More »
Almost ten years ago, I was working at friends of ED — a web design book firm. The imprint is still going, but is owned by an American publisher rather than two brothers who set up shop in Acock’s Green. For a couple of years it rode the “creative” wave of flash design, which in effect gave us staff free reign to surf the web looking for weird shit — the thinking behind it being that the odder stuff was popular, the designers became “stars” of a sort and they’d sell more books. Which mean that a great deal of work time was spent colouring the office air blue with sweary flash toys — Britney’s Naked Cat-o-phone, Buffy’s sweary keyboard and so on (seriously, not at work — unless you work in Shoreditch).
I know I’m weird, most people are but it takes a bit of self awareness and a sort of forthright bravery to admit it. Inspired by this blog post, here’s five things that made me weird:
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.
Following on from the warmly received post on the happiness of various cat food models, it’s only inevitable that I should be looking at dogs next. After this, who knows. I did have a look to see whether the fish on the fish food packaging looked happy, but they’re a bunch of cold-blooded emotionless bastards.
To dogs, then, and here’s a two-for-one deal — the pootches on Pedigree Chum’s various products always look like they’re having a great time (a doggy, Forest Gump of a good time, but a good time never the less):
They could run for miles on never more than the promise of a fat stick to chase or some of that incredibly waxy chocolate (I’ve tried it — what do they see in it?). Tesco-own-brand dog, however, is not a laugh-a-minute hound:
Hang-dog or what? But while this pup is feeling the “small” bit of “small bite biscuit bone” at least he hasn’t the positively fuming countenance of mutt number three:
That’s the look of a canine with issues, the tawdry nature of the “supreme selection” is only the start of it.
Twestival in Birmingham was so packed with fun that I don’t think anyone got time to do the quiz that I’d prepared. So, I present it here – no entry free but you can still donate to Charity:Water if you like.
If you like the Two Ronnies your first thought when using the word Rhubarb is probably “manure”, but no more. At least until they run out of themes and end up doing a gardening-with-poo based show, Danny Smith et al’s Rhubarb Radio show puts all effluent fertilizer thoughts out of my head. It replaced them this week with robot sex, but that’ll change as long as I keep tuning in at 7pm on Saturdays.
If you spent your evening less productively this week you can still listen again:
) of sweary-flash was 
— 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.
