Posts from March 2006
30
Mar 06
New Dog Old Tricks
Publicity gets moving for Who Season Two. The BBC reports everything quite staidly but guess what story the radio is running with? (And, one imagines, the angle the tabs will take on it?) Yes, the Doctor could be a woman! OMG A RADICAL BREAK WITH TRADITION! Or the reverse, since Dr Who producers have been pulling this particular leg year upon year since at least the late 70s. John Nathan-Turner in particular used to ‘float’ Joanna Lumley as the Doctor with fetishistic regularity, and during the ‘lost years’ there were two or three speculative trails along “..AS A WOMAN!!” lines.
Whether or not the Dr should be a woman is not for this blog post to say – I kind of suspect the qn is moot anyway – but it’s heartening to know that the new brooms on the Who marketing staff are happy to open JNT’s Big Book Of PR Tricks every now and then. As long as they stay well away from Ken Dodd…
29
Mar 06
urville.com
Imaginary City #773 “urville” from the 20 years + imagining of one Gilles Trehin. There is a book forthcoming. Perhaps this is where St Elsewhere is found?
28
Mar 06
annals of the pre-net troll: 1880s-1970s
one of the more unsettling — if possibly misleading — epiphanies of being an interweb moderator was the realisation (while reading about Jack T. Ripper, possibly the tiresome p.cornwell’s VERY EXTREMELY RISIBLE anti-sickert case) that the tone an effective troll takes is exactly the tone adopted by the writer(s) of the most famous “i am jack” messages, sent mockingly (and by the sackload) to newspapers and police: jabbingly smug, all faux-surprise at and concern for the reader’s shortcomings in regard to morals, reason, competence, offering help but delivering — at BEST — petty woe and aggravation,
the exposure of “wearside jack” was main subject of a not-that-good yorkshire ripper doc on bbc1 last night: the perpetrator turns out to be pure distillate of sorry loser, of course: a resentful alcoholic loner of no accompishment whatever, however tiny, who craved (as he put it in the police interviews when caught), “publicity” and “notoriety”, without moving out the safe yet infinitely crappy world of his own friendless anonymity
even knowing this, the children of his first victim, listening to a playback of the tapes he sent the west yorkshire police — which caused them to misdirect time and energy on a wrong profile of the killer — still shuddered at the evil they heard: and it’s true, the voice of “wearside jack” on that unwieldy mid-70s real-to-real still makes yr nape bristle… what does it for me, i think, is the complacent confidence in untouchability, a very ugly power balance in communication terms…
which turn out to be complete fiction: here it is now, the exactly same voice out of the mouth of the nobody in question (after conviction and sentencing = eight years for perverting the course of justice); crushed and hopeless and clumsily remorseful in custody — but back to the tape, and it’s still the essence of sinister control
wearside jack had read a book (possibly several) on the ripper, and adapted the historical material he found for his own use — i’m not sure what this means exactly, maybe that the original “i am jack” writer fashioned so strong a template for the voice that anyone can method-think their way into it… or maybe that the template sits unused in all of us, needing only the right combo of isolation and need for isolation to spark it into nasty life
27
Mar 06
Dave’s World Cup Spreadsheet
This year’s World Cup Spreadsheet is now live. It’s being hosted on the Football Supporters International site, which is a guide for fans, by fans, produced by a coalition of European supporters’ organisations.
It’s easily the best one yet; the design is pretty good, the calculations work fine and it covers all eventualities except tossing a coin to separate teams tied after the previous 7 ways of separating them have not worked.
It’s totally free, and all I ask is that some kind soul buys me a pint; FT regulars in London have opportunities to do this for real, but since I shan’t be in every pub FT readers drink in (though one can try), there’s a donation page to buy me a virtual pint.
If you like it, then please feel free (=please please please) sent it to friends, post on messageboards and the like. It’d be dead good if you could.
24
Mar 06
BRECHT-WATCH: annals of rib-nudgin smash-the-fourth-wall DO-YOU-SEE self-reflexivity
in the ineffable HOUSE, someone asked someone else, “Do you have a point? Or are you just providing an extremely lengthy explanation of something medically irrelevant?”
23
Mar 06
The Great Taco Hunt
being round about hungry o’clock my ailing eyes&tummy alighted on just such a site.
yes, a stout-hearted legend drives around the City of Angels sniffing out tacos (photos too!).
absolutely brilliant.
21
Mar 06
the gabby shade of alexander woollcott*
ok, i can’t really object to james “wait let me just overwrite some more” wolcott claiming L&O:CI is better than the sopranos cz even if i didn’t actually agree (and i do more or less agree, d’onofrio’s phone-it-in robotic aspergismus notwithstanding), this is the kind of hohum critical gotcha i pull the whole time (eg of COURSE pokemon 3: the spell of the unown is better than any of the pseudo-swanky toytown nonsense committed by er bresson etc zzz) — but BOY is wolcott’s anti-dream sequence take weak: both the L&Os and the CSIs wd be EVEN BETTER with dream sequences and indeed the intervention of ghosts, hellmouths, timeslips, and general all-round otherkin action! how is this not obvious?
“Horatio! Ik bin dein Papas Spook!”
*i can’t be bothered to explain this joke it is so funny
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