Dadblog

This from BBC NEWS

“About a million people have listened to internet repeats of sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy over the past six weeks, the BBC has said.”

Good for them. What they don’t say is how many people listened to it on the radio, which is probably the real story. I’ll bet it’s a lot, lot less.

Courtesy of Ben Hammersley, this wonderful post about the November 2004 National Geographic, which asks on the cover “was Darwin wrong?” and then answers inside “No.”

Brilliant. Here’s a taster:

And yes, it’s just a theory. And so is that whole “the Earth orbits the Sun” thing. Time out to look up the scientific definition of the word “theory,” okay? Go on. I’ll wait here.Got it? All done?

Iron Circus is going straight into my feed reader from now. Wottaguy.

UPDATE: Iron Circus is a female, and I am a sexist toerag. Apologies.

Slate has a lovely John Peel tribute today from an American perspective. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was an American perspective on Peel, but it seems there is:

American music fans listened to him anyway—via the Internet broadcast of his BBC show and, before that, shortwave broadcasts of his BBC World Service program and tapes forwarded by kindly friends in the United Kingdom. We sought Peel’s shows out because he seemed to know about all the good stuff before anybody else. He waved the flag for David Bowie, Nirvana, T. Rex, the Smiths, the Cure, and the White Stripes long before virtually anyone else had heard of them; Elton John, Black Sabbath, New Order, and hundreds of lesser-known bands tell stories about Peel giving them a hand at the beginning of their careers. Every Peel broadcast seemed to include a couple of homemade records that somebody had pressed in an edition of 400 copies, for which he’d carefully read out a mail-order address.

I think that’s rather marvellous. I wonder what a world without Peel would have looked like in America. Would flashbacks on Friends to their schooldays have featured British music so heavily? Would Simple Minds have got to number one? And does this explain the baffling conundrum: why were Flock of Seagulls popular in the States?

According to the Register:

Four in ten IT workers have been sick at their Christmas party while more than third admit to snogging their boss or a colleague, according to research from Sussex internet outfit Sigmer Technologies. The research doesn’t reveal what proportion of people threw up before snogging their boss.

God obviously has a problem with George Bush. Only days before the US election, the Deity engineers the discovery of a pre-human on an Indonesian island which only serves to nail, once again, the real divine wonder of evolutionary theory:

By the same token, evidence for the diversity of human species through time has been downplayed, first by the cultural inertia of stories of an upwards progression towards the human state; second, by the curious chance that Homo sapiens happens to be the only species of human around today - a situation probably unprecedented in 7m years. The evidence for the coexistence of humans and Neanderthals in Europe for at least 10,000 years until Neanderthals disappeared around 30,000 years ago, and the fact that anthropologists have known for years of the multiple lineages of prehumans living in Africa between 4-2m years -has done little to dent the robust idea that humans are so distinct from the rest of the animal world that they rule the earth by virtue of inherent perfection, or divine fiat.The Flores finds could change all that with a single stroke.For one thing, they underscore the fact of human diversity until very recent times. “Maybe little folk from Flores will hammer the point home more effectively because they are so different in anatomy but so close in time,” says Tim White. “How will the creationists cope?”For another, the evidence challenges the human-centric idea that humans characteristically modify their surroundings to suit themselves, rather than allowing natural selection to adapt them to their environment. If the Flores skeleton is evidence of the kind of evolutionary size change more associated with animals such as rats and elephants, this, says Brown “is a clear indicator” of human-like creatures “behaving like all other mammals in terms of their interactions with the environment”.”Darwin and Wallace would be pleased,” adds Tim White. “What better demonstration that humans play by the same evolutionary rules as other mammals?”

Lovely. God doesn’t want George Bush, or any creationist, in the White House, so he demonstrates the wonder of his evolutionary creation method and makes Bush and his American religious creationist zealots look like the idiots they are. Well done God.

And here’s another lovely quote:

Peter Brown, an anthropologist from the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, says: “I would have been less surprised if someone had uncovered an alien.”

There’s been an awful lot of music under the bridge since Elvis went into Sun Studios, and unless you’ve done nothing but listen to music since you were eleven, you haven’t heard most of it. Everyone of us has huge tracts of music to discover, and some of us (mostly male, mostly in their thirties) are vaguely embarrassed that our knowledge is incomplete.

It’s like that scene in David Lodge’s Changing Places, where at a dinner party they play a game where they admit to a great piece of literature they’ve never read. When someone from the English faculty claims not to have read Hamlet, no-one believes him, even though he hasn’t.

As I get older, and as I frankly get a bit more money, I get the chance to revisit some music I’ve never listened to. And what I’m discovering is that it can be just as revolutionary to listen to, say, The Eagles as it is to uncover a latent passion for Captain Beefheart.

One thing I bought recently was The Very Best of Jackson Browne. Now, in my formative years, Jackson Browne was quintessential naff, the kind of thing your dad listened to while you enjoyed the Clash. So how do I find a way to listen to this music now? Because, in the terms laid out by the Clash, it is naff.

There’s a kind of Zen-like process of emptying yourself. Switch off the twitch of fear when the first smooth piano roll comes in, followed swiftly by the polite drums and the immaculate backing vocals. Shut down the sense of queasiness at the musicianship. Unplug the political scepticism at the sound of a white guy from Orange County having anything to worry about.

If you can do all that, it’s worthwhile. There’s some lovely lyrics in there, a kind of gentle counterpoint to Warren Zevon. Fragments of today’s rediscovered Americana are in there; Richmond Fontaine would be happy to put some of this stuff out. And there is a terrible sadness in there, a sense of a party coming to an end, a kind of hippy’s lament.

The upshot is if this stuff was recorded by Rilo Kiley we’d hail it as genius. Context is everything, however cool and informed we think we are.

Sidle up to something naff. You might enjoy it.

Tomorrow night I’m off to the Garage to see Grand National. If you haven’t heard their stuff, their debut album is Kicking the National Habit, and is the kind of music indie bands make when they grew up - think how Blur changed things around post-Britpop with their album Blur and you’ve got a good picture of Grand National, though Grand National are less wilfully obscure because, at the end of the day, it’s exhausting being as pretentious as Damon Albarn, isn’t it.

Grand National are two late twenty-something Londoners, Rupert Lyddon and Lawrence ‘La’ Rudd. Best song on the album is Cherry Tree, a bonkers song with a monster pop chorus which is apparently about one night stands, but as I can’t remember what they are it’s all Greek to me…

My son came into work with me yesterday, despite my assurances that he would find it pretty boring. He did some homework, played in Coffee Break Arcade, hung out in Habbo Hotel for a while, and watched an episode of Blackadder on DVD on my laptop. Not a bad day all round, particularly when you throw in a lunchtime pizza.

But the problem is that even for a 12 year old it’s hard to see what I do all day. From where he sits, I spend the day either looking at a screen and tapping a keyboard occasionally (which, he would argue, is what he does when he’s playing Age of Empires), and chatting to the occasional person who drops by (oh, and swearing a lot, which I became very aware of with him sitting next to me). And this is what I do do all day. But he has a vision of work as being an exciting manufactory process, with people making stuff all day long.

So, fellow information workers, what we need is this - something that sits above our monitors and says “new achievement! web page design completed!” every time we complete something.

If not that, we need super-snazzy offices to compensate for the fact that we don’t appear to be producing anything. The GU offices are most definitely not super-snazzy. On our way home in the evening, my son indicated an office furniture showroom across the road and said “why can’t you have an office like that?” Maybe I should never have left Yahoo! - at least the offices were flash (in California, anyway).

Being a moral coward who just wants to be loved, I didn’t say anything about the death of Lynda Lee Potter last week. Thankfully, David Aaronovitch is less cowardly:

Telling women that other middle-aged women look like wrestlers and have “ugly” bodily features does not strike me as being particularly fearless. Some 60% of British women really don’t like how they look, with most unhappiness concentrated on stomach, hips, thighs and bottom. Lee-Potter gave them surrogates for their own self-loathing, without ever offering them any real relief. In a school it would be called bullying. She might have been nice to Sue Carroll in private (someone has to be). In public, though, she was the epitome of all that is most shitty about British middle-market journalism.

I thought I’d broken my Neal Stephenson addiction. After throwing down my copy of Quicksilver in disgust (breaking my foot in the process) and exclaiming “it’s not about anything and it’s too bloody discursive” I believed I could go on to other authors and maybe, you know, dip into Stephenson for a bit of action every now and again. Nothing I can’t handle, I thought.

And then I read his interview on Slashdot and the whole sordid addication kicked in once more.

Take this on the subject of “should we have data havens?”:

At this point, that is probably a technical question that I might not be competent to answer. I can carry a gig of encrypted data on a thumb drive now, and it doesn’t cost much. Soon it’ll be smaller and cheaper. Millions of people in different countries carrying gigs of data on thumb drives, iPods, cellphones, etc. make for a pretty robust distributed data storage system. It is difficult to imagine how one could build a centralized, hardened facility that would be more robust than that. But perhaps there’s some technical or regulatory angle that I’m failing to appreciate here. I have not kept up to speed on this since Cryptonomicon.

Or this on whether “making money as a writer and more open copyright are compatible in the long term”:

Publishing is a very ancient and crafty industry that existed and flourished before the idea of copyright even existed. When copyright came into existence, the publishing industry dealt with it and moved on. My suspicion is that everything that’s been going on lately will amount to a sort of fire drill that will force publishing to scurry around and make some new arrangements so that they can get back to making money for themselves and for authors.

Isn’t that brilliant and pithy and right? Oh God, I’m in love all over again. Time to disappear with a copy of Cryptonomicon and try and pretend the whole Baroque Cycle thing was just a bad dream that happened to somebody else….