Jon Curnow's Digital Home
More Mac Envy
I have noted the passion of the Macintosh owner before. There’s story on Wired News that suggests some people’s obsession with the beautiful machine goes a little too far [via plasticbag.org].
Anybody reading this site will know that I seem to have lots of opinions on urban transportation.
Anybody reading this site will know that I seem to have lots of opinions on urban transportation. One of my favourite visits of recent weeks was to the London Transport Museum (see pictures) which is housed in an old flower market at Covent Garden. I thought the place was great but then I read about the New York Transit Museum which is actually housed in a historic 1936 subway station in Brooklyn Heights, New York. How cool is that?
This weekend I was visiting my parents in Shropshire and we went to Llangollen in North Wales for the day. I couldn’t get anybody to agree to ride the Llangollen Railway – which is part of the British rail network from Ruabon to Barmouth in North Wales which was closed on 1st April 1968. It would have been a good way to spend a Saturday so, perhaps, I will next time I visit.
My parents live in Shrewsbury which, this year, has been a little protected from the winter flooding by some new flood defences. There seems some dispute about the effectiveness of the defences. If you look at some of these pictures on BBC Shropshire’s site you would have thought that nothing had changed. I am not always glad to be living away from the river but at this time of year I certainly am.
You might not know it, but you are now my gum buddy and it is your responsibility to get me to exercise. I’ll blame you if we don’t go.
In a fit of self deprecation, I mentioned in my last entry that you don’t care what I say here. So you won’t care if I turn you into an invisible friend (but unlike the version I had as a five-year old who was the excuse for opening the car door while traveling at speed) you, my imaginary friend, have a purpose. You see, you are going to be my gym buddy.
Ha, I hear you cry, you can’t find the time to go to the gym. Your busy social life precludes you from even contemplating exercise. Well, my trusty invisible friend, that is but a weak excuse and I am going to take you with me. I will not tolerate that lazy and unhealthy attitude. You see you are gaining the pounds (don’t tell me you only deal in kilos) and I am going to be the one to make you go and exercise and lose the flab. I won’t listen when you say you’re going to the pub (you should have joined me in giving up drink) and I won’t tolerate you going to sit in the sauna rather than working out. I won’t stand for your nervousness when entering the gym and I won’t listen when you say ‘but everyone’s looking at me’.
No, my invisible friend, we are commencing a journey and it’s for your own good.
And we start next Monday.
UPDATE: The alternative to you becoming my gum buddy was posting a picture of my ever-growing stomach on the site as a motivation. But then I thought I might be visiting you in hospital as you recovered from the shock so you can’t get out of it that way.
Pop is good so you will be buying the next Phixx single, won’t you?
I know you don’t care at all but I was incorrect (here and here). The new Phixx single is not out until March 8th according to the newly designed Phixx official web site (which, to be honest, needs some work to work with Mozilla). See, I am launching a campaign for the acceptance of pop as a musical form with people over 16. You must chant ‘pop is good, pop is cool’ every morning and before you go to bed.
While on the subject, Caroline Cooper of carolinephotos.com has some great pictures of the Phixx boys including our favourite Man of the Moment, Andrew.
If you also look at Caroline’s site you will see some photographs of Liberty X taken in November 2003. They are labeled ‘Coronet’ which means they must have been taken at the one-off exclusive gig for World AIDS Day at The Coronet, London SE1 on Sunday 30th November 2003. Which means Caroline must have been one of the people wielding a big lens on that day. How do I know? I was there!
UPDATE: 9 Feb 2004 – I see the Phixx web site now works in Mozilla. Great.
Time to stop worrying about Janet’s boobs.
Is it just me or is most of the world laughing at America’s reaction to Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at the Super Bowl? It really amazes me the way people can get so worked up about a little bit of flesh. Shouldn’t we be celebrating our bodies? It’s not as if Janet showed off a great deal. I would agree that people deserve better but not because I disagree with what what shown but because it’s such a cheap stunt.
One of my current favourite reads, The London News Review, has one of the best pieces written on the subject
By thunder, America is one fucked up country. With one eye it ogles the antics of Trousersnake and his bootilicious buddies, while the other eye is screwed shut in disgust. [Source]
Exactly. Calm down people and don’t buy the record. Of course, had it been the Trousersnake having a wardrobe malfunction it would all have been different.
I’ve slightly changed the design for my site.
You may notice that the colours on the site have changed. I’ve lost the duller beige/brown/gray colouring in favour of something a little more colourful. I am not sure it really works at the moment but I will play with the colour settings over the next few days. As you can probably tell, I do not have an eye for colour so I used quick colour to help me. It’s quite useful to find colours that are supposed to work well together but I wish it could find a greater range of colours. I’ll see if I can get used to it. I am pleased to have lost the harsh, bold red that was used for the links.
I gave up drink for Janaury.
I didn’t mention this before but I am rather pleased with myself for having given up alcohol for the whole of January. I don’t want you to think I’ve been craving drink or anything like that, but I decided it would be good for me after the all the alcohol you tend to consume over Christmas.
The interesting thing I learnt was that the most difficult thing was nothing at all to do with the actual drink. The hardest part of the exercise was dealing with other people. To start with people question your reasons. A test of will power became my default answer. Then there was their behaviour when I was around. It seems that having a wholly sober person in the room while you drink can be very difficult or un-nerving for some people. I had no idea people would react in that way – perhaps it made people face up to the amount they were drinking.
I also found some social situations very difficult because, deep down, I am quite shy. Drink is certainly a social lubricant and without it some situations where a little awkward. By the end of the month I was definitely feeling better about meeting people in pubs and at parties without drinking, but it wasn’t easy. It’s also not easy to be in those situations and find an alternative. London pubs do not have the greatest of choice. After a evening drinking colas and orange/lemonade drinks your stomach feels worse that it would have done on double the beers. My top tip is to drink Virgin Marys.
As to my health, I honestly don’t feel any better or any worse for the lack of drink. I guess it proves I never really over did it anyway but I expected something to change.
I imagine that I will have a beer tomorrow.
A quick look at interest in this site in January 2004.
Traffic to this site in January 2004 seems to have taken a little bit of a leap. I see that Justin Timberlake was the most searched term. Unfortunately, dear Andrew Kinlochan hasn’t scored any comments. February is supposed to see the release of the new Phixx single so I’ll wait to see if traffic to the Man of the Moment section follows other trends where the visits raise with some outside public event concerning the individual. It’s not science but it is interesting to watch.
Just a little bit of fun for today.
Just a little bit of fun for today:
Pholph’s Scrabble Generator     My Scrabble© Score is: 11. What is your score? Get it here. |
What’s yours?
Tim Berners-Lee is honoured.
Worthy of note – and not covered by a lot of the media – but Tim Berners-Lee has been awarded a knighthood for his work on developing HTML which allowed the web to become a useful tool for millions of people. Whatever you think of the Honours List I think this recognition is certainly deserved. [FT: Unsung heroes dominate UK honours list]
Despite the fact that you can be critical of television over Christmas 2003, I really think that it served me some unexpected movie gems.
There was something of an 80s flashback over the Christmas period which set me thinking about my teenage years – although I am not suggesting you should now read my regurgitated teenage angst. The flashbacks came in the form of three films on free-to-air television that I caught by accident (by which I mean I didn’t know there were on until I flicked past them).
Firstly, we had the excellent Footloose (Kevin Bacon, dancing) which is a film I must have seen several hundred times and never get bored. It’s those standing up for you rights and proving your responsibility moments that resonated with people of a certain age when it was released. It’s helped by the fact that the 80s electro-pop soundtrack was pretty good (for the time) and Kevin Bacon is moody and supports a tight fitting vest at one point!
Then, on New Years Day, we had another teen angst film in the shape of The Breakfast Club. From the John Hughes stable (he made one of my all time favourite movies, Some Kind of Wonderful) this was a teen film with a difference. The film is – almost entirely – dialogue driven and there is very limited action. It’s set in the detention room on a Saturday where a small group of students (of all the stereotypes) must spend the day together as punishment for various misdemeanours.
Again, we are treated to the teen isolation, the misfits and the stupidity of the adult world. And, it also features a soundtrack that instantly brings to mind the mid-Eighties including Don’t You by Simple Minds – which is possibly the only Simple Minds track that I can listen to again and again.
Sandwiched in between Footloose and The Breakfast Club and shown sometime in that almost-dead period between Christmas and New Year was the first Back To The Future movie (which again has a soundtrack of it’s time featuring Huey Lewis and The News, Eric Clapton and Lindsey Buckingham). What struck me about it (apart from the now dated effects) was how good a film it really was. There are some superb performances in it (Christopher Lloyd and Crispin Glover) and it was a real combination of teen and sci-fi movies. It was also the first film I can recall going to the cinema more than once to see – it must really have inspired me as a 15 year-old. Superb stuff.
So, despite the fact that you can be critical of television over this past Christmas period, I really think that it served me some unexpected movie gems. And for that, I am grateful.
Like Jerry, my final thoughts on 2003.
If I can be allowed to be more self-centred – or inward-looking – than usual, I have found the process of re-reading the year’s worth of entries to be very interesting. Not only have I surprised myself with some of the pieces that I have written, but when viewing them all together, it seems that the site is a lot more coherent than I imagined. There are some key groupings of themes that have emerged – it’s clear I have a fascination with transport – and there are considerably fewer trivial pieces.
Many of the words I have written are, of course, about my life and might be considered to be trivial to some, but I feel I have gained an insight into myself with some of the longer pieces. And, it is those longer pieces which have most startled me on the re-reading: I must make a conscious effort to write more discussion works. Perhaps I should open the comments on the main body of the site to stimulate further thinking.
Of all the other sites I have read across the year, I still come back to my old faithfuls. So, this is the point where I should wish Tom, Jase, Jason, Bart, Meg, Phil, Eric, Chris, Bravo, Nick and Luke a very Happy New Year. Oh, and those are just the top-listed ones in my Bloglines subscriptions.
Bloglines is to be nominated as my tool of the year for 2003, it’s made the whole business of reading other sites so much easier (if only Blogger users would provide nice RSS feeds). Of course, I shouldn’t forget Six Apart who, via Movable Type, make all this possible.
Writing is one of the few creative outlets I have, and I am happy to have it as a hobby – it seems more useful than making a model of St Paul’s Cathedral from matchsticks.
Best wishes for 2004 to all who come across this page.
This is really an inoffensive, somewhat amusing, light-hearted, feel-good British comedy.
Love Actually is not the film I imagined it to be. I guess you can call it a romantic comedy and it seemed like a sensible film to watch on New Year’s Day. The cinema was packed which suggests we wen’t the only ones with that idea.
I should say from the beginning, it’s sentimental and feel-good. If those words put you off then you shouldn’t really see this film. I do think, however, that if you have ever (even once) got a little lovey-dovey then could go and see this movie and get something out of it.
It’s weaves a whole stack of separate stories together about people in love or finding love (and even out of love) with the backdrop of Christmas in London. Richard Curtis (of Four Weddings And A Funeral fame) makes his directorial debut and provides a very well-shot image of 21st Century London at Christmas. There are some really well-done sequences around the city which gives somebody like me – who thinks he’s seen all he wants to of London – something to smile at.
Having said it’s well-shot it is not without problems. Too many stories are intertwined leaving too many questions unanswered. When you leave a cinema questioning some of your understanding about who was who and where things were set you know that at some point this film failed. Why have the whole Wisconsin sequence, for example? And what happened to the Laura Linney parts – I suspect there is something on a cutting room floor that explains all that somewhere.
But don’t let that put you off. Liam Neeson’s storyline is great (even if it stretched believability a little), Emma Thompson is superb (and you will feel for her as she opens a Christmas present) as Alan Rickman‘s wife (he too stands out with a great, typical Rickman performance). Even Hugh Grant is believable as a Prime Minister who falls for his tea lady (Martine McCutcheon).
What I liked, although I have no idea if they will translate to the US, are the really British touches. Ant and Dec are the kid’s TV presenters; Jo Wiley is a DJ and Wes Butters does the chart run down for the Christmas Number One. And there wasn’t an over abundance of red London busses – which must be a first for British films.
This is really an inoffensive, somewhat amusing, light-hearted, feel-good British comedy and I hope it does well. If you read the message boards over at the Internet Movie Database you’ll read about people walking out in shock and disgust – which, if you’ve seen the film, is just as amusing.
While I will miss the disappearances, they are – of course, just blips in the workings of the web. What I find sad is that, in time, it is likely that all this content will disappear from servers as the owners stop paying for the space that houses the sites. It would be like burning every copy of a book you had read – vanished. It’s part of a shared history that disappears.
I always feel it’s a little sad when a blog dies – particularly when all trace of it is removed. If it’s a blog I have been reading for some time then it feels as if a part of my history disappears. It is one of the strange things about the online experience – it’s very easy for things to disappear; things that were once inspirational, useful or entertaining.
One of my earliest online inspirations was Jase Wells. Although I’d been trying out building web pages for the company I worked for, Jase was the inspiration for my first home page (sadly long gone from the servers on which it resided and a great example of what I am talking about). Jase is still alive and well but the focus of his site has changed and, while it’s updated much more often now, the coming out story that was such a useful resource has gone (although it’s still available via archive.org).
Another Jase, now Snoboardr of OutEverywhere, had some personal pages once that were also fairly important in my use of the web.
Then there are the blogs that disappear. Mike of Troubled Diva fame (who I was introduced to via the excellent 40in40) put the blog on indefinite hold at the beginning of December. 8Legs went the same way a few weeks later. And now Chris has packed up. I don’t know Chris nor have I ever mailed or commented his site but I read it almost religiously. Why? Well, he has a talent for writing to the extent that almost everything he wrote was compelling. It was his writing style which was an inspiration because, by the time I discovered his site, I had been writing this blog for a while.
At least Daniel’s said it’s unlikely that he will give up completely.
While I will miss the disappearances, they are – of course, just blips in the workings of the web. What I find sad is that, in time, it is likely that all this content will disappear from servers as the owners stop paying for the space that houses the sites. It would be like burning every copy of a book you had read – vanished. It’s part of a shared history that disappears.
Diary writers perform an unintentional function as social historians. If you go all the way back to Pepys or think more recently of somebody like Kenneth Williams, their diaries are read today and give us an insight into what the world was like. If Mike or Chris has written their blogs as paper-based diaries there may very well have been something for historians to use in the future. If they don’t keep some kind of record of what they wrote in an accessible form then it will be lost to the future and people trying to understand life in the 21st Century will be poorer.
So, to those who wrote content I enjoyed reading, a plea. Archive your content for future generations. Regardless of how you do it, keep it.
Oh, and thanks for sharing your thoughts. I enjoyed them all.
Humidity is rising – Barometer’s getting low, According to all sources, the street’s the place to go.
I have been recovering from my trip to the USA by spending a great deal of today asleep and generally caching up on the mail, the christmas cards, the washing and all the other things you need to do when you’ve been away for a week. It’s almost Saturday night and I am going supermarket shopping (you see, dear reader, I have a very exciting life).
While I managed to listen to the radio and some CDs I did, eventually, resort to music television so that there were some pictures to provide an alternative visual while I drank my tea (real tea, not a USA-style tea, is one of the greater comforters in my life).
The Hits is showing some so-called classics this afternoon. The video for It’s Raining Men (The Weather Girls) looked so dated that it made me wonder what those brought-up entirely on the sophistication of the modern day music video would make of these dated images.
Interestingly, it occurred to me to that it’s the video that looks a lot older than the music sounds. Allowing for the fact that It’s Raining Men is part of the soundtrack to my youth, I still think it’s the video technology that has made the noticeable leaps in the last 20 years.
And it’s 20 years next March since It’s Raining Men was a hit for The Weather Girls. Originally charting in the UK in August 1983 it eventually made number 2 in March 1984. It’s one of those songs that I would have sworn topped the charts but, apparently, not. I would imagine that a combination of Nena’s ‘99 Red Ballons‘, Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello‘ and Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex‘ kept it from the number 1 slot.