The personal memoirs of Randi Mooney
I think I’ll catch a pigeon
To teach it how to dance
I’ll keep it in the wardrobe
And feed it bread from France
My pigeon will be stubborn
And steadfastly refuse
To switch off Silent Witness
So I can watch the news
My pigeon will make gravy
With string and twigs and dirt.
Our guests will smile indulgently
But leave before dessert.
(with thanks to wetwebwork for the pigeon photo)
I’m not a superstitious man. Except in the dark or whilst alone. If I were, perhaps I would consider my bike to be CURSED. The first time I rode it (home from the shop) I got a puncture. The next time I rode it I was run over by a transit van.
Anyway I fell off last Friday - hurting my ribs. It was a very low-speed and unspectacular fall, but I was winded and my ribs were bruised. Because you can’t take bikes on the Underground, I had to cycle home at low speed, groaning and puffing, and I had to spend Friday evening in Casualty. Even the smallest things hurt - breathing, lying down, flushing the toilet. I haven’t sneezed in days…
While spending a week’s holiday in Gran Canaria, (it was a last-minute deal, we booked it the day before) my girlfriend and I noticed the preponderance of Comic Sans, a horrible font.
As we noticed more and more instances of this pernicious weed (menus, shop fronts, signs, notices, posters, fliers, etc) we developed a kind of shorthand “look, Comic Sans” gesture. The satisfaction - similar to that felt in the mid-nineties upon sighting of a prime mullet, before the term had seeped into the public consciousness - was short-lived. It became less funny and our tastes became more discerning.
Now only the crassest use of the font will hold our interest. We haven’t seen any funeral homes using Comic Sans yet, but pictured above is a handout from a course my girlfriend attended. It quotes (probably erroneously as it turns out - see Wikipedia article) Petronius Arbiter, a noted satirist and courtier in Nero’s Rome, who committed suicide in AD 66.
The Jedi Song is an animation which features everything: winged monkeys, Jar-Jar’s death, eggs on swings, and the full text of an undiscovered Shakespeare play.
Alright… not that last one.
The video was made for a song originally strummed by my good friend Mark Huckerby one Saturday morning in Wandsworth circa 1998. I had come up from Cowfold to do a student radio show together with Mark, Nick Ostler, Catherine Chew, Paul Lewis and Salim Fadhley. We made the song into a short sketch involving a drunk Obi-Wan Kenobi trying to use his powers to get a free Shepherd’s Pie.
A while later (about five years later) the very talented Rob Stangroom rearranged the song into the current version. He played all the instruments and sung along with Nick and Mark. I can’t remember why I wasn’t there… they gave me very specific directions which led me to a dark thicket where I was assaulted by three men in balaclavas.
Anyway I swore one day to animate to the song and with only five days to spare before the new film came out, and with a new job and moving house to contend with, I begun the Herculean task. It’s a bit rushed in places, and there are some places where I would have liked to animate instead of having still images. Hey-ho, maybe one day.
UPDATE: If you are having difficulties playing the movie please try updating your software before asking for help here. If you use Windows we suggest that you view the web-page using Mozilla Firefox. If you want to play the MP3 file, we suggest downloading Apple iTunes - It’s free. If you use a Mac, then things should work fine in Safari or Mozilla Firefox. We suggest that you do not use Internet Explorer. As with Windows, iTunes is completely free and has no problem playing the MP3 file.
I work in Soho in London, and for a while now have been disturbed by the number of trilbies being worn by media herberts. Just like “the rudest horse in the world“, (although not now “sat down heavily on the cake”, which yields 2 results - one being this blog and the other being a LibDem blog which has been aggregating content… which is something I don’t completely understand but have resolved to ask Sal about.) searching for the exact phrase “ironic trilby”, yielded 0 results.
Although maybe the reason is that these people aren’t wearing them ironically. Or maybe my understanding of irony is way off the mark.
I’ve got no voice. I can’t vote tomorrow because, as I’ve been moving around so much recently, I neglected to update my details soon enough and I’m not registered in my area. I feel a little ashamed as this is the first election in which I have been eligible but haven’t voted. So I figured that the most useful thing I can do is try to hijack somebody’s vote by influencing their opinion.
Vote LibDem. Locally, vote Green.
If I’m honest, I find myself inclined towards a protest vote. My opinion is based on little apart from my habitual revulsion for the Tories (retraction of public services, immigration controls), coupled with a feeling of having been misled over the war in Iraq, which I wavered over, rather than being entirely for or against.
Anyway - if you’re unsure, maybe you can just think of me and donate your vote to me - just tip a cheery wink to the skies and know that I will be beaming down on you from my orbiting space-jar.
I guess that’s all I can do!
Recently I’ve been haunted by the cute, funky bleeps and clanks of 8-bit music. Especially pecan medley by an artist named yuppster, which includes a short but stirring tribute to the seminal eighties hit Take On Me, which is notable for its use of rotoscoping.
Feeling inspired, I tried to find out how to make music like this, but it seems that there is no easy way - you have to plug Game boy carts into your brain-stem or compile some somethings. I even tried installing the CPC6128 emulator on the Mac and loading up an old music program, figuring I could use… I don’t know, some Audio program… to record to MP3. but the interface was taking too long and my initial squirt of enthusiasm was soon smothered in the labyrinth of procedure.
It all got me to thinking about the lo-fi music I grew up hearing on my Amstrad CPC 464 and how evocative negative space can be, like the black backgrounds in those old games. Since Wipeout hit the Playstation about ten years ago, all the blank space in video games seems to have been taken up all kinds of stuff, adverts, flashing things, rendered landscapes etc. Sometimes this is how I feel walking through London - it’s like a hundred He-Man adverts a minute, all screaming for my attention. I defy you, He-Man! I am Skeletor!
I went to Trafalgar Square today to watch Nelson Mandela deliver a speech in support of the Make Poverty History campaign. At one point I looked up to see Horatio Nelson standing on the famous column, then down to see Nelson Mandela, one of the most remarkable leaders of our time, commanding an audience of what must have been eight or nine thousand. Two of the most famous Nelsons in history, unless you count Nelson Muntz from the Simpsons.
Read the transcript of his speech here.
Click here for the BBC article about the event.
Coincidentally, if you go into a pub and ask for “two Nelsons” you will be served two pints of Stella Artois, Nelson being rhyming slang for this strong continental lager (Nelson Mandela = Stella).
I’m making light of it but the whole event was very moving and awe-inspiring. I couldn’t hear much, especially as I arrived late and had to stand at the back of the crowd where I only got a tiny view of the great man from far away. But among the few words I could make out were the following:
“…overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity.
It is an act of justice.
It is the protection of a fundamental human right,
the right to dignity and a decent life.”
I’ve been wearing the white wrist-band for a few weeks now, since a colleague got back from Africa where she had been filming for Comic Relief and to be perfectly honest, when I read the words Make Poverty History on it I can’t help feeling the same vague hopelessness that such words bring. The obstacles are so huge, the widening gap between rich and poor is so entrenched and reversing it is against the interests of so many powerful people. It’s difficult to know what to think, how to estimate the chances that something will be done instead of more promises which fall “tragically behind”.
According to Ananova, Terry Nutkins wants to make a biopic (or should that be autobiopic?) about his own life. Nutkins, 51, who lives in Glenelg, west Scotland, said the film would mainly focus on his childhood experiences of growing up with author Gavin Maxwell - whose own life was chronicled in the film Ring Of Bright Water. Nutkins would like Dennis Waterman to play the part of himself (Nutkins) in his later years, even though Waterman is 5 years older than him! (My italics.) For those who don’t know, Terry Nutkins is famous to a generation in the UK for presenting children’s programmes about wildlife, including Animal Magic and The Really Mild Show, and for having some of his fingers bitten off by an otter.
Dictionary.com tells me that Synecdoche is “a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).”
Compare this with Metonymy, which I am told is “a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.”
So what’s the difference? Difficult to say. Can you use steel for military power? What figure of speech would this exemplify?