meish dot org: life, unfolding

I sometimes play a game when I’m reading stuff on the internet. It’s called Commentogeddon – or, if you prefer, Crystal Ballocks. Do you want to join in?

Here’s how you play:

1. Read an article which has comments open. Since most things have comments these days – wisely or otherwise, YMMV – this can mean anything on a blog, news site, content portal or whatever. It helps if the comment count is greater than 0, but don’t read the comments just yet.

2. As you are reading the piece “above the line” (i.e the blog post, article, original content), try to predict the nature of the comments which will follow. Your prediction may concern form, tone or content of comments. For example, you might keep a mental tally (NB this is not the same as a mentalist tally) as follows:
– there will be a comment consisting of just one word
– someone will complain about the topic, insisting that this has already been discussed and concluded
– people will mention (and take issue with) the third paragraph

3. Now read the comments.

4. Award yourself a point for each comment type or form you correctly predicted would occur “below the line” as a result of the piece above it.

Over the years, you will hone your instincts to such an intuitive level that you’ll be able to accurately predict the content of any thread without needing to read it.

Whether you then decide to do so is entirely up to you.

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Went to the AOP awards dinner last night. We won six!

There was a photobooth. And champagne. Oops.

I don’t often write about work here, but the news this morning is too exciting not to share.

1. The Guardian is moving to publish exclusively online after 188 years in print. This partnership between Twitter and the Guardian is called Gutter.

2. We’ve extended the Gutter partnership to work with WordPress, to build a bold new commenting platform which limits all responses to 140 characters or less. This is known as GutterPress.

I like the logos.

1. The crushing inevitability that the irritating/drunk/loud bloke on the train will get off at your stop and may well turn out to be a neighbour
2. The memory of a scent you once loved
3. The experience of gorging yourself on a TV show via some time-shifted electronic medium
4. The place where someone is when they’re on their mobile phone on a train
5. The surefire knowledge that the cat is only sitting on you because there’s nothing warmer in the area, but as soon as there is, s/he will defect
6. The warm spot on the sofa/bed/your lap after the cat has gone
7. The realisation that your friends are at a party to which you haven’t been invited, which you didn’t expect to be anyway because you don’t know the host/ess
8. The thronging of wankers on mobile phones on public transport directly around your seat
9. The ability to understand a language but not speak it
10. The person who thinks the signs prohibiting smoking, feet on seats, parking, making noise or throwing litter don’t actually apply to them
11. The dream you have in between pushes of the snooze button
12. A pair of glasses which has an entirely redundant pane of plain glass in front of one eye
13. The realisation as the door swings closed that your keys are inside
14. The moment or place you reach having left the house when you realise that you have come out without your phone/earrings/book/purse/travelcard but it’s slightly too far to go back to collect it/them
15. The film of watery stuff that rests on top of the ketchup when the bottle has been unused for a bit and which can spurt out and soil your food if you don’t shake first
16. The disappointment of spending a large-ish amount of money on a game console or particular game and, after the first flurry of play, realising that you can’t be arsed anymore

Actually, there’s a word for the last one already: in my house we call it Playstationnui or Wiiui. I don’t think there’s an Xbox equivalent, or if there is, I haven’t thought of it yet.
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I wasn’t going to comment on the election of that “tallest-dwarf” smug-faced buffoon into public office while I was in the US, except that now the deed is done, I am roundly looking forward to him being exposed for the zero-content publicity-seeking toffo timewaster that he probably is, and all his bold initiatives being exposed as the rather underthought and populist reactionary twaddle that they no doubt will reveal themselves to be in due course.

No-one comes here to read my whinging about politics, and the internet doesn’t need another blog pretending that London is Where It’s At, so I expect that most of the above can go unsaid.

However, I just spotted this on the BBC website:

I love the idea of news trees – juicy ripe news ready for plucking from the bough, or tumbling onto the heads of unsuspecting picnickers/budding physicists in Hyde Park. A bountiful harvest of golden news ready for pressing into RSS cider. Small birds making nests among headline twigs.

It’s like something that The Day Today (“slamming the wasps from the pure apple of truth”) would have come up with, and thus utterly at home in Boris’s manifesto.

Alas, the story itself reveals this fancy to be merely a typo, which is a shame because with all the stabbings and shootings in the city and the time we’re going to spend waiting for a Routemaster 2.0 bus that will never show up, it might be nice to have nugget of fresh news to nibble on (remember, editors recommend you have five a day!), harvested from a nearby tree, once in a while.

Reading this story:

[Microsoft] has filed a patent application for a system which links workers to their computers via wireless sensors which measure their metabolism.

It would allow employees to remotely measure body temperature, heart rate, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.

“This particular patent application, in general, describes an innovation aimed at improving activity monitoring systems and uses the monitoring of user heart rate as an example of the kind of physical state that could be monitored to detect when users need assistance with their activities”

….I found myself wondering whether it was time Mr Clippy had a revamp…

A few months ago, I made a televisual gold programme name generator which TV commissioning Editors (especially those from BBC3/Channel five/Sky three/ITV3) could use to create titles for their summer season of programming.

Now that the all-important autumn season is swift approaching, it’s time to plunge once again into the bottom of the programming barrel and see which tired old formats can be recycled with a new twist for the gaping sofa-dwelling hoardes.

After whole nanoseconds of analysis, I’ve discovered that the secret to this type of television planning is as follows:

a) find an established programme concept
b) keep the basic format, but substitute the focal aspect

Hey presto, new programmes! You’ve already got the sets, too (not that anyone uses sets anymore…), not to mention the ‘talent’.

Like a monkey with a typewriter, simply hit the big shiny button below and – hey presto – eventually you might find the highly derivative televisual concept the world’s been waiting for!

Your show pitch concept will appear in the box beneath. Simply copy, paste, get a prime-time slot scheduled and await your inevitable promotion. (NB: may not work in non-Firefox browsers)
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So, for the last few weeks, I’ve had a fragment of a pastiche song lyric floating in my head as I sit idly on the tube, but haven’t managed to get any further with it.

In the spirit of harnessing our collective wisdom/crowd-sourcing, I thought maybe you might be able to help.

The tune: Coldplay’s In My Place (video link)

The lyrics so far:

On MySpace, On MySpace
Were contacts I couldn’t erase
Just get lost
Oh yeah

Well, I said I hadn’t got very far.

Over to you.

So in 2001, I wrote a post about how you could recreate your very own Glastonbury festival experience in the comfort of your own home.

Given that six and a half years have passed, and things have moved on a bit, and in honour of the festival’s arrival this weekend, I thought it might be worth looking at updating it again. So, building on the previous post, and without further ado, here’s

DIY GLASTONBURY 2007

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I can’t help it. I’m not a big celeb-follower, and I tend to think that I wouldn’t know most modern celebrities (soap stars, pop acts, etc) if I was squished up against them in a crowd of people calling their name.

Famous people (as distinct from celebrities) are another matter again – some I recognise but can’t name. Some I can even go as far as placing in a particular context (TV show? Sports? A film?), but if they’re not in that context when I see them, I’m left hopelessly clamming. I’m constantly being teased in our household for referring to people as “that bloke from, y’know, that programme about houses” or whatever.

That being said, I’ve noticed recently that in the course of my new commute and working environs, I’m seeing many more famous people. For example, in the last twenty-four hours I’ve seen Chris Barrie, Keanu Reeves, Billy Connolly, Kristin Scott Thomas, one of the Bee Gees, Andy from that Little Britain sketch and David Caruso.

Of course, it’s just possible that I might have seen people who bear a resemblance to the above, and my pollution-affected brain is filling in the rest. There must be a word for this: mistakenly identifying people. False-recognition syndrome. Aphasia for faces. Afascia?

I prefer to think that the streets of sunny Clerkenwell are thronged with showbiz luminaries, though.