Of course a monstrous fable

WARNING Mango et al: contains positive sentiments about summer

2009-07-11T20:47:10Z

Summer: not as scary as I thought!

In other news, you know what's pretty great? Summer!

This is surprising to me! Summer is supposed to be a nightmare: three months of misery and rashes and sunburn, of staying up till six in the morning in order to get to the fruit and veg shop before it's too hot to breathe outside, of giving up on baking and possibly eating in favour of lying around looking pathetic and crying out for ice-cubes. But it turns out, the English climate differs significantly from the Australian climate! This shouldn't surprise me, especially as it's part of why I moved, but it's taken a while to really sink in.

This is my third year in London, and for the first two I never quite trusted summer: sure, it seemed pleasant enough, but here I was in a country without air conditioning, and who could tell when the weather might turn on me? But three summers in, and following a "heat wave" that would be known in Adelaide as "oh, thank goodness, the heat wave's over", I think I'm ready to accept that actually, I find summer here pretty enjoyable.

It's a cultivated enjoyment - I have to maintain it through the careful application of fans, summer dresses, ice-cream, water-pistols, excessive raspberries, time for lounging around in the garden, and time for wandering around at night and sitting on famous London landmarks while reading books intended for 12-year-olds. But these are sacrifices I'm willing to make.

Festivals: might they, too, be less terrifying than I think?

I am still, however, very nervous about that hallmark of an English summer, the "festival". Not the sort of festival where you go to a big mixed arts venue made out of concrete, wander along a riverbank or lakeside terrace, drink some slightly overpriced coffee, and wonder whether to go for the production of A Doll's House on motorbikes, Edward II on fire, or Coppélia on stilts. The other sort, where you go and stay in a tent in a field.

I am going to one of these, specifically Latitude, as part of my work with Hide&Seek, in order to run some games there. I'm quite scared by this prospect, because it's in a TENT, in a FIELD, for DAYS, and apparently it's going to be either muddy outside or hot in the tent (it's not clear whether this means England hot or real hot). Also I don't usually like live music, and there is no way to get back early, and it turns out there's a huge list of things I need (mattress of some description! Wellington boots! Long socks! Apparently you're supposed to take special toilet paper? I'm not sure in what way its specialness manifests).

But if summer can be nice, approached in the correct and slightly careful manner, maybe festivals can be too?

So, er, is anyone else going? If you are, you should come and play our games, or at least reassure me that it will all be very pleasant and that you will come and say hello to me! I'm told I will probably enjoy it. At the very least, I enjoy its website's dual conviction that I shouldn't bring ANYTHING MADE OF GLASS AT ALL and that it is VERY IMPORTANT TO BRING A BOTTLE OPENER.

Probably don't actually jump in!

2009-07-11T19:28:19Z

Hey, just in case anyone's desperate for updates on movies starring members of the High School Musical cast which are not themselves part of the HSM world: don't bother with Jump In!.

It's kinda okay! And the premise, at least, is charming. High School Musical, you may remember from my previous repeated posts on the subject, features a boy whose father, a basketball coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves basketball, but he also wants... to SIIIIIING.

Jump In! features a boy whose father, a boxing coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves boxing, but he also wants... to jump rope competitively for a double-dutch team.

(Clearly this bespeaks a desperate attempt to keep remaking the same movie with as few changes as possible ("lead male has aw~~ful~~esome hair"), which is great because it will, as joranj helped me deduce, inevitably lead to a movie starring Hat Guy from HSM, whose father, a spear-hunting coach and ex-champion, desperately wants his son to follow in his footsteps. His son, however, is torn: he loves spear-hunting, but he also wants to join his next-door-neighour's synchronised swimming team. There will be a huge swimming spears-versus-sparkles water-dance number.)

Anyway, Jump In!. Jump In!, it turns out, isn't very good, though it does deliver on its implicit promise of lengthy jump-rope dance sequences, which are mostly pretty great, except for this one move that they keep doing despite the fact that it looks very very clearly like wheelbarrow-position jump-rope sex. To be fair there are probably only so many ways for two people to jump up and down repeatedly in close contact with each other that don't involve looking a bit inappropriate for the playground.

So this newfangled "telephone" thing

2009-06-25T11:15:21Z

Hey! It turns out my telephone is actually capable of making phone calls to numbers that aren't in its directory! It has taken me two and a half years to realise this: apparently it involves pressing the little button with a picture of a telephone on it. Thanks, random person who borrowed my phone and explained this to me!

The fact that I've only just realised this means I have a directory filled with two and a half years' worth of mysterious numbers belonging to people named, among the five Alexes, three Amandas and three Matthews:
6 [no idea who this is; I don't think I know any cylons, but then, I suppose the point about cylons is that I wouldn't]
Aha [no idea; I do not think I know any Norwegian pop bands]
captain [no idea]
copper [no idea]
curry! [actually I'm pretty sure this one is the local curry takeaway]
espiougog [I guess this is a predictive text malfunction?]
fictional [no idea]
ryman
ryman2
rymans [these are, I now recall, all the result of a long, boring, stationery-hunting day]
sky [no idea]
spy [no idea; I don't think I know any spies, but then, I suppose the point about spies is much the same as the point about cylons above]
swarm [no idea; I am pretty sure I do not know any swarms]

Brighton! It's pretty great

2009-05-10T09:54:00Z

REASONS I SHOULD MOVE TO BRIGHTON

1. The sea
2. It is quite a lot cheaper than London
3. There are those bungee trampoline things, which I've never tried but they look pretty great
4. The stone beaches are still, after many visits, funny to me
5. Its scones seem generally better than London scones
6. Half-price entry for residents to museum exhibitions!
7. The turquoise metalwork near the sea goes really well with my spring coat
8. It remains willing at all times to wallow unapologetically in Brighton stereotypes, thus:

REASONS I SHOULDN'T MOVE TO BRIGHTON

1. Most of my friends are in London
2. As is my lovely job
3. I would replace my "overcome by desire to move to Brighton every time I visit" problem with a new but strangely familiar "overcome by desire to move to London every time I visit" problem

Not quite as bad as actually being 17

2009-05-08T13:22:44Z

You are going to have to accept as a premise, at this point, that roz_mcclure and I are collectively required to go to any movie which combines (1) a ludicrous premise, and (2) teenagers. Otherwise this post is just going to get derailed immediately into "you went to what? You paid money to see 17 Again? You what?"

So, that premise accepted: roz_mcclure and I went to see 17 Again. We'd planned to ready ourselves by picnicking in a Chelsea park and sundresses, but as habituées of Chelsea will know, there are no parks in Chelsea: only locked private squares with signs reading POOR PEOPLE KEEP OUT. So instead we sat in the gutter outside a locked square, drinking dessert wine from plastic champagne flutes and unwrapping chocolate cake from High School Musical 3 kitchen towel ("clean up your kitchen with High School Musical 3 and Thirst Pockets!"). Inside the fence, polo-shirted families played cricket and laughed merrily.

And then 17 Again. If you've missed the side-of-a-bus advertisements, 17 Again is a movie in which Troy from High School Musical lives in the 1980s, grows up in the present day to become that guy from Friends, and then gets turned by a magical janitor into his 17-year-old self. It is... it is pretty bad. More than pretty bad, it is incredibly messed up. It is possibly the most messed-up movie I have ever watched all the way through. There are so many things wrong with it that there is no way to describe them all; but fortunately, as we sat in the pub afterwards, a magical janitor dropped the Table of Contents of a masters thesis from 2043 through a hole in time, saving us the trouble of trying:

Dissertation for a Masters of Early 21st Century Studies
University of Battersea and Kilburn
"17 Again: No, Seriously, What The Hell?"

1. Troy From HSM, Please Put Your Shirt Back On
2. Lol incest
3. When Nice Girls Put Out: it's all in the family
4. Our Journey So Far: no, wait, what?
5. What's the age of consent in America again?
6. Teen Pregnancy: let God decide
7. Avoiding Racism: it's easy when everyone's white
8. Vapid Teenage Whores
9. It's Fine As Long As You're Rich: male nerds and "no means yes"
10. This film contains every single thing that was wrong with early twenty-first century western culture

APPENDIX A: Strangely, I would have been more okay with the momflirting if he had really been 17.
APPENDIX B: The lectures on female virtue: still a no.

TRUFFLE THE CAT IS STARTLED BY FELINE PROSTITUTE'S ADVANCES, ARGUABLY REVEALS SEX

2009-04-03T13:01:35Z

SCANDAL. Gosh. This may require some context, and I'm a little overexcited, so bear with me for a moment. Do any of you remember Truffle the Cat? For those of you who don't and are too lazy to follow the link, a quick summary. Somerfield, a chain of small supermarkets, puts out a monthly magazine. This magazine features a regular interview with the pet of a reader (typically a dog or a cat, but on occasion a hamster, rabbit or other more unusual animal). This monthly interview is conducted by Truffle. This is Truffle:

For several months last year, the interviews stopped, but I wrote in and complained and Truffle returned "by popular demand", which obviously was my personal triumph for 2008 and meant our household could go back to its monthly live readthroughs of Truffle's latest adventure.

Truffle—whose sex has never been revealed—is a lascivious creature who tries to seduce both dogs and cats, though (s)he is typically less taken with other animals. This has been even more distinct since Truffle's return from exile. Recent issues typify these tendencies, well past the point of deniability...

Extract from Truffle's interview with Tara, a tiny and pert-eared dog, showing Truffle's predatory side:

Tara: My mum says I am the perfect companion — friendly to a fault!
Truffle: Well, I myself am on the lookout for a new companion...
Tara: Oh dear. Well, I'm very busy being vigilant at home, so I'd better be going.

Extract from Truffle's interview with Foxie, a ferrett, showing Truffle's bias against animals that are not cats or dogs:

Foxie: But I like to play too — I love chewing on rubber.
Truffle: Can't say I see the attraction in that myself.
Foxie: Oh you really should try it some time.
Truffle: I might give it a miss, if that's all right with you.

(You'll have to trust me when I tell you that Truffle would pretty clearly have jumped on this, or any, offer if it had been extended by a cat or a dog - Truffle's tastes are wide-ranging and his/her advances are if anything only inflamed by the revelation that a young labrador is not very well house-trained, for example.)

So, right, that's got you more or less up-to-speed. The main points are:
1. Truffle is a cat who interviews pets in a national magazine handed out at supermarkets.
2. Truffle's biological sex and gender identity have never been revealed.
3. It has been increasingly impossible to argue that Truffle's lascivious ways are not present in the text.
4. These things please me, and also please various housemates, ex-housemates and tolerant visitors but particularly roz_mcclure and the_alchemist

And then this month:

I promise this is verbatim - I'll add a photo later. Truffle is interviewing a wide solemn cat named Humphrey, a member of the Ward-Corderoy family in Kent.

Truffle: Well hello. You're a handsome devil. What's your name?
Humphrey: I'm Humphrey. Good to meet you, sir.
Truffle: Likewise. You look like a stand-up sort of chap...
Humphrey: I am my family's number one security cat.
Truffle: Oh, a mature beast?
Humphrey: Well I'm only two, but I'm very sensible.
Truffle: Excellent, I like a cat who keeps his nose clean.
Humphrey: I am very well behaved. I do like cuddles though.
Truffle: Well I suppose there's always room for a cuddle.
Humphrey: And I like presents.
Truffle: Oh my. You're not the cat you seemed, Humphrey...

EDIT: This is Humphrey:

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Game names

2009-01-16T19:21:44Z

Gosh, Go does better at naming its famous games than anything else ever. Chess has to make do with stuff like "Polish Immortal", "The Immortal Zugzwang Game", "Pearl of Zandvoort", maybe "Octopus Knight" on a good day. Whereas Go has:

The Atomic Bomb Game
The Famous Killing Game
The Ear-Reddening Game

There's a game of Go where three of the decisive moves were suggested to the winning player by ghosts, and that's not even the most memorable thing about it. It's not called the Suggested By Ghosts Game, or the Supernatural Assistance? That's Surprising! Game: it's the Blood-Vomiting Game.

Underground stories

2009-01-12T12:35:21Z

It's been a while since my last enthusiastic but slightly overambitious "you know what would be a good idea?" project - which means it must be time for Minor Delays: a very short story for every station on the London Underground and DLR, in alphabetical order, with a new story going live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

I started last Monday with Acton Town, and if everything goes according to plan will be finishing with Woodside Park in, er, somewhere towards the end of 2010 or beginning of 2011 in fact. Predictions are currently being accepted regarding (1) when I'm first going to fall behind schedule, and (2) when the whole plan will first be messed up irrevocably by massive changes to the tube system.

There's a livejournal feed at minordelays, thanks to amuchmoreexotic.

December reading

2009-01-06T13:57:57Z

I should really read more paper books, given that it makes me happier and more productive, with no down-side other than "will have to go the the local library and find out how much I owe them in overdue fines".

This is a New Year's Realisation rather than a Resolution, and it's one that dawns on me - briefly - every six months or so. This time round it's prompted by a December in which I've had a very persistent cold, some holiday time, and to go into a lot of bookshops for "Christmas shopping"; as a result I've read... more than I have any month since, well, since I got home internet access in fact.

It's all the fault of The Internet, yes. In 1994, when I was 13, I turned down the opportunity to see what this Internet was like; I went to the library instead. In 1998, I spent a couple of hours in my dad's office on a cold Glaswegian night, poking around online for the first time and looking for essays about words - the ones I remember best are still online - which I then printed out en masse, filed in a big folder labelled "Interesting Things", carried back to Adelaide, and kept in a cupboard for years. Then university, and computer labs everywhere, and an actual email address, and eventually home internet access in 2002, and if I've read as many books during 2003-2008 inclusive as I did in any single reading year before then, I'd be surprised.

Fight fire with fire, though; turn the internet against itself! Which is to say, I'm going to do what half of you are doing already and post monthly what-I've-been-reading lists with tiny reviews.

Scott Westerfeld: Uglies, Pretties, and Specials.

In December I started reading Facial Justice, by L.P. Hartley, in which it is THE FUTURE and everyone undergoes surgery to promote equality of appearance. I like Hartley; he writes well enough that he made me read a whole naturalistic novel about some small Edwardian children and the process of growing up, which - lacking as it does explosions, chase scenes, set-piece comedy, interesting facts, and a gimmicky structure - is the sort of thing I'd usually put down and forget to pick up again after a few chapters. Plus I have an abiding obsession with science fiction as written by people unfamiliar with the field, and Facial Justice is firmly in that "hey, it worked for Huxley and Orwell, my turn!" mould. It's also, unfortunately, pretty bad, chock-full of "for in THE FUTURE we have a dictator whom we sometimes call DD, for Darling Dictator, which is what we call him the rest of the time, did I mention it's THE FUTURE which is really an ALLEGORICAL VERSION OF THE PRESENT?" writing.

I haven't finished it yet, and probably won't, but on the plus side it did lead me to the Uglies series, recent YA by Scott Westerfeld in which it is also the THE FUTURE and everyone undergoes surgery to promote equality of appearance. Lots of adventures, charming technology, teenagers saving the world, hooray!, etc.

Naomi Novik: Temeraire, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War and Empire of Ivory.

These are the most rollicking things I have read since - I don't know, The Prisoner of Zenda? They are about the Napoleonic wars, with dragons. If anything about this description sounds attractive to you and you haven't read these books, then you should. So much rollicking! I lent them to roz_mcclure and thought I had maybe overplayed how much rollicking there was, but she sent me a text message a few hours later to inform me that there was in fact even more rollicking than I had prepared her for.

Dan Rhodes: Anthropology.

101 short stories, each 101 words long, about girlfriends. I am a dreadful sucker for gimmicky formats, and this is lovely; though really it feels like it should have been online instead of a paper book, since it's best when read a story at a time. The girlfriends are mostly seen by the narrator (who gives the impression of being a pretty awful boyfriend) as evil or cruel, so it gets wearing en masse. (Anyone who does want to read 101-word short stories online knows about Anacrusis, right? Brendan's daily 101-word stories, handily available as a livejournal feed at _anacrusis, mostly not about girlfriends unless there's a twist he's only going to reveal when he hits story number 10,001.)

Andrew Parker: Seven Deadly Colours.

You know that Slightly Annoying Science Journalism tone, that's three thousand tonnes, so if you had an ant for each kilogram you could lay them head-to-toe along the side of 12 Olympic-size swimming pools? Seven Deadly Colours is almost the opposite of that: it's unslick to the point of being occasionally slightly awkward in its measured attempts to explain. So that's pleasing, and so is the content: lots of very weird stuff about how nature makes colours, around the hook of showing how the eye can be fooled.

Helene Alexander: Advertising Fans.

We're a hundred and fifty years into a tradition whereby fans (the paper sort, that you fan yourself with) are used as a medium for advertising. Advertising for all sorts of things, too - hotels, perfume, champagne, funeral homes. If you are interested in advertising fans, then Advertising Fans is undoubtedly the book for you. It's available from the Fan Museum at Greenwich, which - like the book - is pretty great.

Or you could get your own advertising fans made to advertise the product of your choice.

Stewart Lee Allen: The Devil's Cup: Coffee, The Driving Force in History.

I am a bit conflicted about Stewart Lee Allen, because he writes books full of really interesting stuff about food and drink, but the stuff isn't referenced in a way that allows me to check up on it easily (give me a works cited list!), and also he does it in a bit of a glib-journalist-having-adventures tone that occasionally involves the alienating assumption that everyone reading his book is a heterosexual male (less bad in this than in his In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food). Also, really long subtitles. But, good to read, even if it did make me want more coffee; if I find another book by him I will pick it up with the expectation of dog-earing a lot of pages to mark interesting things I should find out more about, and of occasionally being a bit irritated.

My head's in the game, but my heart's in the song

2008-12-31T13:08:41Z

It's time to talk about High School Musical.

I know, I know - when isn't it time to talk about High School Musical? But it's time for me to talk about High School Musical, because it's been one of the defining themes of my year, and when else am I going to have even the slightest excuse for posting 2200 words arguing that HSM is basically an enormous live-action role-playing game/collaborative theatre piece, and that in experiencing it you are asked not just to watch a movie and give Disney your money, but to become an imaginary member of an imaginary high school and thereby help to create, very temporarily, the world that the movies envisage?

The most and least important things about High School Musical

So. High School Musical. The most important thing about High School Musical is that it's about high school students, but it's not for high school students. Its enthusiasts are overwhelmingly younger children, some of their parents, and childless women in their twenties.

The very least important thing about HSM is the storyline. All of the movies - and the theatre shows, and the Ice Tour - have the same basic plot: romantic leads Troy and Gabriella compete against self-centred manipulative Sharpay for the roles in a musical production created by put-upon Hat Guy (Sharpay's brother) and Piano Girl; eventually, Troy and Gabriella's blander, slower versions of the songs win out against Sharpay's peppier arrangements, and Sharpay learns the error of her ways, at least until the next movie. The tension is non-existent, and the storyline advances not at all from one film to the next. Instead it's the budget that changes, as the exuberant choreography outstrips by an increasing margin the technical capacity of the leads: "hey," each subesquent movie says, "we've got money, where did that come from? Quick, put the camera on a crane! Now spin it around! We still haven't spent it all - send in a chorus line of fifty dancers in sparkly pink hats, they can do high kicks!". The message of the production choices made is the same as the message of the movies themselves: "having fun is good - let's do that! AS MUCH AS WE CAN!"

Towards a critical framework for High School Musical

High School Musical, then, is aimed at non-adolescents, and it portrays an idealised adolescence that has never existed. This is of course not an unusual thing for a movie to do. Where HSM differs is that it doesn't just portray this ideal: it invites its enthusiasts to enact it, movie cycle as pop-culture LARP. "Hey," it says, "wear red and black. Wave pom-poms. Scream out GO WILDCATS. Not you, real teenagers, in your strange awful world where everything matters so much, where your stress-filled suddenly-ugly friend-fraught days are filled with all those superficial or genuine problems you can't escape yet; go and get on with your homework, or writing bad songs, or whatever it is you do. We can't help. But for the rest of us, wouldn't it be fun to pretend?" When ten-year-olds queue around the block for a day to scream at the actors at the premiere of HSM3, when their parents have a go with the pom-poms at the ice show, this is not about watching a ridiculous high-school-as-it-never-was-nor-will-be; it's about creating it.

This means that High School Musical cannot be approached critically by a mere observer; reviewing it after watching it would be like reviewing a video game because you happened to be in the room while somebody else was playing. The HSM experience is an active process, not a passive one. To talk about High Schol Musical, therefore, is to talk about my experience of the cycle.

High School Musical

Early this year I watched the first High School Musical on a weekend afternoon, sitting on a sofa with roz_mcclure, both of us unprepared for just how great it would be - how enthusiastic, how wholehearted, how relatively free of pop culture's usual background sexism, racism, fat hatred and other lazy biases; how a couple of the songs would be surprisingly catchy, how the choreography would mean everything so hard.

High School Musical 2

So as soon as possible, maybe a week later, we watched High School Musical 2. This time we were ready with cake and fizzy wine and anticipation. The budget was obviously bigger than before; it was, in some ways, not quite as great, with a couple of moments of idle sexism, and the male lead proving either pretty dumb or pretty willing to sell out his friends for his own advancement (it's never quite clear which; I go for "choosing to be dumb so as not to confront what he's doing", but it's ambiguous, and that's unusual and not entirely welcome for the HSM cycle). But there's also more incredibly exuberantly choreographed numbers, starting off with "Summertime" and reaching the high point of the whole series with "I Don't Dance", a gleeful song with a gorgeously choreographed accompaniment that is (1) a coherent baseball game, (2) an intrinsically cheering well-executed dance, and (3) a phenomenal dance fight about whether baseball or dancing is better that's playing loudly inside your head right now, if you're me, and several times a week into the bargain.

High School Musical: Sing It

Part 3 comes with High School Musical: Sing It!, a Singstar-a-like with the songs from HSM1 and HSM2. The game deviates from the classic Singstar mould by the inclusion of a "story mode" following the storyline of the first movie. There's also a limitation on the available songs: you have to unlock many of them by getting a certain number of points on the earlier songs, playing in story mode. This deviation is interesting, because it's a rare mis-step for the HSM franchise; it was widely deplored, and they've backed off from it in the Singstar release for HSM3 [apparently, I haven't played it]. It's an understandable mistake, because as I've argued above, HSM is about enacting the world of the movies; but the mis-judgement fails to realise that nobody cares about the story, we just want everything to be bright and cheerful and full of song and dance and unself-conscious delight.

High School Musical on stage

Part 4 comes with the High School Musical stage show, a theatrical adaptation of the original HSM1. We bought the cheapest possible tickets and sat in the very back row, with a pair of pom-poms which we split between us. "No light-sabres allowed in the auditorium", a sign said, and this was wonderful: first that they thought it necessary, and second that it was so massively unenforceable and unenforced. HSM-themed light sabres flashed, pom-poms whirled, the glee of the audience buoyed the whole production up through the dubious decision to add a narratorial student-radio character. Two dozen basketballs dropped from the ceiling. "REVISIONISTS!", we shouted critically at the end from the back of the auditorium as Unnecessary Narratorial Student-Radio Character took his bow; unheard above the massed cheering, of course, but still, a shockingly thoughtless thing to do that again was only possible because HSM had shifted us into an imaginary teenager world where if you say what you think, and mean things a lot, and have fun, then everything is okay. We shook the pom-poms some more as the actors roused us to our feet for "one last High School Musical party".

High School Musical 3

Part 5 is HSM3. We went to a 9pm showing in Wandsworth on opening night, with no idea whether to expect massive crowds (opening night!) or the whole auditorium to ourselves (movie whose primary audience is under 12 years old, at 9pm in Wandsworth!). To be on the safe side we booked tickets in advance and arrived half an hour early, dressed in East High black-and-red. To fill the spare time we bought a bottle of fizzy wine and some cheap glasses from the Sainsbury across the road.

Twenty minutes later it was time to go in, and we'd only managed half a glass each, too distracted by anticipation to drink quickly. An American and an Australian, we had no idea whether the bottle would be confiscated at the cinema doors.
"I know," roz_mcclure said. "Your bag's pretty big. I'm good at carrying open bottles in bags and not spilling them."
"Um. I suppose?" I said. "I'm a bit nervous about this," I added as she leant the bottle in among my phone, purse, books, notebook and miscellaneous papers; and then inspiration struck. I took the wine out and rummaged in my bag. "I've got a balloon in here somewhere. We could put it over the top of the bottle to stop it spilling."
I found the balloon - yes, really a balloon, this is not a bowdlerised version; it was pink, and a friend had given it to me a few weeks earlier. We stretched it over the top of the bottle, Roz nestled the bottle in the bag with only the very top poking over, and we went into the cinema.
I mentioned earlier that this bottle contained fizzy wine, and some of you will, as we did not, already have spotted the problem.
"Um," Roz said. "The balloon's... expanding."
"Er," I said, as the bubbles continued to fill it.
We'd brought the pom-poms; Roz rested them over the bright pink balloon that was sticking out of the top of the bag, slowly increasing in size. The pom-poms were silver and shiny red, it might be worth noting: the manner in which they were supposed to draw less attention to the balloon is unclear.

It all turned out fine, of course, like everything always does in High School Musical land: the balloon didn't burst, the wine got in unconfiscated and apparently unnoticed, the auditorium was almost empty (eleven people including us, all adults). And the movie was astonishing: negotiating that awkward first-song-in-a-musical moment by opening with a song-and-dance basketball game to decide the championship, the plot culminating in the characters making a High School musical about their own year, even about the process of making the musical; sometimes playing themselves, sometimes each other.

HSM3 all but openly discusses the dependence of the cycle on an enactment of fantasy lives by its viewers/participants. The best song-and-dance of the movie, The Boys Are Back, takes Troy and Big Hair Guy into the junkyard that was home to their childhood adventures. Once there, they sing about the joy of imagining possible lives for a couple of hours at a time: "to solve a mystery, fight the battle, save the girl! No one can stop us now, we're the ones who make the rules". They disappear behind a window and take on different guises in silhouette; at one point they roll under a derelict car and come out the other side as five-year-old versions of themselves. For the one moment in the whole series that actually portrays peers of HSM's primary audience, they are explicitly play-acting fantasy lives, and being celebrated for it.

And if this wasn't a clear enough indication that HSM's appeal is one of imagination and enactment, there's the very last song. High School Musical, the cast sings right at the end: who says we have to let it go? It's the best part we've ever known. The song that summarises the whole series, then, makes all-but-explicit the dependence of the cycle on the choice its audience/participants make to play at being in this imaginary high-school world. It's not the best high school the singers have ever known, it's high school musical, the parts they've played, the ridiculous unreal world that they've constructed and invited participation in.

High School Musical: The Ice Tour

Part 6 was High School Musical: The Ice Tour, which is based on HSM1 and HSM2. Where HSM: Sing It! was an interesting mis-step, HSM: The Ice Tour had it exactly right: it taught the audience a (pretty awful, but easy) dance, it told us firmly to clap along, and it sacrificed all the different plotlines in the service of its desperate attempt to squeeze 3 hours of movie into 100 minutes of ice show, without missing any of the good bits. "Well, you all know what happened next," said Piano Girl (like all of them, lip-synching her dialogue as well as her songs), shuffling us as swiftly as possible between songs; and yes, we did all know what happened next. And at quarter to five they ice-danced the baseball song, swinging styrofoam bats around their heads in unison.

The two messages of High School Musical

Of course the world that HSM portrays is nothing like any real high school. And perhaps no real high school students would want it to be. But, you know, fuck them, and all the miserable bored misery of real adolescence: this is the way to redeem it, through songs and sparkly hats and four-year-olds who jump up and down waving paper Wildcats banners, through observation of and performative participation in a world in which there are only two messages.

The first message, declared with almost shocking consistency throughout all three movies is: don't try to control other people's lives. Everyone who does this is wrong: parents, teachers, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, the woman sitting in the row in front of us during the first half of HSM-the-stage-show who kept turning around sour-faced whenever we cheered. This is a generic enough message, pulled from the list of acceptable Disney messages: "everyone's special", "it's amazing what can happen if you try", "let's all work together", "there's a bit of good in everyone", "female sexuality sure is scary". Certainly, as a message, it's not on a par for originality with "unionisation is an unambiguous good and 18-year-old Christian Bale is embarrassingly attractive in rumpled nineteenth century newsboy outfits" (the unifying theme of Newsies, an earlier Disney film by the director and choreographer of HSMs 1 through 3). But it's a pretty nice message, and ingrained into the plot at every level.

The second message is: singing and dancing and exuberance are pretty great, even if you're not actually very good at them. And they are.

paranoia mystery suspense intrigue cars

2008-11-07T11:52:37Z

Here are some great things about different systems of classifying books.

1. Their specificity: the particular strange categories that somebody has deemed important. Dewey has "phrenology" and "shorthand" on a par with "anatomy" and "Japanese history"; the Chinese Library Classification system opens its twenty-odd major classification types with "Marxism, Leninism, Maoism & Deng Xiaoping Theory". The Free Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen has a classification for "chafing dish".

2. The unexpected conjunctions: the places where someone's judged "this thing and that thing are alike", and made a whole system out of their brain's unexplained metaphors. The Free Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen combines "bees and silkworms", presumably on the grounds that they're both tiny critters that make useful things for people; and early Dewey does the same thing (at 638, now "insect culture").

3. This:

See also thrillers and fiction.

Things To Do In Broadstairs #2 of 4: Walk To Margate or Ramsgate

2008-08-28T13:07:38Z

Ramsgate is a few miles from Broadstairs in one direction; Margate is six or seven in the other.

Broadstairs feels like it froze in 1955 and has been disintegrating slowly ever since: there's Morelli's Ice Creams in a big red 50s typeface, second-hand bookshops with closing-down sales, faded buckets in a row, people sitting with crossword puzzles in deck-chairs lined up under the narrow shelter of the promenade walk. Ramsgate, on the other hand, seems to come from the late 90s, the high street lined with big-name shops now standing half-empty; and Margate from the 80s, with Beano's Cafe, jangling amusement arcades, a shop called "Pizza Man and Mr Chips", a bright orange pillar marking out a now-empty lido. There's even a contemporary art space on the main street filled with inflatable mountains for world peace.

The thing is, all this poised decay feels very appropriate for English seaside resorts, and the reason it feels appropriate is that my expectations are based on a literature that likes to see them this way: for ever at the moment before shabby or glitzy decline collapses them into a row of ghost towns. So they're still like this a hundred or two hundred years later, after The Birthday Party in the 50s, and The West Pier and Brighton Rock and The Waste Land in the 20s and 30s:

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.

and 1890s arguments about what to do with Brighton's decaying pier, and Dickens in the 1850s, writing from Broadstairs:

There are no visitors in the place but children, and they (my own included) have all got the hooping-cough, and go about the beach choking incessantly. A miserable wanderer lectured in a library last night about astronomy; but being in utter solitude he snuffed out the transparent planets he had brought with him in a box and fled in disgust. A white mouse and a little tinkling box of music that stops at 'come', in the melody of the Buffalo Gals, and can’t play 'out to-night', are the only amusements left.

It's performative decay: where other towns try to hide disintegration behind hoardings and optimistic architectural sketches, here they scrawl "Joke Shop Still Open! This Is No Joke! -> -> ->" on the boarded-up windows of the shops that didn't make it. The leftover title letters from Margate's closed cinema read OO YEM ARGATE 1935-2007. Whole panels of fence have been removed, turned upside-down, and put back with the graffiti inverted but otherwise undisturbed.

Take a big enough group of tubewalkers down to Margate and you'll never get them back: they'll be stuck for ever, taking just one more photo of flaking paint and fish stalls with bad spelling. It's all perhaps a bit hard on the local children, who seem have nothing to do except throw two-litre bottles of fizzy drink hard onto the lawn of the seafront's small park.

Things To Do In Broadstairs #1 of 4: I'll Be Scone In A Day Or Two

2008-08-27T14:12:26Z

Broadstairs is a pretty great place to spend three days! It's over on the east coast somewhere, about two hours from London, and it has (1) the sea, and (2) a sense of inevitable decay, which are my top priorities in an English seaside resort. (3) is hot cinnamon doughnuts, on which score Broadstairs sadly let me down, but it did well on (4) decent chips, (5) overambitious sandcastles abandoned halfway through, and (6) ice-cream.

(7) is hubris.

I also like my seaside resorts with a weird local habit, in this case "windbreaks". Windbreaks are a bit like a beach umbrella, but rotated ninety degrees so that they keep off wind instead of sun, and also you need a mallet to put them up.

If you find yourself with time to spend in Broadstairs, why not try to come up with an exhaustive list of song titles in which one of the words has been replaced with a similar-sounding cake-related noun?

Good:
You're The Bun That I Want
Bun Of A Preacher Man
Girls Just Wanna Have Bun
Cake On Me
Achy Breaky Tart
Muffin Compares 2 U (alt: Nothing Eclairs 2 U)
This Charming Flan
I Think We're A Scone Now
Don't Go Cakin' My Tart

Bad:
Life On Marzipan?: marzipan is merely a potential ingredient of cake
If You Wanna Be Pavlova: superficially brilliant, but actual song title is merely Wannabe. Your Pavlova Is Dead is unfortunately a significantly less well-known song, plus the title doesn't appear in the lyrics so you can't sing it.
Heard It On The Crepevine: crepes are not cakelike enough, and also this is kinda strained
Pie Of The Tiger: tiger pie is probably savoury rather than sweet, and is also insufficiently cakey

Allow at least one full day for this activity.

Paper

2008-08-05T11:53:06Z

Our printer paper has this on it:

In case your images aren't working: it's a little warning note which says "before use, keep the paper next to your machine for 24 hours". There's a little box above the note with a picture of a photocopier in it, and some not-to-scale paper next to the photocopier, and a clock above them both, and the number 24 in a big cautionary typeface.

Reasons this may be necessary:

The paper needs time to settle after being moved, or it gets sad.

The paper needs 24 hours to reach room temperature, so that you can be sure, on putting it into the machine, that it isn't (a) frozen or (b) on fire.

Leaving slightly heavy things lying around is part of a government health initiative aimed at encouraging spontaneous exercise.

Um. Marketing campaign, perhaps? I suppose if people see the paper by the machine, they might recognise the package and go "ohh, that's the paper we use!" next time they're shopping for stationery?

There used to be a different warning label there, something like DO NOT EXPOSE TO SUNLIGHT perhaps, but then the paper composition changed so that it was fine to expose it to sunlight and they took the label off and it left a space, and they needed to put something there, and

Professor Paperman: We need... another warning. And we've got less than fifteen minutes to write it.
Karen: How about KEEP NEXT TO MACHINE FOR 24 HOURS? Or STROKE GENTLY BEFORE PLACING IN MACHINE?
Arthur: Why should they do that?
Karen: Well, it can't hurt.
Arthur: Come on Kaz, we can do better than that. How about DO NOT EAT?
Karen: Actually, take a look at this report from the lab - it's surprisingly digestible.
Arthur: Okay, well I didn't realise that, so maybe the buyers won't either. And it's a nice selling point. How about DO EAT, IS SURPRISINGLY DIGESTIBLE?
Karen: I dunno, they shouldn't eat the whole 500 sheets. How about EAT ONLY AS PART OF A BALANCED DIET?
Arthur: How about DO NOT FLUSH? In case they aren't sure what sort of paper it is?
Professor Paperman: Damn it, this is getting us nowhere and we're going to press in ten minutes! Karen, what was the first thing you said? Go with that! Run it down to the printer's room right now! God, I'll be glad when this is over and we can all sit down and have a cup of tea and a nice piece of paper.

And that's me out of ideas. I suppose it's the "room temperature" thing really? Or is there something exciting and implausible I haven't thought of?

Somerfield Magazine: Part II

2008-07-31T12:16:35Z

A few days ago I mentioned "Pet of the Month - with Truffle the Cat", a feature in Somerfield Magazine. I said that more details on Truffle would have to wait, because it's a bit complicated.

Nobody asked for elaboration, but I'm going to give it anyway. And it's not actually that complicated. It's just... difficult to get a grasp on the fundamentals, so I'll break it down into three steps:

1. Each month, Somerfield magazine shows a photo of a pet belonging to one of its readers.

2. Along with this photo, there's an interview. With the pet.

3. This interview is conducted exclusively by Truffle the Cat. Who is a cat.

This is Truffle:

Truffle is, despite that austere gaze, a shameless flirt with both dogs and cats alike. One month, (s)he declares Scooby the golden labrador to be "very elegant"; a couple of months later, (s)he's telling the young dog Merlin that "as a cat, I am not naturally drawn towards dogs. However, even I am inspired to declare what a handsome chap you are". This blatant exploitation of a puppy's innocence is, sure, not the sort of behaviour we would condone in a human being, but it's not coming from a human: it's coming from a talking journalist cat.

If you look at recent appearances of Truffle, you'll notice a change:

The "back by popular demand!" banner refers to the Somerfield magazine issues of May and June this year, when Truffle the Cat disappeared, apparently because the advertiser who used to fill almost a whole page with dogfood adverts had pulled out.

I wrote to request the reinstatement of Truffle, and it was a pretty moving letter: telling of how my housemates and I like to read the interviews aloud, taking it in turns to take the part of Truffle and the interviewed pet; how we sometimes perform the pieces when guests come around for dinner; how we can no longer read Somerfield magazine without a twinge of regret for what is lost. But I can hardly have been "popular demand" on my own.

What this indicates to me is that enjoyment of Truffle the Cat is not localised to a very specific area of Battersea, as has been previously suggested (primarily by dinner guests). In fact, enjoyment of Truffle the Cat may hide within us all, just waiting to be activated by, say, actually finding out about Truffle the Cat. In which case — race you to an appearance in Pet of the Month? I don't actually have a pet, so anybody who does is way ahead already.

I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but it was buried at the end of a longish post

2008-07-31T11:03:09Z

Does anyone want to come to Kensington or Chelsea on Sunday 10 August at 1:30pm, wear a blue or white hat (which I will provide), look menacing and maybe chase people a bit, and then have a picnic?

I'm running a game called Kensington versus Chelsea, which goes from Holland Park down to the river, and need some defenders for both sides - the more the merrier, and also, more to the point, the more the menacinger. Being a defender will mostly involve wandering around the area, looming at anyone you see trailing the ribbons or balloons of the other team, and then - optionally - reuniting with your team for some celebratory cake and biscuits at the end of the game (around 3:30 to 4pm). Depending on what side you're on, you may also get to see the_alchemist give a rousing five-minute speech to call Chelsea to arms.

If you get bored or need to leave after an hour then that's fine; if you don't want to chase anyone but will be in the area and are willing to wear a hat to potentially scare anyone who runs into you, that's fine too and you can demand your cake the next time you see me.

Comment or email holly@severalbees.com if you can - I'll send you details, a complete ruleset, and slightly embarrassingly effusive thanks within the next day or two.

Edit: "Catching" someone consists of tagging them, at which point you get to confiscate one of the ribbons or balloons or similar that they're carrying.

DISASTER. (Edit: don't panic, disaster is not actually disastrous.)

2008-07-29T15:58:36Z

Some of you, particularly those whose local supermarket is located on a council estate or a small suburban high street, will be familiar with Somerfield magazine. It's a free monthly magazine from Somerfield, a chain of small supermarkets, and in some ways it's kind of awful. There's a feature called something like "Judge My Fridge" (edit: it's "What's In My Fridge"), for example, where you send in a picture of your fridge in order to be told you need to eat less meat, more vegetables and to replace salt with lemon juice and herbs at every opportunity.

However, the magazine has four genuinely pleasing elements.

One is its matter-of-fact enthusiasm: its recipes are perfectly acceptable and include the cost per serving; its exclamation marks come across as the result of someone who genuinely feels like exclaiming.

Another is the Star Letter, where people send in photographs of themselves in an attempt to win £20. Past winners have included someone who was pretending to read Somerfield magazine while camping; someone who was pretending to read Somerfield magazine while standing on a mountain in skiing gear; someone's tiny baby propped on top of Somerfield magazine with a "gosh my tiny baby sure does love this magazine" caption; and someone's dog propped on top of Somerfield magazine ditto. The increasing ingenuity with which Somerfield magazine is worked into inappropriate situations is consistently pleasing, and I like to try to think of advances: one copy of the magazine made into Christmas decorations; another rolled up on a shelf in a Soho sex shop; another fashioned into a boat and sailed down the Thames while an alert squirrel in pirate costume perches on top.

The third redeeming feature is Pet of the Month - with Truffle the Cat!, which I'll have to go into another time because it gets kind-of complicated.

And the fourth is — or was — the horoscopes. These were always, a little pink star on the page proclaimed, "the only food-based horoscope in the UK!". They were also, quite possibly, the only accurate horoscopes in the UK. They said things like "this month, you may well encounter a sale in the fruit and veg section", and they were fantastic.

Looking at the February 2008 edition (yes, we do indeed keep back-issues of Somerfield Magazine), we see:

Virgo: It might hit you this month that you've become stuck in a rut when shopping, rarely adding anything new to your shopping list. Be willing to try different brands.

Scorpio: If you don't usually try organic products, check them out this month. New lines currently in the chilled aisles are also worth your investigation.

Cancer: Plan a party or invite friends around for a meal. Herbal teas are worth adding to your shopping basket this February while a daily vitamin C boost may help reduce the likelihood of catching a cold.

But suddenly, in the August edition, there's no little pink star. There's no shopping advice. There's no hints about what food will be on sale. It's just "blah blah pleasant surprises blah blah watch out for blah good relations with the people around you". There is not one single mention of food, special offers, the chilled produce aisle, or whether I should or should not stock up on my favourite dairy products. Not one! Not one.

Edit: Yes, well, now that I've typed this all out, I realise I may have oversold its importance with the "DISASTER" subject line. "OPPORTUNITY", perhaps? There are now presumably no food-based horoscopes in the UK, and a few of you have been looking for new jobs lately...

Some things you should maybe come to

2008-07-11T09:30:36Z

Are you sick of those guided tours where people tell you lots of so-called "facts" and "figures"? Then come along to True/False, a game-and-tour I'm running later in the month. At True/False we are unconstrained by the reputability of our sources and the plausibility of our tales, mixing "verified fact" with "stuff Holly made up on the bus last week" and challenging you, yes you, to work out which is which. It's free, running from Sloane Square at 7pm on the 17th and 23rd of July, and if you're coming you'll need to phone and book with Kensington and Chelsea's arts branch (020 7361 3003). If you really hate phones but want to come anyway then tell me - I'm allowed to bring a few unbooked extras, but not many.

(Yes I'm running something with a forward slash in its title, yes I promise never to mock any pretentiously-titled arts event ever again, yes I will break that promise by early next week at the latest.)

Do guided tours, even deceptive guided tours with games and possibly cake, bore you? Do they seem inefficient - all that walking around and stopping? Then consider Kensington versus Chelsea on 10 August at 2pm - a borough-wide chase/scavenger hunt/"thing where people run around with ribbons or balloons, or maybe they sneak" in which we find out once and for all whether Kensington or Chelsea is the best. Kensingtonians start in Holland Park near the tennis courts, Chelseates in Ropers Garden (just east of Albert Bridge), and again it's free and requires you to call 020 7361 3003 to book. Alternatively if you'd rather be a chaser than a player, let me know: I need quite a few people to dress up in blue or white and look ominous.

Hide and Seek

2008-07-01T11:55:41Z

Over the last day or two I've been having the same conversation with pretty much everyone I talk to, so to save time should I run into you within the next week, here it is:

Me: Hide and Seek is over! It was great!
You: Oh, fantastic!
Me: Did I tell you that we were on BBC Radio London and I explained my game Bees and we played the kazoo, and then I was called “weird” and “properly obsessed with bees” by the continuity woman?
You: Yes, you sure did tell me that! You mentioned it twice and also it's your current facebook status.
Me: And someone made a tiny felt Battersea Power Station for my collaborative map of lies!
You: Mmm.
Me: Oh, and guess what - the Southbank Centre keeps bees on its rooftop! They read them poetry every week! They are the most educated bees in London.
You: That's great.
Me: And there was a game with balloons that had a hundred balloons left over, so during clean-up roz_mcclure and I got to run up and down the South Bank trying to find small children to give balloons to, and it was legitimate work!
You: I'm going away now.
Me: Hey, take a copy of the programme! Look at my photos!

It's all very exciting! Also, tiring. Also, anyone who says you can't live healthily for a week on pizza and Southbank Centre muffins is probably right, but it's too late now.

London games thing

2008-03-26T15:19:36Z

Y'know, I remember when I used to use this space as somewhere to be annoyed or to link to interesting things, but no longer, apparently. Now it's all very-intermittent updates focusing on things I've done that you're not interested in. On which note, I'm currently involved with this, which is associated with Hide and Seek, a festival of social games and playful experiences running at the Southbank Centre from June 26 to 29. The Sandpit involves monthly playing and playtesting meetings wherein we make up games, play games, and (hopefully) polish games to reappear at the festival itself.

I'm curating the games for the next one, which is taking place at Shunt, in the tunnels under London Bridge, on Wednesday 16 April. It's themed around "Spying and Lying", so come along if you feel like passing secret messages, smuggling objects, being assigned numbers and possibly having an excuse to wear a fedora. And if there's a game that you'd like to run (or just a ruleset you'd like to send in in case someone else wants to run it), let me know. They don't need to be big running-around games with actors and fireworks; low-key sit-in-a-corner games, and hidden play-secretly-through-the-night games, are just as good.

Related: Iglab, the Bristol equivalent of the Sandpit events; Come Out and Play, the New York equivalent of the festival; some photos from the last (listening-themed) event, though unfortunately Shunt's whole "being a maze of dimly-lit underground tunnels" thing doesn't really lend itself to action photography so there's very little documentation of the games themselves.

Coming next week, I tell you about how I seem to have more bags of rice in the kitchen cupboard than I remember buying or can ever possibly eat, and point you to a new blog wherein I will document the life of each individual grain of rice as I attempt to find a new home for it.

Edit: bateleur reminds me to mention thesandpit, the livejournal feed of the Sandpit blog, essays and ruleset. The blog part is kinda London-centric; if anyone would like to keep up with the essays and rulesets but doesn't want to sit through all the overexcited London events stuff, kick me and maybe I'll finally get around to sorting out separate feeds for different categories.

Most of you have never known me while I was not doing a thesis. Gosh.

2008-02-29T13:22:17Z

I'm not a student, for the first time since 1986! Now I just have to wait around for several months while the examiners decide if I get to have a PhD or not.

In the mean time, let's see the result of all that study in the form of some statistics!

Times I changed thesis topic dramatically: 1.
Line which I thought was uncontentious but which turned out not to be: "Reading a novel that's had an enduring effect on the course of English literature doesn't make you a better person".
Line that still makes me snigger every time I read it: "Landow further argues that hypertext fiction instantiates the characteristics of Barthes' ideal "writerly" text".
Number of works in the works cited list: 112.
Number of people in the Works Cited list whom I've lived with: 1, down from a first-draft 3.
Silliest name in the Works Cited list: Cheeseburger Brown.
Appearances of the word "zombie" or "zombies" in the text of the thesis: 4.
Number of years since 1986: 22, apparently!
Line that I was told to edit for its non-inclusive language: "The cost of production acts like a peacock's feathers, flaunting his health with their extravagance".
Three sentence fragments: "Peter Pan/Anaconda crossover story", "a habit abandoned nowadays save in outmoded institutions like universities and marriage", "I must stop at the mall of Rundle to buyez des fleurs".

So, um, how does "not being a student" work? I'm doing bits of freelance game design and writing, but should I get a proper job? How would I do that? Do any of you need some games designed or stuff written or, er, relatively static websites or cakes made?

Food

2007-03-22T14:49:33Z

I was intending to wait and point at this when I'd written an actual, you know, post with content, but then I remembered how often that happens, so: as well as persistently not getting around to writing livejournal entries, I am now intending to actually get around to writing entries at my new food blog, Raspberry Debacle. Coming in the next week:

Salads - gosh they're rubbish, aren't they?
A ten-thousand-foot-tall mountain of rice pudding.

There's a feed at raspbry_debacle, thanks to thewronghands, because "raspberrydebacle" is one letter too long for Livejournal.

Boring administrative/social

2007-01-15T10:50:43Z

So, London is great, and full of exhibitions and squirrels and tubewalks and people pointing at things and playing board games with me. Unfortunately somebody suggested to our delightful but impetuous housemate verlaine that he move to Canada, and the next thing we knew he was dancing on the kitchen table wrapped in a Canadian flag and singing their national anthem (technically it was "America the Beautiful" with the word "Canada" replacing "America" throughout, but nobody knows the Canadian national anthem, and it's the same accent, so never mind). We managed to coax him down with biscuits, but the next day even that wouldn't work - he refused to eat anything unless we drizzled it with maple syrup first. The upshot of this is that he's moving and we have a spare room as of late February. Do you want to live in it?

We're in Battersea, on a friendly Zone 2 council estate so central that we can all but fly our kite over Battersea Park from the verandah. Ten-minute bus ride to Vauxhall or Clapham Junction, neighbouring train station seven minutes walk away, forty minutes walk or ten minutes by bus to Victoria. The room's smallish, but for £300-ish a month including bills (probably increasing to £325ish in an April rent hike), what can you expect? People in the midlands can shut up about their £250pcm six-bedroom detached houses with study, garage and butler, thank you very much. You shouldn't live in the midlands anyway, you should live with me (I'm lovely), kevandotorg (he's also lovely), and the_alchemist (again, lovely, and also she has a Wii). Frequent views of squirrels from the largeish living room, charming housemates with nice hair, fire escape, verandah, etc. Available pretty much any time from late February onwards, though to some extent the sooner the better.

If you don't actually want to live here, d'you want to visit and play board games with me instead? I can't stand parties, but I keep envying other people's excuses to wear costumes. The solution to this may be a monthly board-game group where each month we play board games based on a different theme (Ancient Rome, food, bean-farming, etc), and possibly wear costumes related to the theme. And eat cake related to the theme (this would be particularly easy for the "food" month). Does this sound like a good idea? What if you didn't have to wear a costume? Would you come to Battersea for it, and if so, what sort of time would be best - a weekend afternoon, an evening?

O Chitinous Tea

2006-12-11T13:05:18Z

Tea is brilliant. I realise this might sound like the English immigration department's been round and given me a stern lecture on fitting in, but I promise I still miss dark chocolate tim-tams, and I don't believe in badgers. Tea, though! For a start, you can make it out of anything. Strawberry and mango! Loganberries, which I didn't know existed! Dried apricots, weeds, flowers, probably wicker baskets and old hard drives if you break them up small and boil the water for long enough.

And then there's all the exotic history: smugglers who paid local shepherds to drive sheep across the sand and eradicate tell-tale trails! Profiteers who sold tea adulterated with sheep dung, copper, and previously used leaves! Apparently used tea leaves can also clean mirrors if you "use a soft cloth to buff away the tea after cleaning", which I suspect would also be true of, eg, coffee grounds, cake batter, or mud, but on the other hand I haven't tried it so what do I know? Maybe tea can do that as well.

It even has a brilliant origin. Roses from Mohammed's blood, rightio; daffodils from Narcissus's body, yes, okay; but tea from Bodhidharma's eyelids which he cut off in fury at his failure to stay awake, and cast on the ground. And there's the decades of disapproval, as this Samuel Johnson review of a book by the charmingly-named Mr. H***** demonstrates:

He then proceeds, in the pathetick strain, to tell the ladies how, by drinking tea, they injure their health, and, what is yet more dear, their beauty.

Admittedly the disapproval only applied to "real" tea, "that detestable and poisonous plant"; at around the same time, teas made from less conventional brewees were being used to promote health, and John Byng was writing

I look'd frequently out of my windows at early morn; and finding the rain to continue, did not rise till 8 o'clock. I drank snail tea for breakfast, for my chest is very sore, as every cold, or damp flies to that quarter.

A couple of hundred years later, even real tea has been rehabilitated. In the UK, a recent advertising campaign showed that tea is really really healthy. It mostly accomplished this by not quite lying and interpolating "Tea!" in the middle of sentences about healthy things: "Fruit and vegetables are a good source of antioxidants and the Government recommends that we should eat 5 portions or more a day. But did you know that tea is too? We recommend 4 cups a day". (Lifting weights can be a great form of exercise. But did you know that tea has a weight too? We recommend lifting it to your mouth every two to three hours.)

The "we" doing the recommending is the United Kingdom Tea Council, and their website is so scientifically rigorous that they won't let you see it unless you click to agree that yes, it's intended for health professionals and you aren't going to sue them when you die from a tea-only diet. Once you get in, though, there's a lot of fun to be had - the personality analysis of How do you drink your tea, the games where you try to pour tea into moving cups (and are told to drink more tea to perk you up when you fail). The best part is Astro Tea, allowing you to read your future in your tea-leaves or, if you don't have any tea-leaves, in a flash fake-tea-leaves interface.

Bee (one): A single bee warns of gossip.
Bee (more than one): A swarm of bees indicates that you are busy or foretells a social gathering.

The list is quite exhaustive, including camels (good fortune), a fern (sincerity) and a flamingo (a shy but good looking stranger will soon make an entrance into your life). A snail in your tea doesn't in fact cure your cold but instead "bids you to continue on your path slowly but surely and can also indicate a very sexually uninhibited person". A unicorn "suggests that you may have psychic powers". No wonder they make you click a disclaimer to get in! Imagine the trouble that could stem from an overconfident tea-drinker misinterpreting a postage stamp ("A postage stamp suggests you'll be sending or receiving an important letter") as a mere square ("A square means you need to think creatively. You need to think about the things around you").

O Christmas Kudzu

2006-12-10T13:06:19Z

A little while ago, offensive_mango pointed to some delightful Humanist Christmas Carols. Silent Night is replaced with Be a Bright, The First Noel with There Is No Hell, the faithful are urged to come from Bethlehem and "ignore him", while, perhaps most charmingly, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen becomes

The World of Richard Dawkins
Is a place where you will find
A scientific plethora
To stimulate your mind.
Expand your intellectual side;
Leave ignorance behind.
O, tidings of knowledge and truth,
Knowledge and truth.
O, tidings of knowledge and truth.

We atheists will have no truck with comfort and joy, though apparently we will have truck with personifying pine trees and then settling our consciences by instead buying fakes made from non-renewable fossil fuels which used to be, er, dead trees:

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,
How murderous and wasteful
To end your life so carelessly,
So thoughtless and distasteful.
[...]
I'll work for change, I promise thee,
For only Man can save a tree.
Long life to thee, O Christmas Tree,
I'm buying "artificial."

Revising lyrics to make them more scientific isn't a new idea. Babbage famously wrote to Tennyson complaining about the line "Every minute dies a man, every minute one is born":

If this were true the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest "Every moment dies a man, every moment 1 1/16 is born." Strictly speaking the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

Furthermore, Christmas songs have notoriously fickle lyrics. Hark! the herald angels sing began as Hark! how all the welkin rings. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas originally opened "Have yourself a merry little Christmas; it may be your last" before being revised to its familiar form, and eventually to "Have Yourself A Blessed Little Christmas".

Since people are so keen to rewrite Christmas songs, then, I present my Christmas Song Generator, whose usefulness is rivalled only by the shoddiness of its decorative holly. At the press of a button, you can make carols appropriate for atheists:

Bring me flesh, and bring me Richard Dawkins,
Bring me pine logs hither.

You can make secular songs appropriate for Christians:

Rudolph the red-nosed angel
Had a very shiny nose.

And you can make everything appropriate for me:

And so this is Xmas,
I hope you have bees.