Pete Ashton’s Blog

Another day, another great comic arives on the doormat. Truely this is a golden age for my letterbox.

The Dial (published by Kingly Books) reprints Chris Reynold’s comic from 1989 along with other short strips from his Mauretania series. I’ve always loved his work for it’s eerie dreamlike quality and The Dial has that in spades. Hopefully this is the start of a complete collection of Reynold’s work.

It’s not officially released yet but sending £7.50 to Kingly will no doubt secure you a copy.

One of my current fave mp3 blogs is 3hive which links to legal mp3s from artists websites. The selection is invariably new to me and almost all of it top quality stuff. And it’s totally above board.

Slight digression - when downloading tracks from p2p networks like Gnutella one expects a certain level of inaccuracy in the metadata, that artist names will be misspelt, tracks wrongly named and so on. This is one of the iTunes store’s selling points, that you get a consistency not only in quality but in data, and in return you get locked into a DRM system. In other words you can forage in the forest for mushrooms of varying quality for free or you can go to Tescos and get consistently quality mushrooms for a price thus locking you into the supply chain that may or may not have environmental consequences. Hmm, I quite like that analogy…

Anyway, back to 3hive. I love it and regularly download everything they post up. Unfortunately half the time the ID3 tags, the metadata that tells your mp3 player what the track is called, who it’s by, etc, is either missing or utterly useless, meaning I have to cross-reference the original filename with the link on 3hive to figure out what the song is. On the other hand, mp3 blogs that host the files on their own server (and thus potentially incurring the wrath of the BPI) have perfect metadata. Two thing occur to me. Firstly that the lables in question don’t understand mp3s and how people use them. Secondly they’re unaware of blogs such as 3hive bypassing their websites and linking directly to the music files thus taking them out of their intended context. Quite often I take the vacuum approach to these mp3s, grabbing loads of them, sticking them in iTunes and filtering out the ones I don’t like, then following up and bands that really grab me. Strikes me the band sites operate in the opposite way, expecting me to investigate the band (possibly following up a radio appearance or album/gig review) and then downloading a track, whereas in my case I’m checking out the tracks first.

Whatever, it’s quite annoying.

At work today (car-parts factory, cleaning glue off shafts, boring) I was chatting to a guy who asked if I was a student. Been getting that a lot these last few weeks probably due to the influx of real students this summer. I denied it and he asked where I was from with that posh accent. Not in a malicious way (the other guy there was from the Congo and we got talking about languages and origins - he was born in Romania but held Congolese nationality which caused all sorts of ID issues) but it did take me aback. I usually take chameleon approach with my voice, adopting the accent of the person I’m talking to but here I obviously wasn’t. I thought it might have been that he was 2nd generation Jamaican, but listening closely the Brummie twang was overpowering any residual patois from his parents. Maybe I just wasn’t bothering to fit in anymore and so my relatively “posh” accent (being brought up by a classically trained singer and then working in bookshops will do that) was coming through.

You’ll have noticed I’ve stopped writing about the temp jobs and I think, barring some incredible fortune, I won’t be writing about them again. It’s been nearly a year and it’s now become a tediously normal part of my life. This might explain the blocks I’ve been having this last month or so. Last summer I wrote about the farm, then I wrote about temping. Now I’m at a loss. I know it doesn’t really matter what I write about and that it’s not really that important from the blogging point of view, but I was really starting to get my teeth into something good, even describing myself as a writer in moments of unleashed ego. (And looking back at posts from two years ago I think I’m definitely a better writer if nothing else.) What now…

Work wise I’m just plodding along. It’s been a quiet summer - I can’t remember when I last worked a full week - so I haven’t felt too pressured or cooped up. If anything I’ve had too much free time and have had to give myself jobs to do. That said, I’m encroaching quite heavily into my savings for the first time which isn’t a major problem but is rather annoying (the wifi network I have planned for the house will have to go on hold, as will those new socks I was thinking about…). I’m thinking full time again, and I’m thinking bookshop. Chum Andy was bemoaning how it’s all just till monkey work these days and while I would have resented that a year or so back it doesn’t seem so bad these days. Most importantly I’d be working with interesting people I can relate to.

Anyway, I’ve got a couple of cash-in-hand jobs lined up and some web projects to finalise before I do anything rash and become a Christmas temp. After that there’s always the option of doing 4 day weeks which would probably bring in as much cash as I’m getting now. Something to ponder.

The final photos from the sailing trip the other weekend. (the others are here and here). Some family, some random pictures of things…

L-R: sister Lucy, Mother, cousin John with niece Isobel on shoulders, cousin Karen, uncle Derek, aunt Liz. Check out the mother-daughter postural echo. The lightship in the distance.
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This Saturday I intend to binge drink. I will go to a pub with some friends and we shall drink alcohol with no concern for the consequences. We shall order pint after pint and consume them at a steady rate until the landlord requests they we leave. Im the process we shall converse, often loudly, about all manner of things, some intellectual in nature but mostly base and puerile. If there are no ladies present we may even talk about breasts. Those present will have their own reasons for being there, maybe to recover from a hectic week or, in my case, the desperate need for human company other than my housemate (who does an excellent job of being human company, lest you think otherwise, but can only do so much), but the overriding reason will be because getting pissed with your mates is a tremendously enjoyable activity.

And this is what the powers-that-be seem to be forgetting with this absurd crackdown on Britain’s drinking problem. The problem is not that drinks are too cheap (on the whole we’ll be paying £2.50 a pint and would drink the same if it were a quid), nor that the pubs and bars have late licenses (I’ve started getting to the pub at nine rather than seven as I used to). The problem is some of the people who drink are idiots, and correct me if I’m wrong but idiots have been drinking to excess as long as there have been idiots.

Then there’s the historical precedent. As a teenager in the historical tourist destination of Winchester in 1990 I used to walk home from the pub through a veritable war zone. As a student at Birmingham Uni in the mid-late 90s there’d be fights for the three taxies that served the town centre after 2am. That’s just in my adult life but I’m sure I’m right in saying that the pub brawl is one of those quaint English traditions that makes us what we are. In other countries the local idiots shoot each other or band together to invade their neighbours. Here they get pissed and stagger around looking for someone to punch. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is irrelevant - it’s been going on since the invention of beer. It is not a new problem.

Going out and getting lashed is an intrinsic part of being British. It’s what we do best and it’s what makes us good people. If we stopped drinking we be a collection of reserved nerds. With alcohol we’re confident, chatty, beautiful people who want to have a good time very loudly. Excepting the idiots, of course. All our national heroes were drunks, from Winston Churchill to Oliver Reed. It’s the great leveler, the only thing that breaks through the class barriers and makes us equal. Nowhere else are social rules so upheld as in a pub, upheld by the implicit threat of violence. I’ve found the safest places to be are hard-drinking pubs where that threat is palpable. No-one’s ever going to start anything there and so everyone has a good time.

There’s an area of Birmingham, Broad Street, where the kind of binge drinking the government is so concerned about tends to happen. Here you will find the young and stupid all dressed up with plenty of places to go offering cheap drinks and late hours. Navigating this road after 10pm while sober is an eye opening experience as you literally swim through an ocean of female flesh. It’s a mecca for the idiots and no doubt a nightmare to police, but it serves a very important purpose. It keeps the morons in one place where they can drink, fight and fuck well away from me. It’s been like this since I first came to Brum in 1995 and was probably like this ever since it was redeveloped. As it happens, the rest of Birmingham is quite pleasant of an evening. Yes there are other areas that get a bit manic and it’s still impossible to get a taxi out of town after midnight, but on the whole you can get pissed with your mates and have a good time.

What’s my point here. Yes, I know it’s not healthy, yes I know it causes problems, and yes I’m being slightly defensive. My point is that what is being described as the “British disease” of “binge drinking” is, on the whole, something we’ve been doing for a very long time and is, on the whole, not a problem. The problem is the tossers who use it as a means and excuse to cause trouble, and in my view they’re just not doing it correctly. They’re not obeying the rules of drinking to excess which ensure that everyone has a good time and no-one gets hurt. Perhaps this is the problem, that rather then teaching our children about the dangers of alcohol we should be showing them how it’s done properly.

Ah, whatever…

For my next trick I shall attempt to defend the smoking of cigarettes in pubs as intrinsic to the fabric and well-being of society, and my argument will probably be “because I bloody well want to”.

It’s always nice to wake up to a comic on the doorstep, especially when it comes in an envelope with a slightly rude drawing on it. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me as much as it used to, so I settled down with a cup of tea and my copy of Whores of Mensa, a new comic divided equally between Jeremy Dennis, Mardou and Lucy Sweet. Top stuff throughout and quite simply one of the best comics I’ve read all year.

for ordering details (or pick it up at Caption).

[Update: Or send £3 cash/cheque to Jeremy Dennis, 18 Hawkins Street, Oxford, OX4 1YD]

Long-time readers will know I haven’t spouted politics for quite a while now but, despite leaving me somewhat unenlightened, Fahrenheit 9/11 does seem to have sparked some feelings of righteous indignation in me and my political synapses are firing more coherently than usual. So thanks, Michael Moore, for that at least.

One thing that’s been bugging me for a while is the apparent divergence between what the Labour party does and what it says. Generally, and somewhat reluctantly, I have to say that Britain appears, from my perspective, and with a couple more qualifiers in there, to be doing fairly well under Labour. My experience of the NHS in the last few years has been positive both here in lower-middle middle class Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham and in the deprived Tower Hamlets, London. Other things, such as transport, crime, etc, while not perfect, don’t actually seem all that bad. Gordon Brown seems to be doing a fairly good job of managing things, considering the expectations are unreasonable and the job very difficult. (I’m excluding Blunket’s Orwellian Home Office from this because the position of Home Secretary, it would appear, would turn Ghandi into Attila the Hun.)

On the other hand Tony Blair is a cunt.

The obvious answer is to get rid of Blair and let Brown become the prime minister he already is in all but title and the big question is why the Labour party don’t do this, now, before the next election. Then it occurred to me that were Brown to be PM he’d get slaughtered by the right wing press and in order to defend himself he’d have to become more like Blair. So while Brown gets on with making things better, quietly implementing just enough of the Labour vision without getting noticed, Blair takes all the flack, gets involved in stupid wars, spouts off bullshit to please the tabloids (that 60’s liberals to blame for crime crap really got my goat) and takes the wind out of the Tories by coming over more conservative than them.

Suddenly it all became clear. Blair isn’t a lame duck, he’s doing his job perfectly. Of course this could just be my tortured logic enabling me to vote for him with a clear conscience…

This is really odd. The International Atomic Energy Agency is spidering my site.

I’ve been keeping tabs on my logs of late to ensure the mp3 blog doesn’t kill my bandwidth and today I noticed something odd - 1,954 hits from http://www.iaea.org (see for yourself). Looking through the detailed logs it seems last night, between 11:23pm and 11:49pm, a bot from their server has accessed all my category and individual archive pages. This sort of behaviour isn’t odd - Google does this on a regular basis as do the more nefarious bots looking for emails to spam, and sites looking to boost their Google ranking the lazy way will sometimes hit the referal logs*. But the Atomic Energy Agency? The only reasonable answer is some spambot is pretending to be from there but the unreasonable conclusions are mindboggling…

*If you’re interested… Evil site puts a link to my site on it’s page, then clicks on said like a few thousand times before removing said link. Evil site appears on my publicly accessible referral logs. Because they’re public Google follows the links and, because Google gives my site a reasonably high ranking and the logs are on my site, passes on some of this karma to the evil site. It’s like comment spam only less annoying.

White Noise by Don Delillo

I bought this in 1998 (August 29th at 5.54pm in fact - I have the receipt) on recommendation from a fellow bookseller but it didn’t rally grab me so I put it to one side. The irony was just too thick for me - bear in mind it was written in 1984 when this irony thing was new - and I just couldn’t be arsed with what seemed to be clever-clever for the sake of clever-clever. Six years later, and having enjoyed Underworld last summer, I figure I’ll give it another go. It’s bloody excellent. Not sure why the change of heart, maybe I’m more open to irony these days. Anyway, this quote had me pondering for many days:

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.” © Don Delillo

Currently half way through. Highly recommended.