Archive for November, 2008
As I write this Mumbai is burning and I’m seeing 20+ text message sized updates a minte from people on the ground via Tweetgrid Mumbai. I wish it was something less horrific so I could rejoice in the whole citizen journalism/Little Brother thing, but as it stands I just feel sick.
I may be in touch with my inner hippy but I usually draw the line at reading romance novels: I’m all for Love in a general sense but if the specifics mean reading about some 18th century governess who gets kidnapped by a pirate that looks like Fabio you can leave me out of it, thankyouveryfuckingmuch.
My friend Noel is quite aware of this and pestered me to read The Time Traveler’s Wife anyway, and may Lord Shiva bless him for pestering me until I gave in. What a book. I haven’t been quite so leaky around the eyes over a love story since I watched La Vita é Bella at the tail end of a three day Ecstasy bender.
The Time Traveler’s Wife is the story of Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire, a couple who could register a patent on the phrase “meant to be together”. Clare first meets Henry when she is six years old, Henry first meets Clare when he is thirty six, and it’s pretty much love at first sight for both of them. It might sound like the type of affair that would inspire an anti-paedo campaign from the Daily Mail but the central conceit of the novel – Henry’s genetic disorder that causes him to spontaneously time travel – ensures it’s not as twisted as it sounds. Honest.
In many senses it’s a remarkably straightforward book that charts a love affair from inception to conclusion. But Audrey Niffenegger performs a remarkable literary sleight of hand by weaving fantasy, in the form of Henry’s inadvertent time travelling, throughout. It’s a simple – and at first glance rather silly – premise which rapidly draws you in and sends the story soaring to heights that will make even the most red-blooded, beer-guzzling, hairy-chested bloke feel a twinge of romantic vertigo. If you’ve ever thought “we’ll be together forever”, even for a moment, you’ll respond to this beautiful book.
I’m quite a bit behind the times when it comes to The Time Traveler’s Wife (it was published in 2003) so I’ll leave the gushing there for now, but if your girlfriend has been banging on about this book for months or years and you’ve caved enough to look it up on the Internet let me add my voice to the choir in saying READ IT NOW! If you’ve got the slightest bit of romance in your soul you won’t regret it.
I just realised the timezone for this blog is set to EST – a shocking lapse considering I live within 100 metres of the Greenwich merdian.
Know why people in Greenwich are so self-centred? Because they think the world revolves around them.
Boom boom!
A follow up to yesterday’s post on the leaking of the BNP’s membership, which has led to no end of giggles to be had from the news and intertubes today. My radio alarm clock woke me by blaring Nick Griffin‘s voice at me which is hardly a pleasant experience at the best of times, much less at seven in the morning.
I was soon cheered by Griffin’s flailing around and trying to present the leak as some kind of PR victory for the BNP though. Perhaps Griffin should tell that to the BNP member who posted “I’m also on the list, what the fuck is going on? I could lose my job”. Just one of thousands of such comments posted on far right blogs and forums in the past 24 hours.
The day provided further lulz when I got in and found out that I was on the BNP member’s list! I think of myself as being fairly liberal so this came as something of a surprise to me. While I do get drunk enough to do things like order stamps on the internet my vodka fuelled browsing faux-pases rarely extend to joining far right political parties.
It turns out I’d been fooled by a friend using BNP List UK. I could be a bugger and play the same trick on you (the site inserts your own details in to a fake BNP member’s DB) but I’ll spare you that moment of cold panic and send you right to the page where they explain how to play this BNP prank on a friend.
So that provided a little excitement with the morning coffee, then it’s back to the news. Around lunchtime news of the first sackings started to come in – told ya – and by mid-afternoon BNP members in high places had been pinpointed all over the country. There’s even a number of Google Maps projects showing BNP memvers around the country, though I wont link to any of them directly…I might think BNP members are cunts but I don’t think they deserve the dogshit (and potentially petrol) that might come through their doors after this leak. Not most of them, anyhow.
I wish mainstream parties would have such epic screw ups more often. It’s made for a very entertaining day.
The entire membership list of the British Nationalist Party has been released on line, El Reg reports. At the time of writing the list can be viewed here. Quite simply the funniest thing to happen to a fascist organisation since Hitler shot himself in the head.
Laughing at the misfortune of others isn’t a very hippy kind of thing to do, but title of this blog notwithstanding I’m not a very hippy kind of person. I must admit this news put a big grin on my face, not least at the thought of the deluge of spam now heading it’s way towards nationalist inboxs. That’ll be hassle enough but when friends and neighbours start outing them the chuckles will really start. As for the various policemen, soliders and other public servants on the list, good luck making it to Christmas without losing your jobs 
I love it. This weekend I get to stay in a beautiful 18th Century hotel on the south coast, and all it cost me was a couple of hours of my time a little while back, helping out a lady who isn’t overly famliar with computers.
Money seems a lot less important when you’ve got stores of good will accumulating around the world.
Mitch Mitchell, most famous as the drummer in The Jimi Hendrix Experience, passed away in an Oregon hotel room last night.
Mitchell began his career as a child (well, teenage) actor, and went on to beat the skins for a number of Jazz combos before joining Hendrix in 1966.
Supreme showman Hendrix understandably got most of the attention in those days, but Jimi’s sister Janie sums up Mitch’s contribution: “His role in shaping the sound of the Jimi Hendrix Experience cannot be underestimated”.
RIP dude.