I just watched The Year of the Sex Olympics . It’s a UK TV drama made in 1968, that was easily 30 years ahead of its time.

(Spoilers follow.) Continue reading →

There’s a meme going around: in 15 minutes, come up with a list of 15 books that “will always stick with you”. Since lists on their own aren’t all that interesting, I’ve added some notes about why I’ve chosen these books.

Being laidback, easygoing types, the spouse and I often end up having long and tedious conversations about where to go eat, along the lines of:

I used to have similar problems with Richard in Cambridge, and came up with an idea I called Oblique Restaurants.

It was basically a variation on Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies: a deck of cards with names and locations of local restaurants. I had the idea that notches in the cards could be used to allow you to filter out (for example) all vegetarian-suitable restaurants, or all Italian restaurants.

Then, when faced with a lack of restaurant-related inspiration, you could shuffle the deck and pick a card—but you would then be obligated to go to the restaurant on the card.

A while ago someone implemented Oblique Strategies as a widget for OS X. And now someone else has implemented Oblique Restaurants, except they call it Dine-O-Matic.

Now we just need Oblique Recipes for quick stuff to cook at home.

Apparently the FCC have taken a closer look at the figures they were offered to prove that à la carte programming would increase prices. Turns out the figures were flawed, and prices would actually drop according to the FCC’s own analysis.

Predictably, the media giants are howling with dire warnings of even bigger price hikes, mass censorship, outbreaks of bird flu, and anything else they can think of.

I’m getting tired of seeing the same old crappy arguments wheeled out time and time again, so I’ve put together a page on à la carte TV myths, based on thoughts I originally wrote up in a letter to the FCC. (Hey, they asked for comments.)

The prize for worst response has to go to Comcast, who announced yet another 4-7% price hike a few days after the FCC turnaround.

If James Brown is the hardest working man in showbiz, Richard H. Kirk must surely be the hardest working man in electronica. He seems to be able to effortlessly drop an album or two every year without the quality suffering. I noticed the other day that most of his back catalog is now available from the iTunes music store, generally priced way below what you can find the limited release CDs for.

Meanwhile, Leningrad Cowboys Go America is finally available on DVD…in Finland. Or from an online store in Denmark, which wants $32 plus shipping. Ouch.

TELEX have a new album out later this month, How Do You Dance? (answer: badly). No sign of it appearing in the US. There’s also a single and a video, can’t find any trace of those either. $19 for the CD, plus shipping from France, equals ouch again.

I suppose I should be grateful that Kraftwerk’s complete remastered box set hasn’t appeared yet.

I just discovered something interesting. Under US law, buildings constructed after 1990 are copyrighted. That means our house is subject to copyright, and as legal owner I can demand licensing fees from anyone who wants to take pictures of the street that happen to include our house.

The more corporate interests force ever-stronger copyright laws on us, the more I find myself questioning copyright. For example, the RIAA lawsuits against MP3 downloaders have made me wonder: why should artists continue to get money every time someone plays a recording of their music? I don’t get extra money every time someone looks at a web site I created; the very idea is laughable. Yet web sites are copyrighted too.

I was just listening to The Sunday Format on Radio 4 when I heard a name I recognized in the credits: DA Barham.

I used to chat to Debbie Barham via IRC. She’d moved to London and gotten a regular gig writing for the Rory Bremner show, and would often while away time on IRC at odd hours as she came down from a writing binge. I think we got chatting because there was a discussion of Bond movies, and we both thought On Her Majesty’s Secret Service would have been the best Bond movie ever, if it wasn’t for George Lazenby. We’d mostly chat about radio and comedy, and try to make each other laugh, though she was also interested in geekier topics. I particularly remember her telling me how incredibly thrilled she was when they had The Stranglers guest on the Bremner show, and she got to meet them. I always felt bad that I didn’t get to meet her in person before I left for the US. Another time we got the whole channel swapping ideas for ridiculous phobias after she’d just finished an article on the subject.

Since I consider The Sunday Format to be the best radio comedy I’ve heard in years, I thought I’d see if I could find Dabs’ current e-mail address and send her a note of congratulation. As I recall, the last time I wrote to her was to compliment her on her BBC radio show celebrating The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which she showed her amazing skill by nailing Douglas Adams’ writing style precisely.

A quick search on Google revealed the horrific truth: she’s dead. She died a little over a year ago, aged 26.

Worse, she died of heart failure, from literally starving herself to death through anorexia. The Guardian has an obituary and a feature article about her. The obituary has a photo of her, in which she looks fragile, yet with a somehow piercing gaze. There’s an Evening Standard article with a color photo. Again, the same penetrating gaze. It’s not how I’d imagined she might look, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense.

She could be sharp, yes. To be funny, you often have to be. But at the same time, she was a good person, and always friendly to me. She seemed to need to write the way other people need to breathe; she wrote for everyone on every subject, yet never wanted to be in the spotlight, in spite of how much she deserved it. I’ll be seeing her name in unexpected places for years. I just wish I could hope to see it more and more.

With the advent of radar-absorbent materials, dazzle paint is making a comeback in the form of dazzle-painted stealth boats.

In case anyone didn’t work it out, it was Internet performance art by Damali Ayo. See also an interview with the artist, an ABC feature, and a letter she wrote to friends and family.

According to the latest Harper’s magazine, several hundred apparently serious inquiries have been posted via the site; I suspect a charming educated black person could make a living by being a token-for-hire. Here are a couple:

The artist should publish a book of all the responses…

The concept: Use P2P filesharing applications, and search for filename patterns used by common digital cameras. You find thousands of personal photographs people have accidentally shared with the world. Compile them into The Stolen Art Gallery, a cross section of what ordinary people feel is worth taking pictures of.