Purple fingers. Yawn. We need a new code-image for "look at the little darlings with their elections in developing countries; they'll be walking next".

News media in China and HK were announcing SBY's win yesterday evening, which struck me as suspiciously early. I'm not trying to do Indonesia down, but if it takes the US longer than a day to count the results, how's The World's Largest Archipelago going to manage it so fast?
But it turns out those were just exit polls, so never mind.
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Indonesia goes to the polls today.

Opinion polls have given incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a comfortable lead over his rivals.
He faces challenges from former president Megawati Sukarnoputri and outgoing Vice-President Jusuf Kalla.

Kalla, currently the vice president, is the 'problem' candidate. He's the candidate for the continuity party of Suharto's New Order, pretty heavily Islamist, and was the kingmaker for Susilo's presidency. A lot of SBY's support from non-Muslim voters during the shaky years of his rule so far has been partly attributable to the knowledge that if he were removed, Kalla would become the man in charge.

He's unlikely to make significant inroads, but if he did his power in parliament would be significant, and the chances of a Susilo-Megawati alliance coming about are slim, let alone the chances of this being effective as a counterbalance.
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This was pretty much made for timdenee but I'm sure other people will find it interesting too.

The Independent has up one of its usual fluff photo-stories, where they cobble together a collection of images related to a recent news story - in this case Newcastle United's new away kit of dubious taste - for bored office workers to flick through without having to think much (hence why I was reading it).

Their "terrible football strips" collection contains the usual howlers (e.g. Hull City's velvetesque tiger-stripes), and for some reason the kit of Palermo (see above). The caption runs "Italian side Palermo play in pink".

This strikes me as excessive anti-pinkism. There's nothing wrong with Palermo's shirts, particularly. And the odd thing is that up until roughly the 1940s, pink was considered a sporty, aggressive colour suitable only for boys and not girls -- on account of it being a version of red, which as we all know is associated with strength, vigour, masculinity and England winning at football, except for all those other times England has worn red.

Little girls, in those days, wore blue.
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So apparently Branson's family were friends of popular sweary amputee Biggles-figure Douglas Bader.


Mr Branson told the BBC that as a "nasty little boy" he would run off with Sir Douglas's legs, requiring the airman to come "on his hands, screaming after me".

This is one of those small historical connections that are just, well, weird.
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"But Fr. Flanagan was unhappy with what he found in Ireland. He was dismayed at the state of Ireland's reform schools and blasted them as “a scandal, un-Christlike, and wrong.” And he said the Christian Brothers, founded by Edmund Rice, had lost its way.

Speaking to a large audience at a public lecture in Cork’s Savoy Cinema he said, "You are the people who permit your children and the children of your communities to go into these institutions of punishment. You can do something about it." He called Ireland’s penal institutions "a disgrace to the nation," and later said "I do not believe that a child can be reformed by lock and key and bars, or that fear can ever develop a child’s character."

However, his words fell on stony ground. He wasn't simply ignored. He was taken to pieces by the Irish establishment. The then-Minister for Justice Gerald Boland said in the Dáil that he was “not disposed to take any notice of what Monsignor Flanagan said while he was in this country, because his statements were so exaggerated that I did not think people would attach any importance to them.” "

This was in 1946.
Edmund Rice, of course, prohibited corporal punishment, which was introduced at the insistence of the (British) government after his death.
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How did I not know about this before?
Iggy Pop has a new album out in three days' time, called Préliminaires.

According to Paul Trynka:

Back when I first interviewed Iggy, we discussed whether he’d ever make a stripped-down album which would place his voice in the foreground, something like Nick Cave’s A Boatman’s Call. Sadly with Avenue B, much of the purity of the original concept was watered down.

Hence I was overjoyed to hear from Hal in January, who told me that Iggy had called him to revive the concept, for a new album, Préliminaires. Here’s Hal on the album:

"Iggy got a call to do music for a documentary about a writer named Michel Houellbecq trying to direct a movie version of his book, The Possibility of an Island. At that very same time I had sent Iggy our old jazz tracks just for posterity's sake, the timing was right, and we used this excuse to resurrect and complete our particular collaboration," Hal explains.

Not that I'll definitely buy it, mind you, but it might be good.
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From James Henry: 

I had a meeting with a producer from quite a well-known British film production company (which narrows it down to two).

We talked about my concept for a while, but it became apparent the producer wasn't going to be happy until I'd described it in terms he could understand. As in 'It's Film A crossed with Film B'.

ME: Fine, it's like 'Unbreakable' crossed with 'Labyrinth'.

The producer's eyes light up, he goes to his computer, goes to imbd.com and types in each film in turn, then goes to 'Box Office Figures'. He then swivels the screen round so I can see it.

ME: No?
PRODUCER: No.
ME: Fair enough.
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The LRB has a fun article on the history of the arobase, better known to you or I as '@'.
It begins simply enough before descending into an Unknown Armies style meditation on the significance of its use in Internet communication. Obviously.

From the more straightforward bit at the beginning:

This legerdemain is clearly nonsense but it’s no less crazy than the various cutesy attempts by languages across the world to naturalise the sign by making it an animal emblem: in Korean it’s apparently a snail, in Danish an elephant’s trunk, in Turkish a ram, in Hungarian a maggot, in many Slavonic languages a monkey, apart from in Russian, where – inexplicably – it’s a dog.

Can't see the monkey myself, but the others are good, particularly the elephant. I think the dog is clear enough -- it's curled up to sleep by the fire.

@

Better let it lie.
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"Dan enjoyed going to the gym to make the
most of his me‐time but also liked socialising with friends.
Last night for instance he had been drinking premium vodka
and imported beer at a local bar or nightclub"

The rather good Ideas Brothers website gives us a tantalising excerpt from this forthcoming novel written by a marketing planner.

‘The Wedding Murder Code’ is so titled because according to research, books with ‘Wedding’, ‘Murder’ or ‘Code’ in the title are more likely to be bestsellers. Poynglass argues that all three words together should create a blockbuster.

Give it a go, it's only two pages long.
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A handful of songs for listening to on a summer evening, reading a book outdoors as the sun goes down. Including some Nick Cave, that Purple Fellow, and some MOR Indonesian rock. And some other things.

Music Playlist at MixPod.com

Over at Blue Cat, the unfolding series pitch that is INCARNATE:

---
So, what if the hero wasn't an ordinary nobody? What if he was one of those ghastly fucking young people whose mum had to work really hard to pay for them to go to school actually, that seem to spawn fully formed from North London, sipping bottled water, big sunglasses pushed up on their heads, talking loudly about how everything's well random lol. The sort of person who would consider the sudden manifestation of superpowers not as some kind of amazing gift, to be held in awe and treated with the greatest respect, but as, frankly, their birthright? And thus TROY BENEDICT was born.
---

http://jamesandthebluecat.blogspot.com/2009/05/television-outlines-incarnate-part-two.html


Incidentally, this made me think 'hey, what happened to that Gogarty kid?'
Well, part of his blurb on the Grauniad was that he "wrote for Skins". After a little research, it turns out the only thing he's ever done approximating work was writing this: http://www.e4.com/video/7Z1WL7BDtocIpiRMnQ8lHC/play.e4

Ten minutes, count them.
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Good post over at China Beat on finding the old city today, and it only mentions Blade Runner once, thank heavens.

One of few exhilarating privileges Shanghai history buffs can nowadays enjoy is staying at the city’s oldest-running hotel, the tactfully-refurbished Astor House (est. 1846), near Suzhou Creek. In its heyday, The Astor hosted luminaries like US President Ulysses S. Grant, Charlie Chaplin, Guglielmo Marconi, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and even Zhou Enlai.

And indeed that's where I stayed when I first visited Shanghai, sharing a dorm room with an Austrian who turned out to be an effusive fan of Robert de Niro.

Whenever I go to Shanghai, I do tend to navigate based on the map in my head of the city circa 1925. This works rather better than you might expect, and shows that reading lots of old short stories that no one else is interested in can have some practical application.
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I just happened to look over a couple of sample units I wrote for the Sports Communication elective course at the beginning of September last year. The coursebooks are intended for use beginning in the coming academic year, and what are the first two activity texts, from which the darling blots are supposed to extract some kind of lesson?

1) A Hull City fan blog bragging about being in the Premier League.
2) A magazine article on Robbie Keane at Liverpool.

The lesson, I suspect, will be that time makes fools of us all.
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(That's him on the left. No idea what I'm squinting at.)
This is the obit that appeared in Time Out Beijing, written by a mutual friend.

Ian Sherman, who died on April 8th aged 36, was one of those people whom everybody
knows and, even rarer, one whom everybody loved. He held an American passport – in fact, came from a famous American family – but was utterly British. After finishing postgraduate work in medieval history, he moved to China ‘for the skiing’, intending to come for a few months, and stayed for eight years. It took him three years just to leave Shijiazhuang, his first Chinese home, and come to Beijing, where he lived in a small hutong apartment covered in books. His permanent companion there was a nameless cat who subjected him to constant sexual harassment; he could never bring himself to have her spayed.

( Read more... )

When I went back to England recently, I dug up this short comedy film I made with a couple of friends way back in 2003. NACHTMUSIK is a fly-on-the-wall documentary following an ancient yet stupid vampire called Lord Jean-Baptiste Darque.
It's not amazing but there are some funny bits. I remain slightly proud of the line beginning "Some called him genius".

Nachtmusik, episode 2 from Tom McGrenery on Vimeo.

John Pomfret's reaction to Jackie Chan's comments is spot on, if you ask me.

"Chan is just saying what a lot of other rich Chinese feel. In the 20 years since Tiananmen, Chinese society has changed enormously. One of the most astounding ways has been in the return of a class society and in the disdain with which China's rich view China's poor. When Chan was saying Chinese need to be "controlled," to be sure, he was speaking about the poor. He didn't have to say it, But that's what the audience at Boao heard and that's why they cheered him on. Anyone who has conversations of depth with members of China's elite has heard this argument before. "The quality of the average Chinese is too low," the line goes. (Zhongguoren de suzhi tai di le.) "So of course we can't have full freedom."

Of course, the elite have become increasingly free. But they also increasingly rely on the instruments of state to maintain those freedoms and to maintain their advantages over China's hoi polloi. Chan is happy, no doubt, that Communism is dead, but he likes the fact that the Communist Party is safeguarding the interests of the well-heeled."

The actor told a forum on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, whose attendees included Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, he was not sure "freedom" was necessary.
...
"I'm not sure if it is good to have freedom or not," he said. "I'm really confused now. If you are too free, you are like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic."

The easy question is, what would the reaction be if a foreigner said this?
It's also interesting that Chan is saying this to appease the mainland government (his latest film was banned on the mainland), who are the descendants of a Communist party whose very raison d'etre was opposed to such a sentiment -- the idea that the Chinese should not control their own destinies.

My friend Paul points out that it's just another wealthy elite wanting the status quo, and he's right there. It's not very surprising.
And what's wrong with Hong Kong and Taiwan anyway? Last I checked they were quite nice.

No, more interesting is this:

He added: "I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we are not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."

This is not new either, and that's what is interesting about it. I've long felt that the reason the US and China are so antagonistic towards one another these days is because they're so similar.
American society is deeply conformist, yet makes a big deal about how Amazingly Individualistic they are. "We are Individuals! That is why we can't be doing with Big Government."
China has something rather similar. "We are Individuals! That is why we need a Big Government to keep things under control."
The earliest reference in Chinese texts I can recall reading is from a couple of hundred years ago, but I'm sure it goes further back than that. (The idea that the people need to be controlled I could dig up from the Shiji for you, but in the Han Dynasty you don't get this sentiment that such Amazing Crazy Individualism is a uniquely Chinese trait.)

What neither national story allows room for is the possibility that maybe they're just as individualistic as everyone else.
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Very addictive: http://lab.andre-michelle.com/swf/fl10/ToneMatrix.swf

Here's some I prepared earlier. Copy the numbers, right click on the app and paste.

65536,8192,2048,0,8192,4608,8192,0,73728,0,20480,0,0,18432,0 ,0

16384,73736,4672,75792,5184,2560,33824,25088,2304,4096,1088,16656,10528,24576,50312,34816

"As a statement of intent, it was deafening."

Despite this being about Spurs winning, I would like sports journalists to lay off this and all other "statement of intent"-based sentences.
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