Dani's

Still sorry that I couldn't go out for as splendid a Birthday Dinner as I had in mind - well, at least we took the culinary journey from Thailand to India together. Looking forward to inspecting the three good Italian restaurants in San Fran and - above that - Mexican food, of course, soon as you got your visa...

Pub Sky

"More customers are men than women, and they want their football so we need it." (Landlady on licensing Sky Sports Channel for commercial use.)

Right. I'm watching Sky in the Pubs. My eyes start to wander, are drawn to the bottom right hand corner of the screen. A little icon in the shape of a pint-glass appears. What does it mean? 'Last orders'? 'This pub is still serving drinks but not food'? - 'Drink, this is Sports' seems to be the most likely interpretation.

A few more pints, a few more pint icons, and I ask a barlady. "What does it mean?" (Several heads on the bar turning, staring at the screen, wondering) - She: "That's something you can move things with a remote control but I really don't know".

I'm getting more and more confused. Interactive TV? Where nobody's got a remote? Internet, help!

This bug was incredibly hard to find out. Nobody loves this icon, nobody sees this except me and the Sky controllers who rumble through the pubs all over UK to 'fight theft'. From the Sky Website: "What is this pint glass symbol on my screen?" - "Sky Business commercial subscribers will see a pint glass 'bug' appear on their screen from time to time and this bug instantly reveals who is - and most importantly, who is not - showing Sky with the correct commercial subscription agreement."

Bug the ones that pay to id the ones that don't?

Newsagent City

"Please note: Only 2 school children allowed in these premises at any one time" it says on the little black & white sign put up inside a newsagent's. "Aha - yes - what's that supposed to mean - schoolkids, do they steal? Aha, ok." is what I get whenever I point this out to non-Londoners. The speed at which this signage is being interpreted, learnt, accepted as part of the city is amazing.

Lonely Jobs, Media Jobs

Liverpool St. View from the top of a Doubledecker: 200 sq ft entrance hall, marble. Bottom right hand corner: two chairs enclose a big black receptionist's desk. All empty, except for the man, slumped over his commuter-sized newspaper.

Mayfair. Peep into a hotel lobby. One man slumped on a sofa, one man working at a computer station. Two seats on a computer re-plays an episode of the Simpsons.

This Book...

...I'd love to read. The cover illustration shows a polar bear vomiting into a toilet, a samowar wearing a military boot, and wodka wodka wodka.

Any hints about author and/or title? Dropped out of Russian class after one mere session, and Grant&Cutler were closed...

Asia Extreme

The hills are alive with the sound of screaming! - Miike Takashis's "The Happiness of the Katakuris". Very funny, very surreal, almost a family comedy. His "Ichi the Killer"? Great. And: I had to take refuge in aestheticism ('just how did they do this to make the pain look that real'). My flatmates moaned and left or sat it through.

You could have it so much better

Nah, I like Franz Ferdinand's graphics, but this one's super class: Alexandr Rodchenko's poster from the 1920's (advertising books, not CD's).

Does Google make me dyslexic?

How unfair a question. There's the keyboard, in the first place.

I:
- type the right number of letters
- dont type them in the right roder
- type the right number of spaces
- dont type them in the righ tplace

but:
- type all this into Google!
And Google guesses: "Did you mean..."?, and I'm binary:
"Yes" (klick), or, "No"!

Things that make you laugh when you're really down

Graphics: Francois Chalet. His v. dysfunctional homepage doesn't come up with my favorite illu: 'Am I Real?'... Homevideos: Ze Frank's Rockin Out. Friends couldn't share my humour at all... Blogs: Query Letters I Love. I've lost too many nights on this one.

Movies McLuhan dreamt of

This little gem (starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue) just flickered across our crappy screen, making us laugh a lot. Entertainment would have been worse, had the telly been better... (remember all that McLuhan? Hot medium, cold medium, the gaps you have to fill in get you engaged...)

Tesco Bag

...everybody keeps saying Tesco is terrible but I just can't see it...

Psychotronic Cinema

Picked up a flyer yesterday from the ICA, in December they'll be having six
'psychotronic' films. This looks great, hope I'll make at least one of them...

(Tony Oursler? Hello?)

Upgrade to Walmart

It's sad, I missed yesterday's Cuong Vu concert. To make up for it, I searched celebrity playlists of artists I had seen live in the past for new music pre-streams. Interface: iTunes Music Store. iForgot, and iRemembered: Apple is American! Their visual 'explicit' vs 'clean' music tagging made this abundantly clear. Upgrade their Software (my Software?), install a bit more of Walmart thinking on my machine (their machine?).

Walmart? I think it was Naomi Klein who told the story of how even the old Nirvana's changed their lyrics so that their CD's would be stocked in Walmarts throughout the US...

* the pics: Nils Petter Molvaer likes it explicit, while Helmet buy clean music! (ok, Helmet are actually much less boybandish than it looks like on the pic (though there's pretty daft lyrics as well, 'I know that you're clever you've mentioned that before', genius), but the pic itself: hilarious, I like it, guy rocking to a palm tree drum jungle or something)

Action or Script

FRI: I've got a code hangover. Nights before coding - cant sleep, wont hear my mobile in the mornings. SAT: I've got a code withdrawal. Days w/o coding - will wake up at six.

Is everything illuminated?

No! They took this marvellous gorgeous lovely intelligent and challenging book and gave it to a cardboard cutout kid to act out.

Keeping Comments Clean

Blogger helps to write clean content. Automated, partly, fully. Well, well. Why would I expect a Google-owned something to write clean code, the least: as well? Sorry, big b, I'm such a stranger, and I do have friends who speak in ä-ö-ü tongues...

No, I'm not a notorious moaner, and yes, I've asked their tech support what I could do to improve my little template for their big machine. dear b - "i've spent some time building a validating XHTML template for my blog - however, i recently had trouble with validation when there were comments being added to a post (the </br> (linebreak) tags generated by blogger weren't accepted; also, special characters like &uuml; (ü) etc. were not properly encoded when input through the comment interface, so i had to go over the pages manually to fix them). is this an issue i could solve on my side (i.e. in my template or css)?" - thanks, a.

Since it's comments I'm having problems with, I'll post their replies to the comments! Wait and see...

Schnitzeljagd

Tripping over a long white cable in the hallways, we followed the lead into my kitchen, finding flatmate J multitasking. Like a pet, his PC laptop had been seated on a high kitchen stool right over at the oven. He himself had been plugged in (a second white lead ended in a mike swung round his neck) and was busying himself cooking burritos. The computer spoke. I only realized then it was his skype-ing girlfriend when the computer got agitatedly irritated about the increasing number of voices, streaming over from our UK kitchen to some place in California...

Exhibit

So we went to Nicole's friend Yan Ki's opening yesterday, and this is what the downstairs room looked liked...

As pragmatic as it gets

This church advert in Stamford Hill made me stop dead and think: I'm quite curious to see this. What would I be willing to sacrifice? Not a Sunday morning. No.

The bottom one feels more like it: Whenever I pass that corner in Stoke Newington, I instinctly listen for my mobile phone to beep, thinking, that would be brilliant, to get a msg right now!

British Gas...

... you must be my best friend. Everytime I push that button ("Water" or "Central Heating", 1 hour please) I think of you. I don't have a button for Sascha, Dani S, anybody. ("conversation flow, hot", 1 hour please!)

Laptop Locals

Chatting loud, we got out of the offices to not disturb the people at work. Chatting loud, we entered a small coffeeshop just off Hackney Road. I felt compelled to leave at once to not disturb the people at work. Who are these Laptop Loonies? Lads&&Ladies? Locals? - ok, this camera is small, a bit crappy; it can look in only one direction and from one angle only, but if-it-only-could-as-it-wanted, it would have recorded not 4 but 12 laptops into this 1 picture - .

Having an ordinary conversation in the midst of such technologically styled crowd feels odd. A double luxury (YES hot chocolate WITH cream please): increase your bloodsugar level, watch your next neighbour's stresslevel grow. Slowly. Steady. Ready? Go?

They're not leaving. Something's wrong. Are they eavesdropping? Is your conversation not what you think it is? Are you giving secrets away, worse: moneyjobs? Paranoia.

Claudia's

Dear Claudia - are you still busy packaging french yoghurt into nice type design? I raided our fridge today to surprise you with some really beautiful London-bought yoghurt typography for your birthday, but, guess what? There's work over here for you (...like the thing with the flowers, though... ) bye, a.

Public Spaces, and...

...definitely depressing: fairground indoors at Alexandra Palace, arrival hall at London Luton...

Advert Ninjas

I'm not a big fan of the Shrek movies; I love the effect though Shrek's street face/street advertising has on me. Two years ago (the 2nd movie was just out), the format filling green thing grin reliably made me grin back whenever I cycled past. When ever would I return the smile of a smiling woman, selling instant coffee to me via a billboard? We're a bunch of advert ninjas. Years of training have enabled us to (not make ourselves invisible but to) treat the smilie woman pattern as invisible.

I am a big fan of some other characters: the 3 teddys/beings/beasts. Fully designed against all good taste, they are so well done and just nuts enough to be my street entertainment.

"What do you want to watch?" Can I vote? I want more ani characters in public space!

... eating things I don't know...

lotusroot, cherimoya, mooli/daikon, poha/pawa...