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Last night, at OMG Glasgow, Robert Wringham (above) announced that he was a paedophile.* It was a bold opening remark and one that instantly captured the attention and imagination of the audience. Fortunately for all concerned, he was only an active paedo when he himself was below the age of consent. So, assuming she was up for it, the eight fourteen year old girl would also have been committing a crime — thus cancelling it out (that is how the law works, isn’t it?).
Curated by Fergus Mitchell (above), OMG Glasgow is a comedy/poetry/confessional night where people read from their teenage diaries. It took place in Offshore Cafe, where the strongest drink was ginger beer, something which made a huge difference to the atmosphere (sober people are so much more engaged in what is going on and don’t talk over the top of the performers). Only one act was ruined when, unwilling to wait for the intermission, I ordered a drink requiring the noisy gargle of the gaggia.
The line about Rob being a kiddy fiddler helps us to understand our fascination with the OMG concept: to what extent are you your teenage self? How many years have to pass before you are distanced enough from your old self to see them as a different person? Or can you never really escape your past? Are you condemned to carry your past self inside like a homunculus who wakes up occasionally and reminds you of something embarrassing. Most of the performers laughed at their teenaged twitterings, but I imagine that, had I not destroyed my past self from history as if he were a Trotskyite in Stalin’s Russia, I would find it difficult to be too harsh on him.
At some point last night I did half wonder whether people who kept hold of mementos from their past — diaries, letters, schoolbooks — were more balanced than those of us who destroy and repress. But then I was reminded by his mate Claire that Rob is hardly the poster boy for the well-adjusted. Nevertheless, what set Rob’s diary reading apart from those of the other performers is that he provided a commentary on the experiences described — giving a sense of vertigo as the present and past offered perspectives on one another.
* By the way, for those who have found this site via a Google search for Neil Scott, I am NOT this one.
14 Jul 2008
blog 
Panicology is a book that purports to give levelheaded accounts of extraordinary popular delusions. It takes sensationalist newspaper-style headlines and calmly explains why the editors got the wrong end of the stick. By rights, the book should make you feel smugly skeptical about the hysterical Daily Mail newspaper scare stories (as Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World did), yet I find myself assailed by a creeping anxiety when I read it.
Partly this is because some of their sanguine words about the state of the economy look rather ironic now in the midst of the credit crunch, which doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence. Mainly, though, it’s because most of the stories are bloody scary.
To allay their reader’s concerns, the authors have added a (quite patronising) mark out of five for each story — with figures for the amount of panic, the amount of danger, and how much power you have to avoid the worst. For example, apparently salt is bad for you but a) *** there isn’t that much panic about it b) **** heart disease is the biggest killer in Britain and c) ***** you have the power to avoid having dangerous levels of the stuff in your diet. At lunchtime, for instance, I had a tin of lentil soup that contained 4 grams of salt — that’s two thirds of my recommended daily allowance. An allowance that is itself 1 gram above the UN recommendations. I will never have that soup again!
13 Jul 2008
blog 
The new iPod Touch 2.0 OS came out yesterday — bringing with it a new App Store where people (including those wimps who feared jailbreaking) can expand the functionality of their iPod. As someone who spent hours faffing around jailbreaking, I was initially reluctant to upgrade. It would mean losing all of my favourite apps — or at least having to pay for their replacements. However, I am condemned to embrace the new and so put my reservations aside and erased the old.
The apps I lost Chess, Sketches, Text Edit, Finder and WeDict were all great programs but I didn’t use them very often. The ones that I’ll really miss are Nemus Sync (which gives the ability to sync goocal with ical over wifi) and Pocket Touch (where you can tap an almost blank screen to pause tracks, which is essential for my Spanish lessons). Hopefully these will be updated soon.
The new applications that I have installed include: Remote (a remote control for iTunes), Facebook, Checkword (a scrabble dictionary, which unfortunately for cheaters doesn’t include anagrams of words corresponding to your letters), Exposure (a great flickr browser), Light (turns the touch into a light), NetNewsWire (allows offline reading of rss feeds), Twitterific, Spanish phrase book and FileMagnet (allowing you to upload and browse all manner of files). The longer you spend faffing around, the more futile it all appears. Sure, File Magnet will give me access to important documents — but when would I ever need important documents to be with me all the time. I start to think that I should even change my lifestyle to get into the position where I would actually use bleeding edge technology. And if that was the case, then surely I would have an always connected iPhone rather than rarely connected iPod Touch.
The most popular applications are those that provide distraction: Super Monkey Ball, Texas Hold ‘em, Bejeweled, Enigmo being the current top games. This is all very well — and, having just read Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson, I can understand the appeal — but it’s not for me.
12 Jul 2008
blog There has, of late, been talk in the webdesign community about moving away from static templates and embracing individual, art-directed pages. Khoi Vinh tried it with A Brief Message and Jason Santa Maria is currently experimenting along the same lines on his blog. Neither effort is particularly effective thus far, lacking both the beauty of great design and the immediacy of great blogs.
In both cases it is a problem of overheads and maintenance: it takes time and energy to design something interesting on a regular basis. In my experience, when bloggers start thinking too hard they tend to stop writing. You may say that you could publish less and work on the quality, but that is anathema to the conversational nature of blogging.
I myself have been thinking in a vague, procrastinatory way about expanding the remit of this website. The main thing is to keep writing on a daily basis in the vain hope of becoming a more accomplished prose stylist, but perhaps the site can be improved and expanded without losing focus. Vinh’s Subtraction remains the gold standard for including lots of interesting information in a simple, unobtrusive, aesthetically beautiful way.
Other ones I like include:
Squawk Design, which has a well-integrated design portfolio. My only problem with that is that I can never think of very much to say about the designs in my portfolio.
Raduceuca, which is nice and colourful and includes all the things that used to be on this site: twitter, delicious sidelinks, flickr photos. Frankly, I am bored of social networks in general and don’t particularly want to pollute my site with other people’s twitty apps.
Equivocality. Of course, I could try and integrate my photography in a more regular way, as I did with my very enjoyable photojournal, but alas I don’t have enough to time to maintain one.
No, less is still more. If I am going to make any changes it will be to improve access to the archives and make it easier embellish the posts. If you, dear reader, have any suggestions please leave them below!
11 Jul 2008
blog Read my review of the night.
Only once in my life have I ever written a daily diary every single day for a year. Most times they degenerated into scrawl and desuetude within 8 days of the new year. Notably, the diary I completed ran from 22nd December 02 to 18th May 04 and ended rather enigmatically:
You act a certain way all you life – what if you suddenly wake up one morning and it all feels false?
I have been looking at the diary this week after hearing about OMG Glasgow, a night where ordinary people read out their teenage poetry and diary entries. It is organized by the lovely Fergus and Devin to encourage people to laugh and wince at the things we used to believe.
The trouble — and the reason I won’t be reading — is that I don’t find what I wrote particularly embarrassing. The only embarrassing thing is that I haven’t changed much in the last five years. My attitude, since childhood, has been to try and obliterate all traces of the useless past, to lighten the load whenever I can. Possibly I will regret this in the future, when I am old and useless myself, but that’s you’re own fault for not living in the present old Neil!
Fortunately, the digital age makes it very easy to hide old documents on a dusty hard-drive so all of my poetry, articles and short stories will be preserved for as long as civilization. I just had a look for them and found them in a few seconds. I expected to be mortified by the contents but now feel like Jonathan Swift who couldn’t believe that he wrote A Tale of a Tub: “Oh, what a genius I was then!” said Swift on reading it. Whilst I wouldn’t go that far, I may well unearth something someday.
10 Jul 2008
blog I am on an information diet again, which gives me more time in which to write longer blog entries. It doesn’t really seem fair that because I am reducing the amount of information that I consume, the four people who read this* should have to endure more. Sorry about that.
Part of the diet included uninstalling my stats programme, which was gradually becoming an obsession. In case you are interested, half of my 30-or-so hits a day came from google, where I appear to be very popular with the following search terms: “best free fonts“, “how to eat a car“, and “Deborah Curtis“. I’m sure a better man than me could fangle a way to optimize the content better, but I’m not bothered. The longer I write this, the less I care whether it is read.
Of course, I wince at the solecisms like everyone else but I am ever-hopeful that through this daily practice my writing will eventually get the point where it is fresh, fluent, and insightful. Rhodri once mentioned that he was worried that the practice of daily (paid) blogging had drained his well of words, as if he had used up his allotted amount and would thenceforth have to grunt. I don’t quite agree with this zero-sum idea of words but it is galling when you see your thoughts arranged into the same constricting constructions.
I walked to work this morning for the first time. Compared to cycling, walking is slow, meditative, and mindful; you can absorb the sights and smells, exercise different muscles, and can even practice your Spanish in peace. It is all part of my push to increase the amount of attention I pay to things. See also Will Self’s great tomhodgkinsonesque piece in the Standard about how the Government are anti-walking because they can’t tax it.
09 Jul 2008
blog 
I’ve been vegetarian, I’ve been dairyfree, but I’ve never been tempted by the idea of a raw food diet. Last night’s Channel 4 documentary on the subject did little to sway my resolve.
The first thing you assess upon hearing that someone eats a fad diet is how healthy do they look. Despite the stary true-believer eyes, the people featured didn’t look particularly good. With this established, you can be as arch and critical as you like without worrying too much about whether their quality of life is significantly better.
It was their belief in their superior quality of life that the rawfoodists spent the entire programme trying to convince the world. When the presenter said: “People who eat normal diets aren’t dying, are they?” The mad, unhealthy, raw food woman replied in a deranged voice “Maybe they are!”
To be a raw foodie you need to be willing to cut yourself off from your society — you can’t go to restaurants, drink in pubs, or send your kids to school. Imagine if you were a member of an undiscovered Amazonian tribe who decided that you weren’t going to eat tapir anymore and whilst everyone cooked and danced and celebrated, you were going to stay in your hut picking termites out of your pubes. That is what the rawfoodists are like.
I do have sympathy for them, though, because like them I too am sometimes obsessed with the idea of purity. The trouble with purity is that it forces you to endure cognitive dissonance. In my own life, I often want to stop wasting time reading livejournal or facebook or twitter — and yet I greatly enjoy the social benefits that can come from engaging with people online. To avoid this cognitive dissonance, I have been making a concerted effort to be more mindful in my life — to read the usual internet rubbish but only for small set periods once a day.
Reading an article about the fate of children in the age of infinite distraction I started to notice symptoms of attention deficit in my own life. The books I read are less wordy, the films I watch are more explodey and I have a persistent impulse to find distraction on the internet. I can’t remember the last time I listened to an album from beginning to end. And so, just as last year I kept a list of all the films I saw, this year (what’s left of it) I am going to make a list of every album that I listen to. The ultimate goal is to have the fixed, laser-like conscious attention of the philosopher or, at the very least, the dog who wins crufts.
08 Jul 2008
blog 
There are few things more depressing than reading other people’s life goals. What a person aspires towards defines the limits of his existence: if your goals are vague you will never know when you have achieved them; if they are too unrealistic you’re bound to be disappointed. Rule one of goal-setting: make sure you’re goals are SMART. Most people’s life goals are unspecific, meaningless, unachievable, unrealistic and vague.
Here are some of the usual suspects:
Achieve Happiness
Unless you suffer from anhedonia, you can be happy whatever your circumstances. Happiness is a relative state — some people are more happy than others, but the reasons they are happy are not always obvious. However, people who have the ability to get into a state of flow are generally happier than those who find it impossible to concentrate.
Financial Stability
Human desires are almost infinite, so it is unlikely that anything less than superwealth will satiate your desire for more stuff. For most people, stability means earning at least what they earn now without actually doing any work, preferably through low-maintenance investments or through their novel.
Create a work of genius that will have make them famous for all eternity
Anybody can write a book, but few get them published, and fewer still actually get them read. What is most dismaying is that most of these writers don’t actually seem to read contemporary novels — if they did, they’d probably think again about wanting to write one.
Improve the World
Again, improvement is a relative concept. Look at someone who has dedicated his life to improving the world, like Bone-o or Bob Geldof. Sure, a few lives have been saved but now the world is running out of resources because of overpopulation.
Help People
. . . Or meddling. Whilst it is admirable to do horrible jobs like caring for the elderly and teaching naughty children, most goalsetters seem to have a less hands-on idea of what help means. Like, say, writing a book which reforms education or something equally unrealistic.
Travel
There is a persistent myth that travel broadens the mind. What it does, I think, is defers the time when you actually have to take action. In the 18th Century, travel was something you did when you were young to help prepare for adulthood. Now we all aspire to live in a state of perpetual adolescent wonder.
07 Jul 2008
blog I know it’s unfashionable to say it nowadays, what with the price of oil rising by the day, but I really love driving. Having only passed my test just over a year ago and not really having driven much inbetween, it is an experience that I still find completely absorbing. Today I drove from Glasgow to Cumbernauld to Paisley and back again. I didn’t stop to have a look at any of the places — what would be the point? they’d probably only have the same high street shops you see everywhere — I just concentrated on enjoying the sensations of speed and smoothness.
What is fashionable, apparently, are the people on the Observer’s 50 Coolest People list. My own sang-froid prevents me from chasing after such notions as coolness, but I am quite interested in the zeitgeist. So I made an effort (bloody Observer can’t be bothered to link up to most people’s websites) to have a look at who they are and what they’ve done. What I discovered was that none of them appear to be doing anything particularly radical. It’s all the same old street styles we’ve been seeing for the last couple of years.
The only really interesting thing about the list is that to be cool, you apparently have to have a krazy name: Santogold, Ladyhawke, LoveFoxx, Yvan Face Hunter, Charlie Le Mindu, Zaldy Goco, Noki, Blaine Harrison . . . there aren’t many Neils on there. Anyhow, my favourite of the lot is one with the unglamorous name of Rob Ryan whose illustrations are excellent:
06 Jul 2008
blog Important thing I learned this weekend: it is easier to imagine the end of the world from your armchair than it is when lying in a tent that is being battered by a gale.
We went camping on the east coast of Loch Lomond on Friday to prepare for my going to Latitude (I haven’t put up a tent for eleven years) and to prepare for TEOTWAWKI (my survival skills run to a couple of badges earned at Cubs).
Everything went well. Driving was fine, putting up the tent was fine, chatting to my camouflage-clad fellow campers was fine and cooking burgers was fine. It was only sleeping that proved to be an issue. Not only is camping really quite uncomfortable, but the wind howled all night long. It would die down for a second AND THEN ROAR AGAIN, never allowing me to go into the deepest level of sleep. In this restless state, I tried to picture myself fleeing the cannibal gangs who had invaded the city but it was no use. I was camping in a campsite, no matter what I tried to tell my mind. Sometimes, it seems, the senses are overwhelmed by reality that they can’t imagine any other possibilities.
The next morning, we got up dozily and set out for Rowardennan where we proceeded to conquer Ben Lomond in a leisurely 6 hours. Again the wind (usually my least favourite element) proved violent but there weren’t too many crags or sheer drops to worry about. Here is me shortly before reaching the summit:
05 Jul 2008