Alasdair Watson

I am not up in arms about ID cards, terribly much. I am against them, yes. But it’s not really something I really care about from a civil rights point of view. I think getting up in arms about it only serves as a distraction from the more pressing civil rights issues in this country.

One, I don’t believe it’ll do any good, as the only protests I’m seeing are on-line, and we all know that petitions signed on-line don’t count.

But, more importantly, two, I am well aware that the state already has all the power and apparatus if could need to investigate my life, should they decide to, and I’ve seen no convincing arguments that would lead me to think that making me carry a bit of card with some personal information on it will not significantly increase its power over me, or provide it with much more information than they could get with, say a court order to my ISP, and another to the Oystercard people. That’ll tell them more than they could possibly want to know about my interests, associates, and movements.

It will, I suppose, make it harder for me lie to the police. I’m not going to be able to give a false name and address, should I get nicked for something. But, I’ve got to be honest, even were I charged with a crime that I had committed, I don’t think it would occur to me to give a false name and address.

But, all that said, I’m still against, them. I don’t see a need for them, or think they’re solve any pressing social problems. Introducing them will be a complete waste of time and money.

But here is an excellent argument for why they’ll be an on-going waste of time and money.

Johnny Cash, John Peel, and now Hunter S. Thompson.  The only three strangers whose death has caused me to shed tears.

I have been trying to sort out what I want to say about the good doctor for most of the day.

Thompson is quite justly held up as one of the great American writers – he pioneered an astonishing brand of journalism, one that I personally feel may be the most valuable kind, because ultimately, it’s about giving a shit about something, getting out there and engaging with the world, learning from it, making it different in some way, rather than just observing and reporting.  So it’s always faintly rankled with me, that the book everyone holds up as his best work is Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas. 

I become suspicious that perhaps, that’s all they’ve bothered to read of his work, because it’s the “underground classic”.  Me, I’ve always prefered Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.  There’s more berserk gonzo madness in the first one, sure.  There’s more drug taking, and lunatic escapades – superficially, it’s cooler.  But the second always seemed like the more mature work to me.  By the second book, he’d mastered his technique, and rather than turning it on the rather nebulous “American Dream”, he was using it on something that mattered – a presidential campaign, a document of how political power worked in America at that time.

The book is no less savage, no less vituperative and no less filled with craziness, but these are stories that actually happened, events by which the world was changed, covered by a man with a command and love of language second to none, a man with passion and conviction.  I don’t understand why everyone prefers the more ficitionalised example. 

I think one of the reasons that people prefering the fiction rankles a little is that whatever else one can say about him (and lets be honest, there are many unflattering things that could be said about him) Thompson was a blisteringly honest man, who wrote what he thought.  There was no-one else who could write books like him, because he wrote with a near complete disregard for the consequences.  No political journalist out to build his career would have written the book Thompson did.  No-one who worried about the safety of their four limbs would have even gone to get the story on the Hells Angels the way Thompson did, never mind written the book afterward.

Thompson is not a man I would like to have met, unlike Peel and Cash.  But, like both of them, I would have liked the chance to thank him somehow.  In most of the pieces of writing I’m happiest with, I can see things I learned from reading his work.

“I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for my own tombstone… and when I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into The Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yeards out in the air and across Fifth Avenue.

Nobody could follow that act.”

— Hunter S. Thompson, from the Author’s Note accompanying “The Great Shark Hunt”.

Via zoo_music_girl, I hear that Flogging Molly are playing the Mean Fiddler on April 26th.  So, there’s that.

But in another vein, the sleazy, creepy and marvellous Flipron are playing their unique brand of music in London on Monday the 28th of Feb.  Anyone out there feel like trying something new?  (Samples available here).  They’re another lot like Firewater, in that I could not explain the kind of music that they play if my life depended on it.  But they’re ace.  Actually, now I think of it, fuse Firewater’s strange fantasies with a more fifties British seaside town sensibility, and you’re getting there.  Dodgy men in raincaots hanging round the end of the pier, soundtracked by sinister fairground rides.  Yes.  Ace.  Come and see them.

Hypothetically speaking, if there were anyone (like, say, members of my family) thinking of buying a gift for me some time in the next couple of months, for, y’know, some reason or other, then they could do a lot worse than one of these.

(link via adrasteah, cheers.)

Well, I had two topics I was going to talk about. And maybe I will come back to the Valentines/relationshippy one later, but right now, it seems a little obvious, and not terribly in the spirit of Valentines day.

So, instead, I am going to look both big-headed and pointlessly neurotic. I’m good like that.

Neurotica

I’m not going to post it, because it’s not terribly thrilling, but I note that comfortably over half of my (unutterably gorgeous) friends don’t have any sort of likeness of themselves as their default pic.  I am faintly disturbed by this – I know this photo doesn’t look a lot like me (and I must get a new one at some point), but y’know, it is me, and I’d never think of representing myself with anything other than a picture of me (at least as a default).  Not doing so would feel dishonest, somehow. (No, I’m not accusing anyone of anything.  Just saying that’s how I’d feel.)

So, I’m curious: if your default pic isn’t a picture of you in some form, why not?  Why’ve you gone with whatever you have as your default pic?

At around four pm yesterday, I felt like I was coming down with a cold.

So, I did what any self-respecting Stupid Bastard would do.  I battered it with cocktails until I couldn’t feel the symptoms, and then I went clubbing, and battered it with other things.  I have woken up with afternoon feeling cold-free.  So, either it turns out the cure for the common cold has been under our noses all along, and is a lot more fun than previously suspected, or the Black Death is in the post, and when the after-effects of the various toxins I have shoved into my system this weekend wear off, I am going to just fall over.  I shall report back  Or not.  For now, I have orange juice, Very Good Bourbon (thanks to alexdecampi) and the new Brookmyre novel to read, all accompanied by the Alabama Three’s sweet, pretty, country acid-house music.  I shall see you later, when I shall discourse on thrilling topics like Valentines Day (sort of), and the terrible hassle of being both basically lazy and popular (kind of).

Valentines day does have some impact on me.

This is the impact it has. Go on, send your loved one(s) a Trojan Records Valentine ecard. Validate my employment. Or something.

Just went to the gym for the first time in most of a fortnight.  Sad but true: I’ve missed it.  I am, therefore, what, when younger and stupider, I always swore was The Enemy.  Oh well.  Happens to us all, etc, etc.

stu_n and burge had their birthday do at The Big Chill Bar on Sunday.  It was ace, for both the company and the setting.  I forgot to put a flash card in my camera.  On the one hand, I am very stupid.  On the other, this just means I’ll have to go back there.  Oh, the hardship.

Via tinyjo I find The Way We See It.  Accordingly, I shall be at Savoy Buildings WC2 at 3pm on Saturday, to take photos, should anyone else fancy it.  If the next location (due to be posted Friday) is reasonably nearby (or within easy tube journey) I shall probably do that, too.

Weekend roundup: Photography, clubbing, nap, drinking, coma, badly-needed day off work doing nothing.  All excellent, thank you all.

Week coming: Taiko, clubbing, haircut, photography, possibly more clubbing, persistent vegetative state. 

Following that, it is Valentines day.  For the record: this year, I have decided to adopt to the official position of having no opinion at all about it.  It is neither good nor bad, and does not affect my life, or anyone else’s, in any way unless they wish it to, and as such I have no need for an opinion on it at all.

Mental list:  Things I want:

A Digital SLR.  Unless someone out there is fabulously wealthy, and feels like gifting me with one, then this is just going to have to wait.

An iShuffle.  Next month, assuming the Apple Store ever gets them back in.  I’d like to use the treadmill at the gym again, and I don’t like doing it with an iPod – I worry about the constant jolting of the hard drive, and the iShuffle seems perfect for my needs.

A new tattoo.  I know what I want – a caduceus on the back of my left calf.  I feel like I should wait a while, though – it’s all of six months since I got my last one, after all.    Anyone want to make bets on how long I’ll hold out?

One for the PHP developers on my friends list, because I’m completely stumped.

Set-up is PHP on IIS, connecting to a SQL server 7 database.

The problem is an interesting one – different data is being generated depending on the browser that accesses the page. I have an “artist” object, on of the properties of which is “name”. If I load the page in Firefox, the “name” property has the value I’d expect. If I load the page in IE, the “name” property is blank, despite the fact that all the other data for the object has been loaded. The data all comes from the same stored procedure call. This isn’t a browser rendering error – the source code for the page is different depending on which browser looks at it, and echoing the raw data before any HTML comes back gets different resuklts depending on the browser.

Anyone ever run across this? IIS/PHP behving differently depening on which browser access it?