Happy Squid

A Lego Space Tragedy - Act I

2008-05-28T19:44:00.017Z

In the age of great heroes, the universe was ruled by a family of immortal gods led by thunderous deity Zeus. These gods dwelt in the lofty heights of Mount Olympos and watched over their mortal subjects on Earth, offering support or hindrance depending on their worthiness. But the gods were not always united in their judgments. Mankind became tired of their inconsistent approach to justice, and gradually turned away from the Olympians in favour of monotheistic religions and scientific thought.

But Zeus and his clan never went away. Angered by the betrayal of man, they cursed the Earth with rising sea levels, global warming and dwindling fuel supplies. When the resources ran out and humanity was forced to seek refuge in space, the gods were lying in wait to re-impose their authority.

Many years ago, noble King Kevin of the planet Phokis led a campaign of war against Gerald, king of the lush green planet Titanos. The great god Zeus was pleased by Kevin's actions, and led his army to victory.

"You have done well, Kevin," thundered Zeus. "Choose a wife from the women you have captured, and return to Phokis to father a great dynasty."

Kevin took the hand of the lovely Hermione, the prized concubine of Gerald, and returned home to follow Zeus's instructions.

Hermione bore Kevin two sons. The first, Mark, toiled hard in the arid soil of Phokis to earn his father's respect and prove himself worthy as his heir, while the younger son, sweet-natured Jason, delighted all who surrounded him with music to rival Orpheus and fantastic tales.

But just as the most glorious tapestry may be unravelled by a single loose stitch, so Kevin's happiness was threatened by a single troubling doubt. Mark, his oldest son, had been delivered a mere nine months after the war with Titanos. Might it be that his heir was in fact the son of his mortal enemy, King Gerald? The King sought the advice of his most trusted General, Alan.

"The problem could be settled by a simple paternity test, my Lord," advised Alan.

"That solution has occurred to me, Alan," said King Kevin, "but to meddle in genetic matters would incur the wrath of Persephone, goddess of fertility."

"That was well spoken," agreed Alan. "We must not refute the will of the gods."

And so the matter remained unresolved. The more Mark worked to gain his father's favour, the more Kevin was reminded of his uncertain provenance, and while he heaped praise on the idle but charming Jason, he could never find a kind word for Mark.

Mark was disturbed by his father's hostility. He turned to Hermione for advice.

"What have I done, mother, to deserve this treatment? I have striven to prove myself worthy of my responsibilities, and yet I constantly come second to my brother in father's affections."

Hermione suspected that she knew the cause of her husband's attitude, but did not wish to plant the seeds of doubt in Mark's mind.

"Your father loves you in his own way, Mark," she said. "But he is a great hero and ruler, and we must not expect him also to be emotionally articulate."

Mark left silently, inwardly cursing womankind and all its conciliatory ways. He would devise a plan of action to resolve the situation for himself.

The next day, Mark left the palace early, and travelled to the Oracle, a mystic hole in the ground with miraculous powers of prophecy. The priestess who dwelt there was said to be a conduit for the predictions of the god Apollo.

"Welcome, stranger," said the priestess. "I foresaw your arrival."

"Greetings priestess," said Mark, sinking to his knees. "The accuracy of your predictions is renowned. I seek your advice on a family matter. Since childhood, my father has spurned me in favour of my brother, and I wish to know whether I am destined to inherit my rightful role as King of Phokis."

"Very well, my prince," she muttered, falling instantly into a trance.

The priestess's voice took on a strange quality as she spoke the words of immortal Apollo. "The winds of fate are blowing against you. You will make an enemy of Zeus, your brother will usurp you, and you are destined to die by the hand of your father."

With that, the woman awoke from her daze. "Bad news, stranger," she remarked.

"Yes," agreed Mark.

Mark returned to his father's palace in a disturbed state of mind. Overwhelmed by exhaustion after years of wasted labour, he marched past his usual tasks and collapsed into bed, where he fell into a fevered slumber.

As he slept, the merciful goddess Athene looked down upon him from the cloudy heights of Olympos. Although her brother Apollo had prophesied his downfall and death, she felt a degree of empathy with this cursed man. She too often had difficulty in gaining the respect of her powerful father, the all-powerful thunder god, Zeus. She decided to offer him counsel in a dream.

Riding down on the wave of a sunbeam, Athene entered Mark's head through his ear and spoke to him soothingly as he tossed restlessly between the sheets.

"Do not be afraid, Mark," she said. "You may yet escape your destiny if you follow my advice. If your brother Jason is disposed of, he cannot lay claim to your throne. Your father would surely never murder his only surviving son, and in the absence of Jason, would surely grow to love and honour you as you deserve."

After delivering this divine reasoning, Athene retreated to her heavenly abode.

Mark awoke possessed by a sense of great calm. Killing his brother would certainly resolve many of his problems, and if the gods willed it, he was in no position to refuse.

But as the day wore on, and Athene's persuasive mist lifted from his eyes, he began to doubt whether he could commit fratricide. Although Jason was lazy and irritating, he was a kind child and impossible to dislike. He would have to find some way of getting rid of the boy without bloodying his hands.

One of the projects Mark had been preparing was a space shuttle that would gather data from nearby planets. Mark had planned to use it to find useful natural resources, but now an intriguing dual function presented itself: he could use it to launch his brother into space exile.

When the shuttle was finished, Mark promised to show his brother around the site. Jason was most impressed.

"Dear brother," he said. "If only I could match your powers of ingenuity and reasoning. Alas, I am only a foolish boy who spins unlikely yarns and strums upon his lyre. I have never told you this, but I admire you deeply."

Mark was unmoved by his brother's speech. Athene had cast her spell upon him, and he was powerless to resist her imprecations. He unsentimentally shoved Jason into the rocket's cockpit, then calmly sealed the door and initiated the launch sequence.

Upon learning of Jason's disappearance, the King was deeply upset. Although he could prove nothing, he suspected that Mark had somehow been involved in disposing of his brother. He confided his fears to Alan.

"My years of suspicion and hostility towards my eldest son have come back to haunt me, Alan. I fear that Mark's resentment of my favouritism have led him to commit a terrible act of treachery."

"It is not impossible," said Alan.

"I have no evidence, so we must proceed as before. We must assume that Mark is now my only son. But promise me this, my faithful friend: if Jason ever returns to Phokis alive, Mark must be killed."

"If that is your wish, my Lord," said Alan.

Kevin handed Alan a sealed envelope containing his wishes. "No-one else must know of this, Alan," urged the King.

Meanwhile, Jason's rocket cruised through the inky vacuum of space. From his seat in the heavens, Apollo glimpsed the shuttle and recognised its lonely passenger.

"Father Zeus," he cried, "is that not Jason, son of Kevin, King of Phokis, in yonder space chariot?"

Zeus squinted through the window. "Indeed so, my son. He is destined for great things; what reason could he have for drifting alone through the darkness of chaos?"

"I suspect treachery, father. I once prophesied that Jason would usurp his older brother Mark and take his father's throne. Perhaps Mark has exiled him in an attempt to subvert my prediction."

"What manner of hubris drives a man to defy the very gods?" raged Zeus. "This man Mark is too weak to have acted alone; he must have been assisted."

"I have seen sister Athene speaking to him, Father," Apollo confessed.

"Bring her before me."

And so Zeus interrogated Athene about her involvement.

"Daughter, what is this I hear of your relationship with the wretched Mark, Prince of Phokis?"

Athene could not meet Zeus's gaze. "He was wronged by Apollo's prophecy, Father. As the eldest son, he should have the right to his father's inheritance."

"Daughter, that was not well spoken. What right had you to contradict the wishes of your brother Apollo?"

"He is only my half-brother, Father. Why should he have authority over me?"

"Silence, child. King Kevin is a loyal worshipper of mine. He did not trust his oldest son, and I decreed that Jason should take his throne. Do you wish to defy me also?"

"No, Father," muttered Athene.

After dismissing Athene, Zeus pondered his options. "My impertinent daughter has meddled in matters that do not concern her. Now we must rectify her mistake and bring about the conclusion that destiny has foreseen. What say you, brother Poseidon?"

Poseidon mused for a moment. "Let us steer Jason into the hands of his father's enemy, King Gerald of Titanos. Jason was not yet born during the great war, so they will not know who he is. Perhaps they will take the kind-hearted boy under their wing."

"You suggestion is righteous, brother. In due time, Jason may lead the armies of Titanos against his perfidious brother. This revenge would be exceptionally pleasing."

Having settled on a plan, Poseidon guided the tiny spaceship through the rippling waves of space-time towards planet Titanos.

[Click here for Act II]

A Lego Space Tragedy - Act II

2008-05-28T18:21:00.009Z

[Click here for Act I]

Years passed. Not long after the exile of Jason, King Kevin passed away, pining for his beloved son. As the King had agreed, Mark took the throne, and worked as hard as King as he had as a Prince. He bred horses that could breathe the stifling air of Phokis, and sacrificed a great many to Athene as a token of his gratitude. In addition, Mark married a beautiful noblewoman, and fathered two sons of his own. He was a just ruler, and well loved by his people.

As time elapsed, Mark began to dismiss the prophecy that hung over his head. His father, whom the Oracle had predicted would be responsible for his death, was now dead himself, and not much missed by Mark. His brother Jason had been missing for years, and although Mark did not like to dwell on the fact, was likely to have also met his death. There was little chance of the boy returning to claim his throne.

But the Gods had not forgotten their promises. The childless King Gerald had adopted Jason as his own when he arrived as a refugee on Titanos, and Zeus watched as the exiled prince blossomed into strong and noble young man. The time had come for him to fulfil his destiny.

Zeus called a conference of the gods. "This man Jason has suffered great wrongs at the hand of his brother," he declared. "We must now tell him to raise an army and return to Phokis to exact his revenge."

There was a general murmur of assent. Only Athene looked doubtful.

"Father, are you determined to humiliate me in front of my mortal subjects? It was I who advised King Mark to cast Jason into exile, and since then he has made many very satisfactory offerings and sacrifices to me. He is a good King. If Jason suddenly returns home to crush him, it will reflect badly on my divine authority."

"Perhaps you should have considered that before defying me and interfering with fate, Pallas Athene," Zeus scolded. "The will of Zeus will be done. Now, I must appear before Jason and tell him of his destiny."

As he had promised, Zeus presented himself to Jason.

"Jason of Phokis, I am Zeus," he announced. Jason prostrated himself before the King of the gods.

"My child, you were once a Prince of Phokis, but your envious brother cast you out. Your father is now dead, and Mark has taken the throne. Does this not enrage you? The prophecy of Apollo stated that you were destined to be King. You must now return to Phokis and fulfil that prophecy. There is no alternative."

"Merciful Father Zeus," Jason replied. "I have forgiven my brother for his wicked deed. I was my father's favourite, and perhaps I frustrated Mark by my idleness. Though it grieves me to learn of my father's death, I am happy here on Titanos with King Gerald, and have no wish to wage war on my homeland."

"Wretch!" exclaimed Zeus, "what kind of word has escaped your teeth's barrier? Of course you wish to have your revenge. It is the will of Zeus. You will raise the army of which I spoke, or I will smite your beloved Titanos with all the thunderbolts that heaven can provide."

Jason was persuaded by Zeus's reasonable words.

"In the meantime," continued the god, "I shall send an omen to your scheming brother."

With that, he lifted the shuttle that had once carried Jason aloft, and hurled it back through space to the planet Phokis, where it crashed into the desert soil.

Not long afterwards, one of King Mark's men reported the discovery of a smouldering wreckage not far from the palace. Mark went to investigate the scene, accompanied by Alan, his father's loyal confidant.

What he saw there brought bile into his throat. He immediately recognised the rocket that he had launched all those years ago. Gasping for breath, he wrenched open the door. It was empty.

Alan, too, was stunned. Was it possible that Jason was still alive and planning his return to Phokis? The deadly request of King Kevin rose from his memory like a savage leviathan from the deep. If Jason returned, he was duty-bound to end Mark's life.

"The return of this rocket is surely a sign from the gods," said Mark. "O, merciful Athene, make your intention clear."

But Athene remained strangely silent.

Shaken, Mark made his second journey to visit the oracle. He reasoned that there must be some further information to be gained regarding his future.

The priestess fell into her trance and Apollo channelled his voice through her once more. "The winds of fate are blowing against you. You will make an enemy of Zeus, your brother will usurp you, and you are destined to die by the hand of your father."

The prediction was unchanged.

"But priestess," Mark protested, "my father is dead. How is it possible that he will kill me?"

"The Oracle is never wrong, my Lord. Is it possible that your father is not the man you supposed?"

Mark's troubled mind was flung further into turmoil by this suggestion.

Desperate to settle the issue of his parentage, Mark confronted his mother.

"Kevin took me from Titanos less than a year before you were born," confessed Hermione, tearfully. "Before that, I was the mistress of King Gerald. It is possible that Gerald is your father. But no! You are surely Kevin's son; you have his likeness, his noble virtue. You must not be disturbed by gossip, my darling."

"This gossip comes from the gods, Mother," replied Mark. "All those years that Father shunned me, he did so because he knew I was the son of another man; a man who is now destined to bring about my death. This is extremely vexing."

Athene listened to this conversation with interest. If Mark could be convinced that Gerald was indeed his father, and that he posed a threat to Mark's life, it would not be difficult to persuade him to attack Gerald pre-emptively. If Gerald could be killed, Jason's army would lose its leader and Mark might be able to fight them off and retain his throne. That would frustrate Zeus's plans, and teach him some respect for Athene's tactical thinking. She quickly darted down to speak with Mark.

"Flashing-eyed Athene!" gasped Mark. "I am glad to see you; I am most desirous of your counsel."

"You have heard, then, that your true father is King Gerald of Titanos?" Athene fibbed.

"I had heard rumours, goddess; only now have you stamped them with the mark of truth."

"You must destroy him, Noble King. Even as we speak, he is leading an army to Phokis to overthrow your power. Strike him down at the earliest opportunity."

Mark did not have to wait long for his chance. The ships of Titanos soon assembled above the atmosphere of Phokis, and in accordance with the rules of engagement, King Gerald requested a formal meeting with King Kevin to declare war officially.

As Gerald turned to leave, Mark thrust his dagger deep into his ribcage.

"I am murdered," Gerald announced.

"Indeed so, Father," agreed Mark. "Now you will never have the chance to murder me, as the prophecy predicts."

"I am not your father, Mark," gasped the ailing King. "My seed is as barren as the cracked deserts of this cursed planet." These were his final words before the sleep of death closed over his eyes.

"Curse you, Pallas Athene!" cried Mark, for the goddess had indeed deceived him.

Athene was stung by the words of her once-loyal supplicant, but she was determined to proceed with her plan to undermine Zeus. She lifted the stricken corpse of Gerald from its resting place and brought it before Jason and the army of Titanos.

"Behold, warriors of Titanos," she cried. "Your leader has fallen to the might of King Kevin. This is a sign from the gods that your mission is doomed to failure. Retreat while the life force still surges within you."

At that moment, a brilliant streak of electricity pierced the sky. Zeus appeared before the awe-struck soldiers.

"Daughter Athene, your insubordination has gone too far. You should never have doubted my superior power." So saying, Zeus flung his daughter effortlessly back to the heights of Olympos.

"Now, noble Jason," he continued, "you must continue this battle and fulfil the will of Zeus."

Until this point, Jason had been reluctant to enter the battle, but now he stood before the men and gave a great war cry.

"Gerald was like a father to me; he raised me as the son he never had when I arrived as a stranger on his planet. Now I discover that my brother has murdered him in the most ignoble circumstances. Men, we will avenge our king, and I will personally ensure that King Mark pays for his cowardly bloody deed."

A great cheer rose from the heroic army of Titanos. Jason removed the pitch black helmet from the fallen Gerald and placed it on his own head.

The battle raged. Jason chopped his way through the battlefield until he came face-to-face with the man he recognised as his brother. Hidden beneath the opaque visor of Gerald, he knew he would be unrecognisable to Mark. Bent on revenge, Jason charged at the King with a deadly passion.

But Mark had always been the more skilful of the siblings. He deftly deflected Jason's attack, and threw him to the dust.

"Who are you, soldier, who would dare to attack the monarch?" Mark demanded, pointing his blade into Jason's chest.

Jason pulled his visor open. "Do you recognise me now, O, glorious King of Phokis?" he asked. "I am the brother you flushed into space to service your own grasping ambition. I was prepared to forgive you for that. But not content with separating me from my own dear father as a boy, now you have cut down the man who nurtured me through all my years of exile. Kill me if you will, but the gods will avenge me, mark my words."

"I have come too far along the tragic road of fate to allow you to live, Jason," said Mark, with steel in his voice; "I must not allow the prophecy to be fulfilled." He raised his sword to deliver the final cut.

Jason closed his eyes against the vision of oncoming death. After a few moments, he opened them to see that Mark had fallen to his knees, and was clutching his chest in mortal agony. Behind the King, a stranger withdrew a blood-stained dagger from Mark's back.

"Athene..." Mark gasped, shocked by his untimely demise, "Athene led me into all my sins. Forgive me, brother."

"It pains me to deliver the mortal blow to a good King," said Alan, for it was he who bore the regicidal blade, "but we must all take responsibility for our actions as men, and not seek to cower behind the seductive charms of the gods."

"Alan..." uttered Mark, feebly. "Why?"

Alan produced the document that the late King Kevin had given to him years ago. He slit the envelope open using his murder weapon, soaking the envelope in Mark's freshly spilt blood.

"It was your father's wish that you should be killed if Jason ever returned to Phokis." He held the letter before Mark's dimming eyes. "Here, it is written in his own hand."

"Killed by my father's hand," Mark whispered. "Then the prophecy was true, if ambiguously phrased."

Kind-hearted Jason grasped his brother's knees, sending forth oaths to duplicitous Athene. But Mark's body was inert with death.

And thus peace-loving Jason ascended to the throne of Phokis. Since King Gerald had died with no sons, he had bequeathed the title of King of Titanos to Jason, the boy he had rescued and raised from childhood. Jason united the two warring planets in a new age of cordial relations, and destiny was fulfilled.

The gods themselves were pleased with the outcome. The will of Zeus was seen to be done, and Athene was humbled into daughterly subservience, as is only right and fitting.

"I hope you have learned the futility of challenging my power, Athene," said Zeus. "Mortal men are nothing but the pawns of my unassailable will, and you will never comprehend the omnipotent machinations of my mind. A son must give honour to his father, even if the father does not reciprocate this respect. The same is true of daughters, no matter how divine. You were wrong to subvert this natural order. Have you learned your lesson, or must I cast you down to the depths of Hades to spend an eternity being mauled by the devil-dog Cerberus?"

"I have learned, father," said Athene, penitently.

"Good," Zeus concluded. "Now, it is time for the sons of the late King Mark to honour their father by rising up against their usurping uncle Jason."

"But surely that will only undo the harmony you have worked so hard to achieve, father."

"Have you learned nothing, after all? Do not dare to question the will of Zeus."

And so the cycle of fate continued along its tragic circuit for the people of Phokis and Titanos, locked into a blood feud passed from the great King Kevin to his descendants. The gods continued to intervene according to their whim.

Seek not to comprehend the reasoning of those powers higher than yourself, for that way lies misery. A man is like a leaf which, upon falling into the stream, is swept and dunked by eddies and currents of divine will on its inexorable journey to the infinite sea of death. Pour libations to great Zeus, then, and be thankful for his merciful providence, lest he dash you against the rocky banks of misfortune.

Surrender to the tides of fate, for destiny cannot be altered by the trivial actions of mortal man. That is the lesson of King Mark of Phokis.

Quantum flux

2008-05-26T19:37:00.008Z

While we're on the subject, one of the unexpected benefits of quantum mechanics has been the resurrection of the slightly obscure term 'quantum', which just means 'an amount', or possibly 'a particular amount'. Quantum mechanics was given its name because the theory shows that particles can only have energy levels that come from a set list of distinct values, and can't take any of the values in between. These 'packets' of possible energy are called quanta. Not very exciting.

But it sounds exciting. It's got a 'q' in it, which helps. Exotic letters can really add mystique to what would otherwise be dull terminology. As Bender from Futurama puts it: "Blackmail is such an ugly word. I prefer extortion - the 'x' makes it sound cool." Not only does 'quantum' sound cool in its own right, it also appears in intriguing word couplets like "quantum leap", "quantum tunnelling" and "quantum teleportation". You can understand why people might want to jump on the band wagon.

But Quantum deodorant? Literally all this means is 'a certain amount of deodorant'*. Quantum dishwasher tablets? Does that mean that the crockery is suspended in a state of being simultaneously clean and dirty until you open the dishwasher to observe the outcome? Or does it just mean that the tablets are made from three separate bits? I need to have this clarified.

High-tech deodorant? Roll on the future. (Sorry.)

Then there's the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. This was apparently the title of one of Ian Fleming's short stories, but it does seem a little pretentious for a series of films whose previous attempts at linguistic subtlety culminated with Pussy Galore. Maybe they should simplify the title to 'A Little Bit of Comfort', and have 007 carrying his security blanket around with him next to his Walther PPK, like Linus from Peanuts. That really would be a brave new direction for the franchise.

===

*Although to be fair, deodorant would be much less fun without all the silly names. Lynx are usually the best at coming up with these: "Mmm, you really smell like Gravity this evening, darling."

Change everything

2008-05-23T16:45:00.015Z

Does anybody else want to go back in time and punch their younger self in the face? I think it would be a constructive use of time travel technology.

Split infinities

2008-05-21T17:00:00.000Z

Sorry for the gap; I fell down a hole for a couple of weeks. Before this unfortunate occurrence, I was talking about Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, a BBC4 documentary about quantum mechanics. It was an exploration of the theory concocted by the late mathematician Hugh Everett, which, so far as I understand it, posits that a parallel universe springs into existence for every possible quantum outcome in nature. If you're not a physicist, or at least a fan of Back to the Future, that might not mean very much to you. Luckily, Hugh had the foresight to father a son called Mark Everett, who is now the frontman of the mildly popular band Eels, thus providing a ready-made celebrity host for an accessible documentary about his work. Less luckily, Hugh didn't talk much to his son during his lifetime, which sadly ended prematurely when Mark was only nineteen. As a result, Mark's understanding of quantum mechanics is considerably less complete than his understanding of scuzzy pop-rock hooks.

Mark 'E' Everett from Eels has faced a huge amount of tragedy in his life. His quest to understand his father's work after the deaths of his entire immediate family was brave and rather poignant.

My own understanding isn't much better, mainly because I'm massively ignorant, but partly because quantum mechanics is weird. If it's right (and recently there have been some murmurings from physicists about a possible problem in its foundations), we have to accept that the universe is random, arbitrary and unpredictable. If you volunteer your services as a human cannonball, you expect to be able to predict your approximate trajectory, given information like the angle and velocity of firing, and the air resistance. If you found yourself performing a Scott Bakula-style quantum leap mid-flight, finishing up pasted against the roof of the big top instead of nestling softly in the safety net, you might be a bit surprised. However, with very small particles like electrons and photons, this kind of thing happens as a matter of course. There are usually multiple paths that such a particle can follow, each with a particular probability.

This probably isn't all that surprising. The theory of evolution relies on genetic mutation to provide variations of organisms that are accidentally better suited to their lifestyle. If nature was entirely predictable, these sorts of anomalies presumably wouldn't occur. What is surprising is that until you observe it, a particle exists in all its possible states at the same time. The most famous example is Schrödinger's cat, where a cat in a closed box dies if a radioactive element decays. Until you open the box to look, the cat is both dead and alive. So why should looking at it suddenly settle the ambiguity? Er, perhaps it's a combination of quantum entanglement and the very nature of human consciousness. Hugh Everett had a less vague suggestion: the cat is both dead and alive, but each outcome occurs in a separate universe.

Not content with inventing the world's most famous hypothetical cat, Schrödinger also came up with a famous partial differential equation. The cat was cuter, and easier to solve in spherical polar coordinates.

The more you think about this kind of thing, the more confusing it becomes, but I like the idea. If the universe branches out into multiple versions every time nature is presented with a decision, we'd never have to take responsibility for our actions. If you make a bad choice and hurt somebody's feelings, you could reasonably argue that you were the victim of quantum uncertainty, and that somewhere there's a version of you who did the right thing.

Your friend: You bastard! How could you do that to me?

You: Chill, baby. It wasn't me, it was the intrinsically probabilistic nature of the universe.

Actually, I think that idea is playing a bit fast and loose with the theory. The complex chain of processes involved in human decision-making is a touch more difficult to analyse than the radioactive twitching of a single atom. In the documentary, the universe was 'shown' splitting into two when Mark Everett made the decision to go in search of his father's scientific legacy, but I suspect that probably isn't quite how the theory works. There are some very deep questions under consideration here, and this fatuous blog probably isn't the place to explore them.

It's interesting stuff, though. Hugh Everett's theories were rejected outright by the scientific community in the fifties, and have slowly gained credibility over the subsequent decades. Science fiction writers have certainly embraced his parallel universes, Philip Pullman to Futurama. And let's face it, once an idea has appeared on Red Dwarf, it's only a small step to widespread academic acceptance. Perhaps we'll never know for sure how space and time operate, but at least we can console ourselves that Iain M. Banks will never be short of inspiration for his weighty sci-fi tomes.

Brilliant.

Some thoughts about science

2008-05-09T17:17:00.009Z

Science is a difficult thing to like. It's technically quite difficult, and it insists on all kinds of pedantic self-regulation, which stifles free-thinking creativity in developing minds. A hip young scientist could come up with a dazzling new mathematical theory of nature, but the semi-fossilised custodians of science would insist on performing 'experiments' to check whether it bore any relation to reality. It's a total bummer that you can't just make it up as you go along. That's why, at sixth form college, I did media studies and English literature instead of physics and chemistry. My penetrating insights into Silas Marner and were much more culturally relevant than anything I could have discovered using a Bunsen burner and a petri dish.

Still, as the years go by, I can't help wondering whether there might be some convenient short-cut I could take to gain some rudimentary understanding of science, in order to appear less ignorant when such subjects arise in conversation at the dinner parties I frequently attend. Concerns over global warming and such apparently mean that one must be subjected to the indignity of listening to the opinions of scientists, and it's tremendously difficult to maintain an air of superiority when one doesn't have the first idea what they're talking about.

Luckily, the finest educators in the land have devised the apparently oxymoronic concept of 'popular science'. It seems to be analogous to 'popular culture' (i.e. not 'proper' culture) and 'popular music' (i.e. not 'proper' music) in that it favours hypnotic graphics and celebrity endorsements over puritanical tradition. You might legitimately ask how many celebrities as such are in operation in the scientific community. Richard Dawkins is quite famous these days, but the sight of him getting a bit cross with religious fundamentalists apparently wasn't sufficiently entertaining to lure people away from Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. If you want to find an appealing host for your scientifically-based television documentary, you have to cast your net a bit wider.

One popular choice of late has been atomic physicist Dr Brian Cox. He's a handsome thirty-something northerner with a Tim-from-Ash popstar haircut and the unusual distinction of once having been a member of anthemic '90s feel-good dance-pop combo, D:Ream. This marks him out as a legitimate celebrity. Even if you think you've never heard of D:Ream, you almost certainly know their New Labour-endorsing hit, Things Can Only Get Better. Or at least the chorus. They also did a song called Shoot Me With Your Love, which sounds almost identical to the later (and more successful) Robbie Williams song, Let Me Entertain You. D:Ream thus have the double endorsement of having been associated with a now widely reviled slightly-left-of-centre political clique, and having been plagiarised by a depressive former member of Take That who now spends his days squinting at the Nevada skyline in search of UFOs. Dr Brian Cox is thus not only rather good-looking, but also extremely famous, and as such you should respect his views. I assume he also has a PhD in physics, unless he's some sort of Doctor of Pop, like Doctor Hook. Or the doctor from Doctor and the Medics.

Dr Cox and his pulsating sphere of thermonuclear energy.

A while ago, Dr Cox presented a Horizon programme about gravity. As everybody knows, gravity was invented by Sir Isaac Newton, when an apple fell on his head [cue graphic of apple falling on the head of a bewigged and bemused Newton]. Dr Cox visited Newton's Cambridge lodgings so that viewers could appreciate the unique laboratory conditions that allowed some fruit to fall off a tree. Sadly, noted Cox, Newton's inverse square rule of gravitational attraction didn't do anything much to explain what caused gravity to exist, only how massive objects behaved under its influence. It would be over two hundred years before Einstein's theory of relativity threw Newtonian mechanics out of the window and explained gravity in terms of the distortion of the fabric of space and time [cue graphic of space and time being distorted, like in Geometry Wars on the Xbox]. Blimey.

The following investigation required a trip to the States to drop in on the military unit responsible for the coordination of GPS satellites (according to Einstein, the rate that a clock runs at depends on its height and the speed of its motion). Then there was a visit to huge atom-smasher (perhaps my favourite scientific term, rivalled only by the sinister 'annihilation operator') to look for hypothetical particles called gravitons which might explain how gravity is transmitted. Of course, the science involved in the hunt for the sources of gravity is extremely complex, and can only be lightly touched upon for a few minutes in an hour-long documentary. This left plenty of time to devote to high-angle shots of Dr Cox gazing pensively into the sky, or low-angle close-ups of Dr Cox gazing pensively out of the window. This allowed us to share in his state of philosophical cogitation, and admire his bone structure. Physics was made sexy, and I loved it.

So much so in fact, that I made a point of watching the first terrestrial airing of Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, another BBC science documentary with celebrity crossover appeal. It was a tale of family tragedy combined with a bizarre theory about quantum mechanics, starring (of all people) Mark 'E' Everett from the band Eels. It's not the kind of subject matter that lends itself to facetiousness, but what if, every time nature 'chose' a particular quantum outcome, parallel universes branched off from that point, one for each of the other possible outcomes? That would certainly make the existence of intelligent life in our particular universe less surprising.

I seem to have wandered into a large new subject area, and completely deviated from the track I started on. More on this later, maybe.

Fire in the hole

2008-05-04T19:55:00.005Z

I heard somewhere the other week that many fire stations are throwing out their fireman's poles for health and safety reasons. Before I continue, I should say that I'm not sure about the veracity of this story. If I were a journalist, 'I heard somewhere the other week' wouldn't cut much ice with my fact-obsessed, scrupulously source-checking editor (I did consider a career in journalism once, even going so far as to do two weeks of work experience at a local newspaper. The editor was recovering from a nervous breakdown at the time, which gave me a taste of the stresses faced by even tinpot parochial rags with nothing better to write about than cracked pavements and abandoned shopping trolleys (the top running story during my time there was that it was a bit cold and snowy). Being a fairly sensitive type, I decided that I wouldn't be ideally temperamentally suited to the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the newsroom. As a result, I can afford to be a bit more reckless about the sources of my information. I just wanted to declare from the outset that this whole thing about fireman's poles might just be a figment of my imagination. I do devote a great deal of time to imagining fireman and fireman-related paraphernalia, so it's entirely possible).

So, poles. Poles are a feat of simple but effective engineering. You wrap yourself around them, and gravity does the work. If there's a more efficient, or more enjoyable, way of getting from one floor of a building to another, lower, floor, I'm not aware of it. If you're an old hand at the art of sliding down low-friction rods, you can even add a bit of a flourish by orbiting the pole balletically during your descent. Batman had a pole. The Ghostbusters had a pole. I'm willing to bet that the cast of ITV's fire-service drama, London's Burning, had a pole. Poles are a huge part of the romance of the firefighting profession. Remove the pole, and all that's left are the cool uniform, the gigantic cherry-red firemobiles, the swaggeringly phallic high-pressure hoses, the unquestioning adoration of women the world over and the warm glow of satisfaction that comes from regular life-saving. Not much of a consolation, especially when half your career is spent being pelted with bottles of urine by bored teenagers.

Other popular pole-related activities are pole dancing, pole-vaulting and Pole bashing, the last of which is popular among readers of the Daily Mail.

Actually, I don't really care about poles. I'd quite like one in my own house, but I think it would be difficult to make a large enough hole in the floor without hacking through multiple wires and pipes. I suppose I could replace the entire staircase with a pole, but then I'd need to find some alternative method of getting up to the first floor. Not really practical. On the other hand, I was watching a repeat of Grand Designs the other day in which a couple in their fifties bought a ruined four-storey mansion in the middle of nowhere (otherwise known as central France), and were quite cheerfully clambering up and down the scaffolding and rafters, so perhaps I'm just being defeatist. Or perhaps the couple in question were just insane. Kevin McCloud thought they were. "I think they're mad," he said. The husband was teaching himself carpentry in order to build the four staircases required. Mad. What he wanted was one long fireman's pole, and a rope ladder. That would have saved time and money, and been a great talking point for guests at their future B&B (the ones that survived, that is). "Je suis tombé par le trou dans le dernier étage! C'était très amusant."

Mangled French: effortless polyglot Kevin McCloud wouldn't let me get away with that. I just thought it would make a change from the mangled English that I normally serve up, and in the absence of any less idiotic ways to construct a conclusion for this meaningless, disjointed outpouring, it'll serve as a fitting final sentiment. Erm.

Fin.

Nick Cave will love this

2008-04-30T16:09:00.003Z

You might think that sounds like an easy challenge, but bear in mind that the film is set about fifty years before The Wizard of Oz was made. No wonder Guy's looking a bit perplexed.

Taken by force

2008-04-30T15:18:00.001Z

xkcd.com has been on brilliant form recently. This made me laugh a lot.

This isn't the whole thing, obviously. This is.

I went through a stage of having dreams where gravity was acting in the wrong direction, so that I couldn't run down hills, and I fell sideways across shops. Perhaps xkcd's creator, Randall Munroe, is haunted by similarly wrong-in-the-head nocturnal visitations. I'm sure he isn't, but I'd like to be able to fantasise that I had at least one thing in common with him, even if it is only a disturbing psychological dysfunction.

Filler cars / Skins

2008-04-27T19:36:00.006Z

More skilful and hilarious videogame-based wordplay to fill some space while I try to think of something else to write. I wanted to do a post about Skins, the E4 drama that might be referred to as an Anarchic Teenage Tragi-Comedy, but I quickly realised that I didn't have anything much to say about it. A shame, because Skins is really good. At least, it is most of the time. Occasionally, it isn't. And that concludes my analysis.

I suppose the feature of Skins that most appeals to me is the fact that it's so utterly different from my own adolescent experience. The characters actually leave the house, for a start. Not only that, but having left, they indulge in all sorts of controversial activities, like smoking, drinking, sex, swearing, taking pills, and dancing without any indication of feeling utterly self-conscious and despondent.

I'm not convinced that this is what being a teenager is really like. I'd always assumed that it was just propaganda dreamt up by society's moral guardians to ensure that parents could enjoy the cathartic effects of shouting things like, 'Not dressed like that, you aren't', and 'Ooh, you've fallen in with a bad lot, you have', when in fact their children were, like me, spending all their time in the bedrooms listening to twee melodic pop music, doing their homework, and wallowing in self-indulgent angst.

But, if E4 is to be believed - and if we can't trust the channel that brought us One Tree Hill, who can we trust? - it seems that teenagers really do socialise, and have relationships, and learn tough lessons about life. In fact, all the characters in Skins give the impression of suffering from borderline personality disorders, which is probably a direct consequence of the neglect they suffered at the hands of their of much-loved-British-celebrity parents. Harry Enfield, Neil Morrissey, Josie Lawrence, Bill Bailey, various others that I can't remember the names of... they're all serenely unconcerned about their children's activities. Cleverly, this casting allows the writers of Skins manage to pin the blame for teenage degeneracy on shoddy parenting and celebrity culture simultaneously. It's definitely not just because the actors in question are keen to increase their profile amongst 16 to 25 year-olds by gurning their way through five-minute cameos.

Ah, Tony. So hypnotically beautiful. Or perhaps it's just the strobing patterns of his garish outfits triggering an epileptic seizure.

Kids can't pin all their problems on the older generation, however, and in recognition of this, there many stern examples of cause and effect. [Spoilers] Tony behaves like a total bastard for the whole of series one, then gets hit by a bus; Chris takes drugs and drops out of school, then dies from a hereditary brain disorder; Anwar abandons his Muslim upbringing, makes sexist remarks and betrays his best friend, so he fails his A-levels as punishment. If this is what you get for having fun, I think my policy of refusing all forms of social contact was probably quite sensible (take that, Mum and Dad, who went to a parents' evening and surprised my English teacher by telling him, contrary to most parents' sentiments, that they wished I'd go out more).

So, it seems I've managed to pad out a few paragraphs about Skins after all. Apparently the next series will feature an entirely new cast, but hopefully it will retain its bittersweet commentary on the painful transition into adulthood. And all the rude words.

Speaking of which, a couple of weeks ago, I recommended David Mitchell's Ghostwritten to a woman who was looking for a book for her seventeen-year-old nephew, but she rejected it on the grounds that it contained too much sex, violence and swearing ("every other word," apparently). I have a copy of the offending novel in my hand, and can confirm the presence of such profane utterances as, "you tapeworm-infested dungpuddle peasant bitch - with bad teeth." That is quite rude, admittedly. What's more offensive is that Ghostwritten is a pretentious mish-mash of high-concept supernaturally-inclined pseudo-philosophical sci-fi that might just as easily have been written by a seventeen-year-old. I should have suggested the Clarice Bean books by Lauren Child, which contain relatively little in the way of profanity, and are much better feats of literature to boot.

Camera obscurer

2008-04-15T18:47:00.004Z

As I mentioned the other day, I know nothing about films. For a long time, my attention span was just too flimsy to cope with more than half an episode of Hollyoaks. During this period, the only films I watched all the way through were Phone Booth (which is so short that the muffin I was nibbling at the time lasted way beyond the end credits), and Pitch Black (which I was hoping might be a bit like the similarly-titled N64 game, Perfect Dark, but was in fact a lot like Alien, except crap). It's hardly a splendid cinematic roll-call.

For the last year or so, however, I've been disciplining myself to concentrate for long enough to watch a wider range of films in their entirety. Inspired by A Clockwork Orange, I started by strapping myself into a chair, imbibing a cocktail of medicinal stimulants and wiring my eyelids open to minimise the risk of distractions. Over time, I became so focused that I was eventually able to enjoy films without any artificial restraints at all, and with only occasional outbursts of foul-mouthed rage (usually coinciding with the on-screen appearance of Will Ferrel).

Unfortunately, my rigorous training programme failed to cure my of my tight-fistedness, and I'm therefore still unwilling to spend money on cinema trips and DVD rental. As a result, my diet of films is dictated entirely by the terrestrial television schedules, which can throw up some interesting material.

Last night, for example, I was watching Timecode, which I remember hearing about on the news when it first came out in 2000. The gimmick is that the screen is split into quarters, each showing a different perspective on the same unfolding 'real-time' scenario. Amazingly, it isn't completely incomprehensible, and gets in lots of swipes at insecure, alcoholic, self-deluded LA artisans into the bargain (Julian Sands spends the whole film in his gym kit, dispensing massages to the rest of the cast).

The problem is, I have no idea whether it's any good or not; my critical faculties let me down when it comes to film, despite all the lengthy, pompous essays I wrote on the subject for A-Level Media Studies. It currently scores 6.1/10 on imdb.com, with individual scores ranging between 1 and 10. I suppose this means it's an acquired taste. Certainly, quite a lot of the running time is devoted to a woman looking pissed off in the back of a limo, and if you edited the action down to one screen, it would be a pretty dull bit of satire. On the other hand, if the plot was an more complicated, it would be impossible to follow four branches of it at once. I don't know what to think.

This could be an excellent new feature for the Happy Squid: completely non-committal, uninformative reviews. There are loads of things that I'm clueless about that I could fail to give my opinion on. All suggestions welcome.

Cereal

2008-04-10T20:46:00.008Z

I've always had a strangely ambivalent relationship with Shreddies. I go through cyclical phases of finding the little wheaty squares appealing, then faintly nauseating. That cloying malted sweetness is a much less brazen affront to your tongue than an honest-to-goodness sugar bomb like Frosties or Coco-Pops, but I can't help suspecting that underneath their bland exterior, Shreddies are profoundly evil.

It's possible that I'm not the only one to have this feeling. That would certainly explain why Nestlé have gone to such implausible lengths to reinforce Shreddies' wholesome image by claiming that they're produced by a squad of grandmotherly stereotypes using techniques normally reserved for the manufacture of Noel Edmonds' jumpers. This does little to reassure me. There's something distinctly sinister about the idea that your breakfast cereal is being 'knitted by nanas'. Has Nestlé got them all locked up in an ageist, sexist timewarp, where the only avenues available to women of retirement age are knitting, playing bingo and dozing in front of Coronation Street? We need Germaine Greer and Jo Brand to go down there and bust them out by force.

Oh, wait. Maybe it's ironic.

Or maybe - and I struggle to believe that this can be the case - the adverts are just wildly disingenuous. What if Shreddies aren't knitted by nanas at all, but made on an industrial production line that may also handle nuts? To allay these suspicions, the webiste knittedbynanas.com allows you to watch live webcam footage of the assiduous grannies taking a well-earned break (you can even hear them breathing, which is rather disconcerting if you don't realise it's coming from your computer speakers. It's like having Angela Lansbury lurking in a dark corner of the room, waiting to leap out and skewer your jugular vein with a hat pin).

This reminds me of the film Felicia's Journey, in which Bob Hoskins plays the mundane manager of a drab Midlands food factory who befriends and murders vulnerable young women. That's probably not the image they were going for.

What you can't see, however, is any evidence that the superannuated staff actually do any work. I suppose this might be to prevent the secret Shreddies knitting technique from leaking out to the competition. Imagine what Kellogg's would do to get hold of that kind of information.

One thing they might do is unleash a wave of Special-K-powered killing machines to storm the Shreddies factory by force while the workforce was distracted by a particularly taxing Countdown conundrum. That would explain the website's Nanas vs. Robots game, in which the matronly protagonist duffs up a rampaging legion of metallic automatons using an arsenal of handbags, doilies and slippers (the sexism/ageism is ironic, remember).

Nanas vs. Robots is the best videogame to star a pensioner since Captain Dynamo (except Advanced Richard Attenborough Simulator, but that only exists in my head).

What have Shreddies done to these women? Not only are they being transformed into suffocatingly cosy self-parodies, but they're forced to engage in open warfare with evil robots when by rights they ought to be going on world cruises or training for the marathon, or something.

In conclusion, Shreddies are definitely evil, and I'm reasonably certain there aren't any holes in my argument.

The heap

2008-04-09T13:35:00.003Z

Gosh, a photo. Haven't seen one of those around here for a while. This one serves as a sort of visual coda to yesterday's post; you'll notice that it depicts a pile of books. More specifically, it depicts a pile of books that I own but haven't read. At my current rate of productivity, it will take me until 12th May 2020 to get through these titles. After taking the picture, I realised there were some missing from the pile, one of which is The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, which is - sigh - 900 pages long. I need to develop the reading skills of Johnny Five (from Short Circuit, remember?), or at least Will Hunting (from, er, Good Will Hunting) if I'm going to make a significant impression on this looming tower of literature. Sadly, I can't scan-read for toffee, and I seem to keep acquiring more books. Perhaps I should employ a team of book-slaves to read them and provide me with a condensed bluffer's precis. Or I could just browse the customer reviews on Amazon - they're always reliable and informative.

In any event, I thought you should be provided with pictorial evidence of the daunting task that keeps me away from blogging. Anyone who would like to guess the titles of the books in the photo is welcome to do so in their own time.

Passable

2008-04-08T16:35:00.002Z

Today is 8th April, which means it must be time for my monthly blog post. Unusually, various things have happened to me in the last month. I met Alan Sillitoe, for one thing. Well, I didn't really meet him, as such, in the sense of conversing with him, or shaking his hand, but I was in the same room as him while he was talking. Some of you might be wondering who Alan Sillitoe is. So was I, to be candid. Turns out that he's a writer of prose and poetry, including the popular novels-made-into-films, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I don't know anything about films, so this fact had escaped me. Other interesting Alan Sillitoe trivia: he knows Morse Code and can speak various European languages. He is eighty years old.

March was also the month in which I finally passed my driving test, ten years after most of my contemporaries. It took me ages. Here's a brief diarisation of my progress:

Lesson 4: God, I'm crap at driving.

Lesson 68: Hang on, everybody's crap at driving.

Now that I've got a driving licence, I can make it up as I go along like everybody else does. Signalling at roundabouts? I've got better things to think about.

Please excuse the perfunctory nature of this post. I would write more, but I really ought to go and devote some more time to reducing the size of my alarmingly huge (and ever-expanding) tower of unread books. Having spent most of my life in an illiterate vacuum, the only available reading material being the words 'Press Start' on the title screens of various Nintendo-branded fripperies, I now find myself with a daunting amount of catching up to do. My knowledge of history, for example, is slightly less impressive than my non-existent knowledge of films. I'd always excused my ignorance using Henry Ford's pithy maxim, 'history is bunk'. Now, the process of reading has revealed to me that what he actually said is that 'history is more or less bunk', which isn't the same thing at all. Come to think of it, I'm not even entirely sure what 'bunk' means in this context.

As you can see, it's imperative that I return to my studies immediately, for fear that the sheer vacuity of my mental landscape may create a negative pressure inside my skull, resulting in catastrophic cranial collapse. Gotta go.

In all fairness

2008-03-08T21:36:00.003Z

A month isn't that long, in all fairness.
In all fairness,
Darling,
You're not the one who has to write this thing.
Although when I say 'has'
Clearly there's some room for interpretation.

What did you do while I was gone?
I know what I did; however,
I shall reveal
Nothing.
Since nothing was a large part of it,
In all fairness.

And in all fairness, why, why, why?
Plate glass glazed stare
Middle distance.
The horizon was nearer before,
I swear;
I promise, unless there was some sort of
Azimuthal miscalculation.

Which is possible. Even the sharpest calipers
Slide rules set squares
Can make mistakes,
In all fairness.
Barrow in Furness.
Don't lecture me about on/off
Standby switch.
You don't have to turn off the red light,
Unless

That zig zag pie chart
Sketched broken
Scale till
3.6 degrees was etched on my protractor.
Protracted ordeal
That was. Still,
Nothing ventured, nothing gained,
In all fairness.

How come? Please/pleese/pleaze,
Let me get what I won't,
For once.
Poor me, over and over;
That smudged tune with every grimy pencil
Chewed end
Buckled copper dirty pink
Scrawled on squared 5mm feint ruled.
(In the margin)

Let's hear the b-side
Live cover session remix bank
Balance. Mono recording.
In all fairness, home taping
Is killing
Yourself. Wait:
It's worse.
It's killing the Bee Gees.

Well, one out of three ain't bad;
120 notches.
That plug-in power point slideshow
About pen up colour = cyan pen down:
Fuck that.
Consonant Carol consonant Boggle
For juniors;
Your anagrams are showing,

Doctor. Fall insane, sir,
You're not the one who has to write this thing.

Time management

2008-02-08T17:19:00.000Z

Two weeks seem to have happened since I last posted anything. I suppose it would be more conventional to say that two weeks have 'passed', or perhaps 'elapsed', but time strikes me as being something that happens to a person, whether that person likes it or not. It inflicts itself upon you. Great chunks of it shear away from your life, like glaciers collapsing into the sea, and all you can do is gawp like a bemused seal cub while you try to remember whether you've done one constructive thing in the yawning period of blankness that's just irretrievably crashed into the vast icy oceans of history.

It's hardly original to bemoan the relentlessness of the passage of time, but I have a particular knack for squandering the stuff in extravagant quantities. I procrastinate. I prevaricate. I agonise over every decision until it becomes irrelevant. I've spent a disturbing proportion of my adult life languishing in a state of perennial undecidedness. Even writing this entirely inconsequential blog presents me with a freedom of expression that I'm simply not equipped to deal with. For weeks I've been attempting to find the right style and format for another idiotic Lego story (not pirates this time, you'll be relieved to hear), but after three or four false starts I'm no nearer than I was when I started. Probably less near, in fact.

And that's not the worst of it. Believe it or not, I have decisions to make in my life that don't have anything to do with Lego, and might even have a long term impact on my future. How am I expected to deal with the responsibility of such weighty choices? It's a ludicrous imposition. So I do what any sensible man in my position would: I shop.

Or rather, I don't shop. In order to assuage the jittery attacks of cabin fever that result from sitting around the house all day, I have instigated the daily ritual of making the half hour walk into my local town centre, walking around it for a bit, then walking home. Given that I stride with a ludicrous bobbing gait that lies somewhere between John Cleese playing hopscotch and Andy Pandy, all this walking exposes me to considerable public humiliation. But despite this, and despite the fact that I very rarely make any purchases, I still enjoy my excursions into the enchanting realm of retail. I particularly like browsing furtively in the CD sections of second-hand and charity shops, revelling in the guilty thrill of rediscovering all the two-bit pop acts that have subsequently disappeared into obscurity. A good game to play is trying to locate the singles that followed up one-hit wonders. Today, for example, I stumbled upon Stiltskin's second single, a song so utterly unsuccessful that I've forgotten the name of it after only a few hours (you might remember that Stiltskin's gravelly committee-rock hit, Inside, was the soundtrack to that monochrome Levi's advert featuring a topless man in a river. Or you might not).

I also saw a slightly dishevelled-looking copy of the limited edition 2CD version The Beautiful South's Carry on up the Charts on sale for the derisory sum of £1.99. The music collector's website eil.com is currently - and rather optimistically - trying to flog this item to obsessive-compulsive spendthrifts for £49.99. But still I didn't buy it. Partly this was because I already own three copies (yes, really), and partly because the mere sight of it triggered tedious flashbacks of yet more time that I wasted earlier in my career, herding CDs into neat sets for discernable reason. Besides, when it comes to music collecting, condition is the key. For those of you not familiar with the standardised system for describing the state of records and CDs, here's a brief rundown:

* Mint - As fresh as the day it left the pressing factory, or at least still roughly the same shape.
* Excellent - Disc likely to be scuffed and scratched, sleeve crumpled and stained with mysterious yellow fluid and squashed earwigs. Probably still plays, though.
* Very Good - F**ked
* Good - Completely f**ked.

On this basis, the £1.99 set was probably in excellent condition. Tell you what: if it's still there tomorrow, I'll buy it and use it as the glittering prize in an exciting Happy Squid competition. That should bump up the readership figures, surely?

Tantalizing stuff.

Need input

2008-01-23T12:20:00.000Z

So look, productivity levels around here are dipping dangerously low. I admit that it probably shouldn't take me a fortnight to scrape together enough imagination to produce a solitary ropey cartoon, but at the moment I'm trying to broaden my mental horizons a little. To this end, I'm currently reading a hefty book called Ideas. I was hoping that this would provide me with a glut of inspiration, but it turns out that it's actually nothing more than a recapitulation of loads of ideas that other people have already had. Since I can't really claim to have invented written language, or been the founding father of democracy, I suppose I'll have to fall back on my aching brain lobes to try to imagine something that you might want to read. Or at least something that I want to write.

What I need is some kind of How to be Creative: A Step-by-Step Guide handbook. I'm sure such things are probably available, given the thriving market for bordering-on-parodic self-help manuals. My favourite example of late is the bluntly-titled Life's too F**king Short by the inimitable Janet Street Porter. It features a great many colourful illustrations, capital letters for emphasis and rounded corners on the pages, presumably to prevent more animated readers from poking their eyes out with it in an uncontrollable spasm of rage. Some of Street Porter's righteous fury is diminished by her publisher's insistence on printing her favourite expletive as 'f**k' (with asterisks) throughout, which has the effect of reducing her splenetic invective to a prim bowdlerized screech. You should still buy it, though, definitely. It's orange, I think.

Most of the world's creativity seems to be focused in the advertising industry, where 'creativity' serves as a euphemism for 'thinking of new ways to undermine people's self-confidence'. I saw an advert for some kind of cosmetic product recently, use of which promised to result in a 'more perfect you'. Now, my understanding has always been that perfection is a binary concept: you either are perfect or you aren't. Obviously, though, it's not a good idea to dent the brittle egos of your potential customers with the suggestion that they're not already perfect, so the ingenious advertising executive - well drilled in the art of thinking outside the box - introduces a sliding scale of perfection. Everybody's happy. Except, uh-oh, now there's always going to be room for that little bit of extra perfection. No doubt that L'Oréal are beavering away on a new product range to take account of this (perhaps the company's slogan, 'Because you're worth it' could be more honestly re-phrased as, 'Because, let's face it, you're not quite good enough'.)

I could rant at length about the insidious idiocy of advertising, but I'll restrain myself because: (a) it would be hugely hypocritical (I use L'Oréal shampoo myself, for instance), and (b) there are already lots of websites devoted to just that sort of thing much better than I can - TV's Worst Adverts, hosted by the delightfully dyspeptic blogger Silky is great fun. I occasionally volunteer to fill in those consumer surveys that companies put out when they're launching a new product, only to end up ticking 'neither agree nor disagree' next to every statement. Still, they only take twenty minutes to complete, and you usually get a free drink and a crap biro into the bargain. This is how advertisers form their opinion of the public: by dragging idiots like me in off the street, plying them with luke-warm tea and gauging their responses to inane marketing jargon. No wonder their adverts sometimes get the tone wrong.

None of this has helped much with my creativity, but I suppose it's much easier to bemoan the shortcomings of others than address one's own. I am going to go away and have a think. My next entry will be nothing less than a shimmering oasis of literary imagination amidst the desiccated badlands of cliché, no doubt.

The corrections

2008-01-08T20:23:00.000Z

Justin Timberlake makes the same mistake in Cry Me a River:

You should've picked honesty
Then you may not have blown it

Such sloppy grammar, yet women still swoon over him. I can't understand it.

Incidentally, the apparent self-pity inherent in this cartoon is purely present to facilitate the punchline. The pedantry, sadly, is fairly true to life; understanding trivial semantic distinctions makes me feel empowered, except when I get them wrong. But that happens on a lot less occasions than it used to.

Yak.

Happy Squid review 2007

2007-12-30T11:39:00.001Z

Last year, Germaine Greer turned up to review 2006's Happy Squid content. She wasn't very impressed. We haven't been able to secure any celebrity pundits to offer the same service this year, so you'll have to trawl through the 2007 archives and think up your own opinions, I'm afraid.

It's been a haphazard year on the blog. Not much happened between January and June except for Jack Everyman and some surreal oddments about Neighbours and Transformers. After that, I started reading webcomics (including the splendid xkcd.com) and fell into the deluded belief that I might be able to draw cartoons myself. After a time, it became apparent that it's much easier to steal ready-made pictures from other people's websites and digitally edit them a bit for intended humorous effect. I sent this one to NGamer magazine, and they rated it as "officially A Good Joke", which might come as a surprise to those of you who were pretty certain it was crap. All the pictorial posts from the blog can be found in the sensibly-named picture index, including Garros's single 2007 contribution, Doing Stuff.

Over the summer, there were some posts about board games that are more confusingly written than the instruction booklet for Hero Quest. The Lego pirates also made a return in seven sequels that nobody asked for. Later on, the Happy Squid branched out into factual content, discussing the history of cassettes, Mario and Radiohead at some length: all absolutely probably guaranteed to be anything up to 100 per cent accurate.

That's about the extent of it; I haven't been very inspired this year on the whole, and there have been some godawful posts as a result (this Smallville one, for instance, just doesn't work: too many exclamation marks? Too obvious?). Resolutions for 2008: scale back the smugness and scowl menacingly at Garros and Hawk until they start pulling their weight.

Well, thanks to all of you who have been reading the blog this year in spite of wildly varying quality and lack of originality. It seems to be the law for websites to start producing t-shirts based on their content, so here's a suggested design based on my favourite bit from this year. A bargain at, ooh, £29.99?

Happy New Year, everybody.

Happy Squidsmas?

2007-12-22T21:27:00.000Z

What?

Lego pirates 8: the day after

2007-12-09T21:18:00.001Z

[This episode takes place the day after the events of Part 7, which got bogged down in Dawson's Creek levels of relationship issues. Can the pirates write their way out of this awkward narrative corner? Only one way to find out...]

Nigella trembles slightly in the coastal breeze as Julian emerges from the swell of the surf, sea water cascading down every inch of his body. Sunlight glints off the individual beads of moisture that form on his sinewy forearms as he strides confidently up the beach towards her. Nigella feels a current of electrical excitement course through her skin as he advances, his vest clinging moistly to his perfectly sculpted pectoral and abdominal muscles. Before she has a chance to take a breath, he is upon her, sweeping her up in his powerful arms and pressing her mouth to his in a salty, intoxicating kiss.

"Oh, Julian," she swoons, "I've waited years for this moment. How I've longed to be the submissive blank canvas on to which you can project your macho, authoritative fantasies."

Julian's eyes narrow with diabolical intent. "You're mine now, Nigella darling," he coos: "forever and ever and ever."

Nigella wakes abruptly from her dream, gasping for breath. She gets up briskly, plucks a paperback book from her bedside table, and hurls it purposefully out of the window into the sea.

"That's the last time I read Jackie Collins before bedtime," she mutters.

Nigella dresses and descends the steps to find Cap'n Smythe in a state of agitation. He hands her a note in Rupert's handwriting.

Dear Cap'n Smythe, she reads,

Nigella has betrayed me. In my grief, I have fled this sordid island of perfidy, perhaps never to return.

Lots of love, Rupert x

P.S. Please tape Lost for me while I'm away.

P.P.S. I have taken Geoffrey with me. He, at least, is loyal, and knows how to make those salmon canapés I like.

"Oh, this is terrible!" wails Nigella, after reading the message. "Rupert promised we were going to Ikea today."

"Gosh, so he did," agrees Smythe; "it's the last day of the sale, too."

Nigella looks inconsolable. "This is all your fault, Julian; if it weren't for you and your roving tongue, I'd be browsing the bathroom accessories aisle by now."

Unperturbed, Julian yawns and stretches. Nigella makes a point of not noticing his well-developed triceps.

In fact, Rupert and Geoffrey have only escaped as far as their tiny hideaway Pirate Isle.

"How could she do it to me, old chap?" wails Rupert: 'she' being Nigella, 'it' being the kiss she shared with Julian.

It's the fourteenth time he's asked that question this morning, and Geoffrey is no closer to being able to provide a satisfactory answer. Frankly, he's preoccupied with daydreaming about Maria, the Governor's lovely niece. Last night he rowed all the way out to the Governor's fort to deliver some flowers to her, only to be informed by Rupert on his return that they were running away from home. He dozes lightly in the warmth of the morning sun.

He's woken abruptly by a loud bang from Rupert's pistol. A stricken parrot tumbles to the earth.

"Not a bad shot, eh, Geoffrey? I used to be quite a crackshot on Pater's pheasant hunts," says Rupert. "Killing seems to be my only comfort in times of emotional turmoil."

Geoffrey edges discreetly away from his companion.

Meanwhile, at his fort, the Governor flings open the doors to find a bunch of roses adorning the driveway. Lance Corporal Davies picks them up and examines the attached card.

"It looks as if your niece has a secret admirer," he deduces.

"Well, I can assure you that it isn't me, Davies; that girl's been nothing but trouble ever since she arrived. First there was that business with letting those pirates out of jail. Then, while I was trying to work, she was lecturing me non-stop about the ethical ramifications of whaling. It put me right off my aim."

"A waste of good harpoons, Arthur."

"Please don't call me Arthur, Davies."

"Sorry, sir. Maria said-"

"Never mind what Maria said. Give the wretched woman her flowers, and then keep her out of my hair, for goodness' sake."

The Governor sighs as Davies departs to do his duty. Women make life so much more complicated.

Davies finds Maria practising her yoga on one of the fort's turrets. He presents the roses to her.

"We found these on the doorstep this morning," he explains.

"Oh, they're beautiful," she says, inhaling their scent deeply. "I'll bet they're from one of those lovely stubbly boys that Uncle Arthur tried to put in prison yesterday."

"Rupert and Geoffrey?"

"Yes, that's them." She's privately hoping that Geoffrey was the sender; she took rather a shine to his unassuming nature. "I must thank them somehow."

Davies remembers the Governor's instruction to keep Maria out of his way. "I could take you to visit them if you like, Miss."

"Thank you Davies, that would be super."

And so the pair stroll off to find a rowing boat. "I do hope these roses were grown locally," says Maria, by way of conversation; "the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during transportation is phenomenal. Oh, it's so difficult to be a romantic and an environmentalist."

Back on Skull Island, Nigella continues to exchange recriminations with Julian.

"I do hate to think of Rupert being all alone when he could be with me, paying for my shopping," laments Nigella. "He's very sensitive, you know."

"Nonsense," Julian counters. "I'll wager he's fallen straight into the arms of that Maria woman he met up with behind your back."

"Piffle. My Rupe has always been faithful to me. You simply upset his delicate emotional equilibrium by kissing me, you brute."

"That kiss was purely ironic," he bluffs. "Anyway, you kissed me back; Rupert's in a flap because he can see that you lust after me. I expect you dreamt about me last night."

Nigella flushes deep red. "I've never known such an ego!" she declares, and strides away indignantly.

She finds Cap'n Smythe upstairs. "This is all very testing, Cap'n," she says.

"What is, old girl?"

"Julian is nothing but an ape, but he's so rugged and muscular that I can't help being physically attracted to him."

Smythe is sympathetic. "Oh, yes; he's certainly very rugged."

"Rupert is a sweetheart, but he's such a fop sometimes, gadding about in his waistcoat and tricorn."

"He's quite the dedicated follower of fashion," agrees Smythe.

"If only he could be a bit more manly sometimes," she sighs. "He's always so prim and chivalrous."

On Pirate Isle, Rupert sits surrounded by the carcasses of two parrots, three monkeys and a shark. He admires his handiwork.

"I think I've accounted for all the available wildlife, Geoffers," he announces. "I feel much better now, I must say."

Geoffrey surveys the scene with distaste.

"I've decided to forgive Nigella for her little indiscretion, so we might as well head back home, what?" Rupert continues. "Put this lot into a sack, will you, and we'll get going."

Rupert reclines against a post, satisfied. Geoffrey dons his rubber gloves resignedly and sets to work.

Meanwhile, Lance Corporal Davies and Maria are en route to Skull Island. Maria is engaging her travelling companion in a conversation about global injustice.

"So you see," she concludes, "the Fairtrade label is really only a salve to the guilt-ridden conscience of the middle class. Until farming subsidies are banned in the developed world, we'll never be able to trade on equal terms with our economically disadvantaged neighbours. Isn't it awful?"

"Shocking," agrees Barnes, through a mouthful of confectionery. "Do you fancy a bit of my Dairy Milk?"

"Ooh, go on then," says Maria. "Let me just check that there are no beef by-products in it. I can't abide unnecessary animal suffering."

Satisfied with the chocolate's contents, she breaks off a few squares and savours them at length. Davies rows on.

After a time, they arrive at their destination. Maria climbs out of the boat to be greeted by Bos'n Julian.

"Hello there," she says. "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering if Rupert and Geoffrey were around. One of them sent me some lovely flowers, and I wanted to thank them in person."

"Flowers?" echoes Julian. "That must have been Rupert. Geoffrey can barely muster the energy to send the mustard to the other end of the dinner table."

Maria tries to conceal her disappointment. By this time, Nigella has arrived to investigate the new arrival.

"What-ho, Nigella," smirks Julian; "this is Maria. Rupert's been sending her flowers, apparently."

"What?" shrieks Nigella.

"Yes, I think so," confirms Maria. "A beautiful bouquet of roses. I came to say thank you."

Nigella is seething. "Rupert is spoken for," she hisses.

Julian rubs his hands with glee. He was right about Rupert, and - more importantly - he's about to witness a lady-fight.

With characteristically fortuitous timing, however, Rupert and Geoffrey's raft drifts ashore at this critical moment.

"Gosh, hello again, Maria," Rupert calls. "Didn't expect to see you again so soon, I must say."

Nigella interjects. "Apparently, you two-faced philanderer, she's come all this way to express her gratitude for the roses that you thoughtfully sent her."

"I sent her nothing of the sort," protests Rupert. "I've been far too mired in my own abject misery to think of anybody else."

Nigella has to admit that his alibi is plausible.

Maria is delighted. "Then they must have been from Geoffrey after all," she reasons. She jogs over to the shore, where he is hauling the heavy sack on to the beach, and kisses him lightly on the cheek. "Thanks for the flowers," she smiles.

Geoffrey is utterly stunned. In his surprise, he drops the bag, spilling its lifeless contents across the sand.

Maria screams as the limp tail of the shark slaps against her thigh. "Oh, God! What have you done?" she gasps.

Before he can draw breath to explain, Maria has turned and leapt back into the boat with Davies. "Get me away from here!" she instructs him. Davies, who had been hoping for a slightly longer rest, grudgingly complies.

"That was a flying visit, eh, Geoffrey?" says Rupert, as the boat departs.

Geoffrey inhales to deliver a vituperative response, but his energy fails him. What's the use?

Nigella, on the other hand, is thrilled with Rupert's haul. "Look at you, my little blood-stained hunter-gatherer! You're just like a caveman; a very manly caveman, at that. I knew you'd never betray me for another woman, especially not a weedy little vegetarian like that."

"Of course not, dearest," Rupert assures her. "Now, be a good girl and fire up the barbecue, will you?"

Maria arrives back at the fort to find her uncle in a relaxed state.

"Ah, Maria," he says, cordially. "How was your day?"

"Well, I went out with Davies to discover who had sent me those flowers."

"And?"

"At first, I thought he was a sweet, quiet type. It turns out he's actually more of the reclusive-serial-killer, don't-make-eye-contact-under-any-circumstances quiet type."

"Oh, dear. Never mind, eh? How about some cocoa?"

"That would be nice, uncle, as long as there aren't any animal extracts in it."

The Governor ponders over how to make cocoa without milk. Women certainly do make life complicated.

Later, the barbecue on Skull Island is in full flow.

"Hurrah!" cheers Nigella, waving a cutlass-skewer laden with exotic grilled meat. "This is all jolly splendid."

"Put a sock in it, you shameless hussy," requests Julian, bitterly.

Rupert chuckles. "Good old Jules," he says.

"Yes," agrees Nigella; "everything's back to normal. Perhaps we can go back to having shorter, less emotionally-convoluted adventures again now."

"I'll drink to that!" cries Smythe. "Chin chin!"

The pirates raise their glasses happily. In the corner, Geoffrey bursts into tears.

Everything really is back to normal.

Lose yourself

2007-12-08T20:27:00.000Z

Lego Pirates 8: coming soon.

Darwinning Eleven

2007-12-04T15:05:00.000Z

(The PES games are called Winning Eleven in Japan, hence the title. Yep.)

Run

2007-11-27T17:30:00.000Z

Somewhere in the world, there must be a secret society of exasperated joggers who ritually burn Forrest Gump DVDs in their clandestine meetings. I want in.

The story of Mario: Part 1

2007-11-19T14:48:00.000Z

If you have a passing interest in computer games, you might be aware that Nintendo have just released the latest 'proper' (i.e. involving running, leaping and saving the princess) Mario game, Super Mario Galaxy. If you couldn't care less, consider this: Mario once topped a poll of the world's most recognised fictional characters, beating Mickey Mouse, Superman and, um, Captain Planet to the punch. Like it or not, Mario is culturally significant.

After meticulous research, then, the Happy Squid proudly presents the definitive history of the corpulent u-bend botherer.

====

In 1979, a young Japanese student named Shigeru Miyamoto came to Britain with the intention of busking his way around the country with his beloved ukulele. A keen reader of Dickens, Miyamoto expected the streets to be littered with filthy, down-on-their-luck urchins, sadistic schoolmasters and top-hatted avaricious aristocrats. He was not disappointed. However, Miyamoto's stay in Slough was short-lived, and soon he was shepherded on to a coach headed for the sleepy northern enclave of Rochdale.

As the bus trundled through the dales of Lancashire, it was clear that he had entered a different world. The cheery locals tilled the fields by hand, singing songs by Gracie Fields to keep their spirits up. When he finally reached his destination, he was greeted by two strange-looking moustachioed men.

"Hello," said the first man, "my name's Barry. I couldn't help noticing that you've got a banjo."

"Actually," said Miyamoto, "it's a ukulele."

"Silly me," said Barry.

"Silly you," confirmed the second man. "My name's Paul. My brother and I are amateur dramatists called the Chuckle Brothers. We do performance art and interpretative dance set to music, but our usual guitar player's gone down with a dose of the clap. Would you like to stand in?"

"Yes please," said Miyamoto, scarcely able to believe his luck.

"Great!" said Paul. "Let's get your luggage off the bus. Come on, Barry: to you..."

"To me..." said Barry.

And so on. After several hours of comical misadventures with his suitcases, Miyamoto and the brothers set off to tour the local area with their unique show. Audiences were rapt by the sight of a mystical oriental man plucking out jaunty George Formby numbers on his ukulele while the slightly disturbing siblings pranced about kicking tortoises, diving in and out of pipes, gobbling enormous mushrooms and plucking coins from mysterious cubes adorned with question marks. Word of mouth spread rapidly, and soon they were commanding audiences of several people. The fun was only slightly marred when they reached the Scottish border, where they got into a fight with some fiercely territorial light entertainers called The Krankies. Wee Jimmy proved to be a lot tougher than he looked (and had a foul mouth to go with it), and the Chuckle Posse was forced to retreat back down south to nurse their bruises.

The Chuckle Posse circa 1980. From left to right: Miyamoto, Paul and Barry.

When it was time to go back to Japan, Miyamoto sadly waved goodbye to his English friends. "Good luck with pitching your TV show to the BBC," he said, as he passed through the airport check-in desk. Secretly, though, he didn't think they'd ever amount to much, what with Barry's chronic heroin addiction and all.

When he arrived in Tokyo, his parents greeted him with portentous news. "I have got you a job with a company called Nintendo," said his father. "The president is a great friend of mine, Hiroshi Yamauchi: very angry man. He will cure you of your liberal beatnik tendencies."

"It's for your own good, son," agreed his mother, tearfully.

And so Miyamoto found himself working for the famous game manufacturer. The company was going through a very exciting period of change, moving from making playing cards to electronic games. His first meeting with his boss was very productive. "Stupid hippy!" screamed Yamauchi. "Think of a good idea for our new game, or you are fired! And dead!" With that, he smashed Miyamoto's precious ukulele to pieces and locked him in the stationery cupboard.

Miyamoto was very upset. It was difficult to think in the dark, cold alcove, so he borrowed some ideas from King Kong, changed the name a bit, and went to sleep.

A week later, Yamauchi opened the door. Blinded by the intense fluorescent lights of the office, Miyamoto handed his hastily-scribbled plan to his superior. "It's called 'Donkey Kong'," he stuttered: "a great hero climbs a mountain of scaffolding to rescue the beautiful lady."

"Great hero?" repeated Yamauchi, warily. "What does this 'great hero' look like?"

Miyamoto hadn't thought of that. He tried to summon a vision of Herculean infallibility, but in his malnourished state, the only person that sprung to mind was Barry Chuckle, his erstwhile busking companion. Realising that his employer was on the brink of a supremely violent outburst, he quickly jotted down a rough sketch to placate him. The result was unmistakeable: squat physique, dubious dress-sense, ludicrous moustache.

Mario had been born.

At the time, however, he wasn't called Mario, but was given the rather more literal moniker of Jumpman. Fittingly, he jumped straight into the hearts of arcade gamers the world over, and Donkey Kong was a huge success. Yamauchi was so happy that he gave Miyamoto his own desk in the corner of the basement, chained him to a radiator, and told him to churn out another smash hit. Or else.

Miyamoto chewed his pencil thoughtfully. If his character based on Barry Chuckle had been so well received, it was surely reasonable to conclude that giving him a brother inspired by Paul Chuckle would cement his popularity. He scrawled another picture, but this time the character was taller, leaner and greener. In tribute to his old friends, the brothers would star in game where they harassed tortoises and scampered through filthy pipes like rodents.

The young designer presented his idea to the president. "I thought we could call it 'Super Chuckle Happy Plumber Brothers Go!! Go!!'" he suggested. "The tall one is called Paul, and the little one is Barry."

"Paul and Barry?" raged Yamauchi. "Awful!" He picked up a leaflet from the local Italian restaurant, and found the names of the proprietors. "We'll call your idiot brothers... Mario and Luigi," he announced. "Now go and make the game before I break this chair over your head."

Miyamoto scurried away. Within weeks, the Mario Bros. arcade cabinet was up and running, and Mario and Luigi were soon household names. "We must capitalise on our success," decreed Yamauchi. "Nintendo will make a computer that will sit under every television in the world!"

Mr. Yamauchi is a very nice man, really. Just don't make eye-contact.

It is not known how many programmers and electrical engineers died during the creation of the Nintendo Famicom (or Nintendo Entertainment System, as it was known in the west), but conservative estimates suggest that more than five hundred perished in Yamauchi's 'development camps'. Ultimately, however, all commentators agreed that the end result more than justified their sacrifice. The console was a triumph of design, and Mario quickly became its figurehead, starring in conversions of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., alongside numerous other cameo appearances.

It was in 1985 that the hirsute Italian siblings really stepped into the limelight. Super Mario Bros. used a revolutionary technique called 'scrolling', which allowed our heroes to run and jump over long distances from left to right. And run and jump they did, headbutting mysterious floating cubes, munching supersize mushrooms and (naturally) stamping on tortoises as they went. The brothers' new arch-enemy was Bowser: a hideous scaly fire-breathing turtle with a proclivity for abducting members of the royal family. At the end of each set of four levels, Mario sent Bowser plummeting into a pool of molten lava, only to be informed by simperingly vague toadstool people that their princess was in "another castle". By the time he'd stormed his seventh irrelevant fortress, his misfortune was beginning to look like incompetence. However, he located the hapless lady on his next attempt, and was rewarded with a shower of feminist-baiting love hearts.

Mario confronts his arch-enemy. Some commentators have suggested that the similar appearances of Bowser and the fearsome Wee Jimmy Krankie are far from coincidental.

Yamauchi was sickened by this happy ending. "This game is for pathetic little girls!" he screamed. "Proper men with fine robotic brains like mine can finish this in five minutes! Do it again, but make it harder, and less soppy."

So Miyamoto set to work on Super Mario Bros 2. It was so difficult that Nintendo didn't think that Western games could get their fat sausage-fingers around it. They were right. For the American and European markets, the second Mario platform game featured a more relaxed blend of digging holes and plucking turnips, based on Miyamoto's bucolic experiences in the north of England.

Super Mario Bros 3 was a big step forwards for the franchise. In 1988, Mario hopped and skipped his way through a diverse range of locales, from arid desert to slippery snowy wastelands, from labyrinthine haunted houses to artillery-laden airships. By dressing up as a raccoon - a species not otherwise famed for its aerial manoeuvrability - Mario could soar through the skies, lending the game a sense of freedom others could only fantasise about. Buoyed by an elaborate advertisement in which brainwashed, colour-coded members of the Cult of Nintendo were assembled in strict military formation to chant Mario's name, it became one of the best-selling videogames of all time (despite being a bit dull, really).

[Proceed to Part 2]

The story of Mario: Part 2

2007-11-19T14:34:00.000Z

By the close of the decade, technology was moving on apace. Mobile phones had become almost light enough to carry with one hand, and Nintendo weren't about to get left behind in the shift towards portability. The Game Boy was yet another attempt to alienate the female consumers that Yamauchi considered fundamentally inferior, but his plan backfired spectacularly thanks to Tetris, a Russian puzzle game whose appeal transcended gender boundaries. He was so cross that he stopped Miyamoto's pocket money and handed control of the Game Boy Mario titles to his colleague Gunpei Yokoi instead. Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins were the results: monochrome variations on the successful NES theme. Miyamoto sulked in his garden shed.

However, he was given another chance to prove himself a man when Nintendo's new home console, the Super Famicom (or Super NES) arrived on the scene. Boasting a sixteen-bit processor, mode-7 graphics and a palette of (wowee!) 32,000 colours, the SNES wasn't shy about flexing its impressive array of meaningless-to-non-computer-scientists numbers. "The plebs want another Mario game," decreed Yamauchi. "Make it happen, and don't skimp on the colours. I will personally check to make sure that you have used every single one.

"I abhor waste!" he added, before devouring the contents of a nearby flower pot.

Still smarting over his Game Boy rejection, Miyamoto reasoned that if his rival Yokoi could only give Mario a 'land', he could provide him with a whole WORLD. Thus were the seeds for the seminal Super Mario World sown. As per his instructions, Miyamoto crammed every screen with colour until the game had reached Munchkin Land levels of gaudiness. Mario could once again take to the skies above these psychedelic landscapes, but this time the raccoon hide was thrown out in favour of a much more sensible superhero-style cape. Other innovations included rideable elastic-tongued dino-dragon Yoshi, and a multitude of molar-erodingly obscure secret exits. It was great.

This screen from Super Mario World shows off the SNES's 814 shades of grey.

Not long after this riot of colourful platforming, Mario began to demonstrate that he had skills in areas beyond jumping really high and fiddling with boilers. One of the first examples was Super Mario Kart, which used the SNES's swizzy Mode-7 graphics to create a mind-boggling impression of perspective on its racetracks. The game was so influential that many teenage players were disappointed to discover upon taking driving lessons that real cars were not equipped with a 'hop and skid' powerslide function. Bah.

By this time, Mario was a phenomenon, and no medium was safe from his seeping influence. He'd already enjoyed his own cartoon series and inspired chart-troubling disco ditties, but Yamauchi wanted more. Hollywood beckoned.

Of course, when the idea of a Mario Bros. film was floated, Miyamoto immediately knew the men who'd be perfect for the roles. He looked up the Chuckle Brothers in his student address book, but when he dialled the number he was surprised to find himself being put through to a showbiz agent. It seemed that since he had seen them last, Paul and Barry had become very successful celebrities in the UK. "I'm very sorry, Mr. Miyamoto," said their agent, "but the boys can't be in your film; they're already booked for Puss in Boots at the Torquay Hippodrome.

"Let me see if there's anybody else on my books who might be available," the man continued. "Ah, yes; how about Bob Hoskins?"

"Bob Hoskins?" asked Miyamoto, confused.

"Yes, you know Bob: he played a booze-sodden dick in that popular film with the two-dimensional Looney Tunes characters and that rabbitty bird with the massive hooters. Y'know... The Long Good Friday."

Miyamoto agreed to his suggestion, and the Super Mario Bros. movie went into production. Hoskins later generously described it as "the worst thing I've ever done," and a "f**king nightmare." Cinema audiences concurred.

Yamauchi was even more enraged than usual. He was so furious that he was beginning to have difficulty appreciating that Mario was a fictional character. "That tubby plunger-merchant is a laughing stock!" he bawled. "We must punish him for besmirching Nintendo's proud reputation in this way."

And so, through no fault of his own, poor old Mario found himself relegated to a supporting role in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. In fact, he was reduced to a helpless mewling nappy-clad infant, sitting astride a succession of lick-happy dragons and occasionally drifting off in a bubble. "Hahaaha!" cackled Yamauchi, whilst throttling a puppy. "That will teach him a lesson in respect!" However, his mirth was interrupted by the poor sales figures: Yoshi's Island was released in 1995, by which time the fickle public had tossed their Super Famicoms on the bonfire to make room for for the next generation of hardware. "Blast!" cursed the Nintendo president, hurling his secretary through a fifteenth-story window.

It was a similar story with Super Mario RPG, a game which cast Mario in a Dungeons and Dragons-style, politely-take-turns-to-hit-each-other adventure. The game didn't sell enough copies in Japan and the States to make it worth releasing in the backwaters of Europe, and its developer, a company called Squaresoft, flounced off in a huff to produce mega-hit Final Fantasy games for Sony.

The technological goalposts were moving once again, and this time the shift was not in Nintendo's favour. "We must build the most powerful machine known to man!" decided Yamauchi. As usual, he sent a team of computer-literate slaves into the bowels of the Nintendo development dungeon. Two years later, the emaciated survivors emerged with the ultra-advanced Nintendo 64 console. By this point, however, everybody had got bored of waiting and bought a Playstation instead. "Balls!" muttered Yamauchi.

Fortunately, Miyamoto had also been busy during this time. Using a combination of geometry and voodoo, he had devised a method of producing seemingly three-dimensional spaces on a two-dimensional television screen, and not surprisingly, Mario was one of the first intrepid explorers of this brave new world. In Super Mario 64, the dungareed do-gooder cast off the shackles of flatness and cartwheeled, long-jumped and backflipped into gamers' affections once more. He was even given a voice for the first time, although his verbal outbursts were limited to such nuggets as "ha-ha!", "waa-hoo!", "it's-a me!", "let's-a go!" and mumbling soporifically about spaghetti. The Italian nation had finally found a representative to be proud of.

I saw Mario 64 for the first time on CITV's long-defunct videogames show, Bad Influence! It was, and still is, easily the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me.

In their excitement about Mario 64, however, Nintendo had forgotten to make any other games for their new console (except for an esoteric jet-ski racing title), and consequently nobody wanted to buy one. Not even the release of Mario Kart 64 some months later could persuade skinflint punters to part with their cash, even with the promise of red-hot four-way multiplayer action. Mario was starting to look a bit bland compared to his arch-nemesis, Wario, who was prone to uttering lovably complacent catchphrases along the lines of, "I'm-a Wario: I'm-a gonna weeen!" It was time for our hero to reassert himself: Mario was going to throw a party.

For those people that bought videogame consoles to escape the spirit-sapping tedium of board games, Mario Party came as something of an unpleasant surprise. It faithfully recreated the dice-rolling and interminable waiting involved in traditional tabletop games, but spiced matters up somewhat with the introduction of flesh-lacerating 'minigames'. The whole process was entirely arbitrary, and the sanitised, Disneyfied niceness of it all was almost as conducive to vomiting as imbibing sixteen mugs of dubious unlabelled 'punch' at a freshers' week house party. Despite this, Mario keeps coming back for more: at last count, he was hosting the eighth instalment in the series.

In his spare time, Mario also took up golf, tennis and football in a series of sports-themed N64 games. It wasn't until late in the console's life that he returned to adventuring in Paper Mario, a cheekily self-referential role-playing game featuring wafer-thin character models. As with Super Mario RPG, nobody bought it: they were too busy snuggling up to their spanking new Playstation 2s.

This time, Nintendo were up to the challenge. "Behold the Nintendo Gamecube!" commanded Yamauchi at the American press-conference launch. "It is small and square and purple. You buy it, now!"

The assembled journalists began to file out, muttering that it looked "a bit gay".

"Wait!" cried el presidente. "We have a new Mario game. You morons love Mario, right?"

"Whoop!" whooped the crowd, turning back to the stage.

Miyamoto emerged. "This is Super Mario Sunshine! It's Mario, but this time he's on holiday on a tropical archipelago, and he's cleaning up gunky mess with his squirty backpack!"

The crowd looked confused. "What?" ventured a man in the second row.

"It's a right-on environmentalist theme, you guys!" Miyamoto explained. "It will teach selfish children that they must take care of the planet, or else they will be eaten by gigantic sludge monsters!"

Mario vs. disgusting effluence beast, Christmas 2002.

By the time he had finished his sentence, the American hacks had scarpered out of the hall and were screeching out of the car park in their SUVs. Nevertheless, Super Mario Sunshine proved popular, and was bought by ninety per cent of Gamecube owners (roughly 258 people). In their hearts, though, they knew it wasn't right for Mario to be sunning himself in the tropics, hosing raw sewage off the streets. They yearned for a return to the old days, which was handy, since Super Mario World had just been cynically re-released on the Game Boy Advance for £30.

Miyamoto was still convinced that the environmentally-aware approach was a good one, as evidenced by the enthusiastically over-punctuated Mario Kart: Double Dash!! This time, racers embraced the laudable notion of car-sharing, piling two characters into a vehicle to cut down on carbon emissions. Meanwhile, Mario Kart: Super Circuit on the Game Boy Advance advocated recycling by including all the tracks from the original SNES version. Nintendo was doing its bit for climate change.

Elsewhere on the GBA, the Mario brothers were putting aside their fraternal disputes and teaming up for Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. It was a tongue-in-cheek role-playing game in the same vein as the N64's Paper Mario, crammed with in-jokes about previous Mario games. One particularly memorable character - I forget her name - spoke in a badly-translated-from-Japanese dialect, like people used to do in computer games in the '80s. "I have fury!" she exclaimed, causing irony-compliant videogame writers the world over to fall about in paroxysms of delight. The actual game was quite good, too, and sold enough copies to prevent Yamauchi from burning its programmers at the stake.

Miyamoto realised that the time was right for a resurrection of the Paper Mario series, this time on Gamecube. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door was packed with clever origami antics, like folding Mario into a paper aeroplane and tearing off pieces of scenery to discover secret routes. Mario also had to put up with a bunch of whining two-bit sidekicks tagging along, including a blustery, busty operatic cloud-woman and a seafaring anthropomorphised bomb whose primary means of attack was to detonate himself in foes' faces. Was this seemingly innocent adventure in fact a subversive commentary on the War on Terror? Er, probably not.

Around this time, Yamauchi stepped down as president of Nintendo. In tribute, Mario was given his own version of Dance Dance Revolution, where players were provided with an electronic mat and encouraged to gyrate along to 'classic' Mario music and bona fide classical music. "Dancing is for sissy ladies!" spat Yamauchi, but nobody could hear him in his hermetically-sealed, radiation-proof retirement bunker, miles beneath the Earth's surface.

Nintendo might have lost their esteemed president, but they soon gained a powerful ally in the form of sonorous frizzy-wigged Angry Kid-doppelganger, Reggie Fils-Aime. "I'm about taking names," he boomed; "I'm about kicking ass!" His first act of foot/ass interfacing was the launch of the Nintendo DS, a double-screened, touch-sensitive, gender-neutral handheld successor to the Game Boy. Sony sneered at this gimmickry, confident that their sleek Playstation Portable console would wipe the floor with Nintendo's feeble effort. Soon, however, Sony's buttocks were smarting from the boot of Reggie, and the DS was flying out of the shops, along with its new, ruinously fiddly version of Mario 64.

Reggie and Angry Kid. They must be cousins, at least.

Before long, the DS had its own new Super Mario Bros. game called, um, New Super Mario Bros. It marked the return of the series to two-dimensional side-scrolling platforming, and reminded everyone who wasn't disgustingly young of how much they loved the old NES Mario games. Again, this was lucky, since Nintendo were soon to announce an online service where retro titles could be downloaded, for a (very reasonable) price.

The service in question was an integral part of their exciting new Wii console. Inspired by Reggie's wild on-stage gesticulation, Nintendo's designers realised that conventional control pads were yesterday's news. In their place came a remote control-style handset that could sense motion in all directions. Suddenly, people who had previously considered computer games beneath them wanted a piece of the Nintendo action, and the Wii became the must-have gadget for iPod-wielding executive yuppies the world over.

Mario quickly made his presence felt. As well as his downloadable retro outings, he starred as a hyperactive football chump in online multiplayer cheat-a-thon, Mario Strikers Charged, and reprised his role as dangerously skinny explorer in the whimsical dimension-flipping escapade, Super Paper Mario.

What everybody really wanted, though, was a proper follow-up to Mario 64. After the tropical stylings of Mario Sunshine, fans demanded a return to the more abstract design of previous instalments. It was time for another press conference.

"Ladies and gentlemen," bellowed Reggie (by this point, Nintendo's marketing strategy was sufficiently inclusive to allow female journalists to participate); "do you like Mario?"

"Woo-yeah!" yee-hawed the slavering press-packers.

"Do you like adventures set in outer space, for example Star Wars and Babylon 5?"

"You're darn tootin' we do!" responded the frenzied crowd.

"Then, my friends, I give you... Super Mario Galaxy!"

Everybody in the audience passed out in a communal fit of hysterical euphoria. Once they'd been revived and heavily sedated, they were allowed to watch videos of the new game. It was amazing: Mario hopped from planet to planet, encountering all his old friends and enemies and toying playfully with the universe's most mysterious force: gravity. Nintendo's mascot had broken through the final frontier and silenced the petty griping of the loyal gamers who loved him most. For about a week, anyway.

Yes, yes; very clever. But where does gravity come from, exactly?

From his humble beginnings as an ape-wrestling Chuckle brother twenty-six years ago, Mario has transcended his mildly offensive Italian stereotyping to become an international icon. Whenever trouble has reared its ugly head, Mario has been there to jump up and down on it, shouting "waa-hoo!" In these dark times, it is often said, we need heroes more than ever; what better hero could civilisation ask for than this intrepid and adaptable handyman?

Mario, we salute you.

====

[Thanks to Eurogamer and Wikipedia for their help with the occasional facts to be found in this article, along with all the all the other websites that I've pilfered pictures from. Credit is also due to NGamer/NGC/N64 Magazine for the 'Yamauchi is a psychotic maniac' idea and the provision of general Nintendo-related knowledge over the last ten years. There goes my carefully cultivated aura of cool...]

At least I didn't use a spoon

2007-11-14T12:23:00.000Z

For no reason, I've just spent a constructive morning re-editing the photos in Robin Hood Lego: Prince of Thieves. If you missed it the first time around, and you're a fan of turgid, overlong, wholly predictable spoofs of sitting-duck Hollywood swashbuckling epics starring Kevin Costner, then check out the digitally remastered version here. It features the same crappy photos as the original, but now you can fully appreciate their poor composition and blurriness in a slightly larger format.

Dobbin the Wonderhorse, away!

Muppets

2007-11-11T19:51:00.000Z

Wakka, wakka, wakkaaaa!

(Dies)

Science is a passion killer

2007-11-11T17:50:00.000Z

It's only a matter of time before love becomes expressible as a mathematical formula. Who'll be laughing then, emotionally expressive artistic types?

The art of conversation

2007-11-07T11:01:00.000Z

Words are great, aren't they? Inchoate, dirigible, obfuscation: all good words.

Writing is great, too. It gives us the luxury of pondering carefully over each of our lexicographical choices, allowing us to carefully consider which combination of words will most satisfactorily express our meaning. Thanks to computerised word-processing, there's no obligation to get things right first time; you can copy, paste, insert and delete to your heart's desire. And these days - if you're of a reckless disposition - you can even start a sentence with a conjunction. But never two sentences in a row.

Talking, on the other hand, is a horribly pressurised means of communication. Your interlocutors want to know what you think now, not in ten minutes' time when you've had a chance to arrange your views in an orderly manner. For me, this leads to numerous situations like the one illustrated above, where I stall suddenly in the middle of a sentence, then spend several minutes in a state of mortified panic while I try to think of the apposite word, before finally giving up and settling on the obvious choice I should have used in the first place. This is very...

....

...irritating.

Praise be!

2007-11-04T21:29:00.000Z

http://www.radioheadstore.com/shop.asp

[Apologies for the lack of non-Radiohead-related content lately. Thinking makes me tired.]

It's been a while . . . . .

2007-11-01T13:32:00.000Z

I would just like to say two things; Firstly, I have eaten cake or pie *every single day* so far this week. Secondly, Radiohead exist. Both of these things are good in equal measure.

Remember kids, Music is delicious.

The Radiohead recap: part two

2007-10-26T14:33:00.000Z

When we last saw Radiohead, the ruling overlords of rock, in part one, they were surfing a wave of critical and popular acclaim following the release of their third glittering masterpiece, OK Computer. However, the band were growing restless. Having attained total mastery of all traditional musical instruments, they felt it was time to branch out in a more experimental direction. Tunes? Old hat. Guitar solos? Relics of a bygone age. At the dawn of the new millennium, Radiohead presciently realised that what listeners wanted was deranged, disjointed, quasi-political mumbling and incomprehensible yelping, set to a background of burbling laptop samples and incongruous orchestral arrangements. The critics were sceptical.

The critics were wrong.

- The fourth album: Kid A

Kid A represented a major paradigm shift for the music industry. It confounded all expectations by blending live studio recordings with electronic samples, resulting in sounds that had previously been inconceivable to the aural imagination. Over ten tracks, the album formed a seamlessly consistent listening experience, and it would have been quite grossly crass to isolate any one song for release as a single. Instead, the decision was taken to promote the record using eye-catching packaging designed by the band's new friends, Stanley & Tchock. The artwork depicted razor-toothed demons, desolate blood-flecked wastelands and shin-kicking stickmen. American fans were treated to a special board book, warning against the dangers of inaction in the face of global warming. Never before had music, art and political sloganeering blended to such attention-grabbing effect.

The booklet on the bottom right was hidden under the opaque CD tray as a reward for people who like to dismantle things. The Stanley & Tchock board book teaches us all a valuable lesson about greenhouse gas emissions and melting ice caps. Doesn't mention excess packaging, though, strangely.

Everything in its Right Place (2000) - A startling study in the contrast between apparent external orderliness and internal chaos, the opening song on Kid A introduced Radiohead's new style with aplomb. Softly wobbly keyboards, backwards vocals and Theremin-style pitch-bend wailing. Of course, there's plenty of room for interpretation. Is Yorke singing, 'Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon,' or 'Yesterday I woke up sulking on the moon'? Either option is tantalisingly plausible.

The National Anthem (2000) - The bass line of this song is so huge, recording had to be relocated to an aircraft hangar to accommodate it. Unfortunately, the hangar in question had been double-booked by the resident RAF brass band for rehearsal purposes, which is why you can hear all those cacophonous horns at the end of the song, spoiling it for the proper musicians.

Treefingers (2000) - Three minutes of nothing, more or less. But it's the most awe-inspiring nothing you'll ever not hear.

Idioteque (2000) - Discos are frightening places, tightly packed with people dancing and kissing, and other disgustingly unhygienic displays of exuberance and affection. Idioteque, Radiohead's skittering contribution to the dance genre, captures the oppressive atmosphere of the dancefloor perfectly. 'Women and children first,' urges Yorke, neatly summarising the admissions policy of nightclubs across the globe.

- The fifth album: Amnesiac

Kid A had originally been conceived as a double album, but it quickly became apparent that everyday mortals would be unable to cope with so much innovation in one go. Thus, in 2001, a second dollop of recordings from the Kid A sessions was released to the public, entitled Amnesiac. Especially wondrous was the special edition of the CD, packaged inside a nondescript hardback book. Beyond the murky maroon of the unassuming cover, however, lurked pages of apocalyptic illustrations and subliminal messages. It also smelt utterly vile, for some reason.

Unless you're fond of horrific nightmares, I wouldn't recommend this as bedtime reading. Its pungent odour dies down after six years or so.

Pyramid Song (2001) - Tea breaks in the recording studio were protracted affairs until PG released the pyramid-shaped teabag. With a surface area sixty per cent greater than standard 'square' bags, they dramatically reduced the amount of time spent brewing up, providing valuable extra minutes in which the band could smash down the walls of musical dogma. This mournful piano-led single was a tribute to this remarkable invention.

Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box (2001) - This song was inspired by a debacle on tour, where confusion over transport meant the band were forced to travel in a small minibus with arch-rivals Coldplay. Due to limited leg room, Chris Martin had to put his feet on Thom's luggage; hence the line, 'I'm a reasonable man/Get off my case'. (The opening couplet, 'After years of waiting/Nothing came,' is believed to be a reference to Yorke's early career as a waiter, when customers would refuse to tip him on the grounds that he looked 'like a right miserable git'.)

There is no possible way that this was not a good idea.

Trans-Atlantic Drawl (2001) - Thom Yorke is very angry about being cast as a celebrity. 'I am trapped in the Society page/Of your magazine', he rages, against an abrasive backdrop of thrashing, squalling guitars. After about a minute and a half, he has an abrupt mood swing, and the song becomes a melancholy choral hymn. He's a genius, so it's allowed.

-The sixth album: Hail to the Thief

Foreign policy, civil liberties, human rights... Never mind all that: look at the stylish packaging. Owners of the not-very-limited edition version of the CD were thrilled to find that the sleeve folded out into a large map. Shortly afterwards, they were mildly disappointed to discover that it was all just an excuse to assemble a boldly-coloured collection of ominous neo-con buzzwords and advertising terminology. Why not amuse yourself for a few minutes by cutting out all the letters, rearranging them to form the entirely arbitrary words PADLOCK UNICYCLE LAXATIVE, and posting it anonymously to the artists responsible? They'll have hours of fun trying to extract the meaning from your subversive masterpiece.

This map is closely based on aerial photograps of Southend-on-Sea.

2 + 2 = 5 (2003) - Politically, we (the public) took our eyes off the ball. 'You have not been/Paying attention!' Yorke lambastes us. A bit rich, you might think, coming from the author of the song's arithmetically inaccurate title, but - of course - there's an explanation in the form of a literary reference. According to Nineteen Eighty-Four's Winston Smith, 'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four'. Now, if those evil politicians you voted for decide to take that freedom away from you, don't say Radiohead didn't warn you. They read The Guardian, so they should know.

Sit Down, Stand Up (2003) - Studio technicians left the tapes running while the band were playing 'Simon Says'; on the 12" remix, Yorke can be heard gloating, 'Aah! Simon didn't say!' A version of the Hokey-Cokey from the same session is being mooted for inclusion on a future rarities compilation.

A Wolf at the Door (2003) - A rare excursion into slapstick comedy, this avalanche of husky-voiced non-sequiturs is most memorable for the line about 'the flan in the face'. The references to child abduction are (marginally) less hilarious.

This is the wrong CD. Still good, though.

Gagging Order (2003) - After years of fragmented stream-of-consciousness lyrics and nosebleed techno-pummellings, this stripped-down, softly-plucked acoustic b-side was a bit of surprise. Even more surprisingly, it wasn't a political tirade, but rather a heartfelt articulation of how rubbish it is when your girlfriend splits up with you. Why do no other bands think of this stuff?

============

That brings us up to the present day, where In Rainbows is blowing up in the download charts like a block of potassium tossed into a swimming pool. If your appetite has been whetted by this completely factually accurate Radiohead retrospective, hurry along to http://www.inrainbows.com/ and do the necessary. I need to talk to somebody about getting a commission percentage.

The Radiohead recap: part one

2007-10-24T15:55:00.000Z

If you're a fan of music, you'll be aware that Radiohead have recently released a new album called In Rainbows. You'll also know that Radiohead are definitely the best band in the world at doing music. True to form, In Rainbows is so good that it cannot physically be transferred to standard musical formats, such as CDs and records, since the sheer quality of the songwriting and musicianship would cause these feeble discs to erupt into their subatomic component parts, releasing enough energy in the process to destroy the entire solar system. This would be at odds with Radiohead's strict anti-explosion policy, and so the new album is being made available only as a digital download.

In a visionary transfer of power to the consumer, you decide how much you want to pay for it. Obviously, no price can be put on an artistic treasure of this calibre, but I suggest paying whatever the upper limit of your credit card will allow. We must financially demonstrate our appreciation of Thom Yorke and his crew of multi-instrumentalist wunderkinds, lest they should be offended by our miserly ways and scamper permanently back beneath the rock they've been huddled under for the last four years. You'll obviously want to order the £40 super-reinforced-vinyl box set version, too. Perhaps you could sell some non-essential body parts (your own, or - ideally - those of a disliked family member) to raise the funds.

But, in our rapturous appreciation of the new, let us not forget that Radiohead also have a flawless back-catalogue of undisputed genius to call upon. I humbly present part one of a resumé of some of their superlative musical endeavours.

- The first album: Pablo Honey

In 1992, five likely lads from Oxford, led by traumatised bullying victim Thom E. Yorke, released a four-track EP called The Drill. Tony Blackburn thought it was great, and roughly seven people agreed with him. Record shops couldn't give the damn thing away (now, of course, copies of The Drill EP change hands for the price of a small Caribbean island, leading to the unlikely, but unavoidable, conclusion that everybody in the UK except for Tony Blackburn is an idiot). After this initial disappointment, Radiohead rallied to produce the most astonishing debut album of all time, Pablo Honey.

Creep (1993) - The best song ever. Four chords (G, B, C, Cm, budding guitarists) have never been used to weave a patchwork of such dazzling emotional nuance. It's so complex, in fact, that when American R&B girl-group TLC tried to perform a cover version of it, they got both the words and the music completely wrong. Only the title remained intact.

TLC were beautiful, intelligent women with remarkable singing voices and an independent attitude, and were therefore completely unmarketable. Cynical record company attempts to boost their popularity by covering Radiohead's smash-hit, however, were disastrous.

You (1993) - Before this, songs came in one of two varieties: workmanlike 4/4 and waltzy old 3/4. Here, Radiohead invent several new time signatures involving fives and eights, then audaciously chop and change between them. And that's just in the intro. Beethoven rolled over jealously in his grave.

- The second album: The Bends

How do you follow the best debut album ever? With the best second album ever, of course. Inspired by guitarist Johnny Greenwood's contortionist girlfriend ('My baby's got the bends'), The Bends ushered in an era of widescreen, nuclear bomb-scorched rock music that made U2 cry into their giant lemon.

Just (1995) - The best song ever. Also features the best guitar solo ever: a wiry, bendy electro-strop that takes down everything in its wake with a petulant bombardment of white-hot audio-meteors. The chorus ('You do it to yourself, just you') probably isn't about onanism, but few clues to its meaning are provided by the arty black-and-white video, which depicts legions of pedestrians collapsing into the foetal position on the pavement in response to a cryptic whisper. Rest assured that whatever it means, it's really, really clever.

Helpfully, Parlophone reissued all of Radiohead's post-1994 singles, thus rendering the originals worthless and annoying legions of devoted Radiohead collectors. That'll serve them right, the soulless capitalist swine.

Killer Cars (1995) - Never ones to take their social responsibilities lightly, the band penned this stadium-rock anthem to promote considerate road use amongst drivers ('What if the car loses control? What if there's someone overtaking?'). Sadly, the Highways Agency considered it too hypnotically brilliant to be used in their radio advertising campaign, fearing that it would have the undesirable effect of sending listeners into a psychedelic reverie behind the wheel. The song was subsequently classified by John Major's government as a class C hallucinogenic, and was banished to the b-side of High & Dry (which is, incidentally, the best song ever).

Maquiladora (1995) - A maquiladora is a type of factory, popular in Mexico, which imports parts, assembles them, then exports the finished product (thanks, Wikipedia). Typically socio-economic subject matter for this incendiary b-side, then, which would have been included on The Bends had busybody scientists not pointed out that it contained more simultaneous guitar riffs than the human brain is capable of comprehending. 'I can feel the hills/Exploding!' claimed Yorke, excitably.

CD1 is red. I like the blue best. The artwork was produced by Sally Noble, age 6, from Dudley.

Talk Show Host (1996) - Another b-side, better known for its inclusion in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. Appropriately, given the Shakespearean context, the lyrics demonstrate a facility for prosaic juxtaposition never before witnessed in any field of linguistic endeavour: 'I'll be waiting/With a gun and a pack of sandwiches/And nothing.' Pedants attempted to argue that it would be difficult to be carrying a gun and a pack of sandwiches at the same time as carrying nothing, but were silenced by drummer Phil Selway's elegant set-theoretic argument: "The empty set contains nothing by definition, and is a trivial subset of all other sets. It follows axiomatically that everybody is always in possession of nothing, regardless of any other objects they may have upon their person. Ha!" Take that, doubting wretches.

- The third album: OK Computer

How do you follow the best second album ever, which followed the best first album ever? With the best album of any type ever, obviously. In a pre-millennial age of technological uncertainty, where traditional values were being eroded, Radiohead's bleak, windswept, washed-out soundscape captured the zeitgeist perfectly.

Paranoid Android (1997) - In the nineties, conventional wisdom suggested that songs intended to be played by radio stations should be roughly three minutes long. Not for the last time, Radiohead snapped conventional wisdom in half, jumped up and down on it, and tossed in the bin. Paranoid Android was six-and-a-half minute prog-rock rhapsody dealing with existential philosophy in an age of rampant consumerism, and still managed to get to number two in the singles charts. This was the first solid evidence that the band had become gods among men.

The reverse of the sleeve gives handy instructions on how to "kill a demon made of wet sawdust". No, really ("cover its face with wet bread and karate chop its head off", for future reference).

No Surprises (1997) - Plink, plonk, plink, plonk, plink, plonk, pling-pling-pling-pling... Amongst other achievements, No Surprises rescued the glockenspiel from musical obscurity, and was the best song ever. The one-continuous-shot, helmet-filling-with-water video clearly shows that Thom Yorke is capable of breathing sub-aquatically, lending credence to the claims that he had evolved superhuman abilities/was a witch.

Karma Police (1997) - Proving that the piano could rock as hard as the guitar and the glockenspiel, this Orwellian thunderbolt awoke the complacent public to the insidious nature of authority. The closing line ('Phew! For a minute there, I lost myself') was written by the pint-sized Yorke after an incident in which he fell down the side of the sofa whilst watching Countdown, and had to be rescued by specially trained guinea pigs.

Bah. The old 'live b-side' gyp. I would have preferred an Abba cover version, myself.

Pearly* (1997) - Ennio Morricone devoted much of his career to composing memorable music for films from the (Spaghetti) Western genre. With this song, Radiohead perfected the idiom, rendering his life's work irrelevant at a stroke. While the ominous twanging of the guitars and hoofbeat drums evoke the dusty plains of Monument Valley, Yorke rasps a vitriolic riposte to shallow materialism (a theme was developing) and meaningless artificial beauty. The asterisk attached to the title left many fans scouring the packaging for days in search of a non-existent footnote.

========

That concludes the first part of our edited Radiohead highlights tour. In the years following the wildly successful OK Computer, the five pals were to strike out in daring new directions. Exciting, eh? Stay tuned for part two at some point in the indeterminate future.

Frankie says relax

2007-10-22T19:41:00.000Z

Terrible. Still, perhaps this will serve as a tenuous excuse for me to proclaim my love of Malcolm in the Middle. I loved Malcolm in the Middle. It ran rings around the episodes of The Simpsons that were being made at the same time: it was funnier, cleverer, sillier, darker and even less respectful. And despite the title, Malcolm was probably the least interesting character (this can be deduced retrospectively from the fact that Frankie Muniz is the only cast member to have landed a Hollywood career).

Any chance of a DVD release for those of us who can't watch it on endless rotation on Sky One, powers that be? Thanks.

The five stages of Facebook

2007-10-17T13:22:00.000Z

Social networking has become an internet phenomenon. Until recently, 'socialising' didn't extend much beyond the notion of a group of people going to the pub and drinking until they forgot that they didn't really like each other. Five years ago, said people might then have stumbled home and ridiculed their less outgoing flatmates for pissing their life away playing World of Warcraft in their darkened bedrooms.

But changes are afoot. New generations of computer-literate youngsters think nothing of using the World Wide Web as their first point of contact with fellow human beings. Enterprising internet technicians have simplified the interfaces of online communication to the point that even people over the age of twenty-five - who are otherwise useless - can understand the appeal of computerised communities.

The fastest-rising star amongst the constellation of social networking sites must surely be Facebook. Its blue-and-black-on-white simplicity is designed to soothe the dimming eyesight of older internet users (or 'Silver Surfers'), who are intimidated by the psychedelic rainbow-assaults of other web pages. Indeed, the 'book' element of Facebook's name was calculatingly chosen to lure obstinate luddites away from their hopelessly outmoded printed texts.

Minty-fresh and irresistibly alluring, with a wildly inconsistent approach to capital letters: Facebook will steal your soul. And eat it.

The tactics of Facebook's executives have been a remarkable success. Its membership figures are predicted to exceed the world's population by March 2008. The site has become such a cultural totem that double-page spreads devoted to Facebook etiquette are regularly featured in the quality national press. Some of these articles make for portentous reading. 'Facebook suicides' - the act of withdrawing one's profile listing - are on the rise. Tales of social missteps and clanging faux pas abound. Old flames return to burn down new relationships. The pace of assimilation has been so rapid that we've never stopped to question precisely what it is we're signing up for. After due consideration, I would like to posit the 'Five Stages of Facebook'. For anyone who has not yet become a member, I hope that this analysis will provide some food for thought. For those already entangled in the tendrils of the network, I can only hope to offer some empathetic comfort.

1. Trepidation

You've signed up. You're asked to fill in some details on your profile page. How much are you prepared to share? Do you really want to post a photo of yourself for everyone to see? Does anybody actually care if your favourite films include Notting Hill and Saving Private Ryan? And what about friends? You can search for the people in your e-mail address book, but do you want all those people to have access to your every thought? Now is the time for serious consideration. The choices you make now could seriously affect your future on Facebook, and beyond.

2. Exhilaration
Ah, nuts to it: say yes to everything! Let's be friends with everyone; we live in an inclusive age, after all. And it's not as if you have to talk to anybody if you don't want to; they'll just be sitting there on your list. It might even make your so-called 'real' friends work a bit harder at being nice to you if they think there's a bit of competition, the ungrateful bastards. And look at all these possibilities for self-promotion! You can change your 'status' on a whim, and virtually everybody will be informed about it. Tee-hee! This will be a great opportunity to demonstrate to everybody how funny/deeply unhappy you are. And you can write on other people's profile pages, so that all their friends can read your nuggets of glittering wit, too! As if all that wasn't enough, you can post whole albums of photos of you and your mates doing really great things, like visiting museums, and playing computer games. This is the best thing ever!

3. Stabilization
The initial rush has worn off. You've reduced your rate of status updates to two per week, and are starting to feel a bit embarrassed about all the previous ones, which somehow aren't quite as funny now as they seemed at the time. Hopefully the people on your friends list that you secretly find attractive don't think you're a total berk. Maybe joining some 'groups' would help to increase your feeling of integration. If you're an insufferable pedant, you'll be well provided for; plenty of Facebook's well-educated denizens have very strong feelings about misplaced apostrophes and rickety grammatical constructions. You decide to join some (in an ironic way, obviously). After a couple of minutes, the pointlessness of the exercise becomes apparent. You feel a bit cheapened. Still, people from school that you barely knew are sending you 'friend requests', which is flattering (it's a bit strange, though; you were hopelessly unpopular at the time). To give visitors a more rounded sense of your multi-faceted personality, you download some novel 'applications'. After a month, however, nobody has scribbled on your Graffiti Wall, and your aquarium is singularly devoid of fish, so you sheepishly remove them. At some point, it occurs to you that you haven't left the house since signing up, so you open a window as a compromise measure.

4. Infuriation
The realisation dawns that Facebook is nothing more than a gigantic sticker album in which the hopelessly insecure can collect dubious evidence of their popularity. You start ignoring friend requests, since, although you harbour no ill will towards the requesters, you understand that they will never communicate with you in any meaningful way. In fact, nobody is communicating with you in any meaningful way. Have you offended them somehow? After all, it's easily done in an environment where face-to-face inhibitions are eliminated, and every gaffe is publicly broadcast. Everybody else seems to be having fun: they're all openly advertising the dates and times of their private social engagements. Is everyone invited? You become increasingly frustrated by your own inability to log into the site without idly browsing for at least quarter of an hour, reading strangers' inane declarations of platonic affection for other strangers, written in nauseatingly infantilised manglings of the English language. You are bombarded with a never-ending mosaic of knowingly-posed, aren't-I-pretty? young faces, most of which you want to deface with rude slogans in indelible ink. The stifling atmosphere of self-regard only serves to remind you of your own egocentric reasons for being part of this petty charade. You feel shamed, hypocritical and exhausted. Only one option remains: Facebook suicide.

5. Acceptance
On second thoughts, it's too much hassle to withdraw from Facebook completely. You'd have to keep explaining to people where you'd gone. The easiest thing is to cheerfully submit to the madness, keep your head down and your mouth shut. Just like real life, then.

Lego pirates 7: the niece

2007-10-14T16:44:00.001Z

Rupert and Geoffrey, the pirates, are in trouble with the law again. Lieutenant Sanders has arrested them for fishing without the appropriate licence.

"I really can't imagine that this is necessary, old boy," protests Rupert, as the ship's crew manhandle him on to dry land and towards the prison.

"It's very necessary, you selfish little bleeder," Sanders informs him; "overfishing is one of the greatest threats currently facing marine ecology, I'll have you know."

"Oh, tush! We threw back everything we caught. Geoffrey here has a very severe seafood allergy."

Geoffrey is looking suitably nauseous.

"That sounds like a tall shaggy wives' story to me," says Sanders, rubbing his chin doubtfully.

"This draconian treatment is becoming rather disagreeable, Geoffrey," sighs Rupert, as the cell door slams shut.

Atop the fort's tower, the Governor is looking rather unhappy.

"Cheer up, sir," suggests Commander Barnes, helpfully; "it looks as if Sanders has brought some prisoners for you to torment."

"I won't be tormenting anyone for a while," intones the Governor, blankly. "I've just had word from my beloved sister that she's sending her daughter to stay with us."

"Oh," says Barnes. A pause. "If you don't mind me saying so, Sir, that seems like a rather abrupt way to introduce a new female character into our midst."

"If this were a work of fiction, Barnes, I would call it plain lazy. However, this is reality, and we must graciously accept the hand that fate deals us."

"Yes, sir. I take it you're not too fond of your niece?"

"Frankly," sighs the Governor, "she's a real pain in the arse."

Barnes descends to the jetty to share the news with Sanders.

"The boss says his niece is coming to visit," he reports.

"His niece?" smiles Sanders. "Ooh, he won't like that. She's one of these liberal, touchy-feely girls; thinks we should all tolerate each other and be nice and what have you."

"Gosh!" exclaims Barnes. "I should imagine the old Gov. doesn't have much time for that sort of nonsense."

"He'll have to make time if he wants to keep his job. Her Daddy is Earl Hugo Caruthers."

Barnes looks blank.

"The Foreign Secretary?" Sanders prompts him.

"Gosh!" exclaims Barnes, again. He's not entirely sure what's so important about a Foreign Secretary, but he supposes they must be jolly clever if they can keep up with all the filing and dictation when they don't even speak English properly.

Not far away, on Skull Island, Cap'n Smythe is struggling to motivate his remaining pirates.

"Come on now, Nigella, there must be something you want to do," he implores. "How about a round of Uno?"

She shrugs.

"Happy Families?"

"I shan't play anything with Julian," she sulks. "He's a shameful cheat, and a jolly bad loser."

"We could play Operation!" suggests Julian, "but I don't think Nigella could grasp a game where you're not supposed to turn on the red light."

"Oh, you wretch!" blurts Nigella.

Smythe is forced to intervene. "Now, now, you two; let's try to keep matters civil." He addresses the Bos'n. "Julian, a word in private, if I may."

Nigella departs resentfully. Smythe fidgets on his wooden leg.

"What's behind all this hostility between you and Nigella, old chap?" he asks. "We should treat our feminine companions as befits the delightful delicacy of their temperaments, not assault their tender virtue with constant pejorative allusions to their putative meretriciousness."

"Yes, Cap'n," sighs Julian.

"However," continues Smythe, "I appreciate that the intellectual laxity inherent in the fairer sex can be somewhat vexing to a man of your credentials. Your enthusiasm for Su Doku is testament to your academic rigour."

"Thank you, Cap'n."

"Now, it just happens that I'm a member of a - shall we say? - gentleman's club, where one can fraternize with all kinds of like-minded fellows. There's backgammon, pipe-smoking, political debate, manly wrestling, and so forth. I imagine I could procure you an invitation; it might help to take your mind off this business with Nigella."

Julian doubts that anything could take his mind off Nigella, but he's always fancied smoking a pipe. "That's extremely decent of you Cap'n," he says. "I gratefully accept your offer."

"Capital!" beams Smythe.

Back at the Fort, the Governor's niece is being rowed ashore by Lance Corporal Davies.

The Governor is tensely grasping a pencil. "Hello, Maria," he says, as she steps gingerly out of the boat. "Lovely to see you," he adds, unconvincingly.

"Hello, Uncle Arthur," she replies. "I've been having a very enlightening chat with Davies on the way here. Have you been up to your old bossy tricks?"

"Please don't refer to me as Arthur in front of the men, my dear," he mumbles; "it undermines my carefully engineered aura of unknowable authority."

"Don't be cross, uncle," she soothes. "Statistics show that staff are much better motivated when working under an approachable and sympathetic employer."

"That's right, Arthur," Davies chips in. "I would feel discernibly more comfortable within my working environment if I felt able to confide in you about the not inconsiderable stress involved in my daily obligations. Maria's been explaining it all to me."

The Governor adopts a face like thunder. "I rather think it's time for some lunch," he says, controlling every word with great effort.

"Oh, not just yet," pleads Maria; "I'd like to take a tour of the premises first."

The Governor's pencil snaps in half. "Very well, favoured relative," he concedes, with a rictus grin.

And so the Governor accompanies Maria as she inspects the fort. Before long, they reach the prison. Maria casts a pitying gaze at its inmates.

"Oh, uncle Athur," she exclaims, "look at these helpless scruffy urchins. I hope you've been looking after them properly." She turns to the pirates. "Hello," she says, slowly. "Are you quite comfortable in there?"

"Oh, what-ho!" cries Rupert. "I must say, it's jolly nice to have some civilised conversation. Geoffrey here would benefit immeasurably from some pointers in the art of casual discourse."

Geoffrey stares through the bars of the cell, transfixed. Before him stands the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

"Oh, dear," says Maria, sympathetically. "I hope the guards are treating you well."

Geoffrey is utterly smitten by this radiant vision of kindness. He's going to say something. He's going to say something any second n-

"Well, mustn't gripe," interjects Rupert, brashly, "but I did request an Archer's and lemonade half an hour ago which hasn't yet materialised."

Maria turns accusingly to the Governor. "You brute!" she whispers, passionately.

Geoffrey swoons against the wall of the cell.

Lieutenant Sanders sidles up to investigate the commotion.

"For your own safety, Miss, I can't advise consorting with the prisoners. A nasty pair, these two; caught them angling without authorisation."

Maria is astonished. "You mean to tell me that these young men have been given a custodial sentence for a minor fishing infringement?"

"Yes, Miss," confirms Sanders. "You have to take a firm hand with these pirates; kill you as soon as look you, they would."

"Eyewash!" ejaculates Rupert.

Maria turns to the Governor. "Arthur," she begins, firmly, "you will rectify this miscarriage of justice and release these two men immediately, or I shall send a telegram to Daddy forthwith, notifying him of your barbarous practices."

The Governor exchanges a glance with the Lieutenant, his teeth audibly grinding. "You heard the woman, Sanders," he growls, after a heavy pause; "release the prisoners."

Sanders grudgingly complies.

"Splendid!" declares Rupert, striding through the open doorway. "Come along, Geoffrey; this is no time for a nap."

Back on Skull Island, Smythe and Bos'n Julian are practising the secret club handshake.

"Now, remember, Jules," explains Cap'n Smythe, "you can only use this on people who are already enrolled in the society. In a large room full of upright chaps, it can be difficult to discern precisely when one has grasped a member, and when one has clutched a handful of less distinguished flesh."

"Right-ho, Cap'n," nods Julian. "Members only."

Nigella appears from her bedroom. "What's all this about members?" she enquires.

"Gentlemen's business," says Julian, dismissively.

"Fiddlesticks!" Nigella expostulates.

"Steady on, old girl," says Smythe. "Julian is just joining my boys' club; terribly boring stuff, really."

"Pah!" she snorts. "All sorts of testosterone shooting about all over the place, no doubt."

She strolls away. "Testosterone all over the place, indeed!" laughs Julian.

"Yes, you'll have to wait until at least your third meeting for that," replies Smythe, deadpan.

Meanwhile, Maria is offering her apologies to Rupert and Geoffrey.

"I hope neither of you have suffered any long-term psychological damage," she says; "my uncle can be a little over-enthusiastic when it comes to law enforcement."

"Not a bit of it!" agrees Rupert. "It takes more than an afternoon in the slammer to dent my steely constitution."

"Oh, I am glad," says Maria. "And what about you, Geoffrey? How are you feeling?"

Geoffrey takes a deep breath. He's been mentally preparing the answer to this question for years, hoping against hope that somebody would one day pose it to him. And now somebody has: this extraordinary, hypnotic woman. He knows exactly what to s-

"I shouldn't worry about Geoff, old girl," blusters Rupert, nudging his friend playfully; "the damage was done long ago with you, eh, old chap?"

Poor old Geoffrey.

Before long, Lance Corporal Davies has got the boat ready to take the pirates home. Maria waves them off from the jetty.

"Cheerio, boys!" she calls. "Stay out of trouble!"

Geoffrey is aware of his heart becoming heavier with each stroke of the oars.

Rupert settles into his seat. "She was awfully nice, eh, Geoffrey?"

Geoffrey is staring intensely across the metallic blue sea towards the whitewashed horizon.

Rupert continues undeterred. "Ah, me! If only women didn't find me so universally irresistible, I wouldn't be burdened with so many difficult choices. What's your secret for deterring the ladies, Geoffrey? Is it that ludicrous moustache, or just your terminal lack of charisma?"

No reply is forthcoming.

The Governor joins his niece on the jetty as the pirates are rowed away. "Cocky little whelps," he mutters.

"Oh, don't be so grumpy, uncle," Maria chastises him mildly; "I thought they were rather sweet."

She watches the departing stern of the boat pensively.

"One of them in particular," she adds, quietly.

Arriving back at Skull Island, Rupert is in a jubilant mood. As Davies rows away, he recounts the events of the day to Smythe and Julian.

"Just between us," he concludes, "that Maria is a bit of a smasher!"

Geoffrey breaks purposefully away from the group and disappears towards the back of the island. On his way, he passes Nigella, who is heading in the opposite direction.

"Salutations, fellows!" she says, embracing Rupert. "What's new in the world?"

"Rupert was just telling us how attractive he finds the Governor's niece," responds Julian, spitefully.

"Rot!" replies Nigella. "Rupert only has eyes for me, don't you, my darling?"

"Oh, rather!" concurs Rupert.

"You fibbing scoundrel!" Julian blurts. "He's taking you for a fool, Nigella."

"What do you care? Go and shake hands, and whatever else, with your precious boys!"

They are face to face, trembling with rage. Well, trembling, at least. Without warning, Julian kisses her clumsily on the lips.

There is a stunned silence. Rupert, blinking back his tears, turns and runs.

"Oh, dear, Jules," laments Smythe. "I'm afraid that sort of thing won't go down at all well with the club committee. Gentlemen only, dear boy; gentlemen only."

Later that night, under cover of darkness, a lone figure rows stealthily up to the walls of the Governor's fort, the soft splashes of its motion masked by the riotous conga music emanating from within. A hooded silhouette deposits a bunch of red roses by the doorway.

The figure returns to the boat, and before long the cyclical motion of the oars propels it into the tar-like blackness of the night.

Attached to the bouquet is a card marked simply, 'Maria'.

On standby

2007-10-10T20:40:00.000Z

I should probably point out that Pirates 7 is in the very early stages of production, so it might be a while before it 'hits the streets'. I daresay you'll control your feverish anticipation somehow.

Younger readers might not be aware of Shed Seven. I thought they were pretty well known, but every time I mention them to anybody more than two years my junior, they deny all knowledge. They should be remembered, if only for the immortal lines: "Where have you been? / If you stop me now I'll kick you in the shins until your na-na-night's on fire." They were quite rubbish except for that.

Oof

2007-10-04T11:49:00.001Z

This advertisement for a well-known fast food restaurant caught my eye today.

Oops. Somebody in the proof-reading department is in for a telling off.

A short history of cassettes

2007-10-03T20:26:00.000Z

In the olden days, people used to listen to music on records. Then an activity emerged that had a revolutionary impact on people's listening habits: jogging. Nobody had really bothered with exercise much before the seventies, as they all worked down the mines and were already quite tired when they got home from a hard day's asbestos inhalation. But then the stock market was invented, and city types found that shouting "sell, sell, sell!" and "get me Tokyo on line one!" into the phone all day wasn't enough to burn off the calories contained in their diet of hourly pies and pints of ale. Thus jogging was born - one of the least efficient methods of ending up back where you started from known to man. It was a hit! Everyone was jogging all over the place, suddenly.

But then people thought, "What if we could listen to music while we were jogging, like the training montage in Rocky?" What they needed was a new way of listening to their Marillion albums without cumbersome records. Fortunately, a company called Philips had already invented a high-tech format called the "cassette" which was used for recording alien communications from outer space. Another company, called Sony, invented a machine called the "Walkman" which, in conjunction with Philips's tapes, allowed music to be piped directly into people's ears while they ran (thus considerably reducing their awareness of nearby traffic and leading to a dramatic increase in pedestrian fatalities) and on the train (thus causing immense irritation to fellow commuters who could only hear the bloody snare drum going tsstssstss, and leading to a dramatic increase in assaults on public transport).

Not long after cassettes were invented, computer games started to become popular. "Aha!" thought home-computing pioneer Clive Sinclair. "The cassette will be the perfect thing for storing computer games on; they're cheap, difficult to accidentally swallow, and only take ten minutes to load!" Using the pocket calculator that he'd invented earlier, he worked out that the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, his new computer, would make him a millionaire (and possibly more, but there weren't enough numbers on the LCD display to be sure)! Thoroughly pleased with his day's work, he drove home in his electric bubble-kart to devise a cure for baldness.

Sure enough, Uncle Clive's Spectrum was a sales phenomenon. Two young brothers named David and Richard Darling decided that they would start a business writing games for the Spectrum and some other computers which weren't as good. They called their company "Codemasters". "This will be ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!" declared David. "We can knock out any old rubbish, and kids will buy it because it only costs three quid!" "No," replied Richard, "I think we should write good games so that people will respect us and we'll be able to become a massive multinational corporation."

The brothers scratched their heads for a bit, but couldn't think of any ideas for games. "Oh, forget it," cried David, despairingly; "let's just get paper rounds like normal teenagers." Just then, Mrs. Darling called the boys downstairs for their tea. "It's boiled egg and soldiers!" she announced. "That's it!" exclaimed Richard. "Yes!" agreed David, "let's make a game about soldiers! It'll be as exciting as Apocalypse Now!" "No, you idiot," scolded Richard, "I meant let's make a game about a boiled egg!"

And so they did.

Dizzy was a very popular egg. In his first game, Dizzy, he did some somersaults, picked things up, dropped them again, and died with alarming regularity. People loved it so much that they made three sequels: Treasure Island Dizzy, Fantasy World Dizzy and Magicland Dizzy. Then they pasted Dizzy into a rubbish Pac Man rip-off called Fast Food, and bundled them all together in the Dizzy Collection (above) for a paltry £9.99. The kids went mad for it; they just couldn't get enough of Dizzy's wry English humour ("Gosh!"), frustrating platforming and how-on-Earth-was-I-supposed-to-know-there-was-a-coin-under-that-entirely-innocuous-piece-of-scenery unfairness. "We're rich, Rich!" said David Darling to his brother. "This is COMPLETELY BRILLIANT!"

Over the years, the eggy industry rumbled on. With admirable restraint, the second compilation was called Dizzy's Excellent Adventures (above); gamers were credited with the intelligence to substitute "eggscellent" mentally. This time there was rip-off of the arcade game Toobin', a rip-off of those shape-sorting toys you get at the Early Learning Centre and, er, another rubbish version of Pac Man (called - deviously - Kwik Snax) alongside two "proper" Dizzy games. "This is PHENOMENALLY BRILLIANT!" bellowed David Darling, in his house made of solid gold.

Richard Darling wasn't so sure. "When we started this company," he mused, "I thought we were going to make a diverse range of quality software, like Advanced BMX Simulator, Advanced Pinball Simulator, and Advanced Poker Simulator. Can't we make some games that don't have any eggs in them?"

So the Codemasters creative team got to work, and came up with Slightly Magic, Little Puff, Seymour goes to Hollywood and Murray Mouse Supercop. When they were finished, Richard made a startling observation. "Hold on," he said; "these are all just Dizzy games with different characters cynically shoehorned in." "Or..." suggested David, "they're great DIZZY-style games.... ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!" "I like it!" applauded Richard. "Let's put that on the box."

And so they did.

Codemasters could do no wrong. They made games about bionically-enhanced slugs (Steg the Slug) and superpowered pensioners (Captain Dynamo), and upset Nintendo with their naughty cheating device the Action Replay. To this day, they continue to enjoy minor success with some niche games about driving and sports.

Sadly, the cassette was not so lucky. Music fans soon became bored with rewinding, fast-forwarding and using a biro to wind the tape back in when their stereo chewed it up. By the time Jason Donovan was a fixture in the hit parade, cassettes were already being superseded by another Philips invention, the CD. CDs were a bit like records, except smaller, shinier, and virtually indestructible unless you snapped them. Or touched them. Or looked at them the wrong way. The quaint old cassette didn't stand a chance, although I did see a length of unravelled audio tape strewn across the street the other day, causing me to momentarily wonder whether I might have slipped through a hole in time back to 1988. In our school days, a friend and I used to pass many a happy hour in Andy's Records by comparing the lengths of fold-out cassette inlay cards. The winner was Pulp's Different Class, with a magnificent ten panels plus the spine. We also used to test the "ejectability" of cassette players in Boots, rating the mechanisms for speed and smoothness. Mmm... nice action. I still can't understand why girls didn't want to hang around with us.

A pyramid of Britpop cassette inlays. Radiohead just lose out to Pulp due to their "shorty" rear panel, but a gallant effort nonetheless. The Bluetones can't compete on length, but gain extra marks for the use of quality card. Oasis come up short on all counts with (What's the Story) Morning Glory, not for the last time.

The educational department

2007-10-02T20:18:00.000Z

Statistics irrefutably show that people are getting stupider. When was the last time you harnessed the power of electricity, wrote The Tempest or formulated the Periodic Table? Never, that's when. Mankind's proudest achievements are all in the past, and with each generation we're sliding backwards down the evolutionary chain. You're an idiot, and your children don't even bear thinking about.

Praise be, then, for the Happy Squid, rising gloriously out of the sordid internet quagmire and embarking on a puritanical mission to inform, educate and edify. This is your first stop for erudite commentary on matters of cultural and historical significance, and probably your only chance to disembark from the handcart that the rest of society is gleefully riding into the depths of Hades. The battle against ignorance starts here. Not literally here, for god's sake; down there, look.

- Creative Blocks
Citizens! Be on your guard against blocks. Garros says so.
- A short history of cassettes
Read up on the world's first truly portable audio format, then copy it on to C60 and swap it for a pirated Erasure album at school tomorrow.
- The five stages of Facebook
Cogent psychological analysis of the emotional journey experienced by newcomers to the social networking phenomenon. Fast becoming the handbook of choice for Facebook addicts the world over.
- The Radiohead recap
An objective and illuminating dissection of the greatest works of the best and most influentual rock band in the world, except for Scouting for Girls.
- The story of Mario
Mario: portly caricature, or iconic definer of the zeitgeist? Investigate his history here, from conception to galaxy-straddling giganticity.

Lawks

2007-09-29T19:34:00.000Z

Still can't think of anything to write. To fill some space, here is a picture of a man in a hat saying "lawks". Looks a bit like Matt from Nip/Tuck, inadvertantly.

Oscar

2007-09-28T21:22:00.001Z

All right my name is Oscar. Testoni sends his apologies, but he can't think of any ideas for blog posts at the moment because his brain has gone rotten after watching Smallville. I said I'd help him out by writing something. How hard can it be? Here's one of my stories. I don't know what it's called yet because I haven't thought about who's going to be in it or what's going to happen. I'll think of a title at the end if I feel like it. That all right with you? Here we go then.

=========

Ellen worked in this office. She didn't like the office a lot because mostly her job was about licking envelopes and filling in spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are all right usually because you can write in the maths equations yourself and they add things up for you. But Ellen didn't know about that stuff because her boss hadn't given her the right training, so Ellen had to type all the numbers into the cells one at a time then add them up on a calculator which took ages.

One day the office fell down. There was a hurricane because of global warming and Ellen lost her job because her desk was under some rubble. Ellen thought this was all right but then thought that she'd probably have to find another job. She went to work as a waitress in this restaurant. This other bloke worked there called Alan. Alan was a really interesting man compared to Ellen who was quite boring and he liked going to nightclubs. One day Alan asked Ellen to go to one of the nightclubs he went to. Ellen said all right because she was fed up of sitting at home watching episodes of Friends that she already knew all the jokes from out of.

So they went to the nightclub and Ellen dropped an e and danced like a loon. Alan thought this was funny and a bit sexy because he'd never seen Ellen do anything like that before. Alan thought Ellen was boring before, but now he wasn't so sure. He started dancing with her and then kissed her and they both thought it was nice.

Ellen was quite happy after that and started wearing contact lenses instead of glasses and wore make up like a lady and had her hair down sometimes but not at work because of health and safety. Alan liked to slap her on the bottom when she was walking out of the kitchen for a while, but then he got bored of her because he'd met this other girl called Natalie and Ellen wasn't any fun unless she was on drugs. Ellen cried a bit and said she didn't mind taking more drugs if that would make him happy, but Alan said nah, it's all right, I like Natalie better anyway.

So Ellen went round to Natalie's house and kicked her in the shins and said back off. Natalie was upset because she thought Alan was a bit of a idiot and she'd just been kicked in the shins. Ellen said sorry, I know, let's get our revenge on Alan. Natalie said, all right even though Alan hadn't done anything to her except for fancying her a bit.

So Ellen and Natalie pricked the tyres on Alan's car and gave them a slow puncture. Alan was driving home and lost control at a crossroads at the bottom of a hill because it was raining and his tyre pressure wasn't very good. Alan died and so did a family that he crashed into. Ha ha, said Ellen that will serve you right for treating me like a whore. She shouted it really loudly during a quiet bit at Alan's funeral because she was feeling probably a bit sad and guilty which can make you do stupid things. Then a policeman who was at the funeral looking for suspicious behaviour said, aha, somebody gave Alan's tyres a puncture which is why he crashed, and because of what you said just then I think it was you.

Ellen cried again and said, okay, but it wasn't just me, it was Natalie as well. Natalie said, it was all her idea, she made me do it. The policeman decided that it was Ellen's fault because he looked at the bruises on Natalie's shins that she showed him and anyway Natalie was quite pretty and had nice legs.

So Ellen went to court and her lawyer said that she'd only burst Alan's tyres because she'd got crack-craziness from the drugs he gave her, so really it was all his fault. The judge said yes, it probably was but Ellen still has to go to prison for two years to teach her a lesson.

While she was in prison, Ellen took a computer course and learned how to add things up on spreadsheets. When she got out, she found a job in another office and never killed anybody ever again (except her second husband with a shoe but it was self defence).

==============

That story was called To Ellen Bach. Ellen's surname is Bach, even if it doesn't say it in the story, it is quite a good joke title although the story is quite serious actually.

Smallville in short

2007-09-17T20:29:00.000Z

I've been watching the opening episodes of Season Five of Smallville today. It's awful; I love it. I see no reason why these two statements should be mutually exclusive. If you've never watched it, it follows the trials and tribulations of future superhero Clark Kent as he advances through puberty (ignoring the fact that he's played by an actor thirteen years his senior). If you want to start watching it - and if not, why not? - without wading through the back catalogue of episodes, I've condensed many of the basic elements of the show into one time-saving, ultra-handy script template.

[This is one of those exercises that seems as if it should be funny in theory, but the execution has gone wrong and it's ended up as highly formulaic smart-arsery aimed at very soft target. Balls. Sorry.]

If you lived / In Smallville Street / Here are the people / You would meet. Click here for some astute commentary on the show, along with a succinctly annotated version of this picture (spoiler warning!)

================

The scene: a dimly lit suburban bedroom in Smallville, Kansas State. In the room is a local teenage high school student, Caleb. The shot begins on a close-up of his twitching face, then slowly pulls back and rotates 180 degrees to reveal that he's sitting on the ceiling.

Caleb: Damn it, my life sure does suck ever since Lex/Lionel Luthor performed that meteor rock-based experiment on me. Sure, it's cool being able to walk up walls, but now I'm a total outcast. You know who I really hate? Clark Kent. I always loved Lana Lang at school, but she was too besotted with him to notice me. I'll wreak my revenge on him the only way I know how: by walking up walls!

Cut to The Talon, the local coffee shop. Lana Lang and intrepid wannabe journalist Chloe Sullivan are talking.

Lana: I really have feelings for Clark, but I can't have a relationship with him when he's keeping all these secrets from me. One minute he's one person, and the next he's somebody totally different, you know?

Chloe: Well, I'm secretly in love with him, so I can't form an objective opinion, but you seem a little picky considering how often you've temporarily altered your personality: you've spent time as a ultra-hedonist, a vampire, and a fifteenth-century French witch, amongst other things.

Lana: I don't remember any of that. Still, there is an unusually high rate of amnesia in this town.

Suddenly Caleb bursts in and scampers up the wall. He stands on the ceiling, surveying the scene with contempt. Nobody looks surprised.

Caleb: You all think I'm a freak! But you'll be sorry!

Chloe: Booooring.

Caleb drops a mysterious tablet into Lana's coffee, and exits though the skylight.

Chloe: Yeesh, another weirdo.

Lana: Yeah [Takes sip of coffee]. Ooh, I feel a bit funny. In fact, I'm suddenly a nymphomaniac, and that Caleb guy was hot. I'm going to change into an extremely minimal outfit and attempt to seduce him.

Chloe: Why does somebody always have to wear an unnecessarily revealing outfit? It seems to contradict our otherwise puritanical attitude to sex.

Lana: Don't be such a prude, Chloe. I'm horny!

Lana exits, passing Clark Kent as he walks in. She runs a suggestive palm over his finely-toned torso, because that stuff looks great on camera. But remember, kids: true love waits.

Clark [to Chloe]: What was all that about?

Chloe: Lana's gone mad again.

Clark: Oh. Why?

Chloe: It's probably got something to do with gecko boy. He was in here a minute ago crawling up the walls and bawling about how much we all hate him. I just looked up all his personal documentation on my access-all-areas laptop, and it turns out that he was part of a Luthorcorp medical experiment.

Clark: Another one? All right, I'll go talk to Lex. I can't remember whether I trust him or not at the moment, so I'll have to play it by ear.

Clark exits with a swoosh. Cut to Lex's mansion. Lex and his father, Lionel, are discussing business matters.

Lionel: You disappoint me, son. Despite the fact that you're the only remotely interesting character in this town, you've let your emotions get the better of you.

Lex: Unlike you, dad, I don't think it's justifiable to exploit innocent people to increase profitability. Or maybe I do. Aargh, I'm torn between my dark and light sides!

Lionel: A son should be wary of trying to fly higher than his father. Remember the tale of Daedalus and Icarus, Lex.

Lex: What does that have to do with anything?

Lionel: Nothing much. I'm just trying to introduce a shred of erudition to this tawdry parade of nubile young flesh.

Clark enters unannounced.

Clark: Okay, Lex, tell me about the experiment you performed on Caleb!

Lex: For the purposes of brevity, I won't bother trying to evade your accusations today. Yes, I injected Caleb with meteor rocks. For a laugh. Now he can dance on the ceiling.

Clark: How come?

Lex: You're not listening, Clark: meteor rocks. With meteor rocks, you can explain everything. Let's cut to the chase; I suppose you want the antidote?

Clark: Yes. He's got Lana!

Lex: Lana? The object of my thwarted attempts at human affection? To the Lexmobile! See you later, Dad.

Lex and Clark exit.

Lionel [to himself]: There's something special about that Kent boy... and I'll stop at nothing to find out what it is. Ahahaha!

Cut to Caleb's house, where Lana, scantily clad, is cosying up to him.

Lana: Oh, Caleb; in common with all the other reclusive, geeky sociopaths in Smallville, you certainly put in a lot of time at the gym.

Caleb: Thanks for noticing, finally; I thought you only had eyes for Clark Kent.

Lana: Nah, he's a loser. Let's get it on!

Caleb: I don't think so. On the contrary, I'm going to attempt to kill you as revenge for your callous spurning of me over the years, and to reinforce to message that sex equals death.

Lana: Noooo!

Meanwhile, in Lex's sports car, Clark picks up Lana's cries with his super-hearing.

Clark: Hurry up, Lex!

Lex: What's wrong with Lana this time, anyway?

Clark: She's lost control of her prim inhibitions again.

Lex: You mean she's drunk?

Clark: No, Lex - as well you know, only irresponsible and desperate people drink alcohol. She's been influenced by some sort of meteor magic.

Lex: Oh, so she's metaphorically drunk. Subtle.

They screech to a halt outside the house. Clark barges his way through the door.

Clark: Lana!

Lana: Clark!

Caleb flings her against a wall, rendering her unconscious.

Caleb: Back off, farm boy, or I'll scuttle around the local non-horizontal surfaces like an intimidatingly large, preeningly muscular woodlouse.

Lex approaches Caleb from behind and knocks him out cold with a rolling pin.

Lana [Coming to]: What happened?

Clark: Caleb tricked you into wanting to sleep with him.

Lana: I don't remember that.

Clark: No, I didn't think you would. Anyway, Lex helped me save you, even though he was indirectly responsible for the whole crisis. Sometimes he's bad, sometimes he's good. I just can't work him out, the fickle little baldy.

Lex: I prefer the term "morally ambiguous intellectual", myself. Anyway, it's not my fault I'm prone to acts of misanthropy; my father was very emotionally distant when I was growing up, unlike your loving family, Clark. Not that I'm harbouring any feelings of familial envy, of course. Oh, wait: I am.

Later, at the Kent Farm, Clark recounts the day's events to his wholesome, death-proof parents, Jonathan and Martha.

Clark: ...and then Lex totally kicked Caleb's ass! It was awesome!

Jonathan: Now, Clark, violence is never the right way to settle a dispute. Unless it looks really cool, or somebody gets to take their top off in the process.

Clark: Gee, Mom and Dad, I sure am proud to be your adopted son. If you hadn't brought me up to know the difference between right and wrong, I might have used my amazing superpowers for evil purposes.

Martha: But [due to budgetary restrictions] you hardly even used your superpowers today. Besides, aren't you forgetting about the time that you got hold of that red Kryptonite and spent six months robbing banks and cruising strip bars in Metropolis?

Clark: Um...

Jonathan: And when we say Red Kryptonite, what we're really talking about is drugs. Drugs will kill you, mark my words.

Clark: I really learned my lesson, Dad.

Jonathan: We love you, son.

They all hug. The end.

Typing errors

2007-09-16T10:12:00.000Z

The problem with Google is that it's now very difficult to get away with plagiarism. This is, of course, a tribute to Graham Rawle's Lost Consonants series, which I was only dimly aware of at the time. I hadn't realised that he'd churned out quite so many (there are hundreds), and inevitably, his website archive reveals that he'd already thought of this one (along with every other conceivable missing consonant pun in the English language, I should think).

Still, I'm just going to ignore that inconvenient bit of copyright infringement and console myself that this effort is better than the one that a friend (hello, J, if you're reading) and I came up with for an English exercise at school: Out of the frying pan, into the fir. This was presumably illustrated by something jumping out of a frying pan and into a, er, fir tree. Brilliant! We'll just brush over the fact that the missing letter is a vowel.

Should you be a huge Graham Rawle fan, you can buy original signed Lost Consonants prints for £200 each. It's tempting to be cynical about a man who milked a single good idea for such a long period, but I can't stop laughing at them, damn it.

Windswept and interesting

2007-09-15T21:33:00.000Z

Hi, I'm Mickey. Hey! Come back! I know what you're thinking: I know a bloke like Mickey (let's face it, everybody knows a bloke like me), and he's an insufferable, conceited bastard. But wait! I'm a nice guy. I've just been misrepresented by the media. I can't help it if women who look like rejects from the Hollyoaks extras audition process find me magnetically beautiful. It's tantamount to sexual harassment, in my estimation; if I were to so shamelessly crane my neck to gape at them as they passed me in the street, they'd be slapping restraining orders on me before you could say "Rohypnol".

And it's hardly fair to criticise me for changing my hairstyle now and then. I wasn't at all happy with that voiceover stating that I like to use my hair as a weapon; that categorically isn't true (although somebody did once accidentally cut themselves on my heavily-gelled spikes at a Green Day gig a few years ago). This is the twenty-first century. A man is perfectly entitled to modify his image if it instils within him a little extra self-confidence when dealing with the hostile situations characteristic of the modern social climate. But now there's a man in The Guardian accusing me of being a "disingenuous slag".

That's simply slanderous. The advertisement was cynically edited to suggest that I wear glasses only when wishing to appear "intellectual", when in fact I'm rather short-sighted and needed them to read the menu in that poorly-lit cafe. I would never endorse the hackneyed assumption that intelligence and myopia are strongly correlated, and I'm certainly not the "skirt-chasing" misogynist that some commentators would have you believe. I have a degree in Philosophy!

There's really not a lot of love for Mickey out there. One particularly hurtful blogger appended my tag-line thus: "Yeah, everyone knows a bloke like Mickey... and he's a c***." It's nothing but character assassination. I daresay I'll have to rise above it and seek solace in the writings of Socrates for the time being. But I would urge readers of this website to be more discerning when formulating their opinion of me; I am the hapless clown in this circus of humiliation, tumbling and pratfalling with a faceful of custard pie for the advertising automatons. Do not mistake my sarcastic painted-on smile for smugness.

Thank you for your time.

A rant

2007-09-13T20:09:00.000Z

Hi. I'm waiting for my latest batch of eBay auctions to finish. As you might have gathered from my numerous previous posts on the subject, I have a lot of superfluous material possessions lying around. At the time, I justified many of these purchases by assuring myself that many would at least retain their value over the years. In retrospect, some of my investments were a little ill-advised. In fact, most of them were. Take, for example, my collection of singles from the debut album by The Electric Soft Parade: five CDs, two limited edition seven inches. Total selling price at the end of the auction... one penny. A year ago, I would have expected this result, as the band had sunk without trace, but at the moment, they've got a critically-acclaimed new album in the shops. I was hoping a fresh generation of fans would be leaping on the bandwagon, keen to snap up my collector's items for extortionate prices, but alas it seems that today's kids are too busy listening to their Fratellis and Hoosiers and Killers to have the common courtesy to provide me with a decent return on my investment.

Still, it hasn't all been a disaster. My DVD box-set of Series 3 of Millennium sold for a respectable-considering-it's-tripe £18.55. A clutch of singles by the stupidly-named Death Cab for Cutie went under the hammer at £12.50. Again, this is fine by me; with the odd notable exception, DCFC's songs are plodding indie dirges sung by a man who's presumably had his mouth sealed up with duct-tape, thus rendering it necessary for him to project his vocals entirely through his nasal passages. The only one I like is I was a Kaleidoscope, and that's because it sounds exactly like Fountains of Wayne. Don't even get me started on Death Cab for Cutie's mutilation of Björk's All is Full of Love; easily one of the most unnecessary uses of studio time in the history of recorded music. What were they thinking? "Hey, guys, you know what would be great? We should take a song by one of the most idiosyncratic and distinctive voices in popular music, and turn it into eight minutes of sub-Smashing Pumpkins indie droning!" Maybe I'm being excessively harsh. Blacking out the Friction and I Will Follow You into the Dark are quite good, I suppose.

I seem to have digressed. I have reached the stage in my life where listening to 'youth' radio stations makes me feel a bit disorientated. Who is it in the music industry that has decreed that every British band must now sing with an authentic regional accent? It wasn't like this in my day. We didn't even know what a Cockney was until Phil Daniels turned up to bellow the vocals on Park Life. Now if it's not wry teenage northerners crooning kitchen-sink ballads about the self-image problems faced by women twice their age, it's cor-blimey Londoners ruminating upon the minutiae of modern urban life. If anybody can think of a justification for the continued existence and consequent oxygen consumption of Just Jack, I'd be intrigued to know what it is. Their songs sound like excerpts from Athlete's first album ("Oh! it's getting hot in here/must be something in the atmosphere") , except - and I struggled to believe that this was possible - substantially worse. In the glory days of Britpop, the majority of singers affected an anonymous mid-Atlantic timbre, and I thoroughly approved. Teenage Fanclub would have been rubbish if they'd stayed true to their national identity and started singing in a broad teek-a-luke-doon-tha-raeltraek Scottish brogue. Today's young upstarts have forgotten to be ashamed of their roots, the idiots.

Bah. At least the Fiery Furnaces have got a new album coming out.

Back to eBay. My final batch is coming to an end. Miraculously, my first set of singles by Elbow is selling for more than I paid for them. The second set... not doing so well. At all. It looks as if one lucky chap is going to get six CDs and three DVDs for the princely sum of 18 pence (plus p&p). Curse the fickle hordes of online auction sites. The market has been flooded by fly-by-night chancers who start their auctions at twice the item's actual value, then have the nerve to expect their hapless punters to shell out a second time for dubiously 'rounded-up' flat-rate postage. On the other hand, it's difficult to blame sellers for squeezing the margins a little, when they're getting hit by listing fees, 'final value' fees, and PayPal charges. It's no way to make a living. Unless you've developed some kind of business model or something, obviously. Then it might be quite a good way to make a living.

All right, I've finished now. I need to go and pack some Jiffy Bags.

============

Epilogue 14/09/07

Lawks - that was a very grumpy post. Imagine my surprise when I received this e-mail earlier today:

Hi. I am sending a cheque for £10 for the three Elbow sets I have won. It does not seem fair to pay 18p+postage. Thank you.

I was touched and entirely taken aback by the notion that eBay auctions were supposed to be in some way fair. I even e-mailed back to say "thanks, but that's really not necessary" (or words to that effect), but the buyer insisted that he'd be "more than happy to pay extra". What a nice chap, eh? [wipes tear from eye as faith in human nature is re-affirmed]

I'm almost moved to take back my comments about Just Jack, but I heard their hit single Writer's Block on the radio this morning and was reminded of their wilful awfulness.

I'm living in the past
My clock's an hour fast
Should really go and make a coffee but I can't be arsed

I realise that it's probably supposed to be an examination of the despondency which arises from a sudden loss of artistic inspiration, but most bands would be content to keep the shrivelled fruits of their creative droughts to themselves, or at least save them for a b-side. In times gone by, soulless record company fat-cats decided what we listened to; now, in the age of MySpace, the kids have the power. And the kids are frequently wrong. This Just Jack song isn't even factually accurate (an essential property of any chart hit); if his clock's an hour fast, then he's living in the future, surely? The chorus is about "loving Mary Jane" and "flying with Lois Lane", all of which takes place "on board a bullet train". This would no doubt provide students of mechanics with an interesting problem regarding relative velocities and inertial forces, but doesn't strike me as a sentiment that's likely to encourage future festival audiences to jump around with wild abandon. Besides, I bet Clark Kent - to whom the singer likens himself by way of Lois Lane - never had any problems motivating himself to make caffeine-based hot beverages (although he could have done it with super-speed, and used his heat-vision to boil the water, which would make the procedure more interesting, I'd imagine).

We're all being mocked. I'm going to listen to some '90s Shine compilations, and be reminded of a happier time, when music was universally brilliant.

Through a glass darkly

2007-09-13T13:57:00.000Z

Like most of this website's content, I'm posting this purely for my own amusement while I try to think of something entertaining to write. If you never played the Zelda games on the N64, there's not much point in me attempting to explain this lamentable pun (although I suppose you could click here if you're interested).

Literary criticism

2007-09-10T13:52:00.000Z

Vernon God Little won the Booker Prize in 2003 for making the remarkable observation that Middle America has a bit of a relaxed attitude towards guns and capital punishment. It was also hailed as being "ridiculously funny". I didn't really get it, so, four years after the event, I'm lampooning it with a highly sophisticated pun, which I'm sure millions of people thought of ages ago anyway. Take that, misguided literary critics.

Made you look

2007-09-08T17:03:00.000Z

Just a quick technical announcement: I've been re-scanning some of the images from the Picture Index - darkening the faint ones and faintening the dark ones - so you can now see my crappy drawings in all their, er, glory. There is obviously no reason that you'd want to do this.

Buying stuff

2007-09-07T13:58:00.001Z

This kind of thing is best left to Garros, really. This is an unofficial companion piece to his Doing Stuff, and should not be interpreted as an anti-capitalist rant. I love stuff!

Also, my Dad would probably like to point out that "proven" is a hideous modern corruption of the perfectly good word "proved", especially when pronounced to rhyme with "cloven". Apologies to any other readers who are offended by this brazen violation of the English language.

Board games #7: Escape from Colditz

2007-09-04T19:12:00.000Z

As punishment for having been born in peacetime, children of the sixties and seventies were (probably) ritually presented with Escape from Colditz, which is not so much a game as a stern reminder to the nation's complacent youth that WAR IS HELL. It turns out that being a prisoner of war wasn't all fun and japes, as Steve McQueen tried to persuade us, but was in fact fraught with tedious planning, arbitrary misfortune and bizarrely arcane regulations. Who would've thought?

Click this link from Top Gear's James May to see Escape from Colditz in action, along with some actual humour.

For example, in order to flee the notorious prison camp, escapees need a 'Civilian Escape Kit', comprising food, a disguise, documents and a compass. Not unreasonable. However, in order to collect these constituent parts, you must simultaneously have one soldier in each of the four rooms that contain them, since, y'know, erm... because. Of course, it's also possible to pick up an equipment card by chance, provided you don't mind running the risk of being arrested and thrown into solitary confinement by the guards. But in spite of the fact that they arrest you for carrying an item of escape equipment, they let you keep hold of it. And if you throw a double, they let you out again. And, according to the instructions, "German guards cannot enter rooms". No wonder the Nazi movement only lasted twelve years.

But it's not fair to make fun of Escape from Colditz, because it's much more of an educational experience than, say, Mouse Trap, and it comes complete with a pamphlet and numerous footnotes by real-life Colditz inmate and escapee, Captain P. R. Reid. It's a historical monument: few mass-market games these days are quite so heavily adorned with Nazi insignia, sadly. So, hooray for Blighty, down with Jerry, and let's make a getaway through this meticulously engineered tunnel, sharpish.

Hang it all. I haven't got the relevant tunnel card. Back to the drawing board...

The 'send' button

2007-09-01T09:44:00.000Z

A fundamental feature of quantum mechanics is that you can't perform measurements on a system of particles without changing its state, and even after the event it's not usually possible to say with certainty which state it was in before you waded in with your meddling experiment. For me, sending e-mails is a bit like that. There's no way of knowing whether or not what I've written is a good idea before clicking on 'send', but immediately afterwards I find that messages are usually revealed as catastrophically inadvisable. Apologies to everyone who's been on the receiving end of one my more... eccentric missives; all I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In fact, having a slightly sardonic sense of humour can cause problems in all walks of life. Take, for instance, this article clipped from yesterday's paper.

Ah, for Christ's sake. I mean, how... why... who could possibly be offended by that? The TV editor of Radio Times? Really? Has she ever actually watched television? There's just no way of knowing what's going to upset people, so I'm going to draw this post to a conclusion with an image that nobody could possibly object to: a towering mountain of glittering kittens (thanks to Garros for the inspiration)

The ones in the middle of the pile are slowly suffocating.

House calls

2007-08-26T09:17:00.000Z

Oh, dear. If you're not a fan of House, enjoy the picture of Jesse 'Dr. Chase/Billy out of Neighbours' Spencer, the world's most implausibly beautiful man.

How cognitive behaviour therapy works

2007-08-25T10:51:00.000Z

That course was real eye-opener.

Board games #6: Barricade

2007-08-24T20:12:00.000Z

Barricade is a German game in which four players - one red, one green, one yellow and one blue - compete to be the first to reach the top of the board. The twist is that there are various 'barricades' littering the path, and if a player's pawn should land directly on one of these, it may be removed and used to build a wall to obstruct an opponent. Simple.

Now look at this map of Germany (borrowed from Wikipedia)as it was after the Second World War. Four players - one red, one green, one yellow and one blue - compete to be the best at restoring the country's economic stability in the post-Nazi depression. Berlin was in the red team's territory, but was nonetheless shared between all four contestants. Unfortunately, the reds had a bit of a falling out with the other players about bombs and precious bodily fluids (this may not be entirely accurate: my knowledge of the Cold War is based entirely on Dr. Strangelove), and so they decided to get some barricades together and build a wall (or - brilliantly - "Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart") of their own.

Coincidence? Let's pursue the analogy further. According to the colour-coding, the Soviet Union is represented by a neurotic, trigger-happy cowboy, the USA by a young lady whose apparent moral superiority barely conceals her fondness for gambling and other extravagances, the French by a beard-stroking professorial type, and Britain by a cheery Joan Collins-lookalike hooker. If that isn't bang-on-the-money national profiling, I don't know what is.

Now that we've exposed the game's blatant political subtext, the simple malicious thrill of sending another player home assumes an entirely new significance. The game is presumably used at the G8 negotiating table to settle disputes over gas supplies and the like. This would also explain why the meetings go on for so long: it takes bloody ages to roll enough ones to get past all the barricades that inevitably pile up at the top of the board.

So there you have it. Barricade: really brainy and historically relevant, and certainly not just another tedious, if nicely presented, Ludo variant, which is what you probably ignorantly thought.

============================

BONUS HAPPY SQUID QUIZ! One of these pictures is current British Chancellor, Alistair Darling; the other is an impostor. Can you tell the difference?

Happy (birthday) Squid

2007-08-21T14:23:00.000Z

Don your party hats and help yourself to cheddar-and-pineapple-chunks-on-a-cocktail-stick things; the Happy Squid is one year old today! Yes, although it probably feels like much (much) longer, it was in fact only on Monday, 21st August 2006, that Garros, Testoni and Hawk all put their inaugural posts on-line (the first and last time that all three uploaded entries on the same day, history fans).

Garros's brilliant opening salvo is still, er, brilliant. I want this printed on a mug, or the side of a medium-sized building.

Since then, it's been a right old mish-mash. There have been over 100 posts, frighteningly - not a bad level of productivity on average, considering that the site lay more or less fallow for the first five months of 2007 while Hawk and Garros did their duty as tax-paying citizens, and Testoni sweated for his finals. Let's not discuss the average quality.

Anyway, it's a celebration, so let off a few anti-climactic party-poppers (aim away from face, remember), guzzle some fizzy pop, then run around in a frenzy of sugar-fuelled hyperactivity when you're supposed to be sitting still playing pass the parcel. The comments section below is open, as usual, for birthday messages [holds breath].

Bah. I'll have a party on own, then; all the more Wotsits for me.

Lego pirates 6: the mast

2007-08-19T13:44:00.000Z

The sun comes up over Skull Island. Nigella, the token female pirate, has emerged from her slumber and is preparing to face the challenges of the day.

"Good morning, Jules!" she calls.

From the ground below, Bos'n Julian feels the familiar wave of comforting nausea sweep through his stomach. He wistfully takes in Nigella's intoxicating femininity and poised elegance, her unobtainability rising like bile in the lining of his gut. Today, he tells himself, he will speak to her in a civil manner without resorting to petty insults to mask his emotions.

"Oh, hello, Nigella," he fumbles, "I was just doing some of the old sit-ups; I'm getting quite the washboard stomach, if I do say so myself."

"What a coincidence," she replies, "I was just reading about Orlando Bloom's new exercise regime, Pilates of the Caribbean. Now there's a man with finely honed abdominals," she adds, dreamily.

Julian is stung by her snub. "Your seemingly insatiable lust for fatuous celebrity beefcakes never ceases to amaze me, woman," he rails, spitefully. "You're nothing but a cheap bimbo!"

As Nigella turns on her heel, Julian curses himself silently. That isn't what he meant to say at all.

Nigella huffs away to find her boyfriend, Rupert.

"Julian is such a bully!" she complains. "He's forever provoking me with his Neanderthal male-chauvinist balderdash."

"There, there, darling," Rupert says, awkwardly. "Just ignore Jules; he's a rather unreconstructed sort of chap. Why don't you forget all about it by making me some breakfast?"

Nigella exits despairingly.

Meanwhile, Commander Barnes and Lieutenant Sanders are on duty at the Governor's bastion, located on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere. From the top of the tower, they survey the gently oscillating surface of the surrounding ocean.

"Pff," exhales Barnes, despondently. "This is phenomenally boring."

"Dull," Sanders concurs.

Barnes tosses a pebble into the water.

Plop.

Seconds scrape by.

"Nuts to this," announces Sanders. "Let's borrow the Blue Lady and find us some action!"

"What a capital scheme!" says Barnes. "Let me just do one more throw."

Hush descends.

Plop.

"All right, let's go!"

Barnes is exhilarated by the sensation of wind in his beard as the Governor's powerful ship scythes effortlessly through the waves.

"This is splendid, Sanders!" he cries. "We're really zipping along!"

"You think this is good?" asks the Lieutenant, sarcastically. "Watch me do a doughnut!"

Sanders spins the wheel gleefully, leaning the Blue Lady into a tight arc. He's making screeching skiddy-tyre noises with his mouth while he does so.

Just then, a loud crack from above interrupts the fun.

"Cripes!" wails Sanders. "We've gone and broken the mast! We're done for!"

The Commander is quick to offer reassurance. "It can't be as bad as all that, can it?" he says.

Sanders describes the fate that befell the last person to put a scratch on the Governor's ship.

"Well, that's certainly an inventive use for a trouser-press," muses Barnes, "but I'm sure the Governor won't be so harsh with us; we're competent and favoured employees."

There is a pregnant pause.

"Hmm," concedes Barnes; "we're in a pickle, all right. Let's go up and inspect the damage; perhaps we can patch the old girl up with a spot of duct tape."

So the two men ascend the rigging.

"Oh, dear," sighs Barnes, peering under the collapsed sail. "It really is a bit jiggered, isn't it?"

Sanders begins to sob quietly. "Nobody can help us now," he blubs.

"Don't be sad, Sanders," says Barnes. "What about the pirates who live near here? They seem like a friendly bunch."

The Lieutenant lifts his tear-stained face slightly from his hands. "Pirates?" he snuffles. "But I hate pirates!"

Barnes adopts a stoical expression. "Then I suppose we'll just have to accept the consequences of our irresponsible actions," he concludes.

Despite their predicament, both men fall about laughing at this ridiculous suggestion.

"To Skull Island!" cries Sanders.

Some time later, the stricken ship limps up to the shore of the pirates' base, where she's greeted by Rupert and Nigella.

"Bloody pirates," mutters Sanders, sulkily. "I hate 'em."

"Then perhaps you'd better let me do the talking," suggests Barnes. He calmly explains the situation to Nigella, taking care to play down his own culpability.

"Oh, what a horrid muddle!" she says. "The Governor can be dreadfully unkind when he's in a temper."

"I'll say!" agrees Rupert, subconsciously fingering his eyepatch. "Never play Ker-Plunk with him, that's my advice."

"So, will you help us or not, you sickening sea-faring swine?" demands Sanders.

Nigella smiles. "Oh, I daresay we can come up with something."

After a bit of head-scratching, the pirates erect a makeshift crane. Nigella is on hammering duties, while Julian, Rupert and Geoffrey prepare to hoist the pole back to a vertical position.

Julian admires Nigella from afar as she athletically climbs the rigging.

"Heave-ho, eh, chaps?" says Rupert.

The three pirates pull on the rope, and sure enough, the mast is gradually rendered upright.

"Hurrah!" cheers Barnes as he guides the post into place. "What do you think of pirates now, Lieutenant Sanders?"

Sanders folds his arms and pouts. Ooh, he really hates pirates.

Nigella sets to work nailing the mast back into place while her manly companions hold the rope taut.

"Golly, Jules," taunts Rupert, "you're not too shabby at this considering how long it's been since you last pulled!" He chuckles: "Pulled! Do you get it, Geoff?"

Geoffrey does not give the impression of being incapacitated by hilarity. Julian is even less amused.

"Blast it, Rupert!" he shouts. "I am perfectly happy being a bachelor, and your hurtful comments do not upset me in the slightest."

To demonstrate how upset he isn't, he turns around and biffs Rupert squarely in the nose, sending him reeling. Without their counterbalancing contributions, the tension in the rope yanks Geoffrey off his feet and into the air at some speed.

Rupert and Julian are too embroiled in fisticuffs to notice. "I'd rather be single than saddled with your air-headed other half," fibs Julian.

"You'll pay dearly for that remark, you bounder!" cries Rupert, swinging wildly.

Over on the Blue Lady, Nigella taps the final rivets into place.
"Thanks awfully, Nigella," says Commander Barnes. "We're forever in your debt."

The pirates' battle cries can be heard emanating from Skull Island.

"Goodness, it sounds as if there's a bit of kerfuffle amongst your boys," remarks Barnes. "Perhaps we'll just leave quietly, eh?"

"That might be best," agrees Nigella. "See you later, you two." She blows them both a kiss as she disembarks.

"Lousy plundering pirates," grumbles Sanders, unreasonably.

Upon her return, Nigella has to pick her way through Julian and Rupert's skirmish, which has by now escalated to include much brandishing of cutlasses.

"What is going on here?" she enquires.

"I'm defending your honour, my sweet!" declares Rupert, between the clashing of swords.

"Oh, how gallant," sighs Nigella. "Well, I'm off to bed. Good night, chaps."

"Good night, Nigella," they meekly reply. "Now taste my steel, you ignominious cad!" adds Julian, returning to the fight.

"Good night, Geoffrey," Nigella calls.

Geoffrey, in his inverted state, has passed out due to a rush of blood to the head.

"Gosh, that's an interesting position Geoff," she remarks. "Have you been watching Orlando Bloom's work-out video, too?"

Half a dozen of the other

2007-08-18T18:00:00.000Z

I think a lot of people missed out on Claire's subtextual lust for Nate in Six Feet Under. Nothing to do with Pirates, though, admittedly.

Board Games #5: Black Box

2007-08-15T15:28:00.000Z

Atomic physics: not the most immediately obvious subject matter for light-hearted tabletop entertainment, you might think. Black Box, however, is no children's plaything. One glance at the box reveals mind-bending Tomorrow's World-style fish-eye photography surrounded by concentric rings of beige - the colour of the future! Intellectual lightweights beware, it seems to pronounce: this is a game for serious-minded academics, and requires a working knowledge of the building blocks of the universe itself.

Not really, obviously. Black Box is essentially battleships, but instead of guessing a coordinate, you shoot a 'ray' into the grid and draw conclusions from the way that it's reflected off your opponents concealed 'atoms'. A black pawn represents a direct hit, white means the ray is bounced back to its starting point, and a pair of like-coloured counters mark the end points of your ray's path after glancing off an atom and being deflected by ninety degrees. Strategically speaking, it's about as complicated as Top Trumps, so it's a bit of a mystery that the instructions insist on scaring science-averse customers away with talk of 'electrons', 'output positions' and 'experimenters'. This was 1977, after all; it would be another three years before Blondie popularised such miniscule particles with their hit single, Atomic (sample lyrics: "Uh huh make me tonight / Tonight make it right / Uh huh make me tonight." If Waddington's had had the foresight to put that on the back of the box, the game would have been a guaranteed success).

The Black Box man in all his close-up glory. It would be traditional at this point to say something like, "give him a big hand", but I can think of loads of better jokes than that. I just don't feel like telling you any of them.

It's also possible to stack the odds in your favour when it's your turn to set the puzzle. For example, below is strategy for which gives a seventy-five per cent chance of victory.

The wobbly blue crosses are your atoms. If you can restrain yourself from laughing at my inept diagram, place four of them at the corners of a four by four grid, and the fifth in one of the four internal squares, as shown. No matter what your adversary tries, he or she won't be able to determine the position of the fifth, since no rays can penetrate your infuriating wall of unsportingness. This would be a useful tactic should you ever find yourself playing the Grim Reaper at Black Box, like in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (I love that film: "You totally killed us, you evil robot dickweeds!"). If he complains about your cheating antics, mumble something about quantum uncertainty and do that little "Wild Stallyns!" widdly-widdly air guitar thing. That'll sort him out.

Um, that's enough Black Box for now.

Four strategies for the eradication of boredom

2007-08-09T18:44:00.000Z

I was pondering the other day about the terrifyingly large proportion of my life that I've frittered away doing utterly pointless things. During some of my, er, "sabbaticals" from the education system, there were times when I wasn't employed, wasn't studying, and wasn't falling over myself to find productive activities with which to fill my life. As a result, I have become a master of killing time. Actually, "killing" doesn't really cover it; it's more like giving time a Chinese burn, stealing its lunch-money, hanging it upside-down from the monkey bars and taunting it with the apparent temporal paradoxes which arise from the theory of relativity. All of which is an entirely nonsensical way of introducing a short list of things that have devoured alarmingly large chunks of my life, and left me with nothing to brag about on my weedy C.V.

1. Watching mediocre US television shows on DVD: I'm sure most people are guilty of slumping listlessly in front of occasional episodes of TV programmes they don't really like, but imagine the grim determination required to sit through three whole series of Millennium, a paranoid occult end-of-a-century drama with laboured religious overtones from X-Files creator Chris Carter. If you've never seen it, it's the story of saturnine former FBI agent Frank Black, whose ability to see murders from the killer's perspective is, not unreasonably, causing him some mental health issues. Fed up with nightmares and dismembered corpses, he retires to the suburbs to work for the benevolent Millennium Syndicate, where he experiences - you guessed it - more nightmares and dismembered corpses, and also the baldy one from Lost. What follows is a procession of geriatric actors in playschool-quality make-up pretending to be sardonic demons, nonsensical historical conspiracy theories, lots of brow-furrowing and anorak-modelling from jobbing rent-a-frown Lance Henrikson (that's him, looking a bit grumpy on the left), incongruous gurning comedy pastiches, and a cameo appearance from Kiss (is there nothing they won't do?). The show featured more or less everything that irritates me about television, yet I watched it to its conclusion: some sixty-five episodes of chin-stroking hokum. I can safely say that the only benefit of the experience was that it made the ironing that I often did in front of it seem slightly less tedious. The whole affair was perfectly summarised by one of the captions that flashed up over the show's opening credits: "Who cares?" They were asking for trouble with that, really.

2. Collecting things: There's something deeply satisfying about owning a complete set of something, isn't there? Um, well, no. No there isn't. If you'd tried telling that to me between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three, though, I would have scoffed disdainfully and replied, "Having full sets of things is very satisfying, actually; I have a full set of singles and albums by the hugely underrated proponents of wry chart-bothering easy-listening, The Beautiful South, and my life is substantially happier as a result. It definitely isn't a device to distract me from my crippling social inedequacy or anything. Nope." Of course, accumulating such a dazzling collection is no mean feat; it requires hours spent painstakingly scouring obscure on-line music directories, paying well over the odds for dog-eared old records that have been gathering dust under a stack of Captain Beefheart LPs for the last decade, and causing no end of hassle to your stoic postman, who has to lug all your inconveniently-sized purchases to your house every few days.

My TBS CDs. I sold all the vinyl on eBay last year, mostly to a nice man from Germany, proving that the band's appeal spanned the world. The entire world!

Combined with the remainder of my CD-single mountain, this hobby devoured a sizeable chunk of my youth. Brilliantly, more or less everything I ever bought is now worth no more than a pittance, but it was worth it for some of the lyrical gems squirreled away on the band's b-sides. I was going to give an example, but they sound a bit rubbish when I write them down. But it was still definitely totally worth it.

3. Getting bogged down in videogame 'side-quests': The first computer game that I played for any length of time was a Nintendo Game and Watch called Lion. The idea was to move two chair-wielding zookeepers up and down (one with each thumb) to prevent a gang of lions escaping from their cage (closing the doors apparently wasn't an option). That was it: up-up-down-up bip-bip-bip. Hours of mindless, repetitive fun which effectively killed off my efflorescing brain at the age of nine.

This might have been worth a couple of pounds had I not scratched the word "yo" into the face-plate with a safety pin. At least I can console myself with the knowledge that I was one cool cat in those days. Daddio.

In recent years, however, Nintendo have felt the need to add a little more in the way of content to their products. Not only do they subject us to weeks of entertainment from the main body of the game (those bastards), but also tack on massive obsessive-compulsive treasure hunts to add value for unhinged completists. I shudder to think of the months I devoted to hunting down scrapy-scratchy spiders, multi-coloured bananas, or deviously-concealed blue coins. Zelda: The Wind Waker was the worst, though: find a treasure map, pay an extortionate fee to a rosy-cheeked imp in a bondage leotard to make it readable, wave your wand of wind to point the breeze in the appropriate direction to carry your boat to the relevant point, drift in a straight line for two minutes to get there, lower your crane, realise you're a couple of inches off-target, swear, make some small adjustments, try again, feel sense of tingling anticipation as a treasure chest emerges dripping from the briny depths, then feel a bit miffed when it turns out to contain the in-game equivalent of seventy pence, which you can't carry anyway because your wallet's already full. Repeat until a blunt epiphany regarding your own mortality forces you blinking out into the sunshine.

4. The Happy Squid: The beauty of the internet is that it provides a democratic forum for the inane output of idle minds. For the owners of said minds, it also provides the tantalising possibility that somebody somewhere might conceivably be reading their witterings. I don't labour under any such illusions, but that doesn't stop me from getting myself covered in carpet-fluff on a regular basis taking fuzzy pictures of plastic pirates and devising increasingly derivative 'stories' to accompany them. Neither am I deterred from scribbling appalling pictures which, for no easily comprehensible reason, take hours to finish. All in all, the Happy Squid is probably the most irrelevant, self-regarding waste of time I've yet devised. Hooray!

Ah, the Happy Squid. Apparently, websites with white backgrounds consume about thirty per cent more energy than black ones, so just by reading this you're single-handedly murdering the planet. Switch your monitor off, I would.

Lego pirates 5: the ghost

2007-08-04T10:55:00.000Z

The Governor is making an inspection of his fort. "Good grief, Davies!" he cries, addressing his Lance Corporal. "This place is positively encrusted with grime, and there's a very peculiar odour coming from somewhere around here. Let's get things looking spick and span, eh?"

He hands Davies a broom, before adding, "And clean out the dungeon, too, will you? I'll bet nobody's hoovered down there for months."

With that, the Governor disappears to his office to do some important paperwork. The Lance Corporal glumly sets about his duty.

Davies opens the dungeon's hatch, muttering to himself about the unfairness of the military hierarchy. As he does so, a ghost appears from beneath.

"Hullo there, young man," says the ghost.

"Oh, hello," replies Davies. "Can I help you?"

"As a matter of fact, you can, my boy. The name's Schofield, and I'd like to speak to whoever's in charge."

"That'd be the Governor, Mr. Schofield," says Davies. "I'll just get him for you. Can I say what it's regarding?"

"Of course; how rude of me," the ghost apologises. "I'd like to make a complaint."

Tee-hee, thinks Davies: a complaint. That'll serve the slave-driving old fusspot right.

A few moments later, the Lance Corporal returns with the rather disgruntled-looking Governor in tow.

"Mr. Schofield?" the Governor enquires. "What seems to be the trouble?"

"The trouble? I'm dead, old chap."

"Well, yes; I'll admit you're looking a little withdrawn," the Governor concedes, "but you can't honestly expect me to be held responsible every time one of my constituents comes down with some trifling ailment, can you?"

"Well, in this case, sir," persists Schofield, "my current condition has largely arisen as a result of having been imprisoned in your subterranean cell for three years without any form of bodily sustenance."

"Pah!" snorts the Governor. "I'd like to see you prove it!"

"Oh, this is shameful form, old bean," retorts the ghost, annoyed; "that's my rotting corpse down there, for heaven's sake!"

The Governor peers into the pit.

"Oh, come now," he says. "That festering carcass could belong to anybody."

Schofield is incensed. "This simply won't do!" he cries. "It's very insensitive of you to split hairs like this in such delicate circumstances. If you really insist on doubting my integrity, speak to my old pirate chum, Cap'n Smythe. He's a trustworthy pillar of the community."

"Oh, very well," sighs the Governor. "Davies, go and fetch the peg-legged old blackguard."

"Right-ho, sir!" he replies, pleased to escape the cleaning.

As Davies rows away, the Governor begins to feel guilty about his brusque behaviour.

"I'm dreadfully sorry about all this red tape, Mr. Schofield," says the Governor, apologetically, "but you do read so many stories about litigious ectoplasmic entities making spurious personal injury claims. It's this modern blame culture, you see."

"Oh, I quite understand. I'm sorry if I snapped earlier, but years of solitary confinement can fray one's patience somewhat."

"Why didn't you just float through the bars?" asks the Governor. "I thought ghosts could pass through solid objects."

"No; that's a complete fallacy, as it turns out."

"Gosh, how interesting."

On Skull Island, the pirates are playing hunt the thimble. Rupert is rummaging through the weapons barrel, Smythe is checking the palm branches, Geoffrey is investigating the prison, and Nigella is foraging upstairs. None of them are having much success.

"You're all really, really cold!" pronounces Julian, smugly. This is because Julian has, in fact, swallowed the thimble. Being a rather competitive type, he wanted to guarantee victory by hiding it somewhere the others would never look. To make doubly sure, he's taken the batteries out of Smythe's portable endoscope, and secreted them in another of his bodily cavities.

Lance Corporal Davies arrives while the gang is in mid hunt. Smythe greets him affably.

"Hullo, Davies," he begins. "What brings you to our neck of the woods?"

"Oh, hello, Cap'n Smythe. The Governor asked me to bring you back to the fort for some questions regarding a dead body."

"Not this again!" the Cap'n groans. "I've told you people a hundred times: that sailor must have wrapped himself in cling-film, hidden under my bed, and died of natural causes."

"Oh, no, Cap'n," Davies clarifies. "This time it's a fellow called Schofield who claims to know you. We need you to identify the corpse."

"Oh, splendid!" cries Smythe, relieved. "Good old Schofers; I was wondering where he'd got to. Come along Geoffrey, this will be a formative experience for you."

Geoffrey doesn't look convinced.

Before long, the men arrive back at the fort.

"Smythe, you old ruffian!" exclaims Schofield.

"Schofers! You're looking fit as a fiddle!"

"Well, as much as I hate to grumble, I've been better. The Governor here tossed me into his wretched oubliette three years ago, and sure enough, il m'a oublié. Now - not to put too fine a point on it - I'm utterly deceased, old chap."

"Ah, yes," muses Smythe, "you do look a little off-colour, now you come to mention it."

"Right!" interrupts the Governor, clapping his hands conclusively. "There'll be plenty of time for pleasantries later, but for now I need you chaps to take a look at this cadaver."

So Smythe and Geoffrey inspect the remains.

"My word!" curses the Cap'n, recoiling from the assault on his senses. "That thing is maggot-infested, putting out an ungodly stench, and barely recognisable as human." He pauses before delivering the inevitable punchline: "That's Schofers, all right!"

Geoffrey is wondering if his therapist can squeeze him in for an extra appointment this week.

The formalities dealt with, Lance Corporal Davies offers Schofield and the pirates a lift home.

"Gosh," blushes the Governor, "this is all very embarrassing. I'll have a word with my solicitor and see if we can't come to some sort of arrangement."

"Oh, what I really want is for some good to come out of this situation," declares Schofield magnanimously. "How about an independent inquiry into your prison procedures, so that this can never happen again?"

"Right you are," agrees the Governor, gratefully.

"Additionally, I'm suing you for a seven figure sum," adds the ghoul. "See you in court, you incompetent nincompoop."

The Governor's melancholy face becomes a tiny speck on the horizon as Davies rows the boat out to sea.

The party arrives back at Skull Island to find the thimble hunt still in full flow.

Smythe introduces their guest. "Jules, Rupert, Nigella; I'd like you to meet my old pal Schofield. He's dead, would you credit it? "

There is a general murmur of pleased-to-meet-yous.

"Perhaps you can help us, Mr. Schofield," Nigella proposes. "We've been scavenging for Julian's blasted thimble all day, and we're no nearer to finding it now than we were this morning."

"Ah, well, perhaps I can be of some assistance, my dear," says the ghost. "One of the advantages of abandoning one's Earthly bodily limitations is that one becomes much more sensitive to the whole range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Let me see if I can discover anything using x-ray vision."

"Ooh, this is just like Smallville!" Nigella observes.

For legal reasons, this is nothing like Smallville.

Schofield furrows his brow, and scans the local area for unusual metallic objects. When his gaze reaches Julian's abdomen, he cries out triumphantly.

"A-ha! There's the little blighter, nestling about halfway through your companion's small intestine! Judging by its striking opacity, I'd say that thimble must be made from at least seventy per cent lead. Most unusual."

Julian has turned very pale.

"Oh, you rotten cheat!" exclaims Nigella. "A good bout of lead poisoning will serve you right."

"Yes, bad show, Jules," scolds Smythe. "Now, how about a good old-fashioned pirate knees-up in honour of our guest? Geoffrey, fetch my Rod Stewart LPs."

Geoffrey shakes his head, and scuttles away to hide. There's only so much trauma a man can take in one day.

"Silly old Geoffrey!" chorus the Pirates.

Five for fighting

2007-08-04T08:47:00.000Z

Heh, dogs say woof.

Board games #4: Donkey Kong

2007-08-02T19:45:00.000Z

The scene: The boardroom of MB Games in the early '80s. A team of twenty-something executives lounge in leather chairs and cut lines of coke with their solid gold business cards. The CEO is not happy.

The CEO: Goddammit, our sales figures are down thirty goddamn per cent this quarter! Which of you friggin' idiots is responsible for this goddamn disaster?

Exec 1: No sweat, boss. Those figures are just a minor blip resulting from the whole Hangman situation. [Snorts line of coke]

The CEO: I'll give you a goddamn hangman situation, goddammit! Even the general goddamn public aren't stupid enough to pay good money for a massive friggin' plastic version of a game they can play with a piece of paper and a goddamn pencil!

Exec 1: That's a little harsh, chief; we all agreed in the last meeting that it was a tasteful celebration of America's proud history of capital punishment. Besides, we were all really friggin' high...

The CEO: All right, but somebody has to take the fall for this. [Points at a bespectacled man who is repairing the photocopier in the corner.] You, four eyes! You're fired! As for the rest of you goddamn imbeciles, what have you come up with this month?

Exec 2: Well, we really learned our lesson about trying to screw our customers out of cash by selling them junk they can play for free. So this time we thought: why not give them something they couldn't possibly afford in their wildest dreams? Gentlemen, I give you... Donkey Kong!

The CEO: Donkey-friggin'-Kong?

Exec 2: Donkey Kong, sir: it's the new video-game sensation that all the kids are talking about! In malls and arcades all over the world, they're just pumping their dimes into this machine. There's this Italian guy called Mario who fearlessly climbs up girders and jumps over flaming barrels to rescue his girl from the eponymous ape. It's cutting-edge electronic entertainment designed by this company called 'Nintendo'.

The CEO: Nintendo? Sounds like some kind of goddamn commie Jap outfit to me. Those bastards will be wanting goddamn licensing payments, I'll bet.

Exec 2: Not a problem, sir; nobody's even heard of them over here, and all the boys on Wall Street say they'll sink without trace after this fluke success. We'll just get the guys in the art department to copy the logo from the arcade machine, then write Nintendo's name in really small letters on one side of the box. No one will even notice!

The CEO: I love it! This is for Pearl Harbor, you goddamn kamikaze pinkos! So, how are you going to bring the charm, excitement and technological innovation of the video-game to our board-based version?

Exec 2: What? Oh, we thought we'd just bang out a version of snakes and ladders with a sexist nubile-damsel-in-distress stereotype at the top. Plus, we've drawn Mario to look like a terrifying glove-sniffing pervert, just like a real Italian!

The CEO: Goddammit, that isn't going to wash with our target demographic! This is the '80s: we need action as well as crude caricatures, like in those goddamn Indiana Jones movies. Can't you spice it up a little bit?

Exec 2: Jeez... uh, how about some orange plastic barrels and a big plastic monkey from which the aforementioned barrels are somehow dispensed? And cards bearing arbitrary numbers that let you jump and use a hammer?

The CEO: Perfect! Proposal approved. Now, let's get some goddamn hookers and a couple of rusty coathangers and have a good time! And don't invite that Brett Easton Ellis guy this time, either; I didn't like the way he was writing shit down in that goddamn notebook of his.

[They all snort several lines and exit, cheering and high-fiving.]

Cutting stingray smile

2007-08-01T19:18:00.000Z

Crumbs, Testoni has got himself a floppy, foppy new hairdo to match my own current 'style'. The cartoon version looks a lot better, actually; a few months ago I referred to my hair as "an ill-advised '70s fright-wig," and that description is even more apt after four months without any professional attention. Interesting, eh?

Yep.

Um, anyway, apologies for yet another self-indulgent, entirely meaningless cartoon. As you might have gathered, I'm really, really, ridiculously, farcically single, to the extent that even the extremely rare occurrence (it's happened roughly three times in my entire life) of being smiled at by a woman in the street is enough to tip me into a state of gibbering anxiety. Bah.

Fortunately, most pedestrians seem to be too preoccupied with text messaging to pay anybody else much attention. What is it that they're writing, exactly? What information could be so profound and urgent that it's necessary to furiously tap it into their miniscule handsets whilst obliviously stepping out in front of the rush hour traffic?

hi m8. i hv formulated comprehensive theory of quantum gravity. it reconciles einsteins relativity with heisenbergs uncertainty principle allowing for a complete description of universal physics. must send this msg now as hawkings ppl are tryin to kill me. btw do u want beans or ps 4 t?

I don't understand it at all.

Stueaz

2007-07-28T10:10:00.000Z

Rummaging through my drawers this morning in a fruitless search for Lego stickers, I stumbled upon a bundle of letters sent to me by my friends from my Midlands primary school after I'd moved to the badlands of Essex. Among the number were some from Stuart "Stueaz" Harrison, a boy I didn't really know that well at school, but was kind enough to send me some samples of his crazed scribblings. For example:

It continues over the page with a "funny anecdote" about a mix-up with technology classrooms, which he brilliantly concludes with, "my how we laughed! Well, HOW we laughed isn't important, but my, how we laughed!" He really did like Nirvana, too; quite impressive for a twelve-year-old in 1993 (certainly compared to my musical tastes of the day: Wet Wet Wet and Bob Seger). Here are some more of his favourite 'sounds':

Guns n' Roses in encapsulation-of-soft-rock shock! Axl Rose will be turning in his grave, assuming he's dead. He looks pretty dead. Maybe we can revive him by poking him with a snooker cue and chanting "when's Chinese Democracy coming out, then?" over and over again. He'd probably quite enjoy the attention.

Stueaz exhibits a daringly diverse range of musical taste, too. At my school, you were either a grunger (or a 'grudger', in Stuart's case) or a raver/townie. You settled on a preference for one or the other, and you choice dictated your behaviour from that point onwards. Grungers sat around strumming out scuzzy power-chords on an old acoustic guitar in the school corridors, and spent their leisure time sitting in fields drinking cider and discussing the relative merits of the first two Bush albums. Ravers, on the other hand, were preoccupied with trying to gain underage admission to the Hippodrome, or one of Colchester's numerous other premier nightclubs; the girls generally achieved this using the tried-and-tested 'low cut top' technique (also an effective device for obtaining free drinks from desperate lecherous blokes at least ten years their senior once inside), while the boys - particularly those without convincing facial hair - were turned away, and so resorted to sitting in bus shelters swigging Stella, looking a bit intimidating and shouting about how gay everybody was. Presumably, Stueaz must have been forced at some point to decide between Pearl Jam and The Shamen; I can only imagine the internal conflict that must have torn his very being asunder while he made up his mind. Personally, I was far too cool and self-assured to pledge my allegiance to either of these restrictive and invidious tribes. I carved out my own niche, sitting in my room appreciating the mordant wit of The Beautiful South and trying to imagine what kissing girls might be like. Things are very different now, of course: I also listen to XTC CDs these days (ho ho - bet you didn't see that punchline coming, eh? Regrettably, it wasn't actually a joke).

Unlike most vacuous adolescents, Stuart also had interests beyond music. In fact, he was quite the philanthropist:

The boy was clearly slightly eccentric. I love the breathless sentence about sleepwalking that just piles through to its destination with no regard for punctuation, followed by the laconic sign-off and extravagant signature. In fact, these hastily-scrawled streams of consciousness from the fevered mind of a twelve-year-old school boy from Lichfield are the best things that have been on the Happy Squid for months. Stueaz, I salute/curse you!

Wahey!

Now you got burned

2007-07-24T08:12:00.000Z

[You might want to zoom in a bit for this one. If, like me, you're a computer cretin, you can do this with Ctrl and + on Internet Explorer, apparently. If you use another browser, why not click aimlessly through the menus until Bill Gates arrives to break your legs with a spanner?]

We've all been in this situation, right? Attempting to dazzle your friends and people you don't really know with extracts from your unusual record collection is a futile endeavour, especially if your definition of 'unusual' is, 'not played much on Radio 1, but featured heavily in glossy US dramas and on blockbuster movie soundtracks'. Let's be honest: the intended effect of the compilation CD is not to altruistically introduce life-improving musical experiences to those nearest to you, but rather to persuade people that you suspect of being substantially cooler than you that you're not quite as square as you look. It's the perfect riposte to their implied superiority, you think: how can I be boring? I like Mates of State!

Having said all that, the above cartoon is destined to be the inlay card for my latest mix CD, hence the eye-straining squashedness of it all. My reasoning is that even the most saccharine slice of twee indie piano-jangle will seem masterful when compared to my desultory drawings. Perhaps this sounds idiotic, but there's a precedent to suggest that it works: Billy Joel used the same strategy for his best-selling River of Dreams album.

Only joking, Billy. It's a lovely picture.

Lego pirates 4: the disguise

2007-07-22T16:36:00.000Z

[Behold the menu at the top right for the Pirate archive]

At his fort, the Governor has just recruited a new Commander.

"Right, Barnes," says the Governor, addressing his new employee, "you did quite well in your interview tests, but there are some challenges in this job that you can't overcome using that fancy education of yours."

"Of course, sir," agrees Barnes.

"As an initiation, I have a little test of my own for you. I want you to infiltrate the local gang of ruthless pirates and see what valuable information you can discover. You'll be in disguise, of course, but it will still be extremely dangerous; at least one of their number is rumoured to be a cannibal."

"Um, right-ho, sir," says Barnes, uncertainly.

The Governor kits Barnes out with an authentic pirate outfit and hands him a map guiding him to Skull Island.

"Those black leather slacks are very flattering, Barnes; very you," the Governor coos. "Now, I'm just going to swap our flag for the old Jolly Roger, and the illusion will be complete. I take it your map-reading skills are up to scratch?"

Barnes confirms this. "Yes sir; I have a silver Duke of Edinburgh award!"

This isn't strictly true, but Barnes did once successfully navigate his way out of Alton Towers. He takes the oars, and sets out in what he hopes is the right direction.

As soon as Barnes is out of earshot, the Governor confides in Lance Corporal Davies.

"This is all a bit of a lark," he giggles. "I've just sent the new boy out on a 'mission' to infiltrate Cap'n Smythe and his pals. I even told him one of them was a cannibal! You should have seen his face!"

"Well, that Nigella does have a bit of a reputation as a man-eater!" quips Davies.

They both laugh uncontrollably for several minutes, tears of mirth streaming down their faces.

Eventually, they regain their composure. "Hold on," Davies remarks, "isn't he rowing in completely the wrong direction?"

Another prolonged bout of hilarity ensues.

Meanwhile, happy-go-lucky pirates Rupert and Geoffrey are relaxing on Pirate Isle, their tiny island retreat. Geoffrey lounges on their raft, gazing skywards with awe. Having spent a rather large proportion of his time in prison of late, he's savouring the unfathomable expanse of the universe. All at once, he's struck by an enormous sense of serenity, as if the heavens themselves are about to bestow some precious pearl of insight upon him. The clouds begin to converge into a regimented formation, and Geoffrey feels the first twinges of a euphoric understanding.

Just then, a sudden impact interrupts his reverie.

"Oh, crumbs, I'm dreadfully sorry!" exclaims Barnes, who has rowed directly into the raft. Looking over his shoulder, he finds himself face-to-face with two fearsome pirates. "I mean, shiver me timbers, me hearties!" he corrects himself. "I've glugged so much grog that I can't barely splice me mainbrace!"

Rupert and Geoffrey exchange dubious glances.

"If you say so, old chap!" shouts Rupert. "You also seem to have your boat pointing the wrong way. You'll find things are more streamlined if the sharp end goes first."

"Arr, thank ye," says Barnes, getting into his role. "I don't suppose ye two fellow sea-dogs would happen to know the way to Skull Island, would ye? I'm more lost than a buxom portside barmaid's chastity. Arrr."

Geoffrey is keen to help this curious drunkard. "Skull Island? That's where we're from!" he exclaims. "Follow us, and we'll take you there."

"Arr, ye be most kind, ye disgusting crusty urchins," says Barnes, sincerely.

Rupert whispers aside to his friend. "This is splendid luck, Geoffrey! Nigella loves these sorts of eccentric vagrants; if I can get him to hobo-dance for her, I'm in with a good chance of getting more than a goodnight kiss this evening."

Geoffrey is trying not to cry.

And so the three men set off for Pirate Isle. Upon arrival, they're greeted by Nigella and Bos'n Julian.

"Hullo, chaps," says Julian, "who's your new friend?"

Rupert realises he hasn't asked the stranger for his name. "Um, this is a very special man that we met on our travels today," he mumbles. "He's a very good dancer apparently, Nigella," he adds, winking conspiratorially.

Barnes doesn't remember mentioning anything about dancing. "Arr, a pleasure to make ye're acquaintance, me lovely," he says, nervously.

"Ooh, isn't he adorable with his little beard and tight leather trousers!" Nigella squeals. "It's just like having my very own Chuck Norris. Make him do a crazy Christian karate dance for me, Rupe!"

Barnes does not like the way this is going at all.

Much to Barnes's relief, Cap'n Smythe chooses this moment to join the party.

"What-ho, troops!" he says. "It looks as if we have a new face, what?"

Barnes seizes his opportunity to endear himself to the leadership. "Arr, that I be," he confirms. "I'm a rum-guzzling, cutlass-waving, authority-hating pirate like ye and ye're men. I've walked a good few planks in my days, I can tell ye."

"Gosh!" gasps Smythe. "How extraordinary. I'm sure if you were to take some advice from the Plain English Campaign, you'd be quite the story-teller. I'm afraid you'll find us rather dreary, old bean; it's been a good while since any of us buckled any swash. All those old-fashioned pirate stereotypes are very outmoded these days."

Smythe's parrot interjects. "Pieces of eight!" she squawks.

Rupert has become bored with his guest, so he, Geoffrey and Julian head off to watch some episodes of David Starkey's Monarchy on DVD.

"Can I offer you a drink, my nameless friend?" asks Smythe. "We don't have any rum, I'm sorry to say, but I can knock you up a Woo-Woo or a Cheeky Vimto."

"Oh, yes, let's have some drinkies!" Nigella enthuses. "Then you can show us your dancing!"

"Arr, a Cheeky Vimto would wet me whistle nicely," says Barnes, reasoning that any time spent drinking is time not spent feasting on his intestines. Besides, he rather likes Cheeky Vimtos.

Hours pass. Back at the fort, the Governor is becoming rather worried about his new Commander.

"I only sent him off as a joke, Davies," he frets, "and now he's been gone for ages. Where could he have got to?"

Davies is scanning the horizon. "No sign of him from here, Sir," he says.

"That does it; we'll have to send out a search party. Tell Lieutenant Sanders to get the Blue Lady ready."

The Blue Lady, of course, is the Governor's ship.

"This is all a bit embarrassing, Sanders," explains the Governer to his Lieutenant. "I packed our new Commander off to meet the local pirates as a prank, and now he's gone missing."

"I hate those pirates, Sir!" Sanders rants. "They're probably filling his head with pirate propaganda as we speak, the scurvy-ridden scuts!"

"Now, now, Sanders; try not to jump to conclusions. Let's get going, shall we?"

Before long, the Governor has reached Skull Island, and is rather surprised to find Barnes, Smythe and Nigella in high spirits and various states of undress. This bizarre ritual is worse than anything Sanders had predicted.

"Guv'nooor!" bellows Barnes, happily, at the sight of his boss. "These pi-rates... they're... all top geeeezers."

"Oh, you know one another, do you?" asks Smythe, surprised.

"Sss'a secret, innit, Guv'nor?" slurs the Commander. "Ss'very secret surveillance op'ration... but there was cocktails... and strip poker... I had to join in so'sssnot t'blow my cover."

"I see," the Governor sighs. "Well, I think we can safely abort the mission now. Please retrieve your pantaloons and cover your modesty: I'm taking you home."

"Oh, don't go yet, Chuckie!" implores Nigella. "I so wanted to see your darling little ninja-jig again."

As they sail away, Barnes is extravagantly sick overboard.

"What have those pirate scum done to him?" asks Sanders. "He looks as if he's been tortured for hours."

"Oh, it was horrible, Sanders," replies the Governor. "The lot of them were half-naked like a bunch of savages, imbibing goodness knows what sort of ghastly potions."

"Absolutely disgusting!" spits the Lieutenant. "Did you get a picture?"

"What do you take me for?" the Governor snaps. "Of course I did."

Meanwhile, the other pirates have returned to the shore. Cap'n Smythe is attempting to beat a shark to death with his wooden leg, and Rupert is somewhat disconcerted to find Nigella wandering about in a very minimal blue thong.

"What the devil has been going on here?" he demands. "I leave you alone with an unhinged stranger for a few hours, and when I come back you're displaying your womanly assets to all and sundry like some kind of cheap floozy!"

Julian raises a sardonic eyebrow at this.

"Oh, Rupe, you are silly!" she replies. "We had such fun with Chuckie that it would have been rude to keep our trousers on." She embraces him affectionately.

Geoffrey doesn't know where to look. He stares out to sea, trying to pinpoint the precise moment at which his life began to descend into a joyless farce.

"Cheer up, Geoff," says Julian, sitting beside him. "At least you didn't end up in prison this time. Hurrah for that, eh?"

"I do love a happy ending!" Nigella agrees. "I'm awfully tired now, though: straight to sleep for me." She kisses Rupert lightly on the cheek, and retreats alone to her quarters.

"Oh, blast it all!" curses Rupert.

Must try harder (with a vengeange)*

2007-07-22T16:28:00.000Z

Yeah, I know: this is getting a bit desperate now. But Garros says he's coming back soon! Hooray!

*This pun was 'borrowed' from this month's Total Film magazine.

Board games #3: Sorry!

2007-07-21T22:54:00.000Z

Sorry! is, according to this game's packaging, a registered trademark. There might, in that case, have been some tension between its makers, Waddingtons, and pint-sized avuncular raconteur Ronnie Corbett, who starred in a 1980s sitcom of the same name. Ronnie Corbett's Sorry! was based on the premise of a middle-aged man, Timothy, still living with his domineering battleaxe mother (a bit like Principal Skinner from The Simpsons, except that - obviously, Simpsons fans - Skinner isn't actually Agnes's son Seymour at all, but rather an impostor in the form of Seymour's Vietnam buddy Armen Tamzarian. I'm sure you can see the basic parallel that I'm clumsily attempting to draw). To quote the BBC's comedy website, "Timothy was a smart enough chap, witty and bright, although his discomfort with women often caused him to blush, stammer and blurt out stupid things in their presence." What a loser, eh?

Oh.

Um, anyway, judging by the video clip provided by the BBC, Sorry! the comedy was no laughing matter. And, despite the mirthful grimace of the cackling witch-child pictured on the box, the same applies to the board-game incarnation. Beneath its gaudy and glossily-laminated exterior beats a sickened heart of undiluted malice.

Long-standing Happy Squid readers with alarmingly good memories might remember me writing about Sorry! before, when I described it as, "canny marketing by executives who realised that Ludo just wasn't malicious enough, so introduced the necessity of smirking a sarcastic 'sorry!' upon sending each piece home." Although rather poorly worded, this description remains valid. Wonder why the youth of today are aloof, ironic and insincere? Here's your explanation. The grasping, me-first-screw-you mentality of the MTV generation can, in my opinion, be attributed entirely to the way this game encouraged its impressionable young players to single-mindedly pursue their own interests at all costs. Anybody daring to stand in their way would be cast into the gutter, with only a flippant platitude ("so-reeee!") for consolation. Perhaps I might have grown up to be a sincere and straightforward member of society had Waddingtons not sullied my childish innocence with its alluring sarcasm. I mean, you make one sarcastic comment, and you blush and grin and cough, and look a bit stupid in front of your older brother and his mates, so you tell yourself that it's not as cool as everybody makes out, but part of you already knows you're hooked. From there, it's a sordid downward spiral towards compulsive insincerity, going for bigger and bigger hits in pursuit of something to match that first dizzying rush, but it doesn't come; pretty soon you're spending hours filling websites with glib diatribes about nothing even though you know nobody is reading them, and finding Chandler from Friends quite funny sometimes.

It's a disease.

More fun with board games coming soon!

At a loose end

2007-07-18T10:11:00.000Z

Clothes again

2007-07-14T21:07:00.000Z

I realise that clothing is becoming a bit of a recurring theme on the Happy Squid, but to somebody who doesn't generally pay a great deal of attention to his choice of attire, the process of shopping for clothes is still surrounded by a mystifying aura of bewilderment.

As far as I can tell, clothes come in three basic sizes: slightly too small, slightly too big, and good-Lord-are-you-planning-to-host-a-wedding-reception-in-that? After years of shambling around swamped in over-sized outfits that frequently caused people to mistake me for a small child decked out in one of Richard Branson's discarded hot-air balloons, I've recently started to lean towards more figure-hugging ensembles. The only problem with this decision is that I don't, in all honesty, have much figure worth hugging. Polo shirts with sleeves that only cover half of your upper arm are doubtless immensely alluring if you have the gym-honed biceps with which to fill them out, but what if the only thing that bulges from your arms is a complex network of prominent blue-green veins? Then you just look like a berk, that's what.

Not that I'd know, obviously.

And how do you know what does and does not constitute 'your' colour? After a brief, ill-advised, flirtation with a bright orange Adidas v-neck a few years ago, which clashed nauseatingly with the more naturalistic acne-flecked orange of my complexion, I think I can rule out anything too gaudy. I have a fondness for the beige-to-brown region of the spectrum at the moment; not only does it complement my ludicrous collar-length '70s mop of mousy split ends, but also signals to potential interlocutors that I am an intensely dull person, thus minimising their inevitable disappointment further down the line.

An even better indicator of my inherent tediousness would be my school leaver's shirt, signed by all my pals on the last day of secondary school.

This little beauty has everything you need to know about me, all printed on a goes-with-anything white background. "I've got a funny walk", "All I want for X-Mass [sic] is a life!", "I am boring", and - my best friend's contribution - "I am a boring fart," are all useful facts for new acquaintances to be in possession of, lest they should erroneously suppose that I might be of interest on some level. Some wag has also added, "I do cannabis (honest)," the final parenthetical qualifier serving to alert the reader's attention to its author's ironic tone. If only I had indeed "done" cannabis, then perhaps I would have been automatically inducted into the International Brotherhood of Deeply Fascinating and Articulate Stoners, which could have spared me much social awkwardness over the years.

So fantastic is this garment, in fact, that I'm now going to throw all my newly-purchased items in the bin, and take to wearing it at all times. From now on, I need only turn my back on ignorant inquisitors for them to be fully apprised of my personal shortcomings, thus saving time and energy for all parties concerned. Why didn't I think of this before?

Board games #2: Calcula

2007-07-11T22:27:00.000Z

Some ideas are just doomed to failure. If I were a lazy internet hack without a solitary particle of originality in my body, I would cite the example of Kellogg's disastrous attempt to add gritty marshmallows to Ricicles or something, because that would be a bit kitsch and would resonate with readers of my own generation, for whom novelty breakfast cereals are a serious concern. However, I am in fact a lazy internet hack with a large selection of crap board games in his wardrobe, so I don't even have to utilise my imaginative faculties to the extent necessary to devise an idea of that poor level of quality: I can just use what's right in front of me. In this case, it's the hit seventies maths game, Calcula.

All the same, you can't fault Interbero, the Dutch company responsible, for their attempts to put a positive spin on their still-born creation. "An exciting number-game for all the family", the box claims, only slightly undermined by the cover photo, in which even the hired models are having difficulty staying awake in its presence. As you can probably discern from the picture, Calcula is Scrabble, but with numbers. More specifically, "the idea is to carry out mathematical operations on the board, using the pieces and arrive at an operation that results in the highest possible score."

Fine. Except, of course, that unless you happen to be Rain Man, or Roald Dahl's Matilda, this is going to cause you a great deal of mental anguish. But "Calcula is a typical brain game," insist Interbero; "carrying out 1001 arithmetical operations makes the player figure-conscious." Not quite sure where they've plucked the figure 1001 from, but it's difficult to dispute that claim. What they don't mention is that it also causes your cerebral cortex to leak out through your nostrils in a desperate bid to escape the ordeal you're subjecting it to.

It's safe to say that Calcula wasn't a smash-hit with board game fans. In fact, I've just tried Googling for it, and haven't come up with any obvious search matches; a sure sign of true sank-without-trace obscurity. Even I've never played it; it belonged to my brother back in the days when children were denied access to all types of non-educational activity for fear that their impressionable minds would be impregnated with the seeds of subversive non-conformity. For the purposes of the above photo, I borrowed some tiles from Scrabble for Juniors, and formulated a very-probably-incorrect trigonometric identity, although I can't immediately recollect why doing this seemed like a good idea at the time (this last statement applies to more or less everything I've ever done in my life, actually).

Stay tuned for more brilliant board game analysis!

Oh, go on, please stay tuned. It'll be entertaining next time, maybe.

Lego pirates 3: the monkey

2007-07-07T11:04:00.001Z

[Click here to read the pirates' previous adventure, or select one from the menu on the right]

Bos'n Julian and Cap'n Smythe are idling away some time on Skull Island by filling in a crossword. Smythe is stumped. "'The distances between the centres and the circumferences of two or more circles'," he reads. "R-A-D something something. Any ideas, Jules?"

"I-I, Cap'n?" offers Julian.

The men's puzzling is interrupted by the appearance of Nigella on the rope bridge above them. She's waving her arms furiously at Skull Island's resident monkey, Bernard.

"Give that back at once, you filthy flea-bitten chimp!" she screams.

"What on Earth's going on?" enquires Smythe.

"Oh, hello, you two," she responds, noticing them for the first time. "That beastly monkey has stolen the card that I was going to send to Rupert in prison. It's our eleven-week anniversary, so it's super-important."

Julian is unable to suppress his pedantic impulses. "Generally, Nigella," he begins, "the term 'anniversary' is reserved for events that occur on an annual basis, although the fact that your relationship with Rupert has lasted for two and a half months is undoubtedly sufficiently miraculous to merit an exception."

"Oh, do shut up, Julian," Nigella snaps. "Why do you always have to be so horrid?"

Nigella returns to the task of pursuing her simian tormentor up and down the rigging.

"What's left on our list of things to do today, Julian?" asks Smythe.

"Well, we've finished the Crossword," says Julian, "so according to our schedule, all that remains is to drink woo-woos and sing amusingly lewd shanties until the small hours of the morning."

Cap'n Smythe is pleased. "Excellent news, old boy. Toodle-pip, Nigella; we're off to get monumentally sozzled."

Meanwhile, at the Governor's fort, Rupert and Geoffrey are in prison for failing to dispose of their chewing gum in a sanitary manner. Rupert is starting to crack under the pressure of incarceration. "I haven't seen Nigella for three days, Geoffrey," he laments. "She must be missing me frightfully."

Geoffrey does his best to look sympathetic.

"A woman has needs, you know," Rupert concludes.

The soldiers guarding the cell overhear this speech. "Needs, eh?" muses Lance Corporal Davies. "What kinds of needs are those, Rupe?"

"Oh, you know the sort of thing, old chap; Nigella's got these blasted hay fever tablets that she always forgets to take when I'm not there to remind her."

"Well, how about we stop by and see if she's all right?" offers Davies. "It's the least we can do, what with the whole throwing-you-in-jail-for-a-minor-transgression thing."

"That'd be awfully kind of you," says Rupert, gratefully. "The last thing I want is to get home and find her all puffy-eyed."

Davies addresses his fellow soldiers. "Right-ho, men; let's be off, shall we?" He turns to the prisoners. "And don't you two try any escaping while we're gone. I know what you're like."

"No chance of that, Davies, old bean," replies Rupert. "Geoffrey and I are thirteen hours into a charades marathon. We're going for the world endurance record."

So Davies and his Privates squeeze into a rowing boat and head for Skull Island.

"He's a decent sort, that Rupert," says the Lance Corporal. "I always like to assist the rehabilitation of prisoners when I can."

"I hear that his girlfriend is a bit of looker, too," Private Wilson chips in.

"That has absolutely nothing to do with it," insists Davies.

As the soldiers approach their destination, Private Wilson scans the horizon with his telescope. Before long, he catches sight of the pirates' crow's nest.

"I can see her!" he cries. "Phwoar!"

"What's she doing?" asks Davies, "Sunbathing in the nuddy?"

"Er, no..." says Wilson, hesitantly, "she seems to be fully-clothed, chasing a monkey up and down a rope ladder."

"Phwoar!" blurt the other two, in unison.

Nigella is still trying to retrieve her card when the soldiers arrive at the shore. "Ahoy there!" shouts Davies.

"Oh, hello, fellows," says Nigella, descending to the ground. "I'm afraid you can't arrest Rupert and Geoffrey today; they're already in chokey."

The Lance Corporal nods. "That's where we've come from. Your man Rupert said that you might have some needs to be attended to."

"Rupe said that? He's such a sweetie! As it happens, I'm trying to catch this recalcitrant chimp; could you give me a hand?"

So the soldiers set to work chasing the monkey. Before long, they've retrieved Nigella's card.

"Thanks awfully!" she sings, and pecks each blushing man on the cheek. "Bernard's been so naughty lately; I don't know what's got into him."

"Perhaps he's got the Rage virus," suggests Private Wilson. "You know, like in Twenty-Eight Days Later."

They all laugh heartily at this idea.

Suddenly, Julian shambles into the group, not looking at all well. He's vomiting blood copiously, and emitting strange strangulated noises though his nose.

"Aaargh!" screams Davies, falling into the sea in terror. "He really has got the Rage virus! Run for it, boys!" The men start to scramble back into their boat.

Nigella is slightly taken aback, but her ability to prioritise remains unaffected.

"I couldn't impose on you chaps to give this letter to Rupert when you get back, could I?" she asks the rapidly departing soldiers. "I'd be ever so grateful."

"Whatever you say!" whimpers Davies. "Just keep that thing away from me!"

With her card safely in the postal system, Nigella feels more relaxed than she has done all day.

As the soldiers row frantically away, Cap'n Smythe saunters casually on to the scene of the drama. "I say, Nigella," he begins, "have you seen Jules knocking about? He left in an awful hurry."

"I'm not absolutely sure, cap'n," she replies. "There's a twitching sack of leaking meat just over there that bears a passing resemblance to him."

"Oh, yes," chuckles Smythe, "that's him all right. Dreadfully funny story, actually; we were drinking our customary woo woos, and Jules was so utterly blotto that he took a swig of your nail varnish remover instead of Peach Schnapps!"

"How frightful!" gasps Nigella.

"Oh, he'll be all right when he's slept it off."

"No, I meant, how frightful: that was my last bottle of nail varnish remover."

Later on, the soldiers return to the Governor's Fort, looking rather shaken.

"What's the matter, fellows?" asks Rupert. "Is Nigella all right?"

"That woman is maniac: she tried to set her zombie monkey on us!" exclaims Davies. "I tell you Rupert, get out while you still can; she's a fruit-loop.

"Oh, she sent you this card, by the way," he adds, pushing the envelope through the bars.

"Zombie monkey?" repeats Rupert, confused. "Dashed if I know what he's talking about, Geoffrey."

Geoffrey indicates that he's no wiser, so Rupert opens his delivery.

"There you are, you see, Geoffrey; a lovely card from Nigella. I told you she'd be missing me. It's a pity you don't have a girlfriend waiting for you to make your time in prison seem slightly more bearable."

Geoffrey smiles sarcastically.

"You know your problem, Geoffrey? You talk too much. It puts women off, all that gas-bagging, you mark my words. Now, let's get back to the charades marathon; it's your turn, old chap."

Geoffrey begins to gesture.

"I say!" exclaims Rupert. "That's not terribly polite, Geoff!"

Oh, boy...

2007-07-06T22:59:00.000Z

The geometric Essex boy seduction technique

2007-07-02T21:23:00.000Z

Girls: they're intimidating, aren't they? The idea of brazenly starting a conversation with one without any kind of solid opening gambit is plainly ridiculous. As far as I can tell, the only situation in which it's acceptable to so much as make eye contact with a member of the opposite sex is when alerting them to their potentially imminent death beneath a rapidly-approaching meteor.

Maybe I'm just over-thinking things. Here's a back-to-basics technique I witnessed last year.

What, you were expecting a punchline? How quaint.
Let's assume, optimistically, that one woman in a thousand will find this kind of behaviour sufficiently charming to stop for a chat, and that each candidate is independent of the ones that have gone before. This data is then Geometrically distributed [Geom(0.001)], meaning that the probability of success within the three trials depicted in this comic strip is a little less than 0.3%. If I was prepared to 'interview' 693 women in this way, my calculations suggest that my chance of success would increase to a respectable fifty per cent. But that would be a pretty lengthy cartoon.

Still, if I were to make a new friend in this way, I could justifiably claim that we 'met randomly'. Here begins my campaign to rescue the word 'random' from depressingly enthusiastic young people who breathlessly use it three times in every sentence, when what they actually mean is 'slightly unexpected'. Who's with me?

Oh.

Board games #1: Hangman

2007-07-01T10:26:00.000Z

Rummaging through my cupboards during a post-graduation clearout, I've unearthed some excellent games from my childhood. Since I'm now apparently incapable of devising a solitary thought without immediately posting it on the internet, I'm going to put together a collection of affectionate tributes to these pre-digital gems. Brace yourselves.

First in the series is the brilliantly pointless Hangman ("A classic American game for two", it says here). Not much to add about this, really: it's hangman. Except! Rather than using a piece of paper and a biro, you play using two huge plastic Guess Who-style secrecy racks, complete with dozens of fiddly letter tiles, and you rotate the dial to add bits to your gallows picture. This is presumably useful for people who aren't allowed to handle sharpened objects/trusted not to swallow crayons.

For players who are struggling to get to grips with the concept, off-puttingly lengthy instructions are provided (sorting your tiles into alphabetical order before starting is a handy time-saving device, apparently). Due to the physical limitations of the apparatus, selections are restricted to a maximum of eight letters. Thoughtfully, there's also a list of suggested words included. "Use these words or any others you can think of," runs the advice. Okay!

I can only assume that everybody at MB Games had been snorting a lot of cocaine before the committee meeting where this was approved for production. It was the eighties, after all.

Board games index

2007-07-01T04:02:00.000Z

Archaeologists discovered the earliest known board game whilst excavating the site of an ancient Athenian palace. It is believed that young siblings were encouraged to roll a primitive die to advance their counters up the board, avoiding various mythical beasts. Success was based purely on the laws of probability, but the feisty Mediterranean children were fiercely competitive. An enraged loser would often explode into a fratricidal frenzy, murdering his or her entire family between tearful sobs of "It's not fair!" It is estimated that without this needless loss of life, Greek civilisation would have expanded to a size easily capable of rebuffing Roman advances.

However, not all boardgames have had such a significant historical impact. Here, The Happy Squid pays tribute to the ones that got away.

- #1 Hangman
- #2 Calcula
- #3 Sorry!
- #4 Donkey Kong
- #5 Black Box
- #6 Barricade
- #7 Escape from Colditz

Lego pirates 2: the cannon

2007-06-28T16:23:00.000Z

[Read the pirates' first adventure here, or select one from the menu on the right]

Rupert and Geoffrey, the pirates, have set up a camp on a tiny island. They've hoisted a flag and everything. "I shall name this place Pirate Isle!" proclaims Rupert. Geoffrey is impressed by his companion's originality.

"I say," ponders Rupert, "how about we christen our new hideout with a celebratory one-gun salute from this cannon? We lugged the bally thing all the way over here, so we might as well give her a test-drive."

Geoffrey offers his tentative support to this suggestion.

After some faffing with cannonballs and gunpowder, the two pals aim the old cannon out to sea.

"Right-ho, Geoffrey!" chirps Rupert. "Let's see what this old girl can do!"

Geoffrey lights the fuse, and moments later the cannon discharges dramatically. The pirates follow the arcing path of the cannonball as it disappears towards the horizon.

After a few moments, they hear a distant crunch.

Rupert peers through his telescope. "Bother!" he exclaims. "We've only gone and hit the Governor's ship. That was a spot of bad luck, eh?"

The Governor does not look at all pleased.

The ship is called The Blue Lady. On board, the Governor calls a meeting with his second-in-command, Lieutenant Sanders.

"We're under attack from an unknown adversary, Sanders," explains the Governor, "but I wouldn't be surprised if Cap'n Smythe and his band of rowdy pirates had a hand in it. I think we'll pay them a little visit."

"Good idea, Governor!" agrees Sanders, nodding enthusiastically. "I hate those swarthy sea-scum. Hate 'em!"

In the meantime, Cap'n Smythe and Bos'n Julian are at home on Skull Island, discussing matters of piratical import. They are oblivious to the trouble that Rupert and Geoffrey have caused.

But not for long.

"My dear fellow," says Julian, "isn't that the Governor's ship heading our way?"

"Indeed it is," confirms Smythe. "Perhaps he's come to return the Soda Stream I lent him for his Christmas party."

It soon becomes clear, however, that the Governor has more pressing concerns than Smythe's carbonated drinks-maker.

"Right!" he shouts, coming ashore. "Somebody's been taking pot-shots at my beloved vessel, and I want some answers. I couldn't help noticing that you have a cannon over there; been firing it off lately?"

"That old thing?" retorts Smythe. "We just keep it for decoration, really. Maintaining our fearsome reputation, that sort of thing."

The Governor is not convinced. "Decoration, indeed!" he thunders. "Your transparent fibbing is a virtual admission of guilt." He turns to his Lieutenant. "Sanders! Let's gather some compensation. What's in this treasure chest?"

"A-ha!" exclaims the Governor, triumphantly. "Just as I suspected: it's treasure."

"Now steady on, old fruit," interjects Smythe, "you can't just go around repossessing people's booty on the strength of circumstantial evidence. You're officers of the law."

"Just watch us, one-eye!" snarls Sanders, relishing the confrontation. "And one-hand and one-leg, of course," he adds, not wishing to appear to discriminate between Smythe's various unfortunate anatomical deficiencies.

At this moment, Nigella appears on the balcony. "What's all this noise about?" she enquires. "I'm trying read Heat magazine, and you're making it jolly difficult for me to summon the necessary concentration."

Smythe explains the situation to Nigella. She is enraged.

"What utter rot!" she fumes. "That cannon is purely decorative; I read in Grazia that Charlize Theron has one in her hallway, and I just thought it was a splendidly chic idea. The wretched thing was deactivated years ago."

Sanders and the Governor look a little sheepish. "Well, if you didn't put a hole in the side of my Blue Lady, who the devil did?"

In a display of impeccable timing, Rupert and Geoffrey arrive back at Skull Island.

"What-ho, all!" says Rupert. "What's going on; are we having drinkies?"

"No, we most certainly are not," huffs the Governor, irritably. "We're trying to discover who's been firing off cannons left, right and centre."

"Ah, yes," stutters Rupert, remembering his earlier mishap; "cannons." He confesses all.

"Awfully sorry, old chap; you can see it was just terribly unfortunate, really."

"Bah!" snorts Sanders. "There's no such thing as accidents. You two are coming with us for six months hard labour." The Governor's crew manhandle the pair of pirates on to the ship.

"Oh, cheerio, chaps," smiles Nigella, absently.

So Rupert and Geoffrey find themselves on the receiving end of the penal system once more.

"This is a blessed nuisance, eh, Geoffrey?" remarks Rupert. Geoffrey stares blankly into the middle distance.

Lieutenant Sanders proposes a toast. "To pirates!" he cheers. "I bloody hate 'em!"

The Governor raises a goblet of cola to lips, fresh from the Soda Stream. "Cheers!" he cries.

Back on Skull Island, Smythe, Julian and Nigella reflect on the day.

"Terrible shame about Rupe and Geoff," muses Julian; "but at least we didn't have to give up our treasure."

"Quite so," agrees Smythe.

"Anybody fancy a quick bit of conga?" asks Nigella.

Silly question.

These precious things

2007-06-28T11:04:00.000Z