I'm a DJ and I've Got Believers

cue, danmachold, 2005

A few weeks back I was in the barber's and I was watching BBC News in the mirror - I think this was the same day Gordon Brown stood down as PM. One of the employees then changed channel to the Radio 1 feed. I stopped listening to R1 at the end of 2003. As the Radio 1 Festival was around the corner, the presenter decided to play an "oldie" from years gone by. It was Avril Lavigne's 'Sk8er Boi'.

Alone Again with the Dawn Coming Up

2AM Eternal, Prij, 2008

In the heat there is a light in the North that defies sunset. Airlanes are pink against the blue airglow. That light is the relief from the winter dark that hangs so low overhead for so long. Sure enough it will return again.

Summer gives way to winter, gives way to summer. Our existence disappears in the cycle. Waves breaking on the shore die for more still behind them. The gears of the orrery crush stone. Imagine what it will do to you.

But for now in the blithe dawn chorus, all possibilities remain ahead. If your soul could explode in ecstasy, it would form the ethereal light on my horizon. She is still rising, stealing the stars from the sky.

Fleeting rhodon touch.

(Deeper Underground) I Get Nervous in the New York City Streets

9/11, marc_buehler/NBC, 2001

Yeah, again. After publishing my analysis of Cloverfield last month, I continued thinking about the film's relation to September 11th. What I have written below is really pushing the limits of the narrative as I highly doubt the producers, being American, are communicating the message that I think could be extracted from it.

»Spoilers Throughout«

In my previous analysis I argued Clover (the titular monster) was a personification of 9/11 and as such, the instigator of the character drama. The origins, motivations, and purpose of Clover are ultimately unknown. The only clue is the brief shot of an object strike the ocean in the final scene before the credits (the promotional material offers a scant back-story). Despite Rob's camcorder perfectly capturing that brief glimpse, Rob and Liz are entirely unaware of it. When Clover starts wrecking New York, no-one understands what is going-on nor why it is happening.

Billions and Billions and Billions and Billions and Billions of Pounds, Billions of Pounds (Corruption, Corruption)

jump-you-fuckers, matthewnstoller, 2008

It's World Cup time, not that I've seen much so far. It seems whenever I go to BBC iPlayer to watch a game it's audio only because fucking ITV have the broadcast rights to that particular fixture. So I had the misfortune of enduring commercial television for the first time in quite a while. I already knew the rampant commercialism of sport is sickeningly omnipresent, but it's still aggravating to see product after over-priced Chinese slave-laboured product so-tenuously linked to the World Cup being hawked as if there's no tomorrow.

Lineman for the County

Endorsing the Returns, Prij, 20/03/10

This week marks my third year working for Royal Mail and, coincidentally, another operational change has taken place. Even in this short time there have been noticeable changes, all of which are driven by the mantra 'mail-volumes-are-down-and-people-are-emailing-and-texting'. Roy Mayall has tackled these claims several times, so I needn't repeat his rebuttals.

When I started, weekday working hours were 0800 to 1300 with deliveries starting at 0930. In October 2007, despite union resistance, this shifted an hour back. The next initiative was 'summer lapsing' in June 2008. This involves dividing a duty amongst surrounding walks during the easy summer period. With the exception of Christmas, 'summer lapsing' now occurs Monday to Thursday using the 'starburst' delivery method. That knocked me off the walk I was on at the time (Hallmark Fount) exactly a year after starting. I didn't appreciate that present.

Window Washer's Dream

NYEastRiver_From_WTC, Fanghong, 1992

At the end of the 90s I was getting a bit old for Lego. There's an old camcorder tape somewhere from the early 90s of me giving a tour of my attic-based sprawling Lego city. When I moved out of my old house in July 2000 the Lego was packed away and it's still in boxes in the basement because this house is substantially smaller. A few months prior to moving, a friend had given me an old copy of SimCity 2000. Along with Pokémon Red/Blue, it was the cause of my first exile from television - even from then-still-good The Simpsons. By my first exams in May 2002 I had a copy of SimCity 3000. I would get up early and play it all day, which in hindsight could have been used for studying but I coasted that year's exams anyway.