This blog has now closed. Please visit my new blog, Stepreo.

Archive: 2007 March

Why I hate The Proclaimers

30 March 2007 17:01

Categories: Edinburgh, Entertainment, Fife, Music, Scotland

Nothing against them personally, you understand. I’m sure they are perfectly nice gentlemen. But their music… oh my goodness.

Despite being ostensibly a pretty average folk-pop band, The Proclaimers are, for some reason, held up as some kind of pseudo-Gods in Scotland. Living legends, if you will. I mean, if you were to do a straw poll of Scots and asked them if they liked The Proclaimers, probably around two thirds would say ‘yes’.

Even those people who weren’t even born the last time The Proclaimers wrote a good song would say that they like them. It is a fact that, despite the fact that they are still making music today, they have had no notable new hit songs in well over a decade and a half.

But they are number 1 today due to the neverending popularity of ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’, now with some additional help from Peter Kay and Matt Lucas, a couple of once-funnymen who lamentably have both been unable to come up with a new joke for about three years.

I don’t even particularly have anything against the music of The Proclaimers. They have some quite good songs. ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’ is among them. Whenever the song is played in a public place it is greeted with mass euphoria. And, yeah, I think it’s all right as well.

But there is one niggling thing that really, really annoys me about The Proclaimers. That thing is also one of the aspects of the duo that makes them so phenomenally popular in Scotland. But it really, really gets up my rear pipe.

The singing.

The singing. Why?

They sing with one of the most contrived accents you will ever hear, twisting every vowel out of shape to an extent that you would never hear in a normal conversation or even in any other song, even a song sung by a Scot. It’s meant to be really patriotic because they are supposedly singing with their real accents, unlike all of those other bands that sing with fakey American accents.

But The Proclaimers do not sing with their real accents. Their hometown is only around thirty minutes from where I live, but I have never in my life heard anybody talk the way The Proclaimers sing — not even The Proclaimers. I have heard The Proclaimers speaking and they actually speak with a normal accent.

If somebody came up to you and spoke with the accent that The Proclaimers use when they are singing, you would think he had special needs or something. That is why you never hear anybody talking like that. Quite why this word warping is celebrated when somebody starts singing is beyond me.

I am afraid that The Proclaimers are right at the arse end of Scottish culture. In a fair world they would be rivals with that silver guy doing the robot. They belong more in some tatty souvenir shop in some piss-stained alleyway off Princes Street than at the top of the charts.

4 comments

Well that’s blown it

27 March 2007 23:57

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Politics

Top story on BBC News online… Very discreet!

Discreet talks

2 comments

Toilet seat etiquette

25 March 2007 19:56

Categories: Current affairs, Economics, General

Toilet seat up or down? This is the perennial question that has troubled humankind ever since the glorious invention of the crapper.

Personally, I am not one of those who cares either way. I don’t see it as my right, as a male, to keep the toilet seat up after doing a number one. However, I certainly do not see it my duty to put the toilet seat down for the benefit of a female who can’t be bothered to put it down herself.

In fact, if I have a preference, it is to not only put the seat down, but also put the lid down. After all, let us not kid ourselves here. The toilet is a hole in our house that leads directly to a sewer. I would quite like to put a lid on that.

Economists to the rescue! Jay Pil Choi has taken a look [PDF file] at this vital issue from an economic perspective, and has concluded that the “selfish rule” — i.e., leaving the toilet seat as you, er, left it — is the most efficient.

So the next time you see the toilet seat up and you wish it was down, just remember — leaving it up was the most efficient outcome. Do you want to incur even more costs by having a wasteful argument about it?

Via Freakonomics.

5 comments

Phone help needed

25 March 2007 00:30

Categories: Blogging, Commuting, Current affairs, General, Internet, Personal, Technology, University

Despite my frightening net addiction and general interest in techy stuff, I am a bit of a Luddite when it comes to mobile phones. I got my first phone only three years ago, which probably made me among the last ½% in the country. I have only owned two phones, including the one I currently use. I have never bought a phone — my first was a gift, and the second is a hand-me-down.

By and large, I’ve been fairly happy with the situation though. I can’t believe the way most people go through phones. Seemingly many people go through them at the rate of about two a year, or sometimes even every other weekend when they forgetfully drop their phone down the drain in a mad binge drinking-fuelled bum-bum performance.

In a way, I’m like one of those insufferable people who go, “OH, I just can’t set my VCR!” People who boast that they can’t set their VCR are stupid posers who really need to find something better to be proud about.

Me? I just go around saying, “Look! My phone doesn’t have a camera on it! It takes me half an hour to send a text! I don’t phone anyone cos I can’t be bothered to top it up!” Yes, I’m one of those terrible people who almost takes pride in how rubbish their phone is. I mean, this is probably three years old, which in mobile phone terms makes it a proper dinosaur. I mean, no camera!

But a certain website has come along and changed my phone habits for the better / worse [delete as applicable]. Yes, that Twitter nonsense means that I now receive about a dozen (probably more — believe it or not, I don’t count!) texts a day. This can be a bit embarrassing. I now receive such a large amount of texts that it suggests that people want to talk to me, when in reality I’m am just getting loads of tweets complaining about hangovers.

Also — I don’t know whether this is down to O2 or Twitter, or just the way that phones work — but often my messages come in clumps of about a dozen or even more. When I’m sitting there in a dull lecture, my pocket is sporadically buzzing away like a short circuiting dildo. All I can say is, thank goodness I don’t have a really annoying ringtone.

Actually having to use my phone has made me realise how clunky and slow it is. For instance, I can’t believe the fact that I run out of memory after about 50 texts. I assume today’s phones can hold a few more messages on them. Also, because of Twitter, I have come to appreciate how handy a mobile phone can come in. And I have occasionally felt out of the loop.

Counter-intuitively, Twitter might be making me less of a geek. (Well, it might be fostering a new era of net addiction for me. But I just like to see it as “engaging with society”. Of course.) Because of my busy modern hectic 24 hour lifestyle, on many days I might not find my way onto a computer all day until well after 9pm. Beforehand, I don’t think I really noticed. It didn’t bother me too much — besides, it’s probably good to stay away from the computer for most of the day.

But now with Twitter, I am being constantly reminded that stuff is happening, and I am missing out on it. What if there was a vaguely important email sent to me this morning? I might not see it until late on in the evening. An interesting blog post? I might miss it entirely. Important news event? My face will be nuked off before I know about it.

As somebody who, over the past few years, has been a bit of a “news junkie” and pale blogger, the realisation that I am actually not informed has unsettled me. And the sporadic stream of texts that I receive via Twitter has made me appreciate that this stupid thing in my pocket could actually come in useful.

Also, I didn’t really get anything interesting for my birthday, apart from money. It feels wrong to have turned 21 and only have the Borat DVD (thanks Gordon!) as a memento. I could get an iPod (and believe me, this is a particularly good opportunity for me to get an iPod), but since I just wrote the other day about why I’m not getting an iPod that would be silly. I mean, my iRiver still works…

So, a phone it (probably) is. But, as you might have guessed from what I have written above, I do not have the first clue about phones. So what’s what? Are there any particular good phones that I should go for? Any dodgy things I should know about?

I don’t want anything too swish — after all, that would make me look like a poserish iPod owner / Porsche driver. But I am looking for something that will allow me to check my email, Google Reader, maybe Facebook mobile and the odd news story. And I suppose I should join that mob of happy slappers and get a camera as well (although I don’t imagine you can actually buy a phone without a camera these days).

Of course, I could do the research myself, but I have actually tried and I really don’t know what’s what. Most of it goes straight over my head. So I would be grateful for any suggestions, should anyone be so kind as to pop into the comments.

Update: (Working my way through all the blog posts that I missed during the week) Blood & Treasure: i am a lonely node

6 comments

Can’t be RSSed

21 March 2007 12:22

Categories: Blogging, Internet, Technology

I have been thinking a little bit about RSS recently (it’s the sort of exciting life I have). For whatever reason, I don’t seem to have as much spare time as I used to. Or at least, I don’t have as much time to read blogs as I once did. That’s what it feels like anyway.

I have had an up and down relationship with RSS. When I first started using it I thought it was a great way to just surf the web more quickly. No more visiting blogs to find that they hadn’t updated. No more visiting news sites to find that there is no news.

The problem is, once you have subscribed to more than a few dozen RSS feeds, it simply doesn’t work like that. I try to keep track of hundreds of blogs, plus a few other websites. So every day when I arrive home, or even when I wake up in the morning, I find myself trying to work my way through hundreds of articles, many of which probably won’t interest me all that much.

What was once a nifty way to keep track of several websites has become somewhat oppressive. The whole exercise of reading blogs has become a perverse game — how quickly can I get that ‘unread’ count down to zero?

Google Reader likes to psychologically beat you with a stick with not just one but several unread counts on prominent display. Worst of all, it stops telling you exactly what your unread count is once it’s gone above 100. This usually happens at least once a day, and if I’m particularly busy some individual feeds (particularly Boing Boing) have even gone over 100 by themselves!

The worst thing about this is that you just don’t know how far over 100 you are. It could be 110, or it could be 2,000. A truly daunting prospect — it’s scary just to start working through them all.

Now at weekends I “catch up” on the RSS feeds I was too busy to read during the week. But because there are so many I end up just scrolling through them all without paying much attention.

The situation has got even worse recently, as I now keep a separate folder of feeds of Scottish political blogs for roundup purposes. Going through every single one of these articles before Saturday evening is a top priority for me every week now. But sometimes I suspect that I probably would have found as many great blog posts if I had just spent some spare time surfing around during the week.

On the one hand, RSS is undoubtedly an indispensable tool. But sometimes I can’t help but wonder if RSS has affected the way I consume blogs for the worse. In the most perverse instances I visit a website and see an interesting article, but I think, “I’ll read that later in Google Reader.” Then, a few days later, I find myself scrolling past that very article without giving it much thought.

I’m thinking of limiting the number of RSS feeds I subscribe to. I have been hitting the unsubscribe button much more often for several months now. But I find myself subscribing to other blogs even more quickly.

Perhaps it would be best for me to go back to reading a lot of blogs the old fashioned way. Even putting aside the issues over tyrannical unread counts, old fashioned blog surfing is good fun. It’s great just to explore what’s out there, to click random links in blogrolls, to actually read the comments (and occasionally leave a comment myself!) and so on.

I’ve already reverted to reading news websites the old fashioned way. Often I would wake up and find about a hundred stories from BBC News and Scotsman.com waiting to be read. I soon found that I had the skimming-and-not-reading problem, and it wasn’t long before I just unsubscribed from all of the news feeds.

It would probably be quite different if I, say, wanted to catch up with news on my mobile phone while I was on the train or something. RSS is perfect for that sort of thing, and it would also mean I wasn’t deluged so much when I finally arrived home. But for me personally, that is no good because I have a pretty bog standard hand-me-down phone that wouldn’t be up to the job.

You won’t find me ditching RSS altogether any time soon. I will continue to read most blogs via RSS, even if it is a bit overwhelming. But for me, RSS works best for websites that don’t update very often. There is no denying that if you subscribe to just a few blogs or just a few news sites, the whole thing becomes a bit overwhelming.

Here is what Robin Hamman thought:

There’s something about hitting the 200 unread posts per blog limit on bloglines that fills me with dread – and leads to bizarre incidents where I have to close my eyes and click on feeds randomly because I just can’t face missing all that content knowingly.

It’s the same with me and my scroll-skimming. When it gets to that sort of stage, I have to ask myself, “Is this really the best way to be going about this?”

I think it is best to remember some advice I read on another blog (unfortunately I have forgotten which one). The basic gist was, don’t be afraid of unsubscribing. After all, you probably won’t miss anything that good. If it really is that good, you will probably eventually hear about it anyway.

In other words, there’s nothing wrong with surfing the web the old fashioned way, sans-RSS. Neil McIntosh considered the issue recently in relation to the fact that not many people have actually taken to RSS, with an interesting discussion in the comments.