Talk To Rex

The press have been making it tediously apparent that the world and his Stephen Fry have become obsessed with Twitter, and as I like to keep abreast of what’s down with the kids (or indeed the artist formerly known as Lord Melchett) I have given it a go.

And I have to say, so far I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It’s like the “status update” part of facebook has been removed to its own website, so you get a running stream of sentences telling you what people are up to.

The problem is, it’s that mundane. If people used their allotted 140 characters to make witty comments or insightful observations then it might be an interesting website to pop onto, but what it actually boils down to is a lot of people saying what they had for dinner, a handful of technogeeks posting their latest observations about the failings of the internet, and Stephen Fry admiring his fans admiring him.

I’ve tried to make my own updates – sorry, tweets (sigh) – like tiny Dickensian bon mots, but I fear I’m ploughing a lonely furrow. Even Stephen Fry hasn’t mastered the art of fitting his usual wit and sagacity into 140 letters.

That such a master of verbosity has championed this website above any other is really quite surprising; you’d have thought blogging would be more up his street. But clearly he likes the ability to make a sneaky update on what he had for dinner in between takes of whatever TV programme he’s guesting on, and I can see why that would be appealing. I’ve taken to doing it myself.

It’s just not very interesting for the people reading it.

Neither is it a useful photo-sharing or staying-in-touch tool like Facebook or any of the other ones I haven’t taken to using. It’s just plain stalking. But not the interesting stalking that makes you feel aroused if you’re into that kind of thing: this is the most moribund stalking you can possibly imagine.

So, sorry to those of you I’ve been “following” (see, even the terminology is sinister) – I don’t care that you won’t be in London for all those dates, Mr Fry; I don’t care that you’re warming to the snow, Mr Carr; Mr Aylett I don’t even understand what all those internet terms mean; and all of the rest of you, your dinner is of no interest to me unless I am invited to join you for it.

If blogging is old fashioned then I’ve got two words for you: dumbing down.

Just finished school, heading home for pork chops.

One of the things I get annoyed by is improvisation groups thinking they’re the first. The first whatever; first group doing student improv in their town, first group doing an improvised musical, first group improvising a play entirely in gibberish. It’s never the first.

In particular, one thing that happens is that a group of actors and comedians start doing some improv games (in a Whose Line Is It Anyway? style), then go to Chicago, or LA, and come back full of ideas about doing long-form improvisation, saying things like “this kind of improvisation is fairly new to this country”. (Yes, there’s a specific group that’s sparked this rant, but since I haven’t seen them perform I can’t pass judgement so I won’t bother linking to them.)

Usually, by “fairly new”, they mean in the last five years, which isn’t true. (The latest wave of improvisation started 5-10 years ago in this country, and there were various people doing full-length improvised shows, one way or another, around in the first half of that, and indeed before it, bucking the trend.)

Sometimes, by “fairly new”, they mean in the last twenty years, which isn’t true. Keith Johnstone was playing with this stuff in the 60s, for instance. (Although he’s often better known for things like Micetro these days, which is a shame.)

Rarely, by “fairly new”, they mean “after Palestrina”, which is possibly true but still seems unlikely (think: bards). Certainly people were improvising narratives back in the Middle Ages quite happily in the UK. If you look farther afield, semi-structured narrative improvisation (where aspects of the story are familiar to the audiences, either using tropes and archetypes, or by using base stories) have been around since before the Romans. Long, long before the Romans.

So stop trying to claim you’re new; just be interesting, and exult in that.

(While we’re here, can lazy reviewers stop comparing every impro group with Paul Merton? KTHXBAI.)

“Hee hee hee! This young man thinks he’s getting an excellent deal in return for relinquishing his desire to put his feet on the seat – little does he know that I never have a bag because I don’t have any arms!“

You may have noticed that Talk To Rex is not carrying the DEC spot asking for donations to help the people of Gaza affected by the recent Israeli military action. We believe to do so would undermine our impartiality, not only with Britons thousands of miles away from the Middle East, but with our international audience. We cannot throw away the reputation we have carefully built up across the years as the world’s premier source of unbiased sarcasm and sniping at Russell T Davies. While the plight of those in Gaza is not to be underestimated, we feel that not carrying the advert is important in underlining our commitment to mindlessly preserving our ante-bellum reputation in the changing world of the 21st century. Bring us an appeal for everyone affected by the ongoing events, be they Arab, Israeli or Western observer and we can talk.

We will sleep soundly tonight, secure in the knowledge that more people are aware of the campaign due to our action than would have bothered to watch another film about deserving others voiced by bloody Jeremy Vine.

Following my previous post:

Dear Mr Aylett

Thank you for your email to Nick Raynsford MP, I am responding on his
behalf.

Nick has always supported much more transparency and less scope for
abuse, and indeed has claimed lower expenses than most other MPs for
many years. Nick does not claim any expenses other than the employment
of staff and communicating directly with constituents.

Most of the media coverage on this issue has focused on the ability of
MPs to claim expenses on the cost of maintaining and furnishing a second
home. This element in the allowances does not apply in Nick’s case, as
an Inner London MP, he does not need a second home and does not qualify
for the allowance.

Nick has not signed EDM’s, regardless of the merits of the case, for
some time as he feels they have been devalued by trivial and excessive
use.

Yours sincerely

[redacted]
Senior Caseworker & Research Assistant

Note that the claim about transparency doesn’t really sit with his voting record on transparency, although I’m prepared to concede a point here as he has generally abstained and so hasn’t really shown his colours, and in any case publicwhip.org.uk has a tricky job actually gluing this stuff together helpfully.

Note, more worryingly, that this is a form response that fails to give any indication what he’s going to do. (Although to be fair, with talk earlier today about a three line whip, he might have simply been hoping the issue would go away rather than have to face expulsion from his party over doing the right thing.) At least, though, it is a form response that talks about him specifically, talking about why I as his constituent should be happy with his attitude towards expenses. And I am, but that’s not what I was worried about in the first place, because I already knew that he is a low claimant; nor am I interested specifically in the second home issue. My letter actually talked about the need for transparency to foster trust in government (not dissimilar to what President Obama said yesterday) — this part has not been addressed in the response.

Nick last signed an EDM on 17th December 2008 (calling for a vote on the third Heathrow runway over environmental impact), suggesting that either he or his office has a very short memory, or a different definition of ‘some time’ than I have. (He hasn’t signed any other EDMs this Parliamentary session, so he’s probably against them in general, but the above claim is a lie.)

It now looks like this won’t go to a vote, and certainly won’t in its current form. This is what we wanted, really; however I’m still left with the bad feeling that Nick Raynsford is another bloody weasel.

Parliament (or something that works on their behalf) has been busy getting ready to comply with the High Court ruling from 16th May 2008 that it must publish MP’s expenses under the Freedom of Information Act. Seven months of compiling the data, and nearly a million pounds, later and they’ve decided a better route would be to change the Freedom of Information Act to exclude the data. The vote’s on Thursday (you may have missed it around all the Heathrow runway kerfuffle).

This, frankly, is taking the piss.

There’s more information from mySociety, the charity that runs TheyWorkForYou and others. Start with their overview, which includes helpful links to things you can do, including writing to your MP to ask them politely to vote against this rat bastard approach to transparency.

(I wrote to mine, but Nick Raynsford MP is against transparency in government to start off with, so I’m not hopeful he’ll pay attention. Mind you, I’m not hopeful he’ll bother to vote at all, since he generally abstains on transparency issues.)

In school today I came across a GCSE music question which I couldn’t answer. It asked for definitions of homophony, polyphony, monophony and heterophony; the first two are simple enough, the (largely choral) styles of writing based either on chords or on contrapuntal lines. By extension, monophony is the art of writing single notes, so a simpler term to use is “tune”.

But heterophony? I’d never heard the word. On the surface it sounds like it ought to be the opposite of homophony, but that role is already filled by polyphony.

It turns out, as a student had to explain to me, that heterophony is “like, when you have one note and then another note on top of it which is, like, the same note, but there are more of them and they move at a different speed”.

But it does seem odd to me that from starting to learn the recorder at the age of five through to completing the Cambridge music tripos some 17 years of musical education later that I never once came across this undoubtedly useful term. In school today I voiced the theory that it has just been made up in the interim to make GCSE music more interesting.

And then it occurred to me that heterophony sounds like the kind of practise that might, until recently, have been found abhorent by normal homophonic musicians. Maybe it was even illegal until Blair’s government passed an act giving heterophonics the same rights as other people. Could it be that until the mid-90s, heterophony was only really found in the dark shady underground of the music world – in heterophonic bars and clubs, in heterophonic saunas, on Hampstead Heath or in Amsterdam?

It put me in mind of certain other musical deviations which, to date, are still not talked about in GCSE papers, or even mentioned in polite society:

Necrophony – using chords written by dead composers

Bestiophony – using animal noises in music (cf Banchieri’s ‘Contrapunto bestiale alla mente’)

Sodophony – leaving a concert before it’s finished

Masochophony – listening to Philip Glass for pleasure

Transvestophony – singing countertenor

Cacophony – music involving faeces

…I expect there are more where that came from…

James likes to write down the first 10 search results.

James likes to relax by swimming, walking the coastal footpath with Jane or catching up with the TV programmes he’s recorded.

James likes to talk.

James likes to throw curveballs.

James likes to keep it hot.

James likes to carry other divas.

James likes to focus on institutions.

James likes to clean the counters.

James likes to be beside the seaside.

James likes to DJ at Corporate events and cook gourmet meals.

…the funny thing is, five and a half of these of these apply to me, four and a third of them apply to the other James, and only one of them applies to P. D. James – but none of us relax by walking the coastal footpath with Jane.

I’ve been visiting opticians regularly since 1987 and until today I thought I knew all their little tricks. The machinery has gradually got more hi-tec looking and they have over the years added in tests to measure the curvature of your eyes and the like, but basically it’s still about reading letters in the distance.

So there I was at the optician’s this afternoon, going through the usual exercises and thinking I knew exactly what was coming next, when the optician said “just put your chin on the rest a moment, I’m going to turn your eyelids inside out.”

And before I could say “you’re going to WHAT?????” or even think of protesting “you’re doing no such thing, they didn’t need to turn my eyelids inside out in 1987 and you’re not about to start” she had her fingers inside my eyelids and was inserting the eyelid equivalent of a shoehorn to flip them inside out.

So I sat there with inside out eyelids. I haven’t even checked to see if she put them back afterwards. I certainly didn’t have the nerve to ask her why she felt the need to turn my eyelids inside out, and I’m worried that it’s a joke that opticians play on people just because they can.

In the meantime, I think I’m traumatised for life.