Hmm, this might explain a few things...

Designed for Landfill

The Sony Walkman turned 30 years old this year, at almost the same time as I did.


Back in the old days a cassette walkman had big chunky buttons, with “Fwd” on one side, “Rev” on the other side, “Stop” in the middle and a bigger “Play” button somewhere equally obvious. They didn’t have a “hold” switch because those massive buttons were never going to be pressed down by accident unless you dropped it on all four of them at once. Doing that would jam them for a minute until you thumped each button one at a time which would generally un-jam them again, sometimes leaving them a little looser but almost always still working.

One happy day “Auto-reverse” came along and removed the need to take the cassette out to play the other side, and at about the same time they got a bit smaller and only needed one AA battery instead of two. As rechargeable batteries slowly came down in price I’m sure I was quite contentedly musically mobile for a while there.

Unfortunately this got me hooked early, and for about twenty years now I’ve combined the activities of walking and listening to music, taking my mind off the massive heavy rucksack I’m often carrying usually via something trashy with the bass boost on. CDs are too flimsy a format to ever really be portable, but they got me used to skipping tracks and I eventually switched to the instantly-obsolete minidisk format. I’m now thinking about getting an MP3 player, but I can’t find anything that isn’t almost completely unusable because of basic design flaws.

This is all I ask…

1) I’d like one that takes a standard sized interchangeable battery, preferably a single AAA, with as long a life as possible. Nothing affects my enjoyment of a music player quite so much as it being silent because the battery has run out, and being able to carry a spare charged battery is the only practical way of making the thing truly portable.

2) I want something reasonably easy to navigate by feel so I can keep it in my pocket out of sight. Not just because I don’t want to get mugged for it, but because I need to pay attention to small matters like crossing roads, looking where I’m going, and generally not ending up like those earphones in a pool of blood from the road safety ads.

3) It’d be handy if it could be reasonably rain proof, or at least come with a rainproof cover it can stay in while I use it. I need this because I live in the UK where it rains quite a lot, and I plan to go out in that rain quite a lot with a portable music player. That’s the whole idea of it being portable. If I wanted to stay at home where it’s dry then I’d use my computer instead. I had a waterproof Sony Sport Walkman in about 1988 so I don’t feel I’m asking for the moon here, but water resistant electronics don’t even seem to exist any more. What happened there? It hasn’t stopped raining.

4) I’ll have it in any colour that won’t show dirt too much. I’ll try not to actually drop the thing in any puddles, but I’m not going to wash my hands before each time I touch the stupid thing. Black works, any other darkish colour would do, white would be bottom of my list.

I’m struggling to find anything that meets even the first two criteria, and I’ve now started just looking for something with as many visible buttons on it as possible.

How does one operate an MP3 player which only has one button anyway? Presumably the sodding thing changes function all the time and you have to keep taking it out of your pocket to find out what the damn button actually plans to do next time you press it. Or each side of the same button does something different so that you have to get it the right way up in your pocket, guess which corner of the circular button you’re stabbing at and then wait a few tantalising seconds to find out whether you’ve skipped to the next track, turned the volume up, turned the volume down or skipped back to the start of the track you were in the middle of. You can be tantalised for even longer if the middle of the same big circular button also happens to be “Pause”.

Touch screens? Horrible! Fine, I guess, if you’re sitting somewhere warm and dry (because I guess you can’t wear gloves), devoting all your attention to dragging the pretty little animated icons around. Not so much fun if you want to go anywhere where you might have to look away from it for a minute or where anything might bump it unintentionally. So you can’t actually put it in your pocket and walk, drive, do the washing up, exercise, weed an allotment or eat anything to music.

And why the hell are these things all white now? WHITE?? They’re supposed to be portable, and yet if you’d like them to stay shiny at least until the novelty of having something new has worn off you can’t put them in a pocket, can’t touch them if you’ve been reading a newspaper, can’t put them down on any surface that might have any dust on it or in a room that might ever have had any children in it. And it must take the potential resale value down to a small fraction at a stroke, because after just a few weeks use it’s going to be a highly unfashionable shade of yellowy grey.

And is it really too much to ask for corners that won’t rub off? Coloured plastic has been around for quite some time now and is available in a vast range of colours, several hundred of which would make very nice colours for the casing of a small electrical device. It’s really not necessary to coat it with a metallic finish of any description, and it’s going to look much better in a few months time if it doesn’t have a coating that wears off all the corners.

But the battery situation is just unforgiveable. Having agreed - more or less - on things like standard time, which side of the road to drive on, and roughly how many volts are going to come out of a socket in a wall, humankind went on to produce battery cells for mass consumption in some common standard sizes. Both AA and AAA rechargeable batteries are easy to source, durable, easy to charge and easy to replace – they’re the quite blindingly obvious choice of fuel for a small portable electrical device. So why would anyone decide to put a completely non-standard sized rechargeable battery in a portable device and then seal it inside so it can’t be charged outside the unit?

Because, obviously, anyone who wants portable music enough to buy one of these things is going to want to sit next to their computer all the time to recharge it. They take 3 or 4 hours to charge, so when the music suddenly stops half way to the 24 hour garage one evening, all you have to do is turn around, walk back home and sit next to a USB port for three hours and then you’re up and running again.

OK it means they can be ultra slim, but I can fit seven AAA batteries in the tiny fifth pocket of my jeans - it’d be well worth an extra 3mm width to be able to carry a spare battery around with me. For when the battery runs out. Which it is generally going to do while I am in the middle of walking and listening to something, rather than when I am conveniently sitting at home next to my computer.

Especially since some MP3 players have a battery life of an unbelievably low six hours - perhaps that’s so that you can’t actually get too far away from your PC before the battery runs out? I despair.

Google Number Ones

That pesky Merrick has tagged me for a meme:

"Give me five great things that your blog or websites rank number one in Google searches, then tag five other blogs. Bonus points if you manage to have any sexual content in the phrase."

So here goes - this blog is number one in Google searches for:

bastards and medium sized shards of glass
skinny nearly-naked women in the weird ice palace thing
singing "Jingle Fucking Bells".
Everything was methodically sniffed, the back doorstep was peed on
be rather odd at an otherwise very pointedly Jesus-free event.

Bonus points, I think, not only for sexual content but for the mental images conjured up if you imagine these as one continuous narrative.

Gonna pass it on to Ralph, Dr. Rob, Dr. Shroom, and... of all people writing anything on the internet I'd LOVE to see Charlie Brooker do this. He usually has at least five great, original, hilarious phrases with sexual content in everything he writes, and then he gets it all published in the Guardian. Still haven't tried his Spotify challenge though, so he'll probably ignore me.

That only makes four other people I'm tagging, so if anyone else would like to volunteer then feel free to add yourself.

The Road by Cormack McCarthy

Ohmygodohmygod - "The Road" is about to come out in cinemas, so if you haven't read the novel yet then you need to read it right now!

Seeing something on film puts someone else's images irrevocably in your head and makes it nearly impossible for you to create your own, so to get the most out of a novel you really have to read it before you see a film version. With "The Road," especially, the post-apocalypse setting draws on the reader's own fears and imagination so much that it's well worth reading before watching.

Basically a father and his young son try to survive in a world that, physically and socially, has been almost completely destroyed by some unspecified disaster. It's dark and horrible, with some nasty surprises, and a wonderfully intricate relationship between father and son. I hadn't realised until I saw a plug for the film that McCarthy had written it after becoming a father again in his sixties, which just adds layers to the play of love, fear and responsibility between them and makes the plot itself all the more poignant, even if you don't happen to already spend any time imagining what a post-climate change world might look like for anyone who survives that.

I warn you, there are spoilers for the book even in the blurb for the film, so beg, borrow or steal this book before you see it - do it now!

Sorry I can't find anything to link to that doesn't have at least some spoilers in it, and it's so well worth scaring yourself with in your own good time that I'm just going to link to Amazon so you can buy it.

It's Nearly White Poppy Time...

I haven’t written here for a while, so instead of covering things I’m a bit late with I thought I’d skip ahead and remind you of something there’s still time to do something about.

It’s four weeks today until 11th November, when you’ll be surrounded by images of people wearing red poppies, marching, saluting and firing cannons, and when you might want to be wearing a white one instead.

So, here is where to get them, and here's a quote about why you might want to buy them from the Peace Pledge Union:

"The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers. Our work, primarily educational, draws attention to many of our social values and habits which make continuing violence a likely outcome.

From economic reliance on arms sales (Britain is the world's second largest arms exporter) to maintaining manifestly useless nuclear weapons Britain contributes significantly to international instability. The outcome of the recent military adventures highlights their ineffectiveness in today's complex world.

Now 90 years after the end of the ‘war to end all wars’ we still have a long way to go to put an end to a social institution, which in the last decade alone killed over 10 million children."

Previous posts about armistice here, here and here.

My Furry Flat

Things which don't work so well with cat hair on/in them:

Velcro
Selotape
The filter in the washing machine
Hand-rolled cigarettes
The wheelie button on my computer mouse
Margerine

Things which work better with cat hair on them:

The cat

So, should I shave the cat?? Just look at her about to sit on the sellotape here:

Big Green 2009 Cancelled - "A Premeditated Political Decision"?

The Big Green Gathering, which I wrote about a while ago here and which should have been on again this weekend, has been cancelled at the very last minute in what seem to be highly suspicious circumstances.

Police took out an injunction to stop the event going ahead, just days before the festival was due to open and while large numbers of people were already onsite building the massive infrastructure that a festival needs.

They'll have laid water pipes, put up marquees, made compost toilets, put up fences, built stages and bars, and generally spent a huge amount of time, effort and money already, and now won't see any revenue coming back in at all. There's no question that the festival will have done absolutely everything they could have done to satisfy the license conditions so it could all go ahead - the Big Green may well not survive the losses they will now suffer after cancellation.

On Sunday issues about security arrangements and traffic management apparently couldn't be resolved to the satisfaction of the council and the emergency services, and organisers had no choice but to surrender their licence for the event. Police have said "The event was not cancelled by the police or Mendip district council. The organisers voluntarily surrendered their licence yesterday; therefore it was their decision to cancel, not ours."

But it's obvious that such late cancellation was the last thing that festival organisers would have wanted to do, and the festival chairman Brig Oubridge has said that on the part of the police "It was a premeditated political decision made at least a week ago. There were going to be people from the Climate Camp here as well as Plane Stupid. It could be seen by police as a gathering ground of radicals."

The whole thing has started to smell an awful lot like what happened with the Smash EDO film. A campaign against an arms manufacturer in Brighton put out a film called "On The Verge" about their protests and the police harassment they'd suffered. Venues across the country which tried to show the film then suddenly had problems with their licenses from local councils, apparently after prompting from the police. Brig Oubridge's statement suggests that something very similar lies behind the cancellation of the Big Green.

It's highly sinister if local bureaucracy is being used by police, across forces, to disrupt activity that they dislike not for public order reasons but because it involves political opinions they disagree with. There's more at stake here than just this festival - John Vidal says in the Guardian that "Some observers believe the closure of the festival is part of a larger plan to crack down on all environmental protest." It's not just festival goers and stall holders who should be worried about how they spend their summers - political policing is everyone's problem.



As soon as the no doubt extremely stressed and worried festival organisers are able to tell their side of this story, a further statement will probably appear on the Big Green Gathering website. Until then, the one thing they’ll certainly need is as much solidarity in the form of cash as they can possibly get.

They’re asking for anyone who can afford it to consider donating the price of their ticket back to the festival rather than asking for a refund. I've just bought myself a BGG T-shirt from their online shop, which may become a kind of political statement depending on what emerge as the real reasons behind this year's cancellation, and which will bring them some much needed money in. You can also donate from their website if you have a credit or debit card, or cheques can be sent to:

Big Green Gathering Co Ltd
PO Box 3423
Glastonbury
BA6 9ZN

With much more of this story still to emerge, the London Climate Camp only a few weeks away and Ian Tomlinson still fresh in everyone's minds, it sure looks like it's going to be an interesting summer...

EDIT: Much more detail is now up in an article on SchNEWS here. It's absolutely astonishing.

ANOTHER EDIT: Bristol Indymedia is probably a good place to keep an eye on this story too.

Free Acid!

There are hundreds of different products for getting limescale off toilets, sinks and kettles, and they all basically involve acid, which dissolves limescale if you leave it to soak for long enough.

There are also a lot of people, like me, growing hundreds of times more rhubarb than they can really handle because the plants get very very big and there's a limit to the amount of rhubarb crumble one can eat in a year.

Rhubarb is incredibly acidic.

Can anyone think of any reason I shouldn't boil up a load of rhubarb and use it as an organic, eco-friendly and incredibly cheap kettle, sink and toilet cleaner?

The Fabulous Wrecked Tent Project

On the last night of Glastonbury I fell asleep in Merrick's tent, with a trickle of rainwater falling on me right in the middle and a small pond growing at my feet. I was warm and tired enough to fall asleep/pass out quite quickly, but instead of counting sheep I drifted off dreaming about groundsheet patches and reinforced seams.

It's a lovely tent - a modern dome design which is easy to put up, flexes in the wind and is strong and sturdy, but made almost entirely of cotton rather than nylon so it breathes and shades like cotton bed sheets. It was bought for Glastonbury 1995 and has been well used since then, but it needs some serious repair work to keep it in service much longer.

As I recently ranted, I hate the way so many people throw things away and buy new replacements rather than repairing and maintaining what they already have, and this tent is such a nice object in itself that I just couldn't resist making a project of it. I thought I'd post my progress here in case it helps anyone else not have to buy a new tent, and in case anyone has any tips as I go along.

I took the tent home with me, but instead of drying it out the whole thing was so grubby that I threw it straight in the bath to wash it first. I started off by handwashing the fly sheet, which is about the thickness of good quality bedsheets and tough enough to scrub with a scrubbing brush. The water coming out of it was only a very pale shade of brown after about the sixth rinse, so I wrapped it in a sheet to keep the fittings safe and put it in the washing machine to spin it halfway dry before I hung it up.

The previously clean white sheet came out so dirty that I changed my mind and put it back in for a proper 40 degree wash with soap.

With the fly sheet drying outside on the line I started cautiously prodding the inner to see if I could get away with not washing that. The inner is awkward because it's stitched onto the groundsheet, but 14 years of mud, sweat, mildew, squashed insects and ...whatever that is... really did need to come out of it before I could do anything else.

Although it will look great (and breathe better) after a wash, cleaning it isn't just for aesthetic reasons. Tiny particles of grit stuck between fibres will eventually wear and break them - some of the smaller holes in the inner look as though they might have been caused this way - and patches of dirt will affect the tension and flexibility of the fabric, making it impossible to sew it straight or with a consistent tension. Wonky or badly tensioned sewing pulls in some places more than others which causes further rips, and the inner fabric is so fine that a little will make a lot of difference.

So into the bathtub it all went, the groundsheet bundled up out of the way making it look like I had a dead body in there, and out came blackish water and 14 years worth of Glastonbury mud. The fabric was too thin to withstand the scrubbing brush so there ensued much energetic squishing, and the rips meant I didn't dare lift any of it out of the water as the weight of it wet was likely to tear it even more.


After 11 or 12 changes of water I concluded that the really black bits were a permanent feature, they'd probably look better when it dried and they add character anyway, so I left it to drip in the bath for a while and then spread the groundsheet out in my bedroom, with a chair inside it to lift the inner up to dry as best I could.

I just love how doing things like this doesn't seem to strike cats as particularly unusual - Mizzy walked right past this enormous thing she'd never seen before which was taking up almost the entire room, and paused only for about half a second to determine that it was wet and therefore not interesting.

By morning it was dry enough to get it outside, and when I put the poles in to spread it out properly it dried out in ten minutes flat in the baking hot sun. The next job will involve either waterproofing it or taking revenge on it for soaking me at Glastonbury. I'll keep you posted.

Mizzy Has Adventures

A neighbour was looking after Mizzy for me while I was away at Glastonbury, and he said that the first time he came round, when he opened the door and she realised it wasn't me, she "did the cat equivalent of bursting into tears." I'm sure she settled down after that, but since I've been back she's been super-cuddly, wanting to sit on me and lick me all the time which is very sweet and makes me feel we're nicely bonded now.

The weather is really hot and I've got a few days of wellie washing and drying out the tent to do at home, so today I put a collar on her with a bell and a tag for my phone number, and let her out of the flat.



Everything was methodically sniffed, the back doorstep was peed on, she tried out some paving stones for rolling around on and she let me catch her again at the bottom of the garden when I started getting nervous.

Having a little sleep now after all that excitement.