The Right Tool for the Job

There is a school of thought that the medium makes, or helps make, the message.  For instance, a movie starring Tom Hanks released in ‘theatres’ (more likely multiplexes, places to buy cola and starch snack ‘meals’ with a projector booth or ten bolted on to the side, often located in a sort of leisure industrial estate) is better than a straight-to-video movie ‘starring’ ‘Tom Guttenberg’, which in turn is better than anything on Youtube, which in turn is oddly enough not better than your old home movies.

Which means good means film stock?  Maybe.  Just as the medium makes the message so there is a school of thought that the instrument making the message is important.  What else explains the continued existence of Mont Blanc pens in the age of the Bic?

Moreover, ‘stationary fetishism’ is a thing, and not the perverse desire to shag a statue you might think it is.  Rather, it’s the, in my opinion very reasonable, desire to use rather nice notebooks and so on for writing, well, notes on.

No doubt having a good notebook is important.  Anyone using one ‘in the field’ meaning surveyors, farmers, scarecrow spotters, appreciate a notebook with a good stiff cover that supports excited scribblings.

It’s when the notebook becomes a ‘journal’ that definitions become important.  A good stiff journal is invaluable if you are travelling somewhere that lacks wifi or Christianity.  You will need good quality paper that absorbs ink but repels damp, of sufficient weight to swat any winged pest but light enough to be portable and thick enough to stop a dart from a blowpipe.

Back in the day, foreign correspondents used to pound out copy on a vintage (or as they called it back in the day ‘a’) typewriter, and a manual one at that.  At least they did in the movies.  Hacks of all descriptions would hammer at the keys and the mechanical levers would pound the paper.  This, one thinks, is the sort of tool that you need to write about the rise of Hitler, the Blitz, the D-Day landings, the Moon landing, JFK’s rise and fall.  Not all such typewriters would come with optional ashtrays and beverage holders, but if they did it wouldn’t be a bad idea.  A serious instrument for a serious composer of prose, like a Wurlitzer of words.

The manual typewriter survived so long as field kit because, unlike its electronic cousin, it didn’t need to be plugged in.  And so things remained until the advent of the laptop.

Early laptops shared important characteristics with manual typewriters.  They weighed an immense amount and they could stop not just a dart from a blowpipe but just about everything short of a depleted uranium shell.

Laptops endured even beyond the advent of tablets, with their fairy-weight and their Methuselah-like battery life because as soon as you bring up the keyboard on the tablet screen, you have more keyboard than screen and the space left is fit only for the composition of postcards of Haiku.  Or modern news reporting.

However, you can now purchase clip-on keyboards for your tablet.  In fairness, you have been able to purchase lightweight and long lasting laptops for some time now, but they are so svelte that they barely pass the ‘stiff enough to lean on to write a note’ test, never mind the all-important blowpipe dart test which is not only important but also the reason I am not allowed in any branch of PC World in the possession of a length of bamboo.  Such keyboards are marketed as ‘robust’, meaning designed for angry bloggers who hammer at the keys like an enraged gibbon.  Is means that when attached to your tablet they make the ensemble a comforting weight, but still about 1/10th of that of a vintage laptop.

Ultimately, it’s probably not the instrument that’s important, but the message.  the instrument and the medium should not prevent the message being recorded, and that’s about it.

That said, ink on paper has more prestige than pixels on screens so, unless the museums of the future exhibit the flash drives of the famous, notebooks will always have a place.

Moron TV The Apprentice

Last Wednesday I watched the first two minutes of the first programme in the latest series of ‘The Apprentice’.  This was a mistake.  In more ways than one.  A mistake because I had no desire to watch the first two minutes of ‘The Apprentice’, and a mistake because having recklessly watched the first two minutes of ‘The Apprentice’, I really wish I had not.

Full disclosure, it was my own fault.  I wasn’t quick enough getting out of the room.  Normally, when the titles roll it’s the que for all right thinking men to go to the kitchen and load the dishwasher to the soothing strains of Radio 5 Live.

And that theme music, ‘The Apprentice Dirge’ needs to go.  Surely the music that used to play over the end credits of ‘The Benny Hill Show’ would make an excellent intro. 

Initially when I watched last Wednesday, I was confused.  Surely this was not a new series but some kind of recap?

All the candidates from the previous series were there.  The Lurker, The Gobby Barrow Boy, The Gobby Bird, The Ice Queen, The Geek, The Village Idiot, The Dandy (cravat), The Closeted Homosexualist, The Older Woman, Hair Gel Guy and, God help us, Ladies’ Man.

The first episode is, traditionally, where the BBC show snippets of the showreel the candidate submitted.  This is not a bloke recreating the magic of pre-internet late night Open University telly by standing in front of a chart and pointing out his sales figures.  This is where you have to stand out, and the place that, apparently, gave birth to the phrase ‘I am the Beyoncé of business’.  Interesting in itself because, given her global brand, I thought Beyoncé was the Beyoncé of business.  In fact I just Googled ‘Beyoncé’ to check the spelling, well, almost, I actually Googled ‘Beyonce’.  The second autosuggestion was ‘Beyonce net worth’.  And that’s with Safesearch off.

Since that proclamation the only way to go, in true ‘The Apprentice’ style, is bigger and ‘better’ or, at least, more absurd.  That’s why we can expect emulation in exclamation by the name-checking of other celebrities although, this being ‘the Apprectice’, we can expect the choice of celeb to be a little off, causing that helper of Sugar’s who looks like Barbies Bitter Gran to wrinkle her nose like a Bad Tabitha.

Given the calibre of candidate, it’s unlikely that they will go for a historical or even fictional reference which is a shame.  And by their very nature a material bunch is unlikely to compare themselves to a deity, even a safe one that’s been played by a British actor in a Hollywood film.  So while we may expect ‘I am the Harvey Weinerstiener of business’, it’s unlikely that we’ll get ‘I am the Stalin of business’, ‘I am the Lawrence of Arabia of business’ or ‘I am the Zeus of business’.

These are three statements that one is unlikely to hear because, while hair gel density may change, the thickness of candidates does not.

‘The Apprentice’ goes beyond being Moron TV, although with candidates about as clued up as something that has crossed over from the Farie Realm, or a box, ‘The Apprentice’ actually makes it into the category of oxyMoron TV, because the candidates are presumably smart enough to dress themselves, apply grooming products if nothing, generally it would appear that none of them, or at least very few, have actually taken the time to watch a few box sets of previous programmes and determine how the whole thing works.

Things not going my way, I’ll throw a temper tantrum in the boardroom and tell Lord Sugar I’ll give him 120%.  He may wonder how somebody with such a shit grasp of maths can aspire to run a business and he’ll surely give me another chance.

Fuck!  How did that not work?

Positives?  I rather like the way that the producers have obviously denied the candidates access to the internet, meaning that they have to rely on books and their own wits.  No wonder they are so fucking helpless in tasks.

God knows it’s difficult to succeed in business.  This is presumably especially true if you are an idiot.

Moron TV, Don't Tell the Bride

Overpopulation may be a thing, or it may not.  It’s probably a thing if you have access to graph paper, some pens, a few stats about birth rates and a nagging sense that there are a hell of a lot more annoying young people about the place than there used to be, many of them on scooters.

It’s probably not a thing if your job involves the maintenance of the lamp at the top of your tall, thin, circular and often fog-bound place of work.

Controlling overpopulation can be done in a number of ways.  Global conflict is a good short term fix, but booms of the explosive kind can be followed by booms of the baby kind.

There is a school of thought that if you can’t stop population growth, then you can at least try and nudge population development.  In short, if people are going to breed, then an effort should be made to ensure that the result is of benefit to the human race.  The problem with this is that eugenics and selective breeding is most usually either the preserve of madmen (it’s always men) or the landed classes, who want to keep property, wealth, power or a particular genetic defect, such as a weak chin, in the family.

Certainly in these enlightened times one would never consider trying to dissuade or prevent anyone from pairing, and starting a family with, anyone of their choosing, no matter how shocking the people in question might be.

But what else could explain ‘Don’t Tell the Bride’?

DTTB is genuine weep-for-future-of-humanity teevee.

Essentially the format is that a bloke is given all the money and all the responsibility of arranging his wedding.

Exactly.

This includes choosing the wedding dress.  If you go into any menswear shop you will witness men asking their wife or girlfriend if what they are trying on is suitable.  Men cannot even be trusted to choose their own pants, so what fucking chance of they got picking out a wedding dress?

One of the worst contrivances of DTTB is that the bride always appears to have a really clear idea of what they want their wedding to be like.  And the bloke, who presumably has spent time with, and possibly even discussed wedding plans with, the lady in question, always does something completely unrelated.

Her:  ‘I’ve always dreamed of a classic wedding, white dress, classic car, church.’

Him:  ‘I fucking love Battlestar Galactica.  Not the remake, the original series, so it’s going to be a Battlestar Galactica themed wedding.  I’ve spent three grand on tinfoil already.  It’s going to be lush’.

Other highlights include the traditional bloke organising a hen do, comprising of a bottle of Lambrini and a VHS box-set of ‘Sex and the City’ to be watched at the bride’s mum’s house, while the groom has a weekend in Vegas, or similar.

All of this, surely, is intended to stop people like this breeding, the intention being that any bride-to-be confronted with the prospect of a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe themed wedding and a groom who still has stripper glitter behind his ears will want to go to her room and cry for so long she is no longer of child-bearing age, while the bloke in question is, thanks to the magic of media, revealed to womankind to be not the sort to be trusted with a white frock and some fruit cake, never mind a family.

Given the lack of imagination, coupled with the love of a format-flogging-franchise that exists in tellyland, I await the arrival of ‘Don’t Tell the Corpse’ to the schedules, where some clueless family member is given seventeen grand to arrange the send off of a loved one.  If it runs true to form, then the gorm-bereft idiot with the loot will blow it all on the wake for him and his mates, leaving the rest of the family to knock up a coffin from cereal packets and pinch any floral arrangements from the local allotments, where a mysterious six foot deep hole has also recently appeared.  Hard to tell what will result from such a show first, ASBO or BAFTA.