Whatever happened to CELEBDAQ?

Back in the days when you had to plug your computer into your telephone line in order to download pornography, sorry, in order to go online, the BBC had a website called CELEBDAQ.  It was fabulous, but it’s probably a good thing that this site no longer exists, for the reasons explained below.

CELEBDAQ was, as the name implies, a trading game.  It was sort of a combination of Fantasy Football and Hello! magazine.  So it was a fantasy trading game, but unlike a game of trading footballers so that you could demonstrate that you were just as fucking clueless as any other manager in the Premiership about squad selection, or fantasy share dealing where you could pretend to be the sort of person who in their day job in the City meddled with the economies of developing countries and fucked them up, then at the weekend continued to spread social ill by supporting the drugs trade and so, generally, being the sort of person Dickens tried to warn us about, you traded in how famous a particular celebrity was that week.

Celebrity fame fluctuated, so if somebody had a film premier coming out, they would get more time in the media and their profile would rise and they would become more valuable as a celebrity.  However, as their fame rose, so their share price did, so if you knew that a blue chip famous person like Tom Hanks was going to be in London promoting his new film, he’s a sound investment for that week but you could only buy a few shares.

Much, much better to go to the ‘B’ listers or, as they were also known, those who appeared on television.

As far as I am aware, ‘personalities’ were not listed.

It was tremendous fun.  You had to register, all the cash was virtual and every week there was a star trader award.

Obviously, it had to end.

The trouble with celebrities is that they have, in recent years, traded fame for infamy.  Jimmy Saville got a lot of press coverage after he died, because it turned out that more than just looking like a nonce, he was a nonce.  Who knew?  Apparently, everyone knew.  People in the industry new and, in front rooms up and down the country when the news broke people who had seen him on telly years ago knew, or at least said ‘I fucking knew it’ under their breath.  Then Operation Yewtree got underway, and might as well have been titled Operation Yewboat because it sank the careers of quite a few telly personalities without trace.

That, as we now know, was just the tip of the shitberg.  Who would have imagined that greasy fucktards would have used their positions of power and influence to take advantage of vulnerable young people.  I mean, really, who knew?

We all know that nonces look like nonces.  We all now also know that any bloke with a fat BMI who is pictured with his arm around a young woman who looks like she is wishing that teleportation were a thing is what the newspapers term a ‘predator’.  And not something sleek that lives on the veldt, or even something with a cool shoulder mounted laser canon that hunts Arnie in the jungle, no, the sort of predator that disguises its distinctive scent of sweat and fat with money and lawyers.

Bluntly, it is no fun trading celebrities when they might make the news for all the wrong reasons.

Celebrities are, by and large, individuals who have used their talent in a way that has resulted in public notoriety in a good way.

The democratisation of the media has meant that anyone with the means to do so can upload a media clip of themselves to a media platform, and other folk can watch it and leave snarky comments.  What this has proved is that although the number of people who think they have a talent is apparently limitless, the pool of really talented people remains finite.

So maybe CELEBDAQ deserves a comeback after all, because of the listing, a bona fide list of who is, and who is not, a celebrity.  Youtubers need not apply.

Improving your Broadband

Broadband has brought us many benefits.  Let’s take porn.  Back in the dial up days, your images would load slowly, from the top down and of course with porn, unless it was some really twisted stuff, it was only one third of the way down the image when things started to get in any way interesting.  Now, thanks to advances in technology, porn is right there, in your face, on demand.

Despite what the cretins at your IT support department would have you believe, technology is not magic.  However, self-appointed techno-wizzards do share a trait with priests and physicians and other professions that seek to create an air of mystery about their activities, that is, they have their own language.  And at least you have to credit those whose job is, let’s face it, half a rung up from being the guy who changes the toner cartridge for at least invention their own language (‘babble’), rather than the priests, who basically asked if anyone would mind if they used Latin because nobody else was anymore and, the Roman Empire not having as many branch offices as it did BCE, there were surprisingly no objections.

Maintaining technological infrastructure takes time and effort.  I recently learned that the internet is an actual physical thing, just like Roy and Moss’s box in ‘The IT crowd’, but bigger and more plural.  The internet is distributed among many many ‘server-farms’, that are kept in secret locations, but normally near water for, not power as you might think, but cooling.  And people have to lay fibre optic cables and so on and so forth.  Basically, there’s a lot more work requiring high-viz jackets in the technology industry than you might think.

None of this mattered when my broadband went off earlier in the week.  Even after power cycling the magic box, nada.  So, called up the company and got a message telling me that because of improvements they were making to their broadband, I might be experiencing problems with my broadband/’phone/telly, until three in the afternoon.

There is nothing quite like being told you can’t have something to turn an inconvenience into a raging desire.  Luckily, I used up all of my emotional energy fuming about the inconvenience and never got as far as desire.  An upgrade, in the middle of the day?  Really?  If I had been able to Google for my emotional state, I might have got ‘incredulous’ back as an adequate description.

Things could have been a lot worse.  First of all, the interruption was only for about 45 minutes, secondly, I was able to use this time to have lunch in front of the telly, which was working fine.  And thank God because you know what they say, mankind is only three lunches and one missed episode of ‘Loose Women’ away from savagery.

I was wondering what the hell they were doing that couldn’t be done overnight, and I have to say that I didn’t notice a hell of an improvement to the broadband speed although, really, what was expecting, that ‘House of Cards’ now plays at the same speed as the Keystone Kops?  And at least Virgin haven’t taken the Apple route of ‘upgrades’, by making sure that their customers know there’s been an upgrade because a) your iPhone home screen looks a bit different and b) your iPhone home screen is the only fucking thing that works on your iPhone now.

Still, I suppose that vital maintenance to ensure increased security and resilience, together with replacement or even modernisation of infrastructure will result in downtime.  Then again, so does turning the internet off and turning it on again if there’s a glitch and, frankly, the image of a bloke in a high-viz jacket and a hard hat standing next to a fuck off huge lever and counting slowly to ten before jacking it back upright again is one that’s surprisingly hard to shake.

ITDB

The chaps who invented IMDB.Com deserve a Nobel Prize.  I’ll get to why in a moment.

The internet has now been around long enough for apocryphal stories to grow up about it.  I don’t mean web pages that record camp fire stories or folk tales or any of that nonsense, or eBay selling haunted crap, I don’t know much about the paranormal but I do know that if there was an artefact that proved beyond doubt the existence of the supernatural, it would not be on eBay.  It would be in the cellar of the Pentagon with all the alien stuff.  What I mean is stories about the internet that are only possible because of the existence of the internet.

One such story is how IMDB revolutionised the dating scene in LA.  Prior to the existence of IMDB, any asshole with a Porche an a wrap of coke could hit on a girl in a club, tell her he’s a producer or something, and try to get her to sleep with him in the expectation that she would get a guest spot on Magum P.I as ‘Pool Girl 2’.  Only afterwards would the ugly truth emerge, that he works in a Porche dealership in Sacramento (should such a thing even exist).

Thanks to IMDB.Com, girl goes back to her place, makes an excuse to lock herself in the loo with her laptop and after a brief search, finds out that ‘Gary Hairful’ has no production credits and so will not be getting sex that night.  He will, however, get tasered in the nutsack while she films it on her ‘phone, or whatever they do in Hollywood.

The International Movie Database, or IMDB, is an internet success story the way that all success stores about tech should be success stories.  Apparently, IMDB was started by a couple of blokes (disclaimer: women can be tech giants too), probably in their bedrooms, that probably smelled of socks and Lynx, and was basically a listing of who starred in what movie and who the best boy, key grip and gaffer were.  I have no idea how they got this information but I really, really hope that one sat hunched over a keyboard and the other one read the credits as they rolled on a TV screen as a VHS tape played/paused/played/paused.  The truth is probably less romantic and no doubt involved less Pot Noodle than I imagine.

Fast forward and IMDB is now the definitive resource of who did what on movies and television.  That’s why the inventors deserve a Nobel Prize.  While others win the Prize for curing disease, these guys have cured the awful suffering of recognising an actor, and wondering where the hell you have seen them before.  ‘The Bill’, it’s always ‘The Bill’.

So, IMDB, is a force for good.

So why not another definitive and comprehensive source of useful information that could be used in social situations?

Why not an International Tattoo Database?

Just a few years ago, tattoos were a relatively scarce commodity per square inch of human flesh.  Before blokes started getting Maori markings to show their tribal allegiance to Oswestry and women started getting Cantonese symbols because they liked Number 38 on the menu or whatever, you got a tat if you were in the military, where part of a tribe, had been in prison or had been in a concentration camp.

Before tattoos became fashionable, they used to mean something.

Now, you’re in a bar, your hitting it off with a young woman and you notice her shoulder tattoo.  Does she like mystical symbols, or hot and sour soup, is she a committed lepidopterist of renown, or a sex worker, or is it a curiously shaped birthmark and she is the rightful Queen of Wessex?  A discreet visit to the ITDB and you can decide whether the evening is going to end with you already thinking about what to name your kids, or exiting the venue now via the lavvy window.

Likewise a lady can establish whether that coat of arms on a fella’s forearm is a distinguished regiment, C Block HMP Chelmsford, or even worse, a minor public school.

ITDB, a force for good.