Crackerwax

Behold! The three ages of Keef!

I reckon he died about three days after that middle photo was taken but nobody told him. Still at least he’s doing his part to prevent the youth of the world doing drugs, by hoovering them all up every where he goes.

By rights the man should be a corpse by now, not just look like one. In actual fact there’s a specialist dude called David Demko who did a thing about rock stars life expectancy based on lifestyle. Keith Richards was looking to kick the bucket around 52. This was when he was 60.

What a guy!

As far as I can tell Keith Richards was relatively normal up until about, well Christ knows, but I’m guessing he can’t always have been this nut job soaked to the eyeballs on jazz talc who dresses like a voodoo pirate.

The thing that fascinates me the most though is the dynamic between Keith and Mick. In my head it goes like this. The show ends around midnight, Mick thanks the audience and scuttles back stage to count the gate receipts and see how the merchandise is selling, meanwhile things on planet Keith are just starting.

Keith disappears back stage to a pair of waiting Italian twins, Alessandra and Isabella, snorts whatever he can come across, grabs a couple of bottles of vodka for the journey to the restaurant, where he alights, eats a bag of crisps, has some speed, then leaves to find the nearest lap dancing bar, in which he grabs six girls and gets them to put on a show that would make Caligula blush, after which he polishes off another bottle of vodka before getting the manager to get him a cab and two bottles of Jack Daniel’s to take back to his hotel, he drinks these en route.

After a bit of grout he procedes, against all the odds, to bed each of the eight girls, twice, then at around eight in the morning he eats half a bag of Skittles before passing out in a pool of someone else’s vomit, waking at nine o’clock that night by a rodie hosing him down and is wheeled on to stage to rock out and start the whole process again!

Meanwhile back at the venue Mick spent the night arguing with a roadie, trying to get him to hand over the $3 for the third piece of chicken he took from the catering wagon, pointing out that the sign (that Mick no doubt wrote himself) states two pieces for crew. He then goes to bed. With a Horlicks.

How can they co-exist? Beats me.

As a callow youth I used to read Commodore Computing International. It was a very serious magazine, not at all like Zzap64!, although it did have one thing that Zzap didn’t and that was a regular column written by Jeff Minter.

As a rule I’m not a big fan of Jeff Minter’s games, but I am huge fan of his style. Living in Wales, eating curry, loving the ungulates, wandering around in the rain, going to the pub, I think you get the picture.

Anyway back in the March 1988 issue of Commodore Computing International, Jeff wrote an article set in the far away year of 2001 that filled we with tingly feelings about the future, so like the geek I am I’ve scanned it in for you all to read.

Jeff Minter finds tea – the drink not the smoke – mind blowing stuff, discovering fantasies of strange futures for Commodore, Atari and even HAL from 2001. What will he think of next a computer called PG?

Quarter to two in the middle of a windy Welsh night, and I have decided to leave off writing the internal-sequencer module for ‘Space II and bring you this. The Bug Which Prints Zeros Forever will just have to wait until tomorrow morning. Right now, I have just assuaged the raving dreaded Munchies with a sarnie followed by one-third of a cream-and-jam pie, and I’m just washing the lot down with a really good cup of tea. Tea. Wonderous substance.

All that is strictly beside the point, however. What I’m going to waffle about this month stems from some thinking I’ve been doing, and something I’ve been reading, too. The reading was an article about Alan Kay, the guy from Xerox who went on to Apple and there worked on the Lisa and Mac interface, you know, the pointers-and-windows stuff we all have nowadays even on the humble ‘64. It seems they had a lot of that stuff running at Xerox, back in the ‘Sixties for God’s sake, on flight-sim hardware! And here’s us thinking that Intuition’s such a brilliant hack, and how come nobody ever thought of doing it that way before – and all the groundwork was done 20 years ago! After reading that article, the thinking ensued – I fell to thinking: what have they got in the labs now? What’s cooking in the Apple labs where they’re using a flipping Cray to design the next generation of user interface?? And what would it be like to have a computer with such an interface? So I came up with the following spoof review – of a personal computer system you might buy to kick off the new millennium with – and I thought I’d lay it on you this month, instead of the usual 68000-worship…

Extract from Your Supercomputer magazine, 21/12/2001
EXCLUSIVE: PREVIEW of the Atari ‘Discovery’ computer system!..

We have been fortunate enough to be invited to the headquarters of Atari where we were shown the new Atari ‘Discovery’ machine, which should be released this month. Atari have been working on this machine since the early ‘Nineties, and now that superconducting chips and ‘processor memory’ (the logical development from the Transputer systems of late last millennium – ALL memory within a ProcMem-based system is capable of performing a variety of processing functions upon whatever it contains) are available, the design has come out of the labs at Atari and onto the streets. Well, we think Atari are going to freak a LOT of people right out with this new machine. Here’s what we saw…

(Your Supercomputer hack, Zippy the Chiphead, takes over the story)..

I got to Atari not quite knowing what to expect. Atari have been very quiet since they bought Commodore several years ago, and despite evidence of some activity in their research labs little has been known of what they were working on. After admiring the quaint little display of antique STs in the entrance lobby (did we ever really put up with pixies so large you could actually see them one atatime?)Iwas ushered into a large, comfortable room in which there appeared to be just a large desk and one of those amazing hydraulic chairs which look like they belong on the Star Ship Enterprise. No monitors, no disk drives, not even a fan. After a certain amount of confusion, I was assured that the desk was, in fact, the Atari Discovery computer.

At first sight the computer appears to be a large, black monolith, perhaps six inches thick, mounted on suitably high-tec legs. On sitting down to the machine you find that the whole surface can be tilted so as to be at a comfortable angle for the user. Of course, I sat down at the machine and felt a little foolish, I kept looking for the mouse and not finding one! I reached out a hand to touch the surface of the monolith, and got my first surprise: the Atari logo appeared in the middle of the smooth black surface. It looked just as if it were painted on, except for the fact that it was doing the most amazing colour-cycling. The image was startling to a computer user used to looking at monitors – even the highest- quality monitor cannot render graphics which look like they were printed images. This was my first encounter with Atari’s new display technology – the ‘screen’ is composed of millions of tiny beads which change their colour according to what image is being displayed. The beads are opaque, and if viewed by ambient light, it appears that the surface of the monolith just changes colour. It doesn’t shine, like a monitor, because unless you turn on the backlighting if it’s really dark, the colours you see come from reflected ambient light just like they would for a piece of paper. The effect is uncanny.

On the Discovery, the whole upper surface of the monolith functions as both screen and interface to the computer. When you rest your hands upon the surface of the machine, it comes to life: after the Atari logo has been displayed the monolith changes into what appears to be a fine wooden table with a couple of bits of paper lying on it. (Atari assure me that the user can configure the default desk surface to be whatever he likes, so if you favour cracked Formica instead of walnut veneer, you can have it). The surface of the monolith feels faintly resilient: in fact it is a highly-accurate touch-sensitive surface capable of distinguishing between the lightest touch and the heaviest pressure. Operating the system is totally instinctive, as I found out: just reach for one of the pieces of paper and drag it towards you, and that’s exactly what happens. You can do anything you could do with a normal piece of paper: turn it around a little so as to get a better view, slide it over or under another piece (depending on how hard you press as you slide) . . . of course you can’t make a paper aeroplane out of it, the screen is still only two-dimensional! Examining the paper, I found that it was headed, in a neat hand-written script, ‘Atari HAL operating system Version 0.9’. (The script is again user-configurable, so if you’re into Epson Dot-Matrix circa 1984 on some kind of nostalgia trip you’ll get your way).

Underneath the main heading was a list of sub-headings; running a finger down the list highlighted each in turn and – a neat touch this – increasing pressure of the finger on an item caused the whole surface of the desktop to ‘zoom in’ on the selected area. Very useful for reading the small print. Tapping an item in the list results in another piece of paper being spawned – the paper and desktop look so real that seeing another piece peel itself off is quite startling a-d weird. I generated a sheet headed ‘Demos’ from the parent sheet, and received a written list of the available demos on the system. Simultaneously, a variety of familiar objects appeared on the desktop: a pen, a paintbrush, a globe (spinning, too)
These objects can be grabbed, moved around, and tapped on in order to get them to work. There isn’t enough space here to fully describe all the demos; the highlights included such things as a WP package upon which you could write with a finger, or by ‘typing’ on a representation of a keyboard painted on the desktop, or by using an empty fountain pen upon the surface of the ‘paper’ on the desktop. There was an art package which was operated by using real paintbrushes on the desktop surface – the surface can detect even minute changes of pressure – proper painting, but with all the advantages of computer graphics.

I liked the Lightsynth program from T.E.A. (a new software company calling themselves True Electronic Art) upon which some remarkable effects are possible by using both hands and that remarkable pressure-sensitive surface. Perhaps the most fascinating program was World, a logical extension from the flight-simulator: linked to a large database of world coordinates, the user can ‘fly’ to any point on Earth at any speed and view the surroundings at any scale; of course a lot of fine detail is lost as even with gigabytes of core you cannot digitise every point on the planet, but advanced fractal techniques are used to generate detail. I went to Machu Picchu in the World simulator and found the fractal rendering of the rough Inca stonework to be quite convincing. At the moment World is empty, but the designers promise an update featuring animals and plant growth next year. The company producing World, Dave Bowman Associates, tell us that there will be a companion program, provisionally entitled God, which will allow the end-user to create new planets to explore using World. Generating a convincing planet should be possible in about a week using the new software.

I can only mention a few of the remarkable demos in my limited space here; expect proper reviews in later issues. After my ‘hands-on’ with the Discovery, I talked with the Atari bosses about marketing and pricing of the new machine. Amazingly, the whole system will only cost you #.

Extract ends, ‘Your Supercomputer’ magazine, 21/12/2001

Who knows?

Anything can happen.

Well, I think I’ll just print this out and shamble off to make myself another cup of tea. Tea. Remarkable substance….

I can’t begin to tell you how cool that was to me when I was thirteen.

This is our friend Miguel. He doesn’t like having his photograph taken, although I suspect you’ll pick that up as the slideshow progresses.

I’ll say one thing for him though, for a small fella he doesn’t half move quick.

I’m not going to go into how great a comedian Spike Milligan was because as good a comedian as he was, he was a better poet. Try this light hearted stuff for size.

I thought I saw Jesus on a tram.
I said, Are you Jesus?
He said, Yes. I am.

Although probably most famous for his light hearted nonsense poetry, most of it a lot more nonsensical than that one, he did do a great deal of serious stuff.

Suffering from depression all of his life, Milligan suffered from several major mental breakdowns and often locked himself away from the rest of the world and refused to communicate with anyone. Of his depression he said:

It’s the nature of who you are. You will see sunsets in a special way, you will see life in a special way.

I very much agree with him on this. Depression to me is the flip side of intelligence, the power to think turning itself inside out, like a mirror reflecting another mirror, on and on to infinity. As sad as it is I’d rather be a depressive than go through life in an unthinking daze.

Back to Spike though, and one of his finest pieces.

Strange lovers may caress you
But once, long ago
You were mine forever.
So should I reach into that past
And touch you with invisible fingers
Don’t move away.

Beautiful.

A lot’s been written about Amy Winehouse over the past few months. Tales of drug abuse, beatings, alcoholism, arguments and all manner of other dreadful things. Many’s the newspaper that’s featured articles droning on about how close to dying she is and that somebody should do something about it before it’s too late.

Bollocks. Keep it up I say.

Artists since time immemorial have fought inner demons, Amy Winehouse is no exception to this. Just because she’s young, gifted and jewish doesn’t mean she can’t have a raging junk habit does it?

The problem with the modern media is that it, rather hypocritically in my eyes, moralises about drug use and how very, very bad it is. Piffle. It’s nothing new and you’re never going to stop it.

Let’s take a look at jazz and soul musicians in particular, after all this is what Winehouse models her self on, and let’s see exactly what’s happened over the decades to the various proponents of the art.

• Billie Holiday
  Well known drug addict, died of cirrhosis of the liver.
• Nina Simone
  A raging alcoholic, who once shot her neighbour’s son because his laughing disturbed her concentration.
• Charlie Parker
  Died of pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, a death that was hastened by his drug and alcohol abuse.
• Bix Beiderbecke
  Alcoholic, drank himself to death on bootleg gin.
• Miles Davis
  Drug addict, eventually overcame it. Then died anyway.

My point is that none of this is new, artistic types have been taking drugs, drinking too much and fighting forever. The only difference now is that the public has a morbid fascination with celebrity tittle-tattle that is catered for by newspapers, television shows, magazines, websites and a host of other media. A picture of Amy Winehouse covered in blood, stumbling out of a London hotel at half three in the morning isn’t going to do any of these media outlets any harm is it?

Add to this the fact that today’s view of drug and alcohol use is much more liberal than it was even twenty years ago, it’s clear to see that the desire of the record companies and agents to cover up their star’s rampant benders just isn’t there. In fact it might even be considered to carry a little kudos with The Kids if they are seen to be living on the edge.

We need to put it into perspective, she isn’t doing anyone any harm, she might be living a life that’s a bit short on meaning but by fuck I bet it isn’t short on experience. And isn’t that what being an artist is all about; conveying your life experience to others through your art? Compare these lyrics:

For you I was a flame,
Love is a losing game
Five story fire as you came,
Love is losing game

One I wish I never played,
Oh, what a mess we made
And now the final frame,
Love is a losing game

And:

As time goes by I probably will
Meet a girl and fall in love
Then I’ll get married have a wife and a child
And they’ll be my turtle doves

But until then I’ll be a bachelor boy
And that’s the way I’ll stay
Happy to be a bachelor boy
Until my dying days

Which would you rather listen to, a young woman singing about regret at having loved and lost or a twat in a suit crooning about maybe marrying someone. Possibly. Someday. Maybe. If he could get over his Christian guilt at being gay.

I’ll leave you with this Keith Richards quote.

‘I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police.’

Quite.

Well it finally happened and here are the pictures to prove it. I really do need to say thank you to everyone that came along, you all contributed to my having a fantastic day. Thank you all very much.

I learnt many wonderful things over the course of the night. For example Sambuca comes in regular, black and flavoured varieties, some drinks can be referred to as pure filth and there are more germs on a slightly dirty glass than there are in a bin!.

For those that couldn’t make it you can PayPal me the money you owe me, just click the button below. That includes you Purdy. By the way, this isn’t a joke, you all owe me £25. So pay up.

Here’s something interesting I’ve just read. It’s a quote from the Reagan Diaries.

‘A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’re-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I’ll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they’ll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.’

That entry’s dated 17 May 1986. Looks like the reactionary old right winger had a bit of nous in the end.

Recognise this man?

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No? Well you should, he saved your life. He’s Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, Stan to his mates. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Russian military who in 1983 avoided a nuclear war by refusing to certify as real, what according to the Russian satellites, was a nuclear strike originating from the USA.

Thank fuck he did, because if he had certified it as genuine, Russia would have launched a retaliatory strike on the USA, which as you may recall hadn’t launched a thing, which would then have lead to the USA retaliating against what they perceived as an unprovoked Russian attack.

Bloody bollocks, the whole world would have been nuked to fuck and back!

Thankfully he didn’t press The Button and the Russian military recognised his prescience by immediately chucking him out, well not quite but his career was fucked and he retired soon after.

Of course, we the public didn’t find out about this until 1998 because of Russia’s military secrecy and international policy. The good news is that in 2004 good ol’ Stan was honoured by the Association of World Citizens who gave him its World Citizen Award along with a trophy and $1000! Then strangely in 2006 he traveled to the United Nations in New York where, for some reason, the Association of World Citizens presented him with a second World Citizen Award.

Seems scant reward for being the man who saved the world.

And our survey said. Go. Go. Go.

Amy Winehouse, once an über fox now a rattly boned skank, appears to be the latest in a long line of popular entertainers to be suffering from, ahem, exhaustion. Severe exhaustion at that.

Not that this applies to Amy, but in the past I’ve always equated exhaustion with massive gack habit or gritty smack battle. Then again, I’m sure Amy’s just been working her self too hard, god knows it must be a strain doing three or four gigs a week.

That equates to about an eight to ten hour working week, outrageous! After all, I do a forty hour week but most of that is spent sitting on my arse in meetings or fighting for every penny of expenditure, it’s certainly not something as strenuous as going on stage and singing to a bunch of people who adore me and are giving me £20 each for the privilege of watching.

Then again what do you expect. If I was a millionaire in my early twenties chances are I’d be fucked out of my skull every night of the week. However I may have enjoyed spending my cash on Jammie Dodgers too, so I’d probably be a little more chunky.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking…

You go girl!

Yay! It was Ian’s birthday on Saturday (well Monday, but no one goes on the lash on a Monday) and we duly trotted off to Nottingham to celebrate in style.

After a dodgy start involving nail appointments and me getting stroppy it all went reasonably smoothly.

After hitting Ask for a pizza we trotted around town, ending up the Alley Cafe Bar, a fine little bar although their website is somewhat over engineered. Anyway back to the night out.

Everybody enjoyed themselves, I had many an interesting conversation with Des and what’s most important Ian seemed to enjoy it. It did get a bit, well, fruity towards the end of the evening but that’s what booze does!

Without further ado, here are the photos of the event. By the way I could do with some help naming names, I was drunk, it was dark and I didn’t have a pen…

[slideshow=23] 

Oh and if you really want the good shit, wait until tomorrow. That’s when Ian’s dancing gets a public outing!

Something has gone wrong with the world if someone can grow to the age of 19 and come out with something like this:

‘Is that Sun up there the same one my mum sees in Essex?’

Fuck me…

Was browsing through my old photos tonight and look what I found!

[slideshow=kate] 

That’s the world famous eco-nazi Kate. Never happier than when she’s repacking your shopping, lecturing you on the best way to compost your vegetable peelings or otherwise complaining about your lack of awareness of the environment.

The lovely Kate can normally be found trolling around the reduced section of supermarkets looking for damaged yoghurts. This is where I ultimately see her in the future, plodding around pushing a trolley full of Whiskas being followed by the feint whiff of piss.

Given all of this you’d think we hate her! That is not the truth though, we love her very much and relish each and every stern telling off she gives us for our bad habits. We would of course love her even more if she arrived on time some times…

The cheek of the boy!

Oh, the shame. Still might keep me away from the chocolate…

Then again, I doubt it.

This is my father-in-law, he’s a top bloke. Mad as you like, but a top bloke nonetheless.

The best bit is when he does his Fulton Mackay impersonation, it’s comedy gold!

As we all know he was a kind caring man who loved his Mum, he just hated coons that’s all. Lovely man.

I agree that words are just words and as odd as it seems I defend Manning’s right to say anything he wants, about whoever he wants, I don’t have to agree with him though.

Using words is beautiful and even ugly words can be used in imaginative non-offensive ways, but singling out a couple of waitresses in Derby and calling them wogs isn’t exactly comedy gold, it’s just bullying and worse still it’s almost pack-mentality, this contradicts what all his close friends would say of course, to him he was a loving caring man who’s racist ‘banter’ was just an act.

I can respect somebody for being honest in the face of opposition but for taking something so vile and turning it in to an act is pathetic. If he truly hated blacks, asians and jews then fine he’s just a bigot but if he does it as an act he’s using people’s hatred and ignorance for profit.

Hopefully he was the last of his breed…

Well, she is isn’t she? Look at her.

She never stops moving, doesn’t tell the truth, demands to be the centre of attention and generally just never shuts the fuck up.

I’m not saying it’s funny, it’s not, it’s tragic.

Plus on top of it all, she looks like Freddy Mercury (but not dead).

Davina McCall is shit. It really is that simple.

I used to love her when she did MTV with that Spanish bloke. Now though she’s just a complete arse. Not only that but sadly she thinks the world’s most amusing woman. She’s not though is she? The last amazing thing she did was a Garnier Nutrisse Creme advert. A quote from which follows.

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‘Mother!’

Fucking comedy gold that.
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I came across these just now, thought somebody might like to see them…
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That’s Russel T. Davies. He writes Doctor Who and Queer As Folk and he wrote this…

‘Whatever you do on Doctor Who, whatever technology or futurism you’re putting on screen, it’s always going to look like it was made now and it should. You know, science fiction in the sixties looks like it was made in the sixties, the seventies, eighties. The worst and most stupid thing you can do is go in to a meeting and say let’s make it timeless.

For a start, why? I think these programs are a record of the year in which they are made and they should be and they should show that off, and plus you can’t fight it that’ll creep in anyway. There’s no such thing as a timeless design, ever.

And I think partly you have to celebrate that.’

What a dick. Of course you can have timeless design, it just takes effort. Effort that you’re not capable of making Russell.

Look at Star Wars, thirty years old and you’d be hard pushed to definitively tell that it’s a product of the seventies. Try Blade Runner I couldn’t tell if that was from 1982 or 1997.

So before you indulge in any more pointless fucking waffle, there just to apologise for your piss poor stories and special effects, think about making a better television series.

I think the T must stand for twat.

During a recent house clearance the following snaps were unearthed.

After a bit of a metaphorical spit and polish in Photoshop they’ve come up a treat. See for yourselves.

No single human being has ever had as much influence on me as Bill Hicks had. Not one. Sure, Bob Dylan makes me think and I like the Beatles, I’ve even been known to laugh at Monty Python. They never completely changed my perception of the world though.

The first time I ever saw any of his act must have been on Channel 4 (looking back it was probably Relentless), the vehemence with which he attacked those things that disgusted him was amazing. I’d never seen someone so angry, or informed, about a subject.

Virtually unknown in the states Hicks only ever really became moderately famous in the UK. Part of the reason for his lack of success in the States could be attributed to his poor opinion of America, and his disappointment in people he once admired. Jay Leno, presenter of The Tonight Show, was one such entertainer. Originally idolised by Hicks for his comedic ability Hicks noted that he’d been reduced to hawking Doritos not even when he needed the money. “You not got enough money, you fucking whore? You’ve got to sell snacks to fucking bovine America now?”. It was this kind of rampant commercialism that dissapointed Bill the most.

Outspoken on virtually all the topics you could care to mention from the Kennedy assassination to people involved in marketing (“Kill yourselves.”) Hicks has left a lasting impression on my world and would suggest that you try and let him do the same to you.

Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer on the 26th of February 1994 and the world’s just a little bit heavier for it.