Self Deluded Cranium Dump

In Reality, I'm Stereotypically Yours

This is a guest post by Dan Bryan, songwriter and vocalist for Icehouse Project, critically appraising the casting of stereotypes in reality television. An edited version of this was originally printed in Gay Times, September issue of 2009. By his kind (and timely) permission, the article is now published here.

One of the main problems with reality television stereotypes is the producers.

In a notoriously young profession you have producers and assistant producers in their early twenties. This is not a bad thing in itself but we are now entering a generation where new, young producers have been brought up and spoon-fed on a vapid celebrity culture. They themselves cannot wait to get a tabloid rag and thumb the pages for the gossip in breaks during filming. This means that the type of people they are picking for their shows tend to be the two dimensional cartoon cut-out characters that we see. When they pick a gay for their show they are picking them for being larger than life, with more front than Brighton and enough mince to feed the Russian navy for a year, for being just gay in fact.

Why?

Because the producers think that is what the public think of when they see a gay. So by pandering to what they THINK the public wants and by giving them what they THINK they want to see it all ends up being stereotypes and pigeon-holed characters. What they have forgotten over the years of saturating us with images of cartoon ‘people’ is that as humans we actually pick up on the subtleties of someone’s character and TV is the perfect medium for platforming these traits in anyone. We are far more likely to find a gorgeous, stubbly, bit-rough-round-the-edges mechanic (who happens to be gay) interesting if he has a sense of humour and a caring, warm personality and crucially; vulnerability. The shows doing well at the moment are the ones where people are chosen to learn a skill or for their strengths and weaknesses rather than what they act like or which pigeon-hole they fit.

As an openly gay male I find it insulting and annoying when we are constantly represented by the mincing, effeminate, bitchy, two-faced phoney twirlies that reality TV keeps parading before us. As if they are doing us proud. Patronising us with the old “here we have a gay so the gays feel represented” when in actual fact it’s not about sexuality at all. I’m not the butchest guy ever and I do possess one of the sharpest tongues seen on television, but on the whole I’m just a regular guy. I was chosen to enter the "Big Brother" house for my strength of character and abilities to deal with any given situation with the kind of leadership skills that you would expect from a 30-year-old alpha male. I was picked for my intelligence and acerbic wit and my abilities to make people feel safe in unpleasant situations and NOT because I have a high pitched squeal and clap my hands at every given opportunity; not for my tan and manicure; nor for my high-lighted hair; and I know this because I have none of those things.

Our producers realised in me that sexuality makes up less than 2% of a persons personality and it is because of this ignorance, and willingness to exploit the obvious that other reality producers are destroying their own work. People simply switch off when they are presented with characters who are not only really blatant and have the depth of a puddle, but continue to show themselves to be just as shallow. And why? Because it’s insulting to think we are that much of a push over.

Reality TV clearly thinks we are stupid.

We are not.

Next blog post will be my own contribution on the wrapping up of Channel 4's "Big Brother" televison series.

L'Ancien Regime - Crumbling And Analogue

This is Part 2 of an article. Part 1 is here, just before the Digital Economy Bill was about to be passed. Now it's an Act. Why was it passed?

I've started looking backwards. I'm so baffled by the absolutist positions of old content distributors lobbying for the Digital Economy Act and denying the truth staring them in the face. I've decided that it can't be the future these people are interested in. To understand them better, I reasoned, I'd have to dig around in history and philosophy, even though I thought such subjects might be irrelevant to the bright shiny internet. So, I started digging around the philosophies of Marxism and Adam Smith with all their talk about free markets, the proletariat, and so on. I originally thought the concepts seemed so quaint. The Marxist proletariat I normally associate with workers in smoking-chimney factories or coal-mines, while Smith's 'invisible hand' used to be seen as a corrective benign guide for market forces. Now those factories or coal-mines don't really exist in that form anymore, while the 'invisible hand' is now no longer seen as benign or neutral, but seen as vicious and connected to Thatcherism. Neither of those philosophies could have dreamt of the the large, amazing force of the internet or the widespread availability of software tools for everyone to democratically create content (whether that be music, Youtube movies or citizen journalism in the form of blogs). The 'invisible hand' in the internet age means that supply always meets demand, as there are no 'scarce resources' as everything is just copied. Plus, for every niche interest, there will be someone else that can cater for it, be it Mongolian folk covers of Radiohead songs or very obscure sexual fetishes.

Why have I started thinking like this? Why have I been looking at dusty Marxist tomes? Before anyone thinks that I'm a Communist planning a downfall of the state, please note that I mentioned also reading Adam Smith and I haven't turned into a raving Thatcherite either. In fact, if you're taking that logical stand, I've read L Ron Hubbard and I haven't turned into a Scientologist or started watching loads of Tom Cruise films. It's just rather neat to re-examine old economic philosophy, particularly those based around machinery exploitation, and then turn it on its head. The big leap on my part is that most of us are now the proletariat and not the middle class. Hey, well, David Cameron did say he was middle-class the other day. Maybe he was right? Because of the way wealth and gadget affordability is within the grasp of most, that doesn't mean everyone in society is now bourgeois and the working-class have ceased to exist; it's the opposite. According to Marxist philosophy in the digital age, this proletariat have expanded to be the biggest in society and their tools are no longer pick-axes or mining equipment, but computers. It's getting dangerous for a dramatically-depleted leisure class and a new ancien régime (I know, an oxymoron, deliberately so), because the internet connects these proletariat tools and might finally cause that deeply-unfashionable Marxist revolution that so many capitalists had deemed dead. It just won't come in the form of a quaint burning of a Reichstag by some cute overalled working-class types from the 1920s. It is emerging from genuine craftsmen doing creative stuff in their bedrooms.

Engels defines Marx's proletariat look like this.

"[The machines] introduction completely altered the existing method of production and displaced the existing workers. This was due to the fact that machinery could produce cheaper and better commodities than could the handicraftsmen with their imperfect spinning wheels and hand looms. Thus, these machines handed over industry entirely to the big capitalists and rendered the little property the workers possessed (tools, hand looms, etc.) entirely worthless. Soon the capitalists got all in their hands and nothing remained for the workers".

An aim of Engels is the abolition of private property - this isn't just flats or houses we're talking about, but the proceeds of a labourer's works now owned privately by someone else. So a modern day example would be copyright owners. "Private property will be abolished only when the means of production have become available in sufficient quantities". Did you read that, folks? I think we've just reached that stage, don't you? Cheap affordable machines that everyone uses (iPhones, computers, music and movie-making software etc) and the world-wide web (given away for free by Mr Berners-Lee) means the communication between a vast, creatively-aware populous is possible.

At ORGCON,the music industry panel pointed out that the word processor came along and suddenly a whole load of typists were made redundant during the 1980s and 1990s. This was seen as a perfectly valid thing to happen at the time, despite a load of upset unemployed typists. In that situation, the government didn't go and ban Microsoft Word to prop up typist jobs. Yet, old distribution models are being shown as inefficient when placed next to internet distribution, but the government is propping up the old industry with the Digital Economy Act (incidentally, as an aside, I know Adam Smith is barely getting coverage in this blog entry, but Elmyra did it so much better in her blog article covering classic economics and the internet - it seems appropriate to plug that here, since I sat a few seats behind her and Cory Doctorow at an ORGCON event and annoyingly didn't realise it was her at the time). Despite widespread puzzlement as to why this perceived symmetry didn't apply to distributors, but did apply to typists, we can check this Marx quote from 1844, about 140 years before Microsoft Word started crashing routinely in it's earliest incarnations.

"[T]he alienation of the worker is expressed thus: the more he produces, the less he can consume; the more value he creates, the less value he has. [L]abour produces things for the rich, but misery is for the poor. Machines replace labour, and jobs diminish, while other workers turn into machines." - Manuscripts of 1844, Marx.

Furthermore, "[I]t not only degrades man, but also depersonalises him". The boss imposes the kind of work, the method and the rhythm, but he never bothers if the worker ends up as a "mere appendage of flesh on a machine of iron".

Nowadays, we come to the odd situation that Marx, normally a man of foresight, could never have seen; the machine starts becoming the appendage to the human and is used for societal change from below. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, I give you a potential real revolution. Rather than typists being kicked out of a job, distributors and money-men are starting to feel that they could be dispensable, while the new l'ancien regime is getting nervous. Three questions for you, then. Question One. Who are good examples of distributors? Why, step forward, Mr Simon Cowell! Mr Paul McGuinness, speak your tune from GQ! Question Two. Who could be members of the l'ancien regime? Aye, aye, it's the BPI. Hello, newspaper proprietors, such as Mr Rupert Murdoch (a man who really hates the internet). In short, anyone defending rapidly-aging copyright laws from centuries ago. Question Three. Which people are chiefly responsible for the Digital Economy Act? Okay, okay, that's almost a rhetorical question - yes, it's the previous two groups. And neither of those two groups want to go the way of the typist. To explain that, let's read this letter to Weydemyer from Marx, dated March 5th, 1852.

"What's important, is to grasp that each social class has its own interests and each holds views about the government of the state consistent with the defence of those interests. Social harmony which certain 'beautiful souls' preach, CANNOT exist. It can't, because so long as any one class lives by exploiting another, a struggle will exist against such exploitation. And this class struggle is NECESSARY for human progress."

We can go back further into the past, just in case you all think I really am a Rampant Red. Hegel's "Philosophy Of History" argued that humanity advances and progresses only because of conflicts, wars, revolutions; that is, through the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors. Peace and harmony don't make for progress. Despite Hegel mainly meaning a religious struggle, he still described it very much as a spiritual conflict; or a struggle between ideas. While not particularly associated with the spiritual, most proponents of the digital revolution are certainly full of ideas as to how the new business model might operate. Most of the supporters of the Digital Economy Act choose either not to understand or ignore the ideas espoused by the individual craftsmen releasing their individual craft online via technology. It's not bafflement or bewilderment; very simply, it's safeguarding their own private property as laid down by copyright in the analogue economy. Never mind the fact that just by opening a browser and accessing any website means you don't own that website, you own a copy that now sits in your machine - so strictly speaking, old copyright law never fitted into the digital model in the first place. Plus, here's where I kill off any suggestion that I'm a raging Marxist. Anyone with a red beret on their head during the 1970s claiming "[A]ll property is theft" ceases to have any meaning in a digital world, since all web properties are copies that are downloaded anyway. Music and video is only a small part of the way the internet works. It's where Adam Smith and Karl Marx end up in the digital afterlife, where there is a perfect virtual free market and all property is copied.

This blog entry is going to ensure I'm never employed ever again, isn't it? Oh well. Next week, I talk about Big Brother. Despite all my high falutin' philosophising here, you'd think I was talking about the Marx-inspired groundbreaking novel of George Orwell. Sadly, nothing as profound as that. I'm returning to the slightly more ridiculous terrain of previous blog entries and talking about the Channel 4 television series that's coming crashing to an end (and getting flooded in the process).

Facebook Be Damned

The DEB Star Will Be Completed On Schedule

 

When the Terrorism Act 2000 was introduced to the British public, there were a lot of very worried people and some, such as photographers, even felt it might impact their careers. With the current Digital Economy Bill (DEB) going through a final review in the Commons, after being passed by the Lords, a helpless sense of deja vu is being felt again.

I remember at the turn of the century, gentle hippy acquaintances frequently protested in the streets (often fruitlessly) against the perils of globalisation or against a park getting bricked over by a building developer. They seemed a bit narked off with various Terrorism Acts during the Noughties, frequently assailing the senses with stories of being cordoned off by the police, who could round them up for daring to hang around a public place with about a dozen other like-minded hippies. Overlapping with this good-willed group, there was another group of people that weren't happy with it, namely photographers. They argued that the Terrorism Act could theoretically have a negative effect on their career. When the initial readings for the Terrorism Bill were first being passed through the Commons, professional and amateur photographers were trying to make their voices heard. This was in a time without Facebook or Twitter either, so they had to do that old-fashioned thing of traipsing around the streets with billboards. Not without irony, a fair few of them realised that by demonstrating in this way, they'd already landed themselves into the same category as the gentle hippies being kettled under the incoming new Terrorism Act.

Ah, nodded those supposedly in-the-know at the time of the Terrorism Act's gestation, but that's all theoretical. Due dilligence and discretion will be used in the application of these new powers to combat terrorism. More to the point, they probably secretly thought; who cares about a bunch of amateur/professional photographers? That's not a proper career, like those banker friends of ours that keep society properly ticking over.

Down through the years of various Terrorism and Criminal Justice Acts, it's now practically a weekly (if not daily) occurrence that police harrass photographers. Here's a few recent examples, just to show the commonality of harrassment; a famous architectural photographer is arrested by the real-life equivalent of Gene Hunt; a man taking photos in Elephant & Castle is arrested and jailed; a BBC photographer is accused of being an "Al Quaeda operative"; and, brilliantly, an Italian student secretly filmed the Met cops harrassing her. This isn't even taking into account the many, many cases from 2001 onwards. All the theoretical talk photographers had "indulged" in at the start of the century seems to have become a reality. Foreign tourists are feeling the warm welcome of Britain when they go out to snap UK landmarks. It took almost a decade for one senior police officer to realise that this was giving the boys-in-blue a rather ugly veneer and he sent a circular around, suggesting clause 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 was being abused. The circular didn't appear to work. The next few weeks threw up new police harrassment cases, including a man being arrested in a shopping mall for taking photos of his children and, the punchline to this paragraph, a retired police officer being harrassed for photographing some buskers.

When viewed in the historical context of the Terrorism Act legislation, any law that doesn't bear close scrutiny needs scrapped when you keep in mind what those poor photographers had to deal with. As the people most likely to be professionally hit by such draconian measures, they knew that badly-worded law could land them into frequent trouble. It is similar with the Lord Mandelson's Digital Economy Bill (DEB). Practically every major digital economy representative opposes the UK legislation, including those from the security services. One of the alarming measures introduced by Lib Dem and Tory Lords was the straightforward blocking of websites suspected of infringing copyright. Superficially, to anyone that doesn't know much about how the web operates, this seems reasonable. Dig a little further and you're banning blogs, small business startups and even Youtube channels, with the presumption of guilt in the first instance. These are the cottage industry areas of the internet, often staffed by people who have to dig into their empty pockets against multinationals armed with unlimited resources, wanting to snuff them out. The onus is still on the little person trying prove their innocence, rather like a shocking electronic version of current British libel law. Most of the time, they'll have no choice but to board up shop. A further amendment to the DEB was outlawing the use of "web lockers". Again, this doesn't bear close scrutiny when you ponder a real-world equivalent. Try telling people in the non-virtual world equivalent that they're no longer allowed to use briefcases, safes or padlocked office drawers, because terrorists and criminals use such facilities to hide stuff. Most people would be picking up the phone to call the men in white coats for you.

To take the real-world analogy further, maybe we should ban all the locks on the windows and doors to our homes, because criminals live in houses as well and that'll make them easier to catch. Does that sound like I'm being unreasonably sarcastic? Well, no actually. Part of the DEB involves tying a single IP address to a person's account. To put it crudely, ill-informed legislation suggests that IP address equals person's account equals physical home address. Dynamic IP address allocation is just one feature of how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) attempt to make our internet connections more secure and make them more impervious to cyber attacks. The DEB legislation is worded ambiguously and it's not entirely clear how dynamic IP address allocation is going to be utilised successfully in this post-DEB world, so they could just be removed as a natural defence against common viruses. IP "address" (dynamic or not) is maybe a misnomer in the wireless age anyway, as it could never be realistically linked to a physical address of one person's account. It's ambiguous as to who could be rightfully termed a subscriber or who could be termed an ISP, particularly as even the government appear unsure at this point. This is why cafes, libraries and museums are understandably upset, while Universities are extremely perturbed at the way their current federated internet structure could be impacted. We're also talking about a future where nearly any notable public area could conceivably have Wi Fi, including public toilets. Surfing the net for the latest James Blunt MP3 while you take a deeply symbolic shit is only a matter of time.

Thus, the biggest damage that the DEB will do is to the digital industry itself. Many small IT firms and cottage industry projects use legal filesharing more than your average user, but the DEB will automatically target those that do the most filesharing. In other words, web developers (particularly those that use legitimate Linux filesharing) are going to start feeling like our old photographer friends. Too far-fetched? On Twitter, I suggested web engineers could be permanent criminal suspects under the new DEB regime and, through the power of the retweet by the blogosphere, I got that suggestion sent out to about 20000 people. Out of those many people, only one tweet came back suggesting I could be wrong. After some discussion, they eventually conceded and suggested "But all you have to do if asked, and we don't think the question will be asked, is disclose the content and author of files". Sorry, I don't want to do that. I've already worked on a system for clinical patient reports, an intranet for schoolkids aged between 4-16 and a CV (Curriculum Vitae) management web application. All of those contain sensitive data files, none of which a befuddled ISP or a Whitehall mandarin should have access to. More to the point, a small business needs to survive on its wits and minnow-like ability to swim quickly amongst the giant behemoth corporations. If a small digital business had a great idea, a new 'business model', a world-shifting 'paradigm' or a 'killer app" that could potentially threaten old corporation interests, then the last thing they want to do is hand files out to ISPs or Lord Mandelson's minions. The Lord of Darkness has already indicated which side he's on by introducing this ill-advised BIll. Just like the photographers were hit by the legal crossfire of the Terrorism Act, any worker in the digital economy will be subject to wandering around a DEB minefield that Mandelson, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and the record companies inflicted on us for daring to think outside the analogue box.

This is the first part of an article. The second part will deal more specifically with WHY Mandelson and others seek to attack the digital economy and this has it's roots firmly at the start of New Labour, if not the roots of British society. It's wrapped up in the timely and symbolic act from last week when Facebook threatened The Daily Mail  with legal action. This isn't a case of just "new media vs old media", this is a case of "new money vs old establishment money".

Thanks to the Broccoli Man for the references on photographer arrests.

The Riddler

Do you remember that scene in "Batman Forever" when Jim Carrey's "The Riddler" plugged most of Gotham City into his head? Big swirly green brainwaves were sucked from the populous sitting befuddled in front of their TV screens and sucked straight into The Riddler's big swollen conk. Well, that's sometimes how I feel Twitter operates. It's sometimes too much, because my brain constantly expands uncomfortably at the swelter of mental projections swirling in the virtual vacuum. Having said that, it can sometimes feel like a fantastic angel-decorated Wim Wenders movie, where you can drift in between a constantly scrolling narrative of peoples' thoughts. It can occasionally resemble the shock horror realisation of the Buffy episode "Earshot", where the drifting between thoughts can reveal an innermost turmoil and shock decision. Or, on a really bad night, Twitter can reveal a bunch of trolls all running out from underneath their bridge and shouting spite.

But overall, it's more like the Wim Wenders "Wings Of Desire" movie. Big brilliant brave thoughts, all jostling with each other, formed from the collective niceness of the whole network, born out of new human-made Twitter customs like Follow Friday and Music Monday. You either share friends thoughts ("Hey, check this guy out, he's funny! Check this girl out, she's building a hovercraft on solar power and blogging about it") or share music ("Hey, just found this harpsichord cover from a 90s band of a 70s classic on Spotify!"). You can saunter between all these peoples' undiscovered blogs and scrappy thoughts, but not feel like an unpleasant voyeur, because they're all wanting to share stuff too.

How come I wasn't born into all this? Six degrees of separation was five too many for me. I lived in a location where 50 miles due East seemed too far, an exhausting struggle to get to meet a few friends for a snatched couple of hours or a strained phone call where only one person was listening (albeit, a great friend on the other end of the wire). But brilliantly, there's a generation just behind me who are growing up with all this. I feel privileged that I'm involved in the Glow project, an intranet that extends all over Scotland's schools and shares knowledge between kids and teachers, which removes those six degrees. It means that children in urban Glasgow and Dundee can share knowledge about the Highland Clearances with... hey, get this... youngsters that grew up in the Highlands. Plus, not to get too parochial about this, it means those kids can talk to other children on other Continents. What's next? Could the Glow intranet start talking to people up in Space, like Soichi Noguchi, and let the children have a literally out-of-this-world experience? No wonder George Lucas has given his seal of approval to Glow on an occasion. I'm even playing with developing a Twitter for schoolchildren that will enable kids to talk, uninterrupted by those pesky adults, to that aforementioned spaceman.

However, a couple of caveats are in order.

Firstly, I sometimes feel like The Riddler, with the big bloated head. I can't keep up with everyone sometimes. I'm busy, developing Glow's search engine, while moonlighting on extremely silly web projects with comedy writers. Or I spend time worrying, just after 5pm, about stupid things like mortgages or the airbrushed forehead of David Cameron. Let's just leave the currently rapid expanding virtual world, free of geographical boundaries, to the kids with their developing dendrites and naughty neurons.

Secondly, this isn't the sort of state education intranet that needs to have money cut by torrid Tories or limping Labourites. In this new world, elitists need not apply and they should allow education (oh, and meaningless babble and gossip) to course through the new digital veins of the world.

For those reasons alone, don't let the digital world grind to a halt. Vested interests in the UK analogue world would be quite happy to let it happen. They've all got bloated heads full of undersigned lobbyist interests, advertising deals and poorly written Digital Economy Bills (DEB) of a world they no longer understand. Younger generations are now already born into this and ready to learn as much as possible. Is it jealousy of those generations that governments and older generations wish to quash, I wonder?

That's the true riddle, isn't it?

And to think. You regular readers thought I could only write cynical posts. Shame on you.

Leftwards... and Upwards?

Guest post from Phil Nicholson. Normal service will be resumed soon. Note that these are not the opinions of this blog as a whole. Both myself and my father are broadly of the liberal left. However, as pointed out in this guest post, sometimes certain individuals on the left believe in that slightly fateful adage "my enemies enemy is my friend".

Venezuela's President Chavez has described the British presence on the Falkands Islands as a hark-back to empire. But he makes no attack on French possessions in the Caribbean or French Guiana (quite close to his own country), nor on various Spanish territories, of which the Canaries are the best known. So there is an element of Venezuelan self-interest at work here: Venezuela needs to keep what friends it has, while hopefully acquiring more in Latin America. The UK of course can be written off as a Chavez supporter because of its close relationship with the US (not reciprocated, unfortunately, by Obama's neutral stance on the Falklands issue). So it would be a mistake for the UK centre and left, which normally support Chavez, to take up a pro-Argentinian position as many blundered into in the 1980s. Nevertheless the charge of "colonialism" should be addressed head-on and not simply dismissed.

The history of the Falklands is similar to many island territories in the "new world" where there have been competing claims of sovereignty by Britain, Spain and France since discovery. Although the islands appeared on Spanish maps in the 1520s, the first recorded landing was by John Davis, English explorer, in 1594. But the UK's claim should not be based on such a chequered history but on a very simple and modern concept: the right of self-determination. Ironically, it is the threat from Argentina which keeps the Falklands a colony instead of opting for independence.

The UK should take a far more active role in the Falklands case. We should take out large adverts in South American newspapers explaining that the UK's presence in the Falklands is entirely at the democratic wish of its inhabitants and that if anything it is Argentina's desires which are colonialist. We should also point out to Argentina that its stance means that it is likely to lose out on refining and port facilities in the coming oil development.To Venezuela we should point out that self-determination was exactly the rallying call of Simon Bolivar, on whose principles Chavez claims to base his own regime.

Like Butter Wouldn't Melt in HIS Mouth?

I just got off the phone to a couple of friends and one of them (indirectly) reminded me of something I meant to do about a fortnight ago. Namely, I had to get a DVD. So, off I trotted down to my nearby Fopp and bought it. The same Fopp shop that the episode 3 opener of "Limmy's Show" was filmed in, fact fans. Anyway, here's the DVD wot I got.

I make special mention of this, because the man himself sent me a rather lovely "Thank you" email back in August, because he asked people to review it on the Amazon site and then email him to tell him. Seeing as I'd seen the series when it was on telly, I thought I was perfectly well-qualified to do it. This is the Amazon review I wrote. You can click on screengrab below to expand it.

Tomorrow, incidentally, I'm doing something a bit different with this blog. I'm having a guest blog entry from my father, who has written something very interesting about President Chavez (not one of this blog's comedy entries then), so that'll be a nepotistic break for all of you lovelies that read my blog.

I'm off to have a bit of a hoot at my Serafinowicz DVD just now. Have a good evening, each and every one of you!

Toby Or Not Toby

Look at that blog entry title, eh? Bloody hell, I admit that's a dreadful title. I'm really not making any effort these days. It's a pithily, poorly-written, pun-tastic blog entry title. It's a bit like what Toby Young himself would write these days. After Toby's weirdly homoerotic call-to-arms for Rod Liddle's (now failed) appointment for editor of The Independent, I wasn't sure how much more complacent his writing could become. After all, that article on Liddle seemed to rest on two salient points. Firstly, Liddle can spout on about anything he wants, because his supposed journalistic opinion can fall under the pretension of being "free speech" rather than just poorly-written graffiti on a wall about "goat curry". The second salient point rests on Toby Young getting hot-under-the-collar at watching Liddle plastering himself all over his girlfriend in a BBC Green Room and those antics showing him up to be an 'iconoclast', rather than just an exhibitionist, unkempt Womble.

But his writing surely did take a further plunge today, when he moaned about... sorry, I'm trying not to laugh here... other journalists cyber-bullying him for an ill-timed article on fashion designer, Alexander McQueen. At the moment, it seems dangerously trendy for 'opinion column' journalists to kick the memories of someone recently bereaved, particularly if the dead person happens to be gay. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) have recently pardoned Daily Mail journalist Jan Moir, who started this whole trend up, so expect more crocks of offensive shit in the print press anytime soon. Anyway, after a rather poorly-written article on Alexander McQueen, Toby got what was no more than a bit of ridicule, particularly from Times journalist, Caitlin Moran. This is taking into account some of the nastier pieces of journalism that Toby Young has written in the past. Sorry, Toby, I'm not buying any of this. You're known to dish it out yourself, so you should be able to take it as well.

Before you say I'm an apologist for McQueen or say I'm defending mischievous behaviour on Twitter, I felt at the time that a provocative article or opinion about McQueen was definitely something that could have been written. Sadly, Toby, you weren't the fellow who came up with it. Joan Smith, of The Independent, wrote it. I did give a sharp intake of breath when Joan questioned the plaudits that had been thrown toward McQueen, barely 24 hours after the man died. But funnily enough, after reading her article, I felt I understood Alexander McQueen better, warts and all. Isn't that what a good journalist does? You can write provocatively, so long as you've got the evidence to back it up and entertain the opposing arguments. In other words, Joan Smith didn't get a bashing on Twitter or elsewhere, because her points were articulately and intelligently made.

Before Toby Young deploys the argument that Smith wouldn't get the same treatment as he would, because Smith is part of the 'liberal' chattering classes, Toby should also remember that AA Gill got a similar roasting on Twitter for his idiotic column on shooting a baboon. Gill's article wasn't a provocatively written piece, it was just wanting to cause an outcry for controversy's sake. An outcry, I suspect, similar to the one Toby was probably secretly predicting and wanting anyway, so he could have the bare-bones material to write another poorly-constructed article to warrant his pay cheque.

Incidentally, I know I'm on thin ice with this blog entry, particularly as my previous blog article recounts an encounter with a rather mischievous and drunken Caitlin Moran in a Soho pub. I got a bit of a ribbing off her, mainly because I'd played a prank on a friend of mine. At no point did I then run off home and write a bleating, put-upon blog entry about it. But then the 'private individual' flamed for being cheeky to Stephen Fry (as referred to in Toby Young's article) didn't do that either. Neither of us 'private individuals' have moaned about it, because we deserved the ribbing. Why can't a Spectator journalist shut his trap and behave like a man about it all, when us supposed 'liberals' can do it?

Doctor Who - New Series Trailer

Oh my word! Here's the new trailer for the "Doctor Who" series that's due to launch around about Easter. Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, you've already warmed my heart on a cold February day.

Please note that the BBC is encouraging the embedding of the above video in blogs, so long as I agree to their terms and conditions. So, spread the word and stick this in your blog, because this looks (to use an old Eccleston "Doctor Who" word) fantastic.

iThink, Therefore iPhone

There's a drip attached to my wrist. It's keeping me alive. It kept me alive while I was in London. It guided me to safety, it found my friends and it helped me decipher an unrecognised haunting melody. It warmed me with familiar songs on my favourite mix tape, it helped me find a sheltering inn and it allowed a renowned journalist to send a dirty message to a pal of mine, with attached photo of herself. I thought this blog post would be about the flashpub event that I attended and, to some degree, it is. However, it's also about the little companion in my pocket, the iPhone, that helped me through the entire weekend and for that I simultaneously thank it and hate it. In that sense, this blog post is more perfectly suited to the Luddite web developer persona of my Twitter username, particularly as I will conclude that such dependence on the iPhone is not a good thing.

From the moment that I landed in England's capital city, jumping on a Tube train to Kings Cross brought with it the first puzzle. Even though I knew the name of my hotel and the accompanying address, I was overcome by the sheer number of damned hotels at Kings Cross. Asking for directions and the people of London were typically helpful, while the cabbies were particularly vocal in showing off "The Knowledge". However, the problem was simply one of similarity. Often, individuals would point to the hotel they thought I meant, so I'd variously get pointed to "Premier Lodge Kings Cross", "Holiday Lodge Kings Cross", "Kings Cross Premier Inn" or, indeed, any permutation of a bunch of words that could conceivably lead me to what I was actually looking for - namely, "The Kings Cross Holiday Inn Hotel (Premier)". In the end, I held up my iPhone and chose an augmented reality application called Layar. This then meant I could look through the lens of my camera and have a grid superimposed on the street in front of me, showing the location of hotels all around me as blue blobs and identifying them all by name. So far, so Tron. The solution of finding my hotel then consisted in walking slowly down Kings Cross Road, staring through the iPhone viewfinder toward the big blue blob marked with my chosen hotel name and avoid looking like a lost tourist. More to the point, I had to really try not to look like a lost tourist  bumping off London pedestrians like a drunk Daddy Longlegs, holding an expensive piece of Apple-branded machinery out in front of me in full view of everyone.

By the time I arrived at my hotel room, the high-tech arsing around had made me feel high-handedly blasé. Stupid of me, as I had to immediately meet up with a female friend and fellow tweeter that I'd never actually seen in real life till now. I ended up rushing out after spending too much time trying to make myself look presentable, something that was ridiculous in hindsight. I was meeting a lady that had admired the cut and gib of my blown 140 character verbal chunks (vice versa, me with her), not for any surface appearances. My fellow tweeter had also confessed to having a black eye due to a gin-fuelled excursion involving a police car and a pavement. She had told me that I could, more or less, turn up looking like Fred West after he'd emptied his bins and she wouldn't have minded. How did I manage to meet her so quickly, if she was in Soho and I was at Kings Cross? Well, considering how unfailingly smug I was with the iPrick, I probably thought I could teleport at that point. However, I downloaded the London Underground iPhone app, which immediately told me the quickest route I could take to meet the damsel-on-Dean-Street and it meant getting to Oxford Street Tube station. My iPhone also helpfully pointed out that I should walk east down Oxford Street once I got off the train.

So, once I leapt out of the station, I did what any smug bellend with an Apple penis extension would do. Rather than check the skyline, I whipped out the Compass iPhone app that duly pointed me east. What an absolute cunt I must have looked to everyone. In my slight defence, I was in a hurry. Even still though, it is only a slight defence. After a few minutes, I turned a corner and saw a proper 3D, honest-to-goodness, non-virtual version of my fellow tweeter, RoxanneLaWin. It's always properly unnerving, but simultaneously exciting to meet a tweeter for the first time. It's happened once before, when I finally met deadlyredhead in a theatre foyer and she made a first impression on me by showing me the fart application on her iPhone (told you the iPhone was the underlying theme to this entire blog entry). RoxanneLaWin made her first impression on me by doing what any self-respecting human being could do to a lost soul in London. She hugged me. Quite apart from it being a good strong squeeze, it made me realise that virtual interaction really does have its limits. Plus, get the iPhone violins out (and there'll be an app for that, I don't doubt), it made me realise that I hadn't been given a hug in ages.

This then leads neatly onto the flashpub scenario itself, because the main reason it was organised was to finally meet all these people in the flesh. And, again, the iPhone came into action again. Quite apart from using the Tweeps function (which geographically seeks out marked tweets), we were made aware of where the flashpub event was taking place by a slyly placed tweet from none other than the highly mischievous Times journalist (and sometime TV presenter), Caitlin Moran. "We're upstairs!". So, we jumped up the stairs and joined the conglomerate of charmers there. That's really no exaggeration, either. Every single one was utterly charming, even "swearmonger-in-chief" Ian Martin. Special mention should be made to one tweeter from Birmingham, who very nearly didn't make it, due to excessive shyness - and the lovely lady, the aptly-named tweeter ihavecake, who brought with her... wait for it... cakes! And, my goodness, what cakes!?! My tastebuds have still not fallen out of love with me because of that encounter.

I should really single out Caitlin too, as she formed the unexpected role of acting as a useful beacon (and hostess) for the flashpub event, as her familiar face (from being in the public eye) marked out the group as being the correct gathering. If she hadn't been there, RoxanneLaWin and myself would genuinely have not found the group! Caitlin also casually brought up the next example of my iPhone being a domineering tool throughout the weekend. After I told her that a male friend of mine (who will remain nameless) couldn't attend the flashpub event, she took my iPhone and sent him a personalised text message, full of empathy and sensitivity: "Hello, it's Caitlin here, come and join us in the pub, we're pissed and talking about cocks!". And just for good measure, she got me to take a murky photo of her and attach it to the lovingly crafted text message, just to prove it wasn't just me winding him up. Plus, it would be remiss of me not to mention that a friend of Ms Moran's and Ms Martin's, writer David Quantick, made a surprise appearance later and I was able to buy him a whisky for his work on one of my favourite comedy TV programmes, "Brass Eye" (and "The Day Today"), as well as enjoying a natter with him.

Anyway, after a blissful night, talking to an elegant array of intelligent and lovely people, I appear to have made a few new friends. I hope to see them all again in the non-virtual world real soon. Preferably a world where I didn't need to rely on my iPhone every second. Quite apart from all of the above uses, it also got me to the airport in time (the Underground Tube app "pushes" notifications of train delays); it identified a song in a cafe that I'd wanted for ages but didn't know the title; plus it played a Spotify song compilation that I'd assembled while I was running around England's capital city. Here's the deal, though. Apple's iPhone may be the bees knees for useful apps, but every single one of them that you buy in Apple's App Store breaks web standards. None of them are cross-platform and none of them can be ported to non-Apple phones. Although a recent Apple acolyte (I'm typing this on my lovely MacBook), I'm certainly not part of the Steve Jobs religion. Sure, Apple's designs run along the "nothing useless can be truly beautiful" principle of William Morris, but the non-portability of iPhone apps is a monopolistic nod to vendor lock-in - something Microsoft is routinely guilty of. I don't want to have an Apple-branded syringe constantly taped to my arm, particularly as the group of smart and sassy real-life tweeters were a timely reminder that technology has its limits and can never replace witty chat, fine wine and good beer.

Here are the lovely people I managed to natter with on the #flashpub Twitter event. Please follow them, because they're all brilliant! I wish I'd managed to talk to everyone there, so sorry if I never managed. Oh, and here's the Spotify compilation I made while I was down in London.