Beware of the Train

Today I shall be mostly listening to Radiohead, in an attempt to find out if they're as bad as I remember.

While it's not 100% true to say that I dislike all things which are popular, it is true that the more ubiquitous something is, the more likely I am to take violently against it. My answer to "Blur or Oasis?" was "Get the hell away from me before I cut you." And Radiohead were everywhere when I was at school. Playing out of every other window, lyrics scrawled on walls, you name it. As one spotty oik, my entire year (except me) went into town and bought OK Computer on the day it was released. But as far as I could see it was just tuneless dirge played by wankers who hated their fans and couldn't even be classy about saying so. I have no problem with depressing music - I listened to quite a lot of depressing music back then, being a teenager and all - but Radiohead were depressing and rubbish.

But it's thirteen years later, and Radiohead are still inexplicably popular, so perhaps I was the one who was wrong. Sometimes you're just not ready for certain music, and will enjoy it more later. And music's always easier to appreciate when it isn't assaulting you every time you turn a corner.

So today I'm going to listen to a bunch of Radiohead albums in chronological order, make notes on each track, and post them on my blog for your amusement.

( Here's what I'll be listening to: notes will appear throughout the afternoon. )

( Overall verdict )

wormwood_pearl is now teaching herself to play Karma Police on the ukulele :-(

Yesterday I finally crossed off a to-do item that's been bothering me for twenty-one years.

In Primary 4 I had an evil, horrible, hateful, permanently-angry teacher called Mrs Begg. I have no qualms about giving her real name, and even if I did, she's surely dead now. Mrs Begg had one of those rolling endless blackboards, and up the right-hand side she'd write a list of things to do. As soon as the first child finished the last task on the list, she'd add another one on the bottom. I, of course, was usually struggling along somewhere near the top of the list, not because the tasks were too hard (they weren't) but because the work was mostly boring and the volume of stuff I was supposed to get through was too dismaying.

Then, one day, she pronounced herself more than usually dismayed with the slow kids, and wiped off a bunch of items from the list. Great! you might think. But you'd be wrong, because (a) I'd just been told in no uncertain terms that I'd failed, (b) the list still grew faster than I could keep up, and (c) there were actually some items on the wiped-out portion that I was looking forward to doing. When I got to them. Whenever that would be.

In particular, one of the wiped-out tasks was to make one of those paper fortune teller things. As a result of the Bonfire of the Makework, I never learned how to construct one. I'm sure you can imagine the difficulties that the lack of this crucial skill has caused in my subsequent life.

When I'm under stress, the image of this Sisyphean blackboard comes back to haunt me, and especially the task that I was supposed to complete - that I was looking forward to completing - but didn't. So on Sunday I decided to exorcise it once and for all, by sitting down and making a paper fortune teller. I was going to Google for some instructions, but then wormwood_pearl offered to use her Magical Girl Powers¹ and teach me how to make one. Turns out it's really easy: cut out a square of paper, fold it across both diagonals, open it out again, fold all four corners into the centre to make a square with half the area, fold all four corners of the new square into the centre to make another square with a quarter of the area of the original square, fold this third square in half lengthways, then stick your fingers into the folds. If that's not clear, there are, for the moment, diagrams on the Wikipedia page.

Since I'm a geek, the fortunes had a programming slant. After spelling out your favourite programming language and choosing your favourite regular expression metacharacter, you arrive at one of the following four fortunes:

• Your projects will all come in on time and under budget.
• You will be assailed by numerous heisenbugs.
• You will not write enough tests.
• You will write a subroutine too cleverly, and later regret doing so.

The first outcome, of course, is the Holy Grail (and seen about as often), and the rest are almost inevitable.

The alert or clueful reader will have noticed that there is only one good fortune, and so if the name of the sitter's favourite programming language has the wrong parity they are denied any possibility of a good outcome. This illustrates the important lesson that, though many technologies may be good enough to succeed, a bad initial choice can scupper you entirely. But even if you choose a language with the right parity, you have only a 50% chance of a good outcome: this illustrates the fact that good technology choices are necessary but not sufficient to success - the skill and good taste of the implementing team are still critical. More devilishly, if I know a particular sitter's favourite programming language in advance I can deny them any chance of success (mwahahaha! The power, it is intoxicating) which illustrates the unfortunate truth that even a good team using the best tools is screwed if the client doesn't play ball.

¹ By which she meant the Magical Powers she has by virtue of being a Girl, not the Powers she would have by virtue of being a Magical Girl. If wormwood_pearl is a Magical Girl, I have seen no sign of it. Which is of course exactly what I would expect to see if she were a Magical Girl...

*cue Bubblegum Crisis music*

Number 1 in an occasional series about friends and loved ones who are no longer with us.

My schoolfriend Fred Hood died on Christmas Eve last year, at the age of 28. Swept away by an avalanche while skiing in Austria, he was mercifully killed instantly. Being an international sort of chap, he had memorial services in Washington DC, Bologna, and Eton; I went to the Eton one, and then went back to his parents' house, where we held a wake for him in the marquee that had originally been hired for his brother's engagement party.

At the wake (and this is an idea I am totally stealing if I ever get asked to run one), they had a sort of open-mike eulogy: a microphone was passed around, and anyone who felt like it could stand up and share their memories of Fred. These were mine.

Back in 1997, we did a show called Blood and Honour at the Edinburgh Fringe, in which Fred played the leading man and I played a corpse. Fred was also in a rather better-received show called Who's Laughing Now?, in which he played a school bully. There's a story about Stanislavsky (from Bulgakov's Black Snow), in which Stanislavsky, unhappy with an actor's performance, calls for a bicycle and tells the actor "Now, love that woman on a bicycle!". In a similar spirit, I challenged Fred to sit down on a chair as his character. And he did. For a few seconds, as he thumped down, sprawled proprietorially, cast a hostile, privileged glance around the room, and shook open his newspaper, Fred wasn't inhabiting his body; instead, the space was occupied by an entirely different person, a million miles from the Fred we all knew. It remains one of the best pieces of acting I've ever seen.

Much was made at the service of Fred the actor, Fred the intellectual, Fred the scholar. Rather less was made of Fred the sportsman. And yet, we used to row together in Lower Boats, training six days a week and lifting weights for a couple of hours every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. I remember one day, when we went for a training run around one of those Etonian sports pitches named after an ancient Near Eastern civilisation, that Fred and I agreed to pace each other, and not to compete with each other. And yet, when we reached the final straight, I sped up to a sprint and hit the finish line well before him.

I just want to say that I'm sorry, dude. That was a dick move.

Conversation over on Reddit, prompted by this image:

the_bob: Since when are meatballs a meal in of themselves!?
pozorvlak: If these are anything like the faggots I was served in my youth, they're quite serious hunks of meat and onions and god-only-knows.
rockefeller2: Was this served in a Catholic church?
pozorvlak: English boarding school. But the principle's similar.
Sabremesh: Did your school have fagging, too?
pozorvlak: In former times, but not while I was there.
Actually, come to think of it, that's not quite right. I went to two different boarding schools in the course of my education: one served us faggots but IIRC never had fagging, and the other had had fagging in the past but didn't serve us faggots. The food was considerably better in the one with fagging but not faggots, though faggots were actually one of my favourite school meals at the one with faggots but not fagging. Although the huge servings of instant mash and peas that they served the faggots with were less pleasant.
pozorvlak: Actually, the school with fagging but not faggots had started life as a Catholic school. But mainly because it was founded before the Reformation.
Sabremesh: Thanks for that! At my boarding school we weren't served faggots, and never had fagging, but I can confirm that fags were everywhere, but heavily frowned upon. In fact smoking indoors was an expulsion offence.

For the terminally confused, faggots are a (very tasty) foodstuff geometrically intermediate between a meatball and a burger, made of pork offal, onions and herbs, and fagging was a system whereby younger boys acted as servants to older boys. It's not clear to what extent this was a form of institutionalised paederasty. "Fags", of course, are cigarettes in British slang.

I went to a high school reunion a couple of weeks ago.

( Cut for arrogance )