Invasion of the Vorticons

I just stumbled across a rare internet treasure. A site that provides you with countless classic video games, for free. I went there originally to satisfy my demand for world conquest via the majestically educational Civilisation II (which should be made compulsory for all secondary school students). But what else did I find? None other than my childhood favourite, and yet almost completely forgotten about, Commander Keen. I used to play this game on the Commodore 64 when I was about seven or eight. I remember my dad taking me down to the local hardware store to buy the games on cassette tape. It was rare that we would get a new one but always magical when we did. Rushing home with it. Taking it out the case. Hurridly ramming it in the tape deck. Hitting play.

Then waiting for forty minutes. The tape had to slowly run from start to finish as the Commodore loaded up all the information it needed before finally it bleeped it action. And in the simple days of my childhood, before girls and social awareness had cast their ugly shadow on my thoughts, these words were all that were true to me:

BILLY BLAZE, EIGHT YEAR-OLD GENIUS, WORKING DILIGENTLY IN HIS BACKYARD CLUBHOUSE HAS CREATED AN INSTELLER STARSHIP FROM OLD SOUP CANS, RUBBER CEMENT AND PLASTIC TUBING. WHILE HIS FOLKS ARE OUT ON THE TOWN AND THE BABYSTIIER HAS FALLEN ASLEEP, BILLY TRAVELS INTO HIS BACKYARD WORKSHOP DONS HIS BROTHERS FOOTBALL HELMET AND TRANSFORMS INTO…

COMMANDER KEEN: DEFENDER OF EARTH

IN HIS SHIP, THE BEAN AND BACON MEGA ROCKET, KEEN DISPENSES GALACTIC JUSTICE WITH AN IRON HAND!

America's disease begins to spread

I do enjoy a good riot. For starts they make great television and every May 1st I hope some misguided punk will give a copper a good smashing just so I can watch the ensuing fight. But I’m a little twisted like that. Bizarrely what I most tend to admire about such events is when the authorities win out. Unlike the spineless French who give in to a few thousands pot smoking students with placards, here in Britain we have a few more draconian laws in favour of the police and we never let the people get their way. If nothing else riots keep the authorities on their toes. Keeps them thinking and earning their wages. Plus they can be of even greater benefit too. We must never forgot how Margaret Thatcher, by depriving a few hundred thousands miners and their families of a future, was able to immeasurably make the whole country richer. And, loath him as I might, Rupert Murdoch played a cruelly cunning trick on the powerful printing unions by secretly building an automated press that came online at the exact same moment that he sacked all his overpaid union workers from their jobs printing ‘The Sun’.

So as I was flicking through the newspaper and saw that in Copenhagen up to 700 so called ‘leftists’ had been arrested after a weekend of frenzied violence I paid attention. Typical Europe I thought, full of lefties still waiting for the USSR to come liberate them from the Imperial powers of old Europe. But this riot came with an interesting twist.

The riots were in reaction to the closure of a local youth centre, which had become the seat of leftwing activism in the Danish capital. First opened to the public in 1982 to keep folk off the streets it also became a hot venue for street music and culture. All of which seem like healthy developments and of which I am in favour. I think such institutions add character to a place and disagree as I might on their finer points of philosophy such places still retain a ‘cool’ factor. But this one was being closed.

And why? Had the government had enough? Was it looking to squash this movement in its infancy? After all these would be perfectly understandable reasons and indeed typical behaviour for many a government. But no. Armed police conducted a morning raid to oust the men and women from the centre because the building had a new buyer.

A buyer by the name of Ruth Eversen. And Eversen had purchased the site because God had told her to. Oh joy. God had instructed her to ‘return’ Denmark to its righteous path of Christian ‘love’ and ‘charity’ - and other such shamefully spiteful words hijacked by organised religion. God had told her specifically to start with the part of town in which the youth centre was based. God must enjoy picking fights because it is also the same part of town in which Copenhagen’s large Muslim community is based.

Good old born again Christian bigots. It seems the disease is spreading out from its American heartland.

Let it be known that should there ever be a riot in which either left or right faced a religious opponent – count me in. And my old offer still stands. In anticipation of the day of reckoning when the Christians take over I am still looking for partisans to come live with me in the mountains from where we shall conduct lighting raids on churches to install condom machines in their bathrooms and distribute scissor sister records under the pews.

Solidarity my brothers, solidarity.

The morality of carphone warehouse

Now I’m not a huge fan of Big Brother. Sure I, like most people, have been hooked in the past and on one level I do appreciate the neat social experiment it represents. I usually like to think myself above such pursuits as idle gossip about people I don’t know. Then again, I am insanely interested in politics, which in fairness is probably more sinister.

The recent ‘racist’ allegations have however sparked my interest. From what I have gathered from various websites and newspapers I think I have struck upon an ingenious explanation, which quite helpfully, slots in perfectly with my all to class-conscious world view. I fear that what happened in celebrity Big Brother might well have been a microcosm of Britain in the near future.

Jade Goody has been cast as the ringleader of the racist attacks against Shilpa Shetty. Now, I am inclined to believe that Goody’s comments were indeed racist, if only because my idol Dave Gorman is quoted on youtube as saying as such. So why? Why would a celebrity, obviously conscious of her own reputation and her own brand name, commit career suicide by saying the things she did?

I think she did it because this was not initially about race. It was about class.

What we saw was a working class and uneducated white female, albiet plucked from obscurity by her big mouth and appearance on a reality television show. While she might be a millionaire for producing work out videos for equally obnoxious and ‘plump’ women; she still holds working class values and is still from a working class family (as we also all saw).

Shilpa Shetty on the other hand is a moderately slim and attractive actress who grew up with values firmly rooted in the upper echelons of society. She also happens to be Asian.

What occurred between Shilpa and Jade was a clash of values. Goody was at odds with the bizarre and pompous ways of the born into affluence Shilpa. So Jade, perhaps also feeling threatened or jealous of someone far more attractive than she – looked for a means to strike back. And she found it in race.

This is my worry. If as I previously stated, globalisation is making the rich richer and the poor poorer we can rightly expect to see a little bit of class conflict occurring. It is only to be expected and in many respects is entirely valid. Yet Britain has dealt with this sort of internal strife before right? We usually solve it by stirring up patriotism with a few good wars and then eventually placating people’s demands by throwing some new social policies at them. Yet I feel any future class conflict will be different, because Britain is now different.

Many of the upper to middle classes in 21st century Britain are not ethnically Anglo-Saxon. They are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, or the children of children of immigrants and most seem to embrace a work ethos far in excess to anything to be seen on the council estates of provincial Britain. This has enabled many of them to climb the social ladder with astonishing speed. Yet their success has also opened up a new dimension in class conflicts.

For when grasping for a means to undermine the higher classes will people be tempted to do a ‘Goody’ and embrace racist rhetoric as a means of unsettling the established order? Possibly.


Note: Please excuse my snobbish arrogance. Again.

Cardboard Coloured Dreams

So a flurry of posting is now underway, which can mean only one thing! Deadlines loom. But for the next ten minutes, loom I shall let them, because I want to tell you about my new favourite band:

You see, I have always longed to be cool enough to listen to obscure bands that know one else really knew about, but alas (alack), I never have been. Always a child of the mainstream. But wait. Last summer someone introduced me to the Rumble Strips. A band from Tavistock. Which is somewhere in the south west of England so I am told, although they are really based in London. And they rock.

I was introduced to them because a friend and fan of the band was insanely jealous that I was off to the Reading festival (where they were playing), and she was not. So after familiarising myself with their style on their Myspace account some weeks previous I went down to the dusty little cow shed that was the Carling Stage. They had secured themselves an illustrious 11am slot on this renowned stage. A stage with a habit of breaking successful new acts. They played in front of no more than about a hundred to a hundred and fifty people. But they rocked. But not in the ‘woo this rocks!’ sense, but in the far more mature ‘woo, this rocks!’ kind of way.

They play an upbeat, yet mellow, sort of Indy music with the saxophone, trumpet and keyboard being just as central to their songs as the usual guitar and drums. Following their Reading gig I sort of became hooked on their progress.

And I have stunning news. Not only do I have tickets to see them on April 2nd when they come to Cabaret Voltaire in Edinburgh (I know – stunning isn’t it). But they also have a full album release for the summer of this year! Previously their only release had been a couple of singles and a cardboard clad EP of only four songs. But now they have a full album, produced by none other than the same chap behind both the Kooks and the Fratellis. I am never sure who in the musical world does the ‘tipping’, but ‘tipped’ they have been - these guys are the next summer sensation. Personally I think their unique style probably excludes them from the mega successes of the former two bands but they still certainly deserve their share of time in the limelight.

So consider this me officially jumping on their bandwagon. Before they get big. So I can say that I was there. At the beginning (sort of).

Here’s hoping.

Desalinising Dreams

This is an obscure post that will undoubtedly offend the faint hearted and those with little appreciation for ‘boring’ subject matter. I apologise now.

Today I’m feeling good about myself. I just bagged up two loads of empty plastic bottles and carted them off to the local recycling bin. Feeling environmentally smug I then proceeded to go for the double, because I then used the same two plastic bags the bottles were in to take my shopping home. How brilliant am I?

Not very it would seem. I’m sitting here now doing my reading, sipping periodically from my bottle of chilled Evian. Not wishing to tame my wondering mind I got thinking about this bottle of Evian. Water. Mineral water. From France. In a plastic bottle. Transported here. And I’m drinking it.

I am not so much concerned with the carbon footprint of this bottle as I am with what it contains. Water from a finite fresh water source. I am sure that the company behind Evian ensures that it extracts a sufficient amount to keep its profits rolling at a sustainable level for a good number of years, but I doubt it is fully sustainable in the long run nor do I suspect it is entirely safe from even slight variations in rainfall that might be caused as part of global climate change. But they are not the only ones tapping their water from shrinking freshwater sources. Most of the world is facing a fresh water shortage of some sort and I even read somewhere that many people predict that wars in the future will be predominately fought either directly or indirectly over water supply.

This seems incredible when you consider that the other danger facing mankind is a rise in sea levels – too much water – that is threatening hundreds of millions of people in low lying areas. Surely a growth industry over the next one hundred years will be the treatment of salt water into fresh drinking water. A process known as desalination.

The technology is incredibly expensive (and has one or two environmental hitches, but none that are not overcome with a little preplanning) and requires massive upfront investment with only long term pay back prospects. Yet it does happen, and predictably it happens most in areas with a hotter climate, Saudi Arabia, for example produces 24% of the world’s desalinated water.

This has got me excited. I sense another way in which someone might help save the world and get rich at the same time. As a lonely fourteen year old I drew out elaborate plans to create my own ‘solar’ company. Now I feel that I missed the boat, any such company established in … what would have been 1998, could surely be sold on now, in an atmosphere of alternative energy frenzy, at a fair old sum – with or without evidence of much profit.

Now I once again feel I have stumbled across a misguided path to morally satisfying riches. If anyone wants to go halves on a fifty million pound (solar?) desalination plant off the coast of Africa somewhere – the output of which could be cleverly bottled and marketed towards the western ‘consumer conscious’ market – let me know.

Apollo

I hope most of you saw the lunar eclipse tonight. I personally went half way up Arthur’s seat to watch it unfold over the city. As did most of Edinburgh by the looks of things, there was a great atmosphere up there. Very pretty.

While the magic of the moment lasted only a split second before it became almost normal to have a reddish coloured moon hanging in the sky, it was a particularly magical split second.

It was sort of strange to see our collective shadow fall over another body in the solar system, even if it was our own satellite. It must have been quite a show for the lunar people too. I’d love to have been there.

Come on people. We can’t live on this lonely rock forever. Can we?

Colonising the seas

This is a story taken straight from BBC News but it has pressed all the right buttons and got me all giddy. So here’s the deal:

A Dutch company has invented a type of floating house which, while stationary, is able to rise and fall with the sea levels up to a height of four meters. The idea being that the Netherlands will be one of the first victims of global warming and answers are needed fast if life is to be allowed to continue in any way close to normality. Apparently officials from New Orleans have expressed an interest in the new designs and hopefully these sorts of homes will catch on around the globe.

It is simply not enough to pass legalisation saying that Europe and the US will cut carbon emissions. Firstly the situation is so desperate that it will take a complete revolution in lifestyle habits in the rich world – which if it happens at all is going to take decades to phase in. Secondly China and India are going to be hard to tame. And thirdly even if everyone suddenly became a green fanatic tomorrow I believe it would still be too late. Events have been put in motion that we cannot reverse. Ice is going to melt. Global climate is going to change. Millions of people will lose their homes.

It is time we accepted this all to likely outcome and began planning for it now. The Netherlands is taking an understandable lead in this (what with their very existence depending on it), but so should Britain. We have plenty of low-lying areas; indeed my very own East Anglia is more or less the mirror image of the Netherlands itself. I can envisage a row of these sorts of homes selling for good prices along the Norfolk and Suffolk coast. Londoners with a conscience and a fascination for the new might be easily persuaded to part with their hard earned cash. Anyone want to lend me a couple of million to begin construction?

On the flip side it is interesting to note that there might be some perverse justice in mother nature exacting its revenge, first on the Netherlands and then Britain. Both of which were of course the first two modern capitalist nations and perhaps therefore have a lot to answer for.

Link:

February 2002

"The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green grass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night. And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flowerpots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamour to cover the silence that came from outside the door and shaded window.

In six months a dozen small towns had been laid down upon the naked planet, filled with sizzling neon tubes and yellow electric bulbs. In all, some ninety thousand people came to Mars, and more, on Earth, were packing their grips…"