almost witty

In the late 1990s, inbetween freelance web jobs, I spent a day as an extra, being a Singaporean stock trader in the film Rogue Trader, a film about how stocktrader Nick Leeson managed to bring down the United Kingdom’s oldest investment bank. The film starred Ewan McGregor and Anna Friel.

Alas, any glamorous notions I had about finally being part of the film industry were somewhat thwarted by the sheer tedium of waiting around on film sets waiting for filming to start, with nothing to do except talk to equally disillusioned Chinese extras, who were mostly Filipino actors/actresses who’d come to London with dreams of treading the stage or doing some good acting, as opposed to ending up with a bunch of extras. Although I did manage to walk around the Pinewood Studios shop and buy a jacket.

After one day of work, being on/off set for about 10 hours and wasting three hours being shuttled between central London and Pinewood for £80 (and they were very keen to get people back for more extras shooting, but I’d rather sit in front of a computer pumping out webcode!), the net result is the picture you see. If you watch the film itself, I’m about 40 minutes into the film, just after Nick Leeson is celebrating Christmas with his girlfriend (Friel).

The only other time I saw it was when slightly drunk and waiting in eager anticipation to see The Matrix. One of the trailers that featured before it was for Rogue Trader, and I yelped in surprise when I saw a strangely familiar moon-shaped face staring at me on the screen before I realised it was me.

I kept meaning to track down the DVD but then to my surprise, when I stumbled in after a hard day at a works do summer party (football, softball, Pimms, quizzes and the odd bit of chat) to find the film showing on ITV4. And finally, I manage to capture my moment of fame alongside Ewan McGregor.

To come … how I had dinner with Frank Skinner and was in Stephen Fry’s bedroom…

Last night, we were at a sports bar grabbing a bite to eat. A sports bar with about sixty thousand LCD screens showing various moments from American TV - including coverage of the Ultimate Fighting Championships - which just about has to be the most homoerotic thing to be screened on American television.

Well, how else would you describe something which mostly seems to involve one muscular topless man sitting or squatting on another, grunting and generally thrusting various bits of his body on the other, while the other one lies there helpless or is grunting and thrusting away himself? All while the male observers in the sports bar were whooping and hollering, encouraging every movement - and then trying to chat up the young nubile college students nearby?

Then this morning, I was flicking through the various TV stations, and came across some kind of US equivalent of This Morning, where the hosts were comparing water options to go with your food. And the caption that ran along the bottom of the screen said:

Tap Water: Good for hydration

I shall never complain about British daytime TV again.

There’s a fascinating article in the Washington Post about what happened when they persuaded a world-class violinist, using a rare Stradivarius, to play some of the world’s ‘best’ classical music purposes while standing on an intersection in a busy Washington D.C. Metro station. Would commuters stop, and listen in awe - or move on in their busy lives?

Ironically, the article itself - as presented on the web - is so hideously long and complicated, I had to skim-read to find out what happened next. So the article online is definitely not a work of art.

Wired UK magazine

Originally uploaded by jovike

Back in 1994, Wired magazine tried to launch a UK version, working closely with the Guardian. Since I was barely in university, I couldn’t afford to waste precious money on such a future-looking magazine, so it came and went from my local newsagent but Jem Stone has kindly linked me to a fantastically grimly hilarious email about the trials and tribulations of Wired UK take 1.

Skip to today, and Conde Nast (the current publishers of Wired) have also announced plans to take Wired to the UK - to be edited by the Jewish Chronicle’s editor, David Rowan.

Not being part of the A-list (or even C-list) crowd of tech journalists, I can’t help but to wonder if it’s going to work second time around, just when the credit crunch is slowly being felt and the second dotcom boom is beginning to fade as a consequence. Besides which, I can only think of a couple of Brit-based tech journalists off the top of my head. And one of them only because she has a fantastically unique name.

There is a rising appetite for gadget magazines in the UK, already well served by the likes of Stuff and T3, but merging that with the internet era on a dead tree format? I’m assuming that TechCrunch UK and sites like it aren’t exactly burning up page impressions - and that’s on a free website.

But of course this gets back to my personal flaw in offering problems and reasons not to do something - but never to point out a solution.

- Gor blimey, what an episode. Just how many elements can you mix in?
- The visual FX were gor-blimey-spectacular.
- If only the episode had been called This Stolen Earth. Work in a bit of literary/sci-fi reference, that’s what I say… (is there a Shakespearian line about This Quiet Earth?)
- Suddenly, the propensity for even the official Doctor Who news outlets to start plugging the identity of the mysterious villain coming back, makes no total sense. Since that’s not what the cliffhanger centres around…

More spoilers here:
(continue reading…)