It happened again tonight. I’d mulled over another blog post on the train home. I had the arguments down pat, the basic outline OK, even thought a couple of witty side remarks to put in. And then it came down to writing the damn thing, and… well it all went a bit crap. Halfway through I decided to “Save As Draft”, and then realised there was a stack of other posts that I’d similarly never got round to finishing. At that point I finally acknowledged what I had known deep deep down all along, which was that none of them would never see the light of day.

I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m running out of things to say. Maybe I’m getting too self-conscious of the audience this blog has. Maybe, worst of all, I’m getting bored of blogging. I’m not sure. But whatever it is, it looks like I need a break from it. I don’t how long - I could go cold turkey and be back in a week, or I might feel so liberated I won’t bother for a year. I might even do an idea I’ve lazily entertained, which is give up this blog entirely and start writing elsewhere under an anonymous identity.

Whatever it is, I won’t be writing here for a bit. I might still run a linklog and take photos, but I won’t write properly until I feel it’s worth the effort again. Till then, seeya.

Johann Hari has a go at Little Britain (via del.icio.us/sharpener), and all in all it’s rather confused: is Matt Lucas the gay and fat equivalent of Uncle Tom, or a sneering white middle-class bully who delights in misogyny? Is it their fault for creating these characters, or the public at large for taking them to their hearts? Everybody and nobody is to blame.

I have never really liked Little Britain that much - unlike other catchphrase-oriented sketch comedy like The Fast Show, its menagerie of characters are practically zero-dimensional, while neither Matt Lucas nor David Walliams possess the acting ability nor the wit to make any sketch anything more than hammed-up pedestrian predictability. Virtually every comic element in the series is borrowed from another (vomiting old lady - Mr Creosote from The Meaning of Life; Marjorie Dawes - Pauline from The League of Gentlemen; people in fat suits - Russ Abbot was doing that fifteen years ago, for fuck’s sake). Add that to the simplistic crassness and toilet humour and you end up with something that’s not very funny, the odd surreal sketch from the first series notwithstanding.

Now, not being funny is no crime, but LB is much worse than that. There’s the sheer inevitability of what will you’ll hear from anyone trying to defend the show’s crassness - that it’s postmodern-faux-ironic, knowingly self-aware in its offensiveness, that it’s satiring homophobia/misogyny/racism, and if anyone’s offended by the poor taste, the joke is on them. If you’re thinking of adding a “come on, lighten up, see the funny side” comment along these lines - don’t bother. That kind of excuse has been knocking about for ten years, if not more, to justify any form of culture which is offensive to some particular group, from Marilyn Manson to South Park. Of course, for this argument to work, then the offensiveness has to be nuanced in some way; there has to be some sort of subtext or different level of alternate meaning conveyed. Problem is, Little Britain has none of this, although that doesn’t stop it from trying to hide its true ugly nature.

In fact, it desperately tries to wear its right-on attitude on its sleeve as much as possible, such as the attempt to paint Marjorie Dawes as a bigot, with her thinly-veiled patronising racism aimed at the Asian member of her slimming group. However, the moment Ting Tong, the mail-order Thai bride played by Matt Lucas, appears on the screen, the pretence to sophistication vanishes. Ting Tong is nothing more than the pathetic flogging of another crass racist stereotype - yellow makeup, dodgy buck teeth and an inability to pronounce one’s “r”s and you have a winning formula. It’s interesting to note that while Spike Milligan’s browning-up in Curry and Chips and The Black and White Minstrel Show have now been consigned forever to TV Hell (accompanied by lots of self-congratulatory back-slapping), Little Britain gets away with away with the exact same kind of thing. If you think I’m over-reacting, then consider this - is it any way likely that Matt Lucas would have instead dressed up as a Pakistani, put on a “goodness gracious me” accent, and done a sketch about arranged marriages?

However, I don’t want to go down the line that it’s the viewing public’s fault for willingly taking it. Although it’s interesting to question why, generally, racism against South East or East Asians is less controversial than that against South Asians or blacks, overdwelling on “the mob knows best” reasoning leads to an easy excuse for any kind of behaviour; it’s intellectually lazy and panders to apathy and conformism as the final arbiter of quality or taste, and is just as invalid when someone tries to justify the commissioning of all those awful 1970s sitcoms. Matt Lucas and David Walliams didn’t have to create that character, if they didn’t want to. They clearly did want to, and this makes them as much casual, ignorant racists as the characters they lamely try to send up.

You’ll never guess what! Remember when this blog used to be good, and I moaned on about ID cards? They’ve only gone and stuck it in a book. So now you too can live the glory days of qwghlm.co.uk, but with the twist of using old-fashioned paper. Crazy stuff. So, waste no time: go pick up your copy of 2005: Blogged - Dispatches from the Blogosphere - the official best of British blogging from the past year. Pages 142 to 145 are what you should be reading first; not that you’d be able to work it out from the index - I am the only blogger in the book to be listed under “www.” rather than my real name. Hmph.

Seriously though, having had a quick flick through, it does look good and there is some high-quality writing there, both from blogs I know and those I don’t; in fact, what will probably follow in the next few days are links to a whole set of newly-discovered blogs to link to. Also, some long-stewing thoughts on the future of blogging and British blogging in particular, a mere six months after everyone else weighed in on the same topic. And also, more interesting posts in general, I promise…

The angry greenie inside me really really wishes that Houseblinger (via wonderful electric), a showcase of houses shrouded in tasteless Christmas lighting, could be turned into some sort of “name and shame” site for people who merrily waste electricity for no good reason - so perhaps when the post-energy crash apocalypse occurs, we all know how who to blame and put in the stocks. Maybe.

Still, it reminds me of a quite magnificent “blinged up” house that I used to pass by every day in winter when I use to work in Greenwich (well, Maze Hill…), which was gaudy beyond belief - ho-ho-hoing Santas, flickery things that were a risk to passing epileptics, the lot. Although there was one unfortunate day I walked by, and it appeared to be the funeral of a close family member; not that that stopped them having the lights on. I suppose it’s what they would have wanted…

Maybe my eyes were deceiving me, but on the Tube at Canada Water yesterday, I could have sworn I saw a big red poster with the words “Kung hei fat choi” in a suitably Orientalish font on the opposing platform’s wall. Now, I know the shops turn Christmassy a little too early for my taste, and it’s just about tolerable. But if we’re now getting adverts for Chinese New Year, which will be on January 29th, in mid-November, then that’s taking the piss, quite frankly. I’ll be going back with a camera tomorrow to take another look…

Some bright spark at The Times has pointed out that the change in licensing laws at midnight on Thursday will technically mean pubs will have to stop serving at 11pm for an hour, wait an hour, then re-open. Well done to whoever thought that one up.

(Actually, I suspect most publicans won’t bother, and will instead wait for Friday, whereupon everyone in England and Wales will stay in the pub till 2 for one of those “being part of history” moments - an event surely worth liveblogging, if ever there was one)

Sorry for not posting of late, but it is for a good reason - I have a new job. And it’s going fine, although I am having to remember many long-forgotten Unix commands… Anyway, while I’m still finding my feet, I won’t be blogging much.

But here’s a quickie. Earlier in the week Alistair Darling discussed introducing additional security measures on trains. So, we’ll be scanned, have sniffer dogs set upon us, have our bags searched, just like on the aeroplanes (although it will be random rather than compulsory). We’re even getting ‘intelligent’ CCTV cameras, that can “detect” faces*. Except of course, that unlike aeroplanes, no-one’s ever steered a train into a skyscraper and blown it up. Although the high mass and speed of a train make it an initially attractive source of kinetic energy with which to wreak destruction, trains are not really ideal to hijack, what with the driver never actually being in full control. I’d be fairly confident in saying that a train is pretty low down the list of terrorists’ preferred options** for taking over for nefarious purposes.

Of course, trains can still be blown up and cause considerable carnage, as Madrid and London have seen, regrettably. But, this is still no good reason for the latest proposals. This is not because of the impracticalities - they would have to scan three million people a day on the Tube alone; instead it’s the sheer frigging dumbness of the ’solution’. Trains may be labelled a “soft” target by Darling, but so are cafés, restaurants, shopping centres, shops, pubs, offices, parks, pedestrian crossings… in fact, practically anything in this country. Posting millimetre-wave scanners on every ticket gate isn’t going to stop the truly deluded and hateful from commiting murder; they’ll just look elsewhere (Israel, with its fortress of a public transport system, is a case in point - the suicide bombers just went elsewhere). Perhaps instead we should start thinking about terrorism as something more than what can merely be solved by throwing technology at it.

* Incidentally, a BBC report quoted that: “a few years ago, it took 10 or 15 seconds to compare a face. Now it takes three”. That’s not at all encouraging - it implied that the systems have Moore’s law to thank, rather than any actual advances in the field.
** Unless the only Western film they have ever seen is The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

Ooh, a post not about anti-terror laws - shock horror. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I mused on NAS drives for the home. Several people in the comments section recommended hooking up an ordinary USB hard drive with a Linksys NSLU2 - an option I had considered but wasn’t keen for the additional expense and un-neatness of having two separate bits of kit.

Anyway, I then found a pretty decently priced USB HD - a 250GB Buffalo Drivestation, from Amazon for £85, and that brought the cost per gig down to a level in my current price range. So I bought the two items, and set them up. And it’s working pretty fine, although my wireless connection does occasionally blip out, but then I am running my MP3 folder as a mapped hard drive, rather than streaming it like I should do. Also, the Buffalo is needlessly ugly, but I really don’t mind that too much.

So, I’m happy with it. But, there’s a few things worth knowing, if you plan to do the same:

• The packaging and manual for the NSLU2 say you have to format the drive using EXT3, which means you can’t then re-plug it back into a Windows PC via USB directly. This would be a pain, especially as it means you can’t load up the drive using the USB connection (which is faster than doing so via Ethernet), then plug it back into the network via the NSLU2. But, help is at hand - Linksys have offered a firmware upgrade that allows it to handle NTFS as well as EXT3. Hurrah.
• The NSLU2’s default IP address is 192.168.1.77. My router (a Netgear) operates in the 192.168.0.* IP range by default, which means it couldn’t find the NSLU2. It took me nearly an hour to work this out, stupidly, a simple change in the settings panel sorts it out fine.
• If you want to use Windows network neighborhood with the NSLU2, then remember to give it the correct workgroup in (”Administration” -> “System” in the NSLU2’s interface), else it won’t show up properly when connected.

And that’s it. It’s not absolutely perfect running the MP3 storage drive using Windows’ own networking protocols, but good enough for the moment, When I have a little more time I will probably re-flash it with some of the NSLU2-Linux project’s software so I can do cool stuff like proper MP3 streaming and things like that. My thanks to everyone whose comments helped me in choosing.