It seems I’ve made myself busy again. In amongst the various engagements that I have entangled myself in for the near future one is sticking out as rather interesting – The Blagger’s Banquet, as kicked off by Niamh from EatLikeAGirl.

In standard fashion I have managed to con my way into the organising of a rather interesting event. The Blagger’s Banquet basically goes down like this:

1. A bunch of bloggers take over Hawksmoor on Sunday November 15th
2. We cook a charity meal for 50 covers
3. ?
4. Profit!

Luckily in this situation step three (actually step 0, but that would fall outside of the scope of a cheap South Park reference and as such I have ignored reality) is defined – blag stuff. The plan is to obtain all the necessary material for the construction of said banquet by means of blagging, as suggested by the name. We’ve been approaching purveyors of food and drink asking for freebie stuff to both serve on the night as well as to auction off afterwards, all in aid of Action Against Hunger (the same guys who were in on NomNomNom) and we now have a list of tasty items that almost constitute a meal (although I think we need a few more veggies to water down the booze and meat combo we currently have going).

I don’t know how much they’ll cost or when they’ll go on sale, but there will be tickets, and there will also be an auction for some rather nice food and drink related items. I’ll stick something up here when either of them appear online. But in the meantime, if any of you nice people have contacts in the consumables industry and you think that they’d want to give us free stuff then please let me know – the more stuff the merrier.

Now to go and beg some fridge space from work…

This week I have mainly been busy. Busy and tired. However I did manage to fit in another cinema all-nighter to make three weekends in a row where I lost a night of sleep. Last night’s was with the lovely peeps of Geekplanet, who put together an all-night horror movie session along with the Empire in High Wycombe. Of the four films two were excellent (The Thing and American Werewolf in London), one was rubbish (My Bloody Valentine in 3D) and I sat outside during the final one, deciding that having a chat with someone was much more worthwhile than being in the cinema as the magic light flickered on the screen (Saw VI).

To kick the evening off we had a Q&A with Doug Bradley, mainly famous for being the lead Cenobite (aka Pinhead) in the Hellraiser movies. Being someone who has only seen the first in the series and didn’t think that much of it I wasn’t all that interested, but he’s an excellent speaker and a thoroughly nice chap and his book on the development of prosthetic make-up as continuation of masque theatre is now on my to-read list (even if it did sell out its small print run and is only available via his website). Me and the Geekplanet posse had a spot of dinner with him beforehand and there was much in the way of grinning and confused looks when there was a general realisation that we could all add “discussed politics, especially the development of the public persona of the BNP as a sign of voter apathy, with Pinhead from Hellraiser” to our list of lifetime achievements.

Anyways, I’ve spent the day uploading a few photos, having a little bit of a kip and playing Tales of Monkey Island episode 4: The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood, so in conjunction with my week of Busy I’ve not had a chance to do anything particularly creatively interesting. However, this photo of Mr Bradley is my favourite of the bunch, so I name it my creative thing of the week:

This evening I went to see Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus at Nicko and Joe’s Bad Film Club. I was quite fortunate to see it with Nicko and Joe talking over it, as the visuals combined with small amount of original dialogue that I did hear were enough to cause a minor nosebleed and I can only just imagine the total exsanguination that may have resulted from actually watching the film ‘as it was intended to be viewed’. I hereby request that the universe prevent, in a non-fatal manner, Deborah (formerly Debbie) Gibson from appearing in any further films. I have similar request about Lorenzo Lamas, although I am prepared to relax the fatality clause in his case.

This is the finest scene in the movie. After seeing this you don’t really need to see any of the rest.

However, on further consideration I feel that what this film needs most of all is a sequel. A brief twitter comment from movie companion Ed Whitfield got me thinking and I came up with a simple plot: Shark swims so fast at Wales (speed stated as 500knots in the first film) that on impact with the shoreline he starts burrowing and doesn’t stop until he pops up somewhere outside Paris. Other than that initial premise I have several other ideas for key scenes, including:

1. The shark biting the Eiffel Tower
2. The shark eating Le Pont des Arts
3. The shark skidding down the Champs Élysées and straight through the Arc de Triomphe, crushing some onion sellers
4. The shark arcing through the sky over an airport just too far outside of Paris to strictly be called a Parisian airport (e.g. Toulouse) but that is still referred to as such, plucking a purple liveried Ryanair jet from the air, and spitting it out with a comedy ‘Do Not Want’ caption under the picture and a grimace on the shark’s strangely expressive face
5. The post credits sequence of the shark tunnel surrounded by workman as a sign saying ‘Chunnel’ is knocked into the ground by a man with an oversized wooden mallet.

While these ideas are all, obviously, awesome I was still missing a villain. Someone, or something, to fill in for the Giant Octopus of the first film. I think I have an idea, as well as an opening for the film:

It was Sci-Fi-London last week and through a train of events that is becoming all too common I ended up watching a film that I didn’t think I wanted to and loving it. At last year’s festival it was Caro and Jeunet’s City of Lost Children (which is even more fantastic when seen projected from a 35mm print onto a nice big screen), this year it was Al Reinert’s For All Mankind – footage from the successful moon landing missions (with a few other space mission bits thrown in for continuity) edited together to look like one mission, from waiting to board the module to splashing down in the ocean, with a bit of weightlessness and playing on the moon in between. I sat with my mouth open and a tear in the corner of my eye for all of its 90 minutes and have now got a copy preordered on (rather pointless) BluRay for when the new release comes out on November 16th. It was nominated for a best documentary Oscar in 1989, beaten by Common Threads, and I see why. Incredible footage and a wonderful voiceover from the astronauts held together by a score that mixes Brian Eno with some of the music the astronauts took into space with them. It’s on YouTube if you want to have a watch:

Along with that the new Ares 1-x rocket was finally launched yesterday after some weather related pushbacks and it was a beautiful thing. A new reusable craft built to try and replace the space shuttle (although without the shuttle’s landing ability) for a chunk less cash, it’s been put together and launched in only a couple of years. The launch is now, of course, up on YouTube. The footage from flight control, unfortunately not on YouTube as far as I can see, is even better when you’ve just watched For All Mankind, where you can see how little has changed – there’s not a cigar or pipe in everybody’s mouth these days, but there’s still loads of hugging when things go right and the traditional chopping in half of the new launch director’s tie happened right on cue.

I think I want to be an astronaut again.

It’s been a bit of week, as demonstrated by the fact that apart from a “powernap” at about midday I haven’t slept since Friday night (hooray for Sci-Fi-London and my 2nd consecutive weekend with some kind of all-nighter thing going on. I have another next week…). Anyways, not much in the way of creativity going on outside of work and a quickly knocked up iPhone app for the BCS Young Professionals group. So, in the spirit of putting up something here’s one of my traditional Stormtrooper piccies from the first event of the Sci-Fi-London Oktoberfest – an evening of sci-fi geekery at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

I also, to continue my rather scary number of vocal appearances, guested on the GeekPlanetOnline’s flagship show – The Eclectic Podcast 1×17 – In Space Noone Can Hear You Squee! In order to keep my promises I watched Alien 3 at last night’s Aliens and Predators All-Nighter. It was okay.

It’s been a busy week this week, so I have little to post online showing my AWESOME CREATIVITY. Anyways, firstly, here’s the podcast that I contributed to. I’m up first to allow proper comedy callback and everything:

I had an idea for something to record for next week’s podcast, but I promptly forgot what it was, so there probably won’t be anything from me next week, but hopefully I’ll have other ideas one day.

Anyways, my proper ‘creative thing’ involved the art of ‘drawing’. Well, actually it’s tracing (and not in the Chasing Amy “you’re just a tracer” sense, just actualy tracing). We’ve recently had a ’social media’ policy come in at work, which includes a rather sensible “Please don’t associate yourself with $company online unless it’s for specific work reasons”. Whle I’m taking a deliberately pedantic take on this, I thought I better sort myself out a new internet avatar, as my old one has me wearing a work hat. So, combine the old photo, a clear plastic sheet, a fat permanent marker and my relative inability to draw, and what do you get?

It’ll do for now.

I like the Prince Charles Cinema.

Just a quick ‘what creative thing I did this week’ as I don’t really have anything I can post online.

Firstly I put together another podcast segment for The Pod Delusion, this one called ‘Fuck You Moon’, which will be out on Friday if it makes it past guest editor Will Howells’s comedic chopper. However, while I have an mp3 of it hiding on the internet it seems a but unsporting to post it here rather than make you download the whole podcast to hear my wisdom and wit.

Secondly I continued my iPhone app writing domination plans with a slightly more featured version of my SCI-FI-LONDON app. It’s not going to be done in time for Oktoberfest (October 23 and 24 – buy tickets now!) and may not be done in time for next April’s festival, but it has now at least one tab (the podcast one) that has some actual code in it. Even if I did pinch some of that code off of the internet.

I’m becoming less impressed with the iPhone API and Apple’s XCode development environment as I continue my tinkering – I found an undocumented ‘feature’ of the UILabel class yesterday (text labels can resize text in them to have a try at automatically fitting the contents to the size of the label, but that stops working if you allow the label to have multiple lines), got bitten by a bug causing very weird errors (a peril of dynamic method dispatch at runtime) that turned out to be due to me reusing variable names that I didn’t know had already been used, and got bitten by a few things that are quietly not available on the iPhone. And to add insult to injury, my Mighty Mouse is a bit rubbish at detecting whether I’ve done a right or left click. It’s still interesting but I hope that fewer of my problems are due to holes in the documentation and annoying ‘features’ as I go on. Next task – multithreading…

Also, this weekend is the Extra Life charity game-athon that I mentioned a while back. As I suspected might happen, noone’s sponsored me, but I’ll be off to almost my childhood stomping grounds to play games from Friday until Saturday evening. I suspect this means that next week’s creative thing that I will be making is a slumped shape on the official GeekPlanet sofa.

I’ve just noticed that I’ve got a bunch of gigs booked up before the end of the year and, as seems to often be the case, I will be sitting in the corner on my lonesome for a couple of them. Anyways, if any of you lovely people feel like having someone talk at you at a gig and also maybe see some bands then here is my upcoming schedule:

NOV11Wednesday 11 November 2009
Hundred Reasons Canterbury	Garage London, United Kingdom
NOV13Friday 13 November 2009
Jonathan Coulton Paul and Storm	Union Chapel London, United Kingdom
NOV17Tuesday 17 November 2009
Alice in Chains	HMV Forum Kentish Town, London, United Kingdom
DEC9Wednesday 9 December 2009
A This City, Stars Of The Search Party	O2 Academy Islington London, United Kingdom

A are a really difficult band to search for on the internet.

My threat of being in a third podcast within a week has come true. It’s only one step from here to the 3-4am ‘Trucker Hour’ on Radio Mercury. Oh how I dreamed of being a DJ on Radio Mercury when I was younger. It would have been the perfect disguise so that I could have got into their building and smashed the transmission equipment, saving Sussex from the rubbish they rolled out over the airwaves. Wikipedia says that they introduced Pat Sharp to the world – I say ‘inflicted on’, no matter how great Fun House was.

Proof there that Pat Sharp didn’t always have a mullet. He is a sham mullet owner, a mere mullet come lately, a temporary wig wearer, a hairy deserter when the going got tough. I seem to be more obsessed with Pat Sharp than I thought. I already knew about my mullet obsession, though – self reflection is a dangerous thing.

The Pod Delusion Episode 4: This week: TAM London special report, sceptical comedy, Apple stores, NLP and video games censorship!

That’s my ‘liberal media radio voice’. I think I need to work on a Reverend Dr Ian Paisley voice for more strongly held opinions, if I can find one that isn’t about my right to buy reasonably priced toffee yoghurt. I really like toffee yoghurt.

It seems that liking the sound of my own voice and knowing easily led people is all that is required for me to become a PODCAST LORD! So, there are now two more snippets of me talking random crap out on the internets, and there is a third that will be appearing at the end of the week. So, for your aural pleasure:

Thomyk Episode 44 – Pixies: In which Billy and Thom discuss Michael’s starring plinth appearance while he takes his art around the world. Thom talks for longer than he should do about his recent holiday before Billy and Thom get on to more interesting topics and tell you about the Pixies, why you probably shouldn’t get a Kindle, but maybe get an eReader anyway and then give their opinions on Star Wars.

One More Go 0×01: Matt and Billy are back for your second monthly dose of gaming chatter. On the agenda: Beatles Rock Band and its ridiculously-priced peripherals, the mysteries of people who trade in their consoles for newer versions of the same unit, shocking revelations about Tekken 6 and thoughts on a new round of games.

Matt’s started referring to One More Go as ‘Officially the hairiest gaming podcast on teh interwebs!’. I just had a bit of a shave and feel like a traitor.

This week the main thing I created was whinging noises due to HORRIFIC MAN FLU, the likes of which most people would shrug off, but that I, like the crying child I am, was brought low by. This gave me a chunk of time in which to be ‘creative’, but also little urge to do anything but lie down and place the back of my hand theatrically upon my fevered brow. So, this weekend I’ve tried to make up for my otherwise fairly inactive week and done Things:

Firstly I finished the first episode of Monkey Island Adventures – Launch of The Screaming Narwhal. It was good and I’ve now got the next two episodes, of five, downloaded and ready to play.

Secondly I made my niche art television debut while standing around looking gormless in Leicester Square watching MykReeve play around on the fourth plinth.

Michael was rather entertaining up on his podium, playing music, dancing around and putting on outfits from the various places he’s travelled around the world. His hour is up on the One and Other site for your perusal, if you wish to join in the fun of watching out for me looking cold.

Thirdly I recorded another episode of One More Go with Matt for the GeekPlanet website, which will hopefully be up next week. I apologise in advance for any coughing that Matt wasn’t able to edit out. I was ill and all that.

Fourthly I recorded some more potential podcastery, putting together a five minute segment as a test to see if I can make something that I think is suitable for James O’Malley’s “The Pod Delusion” – I wiffled about being followed by NLP practitioners on Twitter and how marvellous http://www.beatswineflunow.com is. I don’t know if it’ll get submitted or make it to the podcast if it is, but I rather like the sound of my own voice, so something of mine may one day appear on that lovely podcast.

Anyways, none of those really felt like a creative thing that I could really post on the internets, so I went for ‘emergency craft project #1′ and produced this:

Yes, it’s a Batman iPod case, made from scratch (including working out a template) by my own fair hand. It’s definitely a version 1, as it’s made of thinnish card, pritt stick, a page from the Superman strip in Wednesday Comics #2 (which I hope doesn’t magically become worth piles of cash sometime in the near future) and a sheet of lamination film. Yes, the ‘circle’ around the touch wheel is a bit crap, and the screen hole isn’t all that great, but for someone who wasn’t allowed to use scissors when at primary school due to the potential of danger for those around him, it’s not a bad attempt. Although I don’t think I will be turning the making of comic wrapped iPod cases into a business any time soon. Now for some more Monkey Islanding…

I now have a balcony and I intend to use it – the polluted skies of north London are my new canvas.

However, what Dan Germain said at Interesting about sunsets does, of course, also apply to sunrises.

For various early morning brained reasons I was considering the use of formalised language in German and French this morning. In my youth I was touted to be a linguist, a label that I have since managed to remove, tear up, burn and bury under a pile of tongue tied and stuttering rubble, but I am still fascinated by the French and German use of tu/du/vous/Sie to indicate familiarity as well as plurality when referring to people as “you” – if you know someone or are talking to someone younger/’lower in status’/etc than you then use tu/du and if you are being polite/formal/talking to someone of ‘higher status’ then use vous/Sie.

A few years after I stopped learning German I discovered that the Germans, ever inventive with their language, had a special word to describe the using of du to refer to someone as you – duzen. It was even listed in the random article I was reading with the polite way of asking someone if it was alright to call them “du” – Darf ich Sie duzen – a phrase that I love for its formality while asking someone if you can lower the level of that formality.

It’s not unusual for early morning preparing for work activitivies to get my brain spinning on issues of language – years ago, while walking to the station to go to work, I had a long and one sided conversation with my erstwhile flatmate Dave about how to translate ‘We Will Rock You’ into French. “Nous vous rockerons certainement” was where we got to, ’se rocker’ being a verb that I am both proud of and expect the Academie Français would have me strung up for. So this morning I had a bit of a think of what the equivalent for duzen would be in French – I came up, logically, with Tuer.

Which means ‘to kill’.

Update: Thank you people who have told me the real french word – it is indeed tutoyer.

As I have often said, I don’t like to talk about my various charitable works. As I have also often said, this is because I don’t generally actually do all that much. However, I do have one of those occasional events coming up soon, so I thought I’d let you know.

So, and please don’t laugh, I will be doing a 24 hour computer gaming marathon. This is actually the very opposite of a running marathon, as the only actual horizontal movement I’ll be doing will be from my sofa to the fridge, bathroom or computer gaming device. However, I will be staying awake for 24 hours playing computer games for Extra Life, supporting the Texas Children’s Cancer centre.

My involvement is partly due to Matt, my One More Go co-host, accidentally pinching the name of the charity for the old GeekPlanet gaming podcast (the one that my awesome appearance on destroyed, only for it to be reborn as One More Go) and mainly because he’s doing it as well.

It’s over the weekend of the 17th and 18th of October (3 weeks away) and there will be a webcam and other ways for people to remotely laugh at me and my ’selflessness’ as I sit on a chair and play computer games. If you do want to sponsor me then you can do so over on the charidee website. Think of it less as sponsoring me and more as giving money to charity.

So, unless I do something fairly interesting tomorrow, I think I have hit my creative peak for the week – I wrote a computer program. This worries me, it being my job and all, but this one has pictures in and everything. I’ve been at Over the Air for the last couple of days, a mobile development conference and hackathon at my old stomping ground of Imperial College. It was rather excellent, with a Dalek in the IC great hall, supa-fast wifi courtesy of JANET, and Rachel Clarke, Ewan Spence and friends exploding stuff at the end of today.

There were many categories for the conference’s programming competition and lots of data was thrown around for us all to grab and use. However, the promise of a special prize for someone who managed to combine Doctor Who, Top Gear and data from the new Lonely Planet API piqued my interest. I may not have managed to include all three, but I got some of the way there:

So, a it’s mobile ‘optimised’ web-app that lets you pit the powers of the Doctor Who posse against the might of the Top Gear presenters and tame manbeast The Stig. Who could ask for more? Well, the people at the conference for one, as there were a bunch of rather excellent apps which were actually properly mobile, rather than slightly shonky websites, so I didn’t win any prizes. However, a nice man at BBC Worldwide grabbed me before I left to give me a bag of Top Gear related goodies as a thankyou for playing with their graphic assets. I am now the proud owner of a copy of “Where’s The Stig?” as well as a Stig mouse and other toys (including the hi-res Top gear and Doctor Who graphical assets that I grabbed on Friday). I suspect my quite horrendous stage fright (when confronted by a room containing hundreds of people, most of whom would realise that my app is a bit shonky, I consider it to be quite natural to shake uncontrollably…) did not aid my prize winning chances.

Anyways, if any of you lovely people would like to play then it’s over on my site. It looks a bit better formatted in a thinner window (until I do some fixing [and learning of how to do the fixing] of the CSS). You know, like on a phone. I will convince myself that it’s a proper ‘mobile’ application one day…

On the more technical side, it’s a JavaScript and php app that is basically a branded and limited version of Google Fight. There are also a number of other versions that I hacked together around the same code base in an attempt to convert it into a Bondi widget (there’s also a version of the pre-Bondi’d app online). In order to do that I hacked the whole thing up to be in JavaScript, apart from the Google fighting bit which is an XML returning webservice. Unfortunately my plans of getting the phone to vibrate while it worked out who was the winner, using the Bondi device APIs, were scuppered by my inability to get them to work. Well, that’s not quite true – the scuppering factor was my inability to get my code running on the Windows Mobile browser that is the heart of the Bondi reference platform, despite it working everywhere else. I did manage to get it up on both a real phone and a simulated phone (courtesy of emulator farm Perfecto Mobile), even if it didn’t work once it was there. I may have unfortunately hinted that it was all Bondi’s fault while I was on stage presenting my app, despite an attempt to pin it on myself that was too little too late, but it looks like it could be a rather nifty thing – an API to allow access to underlying phone functionality from JavaScript. There were rather a lot of problems with the Bondi APIs during the conference, with the website not being particularly helpful and the dev tools that there were only being incomplete in a few places and only available for Linux or Windows, which wasn’t much help to the Mac heavy crowd. However, I have another Bondi widget to write, thanks to one of the dev team being a fellow member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society with a whisky widget part written. I’ve got some useful data, he’s made a start on a widget – BY OUR POWERS COMBINED! there may soon be a whisky widget with some nice maps in. And then I write my iPhone one.

Dense block of text over. I am now reclining on my comfy Over the Air branded beanbags (as it seems that there is a tradition of hackdays both having beanbags and also asking the attendees to take them home afterwards) and contemplating what shiny things I should write next. Which is nice.

Yet again Sunday has rolled around and I’ve had a think as to what I’ve done this week that could be called creative. Unfortunately as a craft project I started tinkering with yesterday fell apart (literally) at the point that I realised that I had no sticky tape I am left with but one thing to choose from.

This week I done made flavoured vodka.

The delicate looking bottles above contain, working from left to right, a chilli and a liquorice vodka. I, of course, didn’t make the vodka itself, but I soaked things in various amounts of vodka to create the two samples above. Vodka-wise I used Russian Standard, as it was more expensive than Smirnoff, but cheaper than everything else. Also it had cyrillic text on the label, which makes it more authentic. It does. Really. So, recipe:

Liquorice Vodka:

1 bag of Henry Goode’s soft eating liquorice (I got mine free at Interesting, but you should probably pay for yours)
350ml of Vodka

Place liquorice in vodka. Leave for an amount of time. Remove liquorice. Drink vodka.

You can probably guess the chilli vodka recipe (I used 3 largeish red chillis, chopped each into 3 or 4 pieces lengthwise).

I left mine for about 2 days for the liquorice and a day for the chilli – while that was fine for the former, the latter became fairly deadly after 5 minutes of steeping and the extra 24 hours and 55 minutes turned it into a dangerous substance which caused my tongue to hurt when I sniff it. The liquorice is an unbridled success and I am sipping at a glass of it, served over ice, as I write. However the chilli is a different story – it tastes of chilli in a excellent way, but the levels of heat surpass anything I expected, especially as I used some fairly mild chillis. I used it yesterday to deglaze a steak pan before making a butter sauce and that worked quite well, so I’m putting it in the ‘food additive’ section of my brain, rather than the ‘get drunk on it’ one. There are only two sections in my brain.

I also experimented with making coffee vodka, sticking a teaspoon of each of the two types of beans I have into glasses and covering each with about 25ml of vodka. I left them for a couple of days and was quite surprised how much coffee flavour (and colour) came out, however was not impressed by the actual flavour, which was generically coffee-like despite the a) quality of the coffees I used and b) total difference in their smells and flavours (one makes a very fruity, grapefruity cup, the other a very tasty but normal tasting coffee). It also didn’t seem to extract all that much caffeine, although after an evening of tasting flavoured vodka I’m expecting that it wouldn’t have mattered if it had. Sleep came fairly swiftly last night.

Anyways, the liquorice vodka is going onto my list of things to make lots of – it’s easy and tastes rather excellent, if you like liquorice. One bit of advice on the ‘brewing’ process for the chilli vodka though, don’t use an old white wine bottle to store it before getting some nice bottles – it looks enough like white wine that someone’s going to pour themselves a glass and then die on the floor clutching at their throat. I didn’t almost do this yesterday, no matter what the rumours suggest.

Not only am I a sekrit guest on an upcoming episode of the Thomyk podcast (although now I’ve put this here and Thom told everyone in the last episode my use of the misspelt word ’sekrit’ seems not only foolish and unnecessary, but also innaccurate) it seems that my mumbling about computer games over at GeekPlanet was successful enough to kick off an ongoing show.

So, once a month I will be talking for FAR TOO LONG with the lovely Matt Dillon about computer games and it’ll appear over on GeekPlanet as the newest podcast in their stable – One More Go. If any of you follow my delicious.com stream, this is the reason why I’ve been tagging things with OMG. It’s not a sudden jump towards either religion or valley girl-dom.

The plan is to talk about current games a bit, but to also have a go at the games that beat us in our respective youths. We were (and, to be honest, are) a bit rubbish at gaming so we have a good number of those knocking around to choose from. I’m recording next weekend, so episode 1 (numbered from 0) will be out sometime the week after, and this month I have mostly been trying to play Elite and The Hobbit on the BBC Micro.

Anyways, we did a pilot a few weeks back and the first ep is up for your aural pleasure. Luckily Matt edited it down a bit, as I went a bit strange about 45 minutes in, with 2 weeks of being woken up every night by a dodgy data vendor and a silver bullet martini catching up with me at the same time. I’ve not listened all the way through, but Matt’s seemingly removed most of my most surreal musings, although he might have left my alleged obsession with Batman’s bottom in. I’m not obsessed, just interested. The next one will be better, but for now, OMG #0:

Recently my brain has been shutting down a bit, with work being busy and me booking myself up to run around like a loon at all other times. So, I have now decreed that in an attempt to make the aforementioned spongy grey blob earn its overly generous portion of my food powered energy I will try and do something ‘creative’ and stick it up on the internets each week. If possible, something that I don’t normally do so that I learn to do a new thing each week. Which would be nice.

So, number 1 – I perform a cover of a well known song on my ukelele. I also sing:

It’s hard to believe that I used to be a en-cassocked choirboy. For some reason I seem to be switching between brummy and west country in my singing accent. I’m from Sussex…

Beer at the end is Leffe Blonde, courtesy of Vatine. I like housewarming presents. Ta muchly, sir.

So, Derren Brown told everyone how he predicted the lottery. Hooray.

Of course that’s not how he really did it. He didn’t get people to come up with random choices and then average them out to select the numbers of the balls – that’s completely nonsensical and if proven to be true would show significantly more success than years of psychic warfare research and professors trying to get vulnerable undergrads into their beds after fiddling Zener cards (I’m looking at you, Dr Venkman). And his alternate ‘maybe I switched the balls’ ? Also obviously untrue, and not as funny as he seemed to hope.

However, I don’t need to tell you this, lovely intelligent beautiful reader, you have already read my blog and expected Mr Mind Control to give a made up explanation. My problem with last night’s show was simple – I just didn’t think it was a very good show. The format didn’t feel right, the tricks seemed to be retreading old ground and the ‘explanation’ half of the programme felt a bit mean on the people involved. I don’t particularly care how he did the original trick – it looked great and made me think long and hard (and I think I now do know) – but I don’t think he followed it with a particularly good show. However, it’s the first in a new series and I look forward to the rest of the shows getting better.

Before I continue, here’s my thoughts on Derren Brown. I really like his magic, however it is exactly that: magic. As in ‘tricks’. The thing that makes him for me is that he often seems to explain what he’s done, just like last night. However, do you *really* think that he uses NLP to do all of his tricks? He’s a very good magician who shrouds his excellent tricks in a smokescreen of explanation that he chooses carefully to be accepted without question by a majority of his audience. The first stage magicians did tricks and were thought of as true conjurers, dabbling with forces beyond mortal ken, a perception that they played on to create better and better shows. Brown uses NLP and hypnosis as things to wrap around his excellently constructed tricks in the same manner – people these days assume that NLP and hypnotism magically work, just as old audiences believed that conjurers really could summon ghostly shadows across stages. It is an updating of the old disciplines pepped up by an excellent performer to push the right buttons in our modern sensibilities. And I love it.

What has depressed me, though, is not that people seem to be angry at Derren Brown for giving an obviously fake solution (see the paragraph above – he pretty much always does that, but this is the first time [afaik] that he’s made such a big point of saying that he will reveal how he did it, so I can understand the annoyance of those who don’t realise his modus operandi) but that many of them are taking him seriously. Already today I’ve seen someone that I consider to be a fairly switched on guy asking people to help him crowdsource the lottery numbers so as to set up a group who can start making predictions each week using The Brown Method and thus beat the system. I really hope that I’m wrong and that the person in question is really just taking the piss, but I really don’t think so. It depresses me that in a world of rationalism, and even religion, as we have, that people can believe this obviously fake (but still fairly clever trickery – he did get the group to seemingly have the predictions get better each week. But I have theories on how he did that too…) explanation from a self-described trickster. In the end I think that’s one of the factors why I didn’t like the show – while he has always given an alternative explanation as to how he achieves his tricks, this is the first time where us normal people can copy his exact given methodology.

And many will.

And they won’t win the lottery.

Update: One of the comments on LJ has made me think a bit – it seems that ‘deep maths’ is mystifying enough these days that people accept it as an explanation just as much as NLP. Thinking about it that way has made the show look a bit better to me, although still not one I enjoyed. People treating maths as an unknowable depresses me just as much as before.