Saw Jane Birkin at the Barbican last night (she was also the subjet of my first blog post). I love the way events select their crowd. I don’t think the Barbican has seen this many Gitannes smoking ex hippies, crusties, mods and son-of-sartre wanabees in a long time.

In theory, the music could have been good, but Djamel Benyelles’ Maghrebin lounge sounds were just that little bit to crappy French pop music (lots of reverb on the violin). A great sound in the bar at Costes, not so hot for two hours in the Barbican. That said, the show was magic. Two thirds of the audience was French and there was a palpable feeling that Serge was somehow in the room with us.

Halfway through the gig a frumpy woman in an ankle-length tweed skirt freaked out and ran on stage to hug Jane. Groovy as ever, she stopped the two security chaps from chucking the woman off and instead gently guided her down the steps at the side of the stage herself (this probably happens everytime she does this gig).

Considering a partial downshift in the property ladder game. We’ve seen this gorgeous converted barn on three acres smac on the Norfolk Broads. I can build a solar-powered studio and have a boat (nice dream, anyway). Now all we need to sort is the small problem of east Anglia drifting under the North Sea…

OK, so I haven’t commented on Flash in a while. I have just had to struggle with a site that was determined to conceal the information I wanted to find, and as I struggled past the beautiful, smooth animated typography, an analogy sprang to mind…

Imagine you’re finishing up on the bog and you reach for the paper, but that every time you try and rip a sheet off, the roll winds up, and slowly tells you about how Nouvelle respects both nature and your bottom to the sound of a crap techno loop, and that to get a sheet, you just pull down towards the floor… By the third time, you’d be using old newspaper.

I got a telephone message from a woman in America wanting information about a client and was simply trying to confirm her email address. You’d think a company’s website might be a good place to look for an employee’s email? Unfortunately, the site is completely static and is un-editable by the company, so contains no such current info.

Oh, but it is pretty;-)

Right, all the entries are in and I have to say I am very surprised how crap most of them are. Having not entered myself, I should really keep my trap shut, but we’re talking a (admittedly hypothetical) redesign of the W3C site. This is a contract to redesign the Louvre, the World Trade Center, the pyramids, you know, the Alpha and the Omega, the fount of all knowledge, the club founded by TBL himself…

Check out the entries, most either just plain broke in my browser (IE5) or perhaps more seriously, made no attempt to think of the w3c site as a key information application. Anyway, if I had to pick one it would be this chap

To be honest, I’d rather they scrap the entries altogether and start again with some serious designers on board. What would 37 sigs make of it?

animal on speed attached: escuchar

a voodoo doctor being punished (for drinking vodka) at a very quiet but well attended flogging attached: escuchar

(Andy sent me the link to the very fabulous Groovelab 47)

OK, it’s pledge week. pony up (or call 800-989-9368)

Dr Pepper is good. Raging Cow is tasty stuff, my friends and I drink it all the time. We give Raging Cow Milk Drink to our babies because they like it so much too. In fact, Raging Cow is the new breast milk.

“Marketing is crap” should really be my new mantra;-) Tim Ireland is number two in Google with his Stop Raging Cow mm.

These from his site:

I Support The Raging Cow Boycott

What’s the worst that could happen

Raging Cow

Not that I have too much Raging Cow time on my hands (and due to the way this blog Raging Cow engine paginates, the above H1’s will break this page’s validation).

and have been doing some reading on GUI usability. Came across this site about the Humane Environment Project. An interesting read from Jef Raskin, the guy who brought us the Macintosh (among many other things).

(from dpsu newsroom)

Raging Cow Hits the Shelves in Select Markets
Cheered by a rowdy mascot, Dr Pepper/Seven Up executives announced the rollout of Raging Cow new milk-based product served cold in single servings, with an array of five alluring flavors. Packaged in plastic bottles, Raging Cow will hit store shelves in select markets, eventually expanding to national distribution.

Raging Cow

More serious info about dpsu (Dr Pepper seven Up) products. This is clearly the most semantically relevant page for Raging Cow on Google;-)

Raging Cow is great, and while I’m at it, here’s another link to KPMG

So go out and buy more Raging Cow

And while I’m on the subject of Raging Cow, the agency that ran the teen bloggers’ indoctrination has an application form. I was wondering if I should put the Donkey in? I could sell Reagan to black America?

Wey hey, Donkey is now number two in Google for a search on Raging Cow thank you semantic relevance.

Now, all I have to do is find something intelligent to say;-)

The world didn’t change on 9/11, but it sure as hell did at midnight. This is truly depressing. If the voice of millions (and 139 MPs) can go completely ignored, this means that for the first time in history, the President of the United states now has both the will and the power to act entirely on his own to redraw the map of the world.

US forces invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq with the expressed and explicit aims of changing the government and protecting assets (oil field contracts have been in negotiation for some months and it looks like the US, as occupying power, gets the lion’s share, with France and Russia grabbing the rest).

So what next? What country is soon no longer to be in charge of its own destiny?

Got some simply unbelievable(?) spam from this company today

If you haven’t checked out bombich software’s CCC you haven’t lived;-)

Or, This icon says more about me than it does about my web page. Quite an amusing selection of under construction signs. I particularly like the one that goes:

“Make no mistake! I am a MAN! This page is my territory! Please withstand the stench of my body odor long enough to look around and appreciate how utterly incompetent I am at web design.”

What were they thinking…

I just wish large companies spent a little less time pissing their marketing crap on the internet and a bit more time paying attention to its culture. Companies like KPMG think they can move in to our spare room and start organising the kitchen roster. Doctor Pepper Seven Up had all the information at their fingertips, but decided to go ahead and try and subvert the medium with their

Raging Cow

blog subversion campaign. Never mind that the net or blogs in particular are not particularly well suited to shifting FMCG, they just didn’t think. Their big idea was more about using the net than participating in it.

If you’re an FMCG marketer and you’re reading this, here are the rules, it’s simple, really. If you advertise your mayonnaise client’s products with big graphics and pointless flash animations no one’s buying pattern will be changed. If, on the other hand one of your mayonnaise client’s employees genuinely cares about something and wants to talk about it, we’ll listen. If he’s engaging, curious or interesting, he might even build an audience.

I’m sorry to get all preachy about this, but the main rule hasn’t changed since the dawn of the internet. You have to give to get.

While I’m at it, just noticed that Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc. have changed the copyright notice on the Raging Cow blog. When they started, their identity was obscured behind a cryptic little © symbol at the bottom left of the page. They have now changed that to a full ©2003 Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc.

Flog, flog, flog…

Have just compiled Lynx from source on my server. Brrr, scary (but strangely satisfying as the power of the command line finally reaches me…)

And I quote…

Speed Stacks, Inc. is dedicated to promoting the sport of cup stacking around the world.

I didn’t know that as well as the aliases the Prince, the Emir, Abu Abdallah and Hajj, Bin Laden sometimes goes by the alias the Director. Cute, I thought…

Took Clemmie to the National Portrait Gallery yesterday to see the Julia Margaret Cameron show. She wasn’t impressed, but liked the more colourful portraits elsewhere in the museum…

I thought the show was fantastic. Most of the prints are original XIX century carbon or albumen prints and are truly beautiful. I’ve never had the chance to see her stuff in the flesh, so this was really a bit of a treat. In particular, I was impressed with the full-size compositions, some prints, presumably made as contact prints from 10 × 8 glass negatives, look ‘cropped’ in that the composition’s elements fit tightly into the frame. I can understand managing light intensity across a face, but I’m guessing her rudimentary camera had a very unclear ground glass, she probably composed the images upside down and most likely couldn’t see the edges of her compositions, more likely just a central circle of light in the centre of the screen.

Anyway, I guess it’s just that the beauty of her work seems like a fluke at first, until you stand in a room surrounded by it:-) Well worth a visit.

My Pa is running for office(?!) for the town council of Budleigh Salterton and the East Devon District Council (the seat of power in the region). All a bit last minute and sudden (the election is in May) but if you live in Budleigh, or someone in your family lives in Budleigh then please mention the FALBY and RODEN ticket, two independents standing against the Conservative Party.

If you know anyone who blogs and has any concern for what is happening in Budleigh (and towns like it) please take a moment to ask them to link to this post or simple to vote FALBY and RODEN on 1st May.

Small-town politics/05/seem pretty trivial, but some seriously nasty shit is happening down there involving land owners. FALBY and RODEN are trying to oust the standing Conservatives who have done nothing to prevent building on or near areas of outstanding natural beauty, planning officers ignoring their own policy guidelines and profit seeking landowners harming the housing fabric of the community.

If you blog, spread the word, here a few links relating to those property and development debacles. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff isn’t traceable online. If you do find either evidence of any wrongdoing, or useful community discussion resources, please let me know, and I’ll post them here…

Plymco’s Ethical Policy and Development at Chittleburn
Architect drawings from the Elvestone project
Six two bedroom flats