The Weekly Hat – Number Fifteen
Hi there.
The house move was successful and I come to you from my new room. Admittedly, I have a very restricted amunt of floor space due to the city of boxes that surround me, but I did at least successfully make my bed and lie in it. At 5:30AM after a couple of false starts.
So, now that we’ve got past that interruption, a quick alert for next week’s reason why the Weekly Hat might be late: I am on holiday from next Saturday until the following one. And hence, I will need to get the Weekly Hat pre-prepared to an even greater extent than usual. It should be possible, but will require planning. And the one after that… may be very late, very short or very non-existent. We’ll see.
But for now, this week’s well-timed burbles:
- Liquid Love: Terrorists arrested! Destroy my chances of having a drink on a plane! Ages ago! Trial recently! Thus current!
- Utter balls?: Derren Brown predicts the lottery. And then pretends he actually did predict the lottery.
- Media and stuff: Theatre! Rap! Facebook! How unusual!
- Behatted Photo Of The Week: A reward for a true winner. Well, if you count featuring here as a “reward”.
Liquid Love
This week, the men responsible for me not being able to take liquids on to aeroplanes were tried for their naughtiness. And, as I understand it (based on my research), three were let off and three were given a good spanking. Although the three that were let off may not have been directly involved in the liquids ban.
Obviously, the strict ban on plastic bottles is just one exciting way in which air travel has been smacked around since the Dread Spectre Of Terrorism started looming over us all, sometimes poking us with its long, black and wispy fingers just to see how we react. The security has become more tedious and involved, the check-in process takes longer and we’re now charged ridiculous amounts to bring our luggage.
Actually, I’m not sure that last one is because of terrorism, just greed the recession. But then again, I might just be spouting conspiracy theories here. I can also easily blame the banning of liquids on greed, as if I now want a drink on a flight, I apparently have to buy their own drinks, which cost a ton and are usually around the size of the toy drinks little girls get for their Barbie dolls.
I am going on holiday next weekend, departing the country for the distant shores of Ireland, and the prospect of catching planes there and back is probably not going to be the highlight. I remember when I was boarding a flight for a school trip, and I had a bag emptied and ended up having my compass (the kind used for drawing circles) confiscated.
I suppose, in truth, it is a sharp object, but I’d love to hear how I was going to commandeer a 747 with it, whilst fighting off the other crew members. There were my many accomplices, in the form of the rest of my class, which may have spoken against me. Ho-hum.
Meanwhile, as the rest of us accept mild flight inconvenience as a sad reality of modern life, terrorists watch and wait. Or so I presume. We’re constantly told the threat of terror exists, even though it’s been a while since the last attack on a Western nation. There was the Mumbai incident last year, of course, and if you live in Iraq or Afghanistan then it’s practically a daily occurrence,
But not here. Presumably the security services, as seen on Spooks, are busy dealing with the threat by any means necessary, as seen on Spooks, so we can all rest easy in our beds, type our silly blogs and so forth, without having to live in a state of constant fear, which is awfully nice of them.
You may note that this article lacks a clear conclusion. Sorry about that, but I found myself mindful of the whole terrorism thing once again after seeing all this. To be honest, the only effect it ever really had on me is to make me slightly jump when I had to get the rush-hour commuter tube, which thankfully I no longer have to do.
But just the fact I had to accept it as a sad reality of the world nowadays is… well, a bit sad. I suppose.
Utter Balls?
Technically, this probably belongs in the media section, but I had plenty of stuff for that, and I wanted to do a slightly longer piece on Derren Brown’s rather odd “predict the National Lottery” stunt that took place in the week just gone. So I took my own approach and pissed all over it. Which, coincidentally, is similar to what Derren’s just done.
I can’t say I’m a huge follower of “the magic”, but I’ve always found Derren Brown at least watchable in previous stunts. The fact that his tricks largely rely on predicting human behaviour and mental cleverness is intriguing, and a smart update of the “magician” concept for a twenty-first century that’s no longer easily impressed by Paul Daniels and his sleight of hand.
Indeed, even during Friday’s odd lottery-cast, Brown still broke out a trick involving a knife under a paper cup which, if it happened as filmed, was both tense and impressive. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Unfortunately, then there was the rest of it, which was either a little bit dull or a little bit cringe-inducing.
Seriously, Brown has always played up his own mystique a bit, but he’s always stopped short of claiming he has supernatural powers before. It’s always seemed just about doable if you were a good enough student of human behaviour, and even if it ended up being a trick, I’d almost be okay with it.
When he rang up his three “ways” of predicting the lottery and “I rigged up the broadcast on Wednesday” wasn’t on there, alarm bells start to go off louder. Already, they’d been going off since Wednesday’s show. Because, to be honest, he’s an illusionist and I was expecting him to tell us how he’d made it look like he’d predicted the lottery. But that wouldn’t take an hour. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes.
But no. Apparently Derren Brown really can predict the future. Or crowds can through automatic writing. Whatever. I note that the Channel 4 website describes the show as “Derren Brown describes how he might have predicted the lottery”. Nice to see they’re at least covered legally.
Media and stuff
- A bit outside my usual media realms, but on Friday night I went to see an actual play at the genuine actual theatre. More to the point, it was a preview night of a high-profile production: Othello at Trafalgar Studios, featuring Lenny Henry. (The term “preview night” is a shade misleading here, as he’s already done a run in Yorkshire, but this is the beginning of its London appearance.) And I love the play, so was delighted to see that they pretty much did it justice. Lenny Henry did a great job showing dignity and (to my slight surprise, I shamefully admit) restraint as the titular Moor, until it was needed. Conrad Nelson as Iago, probably my favourite character in Shakespeare, was good too, seemingly playing the “vengeance of the racist working classes” version of the character. And as a whole, I rather enjoyed it. It’s been an absolute age since I saw a “proper” play. The actors perhaps took a couple of scenes to warm up, as it was difficult to work out quite what they were saying at the very start, but by the second act, it was all systems go. Highly recommended if you like Shakespeare, Othello or being pleasantly surprised by comedians. And my English module tutor from university wrote the essay in the programme, which was nice.
- The more widespread big media news this week is the winning of the Mercury Music Prize by Speech Debelle, a young South London rap artist who no-one has heard of. The prize has gone to a few slightly more “known” artists of late, such as Arctic Monkeys and Elbow, so maybe the judges felt it was time to go for virtual obscurity again. I listened to around half of her album on Spotify, and although I’m not a hip-hop expert (or even a particularly big fan), she’s definitely got something. It’s odd, but probably good, to hear someone rapping in a way that sounds uniquely South London, rather than warping her voice to match the big American acts. So, yes, well done to her. (It helps that I had no particular strong feelings of support towards any of the other nominees, so I can be gracious whoever wins.)
- In social media news (which still counts), Facebook have been taking a few more steps this week in their bid to eventually become Twitter. Foremost was the public unveiling of the new ‘lite’ version of their site, with all but the basics stripped out, seemingly a direct response to the criticism that Facebook seems blocky and overcrowded next to the simplicity of… certain other services. Unfortunately, I’m not able to give you a particularly informed view of this innovation, as it’s not yet available in the UK. But considering the proliferation of applications and other clutter over the years is one of the big enduring criticism of Facebook, this has the potential to be worthwhile.
Smaller, yet odder, is their apparent decision to introduce ‘mentions’ in status updates, where you reference another user by typing an ‘@’ symbol, then their username. And yes, I’m talking about Facebook, not Twitter. As Twitter have been doing this for years. It’s a bit odd. I gather the function will work much like tagging people in photos, only with status updates instead. Why would people want to do this? Who knows.
Behatted Photo Of The Week
Today’s luck recipient, as a reward for his narvellous Shakespearean acting, is Mister Lenny Henry (human), accompanied by Skate (hat). The picture I eventually found also featured a guest appearance by writing chap Neil Gaiman (human), who I gather is friends with our main hero, so I let him participate as well, as his books are generally good fun. He is being mounted by Mac (hat), at a jaunty angle too.
The Little Print: This lovely double-photo was nabbed from heyjupiter on Flickr, and both it and the above modification are covered under the same Creative Commons Licence.
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