Random Burblings

Okay, I should have done this before but as usual I am an arch procrastinator. So starting with a little announcement, if you have a link to this weblog on your site, would you be so good as to update it for me. You may have noticed, if you come here regularly, that the address changes on entry to the site. The old address, http://www.alansharp.34sp.com/weblog/, gets replaced with the new address, http://www.randomalan.co.uk/weblog/.

This is because 34sp, the provider of my webspace, made an arbitrary decision to stop supporting their free .34sp.com domain names. They gave me a list of alternative domain names I could have, one of which was www.alansharp.ismyblog.com, which I’m sure you can see is such a hideous prospect I considered it pretty much an insult to my intelligence. In general I was pretty pissed off with this particular move, but that said, 34sp have been so much better in every other respect than my previous webspace provider (lycos) that I don’t really want to move on from their service.

So, to protect myself against any such arbitrary decisions being made again in the future, I decided to purchase my own domain name which I can then move with me anywhere I decide to go. And with pretty much every variation on my name having already been taken, I went with the randomalan idea as the next best thing (although the .com version of this was also already taken.) There is another good reason, which is that with the new book in the works and various other things going on, I’ve been thinking for a while of revamping to a proper personal website, and although it’s an idea that will have to stay on the backburners for a while due to the myriad of other things I need to do, having a decent domain name for it is at least a start.

So anyway, back to the point, which is that if you currently link to me, could you possibly change that link to the new address. 34sp are currently forwarding the old address to the new one, but that will only continue to happen for a few more weeks, and then the old address will become a broken link, and I will be lost in the ether somewhere.

Which brings me to a second point regarding this. At the moment the tagline to this site reads “Officially the 141st best blog in Britain.” It used to read officially the hundredth best, which was an idea I liked (boasting about something that’s actually a little big crap.) This was based on my discovering that I was at number 100 in the technoranki charts, and I later changed it based on my position as of January 1st this year (141). Actually, at time of writing I’m at 149 (and sinking).

But the point is, those charts are ranked according to the number of links coming in to a site, and as those links are all about to get broken aside from the ones that get changed, I’m probably going to plummet off the chart altogether never to be seen again. So I need a new tagline. I could go back to my old one, “comedian, chameleon, corinthian and caricature,” which for anyone not Bowie-literate was a line of lyric from the song The Bewley Brothers, but I’m thinking I should move forward instead.

So, I’m opening up the floor for suggestions. Can anyone think of a line that sums me up in a single sentence? (I’m sure some people can think of one that sums me up in a single word, four letters long starting with a C, but I’m vetoing that one.)

There may be prizes. (There probably won’t.)

The news this week has been dominated by the protests surrounding the Olympic torch. We have been roundly told off by Steve Redgrave and Paula Radcliffe for disrupting such a momentous event. Because don’t we know that sport should have nothing to do with politics?

Except of course that they seem to have missed one important point. London is not on a route between Mount Olympus and Beijing. Paris is not on a route between Mount Olympus and Beijing. San Francisco might be, if you go the long way. But essentially, there is no reason for the Olympic torch to pass through any of these cities as it travels from Mount Olympus to Beijing. It is doing so for one reason, and one reason only. The running of the torch in London on Sunday had nothing to do with sport, and everything to do with politics.

And now we are getting the questions. Is Gordon Brown right not to go to the opening ceremony? Should he boycott the games altogether? Should all the political leaders boycott the games? Should we boycott the games, and turn off our television sets?

When the modern Olympics began at the end of the nineteenth century, the idea was simple. The best athletes, representatives of the people of the world, should gather together to compete, like for like, for nothing but the glory of competition itself, as a show of worldwide solidarity, to demonstrate that we have more in common than we have differences, to show that there is more that unites us than divides us.

And so, in that spirit, in a few months time the eyes of the whole world will be on a city chosen for its ability to fill the pockets of the IOC members with money, as we all pretend to be interested in sports that we couldn’t have given a flying fuck about for the previous three years and fifty weeks, and will go back to caring less about immediately afterwards. It will be a glorious demonstration of the ability of those who won the franchises to overcharge for admission, overcharge for merchandise and overcharge for refreshments and other concessions.

And meanwhile the television companies of the world will follow every second of the action, careful always not to compromise by letting the sport get in the way of the number of seconds they are contractually obliged to let the camera linger on the carefully positioned advertising hoardings. And young men and women from all over the planet, who have worked and slaved and sacrificed, honed their bodies to the peak of physical perfection, will finally realise their dreams as for one fleeting moment they get to stand before the whole world and be paid to wear a Nike branded sweatband.

So Paula Radcliffe tells us that we tarnished the ideals of the Olympic flame, ideals of unity and hope, by using it for political protest. I contend that the Olympic torch could not be more tarnished than it already has been by the very people who were entrusted with its protection. The International Olympic Committee have already pissed all over it in their frantic pursuit of the almighty dollar. It long since ceased to symbolise unity and hope, today it is merely a reminder of corruption and greed.

I might have considered boycotting the Olympics to protest human rights abuses in China. But instead I simply won’t be watching. Because it isn’t Olympian any more.

So yes, that’s me. Not the most flattering photo ever, snapped by the pink haired hellcat, taking me by surprise as I wandered into the kitchen one morning bleary eyed and desperate for the first caffiene injection of the day. But me nonetheless.

As of late, as you may have spotted, I’ve been going to a lot of comedy shows. What with the aforementioned strangely coloured bonced one now working in a comedy club, and having started up a new dedicated comedy blog, I seem to be averaging at least one show a week and usually more, and that schedule doesn’t look like letting up any time soon. Seeing as around half the time now I’m getting in for free, it seems like a pretty good way to spend your evenings.

But the thing is, when you look like what you see above, if you sit anywhere near the front in a show, there’s a likelihood that the comic is going to spot you. Ah, he will think, there is a large and particularly hirsute person, I will make him my butt-monkey for the night. And one of their stock-in-trades (should that be stocks-in-trade? I should know these things) is to find a point of comparison, by pretending to mistake me for someone in the public eye.

And so, what follows, is a list of people I have recently been hilariously* compared to from various public stages around Edinburgh.

* please read this word with a particularly sarcastic tone to the voice.

We’ll start with the obvious one. It isn’t just comedians who mistake me for Romeo Stodart from the Magic Numbers, it’s a common occurrence. The most recent comic to come up with this one was Lloyd Langford, to whom I told the story of being chased down the road by two girls screaming “Magic Numbers! Magic Numbers!” at me. Why did you run? he asked. Because they were scary girls, was my reply. But anyway, this one is acceptable, I do look like him, I hold up my hands.

Yes, it’s Lemmy from Motorhead. Because you see we both have long hair. And facial hair. And our facial hair is in a completely different style to each other. And he has a long face whereas mine is round. And he has a number of warts on his face whereas I have none. And in general we don’t resemble each other in any way whatsoever. But we both have long hair, you see. And facial hair.

To be honest, I just thought this one was lazy. Gordon Brunton, hang your head in shame. If you’re going to compare me to someone, at least make it a clever comparison.

Hmmm. In his defence, the comic in question, and I don’t actually remember who it was now, had just learned that I write books about murderers. So obviously I must be one, right? This is the sort of tortured logic that spills over into real life. People are forever saying that the things I write about make me a scary person. Here’s a hint, if all murderers wrote books about murderers, the police wouldn’t have to cast their net very wide when a murder occurred. Anyway, for those who don’t recognise him, this is Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who has thick curly hair which I don’t. But you see he’s got a beard. So we must be twins, right?

Now that’s more like it. This is another one that spills over into real life. At the Scotland v England game last weekend, I was planning to beat the next person who said “shouldn’t you be in France getting ready to play” to death with their own severed arm. Especially as, being rugby followers, they really should have known that Sebastien Chabal had not actually been picked for the French team that week, and therefore the answer, had I been him, would have been “no, I shouldn’t, and thanks for rubbing it in.” However, I will admit that there is a resemblance here, for anyone who doesn’t look down at my gut at least.

But at the end of it all, the prize goes to Tom Stade. For it was he that spotted my true secret identity. I have been trying to keep it hidden for years, but finally I will have to own up. Like Elvis, I faked my own death and went into hiding, seeking a quiet life, avoiding the spotlight of publicity. Fame had taken it’s toll on me, the wild lifestyle of big Hollywood parties, the drink, the copious quantities of cocaine I was shovelling up my nose. It affected my work, made me slow and weak, and all the while my rival was living clean, mainlining spinach and in the end it was he that swept Olive off her feet and all the way to the altar. I crawled away into obscurity, until Tom found me out. Oh fate, why are you so cruel.

So what have I been doing the last few days? Well, mostly taking a crash course in what constitutes an image being in the “public domain,” finding contact details for people who might have access to such images, contacting them and in my best wheedling manner trying to persuade them that they really want to lend them to me, or let me use them in some way in exchange for a random credit at some point in the future.

Oh yes, maybe I should explain from the beginning. I’ve told bits of the story here and there, but I have tried to remain circumspect, partly because I didn’t want anyone involved to stumble across this site and think I was being arrogant, and partly because I’ve just been too frightened to jinx things.

So lets go back a little over a year in time. Having been working on the book that I hope to be my “opus magnum” for a while, I am put in touch by a mutual contact with a commissioning editor at a major publishers, with a recommendation to him that he give my proposal a favourable view. So I speak to the chap and explain that the book is a long term project but I am hoping to get a feel for its publishing potential, and he tells me that he would certainly be interested, and while we are on the phone I mention that I had also been thinking of another book, one which would be quicker to put together, and which I think would fit into his company’s catalogue nicely. He agrees with me, and tells me that if I want to go ahead, he will certainly be interested to see the finished result.

If you’ve been with me since last year, you will know that since stopping work last November I have been pretty much exclusively working on that book. But as I got near to finishing the first draft, while having a random conversation with a literary agent, I mentioned this tale to him, and he dropped a bit of a bombshell on me. This being that the commissioning editor in question was no longer with that company. There had been a takeover, and in the shake-up he had decided to move on to pastures new. So here I was, writing a book for a company who had absolutely no idea I was doing so.

At this point I had two options. First, I could go back to the company and see if I could interest another commissioning editor in the same idea. Or, as I was nearly finished anyway, I could go ahead and get the first draft completed, and present it to them as a fait accompli. I chose the second option.

About a month ago I was ready, and I contacted them. After being passed around the company for a while, I was eventually put in touch with the correct editor. And thankfully, she seemed as enthused as the original one was. She read my sample chapter, got me to put together a detailed proposal, and told me she would take it to the next commissioning meeting. But she said that she was “very confident” that they would want to publish it.

But of course “very confident” is not the same as having a signature on the dotted line. So, knowing that the meeting in question was last week, although not which day, I spent the whole week with heart in mouth waiting for the phone to ring. And it didn’t.

So what did this mean? Was no news good news? Had they rejected it? Had they not got round to it and held it over to the next meeting? Should I phone them, or would that seem too pushy? Perhaps the meeting hadn’t been until Friday and they hadn’t had time to get round to me and would do so on Monday morning?

So I sat through Monday and still answer came there none. By now I was starting to get a very bad feeling about things. I had started writing something different, on the basis that perhaps it would cushion the blow of rejection if I already had another project on the go. That’s what I was doing yesterday morning as I sat up on my bed, listening to the usual morning noises going on around me. Voices in the street, the usual winds of Edinburgh, the builders banging away on the building next door, the postman clanking up and down the stairs pushing junk mail through the letter boxes.

About half past eleven I decided to go and make myself my second coffee of the day. As I walked past the front door I noticed that among all the leaflets and credit card offers was a large brown A4 sized envelope. I wondered what it was, but left it there until, coffee in hand, a couple of slices of toast consumed, I was heading back to get to work again. I picked it up, put my cup on the side, absent mindedly opened it, and found the publishing contract and offer letter nestling inside. Please sign one copy and return, please deliver the finished manuscript and illustrations by May 30th.

I danced round the flat. I made up a merry song about how wonderful publishers were. I phoned everyone I knew. I pissed my daughter off mightily. And then a sobering thought occurred.

Oo-er. May 30th. That’s less than three months away. In the words of Douglas Adams, “I love deadlines, I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly past.”

You know, I’ve always liked to think of myself as a trendsetter, right on the cutting edge of what’s new and hip. (And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.) And one area in which I know that I was well ahead of the pack was this. I thought Margaret Thatcher was a complete twat at least five full years before most of you began to even get an inkling.

It was back in my childhood, I was in my first term in “the big school”, and Mrs Thatch was coming to the end of her time as Minister for Education, when she came to our school for a tour. We were told that she would be coming into our art class, and that we were to act as if she wasn’t there and just get on with our work. We were only to speak if we were spoken to, and if she asked us a question we were to be polite and try to make our answers short and simple.

So there we were, and in walks this middle-aged woman who looked and was dressed like one of the old ladies in church, surrounded by men in suits and with the Headmaster and other teachers fauning over her. And she walks through the classroom looking over the shoulders of people working away on their art projects, and she stops at my table.

“And what are you doing?” she asks me, in one of those “condescending adult” voices.

Now I am at my table, and I have a paint brush in my hand. On the table there are pots filled with different coloured paint. And there is a piece of coloured paper, on which there is a half finished picture. In paint.

I don’t know about you, but looking back on the incident today, I feel I would be much happier if the woman who was going to run our country for over a decade, and was going to order our troops into a major conflict in the South Atlantic, could have worked it out for herself.

Anyway, the reason for recounting this rather nondescript incident is that this weekend I had, for reasons too boring to go into, occasion to need some information about my old school. And, as everyone else does today, I discovered they have their own website. And I looked at the website, and something struck me about the banner picture at the top of the page.

Is it just me, or does that girl have the most weirdly long bendy arm EVER?

So I went for the interview with “the company that shall not be named,” and I didn’t get the job.

I am not altogether unhappy about this. For the following three reasons:

1. I didn’t actually particularly relish the idea of going back to work there. When you are an independent and move from company to company, there are some companies that you enjoy working for and would happily go back to. Really Big Scottish company would be one of these. And there are some that you simply endure for the sake of earning the money. This company would be one of this type. I enjoyed some bits of my time there, but for the most part I found the company to be quite annoying. I really accepted the interview mainly because, while I am not quite at the “beggars can’t be choosers” stage yet, I will be getting there sooner or later and I figured that even if I just took the three months contract it would build my cash reserves back up a bit.

2. It was a help desk/telephone support role. Now this is something I haven’t really done a lot of, and to be honest I’ve never been terribly good at it when I have. I love problem solving, it is kind of my forte, but I enjoy it in the context of working a project I really know well. In this case it would be solving problems in isolation from their context, and that really isn’t my thing at all. Also there is not the inconsiderable fact that, on the occasions I have performed this kind of role, it has come to my attention that (present company excepted of course) around 95% of all people in the world are fuckwits, and having to deal with that many fuckwits on a daily basis would probably drive me up the clock tower with the high powered rifle.

3. And this is the most important one. If I had got the job, I would have had to work with the chap who interviewed me. And he was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, one of the creepiest individuals I have ever come across. He spent the entire interview staring at me and grinning. And if that wasn’t disconcerting enough, this wasn’t any ordinary kind of grin and stare, this was a really freaky grin and stare, the kind you imagine on the faces of paedophiles. Except, of course, even paedophiles aren’t that creepy because if they were, kids would do the 100 metres in 9.1 seconds in the other direction the moment they set eyes on them.

And then there was his voice. It was smarmy, superior and dripping with sarcasm. This was the voice of someone who loves the interview process, not because they want to find the best person for the job, but because of the feeling of power over other peoples lives that it gives them.

And finally there were the questions. Now I usually complain about the type of technical questions you get asked in interviews. But I usually complain about them because they are so insulting. Normally you get asked such basic questions that you can’t believe anyone would have even got through the door without knowing the answer. The first technical question they nearly always ask, for any job involving Cobol programs is, “what are the four sections of a Cobol program?” Well obviously, having only been working with Cobol programs for 25 years, that’s a real toughy and not at all something I learned on the very first day!

But this guy’s questions were far worse, because they were just so bizarrely vague. I’ll give you a for instance. At one point he said, “okay, now we’re going to talk about DB2.” And his question was? “What can you tell me about DB2?”

Now anyone who works in the industry knows where I’m coming from here. For those who don’t, I’ll give you an analogy. It’s a bit like interviewing someone for a job as a car mechanic, and asking “what do you know about cars?” The answer could be anything from “they have a wheel in each corner and can go backwards and forwards,” to giving a blow by blow description of stripping down the entire engine. What I could tell him about DB2 would have taken the rest of the day and a good portion of the next one to itemise.

And so you have to hint that he really needs to be a bit more specific. But you can’t just come out and say so, otherwise you have just told your interviewer that he has asked a stupid question, and that isn’t likely to endear you to him.

So overall, I’m quite pleased that I don’t have to work with this person on a day to day basis, because there’s a good chance I would have had to kill him very quickly. Or more likely, very slowly. About the only thing I can say in his favour is that maybe he is a prime example of what happens to a person when they have to spend 95% of their working day dealing with fuckwits. In which case, I may have dodged the bullet.

One of the chief ironies of not having regular employment is that suddenly you have plenty of time to write, but because you are not interacting with other people on a daily basis any more, you have bugger all to write about.

So, yes, sorry it’s been so long since my last appearance, but inspiration has been sadly lacking. There have been lots of little things I could have written, but no big thing to engage my enthusiasm.

I could have written about:

- the fact that Ian Rankin spoke to me. Yes, Ian Rankin the famous novellist, creator of the Inspector Rebus books, actually spoke to little old me! He said “are these seats taken?”

- the fact that I then attempted to pimp my daughter to his teenage son, but she was having none of it.

- the fact that said teenage daughter, aka pink haired hellcat number one, is now in gainful employment working behind the bar in a comedy club.

- the fact that said teenage daughter, aka pink haired hellcat number one, had a university interview last week and got an unconditional offer out of it, meaning that whatever happens she’s not going to spend the rest of her life working behind the bar in a comedy club.

- the fact that I have an interview this week to go back to “the company that shall not be named,” who still pay peanuts, but as I’m starting to run out of money now beggars can’t be choosers.

- the fact that the book is set to go before a commissioning meeting in a fortnight at which point I will learn if all my hard work has been worth it.

I could have written about all those things. Didn’t. Have now.

See you around Mr Beadle, sir. We’re going to miss you. A lot.

Okay, first the good news. That book I was writing? You remember the one? It’s done! First draft, all finished. 65,000 words, heck of a lot of research, and the publishers may turn round and say they don’t even want it. But fuck it, it’s done.

The bad news, of course, is that now I don’t have any more excuses not to go looking for proper paid work.

It’s a coincidence that in the comments box of the last post I was talking about how US network TV is the most censored in the Western world. And then yesterday comes the news that ABC have been fined $1.4 million for showing a naked bottom in the 9-10pm slot.

Now first, if you don’t know how US TV works, you need to understand the series of delays. Because the US is spread over four time zones, shows go out at three different times depending on where you are. A show that goes out at 10 on the East Coast, because of the switch in time zone, goes out at 9 in the central zone. It is then delayed an hour to go out at 9 in the Mountain zone, and delayed 3 hours to go out at 10 on the West Coast. And according to the censorship board, the naked bottom was fine at 10. But it was unsuitable at 9.

Also, it should be added, that it wasn’t the naked bottom per-se that they were objecting to. Apparently it was because the camera panned slowly down the naked back and then lingered on the naked bottom. It was that lingering that was the problem. Apparently it was offensive to the morals and sensibility of decent American families at a time when children might still be watching.

Now let’s disregard the fact that in the UK, an evening of viewing with only one naked bottom would be considered unusual. And disappointing. Let’s focus instead on these children who may have been watching.

They, of course, fall into two categories. Those who have passed the age of puberty, and those who have not. This latter category, assuming American children are anything like British children, would not have their morals corrupted by the sight of a naked bottom. They would, rather, giggle like maniacs. As would many of the former category and not a few adults. Let’s be honest here, naked bottoms are inherently funny.

But also we shouldn’t be worried about that younger category, because this naked bottom appeared in an episode of NYPD Blue. So, quite frankly, if you are allowing your ten year old to watch a show that prides itself on it’s grittily realistic approach to the detection of grisly crime, you are a piss poor parent and deserve anything you get quite frankly.

But as to the latter category, well here’s the thing. This show actually went out five years ago. Yes, you’d think they would have got over it by now, wouldn’t you? Still. I don’t know, but if I was now a young adult who had grown up in the bible-bashing American Midwest where the sight of a shapely ankle was considered enough to corrupt my morals, I think I would be looking back over those five years right now and thanking God for that naked bottom. I think that naked bottom might have seen me through some very tough times indeed.

Finally, some of you may have noticed that Last Friday was Burns Night. And you may be aware that Burns Night marks another important anniversary. Yes, this blog was three years old. And I completely forgot all about it. It isn’t speaking to me at the moment, but we’re going to counselling and I think everything will be okay.

So the oscar nominations came out yesterday. But sadly, it seems, it’s possible there will be no award ceremony.

Because of the writers’ strike, you see. Nobody to write the script.

Well I think that’s a damned shame. Somebody needs to do something about it. And if nobody else is going to step up to the plate, I will.

Presenter 1: (pick up envelope) Now for the award for (read name of award from front of envelope)

Presenter 2: The nominees are…

(show film clips of nominees. caption each film clip with name of nominee. have voice over man read captions out loud)

Presenter 1: And the winner is… (open envelope. remove card. read name on card)

Repeat as necessary.

Hope that helps.