- Music from the “See how it feels” BMW ad
My regular reader will recall that, a while back*, I was obsessing about the music in the “See how it feels” BMW campaign. It was a stirring orchestra-and-synth creation based - I discovered in this blog’s comments - on Beethoven’s 9th.
Extensive Googling revealed it was produced by London musical group/collective/gathering/trip-hoppers UNKLE, whose stuff I’ve liked in the past, not least the atmospheric Be There featuring Ian Brown (the video, shot on the London Underground, is smashing, in a slightly postgraduate-film-school-project way).
Anyway, the BMW music now has a proper name - Trouble In Paradise (Variation On a Theme) (iTunes link) so you can all go off and play it very loudly while not driving a BMW.
* I’m staggered I posted that back in February of last year. If I didn’t have complete trust in WordPress’s ability to get the date right, in the cold, mechanical, unsentimental manner so typical of blog software, I’d be convinced it was earlier this year. How time flies, etc.
- Anyone fancy a game of fantasy football?
In a fine example of mixing business with pleasure, I’ve been helping devise Guardian.co.uk’s new Fantasy Football game, which launched last night. In the hope this blog’s reader will join in the fun, I’ve set up a Completetosh.com league - The League of Scoundrels. Joining details are below. Go on! Do it now! So much more fun than work!First, the sales pitch… we looked around the market and saw quite a few rather dull games which people were charging for. So we’ve worked with one of the leading fantasy game makers - Clever.tv - to build a free game that is… well, hopefully a little smarter than your average fantasy football game.
Obviously, the central idea is still to assemble a team with your £100m budget, and win points based on the players’ real performances in the Premier League. But, instead of just getting points for an assist, or a goal, or a clean sheet, there are a bunch of other ways to score points - tackles, shots on target, interceptions, and more - which should make this a much more interesting and nuanced play than you might get elsewhere. We think it’ll mean that managers who take a punt on some of the Premiership’s less lauded names may well be rewarded.
Then we added choices of formations, a squad system, stuck on a gorgeous interface, and club supporter and national leagues that your team can all be part of. Best of all, the game’s free. And there’s a £50k prize fund.
We think it’s going to be a scream.
I’m thrilled with how it’s turned out, yet - despite my involvement - it’s still guaranteed that I’ll be rubbish at actually playing it. So now’s your chance to humiliate me (in some cases, again). Better still, your one team can be part of many leagues, meaning you don’t need to have multiple teams, which would be a fiddle.
To sign up: first go to Fantasy Football, pick your team and save it. Then click on Friends’ Leagues. You’ll need to enter the league name: League of Scoundrels. And the password: Completetosh.
You’ll see my team - Kristal Palace - is already there, and ready for its heroic plummet to the foot of the table. Your glory is assured.
- SEO: we’re all at it
Over at the Telegraph, Shane Richmond is lamenting Private Eye’s confusion about the search engine optimisation (SEO) work they’ve been doing. He even speculates that, at Guardian towers, we’ve been doing some SEO of our own.
Well, I can’t confirm or deny that, but the conspiracy theorists will be taking a close look at two exhibits: Charlie Brooker today, and - from earlier in the month - sportswriter Tom Lutz, providing probably the best SEO’d article you’ll find this side of a Viagra blog.
The tragic thing is, it really worked.
- A TV news report that could make you sick to the stomach
My attention was grabbed by an ITV London Today story this lunchtime, firmly stating that not only is water in the Thames clean, but that it is easily drinkable - the best in the country, no less. London Today claimed: “99.98% of tests taken on samples from the river met national and European standards of safety, appearance and taste.”
Surely not, I thought.
Y’see, the River Thames doesn’t look like a clean river, and it’s not. Anyone living here knows. Its distinctive swirling brown murk is caused by silt stirred up by the fast-flowing tides - that’s not the real problem. The biggie is that sewers often overflow directly into the river after heavy rainfall, meaning it’s still quite possible that the river is - in a sense only too literal for those keen on watersports, or surfboarding to work - full of shit.
We even know 2012 London Olympic organisers are fretting that the sight and smell of London’s backed-up sewage might mar their events. It’s a great scandal.
Yet here was ITV’s local news suggesting otherwise. And not just that there was not a problem; that this was the best draw of water in the land.
A quick (web) surf turns up the truth, in a press release from Thursday: Thames Water, the water company which serves the south east of England, is indeed serving up commendably clean water. But Thames Water does not draw its water from the Thames river, thank God, and this report does not mean the Thames River is clean.
So, ITV News’s claim that “samples from the river” have done so well is, alas, as full of shit as the river itself after a heavy downpour. They mean Thames Water, not the Thames river. But that’s not what they said, while showing library shots of the murky old river itself - just to add to the confusion.
The offending 30 second item is below, recorded off my TV - sorry I can’t stand still. And a warning: paying attention to this news bulletin could be a mistake you come to regret, quickly and repeatedly, all because someone somewhere can’t take a days-old press release and rewrite it properly for a bulletin.
- From the archives… Google’s first mention
For no other reason than it’s a lazy Sunday morning, I was browsing back through the Guardian.co.uk archive to see when the first mention of Google was in the Guardian and Observer. I should have guessed; it was the ever-perceptive John Naughton who got to the punch first, writing in the Observer on Sunday March 14 1999.
His column that morning was a complaint about “bloated and vulgar” portals, and he made a very perceptive comment that many in our business still forget today, more than nine years on:
“The Net is all about something quite, quite different - namely individuals choosing what they want, and only what they want.”
Amen to that, again.
He also thought Yahoo was going to the dogs, and that Google would eat its lunch - until it went public too.
“Before it became a business going nowhere, Yahoo! was called ‘Dave and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web’. Dave (Filo) and Jerry (Yang) were graduate students at Stanford who had the idea of making a directory of the burgeoning Web. Now they’re the billionaire owners of a plonking great virtual billboard with en-suite directory services.
Still, maybe Dave and Jerry will appreciate the irony of being wiped out by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two more Stanford graduates armed with a great idea and a wacky name. Google (www.google.com) indexes Web pages using an ingenious algorithm which ranks a site on the basis of who links to it. It’s a kind of automated peer-review of the kind that created the software on which the Net runs. Google is still in Beta form but works a treat, so it’ll probably be okay until Sergey and Larry float the company and get wiped out by the next pair of kids in the queue. On balance, it’s safer to invest in railways.”
Only on that last point can we see Naughton’s not entirely right. Yet.
- Pies are great
Tony down at Supa Fry, my local chip shop, is a big fan of Pukka pies. “The guy who started the company,” he says, “he started in his garden! This was 40, 50 years ago. And now look at it. They’re sending pies around the world now. And good luck to him.”
Tony is, as ever, right. Pukka pies are everywhere, and it’s for the best. While some traditionalists lament the demise of the regional pie, and I certainly miss being able to score a good Scotch pie here in London, the rise of the Pukka superpie has removed the occasionally intestinally devastating variation in quality that has, historically, been a significant hazard for the enthusiast.
The Pukka Pie founder of whom Tony speaks is Trevor Scott, who kicked things off in 1963 and made himself one of Britain’s richest men on the back of his pie empire. 180,000 pies and pastries are produced every day at Pukka’s high-tech factory at Syston, Leicestershire. You can get them all over the place - as well as at Tony’s Supa Fry, I think I’m right in saying they are now the principle pie in English football, and it is in this context I have come to know them well.
Like all the best football rituals, there’s a knack to eating a Pukka pie. When served in a crinkly plastic bag, the top may appear cool, while the foil tray in which they rest is quite warm. Nothing, however, indicates the extraordinary heat in the centre of the pie. N00b pie eaters will dive straight in, and risk serious burns to tongue, lips and even face as the pie contents spill out. Seasoned supporters view this as something of a test; the “serious” fan would not make such a schoolboy error.
The pragmatic pie eater, therefore, may choose to wait 15-20 minutes before consuming the product, knowing that it is piping hot throughout despite its cool exterior. This waiting time is known, at least round seat M108 of the Don Rogers Stand, Swindon, as the “half life” of the Pukka pie. The pie should then be debagged and, by means of gripping the edges of the foil tray while using the index finger to push the bottom of said tray, the pie raised out its container. This allows a safer approach to the snack, all the while ensuring no gravy spills down your front.
Could this ritual spread from the English lower leagues to Serie A or La Liga, or even Major League Soccer in the US? The company’s advertising makes no secret of Pukka’s global ambitions, as you can see from these snaps from SupaFry.
A terrifying vision: a fleet of giant pies swoop down towards the Houses of Parliament, sent through some kind of tractor beam from a giant Photoshopped orb.
Pukka make their global ambitions clear, as a giant pie - aroma clearly leaking from under its pastry lid, prepares to land on the White House.
History meets the future in his pastry-packed vision, where the foil-wrapped snacks make their weaving way down from the stars, and squeeze through the historic landmark. Note: the bridge stays down, to avoid any punctures and/or spillage of gravy.
In a surprising turn, Pukka point out the noted aphrodisiac qualities of their products. The snack being advertised here is known in the trade as - and I $hit you not - a Stand Up Cornish Pasty.
You’ll find plenty more brilliant Pukka posters at their website (and they’re available to buy) although I think Tony’s selection is pretty damn fine.
- The BBC goes a’trampling
An old BBC microphone. Pic by Dave’scunningplan, taken from Flickr under CC: license
Let’s be clear: at work, the BBC is a competitor. One of the strongest, and most commercially minded, at that.
But as a media consumer I love the BBC. This sets up an interesting set of conflicts.
I devour its output on TV, on radio, online via iPlayer, and on the web - although some, especially online, simply isn’t as good as it should be.
It is cracking value for money, especially compared to my Sky subscription, even if it appears to have lax internal controls on the tax money it spends competing with my employer and the rest of the private sector (ref its £36m - count ‘em - overspend this year).
Much of its journalism is superb. And I know some cracking people who work for it, who are motivated by the highest principles.
But…
It does keep saying and doing things which suggest it is either unaware of its 1000-lb gorilla status, or that it doesn’t care.
Here are three examples, two big, one quite small, all unconnected, but only from this week.
- To Twit, or not to Twit
[Warning: this post will mean nothing to you if you don't use Twitter or - at least - are familiar with Facebook's news feed. If you don't fall into this camp, this will be much more interesting than what follows. And even if you do fall into that camp, you might want to think about just following that link anyway.]
Journalism blogger extraordinaire Paul Bradshow quotes me being, I’ll admit, a bit of a Twitter twat on his Online Journalism today. Paul was live-Twittering a conference last week. I, and a few others, unsubscribed from his normally very interesting feed because his updates were overwhelming our streams. We couldn’t see what any of our other friends were up to because of his volley of updates.
Maybe I was having a bad day. Maybe it was all just a bit much. But Paul’s rapid-fire flow of Tweets displaced those from all my other contacts that day, and I found myself needing to get out straight away. I’m glad Paul’s written about the reaction he saw, because what happened there - and the mixed reaction to it - tells us something about how people like to use this emerging form of communication.
My problem with it was caused by two things - my expectations of the medium, and the medium’s limitations.
My expectations: I like to use Twitter to keep up with friends and acquaintances. They tell me what they’re up to, or what they’ve just seen, or offer up a link. Occasionally - although I’m a little uncomfortable doing it, as I don’t think Twitter is a conversational space - I’ll have brief one-to-one, but public, exchanges with people. But, generally, this is about short, one-off messages to a group.
The medium’s limitations: it is very easy to overwhelm. Twitter doesn’t thread and, although conventional spam is unlikely, it’s easy for people to spam their friends if they go off on one. Sometimes, that’s entertaining - someone will be at an interesting place, or talking to someone cool, or just madly frustrated by something, and you want lots of updates. Sometimes it’s entertaining for all the wrong reasons - I follow the Tweets of someone someone I’ve never met, who writes the most infuriating things about the business we’re both in. Somehow, I can’t let go.
But I digress.
All this means for me is this:
First, Twitter’s no good for live (micro)blogging. It’s hard to convey a sense of what’s happening at an event in only 160 characters.
Second, Twitter’s a personal medium, which means I want to know what you think about events - not just have those events described to me, but that 160 limit stops you doing that.
Third, Twitter’s a broadcast channel. Except when you go into conversation with another user - and I’m not convinced Twitter’s good even for that - it’s a way of saying brief things to lots of people. And people, confronted with a broadcast channel that’s blasting out lots of stuff they’re not interested in, will change channel.
Don’t get me wrong. I love liveblogging - my colleagues on Guardian Sport pretty much invented it with their minute-by-minute reports, which meld commentary with analysis, wit and user interaction. We now have similar all over the site, in lots of different subject areas.
I just don’t think Twitter’s a particularly good place to do it.
- It helps to forget
It’s the week of the summer which proves: a really bad memory only helps you become a better football fan.
Let me explain: the new season may be two months off - the fixture list isn’t even out yet - but the arrival of the new season ticket is an exciting moment. Mine thudded onto the doormat this week.
The close season is not, I suspect, something non-football fans will understand. But an attraction of the sport is that, unlike Real Life, things get reset every summer. No matter how shocking your side was last season, the slate is wiped clean. Forget about the midfield’s abject inability to pass to colleagues, don’t bother thinking about how leaky the defense was against even the lowliest journeymen, and just blank out how appallingly bereft of confidence the strikers were. There, there. It’s all gone. A fresh start is made.
Relegated? No bother. You’re too good for this new, lower league, and will bounce back in a memorable Season Of Glory.
Or was the tale of last season like Swindon Town’s - one of mid-table obscurity? Even better - it’s only a small step to the the playoffs which surely await you next May. Let’s all sing Town Are On Their Way to Wembley.
Better yet, maybe you actually suffered the heartache of a cup final gubbing or playoff defeat? Now is the time to let the scars heal - your team, the stronger for the experience (and never, ever, shattered and demoralised and thinking of getting a transfer somewhere better/wealthier/sunnier) will make sure of it next time.
And there will be a next time.
So, after a few weeks in the Mediterranean (lower leagues) or Dubai (Frank Lampard), the players are back sweating it out in preseason. Let the the players be photographed throwing up with exertion for the benefit of the first home game match programme, while our delusions find new voice.
Euphemisms abound in the local papers (lower leagues) or News of the World (Frank Lampard); strikers talk of the need to find the net only once early on, at which point the floodgates will open. You naturally believe they have 20 a season in them, defying the bitter experience of your own eyes only a few months ago.
Defenders talk up all the work they’re doing as a “unit”, calling to mind a well-drilled military outfit ready to defy even the flying Ronaldo himself. Midfielders talk about workrate and getting-the-basics-right-and-the-rest-will-follow, of dynamism and tempo and width.
And, by God, you lap it up. If we don’t look like a Wiltshire Brazil on that sunny opening day in August I’ll be aghast.
And when the fixtures finally come out you’ll busily scan through the list, earmarking the away trips and forgetting - just as you forgot about the performances themselves - about the assorted dreadful places you chose to go last year, just to see the team lose.
Truly, amnesia is a football fan’s greatest friend. That and a pair of warm gloves.
- Spinning through time on Live Search Maps
It’s unfashionable to say it, but I rather like Microsoft’s Live Search Maps. The first thing you notice is the maps themselves are clearer - more map like - than at rival Google Maps, but it’s the bird’s eye view that strikes me as most impressive. You can find a location, then view it at an angle - not from right overhead, as with Google Maps’ satellite view - which gives more perspective. Then you can spin right around a point, through 360 degrees in four stages.
Because the images from each angle are obviously taken at different times as the satellites pass overhead, you get some rather interesting effects. Take the Guardian’s new home at King’s Place, London. In Google Maps, it’s a hole in the ground.
In Live Search Maps, take the overhead view and the image comes from even earlier than Google’s - the site is still home to a working warehouse (making it, perhaps, two or three years’ old). Move into bird’s eye view, and you can spin round a building site and see four different stages of construction. The opening shot shows the core is being built into the large hole in the ground (late 2006, I think). In the final shot the building looks finished, so must be from this spring (the building is, today, externally complete, and being fitted out for occupation later in the year).
Click on the pictures above today (the day of writing) and you should get to the original picture on Live Search Maps. But, in time, those links will come to show a more recent image.
Which begs the question… I’d love to know if Microsoft (and Google) are keeping these images as they replace them with new versions… over time, they’d build up a archive of cities as they once looked. You could view timelapse overhead shots of districts as they change - in the case of King’s Cross, that could be quite a change indeed. It would add a fascinating new layer to the mapping services, even if you’d still really, really want to change the splendidly inelegant name of the Microsoft version…
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