Old Personal: June 2005 Archives

Apparently my Aunt has started a little e-mail campaign to get extended family members to vote for my cousin Alex (who I've not seen in years), who helped design this display. It's all part of this Design Awards thing, where they're having a people's choice award - having actually already given out all the awards that are worth a damn (my cousin's got a gold award). My cousin's team's contribution is the Ambient Experience for Healthcare - the idea of which is actually quite wonderful.

What it is (from what I understand) is an effort to make the experience of an MRI machine less intimidating. As anyone who's watched any medical drama (House in particular), MRIs can be very stressful - leading to a great deal of claustrophobia and stress at the very loud noises and enclosed spaces that accompany it. Ambient environments would then have a genuine medical application, from what I understand, since people who are more relaxed will tend to move less - and the less movement there is, the more accurate the scan will be. Which is good too for the patient, not having to go through the experience again to get a proper scan.

But yes, I always point out (rather silly-ly) that it's a Philips MRI machine in House (well, most of House season 1 anyway). That's the wages. So while it's probably unlikely that my cousin had that much to do with the machine itself (or not, whatever), the display here seems like a worthy enough thing to vote for. Certainly better than Apple Fanboy-ware (who would have thought, eh?) - the Smack-Mini and the iPod-Snuff-Film.

Despite the fact that I really quite like both the idea and the implementation, I can't begin to describe what must the immense amount of vote rigging that must be going on for their display to currently be in the lead - to a comical extent. Once you've voted (for him of course), you'll see that they are currently leading at 57% of the vote in what is really a very crowded field. And I mean I have no particular compunctions on the rigging of votes in this case - if it can be rigged, whose fault is that; just as long as the fuckers from Apple don't get it.

Notice though, that in the Environments category, my cousin's team got Gold to Team America: World Police's Silver.

I can't remember quite what exactly sparked it off in my head, but I suddenly felt the need to listen to a particular Jessica Simpson song. Of course I know it because, unlike the rest of you, I wasn't some silly Newlyweds-come-lately. Of course Louis always seemed to have a particular fascination with the whole female teen pop thing that for so long obsessed so many - epitomised so much by Britney and Christina. So being who I am, I decided to explore the lunatic fringe of blonde female pop singers of the period - and hence, Billie, Hoku, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore, M2M, even perhaps that spooky one that did unforgivable sinner.

So yes, I wanted to listen to this song off of Irresistible, but not the one that channeled whoever I thought it channeled at the time (I think it was Michael Jackson), Hot Like Fire, or one of those. I wanted to listen to What's It Gonna Be - which sticks to me because I associate it so readily with Mariah's own unforgettable summer anthem, Always Be My Baby. I sometimes think to myself, and I can't remember if it was Tupac who said it, but someone (ODB?) said that having been in prison really made you understand what you were missing when Mariah came on the radio, and that those who poohed it just in some way didn't quite get it.

But yes, Jessica Simpson's song wasn't the first of that kind, and obviously there was a reason for that, because she was, in Tommy Mottola's mind, the next Mariah, so she was given all the same shapers and mouldings that Mariah was. And she was still married during Fantasy. So previously there had been I Think I'm In Love, which I found out later samples Jack and Diane, a John Mellencamp song that is widely known and popular.

John Mellencamp I bought an album off of the strength of the one single he put out, which sadly was a cover, and which I approached because of the association that song had with Me'Shell NdegéOcello - who I had seen If That's Your Boyfriend off of. Wild Night. And that video, the former, had featured a rather hot blonde woman slipping rather fetchingly into a pair of jeans in her undies at the beginning of the video before she went of to be a cab driver, as you do. The latter had been poor babied by Madonna, who just told her to get on with it and she did.

I should have been married to Mariah at 12.

Some times I'm not sure what comes over me. It's not like I'm as angry as I used to be, maybe just a couple of weeks ago. But if I'm not angry so much any more, where does all this nonsense come from? Righteous indignation? I can hear Nirvana playing in the background.

Well, whatever the case I find that cutting anger out of the equation doesn't seem to get rid of spite, or unpleasantness, or self-righteousness; much less fear and shame and mortification. I try not to edit things out, since the retention is important, if only to me, as a record of shame and weakness and grovelling crawling back.

Is it really the unresolved? But what to do when you think how things would not be different even if you tried?

insufferable, sprinkling random references to sex and the city, uses the lingo of blah blah, very much like the fry and laurie sketch.

random sexual encounters I'm sure are fun fun fun, and I think the phrase is "I still would though".

at least writing about prostitution when you can write worth a damn is at least engaging; as opposed to semi-literate, middle-brow, pseudo-intellectual twaddle - not quite as good as pornography.

and I *still* think people should keep it in their pants (to the right) and mind their own fucking business and not be so (hokkien is just so apt sometimes) fucking kay-poh.

Where's the liberal party when you need it? Freedom of enterprise and freedom of the individual, sounds like a good idea huh?

But yes, you can take your "artistic value" and shove it up your ass.

And you can barely see nipple.

Courtesy of Ashley Blue, and unidentified member. I'm hoping Google will forgive what is merely a didactic tool. (Aren't I a funny one?)

I'm suddenly enjoying having to pad out the text, so that the picture doesn't cross ugly-ly over the line seperator at the bottom of the post - I just think making the picture smaller would detract from its effect and intention.

It is not in the what of the doing, but rather the who. Things are wrong not necessarily because what is being done is wrong, in some qualitative way – to dissect it that way is to do artistry (or lack of) disservice – more often than not it is simply the ineptitude of the one doing the thing. And so it would be nice to say that so and so has done this thing badly because he did this, and you don’t do this, that’s not the way things (or this) works. And then someone else does it that way (or this), and the working ensues. People of suasion, of power and mastery, of tinkling and till it is, people of ability and talent, apparently, can do as they please. And so perhaps the Beatles could recite the phonebook and sell a million records, but you wouldn’t wonder if they’s also launch a thousand ships in the process.

The best part of the review though, and the one thing they particularly got right, is this: "Coldplay, the most insufferable band of the decade".

And so perhaps it is no surprise that moving sentimentality should accompany such thinly veiled jingoism and preservation for fear of the elided and rude third estate - the staving off of progress and the grubbiness of economics. But you wonder if that sentimental feeling in and of itself is unable to move beyond that context, that lexicon of dismissal and feeling. And the talk of Beauty and Desire and Right and Normalcy. I suppose didactic isn't the worst epithet it would choose for itself, but still. But if feeling is the fascist impulse.

And so is a lack of subject in itself sufficient to disperse the focus of nostalgia? A peripheral grazing of movement and sentiment, perhaps.

Cute Mouse though.

A very wrenching kind of socialisation, and all such rude conversion and getting sprayed.