Guardian columnist Bidisha made a post yesterday about the downside of romanticism. She didn’t quite get her point across after the rant went off course and started talking about the injustice of having a cleaner and not reading Germaine Greer (this is often a problem for her) but I read Guardian articles for the comments, and one of them pointed me towards this gem.

Like a blind date where a handsome man shows up and asks where you stand on spousal battery, this starts off looking like a good idea but then goes rapidly downhill. The whole list is gold, but I have picked my favourites

#3 : Give her a facial massage

This would totally work if the man in question were a qualified masseur, but if he’s not, it’s just some bloke smooshing his calloused fingers into your face until you beg him to stop. I personally have seen far too many Dario Argento films to assume that the ‘hands towards face’ action means anything but eye gouging.

#8 Give her a key with a note that says “You have the key to my heart”

Let’s look at the semiotics behind keys – they open and lock things, they are mysterious objects when encountered out of context of the things they open. Ergo my first thought would be – what does this key actually open? If it’s the back door, it’s not romantic, it’s a key to a portal behind which bins are kept. Key to my heart? More likely it’s the key to your dad’s old Ford Maestro. Plus, a very depressing keepsake to find  after your husband succumbs to angina.

#11. Take a polaroid of yourself holding your breath. Stick it in her lunch or purse with a note that says, “I’m holding my breath till I see you again.”

That sounds like something out of Se7en – as does this

#22. Give her a pocket dictionary – Write “You” as the meaning next to the word “Life”, mark the page and give it to them “Without you, life would have no meaning.”

A nice return present might be a thesaurus where you point out that the word ‘boyfriend’ isn’t synonymous with ‘terrifying stalker’.

#32. Start a journal of your thoughts and present it to your wife.

Consider leaving out entries such as ‘sneaked photo of me holding  my breath into her lunch’ and ‘stole the key to Uncle Maurice’s taxidermy case’.

#31. Give a fish & fish bowl with a note attached that reads, “Out of all the fish in the world I pick you!”

Mangling idioms is not something that would win my heart, neither would being compared to a fish, nor implying that the only choices in the world for physical intimacy were fish, or you.

#39. Write 100 reasons why you love your wife on 100 post-it notes and place them all over the house.

Ostensibly this seems romantic, but have you ever tried to list 100 reasons for ANYTHING? The first ten might be sweet, the first twenty if your beau is particularly good with words, but by number 67 you’d be down to “you make me toast sometimes”, “once when I came in loaded you were already asleep” and “you have eyebrows”. This can be evidenced by number 45 on this very list…

#45. Catch her eyes in a crowd and wink.

Certainly a substitute for that weekend in Paris.

And at the risk of being called a mysanthropic whinger with nothing useful to say – here are some tips from me, an actual woman.

#1 Acknowledge her individuality

Some women might actually enjoy all the creepy attentions above, each to her own. You might have the kind of girl who will laugh her tits off when you gift wrap your asthma inhaler and add a note saying ‘you take my breath away’. But everyone likes to feel that they are unique and special, so try to think of things that she likes and nobody else does, from photo manips of Robert Pattinson with a hedgehog’s body to the Black Eyed Peas.

#2 Listen and look

We share so many details of our specific likes and dislikes on social media that making some ill advised attempts at face massage or presenting her with fish are not necessary. Facebook, twitter, livejournal, amazon – all these will give massive clues to what she actually might find romantic. Or you know, just ask her. Use questions such as “What do you find romantic?”. Things like that.

#3 Stop trying so fucking hard

All of the things on that list are either things you would do anyway, or things which require props, planning and nail-biting suspense. Also, Valentine’s Day seems hell bent on reducing female halves of relationships into inert spectators waiting for things to be ‘done’ to them by the half which doesn’t do those things naturally very well at all.  That ‘surprise’ mentality might also not be popular. Surprises can be unnerving and just lead to people paintballing in cocktail dresses or being turned away from Jamie’s Italian because they’re dressed as Darth Vader. (Both of these have happened to me).

WISTABLE – Dec 17th – Jan 20th – symbol : the surplus box of nougat

Your birth was a distraction to everyone hoping to enjoy the festive season and because of your hubris at trying to overshadow the funnest time of the year with your mewling, gory entrance into the world, you shall be forever punished as card retailers remove birthday cards from their shelves to make way for Christmas cards. You burden your friends by trying to shoehorn your birthday celebrations into an already packed month. Everyone hates you.

FOLIO – January 21st to February 16th – symbol : the corncrake

You are the kind of person that swerves into puddles in order to drench pedestrians. Your joyful mysanthropy belies your deep seated need to be loved and appreciated, despite your lack of talent, charm, good looks or indeed any positive human trait. You start a diary every year but give up after January 8th’s entry which simply says ‘meeting’.

FLAVIVIRUS – Feb 17th – March 11th – symbol : the valet ticket

Oh everything’s just wonderful for you isn’t it? You float through life dating millionaires and porn star millionaires and holidaying on yachts and having dental treatment whenever necessary. Every now and then you toss a bone to humanity in the shape of a Somalian orphanage or a cure for cancer, humbly refusing the plaudits and blushing at the awards you receive for your efforts. But we all know what happened that night at the boathouse. You thought no-one was watching, but they were.

VISA – March 12th – April 18th – symbol – the meerkat

Your existence baffles many. When normal people shake their heads at the popularity of products aimed at the  lowest common denominator, they are unaware that as the most prevalent sign, you are controlling the world’s tastes. You like TGI Fridays restaurants. You read Dan Brown books. You buy merchandise which has been developed from television advertising mascots. You spout catchphrases. You are the sole reason that any reality show contestent ever writes their own humorous spoof self-help book. Without you, the world would be a true reflection of the beauty of the human mind and soul.

AIRFIELD – April 19th – May 13th – symbol : the individual portion of low fat spread

You are never going to be the lead in a Broadway musical, and you may as well accept that now before you waste any more time and energy. That Starbucks guy likes you, you know the one at the good Starbucks, not the other Starbucks? His name’s Mark and he likes The Killers. Yeah I know, they’re kind of lame now but the first two albums were okay. And he’s a good guy really. You should date him, go full time at Bed, Bath and Beyond and accept that this is your life now.

HOWL – May 14th – June 22nd, symbol : the cup holder

You are one of the only people who can stop the steady decline of the Earth, its peoples, lands and natural resources. You have known this for some time but had no real way of communicating with others like you. Sign up to some automated twitter horoscope services, buy some keychains, tshirts, “Howls Do It To Save You All” bumper stickers and ask around at parties. Keep a note of MySpace birthday alerts during the Howl period. Unless you meet and devise a strategy, the world will begin to disintegrate in 2015. Good luck.

SUBSCRIPT - June 22nd – July 20th – symbol – ^

Once your powers start to manifest, you will become the arch-nemesis to Howl. After the Great Awakening (June 24th 2015, 2.34pm) you will either ascend to Mah-Karahach as one of the children of G-raThok, or be defeated by the global union of souls which will be achieved if the plan of the Howls is successful. Until then, you may as well sit tight. Really not much you can do.

GHENT -  July 21st – August 10th – symbol : the overused candle

Because your birthday fell within the long summer break from school, college and university, you have never had a satisfying birthday party, instead having to sit with a fixed smile as some Portuguese waiter brings over a hastily prepared birthday cake on your summer holiday with your parents while inside, you slowly blacken and die. Consider a relationship with a Wistable, and together you can grow old and adequately content in bitter delirium.

COIL – August 11th – September 16th – symbol : the foreign postage stamp

Once you made an off-the-cuff remark which made a few guys in the office laugh. Then later, in the bar, you found a five on the floor and a pretty girl smiled at you. That was the best day of your life.  Oh I’m not saying you won’t have good times, but you will never again feel the sense of achievement, acceptance and self-actualisation you felt on that day. Although it’s technically all downhill from here, try to remember that day fondly, and get through the rest of your life without too much regret that you never smiled back.

RABBIT – September 17th – October 30th – symbol : the rabbit.

You are a rabbit. That’s it. You’re probably now saying “But I’m not a rabbit.” That is a typical rabbit thing to say. Denial of Laporidity is one of only two characteristics associated with this sign, the other being ‘rabbitness’.

JOHN ROBERTSON – October 31st – November 19th – symbol : the pencil

As an arbiter of tastes you will repeatedly find yourself ostracised and ridiculed by the general public until which time that your unique vision will be mass marketed and co-opted by The Man. At this time everyone will see, they’ll finally get it, they will come to realise that you were a pioneer, and in future they will listen to your wisdom, even giving you a column in one of those hipster magazines which don’t even have words on the cover. You will eventually have your own TV show and a film will be made about your life for which you will be credited as screenwriter and win an Oscar. Either that or you’re just a delusional weirdo with a God complex. Depends on whether you’re on the cusp or not, and I’m not going to tell you where that is.

RANGE – November 21st – December 16th – symbol : the pocket handkerchief

You were almost certainly conceived some time around Valentine’s Day and as such you are the living embodiment of hollow promises and store-bought sentimentality which was soon washed away with the March rains, along with any real hope or love that your parents felt for each other. You are a reminder of what can happen when alcohol and loneliness meet head on. Congratulations.

High school kids working with HAM

Children In Need changed my life. I wasn’t a child who benefitted from their funds, I was a project manager with a team of dedicated people who had risked their livelihoods to become members of the Third Sector, where no-one had a permanent job and everyone was working for the goodof people worse off than themselves.

I’m no saint – I applied for a job at a community media group because it was a job I saw as easy. I had no idea. I got  a job as manager of Halton Access to Media. The organisation aimed to help all people in the deprived ward of Halton to increase their skills and self-esteem through radio and film making.  I’m sure some people will see that as wishy-washy so let me give you some real examples.

Amy (19) was severely disabled and would rarely speak, even to only one person. After working with our project she actually presented her own live radio show which went out to over 10,000 people and learned skills such as money management and form filling. Her life was transformed.

Martin (23) was intelligent but had limited social skills. He had never had a job since leaving school at 16 because he found it difficult to relate to people. During our course he tapped in to a creative writing streak and ended up getting his first ever job. Now he’s engaged and starting his own family.

Those are just two examples of dozens of young people who benefitted from our Children In Need funded project. The great thing about CIN is that they really understand children and young people and what benefits them. They know that self-esteem and fun are at the heart of everything which really enriches their lives. Young carers, disabled young people, children in care, autistic, excluded and vulnerable children who had been abandoned by everyone else, they grew in personality, skills and confidence and were able to have at least an hour a week where they could express themselves, laugh and learn.

After working at Halton Access to Media I realised how rewarding it can be to work with young people. I had previously been rather self-absorbed, as the media industry sometimes required. Suddenly I cared more about the future of the young people and children I worked with than my own. It felt so good that I trained as a teacher and now I work with young people full time. I would never have considered doing this if it weren’t for Children In Need, so please – give them a pound and know that you have made a huge difference in their lives.

I will try to itemise this for you -

£2 will pay for a young person to use public transport to get to a project that might be the best thing that happens to them that week.

£7 will pay an hour’s wages for a youth worker

£10 will pay for lunch for 5 young people attending a project. It might seem like nothing, but some are so poor they will come just for the food, and get the training and self-esteem boost incidentally.

Children In Need money goes towards the dreams and aspirations of our children and young people. They fund unpopular projects which actually make a difference. If it weren’t for them I would probably still be working for my own benefit instead of working with young people to support and help them. Our young people are our future, and it is still our job to protect and help them. Please give to Children In Need tonight.

DONATE WHATEVER YOU CAN – CLICK HERE

All these shirts are for sale now in UK clothes stores and are categorised under ‘boy’ or ‘girl’. See if you can guess which is which.

The bit.ly Link of Mystery

Unless you’re the Riddler, don’t just tweet a random link with no indication of where it might go to. It suggests a level of trust which you might not deserve from your followers, and most people won’t risk it. If it leads to your own site it implies that you’re not confident enough that people will follow the link once they know it’s your content.

The Numerator

So? You could have spent that valuable tweet giving us some reason to follow you, or #FF you. Instead you pounded your fists on the floor like a toddler and demanded MORE even though you have demonstrated nothing to deserve it. Here’s a tip – be interesting, be funny, provoke thought, be helpful, be nice. Then you’ll get more followers.

I Know What You Did Last Twitter Update

Translation : I’m not quite confident enough that my tweets will make you want to follow me, so I’m instigating a campaign of fear and social awkwardness. No-one will ever unfollow me again! And I just mistook twitter for some kind of universal judgement on my character and worth as a human being.

Hey….HEY!!!…Hey!! LOVE ME!!!!!!

Excuse me, I think you dropped this self-respect on the floor.

The Tweeter of Many Faces

That’s cool, but you might not want to change your background, userpic and loca – -oh wait, you’ve changed everything and I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHO YOU ARE!

The Boy In The Bubble

This is a tweeter who doesn’t think that anyone is as dumb as him. There are 3 people who are, the ones who re-tweeted him. Twitter is not the place to ask why things are trending. This question is like putting your hand in a fire. Once you do it, you don’t do it again. Unfortunately some people never learn..

Is your feed full yet?

Yeah thanks for that. Ever heard of staggering? I follow less than 500,000 people, so you’re kind of clogging my feed there…

I love Democracy!

I know that sometimes you don’t know an app is doing this until all your followers disappear but a general rule of thumb is – if they ask for your twitter name, they will spam all over its face with this stuff. If you’re happy with that then maybe Twitter isn’t for you. Because we will burn you.

I used to love Dawson’s Creek…

Translation : Everyone, stop what you’re doing and tell me how much you can’t live without me!! Anyone??  I’m serious, you know….

Oh great, THIS guy again…

Why don’t you just fuck off Pepys, you emo bastard. The Pity Party supplies store is closed.

*Disclaimer : I may have done one, more or all of these, repeatedly.

This is a less stupid reason than the real one

Our flight is delayed so I’m going to fly the plane. I’ve seen literally dozens of planes in flight so it should be fine.

By now I should be sipping mojitos on a rooftop somewhere. Well, drinking beer in an Irish pub. One or the other. Same difference. Instead my Comic-Con adventure has stalled because of an un-adjustable pilot’s seat.

Last night me and my endofshow.com colleague stayed at an airport hotel ready to fly to San Diego via New York. At 11.10 am our flight was supposed to leave. At 11.25 we were told the pilot’s seat couldn’t be adjusted and the part necessary was nowhere near Manchester, and was possibly imaginary anyway. At 11.45 we were told an announcement would be made shortly. At 12.30 we were told that the flight was cancelled.

If anyone wants to find out what it’s like to be sub-human I recommend flying American Airlines. Transport to the hotel was promised but instead they led us on a death march across a busy roundabout.

American Airlines then asked us to pick up our bags and check into an airport hotel which they had paid for, they were going to send a bus to pick us up. There was no bus. Instead, we trailed after a man in a yellow vest who led us across a few busy roads and a roundabout, dodging taxis and shuttle buses as we made our way to the Bewleys Hotel.

This is a nice hotel. You can tell because a pint costs £3.50. Kevin and I holed up in the bar for a bit checking our EC regulations. The £508 we’re due in compensation might be a balm to the wounds of being abandoned in a hotel like modern refugees. (If you were on our flight, go to http://tinyurl.com/aaflight211 for a guide on how to claim your compensation).

Gone through the 7 stages of Northern grief – irritated, angry, comedic, bloody angry, accepting, amused, drunk. Flight tomorrow.

So I’m sat here in a hotel room feeling strangely detached from what’s going on in the ‘real world’ of the UK I’m trying to leave. There are flash floods apparently but they may as well be in New Delhi or Indonesia. The flight is re-scheduled for tomorrow at 11.30am which should get us into San Diego by 7.30pm local time.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, or feel free to burn some effigies or something. Whatever your individual spirituality allows.

Bill and Sam in my head, and now on screen

True Blood is finally back! Also, my book is out soon, you can pre-order it from Play and Amazon, and from the Benbella books site. I say my book, I am one of the contributors to it and the other essays are really good. I did a bit of a Q and A thingy for Smartpop which you can read here.

I have to write a blog post for Smartpop about episode 3, kind of updating the thoughts in the essay I wrote, which was about Jason Stackhouse and his search for masculinity. I also looked at Eric, Sam, Lafayette and Bill Compton with regard to their masculinity. Episode 1 was chock full of references to masculinity and male sexuality, so I hope these continue so my update will link nicely to the essay.

Jason

In my essay I mentioned how Jason, at the end of season 2, had begun to put himself on the right path, emotionally and ethically. Of course then he goes and shoots Eggs which threw a spanner in the works. Since Andy decided to take the rap, Jason was given a moral dilemma over whether to confess and land both of them in trouble or keep his mouth shut. Andy’s advice to him was so perfect in the context of my essay that I was slightly weirded out – “Conscience off, dick on.”

Jason is a good boy however, he’s learned sexual lessons which have lessened his ability to fuck and run, so he can’t do what Andy is telling him. I also liked the fact that Hoyt moved in, he’ll be the angel on Jason’s shoulder.

Bill and Sam

Not that I’ve dissected Sam’s sex dream scene, but here’s my dissection of the sex dream scene. Although the slashers were very pleased with this, it struck me as a straight man’s version of what a gay fantasy would be (and the straight man I’m referring to is Sam Merlotte btw). The way Sam Trammell chose to play that scene, all coyness and fluttering eyelashes, was very effeminate. Stephen Moyer played it for laughs. It was still sexy, but it was not authentic, and I guess that was the point of the scene. It had a flavour of bad pr0n about it and that made it a scene that could make sense within the wider plot, as a clear example of a vamp blood-induced fantasy.

Eric

Eric had three big scenes – the sex scene which contrasted his new waitress and Sookie’s reactions to his body and gave a hint of Eric’s longing for her; the scene with Pam where real worry and desperation starts to set in over what Sophie’s reaction will be to Bill’s disappearance; and the scene where Sophie pretty much emasculates him, demonstrating that she is stronger and more powerful and ready to cut him loose if he misbehaves. I’d like to see Eric’s position as Sheriff explored this season – especially the dichotomy of being king of all he surveys in one sense, and an underling to the Queen in another.

On the back of recent Facebook privacy wrangles comes the news that four self-confessed nerds from NYU have raised the capital they needed to start coding a new type of social network – open sourced and with a focus on personal ownership of data rather than the bowl full of car keys Facebook has become.

My own FB pet peeve is photo tagging. We’re encouraged not to attach a great deal of importance to who we allow to be a Facebook ‘friend’. How many of us have clicked the ‘accept’ button just to avoid a little awkwardness at the bus stop or because it seems petty to fence off your virtual world in the same way you would lock your door at night? The problem is, as our coterie of friends grows, so does the amount of license we give to them to spread our personal information across their own online buddies. I have ended up tagged in pictures which I had no idea were being taken, uploaded and shared, by friends of friends who I have never met. Of course there’s the ‘untag’ option, but to me that’s the equivalent of pulling your pants back up after someone has yanked them down in public.

Also, Facebook assimilates us so that everyone’s profile looks the same and gives the same amount of attention to every action we take. If I had a personal website, a dot com for example, I might include links to blogs, twitter feed, maybe even the odd photo. What I wouldn’t do was include pictures of my farm, or add 32 point text proclaiming I ‘like’ my friend’s picture of a kitten in a teacup. These things are unimportant, but treated by Facebook with the same reverence as creative endeavours such as videos, blog posts or artwork.

So how can Diaspora* help? Put plainly, it can give us options which Facebook would hide in a ticky-box odyssey, and wouldn’t get pissy when we used them. It would enable us to tailor which information we shared, and who in turn was allowed to share that. The open source will allow app development which will make each ‘seed’ unique and each user experience different. Moreover, it will take the social networking power back from those would use it to treat us like data cows and milk us for all we’re worth.

You can find out more at www.joindiaspora.com or follow @joindiaspora on twitter

 Here’s an NY Times Article

Stupid kids...

90% of children know that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, a survey of children’s science knowledge confirmed.

Four fifths of the 1,000 primary and secondary pupils knew that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, and forty percent of nine and ten year olds were able to correctly identify the discovery of gravity as Sir Isaac Newton’s most famous contribution to science.

Seven in ten nine and ten year olds said they would like to be famous for winning a Nobel Prize in Science. The poll was carried out online with a panel of 1,000 UK Children in early March by OnePoll, and commissioned by Birmingham Science City.

This is re-written news based on this story : Queen invented phone, children say from BBC News

Interested Parties :

Birmingham Science City – they are more likely to make it into the papers by highlighting the cute misconceptions of children, and have a vested interest in depicting children as ignorant about science as this is what they are funded to tackle.

Onepoll – the ‘ world’s fastest growing online market research company’ get their name in all the papers, but to fair, they probably only supplied the raw data. How it is presented is not up to them but the client, who in this case was Birmingham Science City.

The BBC – the story depicts children as lacking in knowledge and more likely to gather information from television. More newsworthy than the more positive data, but also takes every response to the poll as completely serious.

This week I started finally writing my comic book, which I first started working on in 2003. I put together the outline all those years ago and then passed it to a friend who was going to draw some character ideas based on what I had written. He lost that, I then lost the disc it was on (yes, it was a floppy disc) and that was that for a good long while. Every now and then I would start it again, realise I didn’t know the format for writing a comic book, give up, start again etc etc until I finally went out at the start of this week and bought a pilot g-1 black gel pen and an A4 sketch pad.

In this I have been building the story using this magnificent resource, Joe Edkin’s ‘Writing For Comic Books’.  I have been re-teaching myself story, plot, themes, characters and everything else that I completely forgot whilst repeatedly writing and re-writing the same outline. I have abandoned outline writing as a fool’s game and instead I am taking tiny baby steps in my sketch pad, including the odd scrawly drawing, arrows, lists, spider graphs and occasionally a simple ‘?’.

These links I have found particularly helpful

http://www.whiterose.org/dr.elmo/cwrite/writing.html

http://www.writing-world.com/freelance/comics.shtml

That last one includes two different examples of a comic script. Invaluable.

If you wondering, I don’t have an artist yet, but if I did I would want them to draw like Dennis Calero or Becky Cloonan – maybe a love child of the two grown in a lab.  Have a look at the movement in this image from Calero, I feel myself almost running after the two guys in panel 3.  And the eyes on Adam on this cover of ‘American Virgin’. *Shiver*