Continuing the occasional – and unequivocally highbrow – series of posts on the subject of urinals, here’s one that, for the chaps, saves you the trouble of shaking.
Though would you really trust that claw-like hand?
And god only knows what the designer of this was thinking. I can only hope it was 4am, the deadline was close, and the Rolling Stones started playing on the radio…
A friend of mine recently experienced a relationship break-up, and she remarked that one of the things which had most stung had been the fact that her ex-partner had changed their Facebook status to Single.
It struck me that she’s not the first person to have commented on this in recent times, and indeed within the last week or so I heard another tale on a similar theme. One of the reasons it can feel like adding insult to injury, I guess, is the fact that it’s a very public way to state things, akin to issuing a press release or whatever (indeed, Stephen Fry’s explained his use of Twitter as a way to pass information to large numbers of people), and if you’re the other party in a break-up you could well be still rattled by the change of circumstances that seeing it online for all your friends or followers or just anyone with a computer could be a bit unpleasant.
However, I’m also inclined to wonder if part of the reason seeing your ex change their status to Single or It’s Complicated or whatever is because of the way it quite categorically removes any ambiguity. If you’re the split-ee and you’re sitting in a state of shock, in the pre-Status Update days you could listen to suitably melancholy music and wonder if the other person’s sitting at home feeling the same way and wondering if they’ve made a mistake. But now, you turn to your friends for some online chat and support (or, in these modern times, the comfort of near-strangers), only to be told that your ex has changed their status to Single and loving it, and that’s probably not really going to help.
In a way, the development of the facility to update everyone everywhere with anything you’re doing or thinking 24/7/365 means that uncertainty is removed from a lot of time periods which would otherwise be pretty much blank.
Obviously, this is frequently a useful thing:
“Where’s Terry? He’s meant to be meeting us here.”
“He’s running late, he tweeted five minutes ago that he was stuck on a bus which had been diverted through Narnia.”
… but this ease of communication and update can remove some of the mistiness – or indeed mystery – that sometimes adds a certain something to our lives. That person you’ve recently met and are thinking about in that way might be thinking about you in the same way, but then again their status from five minutes ago is ‘Bored’, so you kind of hope that they’re not thinking about you if that’s the case, but on the other hand you’d kind of like it if they were thinking about you and you’d almost have been better off not knowing that little nugget.
In the worst instances – such as the online changes of relationship status mentioned above – the updates take an almost binary form; the person is happy or not, coupled-up or not, and so on, and for another party to see that one has become the other can make it appear more of a leap than it may actually be, which can be uncomfortable to read.
It’s probably because I’ve historically been the dump-ee (I’m talking about the past; don’t get your hopes up about exploiting any desolate desperation on my part, ladies, I’m married now) that I feel empathy with the people I know who’ve smarted at seeing their recent ex update their personal details online, but there is a part of me that feels that the constant capacity to know what everyone you know is doing or thinking about pretty much constantly isn’t necessarily a boon. It’s all a question of how you use these capacities, I guess, and the degree of detail you go into about particular subjects; not only does great detail risk boring your more marginal acquaintances, but it also means that your actual meet-up-in-real-life friends, if too well briefed, may not feel the need to meet up for a catch up, as they already know exactly what you’ve been up to… in more detail than they needed.
You’re probably thinking that I sound luddite and slightly preachy on this, but then again you may also realise that I’m fairly well-placed to demonstrate a certain sanctimony on this subject, given that this blog is, more times than not, wildly impersonal and utterly lacking in any kind of content whatsover; the signal to noise ratio, I think you’d agree, is emphatically in favour of noise, leading to the content being, all too often, more of a 0 than a 1.
I’ve written several times before about what a rubbish newspaper I consider the London Evening Standard to be, and it’s recently taken the unusual – some might say downright strange – step of apologising for its editorial stance (mainly because it has a new owner and change of editorial line-up). A sample of the ad campaign is shown here.
I certainly wouldn’t argue with the assessment of it as being negative – the selection of headlines here gives a flavour of its previous approach – but given that the paper’s previously been running a loyalty card scheme which enables readers to register and pay a bit upfront and get the paper cheaper , I have one question:
Are people who bought issues of the Evening Standard before the relaunch going to be given refunds?
Strangely enough, the older I get, the less certain I get about many things, but I often find myself getting more and more convinced (some might say dogmatic) about aspects of the whole business of storytelling (and from that, writing).
One such conviction relates to the notion of ‘playing fair’ with the audience, especially in tales involving a mystery or last-minute twist revelation. This isn’t a new notion by any means – S.S.Van Dine wrote about it over 80 years ago – but I think it’s one that remains key, especially as we reach a stage where ever more complicated and convoluted layers of bluff and misdirection are required to surprise an audience.
In murder mysteries, it’s pretty poor form to reveal that the killer was someone who we’ve never met before the final page; for this reason, due to only partly paying attention, I thought that the end of Jagged Edge was a cheat, as I thought it was revealing the killer to be a minor background character – not the case, but that’s the kind of thing I’m driving at.
Interestingly, I think that this is an expectation which audiences have carried over into general expectations of narrative, and I’d say that this is why hardly any (I’d go out on a limb and say none, but there’s almost inevitably an exception or two on a global scale) of the people who are voted winners of Big Brother are contestants who came into the house towards the end of the show’s run: you shouldn’t be able to win the game with a piece which hasn’t been on the board for the duration. For this reason, if you’re doing an exam which features a scenario with characters called A, B and C and you have to write about the scenario, you tend to get pretty short shrift (or, as it’s known in academic terms, crappy marks) if you introduce characters D and E and take the story in a direction more in line with the areas you’ve revised.
Also in murder mysteries, there’s pretty much a tacit rule that you will, at some stage, reveal the identity of the murderer (or murderers). It’s rare to have a story where you can get away with hooking the reader in with a ‘whodunnit?’ mystery and then get away with not stating who the killer is because another, more compelling storyline intervenes. David Lynch apparently didn’t want to reveal who the killer of Laura Palmer was in Twin Peaks, and as much as I love that show, I’d have felt rather cheated if the mystery hadn’t been resolved; similarly, the opening scene of The Wire sets up a murder scene, and whilst I haven’t watched enough of the show to know if we find out who killed the delightfully-named Snot Boogie, I rather hope so, though I guess one might argue that in the more naturalistic vein of that show, an unsolved murder may be more part of the setting than a narrative thread in its own right.
In fact, now I muse upon it, I can’t think of any entirely satisfying stories that end with a murder left unresolved; I’m perhaps being stupid, but I was left uncertain as to the killer’s identity at the end of Grant Morrison and Jon J Muth’s The Mystery Play, and so for me the story – unfortunately given its themes – ended without the appropriate Revelation. I have a feeling that the end of the Polanski film The Ninth Gate may have ended with some of its plot threads left dangling, though that might just be my memory playing tricks; I have a vague recollection of it ending with the protagonist standing before the place he’s been seeking, and the film just rather ending. On the other hand, that in itself is rather like the end of Browning’s poem Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came, which ends in a similarly ‘sudden’ fashion; no wonder Stephen King was inspired to write about what happened when Roland arrived at The Dark Tower.
I suppose the most famous example of a story finishing with a murder left unsolved would be The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, wherein the death of the chauffeur Owen Taylor isn’t solved. Legend has it that when they were making the film version, the screenwriters realised that this wasn’t explained in the novel, and sent a telegram to Chandler asking who had killed Taylor… only to receive the reply that he didn’t know either.
Anyway, all this sort of thing has been on my mind lately because it seems that the good people behind Emmerdale appear to have decided to just let the Who Killed Tom King? storyline drop away, despite the fact that the murderer has not been brought to justice. Granted, the audience knows who killed him (unsurprisingly, one of his family), but given the publicity that surrounded the murder itself when it was screened in December 2006, it feels a little like a joke without a punchline for there not to have been some equivalent narrative closure, to my mind. In the same way that I as an audience member didn’t feel raging hysteria when John Hannah’s character recited Monty Python lines in Sliding Doors, for me as an audience member it doesn’t quite ring true that people who live in such a small village would be content to go about their lives in the pretty certain knowledge that a killer still walks amongst them.
It’s often said – again, I refer you to Mr Van Dine’s article linked above – that in a mystery story it’s only right that the audience is at an level of knowledge equivalent to that of the detective; that seems fair to me, as it allows you to play along and try to solve it, which adds to the enjoyment and involvement. However, it occurs to me that it’s not just that the characters shouldn’t be privy to facts which the reader is excluded from, but that the reverse is equally true; unless you’re seeking to display the disparity between what characters in a story believe to be true, and the actual situation (as in, say, Peep Show), you probably don’t want the audience to be privy to knowledge which, if the characters were aware of it, would make them see things in a very different way. Or, at least, not for a sustained period of time.
It may well be that there’s a plan to bring some proper in-world resolution to the Tom King murder storyline in Emmerdale – though I have to hope they’re not going to wait until the traditional big-story time of Christmas to wheel it out, as that would make it two years since its inception, including many months where it’s not been given much airtime – because at the moment it means that I’m watching the programme with a feeling that something major’s going unresolved.
Whilst it’s established to the viewer that the death was an accident, a crime of passion unlikely to happen again, the characters living in the village don’t know that, and so within the reality of the show it’s something that would cast a shadow over their daily lives. What it does, more than anything, is remind me of the artifice of the programme, as if I’m constantly able to see the strings and hear the plot levers moving things, whilst a elephantine item in the middle of the room goes ignored.
And one of the things I’ve always been sure about, when it comes to the telling of stories, is that you want to utterly absorb your audience in the story; if you’re going to tell a tale of events which never happened to people who don’t exist in a made-up situation, you want avoid reminding your audience of this by jolting them out of the story, especially on something avoidable and fundamental.
Am I over-thinking this? Very possibly, but I wanted to provide a bit more of a meaty post today by way of balancing out the recent tendency towards just supplying you with links, and it was either this or a rather more facile post about the way that EastEnders seems to want to present the Mitchell sisters as alluring sex kittens but completely blows it by having them spend most of their time either shouting angrily or crying. Perhaps I’ve got strange tastes, but I don’t find that particularly appealing, on my TV screen or in real life.
Once again, I gather I’m rather late in discovering this, but if you haven’t seen it before, I think you’ll like this:
The Colour-Changing Card Trick, Presented by Richard Wiseman.
If, like me, you’re new to it, you’ll probably do what I did, which was to want to show someone else… which is why I’m posting it here.
Apologies for not embedding it – the Youtube version wouldn’t let me, for some reason.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll no doubt say it many more times: chocolate is an evil which must be stamped out – one bar at a time, if need be.
Anyway, tying together chocolate with the not-rubbish pastime of reading, Galaxy are currently running a promotion where their products have little codes inside the wrapper, and you can enter those onto their website and win a book. As the (swiped from their site) picture shows, they have a million books to be won by the end of August, which is a lot of books. Almost as many as are glaring at me from my ‘to read’ shelf, but that’s not something I ought to get into now.
The thing is, you don’t have to buy chocolate (or, indeed, anything) to enter – if you go to this page and enter the appropriate details, they’ll send you a free code, so you can have a go for nothing. And you’re allowed to request a code every day until the promotion ends, which seems pretty fair to me.
You might want to check the list of books to see if the possible prizes are the sort of book you’d like to read, granted, but if you do win one, let me know, eh ? I’ve tried a couple of times now with no success, and I’m starting to think it’s like one of those Reader’s Digest Prize Draws that we’re told are legit, but no-one really seems to believe in…
Final Draft, the software much used by writers (and especially screenwriters) has now come out in version 8.
Ignoring the fact that the design of the box makes it look like a washing machine, I’ve found it slightly odd that I haven’t seen many reviews of it – in fact, when I was looking for information on the new features, Amazon’s page for it seemed to have more actual data than FD’s own sales pages, which seemed strange.
I’m vaguely thinking about investing in a copy (I gather v8 is Vista-compatible), but was wondering if any of you lovely people had heard anything (good or bad) about it- or even have first-hand experience of using it – which you could share.
As I say, I’m mulling over the possibility of thinking about considering buying a copy, but if it’s riddled with bugs – oh, I’m sorry, I mean undocumented features – then I’d appreciate being told before I spend any money. Thanks!
Tch, I’ve just found out that a piece of my writing, despite making it into the finalists’ enclosure, has not romped over the finish line to publication. A pity, as it would have meant inclusion in a proper real book with an ISBN and indicia and everything, on sale in normal bookshops up and down the land, and I’m sure that you can imagine just how giddy that would have made me (mind you, I probably would have been pretty insufferable about it, so you good readers have probably dodged a metaphorical bullet).
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