Stop avoiding your tax commitments!
“Tax is an integral, sexy, hip aspect of the social contract of modern nation states”
Stop avoiding your tax commitments!
“Tax is an integral, sexy, hip aspect of the social contract of modern nation states”
Literally the least helpful support forum I’ve ever come accross (yuk). Seemingly populated by illiterates with a completely inappropriate structure to boot (one which puts all the massive number of posts saying ‘come and look at my fucking blog’ in with all the usefull stuff with the side effect that 1) you can’t find any usefull stuff, 2) anyone trying to be helpful has got their work cut out sifting though all the crap to find anyone to help). I sometimes wish tags had never been invented, increasingly they seem to be used as a replacement for doing any thinking about a sites information architecture and structure c.f. wikis. I’m not saying that either ‘tags’ or wikis aren’t excellent when used properly ([1][2]) but they’re often seen as a kind of magic bullet or an excuse to not think properly about the problem. Grrr.
This kind of comment seems custom designed to annoy me on so many levels:
“the screen is far too small. but is is quite a sexy little gadget. ”
Fuck. Off.
That’s what I should have replied but I just kept quiet as usual.
There’s a bit in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard where the main character, a little known abstract expressionist, (or maybe it’s an anecdote he tells about Jackson Pollock or someone, i don’t remember) is challenged that his work is just a big mess, the classic modern art criticism that ‘anyone could do it’ is duely leveled. Our hero’s response it to sketch out a perfectly realistic representation of his attacker on the back of a canvas and say ‘until you can do this you can’t make a mess like I can’ or words to that effect, my recollection is a little hazy.
Anyway the point is, there’s a moment in The Minutemen documentary I saw last night: After about half an hour of rough punk gig footage, apparently shot by a small child, we see D.Boone and Mike Watt and George Hurley (really funny haircut) sat on the floor, acoustic guitars and bongos, giving a note perfect redition of I Felt Like A Gringo the song’s stripped down and on display, as taut and funky as anything James Brown ever did, as poetic and politically incisive as the best of Bob Dylan and with an economy of expression neither could match. It’s the same thing as that bit in Bluebeard, because they can do this perfect songwriting and techincally superb performance they’re aloud to do their more abstract ‘messy’ stuff, they’ve earned their right to experiment and be thought of as true artists though discipline and craftsmanship. The film ends with another performance from the same session, predictably but absolutely appropriately History Lesson (Part 2), and I remembered how sad I was when, after having discovered The Minutemen around 1999, I found out that D.Boone had died about 14 years earlier.
There’s someone else in my company with the same name as me. After I got back from lunch I found I’d been recieving a load of email for him Nick Broomfiled was also on the distribution list, wierd.
Little Things heartily endorses the following product(s) and/or service(s):
Nothing Concrete, a cd with a with ‘Tortoise style’ sleeve!
File under police state*.
Critical mass is an event which takes place in London on the last Friday of every month, the capital’s cyclists get together and cycle around chatting and generally being good natured, a couple of times I’ve detoured on my way home to join the throng for a mile or two and allways found the atmosphere to be good natured and the speed of transit to be somewhat faster than that which normal central London trafiic would allow. I was actually thinking of going last Friday but didn’t in the end because I would have had to park my bike around Victoria where it probably would have been removed, stolen or vandalised. If I had gone I would have recieved one of these letters from the police. Nice. Here’s a brief account from someone who did go along .
Hopefully the police will be handing out similar letters to the thousands of motorists who congregate daily to block our streets and make our city a more dangerous, polluted and generally unsightly place to be.
Naturally, I’ll be going along on the 28th of October to excercise my right to cycle around as I’ve been encouraged to do by the mayor of Londons poster and TV ad campaigns, I recommend everyone else who has a bike to come along and join the fun. In the meantime I’ll be writing to my MP.
New design, not finished yet though so will probably be flaky for a while. Colours need to be sorted out too as I’ve only seen it on my laptop.
[edit: er, changed back because of some teething problems]