The Kate Emms Tour: The Australian Leg

It's only a guess but I assume Australian TV has just aired Michel Cockerell's excellent series on the House of Commons. Early Sunday, my web statistics went crazy with hits from the southern hemisphere. For two solid hours, I had hits from people searching for... Well, if you've read this blog long enough, then you'll know what they were searching for.

This whole 'Kate Emms' thing is beginning to intrigue me to the point of it becoming a distraction. I watched the Cockerell series twice and I didn't immediately hit the internet to research the name 'Kate Emms'. Yet that's precisely what hundreds (if not thousands) of people regularly do whenever that second (I believe) episode of the series is aired.They say hat certain people have 'star quality', that hard to define quality which can neither be taught not bought. If that's true, then it seems sensible to reason that there must be people out there who have star quality and just don't realise it. I'm beginning to think that Kate Emms might be one such person. If this blog can get thousands of hits from 'fans' of Kate Emms when all she's done is briefly appear on TV buying chocolate bars from her co-workers, then imagine what would happen if she launched a proper career in light entertainment. Perhaps with a song and dance act. Think Madonna with a Parliamentary/Chocolate slant.

I don't know. Thinking on my feet here. I see a name in lights. A spotlight picking out a figure. It's a large cardboard cut out of John Bercow, with oversized novelty head which wobbles from side to side. The music starts and the figure does a soft shoe shuffle before somebody carries the head one way, the arms and legs another, and then the body splits in half revealing the star of the show dressed as Black Rod and doing a two minute tap dance.

There has to be money in this. Perhaps this calls for a letter to Sir Cameron Mackintosh...

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The problem with technology is that it ages so damn quickly. At the moment I'm struggling with aging computer hardware and my limitations seem to grow by the day. I know now that there will come the day when I'll simply have nothing left on which to blog and The Spine will go dark. Already this year, I've lost a laptop which I can't afford to replace. My remaining PC is a six core beast but beginning to struggle with some of the tasks I ask it to perform. It's also hardly portable and getting on in the years. My Samsung Note is good for drawing but severely limited when it comes to painting with colour. It's also useless when it comes to writing or blogging. I wrote yesterday's blog post on it and it was a very long struggle. It's the reason why I'd probably never again buy a Samsung tablet.

There are certain things you realise about companies once you join their user groups. With Dell, it was their complete lack of responsibility. My laptop was always overheating because of a design flaw. They failed to issue a recall and I was stuck with it and it died a few weeks ago with barely enough hours on its clock to justify the initial outlay. Plus they had incorporated technology into their power supplies so you always had to use an 'official' power supply, which I always think is a bit of a shoddy trick. I won't buy Dell again. It's a shame but the thinking of some corporate types goes beyond logic when they choose some short term gain over the loyalty of very long time Dell owner. It's the same thinking, I suppose, which made them move the Dell technical support to India. It says something about any company when they choose to save money instead of providing proper support to their user base.

The thing you realise being a Samsung user is that the company seems to have the attention span of a gnat. The Samsung Note 2014 Edition is a truly great tablet but, once the product was out the door, Samsung moved on to something new. Firmware updates have been sporadic and they have completely ignored the plethora  of people complaining about the Bluetooth issues that affect the tablet. Simply: it's impossible to get the 2014 Note 10.1 inch table to work with a Bluetooth keyboard. There are hundreds of pages on the web detailing the problem. Connecting to the keyboard is simple. In my case, I'm using an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, which is one of the better keyboards out there. I can type on it and the tablet captures my input. But after ten seconds, it drops the connection and I have to wait another ten seconds before it connects again. I then have about ten seconds of typing before it disconnects again... Ad nauseam.. After nearly two years, there are still no fixes.

Since my main activity is writing, the Note has been a huge disappointment. I can't type using the screen. My fingers are simply too big and I want to type quicker than the touch screen allows. It's not enough to turn me off Samsung products entirely but I'd be cautious about buying another.

Friends I know swear by Apple and though I've always scoffed a little, I can see why their loyalty lasts. I've never had such luck finding a company to whom I've been entirely loyal. Apple were about the best but I could never live with their restrictions. I wanted access to SD cards and operating systems. I want control over the devices I own and I don't want to pay the earth for beautiful hardware that's locked to me. I don't know where I'll turn next or even when I'll have a chance to move on to new hardware. Perhaps I'll go back to paper and ink and I'll grow a beard in the style of Henry David Thoreau, retire from the electronic world to live in a cabin. Sometimes it feels like it would make a lot more sense, instead of wasting my days making podcasts that only three people listen to and writing words largely ignored by the multitude only passing through in order to read the last news about Kate Emms.

 

Dreaming of Tom Waits

I met Tom Waits in my dreams last night. It was the first night I’d slept soundly, undisturbed by the coughing that’s characterised the latter days of my heavy cold. Waits was at his charismatic best, performing a duet with David Bowie in a clever video which I can’t entirely remember but was one part hobo chic and another part travelling balloon carnival. After the song, Waits took to the stage and I was sitting near the front, feeling blessed that I had an opportunity to see my very favourite musician up close. Then he started to hand out free albums and magic beans and the whole thing got crazy.

I can’t remember much of the show except it seemed to involve driving old 1930s cars through a corn field as a dwarf accompanied him on the sousaphone. After the performance, I had chance to meet Waits and I reached out to shake his hand. I thought his hand was small. Perhaps I’d shaken hands with the dwarf instead. I’ll never know. We got to talking about the topless brunette sitting in the Model T Ford and that’s when the telephone rang and I woke up.

Sleep, I think, is important to me. Or at least, dreaming seems to be key to the way my brain functions in the day. I’ve been struggling to come up with good cartoon ideas for the past week, which I think confirms my suspicions that my imagination is tied to getting a solid eight hours. Today I’m supposed to start work on one of the websites I’ll be building instead of enjoying Christmas this year but I also intend to make some room in my afternoon for some serious cartooning.

The lack of time and ideas to cartoon is particularly galling because on Saturday I took the bold step and upgraded my Samsung Note.

I’d found a buyer for my relatively new Samsung 10.1, meaning that I took next to no financial hit when it came to buying the newer 2014 edition I’ve been talking about for so long. I did the deed at the John Lewis store in Liverpool with a little of the money I’d made from my animation project.

The whole experience has been a bit unsettling, given that the first Note had quickly become as useful as my right arm. I’m still not completely at home with the new Note, though that’s partly down to my ordering a case from Amazon that is now going back. I originally ordered one of these, a beautiful case but with major flaws. The magnet in the lid is meant to wake the Note when you open it and shut it down when you close it. This it does but it also shuts down the Note when you fold the lid all the way back, as you do when holding it to draw. The same magnet (I suspect it’s just too powerful) also infers with the magnetic field that S Pen uses to locate its location on the screen, meaning that if you happen to draw in the same spot where the magnet’s located at the back, you have a dead spot on the screen.

I’ve now bought the same type of case as I had on my original Note and hope that things improve. The reason I wanted the newer Note was to draw on the 4k canvasses supported by Art Flow and the experience so far hasn’t made me regret my decision. I think my few scribbled test cartoons are already looking crisper and the whole drawing experience is much improved, with smoother operation and no lag between my hand and the screen. The only problem is a bug in Art Flow which means I can’t export the canvasses to Photoshop. I emailed the developer and apparently he’s working on a fix.

Tomorrow, I’ll post the results, if there are any results and my brain starts functioning again. I suppose the fear I always live with is that one day I’ll wake up and I’m no longer able to think of a funny joke or a funny cartoon. I fear that one day I might wake up to discover that I’ve grown up and become fascinated by tax and the brain rotting seriousness you find among the comment section of The Guardian. I worry that I’ll become one of those serious people when all I want is to be like Tom Waits, casting glitter over the heads of the midget tumblers and brunettes in classic cars.

On Samsung, Bond, Boyd, and Teeth

So, I think we’re back and, as usual, I’m probably last to get updated name servers, those mysterious doodads that translate the www address you type into your browser into the real life address of the computers where websites live. I’ve been looking at a grey screen all weekend, waiting for the website to come live. Now it is, I’m left wondering what to say.

I wish I could say I had a busy weekend but I’ve been distracted by, among other things, the terrible news that Samsung are launching their cheapest Note 10.1 (2014 edition) in the UK at the price £479, or about £130 more than I’d hoped and considerably more than I could afford.

Another disappointment is the news that William Boyd’s new James Bond novel, Solo, might be a bit of a disappointment. If we’re to believe the early reviews, it’s probably the worst effort so far. It wouldn’t surprise me if it is, given that I’m a bit of a Bond purist. I will often reread all the original Bond books every year or so and then relive the disappointment of attempting the continuation novels. I’ve not enjoyed any of these new writers writing as Fleming. I thought Faulks’s effort the least objectionable despite the monkey pawed villain and the book being generally dismissed by the public. Deaver’s effort is as easy to ignore as he found it easy to ignore the canonical Bond, choosing instead to create something new and different and (sadly) popular. I couldn’t read any of the novels by Raymond Benson or John Gardner. The best was Kingsley Amis, though Colonel Sun was more Amis than Fleming. One book that I did enjoy but haven’t read it in many years was James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007 by John Pearson. Perhaps I should give that another go.

Having said all that, I don’t want to dismiss Boyd’s efforts until I’ve tried it, especially when reviewers customarily confuse the literary James Bond with the movie James Bond. Reading Amazon’s reader comments, I found this, typical of many:

Remember how Fleming would introduce a subject? M would mention a name and Bond, showing off, would fire back a couple or three facts about it in half a minute which was supposed to be useful, as if spat out by his card index system (no computers worth anything in 1960-70: I used the first, at Manchester, a KDF 9 in 1965 which needed punched cards). This Bond is more intelligent. He takes serious injuries unlike the original who is always unscathed, his looks just as handsome as before. This version even has a scar.

I don’t recall Fleming introducing a subject through M and then Bond rolling off all the facts. That was the movie Bond. Yet the bigger mistake is in believing that the literary Bond was ‘always unscathed’. The Bond of the novels was routinely battered, broken, and bruised. It was his defining characteristic. He spends nearly the entirety of Live and Let Die with a broken finger and Fleming is always commenting on his scars, including the scar on his face which has never made it onto screen. It’s Bond’s vulnerability that makes the books so great. The films have entirely different virtues.

Speaking of battered yet misunderstood heroes, I’m going to the dentist later today to make a long overdue appointment. I’d like to say it’s precautionary but life isn’t like that. A bit of tooth broke off last week and it needs fixing. As soon as it happened, I knew my Samsung dreams had come to an end given that my money will now probably go to fund my dentist’s next skiing holiday.