The Handle of Fate.

Well as there’s no rest for the, lets not say wicked lets say capable, I’ll be doing next doors kitchen shortly. Mothermouse thinks it needs “new energy”; that’s new age speak for two weeks work putting in new units, worktops, tiling, re-plumbing new sink, taps and dishwasher, tiling, screeding floor in preparation for new flooring. Unfortunately new age energy doesn’t extend past an hour in B&Q. We enter kitchen psychology land. Where a glorious garden consists of a wonderful variety of flowers and shrubs in a beautiful panoply of colour, in Kitchen Land everything must match. If for example one breaks a handle off a unit and finds the design discontinued one cannot screw in a handy nut and bolt. One must replace all the handles to match. If then one subsequently finds no handles that have the same hole centres, and would thus leave unsightly holes that multitudes of germs would colonise and jeopardise one’s future health, one must buy all new doors. Which don’t fit the old carcasses thus requiring new ones. The slightest re-design requires all this and more. Worktops don’t fit, appliances don’t match and so on. As in my case, the one-inch lip at the back of the old stainless sink reveals a lack of tiles when fitting a new surface sink. This requires hammering off all the old tiles and sticking on new ones. By this point the old flooring will be lacerated to buggery so a new one will need to be laid, probably requiring a screed of levelling compound first.

And then what happens? You stand back to admire your beautiful new kitchen and break off a handle.

Task-free Information.

So why is it our particular younger gens know the names and histories of the famous as assiduously as a racehorse trainer knows the lineages of his stabled stallions? What earthly point is there in filling one’s brain with the career histories of actors? These thesps who after years of struggle finally managed to hitch onto the TV gravy train and began appearing in everything? If one was really interested in the underpinnings of talent one would be also curious about they stints in drama school, Burger King and call centres. But no, it only extends to their bit parts in Sex and the City or being second from the left in an X Factor boy band. It’s as if one’s personal history is plotted by these career arcs; as if one is aging on the back of people you don’t know and will never meet acting make-believe characters who fought dragons or implausible plot lines you never quite got. This as I understand it is useless information of the highest order and utterly unworthy of assigning brain cells to. It’s as if useless information is the new knowledge base, the product of our super highway interconnectivity. It fulfils the necessary requirements of ‘information’ yet doesn’t include the inconvenient downside of having to do anything meaningful or useful with it. If one learns to plumb in a sink one will sooner or later be lumbered with hours of being moistly inverted attempting to make a watertight joint without burning the house down. If one’s knowledge lies elsewhere, like knowing Johnny Depp played a bit part in Home and Away circa 1997, one can justifiably leave actual work to others. If one doesn’t know where the supermarket is how on earth can one be expected to do the weekly shop?

Mice around the World.

Thanks to a new feature in Blogger I can now see who’s reading my blog, and it appears 6 in USA and 1 in Canada. I knew that catering for the niche Mouse Market would bear fruit eventually. Who would have thought ten years ago that mice would have the savvy and the IT skills to use human technology while they’re at work, asleep or watching re-runs of Friends and Cash in the Attic. Cash in the Attic is where you sell your old valuables to buy a larger TV to watch Cash in the Attic on, which suggests humans are beginning to suffer from the same circular logic as the snake that mistakes his own tail as a juicy morsel. And that mice have far more free time to master the intricacies of how to play mpeg4 videos on Media Player, which for most humans is an impossibility. The moral is clear; don’t let your young mice watch Cash in the Attic or you’ll be bubble wrapped and ebay-ed the moment you stop providing them with bigger TVs. Many years ago in England we had Mary Whitehouse who warned about the effects of sex and violence on TV. She had this ridiculous notion that if 30 second adds influenced the sales of cars, garden furniture and shampoo the 30 minute programs in-between weren’t actually completely influence free entertainment. Silly woman. Luckily we animals were able to recognise the difference between 2D moving pictures and real life, where as humans can’t seem to tell the difference. So if you ever find your young mouselings saying, “Mummy I think that picture reminds me of our eighteenth century pewter jug and may be worth a reasonably sized piece of cheese at auction”, gnaw through the mains lead. Yes you may find yourself the other side of the room nursing singed mouthparts but it’s a small price to pay to save our species. So welcome Mice of the World, the web will soon be ours. 

Do You?

While out with ex BinLmouse, who waited at the pub I said while I waited at the pub I meant until B phoned J, J phoned D and D walked the not inconsiderable distance between the two, I missed Big Brother. Apparently a famous mouse dancer has gone into the house to teach them a routine so they can get a million hits on YouTube to complete a task. Nice link up. And free if you don’t count the £60 a month broadband/TV/free phone calls package. But who is this famous mouse? Mousemates discuss. Could he be from ?? or X Factor or Glee even? As these shows aren’t currently airing and the outside world must be a distant memory by now no one knew. It was the same with the last Famouse Big Brother. They were all famous but no one knew who anybody else was. They had to painfully explain that they once went out with the brother of a footballer’s ex wife’s cousin, or that he had a film star brother but was famous in his own right, with God. A pattern is emerging. Not that everyone is famous for fifteen minutes but that fame itself now only lasts fifteen minutes. Not that mice can’t sustain fame for longer but because the attention span of fames followers has dwindled. If one’s face isn’t pumped into the nations living rooms on a weekly basis it drifts into a montage of a million others. On several occasions I’ve seen ‘someone famous’ only to find they served me in Tescos or the local fish shop. So for me a mouse is a mouse is a mouse. Then out with the Family Pie (party) Saturday we see, I mean actually see in reality, Richard “I don’t believe it!” I forget his second name. Well! Well actually I missed him, I think I was looking at a pigeon. So this Richard, who no doubt spent years going to RADA, acting in flea pits, learning his Second Guard line in Hamlet, being sick before his first major entrance, is now renown for saying “I don’t believe it.” Well that’s what I said when they told me, and no one laughed.

Stiffmouse on Radio.

I am listening to PM on Radio 4; it’s 5.40pm, Wednesday. Nills is doing his financial bit and Eddie suggests he should do a series about money itself. I am reminded I’ve written a fair bit about the concept of money and think I’ll email them offering possible input. I go to the PM home page and text thusly, “I have been studying the concept of money. It is deeper than one might expect. I can send notes.” OK ‘studying’ infers reading etc and I’ve just been making stuff up, but you never know. I mean I think it’s good stuff and it would be vastly more interesting to Radio 4 listeners than the usual shallow twaddle. Send. 5.55 As they sign off for the six o’clock news I hear, “And this has come in from Stiffmouse. (Actually they used my real nom de plume) ‘I have been studying……..can send notes.’ I am amazed. Mothermouse laughs; she is appreciative of some subtle humorous element I seem to have overlooked. I look puzzled. “Well it’s funny; that’s why they’ve used it.” What? “Well bla bla bla. ‘I can send notes.’ It’s funny. ‘money; send notes;.’ I realise, and have to admit I had, albeit unknowingly, made a very witty and succinct joke. I am now perplexed. Do I bask in the rosy glow of having my joke read out on the radio or do I bemoan the fact my incisive notes on the psychological nature of money and our irrational concept of the negative will never take their rightful place in the cosmology of human incisiveness? It’s a tough one. I’m coming down on the side of the former on the grounds that bullshit, provided it never sees the light of day, doesn’t smell. 

Designing Out.

As a designer I had two basic roles; one, to make something more appealing, and two, to take cost out. Notice how kitchen cabinets used to have a drawer at the top, cupboard at the bottom. Not anymore. Drawers are expensive and a cabinet looks just as appealing without it; that is until you’ve built your kitchen and can’t find a place for your knives and forks, kitchen utensils and all those odds and sods that need a place of their own. So you buy a three-drawer unit for £170 only to find the sides have been standardised to the shallowest size and deep drawers are only surrounded by a shallow rim and things fall out. Then there’s obesity. It’s a big leap but stay with me. Food is designed and everything on your supermarket shelves from fruit and veg to ready meals and drinks are designed; designed to be max appealing and min production cost. Of course you don’t mention the true intention of the latter, you construct a virtue around it. Sodas, Coke, Pepsi etc are wonderful examples. They’ve long since ceased to be a natural fruity beverage and are just water, colorant, synthetic flavouring and aspartame. Aspartame is used as a sweetener because it’s cheaper than sugar but don’t say that, say it’s low calorie Diet Coke. The packaging, the bit you throw away is far more expensive than the product. Big bottles of Coke are half the price of cans because the packaging is cheaper. OK we’re all irrational and we ‘like’ what we like, largely because we’ve been trained to like it, but our bargain hunting instincts have led us to the ‘it looks delicious and it’s a nice price’ foods that, because they’ve been designed to use the cheapest ingredients, make us blow up like balloons. Our body doesn’t have the brainpower to figure out what we’re doing to it. We feed it the rubbish that our brain has been trained to like the look of and because it’s not nutritious it feels it’s being starved and so builds fat for a rainy day. But don’t worry, obesity will be eradicated along with disease, hunger and poverty as we progress towards a fully integrated on line X Box bodiless brain housed in a fist sized MFI cabinet. It’s a marketing man’s dream and the designer’s ultimate low cost solution. It’s only natural.

It’s Over.

So much for the Dutch nice guys. Oh I’ve just cleaned my glasses and noticed my cognitive requirement for visual postproduction reduce dramatically. Wow I never realise that before, I just thought I couldn’t see. Anyway back to the climax that is inevitably an anticlimax. The Dutch must have watched the flamenco dancers passing game and decided their Nederland’s game of truth and beauty was not going to be a winning tactic. The haughty bullfighters would require a few broken ribs and legs for the playing field to be tilted in their favour, a task given to Van Bommel and De Jong. Van Bommel epitomises the changes in the State of Denmark. When truth and beauty are spurned by the world the eyes go black and lifeless. Even the noble Arjen Robben knows the world is unfairly against him. To ‘The Oranje’ Spain epitomised this unfair world that would treat them thusly. To Spain the Dutch were the players of the beautiful game and played them, as far as they could between having to periodically limp off the field, with equal beauty. The result, as well as being Thugs nil: Flamenco Dancers one, was that each team acted as they perceived the other team would act. It is an often-overlooked phenomena that when one ‘reacts’ one acts in accordance with what one is re-acting to; one changes one’s coat for the coat one perceives the other is wearing. It may be lucky for Van Bommel that he stayed on the field for 120 minutes but it’s lucky for football that Spain won. But if truth and beauty are not enough and thuggery loses, what then? Steely honour. For the world is always hungry.