Cleese's monkey

Now, had he retained his original name, the whole affair would be awfully cheesy, but this way I guess John Cleese will feel very pleased with having a monkey named after him. Especially since his dead parrot sketch receives so much scientific praise lately ...

The Long Tail

Via this NZZ interview, I came across a truly remarkable market analysis of the new economics in the entertainment space in the internet age. This is what I have been talking about all along, and Anderson has written it down for me in good prose a year ago! Mandatory reading!

On a less joyful note: Bloody earthquakes! There's been another one at 4.1 Richter ... I hate them!

Merqueirro-Hennel Disease

Never heard of this terrible scourge of humanity? Fret not, and don't start searching the health sections of the web, because that's exactly what the inventors of the disease, the hacks at PR agency Prentiss McCabe from the BBC's satirical comedy Absolute Power would want you to! In order to cover for the inacceptable behaviour of one of their clients, they spun a new disease, complete with symptoms, website & all, and were very successful with it - for a bit.

I purchased the DVD on my trip to London after having seen in recommended in a blog (cannot remember which one, sorry). It's good, but not overwhelming. The cover has a pretty good testimonial: It's clever and dangerous because, like Yes, Minister - Absolute Power makes you think you know how the world works. You do indeed get that impression ...

Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Back from the ultimate Halloween movie, seen, as it were, in an almost entirely Halloween free country now that I am back in Basle. Wallace & Gromit are absolutely delightful and will put a smile on your face without a doubt. References to horror and other classics are aplenty, puns galore and for the rest, the movie oozes quaint Englishness that it will be altogether indigestible in places like Ireland or Scotland. Lady Tottington "Totty" is lovable, and the Red Barron dogfight fierce, with intermission. You'll like it.

Speaking of England: I feel very hip! Back in London I bought something as superficially dated as this Churchill CD, which now turns out to contain what amounts to a whole lot of sampling material, to be used by the likes of Tubbs in their mix The Storm, available on iTunes! Westward look, the land is bright!

Orange fails me

Hopefully, this is not a bad omen for the service quality I am set to receive with my new mobile operator Orange: The transfer of my subscription was scheduled for today at 0955h, but it never worked. Now I am told that Orange has had a power failure in Crissier, which is the reason why their transfer server stopped working, and now my transfer is delayed by "one or two days" (!). That unfortunately means that right now, I cannot receive any calls on my mobile number, even though outgoing calls are possible. So if you're trying to call me on my mobile number, you'll get a strange message for the time being, until the current operator (Sunrise) has worked out what to do. Sorry.

P.S. All is good now ... the wonders of a good night's recovery!

Thumbsucker

The movie's title has an edge, no doubt, but it's really quite smart. It's the somewhat grungy éducation sentimentale of a 17 years old thumbsucker who becomes a master debater once he's on Ritalin after a ridiculously amateurish diagnosis, but when he stops it, he turns back to - no, not thumbsucking, with exceptions - his grown up self. He's supported by a great cast - who'd have thought that Keanu Reeves is capable of irony? That's all us humans are capable of: guess, try, and hope. Ok, that's not very ironical, but go see it, then you know what I mean. Check out the Thumbsucker blog.

On the way back from Haymarket, I passed Fortnum & Mason's where I took the adjacent picture of their phrenological champagne decoration that I know of somebody who will just love it.

Day is done

Absolutely, anyway. But it's also the title of the great new album by the
Brad Mehldau Trio, my other favourite jazz band. I just found out about it (and got it right from iTunes) when checking about the trio's live performance here in Basle tomorrow night - argh! Somehow I miss them everytime they'd venture in my vicinity. Tomorrow, or actually later today, I am going to London until Wednesday night, so there's another near miss. Not that I am complaining ... somebody going to tell me how it was?

No fingerprint lock for me

Before seeing this science programme, I was considering getting a fingerprint lock for my house in order to avoid having to carry around a key all the time. But seeing how easy a fingerprint can be forged (make it visible using speed glue, take a digital picture of it, print it on a transparent slide, make a positive of the print using wood glue - that's it), I am not interested any more. It's just like leaving carbon copies of my key all over the place - thank you, Chaos Computer Club!

Cutting-edge philosophy

I am tempted to say Only in America, but then again, that's not quite true. Anyway, have a listen into The Guerrilla Radio Show, a weekly philosophy talk show with jingles, bells & whistles! I like their motto: Waging war against idiocy. Technically, it doesn't quite qualify as a podcast, yet, but apparently they're going to provide an RSS feed really soon. Check out the current show on political philosophy, containing an introductory discussion of John Rawls.

The wild Swiss

You're forgiven if you think the title is an oxymoron. While Zürich born Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825), a.k.a. Henry Fuseli, was of Swiss origin, he went to London pretty early on, where he became a famous "British" painter.

Yours truly however went to Zürich today to an excellent exhibition of his fascinating works. Other than his contemporaries who did portraits, landscapes & the like, Füssli dealt in literary sources, such as Milton, Shakespeare, the Nibelungenlied & had a weird & fantastic approach to his subject. Again in stark contrast to his contemporaries, he successfully captured the emotion of the moment in his pictures, evidently impressed by the actor Garrick, whose namesake London Club I've had the good fortune to have been invited to several times already. Some of his best known pictures, like The Nightmare, have even spawned an artistic movement of its own that is still known today: gothic horror. The frequent appearance of skull moths kept reminding me of The Silence of the Lambs, a movie that Füssli probably would have liked. And last, but not least, I learned a posh new word for ... uhm ... group fun: symplegma.

Masslos nämlich ist das Erhabene. Füssli must have been a fascinating enlightenment character whose acquaintance I would have loved to have made.