Northern Line, London. February 2008. Early evening. Almost empty carriage. Young white man asks Afro-Caribean woman for spare newspaper beside her. She refuses, claiming imminent appointment for reading. Frosty moment. Opposite, young Polish female smiles in amusement at irritation in voice of older woman and obvious umbrage taken by young man. American tourist, some feet away, overhears a four-letter expletive, but is unable to determine source of oath.

Twenty-two minutes later, young man emerges from train carriage, stands on escalator, is hit in face by airborne periodical. Swears profusely.

Gonzo

We were somewhere around Belsize Park on the edge of Hampstead when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit light-headed, maybe I should read that paper for you." Her hair was golden-blue, a kind of dense mat of irridescent tendrils growing from her scalp, each one ending in a puking arse. Her mouth was mocking me - a slashed tire smile and tombstone teeth. Ye gods. The young girl began licking my face, her tongue a fat, slavering lizard's paint roller, slopping and dribbling all over my eyes. I ran screaming from the train carriage, the newspapers chasing me up the escalator, swooping, screeching, an army of bastard bats, shrieking and wailing in my what was left of my hair.

London Blog

So, I'm the way home on the tube, yeah? And there's this guy beside me, yeah? Narky looking like fucker. Irish by the sounds of him, the pencil-necked cunt. And he leans over and he's all like 'Begob, do ye mind if take a look at yer paper missus?' and I'm all like 'I'm just about to read that, yeah?' and then he's all like 'OMG' and getting humpy and stuff. So he sits there like, smug fucking grin on his pasty fucking face, leering at some Eastern European biro-refill with tits who's sitting opposite him and I'm like, 'get over yourself', like. He gets off at Manor House, yeah? And he's all like 'I am sooooooo not bothered' and all and then the wind blows a copy of the Metro right in his ugly cunting face. The cunt.

Scientology

We know the Northern Line. We know that you know that we know the Northern Line. And we know that we can intervene to heal the conflict between the London-Lite hogging lady and the irate Irishman. Because we are the world-leaders in tube-hostility reconciliation facilitation. We can keep going when others can. Because we know that we can make the difference. We know. And so do you. Even if you think you don't know it, you do know it. You do. And we also know that you have a defective personality born of the thetan imbalances inherent in consuming mass-media. We know the history of free public-transport based news media. Oh yes. We know why it flies in your face. And we also know that by reading this text you now owe us two thousand pounds, your first born son and a pint of cum.

+Lost in Transportation+

Inspired by Raymond Queneau's 'Exercises in Style'.

+Choon+

Callin' on Sunday (Remix) by Party Ben. Wanna hear more? Go to the Blatherverse and click the BlatherPod tab.

+Art+

'Missing Canary' by Dr. Jo.

It's difficult to be precise how big he is, but sufficeth to say that he knocked me down last week - as he cannoned past me on the stairs before sprinting up the hallway and sliding into the front door with a bang that shook the wall.

Oh and here's the funniest bit: he's still a puppy. And yes, he's had his nuts off and no, it hasn't slowed him down.

Anyway, Barney likes to eat things. Big things. Plastic things. Metal things. In the time I've lived with him he's eaten two carpets, one camera (not mine), a cat flap (I'm not making this up - he ate the thing right off the door), a leather coat, a mattress, two remote controls, four pairs of shoes, one pair of glasses and two broadband cables.

In the time since I posted this photo on Flickr this morning, he's had the carpet off the stairs.

His most spectacular chow-down was the time he ate through the boot of the car and chewed through the brake-light cables. Visitors to the house have learnt the cost of leaving stuff lying around on tables and chairs. He will eat anything - hence the now common expression heard about our house,'You've been Barneyed'.

I'm seriously expecting that any day now, I'll get a phone call from my housemate Dan: 'Nah sorry mate, you better not come home. Yeah, Barney's eaten the living room. No, the whole thing. Yeah, sofas and walls. Nah, bit of a breeze..'

He's also (and I say this with all love and affection) possibly the dumbest dog in London - I've seen him run into doors, walls and his own reflection in windows. On one occasion someone called his name, and in anticipation of having some fun (it doesn't take much to get him excited) he spun on his heels and walloped his skull off the kitchen table with a bang that could be heard upstairs. It sounded like a bowling ball smashing into a floorboard. He didn't even blink.

He's got two different coloured eyes, dodgy hips (he takes hydro-therapy - seriously), can't bark properly, gets lost in the garden and despite weeks of training, doesn't understand (never mind obey) even the most basic commands. Actually that's a lie: he's just started to sit on command. Sort of. He just kind of, well, falls on his ass.

He is (to use the common expression in our house) a fucking beast. Barney - the Beast of Turnpike Lane*.

+Music+

The 13 Sins of Scooby Doo by Celebrity Murder Party

* the Spud

The needle twitched again, scratching it's way across the board. It stopped dead, as though suddenly out of gas.
'What do you want?' she asked again, her eyes staring straight at the board. Beside her, the young man moved uneasily. He watched her through the dancing torchlight - her eyes, her hands, her mouth - scanning for any signs of charlatanry, any signs that his leg was being pulled. Six hours ago, in a drunken Halloween Fancy Dress party (he came as Action Man, she as a Vampire) this had seemed like an excellent idea: going to an abandoned 18th cenury house in the Wicklow Hills, with a crazed Wicca woman (or at least that's what he thought she was) to smoke a spliff, drink absinthe and play with a Ouija board. Deep down he had really hoped the Ouija board wasn't the only thing he would get to play with, but he decided to keep that to himself for now.
'What do you want?' she repeated, this time more urgently.
The young man looked to the board and back to her. Nothing.
'What do you want?' she pleaded, this time with a slight tone of disquiet in her voice, something that suggested impatience, a need to get on with it. The young man was only too aware of the pressing time. He was beginning to worry that her suggestions about absconding into the hills for some 'magick' (she was most insistent about the spelling and pronunciation when they had met in the bar) were a request for just that - and nothing more.
Leave it too late, she had told him beforehand, and you might trap something here. The dead, she informed him with leaden solemnity, had only a limited time in our world - when the veil was thin as she described it, during that crucial few hours of this specific day. Hold them too long, she had warned, and they could get angry. They had agendas of their own she had explained, things to do, people to see, places to be, scores to settle.
The needle twitched. Slowly, imperceptibly, it whined its way across the wood. Finally, it settled on the letter 'P'. Then, agonisingly, on to the letter 'L'. Then 'A'. Then 'Y'.
'Play?' blurted the man, 'it wants to fucking play?'
'Quiet' she hissed through closed teeth, 'it's speaking now'
'Speaking?' the man asked, his eyes shooting around the cavernous insides of the house. 'About what?'
She said nothing, but instead rocked forward slightly, sniffing the air. He leaned back, slightly shocked at the visceral nature of her gesture.
'It needs to be reborn' she said calmly, her hand moving the pointer in circles. It could have been a trick of the dark, but he swore that he could see a fleck of bright red at the corner of her mouth.
'How do you know that?' he asked, moving closer, straining to see. 'Does the board not have to spell that out...'
'I know' she said in a low voice. 'I know, because it tells me what it wants. Because I am Sidhe'
'Sith?' he blurted, almost laughing. His head momentarily filled with images of Darth Maul.
'Sidhe' she growled.
Cool, he thought to himself, a Star Wars chick too. This could get kinky, he thought.
He decided to bluff along. 'What does it want?' he asked playfully.
'You' she said calmly, 'it wants you'
'Oh...'
'Yessss' she snarled, her teeth glinting in the dark, 'to play'.

+Image+
Photo by Daev Walsh

+Music+
'Dub of the Dead' by Celebrity Murder Party. From Beat-Boot-Iques Mashuptown Massacre. Wanna hear more? Go to the Blatherverse and click the BlatherPod tab.

+More Blather+
Blather visits the Hellfire Club, Ireland

Happy Samhain.

I've become quite a fan of the American writer/web-guru Steven Johnson. I recently read his brilliant work 'Everything Bad Is Good For You', in which Johnson argues that contrary to the popular perception (parrotted by red-tops, Hilary Clinton and other luddites) that TV, video games and modern media are making us dumber, they are, in point of fact, making us smarter. But that's a whole other story.

Johnson's most recent book 'The Ghost Map' deals with an altogether different subject matter - the cholera outbreak in London of 1854 and how the work of Dr. John Snow and his attempts to map the outbreak of the disease, changed the very nature of how we live in cities. This is Johnson speaking about the book.

+More+

Steven Johnson

+Image+

A living room circa 1870. Taken at the Geffrye Museum, London. View the full set of Geffrye Museum periods here.

One of the most commonly cited series of 'facts' about the London Underground is the statistics surrounding its dodgy hygiene. A chain e-mail has been doing the rounds for years which claims to quote from a scientific study (supposedly carried out by Department of Forensics at University College London) on a randomly-selected tube seat which found:

• 4 types of hair sample (human, mouse, rat, dog)
• 7 types of insect (mostly fleas, mostly alive)
• vomit originating from at least 9 separate people
• human urine originating from at least 4 separate people
• human excrement
• rodent excrement
• human semen

It's an intriguing notion and a fascinating read. Unfortunately, it's total bollocks. There is no Department of Forensics at University College London and no such study has ever been carried out - that we're aware of. Yet I've heard this story cited as fact almost a dozen times since coming to live in this city. Rumour-mongering that Julius Caesar would have approved of.

+More+

Snopes.com

Go here for more random London Underground factoids

+Music+

Trans London Express by ElectroSound. Wanna hear more? Go to the Blatherverse and click the BlatherPod tab.

Blather.net proudly presents 'Double-Bill': an extract from the forthcoming book "False Memory: 15 stories that I think actually happened" by Maninder Obhrai.

The best thing about Mondays was getting to write about what happened over the weekend. Though I was only eleven years old, I had realised that there was no real way for the teacher to actually verify the authenticity of these stories, and thus they had progressively become more and more implausible.

As Mr. O’Malley read about the red Lamborghini Countach that had been donated to me by a complete stranger purely as reward for my unflinching kindness, I looked forward with excitement to the afternoon: after lunch, our class was going to visit the nearby high school to create a mural from mosaics, and I couldn’t wait.

Soon it was time for our morning break, and I rushed with my friends into the sun-baked playground to catch up after the weekend. We chatted about the hugely exciting episode of The A-Team that was aired on Saturday, the highlight of which, we unanimously agreed, was a scene where a taxi cab, driven by B.A. Baracus, careered dangerously through busy streets at extremely high speed. As we discussed the finer points of the scene, something on the ground caught my eye.

I looked down to discover a crane fly – though ‘daddy longlegs’ was the name we generally used – and a wasp, locked in battle. It was immediately clear to me that the crane fly, with its spindly legs and slender abdomen, was likely to come off worse. I crouched to get a closer look.

The wasp gripped the crane fly in a headlock and was punching it repeatedly in the head; the crane fly tried to block these blows with its delicate legs, but the wasp was agile; it timed its onslaught such that the vast majority of its jabs caught the crane fly’s tiny snout. The wasp was toying with it; in fact, the crane fly was an inept brawler and wasn’t even fighting back. Instead it just grimaced, its face covered in miniature bruises, and screamed for the wasp to stop.

Snapping from my fantasia, I noticed that there was a group of children circling the action. Gusts of wind blew the combatants around in random directions, and our ring of juveniles veered and stretched in order to maintain a good view of the duel.

Soon, though, the altercation turned nasty. The wasp knew it could overpower its opponent at any time, and when it finally decided to, there were devastating consequences: it effortlessly tore a leg from the crane fly and watched it drift away in the breeze. The fighters rolled around some more, air currents buffeting their tiny bodies, and soon another limb had gone the way of the first.

One by one, the wasp ripped the legs from the crane fly and left them to the elements. Each was accompanied by a silent shriek, as the crane fly was slowly maimed. Its wings followed in the same manner, and glinted wildly as they were tossed into the wind. And then, the fight was over. The crane fly’s limbless abdomen twitched erratically as the wasp danced victoriously over it.

By the time the teacher arrived to see what we were all looking at, the wasp had concluded its celebrations and flown away; all that remained was the limbless and motionless corpse of the crane fly. The teacher was convinced that she had just missed some sort of ritualistic insect sacrifice, and no amount of pleading on our part appeased her. During her extensive reprimand, the buzzer sounded to signify the end of break; it was time to head back to the classroom.

The remainder of the morning went quickly: we were all overexcited about the wasp, as well as the forthcoming trip to create the mural, and before long, it was lunchtime.

Over the lunch break, we decided to play football, and during the course of the largely uneventful game, I noticed Goebbels, the stocky loner. He was sitting on the floor beside one of the wooden benches we were using as a goal, scratching randomly at it using a small sharp stone that had been selected from a pile he gathered earlier.

Every so often Goebbels looked among us, his eyes burning with contempt and hate. Whenever someone neared him, Goebbels would hurl one of his stones in the general direction of whoever it was, and, more often than not, he managed to hit his intended target.

Soon, it was my turn to become his victim...

+Mani+

"False Memory: 15 stories that I think actually happened" by Maninder Obhrai, is on sale via Lulu.com. Bonkers, demented and damned funny, we recommend this book be consumed whilst wearing a smoking jacket and a nice pair of tights.

Image by Mani.

+Music+

'Karma in the Life'. Radiohead vs. The Beatles. Mashed by Go Home Productions. Wanna hear more? Go to the Blatherverse and click the BlatherPod tab.

Press play.

+More+

The CIA and the Venezuela Coup by Bill Blum (from Counterpunch.org)

+Art+

Original image by Dr. Jo. Our thanks.

Black screen. Faint and indistinct noises and shapes, out of focus.

Listen: you hear a drum loop. It gets louder. Not too fast. Not too slow. Just the right side of an unquantifiable border where you start tapping your foot to the beat, moving your foot to the loop. And loop is the word. It loops, around and around, swirling and diving, always reconnecting perfectly to the same point. A shimmering, warm sound keeps time. A guitar, far away, echoing in symmetry, sings a melody.

Then the bass. Walloping and juddering, thumping and rolling. It comes in waves. Your head begins to bob along. You don't know why, but you know that you like it.

Now watch: a pair of hips, gently swaying in time, slide into focus. Moving in melody, her arms orchestrate the sound and rhythm.

Then the snare kicks in. Like the most obvious thing in the world. You realise that the musician has been teasing you. Like the way she does as she starts to dance, her body moving in infinity figure-8 loops.

Purple and blue, red and black, she moves the rhythm. Like it was written for her. Like she wrote it. Like she is writing it now, at this very instant, her gyrations creating the notes as she moves...

But, we've gone too far. We need to go back.

Select menu. Select scene selection. Select August 2003...

+Choon+

'The Forgotten Groove'. Mixed by LeeDM101. From Simon Iddol's 'Forgotten Hits' project. Wanna hear more? Go to the Blatherverse and click the BlatherPod tab.

+Words+

Extract from 'Factor Nagasaki' - an unfinished novel.

+Art+

Taken in Valencia, Spain. Graffiti artist unknown.

+More+

Factor Nagasaki: Hot as Hell

+Choon+
4x4 by Bobby Martini. Download the track here. Wanna hear more? Go to the Blatherverse and click the BlatherPod tab.

+Art+

Artwork by miss w. tod.

From Wikipedia:

'The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.'

From Solisbury Hill (summary of Weiten, 1992):

In a study published in 1963, Stanley Milgram of Yale University investigated the human tendency to adhere to other's wishes or orders, even when those orders directly violate one's own ethical standards. Milgram's study has become one of the most celebrated and controversial social experiements of our time. In the original experiment, 40 subjects were recruited from the community to participate in a "learning experiment" looking at the effect of punishment on learning. At the laboratory, the subjects were met by a grey-lab-coated experimenter and another "subject", a 47 year old accountant (in fact the accountant was an actor and an accomplice of the experiment). Experimental roles were then "randomly" designated, although the draw was rigged so that the accomplice always became the "learner" and the real subject the "teacher".

The accomplice was strapped into an electrical generator with the subject watching. The idea was that whenever the "learner" made a mistake on the questions to be asked, the "teacher" would then deliver a shock through the generator to the "learner". The subjects were told that, while the shocks were painful, no permanent tissue damage would result. Once the "learner" had been strapped in, the subject was led to an adjoining room where the switches for the generator were housed, but where the "learner" could not be seen. There were thirty switches from 15 to 450 volts with rather helpful labels above stating at increasing voltages: "slight shock", "danger: severe shock" and "xxx". again all of this was phoney, but looked impressive and (more importantly) realistic, particualrly to the subject.

As the experiment progressed and the accomplice continued to get answers wrong, the subjects were instructed to increase the voltage with each wrong answer. The accomplice would scream and yell more loudly with each successive shock. At 300 volts, he began pounding on the walls and stopped attempting to answer the questions. At this, subjects usually turned to the experimenter who firmly stated that no answer was the same as a wrong answer and that stronger shocks should continue, even though the "learner" was now silent.

If a subject attempted to stop the experiment they were flatly informed that "It is absolutely essential that you continue". If the subject refused to cooperate further or once the maximum shock had been administered, the experiment ended and subjects were debriefed on what was really going on.

+Video+

Video by xavierXreivax, music by Peter Gabriel.

+Art+

'Wake up Motherfucker' by Dr. Jo.

+More+

The Milgram Experiment Podcast

Press play. Scroll down. Read.

I went to see Gabriel a few weeks ago in Hyde Park, London and well, I dunno, but it did something to me. I went with very low expectations - he's not as young as he used to be, perhaps the voice isn't as strong as 20 years ago and I'd heard mixed reports about the last tour. To my joy, he fucking rocked.

He began by explaining that because there was no new album for the 'Warm Up' tour (they were together for the upcoming 20th Anniversary of Womad gig), the setlist was chosen by the fans on his website. What we got was a ninety-minute stomp through old Gabriel tunes - mostly from PG3 and PG4. For the uninitiated, that's the real Gabriel - proper, barking mad, howling at the moon, salivating at the mouth, jumping around screaming and dancing Peter Gabriel. Tracks like 'No self control', 'Intruder', 'I don't remember' and yes ' Lay your hands on me'.

It was superb.

**********

'Sat in the corner of the Garden Grill, with plastic flowers
on the window sill
No more miracles, loaves and fishes, been so busy with the
washing of the dishes
Reaction level's much too high - I can do without the stimuli

I'm living way beyond my ways and means, living in the
zone of the inbetweens
I can see the flashes on the frozen ocean, static charge of
the cold emotion
Watched on by the distant eyes - watched on by the silent
hidden spies

But still the warmth flows through me
And I sense you know me well
No luck, no golden chances
No mitigating circumstances now
It's only common sense
There are no accidents around here

I am willing - lay your hands on me
I am ready - lay your hands on me
I believe - lay your hands on me, over me

Working in gardens, thornless roses, fat men play with their
garden hoses
Poolside laughter has a cynical bite, sausage speared by the
cocktail satellite
I walk away from from light and sound, down stairways
leading underground

But still the warmth flows through me
And I sense you know me well
It's only common sense
There are no accidents around here

I am willing - lay your hands on me
I am ready - lay your hands on me
I believe - lay your hands on me, over me
over me

Lay your hands on me
Lay your hands on me
Lay your hands on me, over me '

+More+

Peter Gabriel

'On the other side of the street, the new restaurants in the railway arches beckoned and the sound of a boat's horn came off the water as Shane stole away in the direction of the wine museum. He didn't see the girl slip out of the fog towards him.

'Hello dearie. Want some company?' She was heavily wrapped up in what could have been a shawl, but it was just as likely a blanket. Shane decided that it was a shawl - blanket wearers usually proffered a copy of the Big Issue, not company. The girl was very pale and short, with dark hair hanging down rather lankly, and she gave off a faint smell of lavender.

The whole scene felt very strange. True, this sort of thing was not uncommon around Brick Lane, but it wasn't what one expected on Bankside. Not anymore, anyway - three hundred years ago, this had been London's red light area and theatre district. That was where Maiden Lane, where Shane was now standing, had got it's name from.

As well as the painted doxies, there had been gambling, bear baiting and theatricals to lure people south. Shane held strong views about south London and it's desirability at the best of times, and Bankside's resurrection as London's leisure district since the 1990's had been as startling to him as it's new attraction as a place to live. Still, it was going too far to believe that the baggage trade had come back as well...'

+Words+

Extract from 'One Eye Grey' Volume II: A Goose in Southwark. "One Eye Grey is a penny dreadful for 21st century that draws on the tradition of those early London publications as well as the pulp fiction that followed".

Buy it at Treadwells, Covent Garden London.

+Music+

'Idlewild Jesus Ribgy' - Depeche Mode, Outkast and The Beatles, mashed by Totom.

+Art+

'In Passing' by Miss Aniela.

+History+

Penny Dreadfuls (Wikipedia).

Blather (Waking the Dead) visits Southwark to talk to the OutKast dead.

"Despite the disinformation campaign performed by the British government to quell public interest in crop circles in 1990, the formations continued to appear throughout southern England in greater numbers, larger dimensions and intricate designs.

It was the summer of 1991 when serious contamination of formations began to take place. Some of the hoaxing was done by pranksters looking for attention, some by mischief makers. But, more sinisterly, it was also carried out by known government infiltrators who purposely added man-made features to genuine formations in a attempt to throw the researchers into total confusion. At the height of the hoaxing, an American tourist etched out huge letters on the side of a hill, 'Talk to us'. A reply came back a few days later when a most bizarre-looking formation resembling Hebrew script appeared at Milk Hill.

Thought to be a hoax at first but since confirmed to be genuine, it was deciphered as a form of post-Augustan Latin and etched in Freemasonic script, creating two words: APPONO ASTOS­ "We are opposed to cunning and deceit." How appropriate given the circumstances. To this day this formation represents the closest the Circlemakers have come to communicating in recognizable script."

+Music+

'Appono Astos' by the criminally over-looked and un-signed Funkspace

+Words+

From Cropcircles.net

+Image+

'selfportrait' by the ever-amusing Michelle K