Recently did a video for a charity and amongst the footage we shot (we meaning and my wife) there was me pretending to pee on a neighbours car. Simple enough to do - just a water bottle and holding the camera at the right angle.
Today I’m meant to be working on something else, but procrastination is a dreadful thing and I found myself making a donk about weeing on cars. Sorry, it won’t happen again.
I always like checking out the Science Museum and today’s visit comes about because I’ve got a lunch meeting in Victoria and after dropping my son at school I reckon there’s no point going home and fiddling with email for an hour. So I’m there at 10, virtually the first to enter the museum, along with all the children on school trips.
Entry is free but there’s a sign suggesting an donation of £3, €3 or $3 which means at the current exchange rates it’s cheapest to be American (£1.80) whilst Europeans donate about £2.50. I pretend to be Scottish and throw in a quid. Ha.
I’m drawn to the computer section where hulking great lumps of old technology sit behind rope. I think it’s the act of putting this stuff in a museum and saying it has value is what I love. I’d quite happily have a proper national museum of computers that took us from an abacus to the world’s most powerful current computer, the IBM Roadrunner. It would be quite a hit with the ladies.
In front of me is a recreation of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and some parts of his slightly less famously named Analytical Engine, the unfinished computer he started in 1837. If he’d have finished the construction, this general purpose mechanical computer would have been “Turing complete” i.e. capable of performing any calculation it’s possible to devise. Basically the same as a modern PC but millions of times slower. Possibly very similar to Windows Vista.
However, work was never completed, the project died with him and the world would have to wait until the 1940s, nearly 100 years later, until we hear the famous names of Colossus, ENIAC and the Manchester Mark 1. BTW: The Germans actually got there first in 1941 with the Zeus Z3, but what with World War II and Hitler, nobody likes to shout about it much. Except me, that is.
There’s no doubt Babbage had an extraordinary brain - half of it is in a jar on display - but he had a fatal flaw, summed up by the statement on a plaque by the exhibit which says that his projects weren’t completed for “funding problems and personality issues.”
Personality issues? So Babbage had had the insight to create the world’s first programmable computer and couldn’t get it made because he was a bit of a shit and nobody could work with him? Fantastic.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers points out that that one crucial element in success isn’t just being dreadfully clever but having the support of a loving family from day one. “It doesn’t start with talent, it starts with love”, as the promotional posters say. He mentions Oppenheimer, best known as “The Father of the Atomic Bomb”, who whilst a Cambridge undergraduate, attempted to poison Professor Patrick Blackett, a lecturer he took a dislike to. Criminal proceedings were avoided by the intervention of Oppenheimer’s father who persuaded the university that some psychiatric sessions would be more than enough.
Sadly Babbage’s Father was never going to solve his son’s problems - he died in 1927 along Babbage’s wife and son, triggering a mental breakdown which delayed the construction of his machines. And I wonder if he’d had better luck with his home life, he might have been nicer to his contractors and we’d have had the computer built 100 years earlier?
Suddenly consumed with the desire to learn more about Babbage - I visit the instore bookshop - hopeful they can supply me with a nice pop science biography, but all they’ve got is an extremely academic reprinting of some personal papers. So, baring in mind that my head has been filled with a warning from beyond the grave: nurture your kids or else they might accidentally invent the future but be too socially fucked up to communicate it to their peers, I buy an educational toy for my 4 year old son: A robot kangaroo.
I figure we can built it together and it’ll engender a life-long love of engineering and he’ll go on to discover the cure to space-AIDS or something.
* * *
I get home. We build the robot kangaroo. There’s nine steps, my son is bored by step three and leaves me to watch Waybuloo on iPlayer. I listen to David Bowie’s Low. My wife asks, “what’s this amazing prog rock?”
The next morning our son finds the kangaroo and thinks it’s so great that he sticks it on my head, and the battery operated legs wind up my hair and pull it out until I start shouting in pain. My wife tries to help and pull it out and OUCH! OUCH! OUCH!
The kangaroo is banished to a top-shelf.
On 26th June we woke up to the news that Michael Jackson was dead. By 6pm I was standing in a crowd of nearly 2,000 people at Liverpool Street Station. One tweet made that happen. I wrote it for a laugh and the result was what the media have described as “London’s biggest ever flashmob”. Let me start at the beginning.
Jacko is dead. Blimey, this is news. Proper news. News on the scale of Die-Di-day and 9/11. My 4 year old son changes the TV channel, he’s not interested in the looped footage of an ambulance leaving Jackson’s home, but wants CBeebies. Tough. He can watch that upstairs - we want to know what happened to Jacko.
We deposit son at school and go to the local Co-op to buy supplies for lunch, and I as I do every day, walk to the newspaper stand to do a headline check. Nine headlines, one story, and again I’m reminded of Diana, I remember seeing a similar slew of headlines on that day and suddenly I regret not having a camera in 1997, and what an interesting little photo I’d missed. So, using all the power of the 21st century, I get out my phone and snap.
In the local cafe they are playing tributes to Jackson, not his songs but My Way by Frank Sinatra. It’s a fantastic and moving performance and again I’m reminded of Di-Die Day. Radio 1, if I remember rightly, appeared to spend a day playing sombre ambient house. Nothing too upbeat.
I say to my wife, “You know there’s going to be one of those internet flash mobs over this. People are going to group up and moonwalk or something.” “You should organise it”, she says. “Yeah, but I don’t really want to. I’m just saying it’s probably going to happen.”
Checking Facebook I have a message from an old school friend Joseph Lenham: “I’m disappointed at the lack of comment on tonight’s news, oh Gingermeister. I came straight to your page to hear the truth.” I’m struck that there is a weight of expectation on me - this is the kind of day people want B3ta - the site I co-founded to be doing something - and I’ve done bugger all.
I get on B3ta and check, yep people are photoshopping bad taste Jackson images, of course they are, so I quickly whip it up into a challenge and mutter that it’s my “historic duty” to collect this stuff up.
My other bastard child, Sickpedia, is where people who like sick jokes go when there’s a big news event. It crashed when Jade Goody died and it’s crashing today. I hammer F5 and eventually get a few jokes out of the smoking server. “Day 96 in Jade Goody’s Coffin. Jade has a new house-mate.”, “Gary Glitter has won the auction for Michael Jackson’s PC.” and “An English man, an Irish man and a Scottish man walk into a bar. The English man turns to the Scot and says, ‘Do you think the person reading this will really think this jokes not going to be about Michael Jackson?’”
I check Twitter - really the world is melting down with Jackson overload. One friend is writing, “remember, the dead can’t sue for libel” and I’m reminded how I once wrote something that casually referenced Jackson as a “notorious paedophile” and my boss brilliantly subbed it to “child enthusiast.” That’s not going to happen today.
My thoughts return to the flash mob idea. I’m theorise that maybe if I put the idea out there it might snowball and I won’t have to personally run around saying, “roll up! roll up! Rob is having a big naff Jackson party and you’re all invited.” Because, well, that would be completely horrific and I’d rather cut off my cock and stick it in a breville.
So I post, tentatively, “If I claimed there was a mass moonwalk being organised for 6pm at Liverpool Street Station would anyone believe me?” and sit back to see what happens next.
I’ve got about 2000 followers on Twitter, not exactly Ashton Kutcher levels, but enough people to cause trouble and the retweeting starts.
Points to note here are firstly that I’m being retweeted by a fictional character from Peep Show, he follows me, regularly retweeting my posts. I’ve found this alarming for quite a while, I like the show but err really, I can’t ever reply to you. You’re not real.
Secondly is Milo Yiannopoulos. This is a name I recogmise, he emailed me a couple of months ago to say he worked for “special projects” at The Telegraph and wanted “to discuss a potential b3ta/Telegraph blogs tie up.” This struck me as extremely unlikely to happen, as experience tells me that B3ta is far too wayward to get into bed with big business.
(Another time I’ll tell you about Disney wanting to give us a small fortune to run an image challenge to promote kids film, Chicken Little. If only that had gone ahead, it would have been LEGENDARY. Imagine, thousands of Disney’s characters, covered in photoshop cocks and Disney having to pay for the pleasure. Brilliant.)
Presumably Milo has similar thoughts and I assume I will never hear from him again, until he twitters me that is. And over the day the message is retweeted numerous times, quickly losing the “If I claimed” caveat and being presented as truth. I sit back, nervous, and watch the messages pile up. Oh my god, something really is going to happen and I’ve started it. How exciting.
At this point Milo sees an opportunity and decides to take over. He puts up a blog post with more details and a phone number and emails me to ask if I’m going to come. I’ve got no choice really.
I have stuff to do, I have a newsletter to write and a meal to cook for my wife. She’d demanded Spaghetti Bolognese and tells me, “you cook the best spag bog in North London.” She delights in calling it “bog”, it’s her reference to my Midlands origins, and she never misses an opportunity to mention it. Hence we then spend the next 30 minutes imagining a soap opera set in Birmingham called “Brummies” featuring a 38 year old bloke called Dave, who’d obsessed with Neds Atomic Dustbin and lives with his keeping-up-appearances mother. Dave has dreads, wears long shorts, and tries to be down with the kids by handing up C90s of mash-ups based upon early 90s greebo culture. You see, we were busy.
At five I get the tube to Liverpool Street Station. I read iWoz whilst traveling and think about Steve Wosniak’s almost sociopathic pranks where he spent a year interfering with the reception on a communal college TV set, making people madly bang it whenever he pressed a concealed gadget. I wonder if there’s a connection - a delight in making people dance to your own tune when in real life you feel a bit ignored.
Liverpool Street is rammed with police. Everywhere I turn there are yellow jacketed coppers talking on walkie-talkies. Suddenly I feel deeply paranoid and I do a circuit of the station and worry that I’m going to be arrested on terrorism charges. I panic and get the first train out of there - I even take the wrong line.
One stop in the wrong direction later and I feel a bit calmer. There’s no way I’m about to moonwalk in public - the horror of that literally makes sweat drip from my armpits, but maybe I can lurk to the side and noone will arrest me. Also I’m making a conscious effort to write at the moment, and if I duck out at the climax of the story, well there’s no story is there?
Back in the station I make my way to the meeting point Milo mentioned, by McDonalds, and gosh, what a huge crowd. There must be one or two thousand people here, all crushed up, all holding camera phones, all straining to see the centre of the action. I’m reminded of the passages about herd instinct in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point where if one animal looks like it’s engaged in killing something then others crowd round for scraps, as this is more efficient than hunting for food themselves. There is literally nothing to see, other than the spectacle of the crowd.
A sharp poke in my ribs and a middle aged business man shouts, “Excuse me, this is a public walkway you know.”
I drift amongst the people overhearing snippets of conversation, “Flashmob” “Michael Jackson” “Twitter” and most of all, “Do you know what’s going on?” which mostly the answer appears to be, “no.”
Media are out in force, I spy two outside broadcasting trucks and numerous self-shooters with lenses too large to be consumer equipment. I blink, all this happened, because I thought it would happen and mentioned it, and yet nobody knows who I am or (quite rightly) cares. I briefly entertain fantastical notions of grabbing one of the news crews and telling them my story, but assume they’ll just think I’m a nutter trying to claim credit, as it’s quite obvious who’s in charge - that would be the bloke in the centre holding a microphone.
Milo has organised a P.A system and occasionally says things over it, which I can’t actually make out, but people cheer. Someone mentions something about “there’s a look-a-like!” another “Michael’s in a limousine” but I can see nothing and I’m reminded of those rumours that sweep crowds at music festivals. “Shaun Ryder is dead!” or “The Beatles are playing.”
Eventually some music starts up - it’s the one Jackson tune I unequivocally love, Billie Jean. It’s the bass-line that works for me, once described by the KLF’s Bill Drummond as like a “lynx on the prowl”. It’s perfect, not a note wasted, and unlike much of Jacko’s later work it tells an engaging story, a deranged fan claiming Jackson is the father of her child.
I can’t tell if people are moonwalking or not. All I see are people holding cameras in the air and trying to photograph the middle of the crowd. This must be the real story, and I turn around and attempt to take photos of the crowd instead of the back of people’s heads. Then I feel dreadfully self conscious and worry about someone thumping me and I stop.
Getting bored now so I check twitter on my phone, hopefully someone I know is around. There’s a message saying I’ve been spotted on CNN. Ha. There’s something for the TV researchers to dig out if I ever become a serial killer or something - a fleeting glimpse in a crowd. Like that photo of Hitler standing among the crowd in Munich as war is declared in 1914.
We have four songs, and then Milo tells the crowd that the police want to all to end and everyone should go home. It’s not quite as dramatic as when the police stopped the Beatles playing on the Savile Row roof in 1969, nobody arrests Ringo or anything.
I spy Paul Carr, the only man I know to ever be sacked from a company he started himself, and he ushers me into the inner circle amongst the cops. “This would never happen in San Francisco. I mean the media wouldn’t bother turning up, we do stuff like this almost every Thursday and nobody cares”, he claims.
“You live in San Francisco?” I ask. “Yeah, but I’m back for Glastonbury.” I wonder about the great mystery of how Paul Carr funds his life, he never appears to do any real work. Maybe we can drum up a Guardian expenses scandal?
Milo is on the phone, I wave at him and I’m shushed by someone telling me, “he’s talking to the BBC”. Milo is beanpole thin, extremely tall and looks like he should be running for headboy at Hogwarts. He’s glorying in the attention, being pulled from one camera crew to another and eventually he finds time for me.
“I mentioned you three times”, he says. “I bet they cut it” I reply. “No I managed to get you mid sentence so you can’t be cut.”
I spot Alex Tew of milliondollarhomepage fame. He’s grown a beard and I ask him about his current project Popjam. “Yep it’s going great, but it’s tricky trying to compete with Facebook.” Alex asks about Sickipedia and I tell him that it’s spent most of the day crashed due to the increased traffic caused by Jackson’s death, and it’s a pig of a site because although there’s apparently limitless demand for sick jokes, it’s impossible to grow it as no advertiser will place their clients near it.
Alex suggests I get B3ta to buy advertising on it, which I suspect is the crazy accounting methods that probably caused current global economic breakdown.
I hang around a bit, realise nothing more is going to happen and decide it’s time that I get home so I can take the Spag Bog out of the oven, share a bottle of wine with my wife and tell her all about my rather odd little world.
* * *
The next day during my headline watch I notice that The Guardian is running one of the most confusingly worded headlines I’ve seen for a while. How can anyone read this and not think of Timelords?
