texturbation

Bagpuss had tits in it! Underage teenage girls’ tits. Really, it did. Look.

Not in the same sense that Captain Pugwash had characters called Seaman Staines, Master Bates and Roger the Cabin Boy, which was a bullshit sense.

Rather, it’s in the sense that Bagpuss really did have drawings of jailbait boobs in it, and you can go over to Youtube and watch them for yourself.

I’m sure I am merely one of many thirtysomethings inspired by the death last month of Oliver Postgate, co-creator of Bagpuss and many other fine kids’ TV shows of the 1970s, to recently remind themselves of that old saggy pink pussy.

I wasn’t born when Bagpuss was first on telly, but I must have caught the repeats during the first few years of my life, because the opening sequence still fills me with an infantile sensation of both comfort and haunting dread.

The sepia stills, the minimalist plucking of the theme tune’s strings, the almost nihilistic nature of the premise, the wistful, avuncular narrator, the downright scary stop-motion woodpecker, the frog with throat cancer.

It just freaks me out. I’m sure I’m not alone.

But I couldn’t remember any of the actual post-credits content of the shows, not until I watched this episode on Youtube over Christmas: part one, part two.

But I was Captain Bagpuss,
I knew the thing to do.
I tied a pole to the end of the string
And baited it with glue.

That way I caught a mermaid,
A pretty child was she.
She sat on my lap in the bosun’s cap,
And we all drank China tea.

Bagpuss, in his inaugural episode, had an underage girl sitting on his lap with her tits out.

Try to imagine any way this storyline could feature in any kids show made in 2009.

It might be illegal to even view this stuff now, at least in some backwaters, come to think of it. If a guy can get convicted for possessing indecent images of The Simpsons…

I feel very old.

My nephew Bob and I watched The Wombles today. Not the original 1970s cartoon, rather the 1997 version, updated by the right-on BBC after it was told it had to be relevant to “urban” people but before it realised that caricatures aren’t particularly helpful.

Did you know there was a black Womble?

No kidding. Here he is. He’s called Stepney. He has dreads and he’s from the East End. He’s even wearing a Rasta sweater, just to drive the point home.

I also thought I detected a slight East Asian accent on one of the other new Wombles, but I couldn’t hear it properly over Bob’s bloodcurdling, terrified screams.

Meet David Lammy, the lowest-scoring contestant on the festive season’s series of Celebrity Mastermind BBC specials.

Lammy scored 13, ranking him last of the 20 celebrities in the week-long quiz, according to the Life After Mastermind blog. The winner, novelist Phillipa Gregory, had 30 points.

He was beaten by comedians, actors, rockers, novelists and radio DJs. And Toyah Wilcox.

David Lammy MP is Minister of State for Higher Education and Intellectual Property.

These are some of the better answers he gave.

Q. What was the married name of the scientists Marie and Pierre who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for their research into radiation?

A. Antoinette.

Q. James Gandolfini played a Mafia boss named Tony in which American television series?

A. The Godfather

Q. Who acceded to the English throne at the age of nine at the death of his father Henry the Eighth in 1547?

A. Henry the Seventh.

There’s, like, this thing. I forget the word.

I used to have one, but now I don’t. I’m not sure I really want one anyway.

You have to get up at a silly hour of the morning and leave the house and go somewhere else that’s about a half an hour away.

When you get there, you end up sitting in a room dicking around with a computer for seven or eight hours.

Sometimes you talk on the phone for a bit and then write something down on a bit of yellow paper.

You do all this so that every month you can go to a machine in the wall and look at some numbers on a screen and the numbers are bigger than they were a month earlier when you went to the machine and looked at the numbers on the screen.

If you’ve eaten and drank too much, or had the heating on too high, or if it’s near Christmas, the numbers might be smaller.

What’s it called again?

If you have one of these things, and you’re doing that thing today, welcome back!

And if you have one spare, gimme a yell and I might be able to take it off your hands.

Have you been watching this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures? Blimey, what a load of nonsense.

Over the last couple of centuries, and particularly in the last several decades that this series of seasonal lectures has been televised, British kiddies have been educated about all spheres of science and technology in an entertaining and accessible way.

The first one I ever saw, Richard Dawkins explaining evolution and the origins of life back in 1991, taught me more about biology than I ever learned in school.

But this season’s, judging from last night’s shoddy performance from Christopher Bishop, is nothing more than a great steaming pile of tripe.

It promised to explain the mysteries of the web.

Instead, we get ten minutes on how PageRank works, using water pumps, followed by a bunch of hands-on “demonstrations” that did more to cloud than enlighten.

“Search engines use something called PageRank to determine how important a web page is,” Bishop explained. That’s “search engines” as opposed to “Google” and “important” as opposed to “popular”.

It seems Google is now, ten years old, so ubiquitous that PageRank is held aloft as a or the primary technology underpinning the web. The fact that PageRank is a patented technology and trademark used by Google was not mentioned.

Bizarrely, Bishop appears to be Microsoft’s head lab rat in Cambridge.

Minor PR blunder aside, the whole lecture left me, somebody who has worked in the web industry for a decade, scratching my head.

It was all demonstration with no useable information.

As somebody who already understands the underlying technologies, I found myself playing a mental game of “Guess what the hell he’s talking about” whenever he performed one of his audience-participation demonstrations.

Bishop attempted to explain secure key exchange using an assistant, an audience volunteer, and several large beakers of coloured water.

While this may tenuously illustrate what is a relatively a complex subject, Bishop made no apparent attempt to explain secure key exchange in practice. He just mixed up his beakers of water and said: “So that’s what happens when you see the padlock in your browser.”

He then rolled on to his next experiment, which used a road map as a visual metaphor for the internet, traffic congestion, etc, with no subsequent attempt to explain how the theories illustrated apply to what actually happens on the net.

“So, how does SSL work?” I could ask any kid who watched this lecture.

“Well, there’s some coloured water, and some other coloured water, and if you mix them up and give them to a web server the hackers can’t get back to the original colours,” the kid would have to say. “But it’s not coloured water, it’s numbers.”

I was reminded of countless press interviews with marketing folk who stubbornly refused to depart from their laboured, tenuous baseball or highway metaphors when trying to explain how their latest $100,000 gizmo worked.

“Look, I know more about how the internet works than how a game of baseball works,” I would say. “Can you just tell me what the darned thing does?”

Often, I got the impression the clueless marketing guy had recently had it patiently explained to him using these very same metaphors by a weary engineer. The marketing guy didn’t really know what the gizmo did either.

And after Bishop’s performance last night, which culminated rather desperately with the flinging of chocolate into the audience, I fear any child who watched the lecture may be primed merely for a low-level tech marketing position rather than as a future employee of Bishop’s lab.

There are some government people running around giving Disability Sensitivity Training to people working in the public sector.

According to a reliable source, these people recommend against using the word “brainstorm” because it might be offensive to schizophrenics.

They suggest using the term “thought shower” instead.

This, I believe, proves the point that you don’t need to be mentally ill to be retarded.

Dogmeat started growling, and I knew the ghoul was close.

I turned off my Pipboy light and crouched in the fetid gloom of the underground bunker’s toilets.

The shuffling from the corridor abruptly grew more frantic. The feral ghoul, a radiation-charred husk of a person, driven crazy by decades scavenging among the ruins and corpses, could smell human blood. Mine.

The ghoul let out a curdling yell, like a German gargling diarrhoea through a loudhailer, and started to race towards my position.

Dogmeat barked once and assumed his attack stance.

Then, suddenly, the ghoul was in the doorway, rushing me from no more than six feet away, fangs glinting in the flickering battery-powered lamplight.

I was in no condition for a fight. My encounter with the Mirelurk Hunter had left my health at no more than 10%, and I had only one stimpack left.

As the ghoul sped towards me, claws raised for the kill, I went into my bag.

To find my food stash, I cleared away the 25,000 bottle-caps I had collected and looked under the five cartons of cigarettes I planned to sell to the next wandering merchant I encountered.

I quickly opened and ate 10 cans of pork ‘n’ beans, three bags of potato chips, a box of breakfast cereal, the raw meat of three dogs, the remains of the aforementioned Mirelurk, and a box of dehydrated macaroni cheese.

I washed it all down with four bottles of dirty water and 13 bottles of Nuka Cola.

The ghoul was close now, barely five feet away from me.

And my Gillian McKeith feast of contaminated food and drink had left me dangerously irradiated. I hurriedly applied three injections of RadAway to my left thigh. I downed a couple of bottles of Rad-X, as well because I can never remember what it does but it can’t hurt can it.

At four feet, the ghoul launched itself at me, and I realised with horror that I was unarmed.

I went into my bag to desperately search for a weapon.

My bag offered a few possibilities, but the flamethrower, minigun, dozens of frag grenades, missile launcher and nuclear missile launcher all seemed like overkill. I was also down to my last 20 nukes. I thought briefly about the sniper rifle, hunter’s rifle, plasma rifle or one of the eight Chinese assault rifles I had looted, before finally settling on my favourite semi-automatic combat shotgun. I like to keep it handy, for close encounters. It was fully loaded, and I had 500 additional shells left in my bag.

I pulled it out at pointed it at the ghoul, mid-flight, who was now so close that the wide-eyed insanity of his face was virtually all I could see.

A headshot seemed the obvious choice, but I mulled it over for a couple of minutes before finally pulling the trigger.

Then the ghoul was no more than a headless, dismembered torso, served on a bed of rapidly decomposing mush, his limbs ragdolled to the far corners of the room.

I slung my shotgun over my back and began picking through the goo for loot.

“You know what the funniest thing about Europe is?”

“What?”

“It’s the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they’re a little different.”

“Example?”

“You know what they call Tropicana Some Pulp in England?”

“They don’t call it Tropicana Some Pulp?”

“Nah, they’re limeys, they wouldn’t know what the fuck Some Pulp is.”

“What’d they call it?”

“They call it Tropicana With Juicy Bits”.

“Tropicana With Juicy Bits. What’d they call it with Lots Of Pulp?”

“I dunno, I don’t think you can get it.”

I see Pringles have come out with Pringles Select, advertised on TV as “the Posh Pringle”.

Yeah, right. And jacking off into a condom is “a posh wank”.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the British class system, but I know at least two of its rules.

1. If somebody says they’re posh, they’re not.
2. Crisps are not posh. Not ever.

Oh, and they’ve done away with the tube too. These crisps come in — wait for it — a bag. Imagine.

Do they really think the sheep who buy their product do so for the taste? It’s the tube, you fucking idiots, they only buy it because of the tube.

Wow, this credit crunch is really having an effect on everybody, isn’t it?

Companies going out of business. All the shops are cutting back.

I took my two-year-old nephew down town today and the department store Santa had a goatee.

Remember when the internet was young?

Naïve mainstream media hacks were constantly nicking stuff off of the web sites, thinking they would get away with it.

The Daily Mail got caught a bunch of times lifting copy from the web by The Register, like these two times in 2001.

Those were not isolated incidents, from personal recollection.

Since I’ve recently started listening into the Silicon Valley media echo chamber once more, I see that the wheel is now come full circle – bloggers are shamelessly ripping off the mainstream.

The Huffington Post has apparently been lifting content from the RSS feeds of Time Out, The Onion and something called the Chicago Reader, and people are pissed.

As somebody who spent quite a lot of his career as a journalist getting angry with uppity tech “news” sites, I feel I have to say: ‘twas every thus.

These guys who think they’re redefining the news media by linking to the news, criticising the news, doing no origina…

Actually, you know what, fuck that. I had a rather extensive rant in mind but no, I’m not going down that road. Not again.