The View from the Spaghetti Factory (proper redesign coming soon!)

Just…

WOW

!!!!

Just a quick public service announcement, in case it’ll save anyone some bother…

I just noticed a comment on the bluesjamtracks Myspace page, where the request “please add me” was accompanied by a hotlinked picture of a comely young maiden.

I always remove spam and non-music advertising from our comments, so I clicked the picture to see what it would link to. It points at the URL http://d0f50129.com/login.php, where there’s a pretty convincing mock-up of the standard Myspace login page, except the “you must be logged-in to do that!” warning (and yes, the misplaced hyphen annoys me every time!) is on a red background, which I haven’t seen on the genuine Myspace site.

In short, a phishing attempt. There’s already quite enough comment spam on Myspace, so don’t fall for it!

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of optimism, but Gordon seems to be living in a fantasy world. Screaming from every tabloid headline and TV news programme today was the shocking news that… I can barely find the words to describe such horror… deep breath now…

A young member of the Royal Family has split up with the girl he was going out with.

Not surprisingly, media commentators and vox-popping members of the public have blamed the aggressive and intrusive press for making newly slebbified Kate Middleton’s life a misery and causing the eventual split. That’s rather disingenuous… we (and I’m using the broadest sense of “we”) get the media we deserve. The tabloids hound the Royals because we pay them to do so.

Granted, it’s not entirely one-way traffic… the media have played their part in whipping up the celeb frenzy. However, they’re simply exploiting their market. The fascination with celebrities began long before the Princess Diana hysteria, long before even the first movie stars of the 1920s. What’s different now, though, is the slack-jawed obsession with the trivial lives of people whose only achievement is to be given enough airtime to proclaim themselves “celebrities”. That doesn’t look like changing for a while, whatever Gordon Brown may think.

Didn’t do a huge amount over Easter… I’ve been pretty busy over the last month or two, so it was good to do some concerted idling (as opposed to my usual random bursts of unplanned idling) and enjoy the weather.

Such was my idleness, I can’t even remember what we did on the Monday, but I know we spent a pleasant Sunday lunchtime in the pub garden, followed by a walk to nearby Nonsuch Park, once home to Henry VIII. Finding the service wing of the current (Victorian) mansion open to visitors, we did the local history thang… I don’t know whether it’s a sign of age, but I found the minutiae of Victorian middle-class domestic life uncommonly intriguing!

It turns out that the partly neglected mansion (owned by a consortium of local councils) is up for sale, and conversion to a luxury restaurant or leisure club must be a possibility. In a borough like Sutton, which grew around the railway and the post-WW2 housing boom, even a neglected stately home is a rare treasure… to restrict public access in any way would be a tragedy, especially with its new-found potential as a museum of Victorian life. (More info… Save Nonsuch)

Saturday… saw the Oscar-winning (at last!) Scorsese film, “The Departed”. Verdict… well, it’s pretty good as gangland grudgefests go, but it’s almost like a Scorsese self parody, and probably not Oscar material. Naturally, he should have won the Oscar for “Taxi Driver” or at the very least “Goodfellas”, but of course the Academy doesn’t work like that, does it?

Friday was the most active day, featuring a sun-drenched walk through the Surrey hills between Dorking and Leatherhead. Spring was at its most glisteningly fertile, and I even captured some moments for you via the medium of photography…

Good Friday walk in the Surrey hills (photoset on Flickr)

… has died in New York.

One of the most important writers of the twentieth century and a rare example of a cult figure who was also a serious and profound artist. Vonnegut also stands out for me as one of very few people (along with J.G. Ballard and Neal Stephenson) who have tempted me to read science fiction. It’s years since I read any of his books, but this news has inspired me (as such things so often do) to go back an re-read the whole lot in chronological order.

We already know that some European police forces have a rather more… let’s say “physical” approach than our own Boys in Blue. So when I heard about the trouble at the Man Utd - Roma match last week, the claims of “over-reaction” rang true. Various reports (including BBC Radio 4 news) spoke of innocent families being trapped at the mercy of the ruthless Italian police. I was ready to fume at length about the irony of the situation… while Italian football has hit yet another grim low point, hooliganism in England has been vastly reduced since the bad old days of the 1970s and 80s. And yet we’re still judged according to that outdated reputation. Who are they to batter our fans when they can’t keep their own house in order?

And then I saw the TV footage.

For all I know, there may well have been innocent families trying to enjoy the match, but they weren’t evident. What I saw was a couple of hundred bullish men facing up to the Italian police, their chests and chins thrust forward in the “CAAAAHN THEN YOU FAKKIN WANKAHS!” stance, beer-reddened faces glistening in the floodlights. I’m no expert in crowd behaviour, but I’d suggest that’s probably not the best way to stay out of trouble.

We’ve become smug about our gentrified football industry with its prawn sandwiches, celebrity guests and sponsored family enclosures. However, there’s a danger that we’re blind to a new emergence of violence. Alex Ferguson isn’t always a reliable commentator on wider football matters; the protective leniency he shows to his own players is like that of a proud grandfather. However, I thought he was right on the mark when he claimed that a “mocking culture” in our society was behind the negative behaviour of England fans in the recent Euro 2008 qualifiers.

It doesn’t take a huge psychological leap to see how that could be connected with the prevalent “Me Me ME!” attitude in England… and from there to the self-righteous, seething arrogance of that small minority of Man Utd fans at the Roma match. Far from being unfairly victimised by over-zealous policemen, some of our football “fans” are starting to believe that they have a divine right to set their own standards of behaviour.

Can readers suggest a well-known London resident and friend of George Bush who is also guilty of this, I wonder? ;-)