Brain Dump
I'm not entirely sure where to start. I haven't really sat down for longer than ten minutes all day. I've cleared all the washing, hoovered downstairs, cleaned the kitchen (more than once), made lunch for everybody, re-wired the phone and internet connection (which involved walking into town again to buy a wire), gone grocery shopping with Miss 18 to make gallons of some soup recipe she found on the internet, made dinner for everybody, finished washing up after the kids were supposed to have done it, and now find myself sitting in the junk room with a beer.
It's now 8pm, and according to my phone I covered ten kilometres during the day. I think I earned the beer.
Tomorrow morning will be spent standing on the touchline of a rugby pitch, so you'll forgive me if I appropriate the next couple of hours of 'me time'. This really just means noodling around on the internet – I hardly ever watch television any more. I occasionally watch movies – evidenced by my late-night viewing of the movie 'Midway' last week. I wasn't surprised at all to find a Hollywood movie about the Battle of Midway neglected to mention the USS Yorktown was sunk during the battle. Amazon has the movie 'Patton' available, but I'm guessing it will be more of the same – a 'version' of history.
Over here the press have become somewhat cynical about supposedly accurate dramatisations in movies playing fast and loose with the true stories. I think perhaps the most astoundingly innacurate movie I have seen in recent years was 'The Immitation Game' – about the breaking of Enigma at Bletchley park. The girl character in the movie never existed, the computer build by Turing was not called 'Christopher', the superior officer at Bletchley didn't dislike Turing, there was no spy found in the huts at Bletchley, and the guys decoding messages never had any moral dilemma about reporting their findings. Oh – and Turing never reported over anybody's head to MI6. Other than that – you know, MOST of the movie, it was pretty accurate.
Anyway.
It's been a long day, and I'm not sitting here with my third can of Budweiser, avoiding playing chess against anybody on the internet. I'm tired, and slightly drunk – which often leads to losing spectacularly against anybody that isn't tired, and hasn't been drinking beer for the last hour.
Miss 13 is trying to distract me with Snapchat. She claimed she was bored, so I suggested she check if any of her friends were online. She is now sat alongside me pulling faces at her phone while checking out the latest Snapchat filters. Or rather, I thought she was. Her exploration of her friend's posts to Instagram was going SO well, until one of them appeared to be lip-synching a rapper, with a song full of the F word. She burst out laughing, and I pretended it never happened.
I can still remember when MTV first started showing rap music. I can still remember when MTV played ANY music videos. I still don't think MTV should have started showing rap music, for the record. I have no idea what MTV was like in the US, but over here it was awesome – I would get in from college on an evening, and the various VJs would provide an escape from the world I knew – they were larger than life – celebrities in their own right. The names Ray Cokes and Marijne van der Vlugt have somehow re-appeared from the depths of my memory.
I still remember the day I switched on MTV, and saw 'Justify My Love' for the first time – and couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. These were the days before the internet – the only way I had of validating what I had just seen was to sit and watch MTV for a while, to see what the host of the show was saying about it. It's difficult to explain to anybody now just how many barriers Madonna smashed down during the height of her career.
I still remember the first video I saw on MTV. Satellite TV had been fitted during the day, and was available on the TV in the lounge when I got home from college. I immediately switched MTV on to show my parents, and the video for 'Rent' by the Pet Shops Boys appeared on-screen. Don't ask me why I remember it so vividly. I wonder if the internet had such an impact on me? Probably not – because the internet appeared in my life via bulletin boards, Compuserve, AOL, and finally an internet service provider.
Who remembers 'The Microsoft Network' – their botched attempt at an AOL style walled garden, before they really 'got' the internet? Who also remembers that early versions of Internet Explorer were credited to Looking Glass Technologies ? It's one of the biggest misses in the history of Microsoft, and yet it's been forgotten. They eventually bought their way back into the game, and fought dirty to destroy Netscape – but for a few years in the early 1990s, it really looked like they had lost their way.
I'll shut up now. I didn't set out to write a rambling load of rubbish about MTV, or the internet. It just sort of happened. Maybe that's how my blog posts should be though – a journey through my subconscious mind – randomly tripping from one thing to another along the way. I'm not sure how readable it might be though.