Celebrity scares

Last week I was at London's ExCel for Grand Designs Live, the TV show, which was filmed alongside the exhibition of the same name. Obviously I was there for work; to get photos of The House That Kevin Built and any other exclusive content for the website that I could find.

It turned out that that included trying to get celebs to comment on property-related stuff. So when I wasn't dolled up in hi-vis jacket, hard hat and steel toe capped boots, clambering around a building site with my camera, I was hanging out in the green room, getting shy around people off the telly. A very, very random week.

I've realised that I'm not very good at talking to celebrities for the same reason that I'm not very good at science fiction. I just can't ... pretend. I can't call them "the talent" like other telly people do. I can't join in with the conversations about how amaaazing people look (unless they really do). I suppose I should try harder, but I just want to treat them like normal people, even though most of them think they're not.

So it makes sense, then, that I got on fine with Dave Gorman (who I do actually think is great) because I could giggle with him about the naming of the "flick off for Britain" campaign and what was on the telly, like I would with anyone. But I found it impossible to even look at Kim-from-Kim-and-Aggie, especially after hearing her tell someone "no dear, I don't talk about my personal life. It's very private to me". This is the woman whose autobiography, "The Story of My Brutal Childhood" was serialised in the paper, for goodness sake.

Being around "the talent" on a daily basis was one of the strangest experiences I've ever had. I saw Denise Van Outen's bottom, for starters. I don't make a habit of looking at other girls' bottoms, but she had to get mic'ed up in front of me, and there it was. (It's teeny tiny - like the rest of her - and absolutely perfectly formed.) I heard Paul from The Salon telling some people that he was responsible for inventing the phrase "back, sack and crack". I went to the loo and found Debra Stephenson (ex Corrie) getting changed into the most fabulous dressing-up dress I'd ever seen. "It's not mine," she said. "I'm going to a ball".

Phil and Kirstie were exactly like they are on the telly. Seriously. We interviewed them and they sat closely, agreeing on everything ("we're going to get one of those for our house," "oh yes, we're so going to get one of those too...") and finishing each other's sentences. After the interview, he went shopping and she shouted jokey admonishments after him, giggling when he rolled his eyes in mock sufferance. They genuinely appeared to be best friends, which must quite a feat for two people who spend so much time working together in the public eye.

Finally: yes, the Beeny was pregnant. Really, really pregnant. And just to confuddle my brain even further, it's apparently only her third.

Ar, oim a Broomooy

Apart from a brief flirtation with Glasgow, I've lived in Birmingham all my life. Not all over Birmingham, you understand - just south Birmingham. In fact, for 31 of my 33 years I’ve lived within four miles of my birth. Meh - call me a homebody.

Despite this, I don't have much of an accent (or so I'm told - although this is mainly by southerners who are probably expecting a "yam yam" black country drawl). I do apparently have a "hard G" (in other words, I pronounce the Gs in words like banging and singing), and the more I drink, the more I go down-then-up at the end of sentences... but I don't strangulate my vowels, and I certainly don't say "ar" instead of yes.

So, having been told on many occasions that I "must be a posh Brummie", I'm regularly surprised to find that words I use all the time are actually West Midlands vernacular.

For example, when giving directions, I've always told people to, say, turn left, "at the next island". Apparently most people only ever call them roundabouts. Who knew?

Likewise, I'll stop at the garage (pronounced garridge, of course) rather than the petrol station on the way home from the pub. Why has it taken me 30-odd years to find out that "garage" in this context is unique to Midlanders? I'm still not convinced it is!

Some words and phrases are historical and I wonder if Brummies are just being old fashioned by continuing to use them. For example, when I was younger, the off licence at the bottom of the road was "the outdoor". This dates back to the time when pubs had a separate entrance for off-site sales. But wasn't that the same all over the country? Why do people in the Midlands still use the word?

Others are just unfathomable. "Wash your donnies", my mom used to say before lunch. In an effort to make up for using such unbecoming slang, she would hurriedly follow this with "from the French, donner – to give..." She's right, of course. But how on earth did that little channel-crossing gem happen?

Obviously I don't want to turn this into a list of local dialect and slang – there are plenty of those around. I just enjoy being genuinely surprised, and wanted to share that. So I could go on (how do you pronounce "tooth"? Have you ever been deffed out, or dismissed as yampy? Does your chip shop sell potato scallops?)... but I won't. And besides, as my dear departed Nanna used to say: I’m off to the larpom.

Flickr Video

So flickr have announced today that Pro members can now post short videos.

My initial reaction was that it's wrong, all wrong. YouTube is for videos; Flickr is for photos.

Flickr are trying to differentiate their offering (I guess) by limiting video uploads to 90 seconds. They said: "Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of 'long photos,' of capturing slices of life to share."

I posted this on Helluva Forum with a bit of a "pfft" type comment, but then something Maffu said made me think about it differently.

"I think they're onto something but I think they've dug past the gold," he said. "I really, really like the idea of 'long photos', but I think 90 seconds is way, way too long. I'd love to see what people could do with a maximum of two or three seconds of movement. Imagine how much more of the 'ness' of an image you could have in these imeos/vidages/vidtures. Think of the scene in Blade Runner where Deckard picks up the picture of (supposedly) Rachel as a child, and for a couple of seconds your can see the shadows of the trees playing across their faces and hear the laughter and the birds singing around them."

Okay, he lost me with the last bit (not too hot on film references, as you know), but I do see his point and I'm going to strive to make some of these vidages, as well as taking snaps, next time I go out on a shoot.

And I think this is what will make it all right. Only Pro members of Flickr can upload video. These are the people who (should) understand where flickr is coming from. How many of them already take video as well as still photography? This will give them somewhere to put the results, instead of just uploading the photos and leaving the video on the computer. Or, indeed, uploading photos to flickr for peer feedback, and then uploading the video to YouTube to get lost in a sea of mobile phone footage and kittens.

Does this make me a twit?

I finally signed up to Twitter this evening. Er ... what do I do now? I'm "following" a couple of people (which just makes me feel like a stalker) but, as I mentioned before, I'm a bit frightened that this might just be another way of pointlessly fuelling my internet addiction.

Search terms

This blog has gone crazy with the hits over the last couple of days. Here's why:



You sick puppies :o)

Is Neil Buchanan dead?

Well, no. So why, when someone asked that question in the office this morning, did at least two people nod vigorously and begin to earnestly discuss the poor man's demise?

I was bemused. Normally, the punchline to the question "did you know Neil Buchanan's died?" is "yes, he had an Art Attack". Boom, boom. Had someone misunderstood the joke? "No," said my colleague, who'd heard the news from her sister. She shook her head gravely. "It was colon cancer. No-one even knew he was ill."

I checked Google news. I checked the BBC. Nothing, anywhere. I checked Wikipedia, where I found a paragraph dedicated to the "death rumour". Wikipedia's source for the rumour pointed me to facebook.

Yes, it seems this current urban myth is down to a facebook group called RIP Neil Buchanan (the art attack guy), which has 9,218 members. The group's homepage says that he died on 21st March 2008 after "a long struggle against cancer of the colon". Eh?

But wait. A comment underneath, presumably by the groups's admin Nick Hernshaw says: "It has been recently suggested that Neil is still with us, contrary to announcements on several radio broadcasts and on blue peter (bbc!). If you are in anyway offended or consider being disrespectful to this group, please bear in mind, that even if you do not necessarily believe, the sole purpose of this group is to show RESPECT for Neil, and this should be done whether he is alive or dead. It would be a shame for the small minority to ruin this opportunity for the majority."

A bit of backtracking going on there. Sounds like he doesn't really believe it himself. So was it a genuine misunderstanding? Or was it just set up to see how quickly and how widely a rumour can spread? Pretty damn quickly and widely, it would seem, when it's on facebook.

Out of interest, I've just counted twelve facebook groups set up to debunk the myth, from the jolly sounding "Neil Buchanan is alive and well actually! lets get him back on tv!" (14 members), to the rather more angry "Nick Hernsahw (sic) is a sick cunt.....Neil Buchanan isnt dead" (32 members). However, even adding the membership of all twelve "it's not true!" groups together, the naysayers have still only got around 300 people on board. The mysterious Nick Hernshaw has nearly 9,000 more. It looks like the rumour will be doing the rounds for a good few weeks yet.

Mullania - update

You may remember that our intrepid Councillor Martin Mullaney had a complaint made against him back in May last year, for a Youtube video in which he, his colleague Ernie Hendricks and (now former) Epic Skatepark owner Keith Marsden went for a wander into a Grade II listed building on the Moseley Road.

This week, Martin's blog reports that "Both Councillors were in breach of the Members Code in relation to showing disrespect to Mr Safdar Zaman, owner of the old tram depot offices."

The Councillors are required to apologise, or be suspended. Bert and Ernie ... sorry, Martin and Ernie have come to an agreement that Ernie will not apologise, and therefore be suspended for one month, but Martin will apologise* and give half of his allowance to Ernie for that month.

The Youtube video has been taken down.

The old tram depot is still a horrendous eyesore.

More at Martin Mullaney's blog.

*UPDATE (26/03/2008): In a dramatic turnaround(!), it seems Martin won't be apologising after all, but instead will appeal. The letter he was required to sign (PDF) apparently "just went further than I was prepared to go".

I can't keep up. You can attempt to, by going to the dedicated pages on Martin's blog.

Oh, Deir ...

Councillor Deirdre Alden, "your Conservative Parliamentary Spokesman for the Birmingham Edgbaston constituency", has a blog. And on her blog, she posts pictures of herself doing Councillor-like things, with a lovely big grin on her face. Not for her the gritty YouTube documentary choice of other local councillors - no, our Deirdre (sorry, Cllr Alden) sticks to the simple digital still and a smile. At a rate of around one every single day.

So it was only a matter of time before the lol meme came to Edgbaston, wasn't it? That's right - it's loldeirdre!

I defy any lolcat fan not to see this and immediately want to have a go themselves. I know I have. And poor Pete Ashton's been getting a little bit fixated on smiley D. "I've spent most of this afternoon obsessing over Deirdre", he muses. "I've never met her but I've built up this complex character in my head, one that I'm starting to care about. This isn't a parody for me and it's certainly not an insult. It's something else. What, I'm not quite sure, but thankfully there's a whole year of photos in her archives just waiting for the captions."

Go on, you know you want to...