“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”

- Oscar Wilde

So here it is, happy Thanksgiving.

There’s very little in my life - all of our lives, I suppose, but at the moment it feels like particularly mine - that isn’t affected one way or another by Americans. And, appropriately, Thanksgiving is the ‘holiday’ that makes me feel happy for all the good American things, and sad for all the less good ones.

So, a brief Thanksgiving thank you to the ten best American things that I can think of off the top of my head (in no particular order)…

1) American women. They don’t do things by halves in America; it’s all about the extremes. Take Manhatten (Staten Island too) - spend some time there and you’ll find every woman is apparently either totally single or totally married. Boyfriends are too - you know - mushy middle. And it’s not just New York. American women (and I’ve been out with the odd one or two, so please know I speak from experience) are without doubt the most loving, hating, funny, lunatic, balanced, psychotic, professional, flighty, essential distractions you will ever meet. There is no feeling on earth when you find a good one, and no feeling on earth when it ends. It’s no accidence there’s a song called ‘I wish they all could be Californian’ and about a zillion called ‘American Girls’, and yet no iTunes results for ‘I wish they could all come from Croydon’ or ‘Welsh Girls’. Quite a few results on Kazza for the latter, though.

2) Aaron Sorkin. Sorry, quite a jump there. But to anyone who says Americans don’t understand irony (or, rather that they do, but they don’t recognise it), I say watch any two minutes The West Wing, or Studio 60, or Sports Night. I’m using Sorkin as a figurehead here. See also Groening, MacFarlane, Trudeau etc etc etc.

3) American Journalism. They actually give a shit when journalists lie in America. Read that back. It actually matters in America. A made up quote is grounds for dismissal. A made up story is so dramatic that they made a film about you. Same goes for autobiographical books. Can you imagine that here? If every news outlet and every author faced the same scrutiny as the BBC? I did a round of interviews with US publications for the St. Martin’s Press edition of the Second Life book last year and two of the reporters called back to fact check. To fact check a puff interview with an author of a book on a fake world. I literally couldn’t make it up.

4) American Journalists. Thompson, Woodward, Bernstein, Wolfe, Mailer, Talese, Capote and on and on and on and on. Oh, and there are some decent ones working today too.

5) Fox News. News 24, as imagined by Stephen Colbert. 24-hours a day. It is impossible to be bored in a US hotel room.

6) US Hotels. And restaurants. And bars. Ice machines in every corner, barmen that talk to you and call you ‘buddy’, sandwiches the size of the moon, 24-hour everything, refills. Refills! If only they could make decent beer, but nowhere’s perfect.

7) The behavioural concept of ‘inappropriateness’. More fun to fuck with than a Playmate holding a can of Cool Whip.

Cool Whip.

9) The Dollar. Iconic, surrounded by cool sounding slang, and absolutely in the toilet. America may not quite be the land of the free, but if the greenback keeps heading south, it’s only a matter of time. iPod? I’ll take twelve.

10) Freedoms.

Nah, just messing with you. Everyone hates America for their freedoms.

10) The Constitution. A (literally) paper-thin barrier between freedom and the police state. And yet, like that joke paper you used to get, the bastard just won’t tear. By contrast, unwritten constitutions, like ours, consisting of hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper, all piled on top of each other, not particularly neatly and with no index and no plan look about as unstable as a pro-lifer on a unicycle. It’s a marvel of science.

That’s my ten. If I spent another ten minutes, I could probably come up with another list, and another, and another. I suppose the idea of Thanksgiving itself should probably be on there somewhere.

But, no, that’s it for this year.

Happy Thanksgiving, America, Americans and all who sail in them.

You know what I love?

Right! I love writing haiku.

That’s why this is one.

Haiku - as you know - is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting (usually) of three lines, with 5-7-5 syllables respectively.

I first stumbled across it in secondary school where my English teacher, Mr Coen, insisted we spend an hour writing Haiku about flowers and trees and all that kind of crap. He was of the ‘must include a season in the second line’ school, and we resented him for that.

This is the same man who forced us to read Tarka the (fucking) Otter. This is the same man who thought that the Canterbury Tales needed to be read by 11 year olds in the original Middle English. It’s also the same man who introduced me to Orwell, Shakespeare, J Alfred Prufrock, wordplay and punnery and the joy of the dicking about with the English language just for the hell of it. Funny how it takes years for that kind of thing to sink in, by which time it’s too late to say a proper thank you.

Haiku is brilliant for a number of reasons. Firstly it’s short. It takes two minutes to write one; five for a really good one. The second is that it forces you to stick to a really rigid form, and still say something meaningful. Which takes a bit more time than you’d think.

In The Friday Thing, we used to have a feature called Haiknews (or variably ‘Haikgeist’) where we summed up the week’s main news in the form of a Haiku. It was one of my favourite sections to write for and I’d like to think some were pretty ok. This one, for example, from the week in which both Terry Shiavo and the Pope died…

Terri Schiavo dies
God incandescent with rage
Kills Pope in revenge

A few weeks earlier, 25th March 2005 (Good Friday), the Pope’s condition was reported to be heading south. Leading to…

Pope about to die
But don’t you worry, Catholics
He’ll be back Sunday

And of course this…

London Olympics
Transport regeneration
Off to rocky start

…from our Seven / Seven special issue.

It’s quite a challenge to make them funny in the space allowed, in much the same way as writing for tabloids is more of a challenge than writing for broadsheets. You have to fit an entire story into 50 words, and at least ten of them have to be bold-face tabloidese, otherwise you’ll be SLAMMED by CHIEFS. And heaven knows would the onlookers would think.

Yes, there’s something that really gets me off about writing to a strict template. And so it is that I am both saddened and terrified by the news that Facebook is to drop the mandatory ‘is…’ from status updates.

No longer will we be forced to say ‘Paul is… doing something’, now it’s just ‘Paul…’.

Perhaps ‘Paul… wants to be a woman’ or ‘Paul… has fallen off his Segway’ or ‘Paul… ate all the Skittles.’ The verb is my oyster. Actually, fuck, I don’t even need a verb.

‘Paul… happy! Yay!’

Yuck, yuck, yuck.

“Oh, but it gives users more freedom,” they say. And so it does. Freedom from having to think. Freedom to write whatever shit falls out of our brain without a second thought as to whether it’s a proper sentence, or even whether there’s a verb. It’s a sop to the people who think it’s acceptable to update their status to read (and this is an actual example, with the name and love object changed to protect the guilty)…

‘Katie is… has got a new car. And I’m loving it!!!!!!!’

No you is haven’t Katie you fucking lazy, idiot mong. And, by the way, how difficult is it to remember which personal pronoun you’re supposed to be using?

Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end of the creative, amusing status update. Without rules to inspire creativity and - very occasionally - wit, there is zero need to make an effort. And so we won’t. Before the year is out, our mini-feeds will be awash with LOL’s! and txt spEk and people like Katie who think that it’s cute to use the present continuous of ‘love’.

Seriously, Katie, won’t you just is dying? Thanx laydee!!! Mwah!

And where status updates go, the rest of Facebook will surely follow. Already profile pages are starting to fill up with zombies and whiteboards and gardens full of digital flowers and all of the other crap we left MySpace to get away from. With this last fort of order and structure taken, how long can it be before Greenday marches in, whining out of the built-in music players of a thousand goth and Emo profiles like a war cry for the stupid and identically unique? How long until Scrabulous is banned as bourgeois and the ‘poke’ becomes the ‘fuck’?

Weeks, for sure, not months.

First they came for the clean navigable profile pages, but I did nothing because I was a Zombie.

Then they came for the simple innuendo of the ‘poke’, but I did nothing because I wanted to throw a sheep.

Then they came for the ‘is…’ and I did nothing because I are loving the fr33dom!!!

And then they came for me.

But I was long gone.

More trouble at the treasury tonight after “Chancellor” Alistair Darling admitted that staff at HM Revenue and Customs had used normal internal mail to post records of every one of the UK’s Child Support claimants to the National Audit office. And now they’re missing.

The records - contained on two CDs - contained the names, addresses and (in many cases) bank account details of some 25 million claimants. Twenty five million.

Fuck.

Showing that the Blairite method of ministerial responsibility is alive and well, Darling apologised but refused to resign, blaming the debacle on a ‘junior official’. Meanwhile the head of Customs and Revenue immediately resigned. Presumably Postman Pat will be found dead under a tree tomorrow with his wrists slashed.

Now, the good news is that I have no children. Or any money in my bank account. So, obviously, I don’t give a fuck about any of this. But what amazes me about the story is the fact that hugely critical government information is routinely sent between departments on CD.

CD.

Not even DVD.

CD!

But it gets worse - this comes after the ‘major IT infrastructure modernisation project (completed on time and to budget)’ boasted about in the Revenue’s annual report back in May of this year.

That’s right, to the HMRC, major infrastructure modernisation means moving data transfer (from what? wax cylinders? monks with quills?) to CD Rom. Which begs the question, what else did they modernise while they were at it?

Fortunately, it’s all in the annual report…

- £1.2 million spent providing all staff with cutting edge early 90’s ‘Rabbit’ mobile phones allowing them to remain in touch at all times, simply by standing within 20 feet of a Rabbit base station. The ultra slim, bag-sized, handsets replace the previous system of tapping Morse code on underground pipes.

- £1.12m to provide all staff with access to the 1994 version of Compuserve (who beat off a strong bid from CIX) for just 10p a minute - providing ‘huge costs savings’ over the previous TELEX system. The new system provides access to dozens of USENET chat rooms, thousands of pages of Red Dwarf fan fiction even allows child support applications to be filed electronically by emailing them to 136836.6492@compuserve.com.

- £3.6m to upgrade all desktop computers from the outdated Amiga 500 to the Amiga 500 Plus. According to the report, Revenue bosses expect a ‘noticable’ increase in productivity thanks to an additional 485k of ram, a vastly improved edition of Deluxe Paint and the bundled games Lemmings and Bart Simpson vs The Space Mutants.

- £1.8m to provide the department’s estimated 3,000 remote workers with Psion Series 3a handheld computers. Although critics have questioned the cost of such bleeding edge devices, HMRC insisted that, while the replaced Simon Says devices had certainly improved the short term memory of workers, they were “simply unsuitable” for advance tasks such as remembering birthdays and recording 30 second voice memos.

- £48m to restock all department vending machines, removing Spangles, Marathons and Treets and replacing them with Wispas, Banana Chewits and chocolate cigarettes.

Total: £55.72m

Which, when you consider the obvious improvement the modernisation has had on efficiency and security, seems pretty reasonable.

Oh. Hang on. What’s this in the small print?

Ah - it turns out the £55.72m was calculated on one of the Revenue’s 1973 Bowmar MX35 Calculators, using 1973 prices. Adjusted for 2007 prices, the real total is a slightly more modern £760m.

But don’t worry! There’s some even smaller print. Turns out that £760m is exactly the same amount of overdue tax that local councils are still struggling to collect from last year due to outdated collection systems.

All they need to do is modernise local government so they can collect their money and the two examples of breathtaking incompetence pay for themselves.

And if that’s not joined up government, then I don’t know what is.

“Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.“

-Christopher Fry

…

Last week I caught up with a friend of mine who knows more about American TV than is probably healthy. She is what you might call an ‘expert’. We ended having something of a tepid debate about The West Wing.

I mentioned in passing that I always thought of it as, basically, a comedy series with a soul and a message. She was having none of it: it was a drama, with funny bits. Annoyingly, a bottle of Pinot Noir in, I couldn’t recall a single one of my favourite West Wing gags to prove my point that, if it’s not a comedy, nothing is.

But this evening, in a break from writing The Book (I’ve actually done something today. And I ate sushi for lunch. My end of year resolutions have started well), I decided to spend a few minutes sending her an email proving my point.

To do that, I employed what I call ‘The Scrubs Test’. The methodology is simple:

1) First, accept that, having been nominated for six *comedy-related* Emmys, Scrubs is unarguably a comedy series. (And yet, like The West Wing, it has no laugh track so you have to figure that out for yourself. The presence of Zach Braff doesn’t help).

2) Having accepted this, hand-pick (Google) a range of exchanges between major characters in your test show (in this case, The West Wing).

3) Next, mentally recast each exchange from your target show so that instead of being between the original show’s characters, it is now between *either* JD and Dr Cox OR Elliot and Carla in Scrubs.

4) If the exchanges from your target show could *easily* pass in a Scrubs script without looking out of place then target show is - indisputably - as much of a comedy as Scrubs. Everything else is window dressing.

Got it? Ok! Let’s go…! Recast the following in your head and see how they hold up…

…

SAM: About a week ago I accidentally slept with a prostitute.
TOBY: [pause] Really?
SAM: Yes.
TOBY: A prostitute?
SAM: A call girl.
TOBY: Accidentally?
SAM: Yes.
TOBY: I don’t understand. Did you *trip* over something?

…

NURSE: I need to ask you some questions, sir. Do you have any medical conditions?
BARTLET: Well… I’ve been shot.

…

ABBEY : “You really planned this all yourself?”
BARTLET : “I’m like Gatsby, but without the problems.”

[Ok, granted this one's borderline. Maybe it's more Spin City. But that's still Bill Lawrence so it counts]

…

GINGER : “You ate a moose?”
SAM : “No. I don’t like eating things where the cartoon character can talk - and, you know, hatch a plan.”

…

JOSH: You like winning, don’t you?
TOBY: Saves you from having to say the word please.

…

JOSH : We think if we hit the ground hard enough, we can make it to the center of the planet and find water?
TOBY : Yeah.
JOSH : That’s not a theory of physics pretty much disproved by Wile E. Coyote?

…

And finally, a bonus one that fails the Scrubs Test but passes the Frasier Test…

Bartlet (Daphne): You know what you are? You are the Charlie Brown of missile defense. The Pentagon is Lucy.
Leo (Niles): I’m not familiar with the reference.
Bartlet (Daphne): Peanuts. Charlie Brown.
Leo (Niles): I’ve heard of them. I’m just not conversant in them.
Bartlet (Daphne): Why?
Leo (Niles): I’ve never read the comics.
Bartlet (Daphne): Leo [Niles], were you born at age 55?
Leo (Niles): I know there’s a dog…

….

Undeniable.

Right! Back to work!

“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.”

- Mary Schmich (Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young)

…

Earlier on, I was round at a friend’s house, swapping my ability to change lightbulbs and plug in huge televisions for a cup of tea with soya milk. A good time was had by all and the soya milk - sweet and sickly as it was - cleared up my hangover a treat.

I mention this because my friend, aside from being a journalist, is also an avid believer in the strange and curious world of positive thinking. And I have to admit, it’s never really been my cup of (er…) tea - mainly because I’ve found that negative thinking leaves far less room for disappointment.

And yet.

Stuck to her wall above her desk, I noticed, were couple of little handwritten notes. Post-it sized things, and on each was written one of those message to the cosmos things that Noel Edmonds used to (presumably) order his wife to run off with a pilates instructor. These were her goals, and she was asking the universe for help in achieving them.

I’ll be honest - my first instinct was to dismiss the idea of them, in the way that I’d dismiss the idea of ordering a book from Amazon by simply writing its name on my hand and waiting for the postman. But then the horrible realisation hit me. My life - the negative thinking one - is currently quite a bit of a mess. I’m drinking too much, writing too little, eating crap and basically waiting for my new passport to arrive so I can get out of London. In contrast, my friend’s life - the post-it note ordering one - is actually pretty okay. She’s healthy, broadly happy and writing a damn sight more than I am at the moment.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pretty sure the cosmos is not the place to do your ordering, but I suppose I’m prepared to accept that writing down things you want to change can do wonders for one’s motivation. If it’s written on a little list, and if there’s a deadline attached, then it’s much harder to ignore.

The book is due on January 1st, which is quite a neat deadline. So here’s my short list of things I’m going to do between now and then. Starting obviously with…

1) Write this fucking book. Seriously, I’m going to have to get down a couple of thousand solid, publishable words a day, starting tomorrow. Today.

And then, in not much of a particular order…

2) Stop eating so much shit. Sushi is my new friend.

3) Stop drinking for a while. There are too many parties and too many dinners at the moment where wine and rum are served. I was only half joking when I Facebook statused the other day saying I was waiting for my eyeballs to turn yellow.

4) Decide what the hell I’m going to do this spec script about. I had a great idea last night, but when I woke up this morning, it was shit.

5) Never, ever, drink soya milk again.

And then, the biggie…

6) Get my passport sorted and take Alison’s advice to get out of London for a while. Samuel Johnson once wrote “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for in London there is all that life can afford.” He was half right*. There is all that life can afford, for sure, but there’s also plenty of yin to that particular yang. It’s time for a break.

…

So that’s my list, and my personal challenge for the next month-and-a-bit. It’s Christmas so I can’t promise the food or drink ones, but I’m pretty sure I can limit it to the couple of big Christmas parties I have coming up, and of course New Year. The book, by hook or by crook, will have to be done. And I feel broadly similar about the getting out of London.

I have no clue what’s going to happen about the spec script.

Maybe something will come, maybe something won’t.

We’ll have to see.

But trust me on the soya milk.

…

* Incidentally, doing and writing things by halves is a something of a re-occurring theme for Samuel Johnson. Whenever he’d compose the first draft of a poem, he’d only ever write down the first half of each line. The rest would be added from memory later. Curious fellow, all told.

“The easiest thing to do on earth is not write”

- William Goldman

…

In ten days’ time, this blog will celebrate its first birthday. A cake will be baked, streamers will be unfurled and all assembled will sing a little birthday song.

And then will come the customary ‘looking back’. How much has changed in the previous twelve months, how much older things are looking, how much we’ve learned. And then some idiot will trip over the buffet table and all of the sausage rolls will be ruined.

To prepare for the party, I’ve decided to have a bit of a spring clean of the blog. Change of colour scheme, updated the text a bit to make it clear it’s a personal blog, that kind of thing. I’m also making yet another public resolution to write stuff here more frequently.

Difference this time is that I might actually stick to it.

You see, the last time I managed to update daily was when we were writing the Second Life book. Weirdly, the more words I have to churn out for work, the more inspired I am to blog. And vice-versa. I think it’s a rising tide lifting all ships thing. Or work displacement. Or something.

Either way, I hope to God it works. The deadline for the Alienating Tail (not actual title) book is hurtling towards me and I still have a shit load to write. There’s too much to go in, and too many years of stuff to go back and revisit (tautology is a great way to churn through the word count, by the way) for it to be easy. But I’ll get there. I usually do with things like this. Inshallah.

…

Mindful of the above, I really need to turn down any other writing commitments until at least January. Which is obviously why, at dinner last night, I was asked if I’d be interested in having a crack at writing a TV script. And it’s why I nearly bit the hand off the person asking. I’m an idiot. But given who was asking (and the fact that she was buying dinner) I’d have been even more of an idiot to say no.

The fact that a) I have no real idea what a script even looks like, except what I’ve seen in William Goldman books b) I’ve never written a word of fiction before and c) I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN A WORD OF FICTION BEFORE didn’t seem to alarm anyone, which I fear has lulled me into a false sense of capability.

Fortunately, on hearing my panic, my friend Ruth, who has actually written a screenplay, sent me the following magic formula…

‘one page = one minute’

…which is brilliant in its simplicity. Armed with that, the rest will surely fall into place.

You know what, it’s going to be an interesting couple of months. I’m really quite excited which, given how the rest of my life is going at the moment, is something of a surprise.

No, not excited. That other thing.

Terrified.

I haven’t blogged for a while. I’ve been a bit busy, with one thing or another. And tonight I’m supposed to be writing a book. But I just wanted to weigh in quickly on something that will interest possible three or four people who read this blog, but is bugging the hell out of me.

Associate Press is suing Moreover.com for publishing AP news reports without permission.

Now, there’s been a lot of comment on other blogs about the subject - quite a lot of it quite wrong (@Mashable: Moreover is owned by Verisign, not Viacom). My problem is not with the specifics of the case.

No.

My problem is with the ridiculous - and growing - trend of companies using intellectual property lawsuits as an opening gambit in rights negotiations. We’ve seen the tactic used against Napster, we’ve seen it used against YouTube, we’ve seen it used against Google News and now we’re seeing it used against Moreover. Media rights owner panics about their inability to compete in the online world and decides a good way to make money is to get huge licence fees from aggregators. Media rights owner opens negotiations by suing for ridiculous damages. Aggregator is forced to negotiate on the back foot. Media rights owner gets more than they would in a more reasonable negotiation. Lawyers get rich.

Enough.

Enough.

Enough.

My fear with Verisign is that - much like Google folded over Google News v Copiepresse because News isn’t their core business - Moreover isn’t core enough to Verisign’s security-focussed business to be worth defending too hard. The result: AP will get a relatively easy victory, and an increased licence fee. And the IP lawyers of the world will get even more encouragement to use litigation in place of negotiation.

Enough.

Given Verisign’s lack of enthusiasm for Moreover, here’s what I’d love to see happen. I’d love to see an entrepreneurial - and synergistic (yuck) - white knight come along and offer to buy Moreover from Verisign right now, law suit and all, with a promise to fight AP’s nuisance suit tooth and nail.

Verisign would get some money for Moreover, and wouldn’t have to worry about a pesky legal action distracting them from their core business. The entrepreneur would get a really valuable service (I’m a huge fan of Moreover) at a knock-down price - and would immediately become a hero to those of us in the industry who believe in finding new solutions to new challenges, and now calling in the lawyers at the first sign of disruption. You can’t buy that kind of publicity.

I’d be prepared to bet my hat that the case would be settled anyway (at a cost far less than the discount received from Verisign) and that all parties would find a new licence agreement they’re happy with.

Win. Win. Win.

So will someone step up to the plate? Do we have entrepreneurs with money *and* balls in this country?

Anyone?