Jack Hargreaves & Southern Television

By "us", I mean my siblings. A younger brother Alexander, and my older sister Maria (Marie-Elaine). 

I think they have both personalised their monikers now, so don't let me define how they like to be called. 

We children ("us") were born before the internet, and as kids if you wish, were often bored at the available options on Sunday for example, but even the weekdays and evenings could be tedious from a child's perspective. Uneventful if housebound.

Sunday was largely commerce-free (shops including supermarkets were closed), which isn't the same as commercial-free. 

The local TV station (Southern TV, TVS (subsequently Meridian) often broadcast perplexing Television content like Jack Hargreaves' Out of Town program about the countryside. 

Internally, we knew it wasn't designed to be boring but it does take aging to appreciate how "slow", can be imbued with more value than fast.

Unexpectedly, a nine-year-old or even an eleven-year-old wouldn't ordinarily be interested in fly fishing, or agrarian seasonal activity. 

It pleases me that I can revisit the "Out of Town" content on the internet, and reassess my somewhat immature, youthful reaction.

I'm still working on the 11:11, 555, 333, etc post. 

Update: Barry at the Waterloo Arms tells me Jack was a complete wanker.

Ken O'Keefe Is A Con Artist

 

Ken O'Keefe has been a compelling speaker for Palestine but it's now clear he's a con artist who uses this cause and other people's suffering to line his own pocket. 

I never paid much attention to his World Citizen ideas but it's an idea he used to raise funds to pay for his Dominican land project where he and his new Filipino babe, Sophia will live in paradise, safe from the people who sent him money for his pyramid scheme as there's no extradition treaty with any country there. If I was her though I'd go for the record deal from the notoriety.

Good luck to him and I hope those who constantly seek leadership figures in their lives have learned a lesson about giving cash to anyone who appears on Television which in this case is Press TV and Russia Today. Many are on Facebook right now standing in solidarity with him when it's clear they haven't even done the basic task of reading his version of events (deranged) and Max Igan's version who himself has troubling questions to answer given the time it took to step-up.

I'm annoyed because the information I needed to know this has been circulating on the net since 2011 and I hadn't come across it, which is unusual for me as it's well known that I'm one of the handful of people to have read the internet in its entirety twice or maybe three times.

While researching, corroborating and fact checking the information and making sure this post is accurate I came across more troubling testimony about other well known figures, some of whom I know personally.

More on that later. 

Update: Ken is interviewed by the world's thickest "presenter" Richie Allen who is notorious for spending more time on saying what he's going to say, than actually saying it. Ken is clearly bullshitting and does a formidable job of maintaining the pretense that he wants to save the world with your donations. 

 

It's random

Go on then what ya waiting for?

Only corporate tie-wearing stiffs would duck a challenge like this.  

Engage a random. The Wiki notes that the segment profiles for "Smooth Smooth" have the ability to politely conclude the discourse at the "time of their choosing" without their interlocutor realizing the entire experience is being micro-managed.

OK I just made that up...... complete fibs. Embellishments can be OK.

I did however get blown out quite quickly in my first Random chat, displayed at the top of this post didn't I? What a loser.

Do you think that response of 'tired man' was a knee jerk termination to my gung-ho-YO? 

Stop sodding about and head over to Omeagle for the wild ride if you think you're hard enough.

P.S. Sam and I finally concluded the name of the movie we've been collaborating on for as long as we've probably known each other. Despite a flight to Bangkok to film some stuff and collaborate on a couple of  scenes, we yet again failed to settle on the films name which has sapped valuable energy on too many occasions.

Then suddenly out of nowhere it magically manifested itself over a long distance conference-call we held earlier and it just felt right because I think I said  the line flippantly, and then Sam gave it a home i.e he said that's the name of our movie, and it was settled in a matter of seconds. One small result for today at least then.

So it's been christened : 'It aint about the movie"

It feels right. It's fallen into place

White Swans

I've been borderline garrulous recently about a potential new model for the marketing communications business which is classic recombinant culture theory that I nicked off Faris. It would take some balls from an agency and even more from their respective clients to seriously implement but in principle it's about mixing and remixing some transmedia planning along with fair chunks of the book, The Black Swan which I talked about at length here.

To save a wee bit on time I want to cut and paste from that post:

"Our view of history is always explaining backwards as best we can. This is a linear approach that cauterizes the true story. Even more breathtaking is the idea that viewing history by working backwards is a fallacy, because history is actually always moving forward."

I ran this by Johnnie Moore the other night (you should check out his ace podcasts) at The Endurance pub in Soho while Piers was in town, and without even ruminating for a second, Johnnie cheerfully fired back that Kierkegaard wrote something similar as follows:

"Life is understood backwards, but is lived forwards"

This was the first seductive simplification that knocked me for six, and I scribbled it down quick on my hand because I knew it was, as are many of Johnnie's thoughts and occasional silences on lots of stuff, really important. It was lovely to see the ink on my skin the next day to remind me to give him a shout about it. I just did. Thanks Johnnie :)

So it's not like I've really discovered anything new, or I'm responsible for inventing anything seminal, but earlier today, as once again I ran the thoughts I've been bundling together on "transmedia-planning-meets-black-swan-mashup" by a generously attentive listener who works in the strategy game, she encapsulated the bit about The Black Swan that takes ages to explain. Describing narrative fallacy and how it leads to the illusion of predicatability that many draw from so called dependable data is not easy, and is actually probably just me trying to be too smart for my own good, but in essence Tania my listener, chipped in and captured the thrust of my long monologue with a lovely expression which she and her colleagues call 'the upside of risk'.

That made for two very seductive simplifications.

That'll do for the time being as I've still got lots of things about China that I'm practically bursting to blog about. So in the spirit of some timely recombinant culture media here is that White Swan I saw walking down the road in Marlow. The file wouldn't open from the Sony mobile phone when transfered to a Sony Vaio PC which Rob has nothing to do with, so instead, I've squirted a Nokia N95 mobile phone video on to it. I may come back and rotate it to portrait, if I find someone who can actually do important stuff like that, but in the meantime here's a White Swan doing a 'Black Swan'. Or put another way, a bird walking down a street that is right up mine.