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From Reuters:
It was a Black Day for love in South Korea on Monday with lonely hearts trying to ease their pain by diving head first into bowls of noodles… Black Day, on April 14, is a South Korean original. It is marked by people who have not found love dressing in dark colours and commiserating over meals of black food, with the dish of choice being Chinese-style noodles topped with a thick sauce of black bean paste.
Which is different from every day of my life how, exactly?
Advisory: this absurdly overlong post will only be of interest to you if you’re fascinated by the London Underground network, or you’re a keen follower of the astounding mismanagement of public services. Or, I guess, if you’re an alien psy-leech who feeds off the misery of others.
So, Bank/Monument Station is on of the most important – if not the most important – interchange stations on the London Underground. Amongst other things, it’s one of only three places that the Central Line and the Circle Line connect; it’s also the Central Line interchange for a whole branch of the Northern Line; and it’s the major central London terminus for the Docklands Light Railway, which serves a huge number of passengers heading to and from the ever-growing residential and financial areas of East London. It is, to put it tersely, fucking important.
Which is why they’ve just decided to shut down all interchange at the station for over a year.
The reason they’re doing this is so that they can upgrade the escalators. Yes, on the London Underground, it takes 16 months to put new escalators in.
I don’t have a problem with them doing important maintenance work. I’m glad they’re doing it. I’d be more glad if they were doing something to actually improve the capacity of the station, which is a hodge-podge of make-do design, twisting awkwardly around bank vaults and other underground obstructions so that you sometimes feel you’re trapped in a giant M.C. Escher lithograph. They aren’t doing that, but hey – shiny new escalators.
But exactly why they chose to shut them all down at the same time is something of a mystery. They’d already had rolling elevator works going on, where they’d shut them down one at a time. It caused overcrowding, discomfort and hassle, but you could live with it.
For DLR passengers (like me), who rely on Bank/Monument to connect them to the Tube network every day, the timing is particularly brilliant – coinciding, as it does, with the complete closure for a year of Tower Gateway, the other DLR terminus in Zone 1, and with the multi-year closure of the East London Line, which connected to the DLR at Shadwell. With a click of their fingers, essentially every single way of getting onto the Tube network in the direction of central London has been shut off.
If that sounds like maybe the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing (the answer in both cases being “wanking”), then further evidence of the superb planning that’s gone into this comes from the fact that the effective closure of one of the most important stations on the network was announced a mere eleven days before it happened. The first announcement appeared on March 20; on March 31, lights out.
This was all build-up. Today, we got to see the actual effects at rush hour… and it’s a bloody disaster zone. At the height of the rush hour this evening, there was actual gridlock in the Bank ticket hall – nobody could move, because nobody else could move. Small children being crushed. That sort of thing. As I was macheteing my way through the crowds, they announced that they were shutting down the Central Line platforms, because of overcrowding. The staff had, through little fault of their own, completely lost control of the situation. One staff member just stood there, repeatedly shouting at a woman “Don’t cut across the motorway!”. It turned out that what he meant was that she shouldn’t cut across the line of moving people next to him (which she had to do to get where she, and hundreds of others, were being routed by the station’s incomprehensible new routes), but that rather, she should move three feet to her left, and cut across the line there.
I don’t blame him. If it’d been me having to deal with such an ill-conceived mess, I’d have been ranting about dragons and the end of days.
The most astounding thing is that they have kept one set of escalators operating; the ones they’d been renovating for the past six months that connect the DLR to the Central Line. But at the top of those stairs, you discover that – bafflingly – the corridor that connects to the central Line is shut off (pictured above). The crucial point here: there aren’t any fucking escalators there. It’s just a corridor, with some stairs up and down. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever I can conceive of why this passageway should be shut, forcing all the DLR passengers up into the tiny Lombard Street ticket hall, with massive overcrowding being the – duh – result. Furthermore, only the up escalator to Lombard Street is working, meaning that the only way to actually get down to the DLR from Bank is via a set of lifts or stairs which go to the Northern Line (are you following this?) This wasn’t exactly flagged up in any of the advance publicity, which explicitly stated that “Exit and entry are unaffected”.
The upshot of this is that a) I’m giving serious thought to moving, rather than having to put up with a nightmare commute for the next year-and-a-bit, which I don’t want to do because I love living where I am now, and b) I’ve written what I think is the first honest-to-goodness Disgruntled Letter to Authority of my life. You can read a copy of it here; I told them I’d blog about it, so I’m fulfilling that promise. (It was written before we actually saw what would be shut down, which is why I refer to the DLR-Central escalators being out, which it transpires they aren’t.)
And if anybody from London Underground or Transport for London happens to read this, here’s two practical suggestions on how to carry out the escalator works without making everybody’s lives quite such a misery. 1) Open the damn passageway at the top of escalators 8 and 9 so that there can be interchange between the DLR and the Central. 2) Consider making the station exit-only, allowing you to operate one of every set of escalators, going up. This would allow for a greater degree of interchange; it would still allow people to exit the station to get to work in the morning. Yes, it would impact on people trying to get in on the commute home, but this is a less time-pressured situation for most people.
As it is, they’ve managed all of the over-crowding, inconvenience and discomfort with none of the functionality. Everything about this smacks of a badly-planned rush job, with a woeful effort to inform the public and little thought given to the practical consequences. And we’re stuck with it until next August. Buggeration.
More on this, naturally, at Annie Mole’s excellent Tube Diary (which includes this interesting text of advice to staff; notably, it doesn’t mention most of the key issues that caused the scenes at Bank today, and its rationale that they had to impose a one-way routing system which prevented interchange to prevent overcrowding didn’t make any sense on a first reading, and looks simply laughable in the face of the disastrous overcrowding it caused today.)
The moment anyone tells me they’re going skiing, I start to dislike them. This is because I’ve constructed my own imaginary version of a skiing holiday in my head: it involves a fistful of self-satisfied bastards called Dan and Izzy and Sam and Lucy sharing a chalet together, drinking wine while listening to Mark Ronson on Izzy’s iPod speakers, taking 15,000 photos of each other guffawing and pulling silly faces, and occasionally venturing outside to slide down a hill on a pair of glorified planks, at which point with any luck they hurtle headlong into a tree, snapping at least three limbs in the process, and the holiday ends with them lying on their back, twitching like a half-crushed spider, exposed shards of shinbone gleaming in the winter sun as they scream for an air ambulance at the top of their idiot lungs.
Did I mention that Charlie Brooker is right about everything?
I’m in a position where a frankly horrifying number of my friends seem to think that skiing is somehow a socially acceptable pastime, rather than an activity morally equivalent to grave robbing or fucking your nephew’s pet hamster to death (which is what it is).
What’s even worse than their belief that a week-long bout of organised falling down a mountain somehow elevates them above lesser mortals is the six months of cretinous babble that leads up to every skiing holiday. People who I know are normally funny, charming, erudite individuals will turn, at the slightest provocation, into witless bores, drivelling on about entirely imaginary differences in snow quality, as though they were Olympic champions desperate to shave off that extra hundredth of a second from their personal best. Mass emails get sent round analysing every possible option in such military detail that you’d think they were setting off to explore an uncharted region of the Amazon, rather than popping over to France to be pampered for a week along with a few hundred other middle-class Brits in a resort devoted solely to ensuring that nothing unexpected or interesting could ever possibly happen to them. And never in this whole period does it occur to them that taking six months to prepare for an activity in which gravity does most of the work – both in pouring people down the hill, and pouring alcohol down their throats – is something that renders them largely unfit to be members of the human race, rather than something to be smug about.
I am, of course, fully aware that any subject can come across as tedious and annoying when you’re the only person in a group who isn’t interested in it and everyone else is talking about it. Furthermore, I’m aware that this argument has, in fact, been made at length about football, something which I’ll happily talk about for hours on end, and which takes up an even larger amount of the year than skiing preparation does. But as a riposte, I’d like to point out that I’m right and other people are wrong.
So yeah. Skiing is shit, and I wish it would stop turning people I like into half-wits. Global warming, with all its glorious melting, can’t happen soon enough.
Dear rotating woman,
Fuck you.
Don’t think I don’t mean it. Fuck you, rotating woman. Fuck every degree of your rotation, fuck your pretentious oh-so-casual arm-dangling pose, and fuck fuck fuck the greyscale background you rotated in on.
“You’re overreacting,” you say. “You’re just angry.” Well, hell yes, I’m angry. There’s poverty in this world, there’s injustice, there’s a war on in Iraq, and what do you do? You rotate. You turn. You circumvolve. You are, in microcosm, everything that is apathetic and self-centred and vile about our generation. You epitomise every “look-at-me” impulse and casual abdication of responsibility that ever degraded the world another notch. You are part of the problem, and the stench of death surrounds you like a miasma.
And what’s more, it’s clearly bollocks that you can look like you’re rotating either way.
You’re obviously going clockwise, you dreadful harridan, so don’t try to pretend otherwise. You wonder why I’m angry? I’m angry that everywhere I go, your revolving silhouette smirks back at me (I cannot see you face, but I know you are smirking). I’m angry that you haunt that precious, fragile space between sleeping and waking. And yes, I’m angry that I spent the best part of twenty minutes staring like a fuckwit at a blurry point several inches below your feet because Jason Kottke told me to. And still – still - you didn’t turn round and spin the other way.
Not only are you purest evil made manifest, but you’re plain stubborn with it.
I sometimes wonder to myself: what would it have been like if things had been different; if you had suddenly started going anti-clockwise? Might I have caught something different, something endearing in your manner – a different tilt of the head, a certain charming lopsidedness in your stance, a carefree flick of your ponytail? Maybe that single frame where the outline of your nipple is visible would have seemed enticing and coquettish, rather than cheap and slutty… Maybe. If you’d just been open to change. But you weren’t.
So, to return to my earlier point: fuck you, rotating woman. We could have had something beautiful together. But no, no, you just couldn’t stop spinning long enough to see it.
Let’s get one thing straight. Catherine Tate was, at least once upon a time, a very talented comic actress, with an impressive grasp of subtle character comedy and a flair for nuanced delivery. That was before she realised that she could become a lot more popular by turning into a shrieking, one-note catchphrase-spewing robot. Ever since then, she’s resembled nothing so much as a washing machine that’s got a bit of metal from someone’s pocket stuck in its workings, with the result that on every rotation it grinds out the same shudder-inducing, piercing metallic yowl at a frequency so horrifying that it leaves you with palsied fingers and a spine permanently bent into the shape of a normal distribution curve.
As such, it’s delightful news that we’re going to have to suffer her truly appalling, monotonous, charmless clot of a character, Donna, for an entire fucking series of Doctor Who. The dire Christmas special that she starred in wasn’t enough stunt casting, clearly. There’s no hope for respite, no faint glimmer of light on the character development front – it’s one of the two most striking flaws in Russell T Davies’s (otherwise wonderful) writing, that alongside his very poor world-building skills, he consistently seems to think that audiences will automatically find two-dimensional loudmouthed harridans utterly endearing. No, Russell. We don’t. Please stop.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuuuuuuck. I don’t want to look like I’m over-reacting to what is, after all, just a television show – but shouldn’t someone be asking questions in Parliament about this horrific shit? Like, whether we can re-introduce the death penalty for crimes of completely dicking up much-loved TV shows? Shouldn’t there be protests? Mass civil unrest? Riots on the streets? Effigies burning in central Cardiff? Rivers of fire and piss and blood? Wanton destruction? Phonecalls?
Or something. I don’t know.
FUUUUCK.
I think we might be entering the calm after the web storm that followed the unveiling of the unspeakably hideous London 2012 logo today. Aside from all the Lisa Simpson jokes, swastika rearrangements and stealth goatses, there’s really very little to add to Chris’s excellent, spot-on dissection of why it isn’t just a eye-buggeringly ugly design, but one that manifestly fails to achieve its stated goals.
But – as a Londoner who is actually quite excited, albeit from a rather sceptical and pessimistic perspective, about the Games – what was almost more distressing than the day-glo fellatiform abomination of the logo was the irredeemably vacuous guff spouted by Coe and co at the launch. So I’m going to slag that off instead.
The new emblem is dynamic, modern and flexible reflecting a brand savvy world where people, especially young people, no longer relate to static logos but respond to a dynamic brand that works with new technology and across traditional and new media networks.
It’s not just that this is buzzword-laden marketing arse talk. It’s not even that that it’s deeply unimaginative, badly written arse (using “dynamic” twice in one sentence? Hire. A. Copy. Editor.) It’s that it actively, almost aggressively, has no connection whatsoever to the actual emblem they’re talking about. Or, indeed, to reality.
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A good friend and I were discussing moaning earlier (this subject was brought up by the fact that one of us was, actually, moaning). The question of how abhorrent smug individuals were was brought up, and I pointed out that smugness was a relative concept: the complaints we had, whilst very genuine and meaningful in our own lives, would seem appallingly self-important to most people in the world today.
My friend responded with the suggestion that “I am having a bad day; and it doesn’t lift my mood to know that millions of people are having a worse day than me” would be an ideal slogan for a t-shirt. As such:
Anybody want to buy it?
See? See? See what I bloody mean? Just when you think that the news can’t get any dafter, and that the lizard-brain gibberings of distressingly important people can’t get any more asinine, Ruth Kelly tells us that we have to be on the lookout for secretive extremist religious groups infiltrating our society and influencing people’s thinking.
Ruth.
Kelly.
Depressing news I can take. Infuriating news I positively revel in. But this slow, crushing mudflow of deadening, humourless thickness spewing out into out lives like that freaky thing in Indonesia, it just makes you want to spend the rest of your days banging your head against a table and moaning “fuckshitty fuck nubbin cockslapping twat bollocks oooh er spunk in yer face missus” over and over again until you get quietly taken away to recuperate in Guernsey.
The problem is not so much the grindingly painful ironies of it all, and the rehtorical question that springs immediately to mind – namely, “didn’t she have someone advising her who could spot that this perhaps isn’t the wisest speech to give, the day after you’ve been accused of blocking legislation simply because the church you’re a notoriously fundamentalist member of told you it doesn’t think gays deserve hotel rooms?”
No, the problem comes from the very strong feeling that you could probably take Kelly, and her advisers, and sit them down and explain it to them calmly and at length… and they still wouldn’t understand.
You know what? Those Matt Zoller Seitz links are going to fall off the sidebar soon, and it occurs to me that I’ve been abusing the ever lovely Nielsen Haydens’ bandwidth for too long now. So, having finally got round to hosting the jpeg of THE GREATEST BAD FILM REVIEW EVER myself, I thought I’d share it with you. As far as I’m aware, it’s not available as text anywhere on the web, so this scan (originally via a MeFi thread) is the only version you’re likely to see – unless you have old, mid-nineties editions of the New York Press lying around your house.
All that kerfuffle done and dusted, all that remains is to ask you to sit back, pour a drink, kick some puppies, and enjoy the Greatest Bad Film Review Ever:
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This Is Just To Say
We have deleted
the files
that were on
your hard drive
and which
you were probably
saving
for posterity
Forgive us
we’re complete arseholes
In case anybody was wondering where I’d got to – this happened at the beginning of the week:
Bastard bastard bastard bastard. I have to say, it’s got me thinking a lot about death, bereavement and the inevitability of mortality. You know, I keep asking myself the question: what will happen to that intangible but essential being that I know of as me, once I die?
It’s also got me thinking about where the hell I put my Win XP backup CD.
And interestingly, the answer to both questions is “It’ll be somewhere in a box, completely forgotten about and buried under piles of crap.”
