That's How It Happened

Yesterday I went to my 14th consecutive Notting Hill Carnival. I'll admit it doesn't have the same visceral thrill as it did in 1990. Then as wide eyed 13 year olds we were overawed by the combination of enormous packed raucous crowds, illicit Red Stripe, and the heady wafting scent of goat curry, BBQ jerk chicken and marijuana. Nothing much has changed, the music is still loud, the floats underwhelming, but amusingly anachronistic, and the food stalls still piled high with rather repulsive Carribean "delicacies". The police presence is however far more obvious now, with thousands of officers and helicopters swarming the parade route.
The central area, particularly around All Saints Road is still deliciously intimidatingly unregulated. Huge crowds surge back and forward, packed shoulder to shoulder trying to get between different stages and sound systems. We half wanted to catch De La Soul, and as ever our travel plans, and the "schedule" of events, proved to be wildly inaccurate, so we just wandered about soaking up the atmosphere.
Seemingly though most of my other friends stayed firmly away. When I told people I'd been, they were unanimously negative. One guy even said he "hates Carnival", and thinks "it's a big f*cking waste of time". Now while I agree that it's not the most unmissable date in the London calendar, it is a paragon of multicultural diversity and tolerance. London may be ethnically diverse, but usually it's not terribly ethnically integrated. If you can't enjoy a single weekend of reggae, saltfish, and sugarcane,(sorry to get all political but) I think you are "part of the problem". I'm not any kind of anti-racism activist, but at least I didn't hole up in my country house for the weekend, wishing the Carnival would just disappear, as so much of Notting Hill seem to. OK, rant over, back to the usual:

McGoogle: google remixed with the bottom of a McDonalds bag.

Unbelievable, but MMORPGs now have the approximate population and GDP of Namibia, and will soon overtake Jamaica.

Gallo and Ebert appear to have settled their "worst film in the history of Cannes"/"curse on your colon" feud. Ebert even seems favourable toward the final cut of Brown Bunny.

I've never managed to dig anything out of the web archive before, but this diary by Linklater of his time making Dazed and Confused, was sure worth saving.

"He covered his whole body in green scale tattoos and split his tongue down the center and I’m calling that a fashion faux pas? Often there’s no difference between DOs and DON’Ts." The truth revealed as Vice launch their new Dos and Don'ts book.

I bought my brother a discount monstro-Habitrail set (pictured at top), for his birthday, in an homage to Microserfs. Now bizarrely Habitrail has been licensed for a rodent simulation game. Moi, always the king 'o' zeitgeist.