The Full Clip #5

Struggling to focus on any one thing for any prolonged period of time this week. I keep flitting from task to task, which means I’ve just got a heap of half-finished bits and pieces in front of me. In an attempt to corral my skittish tendencies by forcing myself to actually finish One Damn Thing today, I’m putting on my crown as The King of Displacement Activity to bang out a blogpost, as I herald the entirely-unplanned return of The Full Clip, a collection of things I've tripped across on the internet when I really should be doing something else. Here we go...

At Buzzfeed (I know, shut up), Mark Slutsky talks about his blog Sad YouTube, which curates and preserves the stray shards of heartfelt and personal anecdotes buried in the slurry of comments under YouTube videos. We’re so used to the tedious accepted narrative that Reader Comments Are Sick And Wrong, and that’s demonstrably untrue. Sure, comment sections are the global water colour for loons of every stripe but, honestly, we’re all adults here. It’s easy enough to skate past the lunatic ramblings to actually dig deep for the good stuff. In Slutsky’s words: “It’s a repository of memories, stories, and dreams, an accidental oral history of American life over the last 50 years written by the site’s millions of visitors every day.” Read the rest in his article Sad YouTube: The Lost Treasures Of The Internet’s Greatest Cesspool.

Over at her blog, Sarah Werner eloquently skewers the likes of @HistoryInPics and similar twitter streams that churn out “vintage” photos, frequently with little or no context, attribution, citation or accuracy. “These accounts capitalize on a notion that history is nothing more than superficial glimpses of some vaguely defined time before ours, one that exists for us to look at and exclaim over and move on from without worrying about what it means and whether it happened.” It really is worth clicking through to read the rest of it: It’s History, Not A Viral Feed.

It only came to my attention the other day that jazz guitarist Ronny Jordan had recently died. I remember seeing him play a terrific set at Ronnie Scott’s back in the day, and fans of The West Wing undoubtedly cherish the scene where C.J. Cregg performed The Jackal. Of all his songs, that’s the one I return to the most often. Here’s an obituary at The Guardian and here, one more time, is The Jackal:

On a lighter note, check this out. In the 2015 of Back to the Future Part II, Marty McFly is briefly menaced by a lurching hologram that attacks him as part of an advertisement for Jaws 19, directed by Max Spielberg. In 2014, we still haven’t got any further than Jaws: The Revenge (the fourth film in the series and the one that killed the franchise stone dead). So we’re still fifteen Jaws sequels away from the world glimpsed in the Hill Valley of 2015. But, history can still change...A fan has issued a call-to-arms to cobble together another fifteen Jaws sequels before October 21st 2015. Read more about this glorious folly here, and good luck to him: The Jaws 19 Challenge.

One last thing: Peter Capaldi is The Doctor. David Tennant riffed on Peter Davison. Matt Smith travelled through time and space in the wake of Patrick Troughton. And Capaldi? I think we all know Who he likes the best…

Reverse the polarity! Here's hoping he can bust out some Venusian Aikido too.

They Call Him The Bandit

There’s no getting away from it. The New Year has begun, and I find that sometimes it helps to clarify my approach to the next twelve months with some sort of Statement of Intent. This year, I will be hewing closely to the words of the prophet Jerry Reed:

Yes, for 2014, I will be adopting the Bandit as my spirit animal. I've got a long way to go and a short time to get there. Just watch ol’ AKA run.

Keep your foot hard on the peddle...Son, never mind them brakes...