The success of Snakes on a Plane suggests a popular craving for simple ideas well executed. A recent press trip that involved a coach journey from Munich to Salzburg suggested another. How do people pass the time without laptops, games and iPods? By telling each other jokes. Comedy has embraced the reality genre in a number of ways - faux-documentaries (The Office, People Like Us), first person narratives (Peep Show), CCTV scams (Trigger Happy TV), but control has always been in the hands of an auteur or auteurs. The great unwashed are the source material for the comedic genius, never the source of that genius themselves. Which is, of course, nonsense. There are hilarious people in every pub, school and workplace. And most humour is viral - the same jokes spreading by word of mouth in playgrounds, canteens and on coaches all over the place. Stick a camera crew on a National Express or Greyhound bus and ask people to tell each other jokes and there would be enough material for a six-part series within days. 'Did you hear the one about the TV executive and the no-brainer? ...'
LA resident Michael Clark has responded to the pending construction of a border fence between the US and Mexico by setting up a website - www.borderdirt.com - to conduct a worldwide vote on the issue and to sell commemorative border dirt from the proposed site of the wall for $9.95. "This is world history in the making. No more open border with our friendly neighbor to the south. No more 'Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.' It will be officially them and us...this wall is kind of an Anti-Statue of Liberty," says Clark. He adds that, "On the one hand, I hate to see so many immigrants come across the borders and exploit our schools, hospitals, health care and job market without paying taxes, but on the other hand, we have to do something. The current plan just isn't working, but I don't want to live in a country that spends a billion dollars of our tax money on a wall that, by the way, has no historical precedence for working! The Great Wall of China didn't keep out the Mongols, the Berlin Wall didn't keep out the Western powers and I'm skeptical that this wall will keep out immigrants." Clark and a group of volunteers will tally the votes in January and send the results to Presidents Bush and Calderon and every member of the US Congress.
A band from Cornwall has translated two Beatles songs - 'Something' and 'She loves you' - into the Cornish language. Wonder if sell more than 400 copies, the approximate number of fluent Cornish speakers?
Governments trying to deal with North Korea might as well throw away the standard diplomacy textbooks and take a look through Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium and reports about the Waco siege. Years of isolation have turned the country into a cult in the shape of a nation state. That, more than anything, makes Kim Jong-Il and cronies a very scary proposition. A rogue 'nucular' power with the ability to make the Jonestown massacre look like a picnic.
A couple of days ago, while glancing through 'Connect', the in-flight news magazine of SN Brussels airline, my eye was taken by an [anonymous] piece about the joys of walking round Stratford-upon-Avon while listening to Duke Ellington's Shakepeare-inspired LP of 1957, 'Such Sweet Thunder'. The bard and Sir Duke is certainly a sweet combination, although I'm not sure they fit quite as snugly as the author of 'Such Sweet Thunder's sleevenotes suggests when writing, "It is, of course, idle to speculate upon what might have happened if Ellington and Shakespeare had been contemporaries, but there is no doubt that Duke, who calls himself an 'amateur playwright' is a very professional showman. And there is no doubt that the bard had rhythm in his soul." Nevertheless, it was great, at 27,000 feet, to see an article positing the combination of an interesting walk with appropriately interesting music. When, in the early 1990s, artists such as the KLF ('Chill Out'), Ultramarine ('Every man and every woman is a star') and Jah Wobble and Brian Eno ('Spinner') were throwing such ideas out of left field, I wonder did they think it would take a decade and a half before the notion would be mainstream enough to intersect with the world of the business traveller?
I've heard nothing finer this year than Jamie T's new single, 'If you've got the money'. Reference points include The Clash, The Streets, Arctic Monkeys and Matisyahu, but T's brew has a heady flavour all of its own. Sup up!
