are polls bollocks?

according to a certain other blogger, polls are bollocks. 

but are they? are they bollocks or are they really an insightful way of judging the mood of the populace? without them, how could we make decisions based on our perception of the zeitgeist? if we here in the cabin do not take a representative splice of the population and ask them critical questions, how. will. we. know? 

so, wheeling out this poll into the virtual arena once more for your deliberation, i ask you to stare at it long enough to decide... are polls bollocks? or aren't they?

coming in april:

a poll about 

  

and we need examples, so please send in pictures/anecdotes about bad art.

enjoy voting!

food for thought

i got us a clock for the cabin. doesn't work mind. nice though isn't it?

I like adverts

This is some sort of reply to Adam's post about the Sky Movies advert and to the common pre-conceived idea of advertising as a negative issue. Still being mentally 17, I am predisposed to disagree and in this case I don't think S.Paulo's decision to ban billboard advertising is anything to praise.

I don't know the numbers but I would wonder where the city council is finding the money to replace the lost advertising revenue. Either schools, public transportation, etc are getting less money or taxes have to be raised. Interestingly the same argument applies to Sky Movies, I know very few people that have and watch Sky Movies, but most people I know watch FilmFour. The reason is simple, Sky Movies has no advertising and therefore you have pay, FilmFour has adverts and is free.

A lot of people voice their discontent with advertising but very few are actually willing to pay more for an ad free world. Similar to this is advertising in public transportation, and almost no one would be willing to pay 30p or so more to have adverts removed from the tube or bus.

In conclusion, compared to other sources of revenue, advertising seems to be a rather harmless one. Yeah, some people get brainwashed into buying crap, but the solution for that is having more informed consumers not necessarily ban advertising. By the way, this rant applies to consenting adults, Nike sponsored school gyms and Ronald McDonald are a different story and one that is wrong, as involves the pure and naive minds of our beloved children being preyed upon by evil corporations.

Finally, Wired's Chris Anderson has just written a book called Free and has a preview article which deals, among many things, with what I'm talking about in relation to advertising. He is also the author of The Long Tail about another very interesting idea.

Anyhow, I finish with an unrelated lovely new story by Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Art School Confidential) which is now online at the New York Times website. Coincidentally, if this was a year or so ago, the story would be a premium service exclusive to paying customers. Through the wonders of advertising is now free.

Enjoy.

palestine/maps

remember when i was talking about that borders thing? well, there's a really good interactive map thing on the guardian site you can check out. it's very well done. also, there's a sort of "brief history" of the whole thing. it's basically the whole contents of the exhibition that we made, but on a computer and better and that. have a look.

words words words words

i just got the first text. it's from julie, my friend in marseille. her word was, of course, night.  if you like her phraseology, you should check out her blog, the kitchen, updated with belligerent regularity and encompassing the ins and outs of daily life in the mind of a creative unemployed type.

after taking delivery of her word, julie duly obliged us with this gem, accompanied with a dusky triptych of views from her  marseille appartement (that's french).

 

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Julie McCalden

Night

I used to think nothing worth happening happened till the sun went down. Now that I’m marginally less ignorant and my days are a bit more roast dinner than salad, that’s just embarrassing. 

Though clearly the night does bring with it many appealing contrasts to that of the day. 

It’s dark for a start. I love the dark. Daylight’s great as well, you’ve got to love daylight (except when you’re seeing it before you’ve been to bed and you can’t remember your name, or where you live. That’s not good.). But I love how the darkness and orange glow from the streetlights morph the familiar into the unrecognisable. Combined with our heightened senses, there is an eerie quality, peculiar to the night. Left to my own devices my imagination runs wild; the moving shadows, the footsteps in the distance, the amplified sounds, the feeling of being alone and the worry of not being as alone as I think I am. And this strangeness makes me feel more alive. If nothing else, the darkness provides an apt change of scenery for the other, less obvious contrasts to unfold. 

Apart from bank holidays, the night is the only time when the shops are closed. In the wee small hours when even the kebab places and burger vans are packed up and only the 24 hour supermarkets and petrol stations are open, we are as free as we will ever be from the relentless opportunity to shop. Of course, most of us are sleeping then, but we can sleep better knowing that free from commerce we remain. Unless of course you have the Internet, because that’s 24/7. But no one’s holding a gun to your head. You could just read the news or find out everything you ever wanted to know about feral children. Or shop, if you want, it’s up to you. It could save you a trip to the unforgiving and vastly more enticing, impulse-buy arena of the frenzied shopping centre, thus also happily reducing your carbon footprint as you would probably have taken your car, unless of course, your online purchase, which was made in china, is going to be delivered all the way from New Zealand.

Night is the time that we associate with pleasure. The day is reserved for work but come nightfall and the time belongs to us once more. You are free to do as you please. You can do something, or nothing, whatever takes your fancy. Your nothing might be somebody else’s something. It doesn’t really matter if it’s something or nothing that you’ll be doing, or if you’ll be doing it with someone else who thinks of it as nothing while you prefer to think of it as something or vice versa. Each to their own. Personally, I’d prefer to do be doing something, but if you want to think of it as nothing that’s your call, I’m not gonna get in your way.

I’m always ready for winter until the night starts casting its shadows at 4 IN THE AFTERNOON. That’s a real low point for me and I long for gin and tonics, the smells of cut grass and sun tan lotion, barbeques and that magnificent phenomenon that is the late summer evening. I couldn’t say the same the other way round. But we couldn’t have one without the other. Except if daylight savings was sorted out to be different. The point is, all said and done the night is tremendous. But it would be nothing without the day.

THE PAST: RUBBISH

     

a woman working in the rubbish past. note her unhappiness.

we are all completely correct and wise to be living purely for the moment. any kind of nostalgia is just silly nonsense, and should be quite literally stamped out (i am lacing up my big, stamping boots right now). 

in order to check whether the myth about things being (rather vaguely) "better in the old days" was true, i selflessly threw myself into a program of grueling research and analysis in an attempt to come up with some solid statistics from which we could all form an objective judgement vis-a-vis the past vs. the present.  

the question i posed was thus: 

"look at us! living in this mind-boggling day and age. no time to stop and enjoy the simple pleasures of life! i mean sure we have wireless internet, 24 hour entertainment, streaming video, laughably cheap international air travel, more ways to relax and entertain ourselves than we can shake a stick at (stick shaking being just one of them), but do we have real quality of life? remember when summer afternoons went on forever? when we had no worries, and spent all day lying on grass discussing what the clouds looked like? when we were grateful just to have a bowl of porridge and not the plague?    no, me neither. but i'm always hearing toothless old tea-bag faces droning on and on about it, as if the old days were the best thing since sliced bread (in fact, they see sliced bread as part of the downfall of the age of innocence, and regard this obvious leap in the unstoppable march of progress as a bad thing, in blatant contradiction of the old saying!)  well, let's settle it once and for all i say. which are better? things now? or things in the old days? your considered opinions if you will. "

...and after a representative sample of the global population cast their vote, the results can speak for themselves. observe!

      

so yeah. things in the past? rubbish. thing now? bloody brilliant thank you very much! i know it's not too much of a shocker, but still, there's nothing like having some definitive statistics to jam a wad of wet toilet roll into the flailing gobs of all those doubting thomas past-lovers is there? now we can all rest easy and know that the public has spoken, and that they prefer things now. 

keep checking here in the cabin as we continue with our ground-breaking research and we will endeavor to bring you more of these world wide exclusives. 

p.s. if you have a suggestion for future weekly polls, well suggest away. there's a chance you may be listened to.

p.p.s. thanks for voting! a poll is nothing without votes. and that's not a figure of speech. it's literally nothing.