Please Spare Us

I'm really really worried Boris Johnson will become Mayor of London. I dread to think what he will do to my beatiful city if he's elected. Please watch this and vote for anyone but him or the BNP, if you're eligible to do so.

Tribute vs Plagiarism

For starters, a little task for you. If you haven't already see the video produced by the band OK Go where they dance around on treadmills (where have you been?!?), please do so immediately:

Now, I think this gives us an ideal opportunity to consider the classification of types of copying. This, for example, is a lovingly created tribute to the above. This, is a gentle mickey-take of the above. This, however, is a blatent rip-off, and I hope the creators are ashamed of themselves. Or, at the very least, send a royalty cheque to the band. Hmph!

(Oh, and if you enjoyed the original, also check out this video by them - I was delighted that they actually did the routine when I went to see them live. And when you're done, marvel at/be terrified by the number of fans who have seen fit to create their own tributes.)

Gingerism strikes again

I can't stand Jonathan Ross, but having written before about the inexplicable appearance-based prejudice that some redheads seem to encounter, I feel I must share this clip from Friday's show, in which Catherine Tate demonstrated that the feeling runs very deep in some quarters (but who'd have thought it'd be a cat's home?)

Ginger's Guide to London Streets: Bits and Bobs

The first time I ever spotted one of these little critters was on Tottenham Court Road. Given the plethora of geeky electrical shops around there, I thought it was some kind of officially sanctioned reflection of the consumer bias of the area. It was only when reading Art of the State that I realised that it was actually part of some much larger project; these mosaic space invaders can be found all over the world. Thus far, I've only located two: the red one is on the corner of Bedford Avenue and Tottenham Court Road, the blue one is near the Oxford Street entrance of Tottenham Court Road Tube station - have a look here to see it in situ.

In other news, I was contacted a couple of months ago by a website called Schmap who wanted to use one of the photos from my Flickr photostream for the new edition of their London guide. I happily agreed, but I'm not quite sure what I think of their guides overall. Firstly, the pages have so much on them that they take ages to load on my less-than speedy machine. Secondly, they stuck my photo as part of a gallery above a review of Patisserie Valerie. Which is fine, as that does feature in the photo. But as the review fails to mention they have more than one branch, I thought it was a bit misleading that they listed the address as Brompton Road. I did contact them about this, and eventually they seem to have removed my contribution, although they didn't tell me that they were going to. Ah well, that's my fifteen minutes of fame over!