Well, I did have a fabulous, hard-hitting critique for this editorial, about the election for London mayor, and also Ken Livingstone’s first week in office. But, hell, I find myself sitting enthralled in front of a long-haired singer from Croatia, blasting out a song about…well, I dunno…while something lurks under a cloak in the background, for reasons which are currentlu obscure. Yes, it’s once again time for perhaps the most eagerly-awaited trash event of the year, the Eurovision song contest.

It’s now a Swede, dressed as a Red Indian — er, make that “native American”, though anyone liable to be offended by such terms would have a heart attack at what I’m watching, which has the cultural sensistivity of General Custer. Oh, but it just gets better; the Macedonian entry consists of four girlies, one blonde, a brunette, a red-haired one, and a raven-haired one. The blonde looks strikingly like Buffy. Though having caught up with three eps of that today – including the “Willow goes drinking from the furry cup” episode – perhaps it’s just me.

Ah, for something which is so far separated from my normal musical tastes, it’s amusing how much entertainment value can be extracted from this. The Latvian entry actually sounds pretty good (almost like R.E.M. but rather better), but was ruined by a performance like a Thunderbird puppet on speed. Bloody hell, Ofra Hazi’s dead. Not that this has anything to do with the Eurovision Song Contest, but our conversation is drifting a bit, ‘cos the Turkish entry wasn’t really up to much. But it is at least better than the Irish, who have clearly had enough of winning, and are playing to lose this year.

Bloody hell. I missed Estonia, the Britney Spears look-alike. Never mind, they’re about to get to the voting, which is always the best bit – I used to fill in charts when I was young, and analyse the results. Which usually consisted of Greece pointedly not voting for Turkey, and vice versa. Two years ago, I watched the voting in a bar just off the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, shouting “It’s a bloke!” every time Dana International showed up. Ah, MEH-mo-REEES… At least I’m now getting a quick review of all the songs (including the ones I missed while I was down the pub), which saves a great deal of time, and allows me to decide that my vote this year goes to Buff…er, Macedonia. That’s them cursed for all eternity.

Though I do have to say that the mid-show entertainment was actually remarkably cool, diverse and yet unified. Unfortunately, things went rapidly downhill once voting started, and the dreadfully dull Danes started racking up the points. Things were enlivened only slightly by news of a disaster in the Netherlands which stopped them from having a phone poll. Still, I found myself getting utterly absorbed by the whole process: “if Russia gives twelve points to Denmark, that’s a real killer”. They did.

And that was it. Denmark’s dire dirge duly delivered victory, and the massed bunch of TC’ers filed away, disappointed for another year: to quote one, “This has just confirmed everything I ever thought about the Eurovision Song Contest. It’s a load of bollocks.” Ah, Macedonia were robbed…

I am always glad to receive intelligent and thoughtful criticism and comment from people who have visited the TC Site. However, I also get stuff like the following, which I reproduce exactly as received, though I feel I should really be cutting letters out of newspapers in order to put over the full effect:

Subject: tom jones

i? see you playing 
 shaking tat pooh 
dont touch me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!poof city
what courage what game your fans have
the IDEA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
you can,t play jus WW2 YOU LOSTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!....

Answers on a postcard please, to the usual address. Put “What the hell is he talking about Competition” in the corner. I think he may be trying to be insulting, but the level of coherence there left too much to be desired. Mind you, even communications from my (slightly) less certifiable friends are not immune to containing the odd subtle innuendo:

Hi, Jim

So there I was in Hamley’s on Friday, and there she was in all her glory: the Britney Spears doll, in the schoolgirl fetish outfit, and the slogan “born to make you happy” proudly plastered on the cardboard case.

And I thought, exactly who is this aimed at?

Does he mean me? Even if my reputation exceeds me, I fear he does — and he’s not the only one, since I know someone else seriously toyed with the idea of buying me said doll for my birthday. There’s clearly something in the air — not that I’d have minded, since I quite like the idea of subverting the doll, by dressing it in PVC and piercing its most intimate regions (not the first time cheerful pop icons have suffered at my hands, but that’s a whole other editorial). Nor do I have any aversion to Ms. Spears, since she knocks the (short, white) socks off most of the rest of the current wave of barely legal pop-tarts. There’s probably not a heterosexual male around who will not be brought to a standstill by that video – which also happens to be one of the catchiest toons of the past few years. Plus you also have to admire anyone who can piss off The Guardian newspaper. The same source sent a follow-up message shortly after, which he found therein:

“Britney Spears is successful simply because she’s an attractive piece of ass. It’s as simple as that. She’s got the youth, the schoolgirl knickers, she’s a living fantasy – but, let’s face it, she’s got the personality of a log.”

It looks as if some journo has been so busy snorting coke with his pals down the Groucho, that he (or she — for this reeks of the sort of dreck Julie Burchill used to write) has lost track of the basic concept. Since when has being a music star required any kind of personality at all? It’s an irrelevance at best, and can be a dangerous distraction — this is perhaps why Ringo Starr is alive today, and John Lennon isn’t. Unless you confuse “personality” with taking copious volumes of drugs, and lobbing TVs out of hotel windows, you might as well criticise Britney because she’s no good at playing cricket.

The problem with pop stars who try to show depth, is that it often backfires horribly. Too often, all they do is latch onto some shallow social concern — I’m thinking Sting & Chumbawumba here — and look like prats or hypocrites, by dressing up as Amazonian Indians, or signing to the same multinational they railed against before they had any hits. It may provide a cheap laugh, but give me the cheerful (if paedophilic) blandness of Britney any day. The best pop music glories in shallowness, because to be popular, it has to pander to the lowest common denominator. Condemning its creators and practitioners for doing so, is really missing the entire point.

April 19th, 1993 – More than 80 Branch Davidians including their leader David Koresh died when federal agents stormed their compound in Waco, Texas after a 51-day standoff.

April 19th, 1995 – A huge car bomb tore apart the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

April 20th, 1999 – Two heavily armed teenagers went on a rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, shooting 13 dead before taking their own lives.

If I was in America, I’d be rather nervous this week…

I have been following with somewhat bemused interest the fraught hand-wringing going on over the Hansie Cronje cricket-fixing allegations, partly because the game’s origins are firmly rooted in gambling. It was only really in the Victorian era, when the public schools took to it, that the game became “respectable” — before then, William Fennex (the man credited with devising the forward defensive stroke) wrote: “Matches were bought and matches were sold and gentlemen who meant honestly lost large sums of money.” In 1833, there were reports of a game for a prize of 1000 pounds — at a mere 4% interest, that would be almost a quarter of a million now, quite sufficient to get fixers interested.

It’s interesting to contrast the useless flapping of the cricket authorities with other sports. Baseball has been particularly sensitive since the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, which saw seven Chicago players banned for taking bribes. Since then, they’ve had pretty much a zero-tolerance policy, up to and including Pete Rose, the man who played in more major-league games than anyone else, who is still excluded from the Hall of Fame solely because of betting. I also suspect that the low wages paid to cricket players also render them liable to temptation. If you are earning $15m a year, like Los Angeles pitcher Kevin Brown, a) you have a great deal to lose, and b) it will take just as much to make you risk it.

Well, it amused me…

New York, NJ, Feb. 28 — People for the Ethical Treatment of Software (PETS) announced today that seven more software companies have been added to the group’s “watch list” of companies that regularly practice software testing. “There is no need for software to be mistreated in this way so that companies like these can market new products,” said Ken Granola, spokesperson for PETS. “Alternative methods of testing these products are available.”

According to PETS, these companies force software to undergo lengthly and arduous tests, often without rest for hours or days at a time. Employees are assigned to “break” the software by any means necessary, and inside sources report that they often joke about “torturing” the software. “It’s no joke,” said Granola. “Innocent programs, from the day they are compiled, are cooped up in tiny rooms and ‘crashed’ for hours on end. They spend their whole lives on dirty, ill-maintained computers, and are unceremoniously deleted when they’re not needed anymore.” Granola said the software is kept in unsanitary conditions and is infested with bugs.

“We know alternatives to this horror exist,” he said, citing industry giant Microsoft Corp. as a company that has become extremely successful without resorting to software testing.

Have a good Easter. There may or may not be an update next week, since I shall be deep in solemn contemplation of the death of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. For he did get nailed to a cross in order that we might stuff our faces with foodstuffs, get plastered without worrying about work the next morning, push off to foreign climes for a long weekend, and lounge around in bed all day. Nice one, JC: that’s what I call a sacrifice…

I sold some shares this week. Which is odd, because I’ve never bought any. Well, not in the “here’s some money, give me shares” kind of way. I just kinda drifted into being a filthy capitalist, thanks to three lots of building society freebies and a share-save scheme at work. I should point out the former wasn’t even due to carpet-bagging: one was an Alliance and Leicester account I’d had since school, the second was courtesy of the Norwich Union life insurance policy on my mortgage, and the third (in a nicely circular way) was because the share-save account was held in the Halifax. All three thus fell into the category of pleasant surprises — it’s lucky I didn’t bin them, exhibiting my usual tolerance for windowed envelopes from financial institutions.

The share-save scheme was equally jammy: back when I signed up, the odds of me staying where I was for another five years seemed close to those of me playing football for Scotland, being awarded a Nobel Prize, or fathering a child. But while those three things are still as unlikely as ever (despite some heroic performances in goal for Dynamo TaB), I somehow managed to survive here without pissing anyone off too badly. In fact, I’ve just passed my eleventh anniversary here, which in the IT industry makes me eligible for a statue in the foyer, a blue plaque, and a Dilbert calendar.

It kinda snuck up on me; I didn’t wake up one day, look at the share price and decide to spot-weld myself to the desk. Following the share price has, however, become a daily obsession, as I watch my virtual wealth rise and fall. Indeed, rather than making me work harder (as company share schemes are supposed to), it probably had a negative impact on my productivity, given the amount of time spent staring at the screen, trying to send the price up by the power of thought alone. Every penny gain was a cause for rejoicing, every drop…hell, it’s not real money yet, anyway.

I got the first lot of shares last July, but it was only a week or so ago that I realised I’d better sell some, or risk letting the damnable taxman get his grubby hands on some of my profits. [I’m getting the hang of this capitalist-speak, no?] Now, working for a bank as I do, dealing in shares is a Byzantine process involving the filling in of multiple forms, but I negotiated the maze and sold them on the Thursday afternoon.

Which was fine, until we announced over the weekend we were buying a French bank, and the share price plummeted. Hmmmm… I should have been pleased at having saved four hundred quid, but…bank employee dumps shares two days before announcement? Can we spell “insider dealing”? Of course, I hadn’t a clue it was going to happen, but it suddenly struck me that trying to prove your ignorance of something is a strikingly difficult concept. Visions of Rogue Trader 2 flashed across my brain – at least Ewan McGregor could keep his Scottish accent for this one. Should I go on the run, and head for Rio? Lock myself up in the house and prepare to sell my freedom dearly? Set up www.free-the-tulse-hill-one.com?

Of course, I took the fourth option: meekly going to work on Monday, and the cheque duly came through, unaccompanied by a visit from the Serious Fraud Squad. I put away the flight schedules, and went back to watching the share price, with the prospect of another four months of screen-staring before the final lot of not-really-bought stocks turn up. My career as a (potential) fugitive was over. Mind you, I haven’t tried to cash the cheque yet — so if there’s no editorial next week, maybe you should take a look at www.free-the-tulse-hill-one.com…

Today saw an announcement from Paramount, ending months of speculation, that the role of Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider movie has gone to Angelina Jolie, winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar a couple of weeks back. Between this and the presence of Con-Air director Simon West behind the camera, it’s clear that it’s a film which is intended to be a serious assault on the marketplace, and given that Lara has already grossed way more than most movies ($500m in sales and merchandise), the potential is also undeniably huge.

Yet note the word potential, for what makes a hit in one sphere, does not necessarily work in the other: to take a patently bleedin’ obvious example, no-one is going to go and see Tetris – The Movie. To start with, they work in fundamentally different ways: computer games rarely achieve any genuine emotion in the player. Sure, I’ve felt the odd bit of unease playing Doom, but who ever wept over the loss of an adventure character? Death is but an irritation, countered and neutralised by the save/restore function. Any emotional punch will without doubt be diluted, because games are controllable, to a varying extent, by the user, and of necessity this means there must be distractions and side-tracks. Sales of any software would be very limited if it offered no interaction, and exactly the same experience every time. [This is unique among media: with the printed word, you naturally expect the ending to be the same it was last time!]

These may seem like simple and obvious statements, yet over the past decade or so, there have been several attempts by Hollywood to transfer successful arcade hits to the big screen. The common factor is that they have all been more or less dreadful. Anyone fancy Street Fighter? Or perhaps Super Mario Brothers? Thought not. Part of the problem is the inevitable lead time involved in movie production: this year’s hot game is next year’s bargain title. Pokemon is a rare case where they’ve managed to get it right, thanks to the Japanese animation being readily available when the craze hit the West, and the net result was a box-office opening that, among animation studios, only Disney could emulate. All too often, things like plot and characters get forgotten in the rush to market — and the truth is that a bad movie remains precisely that, no matter how hip the tie-in.

In reality, turning a game into a movie is no different to adapting from anywhere else, such as a book or comic-strip. You need to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of both source and destination media, and work within them. The process is especially fraught because the target audience for your movie is likely to be the same as for the software, and if you alienate them…well, two words: Tank Girl.

Perhaps what is needed is more cross-pollination. Just as computer animation only really blossomed when it was taken out of the hands of nerds and given over to animators like John Lassiter, so maybe those whose write screenplays could work on computer game scenarios, and vice versa. The increasing complexity of the latter (and, some might say, the general dumbing-down of the former) would seem to indicate an emerging potential for co-operation.

As for Jolie, viewers wanting to catch a glimpse of ‘Lara’ in action, should go raid themselves a copy of Cyborg 2. Though let’s add, it’s the kind of film Angelina would probably rather we all forgot she’d appeared in, and to which absolutely no Oscars were awarded. Let’s hope that’s not some kind of an omen…