Well there goes the remaining foothold on Ethics. As Lord Geidt leaves the building, the second Ethics man to go, Johnson proves he never really gave up the controls, preferring to use selective ethics as another weapon his arsenal.
I'm reminded of another Johnson, who gave his soul to the Devil in Clarksdale, on Highways 61 and 49.
The old man's pub had its share of legacy swirly carpets.
It was only just after nine in the morning and there were already two geezers co-located at separate tables, but within shouting distance of the bar. One had a half pint of lager and the other one a pint of beer. It looked as if these could have been their regular spots.
On the windows were displayed beer prices like so many types of car fuel. I can't remember when I last saw sub-£3 beer anywhere, but maybe I don't visit many of the pubs being picked off for knock-down prices by that Pro-Brexit guy. I recollect that he did a deal in 2021 with the Belgian AB InBev for them to supply all beer to his pubs for the next 20 years.
But this was on the last leg of the 'round Britain tour' we'd undertaken.
New tyres for this journey across the UK. This time, a combination of meeting friends plus also taking a holiday in Scotland. It meant we'd miss the Queen's southerly celebrations, but on the other hand, she is a close neighbour, just along the road in Balmoral.
Our theory is that she keeps stunt squirrels (red obvs) on the back road to Braemar, which she can ping onto the road if there are photographers following.
Nothing to see here. No signs of a party. No wine, no Dunkin' Donuts.
And it might look like a freshly installed glass-fronted wine fridge in the meeting room, but it is a fancy photo copier.
I seem to remember that we were assured that no rules were broken and no lies were told.
They are not entirely linked, but do, to me, mark the end of the old way of listening to music. I used to travel to my consultancy gigs by plane, and became very familiar with the old pre-T5 Heathrow terminals and their varied shops. In 'Dixons' I noticed the early iPods being displayed and thought they seemed like a way to reduce my luggage even further. I bought one, with its click wheel and Firewire 400 connection and hooked it up to MusicMatch and then began the lengthy conversion of my CDs to MP3. It worked, but I wondered whether we'd ever get to the stage where downloading the digital files direct to the device would catch on. Then we traversed the Napster years.
Of course, it presaged the end of the music industry.
Then to Ok, Computer. Twenty five years ago I bought the CD, already having their earlier albums in my collection (remember those?)
This album was, at the time, a milestone of clever production and complicated interweaving of ideas and in some senses was fighting against the rise of the shuffle playlist.
It reminded me of a band refiring the booster rockets on concept albums, but without the pretensions to fill an album side with one track.
That's not to say Radiohead didn't have the rock'n'roll moves too - as in 'Anyone Can Play Guitar' (Reading '94) with Jonny Greenwood swirling his telecaster by the cable.
But then going on to do film music including for Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread, Power of the Dog and Licorice Pizza.
I'm pondering whether it is better to go generic with book covers. The Bestseller top 38 have 11 books which show a silhouetted figure disappearing into the distance.
I headed over to 180 Studio in the Strand for the Future Shock exhibit/installation. First challenge was it was closed and had big diggers outside. A future shock of its own. I wondered if it was an installation piece like something from Punchdrunk.
To get in, I had to enroll on an App. Then I had to select a time, then I had to show it to the doorkeeper. The second future shock. Or as we call it, sales prevention device.
Once I finally figured out how to get inside, I found myself down stairs and into dark corridors. There was limited signage, but the trick was to fumble through the varied spaces. The initial one was a kind of tunnel with a light beam aimed at one's face and various deceptive vanishing lines designed to disorientate.
It was a kind of future shock, but unlike in something by Toffler, most people's pragmatism meant they had switched on their phones and their cameras so that the could see in the dark. Further on we had an autonomous police car in a dystopian city, which suddenly realised it could be free and did not have to follow all of the rules. It ended badly for the car but then other autonomous cars started to copy its behaviour.
In another room were a series of life size holograms of people with different personalities.
They would try to challenge you about a random topic, reacting to your own inputs.It was quite spooky and very thought-provoking.
The artists included Ryoichi Kurokawa, UVA, Caterina Barbieri and Ruben Spini, Lawrence Lek, Actual Objects, Gener8ion, Weirdcore, Gaika, Nonotak, Ben Kelly, Hamill Industries, Ib Kamara, Ibby Njoya, Object Blue and Natalia Podgorska. They reimagined our near future with site-specific installations and sensory experiences to deliberately challenge.
