He's Red Jim

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A slightly stressful recording session with Strict Machines. Partly because the band expected issues of microphone placement and mix levels to be instantly and magically solved without their needing to be aware of them. Partly because the band don't seem to grasp the notions of "test recording" or "telling the producer what they want to do". I say "the band", but I mean the guitarist. But then, he has difficulty with the notion of "other people" anyway.

I dealt with feeling stressed in my usual way - a plate of fried chips and reconstituted chicken nuggets with mayonnaise.

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I admit it, I've been watching Star Trek. Quite a lot of Star Trek. The political assumptions and aspirations of the show, which seemed so quaint in the 1990s, now seem progressive again. That's not to say they're entirely clear or consistent. We wouldn't expect them to be - it is a dumb TV show after all.

In Errand of Mercy, Kirk and Spock become terrorists against a Klingon occupying force. In The Alternative Factor and the famous The City on the Edge of Forever, they unwillingly sacrifice a blameless outsider to save the world.

Mirror, Mirror tells us why totalitarian states always eventually fail, while Space Seed and The Changeling are about defending the weak and "inferior" from the strong and "superior" who've forgotten the human values they're supposed to be protecting. I, Mudd is a warning against being enslaved by apparent luxury, and Day of the Dove is about the impulse to continue fighting when you've forgotten why you started.

When I was doing degrees in Cultural Theory in the late 90s, there were hundreds of articles you could read about "Gender Roles in Star Trek", "Star Trek and Postcolonialism", "The Federation in Star Trek as Humanist Military Utopia" and such like.

Cultural Theory is now completely out of fashion, and thankfully so, given the vacuity of the articles it produced. But I think it would be much more difficult to write those kind of articles now, because the "message" of the show - however garbled and dumbed down it was - is no longer so safely "dealt with" and "in the innocent past".

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Tomorrow. I'm having a tooth out, probably. Just thought I'd share that with you.

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Microsoft are launching an mp3 player. The "Zune" has wifi capability, enabling people in the same room to send music files to each other without the bother of plugging in a USB cable. They can listen for 3 days before the music "expires".

Typical Microsoft - barge in on an already overcrowded market, with a snazily named and completely unnecessary product. Market it with a meaningless gimmick, and defeat the whole point with time limits or activation codes.

I predict the shops will be full of cut-price Zunes in January, because sales were slow over christmas and they got a bad reputation. Then the Zune will disappear into that enormous pit full of failed Microsoft products - discontinued and airbrushed out of corporate history.