This time last week I rattled off the world’s laziest column. I was struggling against my book deadline which expired 24 hours later and I simply didn’t have time to write anything else. This week should have been different; I should have finished the book days ago and now be sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping a Diet Coke martini and lazily writing a long, well-thought-out column about some vital issue of the day. Why it’s inadvisable to write a mea culpa in the passive voice (otherwise it’s just a ‘culpa’). Something like that.

And yet, and yet – the fact that, seven days later, I’m still sitting at my desk and I still haven’t delivered the manuscript to my publisher, should give a hint to how perilous things are right now. I’m Wile E. Coyote about five seconds after he looks down and realises he’s overshot the cliff. And yet despite my urge to sack off this week’s column and focus on lessening the size of crater I’m about to leave in the desert floor, there’s something on which I can’t remain silent on any longer. Four words which I’ve been seeing again and again all week, and which threaten to drive me mad…

“A victory for authors.”

That’s how some people are describing Amazon’s capitulation to Macmillan over the pricing of ebooks. They say it in the same tone as people describe more expensive milk as “a victory for farmers” or subsidies for domestic cars as “a victory for American auto workers”, which is to say the same tone as you might use to pity a cat with three legs.

Poor authors, after all, need all the help they can get. They work for years on their Great Novel, probably subsisting on stale cheese and rats’ milk as they do so, and what thanks do they get? A measly royalty, chipped away at by heavy discounting in book stores. Thank God then for Macmillan taking a stand against Amazon and its aggressive discounting. And thank Jesus for all of the other publishers bravely following them.

Oh please.

Read more on TechCrunch…

Columnist’s Note: In a little under 24 hours, I have to submit the final manuscript of my next book. My original deadline – January 1st – sailed past weeks ago, as did the one-week extension I awarded myself on the basis that no-one does any work in the first week of the year. This last deadline, though, is immovable: lawyers and editors and typesetters and proof-readers are standing by; the thing has to be printed at some point. I haven’t slept for days, my blood is an 80:20 Caffeine:Provigil blend and I can’t feel my fingers. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t have time to write this week’s column.

And yet, I still have a contract with TechCrunch – one that’s no less binding or legally enforceable than the one I have with my publisher. By hook or by crook, 1000 words have to appear in this space. I briefly considered outsourcing this week’s column to India – or maybe employing some Indians on H1Bs here; I gather that’s the future. But then I remembered that employing people costs money. Next I considered asking one of my journalist friends to take over for the week; but there’s always the danger that they’ll be better at the job than I am and I’ll find myself unemployed. Again. I needed a solution which a) fills space, b) is free and c) is unlikely to put me out of a job.

And that’s when it hit me – I should commission a Guest Post.

But I’m not going to give away my space on TechCrunch to just anyone: I need to make sure that they conform to the high standards demanded of a typical tech blog guest author. To that end, I’ve put together this useful list of hints for writing the perfect Guest Post…

Read more on TechCrunch…

I’m 1000 words behind my target already. No time to waste writing this post.

I’ve decided that it was XFM distracting me. Too many lyrics. Instead I’ve switched to this Spotify playlist. Five days of classical music. That should do it.

Looks like it’s going to be my third all nighter in as many nights. I’m three weeks past my original book deadline and six days away from my revised, last chance saloon, can’t possibly be missed or I’ll destroy the entire publishing machine, deadline.

Tonight I have to write 6000 words. An entire chapter re-write. I’m just not happy with the current version – mostly not because of the actual writing, but rather because it doesn’t quite fit with the narrative of the book.

It’s 12:43am, San Francisco time; I’ve just made a pot of coffee; I have three notepads open beside me and XFM is playing in my ears.

As a transplanted Brit in America, I’m having something of a hard time getting my head around this whole Late Night debacle.

Unlike most American television, late night talk shows – the Conans, the Lettermans, the Carsons (he’s the one who’s dead, right?) – never really made it out to the rest of the world.

The first, and biggest, reason for this is that the shows tend to be vehicles for movie stars to promote their latest project: movies that probably have different release dates outside the US. Watching Ben Stiller talk about a movie that we won’t be able to see for six months isn’t so much entertaining as annoying.

The second reason is that, to my eye and ear at least, most of the shows are astonishingly unfunny. I mean, really. The men are paid millions – tens of millions – of dollars and given armies of writers to be hilarious and yet they still have to hire a sidekick to laugh at their punchlines. Hell, one of them – is it Leno? – even has a drum rimshot to telegraph when we’re supposed to laugh. It’s about as pathetic as me hiring some guy to add a ‘LOL’ comment to all of my posts on TechCrunch. Which come to think of it isn’t a bad idea.

I’m sure I’m missing the joke somewhere, but I suspect the real reason these shows are so popular to you Americans is that they’re institutions. And what was it Groucho Marx asked? “Who wants to live in an institution?”

Amiright folks? Badoom-tish!

But still, I live in America now, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the most important cultural rift in the country’s history since the great Cheersquake of ‘83. In particular I’d be doing the world a disservice if I didn’t respond to the growing number of apparently sane commentators who are urging Conan to take his act online.

Read more on TechCrunch…

What do we know about Gaspar Llamazares? For a start, we know he’s a Spanish politician, a former Communist party member and leader of the leftist coalition Izquierda Unida. We know he has a Masters in Public Health from the University of Havana. We know he once attacked the Pope for his stance on contraception in the developing world.

And now, thanks to the FBI, we also know that he bears more than a passing resemblance to a 53-year-old Osama Bin Laden.

This most recent fact about Llamazares came to light this week when the bureau published a computer generated photograph of what Osama Bin Laden – 9/11 mastermind; cave-dweller; last remaining user of audio cassettes -  might look like today. The photograph, we were told, was produced using the FBI’s special digital aging software, the technical brilliance of which we could only dream about.

One is led to imagine gigantic whirring super-computers, surrounded by federal agents in white coats, feeding in old Bin Laden family snapshots, screen-grabs from his video messages; perhaps even trimmings from his beard. Then, when the miracle machines have done their work – after weeks of computation, burning through enough energy to light the whole of Holland – a printer whirs into life, rendering a single wanted poster-sized image. The current face of evil.

No wonder the bureau was proud of the photograph, posting it on their website and distributing it to the world’s media, from Minnesota to Madrid. And no wonder Gaspar Llamazares was shocked – no, terrified – when one of his friends pointed out that the resulting photo was his spitting image. What were the odds? A million to one? A billion?

Well, not quite.

In fact, as the FBI were later forced to admit, one of the things their super-computers aren’t very good at drawing is beards. Or hair. Or noses. Or faces, really. So the poor agent tasked with producing the image did what any of us would do when faced with an impending deadline and a multi-million dollar operating budget: he fired up his laptop, went to Google images, found a photo of someone who looked a bit Bin Laden-y, copied his features onto the photograph, added a few wrinkles and hit ‘print’. Unfortunately for all concerned, the face donor turned out to be a high profile Spanish politician – a politician who is now, quite rightly, worried that he’ll be lynched if he ever sets foot in the USA.

It goes without saying that the incident raises a couple of pretty serious questions. For a start, what precisely did the FBI agent type into Google image search to find someone with similar features to an older Bin Laden? ‘Sinister middle-aged guy’? ‘Swarthy foreigner’? Presumably not, as the former brings up a photo of Liam Neeson while the latter returns Borat. More worryingly if the FBI’s cutting-edge photo aging technology is nothing more than a kid with a laptop, an Internet connection and a copy of Microsoft Paint, then what else are they lying to us about?

Read on at TechCrunch…

Fittingly, I was sitting in a bar in downtown San Francisco waiting for a date to arrive when I received the email. Could I write a few hundred words on the cliche that American women prefer British men?

The request made a sort of sense: I’m a Brit who recently moved to Northern California; my last girlfriend was American; as was the girlfriend before that. And the, well, five before that.

Even before I left London, I had enjoyed astounding luck with displaced Californians and Texans and girls from Philadelphia. The fact that every one of those relationships ended in hissing and yelling and floods of tears doesn’t alter the fact that for maybe a week – right at the start – these American girls were attracted to me: an occasionally-recovering alcoholic writer with a head shaped like a potato and a pathological inability to remember birthdays. My being British is the only possible explanation.

And yet, asking me to explain the attraction is a bit like wanting to know why mice love cheese, and asking the cheese to investigate. To really get to the bottom of the mystery, I’d really need to ask the women themselves. So that’s what I did. Still at the bar, I forwarded the request to all of the American girls I’ve been romantically involved with; or at least the ones who are still talking to me; and asked what made me, and my fellow countrymen, so irresistible.

The first replies came in almost immediately, and frankly I was glad I still had a drink in my hand when they did. Most acknowledged the power of the accent – “it’s Kryptonite to us” wrote Kelly from San Francisco – and of our endearing use of words like “bloody” and “darling”. Some mentioned our famed good manners, our habit of dressing well and our knowledge of literature. But all ended with the same caveat “…of course, that was before I actually got to know you.” Ouch. Indeed, the consensus seemed to be that, aside from the accent, the whole “British men are better” myth was precisely that – a myth, albeit an alluring one. Kate – a Californian in London who has dated as many Brits as I’ve dated Americans – summed it up best. “I’ve spent years looking for Mr Darcy, and  I haven’t found him yet. But I know he exists.”

Oh no he bloody doesn’t, darling.

The truth is that British men should indeed be celebrated, but not for our worldliness or charm or intelligence. Rather we should be applauded for pulling off the most brilliant PR coup the world has ever seen. We have taken a seriously flawed product – we’re pudgy, socially awkward, bumbling, dorky and we drink far too much – and we’ve convinced American chicks that these are actually selling points.

The roots of the great British lie can be traced back to Jane Austen. As Kelly put it: “American women learn about British men from Pride and Prejudice, so instead of thinking that Darcy is an uncommunicative dolt, we think he’s just being British.” Another of my exes, who threatened to kill me if I mentioned her name, supported the theory: “for the first month of our relationship when you showed up at my house drunk at 2am, I just assumed it was a ‘British thing’” Likewise when Hugh Grant was caught with a hooker on Sunset Boulevard and went on American TV to apologise. British women would have laughed him off the screen, but over here he just had to act bumble-y and bashful and – “my goodness, crikey, I’m so frightfully silly” – all was forgiven. He wasn’t out whoring and cheating on his girlfriend; he was just being British. It’s like the apocryphal story about PT Barnum selling a truck-load of white salmon by boasting that it was “guaranteed never to turn pink in the can”. British men have pulled the same trick with American women: “guaranteed never to turn mature in a relationship”.

Of course, you probably think I’m taking a huge gamble admitting to all of this. What if an American girl sees it and tells her friends? Hundreds of years of cunning ruined in 700 words. But therein lies the brilliance of the scam: if you’re a Brit-loving American girl and you’re reading this, I guarantee I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “oh, how wonderfully self-deprecating of him!. How typically British! And I bet with his accent it sounds even more charming.” And – you know what – you may be right. Or you might not. Really there’s only one way to find out.

Call me.

How exciting! Google has issued a statement saying it’s un-censoring its search results in China! And it’s threatening to pull out of the country completely, in retaliation for an alleged (and, we’re lead to infer, government-backed) attempt to hack the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents!

As a tech story, it has all the makings of a classic diplomacy thriller; a modern-day Cuban Missile Crisis with Google as Adlai Stevenson, waving photos of hacked emails at China’s Valerian Zorin. “Don’t wait for the translation! Just answer yes or no!” Meanwhile, Google slowly provocatively moves photos of Tiananmen tanks back onto it’s Chinese image search.

Unsurprisingly for such a bold move, Google’s statement – that it would no longer be bowing to Chinese censorship, having spent four years doing precisely that – has sparked debate amongst my esteemed friends and colleagues in the blogosphere.

On one side, Robert Scoble has congratulated Google, almost unconditionally. “Google has EVERY INCENTIVE to kiss Chinese ass,” he says, “that’s why this move today impressed me so much.” And to those who say that Google’s behavior to date has been overly sympathetic to the Chinese government? Um, he’s sorry…

“Um, I’m sorry, but when I visited China I heard from many people that of the American companies Google didn’t play the game as well as, say, Yahoo or Microsoft. Remember Yahoo? Remember what they turned over to the Chinese government? When I worked at Microsoft I saw them play footsie with the Chinese government too. Heck, the Chinese president visited Microsoft’s campus when I worked there and got a red-carpet welcome. Why? Because China is a HUGE market and a HUGE supplier of labor that builds Microsoft’s products. It doesn’t matter to me that Google played footsie up until today, either. They were the first to stop playing footsie and THAT deserves a HUGE round of applause.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the debate is TechCrunch’s own Sarah Lacy whose take is pretty well summed up by the title of her post “Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil“. She asks…

“Does anyone really think Google would be doing this if it had top market share in the country? For one thing, I’d guess that would open them up to shareholder lawsuits. Google is a for-profit, publicly-held company at the end of the day. When I met with Google’s former head of China Kai-fu Lee in Beijing last October, he noted that one reason he left Google was that it was clear the company was never going to substantially increase its market share or beat Baidu. Google has clearly decided doing business in China isn’t worth it, and are turning what would be a negative into a marketing positive for its business in the rest of the world.”

So who is right? The Economist seems to be siding with Sarah, quoting her in a piece bearing the punderfully British title ‘Google errs‘. Meantime Robert has support from search expert Danny Sullivan and a Google Spokesperson who writes “This is not about market share. While our revenues from China are really immaterial, we did just have our best ever quarter [in China].”

The truth is I don’t know who precisely why Google made its decision. I wasn’t in the room when it was discussed. But here’s one thing I do know: anyone who is applauding Google for taking a stand against censorship needs – ironically – to sit the hell down and shut the hell up.

For four years, Google complied with the Chinese government’s demands that they censor search results. It did this in the hope of becoming the number one search engine in China, a goal it failed to achieve. You can argue – reasonably – that there’s nothing wrong with Google operating under the laws of a country, much as eBay is banned from listing Nazi memorabilia in Germany. Self-censorship is the cost of doing business in China, and it’s a price that Google decided was worth paying. Or you can take completely the opposite view: calling Google evil for ever setting foot in Beijing.

But whatever your view, you have to accept that Google spent four years, and earned vast sums of money, operating under China’s censorship laws. And now only when they suffer an attack that threatens to damage their business worldwide – “What? The communists can hack my Gmail?” – have they suddenly found a conscience.

This may be a case of scorched-earth diplomacy on the part of Google, it may just be pure retaliation against a government which tried to hack their servers or it may be a shrewd business move dressed up as “taking a stand”. But what it’s absolutely not is a “moral position”, nor one that they should be particularly applauded for, any more than a man who has spend four years beating his wife should be applauded when he decides to stop. If anyone should be applauded it’s the man who didn’t beat his wife in the first place: companies like Twitter and Facebook whose refusal to work with the Chinese government lead to them being blocked last July.

Taking a moral position four years too late – whether you’re the first or the last to do so – is like suddenly declaring that you oppose the Iraq war now you’re no longer standing for the Senate or renouncing your own steroid abuse once you’ve retired from professional sports. Which is to say, it’s taking no moral position at all.

(Originally published on TechCrunch)

So this is a little weird.

In May of last year, I wrote a short post about Mark McGowan – a London-based performance ‘artist’ who had decided to stage a tawdry ‘reenactment’ of ‘The Death of Jade Goody’. Here’s some of what I wrote…

“Mark McGowan – if because you haven’t heard of him – is a performance artist. But, unlike those who chose ‘performance’ because it’s the medium that best suits what they want to say, McGowan is a performance artist because he is too much of a simpleton to be trusted with paint. He’d probably try to eat it. Or fuck it.

This week McGowan – who unbelievably has a job teaching at the Camberwell College of Art – finally achieved his lifelong goal. One of his attention-seeking hack-stunts made it into the Daily Mail. The stunt? Dressing actors up as Jade Goody and her family – complete with cardboard boxes on their heads as masks – in order to reenact the moment a 27-year-old mother of two lost her fight with cancer.

Awesome, truly awesome.

No, not awesome. That other word…

Awful.

Fuck Mark McGowan, fuck him and his pseudo-provocative-but-actually-just-outrage-by-numbers schlockery to death.”

I also quoted a piece we published in The Friday Thing some years back, detailing some of McGowan’s earlier crap.

Since I wrote the post I’d all but forgotten about it, and McGowan until yesterday morning an email arrived in my inbox, purporting to be from his girlfriend. A cursory Google search confirmed that the sender – ‘Vicky Go(u)ld – was, at the very least, a long-time collaborator of McGowan’s.

I read the email, and fired off a quick response but – even though the sender had ticked the box on my contact form confirming that I could publish the correspondence – I decided to keep it private. This is a couple that feeds on public attention, and I was quite happy for them to go hungry.

But now I notice that Ms Gould has published my reply on her blog. Not her original mail, just my reply, with email addresses unredacted. In the interests of completeness, then, here is the whole dull exchange, without further comment…

2010/1/11 vicky gold

Hi Paul. Basically, Mark is my boyfriend. And I just find it really hard seeing people say these things then seeing how it upsets him again and again. I completely think it’s your right to say what you want and everything (believe me I wish people let me say what i want to say more but then there have been issues…) and I know you’d just say “goes with the territory” by going out with him and all. But I just think people should know when they’re upsetting people cause maybe they don’t know. So, there you go. Do whatever you want with it. Much love, Vicky Gold x x x

Public (can be published elsewhere)

***

Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:06:24 -0800
Subject: Re: From blog: mark mcgowan
From: paul@paulcarr.com
To: rapterringo@hotmail.com

Hi Vicky,

Thank you for your email but – I mean – you’re kidding, right? This is
the same Mark McGowan who reenacted the deaths of Jade Goody and
Jean-Charles de Menezes? Goody was a wife and mother who died of
cancer at 27 and de Menezes was an innocent man, shot dead by police
thousands of miles from his family. And at the moment of their
families’ most intense grief, your boyfriend decided to re-inact their
deaths in a piece of barely disguised personal publicity. Did he take
a second to think how they might feel before he sent out his press
releases?

If I understand you correctly, it’s easier for you to stomach
something that grotesque than it is to see someone you’re dating being
called a cunt on the Internet.

Mark McGowan may be a thoroughly nice person to go out with. I’m sure
he is, or you wouldn’t be emailing me. Unfortunately he also spends
his life using other people’s misery to boost his public profile, and
for that it’s only right and proper that he’s called out every so
often.

And by the way I’m more aware than most people about the problem with
online hate. Read what I said about it in the Guardian…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/28/not-safe-for-work-techcrunch-arrington

Best,

Paul

From: VICKY GOLD
To: paul@paulcarr.com
Date: 12 January 2010 04:12
Subject RE: From blog: mark mcgowan

I know it’s our problem really. He’s got a lot of issues and stuff etc. It’s the media’s fault though really. They just hear about him doing something and come charging down faster than the speed of light. If he got a chance to explain himself better it might be a different story but the media seem to like making him seem like an idiot for some reason. I’m not even allowed to make work at the moment because I got in trouble with the law through some art. Once a lot of people start talking about something it snowballs out of control. If we never showed anyone our work we’d be fine, but that’s sort of the point.

Vicky Gold

***

From: VICKY GOLD
Date: 2010/1/12Subject:
RE: From blog: mark mcgowan
To: paul@paulcarr.com

Oh and he did this recently btw: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bPwVrraCF8

I don’t know how I feel about it really. But he seems to think it’s very good.

Vicky

In case you missed it…