Rate this wooden and metallic wonder

Damien’s Desk

(The following review was actually penned by new recruit (kinda) Damien Hadley. The thoughts and opinions are by no means that of myself or anyone else I know for that matter, you have been warned)

This is my desk, there are many like it but this one is mine; without it, I am useless, without me, it is useless.  Of course the latter part of this statement is not true, my desk will still function after I have shouted “Screw You!” and left; and I will still function after it has collapsed into a pile unable to support even the lightest of paper.

I spend about 5 hours a day, Monday to Friday, at my desk, which is roughly 25 hours a week sat at my desk.  Only my bed beats my desk on a where-do-I-spend-my-time chart.  I have named her “Old Desky”.  The top of Old Desky is made of wood which presumably has some kind of coating, this leaves her inherently cold and me annoyed, two screws are missing so in a strong wind she would break, the lock on the drawers doesn’t work and she is exactly the right height to give me a dead leg when I neglect to look where I’m going.

Despite all the bad points I feel a certain warmth towards Desky, she doesn’t care if I have a hangover, she doesn’t mind if I don’t do any work, this ranks her higher than my boss. Phones, computers and staplers get the same attention from me but Old Desky has remained the longest.  Whilst I have lost two pens this morning I have a 100% record for keeping desks. Old Desky even helps me emphasis points by letting me slam my fist down whilst she lets out a clearly audible, satisfying thud.

Most importantly of all, Old Desky has wrinkles on her surface easily enabling me to bring comedy to my day by making my paperwork look like it’s been scribed by a blind monkey with slugs for fingers and a pen the size of Hulk Hogan.

Ability to provide a flat surface for all of my scared-of-gravity items: 7 out of 7

The way she lets anyone use her: 2 out of 7

Rated: 6 out of 7

Rate this year in books

Year In Review – Books

Slightly different article for you today, what you’ll find after the jump is a tantalizing list of the books I’ve read this year. Each one sporting a brief review and a final collection of my top three books of 2007. Excitement embodied is just round the corner!

Game Demo Round-up Extra Extravaganza

The picture has nothing to do with the article, I’m sure Tom will agree.

Good evening all and welcome to another round-up of stuff that we’ve somehow been involved in recently. This week’s round-up is a bit different as it’s entirely composed of reviews of various demos that have graced the Xbox Live service over the past few weeks and months. As far as I can remember there hasn’t been a time where so many good, no, great games have been released in such quick succession. The final quarter of 2007 has seen the release of some truly amazing titles, especially on the Xbox 360 (apologies, Sony fans, this site is not for you) and any game on the market at the moment faces some truly stiff competition from the likes of Halo 3, Half Life: The Orange Box, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4, my personal favourite Bioshock and many more to come.

So therein lies the problem for the following demos, cursed with being released at the same time as the afore-mentioned leviathans of the gaming industry. How will each one fare? I guess by logical deduction based on the existing content of this site that the answer will lie beyond the jump…

Rate this daily fix of stuff that’s going on right now

Electricity and Lust

Electricity and Lust is an online magazine of links to all things pop culture. Not just any old rubbish makes it’s way to their expertly kept pages however, oh no this is a site for the discerning wonderweb user. Mixing a joyful and bubbly slant on stuff that’s actually interesting rather than just any old rubbish, the rubbish that makes up the vast majority of other websites in a similar vein, Electricity and Lust always maintains a certain air of class with an intriguing mix of links relating to music, fashion, politics, TV, film and more which makes for a refreshing and mature look at pop culture. It was quite a while back when I thought about doing a review of their site and I would have marked them down slightly for not having enough original, well-written and thought-provoking articles, something which they’re more than capable of producing. But since the picture above was taken they’ve not only changed the site’s appearance but now sport a series of columns which make for perfect lunchtime reads at work. It’s a dangerous site which features a hell of a lot of content and considering their daily update schedule this is no mean feat, dangerous for people like me who can spend hours on the net reading article after article… Add this one to your favourites and you’ll never look back (or look at another culture news site again).

Plus all the post titles pun on the word “link”, it must be some Herculean task to come up with gold such as “Silence of the Links” as part of their season on Anthony Hopkins-related links every day. Worth the price of admission on this basis alone.

Rated: 7 out of 7

Rate this oh my god this is so amazing oh my god!

Wicked- Apollo Victoria Theatre (7th November 2007)

Despite being a huge fan of musicals, it has only been recently where I’ve finally embraced the joy of going to the theatre (while I did go to see Starlight Express as a kid, I choose to ignore that as people pretending to be trains is rather rubbish). But after seeing Wicked, I now realise what I’ve missed: Unadulterated joy! Wicked was simply one of the best experiences EVER! I’ve never been so happy to witness people wearing silly (though fantastically designed) costumes and singing about unrequited love, defying gravity and being exceedingly popular.

In fact the songs are all wonderful and my complete addiction to the show is evidence by the amount of time I have listened to the soundtrack on my ipod (it’s a lot, for the record). I’m not too sure any of the score is necessarily going to become a classic in years to come, but songs such as Popular, What Is This Feeling and No Good Deed are as entertaining as they come, while the storyline of how the Wicked Witch of the West became….wicked, is capitivating, charming and darn right funny.

There simply isn’t a bad thing to say about the show (well not from me anyway…critics on the other hand kinda hate it, and I could berate them for being clueless but I’m too happy thinking about the amazing show that is Wicked).

Ability to be better than anything else in the world: 7 out of 7

Ability to use ridiculous amounts of unnecessary hyperbole to write this review: 7 out of 7

Rated: 7 out of 7 (though I wish it could be higher)

Rate this welcome solution for standing

Chairs

 

The chair – where would we be without it. Well probably standing up an awful lot actually, wishing there was something to take the weight off our legs.

Chairs are a fantastic invention & always there to welcome you when you come home after a hard day at work. Never does a chair look more inviting and comfortable than after a day of pounding the streets, standing for what seems an eternity on the tube and also after a soul destroying day of the nations favourite sport – queuing. Chairs are like a constant home companion, ever ready for you to collapse into.

 

There are many different forms of chair, each with their own benefits. The sofa, or rather my own sofa, is my particular favourite. I’ve had my sofa for a while, and over time the cushions have moulded themselves perfectly to fit my posterior – perfect for optimum comfort. Office chairs are a surprising favourite chair type of mine as well. Office chairs are ergonomically designed to support our backs and correct our posture, but the added genius of office chairs is that they come with wheels. Hands up who has not participated in a game of ‘Extreme office chair racing’ I put it to you to name one other piece of office furniture that has the same fun factor level. Impossible isn’t it?

Chairs of course can be deceptive. Whilst we would like to think that chairs are designed for comfort, some chairs it seems, don’t even do that. Never have I sat on a comfortable dining table chair – designers of these are missing a trick. With dining chairs you cannot relax and sit back into them after stuffing yourself with food, instead you have to sit upright whilst your expanded stomach digs painfully into your trouser band.

Another disliked chair of mine are bar stools. I hate climbing onto bar stools as I cannot help but feel like I’m about to perform a duet with Anita Dobson on Top of the Pops Two. They are also a hazard for drunk people as getting on and off bar stools suddenly becomes a mammoth effort whilst you struggle to maintain some form of dignity.

Of course the true power of the chair is shown on tube journeys home. I think all of us experience some sort of joy at being able to grab a seat on the tube journey home. This is of course, after a long day spent at the office… sitting.

Rated: 5 out of 7

Rate this new recruit

I’d like to welcome aboard the lovely Debs Whitfield to the hallowed halls of Rate This Day as a new reviewer! I’m sure Debs will bring a much-needed air of class to the site, or even more class than it already has, or something, whatever.

Debs’ Halloween 2007 costume Rated: 7 out of 7

Rate this childhood nostalgia

Pogs

They were just discs of cardboard but by crikey they were bloody awesome. Purported to be replicas of milk bottle caps from Hawaii the aim of the game was infuriatingly simple. Stack ‘em and whack ‘em, kids! Using the kini Pog (pictured) you had to slam your large plastic piece on a stack of the cardboard tokens to try and flip as many as possible. The ones you did flip were keepsies, everything else went back into the pile. Even though Pogs were won and lost and the fact that they were essentially casino chips from a very simple game I still don’t recall any element of actual gambling when I was a nipper. It just seemed case of everyone putting in their Pogs until someone cried and tried to start a fight because you kept stealing their hard-earned bits of cardboard.

The Pogs themselves were great. I still remember when series one came out and I was just the right age to sink my teeth into this latest fad, devouring everything Pog-related until Tazos came out and all of a sudden Pogs just weren’t cool any more. Remember the booster packs? I think each one came with a checklist card and it wasn’t long before I had a full set of series one in an official orange plastic Pog container, plus about a hundred of the floating eye Pog which I remember seemed to float around more than anything else. When series two came out it went a bit weird, the colours were brighter and there was almost certainly a distinct Hawaii flavour to this new set, so maybe the legend of the milk bottle caps was actually true and they were just out to prove a point. Along with my completed series one and two, attained after months of trading with mates, “Got, got, got, got, got, got, got, need! Need! NEED!! Got, got got, got, got…” I also had all the kini counters. The several dozen holographic variations of the skull motif took up almost another plastic can and it wasn’t long until I was collecting all the Pogs, not just the official ones (I even had a few Space Precinct Pogs).

Everyone was on the bandwagon and this wagon was warm and comfortable, it had fully reclining chairs and TV sets set in the seat in front of you. It was an awesome time to be a kid and perhaps an awesome time to be a businessman. These kids were spending all their money, and quite often their parents’ money, on bits of printed cardboard. Cardboard. These companies were literally printing money and we lapped it up.

No other fad has come close to the divine simplicity of Pogs, forget Pokemon and those cheap colourful rubber shoes with the holes in, bits of printed cardboard were the way.

Usefulness in settling arguments between warring factions in the playground: 7 out of 7

Cynical and jaded view of how good an idea it was on purely business terms: 7 out of 7

Rated: 6 out of 7

Rate this unsettling fissure

Doris Salcedo – Shibboleth

Having never reviewed an art exhibition before this may be a learning experience for you and I. The exhibition in question is the latest in the line of Turbine Hall transformations at the Tate Modern on London’s South Bank arts complex. The hall itself is a gargantuan space of which a handful of prominent artists have had almost free reign over how they choose to fill it, Olafur Eliasson magnificently chose to create an artificial sunrise, Bruce Nauman had a disturbing soundscape of disparate vocal tracks and perhaps more famously the hall played host to a series of tube slides in a piece by Carsten Holler.

The new inhabitant of this daunting workspace is a fissure in the floor, the crack runs from the top of the sloping entrance right up to the glass wall on the far side. It’s a remarkable sight and very well executed as you can’t help but feel slightly unsettled walking further down this snaking line in the floor which only opens wider still. The name of this piece means a word or phrase, which upon being pronounced, indicates (or at least gives a clue to) the origin of the speaker. The guide at the Tate helpfully points out this may be interpreted as an unearthing of history, a dark history at that. For me this makes a great deal of sense, I can understand having a visible structural weakness in a space such as the Turbine Hall reminds us what we build on, how the modern world is constructed on, and indeed using, what was there before. Salcedo has succeeded in making something incredibly thought-provoking. When I was there everyone was taking pictures of this crack in the floor, practically every six feet along the way another picture was snapped (I can’t really say I disapprove, I was entirely guilty of this myself). The fact that everyone was so eager in capturing the piece was intriguing, it seems like an odd thing to want to get so close to. Do we really love seeing this kind of potential impending destruction or is it simply because you don’t see stuff like this every day? I have neither the energy or academic background to call that one, all I can say is that there did seem to be a lot of people taking photos at this exhibition, I’m not too sure what to make of that.

Rated: 4 out of 7

Rate this guttural electronica

Murcof – Cosmos

Fernando Corona continues his run through the Murcof moniker with the letter ‘C’, more precisely with his new release Cosmos on The Leaf Label. It’s a marked departure from previous work in as much a new Murcof album can be a marked departure. His records previous have been very cold orchestral glitch imaginings gleaned from a huge palette of clicks, pops, white noise, sine waves and real world instruments, though while each one has been a spellbinding listen, the range of development from one album to the next isn’t really that noticeable and certainly the two-year interval between releases becomes hard to justify. That said, Cosmos is ever-so-slightly different from the rest.

About half the tracks favour the tried and tested minimal glitch-house approach but the remaining pieces are a curious mix of ambient, beat-less dronescapes. All these tracks are big, using sweeping, deep pads and massive sub-bass attacks. Corona clearly has invested a considerable amount of time painting these tapestries with care and his patented OCD approach to the finer details is very much apparent. Cosmos sparkles from within and there are so many small treasures buried in the huge canvas of sounds. It’s a majestic album which, rather surprisingly, is quite commanding considering the subtle leanings of the electronica that underpins it’s very foundations. Maybe that’s why it’s so different to the previous albums; take away the rhythms and Murcof has made a record that finally demands to be noticed. It’s more an idea album than a concept album which from the start feels like a precursor to something great and breathtakingly beautiful, which thankfully is the final track.

‘Oort’ is the absolute pinnacle of Murcof’s talents at this moment and twelve minutes of divine perfection. It comes at such a crucial moment in the record and just when the album starts to slow down this cataclysmic masterpiece shows you exactly what Corona is truly capable of. Given that are only the tiniest of hints of the mastery that lurks around the corner makes it all the more enjoyable, Murcof demonstrates with these commanding ambient soundscapes early on in Cosmos why you should be listening in the first place. Now that he has your attention it’s time to show you exactly how good he really is, in case you’d forgotten over the course of three other albums.

Rated: 6 out of 7