Unsolicited Advice

I believe I've mentioned that one of my persistent problems with profiling is that I don't know what anyone else looks like to a normal person, because I've never been one. I am occasionally reminded of this, usually with all the subtlety of a brick to the head. Moggie recently turned up this piece , by Amy Raphael for The Observer  -- the Sunday Guardian , more or less -- as press for the third series of The Mighty Boosh , which was out late 2007-ish. She's not particularly wrong in her observations, or at least no more factually wrong than any other entertainment reporter -- how she could talk to Fielding for any length of time and think he was from south  London, I have no idea, do other people not hear the th->f bit everywhere?  -- but her interpretations of a lot of their interactions are completely alien to me. I assume hers are more normal than mine, primarily because Fielding mentions that people tend to take Barratt as more aloof and sometimes abrasive t...

Been entertaining myself with that perennial favorite, teaching myself new languages from random documentaries on YouTube. Bunches of episodes of Mystery Diagnosis  on this playlist have foreign language subtitles; the Dutch ones are old hat to me now, but the handful at the start are more interesting. Mind you, I don't have the foggiest clue what language this actually is. For all I know it's Lower Venusian. I'm just doing crypto here.

Anonymous writes: So I always kind of imagined makeup to be a purely about practice, and I just haven't been assed to learn. So starting from absolute point zero, what do you think should be included in sort of a beginners starting kit? (And how much should you expect to pay for it?) I keep thinking this one over, and I may be the wrong person to ask. I inherited all of my starter kit from my mother, who has terrible taste, and from a friend of mine in high school whose aunt was a former beauty queen and current Mary Kay sales rep. It was rather eclectic, to put it mildly. The second question is easier to answer than the first. You should expect to pay whatever your local Walgreens, CVS or Rite Aid charges for the stuff. Makeup is much like shampoo and conditioner, in that there are three main price brackets: Unusable crap, perfectly serviceable, and ridiculous mark-up. Drugstore brands like Maybelline, Revlon, Cover Girl, Almay, L'Oréal, Neutrogena, etc., all work fine. ...

It has recently come to my attention that a whole passel o' people think that Sunflaaash  here on Twitter may be where Noel Fielding migrated after internet trolls were trolly at him on his official account . Considering that forensic document analysis is what got this blog attention in the first place, I thought I'd take a crack. There are a lot of tools you can use in document analysis. There is the blindingly obvious, like checking for spelling -- don't laugh, the guy who forged the Hitler Diaries fucked this up and put the wrong initials on the cover because he couldn't tell an A from an F in Fraktur. It's also surprisingly difficult for people who can spell correctly to spell things appallingly badly. Many an amateur kidnapper has flunked Ransom Note 101 because of this. Phrasing is also a useful thing to pay attention to, particularly if your target is writing in a second or third language, and particularly particularly if that second or third language is En...

I am toying with my list of New Year's Resolutions. I'm not entirely sure that having them is such a good idea -- if I get too ambitious, that's effectively just a list of ways I am scheduled to have failed at life by December 31, 2013. I know myself too well to try anything like "get up before noon every day like a normal human" or "stop spooking people inadvertently", at least. Over the years, I have come to recognize that feeling that means that no matter how hard I push myself to do a certain thing, it is simply not going to happen. It's not even a declaration of rebellion. It's more a sort of prognostication. That feeling means that regardless of how much I try to push, wheedle, talk, trick or bribe myself to do whatever it is by whatever the arbitrary deadline is, I will just keep getting more and more anxious about it and generally overwhelmed, and then the deadline will pass, and the whatever will not have been done. And if I keep tryin...

I've gone and crammed Russell Brand's books -- plural, there are two now, which I thought was either a great sign or a really horrible one -- into my head, on the basis that I was bored and already at the library. I have a lot of Thoughts on the stuff in them, most of which are probably important solely to me, which I will type out one of these days, when I'm not standing in the Dollar Tree trying to figure out if buying clearance wrapping paper solely to keep decorating the rat cage is completely insane, or merely charmingly whimsical. One thing I inevitably get asked when I talk about other people's autobios is, "Do you think they're telling the truth?" And there are actually two different answers to that, on two different communicative levels. Specifically about Brand's book, yeah, I think he generally is. He's incredibly flippant and probably rather hyperbolic, but it's a consistent kind of flippancy and hyperbole. Doing enough research...

Let's check the weather forecast for the next day or two, shall we? Hm. Tornadoes in the Bayou, says The Weather Channel. Apparently we're all gonna die. Snow in the Deep South. Also all gonna die. Still digging out the Midwest. All gonna die. Round two of whatever that was that soaked NoCal expected. Gonna die, usw . Winter Storm Euclid (wait, we're naming all our precipitation now?) scheduled to sweep across the entire country, leaving chaos in its wake. We're all definitely gonna die. Except me, apparently. Boston is scheduled to be cloudy and just around freezing, at about 50% relative humidity, with light snowfall starting early Christmas Day and tapering to a stop right around sunset. The airport hasn't even noticed, and they're prone to issuing warnings whenever they feel the tarmac will be slightly damper than normal. I feel almost guilty. Also, have a random space-related Christmas story .

I, as you may have noticed, do a lot of ordinary things slightly caterwampus. In some cases this is obvious, and in some cases it isn't; sometimes my way makes so much sense to me that it never occurs to me that anyone might do it any other way and I am horribly startled when I find out otherwise. One of these things is knitting. My mother taught me to knit, some years ago -- it's one of the very few useful things she ever taught me intentionally, most of the others having been inadvertent life lessons by counterexample, such as the one about Why We Are Not Supposed To Float Checks Even If We Are Out Of Groceries Right Now. I took some scrap yarn and some of the straight needles she was trying to get rid of off to college with me after that Christmas and had a go at a scarf. A few inches up I decided that the standard method was inefficient and occasionally stupid, and was also killing my wrists, so I picked it apart, squinted at the interlocking for a while, to see if I coul...

Things I do when actual work doesn't take up  quite enough processing cycles to keep me from getting horribly bored: Watch documentaries in languages I don't technically speak. So far I'm running about 30% comprehension on a thing on eating disorders which is entirely in Dutch. It sounds a lot like Hochdeutsch with a very French accent, although by saying that I probably just managed to insult all three countries involved. I used BBC Radio Cymru for a while, but it turns out that most radio in Welsh is just as boring as most radio in English. The main point of Radio Verda is to be in Esperanto, and consequently their content is very scattershot and mostly inane. Taunt rats. Getting peanut butter on their tails keeps them deliciously occupied for quite a while. Read up on murder and horrible transit disasters. I don't really like all the death per se , but for some reason those occasions are the only times in our culture where it's acceptable to collect endless...

Is it just me, or is there something odd about Rita Ora? [ Important Note : Odd does not mean bad. Just odd. I haven't seen her do anything that makes me think she's anything but a perfectly decent human being. I also have no opinion whatsoever on her talent or music, not really having come into contact with any of it ever.] [ Important Note bis : Almost always, when I do this, what happens is my brain pops up a flag and does not bother to tell me why. Then I have to rewind and figure out what set it off. This is therefore another friendly reminder that I am not magic, and I am fully capable of fucking things up if I think about them too much. Don't take what I say as gospel -- actually look  at this stuff before deciding if you agree.] She doesn't seem to be stupid, although judging from the way she keeps putting her foot in her mouth and scrambling words she's probably more than a little nervous. (Why doesn't she reword things when it becomes appare...

So out of sheer curiosity, I went and looked up Topshop the other day. I gathered from the Boosh  stuff that they're a high street retailer, probably very Mod-y, but I was unaware until I went poking through their website that they were also somewhat mad. The have tights with panthers flocked onto the front. Mixed in with the suits sets with drainpipe trousers are things like matching motorcycle jacket and hot pants in flower-print PVC. Half of their socks  glitter, ffs. This explains a lot -- not leastly, where Fielding gets some of his more baffling sweaters. There is actually a Topshop US now, both online and in the form of a few freestanding boutiques and in-store sections in a number of Nordstrom's locations. I would characterize their prices as "not entirely out of the question" -- higher than Target/Kohls, lower than Lord & Taylor -- and they gained a lot of points with me when I discovered that their entire shipping policy is "That will be $10"...

There are many things that annoy me about all those "learn to ready body language" lists of cues you see in magazines and self-help books. One is that half of the things they tick off are completely fucking made up. The thing where liars supposedly look to one side while thinking, and truth-tellers to the other? Bollocks. People look away from the speaker for lots of reasons. They're thinking and they don't want to process visual input on top of that, they're trying to escape the conversation they're having, they think you're some sort of frightening madman continually scrutinizing their face for imaginary signs of deception, etc. It means nothing. And, in fact, some of the most accurate truth-tellers you can find will wobble their eyes all over the place -- it's not uncommon for eidetickers to exhibit eye movement corresponding to what their real eye movements would be if they were checking for details on an actual photo held up in front of them. O...

Dear speakers of British English: Judging from the comments on YouTube, and the occasional American/Canadian making a fool of themselves on your television shows, I have this feeling that nobody has told you that "to get off with [someone]" has a very different meaning in North America than it does in the Commonwealth. In AmE, the phrase "to get off" has explicitly sexual connotations, and indicates that whatever it was you were up to with the named person involved an orgasm. Hence the reflexive pronominal construction, "to get [oneself] off", i.e., wank. Saying that someone "gets off" on something is therefore a mildly rude phrase, which retains a metaphorical tint of taboo sexuality, something along the lines of "screw you". The AmE equivalent to the phrase you want is "to hook up with [someone]", which has much the same range of meaning, although with a progressively more explicit skew as the speaker and audience age out ...

Julie writes: If I wanted to make up a pale face like mine so that it looked good being photographed, and by "looked good" I meant "had features that didn't all blend together, but don't look like the headshots place at the mall," what would you suggest? I'm thinking photographed outside in natural light, without a flash. Oh god, the dreaded mall photography studio. Those people are like the school photographers, except more dangerous, because they also have a makeup kit. They like to spackle you half to death, on the erroneous assumption that more makeup = more glamorous! There are a few different ways to do camera makeup if you're very pale. If all you want is to show up properly on Skype without looking like you're really wearing makeup, your best bet is probably to apply eyeshadow, eyeliner, eyebrow pencil, and lip color in a scheme called 'nude'. This is a terrible name for it, frankly; like 'nude' bras and 'nude...

To all y'all who have asked me "how do I put on makeup?": I cannot answer you unless you give me some idea of what you want to look like . "I want to look pretty," is NOT a helpful answer. Information on what you look like now, what your budget is, and how much trouble you are willing to go to in order to apply the stuff is also helpful, but I can literally give you nothing unless you tell me what your end goal is. You are effectively looking for lessons in how to paint. Manet and Jackson Polluck were both painters; getting "Olympia" out of pigments and canvas is a hell of a lot different than getting "No. 5". Your best bet is to find a picture of someone whose makeup you like and link me to it. Then I can tell you how to do that particular thing. Otherwise I'm helpless.

There's a photo I've been staring at, off and on, for about the past week, trying to work out if I could put my thoughts about it into words, and whether it would do anyone any good if I tried. After much writing and deleting and writing and deleting and writing and deleting with extreme prejudice, I think my point is: If ever there were an example of how we do the human race a grave disservice by using the very concept of intimacy solely as a euphemism for sex , it is these two. I have no idea where this picture was taken. It's a candid shot; the flat lighting suggests an unbounced flash, and the depth of field is not quite sufficient to get everything in focus at the same time. No pro would have done that intentionally -- and if it happened accidentally, the image would have been trashed with anything else that didn't quite work at the proofs stage. I don't know what prompted the gesture. They could be acting, I suppose, but they're comedians. When t...

Whenever I start writing up a profile on someone, I always end up going through things like fan blogs and message boards to find links to their material. And sooner or later, I always run into someone who thinks it is fun to start a conversation with, "If you could ask [celebrity] one question, what would it be?" It might surprise you to learn that I very rarely have a question that I'm dying to ask anybody. The few that do accumulate are universally either too stupid for words or very very nosy, except for the ones that are both stupid and nosy. The problem is that all of the really good, useful answers belong to questions that I don't know enough to ask. In real life, when something happens to bring a specific question to mind, I handle it by just asking point-blank for what I want to know; sometimes people are flustered or embarrassed, or flat out lie to me, but even the fact that they feel the need to lie about something gives me a lot of information. With the c...

Sometimes I wonder if other people can even see the subtitles I keep getting on conversations. One of the recent eps of NMTB was hosted by Richard Ayoade, whom you might recognize from the Boosh stuffs and also The IT Crowd . He has a positively superhuman deadpan, resistant to almost anything thrown his way -- although if you watch the gag reels for The IT Crowd , on the rare occasion that he does crack, Ayoade can't quit laughing and usually wrecks a dozen takes in a row. This episode is uniquely hilarious for the complete lack  of jokes from the host. Even if you didn't know they'd worked together before, it's easy to tell that Fielding at least knows of  Ayoade; he starts hiding behind his coffee mug and trying not to die laughing before anything's even really happened. Given whatever brief context you've picked up here from my babbling, what might the following exchange lead you to guess about Ayoade? My observations below.