London Underground's Inspector Sands

Something I've come across several times in London, but never remembered to look up afterwards - the sort of experience I suspect the iPhone is ushering into history, along with the pub quiz and bothering to describe individual music videos - is the announcement for Inspector Sands.

It goes out over the Underground tannoy system, in a style seemingly calculated for maximum creepiness: a very loud, obviously pre-recorded loop of a well-spoken lady saying "Would Inspector Sands, please report to the operations room, immediately." It stands out a mile from the resigned, heavily-accented service updates you usually get, and runs on a permanent loop reminiscent of the "Base will destruct in X minutes" warnings at the end of 1970's Bond films.

It's very obviously a coded warning, but I've never seen anybody, staff or otherwise, pay the slightest attention to it. I'd secretly hoped this made it more secret and exciting, but now I discover that it's just a fire alarm warning and not a very important one at that. An alleged TFL worker in the comments says that it's just a first-stage warning - it's not until two separate fire alarms are triggered that it steps up to the more obviously significant "please evacuate this station immediately". As such, it's recommended that if you do ever find a fire, be sure to trip two alarms because nobody will take it too seriously otherwise.

UPDATE: The inestimable John Walker points out that this has been spoofed to good effect by Mitchell & Webb, and has posted the clips on his site.

Other tips: the "please evacuate" drill is used any time they want people to bugger off, so don't panic too much if you ever hear it, and "if you need to stop an oncoming train, hold both hands over your head while looking at the driver." The commenter helpfully advises not to stand in front of a train while doing so. All handy tips for urban living.

In other vaguely-related news, this is pretty awesome:

Four Things Overheard At A Left 4 Dead Wedding

Wedding cake, over here!
Ring-exchanging!
You may vomit on the bride
You have startled the mother-in-law!

Four Cocktails Named For Left 4 Dead

The Boomer Bile
The Lazy Smoker
The Flaming Hunter
The Rage Quit

UPDATE: Because I am in a position to indulge daft whims like this, OXM actually tapped up a cocktail waiter to create a series of gaming cocktails. Remember, kids, you can do this sort of thing too if you grow up to work in media.

Twitter

I'm a big fan of Twitter, these days. This isn't the reason, but it could have been.

The Monkey Dies

A snappy shorthand for commercial reality is recorded in the often-interesting, occasionally-wrong blog of Keith Boesky: why publishers don't want film licences, particularly King Kong.

"This is exactly the kind of things you said you are looking for. You have two and a half years until the release of the film, the budget is fixed and large and the promotion will be huge."

"Doesn't sound like us. We need big franchises."

"What's bigger than Kong with the director coming off Lord of the Rings?"

"Something with a fixed release 2 years out, guaranteed marketing budget in excess of USD 80 million and guaranteed sequels."

"Wow, that's a tall order. King Kong is kind of unusual though, is it worth an exception."

"No, can't commit. The monkey dies."

Small wonder that Flash minigames are more de rigueur for marketing purposes at present.

Interview Technique

This made me smile: The Onion's Nathan Rabin points out an old interview in which Amy Heckerling makes the mistake that interviewees should never, ever make:

AH: Did you see the movie?

O: Yes, I did.

AH: Did you like it?

O: [Pauses; makes "don't ask me that question" gesture.] Um... There were parts about it that I liked. There were things I liked about it. [Note: This is a lie. —ed.] And it was short. You know? Really short. Only, like, 83 minutes.

I usually do better in these circumstances, although otherwise I'm a terrible interviewer. I've always known this, and have been reminded this week by other people transcribing interviews I have done pausing occasionally to look at me with quizzical, sad expressions at the nonsense I am putting to the luminaries of the games industry.

Three Stories From 'The Onion' That Came True

• Hershey's Ordered To Pay Obese Americans $135 Billion
• Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
• Bush: Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over

The final one is the scariest. It's like a bullet-point list of everything Bush has done wrong, written years before it happened.

Low-Budget Remakes of Hollywood Movies Set In The Towns In Which I Grew Up

The Bournemouth Identity
Poole Harbour
The Passion of Christchurch
The Sword in Parkstone
The Sway

Science Is Fun

Dammit, Wikipedia

I can't even remember what I was looking for to start with and I've just wasted three hours.

Three Highly Unsuitable Songs That Came Up On iTunes Party Shuffle While We Were Working Stupid Amounts Of Overtime On The Last Magazine Deadline

We Have All The Time In The World
Suicide Is Painless
Theme from Bergerac

User-created content

A piece that made me laugh in Private Eye last week:

As storms battered Britain at the beginning of last week, presenters on Sky News begged viewers to "help us put together the fullest national picture possible" by sending in their photos of the damage... posters on the Football 365 forum, finding that such pisspoor efforts as a shot of a watering can ("the wind blew it around all night") were being featured...rose to the challenge.

And so:

By 11.30am on Tuesday, despite a solemn promise that “your photo will be checked by moderators before it can be displayed,” the 408 photographs in Sky’s “Wild Weather” gallery included a shot of a young Norman Wisdom dismayed by a car crushed by a tree; footballer Carlos Valderama in flooded New Orleans captioned “it’s windy here in Widnes”; a still from the environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow captioned “Whitley Bay”; a suspicious number of scenes of destruction featureing either teddy bears of the athlete and television presenter Kriss Akabusi; and several shots of fallen trees and flooded streets in which missing toddler Madeline McCann was clearly visible in the background.

In other news, I got a new job and moved to London. It's pretty hardcore but I'm on it.

Time bandits

I really like Paris, somewhat to my surprise. Now I like it more:

A group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

These are the same people who ran the secret underground theatre. More power to their WD-40.

Fame please, Carol

It's not easy being a former Countdown champion. In fact, if I was going to be dramatic, I'd say that Countdown ruined my life. Ever since I won, my life has been a constant, utterly in-vain struggle to ensure that this would not prove to be the defining moment of my life.

The story itself isn't really all that interesting, unfortunately, but I want to take a note of the opening line.

Money well spent

Paul just pointed out that Discovery are buying HowStuffWorks.com, for $250 million. Not having much memory of HowStuffWorks beyond it occasionally surfacing in Google, I visited it and can confirm that it is absolutely worth the money. Just on the front page today:

How Machineguns Work
How Bats Work
How Quantum Suicide Works

All Discovery need to do now is buy up Look Around You to run practical demonstrations.

Know your market

A fine statement on the recent hoo-ha about a church group using Halo 3 to tempt in kids for later reprogramming, care of the NYTimes:

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

The unstoppable Heavies

I've been spending too much time playing TF2 recently, despite having loads of work and lots of other really quite significant games I could be playing instead.

An interesting encounter on PC Gamer's server last night: Team LOL, including Richard, decided that they would all play one class per round, resulting in offences composed exclusively of Scouts, Pyros, etc.

It ended predictably: all-Scouts were whittled away on 2Fort by entirely standard tactics, all-Engineers held that factory level for quite a while but fell to massed Spies in their midst, and all-Spies perished almost immediately in an unending whirl of flame. Worryingly, however, all-Heavies and all-Demomen proved almost unstoppable. Could it be that TF2 is susceptible to monoculture?

Zero Punctuation

My current favourite thing on the internet is Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw's (I think that's the correct form) Zero Punctuation, a series of animated rants about gaming delivered in a polite British monotone that is slightly reminscent of what I used to do when I got worked up about something back before I was a burnt-out corporate shell but I just got drunk and moaned at people in pubs rather than fashioning associated illustrations that are actually much funnier and thus get signed up by inexplicably but cheeringly not-gone-bust-yet games site The Escapist.

Guess where the title comes from. Anyway, I find it deeply entertaining and everybody should watch it. I post this not because I think you haven't, you being a discerning gaming enthusiast who spends too much time on the internet and all, but because it's really hard to find on The Escapist - presumably in an effort to get you to sign up to their newsletter. So here's the link to all the Zero Punctuation videos on the Escapist.

The first couple are on Yahtzee's site but I in the interests of neatness I reproduce them here. They are funny.

The Darkness demo on PS3


Fable: The Lost Chapters: A retrospective

Carnival of Lockjaw

Cardhouse has posted some choice quotes from a book on fireworks. The factory explosion survivor is a good 'un, but this is my favourite:

"Because of such devices, nearly as many people died celebrating independence – around four thousand over the years -- as actually died fighting in the War of Independence itself. The glorious Fourth became known as the “Bloody Fourth” and, because of the large number of severe infections from burns, the “Carnival of Lockjaw.”

Cri di coeur

There's a status bar at the bottom of the CMS software we use to put the magazine together. Since launch, it has held a brief text message - similar to the "I'll find something to put here" at the bottom of a Facebook page, except this one has spooled through random quotes from the minds of, presumably, our merry band of internal developers.

A new one today: "l'enfer, c'est les autres". They must be getting a lot of support calls.