1) Gather at the location (to be revealed closer to the time) just before 2pm in a loose crowd.
2) At 2pm two members of the Brumob team will walk into the centre of the location and draw their fingers on each other.
3) In response pull you fingers on each other until a huge standoff is created. PLEASE NOTE: THERE WILL BE NO WHISTLE FOR THIS ONE!
4) As the tension builds one of the original two will “shoot” the other shouting “BANG!”
5) This is your cue, let the shootout commence!
6) When you’re shot fall to the ground, the more gruesome and exaggerated the death the better. We all know that pretending to die is half the fun, and if people get too competitive this could go on for a VERY long time.
7) Stay on the floor (or slumped up against the phone box you clawed a while taking your final few breaths in this world) until everyone else is dead/gone.
8) If you find your self the sole survivor either tern your fingers on yourself or leave jubilantly (Brumob team suggest that skipping a little would add to the over all effect).
9) At this point disperse quickly and calmly in different directions.
If all goes to plan it should look a little like this:
or this:
I just home the police armed response teams aren’t out in force that day. Keep tabs on the Brumob site for final location details.
Mary Rochford writes to inform of her new book, Gilded Shadows, which comes out later this month.
Set in the West of Ireland, Birmingham, Dublin and Nice, five of these stories explore our need to come to terms with the past.
Three sisters: Aefe, Fionuala and Sorcha, struggle towards a recollection and resolution of the event which almost destroyed their family.
Tom and Breda flee Derry for the safety of England and discover that history casts a long shadow.
Bridget, haunted by the past, takes the first plane out of Birmingham and spends a life-changing week in Nice.
The remaining seven stories which are located in Birmingham are laced with humour and deal with the universal desire to be loved and to belong.
She’s released the first piece, Aefe’s story, as a free PDF download. You can buy the book from Bonds Books in Harborne from December 12th and at the Custard Factory’s Sunday Flea on the 16th.
Artsearch is a web directory of Arts websites which is very old school but still, searching for Birmingham (no permalink to searches unfortunately) did bring up a number of sites I wasn’t aware of. You can submit your site and they’ll put it up once they’ve reviewed it. via Audiences Central
The events listings site What’s On In Brum has had an overhaul so I had a quick look. The listings are pretty normal, allowing you to search by day and type and to see what’s happening right now across a range of areas. The Venue Guide is pretty slick, giving you an aggregation based on information put in by promoters along with a Google Map. It’s nice to see some Facebook integration although it only adds links to the site on your profile rather than events to your calendar. A bit more work needed there but it’s a start. Hopefully adoption of the iCalendar data exchange standard (meaning you can add info to your own calendar with one click) is in the offing. THSH and Facebook themselves offer this and once you start using it it’s very useful.
No RSS. At all. C’mon, this is 2007 people. Gimme a custom feed based on search terms please!
A really nice feature is the Flyer Wall which runs down the side of each page. Hovering over the listings shows you a flyer and clicking through lets you effectively download it for your own use. I can see this being very useful for my own gig listings blog and anything that enables people to share the knowledge is a good thing.
There’s no indication who’s behind this other than the fact that promoters who have a TheTicketSellers.co.uk account can sign in with the same details implying there’s some cross-ownership here. This might not seem a big deal for a consumer-facing site but if they want to build up relationships with the wide range of promoters in the city then answering the “who the hell are you?” question would be a good idea. Needless to say I think some kind of blog would be good for this.
On the whole the site, while not that revolutionary, looks much better and appears to work well. What concerns me though isn’t particularly specific to What’s On In Brum but to the whole events listings industry where the onus is on the promoter to input the same information into numerous sites. Given the iCalendar standard is pretty well established it should be easy to have promoters put their information in one place and have the sites subscribe to it ala RSS? Or am I living in a tech utopia?
I’ve been putting off commenting on this whole vote for the Black Country Urban Park thing partly because I dislike the whole popularity TV vote way of deciding where money should be invested, especially at this sort of level, but also because as a cyclist I think the Sustrans bid is more worthy. But it’s my duty to push this stuff so for those of you who put local pride above all else (not that there’s nothing wrong with that!) and because there is probably a benefit to the local creative community in there somewhere, here’s a handy piece of propaganda from Jonny BiNS:
Rich Batsford uses his blog to plug a comedy gig at the Old Joint Stock Theatre featuring Reginald D Hunter (who recently took part in Project X) and new-to-me act Hospital Radio DJ Ivan Brackenbury aka BRWM and Kerrang DJ Tom Binns. But don’t hold that against him. Judging by this clip he’s quite odd in a rather wonderful way.
Up and to the left a bit, Creative Wolverhampton seem justly chuffed that SP/ARK, the “specialist business incubator for digital creative industries at Wolverhampton Science Park”, is up for the UK Business Incubation (UKBI) Best Established Incubator of the Year Award.
When I do get a chance to reply and I’m saying no, then I always try and encourage bands to self-promote, as I seriously think that this is the way that things have to change in order to address the imbalance between the number of gigs there are available and the number of gigs which bands are available to play.
Claire Galleries in the Jewellery Quarter are having a Private View on Thursday 6th December, 5.30-8.30pm, for an exhibition featuring Rosa Sepple RI, Jonathan Taylor and Doug Eaton plus more. Here’s the invite.
I’s slightly torn on how to report the news that The BBC Big Screen in Victoria Square has been turned off “due to technicalities in the planning process” with a review to take place in the new year. On the one hand the screen does show a fair amount of local film and animation work and is available for festivals and the like in the city. But on the other hand I’m vehemently opposed to the whole concept of public televisions believing them to be pernicious contributors to the levels of mental polution in our built environments and nothing is going to change my stance on this. The Big Screen should go.
