littled.net

… and I’m losing.

It hasn’t bothered me up till now but today when I was at a loose end, I casually looked at some of my friends’ profiles to check how many other friends they had. Frankly I was astonished — 80, 90, hundreds? Is it really possible to have that many friends? I’m not sure I’ve even ever met that number of different people. Or, as I head into my late 30s am I just getting plain grumpy and lazy when it comes to making and sustaining friendships? Err, yes, probably.

I started to feel quite ashamed of my paultry 40-odd friends, especially as some of them may not actually be, umm,  real people (one of them may be a friend’s cuddly toy which I initially had some qualms about adding but then did so in a flurry of desperate activity to bump up my numbers).

But why does it matter? Do I really want to compete in a game I know I’ll never be able to win? Is it even a game anyway, or, unbelievably, are my friends really just more popular than me? Hmm, I guess the answers to those questions are possibly, no, yes and yes. It only possibly matters when you’ve obviously got a secret agenda — for instance you’ve had a “friend” request from that really popular person at university, or even worse, an ex. I say “no” to not wanting to compete because it’s in my nature to lose interest in things I have no clear ability to do even reasonably well in (like being able to change a duvet cover in less than half an hour without getting angry for instance).

I also looked at Flickr today and realised most of my contacts (about the same number as Facebook friends) I have never met or am likely to meet. I just like their photos; and can do so without any sense of social inadequacy. Much better, although it has to be said you can’t play scrabble on it. Well, you probably could, but it might take some time. Actually, I bet there’s actually a Flickr group for doing just that…

Just got back from Latitude 2008. Here are my festival highs:

• Elbow and Sigur Rós on the Obelisk arena on Saturday night. Utterly amazing
• Grinderman on Sunday. What can you say, just brilliant
• Some other bands, notably Gravenhurst and Truckers of Husk
• The Literature tent. What a great idea. Especially when it features Robin Ince and Ros Noble doing a “John Peel-off”
• Joanna Newsom. Previously I wasn’t that convinced by her but thought she was  spellbinding, even when she kept forgetting the lyrics to one of her songs she was so nervous. Bless her.
• The beer. Not just crap Carling but proper real ales: Hector’s Pure and Scarecrow. Nice one.
• Those refundable cups at the beer tents: what a great idea. Meant the site wasn’t a sea of broken plastic or paper cups
• Making an effort to be green

And lows:

• Julian Cope coming on late and only playing three songs
• Franz Ferdinand. Yawn. So, so boring
• Parents taking up four acres of space in the arenas with all their chairs, wheelbarrows, blankets and tents, and then talking all the way through the sets anyway. Bah!
• Not being able to get anywhere near the comedy tent for most of the festival.
• The size of the programme — like carrying a paperback book around with you

I’ve just read an article in Wired marking the sixty-third anniversary of the Trinity test, the explosion of the  first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico, 16 July 1945. An interesting article: as well as citing J. Robert Oppenheimer’s now famous quote following the test, “Now I am become death. The destroyer of worlds”, it also provides a less famous (as far as I’m aware) but just as apt one from Kenneth Bainbridge, director for the Trinity site, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

Wired have also published a small gallery of historical photos relating to nuclear explosions. As always with these kind of images, I found them grimly compelling and some have an almost horrifying beauty to them.

The one above is astounding and one I’ve never seen before: the exact moment of the detonation at Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. It looks almost unreal, with the characters in the foreground still seemingly unaware of the explosion. I’m not sure how this photo was taken, but it is apparently legitimate. It was taken by Hiromichi Matsuda and featured on the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum website.