Nobody's text and nobody's toys

(originally posted on myspace here)

 

While spending Christmas in France with my parents I took these photos of the Pezenas Toy Museum, not to be confused - as we did - with the plain old "Pezenas Museum" which it turns out just contains doors:

I think they provide quite a nice accompaniment to the following completely predicted texts, even if neither in isolation are that interesting. A completely predicted text is a text predicted not just from the first letters of each single word typed into your mobile, but from the first word alone. For example I type in the word "Might" then space, my phone then flashes up the next word "just" and I can either press enter or ignore this suggestion and type the next word in for myself. On this occasion, hanging around a recording studio in Hoxton on Monday morning, waiting to record a voice-over for, as it turned out, a company suddenly finding itself having to rush out an educational video to promote the structural integrity of its product following the explosion two months ago of a submarine, I decided to keep on pressing enter just to see how long my phone could keep this up. We got as far as "Might just think you say something about a cat" before the predictions dried up. Then I tried it a few more times. Not every first word produced a prediction but here are the ones that did:

All sound in the heart of 's West End

If not too late

I'm in the candle

So I haven't ...

My slaves on Thursday

(For anyone really interested in ugly toys I recommend a visit to Shunt this week: Faulty Optic's on, as well as a collection of automata from a company called Sharmanka which I caught last week leading me to ponder anew the phenomenon of "clock theatre", something that's been pretty much absent from the capital as far as I can see since the demolition of the Swiss Centre... If you do pop along to Shunt however, be warned you might need a passport now as the pissing security checks suddenly include the scanning of either a photo ID or your credit card. Something to do with the new license I heard. It's horrible. I was hoping to do "Jonah" again there next month but... hhh... it can probably wait now until I summon up more enthusiasm or else find a venue a little more removed from the ground zero of modern godawfulness... anyway there's good stuff once you're in though... but hhh...)