Weblog | I don't like the word blog, it's ugly. Anyway, new content happens here. (Swedish dito)

About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

Archives | Things written here since... well, 2001. Some of it is good, some is utter shait.

Books | Books read, not books written. So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.

Photo | I like my camera and it likes me.

Links | Outwards, away, flee.

e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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Horrors at the used bookshop

After the coffee I went roaming around in my lonesome, drifting from place to place, back alley to back alley. Not that Växjö has many back alleys worth the name but those that do exist looks pretty nice. So it’s just more of a bunch of alleys. Topic drifting here. Lets get back to the point. So I went to the used bookshop and turned on a few books here and there.

I found among other things a hardcover edition of a P.G. Wodehouse. I looked at the spine. I blinked and then looked at it again. Who in their right minds would sell something like that? I seriously considered to search up the previous owner and give it back. But then I thought about it some more and decided to keep it for myself instead.

Down the stairs came two goons. Long coats and junk in their hair to keep it in place. It still looked ridiculous. They looked at the politics-shelve and I decided that this was my que to ascend upstairs. Later, I’m still in the used bookshop, they popped up through the hallway and walk forwards to the counter. They had found some book and I thought nothing of it. I mean, it didn’t sound as something I would like to read anyway, and who am I to criticise them?

Then it comes. The needle, the bullet that makes me shiver as if someone had aimed and fired right at me. They asked the store manager for another book, this one by none other than Ayn Rand. I was horrified. They had the look of someone who really believes in her teachings. Now, I’ve meet nice people who have believed in Ms. Rand before, but they don’t seem to have bought the whole thing like these. They where not old enough to read Ayn Rand, they should have an age limit so that the reader won’t be dragged into the whole Objectivist-cult. The used bookshop didn’t have the book though, thank God for that. The last thing we need is some naive economics students turned into fullblooded Rand-freaks running around at the big U.

(This has been entry number 200 here at the Lost Pages.)

28/2 -02

-- Did you see?
-- See what?
-- The senior, she took a handful of napkins and then put them into her bag over there.
-- No, I missed that. A handful?
-- Yes.
-- What the hell is she going to do with a handful of napkins?
-- I don’t know. Senior stuff probably.
-- Senior stuff? No, on second thought I don’t want to know.
-- Oh, she’s not going to use them. They’re far too expensive for that. She’ll probably keep them in a drawer somewhere. Maybe even in a box stacked away in the attic.
-- Right. If she wants to use something like that, she’ll only have to go out and have another coffee or something.
-- I’m not sure seniors are allowed to drink coffee.
-- Sure they can, just not black. But then again, if it isn’t black it isn’t a coffee.
-- Coffee-coloured milk then.
-- Right. Milk in the coffee together with a voodoo mixture of Viagra, Amphetamines and Opium.
-- My God! No wonder they’re as crazy as they are.

Number 131

I’ve got a lot of books to read in the course, Shakespeare, Bronte, Pinter and a bunch of other English classic literary works. (No Flann O’Brien which bugs me to no end. They have books by him in the library but they don’t use them to anything. Weird. No Jerome K. Jerome either and they have several Three Men in a Boat aligned on the shelves. Those books we were assigned to read had been forgotten by the library altogether, so we’re forced to buy them. Bastards.)

However, and this is a big one of those, I’ve just agreed to write the apa membership fanzine for April/May. Despite I have had problem filling out my own fanzine (which by the way will now take even longer to get finished). Despite that I now have a deadline and I suck at those. Despite all the work we’ve been assigned to read at the course. I must be crazy.

This has made me realise that I’ve got to have some priorities, sort things up in an order which represents how important it is. Fanac or study? Fanac or study? There is only one way out though and I’ve known it all along. It is as if the choice glows and illuminate the room. It’s in my blood, I can’t betray and turn my back on it no matter how much I really need to.

School, bend over.

Redesign sickness

I told you I was bored, when that mood is upon me things like this is happen. Truth to be told, the whiteness on the borders had started to make me restless. Too much empty spaces, it was as if I’d been imprisoned in an asylum, with only porridge to eat. I don’t like porridge. You see what I struggle against here? Things that remind me of inedible food, but apart from that I mean?

I couldn’t pretend any more. I’m not one of those sans-serif people, so when I used Trebuchet it felt as if I was living a lie. Trival matters to most people, but not to me. That was how it started, and then just like a falling elevator it just passed on by the floors al the way to the bottom. Bottom = redesign.

It didn’t even have time to grow on me. It’s kind of sad really. Tissue?

(If you use IE, just pretend that the dashed line consists of dots. It look much better then, even if you’re limited to mental editing.)

Inspiration can come from utter crap

I was bored today. Bored. Boooored. At first I didn’t know what to do, so I turned on the telly. Bad move, Sunset Beach. If there was a hell, not even Satan would want to touch those involved in that piece of shit out of fear of getting “dirty”.

I had not other choice than to turn it of again. The screen was infected and needed to be cleaned. Instead I picked up and cintinued reading Eric Gill’s An Essay on Typography and right there and then I decided to draw a typeface. It won’t be the greatest gift to mankind, but hopefully it will be better than the horrible Helvetica. (Not that it will be a sans-serif though, I like them a little bit more pointy truth to be told.)

(The crap in the title refer to Sunset Beach, not Eric Gill’s book.)

25/02 -02

-- Are you sure we can do this?
-- Sure we can. It is a real typographic word after all.
-- Well, okay. I think we need to do something with it though. Split it up with a hyphen here and pull up the font size to look like this.
-- Ha! Great, great. Someone will choke, hopefully. Too bad there is not much else one can do to make people raise their eyebrows in this country.
-- The only problem is that some idiots will misunderstand and assume it is some kind of generation novel about drunk buffoons that run around at parties, take drugs and sleep with quasi-celebrities.
-- So? It’s their own fault.
-- Point taken. “Stupidity sorts out itself.”
-- Who said that?
-- Bugger if I know. It sounds good though.
-- Probably true too.

From the scrapfile

Do not cry over spilled milk, after all it’s only milk. You can still eat the cow.

Truly Burtonesque

If one felt that feeling of betrayal by Tim Burton for his latest motion picture, all one need to do is to watch his short Frankenweenie made for that Disney corporation in 1984. If he managed to get paid for doing that by Disney, I’m confident that he will embark on the dark twisted road he used to travel soon enough. Patience.

Frankenweenie was more Burton than the first Batman for Chirst sake. Magnificent and charming story about a kid named Frankenstein who brings his runover dog back to life. Shoot in black and white and with angles and lightning effects that are beautiful. oF his later wok, only Sleepy Hollow comes close in style and feeling.

Superhero Academia

Now that they have mapped and compared the social networks between real life and the Marvel Universe (link via Platicbag.org), what’s next?

Why the Marvel World is obsessed with Spandex uniforms? The genetic structure of Bruce Banner pre-Hulk to decide why he reacted to gamma-rays the way he did? Or, best of all, genealogy on the Summers-clan in X-Men?

The snowstorm moves up north

The soft breeze blew the snowdust into my face. Then, without much warning, came the stronger wind and both bit my face as well as tossing sharp snow particles on my cheeks. It hurt. A lot. Right there and then, I thought about turning back, to go inside the building once again. I looked at my watch, and there was little time left. I had to go out there. Into the cold — I hate cold almost as much as warmth.

I wrapped my neck in the scarf — the small one, not the three metre long furrball that resided on the shelf at home — and with a heavy sigh I opened the door once again. The wind bit my face but I pretended that it didn’t bother me. At that time, it wasn’t that much of a problem. My back was against the wind so I was sort-of into hiding. This was great up until one moment when I had to turn.

I felt something cold in my face. That was snow. I also felt something cold going into my left pocket, where I kept my hand tucked. That was also snow. The wind blew the snow right into my face and I had to divert my head downwards just to be able to walk forwards. Navigation was a bit tricky as I could only see two metre in front of me.

I didn’t offer this much thought though. I had other problems. My ears where turning read and if they had been my hands they would have shaken until they shattered. Why did I have to lose my hat now when the horrible weather had returned?

Almost everything works

Installed win2000 on the slaptop, and despite two things everything is better than fine. I might need to update SLRN — newsreader par excellence — and then hopefully only th trouble with dual screens persist. (Anyone know how to get w2000 to accept the fact that the graphic card actually can have two screens to the same card?)

But others work, directly without much tinkering. This can’t be true, karma needs balance, and with Microsoft it needs big leveling. This is not how it supposed to be. Well, actually it is, but not with Windows.

Mimeo ink

Weird fact of the day: I think I’m allergic to certain brands of mimeo ink. So sometimes I sneeze and scratch my hands when reading fanzines from the 70s and 80s. It’s annoying, as several of these fanzines are good.

reBlog it

Neil from Beatnikpad has just recently created a new blog (I still don’t like that word) about web design, graphic design, programming, Internet business and whatnots called reBlog. It is meant to be a group-thing in the near future, so go there now and join if this is your cup of tea. If not, go there anyway and look at the lovely poster art artifacts that he uses for illustrations.

Wierdest definition of fanzine yet

There is a magazine in Sweden — which I won’t mention by name in protest — that calls itself fanzine. This is wrong on so many levels. For the first, it is suffering from the Wired-ad syndrome. You know what I mean? That the articles disappear among all the ads and that even the content-listing is divided by this. Everything is in four-colour print and on a glossy paper. Tell me, is this a fanzine?

Obviously, there can be only one answer to this question and that is a firm no. Several of them live on this magazine, so it can’t even be called a semiprozine. A fanzine is not a name for the genre “we’ll write about everything we want to write about,” something they seem to believe. A fanzine is something else, copied on a regular xerox-machine and written just for the enjoyment of it without any thoughts of professionalism.

According to me, one shouldn’t even have to pay at all for fanzines but that might just be me. If they cost money, they should be fairly periodical as one issue a week or so.

Brain mushy

There is a jellyfish swimming around in there, the head, poking brain cells back and forth at a tremendous slow pace. The fish is about this big — typing with one hand to show you this — and as such it also blocks much of the traffic. This is just as horrible as it sounds. I’m too tired to sacrifice what is left of my wits in order to read fiction and most non-fiction is also way outside my current limits.

However, there are some things I could read despite my state of mental decay. One of them is Blue Note Records by Richard Cook. (Of course it is a sort of biography about the record company, what did you expect? World records held by Richard Simmons?) It’s interesting, as the author seems to be pretty well aware of the record company’s strength and weaknesses.

(I don’t recommend it though, even if I like it. Unwanted recommendations tend to be as inviting as the “Hot! Hot! Hot!”-signs in Las Vegas)

One word

I’ve been thinking about this now for a day or two. What word defines me as a person? I don’t have a definite answer, but this is as close that I’ve gotten so far.

Subderisorious adj. mildly ridiculing.

The Others

Just came back home from the Others. Unlike both Boo and Ola, I knew how it would end about halfway through. I think I have to stop watching movies, this always happen (even with Sixth Sense and how fun is that?) But apart from that it was good, very good usage of the music and the camera. I liked it, although it had its flaws (a bit too slow in the beginning).

Afterwards we sort of ran, but really we didn’t, towards GVG where I bought a State and Main-DVD really cheap. We stayed fopr quote some thime and bitched about movies before splitting up in two directions.

That Cubicle Movie

I’ve seen it about ten to twenty times now, but Office Space is still just as good.

-- It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.

-- I’d relax, sit on my ass all day, I would do nothing.
-- Well you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, He’s broke, don’t do shit.

SPAM!

I got some spam today. That is by itself nothing unusual, even though I usualy doesn’t get things encoded in Big5. It was a stroke of genius. I can’t understand a word, and there is no link to click. In short: all you can see are numbers, equal signs and letters, all in a glorious pattern of chaos.

Strangely enough, it doesn’t feel intrusive, or that it occupies valuable storage space. I wish all spam should be like this.

Addition 22:09: The spam is now printed and typset properly, ready to be pinpointed on a wall.

Numbers

I question the occurance of uppercase numbers that almost every font uses. How hard can it be? I want lowercase as they go much better to written texts than their taller kin. This is important, and would do alot to improve the screen readability.

Reading the wrong book

Just now, I realised something. I will never learn, never. I have as usual an exam on Saturday; the next Saturday that is, the twenty-third and the exam are about linguistics. I should be studying, but I am not. Instead, I sit here and device plans to circumvent this horrendous fact and read other things. Such a thing is the Anatomy of Bibliomania by Holbrook Jackson (who according to me should be dubbed Sir Holbrook Jackson even though he’s deader than a can of beans).

Why should he be knighted? Well, this is just one of three meta-books, just one and this is about 660 pages or so. Where else is one to find an essay that deals with the moral approach about books or discussing the proper time for reading? Or when he deal with the greatest question of all, to lend our or not to lend out books to friends and family. He is as he was, a philosopher in his heart dealing with the troublesome and undiscovered problems about the tomes that fill up the space provided within bookcases. How to behave and what to do, this is as close to a manifesto a bookman has ever come both before and since Jackson left the material plane.

If that isn’t enough to be called Sir, then nothing is.

Horrible, bad, stupid Fox

Nonononononono!

From Gotfuturama.com (by way of the cult at Orbyn)

FOX keeps telling that the show isn’t cancelled but put on hiatus for a year till the backlog of episodes are aired. While there might be a show called Futurama being picked up in 2003 that won’t be “our” Futurama as the original crew is leaving for other projects.

So, in all that matters, the show is dead even if it does continue. Fuck. Double shait. All this while the Simpsons can go on no matter how stale it has become. There is something wrong at the Fox-building. Perhaps there is an unwritten law that states that if a show is funny it can’t continue.

Disturbed by the old folks

Despite the never-ending chatter of seniors in the same room, we sat down and actually accomplished something. Accomplish in the terms of having had an idea and then we’ll do something with that idea later. We in this case was a slightly taller and skinnier chap called Tommy and I. We didn’t bother to ask the seniors about their names. We just wished they could be a bit quieter in their strive for running out of breath by talking past each other.

So, we just agreed that it was interesting and that we should do it. After all, every other way in the project — ingeniously dubbed The Big M for those who isn’t in on it, we of course have another name just to add some confusion — has reached a dead end.

The new idea of the Big M, which is a magazine on real paper and as far away from Internet as possible, was to write all the articles on a 24-hour marathon. Insane? Not quite, but we’re used to that by now. We have our laptops, so all we need is to stock up on high-quality coffee and some even more high-quality whisky and then we’re all set.

After all, one only lives twice and then it’s feeding-time for the little worms.

Oh, lookit the bump

I have hardly opened it yet, but already I’ve found interesting things in The Art of Looking Sideways. For instance that less and less people have a bump in the back of their head.

So, right now it seems I’m one in a million (I got me bump). Who would have though? Not me, that’s for sure. But whether it’s one in a million good or one in a million bad, that is an entire other matter which I’ll stay out off as much as possible. (Oh, and I don’t live in the London area, so I might not count at all. Shait.)

Faster than a speeding bullet

It is now proven, Amazon.co.uk is faster than the Swedish Postal office. It took just as long time for the package to arrive to me from England than from “Any Swedish Town Of Your Choice”. It’s ‘masing.

(Completely off the topic, why has never anyone tried to give Superman a ticket for speeding?)

The good things, they're off the air

On the telly they hurl huge testicles on the ice towards an even bigger bullseye and I don’t quite get it. What is the fun in banging the chestnuts together like that? And if the floor is so dirty, at least one of them should have been wealthy and smart enough to buy a vaccum cleaner and bring along. But no. That would be far to logical, wouldn’t it?

So this is the olympics. Colour me bored and unimpressed...

To the street station in the centre

There are times when one stumbles across something extraordinary good. China Miévilles Perdido Street Station is one of those things, a book that closest can be described as a synergy between Mervyn Peake, Stanley Kubrick and H.G. Welles. This is of course an oversimplification, as in the end it is nothing more than a creation from Miéville himself.

The book is thick and could probably do a lot of damage, but not in the usual sense. It is justified, as it doesn’t feel too long. The tale demands this length to be told properly and unlike most books, there is not too much padding.

It is brutal to the end; a harsh tale where the questions still hang in the air after it is finished.

Dangerous ideas

Those dangerous thoughts are back again. Those who lift me up just to later drop me down on top of long, pointy and sharp nails. As if that wasn’t enough, they’ll probably be rusty too.

The think is that I want to write a book. I have tons and tons of ideas, characters and whatnots that just lay there inside closed notebooks waiting for release and the small possibility of being used.

Why don‘t I have better self-control and more patience? Because these two things stand in my way to successville, they hold me back as without these it is mighty hard to actually finish writing the damn thing. I believe, and don’t laugh, that once I’ve learned how to do this something might be published one day.

Three men in a boat (sort-of)

Two and a half minutes.

Ola was sitting straight across from me, fretting and constantly keeping his gaze on the time on his watch. When you wait, five minutes is never really five minutes. They’re more like fifteen or in some rare cases even more. But five? Never. Not unless you’re only supposed to wait for one minute, then one can be like five. Time is not an exact science, no matter what the current theory is. Time have a mind its own, working against everyone at the same time.

Beside me Niklas was trying to study, so was I but he was better on that than I was. It was he who inflicted the “don’t quote Monty Python for five minutes”-penalty on Ola after a quoting killing spree moments earlier. Apart from writing “Dinsdale” on the display of his cell phone, he made it.

Three minutes.

I wrote “Typically, the beginning of a word is joined with the end of another. Ex: smoke + fog = smog” with my new pen. Damn nice pen too, transparent in places and with rubber strategically planted where one holds the fingers.

Four minutes, ten seconds

We who were there to study discussed what kind of word formation processes lay behind the word “car-phone,” or we tried to despite interruptions from the man with his eyes directed downwards to his watch.

“Could you two be quiet? Some of us are trying to get things done.” He looked at us and then continued to study the effects of time. He looked as if he was soon going into withdrawal.

Five minutes

“Wait for it!” The watch beeped.

“Perhaps you should try it with ten minutes now?” I laughed at the remark. Ola shook his head violently.

“I shouldn’t think so.”

In retrospect, it was Three Men in a Boat, except that we didn’t have a dog and we weren’t in a boat at all. I (Harris in the book) didn’t get a lot of people lost in a maze and turned them into a lynch mob with the stakes pointing at me, and Ola (George in the book) didn’t try to open a tin of pineapples with a pair of scissors and almost put his eye out while doing so. So, except both the small and the big details it was spot on.

Worst movies ever

Over at the Stinkers they have a list of the worse hundred movies ever made. What is worse though is that I can’t really argue about top 10 worst as, and this I probably shouldn’t say in public, I’ve seen many of them and agree. They where bad, horrible and downright shit. Perhaps I should give Showgirls a higher position than “only” 8. And where are Highlander 2? Any list about the worst movies must have Highlander 2 among the top ten, it is in the rules. The rest of the movies, all 90 of them can also be discussed. Some just don’t belong there, while they seem to have forgotten other totally crappy films.

Oh, I didn’t see that at first: some wise-asses voted in the movies. Well, it was to be expected then. Most people don’t know The Third Man from Police Academy 5, and PA5 they can’t separate from that sequel to Saturday Night Fever. The en masse don’t know jack shit.

(By way of Plasticbag.org)

Remember this

I’ve forgotten to bring along my camera for quite some time now. That it has constantly rained since God knows when doesn’t help either — there have not been much to photo as everything has been gray and dark. I must change this, now and not a moment later. Not sure what I can do about the weather but at least I can change my ways with the camera bit.

The Quicksilver mine

According to the the latest lists Neal Stephenson’s quasi-followup to the earlier Cryptonomicon, that thick-as-hell tome, is due in march. Yes, this is the book entitled Quicksilver that Amazon had given a July 2000 release. They too have caved in and changed the unofficial date, which makes me a bit sceptical about the whole thing. It won’t be released then, will it? Amazon, by difinition, can’t be right about the shipping date.

The thing is I want to read it as fast as possible, this time I can’t hold back. I have to buy it in hardcover, as soon as I can and not wait two months like last time.

21:15

I rarely listen to the radio nowadays. There was a time in my youth when it was constantly turned on, but those days are gone. The left when I made the awful discovery that they mostly played shit.

However, I can see on the look on your face that you suspected this however, there is an exception. The national government funded channels have these wonderful imaginative names of P and a number from one to four. As you’ve already guessed, quick of wits as you are, P stands for Programme. On Sundays for forty-five minutes on P2 they have a show dedicated to Jazz recorded before 1950 and it is good, solid entertainment four almost an hour. Gosh and wow.

Today I discovered that if I walk around I would cause static in varying degrees depending on where I stood and that was the only channel that is affected by this. Fun? No, not particularly. It is much more annoying that I first thought it would be.

This is fucked up

Every bone in my body told me I shouldn’t like it, but they and parts of my brain had to surrender. I actually liked Moulin Rouge. It was as if Hunter S. Thompson had written a musical and then the distributor had stripped the finished product of every reference to drugs in the editing process. So you don’t actually see anyone indulge in a cocaine snort race, but the effects are there as they skip and dance and sings and well, dance some more. The story was a bit banal but it somehow fitted the wonderful camera-work.

And no matter what one say about the rest, the credits are stunning. The most beautiful piece of work I’ve seen in a long time, but then again I’m a sucker for everything nostalgic to the old times of any given technology. Anyway, the titles had that sort of flickering strobe light at the edges from old movies. Don’t get me started on the usage of type. It was as if someone had deviced a wet dream of credits.

The best elevator moment through the ages

A man enters an elevator. It is a tired man, but he stands tall although his gaze is sad as if he just lost everything. This is as expected as this is what he has. Once, not long ago, everything was his. Power, wealth and control. Other powerful men bowed before his will and feet, afraid for his wrath. And now everything is gone, fallen through cracks he never knew existed or brushed over in false confidence.

He push the button marked with the floor number to which he is headed, and by doing so one can see the initials W.R.H. that probably embroider his coat. If he is aware of the other man present in the elevator, he didn’t show it. W.R.H. probably ignores him, as he must possess the knowledge that this man was the catalyst to his loss. The other man however is not content to be ignored like that and extends his hand as a man greeting another.

“Mr Hearst, I’m not sure you remember who I am. My name is Orson Welles.” He then continued to invite William Randolph Hearst to the premiere of Citizen Kane but the man was dead silent all the way down.

My God, what wouldn’t I give to be in there at that moment with a camera?

(Yes, I’ve just seen RKO 281 again. Fun, despite some minor fictionalisations. If this is one of them then Mr Welles himself is guilty, but who cares? It’s a good story.)

Things I'd like to do but never will #294

The last year or so I’ve had this romantic imagery of hitchhiking through Asia and where it would be impossible to catch a lift, I would walk. I recon, that by doing this I would learn the languages and the nuisances of everyday speech without much difficulty.

I would go up to a farmer who lives far away from civilised villages and say things like: “Howdy! How do you do?” and he would say “Fine thank you, but I’ve got an itch here by my bottom, could you scratch it for me?” and I would say “No, but I got this semi-out-of-order-can’t-reach-the-network cell phone so I could call to a radio station and say hi to your relatives in Hong Kong when it can connect.” And then he would say, “Oh could you, that would be lovely! Here, have my magic lucky potato!” and to that I say “Only if you accept this self-made ice bear-hat that I made from the head of an authentic ice bear last spring.” Then we’ll part with our gifts and I would call the moment I got the phone working and drain the batteries.

I told you it was highly romanticised and with no contact to the real world — conveyed by the cell phone’s lack of connection to the phone-network or so the post-modern deconstructionist would like to claim. I on the other hand think that they, and in times such as this even I, just say a lot of bullshit.

Trust no one

Sometimes when dealing with humans something has got to give. This is because humans do not understand concepts such as time unless it is themselves that’s affected negatively. This happened to Boo and me today, while we emerged from the other Niklas building.

A Peter Jackson-clone with about a beer or two (perhaps even three) approached and wanted a lift towards Telleborg centrum. I started out to explain that we didn’t have any time. Of course, he had as I’ve clarified above no notion of “little time.” I kind of sagged, and realised something that Tommy did last time the Mafioso’s of the Tenant Union (or whatever they’re called in English). It is better to agree and be rid of them than to lose even more time trying to get them to understand.

So, I drove him there and dumped the guy. Boo later said that I was to trusting, but truth to be told I trust a very few and select cadre of people. The rest is calculated risks, thing to be considered and added up together with circumstances. Boo probably understands people better than I do, but insane people running around with a machete would chose a lonely victim instead of two blokes built of a slightly larger frame. No matter what Boo was expecting.

Not your average pie-chart

I take it that everyone already memorised the the Universal Conspiracy against Everything chart about how everything is conspiring against you.

My kind of watch

This is the future. Some science-blokes at Bristol U and HP Research Laboratories have “discovered” and developed a wristwatch. With a gps that locates pubs. If you feel like it you could use voice command to ask it to find the way to that and that pub.

I want one. Badly.