MySpace a place for friends

I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

To put it another way, "what the hell am I doing on MySpace"?  In person, I am usually fairly outgoing, although when I was younger I was much more introverted and can still be very moody, sullen, and withdrawn at times.  The one thing guaranteed to make me instantly sullen and moody is to try to take a picture.  The paradox is that in spite of being outgoing, I am also intensely private.  I don't do photos.  It's not a vanity thing as most people assume.  I work to a simple enough principle: people I have met know what I look like; people I haven't don't need to.  I don't need photos for memories.  I have memories for that...  Besides, memories are already past.  Time marches on, and I move right along with it.  The challenge is in the future.  I similarly private fashion keep most other personal details to myself.  In general I don't reveal my birthday, even to my closest friends, but that's simply down to the preference that the day be allowed simply to slip by by with the minimum of fuss - I prefer to choose to be the focus of attention, not have it thrust upon me by arbitrary circumstance.  Even the friends who have discovered it by fair means or foul generally respect its non-observance.  The polite word for it is "eccentric".  Or to put it another way, strange.  So if I'm so circumspect, what in hell am I doing here anyway?  Damned if I know.

Eh?  Oh yeah - I'm here to keep up to date with the music.  Twang (who calls me, very charitably, as his "occasional co-host" on Totalrock - "occasional dead weight" would be more appropriate - kept yacking about it, so I thought I better give it a look.  So here I am.

Cain Mosni is, unsurprisingly, a pseudonym; a persona I adopted some five or six years ago, in a mere accident of history - although it is quite surprising how many people know me and address me by that name.  The name has since been adopted by other more prominent figures.  Just to be absolutely clear, I am neither the performance artist nor the wrestler who go by the same name.  I'm not about to explain where it comes from, but stare at it long enough and it might hit you.  Most people on here (MySpace) who know me personally will know me as part of the tech team for Redline Productions, and specifically from The Pit rock club, alongside a certain Mr. Flipflop.  As it happens, I'm also the bod maintaining the Pit's MySpace presence.  I'm also a (very) occasional DJ, but I don't get enough deck time to smooth off the edges and stay in practice, so I usually only do a mediocre job, sadly - a circumstance I have an ambition to correct.

Born in London of a mother from a town in Lancashire once famous for its football and a father from Karachi (in the days before the violent and bloody social disaster that was Partition, when there was still one united India), I am proud both of who I am now and the exotic mix of cultural inheritances that contributed to my being.  If nothing else, I have always been hard to pigeon-hole (and I make a point of keeping it that way).  My appearance belies my age; my head is younger than I look; and my heart younger still.  I don't do inter-personal politics, and I very rapidly tire of anyone who tries to draw me into such things.  You get one of two things from me - either absolute (and sometimes brutal) truth as I perceive it or nothing.  Rather than tell a lie or break a confidence, I will simply resort to silence, and refuse to be drawn.  I can be very stubborn in that regard.  I honestly cannot recall a single occasion in adult life when someone has managed to cajole or bully me into answering a question I chose not to.  Once I take a stance, I will not relinquish it unless my true conviction changes.  I cannot abide insincerity and above all else I do not, and indeed cannot, feign friendship.  It's not that I don't like people, but I make a strong distinction between regular acquaintances and friends.  I value my friends; the true friends I see not nearly often enough.  The company of acquaintances can be enjoyed and and yet barely be missed in its passing; true friends are the foundation of life.  My friendship and loyalty are very forgiving, but can eventually be lost with repeated abuse, and once lost they are nigh on impossible to regain.  I may forgive betrayal; I never forget it.  I am very uncompromising.  In my mind the world is generally distilled into right and wrong.  Moral grey areas are far rarer than people pretend, and the few that do arise make me very uncomfortable.  I set a lot of store by matters of honour and principle but frequently fail by my own standards.  My determination to do the right thing over the expedient occsaionally lands me in hot water, and has been detrimental to my own state of well-being on more than one occasion.  I have no doubt that some people consider me arrogant and sanctimonious.  Certainly I can, at times, be a very difficult person to get along with.

I'm an obsessional techy, who will most likely be found in front of a computer whether it be for paid work or for leisure when I don't have something else specific to be doing (and sometimes even when I do).  My principal interest is open-source and (legitimately) free software.  I'm well-known for my particularly anti-Mcrosoft stance, not because they're big and powerful but for the deceit by which they achieved their dominant position (it's that principle thing again).  And just to consolidate my nerdish credentials I am - along with millions of others - a contributor to Wikipedia under this same pseudonym.

And finally - a little piece of useless trivia: as a child Mum never had to nag me to drink my milk.  I loved the stuff, and still do.  How's that for rock'n'roll?

Word of warning: if, by some miracle after all that, you choose to put me on your friends list, I will not participate in stupid cut and paste bulletin chains, and I get thoroughly pissed off with them.  I'm like as not to pop my cork and say so, too.

One for the MySpace techs:

Something I would like to see: MySpace re-written so that the pages allow for disability access.  At the present it's all fixed font sizes, inconsistently structured, and table-dependent (without even the right mark-up for tables).  Ever heard of the WAI, guys? All of which probably means SFA to 99% of the users.

I've just discovered that the "networking" is fucking useless, too.  Only allows 3 entries and the all have to be role-specific, so if your affiliations or interests are broad or non-specific you're screwed.  You have to confine yourself to just 3 pigeonholes.  It is quite incredible how such a poorly designed and managed system can be so popular.

This page and style not edited with anybody's third-party page-munger, but by my own fair hand.  But then I am a professional Übergeek.  Need a hand with yours?  Ask me nicely, and I may be inclined to help.

Marie Curie; Albert Einstein; Norma Jean Baker; David Daniel Kominski; Yuri Gagarin; David Niven; Peter Sellers; Bill Hicks; Frank Zappa; Akira Kurosawa; Farrokh Bulsara.

Bugger - they're all dead.

Actually, I don't get starry-eyed about so-called "celebrities".  I have met a number of well-known people in my time, but I am only interested in knowing them if they can converse as people, without all the fame baggage.  Living and working in London it is possible to bump into some very interesting people, quite by chance.  It is also possible to be sociable without being intrusive, and the reward is often a stimulating conversation.

People I would like to meet who probably fall into the "famous but approachable" include Billy Connolly (because he's very clever, very funny, has a keen eye for people, and is earthy in his humour) and Derek Dick (a.k.a. Fish) (because by all accounts his musical interests - including his own work - overlap very significantly with my own).  I imagine Terry Jones and Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) would also be great to talk to - after all they aren't just very funny comedian's but very intelligent, too.  I'm less sure about John Cleese who, though very funny, I feel may well be a little remote.  Terry Gilliam is just plain bonkers, as far as I can tell, and might well be worth meeting although I somehow doubt the memories would make any kind of sense after the fact.  I'd love to spend an afternoon discussing film style with Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott (provided the latter was in a decent mood, which by some accounts is not often).

I would probably like to meet John (Ozzy) Osbourne, but without the rest of the lunatic clan in tow.  I admire Sharon for her strength, in so many ways, but I would want to have a quiet chat with the man behind the "reformed" pariah without intrusion, and I simply cannot imagine that happening with any of the others in the room to interfere.

I wouldn't want to meet anyone who has "found" religion - you know the sort so new to their beliefs that they consider it their duty to bombard you with "truth".  Truth is too subjective, religious truth doubly so.

With that in mind, I would like to get a first-hand account from Neil Armstrong - who holds very strong religious beliefs - of his first steps on the moon.  This might reasonably be judged as wanting to meet the celebrity not the person.

If I could pick any one famous person to spend a day hanging with, it would absolutely have to be Alice Cooper (which although not his birth name is, apparently, his legal name, but I'd want to spend time the person not the persona).  The guy has done it all, been through the wringer, and come out the other side and still manages to face the dark side of his creativity head on...

And of course I'd like to meet you because you actually bothered to read all this guff.  Anyone that obsessive has to be on my wavelength.

Blimey - all they asked was who I wanted to meet and ended up getting a flaming essay!

PS: Don't make too much of either appearing or disappearing from my top friends. I just shuffle them from time to time. If you disappear it doesn't mean I like you any less.