Telephones.
I hate the fuckers.
You all know my views on mobile telephones, but I think my advice to the fuckwits who use mobiles on my commuter train bears repeating:
"Now … heads up, mobile phone users. If you don't want to be wearing that thing up your arse, here's a little piece of advice (this is best read slowly and clearly, as if to a small child):
• First up: the concept of the "telephone":
If you speak into your "telephone", the person you're connected to can hear your voice coming out of their "telephone". Just because they may be miles away doesn't mean you have to SHOUT to make them hear you.
Related to this point: If you cannot hear them clearly over the noise of the train, shouting at them is unlikely to resolve the problem. They will, in all likelihood, be holding their phone at arms length because you're so fucking LOUD! It also causes other mobile users around you to stick a finger in their ear and raise their own voices, and is therefore counterproductive.
The urge to talk loudly if you cannot hear somebody else speaking is caused by "Basic Stupidity".
We now move on to "Advanced Stupidity".
• "Hi. It's me. I'm on the train".
Whoever is waiting for you at the end of your journey (and one day it might be me, with a nasty headache and a baseball bat), you need only call them if you MISS the train, or if it breaks down. Should your partner be so insecure and pathetic that they need to be constantly informed of your whereabouts, ditch them NOW and get a life. Grow up, for Chrissakes!
"Postgraduate Stupidity" includes the following:
• The constant, repetitive and loud barking of the word "Yeah" merely informs those around you that you are a moron who would lose a drooling contest with George Bush.
• Using your inane laugh as punctuation when you speak merely highlights the fact that the tedious drivel spewing from your mouth does SO not justify your whinnying cackle at the end of every boring sentence. If you were that funny, we would all be laughing. Look around you. We are not …
• Secretaries: If your boss fucks off early, leaving you slaving late in the office, then phones you from the train to ask about some email or tell you something he should have told you before he left: get a new job. He is a worthless piece of shit who clearly does not deserve you.
• In the thousands of train journeys I have suffered since the dawn of mobile technology, I could count on the fingers of one hand the words I have heard bellowed into phones that actually needed to be said. THINK before letting a carriage full of annoyed people know how utterly worthless your life is and how fucking BORING you are.
• Your ringtone is neither cool nor amusing."
As well as hating those fucking things and wanting to kill - in amusing and protracted ways - anyone who uses one near me, I hate ALL telephones with a vengeance.
The thought of having one actually follow me around gives me the creeping horrors.
I seem to have developed a kind of phone-phobia over the decades.
Every piece of bad news, be it deaths, disasters, heartbreak and general "change my life in a really unpleasant way" crap has come at me down the phone and I shudder with apprehension whenever one of the bastards rings.
Six people know my phone number and I really wish they didn't.
And they know to only phone me between 8 and 9 PM as the mute goes on after that and ring all you like, I'm not going to hear it.
If what you have to say is not worth popping round to say to me face to face, then it's probably not worth saying at all, so shut the fuck up.
Emails are bad enough, in that - if one doesn't wish to appear rude - they demand an instant reply.
I wish to appear rude.
I wish we could all just go back to writing letters.
That's one of the things I like about blogging (and why I don't leave my email address where people can see it); that I can communicate with my blogpals when I feel like it.
When the phone rings I'll often just ignore it as shouting "FUCK OFF!" can sometimes set a conversation off on the wrong foot.
I'm an antisocial and grumpy old fucker and I'm only good to talk to when I'm in the mood to talk.
This has been a public information announcement for those who don't like to be told to fuck off.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Ah, Innocent Romance …
Right!
Let's get nauseating!
Let's plumb the fœtid depths of squirming embarrassment.
It's time to talk of the perils of underage drinking.
It's time to talk of the deep, traumatic horror and shame of getting off with a friend because you're both too drunk and horny to stop.
It's time to talk of "The First Kiss"!
Ew …
My first serious kiss coincided tragically with the first time I got really - and I mean really - drunk.
The year: 1972.
The place: Sir John Leman Grammar School for girly swots.
The event: The Lower School Christmas Party.
The girl: Janet K_, a good friend who luckily (thank God) saw the funny side and remained a good friend for many years - before marrying the vicar's son … So much for sanity.
Let's set the scene for this Gothick tale of debauchery:
Young Dive and my K2 canoe-buddy, the equally young Bav, both spivved up in crap paisley shirts and flares - Hey! This was 1972! We were HOT! - enter the darkened school hall (a temporary and very dreadful disco) and head for the bar like the seasoned drinkers we plainly are not.
We've only just turned fourteen but we have no trouble getting served.
The guys behind the bar like us. We both play lead guitar in local bands and we both write, illustrate, print and distribute Mawkin, the satirical evil twin of the "official" school magazine, which has just got banned from every store in town (and the two of us told in no uncertain terms to tone things down) for the Christmas Issue cover picture of Santa with a huge beard shaped suspiciously like a cock and balls (I was rather proud of that one - and the fact that it had sold several hundred copies before anyone complained).
Anyhoo, Adnams will be Adnams (the world's finest beer) and stupid little boys will be stupid little boys and before long we had got ourselves totally shit-faced.
Boy, oh boy, we were young, we were genuinely falling-down drunk and we were loving it.
To the extent that when all the lights suddenly came on in the hall and the party stumbled to a halt, we were just about capable of looking up and going "Ooooh!" but totally incapable of realising why everyone was glaring at us until we had been roughly shoved aside from the bank of light switches that we happened to be leaning on.
Oops!
Shortly after that, Bav decided rather wisely to go live in the bathroom and commune with the spirits of the toilet bowl, which left me to reel and stagger around by myself.
Never having been drunk to the point of helpless imbecility before, I could see no downside whatsoever to the sudden and dizzyingly tempting notion of shoving my sweaty, beer-breathed, pimply kid's face at the prettiest girl I could find and I headed into the fray with lechery in mind, a lopsided smile and a belch of hope.
Of course, Vivian P_, the girl I fancied most was surrounded by guys much older than me but my inebriated eyes - after whirling around the room a few times - finally focused upon poor Janet, sitting with a few of our friends … and a thought formed in the beery recesses of my mind … It went something along the lines of "Hey! Janet's pretty, and right now I happen to be God's gift to teenage girls! Woohoo!"
I remember leaning over her and swaying a lot (I needed to hold onto the wall to keep myself from falling over) and - much to the hilarity of our friends - turning on the drooling, drunken idiot charm …
And it WORKED!
(Perhaps it's time I tried it again … perhaps not).
With the somewhat astonishing result that a few short minutes later, I left the party arm in arm with a very tipsy but undeniably pretty girl and - thanks to wicked Uncle Alcohol - nary an inhibition between us.
Somewhat inevitably, what started as a beer-fuelled snog-fest in the woods down the road was soon getting well out of hand …
All I can say is thank God I was too drunk to go any further than we did.
Holy crap.
The cold air sobered us both up just sufficiently to induce a creeping horror at what we were doing and with whom, but the booze, our rampant teen hormones and the fact that we were both hornier than a roomful of rhinos urged us on to ever more hideous excesses of clumsy, fumbling, slavering lust until (mercifully) the freezing December air - biting into bits that are not supposed to be exposed to it - prevented us just in time from discovering alcohol's hilarious and inevitable combination of increased libido and decreased ability.
What made the trauma deeper and more horrifying for us both was - having been too insensible to stray out of sight of the path - being discovered by two of our friends (Hi, Larry and Susan) whilst trying to get dressed; doing up buttons as only a pair of hopeless drunks can whilst still slobbering over one another like a particularly nasty re-make of Turner and Hooch.
It was a small town and we had a lot of mutual friends and looking back on it, that Christmas - with our desperate attempts at denial and our frenzied avoiding of one another - was pretty darned funny.
We never did date after that, out of pure shame.
Shit, it took us weeks to even LOOK at one another again!
Fortunately, the sheer stupidity of our drunken misadventure, together with our friends' constant ridicule and laughter, helped us to see the funny side.
And Mum's remark - when the gang came round our house - of "Where's Janet tonight? Have you two fallen out?"
I still wince at the memory.
Let that be a lesson to any of you who think your teenage kids are well-behaved, don't drink and aren't likely to come home pregnant.
Kids … Huh!
Young, dumb, and full of cum.
Just add booze …
Now fess up, people.
Your own "first kiss" stories.
All the gory details; all the shame and embarrassment.
You know you want to.
Let's get nauseating!
Let's plumb the fœtid depths of squirming embarrassment.
It's time to talk of the perils of underage drinking.
It's time to talk of the deep, traumatic horror and shame of getting off with a friend because you're both too drunk and horny to stop.
It's time to talk of "The First Kiss"!
Ew …
My first serious kiss coincided tragically with the first time I got really - and I mean really - drunk.
The year: 1972.
The place: Sir John Leman Grammar School for girly swots.
The event: The Lower School Christmas Party.
The girl: Janet K_, a good friend who luckily (thank God) saw the funny side and remained a good friend for many years - before marrying the vicar's son … So much for sanity.
Let's set the scene for this Gothick tale of debauchery:
Young Dive and my K2 canoe-buddy, the equally young Bav, both spivved up in crap paisley shirts and flares - Hey! This was 1972! We were HOT! - enter the darkened school hall (a temporary and very dreadful disco) and head for the bar like the seasoned drinkers we plainly are not.
We've only just turned fourteen but we have no trouble getting served.
The guys behind the bar like us. We both play lead guitar in local bands and we both write, illustrate, print and distribute Mawkin, the satirical evil twin of the "official" school magazine, which has just got banned from every store in town (and the two of us told in no uncertain terms to tone things down) for the Christmas Issue cover picture of Santa with a huge beard shaped suspiciously like a cock and balls (I was rather proud of that one - and the fact that it had sold several hundred copies before anyone complained).
Anyhoo, Adnams will be Adnams (the world's finest beer) and stupid little boys will be stupid little boys and before long we had got ourselves totally shit-faced.
Boy, oh boy, we were young, we were genuinely falling-down drunk and we were loving it.
To the extent that when all the lights suddenly came on in the hall and the party stumbled to a halt, we were just about capable of looking up and going "Ooooh!" but totally incapable of realising why everyone was glaring at us until we had been roughly shoved aside from the bank of light switches that we happened to be leaning on.
Oops!
Shortly after that, Bav decided rather wisely to go live in the bathroom and commune with the spirits of the toilet bowl, which left me to reel and stagger around by myself.
Never having been drunk to the point of helpless imbecility before, I could see no downside whatsoever to the sudden and dizzyingly tempting notion of shoving my sweaty, beer-breathed, pimply kid's face at the prettiest girl I could find and I headed into the fray with lechery in mind, a lopsided smile and a belch of hope.
Of course, Vivian P_, the girl I fancied most was surrounded by guys much older than me but my inebriated eyes - after whirling around the room a few times - finally focused upon poor Janet, sitting with a few of our friends … and a thought formed in the beery recesses of my mind … It went something along the lines of "Hey! Janet's pretty, and right now I happen to be God's gift to teenage girls! Woohoo!"
I remember leaning over her and swaying a lot (I needed to hold onto the wall to keep myself from falling over) and - much to the hilarity of our friends - turning on the drooling, drunken idiot charm …
And it WORKED!
(Perhaps it's time I tried it again … perhaps not).
With the somewhat astonishing result that a few short minutes later, I left the party arm in arm with a very tipsy but undeniably pretty girl and - thanks to wicked Uncle Alcohol - nary an inhibition between us.
Somewhat inevitably, what started as a beer-fuelled snog-fest in the woods down the road was soon getting well out of hand …
All I can say is thank God I was too drunk to go any further than we did.
Holy crap.
The cold air sobered us both up just sufficiently to induce a creeping horror at what we were doing and with whom, but the booze, our rampant teen hormones and the fact that we were both hornier than a roomful of rhinos urged us on to ever more hideous excesses of clumsy, fumbling, slavering lust until (mercifully) the freezing December air - biting into bits that are not supposed to be exposed to it - prevented us just in time from discovering alcohol's hilarious and inevitable combination of increased libido and decreased ability.
What made the trauma deeper and more horrifying for us both was - having been too insensible to stray out of sight of the path - being discovered by two of our friends (Hi, Larry and Susan) whilst trying to get dressed; doing up buttons as only a pair of hopeless drunks can whilst still slobbering over one another like a particularly nasty re-make of Turner and Hooch.
It was a small town and we had a lot of mutual friends and looking back on it, that Christmas - with our desperate attempts at denial and our frenzied avoiding of one another - was pretty darned funny.
We never did date after that, out of pure shame.
Shit, it took us weeks to even LOOK at one another again!
Fortunately, the sheer stupidity of our drunken misadventure, together with our friends' constant ridicule and laughter, helped us to see the funny side.
And Mum's remark - when the gang came round our house - of "Where's Janet tonight? Have you two fallen out?"
I still wince at the memory.
Let that be a lesson to any of you who think your teenage kids are well-behaved, don't drink and aren't likely to come home pregnant.
Kids … Huh!
Young, dumb, and full of cum.
Just add booze …
Now fess up, people.
Your own "first kiss" stories.
All the gory details; all the shame and embarrassment.
You know you want to.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Monday Crapfest
After delving into my vinyl for yesterday's post, this morning on the train I donned rubber gloves and waders (just for pleasure) and mounted an expedition to the nether reaches of my iPod in search of "unfortunate" musical choices.
Under the various genres of music, some distance beyond Apple's own "Unclassifiable" label, sits a genre I have named "Just Plain Wrong."
Let's go inside and sample the strangeness …
Hokay:
The wrongest thing on my iPod without doubt is still Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins."
On my very first blog post I reviewed this record thus:
"The Hobbit Song by Leonard Nimoy (yes, THAT Leonard Nimoy). Not currently available anywhere, as far as I know, but well worth maiming a friend for. Mad as a chocolate hat. Nimoy, what the fuck were you thinking? This is JUST PLAIN WRONG!
There's a video to go with it, too. I caught it once on late night tv and laughed so hard my dinner came out my nose."
And then our wonderful Betty actually tracked down the wrongest video of the wrongest song ever recorded.
But as her link no longer works, here it is, on YouTube:
Next up comes "Sabbatum" by Rondellus.
This is … erm … an album of Black Sabbath covers sung in Latin by a Finnish mediæval music collective.
They are all arranged as plainsong (like Gregorian chants) and it actually makes splendid dinner music. Lovely echoey choral voices singing in harmony.
Until your brain begins to unravel the tune to "War Pigs".
The word "strange" doesn't begin to do this record justice.
Amongst the other weird shit on my pod is my vast collection of obscure sixties psychedelia, including the impossibly wonderful "Granny Takes A Trip" by The Purple Gang and "So Much In Love", a song by poet Roger Mc.Gough and Paul Mc.Cartney's brother Mike Mc.Gear, which features Macca and a certain Jimi Hendrix playing lead guitar all over it. Rare and spiffy.
Then there's Big Black's gloriously trashy lo-fi album "Songs About Fucking" which delivers exactly what it says.
And Bongwater covering bizarre pædo-baldy Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll, Part 2".
Plus a speeded-up punk version of the theme tune to "The Banana Splits", by The Dickies (digitised from my yellow vinyl 7-incher).
An honourable mention must go to "Tony Benn's Greatest Hits", which is essentially a collection of parliamentary speeches by our greatest living socialist, set to trip-hop chill-out music.
Groovy and educational in equal measure, and actually very good indeed.
There is of course a plethora of stupidly obscure blues and country and parlour music recordings from the early years of the twentieth century.
And my wonderful party CD of traditional sea shanties and pirate songs.
The title of "Weirdest of the Weird", however, must go to the "so scratchy it's unlistenable" version, digitised from my 78rpm original (found in a junk shop pile of 78s in the seventies) of "The Laughing Yodeler", by the magnificently named "O. Joy and B. Gay".
Splendid.
So what's the weirdest thing in your iPod?
Under the various genres of music, some distance beyond Apple's own "Unclassifiable" label, sits a genre I have named "Just Plain Wrong."
Let's go inside and sample the strangeness …
Hokay:
The wrongest thing on my iPod without doubt is still Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins."
On my very first blog post I reviewed this record thus:
"The Hobbit Song by Leonard Nimoy (yes, THAT Leonard Nimoy). Not currently available anywhere, as far as I know, but well worth maiming a friend for. Mad as a chocolate hat. Nimoy, what the fuck were you thinking? This is JUST PLAIN WRONG!
There's a video to go with it, too. I caught it once on late night tv and laughed so hard my dinner came out my nose."
And then our wonderful Betty actually tracked down the wrongest video of the wrongest song ever recorded.
But as her link no longer works, here it is, on YouTube:
Next up comes "Sabbatum" by Rondellus.
This is … erm … an album of Black Sabbath covers sung in Latin by a Finnish mediæval music collective.
They are all arranged as plainsong (like Gregorian chants) and it actually makes splendid dinner music. Lovely echoey choral voices singing in harmony.
Until your brain begins to unravel the tune to "War Pigs".
The word "strange" doesn't begin to do this record justice.
Amongst the other weird shit on my pod is my vast collection of obscure sixties psychedelia, including the impossibly wonderful "Granny Takes A Trip" by The Purple Gang and "So Much In Love", a song by poet Roger Mc.Gough and Paul Mc.Cartney's brother Mike Mc.Gear, which features Macca and a certain Jimi Hendrix playing lead guitar all over it. Rare and spiffy.
Then there's Big Black's gloriously trashy lo-fi album "Songs About Fucking" which delivers exactly what it says.
And Bongwater covering bizarre pædo-baldy Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll, Part 2".
Plus a speeded-up punk version of the theme tune to "The Banana Splits", by The Dickies (digitised from my yellow vinyl 7-incher).
An honourable mention must go to "Tony Benn's Greatest Hits", which is essentially a collection of parliamentary speeches by our greatest living socialist, set to trip-hop chill-out music.
Groovy and educational in equal measure, and actually very good indeed.
There is of course a plethora of stupidly obscure blues and country and parlour music recordings from the early years of the twentieth century.
And my wonderful party CD of traditional sea shanties and pirate songs.
The title of "Weirdest of the Weird", however, must go to the "so scratchy it's unlistenable" version, digitised from my 78rpm original (found in a junk shop pile of 78s in the seventies) of "The Laughing Yodeler", by the magnificently named "O. Joy and B. Gay".
Splendid.
So what's the weirdest thing in your iPod?
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Call The Taste Police!
Oh, shit.
There I was hoping that Maria would post a meme that wasn't one of mine so I could post something to relieve my blogger's block, when Betty chips in with this horror-fest:
"List ten records in your collection that no man (or woman or child or even an Australian) should ever confess to owning."
How to destroy my credibility completely and forever in one short blogpost.
Right … Let the shaming begin:
1 - Apple Records catalogue number 002: Mary Hopkin - "Those Were The Days".
In mitigation, I was such a huge Beatles fan in '68 that when they started their own record label I decided to collect everything on it.
And it is a great song for drunken Russian dancing.
Sing along:
"Once upon a time there was a tavern … etc."
2 - The most horrendously embarrassing pile of tosh I ever bought: "Olias of Sunhillow" by Jon Anderson out of Yes.
Holy fuck! A forty-five minute long, unflushable turd of the most fœtid, stinking dregs of twee, sub-hobbit twaddle, sung in a squeaky voice by a man who took elves just a teensy bit too seriously.
And I bought the fucking thing!
Kill me now.
3 - "Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere" by the otherwise splendid Bob Geldof.
Okay, Bob … You were depressed. So was your songwriting talent. Believe me; this one should have stayed in the saddo diary and never come out.
4 - Yngwie Malmsteen's dire widdle-fest, "Odyssey."
What the fuck was I thinking? My head is in my hands and I am weeping like a girl.
5 - "Not Fragile", by Bachman Turner Overdrive.
Actually, this is Phil's. I think I borrowed it in 1974 but he's just been too embarrassed to ask for it back.
6 - Dammit! I've failed a meme!
I have thousands of records and well over a thousand CDs and I cannot really say I am embarrassed by any of them except the above.
I am a meme failure.
I cannot get it up.
Five out of ten.
What a gyp.
Oh, well … at least those five would bring me a death sentence on any planet with taste.
Your turn to fess up, peeps.
There I was hoping that Maria would post a meme that wasn't one of mine so I could post something to relieve my blogger's block, when Betty chips in with this horror-fest:
"List ten records in your collection that no man (or woman or child or even an Australian) should ever confess to owning."
How to destroy my credibility completely and forever in one short blogpost.
Right … Let the shaming begin:
1 - Apple Records catalogue number 002: Mary Hopkin - "Those Were The Days".
In mitigation, I was such a huge Beatles fan in '68 that when they started their own record label I decided to collect everything on it.
And it is a great song for drunken Russian dancing.
Sing along:
"Once upon a time there was a tavern … etc."
2 - The most horrendously embarrassing pile of tosh I ever bought: "Olias of Sunhillow" by Jon Anderson out of Yes.
Holy fuck! A forty-five minute long, unflushable turd of the most fœtid, stinking dregs of twee, sub-hobbit twaddle, sung in a squeaky voice by a man who took elves just a teensy bit too seriously.
And I bought the fucking thing!
Kill me now.
3 - "Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere" by the otherwise splendid Bob Geldof.
Okay, Bob … You were depressed. So was your songwriting talent. Believe me; this one should have stayed in the saddo diary and never come out.
4 - Yngwie Malmsteen's dire widdle-fest, "Odyssey."
What the fuck was I thinking? My head is in my hands and I am weeping like a girl.
5 - "Not Fragile", by Bachman Turner Overdrive.
Actually, this is Phil's. I think I borrowed it in 1974 but he's just been too embarrassed to ask for it back.
6 - Dammit! I've failed a meme!
I have thousands of records and well over a thousand CDs and I cannot really say I am embarrassed by any of them except the above.
I am a meme failure.
I cannot get it up.
Five out of ten.
What a gyp.
Oh, well … at least those five would bring me a death sentence on any planet with taste.
Your turn to fess up, peeps.
Nothing Day
It's Sunday.
It's gloriously sunny (but cold enough to almost freeze my fingers to the car when I washed it this morning).
Current status:
Dusting and polishing and dancing round the house to Belly.
Completely and utterly blog-dried.
I have nothing to write about.
Can't you guess?
Hey ho.
It's gloriously sunny (but cold enough to almost freeze my fingers to the car when I washed it this morning).
Current status:
Dusting and polishing and dancing round the house to Belly.
Completely and utterly blog-dried.
I have nothing to write about.
Can't you guess?
Hey ho.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Mmmmmm … Cake …
Hey ho.
Just back from mother's place in Suffolk.
She asked if I'd help her get a wedding cake down to a riverside hotel. The cakes she bakes and decorates are heavy and extremely fragile, so it's always a bit of a fraught operation.
Especially with this one. The bride and groom wanted hibiscus flowers … yeah, right … Mum's great at flowers, but how the hell do you make hibiscus flowers out of sugar paste and food colouring?
Anyhoo, after much hair-tearing and swearing and off-loading cake-related trauma on Phil and me, she finished it and we managed to get it through Saturday afternoon traffic chaos and down a bumpy old mediæval street to the river and here it is:
Mum looking very relieved. If anyone breaks the flowers now it's not her responsibility.
Take the money and run!
The cake.
Those pesky hibiscus flowers
Just back from mother's place in Suffolk.
She asked if I'd help her get a wedding cake down to a riverside hotel. The cakes she bakes and decorates are heavy and extremely fragile, so it's always a bit of a fraught operation.
Especially with this one. The bride and groom wanted hibiscus flowers … yeah, right … Mum's great at flowers, but how the hell do you make hibiscus flowers out of sugar paste and food colouring?
Anyhoo, after much hair-tearing and swearing and off-loading cake-related trauma on Phil and me, she finished it and we managed to get it through Saturday afternoon traffic chaos and down a bumpy old mediæval street to the river and here it is:
Mum looking very relieved. If anyone breaks the flowers now it's not her responsibility.
Take the money and run!
The cake.
Those pesky hibiscus flowers
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Sunny Lunchtime
Hey! A non-Buffy post!
On my way back from this morning's meeting I had to swing by City Hall, so I popped across the street to the BBC to visit Joy in her radio studio (sorry, Joy; I nicked your photo), but I missed her by twenty minutes … DOH!
Better luck next time …
So anyhoo; I wandered back to my car via the Castle.
This is a Barbara Hepworth "Sea" piece that she did for the Castle Gardens in 1964. I've loved it since I was a kid.
It used to stand the other side of the moat but this is a nicer spot for it, just beside the outdoor theatre.
On my way back from this morning's meeting I had to swing by City Hall, so I popped across the street to the BBC to visit Joy in her radio studio (sorry, Joy; I nicked your photo), but I missed her by twenty minutes … DOH!
Better luck next time …
So anyhoo; I wandered back to my car via the Castle.
This is a Barbara Hepworth "Sea" piece that she did for the Castle Gardens in 1964. I've loved it since I was a kid.
It used to stand the other side of the moat but this is a nicer spot for it, just beside the outdoor theatre.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Know Your Chicken
Wow!
Kate, our champion Buffster suffered a temporary memory-fritz and actually had to Google for the answer to the way too easy quiz in the previous, worthless filler post … though she compensated with some gloriously bitchy trivia notes of her own.
Time for some answers, then.
Time to put the Buffsters out of their collective misery and for the rest of you to go "Yeah … Whatever … I couldn't give a shit."
In answer to the questions:
"Where, doing what, and wearing what colour lipstick did John and Yoko's sprog, Sean Lennon appear as himself in Buffy The Vampire Slayer?", I refer you to the opening episode of Series 2 … Whaddya mean you don't have it on DVD? Go out and buy it now!
Let's set the scene:
For the unBuffsters among you (Hi, Robyn and Lynn and Katherine), Buffy is set in the fictional Southern California town of Sunnydale, down at the scuzzier end of which is a nightclub and occasional vampire hangout called The Bronze.
Rather than just have some crappy DJ and backing track, those lovely, cuddly Buffy production folk decided to support live music and especially up-coming and cool bands; the upshot being that every scene set in the nightclub has totally groovy acts up on stage.
Even cooler; the acts were never mentioned in the credits; you had to search out posters in the background or dotted around the town/school/college to discover who they were, then look 'em up and try out their stuff.
So … Series two; episode one:
There on stage at The Bronze, doing his regular day-job playing bass for one of the grooviest bands ever to hit this planet was young Sean Lennon.
The band was - of course - the sadly defunct but weird, wacky and wonderful Cibo Matto, fronted by oddball Japanese girls Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda (the latter of whom young Lennon was dating at the time).
They performed the strange, dancey "Spoon" and the languorously sexy and gorgeous "Sugar Water", while Buffy (in full-on slut mode as Kate points out) and Xander practiced foreplay on the dance-floor.
For reasons best known to himself, Sean was wearing icky blue lipstick (see the screengrabs below for the full awfulness).
If you don't already have all their stuff, you should check out Cibo Matto.
They're what happens when Japanese girlie-pop weirdness crashes into the New York Art Rock crowd and starts dancing.
If I mention that such awesome luminaries as guitarist Marc Ribot and Medeski and Martin from MMW acted as their sidemen, our musicians - or Vic at least - will start drooling.
The music on Buffy (like the scripts and the acting) was frankly, pretty fucking astonishing for a TV show.
With the exception of Oz the werewolf's band "Dingoes Ate My Baby", every act on the show was for real.
Even the Dingoes were pretty good (they played real songs by LA band Four Star Mary, who also played the Bronze as themselves).
Veruca's band were in reality trip-hop duo T.H.C. posing as Sunnydale locals.
Occasionally, a fairly major mainstream artist would play at The Bronze, such as Aimee Mann or Michelle Branch (Sarah Mc.Lachlan provided the music for the Buffy/Angel luurve thang), but mostly it was just great and groovy indie bands, the likes of Sprung Monkey, Dashboard Prophets, Curve, Darling Violetta and of course, the über-groovy Cibo Matto themselves.
Outside of The Bronze there was music in other parts of town; the gloriously monickered punky songstress Bif Naked played a few songs with her band at a U.C.Sunnydale frat party.
And of course - as Kate and I both know and love - spiffy English librarian and "watcher" Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head; the Gold Blend coffee man of our youth and Prime Minister of Little Britain), played and sang an utterly hilarious and cringe-inducing version of The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" at the downtown coffee bar (Pump), plus - thankfully in the privacy of his own house - a chortlesome cover of Freebird on acoustic guitar and, best of all, a wonderfully camp, Meatloaf-esque, cod-metal "Epiphany", live at The Bronze, backed by Four Star Mary and the show's main orchestral music composer, Christophe Beck.
So many tongues lodged so deeply in so many cheeks.
Watch him and wince.
Other bands that the production staff thought were cool didn't actually get to appear at The Bronze but in snatches of music coming from various places. However, there was always a poster up somewhere or a sticker on someone's locker to inform you of who was making that cool sound; probably the best being Boulder's bluegrass/zydeco funsters "Leftover Salmon", whose posters adorn Sunnydale in series four.
Weirldy, the orchestral music for series 5 and 6 was provided by someone calling himself Thomas Wanker.
Ahem …
Oh, and Nerf Herder played the glorious Buffy theme tune (covered brilliantly by Kim Deal's post-Pixies, girlie thrashfest "The Breeders" - available on the CD "Radio Springfield").
And I've not even started on Christophe Beck's incidental music or indeed the fabulous, all singing, all dancing "musical" episode "Once More, With Feeling" (which - on my DVD's special features, has a "Karaoke" version, which puts up subtitles of the lyrics so you can have a singalong party)! Come on over, Kate!
Or - come to that - Buffy's "yummy sushi pyjamas" … not a musical item but a scene that will forever make me twitch in all the right places.
Get a life?
Who needs it?
I have Buffy.
Quiz answers: On stage at The Bronze …
… playing bass with Cibo Matto …
… and wearing icky blue lipstick.
Giles plays The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" at Coffee Pump
Anya, Willow, Xander and Tara watch in horror.
Kate, our champion Buffster suffered a temporary memory-fritz and actually had to Google for the answer to the way too easy quiz in the previous, worthless filler post … though she compensated with some gloriously bitchy trivia notes of her own.
Time for some answers, then.
Time to put the Buffsters out of their collective misery and for the rest of you to go "Yeah … Whatever … I couldn't give a shit."
In answer to the questions:
"Where, doing what, and wearing what colour lipstick did John and Yoko's sprog, Sean Lennon appear as himself in Buffy The Vampire Slayer?", I refer you to the opening episode of Series 2 … Whaddya mean you don't have it on DVD? Go out and buy it now!
Let's set the scene:
For the unBuffsters among you (Hi, Robyn and Lynn and Katherine), Buffy is set in the fictional Southern California town of Sunnydale, down at the scuzzier end of which is a nightclub and occasional vampire hangout called The Bronze.
Rather than just have some crappy DJ and backing track, those lovely, cuddly Buffy production folk decided to support live music and especially up-coming and cool bands; the upshot being that every scene set in the nightclub has totally groovy acts up on stage.
Even cooler; the acts were never mentioned in the credits; you had to search out posters in the background or dotted around the town/school/college to discover who they were, then look 'em up and try out their stuff.
So … Series two; episode one:
There on stage at The Bronze, doing his regular day-job playing bass for one of the grooviest bands ever to hit this planet was young Sean Lennon.
The band was - of course - the sadly defunct but weird, wacky and wonderful Cibo Matto, fronted by oddball Japanese girls Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda (the latter of whom young Lennon was dating at the time).
They performed the strange, dancey "Spoon" and the languorously sexy and gorgeous "Sugar Water", while Buffy (in full-on slut mode as Kate points out) and Xander practiced foreplay on the dance-floor.
For reasons best known to himself, Sean was wearing icky blue lipstick (see the screengrabs below for the full awfulness).
If you don't already have all their stuff, you should check out Cibo Matto.
They're what happens when Japanese girlie-pop weirdness crashes into the New York Art Rock crowd and starts dancing.
If I mention that such awesome luminaries as guitarist Marc Ribot and Medeski and Martin from MMW acted as their sidemen, our musicians - or Vic at least - will start drooling.
The music on Buffy (like the scripts and the acting) was frankly, pretty fucking astonishing for a TV show.
With the exception of Oz the werewolf's band "Dingoes Ate My Baby", every act on the show was for real.
Even the Dingoes were pretty good (they played real songs by LA band Four Star Mary, who also played the Bronze as themselves).
Veruca's band were in reality trip-hop duo T.H.C. posing as Sunnydale locals.
Occasionally, a fairly major mainstream artist would play at The Bronze, such as Aimee Mann or Michelle Branch (Sarah Mc.Lachlan provided the music for the Buffy/Angel luurve thang), but mostly it was just great and groovy indie bands, the likes of Sprung Monkey, Dashboard Prophets, Curve, Darling Violetta and of course, the über-groovy Cibo Matto themselves.
Outside of The Bronze there was music in other parts of town; the gloriously monickered punky songstress Bif Naked played a few songs with her band at a U.C.Sunnydale frat party.
And of course - as Kate and I both know and love - spiffy English librarian and "watcher" Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head; the Gold Blend coffee man of our youth and Prime Minister of Little Britain), played and sang an utterly hilarious and cringe-inducing version of The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" at the downtown coffee bar (Pump), plus - thankfully in the privacy of his own house - a chortlesome cover of Freebird on acoustic guitar and, best of all, a wonderfully camp, Meatloaf-esque, cod-metal "Epiphany", live at The Bronze, backed by Four Star Mary and the show's main orchestral music composer, Christophe Beck.
So many tongues lodged so deeply in so many cheeks.
Watch him and wince.
Other bands that the production staff thought were cool didn't actually get to appear at The Bronze but in snatches of music coming from various places. However, there was always a poster up somewhere or a sticker on someone's locker to inform you of who was making that cool sound; probably the best being Boulder's bluegrass/zydeco funsters "Leftover Salmon", whose posters adorn Sunnydale in series four.
Weirldy, the orchestral music for series 5 and 6 was provided by someone calling himself Thomas Wanker.
Ahem …
Oh, and Nerf Herder played the glorious Buffy theme tune (covered brilliantly by Kim Deal's post-Pixies, girlie thrashfest "The Breeders" - available on the CD "Radio Springfield").
And I've not even started on Christophe Beck's incidental music or indeed the fabulous, all singing, all dancing "musical" episode "Once More, With Feeling" (which - on my DVD's special features, has a "Karaoke" version, which puts up subtitles of the lyrics so you can have a singalong party)! Come on over, Kate!
Or - come to that - Buffy's "yummy sushi pyjamas" … not a musical item but a scene that will forever make me twitch in all the right places.
Get a life?
Who needs it?
I have Buffy.
Quiz answers: On stage at The Bronze …
… playing bass with Cibo Matto …
… and wearing icky blue lipstick.
Giles plays The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" at Coffee Pump
Anya, Willow, Xander and Tara watch in horror.So there you have it. Yet more boring Buff-Stuff.
Oh, and the post title "Know Your Chicken" is a Cibo Matto song …
Most of their songs are about food or sex - usually both.
Which is as it should be.
(the poster for Oz's band that Willow had up on her wall)
Most of their songs are about food or sex - usually both.
Which is as it should be.
(the poster for Oz's band that Willow had up on her wall)Your Time Starts … Now
Pop quiz …
Hokay.
One question (in three parts) …
… and don't Google this; a wrong but silly answer still gets points.
"Where and doing what (and wearing what colour lipstick) did John and Yoko's "Beautiful Boy" Sean Lennon make a cameo appearance in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, playing … er … John and Yoko's "Beautiful Boy" Sean Lennon?"
Answer (with screengrabs) in the next post.
Apologies to the un-Buffsters for yet more Buffy, but that's what you get when I re-watch the whole seven series, and I have a busy day ahead and may not have time to post anything worth reading.
Apologies to Kate for this being too easy.
Hokay.
One question (in three parts) …
… and don't Google this; a wrong but silly answer still gets points.
"Where and doing what (and wearing what colour lipstick) did John and Yoko's "Beautiful Boy" Sean Lennon make a cameo appearance in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, playing … er … John and Yoko's "Beautiful Boy" Sean Lennon?"
Answer (with screengrabs) in the next post.
Apologies to the un-Buffsters for yet more Buffy, but that's what you get when I re-watch the whole seven series, and I have a busy day ahead and may not have time to post anything worth reading.
Apologies to Kate for this being too easy.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
New Atlantis
I found this rather splendid Cluff cartoon in today's Private Eye on the train on my way home.
It made me think of our Lynn and the plight of the residents of Tewkesbury.
For all of the latest news and photos from New Atlantis, float on over to Lynn's photoblog.
Shudder at the view from her window.
I once lived in a house that flooded. That's the main reason I now live on a hill.
Much as I like the thought of our lovely Lynn getting all moist, I do hope she manages to stay high and dry this year.
It made me think of our Lynn and the plight of the residents of Tewkesbury.
For all of the latest news and photos from New Atlantis, float on over to Lynn's photoblog.
Shudder at the view from her window.
I once lived in a house that flooded. That's the main reason I now live on a hill.
Much as I like the thought of our lovely Lynn getting all moist, I do hope she manages to stay high and dry this year.
Look Up. Pt.11
Back in jolly Westminster this morning, still with residual IT problems (I mean the servers, not the fact that IT trolls only speak Klingon), but at least I can do a little work.
And to keep myself relatively sane I had a nice stroll through Green Park and St.James's Park on my way in.
In the parks, the snowdrops are in full bloom and the great drifts of daffodils are already showing touches of yellow at the tips of their buds, which means I'm going to have to oil and sharpen my stupid lawnmower soon.
Bummer.
Spring's on its way at last, but every silver lining comes with its own cloud.
Anyhoo; I've posted way too many shots of the parks, so this morning I snapped the austere yet wonderful Art Deco headquarters of London Underground, 55, Broadway, above St.James's Park tube station.
This just has to be the creepiest and most uninviting thing to stick over your front door.
Grim, huh?
And those eyes! Brrr …
I'm going to have to get me one.
And to keep myself relatively sane I had a nice stroll through Green Park and St.James's Park on my way in.
In the parks, the snowdrops are in full bloom and the great drifts of daffodils are already showing touches of yellow at the tips of their buds, which means I'm going to have to oil and sharpen my stupid lawnmower soon.
Bummer.
Spring's on its way at last, but every silver lining comes with its own cloud.
Anyhoo; I've posted way too many shots of the parks, so this morning I snapped the austere yet wonderful Art Deco headquarters of London Underground, 55, Broadway, above St.James's Park tube station.
This just has to be the creepiest and most uninviting thing to stick over your front door.
Grim, huh?
And those eyes! Brrr …
I'm going to have to get me one.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Quick, Crappy Filler
Hey ho.
Five hours in to London this morning on the crappy trains (it's Monday … it must be "over-running engineering works"), to find all the computers and servers down (again), so I came back here to work from home and the crappy trains were even worse so having got up at 4:40 this morning to get to work I am now about to start my working day at 4:05 in the afternoon.
I'll catch up on my blogging obligations when I can.
A pox on trains and IT departments.
Five hours in to London this morning on the crappy trains (it's Monday … it must be "over-running engineering works"), to find all the computers and servers down (again), so I came back here to work from home and the crappy trains were even worse so having got up at 4:40 this morning to get to work I am now about to start my working day at 4:05 in the afternoon.
I'll catch up on my blogging obligations when I can.
A pox on trains and IT departments.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Yet Another Buffy Obsession Post
"Aww Crap!" shout Robyn and Lynn, the un-Buffsters.
Sorry, but when I watch episode one I have to watch all seven series and I get kinda fixated on silly little things in the background, like the stickers in Willow's locker or the obscure band references … or this:
I've known for ages how the nerds who made Buffy vied to out-cool one another with obscure little easter eggs (hidden in-jokes, people … keep up) scattered throughout the programme and I just found another one.
I'm in series four at the moment. Probably the only slightly weak series (though Kate put it a little stronger) but it does have its redeeming moments such as Anya's hilarious seduction of Xander and the cranberry cum-shot; the Spike and Willow "vampire impotence" skit ("I swear this kind of thing's never happened to me before"). Plus some lesbian witches but hey, that's just my own particular thang going on there.
Anyhoo, I was just watching the episode where Oz (for Robyn and Lynn: he's a werewolf) gets the hots for Veruca the lady werewolf and the Scoobies are sitting around at the Bronze and Oz is wearing this teeshirt with 大変 written on it.
Now that's just asking for trouble with Old Dive …
大 is no problem … As any fule kno it is pronounced "おおきい", and it means "BIG".
I thought at first glance that Oz's teeshirt might read "BIG LOVE", but "LOVE" (as in love for the opposite sex) is 恋, which has the same top radical, but with the radical for "HEART" underneath (Awwwww).
変 really got to me, so I did a Giles and hit my Japanese textbooks …
Those sneaky bastards at Buffy Central had me stumped for a good half hour until I finally tracked it down.
It's a pretty obscure kanji with the おん reading of "へん" and the くん reading of "か", usually as the verb "かわる", which means "UNDERGO CHANGE, BE ALTERED or BE TRANSFORMED"
How fucking cool is that for a werewolf to wear on his teeshirt?
Undergo change/be altered/be transformed … BIG TIME!
So … two nerd points to Old Dive and a hundred cool points to those tricksy Buffy backroom folk. Their attention to detail leaves me in awe.
I know I'm sad; you don't have to tell me.
Sorry, but when I watch episode one I have to watch all seven series and I get kinda fixated on silly little things in the background, like the stickers in Willow's locker or the obscure band references … or this:
I've known for ages how the nerds who made Buffy vied to out-cool one another with obscure little easter eggs (hidden in-jokes, people … keep up) scattered throughout the programme and I just found another one.
I'm in series four at the moment. Probably the only slightly weak series (though Kate put it a little stronger) but it does have its redeeming moments such as Anya's hilarious seduction of Xander and the cranberry cum-shot; the Spike and Willow "vampire impotence" skit ("I swear this kind of thing's never happened to me before"). Plus some lesbian witches but hey, that's just my own particular thang going on there.
Anyhoo, I was just watching the episode where Oz (for Robyn and Lynn: he's a werewolf) gets the hots for Veruca the lady werewolf and the Scoobies are sitting around at the Bronze and Oz is wearing this teeshirt with 大変 written on it.
Now that's just asking for trouble with Old Dive …
大 is no problem … As any fule kno it is pronounced "おおきい", and it means "BIG".
I thought at first glance that Oz's teeshirt might read "BIG LOVE", but "LOVE" (as in love for the opposite sex) is 恋, which has the same top radical, but with the radical for "HEART" underneath (Awwwww).
変 really got to me, so I did a Giles and hit my Japanese textbooks …
Those sneaky bastards at Buffy Central had me stumped for a good half hour until I finally tracked it down.
It's a pretty obscure kanji with the おん reading of "へん" and the くん reading of "か", usually as the verb "かわる", which means "UNDERGO CHANGE, BE ALTERED or BE TRANSFORMED"
How fucking cool is that for a werewolf to wear on his teeshirt?
Undergo change/be altered/be transformed … BIG TIME!
大変
So … two nerd points to Old Dive and a hundred cool points to those tricksy Buffy backroom folk. Their attention to detail leaves me in awe.
I know I'm sad; you don't have to tell me.
Spike Lite
Yeah, I know … Why is the man who hates TV posting about a TV programme?
You know me; I try to steer well clear the idiot box, but I do keep in my dusty vaults television's only worthwhile spewings (DVD sets of The Big Box of Buffy, Frasier and The Simpsons) and am currently re-watching Buffy on my big new Mac.
This post is for fellow Buffster Kate, to let her know that when this series arrives on Aussie TV she can watch without fear.
Someone at the office told me this week that the incomparable James Marsters - our beloved Spike from Buffy - has turned up in in the BBC's teen-kiddie, Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood.
I'd actually caught a couple of the first series, which was only made watchable by the weirdly sexy Burn Gorman (who stole the show as Guppy in the Beeb's adaptation of Bleak House), the openly gay, ham-acting Captain Jack and a token sexy Japanese girl.
Spike … Cool as fuck
So this morning, after breakfast in the city, I switch on the Mac, open the Beeb's iPlayer and watch last week's Torchwood.
I almost daren't look.
Spike in a Brit teen show?
Could this ruin him forever?
I needn't have worried … the scriptwriters are very obviously Buffy fanatics.
Hokay: Big flash of light and here he comes; he walks the Spike walk, he talks the Spike talk, but he's now a brunette with an Adam Ant pirate jacket and silly guns … oh, and he's no longer a vampire but some kind of time traveller addicted to sex (men, women, even a poodle), booze, drugs and murder … Kinda like Doctor Who should have been.
So far, so watchable …
Within seconds he's dropped some bloke off the top of a multi-story car park and hits the first Buffy tribute line: "Thirsty now."
Not to spoil things for Kate too much, there follows an hilarious "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope" piss-take, worthy of Buffy; a full on snog-fest with gay Captain Jack (well, several actually), and some chortle-inducing bitching and posturing.
After that is was, rather disappointingly Spike Lite, played for laughs and never quite evil enough (this is British teen TV after all).
Gay fun with Jack and John
So … our Spike survives the transition. He's still kinda residual-cool, bitchily funny and so much more camp than everything else on TV … but it ain't Buffy.
This has been a public service announcement for my fellow Buffsters.
The rest of you can just go watch all seven series of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and discover that - in an ideal world - television can actually be genuinely cool, sexy and funny.
It's just not an ideal world any more.
You know me; I try to steer well clear the idiot box, but I do keep in my dusty vaults television's only worthwhile spewings (DVD sets of The Big Box of Buffy, Frasier and The Simpsons) and am currently re-watching Buffy on my big new Mac.
This post is for fellow Buffster Kate, to let her know that when this series arrives on Aussie TV she can watch without fear.
Someone at the office told me this week that the incomparable James Marsters - our beloved Spike from Buffy - has turned up in in the BBC's teen-kiddie, Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood.
I'd actually caught a couple of the first series, which was only made watchable by the weirdly sexy Burn Gorman (who stole the show as Guppy in the Beeb's adaptation of Bleak House), the openly gay, ham-acting Captain Jack and a token sexy Japanese girl.
Spike … Cool as fuckSo this morning, after breakfast in the city, I switch on the Mac, open the Beeb's iPlayer and watch last week's Torchwood.
I almost daren't look.
Spike in a Brit teen show?
Could this ruin him forever?
I needn't have worried … the scriptwriters are very obviously Buffy fanatics.
Hokay: Big flash of light and here he comes; he walks the Spike walk, he talks the Spike talk, but he's now a brunette with an Adam Ant pirate jacket and silly guns … oh, and he's no longer a vampire but some kind of time traveller addicted to sex (men, women, even a poodle), booze, drugs and murder … Kinda like Doctor Who should have been.
So far, so watchable …
Within seconds he's dropped some bloke off the top of a multi-story car park and hits the first Buffy tribute line: "Thirsty now."
Not to spoil things for Kate too much, there follows an hilarious "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope" piss-take, worthy of Buffy; a full on snog-fest with gay Captain Jack (well, several actually), and some chortle-inducing bitching and posturing.
After that is was, rather disappointingly Spike Lite, played for laughs and never quite evil enough (this is British teen TV after all).
Gay fun with Jack and JohnSo … our Spike survives the transition. He's still kinda residual-cool, bitchily funny and so much more camp than everything else on TV … but it ain't Buffy.
This has been a public service announcement for my fellow Buffsters.
The rest of you can just go watch all seven series of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and discover that - in an ideal world - television can actually be genuinely cool, sexy and funny.
It's just not an ideal world any more.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Obsessive Stupidity
In the absence of any time to write a meaningful, coherent or even a simply abusive blog post (I am insanely busy at the moment), here are five stupid little things that are currently obsessing me:
1 - Keeping meticulous records of train delays every day for years and sending my own records to the rail ombudsman to mock the official punctuality figures.
One Railway claims a 96.8% punctuality record on my line, but - in the three years since they took over and wrecked the franchise - I have been on three trains that have arrived on time (I count "on time" the same way as Japan Rail … to the second … whereas One counts it as "within ten minutes of the stated time" … Huh?) and in that same period of time I have been on five trains that have caught fire, including two that have had their windows smashed by flailing broken overhead electricity lines, three trains that have squished and smeared stupid fucking jumpers all along the tracks, seventy-two that have broken down and countless trains that have been between one and six hours late.
96.8% punctuality, my arse.
2 - The so far fruitless search for a coffee shop that sells me both a perfect coffee and a perfect croissant (on the same day).
I have become convinced that, due to some weird anomaly with the physics of the universe, the perfect coffee and the perfect croissant are mutually exclusive and cannot exist in the same universe at the same time.
My impossible quest continues.
3 - Writing my site meeting notes phonetically in hiragana (ひらがな).
A bit stupid, this one. Even though it is great practice for hiragana (and easy, as hiragana is a syllabary rather than an alphabet and is almost as quick as shorthand), the upshot is that nobody but myself can read the damned things.
4 - Always parking in exactly the same spot, whether it is at the station, at college or in Norwich on a Saturday morning.
If there's somebody in "my" space it gets me really grouchy.
How stupid is that?
5 - The stickers on the inside of Willow Rosenberg's school locker (they change 'em every series).
I'm currently watching all 39 DVDs in my Big Box of Buffy (yet again) and have been a slave to the freeze frame ever since I noticed a Luv Show sticker inside the locker door of my favourite witch.
The Luv Show was a strange concept/fake TV show/album by kooky performance artist/singer/movie actress Ann Magnuson after Bongwater split up.
Being one of approximately three Bongwater obsessives on the planet I was somewhat gobsmacked to see it in there as I was convinced that only myself and Ann Magnuson's mum own a copy of that album.
Apparently the staff on Buffy had a bit of a pissing contest to see who could out-cool the others with the most obscure references and bands (like the Luv Show and Japanese girlie weirdos Cibo Matto - who, by coincidence, I was listening to on my train journey this morning … forty-nine minutes late in case you wondered).
And now I'm hooked, too.
So … What are your current stupid little obsessions?
1 - Keeping meticulous records of train delays every day for years and sending my own records to the rail ombudsman to mock the official punctuality figures.
One Railway claims a 96.8% punctuality record on my line, but - in the three years since they took over and wrecked the franchise - I have been on three trains that have arrived on time (I count "on time" the same way as Japan Rail … to the second … whereas One counts it as "within ten minutes of the stated time" … Huh?) and in that same period of time I have been on five trains that have caught fire, including two that have had their windows smashed by flailing broken overhead electricity lines, three trains that have squished and smeared stupid fucking jumpers all along the tracks, seventy-two that have broken down and countless trains that have been between one and six hours late.
96.8% punctuality, my arse.
2 - The so far fruitless search for a coffee shop that sells me both a perfect coffee and a perfect croissant (on the same day).
I have become convinced that, due to some weird anomaly with the physics of the universe, the perfect coffee and the perfect croissant are mutually exclusive and cannot exist in the same universe at the same time.
My impossible quest continues.
3 - Writing my site meeting notes phonetically in hiragana (ひらがな).
A bit stupid, this one. Even though it is great practice for hiragana (and easy, as hiragana is a syllabary rather than an alphabet and is almost as quick as shorthand), the upshot is that nobody but myself can read the damned things.
4 - Always parking in exactly the same spot, whether it is at the station, at college or in Norwich on a Saturday morning.
If there's somebody in "my" space it gets me really grouchy.
How stupid is that?
5 - The stickers on the inside of Willow Rosenberg's school locker (they change 'em every series).
I'm currently watching all 39 DVDs in my Big Box of Buffy (yet again) and have been a slave to the freeze frame ever since I noticed a Luv Show sticker inside the locker door of my favourite witch.
The Luv Show was a strange concept/fake TV show/album by kooky performance artist/singer/movie actress Ann Magnuson after Bongwater split up.
Being one of approximately three Bongwater obsessives on the planet I was somewhat gobsmacked to see it in there as I was convinced that only myself and Ann Magnuson's mum own a copy of that album.
Apparently the staff on Buffy had a bit of a pissing contest to see who could out-cool the others with the most obscure references and bands (like the Luv Show and Japanese girlie weirdos Cibo Matto - who, by coincidence, I was listening to on my train journey this morning … forty-nine minutes late in case you wondered).
And now I'm hooked, too.
So … What are your current stupid little obsessions?
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
That Pesky Appendage
Hokay, so this is three Maria posts in a row.
What of it?
I just read her comment in yesterday's postbag and she mentioned "that pesky appendage", so here we go; just what the world has been waiting for: a post about my penis.
First up:
Never mind common sense, reason, observation and experiment; the real clincher in the argument against "intelligent design" has to be the penis.
I mean, look at it!
Design?
Intelligent?
For fuck's sake, that has to be the ugliest thing in the universe. A thing stuck to my front that, in its pomp, looks like a deformed sausage, and the rest of the time resembles nothing more than a very elderly, wrinkled midget with its insides sucked out.
And it's not just "intelligent design"; the penis makes one seriously doubt God's existence.
According to scripture, He made us in His image …
I've seen myself naked and I mean "WHAT?"
"What the fuck?"
If that's what God looks like then it's little wonder He goes around disguised as a burning bush or a pillar of fire.
Moses climbs up the mountain and sees Him standing there? He's likely to walk straight back down and start a golden calf factory.
Good Christian people devote their whole lives to worshipping Him and to doing good works and they get to Heaven and see the little sign by the gates that says "Laugh at Him and you go straight down to Hell." And they go in and there's this big throne and sitting on it is something that looks like me first thing in the morning …
With a wizened penis on the front …
And as for the practicality of the thing?
Picture this: I'm sitting in the office, beavering away … remember I design girls' schools for a living and my office is ninety percent weemen … and my girlfriend sends me a frisky email (which she does, dammit).
"SPANG!" I'm stuck at my desk for ages.
I have to sit there, ignoring requests from Aga or Genevieve or Squeaky Kate to help them with something, forcing myself to think of doing a week's worth of washing up with George Bush until my trousers are a more socially acceptable shape.
Working where I do, a misbehaving penis could land me in real hot water.
Which imbecile designed that?
No God worth worshipping, that's for sure.
And that's why I only wear 501s when I'm not at work. I'm a button fly man.
Zip flies? I've seen "There's Something About Mary." Brrr … The zip fly suggests that if there IS a God, then not only is She a woman, but Satan is, too.
I can see Ms. Beelzebub now, cackling to her deformed minions that she has made a new and terrible form of dæmon; a thing consisting of nothing but lots of tiny, sharp teeth, designed to bite into the foreskin or scrotum and never let go. And that she will cause this dæmon to live in men's trousers …
Shudder.
And don't ever go swimming with one!
Cold water makes 'em shrink down to a nub and try to hide inside your body. Tight Speedos are only a good idea BEFORE you go in the water. When you come out, be sure and wear baggies.
Actually, I've never really understood all of this macho, penis-size shit, either.
I drive a small car because I'm happy with my pesky appendage (no, it doesn't have a name); driving a strap-on sports car just screams "TINY DICK!" at passers-by.
And that thing where men can't pee if they're standing next to someone with a big cock?
Weird …
Por exemplo:
Andy, our deputy head of accounts is a six foot five Nigerian, big and black and so darned handsome that the girls in accounts have plastic, wipe-clean chairs; shit, he even gets ME wet.
We're the best of buddies, especially since an incident in the men's room a few years back which will illustrate my point.
We were standing there, peeing and suddenly Andy laughs and I say "Fess up."
He says (absolutely true) "I know "men" don't talk about this stuff, but it just strikes me as funny. In all the years I've been working here, you're the only guy who'll stand next to me and pee. All the others see me here and turn around and duck into a cubicle."
I laughed, but I had to confess that I'm just Mister Average; hung like neither horse nor cashew, but that I've got no hang-ups about it.
Andy replied that - unlike the racist stereotype - he was Mister Average, too … then he chuckled and added "For my height".
Andy, you bastard! Hee hee.
Actually, the reason I can pee next to anybody is that since I was nine, I've played in bands and you have to hold it in on stage and then dash to the loos during your breaks. Just after the music stops the urinals are always crowded so from a young age I just learned to pee next to much bigger guys as a matter of biological necessity. If I couldn't squeeze one out I'd be in real trouble back on stage.
And "penis envy", what the fuck's all that about?
Listen up, girls. You've got it lucky! You can wear strap-ons. You can choose the size, the shape, the colour, the consistency … er … extra knobbly bits, battery power … whatever …
I'm stuck with a Mister Average pink penis.
If my girlfriend says "Actually, today I fancy an eight inch, see-through purple, slightly squidgy one", then I'm gonna be a disappointment. I only come in one size and flavour.
Women shouldn't have penis envy; men should have strap-on envy.
Or vibey envy.
So … in conclusion:
The penis.
A piece of disgustingly ugly and poorly designed meat that crawls around in your trousers and behaves totally independently of your will.
Intelligent design, my arse!
Mind you; it's the only part of a man that doesn't lie.
What of it?
I just read her comment in yesterday's postbag and she mentioned "that pesky appendage", so here we go; just what the world has been waiting for: a post about my penis.
First up:
Never mind common sense, reason, observation and experiment; the real clincher in the argument against "intelligent design" has to be the penis.
I mean, look at it!
Design?
Intelligent?
For fuck's sake, that has to be the ugliest thing in the universe. A thing stuck to my front that, in its pomp, looks like a deformed sausage, and the rest of the time resembles nothing more than a very elderly, wrinkled midget with its insides sucked out.
And it's not just "intelligent design"; the penis makes one seriously doubt God's existence.
According to scripture, He made us in His image …
I've seen myself naked and I mean "WHAT?"
"What the fuck?"
If that's what God looks like then it's little wonder He goes around disguised as a burning bush or a pillar of fire.
Moses climbs up the mountain and sees Him standing there? He's likely to walk straight back down and start a golden calf factory.
Good Christian people devote their whole lives to worshipping Him and to doing good works and they get to Heaven and see the little sign by the gates that says "Laugh at Him and you go straight down to Hell." And they go in and there's this big throne and sitting on it is something that looks like me first thing in the morning …
With a wizened penis on the front …
And as for the practicality of the thing?
Picture this: I'm sitting in the office, beavering away … remember I design girls' schools for a living and my office is ninety percent weemen … and my girlfriend sends me a frisky email (which she does, dammit).
"SPANG!" I'm stuck at my desk for ages.
I have to sit there, ignoring requests from Aga or Genevieve or Squeaky Kate to help them with something, forcing myself to think of doing a week's worth of washing up with George Bush until my trousers are a more socially acceptable shape.
Working where I do, a misbehaving penis could land me in real hot water.
Which imbecile designed that?
No God worth worshipping, that's for sure.
And that's why I only wear 501s when I'm not at work. I'm a button fly man.
Zip flies? I've seen "There's Something About Mary." Brrr … The zip fly suggests that if there IS a God, then not only is She a woman, but Satan is, too.
I can see Ms. Beelzebub now, cackling to her deformed minions that she has made a new and terrible form of dæmon; a thing consisting of nothing but lots of tiny, sharp teeth, designed to bite into the foreskin or scrotum and never let go. And that she will cause this dæmon to live in men's trousers …
Shudder.
And don't ever go swimming with one!
Cold water makes 'em shrink down to a nub and try to hide inside your body. Tight Speedos are only a good idea BEFORE you go in the water. When you come out, be sure and wear baggies.
Actually, I've never really understood all of this macho, penis-size shit, either.
I drive a small car because I'm happy with my pesky appendage (no, it doesn't have a name); driving a strap-on sports car just screams "TINY DICK!" at passers-by.
And that thing where men can't pee if they're standing next to someone with a big cock?
Weird …
Por exemplo:
Andy, our deputy head of accounts is a six foot five Nigerian, big and black and so darned handsome that the girls in accounts have plastic, wipe-clean chairs; shit, he even gets ME wet.
We're the best of buddies, especially since an incident in the men's room a few years back which will illustrate my point.
We were standing there, peeing and suddenly Andy laughs and I say "Fess up."
He says (absolutely true) "I know "men" don't talk about this stuff, but it just strikes me as funny. In all the years I've been working here, you're the only guy who'll stand next to me and pee. All the others see me here and turn around and duck into a cubicle."
I laughed, but I had to confess that I'm just Mister Average; hung like neither horse nor cashew, but that I've got no hang-ups about it.
Andy replied that - unlike the racist stereotype - he was Mister Average, too … then he chuckled and added "For my height".
Andy, you bastard! Hee hee.
Actually, the reason I can pee next to anybody is that since I was nine, I've played in bands and you have to hold it in on stage and then dash to the loos during your breaks. Just after the music stops the urinals are always crowded so from a young age I just learned to pee next to much bigger guys as a matter of biological necessity. If I couldn't squeeze one out I'd be in real trouble back on stage.
And "penis envy", what the fuck's all that about?
Listen up, girls. You've got it lucky! You can wear strap-ons. You can choose the size, the shape, the colour, the consistency … er … extra knobbly bits, battery power … whatever …
I'm stuck with a Mister Average pink penis.
If my girlfriend says "Actually, today I fancy an eight inch, see-through purple, slightly squidgy one", then I'm gonna be a disappointment. I only come in one size and flavour.
Women shouldn't have penis envy; men should have strap-on envy.
Or vibey envy.
So … in conclusion:
The penis.
A piece of disgustingly ugly and poorly designed meat that crawls around in your trousers and behaves totally independently of your will.
Intelligent design, my arse!
Mind you; it's the only part of a man that doesn't lie.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Meanwhile, Back In The Gene Puddle …
I know, I know … This is two days in a row I've taken my post from Maria's blog, but her posts are always so damned good.
Today's is a doozy!
Go read it. I didn't believe the kind of person she's writing about actually existed outside of the world of black comedy.
Basically: Maria; our beloved blog-pal, who just happens to be a woman, a lesbian and a democrat got hit on by a racist, sexist, homophobic right-wing redneck who thinks he's God's gift to weemen.
I read it this morning, before I left for work and then sat on the train, brooding over the sudden change in the dickless moron's behaviour from sleazy creep to abusive bigot when he realised that our heroine actually had a mind of her own and called her a "lezzy bitch" … and I came to a conclusion:
Right-wingers are evolutionarily retarded.
Not merely emotionally, intellectually and socially deficient, but all-singing, all-dancing, evolutionarily challenged throwbacks.
Think about it:
Your basic right-winger is afraid … scared shitless of anything outside its immediate tribal group, just like a troop of chimpanzees.
They are ruled by fear.
Of course their antecedents were late coming down from the trees (walking upright was too scary) and so exposure to anything remotely advanced in the way of evolutionary traits such as individual freedom, civil rights, women's rights, workers' rights, social empathy, sharing, sexual freedom, charity (I mean real charity, not tax write-offs) … causes them to band together, bare their fangs and screech like the frightened apes they are.
Consequently, a fair, decent, civilised and democratic society embracing individual freedom is incompatible with the posturing ape retards of the right. It exists outside their scared little group and must be pathologically hated and feared in that it doesn't embrace the right-wing group ethos of sexist misogyny, bigotry, racism, homophobia, greed, profiteering, warmongering, religious intolerance and pathetic bunker mentality …
Look at the long and bitter struggle we "pinko fags" have had to gain even the most basic of human/women's/civil rights. And see how the throwbacks are digging in against taking action on climate change as it interferes with their short-term profits.
I'll admit that here in England we were recently forced to live in close proximity with right-wingers during the disgusting Third Reich and that this may have coloured my opinion of Nazis and Neo-Cons and their ilk, but I still maintain that their fear and cowardice; their mindless lashing-out at anyone more evolutionarily advanced is unreconstituted screechy, fang-bearing, stick-waving chimpanzee-troop behaviour.
And look at the US President, for fuck's sake!
It looks, walks and talks like it just dropped out of a tree.
It's pre-election time in the States at the moment and the right-wingers are once again banding together for courage, preparing themselves for a good fangy screech of fear.
In an hilarious attempt to make any wavering voters as scared as they themselves are, they have put about the rumour that Barack Obama (an active Christian) is a Muslim (he's got a funny name, ergo: he must be a terrorist).
We've been laughing about that one for a while over here, but it is still doing the rounds in the US.
Quite apart from anything else, what the fuck is wrong with being a Muslim? All it means is "surrender to God's will". The same stupid God the Christians and Jews profess to worship and in which Americans profess to trust.
Sheesh!
Or do I mean "duh"?
Boy, would I love to see a black, Muslim woman in the White House (doing something other than the cleaning, of course).
Here in England I am accused by my right-wing friends of being part of a "Marxist intelligentsia" … some kind of intellectual conspiracy against the new, wishy-washy Tory policy of "cuddly, caring Fascism".
They like that word: "intelligentsia", and so do I; it equates superior intelligence to scary, reds-under-the-bed commie pinko-ism; with individual freedom and social empathy rather than profiting from the labour of others.
And they are right.
So there you go.
Dive's latest little theory.
Right-wingers … Ha!
Self-evidently sub-human.
Scared shitless of reason.
Intellectually stunted.
Emotionally deficient.
Socially challenged.
Evolutionary retards.
Being a compassionate lefty I don't want to see them exterminated (as they do me). I think perhaps that until we finish out-evolving them we should simply pen 'em all up somewhere so we can point and laugh at 'em and show our kids what happens when you arrive late at the evolutionary party.
Actually, I think that's already happened.
Hello, America!
Hee hee hee hee hee.
Sorry guys. It's taken a couple of weeks but I've finally woken up to 2008 and am mildly frisky, so expect rants, facetiousness, mischievous finger-poking and abuse from here on in.
Today's is a doozy!
Go read it. I didn't believe the kind of person she's writing about actually existed outside of the world of black comedy.
Basically: Maria; our beloved blog-pal, who just happens to be a woman, a lesbian and a democrat got hit on by a racist, sexist, homophobic right-wing redneck who thinks he's God's gift to weemen.
I read it this morning, before I left for work and then sat on the train, brooding over the sudden change in the dickless moron's behaviour from sleazy creep to abusive bigot when he realised that our heroine actually had a mind of her own and called her a "lezzy bitch" … and I came to a conclusion:
Right-wingers are evolutionarily retarded.
Not merely emotionally, intellectually and socially deficient, but all-singing, all-dancing, evolutionarily challenged throwbacks.
Think about it:
Your basic right-winger is afraid … scared shitless of anything outside its immediate tribal group, just like a troop of chimpanzees.
They are ruled by fear.
Of course their antecedents were late coming down from the trees (walking upright was too scary) and so exposure to anything remotely advanced in the way of evolutionary traits such as individual freedom, civil rights, women's rights, workers' rights, social empathy, sharing, sexual freedom, charity (I mean real charity, not tax write-offs) … causes them to band together, bare their fangs and screech like the frightened apes they are.
Consequently, a fair, decent, civilised and democratic society embracing individual freedom is incompatible with the posturing ape retards of the right. It exists outside their scared little group and must be pathologically hated and feared in that it doesn't embrace the right-wing group ethos of sexist misogyny, bigotry, racism, homophobia, greed, profiteering, warmongering, religious intolerance and pathetic bunker mentality …
Look at the long and bitter struggle we "pinko fags" have had to gain even the most basic of human/women's/civil rights. And see how the throwbacks are digging in against taking action on climate change as it interferes with their short-term profits.
I'll admit that here in England we were recently forced to live in close proximity with right-wingers during the disgusting Third Reich and that this may have coloured my opinion of Nazis and Neo-Cons and their ilk, but I still maintain that their fear and cowardice; their mindless lashing-out at anyone more evolutionarily advanced is unreconstituted screechy, fang-bearing, stick-waving chimpanzee-troop behaviour.
And look at the US President, for fuck's sake!
It looks, walks and talks like it just dropped out of a tree.
It's pre-election time in the States at the moment and the right-wingers are once again banding together for courage, preparing themselves for a good fangy screech of fear.
In an hilarious attempt to make any wavering voters as scared as they themselves are, they have put about the rumour that Barack Obama (an active Christian) is a Muslim (he's got a funny name, ergo: he must be a terrorist).
We've been laughing about that one for a while over here, but it is still doing the rounds in the US.
Quite apart from anything else, what the fuck is wrong with being a Muslim? All it means is "surrender to God's will". The same stupid God the Christians and Jews profess to worship and in which Americans profess to trust.
Sheesh!
Or do I mean "duh"?
Boy, would I love to see a black, Muslim woman in the White House (doing something other than the cleaning, of course).
Here in England I am accused by my right-wing friends of being part of a "Marxist intelligentsia" … some kind of intellectual conspiracy against the new, wishy-washy Tory policy of "cuddly, caring Fascism".
They like that word: "intelligentsia", and so do I; it equates superior intelligence to scary, reds-under-the-bed commie pinko-ism; with individual freedom and social empathy rather than profiting from the labour of others.
And they are right.
So there you go.
Dive's latest little theory.
Right-wingers … Ha!
Self-evidently sub-human.
Scared shitless of reason.
Intellectually stunted.
Emotionally deficient.
Socially challenged.
Evolutionary retards.
Being a compassionate lefty I don't want to see them exterminated (as they do me). I think perhaps that until we finish out-evolving them we should simply pen 'em all up somewhere so we can point and laugh at 'em and show our kids what happens when you arrive late at the evolutionary party.
Actually, I think that's already happened.
Hello, America!
Hee hee hee hee hee.
Sorry guys. It's taken a couple of weeks but I've finally woken up to 2008 and am mildly frisky, so expect rants, facetiousness, mischievous finger-poking and abuse from here on in.
Monday, January 14, 2008
L'enfer, C'est Les Autres … Again
Maria posted a splendid piece today, rightly bemoaning overheated bookshops and under-heated cinemas and giving some justifiable reasons why the modern cinematic experience sucks such huge and hairy wide-screen arse.
As I turn fifty this year there will probably be a plethora of posts about how much nicer things were back "in the good old days"; that golden age of Cold War, cold houses, outside toilets and creepy old men stalking schools with canes in their hands.
This is one of those.
Let's follow Maria and start with "going to the pictures".
Back in the olden days, my small town boasted a magnificent, art deco cinema called The Regal; a monstrous cavern of a place that doubled as a proper theatre, with an orchestra pit and full stage.
It also had toilet facilities stuck out at either side, accessed directly off the auditorium, with convenient fire-escape doors so that every gang of kids only had to send one paying kid in through the front doors while the rest waited for him to nip to the toilets as soon as the lights went down and to open the fire doors. We would then all hide in the cubicles and sneak in to the cinema two or three at a time during the ads before the first feature.
Each eternally sunny and wonderful Saturday afternoon during my youth, every parent in town would send their kids to The Regal for the matinee performance; it was the only opportunity grown-ups ever got to have sex.
And we loved it. A whole afternoon's worth of glorious, huge-screen entertainment for nine-pence (a little under 4 pence after decimalisation).
At tea time, the doors would burst open and the streets would be full of joyful, shrieking children armed with pretend swords or pretend guns, depending on whether we had seen Errol Flynn or John Wayne, re-enacting the past few hours of swash and buckle, and making their way home to their strangely smiling parents.
It was bliss.
Really!
Of course all kids walked (or ran) back then; right across town to school or the cinema or the surrounding fields with all of our mates. There were no monstrous four-wheel-drive behemoths blocking the streets, or pathetic "people-carriers" each containing one idiot parent and one small child who never gets exposed to the outside air.
Today's children are rapidly evolving into gross globs of fat who will soon lose the use of their legs due to being ferried every-fucking-where by over-protective, drooling imbecile parents. Most of them have already developed allergies, asthma and diabetes from lack of exposure to fresh air and to other kids' germs and are drowning in their own fat from a diet of deep-fried "recovered" gristle.
Fuck 'em. They deserve to die horribly and so they will.
I digress (as usual).
Back in the world of "the pictures", things suddenly went very wrong …
The first I knew of it was when we went to Norwich to the ABC cinema, only to find the big auditorium had disappeared and had been replaced by five tiny little boxes with paltry, home-movie-sized screens.
They called it a "multiplex".
Yeah, right.
Suddenly all the joy had been sucked out of the cinema.
We started going to the Odeon instead (The Regal had already died and been tragically resurrected - zombie fashion - as a bingo hall), but a year later, the Odeon too succumbed to being chopped into small, crappy pieces.
Then they closed the ABC altogether, re-opening the building as an amusement arcade (for fuck's sake)! The ABC was eventually replaced with what was promised to be a fabulous, custom built cinema "complex" but turned out - inevitably - to be a bunch of industrial tin-sheds with some neon lights on the front, each containing ever smaller screens, like a Russian doll, and all showing the same fucking "blockbusters" as everywhere else.
I rarely go to the pictures these days, except to Norwich's wonderful alternative cinemas at Cinema City and The Noverre, where I can sit amongst quiet, like-minded people and watch black and white movies or subtitled foreign films on a single big screen.
The "multiplex experience" these days involves paying an exorbitant amount of money, walking down a dingy corridor and into what would have (in the olden days) been called a private viewing room, which - as Maria points out - is invariably freezing; finding my shoes sticking to the filthy floor and being surrounded by noisy, inconsiderate dolts who bellow and shriek throughout the film and invariably include (always sitting really close to me) a pair of twats eating popcorn with their mouths open, making the most disgusting noise imaginable.
Popcorn …
Why?
What fucking idiot thought it would be a good idea to sell huge buckets of fat-covered crunchy stuff in a room where a film is being shown?
If it's not popcorn it's fucking crinkly wrappers.
These places have become the equivalent of the "anti-gym", where fat fucking retards congregate to slurp, crunch and loudly masticate their way through gallons of wet sugar and buckets of greasy cholesterol.
How the fuck am I supposed to hear the film? It sounds like feeding time at the hyena enclosure.
These days, if I want to watch a "blockbuster", I stay home with a DVD.
I have a big screen Mac, a comfy chair, a non-sticky floor, a phone with a mute on the ringer, a glass of scotch and most importantly of all, no fucking people.
As I turn fifty this year there will probably be a plethora of posts about how much nicer things were back "in the good old days"; that golden age of Cold War, cold houses, outside toilets and creepy old men stalking schools with canes in their hands.
This is one of those.
Let's follow Maria and start with "going to the pictures".
Back in the olden days, my small town boasted a magnificent, art deco cinema called The Regal; a monstrous cavern of a place that doubled as a proper theatre, with an orchestra pit and full stage.
It also had toilet facilities stuck out at either side, accessed directly off the auditorium, with convenient fire-escape doors so that every gang of kids only had to send one paying kid in through the front doors while the rest waited for him to nip to the toilets as soon as the lights went down and to open the fire doors. We would then all hide in the cubicles and sneak in to the cinema two or three at a time during the ads before the first feature.
Each eternally sunny and wonderful Saturday afternoon during my youth, every parent in town would send their kids to The Regal for the matinee performance; it was the only opportunity grown-ups ever got to have sex.
And we loved it. A whole afternoon's worth of glorious, huge-screen entertainment for nine-pence (a little under 4 pence after decimalisation).
At tea time, the doors would burst open and the streets would be full of joyful, shrieking children armed with pretend swords or pretend guns, depending on whether we had seen Errol Flynn or John Wayne, re-enacting the past few hours of swash and buckle, and making their way home to their strangely smiling parents.
It was bliss.
Really!
Of course all kids walked (or ran) back then; right across town to school or the cinema or the surrounding fields with all of our mates. There were no monstrous four-wheel-drive behemoths blocking the streets, or pathetic "people-carriers" each containing one idiot parent and one small child who never gets exposed to the outside air.
Today's children are rapidly evolving into gross globs of fat who will soon lose the use of their legs due to being ferried every-fucking-where by over-protective, drooling imbecile parents. Most of them have already developed allergies, asthma and diabetes from lack of exposure to fresh air and to other kids' germs and are drowning in their own fat from a diet of deep-fried "recovered" gristle.
Fuck 'em. They deserve to die horribly and so they will.
I digress (as usual).
Back in the world of "the pictures", things suddenly went very wrong …
The first I knew of it was when we went to Norwich to the ABC cinema, only to find the big auditorium had disappeared and had been replaced by five tiny little boxes with paltry, home-movie-sized screens.
They called it a "multiplex".
Yeah, right.
Suddenly all the joy had been sucked out of the cinema.
We started going to the Odeon instead (The Regal had already died and been tragically resurrected - zombie fashion - as a bingo hall), but a year later, the Odeon too succumbed to being chopped into small, crappy pieces.
Then they closed the ABC altogether, re-opening the building as an amusement arcade (for fuck's sake)! The ABC was eventually replaced with what was promised to be a fabulous, custom built cinema "complex" but turned out - inevitably - to be a bunch of industrial tin-sheds with some neon lights on the front, each containing ever smaller screens, like a Russian doll, and all showing the same fucking "blockbusters" as everywhere else.
I rarely go to the pictures these days, except to Norwich's wonderful alternative cinemas at Cinema City and The Noverre, where I can sit amongst quiet, like-minded people and watch black and white movies or subtitled foreign films on a single big screen.
The "multiplex experience" these days involves paying an exorbitant amount of money, walking down a dingy corridor and into what would have (in the olden days) been called a private viewing room, which - as Maria points out - is invariably freezing; finding my shoes sticking to the filthy floor and being surrounded by noisy, inconsiderate dolts who bellow and shriek throughout the film and invariably include (always sitting really close to me) a pair of twats eating popcorn with their mouths open, making the most disgusting noise imaginable.
Popcorn …
Why?
What fucking idiot thought it would be a good idea to sell huge buckets of fat-covered crunchy stuff in a room where a film is being shown?
If it's not popcorn it's fucking crinkly wrappers.
These places have become the equivalent of the "anti-gym", where fat fucking retards congregate to slurp, crunch and loudly masticate their way through gallons of wet sugar and buckets of greasy cholesterol.
How the fuck am I supposed to hear the film? It sounds like feeding time at the hyena enclosure.
These days, if I want to watch a "blockbuster", I stay home with a DVD.
I have a big screen Mac, a comfy chair, a non-sticky floor, a phone with a mute on the ringer, a glass of scotch and most importantly of all, no fucking people.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Bloggers' Block Again
I am soooo blog-dry at the moment.
2008 has left me uninspired and totally unable to dredge up anything but the most boring crap to post.
So in the absence of my brain, here's yet another old photo.
Yes indeedy; the sun really does shine out of my ass.
2008 has left me uninspired and totally unable to dredge up anything but the most boring crap to post.
So in the absence of my brain, here's yet another old photo.
Yes indeedy; the sun really does shine out of my ass.Friday, January 11, 2008
Bizarre Monotonal Apoplexy
Suicidally boring update to this morning's festering pismire of tedium …
Yup.
I was right …
Apologies for reaching hitherto unplumbed depths of dismal dullness, but the engineer came out and told IT that they had indeed ordered the "basic" machines without the Postscript hardware needed to enable them to talk to our disparate mix of Mac and Windoze beepy-boxes.
And of course the engineer didn't have those parts with him. We've got to order them from Narnia or Mordor or somesuch place with a six week postal delivery service manned by incompetence dæmons.
Why I don't start my own IT department is a mystery. I'm always doing their smegging work for them.
Twats.
Even worse; they have got me posting about IT issues. If I'm not careful, the bastards will soon have me speaking Klingon! Fuck it.
On a separate note, Heidi is now drunk, and an upset Finn who is drunk and maudlin is even more hilarious to listen to than a merely upset Finn … and my involuntary grins and giggles make her even worse.
Which has cheered my day considerably.
So … advice for anyone feeling down: go out and upset a Finn, then have a good laugh at their bizarre monotonal apoplexy. Getting them drunk makes it all the funnier.
Yup.
I was right …
Apologies for reaching hitherto unplumbed depths of dismal dullness, but the engineer came out and told IT that they had indeed ordered the "basic" machines without the Postscript hardware needed to enable them to talk to our disparate mix of Mac and Windoze beepy-boxes.
And of course the engineer didn't have those parts with him. We've got to order them from Narnia or Mordor or somesuch place with a six week postal delivery service manned by incompetence dæmons.
Why I don't start my own IT department is a mystery. I'm always doing their smegging work for them.
Twats.
Even worse; they have got me posting about IT issues. If I'm not careful, the bastards will soon have me speaking Klingon! Fuck it.
On a separate note, Heidi is now drunk, and an upset Finn who is drunk and maudlin is even more hilarious to listen to than a merely upset Finn … and my involuntary grins and giggles make her even worse.
Which has cheered my day considerably.
So … advice for anyone feeling down: go out and upset a Finn, then have a good laugh at their bizarre monotonal apoplexy. Getting them drunk makes it all the funnier.
Moan, Moan, Moan
Sheesh.
The myth of the "paperless office" is once more debunked.
I got in to work this morning to find shiny new printers/copiers everywhere.
Great!
Except that none of the drivers seem to want to talk t0 our servers and IT are spontaneously combusting in a frantic effort to make beepy stuff talk to other beepy stuff.
I told them "It's Postscript crap. It's exactly what happened last time we replaced the machines." but because none of the present IT staff worked here back then, they will now spend the day running round the office like headless chickens on acid before eventually conceding that it is indeed a Postscript problem and they will then admit that they ordered the printers without the correct Postscript hardware.
Hey ho.
Meanwhile, there is a lot of beeping and clattering going on to no apparent effect. There is also a choice selection of expletives tainting the crappy, air-conned office atmosphere.
Emails are all very well, but our so-called paperless office requires a vast amount of letters, forms, invoices and general crap to be printed each day and suddenly we are back in the age of steam.
As one of the only people here old enough to remember how to write, I have spent the morning hand-cranking out my letters, interrupted by secretarial staff peering over my shoulder, cooing "Oooh. Haven't you got lovely writing?" as if they don't teach handwriting skills to kids today … er … actually, they don't, and they haven't done that since my old grammar school days; so neat handwriting and the arcane and magical knowledge of the workings of a fountain pen are concepts beyond the cranial capacity of these strange children I call my "administrative assistants".
On top of that, Heidi has just tendered her resignation in a fit of monotonal Finnish pique (to hear a Finn getting upset is hilarious as they have no tonal inflections and everything comes out as flat as Stephen Hawking's talky-box), and Aga has just whispered to me that she has an interview next week.
Having spent last year building up staff numbers to a stage where we can almost cope, we are now losing two of our best girls.
Poo all over today.
It's only eleven o'clock; it's pissing down with rain and I have the feeling today still has a shedload of crap to throw at me.
And you wonder why I'm such a carefree, cheerful sort of chap.
Happy days …
The myth of the "paperless office" is once more debunked.
I got in to work this morning to find shiny new printers/copiers everywhere.
Great!
Except that none of the drivers seem to want to talk t0 our servers and IT are spontaneously combusting in a frantic effort to make beepy stuff talk to other beepy stuff.
I told them "It's Postscript crap. It's exactly what happened last time we replaced the machines." but because none of the present IT staff worked here back then, they will now spend the day running round the office like headless chickens on acid before eventually conceding that it is indeed a Postscript problem and they will then admit that they ordered the printers without the correct Postscript hardware.
Hey ho.
Meanwhile, there is a lot of beeping and clattering going on to no apparent effect. There is also a choice selection of expletives tainting the crappy, air-conned office atmosphere.
Emails are all very well, but our so-called paperless office requires a vast amount of letters, forms, invoices and general crap to be printed each day and suddenly we are back in the age of steam.
As one of the only people here old enough to remember how to write, I have spent the morning hand-cranking out my letters, interrupted by secretarial staff peering over my shoulder, cooing "Oooh. Haven't you got lovely writing?" as if they don't teach handwriting skills to kids today … er … actually, they don't, and they haven't done that since my old grammar school days; so neat handwriting and the arcane and magical knowledge of the workings of a fountain pen are concepts beyond the cranial capacity of these strange children I call my "administrative assistants".
On top of that, Heidi has just tendered her resignation in a fit of monotonal Finnish pique (to hear a Finn getting upset is hilarious as they have no tonal inflections and everything comes out as flat as Stephen Hawking's talky-box), and Aga has just whispered to me that she has an interview next week.
Having spent last year building up staff numbers to a stage where we can almost cope, we are now losing two of our best girls.
Poo all over today.
It's only eleven o'clock; it's pissing down with rain and I have the feeling today still has a shedload of crap to throw at me.
And you wonder why I'm such a carefree, cheerful sort of chap.
Happy days …
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Too Busy To Post
Hey ho.
Too busy to post, today.
Lynn posted some ducks this morning so as I am too busy to write anything I will post some ducks straight back to her. These ones were in St.James's Park on Monday morning.
Oh, and pop in to see Robyn today. She has posted a scary horror movie starring herself and Carlos Santana; two of my favourite people who I will never see in the same light again.
Shudder …
Too busy to post, today.
Lynn posted some ducks this morning so as I am too busy to write anything I will post some ducks straight back to her. These ones were in St.James's Park on Monday morning.Oh, and pop in to see Robyn today. She has posted a scary horror movie starring herself and Carlos Santana; two of my favourite people who I will never see in the same light again.
Shudder …
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Yet More Tedious Dross
Until 2008 actually inspires me to write something other than tedious dross, here is some more tedious dross.
I stole this one from Tiina's blog.
It was originally a "two things" meme, but I've upped it because I have a headache and I want to annoy the meme-haters.
Five names you go by:
1. Dive
2. Baldy
3. Meester
4. デービッド。
5. Sir (this one always cracks me up when I'm out at one of the schools).
Five things you are wearing right now:
1. Che teeshirt
2. Black 501s.
3. Boxers.
4. A kind of sardonic smile.
5. er … that's it.
Five things you would want (or have / had) in a relationship:
1. A woman.
2. Chocolate.
3. Real bitchy, points-scoring arguments.
4. Mutual suspicion.
5. Faked orgasms.
Five of your favourite things to do:
1. Frantic masturbation.
2. Eating bad stuff.
3. Drinking bad stuff.
4. Behaving childishly.
5. Sulking.
Five things you want very badly at the moment:
1. To get rid of this headache.
2. Trains that run on time and that ban mobile phones and anyone under thirty-seven.
3. My youth back.
4. To kill everybody on the planet, including myself.
5. The toilet.
Five things you did last night:
1. Had a very rude video chat with my girlfriend.
2. Drank scotch.
3. Offended fat America.
4. Watched a couple of episodes of Buffy.
5. Slept.
Five things you ate today:
1. Greek yoghurt.
2. Organic oats.
3. A handful of dried cranberries.
4. That's it so far. I'm not Elvis!
5. Still nothing else.
Last five people you talked to:
1. My girlfriend.
2. The train conductor.
3. My kettle (in a threatening manner).
4. Squeaky Kate.
5. Myself.
Five things you're doing tomorrow:
1. Going to Norwich to check out all the mistakes and cock-ups the builders made on my new nursery at the girls' school and planning the new sixth form centre.
2. Hanging around with schoolgirls.
3. Reading The Guardian in my favourite coffee bar.
4. Going to college for my Japanese class.
5. Missing my girl.
Five longest car rides:
1. Faro to Porto and back.
2. Norfolk to York.
3. Norfolk to Cardiff.
4. Norfolk to Devon.
5. Norfolk to Goodwood.
I use public transport for long journeys. Not because I'm environmentally conscious so much as because I'm lazy.
Five favourite beverages:
1. Coffee.
2. Green tea.
3. Green and Black's cocoa.
4. Scotch.
5. Red wine.
Five things about me you may not have known:
You know just about everything about me as I am such a pathetic meme-addict, so I'll re-hash a few and call this "Five things you already knew about me and didn't give a toss about":
1. I find Deanna Durbin totally hot.
2. I laughed when Diana died.
3. I've eaten my own cum. It wasn't deliberate; just a mischievous ex.girlfriend after a blowie who pounced on me and jammed a cum-covered tongue into my mouth. Ew!
4. I once recorded under the pseudonym of "Clint Slick" because I was a drunken student and thought that the fact that it looked like "CUNT SUCK" when written in capitals was funny.
5. The last song I listened to was America's "Ventura Highway". No reason; iTunes is on "shuffle" and is trying to tell me I'm still a hippy.
Five jobs I have had in my life:
1. Architect.
2. Guitar player.
3. Photographer.
4. When I was a kid I worked at a butchers for a while. That truly sucked.
5. I also worked at an engineering firm in the school holidays. That sucked, too.
Five movies I watch over and over:
1. Doctor Strangelove (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb).
2. Chinatown.
3. The Bed Sitting Room.
4. This Is Spïnal Tap.
5. Any and all Austin Powers movies.
Places I have lived:
1. England.
2. Malta.
3. Portugal.
4. Inside my scary head.
5. The Small Glass Planet.
Five of my Favorite Foods:
1. さしみ。
2. みそしろ。
3. どんぶい。
4. くじら。
3. Clitoris.
Five places I'd rather be right now
1. Wrapped tight around my girl.
2. Sitting in Prudence's living room in the beautiful lakes region of New Hampshire with a hot coffee, looking out at all the snow.
3. Lounging on Jules' porch in Rabaul with a cold G&T, gazing out over the turquoise waters of the bay at the volcano.
4. Sitting outside はらじゅくの駅, watching the girls go by.
5. Eating sashimi in a Tokyo bar.
Five people I think will respond:
1 to 5: The meme-lovers will probably have a go; the meme-haters will curse me for being a meme-lover.
Hey ho.
I stole this one from Tiina's blog.
It was originally a "two things" meme, but I've upped it because I have a headache and I want to annoy the meme-haters.
Five names you go by:
1. Dive
2. Baldy
3. Meester
4. デービッド。
5. Sir (this one always cracks me up when I'm out at one of the schools).
Five things you are wearing right now:
1. Che teeshirt
2. Black 501s.
3. Boxers.
4. A kind of sardonic smile.
5. er … that's it.
Five things you would want (or have / had) in a relationship:
1. A woman.
2. Chocolate.
3. Real bitchy, points-scoring arguments.
4. Mutual suspicion.
5. Faked orgasms.
Five of your favourite things to do:
1. Frantic masturbation.
2. Eating bad stuff.
3. Drinking bad stuff.
4. Behaving childishly.
5. Sulking.
Five things you want very badly at the moment:
1. To get rid of this headache.
2. Trains that run on time and that ban mobile phones and anyone under thirty-seven.
3. My youth back.
4. To kill everybody on the planet, including myself.
5. The toilet.
Five things you did last night:
1. Had a very rude video chat with my girlfriend.
2. Drank scotch.
3. Offended fat America.
4. Watched a couple of episodes of Buffy.
5. Slept.
Five things you ate today:
1. Greek yoghurt.
2. Organic oats.
3. A handful of dried cranberries.
4. That's it so far. I'm not Elvis!
5. Still nothing else.
Last five people you talked to:
1. My girlfriend.
2. The train conductor.
3. My kettle (in a threatening manner).
4. Squeaky Kate.
5. Myself.
Five things you're doing tomorrow:
1. Going to Norwich to check out all the mistakes and cock-ups the builders made on my new nursery at the girls' school and planning the new sixth form centre.
2. Hanging around with schoolgirls.
3. Reading The Guardian in my favourite coffee bar.
4. Going to college for my Japanese class.
5. Missing my girl.
Five longest car rides:
1. Faro to Porto and back.
2. Norfolk to York.
3. Norfolk to Cardiff.
4. Norfolk to Devon.
5. Norfolk to Goodwood.
I use public transport for long journeys. Not because I'm environmentally conscious so much as because I'm lazy.
Five favourite beverages:
1. Coffee.
2. Green tea.
3. Green and Black's cocoa.
4. Scotch.
5. Red wine.
Five things about me you may not have known:
You know just about everything about me as I am such a pathetic meme-addict, so I'll re-hash a few and call this "Five things you already knew about me and didn't give a toss about":
1. I find Deanna Durbin totally hot.
2. I laughed when Diana died.
3. I've eaten my own cum. It wasn't deliberate; just a mischievous ex.girlfriend after a blowie who pounced on me and jammed a cum-covered tongue into my mouth. Ew!
4. I once recorded under the pseudonym of "Clint Slick" because I was a drunken student and thought that the fact that it looked like "CUNT SUCK" when written in capitals was funny.
5. The last song I listened to was America's "Ventura Highway". No reason; iTunes is on "shuffle" and is trying to tell me I'm still a hippy.
Five jobs I have had in my life:
1. Architect.
2. Guitar player.
3. Photographer.
4. When I was a kid I worked at a butchers for a while. That truly sucked.
5. I also worked at an engineering firm in the school holidays. That sucked, too.
Five movies I watch over and over:
1. Doctor Strangelove (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb).
2. Chinatown.
3. The Bed Sitting Room.
4. This Is Spïnal Tap.
5. Any and all Austin Powers movies.
Places I have lived:
1. England.
2. Malta.
3. Portugal.
4. Inside my scary head.
5. The Small Glass Planet.
Five of my Favorite Foods:
1. さしみ。
2. みそしろ。
3. どんぶい。
4. くじら。
3. Clitoris.
Five places I'd rather be right now
1. Wrapped tight around my girl.
2. Sitting in Prudence's living room in the beautiful lakes region of New Hampshire with a hot coffee, looking out at all the snow.
3. Lounging on Jules' porch in Rabaul with a cold G&T, gazing out over the turquoise waters of the bay at the volcano.
4. Sitting outside はらじゅくの駅, watching the girls go by.
5. Eating sashimi in a Tokyo bar.
Five people I think will respond:
1 to 5: The meme-lovers will probably have a go; the meme-haters will curse me for being a meme-lover.
Hey ho.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
All Hail His Pinguescent Majesty
Many thanks to Robyn, our inestimable keeper of arcane knowledge, for pointing out that The King is 77 today!
This wouldn't be a proper "Dive" post if I didn't make some sarky crack about Fat Elvis and the obesity epidemic, so here goes:
You kids won't remember, but way back in the seventies, the Elvis diet briefly vied for supremacy with the Karen Carpenter diet for the soul of America; but while a few young girls still kill themselves the Karen Carpenter way, an increasing majority of modern America has whole-heartedly embraced the Elvis diet, making it the most successful ever.
As a role model, The King has shaped the America we see today; a nation groaning under a hideous, heaving horde of wobbling, half-ton lardosaurs gorging themselves to death on junk food.
Elvis is succeeding where al-Qaeda failed; slaughtering whole generations of innocent Americans in a bloated, oleaginous, adipose apocalypse.
But what a fucking great singer he was (for which we can forgive his becoming a fucking great lard-arse).
Inevitably, this brings to mind an Elvis story from my past.
Back in the tragic year of his alleged death (I'm a firm believer in his immortality, though possibly not of his being a space alien), I played probably the easiest season of my life; rattling off Scotty Moore licks behind an Elvis impersonator.
Actually a rather good one, not like the dross you get these days.
It happened like this:
In the heady days of 1977, I was making no money whatsoever playing lead guitar in a band doing Yes, Focus and Mahavishnu covers, whilst listening to Punk and managing a spectacularly unsuccessful Punk band (what a monstrous master of the sell-out I was).
Being but a schoolboy I needed cash desperately to spend on riotous living … and more guitars.
So when a couple of old guys heard me playing Zappa stuff as they walked past the house and came knocking on the door to say "Will you join our band, please?", the only question in my mind was "Do you have paying gigs?"
They did … and so I became Scotty Moore for a season, playing stuff I could do with both arms cut off.
It was all rather splendid fun, made lucrative by the King leaving the building that very summer.
"Elvis" himself took a bit of a shine to young Dive, inviting me to his house for meals and introducing me to his lovely daughter (you can cringe now, Theresa; you know what's coming).
Being a lusty eighteen-year-old version of Dive, one thing swiftly led to another, and a few days later I found myself in their kitchen "helping" Theresa bake stuff.
To my utter horror, in walks "Elvis" to be confronted by his smiling daughter in a bright red sweatshirt with floury white hand prints all over her boobs.
Ahem …
To my (again "utter") delight, he simply grinned and told us to clean up and "go upstairs where it's more private and play some records or something".
Smiling like a couple of idiots, up we went, as it were … "up" being the operative word.
It was only later, at dinner, when they invited me to tea for Theresa's upcoming birthday.
"Great! What is it, your seventeenth or eighteenth?"
"I'll be fourteen." she said.
Fuck!
Fuck my fucky, fucking luck!
It turned out that they thought they had found "a real catch" and were already planning our wedding! Sheesh!
To be brutally honest, these folk were - like the real Elvis - people of a somewhat … er … "rural" outlook, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
As a result of which I dropped poor Theresa like a hot … well, like a hot underage girl, dammit!
Poor thing. On the rebound, she got herself an alarmingly porcine boyfriend within a couple of months but he promptly eloped with her mother!
That was just too "Deliverance" for me … Theresa's mum possessed none of her daughter's charms, resembling nothing so much as the grisly offspring of an unnatural liaison betwixt a dugong and a potato.
The upshot of which was that poor "Elvis" gave up singing and I ran away to college, getting the Hell outta Dodge.
This is what life is like in rural England.
I deal with it as best I can …
Happy Birthday Elvis!
You still rock, dude.
This wouldn't be a proper "Dive" post if I didn't make some sarky crack about Fat Elvis and the obesity epidemic, so here goes:
You kids won't remember, but way back in the seventies, the Elvis diet briefly vied for supremacy with the Karen Carpenter diet for the soul of America; but while a few young girls still kill themselves the Karen Carpenter way, an increasing majority of modern America has whole-heartedly embraced the Elvis diet, making it the most successful ever.
As a role model, The King has shaped the America we see today; a nation groaning under a hideous, heaving horde of wobbling, half-ton lardosaurs gorging themselves to death on junk food.
Elvis is succeeding where al-Qaeda failed; slaughtering whole generations of innocent Americans in a bloated, oleaginous, adipose apocalypse.
But what a fucking great singer he was (for which we can forgive his becoming a fucking great lard-arse).
Inevitably, this brings to mind an Elvis story from my past.
Back in the tragic year of his alleged death (I'm a firm believer in his immortality, though possibly not of his being a space alien), I played probably the easiest season of my life; rattling off Scotty Moore licks behind an Elvis impersonator.
Actually a rather good one, not like the dross you get these days.
It happened like this:
In the heady days of 1977, I was making no money whatsoever playing lead guitar in a band doing Yes, Focus and Mahavishnu covers, whilst listening to Punk and managing a spectacularly unsuccessful Punk band (what a monstrous master of the sell-out I was).
Being but a schoolboy I needed cash desperately to spend on riotous living … and more guitars.
So when a couple of old guys heard me playing Zappa stuff as they walked past the house and came knocking on the door to say "Will you join our band, please?", the only question in my mind was "Do you have paying gigs?"
They did … and so I became Scotty Moore for a season, playing stuff I could do with both arms cut off.
It was all rather splendid fun, made lucrative by the King leaving the building that very summer.
"Elvis" himself took a bit of a shine to young Dive, inviting me to his house for meals and introducing me to his lovely daughter (you can cringe now, Theresa; you know what's coming).
Being a lusty eighteen-year-old version of Dive, one thing swiftly led to another, and a few days later I found myself in their kitchen "helping" Theresa bake stuff.
To my utter horror, in walks "Elvis" to be confronted by his smiling daughter in a bright red sweatshirt with floury white hand prints all over her boobs.
Ahem …
To my (again "utter") delight, he simply grinned and told us to clean up and "go upstairs where it's more private and play some records or something".
Smiling like a couple of idiots, up we went, as it were … "up" being the operative word.
It was only later, at dinner, when they invited me to tea for Theresa's upcoming birthday.
"Great! What is it, your seventeenth or eighteenth?"
"I'll be fourteen." she said.
Fuck!
Fuck my fucky, fucking luck!
It turned out that they thought they had found "a real catch" and were already planning our wedding! Sheesh!
To be brutally honest, these folk were - like the real Elvis - people of a somewhat … er … "rural" outlook, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
As a result of which I dropped poor Theresa like a hot … well, like a hot underage girl, dammit!
Poor thing. On the rebound, she got herself an alarmingly porcine boyfriend within a couple of months but he promptly eloped with her mother!
That was just too "Deliverance" for me … Theresa's mum possessed none of her daughter's charms, resembling nothing so much as the grisly offspring of an unnatural liaison betwixt a dugong and a potato.
The upshot of which was that poor "Elvis" gave up singing and I ran away to college, getting the Hell outta Dodge.
This is what life is like in rural England.
I deal with it as best I can …
Happy Birthday Elvis!
You still rock, dude.
Going Through The Motions
Jules posited in yesterday's comments that perhaps I need a hobby to cheer myself up and suggested diving … in The Thames!
I love The Thames and walk alongside it as many days a week as I can manage, but diving in it?
To rehash an old joke (which Peahen reminded me of last night), swimming in The Thames is just going through the motions … Ew!
Actually it's a lot cleaner than it used to be when I was a kid. There are salmon and otters (and the occasional whale) in it now; actually swimming about rather than laying on the surface, gasping and choking.
Still, as you can see by this morning's walk to work photos, the visibility is zero, so you wouldn't get to see a whole lot.
In the days of The Great Stink in the mid-nineteenth century, human waste, animal waste (we're talking megatonnes of peepee and poopoo here), rotting animal carcasses, chemical waste from tanneries, laundries and industry, and all manner of pungent and pestiferous effluvia were not only dumped straight into the Thames untreated, but were then pumped straight back out and used for drinking and washing.
Yummy!
Not only did that lead to cholera and the extinction of all life in the river, it also drove Parliament out of the city, having first forced them to cover all the windows alongside the river with lime-soaked heavy curtains.
Fragrant it was not.
Good old Joe Bazalgette sorted that one out by building our lovely sewer system that Thames Water now seems unable to maintain properly, the useless bastards.
But given a diving suit, I would far rather hop on a plane and go diving off Jules' porch than to dip my toes in my lovely Thames.
Any more feasible Dive-cheering hobby suggestions gratefully accepted.
I love The Thames and walk alongside it as many days a week as I can manage, but diving in it?
To rehash an old joke (which Peahen reminded me of last night), swimming in The Thames is just going through the motions … Ew!
Actually it's a lot cleaner than it used to be when I was a kid. There are salmon and otters (and the occasional whale) in it now; actually swimming about rather than laying on the surface, gasping and choking.
Still, as you can see by this morning's walk to work photos, the visibility is zero, so you wouldn't get to see a whole lot.
In the days of The Great Stink in the mid-nineteenth century, human waste, animal waste (we're talking megatonnes of peepee and poopoo here), rotting animal carcasses, chemical waste from tanneries, laundries and industry, and all manner of pungent and pestiferous effluvia were not only dumped straight into the Thames untreated, but were then pumped straight back out and used for drinking and washing.
Yummy!
Not only did that lead to cholera and the extinction of all life in the river, it also drove Parliament out of the city, having first forced them to cover all the windows alongside the river with lime-soaked heavy curtains.
Fragrant it was not.
Good old Joe Bazalgette sorted that one out by building our lovely sewer system that Thames Water now seems unable to maintain properly, the useless bastards.
But given a diving suit, I would far rather hop on a plane and go diving off Jules' porch than to dip my toes in my lovely Thames.
Any more feasible Dive-cheering hobby suggestions gratefully accepted.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Bored Now
At last; a nice sunny morning.
And it's Monday, too, which should cheer me up a bit.
But it doesn't.
Christmas and New Year were just so depressing that it will take more than a sunny Monday morning to get me going.
Everything's boring.
Not even the sight of Boudicca can rouse my brain from its grey torpor.
And if a kick-ass bird in a spiky chariot can't do it then what the fuck can?
2008 really sucks ass.
A measly two credibility points to anyone who can spot where the post title comes from. I'm so bored that I couldn't be bothered to think up a harder one.
And it's Monday, too, which should cheer me up a bit.
But it doesn't.
Christmas and New Year were just so depressing that it will take more than a sunny Monday morning to get me going.
Everything's boring.
Not even the sight of Boudicca can rouse my brain from its grey torpor.And if a kick-ass bird in a spiky chariot can't do it then what the fuck can?
2008 really sucks ass.
A measly two credibility points to anyone who can spot where the post title comes from. I'm so bored that I couldn't be bothered to think up a harder one.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Suffer, Meme Haters.
Well, as I'm feeling particularly uninspired of late, here's another meme to make you even more bored:
This one appears to be about 2007.
It also appears to be written by an American kid, so a lot of it doesn't apply. But I don't really give a fuck.
1) Where did you begin 2007?: In bed, asleep.
2) What was your status on Valentine's Day?: Stunned, as after decades of enforced loneliness I appeared to have acquired a girlfriend four days before.
3) Were you in school (anytime this year)?: I spent a lot of my time hanging around girls' schools. But then I design girls' schools for a living so it's not as dodgy as as if you were hanging around them.
I also kept up my Japanese lessons at Yarmouth College. Still 100% test record. すごいです。
4) How did you earn your money?: Designing girls' schools … duh!
5) Did you have to go to the hospital?: Yes. I spent a happy nine hours waiting for a blood test and also had my check-ups, X-rays and general maintenance done.
I didn't visit anyone in hospital in 2007, which is always a nice thing to say about a year.
6) Did you have any encounters with the police?: Not in 2007, other than getting my annual CRB check done (Criminal Records Bureau … It's part of my job that I'm a good boy and they check me out and provide a certificate to say I've not been naughty. Someone with a record of drug dealing or on the sex offenders register would not be the wisest choice for working with schoolgirls).
In 2006, they came round to remonstrate with me for throwing a burglar out of my kitchen window, leaving him somewhat the worse for wear. That was when I discovered that fingerprint dust is a fucking pain to get off stuff.
The CSI girl was gorgeous.
7) Where did you go on vacation?: Nowhere. I've not been away on hols since 1994.
8) What did you purchase that was over $1000?: Too much. I like stuff.
9) Did you know anybody who got married?: Yup. Fat Claire from the Village of the Damned. I think they had to sign a legal document to the effect that they wouldn't breed … at least I hope they did.
10) Did you know anybody who passed away?: Too many fellow musicians.
12) Did you move anywhere?: Only shuttling between Norfolk and London.
13) How did you celebrate your birthday?: I read a book and went to bed.
14) What concerts/shows did you go to?: Only weird shit that nobody's ever heard of.
15) Are you registered to vote?: Yup, though finding a good Socialist to vote for is becoming tricky these days.
16) Who did you want to win Big Brother?: I've never watched it or read about it and I have no idea who was in it and I'm glad.
17) Where do you live now?: On the edge of a cute little village nestled in the middle of the Norfolk Broads.
18) How did you spend your summer break?: My what? I seem to remember telling you that I design schools for a living. Most of our major construction work goes on during the summer break so I was busier than a hive of bees.
19) What's one thing you thought you'd never do but did in 2007?: I found a girl who seems to like me and fell in love. Sickening, isn't it?
20) What has been your favorite moment?: A first kiss … in the British Museum of all places.
21) What's something you learned about yourself?: That I can no longer simply bounce straight back up if I fall down the stairs. Suddenly it hurts. Getting old sucks.
22) Any new additions to your family?: Only the occasional new spider scuttling about the place.
23.) What was your worst month?: January. After that I was half of a couple.
24.) What music will you remember 2007 by?: Lots of good new avant-garde music came out and Joni came out of retirement with a spiffy album but nothing stands out particularly.
25) Who has been your best drinking buddy? Charlie and Fern; next door's cats.
26) Made new friends?: Yes, oddly.
27) New best friend?: Rupa; a small, spherical Indian woman who is more fun than watching a paraglider slam into the side of a caravan.
28) Favorite night out?: All the parties I've avoided going to. One day people are going to realise and stop inviting me. Twats.
29) What sporting events did you attend?: None, other than motor racing. Though I do enjoy watching our girls slaughter the opposition at lacrosse (we have the entire England team and a whole lot of international players at our schools; most of them at Norwich, which specialises in it).
30) What was your best month?: July was pretty good.
31) Overall, how would you rate 2007 out of 10?: I wouldn't. Like most years it was a bit of a curate's egg.
32) Other than home, where did you spend most of your time?: Stuck on fucking trains getting backwards and forwards to London.
33) Did you change your hairstyle?: I went slightly balder.
34) Have any car accidents?: Nope.
35) Did you have a New Year's resolution?: It's all here.
36) Do anything embarrassing?: Way too much to relate here.
37) Buy anything new from eBay?: Nope. Never use it.
38) Get married?: Nope. Though I might one day.
39) Get arrested?: Nope.
40) Be honest - did you watch American Idol?: Nope. I don't know what that is and I probably wouldn't care if I did know.
41) Did you get sick in 2007?: The odd headache.
42) Been snowboarding?: What a fucking stupid question to ask a middle-aged man in a country where there's not enough snow to make a decent snowball.
43) Are you happy to see 2007 go?: Yup.
Well. So much for 2007.
So far, 2008 has been utter crap.
Who makes these fucking years? Whoever it is needs a damned good kick up the arse.
This one appears to be about 2007.
It also appears to be written by an American kid, so a lot of it doesn't apply. But I don't really give a fuck.
1) Where did you begin 2007?: In bed, asleep.
2) What was your status on Valentine's Day?: Stunned, as after decades of enforced loneliness I appeared to have acquired a girlfriend four days before.
3) Were you in school (anytime this year)?: I spent a lot of my time hanging around girls' schools. But then I design girls' schools for a living so it's not as dodgy as as if you were hanging around them.
I also kept up my Japanese lessons at Yarmouth College. Still 100% test record. すごいです。
4) How did you earn your money?: Designing girls' schools … duh!
5) Did you have to go to the hospital?: Yes. I spent a happy nine hours waiting for a blood test and also had my check-ups, X-rays and general maintenance done.
I didn't visit anyone in hospital in 2007, which is always a nice thing to say about a year.
6) Did you have any encounters with the police?: Not in 2007, other than getting my annual CRB check done (Criminal Records Bureau … It's part of my job that I'm a good boy and they check me out and provide a certificate to say I've not been naughty. Someone with a record of drug dealing or on the sex offenders register would not be the wisest choice for working with schoolgirls).
In 2006, they came round to remonstrate with me for throwing a burglar out of my kitchen window, leaving him somewhat the worse for wear. That was when I discovered that fingerprint dust is a fucking pain to get off stuff.
The CSI girl was gorgeous.
7) Where did you go on vacation?: Nowhere. I've not been away on hols since 1994.
8) What did you purchase that was over $1000?: Too much. I like stuff.
9) Did you know anybody who got married?: Yup. Fat Claire from the Village of the Damned. I think they had to sign a legal document to the effect that they wouldn't breed … at least I hope they did.
10) Did you know anybody who passed away?: Too many fellow musicians.
12) Did you move anywhere?: Only shuttling between Norfolk and London.
13) How did you celebrate your birthday?: I read a book and went to bed.
14) What concerts/shows did you go to?: Only weird shit that nobody's ever heard of.
15) Are you registered to vote?: Yup, though finding a good Socialist to vote for is becoming tricky these days.
16) Who did you want to win Big Brother?: I've never watched it or read about it and I have no idea who was in it and I'm glad.
17) Where do you live now?: On the edge of a cute little village nestled in the middle of the Norfolk Broads.
18) How did you spend your summer break?: My what? I seem to remember telling you that I design schools for a living. Most of our major construction work goes on during the summer break so I was busier than a hive of bees.
19) What's one thing you thought you'd never do but did in 2007?: I found a girl who seems to like me and fell in love. Sickening, isn't it?
20) What has been your favorite moment?: A first kiss … in the British Museum of all places.
21) What's something you learned about yourself?: That I can no longer simply bounce straight back up if I fall down the stairs. Suddenly it hurts. Getting old sucks.
22) Any new additions to your family?: Only the occasional new spider scuttling about the place.
23.) What was your worst month?: January. After that I was half of a couple.
24.) What music will you remember 2007 by?: Lots of good new avant-garde music came out and Joni came out of retirement with a spiffy album but nothing stands out particularly.
25) Who has been your best drinking buddy? Charlie and Fern; next door's cats.
26) Made new friends?: Yes, oddly.
27) New best friend?: Rupa; a small, spherical Indian woman who is more fun than watching a paraglider slam into the side of a caravan.
28) Favorite night out?: All the parties I've avoided going to. One day people are going to realise and stop inviting me. Twats.
29) What sporting events did you attend?: None, other than motor racing. Though I do enjoy watching our girls slaughter the opposition at lacrosse (we have the entire England team and a whole lot of international players at our schools; most of them at Norwich, which specialises in it).
30) What was your best month?: July was pretty good.
31) Overall, how would you rate 2007 out of 10?: I wouldn't. Like most years it was a bit of a curate's egg.
32) Other than home, where did you spend most of your time?: Stuck on fucking trains getting backwards and forwards to London.
33) Did you change your hairstyle?: I went slightly balder.
34) Have any car accidents?: Nope.
35) Did you have a New Year's resolution?: It's all here.
36) Do anything embarrassing?: Way too much to relate here.
37) Buy anything new from eBay?: Nope. Never use it.
38) Get married?: Nope. Though I might one day.
39) Get arrested?: Nope.
40) Be honest - did you watch American Idol?: Nope. I don't know what that is and I probably wouldn't care if I did know.
41) Did you get sick in 2007?: The odd headache.
42) Been snowboarding?: What a fucking stupid question to ask a middle-aged man in a country where there's not enough snow to make a decent snowball.
43) Are you happy to see 2007 go?: Yup.
Well. So much for 2007.
So far, 2008 has been utter crap.
Who makes these fucking years? Whoever it is needs a damned good kick up the arse.
Another Filler Post
The grey, miserable start to 2008 has settled heavily on my soul and left me with all the wit and sparkle of an American TV anchorman during the writers' strike.
No matter how much caffeine I jolt my brain with it remains a doughy, lumpen mass with nothing blog-worthy leaking out of it.
Hence, yet another filler post.
This one will bring cries of joy to any of you who have ever wondered about the little thatched house hidden in the bamboo garden at Kew.
So that's none of you, then …
I stumbled on it when I took Mum for a day out at Kew a little while back. It's a traditional Japanese みんか house.
Kinda woody.
The script on the wooden panel describes the construction of the house and starts with (top right) the characters: 高木（たかいぼく- takai boku), meaning expensive wood. Don't ask me to translate the rest as I have a headache.
Anyhoo, here's what Kew's website says about it:
Normal service will be resumed when my brain starts working.
No matter how much caffeine I jolt my brain with it remains a doughy, lumpen mass with nothing blog-worthy leaking out of it.
Hence, yet another filler post.
This one will bring cries of joy to any of you who have ever wondered about the little thatched house hidden in the bamboo garden at Kew.
So that's none of you, then …
I stumbled on it when I took Mum for a day out at Kew a little while back. It's a traditional Japanese みんか house.
Kinda woody.
The script on the wooden panel describes the construction of the house and starts with (top right) the characters: 高木（たかいぼく- takai boku), meaning expensive wood. Don't ask me to translate the rest as I have a headache.
Anyhoo, here's what Kew's website says about it:
Kew's Minka House was originally a farmhouse built around 1900 in a suburb of Okazaki City, near the southern coast of central Japan. The first owners sold the house to the Yonezu family in 1940 and it was dismantled and moved to another part of the city. After their main home was destroyed in a bombing raid, the Yonezu family moved into this minka in 1945. Mr Yonezu was a keen photographer and he took pictures of many of the family events and celebrations held in the house. |
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The house fell vacant in 1993, on the death of Mrs Chiyoku Yonezu, who was the last member of the family to live there. The Japan Minka Re-use and Recycle Association (JMRA) acquired the house and donated it to the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew as part of the Japan 2001 Festival. After the minka had been dismantled, its wooden framework was shipped to the UK. Construction at Kew began on 7 May 2001, with experienced Japanese carpenters reinstating the intricate joints that are formed without the use of iron nails. When the framework was completed on 21 May 2001, a Japanese ceremory was held to mark the auspicious occasion. A team of British builders, who had previously worked on the Globe Theatre in London, then assembled the mud wall panels and thatched the roof with Norfolk reeds and wheat straw on a grid of bamboo laths. Work was completed in November 2001.
So now you know.Normal service will be resumed when my brain starts working.
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