if i don't have nightmares about this photo this evening i shall be a happily-surprised bunny indeed.
oooh, yeah, no, that's just fucking...
fuck.
don't like that at all
i have just burnt an old Ben Folds Five album, and am reminded of a date i almost went on with an ex-girlfriend; to go see a joint gig between the Ben Folds Five and the Divine Comedy - she vetoed it because it was "far too twee". in retrospect i can't help but agree with her...
i am now taking bets on how long it will take tour-operators to start doing surfing-trips to New Orleans
August 31, 2005
stereo-tastic
my right ear is listening, via iTunes and iPod headphones, to Tyrant by The Bravery.
my left ear is listening, via Fred's new CD, to Sympathetic Noose by The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
cocktail-party-effect my hole, it's just a fucking noise...
my left ear is listening, via Fred's new CD, to Sympathetic Noose by The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
cocktail-party-effect my hole, it's just a fucking noise...
Day 2
Observation 1: I can see my office desk from the window of my hotel room. I feel a larger work > hotel distance is necessary in order to maintain mental balance. This is like working from home - which generally does my head in
Observation 2: On leaving the building at 1830 my PM pointed out that all the staff had gone home. He said that this proved they were all lazy and that we'd soon sort that out. I ventured the opinion that perhaps it was actually a sign of a well run business that the office wasn't stuffed full of nervous looking people doing habitual unpaid overtime. The PM said I was being blasphemous. Apparently Management Consultants aren't allowed to say nice things :)
Observation 2: On leaving the building at 1830 my PM pointed out that all the staff had gone home. He said that this proved they were all lazy and that we'd soon sort that out. I ventured the opinion that perhaps it was actually a sign of a well run business that the office wasn't stuffed full of nervous looking people doing habitual unpaid overtime. The PM said I was being blasphemous. Apparently Management Consultants aren't allowed to say nice things :)
Fucking Catastrophic Disaster
she comes over and talks to me. incredible.
and then i fuck it up like no conversation has been fucked-up before:
my brains has, queued-up in its output buffer: "aye! sorry for not waving at you on the bus today but i'm never very switched-on in the mornings"
but my subconscious steps in (which is the diastrous bit, since it's never liked me very much) and i actually say "aye! sorry for not waving at you on the bus today but i'm never very turned-on in the morning"
freudian slip - where you say one thing but mean a mother...
and then i fuck it up like no conversation has been fucked-up before:
my brains has, queued-up in its output buffer: "aye! sorry for not waving at you on the bus today but i'm never very switched-on in the mornings"
but my subconscious steps in (which is the diastrous bit, since it's never liked me very much) and i actually say "aye! sorry for not waving at you on the bus today but i'm never very turned-on in the morning"
freudian slip - where you say one thing but mean a mother...
August 30, 2005
Fear and Loafing in Las Leeds
I have traveled to Leeds to look at some big holes in the ground. I have bought some new steel toe-capped boots expressly for this purpose. It sounds like we'll be hanging out in a call centre instead which is somewhat disappointing from a nu shu perspective.
The bigger issue for me is getting here. I decided to fly up from Southampton and I had the worst flight of my life. 20 seater prop (not unusual - use one to fly over to see Dad). Seats creaking, funny noises from above you, wings flexing, hit the clouds and we're bouncing around way too much. I was sitting near the emergency exit over the wing and I swear to god there were fingernail scratch marks by the handle.
I can't do it justice but I was fucking scared. I've never been scared of flying before in my life. A minute after we'd taken off I started to think "I want to get off" and then started to panic because I couldn't. Then I started to feel claustrophobic. Then the fun really started.
There's absolutely no way I'm using the return part of my ticket, which means a 4 hour train journey or an amusing divert via an airport that works with proper planes with jet engines, more than one door, audible announcements and other luxuries like structural integrity.
In the meantime, Leeds is a cracking place to be and - as I may have already mentioned - it's my second favourite city in the UK after London. However, we're in a hotel (admittedly a really good one) closer to the M1 than Leeds which is a bit annoying. However, it's only 50 yards from the office so bearing in mind the silly hours we'll be working our out-of-the-way location is probably a good thing.
Wrote some great training material over the last couple of working days as well. Really happy with that, so looking forward to practising what I preach.
Arm hurting from extensive badminton playing over the weekend. Liver recovering from multiple hangovers - esp. a great one after an awesome picnic / party session on Sunday.
Have booked driving test for the near future. Instructor is confident. I am 50/50. Still need some major work on maneuvers before I'm happy. Guess we'll just have to take the plunge and see what happens there. I have a book with me called 'how to drive' but feel embarrassed to be seen reading it in public. Onwards and upwards...
Any bright ideas on how to skive work in order to watch the cricket gratefully received...
The bigger issue for me is getting here. I decided to fly up from Southampton and I had the worst flight of my life. 20 seater prop (not unusual - use one to fly over to see Dad). Seats creaking, funny noises from above you, wings flexing, hit the clouds and we're bouncing around way too much. I was sitting near the emergency exit over the wing and I swear to god there were fingernail scratch marks by the handle.
I can't do it justice but I was fucking scared. I've never been scared of flying before in my life. A minute after we'd taken off I started to think "I want to get off" and then started to panic because I couldn't. Then I started to feel claustrophobic. Then the fun really started.
There's absolutely no way I'm using the return part of my ticket, which means a 4 hour train journey or an amusing divert via an airport that works with proper planes with jet engines, more than one door, audible announcements and other luxuries like structural integrity.
In the meantime, Leeds is a cracking place to be and - as I may have already mentioned - it's my second favourite city in the UK after London. However, we're in a hotel (admittedly a really good one) closer to the M1 than Leeds which is a bit annoying. However, it's only 50 yards from the office so bearing in mind the silly hours we'll be working our out-of-the-way location is probably a good thing.
Wrote some great training material over the last couple of working days as well. Really happy with that, so looking forward to practising what I preach.
Arm hurting from extensive badminton playing over the weekend. Liver recovering from multiple hangovers - esp. a great one after an awesome picnic / party session on Sunday.
Have booked driving test for the near future. Instructor is confident. I am 50/50. Still need some major work on maneuvers before I'm happy. Guess we'll just have to take the plunge and see what happens there. I have a book with me called 'how to drive' but feel embarrassed to be seen reading it in public. Onwards and upwards...
Any bright ideas on how to skive work in order to watch the cricket gratefully received...
August 26, 2005
antistalk
i have invented antistalk, the process of {deliberately avoiding someone you're obsessed with} so that they don't think that you're {obsessed with them and deliberately following them around}.
ha...
allow me to explain
the etherially-beautiful girl at work (obscenely-cute stripy jumper today...made me whimper...) leads a remarkably similar life to me, in terms of day-to-day movement. now, previously, if i really took a shine to a girl, then certain slight adjustments could be made to my timetable & my movements so that chances to talk to them could be...engineered (#i bump into you/accident-tally...). however! the new girl parks in the same car-park, gets the same bus in, gets the same bus out, goes to lunch at the same time, frequents the same shops and so, if i went about my life normally, she would, i fear, think that i was following her around, even though i'm just going about my life totally normally for once!!
thus i find myself in the fucking surreal position of having to avoid the girl i'm entranced by simply so that she doesn't, half-way down the high-street, spin-round and mace me. take yesterday for instance - leaving work with nano-second simultaneousness, we both turn the same way down the same street and i find myself lingering in a doorway, needlessly fiddling with my iPod, merely to so she could walk-on & put some distance between us. and then she walks into exactly the same shop i need to go into (to pick up emergency sirloin-supplies for my carnivour of a brother); i dutifully lunge into the most remote & far-flung aisles so as not to be seen to follow her about.
ghaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!
AND THEN from down the road i see her get on the same bus that i need to get on - normally i'd run to catch it but this time i sigh and dawdle, deliberately missing it, so that we don't get jammed next to each other in horribly-awkward & suspicion-drenched silence.
fate! WHY do you MOCK MEEEE?!?!!?
so yeah. that's what antistalk is. deliberately avoiding someone you desperately want to be with in order to remain some semblance of a chance of being with them...
of course, one miniscule possibility is that she is obsessed with me, and is therefore following ME around in order to engineer conversation with the strangely-compelling burping-boy in the corner. which is unlikely. and just far too cruel to be plausible...isn't it...?
*whimpers*
ha...
allow me to explain
the etherially-beautiful girl at work (obscenely-cute stripy jumper today...made me whimper...) leads a remarkably similar life to me, in terms of day-to-day movement. now, previously, if i really took a shine to a girl, then certain slight adjustments could be made to my timetable & my movements so that chances to talk to them could be...engineered (#i bump into you/accident-tally...). however! the new girl parks in the same car-park, gets the same bus in, gets the same bus out, goes to lunch at the same time, frequents the same shops and so, if i went about my life normally, she would, i fear, think that i was following her around, even though i'm just going about my life totally normally for once!!
thus i find myself in the fucking surreal position of having to avoid the girl i'm entranced by simply so that she doesn't, half-way down the high-street, spin-round and mace me. take yesterday for instance - leaving work with nano-second simultaneousness, we both turn the same way down the same street and i find myself lingering in a doorway, needlessly fiddling with my iPod, merely to so she could walk-on & put some distance between us. and then she walks into exactly the same shop i need to go into (to pick up emergency sirloin-supplies for my carnivour of a brother); i dutifully lunge into the most remote & far-flung aisles so as not to be seen to follow her about.
ghaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!
AND THEN from down the road i see her get on the same bus that i need to get on - normally i'd run to catch it but this time i sigh and dawdle, deliberately missing it, so that we don't get jammed next to each other in horribly-awkward & suspicion-drenched silence.
fate! WHY do you MOCK MEEEE?!?!!?
so yeah. that's what antistalk is. deliberately avoiding someone you desperately want to be with in order to remain some semblance of a chance of being with them...
of course, one miniscule possibility is that she is obsessed with me, and is therefore following ME around in order to engineer conversation with the strangely-compelling burping-boy in the corner. which is unlikely. and just far too cruel to be plausible...isn't it...?
*whimpers*
Barbecue etiquette
Just when you thought South Africans had nothing to offer polite society, a very instructive video comes along to illustrate the social structures at play during a barbecue. Excellent viewing.
Gayboy Macleod
Wow! Look at this picture of Ewan looking ubergay.
I dug this up from years and years ago!
Oh no, wait a moment....
I dug this up from years and years ago!
Oh no, wait a moment....
zealot
it never fails to amaze me how easily the sociopathic behaviour of human males can percolate through the mask of normality that everybody wears (i.e., everyone's a nutter but hides it...).
give someone a cause they can believe in and, lo & behold, quicker than you can say "petrol bomb" they've turned into violent crusaders and left the planet Sane for pastures new.
it's almost as if they're begging for an excuse to let rip.
most notably in modern life this takes form in terrorism, although fringe-crusades also quickly breed frothingly-rabid hammer-wielding fuckwits; animal-rights groups being the worst. for years now groups have roamed the country and fucked-up people & families & businesses with tactics that would make even Pol Pot go "now, look, just hang on a minute...". in case you can't be arsed to read that above link one tactic they used to shut down this guineau-pig farm was to go to the grave of the owner's mum and dig up her fucking body!
and they still haven't given it back!
i mean, i know humans are capable of stunningly horrible actions but this is pushing it.
why does this happen? why is it that the minute that an organisation embraces "direct action" it is instantly taken over by psychopaths? i think the only explaination is that it's the maladjusted wannabe-hardmen who've fantasised about violence their whole lives who are most able to prove their "seriousness" by going out and prosecuting cuntish behaviour, thus pushing them up the organisational heirarchy. you could argue that this even happened with the various factions in Northern Ireland, as in, political movements that started off with "good" intentions got subverted from the inside into cartels of barbarian thugs because the internal leadership-evolution can only ever favour those willing to perpetuate the most extreme actions, thus creating an inevitable and self-sustaining shift towards more & more violent people. as in, if your organisation is engaged in illegal & dangerous acts then the only people who will prosper are those who are inherently criminal & dangerous themselves.
this is what happens whenever you mix ideology with violence; when you equate success with fear & bloodshed then how can you not reward someone who goes out & hurts people? it's a slippery slope, in everything from the BNP to the witch-hunts in Salem, to the purges of Soviet Russia (and not forgetting a couple of thousand years-worth of religeous fanatasism)...and hence the sociopathies in animal-rights "activists".
using scare-tactics & violence to change the way that other people behave is terrorism, pure and simple. if you want to change things in a democracy then you do it through the fucking ballot-box, not by setting fire to people's houses and digging up their dead parents.
the fucking annoying thing is that i agree with their cause (in that a huge proportion of vivisection is medically-pointless and only done to satisfy the due-dilligence muppets at the firms who insure the pharmacuetical & cosmetics industries) but i disagree with their tactics so inherently, and think them all to be such a bunch of cunts anyway, that i'd probably squeeze carbolic acid into the eyes of a little fluffy kitten myself, just to fucking annoy them...
ho hum.
anyway. that's all i've got to say about that...
give someone a cause they can believe in and, lo & behold, quicker than you can say "petrol bomb" they've turned into violent crusaders and left the planet Sane for pastures new.
it's almost as if they're begging for an excuse to let rip.
most notably in modern life this takes form in terrorism, although fringe-crusades also quickly breed frothingly-rabid hammer-wielding fuckwits; animal-rights groups being the worst. for years now groups have roamed the country and fucked-up people & families & businesses with tactics that would make even Pol Pot go "now, look, just hang on a minute...". in case you can't be arsed to read that above link one tactic they used to shut down this guineau-pig farm was to go to the grave of the owner's mum and dig up her fucking body!
and they still haven't given it back!
i mean, i know humans are capable of stunningly horrible actions but this is pushing it.
why does this happen? why is it that the minute that an organisation embraces "direct action" it is instantly taken over by psychopaths? i think the only explaination is that it's the maladjusted wannabe-hardmen who've fantasised about violence their whole lives who are most able to prove their "seriousness" by going out and prosecuting cuntish behaviour, thus pushing them up the organisational heirarchy. you could argue that this even happened with the various factions in Northern Ireland, as in, political movements that started off with "good" intentions got subverted from the inside into cartels of barbarian thugs because the internal leadership-evolution can only ever favour those willing to perpetuate the most extreme actions, thus creating an inevitable and self-sustaining shift towards more & more violent people. as in, if your organisation is engaged in illegal & dangerous acts then the only people who will prosper are those who are inherently criminal & dangerous themselves.
this is what happens whenever you mix ideology with violence; when you equate success with fear & bloodshed then how can you not reward someone who goes out & hurts people? it's a slippery slope, in everything from the BNP to the witch-hunts in Salem, to the purges of Soviet Russia (and not forgetting a couple of thousand years-worth of religeous fanatasism)...and hence the sociopathies in animal-rights "activists".
using scare-tactics & violence to change the way that other people behave is terrorism, pure and simple. if you want to change things in a democracy then you do it through the fucking ballot-box, not by setting fire to people's houses and digging up their dead parents.
the fucking annoying thing is that i agree with their cause (in that a huge proportion of vivisection is medically-pointless and only done to satisfy the due-dilligence muppets at the firms who insure the pharmacuetical & cosmetics industries) but i disagree with their tactics so inherently, and think them all to be such a bunch of cunts anyway, that i'd probably squeeze carbolic acid into the eyes of a little fluffy kitten myself, just to fucking annoy them...
ho hum.
anyway. that's all i've got to say about that...
August 25, 2005
Important Life Decision
Benny has recently been despairing at his single status, but I'm happy to use the capacity in my life to ponder some important issues. You know, the big stuff.
Recently I've been tempted to pre-order the new Xbox which is out in November. However, after some serious thought and research I've decided to go with the next generation Playstation which is out next spring. The xbox is a big step up from the previous version but the ps3 employs lots of new technology which should make it a much better experience. Also, it supports hi-def and will work with bluray DVDs.
Recently I've been tempted to pre-order the new Xbox which is out in November. However, after some serious thought and research I've decided to go with the next generation Playstation which is out next spring. The xbox is a big step up from the previous version but the ps3 employs lots of new technology which should make it a much better experience. Also, it supports hi-def and will work with bluray DVDs.
August 24, 2005
World Domination Delay
We Apologise for the inconvenience
No rise of nations for a little while longer :(
Hi Tom
We are having problems with the repair of your laptop.
One of the plastics that was to be used in the repair of your laptop was
actually broken when it was taken out of the box.
I ordered another one from samsung straight away but it seems they don't
have them in stock right now.
I then sent samsung an e-mail and they said they would be getting a shipment
of those plastics form china soon.
I am so sorry for they delay on the repair of your laptop.
It seems our hands are tied until our supplier in the uk receives the
shipment from china.
Again my apologies and i will keep you up-dated with any progress of the
bottom plastic.
Kind Regards
Sharlene.
No rise of nations for a little while longer :(
look..
Ken Clarke, just fuck off and die will you? stupid old disgusting toad of a man that you are...
if he turned out to be a secret Labour party spy, trying to bring the Tories down from the inside, then i would not be terribly surprised...
if he turned out to be a secret Labour party spy, trying to bring the Tories down from the inside, then i would not be terribly surprised...
a threat to use today, if you can...
"...or i'll break into your house and piss into the reservoir of your steam iron."
i don't know where i get this shit from, i really don't
i don't know where i get this shit from, i really don't
Rock out with your cock out
You can't have a list of the greatest living rock guitarists without including Slash. I'd wager even Macleod would know who he is which probably can't be said of most of the entries in Benny's list.
Other alterations which are more a matter of taste:
DROP Jonny Buckland - Very talented, but it's not rock, it's lifestyle music. And I think it's Martin with the dodgy tuning, buckland stays EADGBE.
DROP Carina Round - No no no. Music to shave your legs to.
DROP Daniel Kessler. More effects and production than talent (takes one to know one har har har)
PROMOTE The Edge ("Everybody's going to remember your songs, it's just that nobody's gonna be able to play them" - Bob Dylan (in reference to Edge's delay-ridden riffs))
SLAP Greenwood in at number one
ADD Slash (nonoptional)
ADD Dan from the Darkness. Cheeky but technically excellent and knows his references.
ADD John Squire. Squire's interesting in that there's too much in there and the man needs to be told to shut up periodically. Witness the seahorses album. Endless solos. Be quiet.
Other alterations which are more a matter of taste:
DROP Jonny Buckland - Very talented, but it's not rock, it's lifestyle music. And I think it's Martin with the dodgy tuning, buckland stays EADGBE.
DROP Carina Round - No no no. Music to shave your legs to.
DROP Daniel Kessler. More effects and production than talent (takes one to know one har har har)
PROMOTE The Edge ("Everybody's going to remember your songs, it's just that nobody's gonna be able to play them" - Bob Dylan (in reference to Edge's delay-ridden riffs))
SLAP Greenwood in at number one
ADD Slash (nonoptional)
ADD Dan from the Darkness. Cheeky but technically excellent and knows his references.
ADD John Squire. Squire's interesting in that there's too much in there and the man needs to be told to shut up periodically. Witness the seahorses album. Endless solos. Be quiet.
the ten greatest living rock guitarists...
since we're on the subject...
10 - "the edge" (U2)
i must admit that hate most of U2's songs, but, alas, i don't know of anyone else who's put together so many instantly recognisable tunes that have shifted so many units in so many countries. so he deserves a place on the list simply out of completism...though the silly name & silly hat did make me think twice. (were i including bassists on this list then Carlos D & Stefan Olstad would have certainly pushed the tea-cozy-clad smuggite off in short order...)
9 - jon buckland (Coldplay)
not so much a vertuoso as the rest of this list but you can't deny his importance in shaping the sound of Coldplay, who are currently fucking everywhere and yet still pissing out vast quantities of excellent, excellent music. also he gets points for his odd guitar-tuning system, which annoys millions of teenage boys who can't quite figure out how to replicate it at home. ho ho ho...
8 - ed o'brien (Radiohead)
this is a man who blatantly wants to be a rock god - you can see it in his haircut, in his posture on stage, in his attitude, what he drinks and how he smokes his cigarettes. being a highly handsome devil (he was actually ranked in a poll of "Britain's 50 most eligable batchelors" for Vogue when he was still just a barman in Oxford) and being a very, very, very talented & exuberant guitarist (and he can sing [i want to beeeee himmm!]) he would - in any other band - be a magnificent frontman. however, he's not quite as unique a guitarist as his bandmate Jonny, and he's not quite as unique a musical talent as his frontman Thom. so he's merely had to settle for world superstardom, untold riches & an infinte reservoir of willing groupies, the poor, poor fella. he really shines on The Bends, though...
7 - carina round (Carina Round)
fiesty, sharp & melodic to a degree of high awesomeness. of all the three-man bands i've seen, she's been the only solo guitarist who could ever cover all the bases (from rhythm to lead to acoustic) and yet still keep the sound of the band whole and flawlessly complete. and whilst screaming out amazingly powerful emotions at the same time, no less...
...the fact she's startlingly pretty has nothing to do with it...ahem...
6. daniel kessler (Interpol)
nobody else on this planet is capable of painting such soundscapes with his guitar. and to mix such blistering precision with such punchy, sharp rock is a rare talent indeed. he also gets the award for the Tightest Live Guitarist Ever. i love watching him play; he just goes somewhere else, mentally, with this funny quasi-mona-lisa smile over his face (not that Mona Lisa ever had sideburns, but still...). but his beauty is actually the only negative thing about him, due to the legions of girls that trail him around, frothing at the bung-hole. i've interviewed him a couple of times - think i may have frothed slightly too...
5. josh homme (Queens of the Stone Age)
dirty great slabs of dribbing rock but with such a degree of precision you wouldn't believe. the entire album - Songs for the Deaf - is just a testament to what six little pieces of wire and five little fingers can do. No One Knows is just a perfect rock song - exhaulting, unstoppable and yet still gorgeous.
4. reeves gabriel (...?)
perhaps the most controversial choice of my list, this fella isn't too well known outside of stoned guitar snobbery - but his work with David Bowie on the albums Tin Machine and Earthling might get you thinking in the right direction; brutally clear, prolonged, rolling, searing electric solos - he doesn't pick or strum, he just fucks his guitar until it screeches. combined with Bowie's usual delightful-overproducing it just meshed into something less aural and more visionary - stunned me.
3. jonny greenwood (Radiohead)
where to begin...a classically-trained violinist turned rock-titan, this shy, unassuming, gentle fellow is stick thin and never seems to eat or speak. however, he's a genius. giving him a telecaster is like giving michaelangelo a can of spray paint and a garage door - such creations as you would not believe. quite apart from his sheer power & pace (see Electioneering, Paranoid Android, Just) his ability to convey pure torrents of emotion through an otherwise brutal instrument is startling (see Lucky, The Tourist). And i haven't yet touched-upon his talents on all the other arsenal of instruments he can turn his magic, magic hands to! quite an extra-ordinary human being all round, if you ask me.
2. chris shiflett - Foo Fighters
i have to say; if this had been "the ten greatest living guitarists" then this fella might not even figure on the list. however, it's the word "rock" that clinches it; i think that the album In Your Honour cements the Foo's firmly at the top of the Rock tree and that Shiflett is most reponsible for their guitar sound (since Grohl is usually too busy boning starletts & suing Courtney Love to play much of anything). if i'm honest with you he gets this spot simply for the recent single Best of You - i haven't been so repeatedly captivated by a track since i was about eight years old. it made me go fucking bananas.
1. The One on the Left (McFly)
word
10 - "the edge" (U2)
i must admit that hate most of U2's songs, but, alas, i don't know of anyone else who's put together so many instantly recognisable tunes that have shifted so many units in so many countries. so he deserves a place on the list simply out of completism...though the silly name & silly hat did make me think twice. (were i including bassists on this list then Carlos D & Stefan Olstad would have certainly pushed the tea-cozy-clad smuggite off in short order...)
9 - jon buckland (Coldplay)
not so much a vertuoso as the rest of this list but you can't deny his importance in shaping the sound of Coldplay, who are currently fucking everywhere and yet still pissing out vast quantities of excellent, excellent music. also he gets points for his odd guitar-tuning system, which annoys millions of teenage boys who can't quite figure out how to replicate it at home. ho ho ho...
8 - ed o'brien (Radiohead)
this is a man who blatantly wants to be a rock god - you can see it in his haircut, in his posture on stage, in his attitude, what he drinks and how he smokes his cigarettes. being a highly handsome devil (he was actually ranked in a poll of "Britain's 50 most eligable batchelors" for Vogue when he was still just a barman in Oxford) and being a very, very, very talented & exuberant guitarist (and he can sing [i want to beeeee himmm!]) he would - in any other band - be a magnificent frontman. however, he's not quite as unique a guitarist as his bandmate Jonny, and he's not quite as unique a musical talent as his frontman Thom. so he's merely had to settle for world superstardom, untold riches & an infinte reservoir of willing groupies, the poor, poor fella. he really shines on The Bends, though...
7 - carina round (Carina Round)
fiesty, sharp & melodic to a degree of high awesomeness. of all the three-man bands i've seen, she's been the only solo guitarist who could ever cover all the bases (from rhythm to lead to acoustic) and yet still keep the sound of the band whole and flawlessly complete. and whilst screaming out amazingly powerful emotions at the same time, no less...
...the fact she's startlingly pretty has nothing to do with it...ahem...
6. daniel kessler (Interpol)
nobody else on this planet is capable of painting such soundscapes with his guitar. and to mix such blistering precision with such punchy, sharp rock is a rare talent indeed. he also gets the award for the Tightest Live Guitarist Ever. i love watching him play; he just goes somewhere else, mentally, with this funny quasi-mona-lisa smile over his face (not that Mona Lisa ever had sideburns, but still...). but his beauty is actually the only negative thing about him, due to the legions of girls that trail him around, frothing at the bung-hole. i've interviewed him a couple of times - think i may have frothed slightly too...
5. josh homme (Queens of the Stone Age)
dirty great slabs of dribbing rock but with such a degree of precision you wouldn't believe. the entire album - Songs for the Deaf - is just a testament to what six little pieces of wire and five little fingers can do. No One Knows is just a perfect rock song - exhaulting, unstoppable and yet still gorgeous.
4. reeves gabriel (...?)
perhaps the most controversial choice of my list, this fella isn't too well known outside of stoned guitar snobbery - but his work with David Bowie on the albums Tin Machine and Earthling might get you thinking in the right direction; brutally clear, prolonged, rolling, searing electric solos - he doesn't pick or strum, he just fucks his guitar until it screeches. combined with Bowie's usual delightful-overproducing it just meshed into something less aural and more visionary - stunned me.
3. jonny greenwood (Radiohead)
where to begin...a classically-trained violinist turned rock-titan, this shy, unassuming, gentle fellow is stick thin and never seems to eat or speak. however, he's a genius. giving him a telecaster is like giving michaelangelo a can of spray paint and a garage door - such creations as you would not believe. quite apart from his sheer power & pace (see Electioneering, Paranoid Android, Just) his ability to convey pure torrents of emotion through an otherwise brutal instrument is startling (see Lucky, The Tourist). And i haven't yet touched-upon his talents on all the other arsenal of instruments he can turn his magic, magic hands to! quite an extra-ordinary human being all round, if you ask me.
2. chris shiflett - Foo Fighters
i have to say; if this had been "the ten greatest living guitarists" then this fella might not even figure on the list. however, it's the word "rock" that clinches it; i think that the album In Your Honour cements the Foo's firmly at the top of the Rock tree and that Shiflett is most reponsible for their guitar sound (since Grohl is usually too busy boning starletts & suing Courtney Love to play much of anything). if i'm honest with you he gets this spot simply for the recent single Best of You - i haven't been so repeatedly captivated by a track since i was about eight years old. it made me go fucking bananas.
1. The One on the Left (McFly)
word
suffusing every pore...
i got a nice hug from a damp farm dog this morning. this has led to me being slightly paranoid about me smelling like, you guessed it, wet dog.
this will not impress my angellic colleague much.
so! i grope around in my bag for the tiny wee bottle of Paul Smith eau de toilette that i cart there for emergency post-work social engagements (v. handy after eight hours of dwelling in a humid office). but i fear i have over-done it slightly...
one drop, usually, smashed between the wrists and then subsequently dabbed on both port and starboard aspects of the neck. however, a mix of harsh halogen lights in the bog and the usual whole-body a.m. tremor (caused by seeing the ethereal object of my affections for the first time in a day) led to too much stinkyjuice being deployed. so i am just wondering if i should take a lit match to my skin to burn some of it off...
ho hum. who cares...
...she's wearing a pair of silver-teardrop earrings today. i've never been so entranced by a lobe in my life...
this will not impress my angellic colleague much.
so! i grope around in my bag for the tiny wee bottle of Paul Smith eau de toilette that i cart there for emergency post-work social engagements (v. handy after eight hours of dwelling in a humid office). but i fear i have over-done it slightly...
one drop, usually, smashed between the wrists and then subsequently dabbed on both port and starboard aspects of the neck. however, a mix of harsh halogen lights in the bog and the usual whole-body a.m. tremor (caused by seeing the ethereal object of my affections for the first time in a day) led to too much stinkyjuice being deployed. so i am just wondering if i should take a lit match to my skin to burn some of it off...
ho hum. who cares...
...she's wearing a pair of silver-teardrop earrings today. i've never been so entranced by a lobe in my life...
August 23, 2005
greetings...
...am explaining the joys of PHP to Rob, after he force-fed me curry, the lovely man that he is. his computer is a lot nicer than mine - must make a mental note to steal it when he's not looking...
...millions die in plague/and murder...
lots of people have been making dire predictions about a nasty pandemic this winter. and i must say i do read these reports with no small degree of smugness, living as i do on a remote farm in a remote part of the world, surrounded by infinite amounts of beef & firewood. so if the world goes to batshit then i really won't care, i'll just barbeque...
...and, any of you city-types reading this, you're quite welcome to come down and hunker in my bunker (subject to an eight-month quarantine period in the barn) provided that you bring a bottle. vitamin C pills, for preference...
...and, any of you city-types reading this, you're quite welcome to come down and hunker in my bunker (subject to an eight-month quarantine period in the barn) provided that you bring a bottle. vitamin C pills, for preference...
bog standard
the nice thing about being the only male in the building is that i get an entire toilet to myself. vast oceans of immaculate tile, unsullied by the bottoms of any other interloper; a porceline oasis of calm in a female-saturated world...
i'm thinking of having a comfy-chair put in. perhaps a pool table...
i'm thinking of having a comfy-chair put in. perhaps a pool table...
Vision of Beauty
If you were to make a list of the ten greatest living rock guitarists and Mr J Greenwood of Radiohead wasn't on the list, well, then you'd be a c*nt who doesn't know anything.
Radiohead are currently pissing around in the studio and have a pseudo blog in operation. But what's really exciting about this photo is that Jonny is playing an acoustic. And he *never* plays an acoustic. Well, not since High and Dry if memory serves. Even when they play acoustic sets for radio shows, he always seems to rock up with a custom telecaster.
Gosh I'm really rather excited.
Radiohead are currently pissing around in the studio and have a pseudo blog in operation. But what's really exciting about this photo is that Jonny is playing an acoustic. And he *never* plays an acoustic. Well, not since High and Dry if memory serves. Even when they play acoustic sets for radio shows, he always seems to rock up with a custom telecaster.
Gosh I'm really rather excited.
August 22, 2005
Alcohell
Back at werk today which is simply ohmygosh thrilling as I have been dumped in Amazingstoke for some mopping up. Proof reading, basically. Word on the street is that following a few days at home towards the end of the week writing training material I will be in Leeds next week to spend some quality time with some gassy people. Another review, apparently (where we wander around finding out problems) as opposed to a project (where we try to talk some sense into people) which is good because I prefer reviews and Leeds is my favourite non-london city in the UK.
Anyway, I spent a lot of time playing badminton yesterday which was fab and then went down the pub for one or two. One or two bottles. Of wine. It didn't start as a session but recently I appear to have misplaced my self control. I'm hoping it's simply me being holiday-tastic rather than a swing towards alcoholism.
Woke up on sofa at 5am, passed out on bed for a couple of hours. Got dressed and packed, still slightly inebriated. Got a ride with Benny into Winchester and then started to feel quite funny on the park and ride bus. I was feverish - burning up. Found it tricky to breathe. Started to feel dizzy. Got off the bus in a car park. A bit like school - everyone still on the bus was staring at me, presumably hoping I'd brighten up their day by blowing a few chunks. Benny stared at me out of the window with a gormless expression on his face. Window licker! I guess he was trying to form a mental connection between the shell of a man outside propped up in a bus shelter with the dozing suit who seconds previously had been sat next to him on the back seat. Presumably he made the assumption that I was conducting some kind of car park / bus stop survey. To be fair, I did get off rather quick and with little warning. And it was, of course, all of my own making.
The bus went and I sat there for a bit feeling weird. I went to take the chewing gum out my mouth but my hand was shaking so much that locating my gob proved impossible. So I sat there for a bit, contemplating the rows of parked cars and then strolled into town and up to the station. An innocent fruit juice procured along the way appeared to calm things down rather nicely and by 10am I was fine. But it may be an opportune juncture to lay off the sauce for a while...
Anyway, I spent a lot of time playing badminton yesterday which was fab and then went down the pub for one or two. One or two bottles. Of wine. It didn't start as a session but recently I appear to have misplaced my self control. I'm hoping it's simply me being holiday-tastic rather than a swing towards alcoholism.
Woke up on sofa at 5am, passed out on bed for a couple of hours. Got dressed and packed, still slightly inebriated. Got a ride with Benny into Winchester and then started to feel quite funny on the park and ride bus. I was feverish - burning up. Found it tricky to breathe. Started to feel dizzy. Got off the bus in a car park. A bit like school - everyone still on the bus was staring at me, presumably hoping I'd brighten up their day by blowing a few chunks. Benny stared at me out of the window with a gormless expression on his face. Window licker! I guess he was trying to form a mental connection between the shell of a man outside propped up in a bus shelter with the dozing suit who seconds previously had been sat next to him on the back seat. Presumably he made the assumption that I was conducting some kind of car park / bus stop survey. To be fair, I did get off rather quick and with little warning. And it was, of course, all of my own making.
The bus went and I sat there for a bit feeling weird. I went to take the chewing gum out my mouth but my hand was shaking so much that locating my gob proved impossible. So I sat there for a bit, contemplating the rows of parked cars and then strolled into town and up to the station. An innocent fruit juice procured along the way appeared to calm things down rather nicely and by 10am I was fine. But it may be an opportune juncture to lay off the sauce for a while...
...random thorts...
you know, on your mouse, the four little tiny round pads of reeeaally smooth plastic, that lets your mouse glide around super-smoothly, well, why don't they make ice-rinks out of that stuff...?
as you can probably guess, today is dragging somewhat...
as you can probably guess, today is dragging somewhat...
victim fashions
once again the field of human endeavour appears to have a few molehills in it...i can't quite believe my eyes...
woe betide me
am feeling quite staggeringly & comprehensively lonely at the moment - all precipitated, i think, by having dreamed of the ex-girlfriend for the last two nights running.
keep having to remind myself how unhappy i was then, too. but, you know, nobody likes a whiner...
keep having to remind myself how unhappy i was then, too. but, you know, nobody likes a whiner...
August 20, 2005
To-do List
Complete
========
Driving Lesson (no deaths, no crashes - yay me!)
Meeting with another mortgage person
Replace lightning-fried power supply for wireless router
Outstanding
===========
Go for bike ride
Catch up on emails
Invade Poland
========
Driving Lesson (no deaths, no crashes - yay me!)
Meeting with another mortgage person
Replace lightning-fried power supply for wireless router
Outstanding
===========
Go for bike ride
Catch up on emails
Invade Poland
August 19, 2005
Today's DVD
I acquired State of Play from amazon, purely on the basis that it was written by Paul Abbott who also wrote Shameless. Man's a genius. I totally missed it when it was on TV. Anyway, It came this morning and I've just spent 6 hours watching all the episodes. Bill Nighy is fucking spectacular in it and the dialogue is of incredible quality.
Spending 6 hours watching TV is not typical of me. However, I have a semi-hangover from being locked in a pub with lots of people I don't/didn't know last night. In addition, I am a glutton. When I get of taste of something stunning I can't stop gorging on it and State of Play is no exception. Ms Macdonald (below) is also in it, hence I have fallen in love.
That is all.
Spending 6 hours watching TV is not typical of me. However, I have a semi-hangover from being locked in a pub with lots of people I don't/didn't know last night. In addition, I am a glutton. When I get of taste of something stunning I can't stop gorging on it and State of Play is no exception. Ms Macdonald (below) is also in it, hence I have fallen in love.
That is all.
oh, fudge
Tom reports that our wireless-network has been fried to a hissing-crisp by having 20,000 volts speared through it (obviously Thor took a dim view of me attempting my very-own Denial Of Service attack on The Hun...) and as such we may be blogless over the weekend...
...in other news, i am still infatuated with the new girl in the office. i know tantalisingly little about her; very early 20's, possibly just out of University, that's it. can't keep myself from glancing at her - my neck's getting a definate crick from surrupticious stares in her direction...
i've exchanged all of about five sentences with her...
i think it's hate at first sight ;o)
oh well. time to break out the old pheremone-spray, eh?
also, it might be time to break out the iPod, since i've had a Kt Tunstall song trapped in my poor, guitar-riddled bonce for roughly eight days now. her new single - Suddenly I See - it just too fucking catchy. so yes. the current objects of my affection are Nameless Ethereally Beautiful Colleague and some singer bint. oh yes, and the girl who works up at the paper-shop at lunchtime, her too...she wears just the merest suggestion of glitter sometimes and every time i see her sparkle i die a little inside...but don't mind...
tsk.
...in other news, i am still infatuated with the new girl in the office. i know tantalisingly little about her; very early 20's, possibly just out of University, that's it. can't keep myself from glancing at her - my neck's getting a definate crick from surrupticious stares in her direction...
i've exchanged all of about five sentences with her...
i think it's hate at first sight ;o)
oh well. time to break out the old pheremone-spray, eh?
also, it might be time to break out the iPod, since i've had a Kt Tunstall song trapped in my poor, guitar-riddled bonce for roughly eight days now. her new single - Suddenly I See - it just too fucking catchy. so yes. the current objects of my affection are Nameless Ethereally Beautiful Colleague and some singer bint. oh yes, and the girl who works up at the paper-shop at lunchtime, her too...she wears just the merest suggestion of glitter sometimes and every time i see her sparkle i die a little inside...but don't mind...
tsk.
ZZZZAP
we got hit by lightning last night.
it resulted in two things - the first thing happened when an triptych of enormous, eyeball-searing flashes woke me up, along with the sort of feeling you get when you stand too close to the speakers at a gig, like, like your lungs are vibrating. standing at the window, still semi-REM-ing, i thought for a moment that the noise and unbelievable light was indicative of me being abducted by aliens. i was just wondering whether or not to lube myself up for the anal-probe when it all stopped and i fell backwards into bed. but i've never been so totally blinded by an electrical storm before - it felt like i was inside the bolt staring out. most strange.
and the second thing was that it resulted in me being late for work; power-cut = no alarm, see. the cat clawed me awake at 9:30 when i have to leave the house at 8:00. now, i'll be the very first to admit that i really don't give a hoot about my job, but to be two hours late is pushing it, even for me...oh well.
these things...er...happen...
it resulted in two things - the first thing happened when an triptych of enormous, eyeball-searing flashes woke me up, along with the sort of feeling you get when you stand too close to the speakers at a gig, like, like your lungs are vibrating. standing at the window, still semi-REM-ing, i thought for a moment that the noise and unbelievable light was indicative of me being abducted by aliens. i was just wondering whether or not to lube myself up for the anal-probe when it all stopped and i fell backwards into bed. but i've never been so totally blinded by an electrical storm before - it felt like i was inside the bolt staring out. most strange.
and the second thing was that it resulted in me being late for work; power-cut = no alarm, see. the cat clawed me awake at 9:30 when i have to leave the house at 8:00. now, i'll be the very first to admit that i really don't give a hoot about my job, but to be two hours late is pushing it, even for me...oh well.
these things...er...happen...
Can't Believe I forgot this
Over the weekend, in the outer reaches of tube zone 6789a, I was roundly admonished for moving to the country. Why on earth would I possibly want to turn my back on London? Was I a total hick?
The answer came the next morning. Strolling through a park in the environs of barnet we came across a piece of paper stapled to a tree: "Stolen Dog, since 07/08/05 please call blah blah blah"
In regional towns this sign would have read: "*Lost* Dog blah blah blah"
In my village there would have been no sign at all. Word of mouth would have done the trick.
So yes, cities are cynical and impersonal places to reside. But the thing I really really can't stand about cities is suburbia. If you need to commute to central london every day then you have two choices: live in central london (duh) or feck off to Surrey, Hertfordshire, Berkshire or even (gosh) Essex. What in god's name is the point of living in Harringey? Barking? Acton? Ealing? Living in these places you have to tolerate the scum of the city and be no closer to work than those who live in the home counties. Either way you look at it you lose. Geography lies. In travel time, Woking is closer to Waterloo than Morden (if you ignore escalator climbing), Watford closer to London than Finchley and Ebbsfleet (upon completion of the channel tunnel stuff) will be closer to St Pancras than, well, the Euston Road.
Should I never live in the suburbs again I will be a happy boy, for there simply is no point.
The answer came the next morning. Strolling through a park in the environs of barnet we came across a piece of paper stapled to a tree: "Stolen Dog, since 07/08/05 please call blah blah blah"
In regional towns this sign would have read: "*Lost* Dog blah blah blah"
In my village there would have been no sign at all. Word of mouth would have done the trick.
So yes, cities are cynical and impersonal places to reside. But the thing I really really can't stand about cities is suburbia. If you need to commute to central london every day then you have two choices: live in central london (duh) or feck off to Surrey, Hertfordshire, Berkshire or even (gosh) Essex. What in god's name is the point of living in Harringey? Barking? Acton? Ealing? Living in these places you have to tolerate the scum of the city and be no closer to work than those who live in the home counties. Either way you look at it you lose. Geography lies. In travel time, Woking is closer to Waterloo than Morden (if you ignore escalator climbing), Watford closer to London than Finchley and Ebbsfleet (upon completion of the channel tunnel stuff) will be closer to St Pancras than, well, the Euston Road.
Should I never live in the suburbs again I will be a happy boy, for there simply is no point.
August 18, 2005
why apples are eeeeee-vil
selling computers for £28 = stoooopid...
PC users would never tread on each other's heads to get piss-cheap kit, i'm sure ;o)
Nonholiday
I'm nominally on holiday but spent today doing things I'd rather not bother with. I've handed my 2004 accounts over to the beancounters from Bristol thence to the taxman, have pursued pensions and mortgages, chased Finnian fixers of laptops, pursued mail order emporia in relation to overdue Anderson birthday presents and been food / parasol base shopping. As you do. My father also managed to piss away an hour of my time in IT instruction. There follows a statement of the problem.
Dad's neighbour on his remote scottish isle ('not technically literate' in every sense) has an MP3 player and cannot get it to work. Dad has set himself up as the fountain of all knowledge, so immediately accepted the challenge of fixing it. He gave it half an hour and got as far as plugging it into the USB socket and determining that the manual was bollocks. So he called me. We worked through the principles of Windows Media Player (is this not the worst piece of software ever written?), encoding music and copying it to removable usb drives. This took an hour. My main problems with this are:
1) If he had broadband I could have remoted into his computer and shown him what to do in 5 minutes
2) The bugger won't stop fiddling with things when I'm giving him simple instructions. So frequently we'll get halfway through something and then there'll be a pause followed by a "Whoops" followed by a growl from my end and a reboot from his
3) When the problem is fixed and he takes it back to the owner victorious there won't be a mention of my help. The man's a fake idol, a false god. This will only encourage them to come up with new and exotic incidents to add to my technical support queue.
But mostly, it's the assumption that I'll know what to do based on the idea that having a degree that's 1/3rd IT confers some kind of Dr Doolittle like ability to talk to silicon and software on the receiver irrespective of previous experience or knowledge. I haven't used a PC regularly in a year now. If this happens one more time before christmas I'm buying him a mini mac. That'll learn him.
Dad's neighbour on his remote scottish isle ('not technically literate' in every sense) has an MP3 player and cannot get it to work. Dad has set himself up as the fountain of all knowledge, so immediately accepted the challenge of fixing it. He gave it half an hour and got as far as plugging it into the USB socket and determining that the manual was bollocks. So he called me. We worked through the principles of Windows Media Player (is this not the worst piece of software ever written?), encoding music and copying it to removable usb drives. This took an hour. My main problems with this are:
1) If he had broadband I could have remoted into his computer and shown him what to do in 5 minutes
2) The bugger won't stop fiddling with things when I'm giving him simple instructions. So frequently we'll get halfway through something and then there'll be a pause followed by a "Whoops" followed by a growl from my end and a reboot from his
3) When the problem is fixed and he takes it back to the owner victorious there won't be a mention of my help. The man's a fake idol, a false god. This will only encourage them to come up with new and exotic incidents to add to my technical support queue.
But mostly, it's the assumption that I'll know what to do based on the idea that having a degree that's 1/3rd IT confers some kind of Dr Doolittle like ability to talk to silicon and software on the receiver irrespective of previous experience or knowledge. I haven't used a PC regularly in a year now. If this happens one more time before christmas I'm buying him a mini mac. That'll learn him.
Sunday Monday Tuesday is a blur
It begins in norf london, trains it to Kings Cross, walks to Camden, buys a T shirt and reads a newspaper in bar. It meets up with Greg and then Nick and eats pizza. Tales of debauchery and body abuse are traded in something that's more like a game of Top Trumps than a conversation. Facial scars are compared and hangovers boasted about. We hurtle up to Totteridge in a car too fast for the shell of the man behind the wheel and pick up Dan. We undertake dozens of cars on the way over to Whetstone and then following a costume change and another life-in-your-hands car journey land up in Highgate. The pace of the banter accelerates with the pace of the alcohol consumption. Not having been in London for a while I'm at first confused to find myself paying £15 for a round between 4 people. I get back into it soon enough.
Dan's CD has just been mastered and is sounding fantastic. He's trying to get label interest so we spend the next day duplicating it and getting it to the people who need to have it. Dan has been procrastinating so I'm happy to give him a firm kick up the ass. To get some blank CDs we go to a shop in Totteridge that sells big, serious kit for recording studios (Olympic was one of theirs). Dan talks to the man while I look at all the faders, racks, TFT screens and dribble. This is serious technology. Yummy.
We pick up a new car in Romford and have an excellent meal at The Orange Tree on Totteridge Lane. The Orange Tree is one of my 5 most favourite pubs in all of London and in a month or two will be turned into an italian restaurant. What a load of crap.
Dan currently works there as a Barman and does a pretty good job of being unfazed by the b-listers who hang out there. By repute, he's gotten pretty good at cursing the embryos from Macfly when they come in for a shandy.
Totteridge Lane is pretty rich for norf norf london. But it's money sans taste. All the houses have horrible pillars and ugly gates. Yuck.
Dan's CD has just been mastered and is sounding fantastic. He's trying to get label interest so we spend the next day duplicating it and getting it to the people who need to have it. Dan has been procrastinating so I'm happy to give him a firm kick up the ass. To get some blank CDs we go to a shop in Totteridge that sells big, serious kit for recording studios (Olympic was one of theirs). Dan talks to the man while I look at all the faders, racks, TFT screens and dribble. This is serious technology. Yummy.
We pick up a new car in Romford and have an excellent meal at The Orange Tree on Totteridge Lane. The Orange Tree is one of my 5 most favourite pubs in all of London and in a month or two will be turned into an italian restaurant. What a load of crap.
Dan currently works there as a Barman and does a pretty good job of being unfazed by the b-listers who hang out there. By repute, he's gotten pretty good at cursing the embryos from Macfly when they come in for a shandy.
Totteridge Lane is pretty rich for norf norf london. But it's money sans taste. All the houses have horrible pillars and ugly gates. Yuck.
Ms Li
Dinner with Ms Li and Ms Di Trolio. I don't have any usable photos of Di Trolio as she's a bit minging, but here's one of the fabulous Hoyan, my off/on/off future wife.
Barnet is only a 45 minute cab ride (via a Toyota Prius - one of the electric ones almost interestingly enough) from Holborn but was a very different place in terms of conversation. Holborn was about over-analysing Malini's love life, extracting unpublishable gossip from macleod and gossiping about mutual friends. In contrast, Barnet was like a play with too many fucking pauses in.
Broken hearts, frustrated dreams and uncertain futures. Dark dark dark. Come and tell uncle Harvey. He'll fix it. I exaggerate, of course. But Holborn was light hearted stuff whereas Barnet was about muddling through. Neither of them have chosen very easy routes for themselves and it's tricky for them at times. But I reckon they've both made the right choices recently, although confidence was at a bit of a low ebb on Saturday night.
More wine was drunk and when I judged that the bridget jones nonsense had concluded I diverted them with a lengthy discourse variously on the solar system, the failures of astrology and why macs are better than PCs which they were both kind enough to stay conscious for.
In the background we listened to the James Blunt album which was totally unimpressive. Allow me to skip about with the chronology a little: the next day, Dan got quite heated as he explained to me how 'Beautiful' (the blunt single) was a direct rip off of 'La Cienega Just Smiled' by Ryan Adams. La Cienega is one of the best songs I've ever heard and is Dan's favourite song - high praise indeed :) - so if you enjoyed that, download the far superior adams original or better yet the entire "Gold" album which is fab stuff. Blunt = C*nt.
Barnet is only a 45 minute cab ride (via a Toyota Prius - one of the electric ones almost interestingly enough) from Holborn but was a very different place in terms of conversation. Holborn was about over-analysing Malini's love life, extracting unpublishable gossip from macleod and gossiping about mutual friends. In contrast, Barnet was like a play with too many fucking pauses in.
Broken hearts, frustrated dreams and uncertain futures. Dark dark dark. Come and tell uncle Harvey. He'll fix it. I exaggerate, of course. But Holborn was light hearted stuff whereas Barnet was about muddling through. Neither of them have chosen very easy routes for themselves and it's tricky for them at times. But I reckon they've both made the right choices recently, although confidence was at a bit of a low ebb on Saturday night.
More wine was drunk and when I judged that the bridget jones nonsense had concluded I diverted them with a lengthy discourse variously on the solar system, the failures of astrology and why macs are better than PCs which they were both kind enough to stay conscious for.
In the background we listened to the James Blunt album which was totally unimpressive. Allow me to skip about with the chronology a little: the next day, Dan got quite heated as he explained to me how 'Beautiful' (the blunt single) was a direct rip off of 'La Cienega Just Smiled' by Ryan Adams. La Cienega is one of the best songs I've ever heard and is Dan's favourite song - high praise indeed :) - so if you enjoyed that, download the far superior adams original or better yet the entire "Gold" album which is fab stuff. Blunt = C*nt.
The Chancery Court
Saturday morning brings an epic hangover and a car ride to guildford, a train ride to london and a cab ride to the marriott the chancery court hotel near holborn. Macleod has long since decided he's too grand for mere bars and apparently generally takes up residence here when he's in town :)
The conversation was better than the water was better than the orange juice was better than my stomach felt. About half an hour after arriving (i.e. 2 hours after I should have been there due to logistical difficulties) I was overcome by this tremendous sense of ease. I felt comfortable, relaxed and pretty happy really. Last time I felt like this we were at the Fat Duck. I think it's just something about being around your friends. I know this is all very cheesy but it's important to record because it's too easy to forget. It was great to catch up with them and the banter was excellent. Great stuff for 4 hours or so, then it was time for Norf London.
The conversation was better than the water was better than the orange juice was better than my stomach felt. About half an hour after arriving (i.e. 2 hours after I should have been there due to logistical difficulties) I was overcome by this tremendous sense of ease. I felt comfortable, relaxed and pretty happy really. Last time I felt like this we were at the Fat Duck. I think it's just something about being around your friends. I know this is all very cheesy but it's important to record because it's too easy to forget. It was great to catch up with them and the banter was excellent. Great stuff for 4 hours or so, then it was time for Norf London.
Winchester Day
Following the excavation of three new craters around my head I wandered into Winchester for the day. I strolled around estate agents, chatted to people about mortgages (Abbey want to give me £40k less than HSBC have offered. I'm currently finding this variance confusing) and had a driving lesson. We'refocusingg on reversing around corners at the moment - another area of confusing variance. Sometimes I rock, sometimes I suck. Practice Practice Practice!
In the evening, Benny took me for dinner with Cliff and Laura, residents of Winchester. It was a little bit annoying if truth be told. No sooner has Cliff made you green with envy at something equal parts beautiful and effortless on his guitar than Laura gives you somethingdeliciouss to eat that you know you'd never be able to replicate in a dozen attempts. It was all I could do to guzzle wine and sit making bad tempered remarks about thecontestantss during the big brother final. I'm afraid I was just a little bit drunk at the end of it all and sat making gurgling noises in the passenger seat as Benny drove me home.
In the evening, Benny took me for dinner with Cliff and Laura, residents of Winchester. It was a little bit annoying if truth be told. No sooner has Cliff made you green with envy at something equal parts beautiful and effortless on his guitar than Laura gives you somethingdeliciouss to eat that you know you'd never be able to replicate in a dozen attempts. It was all I could do to guzzle wine and sit making bad tempered remarks about thecontestantss during the big brother final. I'm afraid I was just a little bit drunk at the end of it all and sat making gurgling noises in the passenger seat as Benny drove me home.
Angel of the North
Here is a rubbish picture I took of the huge - well, would you call it a sculpture or a statue? - as we whizzed past on the long trek from Middlesbrough to Newcastle Airport. I dimly remember it being maligned by the meedja when it was unveiled. Now it's iconic. Inspirational almost.
Whatever. The point I guess I'm trying to get across is that I always feel happy to see it.
This journey was also notable for travelling through Sedgefield where the roads were wonderful and everything looked new. Must be quite a treat to have the PM as your MP. Apart from the occasional undesirable dropping in...
Whatever. The point I guess I'm trying to get across is that I always feel happy to see it.
This journey was also notable for travelling through Sedgefield where the roads were wonderful and everything looked new. Must be quite a treat to have the PM as your MP. Apart from the occasional undesirable dropping in...
Orifice_Count = Orifice_Count + 3
On Thursday I had some moles chopped off. This was motivated partly by vanity and partly through shaving-related practicality. Thanks to my uber-private medical insurance as laid on by my employer this took a few weeks to arrange rather than a couple of ice ages.
Local anesthetics can lead to somewhat surreal experiences. At one point, sensing wetness on the back of my neck I assumed that I was perspiring from the stress of the situation. Luckily, it only turned out to be a small stream of my blood, flowing freely from a fresh hole in the side of my head. A minute later I told the doctor that I smelt something burning but he reassured me that it was only my face. Cauterisation eh? Phew!
In the aftermath I have been told to avoid getting the (small) wounds wet. This makes showering quite a confusing and protracted process as I have to complete it without getting one side of my face and the opposite side of my head moist. It's rather like trying to move a sofa into a house only to find that some cunning manipulation is required to navigate it around the banisters and up the stairs. I believe I'm referencing a Douglas Adams book now so I'll move on. I'm not sure whether it was stress from the op, the small quantity of drugs involved or the fact that it was the first day of my holiday but I got home afterwards and passed out at about 4pm. Very relaxing. Perhaps I'll take up minor operations as a hobby. Nurse!
Local anesthetics can lead to somewhat surreal experiences. At one point, sensing wetness on the back of my neck I assumed that I was perspiring from the stress of the situation. Luckily, it only turned out to be a small stream of my blood, flowing freely from a fresh hole in the side of my head. A minute later I told the doctor that I smelt something burning but he reassured me that it was only my face. Cauterisation eh? Phew!
In the aftermath I have been told to avoid getting the (small) wounds wet. This makes showering quite a confusing and protracted process as I have to complete it without getting one side of my face and the opposite side of my head moist. It's rather like trying to move a sofa into a house only to find that some cunning manipulation is required to navigate it around the banisters and up the stairs. I believe I'm referencing a Douglas Adams book now so I'll move on. I'm not sure whether it was stress from the op, the small quantity of drugs involved or the fact that it was the first day of my holiday but I got home afterwards and passed out at about 4pm. Very relaxing. Perhaps I'll take up minor operations as a hobby. Nurse!
Grade Inflation
There's no newspaper better qualified to discuss the many forms of inflation than The Economist and it doesn't disappoint on the subject of 'A' levels either. Very informative.
August 17, 2005
oh yes...
...i forgot to mention that Russell, the nice man whose nice Jag my NASTY car rolled into ("Bad car, BAD! Go to your room!!") has actually turned out to be the head of the department with whom i applied for a job last week.
Ahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaa
"These things happen", I've been told.
Only to fucking me!!!!!
I'm fed up with getting dicked-around by the world, so I think I'll just destroy it...where did I put my death-ray...
forgive my irritation - gave up smoking today. only smoked about forty fags in this suicycle, thought, so it shouldn't be too difficult. i do this - i spend four or five months running, weightlifting, biking miles & miles a week and generally honing the old mortal-coil into a size & shape which i think is pretty decent and THEN i just randomly undo all that hard work in a month of not doing any exercise at all, over-eating and smoking. i've done this all my adult life and i can't for the life of me figure out why - i'd be better off just not doing any exercise but just eating sensibly & not smoking, because the net result would be the same (over time an average-sized bod) but i'd cut out all the long-term nasties (i.e., injuries & arthritis from running/cholesterol from avarice/smoking-related-doom).
but the old trousers feel a bit tight around the tum-tum today, and the once-firm pecs jiggled most unpleasantly as i skipped lightly up the steps outside the office this morning, and so it's time to risk a spot of exercise again. i did a tiny, tiny number of pitiful weights last night just to test my neck (buggered by sit-ups) and my right shoulder (exploded by cricket) and the pain wasn't toooo bad. it's always hard with sports-injuries to know the difference between Pain Type One (doing more damage to an injury by putting too much strain on it) and Pain Type Two (doing good to an almost-totally-healed injury by breaking-in the new cells & internaly-exfoliating the scar-tissue).
but i think i'll be okay. so some more tonight, maybe a bike too, and it'll be bye-bye bouncy-boobied Benny before you can say "man-bra"...
...the back of my lungs feels strange...constricted, somehow. whenever i lean forwards it feels like they're peeling away from the back of my ribs...
oh well. at least in my short smoking career i was blessed with the perfect weather for it; warm, sun-kissed afternoons and, later, for the final cigarette of the day, stood outside, staring straight up at the crystal-clear sky and marvelling, between luxurious, revelling puffs & succulent sips of brandy, at the clarity of the stars. one of the effects of nicotine (before your body gets used to it) is to drug you slightly to increase visual clarity, and it really did seem like i could see every single one of the little twinkly bastards, like i could see every dent & every crater on the boiling-silver moon.
most pleasurable.
that's what cigarettes are, alas - pleasurable...
i must buy one of those arabian hookahs, the hubbly-bubbly ones...moist mists of apple tobacco rolling down my throat like refridgerated-treacle oozing out of a petrol-pump...yeaaaah...
Ahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaa
"These things happen", I've been told.
Only to fucking me!!!!!
I'm fed up with getting dicked-around by the world, so I think I'll just destroy it...where did I put my death-ray...
forgive my irritation - gave up smoking today. only smoked about forty fags in this suicycle, thought, so it shouldn't be too difficult. i do this - i spend four or five months running, weightlifting, biking miles & miles a week and generally honing the old mortal-coil into a size & shape which i think is pretty decent and THEN i just randomly undo all that hard work in a month of not doing any exercise at all, over-eating and smoking. i've done this all my adult life and i can't for the life of me figure out why - i'd be better off just not doing any exercise but just eating sensibly & not smoking, because the net result would be the same (over time an average-sized bod) but i'd cut out all the long-term nasties (i.e., injuries & arthritis from running/cholesterol from avarice/smoking-related-doom).
but the old trousers feel a bit tight around the tum-tum today, and the once-firm pecs jiggled most unpleasantly as i skipped lightly up the steps outside the office this morning, and so it's time to risk a spot of exercise again. i did a tiny, tiny number of pitiful weights last night just to test my neck (buggered by sit-ups) and my right shoulder (exploded by cricket) and the pain wasn't toooo bad. it's always hard with sports-injuries to know the difference between Pain Type One (doing more damage to an injury by putting too much strain on it) and Pain Type Two (doing good to an almost-totally-healed injury by breaking-in the new cells & internaly-exfoliating the scar-tissue).
but i think i'll be okay. so some more tonight, maybe a bike too, and it'll be bye-bye bouncy-boobied Benny before you can say "man-bra"...
...the back of my lungs feels strange...constricted, somehow. whenever i lean forwards it feels like they're peeling away from the back of my ribs...
oh well. at least in my short smoking career i was blessed with the perfect weather for it; warm, sun-kissed afternoons and, later, for the final cigarette of the day, stood outside, staring straight up at the crystal-clear sky and marvelling, between luxurious, revelling puffs & succulent sips of brandy, at the clarity of the stars. one of the effects of nicotine (before your body gets used to it) is to drug you slightly to increase visual clarity, and it really did seem like i could see every single one of the little twinkly bastards, like i could see every dent & every crater on the boiling-silver moon.
most pleasurable.
that's what cigarettes are, alas - pleasurable...
i must buy one of those arabian hookahs, the hubbly-bubbly ones...moist mists of apple tobacco rolling down my throat like refridgerated-treacle oozing out of a petrol-pump...yeaaaah...
August 16, 2005
ignite your bones
you know, the more i listen to this the more i adore it (actually, "adore" is the wrong word - assimilate is a better one, because i do have a habit of encorporating things that emotionally affect me into my own attitudes & thoughts). anyway, i just think this is a song that i'll still be listening to in twenty years time...
...earwax & speaker-induced tinitis permitting...
although the "lights will guide you home" line does always make me think of "the lights that guide you inland" from REM's Be Mine...
oh well. everything's derivative.
anyway, seeing Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love over the weekend, and listening to lots of Chris Martin at the moment, i can't help but come to the conclusion that their progeny, Apple, is the pinacle of human DNA; beautiful & sucessful & talented & worthy mother + beautful & sucessful & talented & worthy father = excellent lineage. time to clone the sprog off a few times, i reckon, just to raise the species-average...
this is all due to a random thought i had the other day that theorised that hollywood actors are actually the finest representations of humanity in existance - fearsomly fit & healthy, robust, driven, flawlessly pretty, able to take care of themselves in a fight AND posessing of a wealth of human experience because their ca$h lets them spend their whole lives gadding around the world meeting people & doing wonderful things, as opposed to the rest of us poor saps staring into these nasty cathode-ray-toooobs for eight hours a day. so there you go. if ever you're in a plummeting plane with brad pit, give him your parachute, it's for the good of the genus.
speaking about plummeting planes, though, fuck me sideways but that Helios business was nasty. the Greek defence ministry confirmed that the bodies were frozen solid. not the way i'd wish to go...the thing is, planes fly at 30,000 feet because that's where the best fuel-efficiency is to be found. unfortunately if you go from 0 feet to 30,000 feet instantly you're knocked unconscious because of the pressure differential ("12 seconds of useful consciousness", apparently). anyway, it's not the end of the world (unless you're sucked out of the hole [and even then Brad might catch you on the way down]) for a jetliner because the pilots can simply strap their oxygen-masks on and descend to less <12,000 feet where the air is thick enough to wake everyone back up, and then land safely.
unfortunately that didn't happen. i speculate that they blacked-out before they could turn off the autopilot, so the plane just kept flying along at 30,000 as if nothing had happened - and the passengers just all passed of hypothermia, since you can have all the oxygen you can gulp but it won't do you much good if the temparature is -40C...they did say that passengers entered the cockpit but, unless you're savvy with how to turn off an advanced autopilot system, it doesn't matter HOW much you push or pull the controls, you're not going to alter what the plane's doing.
must've been hell-off earth in the passenger compartment though - gasping for breath with the cold knifing straight thought you.
it must've been like being instantly hurled into a freezing river.
those poor bloody kids.
...earwax & speaker-induced tinitis permitting...
although the "lights will guide you home" line does always make me think of "the lights that guide you inland" from REM's Be Mine...
oh well. everything's derivative.
anyway, seeing Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love over the weekend, and listening to lots of Chris Martin at the moment, i can't help but come to the conclusion that their progeny, Apple, is the pinacle of human DNA; beautiful & sucessful & talented & worthy mother + beautful & sucessful & talented & worthy father = excellent lineage. time to clone the sprog off a few times, i reckon, just to raise the species-average...
this is all due to a random thought i had the other day that theorised that hollywood actors are actually the finest representations of humanity in existance - fearsomly fit & healthy, robust, driven, flawlessly pretty, able to take care of themselves in a fight AND posessing of a wealth of human experience because their ca$h lets them spend their whole lives gadding around the world meeting people & doing wonderful things, as opposed to the rest of us poor saps staring into these nasty cathode-ray-toooobs for eight hours a day. so there you go. if ever you're in a plummeting plane with brad pit, give him your parachute, it's for the good of the genus.
speaking about plummeting planes, though, fuck me sideways but that Helios business was nasty. the Greek defence ministry confirmed that the bodies were frozen solid. not the way i'd wish to go...the thing is, planes fly at 30,000 feet because that's where the best fuel-efficiency is to be found. unfortunately if you go from 0 feet to 30,000 feet instantly you're knocked unconscious because of the pressure differential ("12 seconds of useful consciousness", apparently). anyway, it's not the end of the world (unless you're sucked out of the hole [and even then Brad might catch you on the way down]) for a jetliner because the pilots can simply strap their oxygen-masks on and descend to less <12,000 feet where the air is thick enough to wake everyone back up, and then land safely.
unfortunately that didn't happen. i speculate that they blacked-out before they could turn off the autopilot, so the plane just kept flying along at 30,000 as if nothing had happened - and the passengers just all passed of hypothermia, since you can have all the oxygen you can gulp but it won't do you much good if the temparature is -40C...they did say that passengers entered the cockpit but, unless you're savvy with how to turn off an advanced autopilot system, it doesn't matter HOW much you push or pull the controls, you're not going to alter what the plane's doing.
must've been hell-off earth in the passenger compartment though - gasping for breath with the cold knifing straight thought you.
it must've been like being instantly hurled into a freezing river.
those poor bloody kids.
August 15, 2005
*gurgles*
curry + beer = inefficient digestive processes...
*clutches belly and yelps occasionally*
was drinking beer with Mara, a childhood friend i've not seen for ten years, on account of her living in Texas.
i bummed lots of gorgeous American cigarettes from her. it was wonderful! i have decided that i like bumming cigarettes off of americans - it makes me feel like a cheeky Soviet defector...
my mission of the day is now to use the word "defector" in three separate conversations.
*resumes staring at his gorgeous colleague whilst yelping & burping*
*clutches belly and yelps occasionally*
was drinking beer with Mara, a childhood friend i've not seen for ten years, on account of her living in Texas.
i bummed lots of gorgeous American cigarettes from her. it was wonderful! i have decided that i like bumming cigarettes off of americans - it makes me feel like a cheeky Soviet defector...
my mission of the day is now to use the word "defector" in three separate conversations.
*resumes staring at his gorgeous colleague whilst yelping & burping*
August 12, 2005
honestly...
i am wearing a t-shirt AND a shirt today and STILL you could hang your coat on my perky little nipples. why must they be permanently jaunty & keen?? i look like i'm one of those mannequins in that godawful & staggeringly patronising Mazda advert...
...maybe i should wear those anti-leakage pads that pregnant women have to gird their chesticles with. or just do a DIY nubbinectomy with a cheese-grater...
gha
yesterday my car, after i'd parked it, decided to roll backwards and smash into a Jaguar, despite the handbrake being on.
yeah. that's what I thought, too...
this did not have a positive effect on my overall mood, and in fact - on top of a shit day in a shit job - led to a shit cricket practice, all of which combined to make me drag myself home and smoke and have a good think. i think that was bottom. yeah. that was bottom. hard to actually describe how low i felt yesterday without sounding like a melodramatic, poetry-attempting adolescent. so i won't.
so the only way is up.
which is nice.
...maybe i should wear those anti-leakage pads that pregnant women have to gird their chesticles with. or just do a DIY nubbinectomy with a cheese-grater...
gha
yesterday my car, after i'd parked it, decided to roll backwards and smash into a Jaguar, despite the handbrake being on.
yeah. that's what I thought, too...
this did not have a positive effect on my overall mood, and in fact - on top of a shit day in a shit job - led to a shit cricket practice, all of which combined to make me drag myself home and smoke and have a good think. i think that was bottom. yeah. that was bottom. hard to actually describe how low i felt yesterday without sounding like a melodramatic, poetry-attempting adolescent. so i won't.
so the only way is up.
which is nice.
August 11, 2005
grim routine
stand
shake hands with interview panel
thank them for their time
(maintain sane-looking smile whilst in sight of building)
rip tie off
grit teeth whilst wrestling with choking-top-button
berate self for letting it come to this
seriously - i thought that, upon hitting rock-bottom, the only way would be up; that a certain magic-formulae of poverty, desperation & job-shitness would - given sufficient quantities of each ingredient - coalesce to alchemically turn a leaden life into a golden one.
but apparently i am gifted in finding further depths of "bottom".
shake hands with interview panel
thank them for their time
(maintain sane-looking smile whilst in sight of building)
rip tie off
grit teeth whilst wrestling with choking-top-button
berate self for letting it come to this
seriously - i thought that, upon hitting rock-bottom, the only way would be up; that a certain magic-formulae of poverty, desperation & job-shitness would - given sufficient quantities of each ingredient - coalesce to alchemically turn a leaden life into a golden one.
but apparently i am gifted in finding further depths of "bottom".
Blowing Hot and Cold
Back from the norf of england. Middlesbrough was shite and my interviewee pissed me off by implying we weren't very flexible. I had to point out that the shirt I was wearing was less than 24 hours old because his people cancelled a meeting with less than an hour's notice.
However, my time off starts tomorrow. Well, tomorrow lunch - work has overspilled because of the cancelled meeting and I'm too knacked to carry on with it tonight.
News is fairly interesting. Economist has a good piece on the price of oil. Very scary.
Do you remember the aacharridee album they recorded in one day ten years ago? The Help Album? Well, they're doing it again in early Sept and a certain band from Oxford will be featuring. When they were involved the first time the result was a brilliant track called "Lucky" which was so good it ended up on OK Computer. So very expectant this time round. And I thought it'd be at least a year before we heard from them again! Huzzah :)
However, my time off starts tomorrow. Well, tomorrow lunch - work has overspilled because of the cancelled meeting and I'm too knacked to carry on with it tonight.
News is fairly interesting. Economist has a good piece on the price of oil. Very scary.
Do you remember the aacharridee album they recorded in one day ten years ago? The Help Album? Well, they're doing it again in early Sept and a certain band from Oxford will be featuring. When they were involved the first time the result was a brilliant track called "Lucky" which was so good it ended up on OK Computer. So very expectant this time round. And I thought it'd be at least a year before we heard from them again! Huzzah :)
August 09, 2005
Poptastic
Good article on slate about manufactured pop. Two bits too good not to copy:
and
Backstory: About ten years ago, my friend Geoff from college whom I'd played in a bunch of bands with was getting married so
In an interview with the Guardian, British singer Rachel Stevens—whose "Goodbye My L.A. Ex" and "Some Girls" are two of the most fabulous pop singles of the past three years—explained why it's OK that she doesn't compose her own material: "'I mean, think of all the great bands from the past who didn't write their own music, like the Beatles.' A slight pause. 'Well, actually, the Beatles did write their own music, didn't they? But loads of others.' "
and
In a 1999 lecture about love songs, Nick Cave remarked that "[the SAW production] 'Better the Devil You Know' is one of pop music's most violent and distressing love lyrics. … When Kylie Minogue sings these words there is an innocence to her voice that makes the horror of this chilling lyric all the more compelling."Intrigued me, this. So I found know how I get about bad "romantic" songs.
Backstory: About ten years ago, my friend Geoff from college whom I'd played in a bunch of bands with was getting married so
The Fog on the Tyne...
Yesterday afternoon I flew up to Newcastle from Southampton. This morning we were to attend two meetings. The first one was good - really productive. The second was cancelled by the attendee for reasons too tedious to go into with only one hour notice.
So, I'm off to Middlesborough tomorrow to meet my tormentor whereupon he will be made aware of my frustration. Actually, it's not that bad. I have time to work, relax, blog, shop and wander around the town which is a rare treat.
Quite naturally I only packed for one night so I've just been out to buy some more clothes. I asked the receptionist for directions to somewhere I could buy a nice shirt and was sent to USC. Things were looking poor but I managed to find a Crombie (nothing if not resourceful). I've holed up in the Malmaison which is really quite nice - may even go for a swim later.
Quite liking Newcastle. The people are friendly, the city is lively (if we forgive the absence of more than one usable shirt emporium) and the food is good. I had my first taste of Ostrich steak the last time I was here back in the heady days of June 2003 - the restaurant in question is called Gershwins and such was its impact that I've just been on a pilgrimage there as part of my shirt outing. It's off the menu now (they've had 2 years to change it - I guess we'll let them off) so I may try somewhere else if I feel like eating out by myself tonight (which I usually don't).
So, I'm off to Middlesborough tomorrow to meet my tormentor whereupon he will be made aware of my frustration. Actually, it's not that bad. I have time to work, relax, blog, shop and wander around the town which is a rare treat.
Quite naturally I only packed for one night so I've just been out to buy some more clothes. I asked the receptionist for directions to somewhere I could buy a nice shirt and was sent to USC. Things were looking poor but I managed to find a Crombie (nothing if not resourceful). I've holed up in the Malmaison which is really quite nice - may even go for a swim later.
Quite liking Newcastle. The people are friendly, the city is lively (if we forgive the absence of more than one usable shirt emporium) and the food is good. I had my first taste of Ostrich steak the last time I was here back in the heady days of June 2003 - the restaurant in question is called Gershwins and such was its impact that I've just been on a pilgrimage there as part of my shirt outing. It's off the menu now (they've had 2 years to change it - I guess we'll let them off) so I may try somewhere else if I feel like eating out by myself tonight (which I usually don't).
More Caching
Another week, another city, same project manager so different geocache. I understand Ew4n doesn't love the idea and considers it geeky. I'm in full agreement, but there's something a little bit too Alan Partridge about sitting in a hotel room all night.
So, we're in Newcastle and there was one 4 miles up the road in a ruined Chapel. A very nice walk and some stunning scenery. Good dinner afterwards as well. The bonus about going for a reasonable stroll before dinner and a little one post-digestion is that you feel like you've earnt your food.
So, we're in Newcastle and there was one 4 miles up the road in a ruined Chapel. A very nice walk and some stunning scenery. Good dinner afterwards as well. The bonus about going for a reasonable stroll before dinner and a little one post-digestion is that you feel like you've earnt your food.
well...
...fuck me sideways! those blatant & outrageous pinko scumbags!!!!
are any other technological marvels out there that i will find fabulously incredulous...?? i mean, how on *earth* did i remain unaware of this for twenty-five years...?
are any other technological marvels out there that i will find fabulously incredulous...?? i mean, how on *earth* did i remain unaware of this for twenty-five years...?
Space Shuttle Fun
Benny asked how they get the shuttle back from Edwards or White Sands (where it can land) to Kennedy (where it can take off). The answer, improbable as it may sound, is that they stick it on the back of a 747 and fly it there.
The whole thing (programme, not the two-breeze-blocks-mating-mid-air quality of the photo) has a feel of total fudge about it. What a turkey.
The whole thing (programme, not the two-breeze-blocks-mating-mid-air quality of the photo) has a feel of total fudge about it. What a turkey.
why nuclear explosions are OK by me
the stars this evening are quite unimaginably incredible. i note this - not an original thought in human history, i am sure - as it strikes me that there is no other vista on or off the planet that is simultaneously all-encompassing in panorama and yet so utterly compelling in detail; as in, there's nothing else you can look at that stuns you with its scale and yet also, when you look at a tiny part of the whole, is still consistantly awe-inspiringly beautiful.
i was able to concentrate on the purity of the stars whilst cycling home for two reasons; the first being that where i live is utterly devoid of light pollution, and the second being that i think Tommy lost my bike-lights when he went for a pedal over the weekend, thus i cycled six miles home in the pitch dark. lucky for me that alcohol is a muscle-relaxant, and thus tree-impacts are more easily absorbed by my punchbaggish body (the secret is to aim where the hedges isn'ts).
the milky-way is as vivid as the proverbial fuck this night.
"...and Alexander looked up at the stars and wept, because there were no more worlds to conquer..."
etc.
one thing i forgot to write about to(yester)day was that hiroshima documentary; for a moment, watching the dramatised personal stories of those who lived through it, i felt profoundly uncomfortable with the realities of it all, so much so, actually, that i changed my life-long conviction that dropping the bomb was - cliché alert - a necessary evil; that no reason on earth could be worth the untold suffering that one grapefruit-sized lump of ore caused.
however, then i considered that Speilberg would - in an alternate, bombless universe - have constructed a heart-string-yanking cinematic epic about yanks storming the Japanese beaches (á la Saving Private Ryan) and i would have sat there blubbing over the broken bodies of innocent Marines instead of being sat there blubbing over the broken bodies of innocent Nips. so what i'm trying to say is that 60 years on my emotional reactions would have been the same whatever the fuck happened, and in the final analysis nukes at least came with the benefits of halting the war, ablating an invasion of the Nipponese mainland and scaring Stalin into not rampaging out of Germany into Western Europe, as more than one revisionista has postulated that he would've.
either way, praps 60 light-years away there was a drunk alien cyclist who paused, (between fending off rabid ultra-bat attacks & pulling himself out of an Arcturian mega-hedge), and looked up at the sky, and saw a tiny earth-originated twinkle, and thought it pretty.
...stranger things have happened...
fuck-a-doodle-do, is that the time...
i was able to concentrate on the purity of the stars whilst cycling home for two reasons; the first being that where i live is utterly devoid of light pollution, and the second being that i think Tommy lost my bike-lights when he went for a pedal over the weekend, thus i cycled six miles home in the pitch dark. lucky for me that alcohol is a muscle-relaxant, and thus tree-impacts are more easily absorbed by my punchbaggish body (the secret is to aim where the hedges isn'ts).
the milky-way is as vivid as the proverbial fuck this night.
"...and Alexander looked up at the stars and wept, because there were no more worlds to conquer..."
etc.
one thing i forgot to write about to(yester)day was that hiroshima documentary; for a moment, watching the dramatised personal stories of those who lived through it, i felt profoundly uncomfortable with the realities of it all, so much so, actually, that i changed my life-long conviction that dropping the bomb was - cliché alert - a necessary evil; that no reason on earth could be worth the untold suffering that one grapefruit-sized lump of ore caused.
however, then i considered that Speilberg would - in an alternate, bombless universe - have constructed a heart-string-yanking cinematic epic about yanks storming the Japanese beaches (á la Saving Private Ryan) and i would have sat there blubbing over the broken bodies of innocent Marines instead of being sat there blubbing over the broken bodies of innocent Nips. so what i'm trying to say is that 60 years on my emotional reactions would have been the same whatever the fuck happened, and in the final analysis nukes at least came with the benefits of halting the war, ablating an invasion of the Nipponese mainland and scaring Stalin into not rampaging out of Germany into Western Europe, as more than one revisionista has postulated that he would've.
either way, praps 60 light-years away there was a drunk alien cyclist who paused, (between fending off rabid ultra-bat attacks & pulling himself out of an Arcturian mega-hedge), and looked up at the sky, and saw a tiny earth-originated twinkle, and thought it pretty.
...stranger things have happened...
fuck-a-doodle-do, is that the time...
baby's got rabies
cycling to the pub quiz* this evening i was hit in the forehead by a bat
bats carry rabies
rabies is bad
i have now left it too late to have the immunoglobin administered
uh-oh
*froths*
*came 2nd. BUT 2nd PLACE IS 1st LOSER!!!
bats carry rabies
rabies is bad
i have now left it too late to have the immunoglobin administered
uh-oh
*froths*
*came 2nd. BUT 2nd PLACE IS 1st LOSER!!!
August 08, 2005
to the owner of vehicle number...
M926 WTP, YOU SHALL BEEE PUNNNNISHED!!!
dent MY cunting door, will you?
give me no fucking room to get into my car, WILL YOU?!
I SHALL SUCK THE LIVING MARROW FROM YOUR BONES!!!!!!!!1111
...or maybe just do what i actually did, i.e., leave a pithy note.
*sniffs self-righteously*
"Thanks for denting my door and leaving me so much room to get in my own car. You're a very worthwhile human being and a wonderful driver..."
...living marrow etc. next time...
dent MY cunting door, will you?
give me no fucking room to get into my car, WILL YOU?!
I SHALL SUCK THE LIVING MARROW FROM YOUR BONES!!!!!!!!1111
...or maybe just do what i actually did, i.e., leave a pithy note.
*sniffs self-righteously*
"Thanks for denting my door and leaving me so much room to get in my own car. You're a very worthwhile human being and a wonderful driver..."
...living marrow etc. next time...
shuttling to & fro
a. i saw apollo 13 over the weekend, and this has led to a slightly-raised interest in the shuttle-kerfuffle, due to a similar bodged-repairs-in-space theme
b. i'm not worried in the slightest about them getting back, since that lump of foam went nowhere bloody near the orbiter, though i do appreciate they have to be a bit careful. or at least, be seen to be careful.
c. reading the following:
...i was struck by something plainly obvious: i.e., if the shuttle only takes off in Floria, and if the shuttle CAN only take off vertically with lots of crazy-pave'ed foam-covered boosters bolted to it, THEN, how the fuck do they get it from California or Mexico to Florida?? Even if they load the great dirty-white albatross onto a ship and swing it through Panama they've still got to load it onto a lorry & get it to & from the ports at both ends, and i now have a delicious image of this thing squatting on an immense lorry, its wings mowing-down telephone cables port & starboard as Mig'huel the Swarthy Mehi-ickan trucker hoons down a dirt-track desert road...
as with all my mental visions, this is rather un-likely. probably for the best.
...i think the new aphrodite-tastic temp hates me. think i overdid the staring...
b. i'm not worried in the slightest about them getting back, since that lump of foam went nowhere bloody near the orbiter, though i do appreciate they have to be a bit careful. or at least, be seen to be careful.
c. reading the following:
"Tomorrow, Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins and her crew will have several opportunities to bring Discovery in, with two windows of opportunity at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and two at the Edwards Air Force Base in California. White Sands in New Mexico is also on the backup list."
...i was struck by something plainly obvious: i.e., if the shuttle only takes off in Floria, and if the shuttle CAN only take off vertically with lots of crazy-pave'ed foam-covered boosters bolted to it, THEN, how the fuck do they get it from California or Mexico to Florida?? Even if they load the great dirty-white albatross onto a ship and swing it through Panama they've still got to load it onto a lorry & get it to & from the ports at both ends, and i now have a delicious image of this thing squatting on an immense lorry, its wings mowing-down telephone cables port & starboard as Mig'huel the Swarthy Mehi-ickan trucker hoons down a dirt-track desert road...
as with all my mental visions, this is rather un-likely. probably for the best.
...i think the new aphrodite-tastic temp hates me. think i overdid the staring...
sexual inequality
oh dear
the only other male in my office has taken three days off to go walk the South Downs Way. this is galling for me for two (2) reasons - the first is that he's a big cricket fan and i was looking forwards to jointly exhaulting over Sunday's two-run victory over the accurse'ed antipodeans.
the second, and rather more important reason, is that i am now the only person in the office with a pork sword. i am a lone bastion of manhood in a tidal sea of bintdom!! oh gosh. the reputation of my gender falling solely on my reasonably-wide shoulders. fellow chaps, i promise i shall not let you down but, let's face it, 17 to 1 ain't good odds...
perhaps i shall start ovulating in sequence.
ghaa! now it's EIGHTEEN to one, as a new temp has joined we happy few.
oh my
oh my
oh crickey, but she's pretty
*whimpers*
*stares*
*whimpers some more*
imustdrawher!
the only other male in my office has taken three days off to go walk the South Downs Way. this is galling for me for two (2) reasons - the first is that he's a big cricket fan and i was looking forwards to jointly exhaulting over Sunday's two-run victory over the accurse'ed antipodeans.
the second, and rather more important reason, is that i am now the only person in the office with a pork sword. i am a lone bastion of manhood in a tidal sea of bintdom!! oh gosh. the reputation of my gender falling solely on my reasonably-wide shoulders. fellow chaps, i promise i shall not let you down but, let's face it, 17 to 1 ain't good odds...
perhaps i shall start ovulating in sequence.
ghaa! now it's EIGHTEEN to one, as a new temp has joined we happy few.
oh my
oh my
oh crickey, but she's pretty
*whimpers*
*stares*
*whimpers some more*
imustdrawher!
Backup
I had a horrific premonition that my computer was going to break last week so have picked up some DVDs in order to back up my essential files.
So far we've got 4 DVDs worth: 1 of data and 3 of music. A sizeable portion of my life fits onto 4 small plastic discs. Just a little bit depressing.
So far we've got 4 DVDs worth: 1 of data and 3 of music. A sizeable portion of my life fits onto 4 small plastic discs. Just a little bit depressing.
August 07, 2005
Backwards Forwards, Forwards Back
Driving lesson yesterday went very well. New driving instructor seems to be a top chap (certainly compared to his predecessor, evil slack witch) and was an examiner in a previous life which is rather useful.
General driving I tend to have little trouble with. Roundabouts, lane merging, junctions I appear to have got the hang of. It's the reversing round corners, reversing into parking bays and parallel parking which is a bit of an arse. Part of the problem here is that of a 2 hour driving lesson around 1.2 hours is spent driving from the sticks to the town and back in order to practice maneuvers. We have now arranged to meet in town (or at least closer to it) which has boosted the effectiveness of the lessons with regard to mastering the sticky stuff. So I'm feeling good about that now.
After lesson, caught a bus into Southampton and poked around a few shops. Good sale in Virgin if you're an impulsive DVD purchaser (5 for £30), department stores quite interesting, new music shop opening soon and got some blank disks to back up important stuff. Mulling the purchase of a bass guitar for no particular reason. Oh what it is to be idle.
Cooked a mighty leg of lamb last night which was really good fun. Studded it with lots of garlic and rosemary. Am shunning boiled vegetables, roast potatoes and yorkshire puddings for a while - fun to eat but boring to cook and not much of a laugh to sit around bloated andimmobilee afterwards. So lots of salad and tomatoes and bread and things with it instead, very tasty. This morning an extensive bike ride around the general area. You know those ones where you have plenty of opportunities to turn back but keep pushing yourself? Surprising distance. Feel very good now.
Now a question: to go to the pub, even though I don't really feel like I'm in the mood and am off the beer for a time, or semi-force myself to go because tomorrow I'll be stuck at home deprived of social contact? Mull mull mull.
General driving I tend to have little trouble with. Roundabouts, lane merging, junctions I appear to have got the hang of. It's the reversing round corners, reversing into parking bays and parallel parking which is a bit of an arse. Part of the problem here is that of a 2 hour driving lesson around 1.2 hours is spent driving from the sticks to the town and back in order to practice maneuvers. We have now arranged to meet in town (or at least closer to it) which has boosted the effectiveness of the lessons with regard to mastering the sticky stuff. So I'm feeling good about that now.
After lesson, caught a bus into Southampton and poked around a few shops. Good sale in Virgin if you're an impulsive DVD purchaser (5 for £30), department stores quite interesting, new music shop opening soon and got some blank disks to back up important stuff. Mulling the purchase of a bass guitar for no particular reason. Oh what it is to be idle.
Cooked a mighty leg of lamb last night which was really good fun. Studded it with lots of garlic and rosemary. Am shunning boiled vegetables, roast potatoes and yorkshire puddings for a while - fun to eat but boring to cook and not much of a laugh to sit around bloated andimmobilee afterwards. So lots of salad and tomatoes and bread and things with it instead, very tasty. This morning an extensive bike ride around the general area. You know those ones where you have plenty of opportunities to turn back but keep pushing yourself? Surprising distance. Feel very good now.
Now a question: to go to the pub, even though I don't really feel like I'm in the mood and am off the beer for a time, or semi-force myself to go because tomorrow I'll be stuck at home deprived of social contact? Mull mull mull.
August 06, 2005
Summary of Activity
Leicester: fun in the evenings and frustrating during the day. We're reliant on data and those charged with sending it to us aren't in a hurry to do so. Lots of waiting around.
Numbers: Got a spreadsheet with costs allocated by calendar week and had to convert it into months. Cripes! Solved it with a lookup table keyed on a concatenation of weeknumber and three letter month. Had to have a lie down after that one, I can tell you. Day of infamy.
To London: Both myself and PM zonked despite lack of work. Lends credence to my theory that we're all stress bunnies.
Sidenote: Read Times on the trip to St Pancras. Interview with italian lawyer defending the highly believable flour bomber. Yummy Mummy.
In London: Found self staring at all non-white people carrying luggage greater in size than handbag. Have concluded am clearly racist pussyboy.
Phone note: Now using new work phone more and more. Nokia handsfree clearly designed by a muppet as microphone falls somewhere near the belt buckle so you have to hold it near your mouth, thus negating fairly significant benefit of product. Tossers.
Tangent: Hazel Blears = fool. No racial profiling my arse. Get real.
Waterloo: buggers won't let you through the eurostar entrance any more without a ticket so shortcut denied.
To Winchester: Absolute Power on shiny laptop as corporate drones sharing compartment tried not to stare. Ewan = genius for sending discs.
Home: Have received a fat manual from work telling me how to do my job. This is useful as I've only been doing it for 30 months.
Home II: Benny a broken man on the sofa complaining of neck pains and talking in vague terms about going to see the doctor if it's not better by next year. My suggestion of Osteopath cast aside.
Home III: Finding all forms of dessert apart from glacial ice cream absent from house I make pancakes. Why is the first one always shite?
Numbers: Got a spreadsheet with costs allocated by calendar week and had to convert it into months. Cripes! Solved it with a lookup table keyed on a concatenation of weeknumber and three letter month. Had to have a lie down after that one, I can tell you. Day of infamy.
To London: Both myself and PM zonked despite lack of work. Lends credence to my theory that we're all stress bunnies.
Sidenote: Read Times on the trip to St Pancras. Interview with italian lawyer defending the highly believable flour bomber. Yummy Mummy.
In London: Found self staring at all non-white people carrying luggage greater in size than handbag. Have concluded am clearly racist pussyboy.
Phone note: Now using new work phone more and more. Nokia handsfree clearly designed by a muppet as microphone falls somewhere near the belt buckle so you have to hold it near your mouth, thus negating fairly significant benefit of product. Tossers.
Tangent: Hazel Blears = fool. No racial profiling my arse. Get real.
Waterloo: buggers won't let you through the eurostar entrance any more without a ticket so shortcut denied.
To Winchester: Absolute Power on shiny laptop as corporate drones sharing compartment tried not to stare. Ewan = genius for sending discs.
Home: Have received a fat manual from work telling me how to do my job. This is useful as I've only been doing it for 30 months.
Home II: Benny a broken man on the sofa complaining of neck pains and talking in vague terms about going to see the doctor if it's not better by next year. My suggestion of Osteopath cast aside.
Home III: Finding all forms of dessert apart from glacial ice cream absent from house I make pancakes. Why is the first one always shite?
Carry On Up The Khyber
Should I ever again find myself in Leicester and in need of a curry I shall re-vist the Khyber.
Local knowledge, you see.
Local knowledge, you see.
August 05, 2005
+++neural damage+++system failure+++
managed to get to sleep at about 5am. woke at about 10 by a call from work wondering if i'd be gracing them with my presence today
haw haw! no dice, you ingallant slave-traders, you
as always, the UK History channel is keeping me sane. and the test. and debating a carotidectory. doc's appointment booked, grudgingly; i do hate admitting the imperfections of my mortal coil, as it puts a dent in my perfect view of myself. puny human!! gha. maybe a return to bed is necessary as i appear to have lost the use of focussing muscles in my eyes - the thought occured to me this morning that all myopia can be cured if only i could devise, essentially, a fitness regime for the eyeball & its surrounding cableage, my reasoning being that so long as you have no damage to the lens or retina then short or long sightedness is merely a case of unfitness to the musculature that distorts & thus focusses aforementioned lens. some sort of projective device that you stare at that shifts minutely out of focus, and thus widening the muscle's field of motion (and thus toning them) for example, would serve to tone up the old orbs. and as someone with one short-sighted and one long-sighted eye i would benefit more than most (i blame this for my skewed outlook on life...). not the first idea that struck me today, actually, as whilst reading a chapter on hypothermia i contemplated that the best way to heat a hypothermia sufferer from the inside would be to introduce a heat-source actually inside their body-core; this isn't new, of course, as hot drinks are the only way to do this in "the field". trouble is, it takes an unfeasable number of 200ml cups of tea @ 100 degrees to warm a 90000ml human @ 35 degrees. but what about a self-perpetuating source of heat, such as a chemical reaction? you can buy chemical hand-warmers that, like glowsticks, you do something to mix the chemicals (snap an internal phial/sachet etc.) and then they kick off vast amounts of heat. so get a hypothermia-sufferer to swallow one and thus, they're sorted, and they can poo it out later. of course, getting someone sluggish and on the verge of a coma to swallow a large plastic pillow is not on (let alone the shitting-out problem), so you'd have to have them swallow a large amount of jelly-bean sized ones instead, possibly washed down with water to make sure that the heat is exchanged (was watching a documentary on nuclear-submarine engineering today...tsk...) and they don't burn their tummy, but these are just issues of implementation. time to pay another visit to the patent office, i reckon...
but then i tossed that idea aside as being too inefficient and just adapted my existing resusitation-device to also warm the body at fantastic speed. but i'm not going to tell anyone about that because the ambulance people didn't want me, and thus i'm throwing my toys out of their pram. ha ha. HA HA HA. ha. heeeheheee.
oh
it may be apparent that i am very bored
my cat smells
haw haw! no dice, you ingallant slave-traders, you
as always, the UK History channel is keeping me sane. and the test. and debating a carotidectory. doc's appointment booked, grudgingly; i do hate admitting the imperfections of my mortal coil, as it puts a dent in my perfect view of myself. puny human!! gha. maybe a return to bed is necessary as i appear to have lost the use of focussing muscles in my eyes - the thought occured to me this morning that all myopia can be cured if only i could devise, essentially, a fitness regime for the eyeball & its surrounding cableage, my reasoning being that so long as you have no damage to the lens or retina then short or long sightedness is merely a case of unfitness to the musculature that distorts & thus focusses aforementioned lens. some sort of projective device that you stare at that shifts minutely out of focus, and thus widening the muscle's field of motion (and thus toning them) for example, would serve to tone up the old orbs. and as someone with one short-sighted and one long-sighted eye i would benefit more than most (i blame this for my skewed outlook on life...). not the first idea that struck me today, actually, as whilst reading a chapter on hypothermia i contemplated that the best way to heat a hypothermia sufferer from the inside would be to introduce a heat-source actually inside their body-core; this isn't new, of course, as hot drinks are the only way to do this in "the field". trouble is, it takes an unfeasable number of 200ml cups of tea @ 100 degrees to warm a 90000ml human @ 35 degrees. but what about a self-perpetuating source of heat, such as a chemical reaction? you can buy chemical hand-warmers that, like glowsticks, you do something to mix the chemicals (snap an internal phial/sachet etc.) and then they kick off vast amounts of heat. so get a hypothermia-sufferer to swallow one and thus, they're sorted, and they can poo it out later. of course, getting someone sluggish and on the verge of a coma to swallow a large plastic pillow is not on (let alone the shitting-out problem), so you'd have to have them swallow a large amount of jelly-bean sized ones instead, possibly washed down with water to make sure that the heat is exchanged (was watching a documentary on nuclear-submarine engineering today...tsk...) and they don't burn their tummy, but these are just issues of implementation. time to pay another visit to the patent office, i reckon...
but then i tossed that idea aside as being too inefficient and just adapted my existing resusitation-device to also warm the body at fantastic speed. but i'm not going to tell anyone about that because the ambulance people didn't want me, and thus i'm throwing my toys out of their pram. ha ha. HA HA HA. ha. heeeheheee.
oh
it may be apparent that i am very bored
my cat smells
yowser
my defective vertebrae exploded with pain today, and i find myself unable to sleep. luckily, however, some people linked a few computers together a while ago to provide insomniacs a tool with which to while away the time (apparently there are fringe benefits for the business & government worlds too) and so i am just trawling the internet looking for interesting things.
however, as is often the case, there isn't anything interesting on the internet at all.
pish. so much for humanity...
anyway, i think the pain has actually driven me mad because i'm actually starting to relish it; although there was a point this evening where i was sorely tempted to insert a carving-knife into my carotid artery just to be rid of it i think i've come out the other side - it's now an anthropomorphic beast to be wrestled with, an enemy to combat instead of a cross to carry.
i like having enemies. they give one purpose. just ask Ian Paisley.
speaking of which, how is it that one set of semi-foreign bombers can detonate their way to the table but another set "will never be negotiated with"...? come on, mr blair, show a touch of consistency once in a while...the irish question is a tricky one. my views align with an observation made once by Paxman, in that the unionists who prize, value & depend on their britishness the most are actually looked upon - by the rest of Britain - as a worthless pain in the fucking arse. NI is an economic & cultural pit with zero fucking value - when was the last time you were ever tempted to go there? what is there that's worth the insane subsidies coughed up by the rest of us? were it up to me i'd amputate that little embarrassing shithole in a second. de loreans were rather funky, i will admit, but come on, chaps, talk about resting on your laurels...
however, apparently there are a few million Ulstermen who disagree with me, so in the interests of democracy i shall shut my hole (...i maintain the tack i developed in A-level politics; devolve NI into a separate state, a sovereign nation quite apart from either the UK or Eire, and then send the fucking UN in to keep the natives vaguely pacified...[fat fucking chance...]).
hmmmn. pain appears to make me truculent. i should routinely keep a pin in my pocket and jab myself whenever i need this particular soapboxy-superpower...
anyway. so far this morning i've been gurgling in horror at the most puerile, obscene & basal website i've ever seen in a lifetime of low-country porno; observe! if google is the eyes of the internet and the hun is its cock then allow me to introduce to you the festering gangrenous necrotizing-haemorrhoid of the web!
"By the way, does England make good wine? I've been unable to find any since I refuse to buy French." haaaahahahahaa!
"However, history will speak glowingly of your leadership." HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!!!!!
...bet you a fucking quid, you pustulent cuntknuckle...
"Your name will be uttered in the same breath as Winston Churchill throughout our history and yours." <-- i do not concur with anything in this statement. Atlee and Chamberlain, perhaps, if you're fucking lucky. the revisionists are already sharpening their quills...
"You're no lap dog in my estimation. You're a swingin' dick!" <-- getting closer...
4am. time to put the 6th-form opines to one side and have another go at this sleeping business.
see you later...
however, as is often the case, there isn't anything interesting on the internet at all.
pish. so much for humanity...
anyway, i think the pain has actually driven me mad because i'm actually starting to relish it; although there was a point this evening where i was sorely tempted to insert a carving-knife into my carotid artery just to be rid of it i think i've come out the other side - it's now an anthropomorphic beast to be wrestled with, an enemy to combat instead of a cross to carry.
i like having enemies. they give one purpose. just ask Ian Paisley.
speaking of which, how is it that one set of semi-foreign bombers can detonate their way to the table but another set "will never be negotiated with"...? come on, mr blair, show a touch of consistency once in a while...the irish question is a tricky one. my views align with an observation made once by Paxman, in that the unionists who prize, value & depend on their britishness the most are actually looked upon - by the rest of Britain - as a worthless pain in the fucking arse. NI is an economic & cultural pit with zero fucking value - when was the last time you were ever tempted to go there? what is there that's worth the insane subsidies coughed up by the rest of us? were it up to me i'd amputate that little embarrassing shithole in a second. de loreans were rather funky, i will admit, but come on, chaps, talk about resting on your laurels...
however, apparently there are a few million Ulstermen who disagree with me, so in the interests of democracy i shall shut my hole (...i maintain the tack i developed in A-level politics; devolve NI into a separate state, a sovereign nation quite apart from either the UK or Eire, and then send the fucking UN in to keep the natives vaguely pacified...[fat fucking chance...]).
hmmmn. pain appears to make me truculent. i should routinely keep a pin in my pocket and jab myself whenever i need this particular soapboxy-superpower...
anyway. so far this morning i've been gurgling in horror at the most puerile, obscene & basal website i've ever seen in a lifetime of low-country porno; observe! if google is the eyes of the internet and the hun is its cock then allow me to introduce to you the festering gangrenous necrotizing-haemorrhoid of the web!
"By the way, does England make good wine? I've been unable to find any since I refuse to buy French." haaaahahahahaa!
"However, history will speak glowingly of your leadership." HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!!!!!
...bet you a fucking quid, you pustulent cuntknuckle...
"Your name will be uttered in the same breath as Winston Churchill throughout our history and yours." <-- i do not concur with anything in this statement. Atlee and Chamberlain, perhaps, if you're fucking lucky. the revisionists are already sharpening their quills...
"You're no lap dog in my estimation. You're a swingin' dick!" <-- getting closer...
4am. time to put the 6th-form opines to one side and have another go at this sleeping business.
see you later...
August 04, 2005
uh-oh
i've just discovered that i've got my boxers on inside-out
this has alarmingly-severe consequences for buttoning-myself-up. i may well end up buttoning my pants to my shirt. again.
this has alarmingly-severe consequences for buttoning-myself-up. i may well end up buttoning my pants to my shirt. again.
Secret Treasure
Being despatched by work willy nilly around the country is rather like being in a rock band on tour. Without the money, the fans, the drugs, the adulation, the music, the helicopters, the spandex, the ....
Alright then. There's no metaphor that can support the general sense of displacement, of scenery always changing and seemingly endless travel. After the novelty wears off (in my case sometime around April 2003) you try different strategies to compensate. Over the years I've tried getting drunk, going bowling, exploring cities, going to the theatre, staying sober, going to gigs, taking up residency in a wine bar, building a DVD collection to watch in my room, swimming, going to strip bars (never *ever* go to a strip bar in Swindon *ever*), doing extra work, going to see films and reading books. Computer games, blogging and writing are other displacement activities. To displace what? Being bored.
So when last night my project manager asked if I wanted to go geocaching with him I jumped at the chance to try something new. Geocaching is a sort of sport where people set up 'caches' and publish the location on a website in GPS co-ordinates. Other people with a GPS handset can then look up the caches in their area and try to find them. The caches themselves typically consist of a log book so that you can record your visit and a selection of small toys - you're supposed to bring one with you and take one away with you. Think semi-technical treasure hunt. I'd never done it before so off I went.
We're in Leicester for the next few days so Paul found one 1.5 miles from the hotel. The distance is as the crow flies - the actual walk was more like 3 miles there and 2 miles back. I've only ever seen the concrete heart of Leicester so the scenery was surprisingly nice - the cache was hidden in a copse in the middle of some watermeadows, accessible from the town centre via a nice walk along a canal and past a weir or two. Very pleasant.
GPS is generally accurate to about 10 feet so once you get to the co-ordinates you have to look around for the cache - in this case a Slazenger tennis ball tube. Finding it was almost an anticlimax. For me, the purpose of the trip was to get a good walk and to see a bit more of the city. For Paul, the purpose was to go to another cache. I think he's getting hooked on it. He says it's a useful excuse to get him, his wife and two kids out of the house and into somewhere semi-countrified over the weekend.
After the walk we had some well deserved dinner at a restaurant with a name like 'Roberts' but I can't be sure. The conversation was better than the wine was better than the food was much better than the grumpy service. Our waitress looked like she had swallowed a wasp. On balance, not a bad night at all.
Alright then. There's no metaphor that can support the general sense of displacement, of scenery always changing and seemingly endless travel. After the novelty wears off (in my case sometime around April 2003) you try different strategies to compensate. Over the years I've tried getting drunk, going bowling, exploring cities, going to the theatre, staying sober, going to gigs, taking up residency in a wine bar, building a DVD collection to watch in my room, swimming, going to strip bars (never *ever* go to a strip bar in Swindon *ever*), doing extra work, going to see films and reading books. Computer games, blogging and writing are other displacement activities. To displace what? Being bored.
So when last night my project manager asked if I wanted to go geocaching with him I jumped at the chance to try something new. Geocaching is a sort of sport where people set up 'caches' and publish the location on a website in GPS co-ordinates. Other people with a GPS handset can then look up the caches in their area and try to find them. The caches themselves typically consist of a log book so that you can record your visit and a selection of small toys - you're supposed to bring one with you and take one away with you. Think semi-technical treasure hunt. I'd never done it before so off I went.
We're in Leicester for the next few days so Paul found one 1.5 miles from the hotel. The distance is as the crow flies - the actual walk was more like 3 miles there and 2 miles back. I've only ever seen the concrete heart of Leicester so the scenery was surprisingly nice - the cache was hidden in a copse in the middle of some watermeadows, accessible from the town centre via a nice walk along a canal and past a weir or two. Very pleasant.
GPS is generally accurate to about 10 feet so once you get to the co-ordinates you have to look around for the cache - in this case a Slazenger tennis ball tube. Finding it was almost an anticlimax. For me, the purpose of the trip was to get a good walk and to see a bit more of the city. For Paul, the purpose was to go to another cache. I think he's getting hooked on it. He says it's a useful excuse to get him, his wife and two kids out of the house and into somewhere semi-countrified over the weekend.
After the walk we had some well deserved dinner at a restaurant with a name like 'Roberts' but I can't be sure. The conversation was better than the wine was better than the food was much better than the grumpy service. Our waitress looked like she had swallowed a wasp. On balance, not a bad night at all.
August 03, 2005
my defective body
currently i am plagued by a host of ailments, all of which are just-that-little-bit too insignificant to go to the doctor's about. however, they are bugging the shit out of me.
from the top down:
my wisdom teeth are starting to grate. upper back-right is the worst; i'm afraid something pretty major will have to be done about these as i suspect that, as happened to my father, too many big teeth are jostling for position in too small a jawbone. congenitally, i have been cursed with tiny, mean lips (that always reminds me of a cat's bumhole) and a miniscule mandible. those plastic chattering teeth that march across a table are bigger than mine, seriously. so apart from the pain they will, over time, knock all my other teeth out of alignment and i will end up looking like Austin Powers. tsk. again with the firecracker/tin-can analogy.
i have a crunched-up vertebrae that i think has trapped a nerve in my neck, just on the shoulderline. this has knocked my weight-workouts on the head for the past ten days or so, and i'm already feeling less-toned and a fair-bit flabbier. i think it was the evil sit-ups i do with my legs tucked under my mattress to really work my lower abs. actually, another reason to stop doing those is that they make my bed jump, skip and thwap around, creaking as if a hundred pirates were frigging in their rigging. combined with the thin, sound-conducting nature of the floor, then, the panting produced by such exertion (and the occasional grunt expelled) all does add up to me loudly performing a virtuoso on the pink oboe. so for the interests of suspicion-free family life, perhaps i'd better just stop...
i have a busted right shoulder. i did this during our final game of cricket on sunday - a ball hissed right past me, and i (in one feautifully-bluid motion) turned, pivoted and kicked off one leg after it. pegged it after the little red fecker at a respectable fraction of C, grasped and - here it comes - threw. and on the moment of hurling it the 50 or 60 meters back to the bowler, i felt a jar and heard a gristle-packed rasp from that ball & socket that i've never before bothered paying any attention to. anyway, it still hurts, and of the tendons there one seems enormously engorged. worryingly, it still rasps whenever i move it, suggesting that something got yanked out of its proper groove, or whatever. combined with my highly-tender neck it all combines to make sleeping a very tricky exercise indeed. everyday movements are also now complicated by stabbing pains; badminton & donning anything with sleeves is now right up there with wiping my arse as a veritable litany of misery; if you hear stifled yelps from the cubical next to you then please chuck me some nurofen.
or perhaps a rape-alarm.
i also have a busted throat/gullet/tummy. i think i'm taking down too much air when i swallow, thus leading to incessant and unstoppable burps. luckily it's not a food allergy as even water brings it on. just call me Billy Osh...this really is pissing me off, actually. nothing seems to be able to stop it; no matter how many mastications i subject my meaty mouthfuls to they still inflict a terrible revenge on me. only pinching by doze can ablate the instantly-forming and utterly unpredictable gaseous jections. no amounts of rennett or wind-eeez tablets can save me; in fact the more chalk i scoff the worse it gets, and also may in time force me to expel some of that white dog-poo that used to be everywhere in the 80's...
something in my ribcage also clicks whenever i breathe in deeply.
and my big toe hurts from dancing on it too much (must get some new ballet shoes...)
but that's about it really...maybe i should plug all this into one of those e-diagnosis websites and see what comes out...
anyone for ebola?
from the top down:
my wisdom teeth are starting to grate. upper back-right is the worst; i'm afraid something pretty major will have to be done about these as i suspect that, as happened to my father, too many big teeth are jostling for position in too small a jawbone. congenitally, i have been cursed with tiny, mean lips (that always reminds me of a cat's bumhole) and a miniscule mandible. those plastic chattering teeth that march across a table are bigger than mine, seriously. so apart from the pain they will, over time, knock all my other teeth out of alignment and i will end up looking like Austin Powers. tsk. again with the firecracker/tin-can analogy.
i have a crunched-up vertebrae that i think has trapped a nerve in my neck, just on the shoulderline. this has knocked my weight-workouts on the head for the past ten days or so, and i'm already feeling less-toned and a fair-bit flabbier. i think it was the evil sit-ups i do with my legs tucked under my mattress to really work my lower abs. actually, another reason to stop doing those is that they make my bed jump, skip and thwap around, creaking as if a hundred pirates were frigging in their rigging. combined with the thin, sound-conducting nature of the floor, then, the panting produced by such exertion (and the occasional grunt expelled) all does add up to me loudly performing a virtuoso on the pink oboe. so for the interests of suspicion-free family life, perhaps i'd better just stop...
i have a busted right shoulder. i did this during our final game of cricket on sunday - a ball hissed right past me, and i (in one feautifully-bluid motion) turned, pivoted and kicked off one leg after it. pegged it after the little red fecker at a respectable fraction of C, grasped and - here it comes - threw. and on the moment of hurling it the 50 or 60 meters back to the bowler, i felt a jar and heard a gristle-packed rasp from that ball & socket that i've never before bothered paying any attention to. anyway, it still hurts, and of the tendons there one seems enormously engorged. worryingly, it still rasps whenever i move it, suggesting that something got yanked out of its proper groove, or whatever. combined with my highly-tender neck it all combines to make sleeping a very tricky exercise indeed. everyday movements are also now complicated by stabbing pains; badminton & donning anything with sleeves is now right up there with wiping my arse as a veritable litany of misery; if you hear stifled yelps from the cubical next to you then please chuck me some nurofen.
or perhaps a rape-alarm.
i also have a busted throat/gullet/tummy. i think i'm taking down too much air when i swallow, thus leading to incessant and unstoppable burps. luckily it's not a food allergy as even water brings it on. just call me Billy Osh...this really is pissing me off, actually. nothing seems to be able to stop it; no matter how many mastications i subject my meaty mouthfuls to they still inflict a terrible revenge on me. only pinching by doze can ablate the instantly-forming and utterly unpredictable gaseous jections. no amounts of rennett or wind-eeez tablets can save me; in fact the more chalk i scoff the worse it gets, and also may in time force me to expel some of that white dog-poo that used to be everywhere in the 80's...
something in my ribcage also clicks whenever i breathe in deeply.
and my big toe hurts from dancing on it too much (must get some new ballet shoes...)
but that's about it really...maybe i should plug all this into one of those e-diagnosis websites and see what comes out...
anyone for ebola?
August 02, 2005
Gissa Job
I've just been told that if I can find anyone that my company wants to recruit then I get £500. Accordingly, please make youself known if you fit the following. I am open to negotiation :)
So if you fancy trading your social life for cold hard cash, come and see uncle tommy.
Our company facilitates successful business change by defining and implementing process, people and performance improvements through robust proven methodologies. We help our clients identify key opportunities for improvement and build business cases to support any proposed changes before designing and implementing effective solutions. Typically we work with our clients in their back office, contact centre and field delivery operations.
To build on our continuing growth, we are looking to recruit a number of outstanding individuals to become management consultants. These roles are client facing and successful candidates are likely to meet the following criteria:
• A self starter with excellent interpersonal and analytical skills as well as the ability to provide critical thinking and initiative
• Educated to degree standard with a good level of commercial awareness and understanding
• 2-5 years line management experience is essential whilst possessing a strong understanding of how operating environments function is highly desirable
• A track record of career progression with demonstrable examples of both qualitative and quantitative business improvements achieved in a line management position
• Experience of working within IT, Telecommunications, Utilities or Finance sectors would be preferable, as would exposure to process and performance improvement and change management
• The ability to present findings and recommendations in a compelling manner and to intellectually hold your own with senior management
• An understanding of how to influence, coach and provide client support to facilitate successful delivery of agreed solutions
You will need to be willing and able to travel extensively around the UK, and at times overseas, on assignments that will typically involve 3-4 nights away from home
So if you fancy trading your social life for cold hard cash, come and see uncle tommy.
The Fat Duck
On Friday night I went to the Fat Duck with Angela, Ewan and Jim. Much as I might like to be able to say that visiting three star michelin restaurants is something that I do regularly, it isn't and was a truly special occasion. So not to record it here would be a bit of a waste of either the experience itself or the general idea of this blog. So here goes.
I had anticipated some trouble because the restaurant is famous for its tasting menu - a 15 course affair that takes in most of its most famous dishes - but is unable to mix and match these within a given table. Ewan had been making noises about getting 'a decent steak' for a number of weeks beforehand (heathen!) while the rest of us were up for the degustation. Because a la carte meals last about an hour and a half whereas the tasting menu is a 3.5 hour (4.5 hour in our case) marathon, there's no way to co-ordinate the two. So I was dreading a ruck.
The fact that it was totally avoided speaks volumes about the place. Ewan took the restaurant manager to one side and explained his aversion to anything more exotic than cucumber. In fact, his words were something along the lines of "No weird stuff". Quite where the man gets the balls from to rock into the best restaurant on the planet and order off menu is beyond me, but in true Ewan style it worked a treat. He was treated to a version of the menu which omitted snail porridge, some of the fishy stuff and other non-macleod-friendly items. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
For me, the highlight of the whole evening were a few 2mm cubes of Amaretto jelly. Checking the menu on the web, I can't see it anywhere. I may have imagined it, but the memory seems very real. The whole evening for me was about tasting flavours that I'd never tasted before or combinations of flavours I'd never dreamt of. The Amaretto jelly was an exception to this; on the plate it's microscopic - only marginally larger than the tine of a fork that it takes three attempts to skewer it on. The concentration of flavour when you taste it is wholly disproportionate. Outstanding.
The oyster was incredible. It was served with a few other things in its shell but the other dominant flavour was the horseradish cream. Oyster and Horseradish cream. Makes no sense looking at the words now. Different matter when you're there.
Something else still quite vivid to me 4 days later is the jelly of quail, langoustine cream and parfait of foie gras. I seem to remember something else in there as well that tasted of and looked like some kind of pea puree but, again, it's not on the online menu. The dish is served in layers (peas at the bottom, foie gras at the top) in a cup angled toward you balanced on top of something that looked like a ramekin. The interplay between all the flavours in there was amazing. Snail porridge was up next - again, phenomenal. Although on balance the whole meal was about flavour, occasionally the texture of something would come into play and surprise you. The texture of porridge and the texture of a snail in one mouthful was very strange. The starch from the porridge was unexpected. Very enjoyable though. There are quite a few things on the menu which you could describe as a gimmick if you felt uncharitable but the snails were definitely an experience.
Sardine on toast ice cream did nothing for me. The poached salmon was [running out of superlatives] but the liquorice it came with was a very submissive note and that was just a little disappointing. Perhaps that's more representative of the sense of taste you end up with when you've smoked for a decade, however. Pigeon was amazing but present in a quantity that a fully paid up carnivore like me was bound to find underwhelming. Of all the dishes I was most sceptical about the white chocolate and caviar but this was the biggest revelation of the night for me (apart from the wine, but we'll come to that later) - I doubt I'd enjoy it anywhere else but somehow fish eggs plus cocoa solids works at the Fat Duck.
I'll be honest - the rest of it was a bit of a blur. Not out of inebriation but because after 10 courses your mouth is in such a sense of bewilderment that it's gone into whatever the oral equivalent of post traumatic shock is. The cornet, the sherbert, the tuile (or shall we be honest and call it a lolly?) were gimmicks to my mind. I ate the bacon and egg ice cream but didn't make much of it. I especially enjoyed ordering a whiskey afterwards - it felt like a bit warm familiar hug.
The wine was an unmitigated total fucking pleasure - an absolute joy. Whoever put the wine menu together was a genius - you order it with the tasting menu and each glass is designed for each course. The first glass was somewhere between a wine and a sherry which really set us up nicely for all the flavours about to be lobbed at us. The red that came with the pigeon was huge. I can't remember when my favourite came - it was with one of the mousses and I reckon it was something like a white burgundy but my recall is imperfect. The wine cut right across the food - perpendicular. It was fucking astonishing. And I'm cursing myself for forgetting, but sometimes these things are better when you can only recall the rough details rather than the whole deal.
Putting all the suspensions, ice creams, essences, corks, nitrogen flasks and weird dishes to one side - and this was the stand out thing for me - there was just a total sense of relaxation sitting there. I felt so at ease and, well, pampered is the wrong word but it's the first one that comes to mind. The service and whole atmosphere was remarkable in itself.
There are two others I'd love to go to: the waterside inn and ramsay's place up in chelsea. But for the time being I think a more modest diet beckons while my wallet recharges.
I had anticipated some trouble because the restaurant is famous for its tasting menu - a 15 course affair that takes in most of its most famous dishes - but is unable to mix and match these within a given table. Ewan had been making noises about getting 'a decent steak' for a number of weeks beforehand (heathen!) while the rest of us were up for the degustation. Because a la carte meals last about an hour and a half whereas the tasting menu is a 3.5 hour (4.5 hour in our case) marathon, there's no way to co-ordinate the two. So I was dreading a ruck.
The fact that it was totally avoided speaks volumes about the place. Ewan took the restaurant manager to one side and explained his aversion to anything more exotic than cucumber. In fact, his words were something along the lines of "No weird stuff". Quite where the man gets the balls from to rock into the best restaurant on the planet and order off menu is beyond me, but in true Ewan style it worked a treat. He was treated to a version of the menu which omitted snail porridge, some of the fishy stuff and other non-macleod-friendly items. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
For me, the highlight of the whole evening were a few 2mm cubes of Amaretto jelly. Checking the menu on the web, I can't see it anywhere. I may have imagined it, but the memory seems very real. The whole evening for me was about tasting flavours that I'd never tasted before or combinations of flavours I'd never dreamt of. The Amaretto jelly was an exception to this; on the plate it's microscopic - only marginally larger than the tine of a fork that it takes three attempts to skewer it on. The concentration of flavour when you taste it is wholly disproportionate. Outstanding.
The oyster was incredible. It was served with a few other things in its shell but the other dominant flavour was the horseradish cream. Oyster and Horseradish cream. Makes no sense looking at the words now. Different matter when you're there.
Something else still quite vivid to me 4 days later is the jelly of quail, langoustine cream and parfait of foie gras. I seem to remember something else in there as well that tasted of and looked like some kind of pea puree but, again, it's not on the online menu. The dish is served in layers (peas at the bottom, foie gras at the top) in a cup angled toward you balanced on top of something that looked like a ramekin. The interplay between all the flavours in there was amazing. Snail porridge was up next - again, phenomenal. Although on balance the whole meal was about flavour, occasionally the texture of something would come into play and surprise you. The texture of porridge and the texture of a snail in one mouthful was very strange. The starch from the porridge was unexpected. Very enjoyable though. There are quite a few things on the menu which you could describe as a gimmick if you felt uncharitable but the snails were definitely an experience.
Sardine on toast ice cream did nothing for me. The poached salmon was [running out of superlatives] but the liquorice it came with was a very submissive note and that was just a little disappointing. Perhaps that's more representative of the sense of taste you end up with when you've smoked for a decade, however. Pigeon was amazing but present in a quantity that a fully paid up carnivore like me was bound to find underwhelming. Of all the dishes I was most sceptical about the white chocolate and caviar but this was the biggest revelation of the night for me (apart from the wine, but we'll come to that later) - I doubt I'd enjoy it anywhere else but somehow fish eggs plus cocoa solids works at the Fat Duck.
I'll be honest - the rest of it was a bit of a blur. Not out of inebriation but because after 10 courses your mouth is in such a sense of bewilderment that it's gone into whatever the oral equivalent of post traumatic shock is. The cornet, the sherbert, the tuile (or shall we be honest and call it a lolly?) were gimmicks to my mind. I ate the bacon and egg ice cream but didn't make much of it. I especially enjoyed ordering a whiskey afterwards - it felt like a bit warm familiar hug.
The wine was an unmitigated total fucking pleasure - an absolute joy. Whoever put the wine menu together was a genius - you order it with the tasting menu and each glass is designed for each course. The first glass was somewhere between a wine and a sherry which really set us up nicely for all the flavours about to be lobbed at us. The red that came with the pigeon was huge. I can't remember when my favourite came - it was with one of the mousses and I reckon it was something like a white burgundy but my recall is imperfect. The wine cut right across the food - perpendicular. It was fucking astonishing. And I'm cursing myself for forgetting, but sometimes these things are better when you can only recall the rough details rather than the whole deal.
Putting all the suspensions, ice creams, essences, corks, nitrogen flasks and weird dishes to one side - and this was the stand out thing for me - there was just a total sense of relaxation sitting there. I felt so at ease and, well, pampered is the wrong word but it's the first one that comes to mind. The service and whole atmosphere was remarkable in itself.
There are two others I'd love to go to: the waterside inn and ramsay's place up in chelsea. But for the time being I think a more modest diet beckons while my wallet recharges.
August 01, 2005
Drinking Your Own Urine for NASA
Broken shuttle tiles, new planets and now drinking your own piss. Houston's having a busy week.
RLD goes titsup.com
A few years ago I worked for a company called Red Letter Days in North London.
The founder (Rachel Elnaugh) went on to appear on Dragon's Den as a judge. This morning I read that the company's in trouble. 10% of the workforce sacked, suppliers cancelling bookings and withdrawing credit - that kind of thing.
I have very mixed feelings about this. I invested a lot of time and energy into the organisation, met some great people there and had a lot of highs and a lot of lows. On a purely selfish level I'm very sad to see the work that I did go to waste. The company's image attracted a lot of interesting, vibrant people (excluding yours truly, naturally) who worked hard to try and make it function. It will be a difficult time for them and I feel sorry for them.
On the other hand, I understand that this has been brewing for a while. Rachel's personal website (which used to feature her 'business rules' for the benefit of others and a lot of glamorous photos) has been taken down while the RLD website carries no mention of the trouble the organisation is in or their current status to reassure customers, which I find quite confusing.
Anyway, let's see how this develops and hope the people involved are alright. This is a very funny feeling.
The founder (Rachel Elnaugh) went on to appear on Dragon's Den as a judge. This morning I read that the company's in trouble. 10% of the workforce sacked, suppliers cancelling bookings and withdrawing credit - that kind of thing.
I have very mixed feelings about this. I invested a lot of time and energy into the organisation, met some great people there and had a lot of highs and a lot of lows. On a purely selfish level I'm very sad to see the work that I did go to waste. The company's image attracted a lot of interesting, vibrant people (excluding yours truly, naturally) who worked hard to try and make it function. It will be a difficult time for them and I feel sorry for them.
On the other hand, I understand that this has been brewing for a while. Rachel's personal website (which used to feature her 'business rules' for the benefit of others and a lot of glamorous photos) has been taken down while the RLD website carries no mention of the trouble the organisation is in or their current status to reassure customers, which I find quite confusing.
Anyway, let's see how this develops and hope the people involved are alright. This is a very funny feeling.
Beware False Prophets
Speaking as someone capable of counting beyond 10, discerning basic causality and occasionally making use of a spellchecker I haven't got the slightest clue what people find useful about horoscopes. My objections to the whole premise are founded on some fairly obvious points. But my chief problem is that some people I know - otherwise sane, rational people - believe in the whole thing. Horoscope writers ("astrologers") are amongst the highest paid staff on any newspaper. As well as commanding large fees, they also get paid a share of premium rate phone line revenues. Some get millions a year. Nice work if you can get it.
So, over the weekend someone discovered a new planet in our solar system called "Xena". Actually, it's more of a rock than a planet but we'll ignore that on the basis that the astrologers considered Pluto to be quite important and that's about the size of a cricket ball. But here's the thing - although a new planet profoundly changes the astrologer's star charts they reckon everything they've said stands!
This is like saying that your past accounts are balanced without including your mortgage. Cue furious backpedalling and further proof that the whole business is a festering sack of bullshit. Witness one Jonathan Cainer of The Mail:
Incidentally, I'm torn between disdain and admiration for whichever geek was responsible for naming the new rock after our favourite warrior princess.
So, over the weekend someone discovered a new planet in our solar system called "Xena". Actually, it's more of a rock than a planet but we'll ignore that on the basis that the astrologers considered Pluto to be quite important and that's about the size of a cricket ball. But here's the thing - although a new planet profoundly changes the astrologer's star charts they reckon everything they've said stands!
This is like saying that your past accounts are balanced without including your mortgage. Cue furious backpedalling and further proof that the whole business is a festering sack of bullshit. Witness one Jonathan Cainer of The Mail:
"I'll soon be making more adjustments as I incorporate the influence of Xena. I expect her to help us all to bring forth new facets to our personalities and develop talents that we never knew we had. Her discovery does not 'devalue' my past predictions. It merely tells us that our rapidly changing world is about to start changing even faster."Do go fuck yourself, there's a good chap.
Incidentally, I'm torn between disdain and admiration for whichever geek was responsible for naming the new rock after our favourite warrior princess.
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