Long time

for some reason I have felt no real urge to blog lately, but suddenly I do again . . . it seems to conincide with romantic failure. I have just batted an unprecedent 0 for 7.

Good going.

I can't believe

that no-one ever reads this drivel. It's fucking hilarious.

Abbey National

Are truly a joke.

I've been waiting for a new card to access my Current Account since the last one expired. Last month!

15 days late so far. It's just not acceptable. Every time I ring them some hapless gnome says they don't know where it is, what's going on, what colour the sky is, la la la, I'm not listening.

The latest I heard was that the reason for the backlog of cards was that their card manufacturing facility was flooded in July. Ah-huh. I'd be more disposed to give this much credence if they'd told me that when I first started hassling them - 2 weeks ago!

What is really annoying is that I have received not one letter, phone call or email from them explaining, or, heaven forfend, appologising for this massive inconvenience. If I hadn't spent several hours chasing them I'd still be completely in the dark.

OK, OK, it's not the end of the world, but I'm supposed to be going away next week and if I can't go because I'm still waiting on this card (which accesses salary and company payments) I'm going to be really pissed off.

Halo 3 - Footage

I just saw this, and it may not be new to everyone, but it's new to me . . . and it's making me hot.

Mmmmmm Halo 3 . . . I suppose that a lot of people have never played Halo being an xbox only title, but trust me - you're missing more than a treat. Halo ROCKS!

London housing

OK I cannot aford *anything*. And I'm not poor. So why is it that the majority of us spend our days hunched over our PCs we're all still expected ro turn up at the office.

Isn't it odd that durin the day all our little flats and houses stand empty and during the night all the offices are as silent as the grave. You'd be forgiving for thinking that in the current environment that sort of arrangement is as dumb as a bag of hammers.

Beard

When my beard is at a certain length - ie longer than stubble but not yet at Rabbi - it has a really interesting consistency . . . sort of like wire wool, with clots in.

I love it.

Insomnia

I'm just not sleeping . . . exhausted at work and then unable to sleep till 3, 3.30, 4, 4.30, whenever. It's not good.

I'm having, even by my standards, a crap time at the moment. Just when I thought I'd done them all I've been finding new ways to be blown off. And not in a good way.

Grrrrr.

In fact every thing's pretty shit right now . . . what can you do?

And my colleagues can spend hours and hours talking about their cats. It's driving me stark staring insane. Dear God people, GET A LIFE.

Cansei De Ser Sexy "Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex"

This is just the *best* song. Terrible video though - looks like it was done as a school project. For the under 10s

Well I was wrong

... I was!

so far

A new low

I'm now being rejected by people I haven't even been out with yet. What next - total strangers are going to start ringing me up to tell me they don't want to meet me, not ever, no way, not no how.

Not in a million years. Not in a million, million years.

I guess it's all my own fault for assuming that just because people pluck your phone from your hands and put their number into it for you they may actually be considering that dinner offer.

Well that taught me didn't it?

Cigs

Now been 5 days. I'd slay Harry Potter with a dirty hacksaw for a wheeze on a gasper.

Potter, and his little friends too.

Lift Rage

My lift phobia is starting to reach our of control proportions. I work on the fourth floor and have now taken to walking up and down the stairs all the time. All well and good - won't do me any harm I know. The problem is that I'm not doing it because I want more exercise (merely a handy by product) but because I can't get into the lifts.

This isn't because I'm afraid of lifts. I am unconcerned that they may plummet to the ground. Being trapped in them fills me with no dread. Agrophobia - nahh.

But I seem to be developing lift rage. Whenever someone else gets in with me I resent them immediately, and the various things that they then do can only make their position worse. Pressing any floor in between where I want to go and the current one is bad. Traveling one or two floors only: very bad. Traveling one floor downwards: apoplexy. Inserting your hand in between closing lit doors to make them reopen so you can sneak in will earn you a violent and protected beating followed by being locked in a coffin full of broken glass, set on fire and thrown down a lift shaft.

It's really much less aggravation to just take the stairs.

Smoking Ban

I haven't had a drink or a cigarette since Saturday, and I feel . . . awful.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not gasping for a fag, I'm not pining for a cheering pint of cockney fizzy keg. I'm just fucking bored. I mean under normal service I'd spend 2-4 evenings a week either down the pub or recovering from same. It sounds awful, but it's not. It's just the way of many 'traditional' Britons. So now you can't smoke in the boozer anymore, what the fuck are we supposed to do with ourselves? I don't even want to go to the pub anymore - a non smoking pub isn't really any sort of a pub at all, it's merely a designated alcohol consumption centre. And who likes the sound of that? Not I.

Maybe I should just give up imagining I'm allowed to do anything resembling what I actually want and sign up for a load of accountancy night courses, or become a prison visitor or counsel disadvantaged yoofs or whatever it is the New Labour Experiment is so clearly expecting us to start doing. Alternatively I might just start hanging out in the park with Ve Kids and the Deros and some cans. At least you can have a fucking fag there. So far.

Amazon porn

There's a certain joy in having your dirty books delivered to you at work.

Just looking at that Amazon emblazoned hermetic cardboard package sitting innocently on the desk is making me laugh.

Wot larks eh?

Sweden in the 1970s

I can't put my finger on what exactly is wrong with this video, but there's something deeply, deeply disturbing about it.

ABBA eh?

Music Freedom

Here at work we have a lot of Macs users, myself included. The great thing about this is that you can see everyone else's iTunes as well as your own . . . thousands and thousands of hours. Of rubbish.

Seriously, you wouldn't believe some of the shit people have in their music collections. And not just shit, but really freaky combinations. I mean who has "The Best Christmas Album Ever", 'The Wamdue Project' and 'Violent Femmes'?

Freaks, that's who,

Unfortunately you can't tell who is who . . . so the real identity of 'Weeza's music for better thinkin' will remain forever a mystery.

---

Haven't been blogging much later - been busy. But just work stuff, nothing fun. And the project *still* isn't launched! Eeeesh.

Cyndi Lauper

Cyndi, Cyndi, where are you now?

And speaking of Wwhere Are They Now I wonder where the 'German' strumpets from Ferris Bueller are right now?

L'Ange

I went to see L'Ange at L'Insitut Francaise last night.

Imagine if you'd read a movier review that described a film as "A sexy South American romp with a lorra lorra laughs" and what you actually got to see was Aguirre Wrath of God. Well mu review said (amongst other things) was "Connected by the recurring image of floating, disarticulated staircases, Patrick Bokanowski's equally transfixing, mysterious, and impenetrable magnum opus, L'Ange may be characterized as a synesthetic composition - a series of aesthetically distinctive, self-encapsulated chamber pieces, each revealing quotidian, if fantastic, acts of obsessive compulsion and moribund ritual." And I still got burnt! It's not like I don't know what "synesthetic composition" or "moribund ritual" mean in film critic speak (its a bit shit) but MY GOD that was hard going.

I actually fell asleep for most of the second half which is actually a shame because it was only 70 minutes long and one rarely gets . . . experiences . . . quite like that. Both my companions confessed to trying to make themselves fall asleep or at the very least lose consciousness, but they were unable to overcome the adventurously discordant score which, for some reason, I found strangely soothing.

On the other hand, if you ever get the chance to see it I would recommend one of the following strategies.

1) Walk away very fast thinking about something else (recommended)
2) Go and see it with a cup of coffee and some headphones. Ideally sitting in a different auditorium altogether.

Actually that's not true. Should you ever have the chance *DO* go and see it because, truly, there's nothing like it. But don't expect "Weekend at Bernies". "Weekend at Casper Hauser's On Drugs", maybe. Put it this way - after it was over and we'd all had a quick drink we had a jolly good laugh at our earlier naivete - wondering if there were going to be subtitles or not. Ha ha ha. Hilarious!

On the other hand IMDB gives it 8/10 which just goes to show that there are either a) a lot of pretensious tossers out there or b) a lot of jokers trying to trick middle America into seeing something that would, quite literally, make their heads explode.

Foyles

I was in Foyles buying some books yesterday. For those of you who don't know Foyles it's a very odd shop. Nothing like as odd as it used to be but still a bit weird. It's not the biggest bookshop in the world any more, in fact it's not even the biggest in London (in terms of square footage) but it has one critical advantage: in terms of number of titles stocked it kicks ass. I don't know if it carries more titles than any other book shop in the world, but it's up there. I certainly never found anywhere with more actual books in New York - it is, after all, one thing to have 100,000 square feet of store space but if 50,000 of that is taken up with Harry Potter, Dan Brown and Michael Crighton you may be shifting more units /square foot, but who cares? Kinokuniya in Times Square, Shinjuku could probably give it a run for it's money, but to be honest it's quite hard to tell really.

Anyway, I'm confident in saying that Foyles has probably the largest number of titles actually on it's shelves of any English Language bookshop in the world, which means that if you can't be bothered to wait for something to be delivered you probably have more chance of being able to pick it up there than anywhere else.

But back in the olden days Foyles was truly mad - like some sort of exercise in Victorian doublethink :-

1. Computers were banned - everything was cross indexed manually
   
2. The fiction was arranged by publisher (ie all the Penguins together followed by the Picadors etc etc). This meant that unless you knew the Publisher of the book you were looking for as well as the author you had to engage with Foyles entirely non-computerised cross reference system to find anything.
   
3. You couldn't just buy a book. Oh no. You had to find you book, take it to the assistant's desk who looked it up in some insane ledger wrote out a chit for it gave the whole lot back to you and then take the chit to a different floor queue up again and give the book, chit and money to the cashier who;d give you a receipt. If you were lucky you'd get the book too sometimes. One can only imagine this was some sort of primitive stock control procedure, but who knows
   
4. Everything above floor 2 was covered in dust
   
5. All the staff were insane - either rabidly obsessed with their own area of book specialisation or rabidly obsessed with hating the customers. Either way it didn't make it easy to pick up something to read on beach.

Actually the shop may now mostly look and operate more normally but both points 4 and 5 still have some validity - up at the top you could still be crushed to death by a stack of, ooh, lets say 'Non Metalic Minerals of the Trans Ural Massif (1934)' and no-one would notice for years. And actually now that regular books can be found and purchased in a normal manner its really good to have assistants that care about the subject matter and not just selling the lastes blockbuster. Nerds love Foyles.

So there I was in book nerd heaven. I'd made my selections and was sidling up to the counter to make my purchases when the specky geek suddenly ducked out of the way and was replaced by a chick. A hot chick. Well hot for Foyles anyway. So what's the problem? Let's just say I don't think I could have been buying a selection of books better designed to tell everyone within earshot "I am still a virgin" if I'd tried :- Build a computer from scratch, The Elfish Gene, Y The last Man: Unmanned

So:- a DIY manual for building a computer in your bedroom, a fantasy role playing memoir and a comic book. I might as well just have bought something called "Animal Cumshots: A Celebration!" and be done with it.

BBC Archive

Sometimes blogging seems like a completely pointless exercise. How can adding my voice to the incessant babble stream of the internet help in any way? Is there anything I could possibly say about Virginia or Iraq or Gordon Brown that would in any way help?

Well no, not really.

So instead take a look at this instead. This is my project and it's gonna kick ass.

Knackered

Can't be bothered to blog anything about the weekend other than to say it was a rock and roll rollercoaster of alcohol, bowling, dancing and, er, alcohol.

Didn't make it home at all on Friday night and got in at 6am on Sunday morning.

Felt a bit poy most of yesterday to be honest, but surprisingly OK today. Just a bit knackered. Seem to have quite a few UDIs as well . . .

Michael Lyons

Exactly how stupid are we supposed to be? Does anyone seriously believe that Sir Michael Lyons has been appointed as anything other than a Treasury stooge. I mean, lets be objective here, what do we know?

1) He's some sort of incredibly dull local government cost cutter.

2) He's a member of the Labour Party

3) He's worked for Gordon Brown

4) He has absolutely no experience of broadcasting

Which. I'm afraid, equals Treasury Stooge. Gordon Brown hates the BBC as can be witnessed by his recent evil License Fee settlement. He basically sees the BBC as just another government department that needs to be bullied and brow beaten until it loses the will to live, and Lyons is, in his mind, the man to do it.

There is though, just one problem. Every government of whatever flavour thinks the BBC needs bringing into line and they're forever sending missionaries to knock it into shape. Trouble is, they always go native, and then you have an even bigger problem - your stooge is, sometimes unknown even to themselves, secretly working for the BBC, but still privy to governments' privy thoughts.

I mean Tony and the entire establishment attenpted to fuck the BBC over Hutton. He may have won on paper, but the court of History gives a different verdict. The government were lying and everyone knows it, whatever anyone else says.

Lyons has no chance. Media is a tricky world. You need big guns and he's got nuthin, Realistically appointing such a non entity can only have one of three outcomes : 1) He simply becomes a government catspaw, taking his orders direct from Gordy 2) He goes native and becomes a BBC evangelist 3) He becomes politically irrelevant as the real players sidestep him completely.

Time will tell, but I'm going for 1. With a side bet on 3.

Joan as Police Woman

That was awesome

Joan describe Real Life (above) as a love song, and I suppose it is. Truly an amazing talent.

But will I never learn not to drink 4 pints of lager before worming my way into a packed auditorium . . .

Joan as Police Woman

I'm going to see Joan Wasser this evening and to say I'm a bit excited is quite considerably understating matters.

To calm myself down I'm drinking a Green Goddess from Crussh. It's almost, but not quite, exactly like drinking the contents of the grass box off your lawn mower.

Is 'grass box' rude? It sounds rude.

Depressed

It's depressing to achieve nothing. I spent the whole day in bed dozing, coughing, blowing my nose on a t-shirt and wondering if I'm ever going to feel well again.

Goddam viral infections. And I'm super depressed as well.

If I go to the gym tomorrow I'll feel better. And be very surprised.