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.

Spain, Ear, Duffel Coat

Well I didn't go to Spain like I was supposed to. Ear is still bad and I just can't seem to shake my cold. OK, maybe on their own they're not sufficient reasons to stay home. I guess some part of me just didn't want to go. For whatever reason.

So I've been having a quiet one over the holiday . . . watching some telly, avoiding my chores, went to the Park with Els today. Sat in the 'sun' all afternoon - and not even a hint of pink. S'pose it is only April . . .

BTW, Phil, if you're reading this, while I very much admire you're refusal to comply with the expectations of society I can't help thinking you must have looked a bit unusual skiing in a red duffel coat. LOL. Respect.

Google, YouTube

Has anyone noticed the way that Youtube pages have suddenly started appearing in Google search results. Were they always there? Have they just somehow crept up the rankings? Mysteries within riddles . . .

At first I though Google might be pulling a fast one, but some research shows that if anything they're being more than fair. Lycos, Altavista and Yahoo all put the same YouTube page at No 2.

I am though reasonably certain that if you'd put "calling occupants" into Google or any other search engine a couple of months ago you wouldn't have seen youtube anywhere in th top 100 . . .

So what are we saying? That in about a year audio visual content has moved from nowhere to top of the tree . . . looks that way.

This is a very boring post isn't it?

And don't ask why I was looking for the flaming Carpenters in the first place, but there was a very good reason. Probably.

Drunk, deaf, Palestinian

Boy oh boy did I get drunk on Saturday.

In fact I was so pissed I got the bus home. I got off somewhere about Highbury intending to walk home. But first I went to the shop to buy some matches and a Dr Pepper, and got talking, as you do, to some guy in a wheelchair. So after a bit we rolled out of the shop (him literally, me figuratively) and began one of those late night London street drunk conversations that begins with 'So how did you lose your legs' and goes down hill from there.

I've no idea what we were talking about but two of his friends turned up and they were a) The drunkest women I've seen in a long time b) About 45 c) Deaf. Really. Anyway one of them decided she was going to have 'Steve' (my new friend) and climbed into his wheelchair to engage in some serious tonsil hockey. I can really only describe her position as straddling his stumps, and the other one decided that she fancied a piece of me as well. I have to say I clearly have no spirit because I fled the scene rather than sticking around to see how it ended up. Last memory walking backwards down the Holloway Road finger signing "I'll call you later" while 'Steve' can still be plaintively heard begging me not to leave him with 'these crazy women'. He didn't stand a chance poor bastard.

Think about it - I could have had a four some with a couple of middle aged deaf ladies and a legless Palestinian. Why don't I ever take these oppotunities when they come up?

Can vaguely remember engaging a copper in conversation at some point after that so probably lucky I didn't end up in jail.

Next memory - Sunday afternoon.

Ack

Veronica Mars. Plague.

It's the Cause Of All The Trouble's birthday tomorrow. I got her present ages ago - it's a hoody + 3/4 sleeve T screen printed with Veronica Mars crap. Or more specifically, Neptune High crap. But as I did the graphics myself it's a lot better than the junk you can buy online. She's a big VM fan.

I'd put up a picture but it's on my old mac and I can't be bothered to boot it up and reconnect everything.

I've been in bed for two days with some sort of lurgy. It's just a cold but it feels like flu - aching bones, headache, flem, snot, maudlin self pity. I'm such a weed - real people would have gone to work anyway and infeted their colleagues with disease, whether they liked it or not.

But anyway, I don't know whether I really want to go the shindig tomorrow, but having looked at all the options carrying on as normal seems the best bet. If I was still ill I could claim disease, but as I'm feeling a lot better even if everyone else believed me I'd know it was bullshit & I'd feel bad. Plus I could do with some fun.

My problem is that I always end up getting drunk and having a good time at these things - I can never maintain a proper demeanor of mournful scorn. The alternative version is that I get drunk, start having a go at people and make an utter ass of myself. Either way I never get to look like Dorothy Parker drowning her sorrows in gin and cigarettes, just some manic depressive nut case . . .

Haven't had a dream in a long time

I was struck to the lyrics to Let Me Get What I Want

Haven't had a dream in a long time
See, the life I've had
Can make a good man bad

So for once in my life
Let me get what I want
Lord knows, it would be the first time

I know exactly what that means. After a while you just give up caring about things, caring about ever achieving happiness, you just go from day to day, one foot in front of another.

And then something happens which gives you hope again. Somehow a modicum of animation enters your life again, you begin to believe that there's some point to it all, that maybe, maybe, maybe, this time it's going to work out, that it won't end in disaster again. You start to let yourself have faith again.

And every time that happens it's just that little bit more painful when that faith is disabused once again. Presumably there's only so many times this can happen. There surely has to be some cut off point where the well finally runs dry and it's over and nothing can ever get you going again.

I honestly don't know whether I want that day to have arrived or not. All I know is that I didn't have a dream in a long time, and that would have been by far the more sensible place to stay.

And I can't believe I'm ill as well. As if there wasn't enough wrong with me already I've got some sort of chest infection. My whole insides are slowly migrating there way outside. Actually there's only 4 other things wrong with me - compression injury in my left foot, ear infection, depression. And chronic flatulence.

Kill me now.

Shanty town art sell out!

I had the strangest dream about someone I don't really know last night.

I dreamt she'd moved to New York and was living with her boyfriend . . . so far so normal. But it wasn't really New York it was mystery Art Technology Metropolis, riddled with crime, overrun by the homeless. Her and her boyfriend built a beautiful shanty town like complex under a freeway out of scrap metal to live in.

Later, after they'd become famous for their wicked cool house, they moved out to live in a purpose built replica of the same place in an up market part of town that would give them better access to the ominously named 'Ants Causeway' that feeds the needs of the city's Super Citizens, who live in the sky above everyone else.

Now that's what I call a dream.

New Mac

My brand spanking new G5 turned up today.

Talk about a thrill.

Actually I'm not sure it's that much of a thrill. I mean, once you've got used to the Mac it's not like getting a new one lets you do anything particularly new and exciting. On the other hand it certainly looks the bill and Twin Processors, 4 Cores, 2GB Ram . . . there's a core geekness there that demands respect.

Plus I don't have a crappy plasma but a proper 75Mhz gigantic monitor that takes two people to move. Actually I'm going to have to get a crappy plasma if I want to use the second screen facility, but there you go, beggars can't be choosers.

---

My friend's wife got him a Wii as a surprise present. Talk about cossetting . . .

Bastard

School sports

Out of my office window, across the 6 lane elevated roadway, squeezed in between the prison and the tube line is a school playing field. Every afternoon I watch the little dots endlessly hoofing a ball from one end of the muddy windswept pitch to the other. Even a couple of years ago the sight would have made me shudder and settle into my seat with the warm glow of knowing that I'd never have to freeze my bollocks off doing that kind of nonsense and being expected to enjoy it at the same time again.

Now I just think - "Well, I'd rather be outdoors doing that then stuck in here with these morons".

In fact when I think of the effort I used to put into avoiding games at school it's a miracle I can still walk at all. On the other hand a youth spent sidling off for a crafty fag or lurking in the library 'reading' Stern or just ghosting into the background provides you with a much better set of life skills than rushing red faced and over excited onto a frozen patch of dog shit to exhort your peers to play up, play up and play the game for two hours.

More Healthy

Well I feel better today. More like my old self. I guess 3 days without alcohol or cigarettes does that. Actually I'm dying for some of both, but am holding firm. Absolutely no getting pissed, at least for a while. Let Mr Liver and Mr Kidney have a little holiday. More healthy food tonight by the way. I'm keeping a log again. I'll bore you with it later.

All I need now is to get back to the gym :(

Quinoa. Again

I've been cooking hippy food again. Today's recipe : - tomatoes, red onion, lemon, corgette, garlic, ginger & garlic. When that's cooked down add a chopped up piece of white fish (hake in my case) and the pre-cooked quinoa mixed in.


Looks vile doesn't it?

Clouds in the sky, Emotional, Vomit.

Shot this from my office window a while back. Can't remember why it's taken me so long to post it . . . but there you go.

Friday was, predictably, a bit grim but I managed to put a very good face on it. Which begs the question - when you're really pissed off with someone is it better to maintain your poker face so they never know or let them what they so richly deserve . . . given that neither reaction will change reality one iota.

Spent the rest of the weekend getting unfeasibly, unbelieveably shit faced. Had 6/7 pinits of strong lager on Saturday afternoon watching the rubbish rugby and then went to Rowan's in Finsbury Park for some all night bowling. It all starts to get very hazy, probably somewhere around pint number 11 or 12 . . . can remember meeting some funny Ukranians called Egon & Igor, but after that it all starts to get a bit patchy. Think Els had to walk me home . . . also have the distinct impression that I might have done some crying on her shoulder . . . urk.

Have a very vague memory of falling arse over tit attempting to bowl at some point. You may be wondering why I didn't get chucked out, but honestly that sort of idiocy is pretty much expected at Rowan's. To be entirely frank it's not an enormously classy establishment ;-)

Suffice it to say that yesterday was just awful. Honestly about 6 o'clock I thought the game was up and death was finally going to claim me. And I didn't much care just either. The best thing that can be said about such a mind melting, gut strangling, paranoic, dizzying, sweating, shivering, hyperventilating, DTs-tastic hangover is that at least you have something to think about other than 'Les affaires du coeur' as our French brethren would say. Even if that something is working out how to swallow the piece of dry bread that's been stuck in your mouth for 5 minutes and not pass out at the same time.

Ack.

Icelandic Comic Genius

Should You Be Laughing at This by Hugleikur Dagsson? Undoubtedly not - he needs to sort his head out, and clearly so do I. At one point I had to close the book and look out of the window trying to breath and curtail the hysterical sobs of incontinent laughter. These are a couple of the tamer ones - you have to buy the book to get, as Daisy Steiner would have said 'The Good Shit'.

Waxy Build Up™

My ear is now so completely bunged up I'm completely deaf. Why this happens I don't know but my left ear has been giving me gyp in one form or another since I was a teenager. Anyway, it's very irritating. On the plus side the Tube is a strangely calm and surreal place when you can't really hear anything. As a general rule announcements on the tube are incessant and delivered via a staccato and incredibly loud PA system on trains, on platforms, in the station by drivers, platform staff, control room staff and pre-recorded announcement. The instructions and advice contained therein is frequently contradictory, and it generally makes tube travel fairly testing. If however the have Waxy Build Up™ like me the whole palaver is reduced to some sort of background mumble "A wubber wubber a wub wub a wub wubwub in wub directions"

But it doesn't really make up for the inconvenience of having to have the telly on max volume like some deranged septagenarian and of the washing machine is on as well I can't hear what my flatmates are saying at all. On the plus side it means I can ignore people with impunity at work ;-)

And the other problem are the ear drops I'm taking to try and get rid of the stuff. They're incredibly smelly so not only does it make your ear smell or Cerumol, (who goes around smelling ears) but pretty soon you start to smell of Cerumol as well, and of course due to the whole interconnectedness of the ENT network, pretty soon everything starts to taste of Cerumol. Which is not good.

Tasty!

Mimi's frozen fucking hand . . .

I'm going to the ENO on Friday to see La Bohème of all things. Now normally I could cope with that without breaking a sweat - La Boheme may be a bucket of sick (with added sugar) but it's harmless and it's still The Opera, so always a good night out, even if it's not the ROH, which, being a crashing snob I much prefer. Excepting Tristan & Isolde of course which is shit.

Only problem is that You Know Who is going to be there as well. First time I'll have seen her since the Skiing incident. It won't be that uncomfortable because, frankly, there's not really much opportunity for interaction at the opera - G&T before kickoff, glass of filthy muck and a gasper at half time, quick pint after the final whistle. But it's going to upset me all the same.

Goddammit!

Why do I get myself into these ridiculous messes?

Quinoa

I've finally found a way of preparing Quinoa that doesn't make me want to hurl. This is important because I've been gazing at boxes of the stuff for eons and have finally decided that I just have to get on with it and eat the stuff. It is, after all, one of God's Wonderfoods.

Quinoa Chicken Pilaf

1 Lemon
3 Red Onions
1 Red Pepper
5-6 Cloves Garlic
Chicken Pieces
1 Beefsteak Tomato
Chile
Olive Oil
Mustard Seed
Cardomum
Quinoa

Cut a lemon into quarters and squeeze juice into a foil bag. Add the leftover lemon pieces and 3-4 cloves of crushed garlic and a roughly chopped red onion. Score the chicken pieces and add to the bag sealing carefully. Steam in the oven until cooked. The time for this will vary depending on the size and quantity of the chicken pieces used ~ 30-60 minutes

Prepare a finely diced ratatouille of 2 red onions, 2 cloves garlic, 1 red pepper, 1/2 a chile (to taste), 6-12 green olives (to taste) & beefsteak tomato. Season with salt & pepper, black mustard seed & cardomum.

Prepare Quinoa in your usual way.

When cooked, shred the chicken. Combine with the ratatouille, cooked quinoa and left over onion pieces if desired. Season.

Something Tragic

I have 1 friend on myspace. And it's Tom Anderson.

Everyone has Tom as a friend. Tom has 162 Million friends and that makes me a big loser.

Actually I think it's kind of a weird picture to post if gazillions of teenagers and geeks are going to be looking at it. I mean what is he saying here with that enormous grin "Hi Guys - you don't know it but actually I'm naked from the waist down and sitting in a huge tub of papier mache made from the all the leftover $ bills I couldn't squeeze into my bank account"? And why is he rather coyly turning away . . . has he just written the word 'knickers' on that whiteboard behind him?

Maybe he's written "RM SUX DIX"?

Heh

Do we suppose that every morning Tom gets a long list of all people who deleted him from their friends list and then sends them wicked flame mail, gives their email address out to every spammer he can find and finally organises a denial of service attack on their blog?

I want to delete Tom so my homepage can be truly tragic . . . but now I'm scared . . . maybe he really does get a list and picks one person at random to consign to interweb hades. That's what I'd do.

He'll never know . . . or will he?

Damn you Tom!

Skiing

As you can tell my skiing trip wasn't quite the garden of eden I was hoping for, but at least the skiing was good, and, by and large, a cool bunch of people. You can see the pics here

But in the meantime :-

Artistic, like


Pan, looking about at his coolest. Tragic, I know.


The cause of all the trouble . . .


Mountains : very dramatic


The excitement of comedy food

Ugh

I'm never drinking again . . . until this evening I guess ;-)

Boring boring boring

So anyway, here I am on Friday afternoon in work and it's *SO* boring. I don't just mean a bit boring, but the proper match sticks in eyes, itchy feet, horror boring.

This is because I don't have anything to do really, I finished a work stream yesterday and at this stage of the project that's pretty much all there is - slogging through the grunt work - and there's no way I'm starting a new one. It's boring, but tricky, a lot of words and numbers to be constantly sifted and pored over. Dullsville.

A couple of colleagues have sloped off already (it's half 4) but as I'm going for drinks at 7 that option is not available. Normally I'd just go shopping but I'm trying to save money, and also feeling rather disgusted with the amount of crap I seem able to buy . . . if you look through your Amazon history and don't even recognise half the things it's not a good sign.

Anyway this post is as boring as I am right this second, so I'll leave it there.

Yawnsville

On a more interesting note, every single person I've spoken to guessed immediately who the person I've got the problem with was.

My question is : If it's that obvious to everyone else, why isn't it to her??

Change is good

Something has to give. Can't go on like this.

And an outward sign of this is to change how my blog looks, to remind me.

Something has to change. And how.

Maudlin

I've spent the whole afternoon listening to this :-

Sentimental wallowing much! But it's just wishful thinking - am not going to be anyone's cigarette. Well at least not the one I want to be smoked by. Analogy getting a bit strained here.

And then I started listening to Local Hero by Mark Knophler, God help me . . .

Fucking Mess

Long time, no post! I've been busy.

Well not so much busy as occupied. And on holiday. have done 2 skiing trips in 6 weeks. Not bad going and am now official Ski God. Actually not.

My Friend Who May Not be Named is still way better. But I don't want to talk about her. Suffice it to say that between the two of us we've managed to turn our friendship into a roiling train wreck which has left both of us battered and bruised.

Well it's left me battered and bruised. She has the interior monologue of a hermit crab, so probably feels just peachy.

It's a teapot full of lost opportunities and regret any way you look at it. Actually it's been a mess for ages except now the mess is articulated and can't be fixed. Well I can't fix it on my own anyway . . .

Ugh

Wii

I want one. I've enjoyed the ole 360 but I totally get what Nintendo are saying - the whole thing is becoming much too hard core and, not to put too fine a point on it, expensive. For the amount I spent on the XBOX 360 console and the various games I could (almost) have had an entry level mac book. And that's just nuts.

Plus I have to admit that beyond the fps & adventure game genre (Prey, Gears of War, Tomb Raider) and the odd driving game (PGR) the whole game thing is starting to leave me a bit cold - there's just no way I'd step up to the PS3 just for more of the same. Re-invening the whole user interface thing sounds fantastic - just what I need to re-invigorate my inner game geek. And it's Ninetendo so everything's going to be just that little bit quirky. I used to love Mario Karts. And Zelda, even though I was always a bit shite at it. Having said that I also loved Final Fantasy VII on the PS1, but somehow I don't really feel the urge to return there . . . maybe it's the online bit - never really got into WoW enough to justify the cost. Maybe I should return.

I have a feeling that after the hard core game kids have slaked their shopping thirst the Wii is going to kick the PS3 from here to upside your head and back again, at least in terms of return on ¥ invested even if not in total figures. it just seems like really good timing - forget the $$$ processor arms race and get back to having fun. And let's face it - at half the cost but double the cool it's going to be everyone's platform du choix. IMHO.

Another year closer to the grave

All things being equal and ignoring such possibilities as being run over by a bus on the way home here are 10 things that :-

A) I'll definitely do this year

1 Get falling down drunk
2 Feel guilty about not ringing my parents
3 Eat a dinner costing over £100
4 Look at internet porn
5 Fantasize about having a job that requires walking through snowy forests at dusk instead of sitting at a desk slowly irradiating myself
6 Have a conversation with my flatmate on the topic of Donna vs Jackie
7 Visualize jumping into the void at work and have to force myself to step away from the edge to get rid of the sudden compulsion
8 Fall over skiing
9 Get turned down
10 My FUCKING TAX RETURN!!!!!

2) I might do this year

1 Confess all to the one I love . . .
2 Seek counseling
3 Buy a flat
4 Get a new job
5 Start learning Japanese
6 Visit Argentina
7 Write some slash fiction
8 Go to the gym
9 Sleep with someone because I'm drunk
10 Create a shitty piece of modern sculpture from broken electrical appliances

3) I definitely won't do this year

1 Shop at Iceland
2 Clean up my act
3 Vote Conservative
4 See Tony Blair & New Labour get what they so richly deserve
5 Ditto George W Bush & the GOP
6 Sort out the rodent problem once and for all
7 Write a scientific paper
8 Climb a mountain in Antarctica
9 Believe that my boss knows better than I do about anything
10 Make any sense of any of it.

New Year Exhaustion

My New Years dinner was, I think, a bit excessive. I certainly didn't want to eat much of it, but that's fairly common. I was basically completely knackered the whole evening, and kept wondering how long people were going to stay for.

it's a shame because normally there's nothing I like more than staying up till 5am setting the world to rights. No one else was really up for it either, except Jules and she really had to take The Riggmeister General home who was a bit pissed ;-)

At least someone was.

I basically spent the whole day running around shopping and cleaning and then spent the whole evening slaving over the stove. But the end result was fairly impressive.

That horror menu in full :-

Hors D'Oeuvres
(marinated artichokes & olives)
-
Oysters
-
Fruits de Mare (Lobster, Alaskan King Crab, Giant Prawns)
-
Roast Lamb stuffed with Crab with a White Wine Gravy
Jerusalem Artichokes with Scallops & Razor Clams
Lettuce & Watercress Salad
-
Tarte Abricot with Fresh Fruit
(Apple, Nectarine, Cherries & Miniature Tangerines)
-
Cheese & Coffee