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

Irrelevance

Thw world's going to hell. The icecaps are melting, animals are going extinct, we've eaten pracically every fish in the sea, Iraq's in freeform meltdown (still), serial murderers are wandering the streets, my project is days away from a terminal crash and burn, it's nearly Christmas and I still have a ton of shopping to do.

But does any of that concern me? Not really, no. Instead the question that is perplexing me is this : Why is it that when you heat up some pasta in the microwave the bowl may be the same temperature as a Saturn V exhasust cone but the filthy tagliotelinni (or whatever) is still completely icy. It doesn't make any sense . . . microwaves are supposed to heat water, not porcelain.

I'm confused.

Music

This is just the best, best, best ever internet jukebox. It kicks last fm & pandora into the proverbial cocked hat. A Fookin' cocked hat.

I think it's French . . .

Chrsty Moore

I went to see Christy Moore the other week, and can safely say it was one of the best gigs I've ever been to. His voice is just amazing, and Declan Sinnott's guitar playing is nothing short of miraculous. This is one of his jollier ones :-

Christmas

I just realised that Christmas is coming up. Again. Perosonally I'd be perfectly happy to live under the White Witch in Narnia - always winter and never Christmas.

I'm not absolutely certain why I dislike Christmas so much. I quite like presents, I don't hate carols, I'm not even that fussed by the rampant commercialism. I think it's more to do the whole thing reminding me that another year has passed and I have still achieved nothing, and as year after year passes I'm somehow stuck, stalled on the runway of life.

How did this happen - it certainly wasn't in the plan. And I'm not even that unhappy most of the time - shuffling along alone - you get used to it. Even to like it. I guess it's the Christmas, family, totting up what you stand for thing. I've go no partner, no kids, no permanent job. I don't even have a mortgage. You could be mistaken for thinking that makes me some sort of wild eyed desperado marching to the beat of a different drum. It doesn't, it makes me a loser.

Happy Holidays, Kids!

GOD! People who get in the lift to go one floor! The stairs are RIGHT THERE assholes. And it's not like you couln't stand to lose a bit of weight either.

And on that note I had a bean salad and two apples for lunch today. But that was to make up for last night's lager & nachos incident. And now I'm eating a ham and cheese panini. With Salad.

I'm feeling angry today, but not as angry as this morning. I was livid then. And I don't really know what about either . . . weird.

I decided that I needed to get a PC at home. I don't have one, and despite the fact that the mac is clearly superior you just can't get everything for it. Anyway, a quick root around online and I was straight back to Mac. PC land : So many models, specs, bullshit, and dammit they're UGLY.

I'm gonna stick with my Mac purity and just learn to live with the lack of software. Since I exchanged my PC at work for a Mac as well I've been living in a Gates free world, and it's nice!

Never gonna give you up, never gonna say goodbye . . . what was I thinking??

I'm starting to wonder just how relevant this whole 'internet' thing is to the world in general. I mean the problem is that the demographic make up of the majority of net users, and in particular prolific users and early adopters (who for want of a better word I'll call the 2.kids) is so off whack as to be virtually meaningless. Surely a case can be made that the internet is massively amplifying the voices and opinions of a bunch of politically and socially infantile geeks.

Of course I could count myself amongst their number, but chew on this for a moment :

Number of videos on youtube matching "Nelson Mandela" : 115

Number of videos on youtube matching "Ann Coulter" : 375

But let's keep this in perspective. How many for Madonna? 13,491.

Is this what it is to get old? Follow the sequence :- 1) Eat too many lentils for lunch 2) Suffer indegestion all afternoon 3) Go to Tesco Metro to buy some rennies to asuage said indigestion 4) Queue up 5) Fumble in pocket looking for change 6) Discover packet of rennies in pocket 7) Remember you bought some at lunchtime 8) Repalce second packet. 9) Creep from store wondering if they're going to accuse you of shoplifting the original packet.

Like, DUHHH.

On the plus side my back is a lot better today!

Things that don't mix no 1,462 : lentils & ginger.

Ack!

Today for my lunch I'm having a chargrilled chicken pasta salad from Tesco (390kc, 16g fat) and I can safely say it's one of the vilest things ever. Bland, soggy, badly seasoned. ACK.

On avergae it takes 8 months to develop a new ekiben. How long did Tesco spend on their chicken 'salad'? It wasn't 8 months was it?

Went to see Metamorphosis at the Lyric on Saturday, and can say that it was astonishingly good. Mesmerising. Plus at only an hour and a half with no interval you're out of there by ten past nine and have time for a proper dinner / trip to the pub. Or in our case both.

However, and I can't say that the Lyric seats were to blame but they can't have helped, I know have the most excruciating lower back pain - shooting pains down the legs, sudden stabbing pains etc etc.

Of course could also be related to the horse incident a few months ago as well . . . or all that dancing I did last weekend . . .hard to say . . . I'm am clearly a bit of a cripple though. Ho hum.

This made me laugh :-

This morning I was so hungry I was actually in pain on the tube and had to have a double bowl of muesli when I got to work. Fair enuf but not when you consider what I ate yesterday :-

Breakfast : n/a
Lunch : Prawn Jambalaya with rice, 2 Apples
Snack : 1/2 packet pork scratchings
Dinner : Roast chicken with roast potatoes, gravy, garlic bread, green salad, baked chocolate pudding
Supper : Tin of sardines, bowl 3 bean soup, 2 apples.

It's disgusting isn't it? The dinner etc was cooked by my friend Ana. I'm not a bad cook but it's quite effortful and by the numbers. It's the opposite of natural. Still though, the results are not too shabby. Ana's cooking is entirely relaxed, casual, almost lazy in appearance and seems to generate no washing up. The results : absolutely sublime. She just understands it at some deeper more intrinsic level than me - it's the difference between Salieri and Mozzer. By the standards of the day they were both fantastic, but in comparison to each other one was a genius and the other a lumpen fingered musical hod carrier.

On the other hand I can make a Hollandaise sauce and she can't so there. BTW there's a lot of guff talked about Hollandaise sauce - it's not that hard, you just need to pay attention.

Stupid Amazon

What can I have possibly done to deserve this as a landing page :-


Are they mocking me?

This is a horrible story. Ugh. Imagine. Finally getting rid of fuck face Tone to be replaced by . . . shudder . . . I can hardly type the words . . . J O H N . . . . R E I D . . . .

ARRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

Hopefully the Guardian just wrote this to give us all a good scare and to make sure it didn't happen by accident in some way. Still - breaking out in a cold sweat here.

The other night I dreamt I was standing on a bridge which was then washed away in a flood and me with it.

You don't have to be brain of britain to know what that's not a good dream. I interpret it as a 'lack of control' dream: I fear that outside events - aging, employment, illness control my life more than I do.

On the other hand I also dreamt that Jack Black came round, so it just goes to show you can't trust your dreams.

I don't even like Jack Black. Why would he come round?


But moving on, it looks like my impassioned ranting has done some good and TB has finally fallen on his sword (a bit). An idiot to the end I love the way he's protesting he'll last until May. Not one chance in a billion. I give him 2 months tops.

Well that was a rubbish weekend. Spent the whole thing in bed illing. Really freaky weird dreams as well. On the plus side managed to resist indulging in excessive comfort eatng / drinking, though quite what the point is, I don't know.

I personally can't see any difference if I've spent a week eating bacon baguettes, cheese strings and crispy duck than if I've spent it eating lentils, chick peas and green leaves. Ho hum.

Lunch today = lentils with artichokes & spicy sausage. Yes, I know, but I'm prepared. I have a cork. And anyway, this'll benothing compared to tomorrow. I have 500g of yellow split peas soaking at home which I'm going to cook with squid in it's own ink and maybe some ham . . . mmmmm . . . by tomorrow you'll be able to run a small camper van off me.

So Tony comes back froom wherever the fuck he's been hiding out and are the first words out of his mouth "I'm really sorry about Iraq, and I'll be pissing off now Gordon"? Indeed they were not. Quelle surprise. Instead we're told that Tony is looking at new ways of telling even more people how to live their lives : Blair to tackle 'menace' children

This is really just taking the cat's flipping biscuit. Iraq is tipping into civil war, Lebanon is a ruin, the Middle East is in turmoil, The Arctic is about to break off in one piece and Tony thinks he can distract us with this shit.

"His aides say people are more interested in problems like anti-social behaviour than in talk about when the prime minister will quit."

That is just pathetic. I mean really. We're totally used to Tony lying his fucking face off but seriously ffs! how stupid do you think we are? Tony, take a tip from me and just fuck off. The only thing people are interested in is when you're finally going to get lost and we can start cleaning up the colossal carpet of turds you and your bum chum Goerge W have spent the last 9 years expelling onto anyone unlucky enough to pop up on your radar. You're done mate.

And as for your policies outlasting you? Dream on.

The only thing that'll outlast you is the melt down in Iraq and the intense desire of a large number of people all around the world to blow us all up. Oh, yeah, and the ASBO. Actually I don't have anything against ABSOs per se, if only there was some evidence that they were in any way effective . . . still, time will tell, though clearly our great leader doesn't think they're working.

But seriously, Tone, who the fuck do you think is going to bing "some sense of discipline and responsibility" to these horrible kids you're so freaked out about? Social services, GPs, The Police? Who? Who? Or are you going to create a whole new department, possibly employing all those civil servants soon to be released from their travails at the Child Support Agency : The Department of Eugenic Correction (DEC)? Yeah, that sounds about your speed, you munter.

In fact, why not combine ASBOs and The DEC - go down to the park and round up all the kids wearing hoodies and gobbing at pensioners and have them spayed. Alternatively I'd be quite satisfied if you could manage a few more guards on the trains at night, get the police to actually do their jobs, and stop people from running me over with their flipping bikes on the pavement - your choice!

Wise words from the Donnas :-

You're a zero on the rock-o-meter,
You wanna get hot? go turn on a heater.

Haven't heard that for a while - heard it on Pandora. Which amazingly for a recomendation engine really seems to work. Still have some way to go before they're up with 6Music tho.

And speaking of hot in the last 16 hours I've eaten well over a litre of lentils and broad beans. Trust me - it's getting hot in here.

Yeah, Fuck You Pluto! You fucking loser. I can't believe you've been hanging around the solar system all this time passing yourself off as a real planet. You are, frankly, no better than some geezer who buys a dog just so he has an excuse to take it for walks and hang around at the recreation ground looking for schoolgirls playing footie.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Funny, funny, guys . . . . .

I hate tofu. I hate it in all it's forms. And apparently it's supposed to be quite bad for you. Yup tofu is now bad for you. Official. But let's face it - what isn't? Actully I quite like miso soup.

I'm still not going to go ut and buy a fucking hummer though. All the same, as they're a lot cheaper than I'd assumed I could afford one should I wish to. So if I was a dick brained panty-wad this ad may well have worked. Unfortunately for the Hummer people all the DBPWs (Dick Brained Panty Wads) already own hummers and I fear it's going to take more than a 30 second slot on Geraldo to convert a tofu zealot into Dick fucking Cheney.

Went to see Miami Vice last night . . . better late than never. Quite enjoyed it but very disappointed that there wasn't a scene where a cigarette boat takes off from a boat ramp over a causeway, is sprayed with automatic weapons fire (preferably from an M60 mounted on the back of a hot pink Subaru) and crashes into an 18-wheeler before exploding in a giant fireball with shrapnel flying in all directions and the camera doing a matrix style 180 to Gong Li jumping off the back of a pin-wheeling jet bike simply to kick Crockett in the nuts so hard his head turns inside out.

Now that's a scene I'd pay to see. That's the problem with these blockbusters - no imagination.

What do we think? White Goodman / Sonny Crockett - same dude?



I can't believe he kept that moustache on all the way through the movie. I thought it was some sort of comedy 'disguise' in the opening scenes . . . but no. WOW!