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.