I do have an apple though...

It's that time of day/week again where I waffle on aimlessly for a few minutes to pretend to myself that I'm doing something.

Once I get paid I swear, I SWEAR, I am going to buy a delicious can of fizzy pop. The worst thing about my pockets at the moment is that they do not contain enough money to fulfill this ambition already. Apparently, at some point Someone Who Is In Charge decided that existing in Central London wasn't hateful enough and made things so that 47p (1x 20p, 2x 10p, 3x 2p, 1x 1p) was not enough for a can of lovely carbonated drink. This means reliance on the water cooler and the various teas available in the little kitchen bit.

What the fuck is it about Michael McIntyre that gets him so much work? Having seen him rise in profile from his early radio/tv panel show appearances and spots on stand-up shpwcases as clearly the least funny participant, it is with utter bafflement and incredulity that I behold his smug straddling of the pinnacle of popular comedy.

He has a plummy voice. That's it. He has a plummy voice and that seems to be acceptable as a substitute for decent material. Every single joke he makes in his 'Roadshow' is agonizingly banal, his delivery staggeringly self-satisfied. He also has a face that looks like an 80s animatronic model of a gameshow host. It's a shame that he has some really good stand-ups on the aforementioned Roadshow, it gets very tiresome skipping through his parts on iplayer.

Wow, didn't realise I had that much venom in me. This is a bit like therapy, but free and even more self indulgent.

AAAGGGHHH, staring up from my desk is a picture of Hazel Blears. I hadn't realised this, she must have been staring at me for at least 45 minutes. I am distressed. From now on every time I go into a room I'm going to check for pictures of Hazel Blears, checking again every 25 minutes to make sure none have crept in. I have no idea what I'd do if I found any, probably shriek on horror, like I am now.

Good night (afternoon) and good luck (in avoiding Hazel Blears) x

The Righteous Fury Minute

Is this the worst man in the world or is pond life like him disqualified from polls of human disgrace?

I actually feel quite bad for lumping pond life with the likes of him. A newt has never made me want to fire it into the sun or hit it with a hammer, a tadpole has a useful place in a pond eco-system, waterboatmen scuttle about on the water's surface like little ice skaters, delightful creatures one and all.

Littlejohn is superfluous, a reactionary, bigoted, bullshit merchant. I shit in your face, Richard. Shit in your face.

Catastrophe

Shit, I've broken myself. After a couple of weeks of making the hardest decision of my life and switching to Diet Coke, I've just bought a regular Coke and I think it tastes weird.

What have I done? More importantly, why have I done it?

NO Locke & Key at the Forbidden Planet today, it should be released more regularly, because apart from the peerless Walking Dead it's the best comic around. There's DMZ too, but I need to catch up on the paperbacks and at £10 a pop and 3 or 4 I still need, unless I'm willing to live off berries and seeds I might have to wait until I'm paid.



In a moment of idle thought I came up with the name 'Crab-Shack', imagining it to be like a kind of Pizza Hut that only sells crab... then Google tapped me on the shoulder and told me it already exists. In London, Jersey, Georgia. What?

More driving today with fabulous Fabio. I hope i don;t spend the whole two hours screwing up, like last time.

Adios x

Welcome to Urville

The above is a poster that my friend Emily did, I'm putting up it for no other reason than it looks nice. Like a poster on a wall. There's lots more of her and the Plats kids' stuff here, go there!

Hmmmm, what to write, what to write.... there's nothing, that's always an option. Don't think I'll take it up though, I feel like spending at least a little bit of my lunch hour doing something I don't despise.

It's 2 weeks and 3 days until I go on holiday and I'm finding it difficult to wait. Budapest-Novi Sad-Split, that's the route, with the Exit festival occurring in the middle bit. Hopefully it'll be a lot of fun. I'm traveling alone for most of it, not feeling apprehensive as such, but more curious as to how I'll cope in my own company in strange places. I'm used to it in familiar places, but these ones will be unusual and exotic, what if I get on my nerves more without my home comforts?

Things I'm planning to do: dance all night, something that involves being on a boat, get in the sea, get out of the sea, eat lots of delicious food (involving sea creatures preferably), go to the island of Brac, find things, see unusual countries I never expected to visit (Serbia?!), experience two weeks of sunny days, have a look around Diocletian's Palace.
I just ordered this ^ book from Amazon. Not sure whether to do a good thing and give it to a friend for his birthday or keep it for my greedy self. Gilles Tréhin is an autistic savant who's imagined a city, to the tiniest detail, and drawn it. It's this kind of thing that leaves me spellbound by the capacity of the human mind.

I think that's all I have to say today.

Adieu x

Freeze! 15/06/09

Very brief little review of a (make no bones about it) bloody great evening.

One more triumph for the inimitable, undefinable Invisible Dot. It was my first ever Freeze! tonight and hopefully not the last. The first half comprised of a wonderful mix of poems, sketches, songs and merriment from Messrs Key and Basden. Tough subjects like War and Sir Stephen Redgrave were tackled with aplomb. There was even a commercial interlude to showcase the hot new product 'Woodland Rain', which revealed, intimately, the (almost) full Basden and Key personage(s).

The second half kicked off with a brief biographical insight from Tim Key, which neatly echoed the revelation of Tom Basden's address, phone number and email address from the first half. And continued with the short (24 minute) film 'The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island'. I can describe this as nothing short of an absolute delight. The perfect balance between levity and pathos. It was inadvertantly accompanied by the sound of a couple of loud yawns, an argument/loud debate outside and the passing wail of a police siren, but not to it's detriment.

I feel I should reveal my vested interest; I was given the role of a kind of town crier before the gig, involving telling everyone it would start in 5 minutes. A small role you might say, but one I am immensely proud of.

Next Monday Tom Basden has a preview of his Edinburgh material at the Hen & Chickens, think I might attend.

Byeeeee x

I like this.



The man himself (Bang-yao Liu) said this: "This is my senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline. I manipulating the post-it notes to do pixel-like stop motion and there are some interactions between real actor and post-its."

Now the dawn has cracked, like that bric a brac I wish I'd bubble wrapped

Today I think I'll write a little bit about a song I am mildly (read: completely) obsessed with at the moment. The song in question is by a wee band called The Wild Wolves, formed by Alex Cox the former drummer of the now defunct Vincent Vincent and the Villains.

I am usually loathe to even visit myspace (home of the Repetitive Impersonal Promotion), let alone listen to music on it, yet this song, unavailable elsewhere, has me returning daily and often for extended periods.

It's called 'Honey' and I love love love it. It has echos of VV&tV in its old fashioned take on rock and roll, with helpful doses of chirpy drums and smooth, airy backing vocals. But I've never ever ever been very good at describing music so I'll stop trying there and just encourage a listen.

At 1,299 listens at the time of writing this is criminally under-exposed. So the more attention the better.

Honourable mention must also go to a band called Fiction, who I saw last week supporting (I say supporting, I mean they happened, by chance, to be earlier on the bill than) my buddypals The Overcoats. They're one of the most visually striking bands I've seen in a long time, mainly due to the two front men also being the drummers... stand-up centre-stage drummers sharing only three or so drums and a cow bell. Their offering is angular post-punky stuff and they are damn good fun, 'Curiosity' being a personal highlight

And now look what I've gone and done, claimed to dislike myspace and proceeded to link to three different myspace pages. Shameful hypocrisy.

In other news, tonight I'm going to my first Freeze! and very much looking forward to it.

Toodle-oo x

For the sake of it

I am writitng this on a Macbook in a kitchen in Chichester. This is something of a change and I thought I'd make a note of it for posterity.

My oh my, the conundrum of having a blog but nothing to write.

I'm justifying this sentence to the right, because I can, you're not the boss of me.

Welcome

Hello me, you are the only one likely to read this. It's like secrets. Really boring secrets.