The World Is Lovely

What Was The Name Of The Mother?

2009-08-27T22:15:00.000+01:00

Thanks to a bout of unwellness that may or may not be pig-related, I've spent the day on the sofa like the unemployed layabout I already was. Of course, the natural thing to do in this situation would be to watch daytime television, or at the very least CBeebies, with a hot fruity drink, but we've run out of Lemsip and the novelty of the former is rather lost when you're at home all day looking for jobs anyway. Our still-novel broadband offers untaxing amusement for the nap-gaps, but by teatime I felt I really hadn't done enough detached gawping to do my role justice. Flicking through iPlayer, The Cell and Only Connect seemed a bit ambitious for my germful brain – but if there's one programme that should only have been enhanced by it, it was the new Shooting Stars.

Now, I don't want to say it was terrible. That wouldn't really be true and, worse, you'd have read through a fairly dull paragraph about how I'm a bit poorly with nothing to show for it but the usual moaning about ill-advised comebacks. In fact, it seemed to me to be up to pretty much the same standard as it always was (although I did miss my old favourite running gag, Vic Reeves's bombing joke). But I wasn't laughing.

Shooting Stars started when I was five and finished when I was nine and I don't think I've grown up that much in the years since. But for me, that means that the show feels as old as any comedy but Danger Mouse. Perfectly able though I might be to arrange the Lumberjack Song, Four Candles and the "The Stripper" breakfast sketch on some hypothetical Timeline of Hilarity, I had heard songs in the club style before I saw any of them. So when Reeves and Mortimer bounded back in HD, really no better or worse than they always were, their very distinctiveness turned back on them. To my mind, and unfairly, they don't sound like comedians: they sound like the tedious friend who thinks quoting Monty Python is immediately and unquestionably funny, or Joe Pasquale.

I worried about this realisation for a little while. Have I been too harsh on the last decade of the Simpsons, on Red Dwarf VIII or on The Krypton Factor's Super Round?

Don't be silly. I'm not that poorly.

How To Win Friends And Influence Hooligans

2009-08-27T16:27:00.001+01:00

Sir Steve Bullock, Mayor of Lewisham, isn't terribly pleased about the Climate Camp setting up shop near him. He has every right not to be, of course, though given that the whole reason he's commenting on it is that the camp is on his doorstep, he'd be a more credible commentator and politician if he'd go and visit before using his position to assert a vague, unfounded prejudice. Come to that, even making a reasoned argument would win him a few points; sadly, he seems determined to assume that the Camp will wreck the site and upset the locals, against all evidence to the contrary.

In truth, it's probably fair enough that he didn't bother with even those token efforts: given that his jumping off point was an insulting and unjustified comparison of Climate Camp to the West Ham/Milwall hooligans. Fairly obviously not a winning move, but of course Mayor Steve didn't mean it like that. Those of us who weren't impressed had "missed the point"; Steve had made himself "very clear". Inevitably, he his sorry that "[his] views may have upset some readers" but considers himself wholly inculpable in the matter. After all, what possible reason could readers of the blog post "Football and Climate Change" have had to think he was making a direct comparison?

Oh. Right. Despite his failure to respond to criticism directed to his Twitter account, our dear mayor is "really quite keen on all this modern cyber communications stuff", so I'm sure he'll be pleased to learn how good the internet is at preserving ill-advised remarks.

Moving to London

2009-08-24T12:45:00.002+01:00

Those who know me are probably well aware that I wasn't dancing the merriest of jigs over moving to London. The tube would be sticky and unpleasant, the pubs sometimes trendy and always expensive. People in shops would make me repeat things because they couldn't understand my perfectly-enunciated Queen's English. I'd be accosted in the street by Apprentice contestants trying to convince me to pay Combobulus Jacket-Buttering five quid to butter my jacket. Possibly, just possibly, I'd be beaten by the Met or knifecrimed by a freesheet distributor.

In reality, my clothing remains dairy-free and my body has the same number of holes in as it did a month ago. My other expectations, however, were all too accurate, and while they've emerged in much lower volume than I had foreseen, that's largely down to the fact that I've been far too busy having extensive dental work and (only marginally less enjoyable) dealing with 3 customer services to leave the flat. On the other hand, I can work out how to get pretty much anywhere using one piece of paper with some pretty lines on it instead of seven different badly-designed websites. I can easily sample a pretty hefty range of delicious ales, and come to that, buy just about anything I could possibly want in an actual, physically manifested shop. There are lots of nicely kept parks, the review sections of the papers have suddenly become relevant (or will once Edinburgh's out of them) and apparently there are some jobs somewhere, though I've yet to get a sniff of them.

All in all, and with the disclaimer that I've yet to be affected by the regional pricing of Boots Meal Deals, I'm pretty satisfied with London. And if I ever get homesick, there's a manhole cover down the road that was made in Brighouse which I like to think of as "the embassy".

Venerable Beads

2008-09-09T12:23:00.002+01:00

Chrissy tells me occasionally that I should start blogging again. Who am I to argue? And I suppose, given the fact I haven't written anything in this space in over a year (I was scarred by that macaroon dream, you see), it's fitting that I should write about the Milk Bottle of Motivation.

The Milk Bottle of Motivation sits on my shabby-looking makeshift desk, and when I move back down to Cambridge it will sit on my handmade mahogany desk and be carefully polished by the Boy that all scholars of the college are assigned to see to their every need. It is simply a Dairy Crest milk bottle with the terms of its use written on the outside with a permanent marker. The rules are simple. For every hundred words that I write in a day (excluding filthy filthy degree-related stuff), I put a green glass bead in the bottle. This act is often accompanied by a vague thought of John Ruskin that does nothing to improve my day; it is always accompanied by a pleasing little "plink" noise that improves my day immensely. If I write a thousand words in a day, I get a bonus bead, this time in blue. The bottle slowly fills up until a day comes when I write less than a hundred words, at which point I tip it all out and leave the empty bottle to publicise my shame, except it doesn't publicise it very much because it lives on my makeshift desk and not in the Upper Crust in Birmingham New Street.

Now, a hundred words is really nothing; you can bash that out in a few minutes. It's very difficult not to feel silly rewarding yourself for such a paltry achievement. That's why the Milk Bottle of Motivation is serving me so well. It's so easy to pull a hundred words out of whatever part of your anatomy seems most appropriate that there's never any excuse for having to tip out those beads. And while there are often days when I sit down planning nothing more than to knock out a quick century to cling on to my hard-earned bottle filler, most of the time I end up writing substantially more than that. The first hundred is enough to get you sat down putting words together; moreover, because a hundred words is so tiny, by the time I finish the thought I started with I'm usually well into the next beadsworth. And you wouldn't want to waste those words, would you? Not when the next "plink" is so close...

Before Going Into Politics, He Had Been A Pro Wrestler

2007-07-31T17:26:00.000+01:00

Last night, I had a dream in which Gordon Brown body-slammed a macaroon.

Needless to say, my support for the Labour party has dropped enormously since I awoke.

At Least This Time It Wasn't My Fault

2007-05-28T13:39:00.000+01:00

There are lots of things you don't want when you're halfway through an essay. The discovery that all your library books are overdue, for example, or the crushing realisation that the one key assumption on which all your arguments rest is fundamentally flawed. I think I would happily have taken any of the essay-woes I've been treated to in the past, though, over the point yesterday - round about the seven hundred word mark - where Windows decided that actually, on the whole, I probably didn't want any of the data on my hard disk and it would save everyone a lot of hassle if it just wiped the whole lot. After all, a little modification to the casing and I could easily turn my freshly-bricked laptop into a fully-functional garlic press, and that would save an awful lot of fiddly chopping when making stir-fry.

It's possible that it just thought it would be appropriate, while I was writing about Ovid, to transform my laptop into an attractive doorstop. Thoughtful though that was, I do already have a very nice doorstop with a little wooden duck named Trinculo perched on top of it, and as I currently only have one door that's really all I need.

On the plus side, I managed to get a lot of reading done while Linux was installing.

Chavs Do Not Think Things Through

2007-01-12T17:39:00.000Z

When my hair is quite long, they shout "Get a haircut!". But we both know that if I did, they'd just shout "Ginner!" instead.

It pains me to see breath wasted like that.

If You Want Something Done Properly, You've Got To Do It Yourself

2007-01-11T22:50:00.000Z

Really, Mark, if you don't want me to clandestinely muck about with your blogger account, you shouldn't let me know your password and then not update for four months. Despite both these things I still feel rather guilty (I'm sorry, I am bored, largely because I have lost one of my procrastination tools due to the fact that YOU NEVER BLOG ANY MORE)... so feel free to delete this post once you've read it. Really, the main thing that's compelled me to post despite feeling rather guilty is the curiosity to know how long it will take you to actually notice this exists...

I've sat here for a little while pondering whether to make a vague effort to be anonymous and mysterious. I've decided that I will, futile as it may be, mainly because I can't think of a way to sign off after this little paragraph without looking silly.

For Your Delectation, Three Games We Invented Last Night

2007-01-02T18:45:00.000Z

1. "Rough Guide to Copenhagen" or "How To Survive A Robot Uprising"?, in which players must identify from which of those two fine books a (very) short extract is taken. Not as easy as it sounds.
2. Read The Headlines Backwards, in which you do exactly what it says on the hypothetical tin. Every bit as dull as it sounds almost all of the time.
3. Greek or Roman?, in which Paul is presented with a classical figure and asked to identify whether they are Greek or Roman.

Warning: This Post Contains Vowels

2006-09-20T22:59:00.000+01:00

Warning from the trailer for An Inconvenient Truth:

"Contains images of ecological disaster."

Look out, parents!

I Know You Got Soul

2006-08-26T01:41:00.000+01:00

My brother just won my other brother's soul in a game of poker.

I just thought that was worthy of recording.

Blowing Off The Cobwebs

2006-08-22T13:20:00.000+01:00

Well, looks like since I last updated I've been to Peru (photo-based shenanigans doubtless coming soon), got my A-level results and stewarded the Secret Garden Party music festival, among other things I can't think of just now, so I should probably start doing some posting and things sometime.

So, you know, maybe I'll do that.

I Honestly Thought Of It Long Before The Weetabix Week

2006-06-16T00:40:00.000+01:00

I owe congratulations to Kellogg's. I never really appreciated how solidly honey-tasting Honey Nut Loops were until I tried Weetabix drizzled with honey.

If You Don't Want To Know The Results Of Last Night's Insomnia Cure Challenge, Look Away Now

2006-06-08T11:03:00.000+01:00

Boots Sleepeaze Herbal 0 - 1 A mug of cocoa and a Winnie-the-Pooh story

I think we could probably have predicted the winner, really.

110001001011001000000001000000000 Kinds Of People

2006-05-15T21:46:00.000+01:00

When I went up to the school library today to use one of the computers (from which you can probably get hold of far more books than you can from the shelves), the person using the machine next to me was using an Excel spreadsheet. There were only two columns to this spreadsheet. In the one on the left were good old-fashioned decimal integers, beloved of so many counting people. And to its right were the same numbers, only in binary. This is the column he was filling in, one by one, and at quite a rate. I don't know how high the numbers went, but by the time I got there, he was rapidly aproaching 500, and from the look of things he was nowhere near finished.

It seems to me that there's very likely an entirely sensible reason for this, but I cannot for the life of me think what it might be. It just goes to show how very odd our activities can seem out of context.

Or that he's a rather odd bloke.

The Card Game Of The Century

2006-05-09T22:04:00.000+01:00

It is not often that a new card game rises from utter obscurity to a place in the card-game canon. And, indeed, this is not yet one of those times. But if there is any justice in this world, one is not far away.

I give you What's In Mr Johnson's Wheelie Bin?.

Choose Your Allegiance

2006-04-30T23:52:00.000+01:00

There are some battles that are worth fighting.

And there are some battles that cannot but be fought.

The Uncontested Highlight Of Our Trip To Stratford

2006-04-18T00:48:00.000+01:00

For more of the important stuff from our holiday, see Chrissy's blog.

Let The Memory Live Again

2006-04-16T15:08:00.000+01:00

I am sorry to tell you that my mobile disk died this morning. It had a good innings - my dad had it for a good few years before he passed it onto me (as attested to by its general massiveness), and it survived being put through the washing machine at least once in that time. But all good things, and most rubbish things, must come to an end, and today the plastic casing finally came apart completely and the circuitry within slid clean out, leaving the rather useless little shell you see to the left.

Now, as I looked at my inadvertently-dismantled disk, a few options presented themselves. I could wrap the whole thing up in a cocoon of tape, and, in fact, I nearly did. If we had any proper bodge-job looking duct tape, this post would have ended here. But thankfully, we only had parcel tape, Sellotape and insulation tape, none of which would really have given it the right aesthetic.

While searching for some decent tape, however, I did find an unused box of plasters and some bandages. That had to look good, surely? A broken mobile disk, held together with medical supplies like a real boy? But it seemed a bit silly and wasteful, and besides, plasters are rubbish and don't stick to anything.

Andrew, helpful as ever, suggested wrapping it up in Sellotape and leaving it at that. It would have looked interesting, certainly, but considering that it has all my important work on it I thought I could use something more substantial. So we decided to do the sensible thing and install it in another object.

But what?

A matchbox? Too easy. A thimble? Too small. A miniature box of Celebrations? Too bloody stupid.

And then I saw the light. Because, nestled away in the summerhouse, we had a big cardboard box of old videogame paraphenalia, and among it was a long-knackered NES controller. It was small. It was mostly hollow. It had a little hole to run a USB cable out of.

It was perfect.

And so, I assembled an Elite Crack Super Team.

Sort of.

Now, as I'm sure you're aware, the first thing to do when you embark on a project like this is to take everything apart into as many pieces of possible and generally make a great big mess.

Here, you'll observe the dismantled controller, the dismantled mobile disk, the screwdriver we took the pad, the USB extension cable (kindly donated/sold by Paul), the little knife we used to cut off some bits of plastic that got in the way, and some little bits of plastic that got in the way. You'll also observe, though they are rather less important, a placemat, a table, a chair, another chair, part of yesterday's paper, the set that we took the screwdriver from, and a refill pad (which we did actually use, as a source of card to brace the buttons, having taken out the printed circuit board that used to hold them in place).

With a bit of fiddling about, we came up with a basic arrangement that we thought ought to work.

It's really rather cunningly organised. I think Paul came up with it, with a little tweaking from the rest of the Elite Crack Super Team. Note how the disk also braces the D-pad so that it can be pressed convincingly.

Now, all that remained was to put it all together so that the back would actually go on. Which was an absolute bastard, because the mobile disk was unnecessarily huge, the end of the USB cable was unnecessarily huge, and the screw-posts had been positioned (in a remarkably forward-thinking move) so that they would obstruct anyone who attempted to convert the pad into a mobile disk. But we battled, and we battled, and we went and fetched a pair of garden secateurs to trim some bits we couldn't get to with the knife, and finally, triumphantly, we screwed the thing back together.

Truly, a thing of beauty.

It Is Soluble In Water

2006-03-17T15:14:00.000Z

Overheard while going out into the rain from my school's rather excellent show last night:

"It'd better not rain on my head."

At Least Her Team Would Have Won The Spin Off Show, "Pissing Alan Sugar's Money Up The Wall"

2006-03-15T22:45:00.000Z

What follows is an exchange between one of the people on The Apprentice and a customer at their pizza marquee.

--------------------

CONTESTANT: That's nine pounds change.
CUSTOMER: Er... eleven pounds.
CONTESTANT: What?
CUSTOMER: It should be eleven pounds.
CONTESTANT: Oh, right.

CONTESTANT fiddles in the till for a while.

CONTESTANT: Right, so I gave you six...
CUSTOMER: No, you gave me nine.
CONTESTANT: Oh, right, sorry.

A moment's pause.

CONTESTANT: So that's three pounds change, then.

--------------------

The contestant in question also chose to sell pizza that had cost over four pounds to produce for three pounds.

She also has a degree in economics.

From Cambridge.

It's cute how The Apprentice thinks people watch it for Serious Business Reasons when really we watch it for the same reasons that we watch The Weakest Link.

The Device Extracts Your Dental Soul

2006-03-14T15:28:00.000Z

The appointments I've had to sort out my knackered tooth have all been just a little strange, principally because the dentist I've been going to (selected on the very sensible basis that he was the only one who would fix my tooth at the time) likes to have the radio on while he works and discuss whatever's on, at length, with his assistant. As a result, I spend my appointments being drilled not only in the teeth, but also in the belief that BBC radio ought to be able to avoid playing rubbish pop music because it's publicly funded so it doesn't need the listeners to keep afloat.

Apparently Lou Reed is touring.

Anyway, as I say, they've all been a little strange. But today's was the oddest yet. Now, I would just like to make perfectly clear that he's an excellent dentist, me tooth is fully fixed up, and there was no pain any time in my treatment. But my God, it wasn't what I was expecting.

First they numbed me up a little, though apparently I didn't really need it because they'd already drilled the nerve out. Now, what I didn't realise is that the stuff they inject into you has adrenaline in it, and sometimes it hits you with, well, an adrenaline rush. I have never, ever had a mysterious adrenaline rush before while lying comfortably in a pleasant chair listening to the radio, and to be honest I can live without it happening again.

After that, everything was sensible for a while. They drilled me with drills, they X-rayed me with X-rays, and they poked me with those little metal things I have to assume are called pokes.

And then something giant got screwed into my tooth.

I don't know for a moment what it was, but I do know that it felt like it wasn't coming out without taking the whole of my lower jaw with it. Quite what it was for I have no idea - it just seemed to sit there throughout the whole affair and then unscrewed and removed.

Anyway, I could cope with the giant tooth-screw. It was weird, certainly, but nothing to concern me. And then I saw a cigarette lighter spark up in my peripheral vision, and within a few seconds there was smoke rising from my mouth. I had hoped to get through my days without anything causing my teeth to smoke, but it seems that it was not to be.

Once my teeth were (I assume) thoroughly branded with the practice's name, they got out The Device. The Device was shaped like a tiny orange hairdryer with a long, thin, angled nozzle, and was pointed at length at my tooth. Sometimes it nudged into it, and made a little buzzing noise. What was it for? I haven't the slightest idea. But it was very impressive.

When all was done, they took one last X-ray. As I tried to remove the little slug of film from next to my teeth, it slipped out of my fingers and I nearly choked myself to death on it.

Lent? What Lent?

2006-02-28T13:03:00.000Z

I just tried a pancake drizzled in honey.

Life may never be the same again.

If You Can Hear It Over The Hoover

2006-02-23T00:55:00.000Z

Just advertised on UKTV Gold: Housework Songs, a two-disc compilation of music "to make housework fun!"

I don't think I even need to make a sarcastic comment about this one.

Some Say The Meadowfish, She's Just A Myth

2006-02-20T13:30:00.000Z

Well, you know how the saying goes. If you've got nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all. And if you've got nothing at all to say, show a picture of a ridiculous sign.