Literally Illiterate

I overheard somebody talking in the garden of the Pen and Wig the other day whilst my friend was in the toilet, and it made me smile to myself, a lot. I think the misuse of the word 'literally' has to, with no exception, be my favourite fuck-up of the English language there is at the average idiot's disposal. For example, the girl was barking out the rest of her evenings plans to her friend, who was stood on one of the benches trying to warm her hands on the heaters by reaching as high as she could. The following key phrase was dropped:

"I don't know how I'm going to fit everything in over Christmas, I've literally got my fingers in every pie"

An all time great. I can think of countless examples. These clangers usually occur when the person speaking intends to say 'practically': "my relationship with Roy was literally a car wreck", or "I'm literally buggered", "I literally haven't got anything to wear tonight" etc. Maybe it's the fact that one simple word like 'literally' means that any statement is therefore a statement rooted in certainty, fact and unquestionnable actuality, or maybe it's just because people (like myself) like to use it because it's a longer word than 'soooooo". To coin a Friends comparison, it's what sets the Chandlers' from the Phoebes in the world.
In the Private Eye almanacs of 'it's 'Colemanballs' (famousy nonsensical statements made by celebrities, such as 'Mentally, he's as strong as an ox' - Michael Owen, or 'There's more secrets in my family than there is in a hot dinner" - Jeremy Kyle) there is often a chapter dedicated to the year-or-so's pick of the misuse of 'Literally'. Sadly unless the girl in the pub was actually Peaches Geldof (unlikely) or a member of the Royal Family (even more unlikely), 'literally' having a finger in every pie is going to remain mine and her friends little secret.

Post Script: I just typed in 'Literally' into soulseek to see if I could find an interesting song title to suit this post, and it produced a six minute comedy clip of David Cross discussing 'The Misuse of Literally'. Much as I have time for David Cross after he ruined several hundred Sleater Kinney fans lives by taking nearly 30 minutes to introduce their set at All Tomorrows Parties, and then they delivered the punchline by being COMPLETE shite, I'm never going to listen to this six minute clip because I don't want to be reminded that I'm not a successful American comedian who's famous to have his quotes bootlegged onto Soulseek, and I don't think my voice has been recorded by anyone except maybe the Samaritans in probably five years.

When You Wake Up a Snake

So anyway, I watched about three quarters of Anaconda last night when I got home from the pub. Wow. What a magnificently, breathtakingly, staggeringly shit moment of cinema history. I'm well aware that a film called Anaconda, about a big ass snake in a swamp is hardly challenging the world of High Arts, but betcha by golly, is this film bad. What I did't know before I started watching mind, is the number of Real! Hollywood! People! cropped up. Jennifer Lopez, I knew took a starring role, and obviously was going to be the token survivor, alongside Ice Cube (who I didn't know was in it). What I didn't know was Jon Voight was going to show up displaying a riciulous display of laughable pantomime ham acting as a lunatic hunter with no actual idea what he was even doing there in the first place, and also can't make up his mind whether he wants to kill the crew, the snake, himself, or the film. I'll settle for the latter. What rounds this mysterious A list cast off perfectly, is the inclusion of Owen 'Llama looking through frosted glass' Wilson, who does his "Gee Wally, I just wanna drink moonshine and have some fun y'all" routine for about five minutes, and then all you see is his shaggy-dog hair disappearing down the gullet of the most ingeniously unrealstic looking big ass snake. Add into the mix a token chesty female who was so insignificant I can't even remember how she snuffed it (although, given every character somehow ended up inside the snake, that's a safe bet), a 5 year old childs vision of what an Engish photographer should look and sound like (a straight Alan Cumming lookalike who's be trained at the Royal Academy of Brtish Pomposity) and some boring git who spent 99% of the film laid on his back in the cabin and was apparently J-Los love interest. Awful.
I wouldn't want to ruin subsequent viewings of the film for anyone by revealing the ending, or the best bits, but there are some howlingly bad efforts right across the board here. Personally, the snake itself was the icing on the cake, because I'm terrified of snakes, but even this lesson in special effect no-nos was too screamingly hysterica to take seriously. Firstly, it appeared to have super-snake powers which not only allowed it to be almost as big as the entire boat, it could move quicker than lightning, had impeccible eyesight, hearing, and movement sensors, to the extent it could attack with it's head and tail simultaneously despite them being at opposite ends of the boat, and had facial expressions, and made "aaaargh" and "eeeeeek" noises when it was in pain. Clears the effects crew forgot half way through they were dealing with a snake and used and leftover effects from the Jurassic Park goody box.

Last night I went for a pre Christmas drink with my ex girlfriend Anna. There really aren't enough people in the world like her, and I mean that in a good way. I can't believe I forgot to ask about her robotic arm though, I'd been saving that question all year.

He Keeps Me Alive

Today has seen two very entertaining comings together of loose ends. I think in a wider world, to the fashion set in London, or people with Parker pens who put 'Filofax accessories' on their christmas list, these are very small things indeed. Both, interestingly, are illegal activities. Slightly less interestingly, neither are going to see me joining a chain gang or being hauled up before the DA or amateur magestrates just yet.

One! I finally found a website streaming episodes of Dexter. Whilst the bubble has been somewhat burst by people constantly telling me how shite the books are and eventually having so much peer pressure compressing hot air inside the opinion chamber in my cranium that I'm half inclined to believe them. The first two are alright actually, especially the second, which features a cartoonish Mexicana slice-n'-dicer with a penchant for word games. The third one is dreadful mind, although I think it was party ruined by the fact that I had to read the hard back edition, which given the other main hard back book I've read this year have been by Alex James (appalling) and Russell Brand (the only example of an autobiography of an adult that reads like it's been written by an overeducated child who's yet to actually live the life being discussed - also appalling) I've been overwhelmed lately with the feeling that hard back books, with their large print, and easy-on-the-eye covers, are more for children. Although tell that to the publishers of Naomi Klein's latest doorstop.
So anyway, I had to call quitting time on my watching of Dexter earlier in the year because the arduous task of trying to get someone who had the FX channel to video it for me every week proved too much after discovering our video player didn't actually work and so I never actually watched the first episode on hard copy anyway. Luckily for lucky old me, the plethora of illegal sites allowing streaming episodes of every TV show under the sun (even 'Kitchen Confidential', the hilariously pointless cable-TV adaptation of legendarily dull chef Anthony Bourdain's crappy memoirs, starring Xander from Buffy the Vampire slayer as a cake icer) had lots of lovely links to watch Dexter chopping up murderous psycho bunglers. Up entire episode six, where inexplicable for the last four months, no bugger has managed to upload the entire episode, so I've watched the opening ten minutes, which, good as the ooh-aren't-we-clever opening credits are on initial viewing, become tediously long like the Will O The Wisp openers, about twenty time you've tried to watch the same episode and it cuts out when Ritas carping on about her housemaids husbands disappearance every single time. Thank heavens and stars above, that this time it didn't happen, and I only had two-thirds of the screen covered up by Spanish subtitles. If this is a capture straight from Spanish television, then God help the Spaniards. You can barely see anything that's happening on screen. I had to squint at one point because the sound was fucked, I was in the lounge and the washing machine starting rumbling no more than 5 feet from me, and the subtitles covered up the characters mouth, face, and eyes. I had to rely on eyebrow gestures and my total lack of understanding of Spanish (three words) to unscramble the unfolding events. I think someone got murdered by someone, and then someone else did, and then Dexter put the bodies in a car boot, only someone was hiding in another car boot and might have seen them but I don't know who it was, and I don't know if you're supposed to know who it was, but it didn't matter but basically I think some people got chopped, and then Dexter threw them in the sea. 'Dexter' is a lot more interesting that I've just made out, although this episode could easily have done without the prostitute knobbing the paraplegic in the hopsital. Seriously, I'm so happy I can finish the series now.

Less psychotic, but equally as morbid, I finally downloaded Sally Shapiro's 'Disco Romance', only with the three US bonus tracks. This album has been an absolute arse to download. Bits and pieces have made it on my hard drive, only to accidenally be deleted, moved to other files by mistake, proved to be 'of a format not known to Windows Media Player', only downloaded half, of best of all, proved to be a completely different album altogether (by what appears to be a vastly inferior Swedish pop singer). Obviously, Sally Shapiro is a Swedish pop singer in the vein of Robyn or the many other Scandinavian females backed by faceless Moroder-esque males in the last few years. All of Shapiro's songs take an extra precedent because they're so lyrically bleak. On the off chance any of them have a back story, then it's pretty much set in winter, or December, or near Christmas, and involve battles of jilted hearts and wistful longing, all coated in acidic musical froth. The seasons must-have accessory, it seems, if anyones following any of the largely piss-poor (Middeton except) attempts by indie artists to 'trump' Simon Cowell. Like anyone gives a honker of a hoot anyway. I'm sure sure Sally Shapiro and the bastard that left her doesn't.

Triumph of Life

It has come to my attention that I don't actually enjoy very much at the moment. It's a myth (that unfortunately, I think I fuel on a daily basis) that I hate everything and everyone and that being misanthropic comes first, and then if you're really lucky, I might like something. This isn't true. But it's becoming much more so. So here below is an incomplete and rather haphazard list of things that right now, at 4.30pm on a dark, wet Thursday in December, that I actually find a modicum of pleasure in doing, and the problems that play amongst the pleasures.

1. I like walking around the perimeter of Roath Park lake listening to the Red House Painters and other Mark Kozelek projects, especially just as it's getting dark, and feeding the geese. I haven't done this for weeks because I just don't have the energy to do anything after work, and every time I've decided to drag my aching body out of the house on a day off, it's been wanking it down with rain to the point that even walking to Tesco (which in an exercise of monotony, I worked out today takes just under three minutes, or for more accurately, it takes EXACTLY the length of 'Glenn Tipton' by Sun Kil Moon to get to Tesco, take three cartons of orange juice off the shelf, and walk to the checkout) is a chore. Plus, the geese don't tend to come out that much in Winter because geese are no fools, and know they can maximise the amount of breadcrumb scraps they can achieve if it's sunny, there are children with new bicycles riding around, and families in pushchairs.

2. I like watching films that make people go 'Whaaat! you've never seen *insert painfully worthy film that populates AFI top 100 films list* ????" under the impression that I'm going to find them overrated and boring, and then surprising myself that I actually really like them. Star Wars is a terrific example of this, and were it not for the fact that The Empire Strikes Back is absolute piffle, I'd cite the example more often. I still haven't seen Pulp Fiction from start to finish mind, although I've seen the same 6 or 7 scenes repeated ad nauseum, so waitching it from start to finish will just be a duty-bound couple of hours filling in the blanks, which is unncessesary because it's non-linear anyway. I also get a similar pleasure to the above when I discover that a band that appear on every conceivable level to be and utterly hopeless bunch of dead-arse fuckers, have at least one good song. For example 'House Party at Boothys' by Little Man Tate, 'She's Attracted To' by the Young Knives, and more recently 'Amylase' By Cajun Dance Party. Bands which have no actual valid right to exist, let alone exist in a world that my ears go anywhere near, but all three of these songs are fantastic, and the odd sensation of not knowing just how bad they are for my aural diet, but gorging anyway, is actually very fun.

3. I like reading out the best sellers at work. I can probably fit the number people who don't work at Borders who don't know what the Best Sellers list, on the back of a tandem, but I'll divulge anyway. The Best Sellers List is a list of the products which sold the best the previous day / week / month / designated time period. Obviously. I like finding out what they are, even though they are mostly eye-bogglingly obvious (Rugby players autobiographys, Rugby miscellanys, a DVD about Rugby, a calendar of Wales, a book written by a author from Cardiff etc) It's when something bizarre crops up it sheds a little stardust on an otherwise predictable day. Like Season 1 of Flight of the Conchords was a bestseller on Saturday. Last Saturday two people decided that the entire box set of Cadfael was a must have Christmas gift. I wonder if they were my parents. The finding out of the best sellers is fun especially, as you can turn it into a cross between Articulate, Give Us a Clue and a general slanging match, on a good day. Also because one of my few good life skills is remembering useless information about irrelevant things (this is what I eschew forming meaningful relationships with people for) it comes in handy. Where else can you drop wisdom like "did you know Russell Brand shared a bed with the guy that plays Martin in Green Wing for a while a few years back, like Morecambe and Wise?". Fascinating.

4. I like drinking orange juice. Not orange squash, I'm not a complete masochist, and at any rate, the general weakness of orange squash these days means you have to fill over half the glass before you add the water, without it tasting like pot-boiled piss. I'm talking about pure orange juice without any shite in it, that you can buy in a white, blue and red carton from Tesco or Sainsbury and it rarely costs more than 50p. This stuff is the shit. I mostly like to drink orange juice out of mugs, or wine glasses. In our house we have two of these large goblets, the sort of ridiculous vessell Falstaff would drink ale from in Shakespeare, which can hold almost a pint of liquid, and this is probably my favourite thing to drink orange juice from. I broke one of these last week in a bizarre incident which involved me dropping the external hard drive of my laptop into it whilst it was empty, and it erupting into a mess of shards and debris on the lounge floor. I then got loads of bits of glass stuck in my foot every time I ventured over there for the next couple of days.

5. I like watching exactly the same things on TV day-in, day-out. I know this makes me boring, but I'm perfectly content with being boring. There's nothing wrong with routine, and at the moment when I have a spectactularly small number of reasons to go out and 'live life', so I'd rather be boring and content. It starts, if I'm home in time, with either The Weakest Link on BBC2, or Paul O Grady although I tend to cook my dinner in the kitchen whilst thats on so that I don't have to actually listen to his vile, nasal Liverpudlian shite, and can bop around the cooker to unappreciated vile, nasal indie shite instead. Then at 6 it's the only thing that guarantees me infront of the television at any given time - a repeat of an episode of the Simpsons everyones seen five thousand times. Although at the moment actually, Ch4 are showing a series that I haven't seen many episodes of, thank fuck, because they're dreadful. Yesterday, Bart for bitten by a mosquito found in Krusty the Klown merchandise (plot recycling #245) and had to live in a bubble. Impossibly bad. At 7 it's Back-to-Back episodes of Whose Line is it Anyway, which after a couple of months I'm fully versed on and I think I'm borderline expert. Having said that, there was someone on there yesterday that I'd never seen before, but he wasn't funny anyway. After that, it depends a lot on what day of the week it is. I don't like Tuesdays much because Dave repeats episodes of the Apprentice and Dragons Den which annoy me, especially Dragons Den, because they insist on showing 'best bits' of Dragons Den, which defeats the point because I challenge anyone, anywhere to admit they like it on Dragons Den when the Peter Jones is grovelling to the client, rather than the other way round invest. Exactly. It's why sadists like me stop watching the X-factor after the audition stages because after that point the people can actually sing and nobody gives a fuck.

6. I like nice photographs. By this, I don't mind endless pages of pixellised losers grinning inanely infront of the lens and filling up so much space you can't even tell where the picture was even taken, so you're left with photo albums of identical pictures and captions saying "dunno where this was taken". These are not even photographs. Although I'm not going to pretend I've not appeared in at least a few of these sorts of snaps, but then I've also pumped several gallons of pollution into the Ozone layer in my lifetime too, and I didn't enjoy that either. An example of a nice photograph would be a hungry looking horse looking wistfully over a fence towards a patch of carrots during lunchtime at a Medieval Renaissance fayre just as they're about to roast a pigs head in the 'murder' tent. Anyone who has a picture like this, please help. I typed in "murder, horse, and carrots' into google and just got pictures of Shergar.

7. I still like making mixxes and making mathematically complex lists of music. As it's now December, I'm starting to compile my tracklistings for my annual CDs which I make for people. These take the forum of 'plus' editions and 'minus' editions, (just like DVD-R's) - with the extroverted tracks going on 'plus' and the introverted tracks going on 'minus'. So far the shortlist for 'minus' is a lot longer than the shortlist for 'plus' which may or may not be a statement on the year as a whole. Probably just because I can't make up my mind whether certain songs are plus or minus. Anyway, this annual process usually sets the scene for the compiling of my top 100 songs of the year, which is, as a rule, deliberated and written out on Boxing Day. I genuinely find this process exciting, although year-on-year, there are less and less people to actually read it, and even less people who might actually enjoy reading it anyway. But having read some magazines and online ballbags with their lists, I can thoroughly assure fans of the Animal Collective and Battles that neither of these two vastly overrated and frankly pathetic excuses for bands are going to feature on my list. Hooray.

Have You Forgotten?

Last week I told somebody in a nightclub that they could 'stop by my house anytime and borrow (my copy of) The Elephant Man'. So far they've declined this lucrative offer, which has so far been a relief for me, and unbeknown to them, a relief for them also, because I don't own a copy of The Elephant Man.I also said that Ian Rankin was 'Britains greatest crime writer' which a completely bizarre thing to say, what with me only ever reading one British crime book and very very few other crime books whatsoever, but at least it was as far as my opinion on such a small knowledge, it was the truth. I bought a crime book yesterday, actually, by James Ellroy. I also bought The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain for £2 because I intend to spend my day off tomorrow listening to Gillian Welch and Uncle Tupelo and read tales of the Ol' American West, keeping the curtains closed to pretend it's not the New Walian South outside, and it's pretty grey with it, too.
Today I went to Blockbuster to return 'The Departed' and a couple of others, and it took more almost 10 minutes between getting to the till and actually leaving the shop. In this time, I enjoyed a few minutes of confusion whilst I was denied my three choices of films because I already had three on rentail, only for me to have to watch them go through the 'quick drop bin' to find the three I'd just returned. Then I had to listen to a conversation between two members of staff who were discussing in distinct business terms a situation involving broken IT equipment at the Glocester Road store, and whether they had to phone head offce or the DC to find a particular member of staff, and that a RM from Choices wanted to know the stats on inventory. I imagine to the stereotypically wisecracking cynics who work in video rental stores, the average drooling apes who drag their knuckles around their stores and then rent Steven Seagal films have no idea what they were talking about. Unlucky for them, I did. So that was fascinating, and I had to listen to it, because they man serving me on the till was new, and had a pony tail, and asked too many questions. The next time you find yourselves resorting to going into a Blockbuster video store for entertainment, the tills ask a LOT of question, but luckily most staff skip them all, but if you have the misfortune to be served by 'the new guy', who has a pony tail, and a remarkable lack of understanding of computers despite the fact the IT equipment in Blockbuster is so primeval it pre-dates Windows, then get ready to wait. Eventually, the two guys 'talking business' stepped away from putting copies of The Simpsons movie in plastic sleeves and came to his (and his pony tail)'s rescue. I might have pulled a few hairs out in frustration, were it not for a brilliant person who came to the till next to me, who was so utterly cretinous he didn't realise that Blockbuster was a rental store, and tried to buy three films (including Ultraviolet) for £7 and was disappointed when he coudn't.
Then I walked past 'Bedz 4 U' and felt a massive twinge of sympathy for the poor man running the place. He was sat in the middle of the glass fronted warehouse with his head in his hands. As I walked past, he looked up, saw me walking past and then sat back on the edge of the bed and resumed the position of voluntary dispair with his head in his hands. I felt sorry two of the best things in the whole world, ever, take place in bed; sleeping, and reading in bed, and he was surrounded everywhere by beds and being totally unable to do so. Like the Ancient Mariner of beds. It wasn't long before I realised I was feeling sympathy towards somebody else and went home to watch 'Taxidermia', the film we bought Martin as a present for basically setting up the multimedia department and being generally awesome. It's been crap so far. The start of December has always been a bit eerie. This time last year I spent almost 24 hours a day holding onto my phone because it wasn't long after I was getting to know Gemma, and I was completely infatuated and hung on every word she said, and didn't want to let go of my phone incase it meant not being able to reply straight away. I don't think I'll be in the position again any time soon.We don't talk now. A few years back, in 2002, I spent too much emotional energy trying to stop a girl from liking me when I had no intention of reciprocating, and naturally she turned against me. Luckily, we don't talk now either. In 2000, during the second week of December I spent all the money I'd saved to buy Christmas presents in order to travel to Chelmsford in Essex, under the belief that my girlfriend at the time was going to try and kill herself that evening. She didn't. I spent the night on the streets of the city and slept in the doorway of a Samaritans. We don't talk either. In fact, we stopped talking no more than three weeks after that incident, after she cheated on me, ditched me, and then got pregnant on New Years Eve. It really is the most wonderful time of the year.

Evel Knievel

Evel Knievel was probably the closest thing I've ever had to a childhood heroes. I don't tend to have much in the way of strong urges towards celebrities as far as putting them on gigantic pedestals for me to worship at and then they can nosedive off every five minutes, ready for me to ignore then when I realise they truly suck ass from the basin of the vast oceans of suck. No, I have friends, work colleagues and relatives for that fun. Evel Knievel tends to get out of being my childhood hero on several technicalities, luckily for him. Firstly, he stopped doing any motorcycle stunts three years before I was born, so in the interests of being contemporary, I'd be idolising a drunken ex motorcyclist womaniser. Secondly, he was a drunken motorcyclist womaniser anyway. And thirdly, he spelt 'Evil' wrong unnecessarily. Apart from these three minor instances, the man is surely one of this century's genuinely brilliant, ridiculous individuals, and therefore deserves and honorary obituary from just about everybody. Seriously, he's up there with Dustin Diamond, 'The Masked Magician' and Lt. Horatio Caine in the inner circle of stupidity. Only out of the four, Evel was the only one who was for real.
My first real introduction to Evel Knievel was in 1998, when I was 15. At the time, 15 sounds too old to have a childhood hero, but given that seems like such a long time ago (I was still buying CD singles for one thing) I guess maybe that's another techinicality he escapes from. BBC2 for no reason whatsoever, other than having absolutely fuck all else in the archivest to show, decided to have an 'Evel Knievel' night one Saturday, in which they showed an hour long documentary, then another slightly longer documentary in which they encoporated all the now-legendary David Frost interviews and it was all about how he (Knieve, not David Frost) wanted to jump Snake River Canyon in Idaho using a rocket powered bike, obviously the pinnacle of his career. This was followed by the fantastically awful 'The Evel Knievel Store' starring George Hamilton. The stuntman had just entered my teenage psyche by firstly appearing on the cover of the single 'Bad Idea' by A, and there was a dance track doing the rounds on Steve Lamacqs Evening Session called simply, 'Evel Knievel', and it was actually pretty good. It's still worth tracking down actually, were it not impossible to find on file sharing networks without it being wedged inbetween two other tracks like a shit sandwich. I watched the entire night, in which they marvellously used the aforementioned 'Evel Knievel' track (despite it having no relevance to motorcycle stunt jumps or anything else within the documentary whatsoever other than the title) all the time. I even watched the film, despite it's utter pomposity and self-publicising nature. It lended itself neatly to the other reason I love Evel Knievel, he was an arrogant self-aggrandising berk, which aren't usually my favourite traits in people, however, if you're a wire-thin greying buffoon who jumps over fountains and buses and fucking canyons for fun, then to be honest the fact you think this is all a brilliant and wonderful thing and you are a brilliant and wonderful person, then bring it on. People who have absolutely no right to be arrogant should be allowed to be as arrogant as they want, really.
But now he's dead, although people die every day, sometimes they're not even famous. But he is dead, and since he just settled a lawsuit with Kanye West, and Kanye West's old dear snuffed it the other weekend, I'd be visiting Bupa pretty sharpish if I'd spent more than five minutes in the company of West in the last year or so. The man's cursed.

All I Want for Christmas is mewithoutYou

Today I have been 'festive'. This has been achieved by finding a jovial felt santa 'hat' with a hole in it buried deep in the chasms of my laundry bags, which I put on my head whilst doing the dishes to Joan Baez at about 4.30 and it is still there. I also, after repeatedly putting it off because I hate the annual realisation that I don't anywhere near the number of interests and hobbies that a 20/21/22/23/24 year old should have, and ultimately I am a man of such simple and illicit pleasures that I either already have them (books, cds, dvds) or am just not pathetic enough to ask for as christmas presents (cigarettes, alcohol). Or the rest are unobtainable (a nice girlfriend who likes Bruce Springsteen more than 'a bit' and Hakan Hellstrom, who isn't a complete idiot, and has some sort of mental deficiancy which means she'll be unable to leave me for any particular reason) or pure fantasy (Dog the Bounty Hunter to come round my house and make me a sandwich) which aren't worth the time of day. So here it is, John Widdops annual collection of materiastic goods to cause my parents to tear their hair out over.

***


Jens Lekman - Night Falls On Kortedala
When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog
Oh, You're So Silent Jens
Shout Out Louds - Our Ill Wills
- Howl Howl Gaff Gaff
The Knife - Silent Shout
The Tough Alliance - A New Chance
Loney, Dear - Sologne
Peter Bjorn and John - Writer's Block
Marissa Nadler - Songs III (Bird on the Water)
Red House Painters - Red House Painters
Sun Kil Moon - Ghosts of the Great Highway
Mark Kozelek - What's Next to the Moon
Fucked Up - Hidden World
Band of Horses - Cease to Begin
mewithoutYou - Brothers, Sisters
Woven Hand - Mosaic
Malcolm Middleton - A Brighter Beat
The Drams - Jubilee Drive
Lucero - Rebels, Rogues and Sworn Brothers
Motion City Soundtrack - Even if it Kills Me

DVDs
The complete Cadfael collection
Seinfeld Season 8
Flights of the Conchords series 1
Curb your Enthusiasm season 5
Insomnia (original Swedish one, not the remake with Al Pacino)
Back to the Future trilogy
Inland Empire

Books

Robert Graysmith - Zodiac (1845765311)
Henning Mankell- Faceless Killers (0099445220)
Simon Barnes - The Meaning of Sport (1904977855)
Paul Auster - New York Trilogy (0571200583)
Might be as good a time as any to start reading PG Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books as well.


A Digital Camera.


******

Obviously I'm not expecting to receive all of the above, my parents aren't made of money and I don't have lucicrous ideas above my station. I just tend to add shit loads extra onto the list to either give my parents choice, second options, plan D's, and to save them the embarassment of having to go into a shop and asking for albums by 'Fucked Up', especially when the album in question hasn't even been released in the UK. The Cds are basically a list of albums I've illegally downloaded during the year and feel I owe the artist in question for the enjoyment that I've had from listening to their music for free, but haven't dipped into my own miserly wallet at any point to actually buy the thing myself. Largely because I still hate buying CDs on the internet and since Spillers Records has decided to not stock anything AT ALL that I want to buy anymore, espcially not crappy t shirts for record labels I don't care about one jot, I've run out of places to buy things. The DVDs are the usual collection of titles I again can't be bothered to buy myself because I've only decided I want most of these things three weeks before Christmas and CAN wait. Seinfeld is on there because series 8 and 9 of Seinfeld aren't really that good, apart from 'The Frogger' and I've seen that episode anyway, but I still want them anyway. I'm still not sure why I want to watch 15 hours of Cadfael. Books are always a problem because I can bookloan almost anything from work anyway, these are just titles I would have bookloaned anyway, or alternatively, books I'd never get round to reading within a two week time bracket. I want the digital camera of course, to take photographs of myself in the mirror after I've spent six months tarting myself up, so that I can use it as my profile photo so I can have an artificially created work of personal digital art to go with my artificially enhanced version of myself in my facebook profile. Either that or I'll take it out to take some photos of ducks and geese in the park.

So for the last six hours I've been feeling festive. Tomorrow is December 1st, which means Christmas music will be on the stereo at work for the next 24 days. If I hadn't wasted the last 90 minutes of my life watching 'Patriot Games', then I'd be excited by all of this.

Someone Always Gets There First

I am using Wordpad. Why anybody in this day and age uses Notepad is completely baffling. Why use a program which doesn't allow word-wrap when you have the same resources to use one that does is ridiculous. It's like using a typewriter in the early nineties when word processors are available? Actually, why am I bothering to write this? Charlier Brooker has probably already written about this is a column. I'm starting to get annoyed with Charlie Brooker now, because almost every exciting though about popular culture in the last three years that I'd had, I've discovered Charlie Brooker also has and expressed in far more interesting terms in a national column, in the Guardian, and in far more explicit and definitive terms than I have. For instance, reading his last anthology, which I tend to do for lack of desire to read The Guardian every week, I've noticed he has written an article about Chat magazine, which, about three years ago when I was going out with Anna, we used to read on a regular basis as a result of it's utter preposturousness. Read it once, and you'll know everything about it. But I never went on about it enough. But Charlie Brooker can mention it in the Guardian Guide and now I'm fucked, because I can never discuss it because I'll sound like a bad Brooker rip-off. I used to hate Nick Hornby because he wrote '31 Songs" because I thought it would be amazing to write a book about how amazing 31 particular songs would be. But after reading it, I realised he never stole my idea because it was never my intention to write a derivative, shitty smattering of sub-par memoirs about how much Teenage Fanclub changed my crappy life for the better" so now I don't feel better. But Charlier Brooker; I might as well not exist anymore. He has done articles about every Tv program I've ever felt was worth ridiculing, but did it so long before me, he has rendered all of my opinions more useless than a bullet proof vest in a Hugh Grant movie.

You're No Rock and Roll Fun

Two things I've learned in the last week or so:

'Atlantis to Interzone' by Klaxons is completely brilliant. Much as I hate to admit it, but having only previously experienced the song on frosty February mornings trying not avoid getting out of bed and having either Phil Jupitus or Sean Keavney (neither both of whom I resent even entering my earspace and thus have no intention of letting them have any persuasive effect on my musical taste) tell me they're so hip they could make Ironside walk again, the general barminess of Atlantis to Interzone was utterly lost on me. It's like having a Murikami book read to you by your parents. A waste of time and effort, and with a bonus headache. However, four consecutive nights of drinks mixed so badly you could paint fields of roses with my vomit, and an involuntary hand actions which prior to last Wednesday, I'd never raised above pint-height apart from volunteering to leave whatever piss-soaked hellhole I'd ended up in. So a new life, a new ability to point out directions to fellow dancers to the nearest loser whilst DJs pump up the nonsense, and Bobs Your Uncle, I'm ressurected as a modern man who likes the Klaxons and makes eyes at people sixteen thousand times my own quality. I'm not entirely sure if this is a good thing. Actually it's not. Plus, as my research which led to downloading one song and declaring the search over, The Routron 5000 remix of 'Adieu' by Enter Shikari is how a preposutrous combination of bad rock music and bad trance music can unite to make the ultimate 2-wrongs-making-a-right slab of total genius.

There are people out there who still think that I know everything about music and are too scared to talk to me for this precise reason. There aren't enough gigabites in the entire universe of cyberspace for me to go into great depth about how utterly wrong a misrepresentation this is, but for the record, the last sentence of the above paragraph proves my point. Tim Westwood knows a fuck of a lot more than 99% of the population about music, but that doesn't mean you should be scared of him - he wears ridiculous striped jumpers on 'Pimp My Ride' for one thing. For another, despite these qualities, he's a total bell end.

Romantic Rights

Romance isn’t the same as it used to be. Romance used to be ticking boxes on a ridiculous list of stereotypes; flowers, girl, jukebox, picking people up in your car, going for milkshakes, all very Pleasantville, or if the whole event were hilarious rather than a grey and white tragedy, all very Happy Days. In 2007, this doesn’t happen. If you dateline the romantic gestures back even further before televised romanticism, you’ve got your poetry, serenading, and the raping and pillaging of petty villages to impress fair maidens. Obviously, this is all baloney right here right now; the audacity of writing poetry is reserved now exclusively for people so fucked up out of their skulls on narcotics and egotism that they can legitimately get away with it, or people aged 15 who post it on their chat room profiles and exists largely around the theme of World of Warcraft and/or how they’re too preoccupied with blood and witches to play World of Warcraft to the best of their abilities. Anyone else who offers poetry as a reason to like them is almost a dead cert to get laughed into the nearest singles bar with a post-it note saying “avoid”. Which is a shame. It takes a certain someone to write a poem, and these people deserve girlfriends, not least to centre their odes of undying love to one person in particular, and putting several others out of danger.
There isn’t even a nature of ‘courting’ anymore. Admittedly, not even I would say I was ‘courting’ anyone, but the connotations of such an innocent dating activity are so far out of most people’s window that it’s a distant blot on the cityscape. At best, people nowadays are “seeing” somebody, which bares no relevance to opening their eyes and enjoying what they have before them; quite clearly ‘seeing’ somebody is a mutant hybrid emotion derived by a series of almost-emotions experienced after giving somebody a good ‘seeing’ to on more than one occasion. Later, it becomes “this girl I’m with”, and then you can coast into fifth gear with “my boyfriend/girlfriend” which is pretty much good enough to last until you both drive off the nearest overpass. I refer to it as ‘coasting’ because, call my cynical, it’s all downhill from there. Of course, you can make the alarmingly unnecessary task of stepping up to ‘fiancee’, but speaking from the ludicrous position of being somebody’s ‘fiancee’, you regularly forget you’re in that position, thus rendering the act entirely pointless. Which isn’t to say at all that I didn’t enjoy and experience entirely the full emotional range that comes with getting engaged, but it never went further than still saying ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’. It was, and I say this with a cross between a cracked smile and a watery grimace, only after the disintegration of the relationship that the word ‘fiancee’ even got bandied around. As any fool who has craved sympathy from every passer by knows, it’s easier and more fulfilling to elicit sympathy if you’ve been ditched by your finacee than if your girlfriends left you.
I think I’m romantic, but then actually, I’m not really. Rarely do I anything about it. Romantic feelings, for me, often happen entirely on my own when I’m in the garden and I think “oooh, look at the way the outside light of next-door-but-one’s house makes the shadows of that bush which is probably a weed reflect against their whitewashed wall” and then before the thought has had any remote danger of inspiring me to do anything except dribble, I’ve finished my cigarette and returned to the harsh unromantic existence of drinking Strongbow and watching Lil’ Chris cuts a karaoke managers hair for Children in Need. I find boring things romantic; things like imaginary small towns in America with picket fences and innocence, places where ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ means a cute girl with an alcoholic father, rather than a haven of pure evil where being beaten to a bloody pulp is a good result of a wrong turn, and then getting run over by a train. In this town, there is nothing to do but chew grass, watch the sun rise, and be in a country band that people say are “going places” because you’ve loaded your hear in a van and played the next town over that three houses bigger than your own, and your next door neighbour jokes that you’re playing “all the big places now” and that girl from the wrong side of the tracks says “think of me when you’re away” even though you’re only playing 15 minutes away but she’s got so wasted on the whiskey her dad hides in the toilet cistern that she can’t even breathe though her nose without slurring. There’s a dog barking fifteen blocks away, but there’s no noise during the day apart from fifteen people all mowing their lawns on dive-thru mowers, that they’ve had to dig out their ‘mowing’ hat from the cupboard under the stairs. It’s a perfectly imperfect place, but simultaneously, imperfectly perfect. The sort of two-horse town where people in Raymond Carver stories elope to uniformly fuck up their lives. The wind blows through a bird scarer planted in the centre of a corn field when I’m out walking. Then my imagination runs out of juice, and I open my eyes and I’m waiting for a bus on a Saturday night outside a nightclub where 21st century romance is happening right infront of me. And through the kaleidoscope of vomit and brylcreem, there’s a flicker of passion. Then I remember it isn’t mine, and I crawl into the bus. There are songs about falling in love on the last bus home, but let’s be honest, they make the plot of Dragonforce songs look like they’re scripted by Ken Loach. I don’t believe romance is a dead art, it’s just in a zombie-like state, and plodding down a high street near you today.
When you’re 16, everything and everyone exits in a pigeonholing wet dream of swots, trendies, townies and yourself and the person you sit next to in English. This is obviously hilarious looking back, because it’s precisely this kind act of assumption that results in people aged 24 who don’t have any life skills because they hate townies, and don’t have any intelligence because they hate swots, and have no social skills or ability to impress anybody because they spent their formative years criticising people for not having heard of Idlewild, instead of going to parties and making their friends drink piss. Over time, these boundaries have blurred to the point of Magic Eye paintings (thanks, in no small part, to Zara and Brian from Hollyoaks) and the people who lived through quadratic glasses for five years are left gog-eyed with their utter lack of understanding. “Uhh, but she likes Sufjan Stevens and the Dresden Dolls, so she must be a rational human being like me, but oh wait, she’s dancing with that guy with the Le Tigre t shirt and he’s buying her a drink, and now they’re going home in a cab together, and he didn’t even have to buy any condoms in the toilet because they both already had them because that’s what they do. Or ‘wait, that girl has impeccably fashionable clothes and a coat with a fur lined hood, so why is she at this Decemberists concert?” It’s because in your mid twenties, pigeonholing doesn’t exist anymore. Or at least, there are so many holes to slot people that fuck-headed people like myself comprehend anything apart from who’s a wanker. Which, the last time I checked, is just about everyone, especially myself. Now that’s romantic.

Gone

There’s an infinite amount of competition, but probably the worst thing about hating every last fibre of your own being, is that nothing in life is ever anyone else’s fault. This is the perfect relationship of course, for anyone who knows you, because it basically gives them a 007/Monolopoly card ‘privilege’ to do whatever they want in relation to your life and not have to worry, because when it comes to the crunch situation, they don’t have to worry too much because I’ll blame myself every single time, and the thought that someone else is at fault won’t cross my mind. It is a solid gold, nugget-in-an-Enid Blyton adventure fact above all facts, an indelible truth, a certifiable statement of certainty, that you, yourself is in some way wholly to blame for the circumstances. For example, for every break up or kick-into-touch I’ve been on the receiving end of, and there have been enough now to count on both my hands, it has in some way been laid on the shoulders or myself. Brilliant! This has mistakenly led me to believe that in every relationship that grinds to a staggering halt like a runaway train diving over a cliff into the ocean, it’s not the fault of the protagonist of the break-up (which it obviously is!) but the fault of the the person who loss the toss and elected to receive. This is of course, because of the break-up speech. The break-up speech is a hilarious facet of the modern world. In ancient times, or at least, BBC adaptations of ancient times, the speech takes the form of a well crafted quill-and-ink paen to lost love “oh my darling sweetheart, you’ll always have a place in my soul, but I fear I must leave. The war is calling, my sweet, and should I not return, be sure that the whisper of your heart will always be on the wind blowing through the trenches, and I will find you, my love” and so forth. These days it’s like “Oh I really want to be your friend to ease my guilt, but seriously, I just really need to be on my own for a while” or “it’s just not working”. Both of these obviously translate into plain speaking English as “I need to be on my own because I really fancy someone else, and obviously I can’t go and persue them with you still being my boyfriend and all” or “it’s not working because I’ve been knobbing someone else and it’s caused a malfunction in my ability to two-time people, and I’m really a one-man girl”. Basically, nobody in the 21st century, it seems, breaks up with someone for legitimate reasons. I’m holding out for my next failed relationship, just because I’m now prepossessed with a function to fill in the words for them person in question. Like when you’re typing in your email address on a computer with all your settings saved, and it fills in the rest of the words for you. The next one had better be well crafted and romantic, otherwise I won’t be amused. I won’t be amused anyway, but at least I’ll admire your creativity.

Ordinary People

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not all roses being chronically depressed all the time. For one thing, it makes you sick of the sight of the animated paperclip that appears on ‘Word’ the first time you use it in ages. The animated paperclip has done no wrong, but I can’t be doing hanging around with vibrant animated metal shapes with googally eyes, when I’ve got some hard graft text to be laying down. It’s not his fault, and I’ll probably be needing his help later, but if I spend another twenty seconds looking at his chirpy ‘head’ then I’ll end up drawing parallels between him, and chirpy people I know in real life, and fantasise about how much I’d like to delete them within the first twenty seconds of talking to them, which is potentially a bad thing. But a pixellised stationary manifestation of The Friday Night Project with Justin Lee Collins and Alan Carr is. For the same reason, I hated the Highland-talking suited man who used to appear in the bottom left hand corner of the screen on Theme Park. It was only when my bouncy castle had steam coming out of it like the socks in the Calamity James Beano cartoon, and all my shark men and chicken men were forming picket lines outside the gates that it dawned on me that without the wisecracking fucker voiced by either Ewan McGregor or Alan Cumming on an off day talking about bushes and toilets and broken bouncy castles, you couldn’t actually play the game. I think he only appears in the PC version though, on the Amiga all you had was a slappable impersonation of Willy Wonka. The Amiga version was brilliant. Your landscapes almost entirely consisted of grey concrete, with the only special feature to these being one-way arrows which served absolutely no purpose whatsoever, apart from wasting hours creating huge diversions for the chicken men and paying customers to get lost in. I hated thinking too much about Theme Park as well, because once you’ve followed a customer and realised they’ve been in the park for seventeen days, you stop thinking of them as individuals, and then you find yourself wanting to fall off the rollercoaster anyway. That was the other neat trick in the Amiga version – if you built the rollercoaster, and had a loop or a corkscrew without having a drop first, then the carts would only go half around the loop, and then career backward down the lift hill and back in the station, and everyone would be really hacked off afterwards and not buy a balloon. You still got the steak restaurant that looked like the roof of The Flintstone’s car.

So yes, contrary to popular belief, it’s not all roses being chronically depressed. I’ve spent the last day and a half hanging around in my parent’s house in Winchester. What I like about Winchester, is that every time I come back, I know less and less about the place, and know less and less people who actually live here anymore. People from Winchester are too ambitious, which explains why almost everybody I know has upped sticks and moved out, despite knowing full well that as far as prosperity goes, it’s the best place to live in England. I don’t think I’m too ambitious. In fact, I wouldn’t argue the case at all that I have any major ambitions whatsoever. Ambitions tend to be mostly for people who know they’re not going to fail them, and only their own capabilities are going to stop them anyway. It’s like “my ambition is to pass my driving test and then drive across America”, isn’t an ambition that many people can’t do. If I had ambitions, then they’d be to work somewhere I like, live somewhere I like, and to be with someone that I love. But I don’t call them ambitions, because ambitions have a failure rate, and I’m quite sure at some point I’ve had all three simultaneously and lost them, so I’ll call them ‘desires’ because you can lose a desire at any point and pretend it’s just ‘how it is’. I moved out of Winchester for the benefit of one of these desires. If I add that I moved to Cardiff into literally a crack house full of wasters and mentalists, with no job, you can point your finger at which part of the Holy Trinity of desire I fucked up on. But to go back to my original point, every time I come back to Winchester, I have less and less to offer Winchester, and it has less and less to offer back. It’s still the most beautiful place to me in the world; for example, I didn’t get ID-ed in Threshers, even though I had my hood up, and said ‘Thank God you didn’t ask me for ID, because I left it in the house’. AND then talked about how I needed to buy mints because my parents didn’t know I smoked. How many people aged 24 have to do that? I don’t even have to do that! Why did I even say it. But that happened, and there was a farmers market even though it was pissing down rain, and WHSmith still looked appalling, and I saw someone licking the handle of their umbrella as they walked down Parchment Street, and everything was all right. The chances of seeing somebody I recognise on the streets of Winchester is so minimal now that I don’t mind going out and spending hours sitting around, even in the rain. The only thing to worry about, is the internal combustion caused by ever corner providing me with memories of happy innocent times, when drinking alcohol was a rare treat only provided if Tom Cootes half-brother, or Rik Neilson were in the Cathedral Grounds, or that psychopathic bed-hopping sex-obsessed fuckfaces only existed in circles other than mine. I think if both of these illusions that alcoholism and nymphomania were fictional past times hadn’t been completely ruined by talking to more than three people end of my second week at university, everything would have been alright. When I was 16, I used to think that someone I’d spoken to twice, and had asked to go and see Mogwai with me, but she changed her mind to go to the cinema with someone else was the worst fate ever bestowed on humanity. That’s not to say that anything else that I’ve put myself through on a world-wide scale offers any more of a blip, but with an 8-year hindsight, these things really are small town nothings. It’s only when you’ve tasted the world and realised it tastes like Gulliver’s turd that you pray for a few small town nothings to neutralise the acid in your heart. It’s only when you’re a teenager living through a series of small town nothings that you can read The Bell Jar or Prozac Nation and have it speak to you, and then you have to write someone a letter in the back of Sociology class telling them how much The Bell Jar spoke to you even though it didn’t. If you did THAT past the age of 20, it’s like, a 65 year old buying a Mary Kate and Ashley DVD for themselves. (“aww bless him, he’s got the mind of a teenager!”). The only people who took Sociology at my college anyway, were a) people who thought themselves as socially competent figureheads of their respective social circles and thus, figured they knew enough about ‘society’ to ace their A level, and b) shrinking violets who wanted to know in textbook terms exactly why they hated everybody, and also to learn how society ticks so they can underline quotes in Michael Haralambos’ ‘Themes and Perspectives’ and quote them at the bottom of glitter-penned notebooks of Manic Street Preacher lyrics and reading lists. Obviously, I was the latter.

So anyway, Winchester right now is almost certain void of any kind of danger. Danger for me is running into somebody from my past that might ask ‘so what have you been up to since I last met you, and what are you doing now?’ It’s a delicious combination of being a place you know like the back of your hand, and also being a place that you know you aren’t going to meet anyone unpleasant. It’s like a 100,000 populated city-sized version of my bedroom, only with more weeping willows and less need for Febreze. Every time I come here, my life situation is either complete and utter crap and I need to come home to rejuvenate and/or go quietly mad away from the bright lights / big city of Cardiff, or I feel sufficiently at calm with the proceedings, and can afford to take two days out in the confidence everything will be just as cool when I get back. The last time was in August, and that was strictly the latter, this time the former, to a tee. The time before that, a funeral. The time before that; a long few days off work watching bands in successive weeks, with my girlfriend. I’m hoping the next time, which will probably be Christmas, that everything is so dramatically improved that this trip home could be considered a ‘small town nothing’ but we’ll wait and see. So far this ‘rejuvenation’ has done little more than to rattle me even further.

Today I had two relatively long phone calls with people, which I instigated. Given my general lack of motivation of even starting conversations, let alone of the phone when the potential for wasting people’s time is wholeheartedly inherent, this was an achievement. Admittedly, I didn’t end up making either call, but both proved to me at least, that I’m not fully ready to shut everything out just yet, and for that I thank the people involved. One of the reasons it’s not all roses about being chronically depressed is the permanent feeling that you’re wasting people’s time, and no matter how much “you can talk to me anytime” or “you’re not a burden” you hear, I still tend to feel like the same headless chicken I felt all those years ago as a 17 year old, clucking thoughtlessly towards each person after person, mistakenly thinking that outpouring a deluge of psychosensational nonsense would be just what our doctors ordered. All wrong, of course. It’s also trying to distinguish yourself as someone who is in genuine need of talking to someone, rather than absorbing compliments as a sensation of utter self obsession and reiterance of their own self worth. Which is sadly what it looks like, but incredibly, not what it is. It’s the people who open themselves up as a place to let out your woes and your world, that make a difference. And I thank them.

She's The Star / I Take This Time

I've only got 17% battery left and I haven't the energy to get up and go into the next room and plug the laptop back in. I'll just type and type and type until it gives up. And then realise I've ended it mid-sentence and then have to go and plug it in and finish anyway. On friday I finally deleted my Myspace account so I no longer have to look at an infinite number of pages of peoples egotistical "check out my life and how, like amazing it is John, just like yours isn't!" dross. I looked at the page for my first ever girlfriend the other day. We went out for a week. I went to sleep that night happy that I'm at least several percent responsible for the tattooed, vile, insipid waste of space she has ultimately become. I also deleted my facebook account because I am a child, although I then realised that I can't now keep in contact with al the people that I actually DO want to remain friends with, plus there's a faint possibility that one day I can take cheap pleasure from anyone that I went to school with who might one day be droolingly bored enough to try and adding me, doing so, so that I can turn them down and pretend for the half-second it takes to click the mouse that I might actually be better than them.

Radio Nowhere

This afternoon I watched a particularly bad episode of the X Files and listened to the radio simultaneously. Not wanting to state this simple and frankly expected tedious Sunday afternoon activity as any kind of triumph of mankind, but I did come over a big H.G. Wells queer because what I was doing was such a late nineties past time, that I felt like I’d momentarily opened a time wormhole back into the end of the last decade. If you ignore the fact I was watching X-Files online on a laptop, I was listening to Stephen Merchant on a digital radio, and eating a flavour of Pot Noodle that only people watching the 1996 Olympics could dream about in apocalyptic nights of terror, then part of it was true.

The X files episode was ‘Roland’ a twins-channelling-energy-post-mortem shocker in which a scientist who’d popped his clogs early into some massively boring laboratory experiment into the speed of sound could ‘live on’ (despite being cryogenically frozen in a vat of gases) through the acts of his ‘special’ twin brother, Roland. By special, I mean thick as a plank at a Kasabian concert; when the twins had their IQs divvied out at birth, captain dead arse clearly got the lion and tigers share, whilst poor Roland ended up with the cranial capacity of a yodelling potato. This didn’t of course stop the spooky shit going down X-style, so Roland was sent on a mercy mission to exonerate every other scientist involved in these massively boring laboratory experiments by getting half of them to have a closer look at a wind tunnel with their faces, and the other bundling head first into some liquid nitrogen and then standing on his ear. So far so good. The innumerable number of flaws in this episode are made apparent by the acts of Mulder and Scully, who do a stupendous number of “calming down” interviews with Roland all of which made my mind shut down the second they started. Then of course, you have the major downer that the one character you want to speak out is held back by the fact that Scully flushing her toilet makes a closer approximation to the English language than poor Roland does. The climax of the episode comes when the parody of a stereotype of a parody of an English tea-and-crumpets professor (the action-packed one because he doesn’t wear glasses, of course) tries to shoot Roland only he doesn’t. The sheer fact that this episode is rehash of episode shown literally only weeks earlier goes to prove what a mish-mash of underwhelming bits this episode was. And to think, when the good doctor with the beard got sent to meet his maker on a prop from a Backstreet Boys video during the teaser, I sincerely had my hopes up.

No such problems over on the radio though, as I dedicated more than ten minutes of my life to it for the first time in what felt like months. There were several good things that came from it, which might have otherwise gone a miss. Radio Nowhere by Bruce Springsteen, is precisely the sort of comeback single you want from The Boss. Now, I enjoyed Devils and Dust as the pretty-good-but-still-one-of-his-worst stop-gaps that it was, and enjoyed the Seeger Sessions for what it technically was; a big piss-up round Bruce’s that probably went too far but was a bit of a laugh none the less, but the meat is obviously in a new E Street band collaboration, which Radio Nowhere clearly has slapped all over it’s chops like a child stinking of candy floss. Unashamedly macho, but sadly closer to The Rising than any of the nitty, gritty seventies top-of-his-game Boss, but for something I was admittedly reserved about, consider it job done, now let’s hope the rest of ‘Magic’ works just as well. There were also good tracks by Georgie James, who I thought was going to be a boring woman signed to Saddle Creek who would ultimately have as little impact on my life as the two faceless voids that used to be in Azure Ray would, but I pleasantly found them out to be a duo featuring the drummer from Q and not U. Who I don’t have an opinion on. Who else features? Oh, After Steven Merchant finished, Stuart Maconie took over, and what’s brilliant about his show on Radio 6 is that he does generally play the most pleasant inappropriate music for Sunday afternoon possible. For example, his ‘tribute’ to Tony Wilson, (who I’d readily admit I have no fucking time for whatsoever because of his red handed responsibilities in ‘Step On’ by the Happy Mondays still being on general rotation in shitty indie clubs across Britain) was to play the full 17 minute version of Elegia by New Order, which consists of about four notes, no vocals, predated Spacemen 3 by about four years and would still sleep with your sister. Awe-some. There was also something by Flowers of Hell, which is essentially the cooing lady vocals from ‘Girls’ by Death in Vegas overlayed onto a lost Belle and Sebastian album closer, and if as a band they’re not regulars in the same greasy spoons and lending libraries north of the border as Camera Obscura, Ballboy and B+S then I’ll eat my kilt, sporran and pathetic little tartan bobble hat.

Adventure

Things I’ve learned upon visiting Alton Towers for the first time in 2 years.

At any given time, at any given opportunity and doing any given activity to fill their days, the majority of the people present are going to be terrible, awful examples of life. For instance, you could stand in a queue for any ride at a theme park, sit on your riding partners shoulders and survey the surrounding 360 degrees. You could fit the number of good specimens of the human race on the underside of your shoe. Thick-lipped black holes of personality sucked inwardly like every waking second is like having a sour lemon dripped slowly into an ulcer. Impatient sloths who think because they’ve managed to squeeze out of their womb, a pair of tracksuited Russian dolls out of their family tree, this entitles them to special privileges not bestowed upon anyone queuing who did manage to keep their legs shut during their brief dalliance with adolescence. Also, loathe as I do to stereotype, but most people there were washboard-rattling buck-toothed northerners who have to push-start their car

Queue-jumping DOES happen. Any when it does, it’s all very exciting. When I say exciting, I mean of course ‘mildly diverting. Three stereotypes-on-legs of the great yoof of Britain hopped over a fence in the line-up for The Corkscrew. The Corkscrew, for anyone who’s ever been to Alton Towers (or anyone who ended up in a neck brace after a car accident who can safely admit they’ve had the same experience) is one ride that most of the day has no queue. When you’ve got at least 10 other rides and even a McDonalds which offer less painful and dangerous thrills than the Corkscrew, you tend to avoid it. The criminal fraternity, upon committing their terrible act of degradation, were on the receiving end of a PA announcement saying “Alton Towers does not look kindly on queue jumping” in a semi-ridiculous “name and shame” system crossed with the demeanour of a boating lake. The fact the announcer sounded like the entire male cast of Coronation street having their balls slammed in a door didn’t aid the situation. So what happens? They tried to hot-foot it on The Corkscrew, they were subsequently denied, and so they decided to throw twigs at the man

Even as you grow older, the act of sitting in the back seat of a car and starring across fields to unidentifiable cities, whilst power ballads spill from the stereo never gets any less romantic or melancholic.

The McDonalds 99p saver menu is brilliant and dare I say it, phenomenally brilliant. Admittedly it ticks all the “ugh McDonalds” categories by basically being gift-wrapped turd burgers. BUT, the chicken wraps have chicken in them, and are a wrap, and Lord praise be to Ronald and the Hamburglar, there’s no fucking tomatoes in the wrap. Stick that in your “fajita” and smoke it, Boots the Chemist. Also, the “Big McBarbecue” or whatever idiotic pseudonym they’ve given it, but it’s basically a big round burger with onion and shit in it. But it tastes EXACTLY like the sort of burger after you’ve tried to cook it on the barbecue, and slapped a few Kraft slices on it, and poured the leftovers from the fridge into two buns and then found out it’s too big to eat properly. If you’re left with a healthy dust-pile of lettuce, ketchup and meaty crumbs in the bottom of the box at the end, you know you’ve eaten good, and eaten well. I won’t discuss the clientele of the joint, as the majority of them can be slotted into the above pigeonholes. Here’s another facet of Alton Towers customers though, the amateur couple who have been together for two years and have utterly run out of the things to do or say to each other, so they go to Alton Towers even though neither of them like the idea, but feel like they should because it’s somewhere to go, and if they might have kids later in life, then they might you know want to take them out somewhere. These are the sort of 100% motherfuckers who ask the gob-driven berks behind the till in McDonalds what they vegetarian specials are, and “excuse me, what’s in the salad?” Not nice.

Air is a good ride, but only if you go on it before Nemesis, and only if you approach the ride with low expectations. It has a million and one limitations – the first being that the first ten seconds involve you looking directly at piss-piddled puddles, rat poo and crisp packets with the offending items dangerously close to your face. The second being that you ‘swoop’ out over the car park and get a eagle-eye view of oceans of grey and miserable vehicles staring at you, as opposed to say, The Great Pyramids of Giza or Lake Michigan, which would be preferable.

Don’t drive. The first two times I’ve been have been weekday coach packages entirely catered for people inadequate at arranging anything (IE myself) and these have worked out spot-on because you get dropped off right outside the main entrance, and you don’t have to get the fucking monorail with all the families, skinheads and Mancunians, and then queue with the same losers to buy a ticket. It’s one thing to queue to be hurled three thousand mile and hour into space strapped into a seat, but it’s another thing entirely when you’re queuing with dead beats in order to fork out more money, and then to find out they haven’t got any of the good tickets left. It saves a lot of time and patience not to drive. Plus, the inevitable shambles that comes at the end of the night when you have to pay your £4 for the privilege of having to get their stinking monorail in the morning, they’ve run out of the token, and it becomes a mad panic, simply for the act of buying an overpriced piece of paper. And then you get in the wrong queue leaving the car park, and then you drive in a ditch and die.

This is once again referring to my low opinion of my fellow adventurers at Alton Towers, but it bears repeating how bleatingly fuck-faced these buffoons really are. The interesting point, and this is interesting in relation to the aforementioned Corkscrew incident, which is that for all the chunder-headed intellectual vacuum’s meandering outside the hot dog stand and parping away on the arcade machines outside Oblivion, every single one has had to find upwards of £30 for the select opportunity to be there. Alton Towers isn’t a community funfair, with candy floss, ring toss, and that girl you hate from your science class knobbing the white-vested pitbull giving her ‘extra spins’ on the waltzer. It’s an expensive places to ‘hang’, dribble your milkshake and throw twigs at the photo seller.

People who like Alton Towers and roller coasters are idiots. This is the best link to go and look at for cheap thrills and a better feeling about your own daily activities. http://forums.towersalmanac.com/lofiversion/index.php?f3.html. Personal favourite on here (and trust me, it’s well worth trawling through the high-density of insipid nerd-speak to get to these) include a bitter character called “Roller Coaster Tycoon” who does next-to-nothing except moan about how Alton Towers is complete crap and nothing could ever be as good as when he went to Islands of Adventure. This point is reiterated in almost every single post he makes “ride X at Alton Towers is isn’t a patch on ride Y at Islands of Adventure! Ps I’m a twat” etc etc etc. Other highlights are instances where people on the forum have “amazing” ideas on what changes Alton Towers should make to their existing rides, and what changes they should make. These ideas are generally preposterous and unrealistic, and include things like “they should add two loops to the runaway mine train” and “where the black hole was, they should build a smaller version of Oblivion” and “they should get rid of ride X/Y/Z and replace it with (insert name of unspeakably expensive concept-ride / nonsensical creation thought up by forum poster which doesn’t and couldn’t exist in a physical context, EVER. Even better than this, is people submitting their ‘visions’ of new things and features, which they’ve drawn on paint. Fantastic.

I Would Have Liked Me a Lot Last Night

Last night I dreamed that Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffatt from the now-defunct Inner Hebredian Edgar Allen Poe miserable sod collective Arab Strap, were both shoplifters. I dreamed they were trying to steal King of the Hill box sets from my shop. I dreamed I chased them out of the shop and pointing them out to a policeman who was standing outside the shop by a lamp post. I said "Look, these two people who were in Arab Strap are trying to steal King of the Hill box sets from my shop" and the policemen said he knew who they were but they were looking too mean so he couldn't stop them. Malcolm Middleton turned round and said I was "goon ta regret that wan" and then I closed my shop and went home to bed. I dreamed that Arab Strap came along and torched my back garden and conservatory and Aidan was saying that stealing King of the Hill box sets was the only way they could make a living now because Ten Years of Tears didn't do so well although Malcolm didn't comment on his moderately successful third solo album because I think he just enjoyed setting fire to my house.

Men's Needs

So basically, I spent £70 pounds on some ridiculous appliance for the lower half of my mouth. For those less fortunate in the audience and haven’t heard my endless reiteration of the pain and suffering involved in this disease only suffered by myself and maybe select others (unknown to me at present) here we go: To summarise, “Fuckjaw” to give the disease it’s sub-medical title, is one of the single most frustrating problems to face a persons face in their lifetime. It stems, I believe, from the rare genetic defect both myself and my sister suffered during our early teens where we were possibly cross-bred with sharks, and ended up with extra rows of teeth growing in our mouths. My mouth, age 16, looked like an upturned tin of beans with a broken stick of rock floating in it. Now, it’s just fuckjaw. The crux of this pseudo-syndrome is that somewhere along the line, my jaw has become realigned or broken, or clicked, or I’ve got scurvy, and on a daily basis my chin has slowly forged a closer bond with my shoelaces than ever before. It feels like my jaw is permanently dropping, only without the sudden female nudity or low low prices that warrant the reaction. So I spent 70 bucks on three trips to James Hull and co. and now I have a ridiculous appliance to wear over my lower teeth, and I get to feel like I’m ninety and wearing dentures for two weeks. Potentially a dignity destroyer; I don’t think anyone is going to see me after lights out for the next fortnight anyway.

Yesterday I watched one of my best friends and my ex girlfriend move out of my house. I don’t condone either of these activities to anyone with a sensitive heart.

I believe I’m meant use this space to write about things like their mood and what food they’re eating and what song they’re listening to. This makes sense. I’m not actually experiencing either at the moment, but if I were, then it probably wouldn’t be the new Chicken Satay pot noodle. Momentarily, I thought this gastronomical black hole of foulness was just because I hadn’t added the sachet of allegedly spicy chilli sauce. Wrong! The whole shebang with chicken satay, which I hadn’t realised before (having my only previous exposure to the dish being the £1 yellow-stickered kebab version 2.0 from Iceland) was that it’s infused with peanuts to give it a distinct aroma. The key difference with Pot Noodle satay, is that it tastes like a combination of something found down the back of an armchair, something found in the ashtray in a car door, and something found behind the wisdom teeth of a regular in the City Road gentleman’s club. Something else to sink your teeth into. The “spicy chilli” if that’s what it even was, served no purpose other than, as with all the red sauces, to make you feel like you were sucking globdules of fat from someone elses gaping wounds. I’ll try the lamb hotpot tomorrow. I've had that Cribs song it's Ok to like because it has feminist undertones running around my head today like a sickly hamster, so I’ll be feeling this one in the morning.