Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage

Tonight, on the occasion that David Beckham won his 101st cap for England, we witnessed, a national, a far more significant spectacle. Kelly Rowland, the 'middle' one from Destiny's Child, performed what has to be the wost rendition of the Star Spangled Banner in US history. Luckily, it wasn't on American soil, otherwise she'd be in big trouble, it was as bad as if she'd squatted down and squeezed out a Destiny's Child shaped little turn squarely on the corner of the stars. It was, and I hesitate to make this comparison lightly, even worse than the Red House Painters version, and that's really really bad. The occasion appears to be a friendly between England and the USA. England had some quartet of faceless cod-classical crumpets cooing out God Save the Queen like they were blowing on a hot spoon of peas, but this was just an aperetif for the main source of hilarity. I haven't watched a full game from football, from kick off to fuck off, in a long time. Like, six months or something. I think I've watched more games of rugby in their entirety since then, and I don't even understand the rules of that. I almost watched the entire champions league final, in which Chelsea came a cropper and their manager got sacked because John Terry fell over when taking a penalty. God I'd hate to be part of the Chelsea board, it's uttery ridiculous, It's not really comparable, but Avram Grant getting the heave-ho for not winning the Champions League, is a bit like me being fired because I managed to sell every single book in the entire of Borders, except for a really expensive leather bound bible. Unlucky.

Disappointing, John Motson has just announced that Brian McBride isn't playing. I say disappointing, I couldn't tell you for a second whether I respect Brian McBride as a player, I don't care either way, but I like him because he used to play for Fulham, and shares his name with one of the members of Stars of the Lid, and as a 'tribute', they named one of their songs Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage. I love Stars of the Lid song titles, because you can tell the members of the band are fed up of thinking of titles for lengthy instrumentals with one note, and so just run riot with the English language. So, without Brian McBride, I don't recognise any of the American players, and barely any of them have American names, they all have barmy transcontinental names. Apart from Demarcus Beasely, who use has a stupid name, and Boccanegra has an identical name to a Verdi Opera. The rest of them have surnames that sounds like Aztec temples. Anyway, sixteen minutes in and it's a boring enough game for me to start typing on my laptop. As to the whereabouts of any of my housemates, I've got no fucking idea, I haven't seen any of them all day, although I did spend the 'arrival time' in my bedroom typing out an epic 1500 word review of the new Hold Steady album, which was hilariously self inludgent and about a third of it basically described two incidents in my life when I was listening to The Hold Steady and going mad, and the other I spent trying to cut down the hyperbole because I find it almost impossible to convey convincingly that I really really like something without sounding stupid. In concluson though, I called it fucking brilliant, with brilliant in italics. Lazy, but I got fed up with the whole thing after 1500 words. You can find the review, and a select amount of some of the other shit I type about music, here: http://www.playlouder.com/.

When I say 'arrival time' I do of course mean 'arrival window' which is the period of the day between 5 and 7 in which my housemates usually return from work and then the plan for the evening is revealed or settled on. This usually doesn't involve me, because I keep the most archaic time in the house because I work at stupid times and on weekends, but when it's my day off, like today, and I've wasted it, like today, then I quite like at least some company, given the only voice I've heard all day apart from my own huffing expletives at the fact my' windows virtual memory is too low'. But I guess it wasn't to be, and so I'll watch the football, drink vodka and cranberry juice, and pretend I don't have to be at work in 10 hours time, or that I'm lonely enough to consider striking up a conversation with the staff in Family Fish Bar, or buying phone credit.

Okay, Let's Talk About Magic

I have pretty much not left my bedroom for two days. After the high jinks of Eurovision, the majority of which I watched on my own in the house, exception a ten minute period in which Thomas and his two French friends who both looked like Javier Bardem in a hall of mirrors gawped and tried to suggest the Swedish singer was attractive which she obviously wasn't, I went out. I went out and danced to incredibly mediocre indie rock tunes like This Charming Man, and La Tristesse Durera, got patronised for a bit by a number of people and then came home. Since then, I have left my bedroom on two occasions: 1) to play Tony Hawks Underground in the living room whilst listening to the new Ladytron and Cajun Dance party albums, which if I get round to it, will receive mediocre reviews, although at the moment they're fighting over which one could make less of an impression on me than the other. Anyway, I learnt how to do 'manual' tricks on Tony Hawks. Every time I find out something new that you can do, I end up whittle away at least a few more hours into nothing. Last week, it was discovering that holding on the back of cars makes you jump higher, now it's the fact you can do handstands and things. I'm guessing most people are going to be dramatically unimpressed with this, because it tells you all of this in the manual, but when you're playing a £1.50 third hand copy bought from CEX with hau hau noodle stains on the outer rim of the disc, things like manuals are a joy, and looking up basic information on the internet for this is impossible. Not least because there are approximate nine million near-identical Tony Hawks games that I don't care about because I don't own them. The other occasion, 2) was to do some washing up in the kitchen, and to listen to Paul Merton singing Stand By Me to to the tune of The William Tell Overture on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue on a cassette.

Last night I couldn't sleep, and it was for probably the most ridiculous reason ever. I kept having visions of David Copperfield. This is unforgivably stupid, but I can only only explain it by the fact I was too bored last night to even bother going to sleep, and so I spent hour upon hour sat in front of my computer watching endless clips on youtube of hammy eighties magicians doing illusions. My particular favourite was the utterly ridiculous clip of David Copperfield 'levitating' over the Grand Canyon. The footage of this is so grainy it looks like it could even have pre-dated the invention of the video camera, but it's hilarious. It looks like it was directed by the same person responsible for the Total Eclipse of the Heart video, and for some reason, haunted me in my sleep and caused me to wake up in a cold sweat and resort to watching Seinfeld. I'm really surprised if anyone was fooled by this trick though, it's poor.

Minor gripes. Dishes or plates which have really bad floral designs which look like dirt. There's one particular dish in our house, which is too small to be a real dish, but too big to be, say, a sauce pot or an inkwell, but it's white, and has a pattern around the edge which looks exactly like burnt-on food. Uncanny. It's only today, when I looked closely, that each seemingly random stain, was exactly the same shape. I put the dish right at the back of the cupboard where hopefully I won't see it again. I'm expecting that if you look really, really closely, the flowers have probably faded loads from me trying to wash them off.

I hate 'next customer please' signs in the supermarket. I was going to spend my day today taking photographs for my ongoing collection where I go to places that aren't very interesting, take photographs of how uninteresting they are, and then go home, but it's been raining. Every time I've gone over to the window to look out, usually in between episodes of Season 4 of Seinfeld, or if the three minute clip of Franz Harary making a helicopter 'appear from nowhere' and taking about twenty minutes to do so, there's been nothing but a constant splashing in the puddles in the centre of the street. It's most certainly rain that's not worth going walking in, not least because my current cords du jour are this pair I don't even know where they came from, or whether they're green or grey. You know you're in trouble when you're wearing clothes you're unsure of the colour of, or their origin. But still, if I was Criss Angel, I'd just walk up a wall with my umbrella and nothing would ever bother me. Criss Angel is rubbish. I don't mind Copperfield, because he's cheesy as you like, and makes really bad jokes onstage, but Criss Angel is a total jerk. He's the sort of person you see in rock clubs that commands the dance floor during 'Sugar' or 'Killing in the Name' that thoroughly deserves to be stabbed in the face. I just watched a clip in which he made quasi-psychobollocks-mind-shit carping on about having 'solid objects passing through his body', then hung out with hilarious comedian 'Carrot top' in Las Vegas making appalling Bill Cinton jokes and pretended to get run over by a rollercoaster. No wonder all the bodily modified supermodels all want to marry him. What an arse. What a jerk-ahontas. "Criss Angel is the mind freak, and my mind is freaked! What I don't understand is why there isn't a good, currently active illusionist who uses digicam tricks to make them more interesting. Like Cloverfield or Jackass. Take away the gloss from magic, make it more interesting. And not like David Blaine with his moronic levitation shit. His entire life is a bloody illusion that he himself has been conned.

¡Soy un ventilador de fuck buttons también, seamos amigos!
I am a fan of fuck buttons too, let's be friends

Pokusaj

Eurovision Song Contest 2008

Venue - Belgrade, wherever Belgrade is. Serbia?

Intro - ridiculous apology announcing last year's fuck up - BRILLIANT

8.00 Last winner appears to have turned into Hiro from Heroes. I don't remember it sounding anything like this. Sounds like it says "shiny crysteal teary spoon" Megalesbian. Is this two songs? It's turned into a sub 'Don't Speak' rock ballad.

8.05 "Welcome to Big Eurovision Party!" Zeljo, Servbias most stylish man, has an unbelieveably goatie. He also plays the accordian and wrote the Serbian entry!


Romania - Massively overblown yet underwhelming power ballad, which for no reason merges into a duet where one of the backing singers mysteriously becomes a cross between Lynn Scully and a Debenhams mannequin. Her parts are slightly more 'sassy'. Absolutely zero chemistry betwen the two parts.


The United Kingdom - Almost certainly going to be forgotten becaue it's second. Hadn't heard this before tonight. Absolutely abysmal opening twenty seconds, that turns into a pathetic Lighthouse Family cast-off remixed by Phats and Small. Bassist looks like he's trying to take a shit on stage.Sickening display of disco-floorl lights. Andy gets way too much into the 'Break it down' bit and starts hugging the backing singers. Terry describes it as 'our best entry in years'. I beg to differ.


Albania - Olta Boka. Backing music soungs like 2090 by Yeasayer. She looks like Joss Stone before she went insane. Lyrics translated incredibly badly. Either this is the worst song ever written, or Albania has about twenty-five different words for 'clock'. One line translates as 'the clock has gone mad'. This is quite likeable, but her voice is far, far too loud and too high and over the top of the music.


Germany - Slags! First good song of the evening, although the stage show and costumes are revolting. The song, a fairly standard electo ballad that sounds a Hot Chip, but has a strange whooshing noise that sounds like a backfiring firework every twenty seconds or so. The 'No Angels' are all reassuring severe and masculine.


Armenia - Subtitles didn't even bother to translate this one. Sounds like most Shakira songs
do after being given the Gay Club treatment, only of course, with superfluous use of traditional instruments. Terrible back dancing typical of Eurovision. Derivative beyond description.


Bosnia and Herzegovina - Tim Burtons remake of The Magical Singing, Ringing Tree. Suspiciously similar to Of Montreal. One of the best Eurovision entries OF ALL TIME.


Israel - Written by Dana International, of course! First man who sounds like a woman of the night. Nice power chord torch song, which would normally excite me, but it followed such a ridiculous Bosnian song. I don't like songs that mix two languages other, fuck that.


Finland - Utterly ridiculous headbanging heavy metal obviously trying to re-create the success of Lordi. Lots oh "hoo! ha!" although the necessary topless men, tight leather trousers and chest thumping goes, it's all present and correct. No tune to be found, mind, and Bruce Dickenson (of which this is a direct imitation) would wipe his arse with it


Croatia - Absolute shit. The whole debacle looked and sounded like an advert for Olive Oil, and just involved a man who looked like Van Morrison singing 'Year in Provence' rubbish, and a man who seemed to be wearing a cricket umpires outfit, literally shouting out nonsense like "they say I'm down in the dumps!" and "I was the first internet!" and then started scratching on a gramaphone. Terrible.


Poland - Given Poland's excellent pedigree in integrating the culture of Western Europe, you'd expect better than this. This is sung by a bizarre experiment to create the least realistic looking women possible out of wax and clay. The song itself is a power ballad so sweeping it could span oceans, and will probably win. It also sounds oddly like the sort of B side that indie bands with singers with high voices used to peddle in the late nineties. Possible winner,


Iceland - group are called 'Euroband'.Supertotalmegaultramassivegay. It's even called "this is
my life!" Female singer appears from nowhere, and hey presto! Jemini! Only in tune, with probably the most advances sounding elecronic sound on show so far, Not particularly impressive.


Turkey - Band have clearly heard more than enough Muse records. Singer looks like a perfect cross between Dave Gahan, Brian Molko and Job from Arrested Development, Really bad lyrics that don't translate well either. I liked it when they all jumped around in the air for the last five seconds, although that didn't save this dangerously average rock song.


Portugal - Baffling looking woman who has tried to encorpoate every single genre of music in living history into her general appearance. Rubbish enough for me to turn off and watch Bosnias entry again on youtube, where they did a completely different 'act' on stage, without the washing lines, and had people digging onstage with large sticks instead.


Latvia - Song is called 'Wolves of the Sea'. Band are called 'Pirates of the Sea' and involves a collectiive of absolute idiots dressed as pisspoor pirates singing songs about being pirates. This is not dissimilar to our song from last year, or indeed, 'Cotton Eye Joe' only with the theme of debunkery on the high seas instead of cowboys or air stewards. The chorus goes "with a hi hi hey! and a yo ho yay!" and you don't need me to tell you it's completely brilliant,.


Sweden - usually good, but this is diablocal. I particularly hated the use of grey filter during the opening verse which was thoroughly unnecessary. The song was massively forgettable, and the singer looked cross-bred with a wild cat, and appeared to have eyes the stretched beyond her ears. Unpleasant.


Denmark - Singer looked like Colin Farrell. Band dressed as English fops completely with trilby, and it sounded like a totally shit Rod Stewart cast off. Singer tried at almost every turn to liven up what was a terrible sing-along that nobody knew the words to, although looked most of the tiime like he was dancing and strutting to an entirely different, more exciting song.


Georgia - Another crap song wih 'Peace' in the title (see also: Croatia). Morbidly dull, that sounds like a funerial chant put to a tacky backing track. I spent the entire of this song listening to Latvias song again, I'm finding it hard to believe that the Latvia song hasn't been written before, it's so obviously catchy!


The Ukraine - This was introduced as song number 18, which it surely isn't. This had some incredibly weird special effects at the beginning with mirrors and lights that reminded me of a scene from The Prestige, and the female singer has borrowed her entire outfit, it seems, from the Armenian entry, only with less of it, and this seems to be a whole load of bombast, but absolutely no tune whatsoever.


France. I'm aware of the brilliance of Sebastian Tellier already, and this was an almost perfect
spectacle of stupidity, involving a group of backing singers male and female dressed as Sebastian himself, and then he came on in a golf cart, holding a plastic globe. The song was really quite good, although quite obviously not suitable for this, considering it was like watching The Flaming Lips perform in a scout hut. Excellent.


Azerbaijan - First ever entry to Eurovison! Absolute nonsense, soprano mentalists singing in angel constumers in glass shattering tomes, and a random lookalike of Gavin Rossdale sat in a black chair. Clearly some kind of good vs evil mess that sounded equally like a mess, but another one chalked up on the 'sounds like Depeche Mode' board


Greece - I hated this the precise second it started. For one thing, the production sounded way too professional, too slick, too out-of-place. It was like listening to a Timbaland produced pop it. It really hacked me off actually, how credible this seemed Fuck this!


Spain - Looks pretty idiotic. Sounds like 'Gasolina.'. Actually stupid, and quite clearly a joke, and designed to sound like Reggatron, a music scene that people tired of three years ago. It had good strobe effects, but really this was like entering Jasper Carrott to sing a pastiche of a Dizzee Rascal song, and was a waste of everyones time.


Serbia - Typically, the host nation follows up their win with something shit. This is no exception ,going down the sweeping route of trying to sound a bit like riverdance or that Norway song that won but shouldn't. This was massively boring,


Russia - This is a complete rip of a song that's already been written, but I can't quite place what. It might be another Rihanna rip off. The singer. who looks like a stray dog having been kicked into a skip, seems incapable of standing up. Oh wait, now he has, and he can't dance any better on his feet. This actually needed something like a baffling rollerskater or a violinist to liven up it's sub A-ha ballad, but it actually didn't improve it in any way. One of the worst. Oh wait, his shirt just fell open. Next!


Norway - I can't think of anything good to say about this at all. It was a very very boring self-righteous female-a-ballad, the sort of which shitty soap stars release as their second single, and moan about it not topping the chart. Awful.

0901522006

Interval - tedious basketball shit. Unwatchable. I voted for Bosnia. Inexplicably, the front runners were Greece ("I hated this the precise second it started"), Armenia ("Derivative beyond description") and the overall winner, Russia ("looks like a stray dog having been kicked into a skip")





I think this was one of the most run Eurovisions of recent years.

Anywhere I Lay My Head

I was bored enough just now to play 'stream of conciousness weblinking'. This is a game that, well isn't really much of a game, in that there's no competitive element, and isn't actually much fun, and only serves you a reminder that your time on earth is wasted, but it's a game that everybody plays, knowingly or not. Basically, you follow links on the internet, clicking from person to person, without pressing 'back' or having to type an address in, or to enter a search term. Nothing but clicking. The top site for this is, of course, IMDB, but Facebook has it's uses too, although when you try and stalk people you don't know, you sometimes have to use 'back' so it doesn't count. Anyway, the point of the above is that during the game I'd just finished playing, I came across a Facebook tribute page in which loads of photographs of some dead teenager were put up, with a quote from some terrible song or other there (possible Snow Patrol, I forget), and there were several pages of vomworthy outpourings from his friends either too grief-stricken to too cretinous to tribute their friend with the correct use of English. It was a horrible experience. But the part that really got me interested was the fact that all the messages were directed towards him. For the sake of decency, let's not use his real name, let's pretend he was Mummra. The messages would be things like "Oh mummra, u wer taken from us to soon" or "m8 i think of u every nite u were such a laugh gonna muss u mummra" and so forth. I think the fact that they think that mummra is, as his first act in the spirit world, is going to go on Facebook to see what his illiterate friends have to say.about the situation. Although, considering how vain, vacuous and pathetically self-obsessed the world is, that probably IS what happens now when you die. It's certainly what I'd do.
This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg, the tip of an iceberg lettuce on the tip of an iceberg, of the stupid, total fucking idiocy of my surroundings. To clarify, I'm not suggesting in any way whatsoever that I'm superior to any of the people I'm discussing, although your surely know that already. Anyway, apart from asshole students in their pyjamas in Tesco, mini supermarkets are a breeding chamber, a fucking boiler room for nurturing anger. Today I saw someone knock a jar of coffee off the shelf and it smashed into a mess of glass and brown sludge in the aisle. The Tesco worker saw it happen, and looked enquringly. I've reached the point where expecting basic manners from lank-haired fucks is an utter waste of effort, but this doofus not only didn't apologise, but actually blamed the way the jars had been stacked on the shelf, which was a ludicrous claim. He then didn't offer to help clear up, and mumbled along into the queue and started talking on his phone. This especially bothered me because at some point in my life I'm probably going to have this clown defending me in a murder trial, or shoving a rectal thermometer up my ass, or flying my to Hawaii, and I'll panic. The other main source of hatred experienced in Tesco, (apart from for myself today when I went in unwashes, and bought loads of shit food like tinned chilli and multbuy turgid pizza and then encounter the girl my housemates and I are obsessed with, restocking the orange juice in the freezer ) are students who try to go against the 'student stereotype' of buying pot noodles and beans, and instead think they're not stereotyping themselves because they buy couscous and strawberries and low fat stir fry in a plastic pot, and houmous. All the while wearing flower patterned shorts, sandles, their university hoodie and a necklace made of solid twat. Think again.


Most of the things I really hate, or really get my angry, are so because they're amusingly hypocritical, or annoy me because the situation is essentially a massive mirror held up against my face and a speech bubble saying "this is what YOU'RE like John, aren't you a wonderful human being. Massively hypocritical, and usually I can't even think of a reason why. I got really hacked off at a gig the other week because someone there was wearing a Fuck Buttons T shirt, and I like Fuck Buttons, and went to see Fuck Buttons on Valentine's Day. I get annoyed when people buy books at work that cost £1.99 rather than £8.99 because I think they're cheap, and then I always buy my shoes in shoe zone, which in actuality makes me far worse because at least they don't have blotchy, blistering stinking feet with cramp. Or maybe they do. I get pissed off when people say "yeah, that's a really good pop song" or "that might just be the best pop album of the last five years" as if to say "well I like it, but I'm not supposed to because I've still got my head up the 'alternative' area of my own asshole, so I'm going to damn it with faint praise". It's like say "this is probably the best posioned cabbage I've eaten this year" or "it's a good marzipan cabbage". As far as DIY music shit-crit, my least favourite phrase used to be "hmm yeah, people should listen to more REAL music", or "Why do people listen to Girls Aloud? They don't even write their own songs! Rubbish! People should listen to real music" and then offer an example like Paul Weller, or Feeder, as if Feeder and Paul Weller are factually superior to Girl Aloud. These sorts of comments used to crop up on Teletext soapboxes like The Void and The Vibe, Todays equivalent, the Drowned in Sound messageboards, which I've no doubt mentioned before, is also a breeding ground for dickless fuckfaces with too much time on their hands and filesharing equipment. But I could start writing about what annoys me about the patrons of that website in a size 5 font on a toilet roll, and I'd still need to go and buy another Andrex to finish the list.


This ones pretty hilarious, but I really get annoyed with people who self harm. This defies initial logic because I self harm. It's also not because I think they shouldn't do it, because everyone has the right to look like an idiot if they want to and it's not my business. But the more times I see people who have done it, the less I understand it, them, and myself. It's maddening, and it's a good example of realising how little you know about something you do a lot. I look at people with cuts and plasters and I think "fool", and then I look at myself and think the same. It's frustrating. Then I think about how little I care and how little I want to bring the subject to the dinner table, and realise that's what everyone probably thinks about me. One time when I was in hospital, a psychiatrist suggested I went to some self harm support groups to hang out with other psychopaths, a la Fight Club. If this isn't the most ridiculous suggestion ever, I don't know what is. A couple of years ago, I did go an online forum for self harmers and realised exactly how little I was like any of the people there. It's very carefully monitored, but tt's not a good place to go. For one thing, everyone used a bunch of internet lingo or slang that didn't make any fucking sense whatsoever, and it ends up with a similar playground social situation as any other website, where it's impossible to intigrate because you've only got 5 posts and someone else has 15,000. Likewise, if you have a problem, or a worry, or a fear, very few people respond unless they know who you are, or you've offered your help to someone else first. They present themselves as a very altruistic community, but it couldn't be further from the truth. The other reason I felt completely isolated from them, is that half of them were predictably angst-ridden Lacuna Coil fans who make their own dresses, and the other half were the hardcore terrifying self harmers for whom it had consumed their entire lives, and who spoke almost entirely in three letter medical acronyms, and always had their posts edited for 'graphic content'. This is because, I kid you not, people go on their website as they slash their wrists, and type things like "Oh fuck, there's blood all over the keyboard, I can't see if this is a b or a v. I can see veins hanging out" or "I know how you feel, I tried to slice my knob off with an egg slicer and now it's gone all pussy where the muscle meets my piss-tube and the stitches are falling off" or whatever. This is supposed to help, but it's like a macho competition, and you're still only on your forearms, then you've got no chance of sympathy. So would I like to go out and 'hang' with these people in real life? I'd rather slit my wrists, thanks.


Similarly to the Fuck Buttons anger above, I've found myself getting annoyed with people who like exactly the same things as I do. Now, if I find people who like Raymond Carver, or Bruce Springsteen, or used to watch The Kypton Factor with Gordon Burns, then I make a mental note and then never discuss it again. It's phenomenally boring, and makes me think I'm boring. You don't discover anything new or exciting about the world by having similar interests to other people.That's why I like talking about things I know nothing about, like football, and cars, and being successful. I think my problem has been that through the desire to eradicate all commitments, and having failry loose ties with friends, housemates and workmates, I've created myself the freedom I've always craved to be exactly who I want to be. And now I don't know who I want to be.


Last night I started a conversation with a girl in a nightclub for the first time in probably, or what seemed like, forever. She sneezed so I said 'bless you' she said 'thanks' then we talked about hay fever and how it's good to live in a city because you don't get hay fever and I'm all for cutting down the rainforests because it means I won't sneeze as much. She bought a drink and had to show her NUS card. Then I said I had to go, even thought I didn't, but it was uncomfortable, and I said I'd see her later, but then it was so uncomfortable that I decided to go home, and it was only on the way home that I remembered it was a NUS card from a university in Derby and that I'll never see her again.

No Future

Nothing has concerned me more in the last few weeks than the passing away of Humphrey Lyttleton. Like most people in the world, my knowledge of Humphrey Lyttleton stretches minimally beyond a) being a jazz trumpeter and band leader I've never heard a single note of, and b) being the presenter of I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue. The latter reason is reason enough to mourn, as It'll result in one of two modifications to I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue. Either it will stop altogether, or it'll continue with 'guest hosts' a la Have I Got News For You. Right now I'm thinking I'd prefer the show to end altogther. Lyttleton, apart from Willy Rushton maybe before he passed away, the key ingredient that made the show unique. In the earlier episodes, with the 'classic' line up of Barry Cryer, Tim Brooke Taylor, Willy Rushton and Graeme Garden, although obviously the entire thing was invariably hilarious, that Rushton and Lyttleton had the stand-out voices: Rushton with his slightly surrealist and less pun-orientated one liners, and Lyttleton, as host, providing all the perfectly timed put-downs and disparaging comments, particularly in the direction of pianist Colin Sell. These are my favourite elements of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, these links, because they turn what could, in the wrong hands, be looked at as a lot of RP jollies at the pleasure of their own puns, the self concious and generally self-deprication made it perfect. The other option, having a guest host, just won't work for me. Not only is it too big a chair to fill, it's not the sort of show where you can bring in newcomers and have it work from that side. Whilst it's OK to have people like Ross Noble on the panel and playing Mornington Crescent, the only people I'd be confident in chairing a game would be one of the original panel themselves. Which seems unlikely. A new host altogether won't work in my opinion either. So whilst it's sad that Lyttleton has passed over, it's as equal a tragedy that without a doubt the funniest radio show, which can lay waste to any number of television shows with it, might pass away alongside him. The biggest reason to mourn is that when one of the great literate, intelligent musicians and personalities ended his days, I was watching 'Balls of Steel' and drinking cider from the bottle.

Breaking news. There's a thunderstorm happening right now. I've just sneaked into my housemates bedroom to watch the sheet lightning and enjoy the thought that lots of people who were previously out drinking and wearing sandals and surfwear are now dodging the raindrops and thunderclaps trying to get home before they get trenchfoot. Hopefully they all do. Anyway, luckily my housemate is in some part of Europe right now and not in some part of his bedroom, so I've moved into his room with the lights off and typing by the light of the storm. And this white page.

So what else has happened lately? I'll condense it into a paragraph and then a list. A couple of weeks ago, massively inept and testament to how fuck-for-brains a cinema experience can be, waste of everbodys time and life purpose shit flick extraordinaire 'Pathology' became the third film I've ever walked out of. Even though it was only a fortnight ago, I literally cannot think of a single solitary split second of an idea why I went to see a film I actively knew I'd hate, but there you go. It starred the dopey Connor Oberst thicko moping spatula of a bell-end from Heroes as a twat with a scalpel, and also featured a wealth of boring beards and the slag from 'Lie With Me'. Megabad. Meanwhile, I did manage to make it to the end of 'The Hottie and the Nottie', a bungled waste of time comedy 'starring' Paris Hilton which was every bit as bad as it looked, yet strangely worse in every single way.

I can't believe that A Question of Sport is still on TV. It's probably one of the few shows that's still on that I can remember watching on Friday nights what I was at school. I think of the other shows from that era; Red Dwarf, The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor, Ground Force. Even Top of the Pops went, yet somehow A Question of Sport has survived multichannel television. I was in a chip shop on the way home from work about a month ago and the owners of the takeaway were watching Sue Barker drooling over Matt Dawsons what-ho humour and Phil 'Tuffers' Tufnell's munchies-schtick, who has inexplicably replaced superniceandcuddly Ally McCoist and thus completed a full house on his bingo card of appearing on every half-baked crummy TV show he posssibly can. Next stop, "Tuffers Top 10 wicket-bad rock moments' on The Hits. With 'Rock Star' by Nickelback at number five, a song which I can't decide if it's operating on nineteen different tiers of irony, or whether it's just plain idiotic. When I got home from the chip shop, my housemate was watching it with the same emotionless expression the people in the chip shop were. When I asked him why he was watching it, I got the reccommended response. "I don't know". It was on again tonight. It hasn't changed at all. It's still an excuse for dunder-headed sportspeople who can't tie their own shoelaces sat on a desk in a suit their agent chose them, answering pointlessly easy questions about their own sport which nobody would know the answer to. I swear once they had an international canoeist on there, who had to answer questions about canoeing, It was even worse than when contestants choose obscure specialist subjects on Mastermind. Tonights guests were a footballer I'd never heard of, a rugby player I'd never heard of, Jermaine Defoe, and someone I can't even remember. I think the forgettable nonentity was the one of offered the predictable 'Hurr hurr it'd be easier if you'd got rid of the tennis racket!" to a picture-round question with a tennis player obscured by the racket they were holding. This joke is, I believe, made every week. The mystery sportsman round has got worse, and even easier as well. Presuming you know who they are in the first place. And is no match for 'Neg's Urban Sports' on Balls of Steel, anyway.

I still hate everyone. Currently top of the pops are: Students (usually female) who don't bother to get dressed out of their pyjamas to go to the supermarket on Sundays, people who shop in Borders and who expect to receive discounts off damaged books when the same book is in perfect condition elsewhere in the building, people who go to 'Bait Shop', a preposturously trendy night club, and dance to CSS but leave the dancefloor whenever anything actually good comes on like Johnny Foreigner, and are so inept at life they don't even know a Cure song when they hear it. Oh yes, people who deem it necessary to ask me if I'm "meant to look like Robert Smith'. I've concluded now that the more time goes on, the more I might actually try to look like Robert Smith so I can say "yes" and hopefully defeat the point of them asking me in the first place. I could go around and start really annoying people by being agressively goth in their direction. Very intreguing. Very Balls of Steel.

I've come to the conclusion that 'The Airing of Grievances' by Titus Andronicus is probably the best album I've heard in a long long time. Other music I've enjoyed recently hasn't even come close, because this album, and especially 'Fear in Loathing in Mawhaw, NJ', the opening track, are unbelieveable. They sound like every band I like crumpled into one ball. I've so far detected the following references in there

The Arcade Fire ('Tunnels')
Neutral Milk Hotel ('Holland, 1945')
The Dropkick Murphys
Explosions in the Sky
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead
Los Campesinos!
Bright Eyes
Desaparecidos
The Walkmen
My Chemical Romance
The Hold Steady.
The Pogues

Elsewhere on the album there's a song that sounds identical to 'Promised Land' by Bruce Springsteen, a song which borrows the riff from 'Bankrobber' by The Clash, and then they play it in the style of The Ramones, and then in the style of Explosions in the Sky. There are spoken word intros and outtros that quote from Shakespeare and Albert Camus, and then the last song is also called 'Albert Camus'. There's a song that sounds like The Rat by The Walkmen, and another than uses 7 seconds of a Strokes song and then wipes it's nose with it. I can't stress how good it is.

I am still unhappy.