Wrapped Up in Books

I've had it with this whole dreaming thing. Last night I dreamed I fell in love with a girl with brown hair, an attic bedroom and a Penguin Classics bedspread. Then I woke up and was annoyed that I was awake. I'm aware that talking about your dreams is about as boring as it gets so I'll pass up this opportunity, but this isn't the first one of these. The more interpretations of perfection my dreams are going to screen for me on a nightly basis, the most annoyed I get when I wake up, and the less likely I'm going to compromise. The thing about all of these dreams are that they're too close to reality. Like, in most of these dreams at some point I have the exact discussion I'd probably have in my own kitchen with my housemate.

"No seriously, she had a Penguin Classics bedspread"
"That's ridiculous, that's the sort of thing that's too perfect"
"I know, that's what I said, I mean, that's the sort of thing you dream of when you're dreaming up perfect situations"

So basically, my life has got so consumingly dull that I've started to dream about dreams about dreams. It's not particularly fun either, it's not like a David Lynch movie when you can drink a cup of coffee and eat some shortbread and the most part dissected by Twin Peaks nerds on websites who wrote about Mulholland Drive for their dissertation. Not me, I wrote about Lost Highway, except it wasn't for a dissertation, it was an essay on Non-verbal communication and I got a good mark for it. But my point is, dreams within dreams within dreams don't make good dreams, and definitely don't make good dream anecdotes.

The two saddest things you can see, I think, on a normal walk somewhere are mountains of post on the doormats of closed shops and lost cat signs. One represents lost friends, the other represents lost dreams. There's a couple of shops around here that have changed owners several times over the year. One's a takeaway, which has had different names, different people behind the counter. One time, I forget the name, the owner had pulled out all the stops, had exciting posters and menus, and cooked all the food himself, and talked to you about the events of the day, almost miniature stand-up routines like local radio presenters do when they're going through the daily rags on their morning shows. He was great, but of course I only ever went there once, and now it's gone. Probably, as soon as the new takeaway opens, I'll go to that one once, and never again. I guess once-and-never-again people like me must make life hell for these people, it probably makes them think it's going to be that all the time, and then it's not, and these people never come back, so maybe there's something desperately wrong with their food. It's not my fault I moved house, or that the takeaway was in completely the wrong place, or that during that period of 2005, I wasn't really into the whole buying takeaways things because my disposable income only covered alcohol. But it still gives me twinges of sadness in my heart to see these vacant shops with piles and piles of post building up on the doorstep, post that was probably the first thing they picked up in the morning, or when they were doing their day-to-day routine, the postman would pop his head around the door and they'd have a brief chat. The saddest part is that not only is their business gone forever, but they can't even bring themselves to visit the shop and collect their mail. It's almost like people who can't face their lovers or relatives graves in the cemetery because it's too goddamn much.

Lost cat signs just make me very unhappy. I get significantly more emotionally affected by lost cat signs in plastic wallets stapled to telegraph poles than I do by hearing about the mass slaughter of human beings in any given country or town. This is because cats don't deserve to be lost. All humans in my opinion, have the potential to destroy and manipulate and create untold evil towards another, and the only thing that stops people is the lack of opportunity, and I just can't get excited about them anymore.

What is exciting though, is ten pin bowling on the Nintento Wii. Our house has managed to borrow one of these consoles whilst one of my housemates ladyfriends is kayaking in Iceland or hunting eskimo in Alaska or whatever to fuck people researching Bruce Parry's Tribe do when they're out of the country, so we've ended up with the Wii rather than her take it to a cattery or whatever. I'd safely assumed that like the Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360, I was going to take a back seat from this era of videogaming like I did with the last one. I'd only just got excited again by the idea of driving fire engines off bridges on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas again but now there's this ridiculous motion-sensitive ten pin bowling thing. It's almost impossibly easy, but takes most of the fun out of ten pin bowling, Namely:

1. Ten pin bowling costs too much, so you have to pretend to be a lot, lot more excited about the game than you would be if it was free
2. In a ten-bowls game, it usually takes until bowl 6 for you to settle on which ball is the 'right number' for you, even though there's not really much difference between them
3. Horrible shoes which have to be sprayed with industrial-strength odour stuff before they're given back. I once asked to have my own shoes sprayed with this.
4. In the olden days when only my mums hairdresser friend Sue had Sky, bowling alleys were the only place to watch MTV
5. You don't get the option to fuck about with the little portable metal 'slope' for people too useless to even hold a bowling ball, playing at home.

Why the Wii is better:
1. You can eat doritos from a saucepan whilst you play
2. The pain in neatly transferred from your finger socket joints to your wrist, which is much less panful when you have to pick things up the next day
3. I don't get fucking spares all the time. The last proper game of bowling I played, I got 9 on the first bowl, and then 1 on the other, for the entire game. I actually texted 8-2-ASK to see if I was the first and maybe only person to ever get this score. No reply.
4. You can talk on the house phone to your parents about how you had a dream about a girl with a Penguin Classics bedspread whilst simultaneously scoring two successive strikes, and this somehow makes you look better than if you weren't on the phone, even though you only really need one hand.
5. I've managed to make a cartoon Wii character thingy who looks just like me, or me if I'd been drawn by Brian Lee O' Malley. Basically me, if I was good looking, played sports, and was a slacker in Toronto.
6. You can walk three steps into your bedroom and listen to Dance Away by Roxy Music any time you like.
7. You don't have to share your own toilet with patrons of Lazer Quest.

Can you even get Penguin Classics bedspreads?

Anyway, this is a photograph I took of a petrol station in Cardiff on a Friday night. It's very Edward Hopper.

Burn

Hello
I should have done something exciting and edgy today. Like going to see "teen film of the decade" (uncredited source; this is what the advert said, but I suspiciously can't find the quote online anywhere) Wild Child, starring whatshername from Aquamarine, that walking haircut from Stormbreaker, and for some reason, Nick Frost. Starring Roberts as some sort of EVIL Malibu teenage socialite who gets banished to boarding school in mega-strict England (because obviously English people don't know how to have fun) only she causes havoc everywhere she goes, and starts all the parties, but ultimately we get a happy compromise of stiff upper lipped English snobs having a gay old time, and crazy US bitch gets a dose of normality, and learns how to do sums or something. I should have gone to see this, I really should. Instead, I did some historically dull activities, which I would say I won't bore you with, but then I don't know who you are, or why you're reading, so maybe this is fascinating for you.

I bought a new CD writer from PC World because I'm sick to the back teeth AND sick to death of burning cds in the weedy little tray that pokes in and out of my laptop like the worlds limpest Swiss Army knife. I'm not expert on these things, but this external CD writer is massive. It's like, bigger than a bible. It's almost the same size as a hardback cope of Ken Follett's A World Without End, and just about as heavy, too. Which makes me wonder what the little burner inside my laptop and located just underneath the Caps Lock and ASDFG keys thing it's doing. No wonder it broke. Although apparently not, as the album I send my dad in the post along with a copy of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo made managed to work OK. To be on the safe side, I walked up to PC World to buy a new one. I've never been in PC World before, but boy are they nothing like the adverts. Admittedly, I went to PC World in Cardiff, and like most things in South Wales, you're guaranteed to get more pathetic version of what might be brilliant elsewhere, but even taking this rule of thumb into account, PC World was a shocker. For the wealth of technology available in, store, I would have though they could have at the very least, created holographic staff with extensive artificial intelligence who actually knew where anything was, and without acne that looked like it was going to erupt any minute. Secondly, it's wonderful that they divided the store into "PC" and "Laptop" halves, but what I was looking for (an external drive for a laptop) wasn't on either, when it should surely have been with Laptop accessories, but it wasn't, it was with a bunch of other CD drives, all of which were labelled in such a high technical register the only words I understood were "CD and DVD", the rest might as well have been written in Klingon. I had to ask for help off one member of staff, who served a pleasant dose of bullshit that the drive I had in my hands was exactly what I was looking for, and then when I got to the "tech desk" where the lady informed me this drive I had was an internal drive for a PC, not a laptop, and that the one I really wanted was fifteen pounds more expensive (of course!). The tech desk was quite interesting, because there was a little room where people with big thick glasses were dismantling laptops. I couldn't help but think it was somewhere like this that Gary Glitter got rumbled. He'd have paid £114 to have his laptop fixed on site too.

I took time to have a look around Newport Road, since it's not every day you get to walk around in the pissing rain amongst an avenue of vile oblong concrete and stainless steel megastructures all ten times the size of the QE2 and infinitely less exotic or relaxing. They're all there: Comet, PC World, Pets at Home, Maplins, some stupid place whose logo was a big R in a circle, a big fuck off blue structure called WHAT! that used to have a high street version, at least three carpet showrooms, and all your other favourites. There's also a drive-thru KFC, a drive-thru McDonald's and a drive-thru Burger King. These as far as I can remember, are the only drive-thru's I've ever really seen close up. They're a massive disappointment, although I get the feeling that the Newport Road industrial estate, which is basically built either side of one long road which stretches beyond the horizon into a scribble of overpasses and junctions about two miles out of town, is modelled slightly on the entrance road to American towns, they've not quite nailed the true horror of these commercial landing strips quite enough. The McDonald's was having a refit when I went past, although they'd kept the drive-thru open, which I thought was rather sad, but not as sad as the thought that the only reason they did that was because they know people are too lazy to try and navigate six lanes of traffic to go to the Burger King on the other side of the road. There was also a Do It All, which became Focus in fuck-knows-when. There was a plaque just outside the entrance commemorating the store opening in 1982. The store was shut, the only sign of life or any kind of wood or plastic was a skateboard ramp that had been built in the car park. I thought for a moment about all the hopes and dreams that took place on that day in 1982, and how this massive structure was now standing stagnant like the Titanic, sunk in a wild sea of grey retail gloom on the outskirts of Cardiff. I carried on. By this time the rain couldn't be described as anything less than ridiculous. I was amused though, by the number of mobile burger vans that had set up in the car parks of the stores. WHAT!, Allied Carpets, The stupid shop with the big R in a circle; even the Quik Save car park had a burger van and Quik Save closed in early 2006. Running one of these burger and hot dog vans must be the worst job in the world. I guess it's like running a worn-out old dog of a pub in a backwater suburb, where you deal exclusively with regulars and nothing but regulars. Here it's builders and nothing but builders. What a job.

When I returned home, I did some rearranging, which including moving all of my DVDs out my bedroom and into the lounge. I cunningly disguised this as a "share and share alike" motif, where my housemates are now entitled to borrow any of my DVDs at will, but really it was an excuse to free up some space in my room. The space previously taken up by the DVD shelving is now taken up by three perfectly neat stacks of books. I still need to sort out space somehow for both these, and a rogue collection of CDs that I've amassed and have no sensible place for which I've then stacked on top of them. I'm praying I won't need to get to any of these books in the near future because I've stacked them like a cross between Jenga and Kerplunk and if they fall over, then there's nowhere for them to go but to fall all over me.. The CD burner works fine though. I made myself two mixes today, to listen to as I pottered around making and doing things. The idea of making a mix CD, putting it in my crappy CD player on the window sill, and playing it was an alien concept last week, but now it's back with me, like a familiar itch or an old friend I'd taken for granted. I wish I wish I had some other people to make mixes for. Requests please.

Up To My Neck in You

Today I'm commemorating it being exactly 365 days since I last fell out of love. The past year has been a mess of scattershot memories, utter tedium, hearts that hate, splendid isolation and fear and loathing in Mahwah, NJ. Pretty much all of it has been soundtracked by Mark Kozelek for want of anything more cheerful. Here are some highlights.

Mistress (Piano Version) (Red House Painters)
I need someone much more mysterious
June 2006, August 2007
Red House Painters I
And so it goes...

New Jersey (Red House Painters)
You're not as good as your mum but you're as good as dead
September
Red House Painters I
Moss Bross Staff Room

Have You Forgotten? (New Version) (Red House Painters)
When we were kids, we hated things our parents did
October
Vanilla Sky OST
I shouldn't have bothered.

Take Me Out (Red House Painters)
If only you could take me out, instead of back in to a relationship I don't understand
November
Red House Painters I
No Use For Old Friends, closing number.

Carry Me Ohio (Sun Kil Moon)
Sorry for never going by your door
November
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Early mornings, familiar roads.

Gentle Moon ( Sun Kil Moon)
But if love was like stone / then yours was mine through to my bones
December
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Juke box.

Glenn Tipton (Sun Kil Moon)
I buried my first victim when I was 19
December
Ghosts of the Great Highway
Stephanie

Up To My Neck In You (Mark Kozelek)
Up to my neck in misery for most of my life / I've been a fool...
January
What's Next to the Moon
Cineworld unlimited card, building sites and cranes

Bad Boy Boogie (Mark Kozelek)
On the day I was born, the rain came down
January
What's Next to the Moon
Manchester

Down Colorful Hill (Red House Painters)
Prayers prayers prayers for success
January
Down Colorful Hill
Manchester Zodiac

Lights of Magdala (Mark Kozelek and Hannah Marcus)
If heaven were a lady, don't you know you'd been the one
February
Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down: A Tribute to Kris Kristofferson
In a park by a lake, a camera

Shadows (Red House Painters)
You ain't saying nothing, that I don't already know

February
Ocean Beach
Everywhere everywhere everywhere everywhere

Cruiser (Mark Kozelek)
Slipping letters under my door / candy wrappers round my floor
February
Little Drummer Boy
Shopping for oranges

Follow You, Follow Me (Red House Painters)
Just one single tear in each passing year
March
Shanti Project
Genesis!

Tonight The Sky (Sun Kil Moon)
She fell into his sweet strong kiss / she made her perfect gardens in this?
March
April
Hello excited stranger, I'm yet to receive my copy of April in the mail.

Michigan / Fly Away (Red House Painters)
I don't need a purpose to plan within / I just need to feel your pulse again
Live Track, The Blind Pig, Ann Arbor 2001)
March
All of her dreams have gone soft and cloudy, all of her dreams have gone dry.

Lost Verses (Sun Kil Moon)
I came up from the ocean / evaporates sea salt water / a mist above the skyling / I haunt the streets of San Francisco
April
April
Dinnertime and the train home.

Katy Song (Red House Painters)
I know tomorrow you will be somewhere in London / Living with someone
June
Red House Painters I
As covered on youtube.

Void (Red House Painters)
And I know that I have picked the most perfect sunflower yet
July
Old Ramon
For windows.

Lost Coastlines

I'd as good as written off Okkervil River after last years damp squib, The Stage Names, and their live show I saw at Cardiff Barfly, where they honked out an hour and fifteen minutes of tuneless dirge, and tried to polish off a dreadful performance by doing a crowd singalong of Westfall, both made for dreadful 2007 for one of the bands on the cusp of being one of my all-time favourites. Likewise, Jens Lekman, whom I didn't get to see live, but managed to squeeze out an atypically and depressingly awful album last year which went pretty much against every reason I liked the guy in the first place. But these things can't be helped. I'm long past the naivety of expecting my favourite bands to consistently deliver. But although I'll probably never forgive Okkervil River for being total shit last December, I'm reconsidering The Stage Names. Well actually, I'm not, it's still not very good, but next month, they're releasing The Stand-Ins, which is either an accompanying album, or an appendix to the former album. Either way it explores similar themes and ideas that were brought up in The Stage Names, and the artwork even sits underneath the previous albums to make a complete picture. It's like Guns and Roses waiting a year inbetween the two Use Your Illusions instead of releasing them on the same day. Except The Stand Ins is more of a mini album, with three pointless instrumentals making up the full XI. And you know what, every single one of those eight tracks shits on the best bits of The Stage Names, massively. In Lost Coastlines, and the ridiculously titled Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed On The Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1978, they have twoof the best songs in their entire canon. In a way, I like the fact that what are clearly the best songs from this recording session all ended up on this album, rather than poorly diffused across the two volumes like a pungent odour. But despite this, they've been entirely overshadowed by Shearwater anyway, so I'm not why I'm really concerned with readdressing the situation.

I spent a few hours today in Pontypridd, for no real reason other than that I had to leave the house, and it didn't look like too shoddy a day. It did rain eventually, but it was such a not-as-bad-as-it-has-been day, that when I got home, I went onto the street and cleaned the outside of my window with windolene, and then opened the window and blasted blue collar indie rock into Rhymney Street. But Ponypridd was alright. I decided to go exploring more than I had done before. Previous visits with Anna involved looking at the down and very little else. The first time I went I only looked at the University of Glamorgan campus which was built on the side of a mountain and basically made me study twenty times for my A levels so I didn't have to go to university there. The person giving us a campus tour genuinely told us that he'd "only been to town (Pontypridd High Street) once, and (didn't) have any plans to go back there any time soon). He was a third year. The only times I'd been to Pontypridd in more recent years were on Sundays with Lisa when there were no buses out to Llantrisant, so we had to get the 132 at ten past seven in the morning, and then sit around at Pontypridd bus station for forty minutes either playing cards, or pop punk top trumps, or seeing who could skid further on the rain-soaked drain cover just inside the railway station. Then we'd get picked up by Abby and drink coffee in her garden, before being driven to work. It used to take nearly 3 1/2 hours to get to work. I don't miss that at all. Nor do I miss having a reason to go to Pontypridd, because it's not a particularly amazing place, and it hasn't really changed much since the very first time I went there. There's still a hill that I wouldn't ever dream of climbing because I know what's at the top (a boring university with an eerie Jim James thing going on where nobody ever leaves the campus) and a pokey little high street. Today was of little exception because the first shop I went into was a charity shop, and I had to pretend to look at books for an absolute age, because a drunk man who had no qualms with drinking Carling at just past midday in a charity shop, rifled through all the videos no less than three times. I didn'y dare ask him to move, but I had to wait because there were CDs I really wanted to buy. The rest of the town can fuck off, the only major difference was that the big stupid pointless joke shop wasn't there any more. It always amused me how such a big joke shop could ever thrive in a town where the only thing anyone does for fun is choke pigeons on the bandstand, and you can't package any of that in a Smiffy bag and hang it up next to the saucy nurse costumes. Alas, it's all gone now, it was replaced by some nondescript shit that had only filled half the building.

What I did like, though, was the side of Pontypridd I didn't even know existed, the park. The park was very pleasant, and walking around under the criss-cross shades of the avenues of trees and looking at the waterlogged crazy golf and the suspiciously clean looking swimming pool (which had done that thing a lot of open air swimming places do, which is to paint the bottom of the pool an obscene shade of turquoise which is so blinding it affects your retina to not even see dead twigs and Quaver packets when they're probably right there. The bandstand was closed to the public, because there was some sort of filming going on. I couldn't figure out what, and I did spend longer than I should have done milling around with my hands in my pockets waiting for something to happen. I watched a man who looked like Mackenzie Crook sweep some water off a path with a broom, but there were no cameras trained on him, so unless he's doing menial handywork because nobody went and saw Three and Out, I don't think the water sweeper was in the film. I wasn't really expectinh Russell Crowe or Viggo Mortenson to jump out and start pounding their chests on Pontypridd bandstand, not least when the surrounding area had been set up to look like a crappy little summer fete with coconut shys and hooplas. It was all very Sylvanian Families. I went home after that.

Post Script. I think from the comment below I didn't really express my point very well: The Stand-Ins is a GREAT album, and everything that I felt that the Stage Names lacked; imagination, a fantastic concept, memorable hooks and melodies, and a sense of the epic.

Game Shows Touch Our Lives

"Ladies and gentlemen, in the audience tonight, Academy Award winning actor, Ralph Feinnes"

Earlier on today I watched Quiz Show, the really rather excellent period piece with Ralph Feinnes and John Turturro. I'm surprised I haven't got round to watching it before, since it was almost to the last second, a perfect hybrid of All The Presidents Men and Network, two of my favourite films. The quiz show in the program though, was pretty shoddy. It was called 21, and was a familiar format, but not one I'd ever come across before, simply because I think quite a few American format quiz shows didn't really cross the Atlantic, and plus it was very very simplistic, with rolling "applause" signs, a hilarious parody of corporate advertising, and a really ordinary systematic set of questioning. It did, though, continue the general theme of last week which I spent in the staff room at work idly reminiscing about the quiz shows of my youth. People seemed surprised at my ridiculously retentive knowledge of some of these, possibly with the suggestion that somehow I wasted my youth. This I can't deny, but at the same time, I have memories all through the childhood and teens of doing the things most people remember; going to parties, shoplifting, sitting around in the park, going to friends houses to watch 15 certificate movies like Demolition Man, and so on. In fact, I remember doing all those things more times than I recall ever wanting to. I also spent a lot of time in large DIY stores like B+Q, Texas, and Do It All. An awful lot of time. So much time, that I don't intend to go to any of them ever again, and it's just as well I can't drive, because these big breezeblock, drafty cubes of DIY misery are far from anywhere I'm intending to go for the rest of my life, and because they're all in out-of-town Sim City industry hell-holes, I can probably use the excuse that I can't. I'll buy my paint from elsewhere. Probably an art shop. I hope I never have to paint anything, really.
But back to quiz shows. David has suggested that I could feasibly write to some people and ask if they need a rough guide / essential guide / pocket guide to quiz shows. I'm actually considering this, but since I can't remember the name of who he said, or whether he was being serious, I probably won't bother. But it's an idea, and if his friend can get a book about Dario Argento, whom nobody really cares about apart from a nanopercentage of horror movie film geeks, buck toothed weirdo women, and Quentin Tarantino. Anyway, I could talk in great length about any game show, right down to some contestants names and scores, but I don't have time, and anyway, I'm not getting paid for this, and I could get paid for that, so that can wait. Here though, is what you would probably find in the back page, the quick-read guide to British game shows.

All Clued Up - bizarre word-guessing game similar to Wheel of Fortune, presented by (I think) Michael Aspel, and it involved a giant keyboard
Bob's Your Uncle - I can't remember much about this, apart from that I think the prize involved winning shit for your wedding, and involved jumping in a swimming pool
Bullseye - Oft-parodied working man's social club darts-themed quiz.
Catchword - BBC2 Who-can-come-up-with-the-longest-word program to rival countdown, which was invariable won by anyone who could spell floccinaucinihilpilidication.
Celebrity Squares - Trashy British version of Hollywood Squares with people like Leslie Joseph and Roger De Courcey and Nookie Bear.
Chainletters - Fun word-puzzle game in which you had to change letters of words to make new ones: CAKE - RAKE - RARE - MARE - MARK etc
Crosswits - Classy semi-intellectual crossword-themed quiz game with Tom O Connor.
Fifteen to One - One of the best: Set design straight born from Foucault, William G Stewart as torture master, with offensive buzzer sounds and flippant rudeness.
Full Wing - Rubbish golf-themed Saturday night drivel with Jimmy Tarbuck
The Krypton Factor - Intelligence and ability-based quasi-intellectual challenge show with Gordon Burns suggesting that anyone who completed an army assault course is somehow like Superman
Lucky Numbers - Unwatchable Bingo-themed shit with Shane Ritchie sponsored by The Sun
Play Your Cards Right - Craptacular
Raise The Roof - Crap short-lived megaquiz in which contestants could win a house in Florida. Hosted by Bob Holness, these seemed to involve more video footage of the house than of anything resembling a quiz.
Take Your Pick. Classic 'open the box' show given cheesy tabloid makeover with Des O Connor.
Turnabout - Daytime quiz which involved answering word puzzles and making computer generated spheres change colour, a bit like a more elaborate naughts and crosses.
Through the Keyhole - Another oft-parodied celebrity show with David Frost and Lloyd Grossman trying to see who could look more out of place on such a show
University Challenge - Rendered fairly useless after the Young Ones parody, this intellectually alienating quiz has hit a new stride with Jeremy Paxman's new insolent approach.
You Bet! - Either with Forsythe or Matthew Kelly from what I remember. This was THE show for rewarding utterly useless talents, like memorising the cast of the Bill by their ears, or the country of origin of stamps from what they taste like.

There are of course, hundreds of others, but in researching, the above, I've discovered this website:http://www.ukgameshows.com, which pretty much renders my continuation useless, and the utterly ridiculous person who runs this website would evidently make a better candidate to write the aforementioned book than me. Unless there's a market for someone who can drop in anecdotes about suffering severe migraines eating a cheeseburger and watching The Main Event, a bizarre and rubbish living-room based family show hosted by Chris Tarrant. Maybe I'll just skip straight to doing in-depth essays trying to explain the concepts of most 21st Century quiz shows and ignore the classics. With the exception of The Weakest Link, Deal or No Deal, and inexplicably, Eggheads, most 21st Century shows have bombed. People just don't like seeing other people win money these days, and I guess advertisers can't drum up the cash because nobody at home is watching. It's sad, because two of the best game shows I've ever seen were short lived ones from the last five years or so: Traitor, and Didn't They Do Well? Traitor was a weird cross between an amateur dramatics improv show, an episode of Big Brother where the contestants all went insane and were convinced there's a total bullshitter in the midst, and an alcoholics anonymous meeting where someone suddenly notices they can smell gin. It was televised slanging matches, all neatly compered by Tony "Daily Sport" Livesly. It was compelling and lasted about a week. Didn't They Do Well? as the title suggests, was hosted by Bruce Forsythe, and was a great concept, because the only concept was that it didn't have one, and was a Frankenstein's monster of a quiz where instead of asking questions, Bruce played clips on a big screen from other game shows, ranging from easy shit like Family Fortunes or some kids stuff, through to the big money questions from University Challenge and Mastermind. It was a great concept, and it was what brought Bruce back to the BBC, his natural environment away from the News of the World scratchcards, illuminated dolly girls and rabid pisshead audience members acting like they were in Jumpin' Jacks rather than a respectable TV studio.

The only new-new show I've seen recently since I don't watch much TV was called Battle of the Brains. Hosted by some clown I'd never even noticed and whom talked too much, I couldn't gather much from the concept apart from that it was basically Eggheads, only without the eggheads themselves. Which meant neutrals can't be bothered to root for either team, whereas you always hope the eggheads lose, or that the show has been cancelled because one of them died. BBC2 have also had the scheduling idiocy to put it on directly before Eggheads as well, meaning you're basically watching the same program twice in a row. Here's hoping the mentalists in Holland or Scandinavia who devise all these concepts have their thinking hats on, and are happy to let us steal their ideas.

Back and Forth

There's a lorry outside my house that's picking up a skip or loading the recycling bags or something similar, and it's taking a long time doing what it's supposed to be doing. The noise that it makes when it either picks up or drops whatever it is that it's either picking up or dropping, is exactly the same noise as our letterbox makes when a parcel, letter or pizza delivery pamphlet makes when they drop onto the front door mat. Because I've got my bedroom window open in a failed attempt to welcome the summer into my bedroom and to usher out the wine and fag smoke from last nights 'Dorm Party' (me and Chris Rock's 'Never Scared' up all night) into the street, then the distance the sound traveling is identical to the distance from the front door, through my bedroom door. Normally I don't care, because I don't receive much post, except parcels of review copies of crap like the new Offspring album or the just-above-average She and Him album, sent to me by Playlouder, and occasionally I get to open the Liberal Democrat propaganda addressed to 'Occupier' or if I'm feeling particularly majesterial, to whom it may concern.
But at the moment I'm actually waiting for a new hard drive to come through the door. Since I only know what size the drive is in terms of how many crappy mp3 files and Microsoft notepad files I can't motivate myself to delete I can shove on there, and not how physically large it is. This is the first thing I've bought off the internet that hasn't been a standard size. A CD, like The Dismemberment Plan one I'm expecting to arrive any day now, is always CD sized, a DVD is DVD sized, a Sun Kil Moon t shirt, although far too big, is still just about the size of a t shit. The problem with buying things like hard drives or similar off Amazon is that although probably somewhere down in the small print, probably in a box of text you have to click and drag for the white text to show up, they give you the weights and measures. Like most people, I figure that because I've already committed myself to cretinous laziness by not getting on the bus and going to PC world, I might as well continue the trend and not look at anything except the price. This hard drive could be the size of half a house brick, which I'm expecting, or it could be the size of a kettle, or a toaster, or a badge maker. I have no idea, they didn't print a picture on the search page of a human hand holding the drive, so I'm lost. At least in the Argos catalogue, if you're buying a set of swings or a paddling pool, you get a picture of the first child of summer pranking about on, in, or under it. If you're buying a board game, you often get some close ups of a ritalin-ruined toddler with a gormless expression that tells you JUST how fun the board game is. I miss those pictures. They should put them on packets of twiglets, to remind you how much fun twiglets are. I guess the internet doesn't have the resources to have pictures of people standing in front of, or holding every object in the world, so more fool me if the drive won't fit through the letterbox and is so heavy I can't even put it on my load-bearing desk.
I went to the cinema yesterday and saw something funny. No, not The X Files: I Want to Believe, that shit wasn't funny at all. I did see a group of teenagers running their mouths off on the escalator telling anyone who cared to listen that "Cineworld ain't got no respect" and "You don't wanna come to this cinema, it's shit" and "fuck this place, don't go to Cineworld, they don't let you have fun", which alerted my curiosity. One of the problems with always listening to headphones when I'm out and about, is that when base-level incidents of mild amusement involving conflict with other people arise, it's really hard to get involved with eavesdropping without looking obvious. As the groups of teenagers were descending the moving staircase and being apprehended by a heavy duty guard by the revolving doors, I had a quick scan up the line of people waiting at the box office. Everyone, without exception, was trying to subtly eavesdrop on the incident in the corner of the room. Everyone. Not even, the inarticulate degenerate couple who go the cinema because they have nothing to say to each other, and then spend twenty minutes deciding what to see (10 minutes gawping at the pretty pictures outside, ten minutes trying to remember what pretty picture corresponded to what title, inside). Not even the quartet of acne-crusted teens in Lost t shirts going to see Batman for the fifth time. Especially not them, I think they were excited to be seeing a real live scuffle that didn't either involve them, or someone who can fire laser beams from their elbows or turn themselves invisible. The scuffle was minimal, but I was far away enough to get away with taking my headphones off, pretending that it was because I was nearing the box office, rather than just wanted to hear a bunch of scally teens getting mouthy in a cinema foyer. I think the general gist of the scenario was that the group were either shouting, or talking, or generally being awful in one of the screens, and had been forcibly removed by a member of security. I think their defence was that they were having fun. Since when was "it's fun" ever been a defence against anything? . I'm sure Harold Shipman found giving old ladies lethal injections fun as well. The only excuse poorer than "it's fun" is "I was bored". I didn't get to hear the extent of their cries because they were ushered out of the cinema before any more of their suggestions to other people not to come in could fall on any more deaf ears. The queue of eavesdroppers averted their attention back to thumbing through their Unlimited newsletter or drooling "so what are we seeing again" to each other, simultaneously, because they're got a psychic connection because they're so in love. I think as soon as they realised the scuffle wasn't going to be resolved with gouging and bloodshed, they had to resign themselves that the film was going to have to be their primary anecdote tonight,

On the subject of eavesdropping though, it did remind me of an incident I saw on Saturday Evening. I was at The Big Weekend, which is an annual horror show where everything shit about life in South Wales all conglomerated into a seething, sweating mass, drinks and lot and makes life hell for everyone else. It's a breeding ground for seediness and dirtiness and every unpleasantry under the sun. Three-legged rabid spongefuckers with backwards fingers and green teeth who live underneath rocks of sea slime in the caves of the Welsh Valleys. even they make their only trip to civilised society for the Big Weekend. I took a detour through the fairground which they crowbar into the roads surrounding the museum like vomit through a sluice gate, because fairground rides make good photographs, especially when it's dark, and patrons are drunk and queasy. The camera battery ran out almost instantly, leaving me stranded in the fairground with no reason to be there. I did see a fight though, and the strategy for listening in on this required more acting skills than in the cinema. If anyone of the people involved in this drunken near-brawl saw my obvious attempt to slow down and take off my headphones so I can really, truly enjoy the sight of someone with a fake diamond earring getting a good lamping on a Saturday Night. My solution was simple. I decided quickly and for no reason, that I really wanted to take a photograph of exactly what was next to where this scuffle was taking place. Obviously knowing my camera was out of battery ,I took it out of my bag and tried to take a photo, giving me a reason to stop, and I could then see what was going on out of the corner of my eye. Then, because the camera wouldn't turn on, I had to take the headphones off to listen to it, and look intently at why it wasn't working. I found myself doing this impulsively. Why do people take their headphones off to do things that don't require silence to do. It's like when my dad used to turn the car stereo down because he thought he could smell gas. It worked, I had a good listen, saw that it wasn't going to end in bloodshed, it was just some petty shit, obviously about a girl, and carried on home before I got killed.