Saturday, February 22, 2003 Buggery Bollox Crafted a wonderful entry yesterday, witty, erudite, inspiring and gramatically correct ... then my work computer threw a Friday night wobbly while I was trying to post it and it got wiped.
Could try and rewrite it, but the moment's gone ... so you'll have to put up with this one.
Nicotine Seem to be back on the fags. I've allowed myself the odd treat (thank you ian and sef for letting me scab them...you may slap me if I ask for another one) but the other night I sucked my way through a packet of 20. There's no such thing as an ex-smoker who has the odd one, there's just a smoker in denial.
Dunno what went wrong. Thought the first few days would be the hardest, then when the nicotine was out of my system it would be a cake walk. It's been the other way round.The zeal of the newly converted kept me going in the first week (the patches helped too), but then the cravings came back in week three, usually tied to caffeine and alcohol scenarios. Passive smoking in pubs? Work's not been overly stressful.
Daft thing is they now taste foul to me. My taste buds had started to come out of hibernation and now my mouth tastes like a morning-after pub and my tongue is actually tingling from the tar or the saltpetre or some other gunk in the smoke.
But I have a new idea for an anti-smoking device: Marlboro Lite smoke-impregnated scratch and sniff cards - this is what your flat's gonna smell like if you light up again
Nicotine II When I was in the shop buying that accursed pack of 20 "tubes of delght" (Dennis Potter) Sef rang about going to karaoke. The shopkeeper handed me the packet which had one of those huge new health warnings in big unfriendly letters."Did you know smoking could damage your sperm?" I asked Sef, reading it off the packet, to the aghastness of the Asian vendor."Dont blame me," I said,"It's written here." His eyes widened as he read what he had been selling, then he smiled. "Oh I'm alright then I'm allergic to cigarettes." Maybe for a moment he had feared that just handing them over the counter was going to damage his fecundity.
6:26 PM
Thursday, February 20, 2003 Look Who's Talking Andreas Whittam-Smith in his media column in the Evening Standard (Andrew Neil is away ... piranha fishing I hope) writes: "The FT is incorrigible. Even though the world has entered a period that is the stuff of history books it remains as indecisive as ever." This from the man who started the Independent.
Something Old, Something New-ish Still in the Standard, was checking out the new films coming up ... three are remakes! Solaris, the George Clooney vehicle, is a remake of a Russian film; The Ring, the latest "You will never have been so scared" chiller, is a rehash of a Japanese thriller; and from the UK The One and Only (which thank god has nothing to do with Chesney Hawkes) was originally a slice of Danish bacon. Nothing against remakes in principle, otherwise we would never have had The Magnificent Seven out of Seven Samurai.
But after Yul throwing his gun in the water bucket and riding out, I kinda ran out of good remakes. And now two more cracking films, the Swedish comedy Tillsammans and the French farce Diner de Cons, are getting refried in English as well. If the new directors can do it with the ambition and balls of a John Sturges, fine. But I bet they will probably be word for word translations like Nikita or be like Vanilla Sky where they not only nicked the film they nicked the leading lady from Abre los Ojos.
Napster News After the Google/Blooger deal at the weekend, had been wondering what had happened to the last e-cult concern to get bought up: Napster. And as if by magic ...
Seems a bunch of music publishers yesterday filed suit against media giant Bertelsmann demanding $17bn for copyright infringement because the German company gave financial aid to the music file sharing service.
The litigants include names like Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who with nice irony wrote Jailhouse Rock.
Bertelsmann owns BMG records and was one of the record labels that pursued Napster into the ground ... but afterwards it poured more than $85 million into Shawn Fanning's creation hoping to transform it into a commercial service with songs licensed from major record labels. But the plan went pear-shaped, and a later agreement by Bertelsmann to acquire Napster's assets out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection fell through because Napster's creditors objected.
Software company Roxio now owns most of Napster's assets.
Thought that the target here is not just Bertelsmann. This could be a warning shot to the backers of the file-sharing services that Napster spawned.
Bless Him Just seen Gore Vidal on CNN slagging off "the Bush-Cheney junta that seized power on 9/11".
Wednesday, February 19, 2003 Batteries Included Been tecching myself up. In the interests of dragging myself kicking and screaming into the 20th century I've just gone out and got a digicam from Tottenham Ct Rd. Got £50 off the RRP, which is nice (but should Olimpus be spelled that way?)
First priority will be to get a new profile pic on outintheuk to replace the staff card photo I've used for two years which makes me look seriously jaundiced. The gaydar shot is hardly less flattering ... me on a Saturday morning, out of focus, underexposed, hungover with a fag hanging out of me mouth. I work on the perverse principle that if anyone likes these mugshots and actually responds, meeting me will be a pleasant surprise.
First reaction of the mates I've shown the digicam to so far has been: "Cock shots?" Errrrr no!! Dirty minded buggers (Well not yet anyway)
Location Location Location Crash has a new post-RVT Sunday nighter, and whoever did the posters and fliers for it has the mind of an estate agent, dubbing it: "The latest addition to the Vauxhall gay village." Am I living in a gay village? That'll do wonders for property prices. Stretching the metaphor way past breaking point, s'pose that obviously makes the RVT the local church (Sunday worship at 5pm-ish, vicar the Very Rev Edna ... genuflections on request). The village pond? Well that's the outside back wall of the church after late service. Crash is the parish hall (Lovely flower show there on Sunday night ... lots of pansies). Caffe Italia can be the friendly village shop, and Hoist the old people's home. Village idiots? About 500 of them ...you know who you are!
Musical Interlude Swapping musical tastes with DJ Moley in CXR. Nice to run into fellow villagers on a trip to the big city. Always had him down as really just an Indie lover.He recommended Timo Maas and Royksopp to me (cos Im sooooo out of touch dance musically) and I gave him Negresses Vertes (folk-punk modal French) and Manu Chao (a multi-lingual Latino beat ... you almost want to lambada)... Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan can wait til next time.
...and totally trivially he reckons that You Gotta Tie That Sucker Down is the only dance music track of the last few years in 3/4 time ... waltz anyone?
6:43 PM
Tuesday, February 18, 2003 Heard of chicken bars, never pigeon bars Picked up first edition of The Guardian at work last night and it took me a full 10 seconds to work out why the front page pic looked familiar (This is a link to Reuters so it wont take you straight to the pic, but it's the 9th one down the list ... and check out the Livingstone snail pic while you're there). That is such a shite picture of Dukes, but guess it needs as much publicity as it can get. That pigeon though!! How long did the snapper have to wait til it wandered into just the right spot .... or did he just pour superglue on the C. If it stood around too long, it would have been the next item on the menu at Dallas Chicken.
5:59 PM
Monday, February 17, 2003 Late Sunday Snacking Friend gets pulled up on stage by the stripper in Dukes last night (Why am I not using his name???? He did it in front of 40 homosexualists so he's hardly shy about it!!). The stripper was Willy the Kid ... not a beer-can dick, but not far off a tinny of Red Stripe. My fluffer friend makes a pretty good effort at trying to measure it with his mouth. Smirking, he comes off stage and says: "There are times I wish I could take my teeth out." The two of them got the biggest ovation I've seen for anything on stage in Dukes.
Greedy Gary A mate of mine works in TV and has to do stuff on They Think it's all Over with fresh-faced, never-booked professional all-round nice bloke Gary Lineker. By all accounts he's a homophobic git (whereas David Gower is apparently a total gent). So I is very happy to see St Gary's halo has been given a dent by a bunch of foody parents sick of seeing him stuffing his face with fatty, salty Walkers Crisps in front of their kids. Lineker's management company issued a statement saying: "Crisps are a useful source of energy and form part of a balanced diet alongside foods such as vegetables and fruit." At least they didn't claim it was a slimming aid.
Blog bollox and Google This may be old news to some, but:
NEW YORK, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Internet search company Google has agreed to acquire Pyra Labs, the handful of Web
developers who helped jump-start the personal publishing phenomenon known as blogging, Pyra's founder said on Sunday.
Word of the deal spread after Pyra Labs chief executive Evan Williams confirmed on his personal Weblog that his team of
six developers would join Google.
In typical blog fashion, the news spread first on Saturday from San Jose Mercury technology columnist Dan Gillmor's eJournal diary to other blog sites.
Does this mean I'll be able to get a glitch free Blog*Plus account?
4:04 PM
Sunday, February 16, 2003 Queuing for Peace Overslept, so was late for the peace march (Hopefully I'll be able to sleep through the war). Jumped on at Cambridge Circus into a swirling mass of banners, flags, kids, families and at least one little old lady in a wheelchair. Forty-five minutes later we had screamed, shouted and hooted our way as far as .... Dean Street, about 200 yards as the cruise missile flies. The usual numbers game went on afterwards, with organisers saying 2m people were out there and the police saying 750,000 Even that lower figure makes it the biggest ever UK demo for anything. And queuing up on Shaftesbury Avenue I could believe it.
And what did we achieve? We had a good therapeutic shout. We possibly scared the shit out of a few MPs in marginal constituencies. We earned the chance to bore our mates rigid with tales of how we were there and they weren't (well, for 200 yards anyway), and we pissed off Tony Blair who was reduced to saying that even if there were 1m people on the march, that was less than the number who had died in all the wars Saddam had unleashed in the world, and anyway demos like this wouldn't even be allowed in downtown Baghdad so there (a tone of envy from Tone there)
Ian, David and Marcus made it from TCR to Piccadilly Circus to the pub. Peter C managed the whole darn thing and looked totally knackered in Composts afterwards ... or maybe it was the thought of having to schlepp up the Piccadilly Line with 749,995 homeward-bound demonstators?
Best Placard Award Is this some kind of of a variation on the "Make Love, Not War" theme?
"Dateless and Desperate"
Ex-Boyfriends are like Buses ... ... they turn up in threes! My past life flashed in front of me.
Ran into Anthony, my big electrical floor manager. No problem there, we see each other all the time. Then there was a rare sighting of Tim, a kinda BF from Birmingham days. Not seen him in yonks and had a nice chat (actually ran into him on New Year's Eve but he was so wasted he has no memory of it).
Then went to to WigOut to welcome back a mate who had been away over Xmas/New Year. In the queue, I turned around to clock who was coming in after me ... and stared straight into the face of Peter from Prague (no, he's not Czech, he's from Leicester). Went out for nine months when we lived in Prague: very intense, very jealous, very immature ....and naturally it all ended messily. Not even spoken in four years. And he had to meet me when i was rolling drunk. Conversation soon descended to the "not much change there then" level. And then Mr Stupid Head here, presumably in the interests of wanting everyone to like me and because I was wazzoked, suggests going out for dinner tonight to catch up. It may end in a food fight ... or I could just lie about working late and blow him out.
With Added Colour Have just noticed how the colour scheme of this Blog and the colour scheme of Composts are scarily similar ... a busy day at work, you can tell
3:14 PM
