I forgot to mention that our birdbox has finally got inhabitants. This box was mounted on the side of our shed the first summer we moved here (just over six years ago) and has remained empty. But because the shed has decayed, needs a new roof and possibly replacing totally, some little Blue Tits have decided to nest here. This means that I can’t go near the shed – this is either good or bad, depending on lazy I am feeling. The birds nip in and out and you have to be quick to see them. It is too early for chicks but I expect them soon.
Took delivery of a new shredder, my fourth in total, after the others blew up or stopped working mysteriously. This one is a no-name brand and has managed to eat its way through several years of credit card reciepts and other semi-sensitive material. My morning has been taken up with this task, which has been quite satisfying. What an exciting life I lead. Hold on to your hats, folks!
Tonight is the final night of The Apprentice and the news has been revealed on the BBC website that both Ruth and Michelle have been working at Amstrad since last September, so it really doesn’t matter who wins, does it? How disappointing is that? I am beginning to think that the cold fish won and that Badger was employed to stop her running amok through downtown Brentwood, uprooting trees and flipping cars as if they were Dinky toys in a She-Hulk type rage. Donald Trump would never behave in this shoddy fashion – to mimic the movie Highlander: “There can be only one!”. Alan, you’ve done a great job on the past two series of the Apprentice, but despite your grumpy demeanour and your uncanny resemblance to a moth-eaten Nookie Bear, I have to say, that even though you’ve increased your ratings, you’re fired!
Meanwhile, in an effort to bring smiles to the faces of my three or four regular readers, here’s a funny video courtesy of Video Google. I was a big fan of the band “The Presidents of the United States of America” back in 1996 and this parody from Weird Al Yankowic tickled me humerous. 😉
Category: Diary
Been messing around in the “studio” lately and messed around with that little track I put up the other day. This is a rough mix of the possible ending of my new CD. As for the end section, just imagine it’s the London Philharmonic at Abbey Road, just me trying to muster the best out of my Korg Triton. The string sounds don’t sound particularly “stringy” but at least I got back to my tribal nature banging the fake timpani on my Handsonic. Oh yeah, banging on the bongos like a chimpanzee, I was.
Direct download: CLICK HERE
At the moment, I am pushing out just over 16Gb of data a month and my stats are roughly double that of another less interesting website I supposedly run. Now I was thinking that this increased traffic might be because of the wonderful pithy commentary I provide on modern life and that just maybe, I was getting a little following. No, it seems that some of this traffic is from people leeching files from my site. Often these are picture files and I’ve tried to stop it. Most of them are being used on MySpace, people linking to a picture of Nookie Bear to use as an avatar, etc. This is all well and good, but I pay the rent on this place and they are costing me bandwidth. When I exceed 20Gb of traffic then I will be in trouble. Oh well, maybe I need to delete all those images and videos I’ve put on this site? But then it’ll just be boring and I don’t want that. Does no-one respect good netiquette anymore? Obviously not.
Meanwhile, that wag Peter Serafinowicz is at it again with his take on the recent Apple vs Apple court case.
Today, my Internet connection has been upgraded. For no extra cash, BT gave me the opportunity to upgrade to 8Mb broadband. The only thing was that only after I had signed up for the upgrade that they revealed that we could only get 4.5Mb broadband in this area – but when they did finally switch over my connection it was 5.5Mb. How fricking riveting was that? Did I just send you to sleep then? I know I nearly nodded off while I was typing it.
Anyhoo, the really interesting this about this service upgrade is that for £30 they would send me a new broadband router. Why? Well, with this upgrade there’s a thing called BT Broadband Talk which gives you a VOIP (Voice over IP – basically Internet Telephony) with a standard phone set connected to your router. I even get my own “05 ” number so people could call me. The upside is that I get free evening and weekend calls and considerable lower call charges when calling abroad. The downside is that I don’t actually know anyone who I can call or who would actually call me – such is the life of the modern 21st Century Electronic Hermit. The service did work very well when The Missus used it to call her nan. She reckoned that the line quality was better than our exisiting phone line.
Well at least I can download porn at three times my normal speed. JOKE – I just wanted include the word “porn” to send the Googlebots wild. Some more Google Mind FuckTM words you might want to include in your blogs are “Syed and Michelle pictures” – that combination of words has been bringing lots of Apprentice fans seeking on-show romantic entanglements this way.
So I have been remembering more of my dreams lately. This is unusual as I don’t usually remember anything that happens during my noctural activities. The other night I was in a dream with The Missus and there was a constant threat of danger at every turn. It was like a disaster movie playing at 100mph. The sky was black, there was a huge mountain we were trying to climb and ridges of moving ice and danger at every turn. A huge tidal wave was sweeping towards us across the flat plains and despite climbing faster and faster, we were going to be hit by the wall of water. And so I braced myself as the tidal wave hit, holding tight onto The Missus’s hand. We were flung high into the air and landed in a jungle, the tree-lined canopy breaking our fall. There was more danger and more running away and peril, but I can’t remember any more. I just remember the fear of the tidal wave and resigning myself to doom, even though by a miracle we were eventually saved. I think it was a metaphor for life in general.
The dream I had last night was much more pleasant. It started with me walking down a dark corridor and flinging open a door into bright sunlight. As I stepped into the unknown, I realised that I was on a field, surrounded by coaches and people busying themselves. I looked down and realised that I was not wearing my usual clothing and that I was wearing something very unfashionable from the 1970s – flared trousers and a goddawful shirt. I checked my bonce – yup my hair had miraculously grown back down to my backside (like it used to be) and the weight I had gained since being involved with The Missus had gone. I was a young stud again. Hurrah!
On investigation, I realised that I was backstage at some open air festival in the seventies and there were many different people milling past. There were bands and groupies and whatever, but I didn’t recognise anyone in particular. I evesdropped on one group and they were speaking in German – I listened and began to think that they might be some kind of Krautrock group I’d never heard of. In fact, most of the names I’d never heard of. Bob Fripp was standing on a soapbox giving a lecture or preaching about something, but I wasn’t interested in him and neither was the crowd milling around. I was more interested trying to figure out what concert this was. I tried looking for my ticket, but these were the wrong trousers and I couldn’t find my way into the event. How could I get inside without a ticket. In the distance, I could hear the low-dull, bass-heavy, thump-thump-thump, of a rock band performing.
I found myself surrounded by a group and they were very friendly to me. One of them offered me a guitar and asked me to play, but when I tried to play the instrument, it just sounded awful – probably because this was some 13 years before I actually began learning to play the guitar. They all began to laugh at me and call me a chancer. I became upset and found myself alone, bemoaning my lack of guitar-based talent and no ticket to the concert. Suddenly, a friendly face appeared – a another lad like myself and he promised that there was another way into the concert.
I followed him away from field, through some trees, into a gulley. The grass was chest height and we had to wade our way through. There was some kind of trough we had to jump over. I might have been a trap to capture those trying to sneak in the back way, I don’t know. My guide jumped first and insisted I follow, but I was nervous. I stood there for a while, mustering up my confidence and made the leap. As I passed over the trough, I saw a pound coin glinting in the sunlight, it’s markings on the rear were familiar and etched out in great detail. “But there are no pound coins now,” I thought to myself before running with my new-found friend to the concert.
We managed to find our way to the front and could only see by looking around a large concrete pillar. In the distance was the sea and a pier. It seems that the bands were playing on a stage at the end of the pier – walking away, down the boardwalk away from the stage, were loads of different people dressed in Victorian or Edwardian wear – some had familiar faces, but I couldn’t put any names to them.
Then I was woken…
A strange dream, but a nice dream. Not too heavy or depressing like some of the other dreams I’ve had recently. I am still finding it weird how I am accessing this flights of fancy again. Is there a switch you need to turn on or something? I don’t know.
Yesterday, I did a little bit of recording. Working on a piece which is far from complete. The ending came together and I added some strings to it using my keyboard – it sounded a bit Michael Nyman-ish writing for Peter Greenaway. I am not happy with the strings, but here’s a different dub with guitars replacing them. It’s nothing wonderful, just a little snippet of the future:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
So it was the local council elections yesterday and our ward was fielding a BNP candidate. In order for us to dislodge this fascist party from our locale it was obvious that some tactical voting was in order, so we voted for our local independent candidate. Unfortunately, the BNP candidate won by four lousy, stinking votes. We tried and we failed. The idiots of Loughton won again.
Anyway, on completely seperate news, Sky One are remaking cult TV show “The Prisoner” and have Christopher “I’m Not Doctor Who” Ecclestone. Why bother when this excellent remake already exists?
Well it’s good being right, isn’t it? Who predicted last week that we’d get an all-female finale on the Apprentice? Why, it was me? Mr Right! 🙂 Oh yes, there was absolutely no way Paul Tulip, the walking gob in a suit, all confidence and smarm, was ever going to get past the final hurdle. Some tips when going to an interview: know your own CV and know about the company you are applying for. It’s really simple, but both Paul and Ansell just didn’t have the common sense to take this precaution. Paul, the incredible bullshitting man, was left out hung to dry, while Ansell revealed that he really was a really nice ineffective guy – a bit like Tuan, really, but with more presence.
So we have Ruth and Michelle in the finale. It’s a bit tough to predict who will win because the final task is key – but from the clips I’ve seen on the promo, Michelle has Syed and Paul on her final team and this could be more a hindrance than a help. While the smashing, crashing Badgertron is like a bull in a china shop, it could be this same bluster that could be her own downfall. I’d like Ruth to win, but I’ve got a strange feeling that the cold fish might just clinch it. How non-committal am I today? No, definately Ruth…I’ve wanted Ruth to win from the early weeks, so it has to be her, but with the Apprentice it is tough to predict what will happen.
Taking of things BBC, I’ve been drawn to the BBC Film Network which lets you download free short movies using a P2P client. It features the excellent short “How to Tell if a Relationship is Over” a funny 2-minute film starring Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh. Also, I found the BBC Motion Gallery which lets you look at stock film clips and purchase them if you are in that line of business. There’s a great clip called HD Andes to Amazon which is a High-Definition film of condors flying over the Andes and all the flora and fauna of the region. Man, it’s High-Definition and I must admit, for nature footage, it’s pretty convincing. No, no, no…pull yourself together man, don’t fall for the HD propaganda.
Meanwhile, here’s a video from the Infadels, an up-and-coming pop combo. Their only claim to fame is that they have Alex Bruford installed on the drumstool. Who? He’s Bill Bruford’s son, but it is a shame that they make him sound like a drum machine. Anyway, it’s called “Love Like Semtex”…it sounds a bit like Big Audio Dynamite and E-MC2. Enjoy!
This a piece of comedy genius. I’ve never had much time for George Dubya, but I think he missed his vocation in the world of comedy. Take it away George(s):