You are allowed to enjoy this…

The sun came out and we spent the last two days involved in Bacchanalian pursuits. Luckily, the hangovers were slight and the drunkeness minor. Hurrah! It’s good to flex the booze muscle once in a while.
Visited the local Woolworths recently and was impressed by the number of Sony PSP games being released on Thursday. It seems that Sony is making much more of an effort for the European release than it did for the US one and Nintendo did for Europe. Man, I might have to smash open my piggybank. Yes, yes, I know it is sad for a 34 year old to play computer games but I only play for half an hour or so when I am in bed to send me off to sleep. If I’m not reading, I am having a quick game of golf. So that makes it OK, OK? 🙂
Do you ever get a twitchy eye? I do when I’ve been using the PC too much. Got a twitchy right eye at the moment and it is driving me nuts. The booze didn’t manage to cure it. Now I am walking around with my right eye closed to rest it, so I am typing this with my one good eye.
In the post: Scenic – Sage EP & Curb Your Enthusiasm Series 4 on DVD.

The theme of the day: door handles.
With DIY giant “Homebase” offering a 10% discount, me and The Missus decided to grab some cheap brass door handles for the newly-repainted doors I had finished several weeks ago. (Yes, we’ve been living in a house without door handles all this time, which suits Alex the Wonderdog just fine as he doesn’t have to ask us to ease his passage through the house as the handleless doors upstairs are left ajar).
We purchased some handles and brass keyhole covers, but it turns out they were the wrong size. Not a problem, we returned them. However, we’d managed to make a mistake when buying the replacement handles and needed to replace them again. Ho, ho, ho. Back to Homebase again. This is why I don’t do DIY – because I am a moron. The devil is in the detail. Anyway, handles are fitted to doors and I can now have a movement with the door closed – so that’s my fun spoilt!
Keeping with the door theme, a joke.
Q. When’s a door not a door?
A. When it’s ajar!
I love those old jokes.
Also yesterday, we’ve been splashing the cash and bought a new radio for the kitchen. The radio reception in our area is “piss-poor” – trust me, that’s a technical term and in order to enjoy the various broadcasts out there, we decided to finally invest in a new player. So we bought a DAB one. DAB or Digital Audio Broadcast is digital radio and so there’s no hiss, cracks, pops or farts. However, you STILL have to get a good signal for the thing to work so this involved me trailing the wire antenna behind the kitchen shelves. It’s a very nice unit though and I thoroughly recommend it especially for all those “new” stations you would normally need the Internet to access such as BBC Radio 6 and 7. The purchase of this new sound system gave me an excuse to terrorise The Missus with my own music on CD over a cup of tea. Ah…in sickness and in health, for poorer and poorer, with good music and bad…It’s good to have a captive audience.
Talking of audiences…are you a musician and ever wanted to shoot your audience? Well now you can with the MIDI Gun. Those crazy kids…I remember when MIDI devices had black and white keys.
Meanwhile, while out shopping yesterday, I realised that my entire personality is based on TV catchphrases gleaned from watching too much TV. My current favourite TV show is the comedy programmed “The Mighty Boosh”, which can only be described as “The Goodies” on hallucinatory chemicals. And so I have been wandering around saying things like:
“My legs are my best feature. I have the legs of a young antelope.”
“You’re ‘aving a larf. This is an outrage.”
“I’m old Gregg. Wanna drink Baileys from a shoe? Wanna go to a party where people wee on each other? I love you…I wanna hurt you.”
Etc.
I desperately, urgently need to get a life. The past three years of captivity has softened my credentials somewhat.
Anyway, you watch episodes of “The Mighty Boosh” courtesy of the BBC website…you know where to go. Just look in the TV section and you’ll find them there episodes. It’s all part of the BBC’s digital strategy to get TV shows online. Bravo, say I, but ditch the crappy RealMedia and make so we can download them and watch them on our widescreen TVs when we want to. Afterall, we DO actually pay for all those TV shows…so techincally they belong to us. 😉

It’s sunny, then it rains, then it hails, then there’s thunder and lightning and then it is sunny. All in a matter of a couple of hours…this weather is confusing me. I’ve taken off/put on my jumper a couple of times today. Crazy!
Finished a track called “Crash” because it is just that…a car crash. It was based on an older track I didn’t finish last year and sounds like a song I would have recorded in 2001. Oh well, I doubt it will ever make it onto a CD, but here you go:

I actually got a blister on my finger playing the bass to this. Now I’ve been noodling on the bass since I was 17 and now I get a blister. Crazy!

Another wet and windy day. Brrr…
Worky work work work.
Read today that K-9 is returning to Dr Who. For those of you who don’t know, his character is a robot dog. Dogs are cool and robots are cool, so some kind of robot dog is ultra cool. However, K-9 isn’t quite as cool as the Sony AIBO but he was the granddaddy of all mechanical mutts. Unfortunately, time hasn’t been kind to K-9 and he’s all rusty and battered.

Poor old K-9!
Last night, I watched a TV documentary about how a boy orchestrated his own attempted murder on the Internet. It was interesting to me because in 1997 I wrote a novel about the Internet called “Moofed” and one of the story strangs in it features a character that seeks out someone to kill them. I realise that I was ahead of my time. Here’s a review/explanation of the case snipped from the Guardian website:

Oh my God, did you see Kill Me If You Can (Channel 4) last night? That’s how many workplace conversations will be starting this morning, I reckon. Watercooler TV, I think it’s called, though I don’t like the phrase. If you missed it, it went something like this.
Boy goes on internet, meets girl in chatroom. They chat, flirt, do cybersexing, fall in love. They never meet, even though they both live in Manchester (it’s a chatroom for Manchester young people).
New people come into chatroom. A 14-year-old boy (first boy is 16), an evil stalker and Janet Dobinson. Evil stalker kidnaps the first boy’s girlfriend and kills her. The boy is very upset, but new boy is there for him and they become best friends. Soon boy is over his kidnapped, dead girlfriend. Boy and best friend actually meet, hang out together, go to Trafford Centre in their hoodies. Janet Dobinson sounds interesting – at 44, much older, but attractive still. She turns out to be the third most powerful woman in Britain – she works for MI5 as a spy mistress and is in the chatroom to recruit new agents. She recruits boy. Boy is told he will meet the Queen and Tony Blair, earn £80m and have lots of sex with sexy Janet Dobinson. Boy is very excited, especially by the last bit. Kidnapped, dead girlfriend now totally forgotten.
Boy is given a very important job: to protect a VIP called James Bell who’s worth £568bn to Britain. James Bell, happily, turns out to be best friend. So boy protects best friend for good of country, but also because he wants to meet the Queen, earn £80m and have lots of sex with spymistress Janet Dobinson. Then a new order comes in from Janet Dobinson: kill James Bell. Boy has to kill best friend. He buys a kitchen knife and sticks it deep into best friend’s stomach.
Best friend doesn’t die but is very badly injured, in intensive care for a month. Boy is arrested, and tells police he is an agent working for MI5. Police take the boy’s computer, find all the chatroom stuff. Police notice something funny: all the other people make the same spelling mistakes, so they’re all the same person. Only one of them is real: best friend. So best friend is also girlfriend, evil stalker and Janet Dobinson. He took his friend for big whopping ride, but also ordered his own murder…
It’s all a bit far fetched, I know: “Skilled writers of fiction could not have come up with this,” is what the judge at the trial said. That right: the judge, at the trial. Because this wasn’t drama, it was documentary. Those things REALLY HAPPENED to two young boys in Manchester, neither of whom could be named. It’s hard to know what to be more astonished at – the gullibility of the first boy, or the extraordinary plot cooked up by his 14-year-old best friend, a plot that was supposed to culminate in his own murder. I think at his age I was just getting into conkers.
They’re free now, and both doing well, we’re told. More important, they’re not allowed near computers unsupervised, which is good news for everyone really.
This film didn’t have much to make it visual – there were interviews with the boys’ solicitors, a couple of child actors walking around Manchester, shots of the Trafford Centre, a seductive Janet Dobinson, looking sultry on Vauxhall Bridge in front of the MI5 building. But it didn’t really matter, the whole thing was so utterly jaw-dropping, you hardly noticed.

The Internet is a strange place, populated by strange people. How do I know? Because I am one of them. No, seriously. The Internet is a place where you can take risks you wouldn’t normally take in real life, it is a place where you can be anyone you want, it is a place of fact and fiction. I’ve met a few people who aren’t what they seem via the Net and if I had children I certainly wouldn’t let them use it unsupervised. There are many people who want to exploit you on the net, either sexually, financially, emotionally or mentally. Luckily, these people make up on 1% of Webusers, but you still have to be careful.
Meanwhile, there’s some very interesting commentary going on at the Iron Maiden website. Apparently, at a Ozzfest gig at the weekend, the band were pelted on stage with bottles and eggs and had their PA cut off several times. The perpetrators? Well it was old ma Sharon “When they did the surgery they threw away the wrong bits” Osbourne and the Ozzfest stage crew. Read what Iron Maiden’s manager said about the event by clicking here.
Useless fact of the day: I went to the same school as Steve Harris, the bass player with Iron Maiden. Wow…what trivia… 🙂
And before I forget, Goldie Lookin’ Chain have a new single coming out called “Your Missus is a Nutter”. Well it made me laugh.

I am completely enamoured with Google Earth at the moment (http://earth.google.com). If you haven’t checked it out, you must. It is an online atlas that allows you to zoom around the earth and check out all manner of places. The thing that is really incredible is the level of detail in the maps. Revisiting locations that I’ve been to in the past (Paris, Las Vegas, Los Angeles) gives you an incredible insight to the architecture and the amount of ground you’ve covered in your earthbound explorations. Fantastic! They even featured Lock HQ on the map too. Here we are and if you look really carefully, you can even make out The Missus’ blue motor. 🙂

Last night, did literally five minutes of recording, trying to make something of an older track that was left unfinished, when I came up with this tiny little fragment.

I love it when musical things like this happen by accident because I get excited when I hear it and then I think “Hmmm…how can I expand on this?”
Good fun.

The eyestrain finally got to me and I decided to update the template used for this website. Black is the new brown and brown is the new blue and that means that puce is the new purple. 🙂 The Missus saw what I was doing and said: “Thank god for that. I hated your last design.” Gee – thanks for the honesty. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?
It’s not quite finished as I haven’t put all the links back on but I’ll get around to it eventually. The idea is to have something a little more legible and to ape the rest of the blogs/websites that are out there. Being radical with design and trying to do something weird doesn’t always pay off. Plus my design are crap. Stick to something else.
Not much else to report, really. I told The Missus a story the other day at the pub. It was an idea I had for novel. She seemed to like it and did her best to convince me to start writing it. I should give it a go but my fingers aren’t willing. Lazy son-of-a-bitch.
The weather veers from heatwave heathaze to overcast November afternoons. At the moment I am wearing shorts and a jumper just to be on the safe side.
On Saturday, I spent a couple of hours with one of the bits of kit we’ve ever bought: a coin counter. Over the years, we’ve collected jars and jars and jars of assorted loose change. So in an attempt to have a clear out, we bought the coin counter and decided to bank all these coins. I forgot what the final total in 1, 2 and 5 pences was, but I think it was around £80. Not bad, I guess.
For the record, I’ve a pain in my chest/back. The pain is dull, but depending on movement, sometimes feels like a stabbing pain. I would like to say it is easing since its arrival on Saturday but it keeps coming back. Not sure if it is my back or something more “internal”.
In terms of creativity: 0% done recently.
Just been wasting time and wasting time and wasting time…