Lost is back on tonight, which is good times for all concerned, and with any luck I’ll be seeing Iron Man on Wednesday. Nordiebuddies will be around come week’s end and there’s a bank holiday to look forward to. And to occupy every other waking hour, there is Grand Theft Auto IV.
I don’t know if it’ll slow down the blogging – after all, eight hours in work don’t fill themselves – but there’s a significant chance it will take over the output. I’ll try to avoid it, sure, I’ll try to be interesting, but I can’t guarantee it. I don’t know… somewhere in the code of a GTA game there’s a sequence of numbers that sinks into your brain, takes over your neural pathways and leaves you unable to talk or think about anything else until you’ve slogged your way through*.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. The release of the last GTA game heralded a month-long era of universal brotherhood, where you could approach practically any stranger on the street and, with a simple enquiry (“So, what mission are you on?”), form a lifelong bond. It was rather beautiful.
This is me out for the moment, then. I’m off home to freeze myself until I can come back into town and buy the game. Gentlemen: see you on the other side.
*The affliction seems to have some tie to the Y chromosome, which is fortunate since it leaves roughly half the population functioning well enough to keep things ticking over.
It was inauspicious, thank you very much. Not only did I receive some unfavourably unceremonious career news, I also managed to embarrass myself in front of the world’s pre-eminent Discordians. I addressed this by sitting on a balcony and staring into the middle distance while poking a cat with a broom handle* and slugging emergency cocktails.
However. My day has officially been salvaged, because what cocktails they are. Roughly equal parts spiced rum (Morgan’s, natch) and fresh apple juice (the proper stuff, what you might see in organic markets – Fallon & Byrne is a good place to pick it up). What’s it like? Imagine a good lascivious helping of apple-upside-down-cake** wearing a low-cut dress and sweating it up on the dance floor of an jazz fusion dive in Havana. Yes, you do want to try it.
*We don’t want our neighbours to know she’s here, so we can’t let her jump up on the railing. This ruse does assume that our neighbours are deaf.
**Allegedly this is better known as “Eve’s pudding“.
Gordon Bennett, this is embarrassing to watch.
I don’t know which makes me cringe more, the poor chap trying to explain how he uh believes, uhh, he believes that people uhhh, that people have uh rights, or the horse-voiced eejit in the back raving about how PEOPLE have DIED because of this CULT. The encounter trainwrecks merrily along until, in an ingenious piece of off-the-hookery, they decide the guy was a plant. Aha! So when you were standing there looking like complete and utter gormless twazzocks, that was just Scientology trying to discredit you! Bualadh bos lads, buladh bos.
[Link via Jazz Biscuit.]
I saw the marvellous and wonderful Elbow in Vicar Street last night. They were marvellous, and wonderful. Guy Garvey is so charismatic that it’s pretty much impossible not to have a good time at one of their shows. Another reason to buy an Electic Picnic ticket, yes?
Strictly speaking no, since I just looked at the lineup and they’re not on it. I’m not sure why I thought they were… but what the hell, Grinderman, a flaming jazz bar* and the best pies in the world will be there, so buy a ticket anyway.
*May be a composite of several blurry memories.
It appears that Maybury has tagged me with some class of book meme, which explains why I was feeling under the weather yesterday. The common wisdom is that you have to starve these things if you want to get better, but I’m going to indulge it this time because the results make me look sinister and dangerous.
The challenge: pick up nearest book, open to page 123, write down sixth, seventh and eighth sentences.
It is war. It is “our nation” against the US Government… If 10 teenage Jews and liberals had blown up a Nuremberg beer hall with Hitler and a thousand storm troopers inside, they would have been applauded.
From I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary by John Higgs. (I should point out that the ellipsis is in the original text. Well, not the original text. But it’s in the book.) I’m mildly disappointed that I have this in my pocket, because the next closest book is a thousand-page guide to current VAT legislation, and that would have garnered me mad economic cred.
I’m supposed to pass this on to five people. Nads to that. In fact, I am anti-tagging you: if anyone reading this post gets tagged by someone else, you don’t have to do it. You may thank me in the comments.
I am seven kinds of wrecked today, so this kind of goes nowhere. It’s my Cormac McCarthy post.
The sweaty ginger apocalypse that is A Futurist Theatre played Doran’s last night and as per usual they raised rooves, wrecked gaffs and mixed metaphors at a rate of knots per hour. Since I’m friends with the band I’d like to be able to say that they’re rubbish, thus proving the Stalinesque ruthlessness of my critical intellect, but they trip me up by being consistently awesome. It’s starting to give me a complex.
Following a night swanning around my flat with a pack of cigarettes shoved up my sleeve, I had planned to blow everyone’s mind and James Dean the motherfucker. Unfortunately, my level of drunken bombast had blinded me to the worrying level of translucency of my one and only white tshirt. James Dean not being famous for subtly flashing his nipples at strangers, a post-work jaunt to River Island was necessitated.
By the ancient and unwrit rules of men’s fashion there was only propely decent shirt there, and that only available in extra small. Now, I’m prepared to call myself a svelte guy – I’m aware of the concept of muscles, but they’re not something I’ve ever got the hang of – so I reckoned I could pull it off. And it worked out all right, although things like eating, drinking, walking, dancing, breathing, thinking and so on were a little trickier than usual.
Plus, on an unrelated note, I accidentally kneed a guy in the mouth. Good times all round.
Over the past while I’ve soldiered through the majority of Andrew Meier’s Black Earth: Russia After the Fall, a book I bought on a whim while wandering through the History section of Hughes & Hughes. It’s interesting and all, but relentlessly bleak is only entertaining for so long. I rather stupidly decided to take a break from it to read At Swim-Two-Birds and naturally I haven’t yet managed to get back to it, despite being less than a hundred pages from the end. In my defence the writing is pretty small and he does that thing where a new chapter starts right after the old one ends. (Authors: we need that bit of white space at the end of a chapter. It gives us a sense of accomplishment.)
Speaking of Flann O’Brien: as soon as I finished At Swim I went straight out and bought The Third Policeman, and it was a struggle not to just swipe an armful of him off the shelf. He is magnificent. I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with Irish writing, but this I can get behind.
Most recently I’ve finished The Dice Man. It’s a very good read with some nice stylistic choices and inventive use of language. It also has that snazzy something I love in countercultural lit from the 70s – after the idealism burned off, but before it started blowing itself.
Finally, on similar lines, a biography of Tim Leary is currently residing in my coat pocket. Unfortunately the writing is determinedly uninteresting, which is practically heretical given the subject matter. Take Hunter S. Thompson’s quote on the jacket: “Tim was a Chieftain. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof-prints on all our lives.” That’s more like it. Why couldn’t someone like him have written it?
If I died suddenly, what would happen to all my social network accounts? Would it be kind of awkward for my e-lectronic i-friends? Would they quietly drop me from their friends lists until there were just these lonely, orphaned profiles floating through the void?
How many dead people are on Bebo right now? Imagine: your profile just sitting there, a snapshot of who you were maybe minutes before you ceased to be, waiting for the time twenty years down the line when the woman who would have been your wife happens across them, glances over her shoulder at her second best sitting there in his vest and boxers balancing a six-pack on his gut, and wonders where her life went wrong.
Someone must have thought of this. Maybe there’s a group of hackers – not so much black hats as black cowls – who have taken it upon themselves to scour the obituaries, take up their posts, patiently observe the slow disintegration of relationships 2.0, solemnly and silently remove the driftwood. Leaving only the terrible finality of an empty profile, the 404 of the soul.
Contrariwise: eight of the most charming seconds of your life.
A short blog about the coolness of other people.
1) “And all the while your silver-brown moon-foxed face gives me full throb, hard and wet, something akin to a cement mixer and a tropical dishwasher going at it like mechanical bullfrogs in full view of a thousand cock-fisted jackhammers.”
Bête de Jour has a way with words.
2) Via The Chancer, some fellas and a lady have sweded Rawhead Rex. In contravention of all existing treaties on Irish comedy, it’s actually very funny. (If you haven’t seen the film, watch the trailer first.)
I really should have let this go by now, but… that o2 ad. Yeah? I’ve been in the cinema a fair bit over the past few days and they insist on giving it top billing. It has its own little space between the trailers and the film. It’s hard to avoid. Which means I’ve been subjected to this kind of drivel:
We are many and we are one. We are a million different expressions. One choice. We are free texts to anyone and any network.
And there’s the whole mystic vibe going on with the music. You might wonder who their target demographic is… as far as I can tell, they’ve just noticed the vast untapped market represented by demented singularity cultists and they’re trying to get in before anyone else.
“Study Reveals Ad Is Stupid” isn’t much of a shocking headline, but this is just… who signed off on this? Who decided that this was the way to create a powerful brand image? And why did they hire the fugliest man in the country to deliver the lines? Whoever it was, I hope they got a good kick in the goolies on the way home from work that day. Just by a randomer, like, nothing personal.
This just in: Check out the Bebo page.
This is not an official page its just a fan page for use who love o2 if you don’t like o2 then don’t leave bad comments because it will be reported and deleted
If this isn’t an embarrassing stab at viral marketing, then it is surely a sign of the impending apocalypse.
Recent Comments