New Year's Resolution

I got a fair way through writing a long and thoughtful New Year-related diatribe about the confusing challenge of remoulding one's life after university, but it ran out of steam and I also realised there are beers, musical instruments and lovely people downstairs, rendering the continued use of the internet tonight something of a sad waste, so all I will post tonight, for the record, is this:

My New Year's resolution is to do more sit-ups and press-ups each day than I managed the day before. These might sound like the shallow, vain actions of a man obsessed with his appearance, but anyone who has ever seen my hair or my clothes will know otherwise. It is simply because, although it is winter here, I'm off to Australia soon during what I assume will be roughly their summer, and I'd like not to be laughed at when I go to the beach. Luckily, I will be accompanied by the whitest man I have ever met, but it would be nice to have to rely on distraction techniques.

Time to go - Happy New Year, everybody.

Merry Generic Winter-Based Period Of Festivity, Everyone

Have you ever watched QI? I have, and it's hard not to trust Stephen Fry when he tells you something - he just has that sort of voice. So when Stephen revealed that "Winterval" was not, in fact, a rather silly, politically correct new word for Christmas, but a useful term specifically invented to describe a three-month period encompassing several religious festivals including Christmas, I believed him. After some brief and admittedly Wikipedia-based research, I have come to the conclusion that I was right to believe him - he was correct. If I had been on Birmingham City Council and had been instructed to put together a campaign to attract shoppers of all faiths to the city centre from October onwards, I think I'd try to find a less date- and faith-specific word than "Christmas" for the posters.
Strange, then, that Dr Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales, seems to be basing his Christmas message this year around the evils of the word "Winterval". Does he not watch QI? The sad thing is, he seems to be making some half-decent points, or at least attempting to participate in an interesting debate, but when his initial angle is "how crap is it that the word "Winterval" is being used to describe Christmas?", which it isn't, then it's hard to take him seriously.
I'm also a little aggrieved at BBC News for failing to point out the factual flaw in his statement. He said it led to situations such as councils calling Christmas "Winterval", schools refusing to put on nativity plays and crosses removed from chapels. OK, yes, he did say that, but when a large percentage of the readership are the sort of people who are predisposed to believe this sort of thing, isn't there a duty to point out that he is wrong? I might have written: He said it led to situations such as councils calling Christmas "Winterval", schools refusing to put on nativity plays and crosses being removed from chapels, although it should be noted that no council has actually called Christmas "Winterval" - the Archbishop made that one up. Less journalistic, perhaps, but less misleading, and notice I have actually improved the grammar from the original article by adding the word "being" (between "crosses" and "removed" - can I have a job, please, BBC?).
You know, while Wikipedia may have its faults, there is something reassuring about the way it works. If someone makes a contentious statement, a helpful if anally retentive single male will add a note saying "citation needed". If, after a while, no citation is forthcoming, the contentious statement is assumed to be bollocks and is removed. If, however, a suitable citation is supplied, the statement can be said to be a lot less contentious, and it stays. Gradually, in this way, some semblance of the truth about a given topic emerges through a multitude of fact-checkable statements. I often get frustrated that public speaking is not subject to the same process. Yes, uploading a speech as a Wikipedia article weeks in advance to allow its content to be verified would be time-consuming, inefficient and impractical, but it would at least be funny. OK, perhaps Archbishop Barry would only be made to drop the "Winterval" element of his rant, but imagine what would be left of a politician's speech...
Hello, I'm David Cameron[valid statement - see passport and birth certificate]. Thanks for listening.

Merry Christmas, Everyone

What with all this heartless consumerism and corporate brainwashing, it's easy to forget what this time of year is really about, so please join me in closing your eyes for a few moments and remembering just what tomorrow, December 25th, really signifies - the fact that it will be six months exactly until I get to see Radiohead live at Victoria Park.

Eh?

Banbury is a town in the South East or possibly the Midlands. It is situated at the northern tip of Oxfordshire, near the border with Northamptonshire. In no way could the town of Banbury be construed as being in, or even in the vicinity of, Wales. That last sentence may seem extraneous, but then you probably haven't been to Banbury recently and seen this advert on a phone box:


For those who can't (or can't be arsed) to make out the text on my blurry camera-phone image, this is an advert for the Welsh consumer advice centre. Were this an isolated incident, I could perhaps believe that there had been an error at the phone box advert distribution centre, and somewhere in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch there would be a teleffon booth extolling the virtues of Banbury's vibrant shopping centre, but does this look like an isolated incident to you?
No, it doesn't. Two adverts in Banbury town centre, and I can't rule out the possibility of others. I can only assume, therefore, that there has been a concerted effort by the advertising department of the Welsh consumer advice centre to reach the people of Banbury.
Why?! I am genuinely interested in this. Do the Welsh exit the valleys each year and travel en masse to Banbury for their Christmas shopping, only to later be disappointed by the shoddy English craftsmanship of the presents, and hence are in need of a sympathetic, Wales-based organisation to deal with such complaints? Or is it the other way around? Do Banbury folk take a trip to Cardiff in search of better deals and more variety, only to get their fingers burnt by knock-off electrical goods, and need a Welsh person at which to shout over the phone? If it's the latter, it seems odd that the Welsh have bothered to set up such a service, let alone advertise it so widely, but then I'm confused by the whole situation so I won't rule anything out just yet. Answers on a postcard.

Why?

I appreciate we are entering a new era of television, in which everything will soon be available on demand in super-duper high-definition bells-and-whistles whatever, but let's make something clear: in Hook Norton, that era has not yet arrived, and I'd appreciate it if, in future, the people in charge of television could understand this and act accordingly. The Mighty Boosh is one of my favourite television programs, in part because of the lavish way they approach the visual and musical aspects of the medium. When I'm watching the advance preview over the internet in cacky Real Player streaming quality, I can't help but feel I'm missing some of the point of the show. When I switch to the only alternative and watch the flickering black screen, complete with helpful "bad signal" error message, that constitutes BBC3 in rural Oxfordshire, with intermittent frozen images of Howard and Vince in bizarre tableaux doing something that looks like it might be very funny if they were actually, like, moving, I can't help but feel pretty pissed off. Perhaps Mr BBC feels we country folk wouldn't get the advanced, urban-flavoured irony of The Boosh? Perhaps he feels that repeating it later in the week on a channel I can actually receive would be wasting the valuable licence fees of hard-working city-dwellers? I guess this is how it feels if you disagree with the hunting ban, that knowledge that you're part of the rural minority who are bullied by the clueless smog-breathers, only with a less pronounced sense of being a total dickhead who tortures animals for fun. Hmmm, that was pretty unrelated, sorry. And yet somehow I've arrived at the end of my point.

Forgot To Write A Title For This One At First

Tonight, I am in a mildly tetchy mood. All things considered, life is good, and yet I have twisted my ankle and it hurts. Unfortunately, I can't expect any sympathy because I always come home from football on a Tuesday moaning about some minor injury, usually a knee, and the boy-who-cried-wolf thing has kicked in just at the point where I can't really walk properly. To add to this source of annoyance, the DVD of 'Seven' arrived at my house this morning from Tesco DVD Rental, and I decided to watch it after football, ankle on ice, expecting to love it. Except...many things stopped me loving it.

1. Radiohead's funny parody of the movie spoilt the ending - I won't link to it or give you any more details, just in case I spoil it for you, but it's on YouTube if you want to see it.
2. The film wasn't that good anyway - considering Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are both great, you'd expect a bit more chemistry.
3. I have a normal telly, so why would I want to watch the whole film in widescreen with most of the viewable area unused? Movies on TV seem capable of getting around this problem, so why can't DVD players? Well, my cheap one, anyway.
4. I've said it before and I'll say it again - DVD's get scratched, so why use them as a format? The closing voice-over, which may have been a great ending to the film, was rendered incomprehensible by the shitness of the DVD. I'm tempted to cancel my subscription to this Tesco DVD thing, based on the fact that it's a flawed system - if you're renting a DVD, you don't take care of it, and depending how unlucky you are and how many you rent, some are going to be unwatchable.

This really is a dull post tonight - sorry. It's also not going to get any better, because I was only moaning about the DVD because it vaguely leads into what I actually want to moan about - technology, and how it doesn't actually work. Things like computers, MP3 players, mobile phones and DVD players are all made by companies who are under pressure to get the latest features "working" as soon as possible. The upshot of this is that very little of it works to a standard that would have been acceptable back in the day (I'm guessing this - I'm not that old so I don't think I was alive back in the day, whenever it was). Things that don't really work properly:

1. Infra-red mice. The pointers shoot off all over the place on a whim, like a real mouse making a break for freedom.
2. DVD players. They skip.
3. Digital TV. The audio sync is crap, the colours are blotchy in random places and the signal sucks in my village.
4. Ipods. I don't have one, but everyone seems to tell me they break.
5. Nintendo Wii. The stupid wiggly stick is unreliable.
6. Mobile phones. Unreliable.
7. Windows Vista. Why can't it just automatically work with all my old soundcards and things? Why do I have to wait almost a year for new drivers? A year in which I can't use my soundcard?
8. Energy-saving lightbulbs. Granted, if you want to save the planet they're better than sitting in the dark, so I'll look the other way, but in case the people who make them are reading this, their colour is depressing.
9. MP3 download sites. They charge a lot of money for tracks that have lower audio quality than was achievable in the sixties.
   

Perhaps I should refocus this rant on the positives - here is my list of approved technology that works well and can be sold to the general public: LED's, USB memory sticks, mobile phone batteries, videos, audio cassettes, kettles, electric guitars, and Windows XP. This list is not definitive but it's a good start. I fear the pain in my foot may be distracting me from writing about interesting things.

One Month

Today is, or tomorrow will be, depending on when I finish writing this, the 18th of December. Not only does this mark one week until Christmas, and hence the point at which I should start thinking about buying presents, but it will also be one month exactly until I leave my job. I was going to call this a one-month anniversary, but anniversaries tends to celebrate events that have already happened - you don't get minus-one-year wedding anniversaries. Because of this, I have decided to invent the word "annireversary", a celebration of an upcoming event. Tomorrow shall be the one-month annireversary of the end of my very brief career in insurance. Hmmm, that doesn't sound right. I'm no expert on these things, but I'm guessing the "anni" bit of "anniversary" means year, in which case I can't really have a one month anniversary (let alone annireversary). I guess I could have one-twelfth of a year's annireversary, but then the 365 days of a year don't go into twelve too easily, so I'd have to celebrate it at some odd and specific time of day. Perhaps the solution is to shut up about the whole thing, although I stand by my new word - what better way to talk about upcoming World Cups or Olympic Games? Come to think of it, if "Olympic Games" is a phrase describing one summer's worth of Olympic activity, what is the plural? "Olympic Gameses"? Yes, now is definitely the time to stop talking about this.
I started this post, which I am happy to announce is now fairly long and rambling, thus allowing it to sit comfortably alongside its brothers, with the intention of talking about the fact that I am leaving my job in a month. I could actually do with another couple of weeks' wages before I go travelling, but as far as I can recall, I started working at this place in August, and five months is definitely long enough - I set my target quitting date a while ago and to move it back now would be cruel on me. While I was talking to a nice bloke this morning who works part-time at the company, I revealed that I was actually not an 18-year-old gap year student, but a grizzled 23-year-old with a Master's degree in physics. The mouth-agape reaction of "so why are you here?", and the fact that this is not the first such reaction, made me glad I'm nearly done. I'm very glad I've been brought up to be stingy (only just learnt how to spell that!), because it would have been very easy to spend the lion's share of the money I've earned, especially given my penchant for guitars and related paraphernalia. Oh man, there's some good synonyms for "stingy" - I am parsimonious with my earnings. I am miserly. I should use thesauruses more often. However, even with all this talk of saving money and being sensible, I am sorely tempted by a wind-up MP3 player. Tell me that isn't cool.

Thread

This blog almost has a plot. First a post about my accent, then a follow-up to relate it to the present, followed by a seemingly unrelated ramble about my vaguely forthcoming solo album but which now comes together with the previous two entries by virtue of this post, the one you are reading right now, even if this one does consist mainly of this first and rather pointless paragraph, along with what I intend to be a rather brief second and final paragraph.
This one. Oh yes, the point. You would think that someone who had recently written at reasonable length about how he disliked his accent would refrain from writing a track that consisted of two fairly lengthy verses of spoken word. You would think that, and you would be wrong. My excuse is that it sounded good in my head, but as my detention-happy schoolteachers would point out, my excuses are rarely worth considering. There I was last night, sat at this very computer with a ten-second drum-and-synth loop playing over and over in my headphones for perhaps an hour, typing lyrics into Notepad (old-skool), apparently imagining my voice had miraculously changed while I had been silent. Lyrics finished, I fired up the hi-fi and attempted a run-through, quietly but out loud. Ah - still painfully middle class. Didn't see that coming. Moron.

Solo

When I would write or play something a bit too avant garde (i.e. shit) with my band, the standard joke was that it was "one for the Bradshaw solo album". After more than four years of concentrating on producing stuff for the band, and given that it's hard to do much with a band that's spread across four different and non-adjacent counties, I've decided it's time to see what happens if I don't listen to anyone else - I'm making a solo album.
So far, it's not radio-friendly. The first track consists mostly of me strumming the nastiest-sounding chord I could find on a distorted bass guitar, augmented by a frantic drum machine and some deeply silly guitar work. I guess you could describe it as a funk-flavoured one-note-samba on crack. I haven't written the lyrics yet but the vocals are expected to be shouty, melodramatic, distorted and deliberately tuneless (the second of two vocal styles in my repertoire, the first being "accidentally tuneless").
I've also started on what is anticipated to be track three, the obligatory, ambitious, mildly epic six-minuter that eases the listener into the album proper after the two opening bangers. So far it's just swell guitar and a beat - I've reached the "orchestral breakdown" but can't be arsed to write it. The interesting thing about this album so far is that, if I keep going at this pace (which I won't, but anyway), I'll have easily finished the whole thing within three weeks. Don't watch this space.

Re: Accent

After my pretty thorough if subjective analysis of my accent the other day, I casually asked a friend recently whether she thought my voice was posh. The reply, "not really, it's just...normal", rather suggests that I sometimes spend too much time thinking about things.

Accent

I've always been quite aware of my accent. Where I live, in rural Oxfordshire, there appear to be two main accents: the fairly posh, middle class accent of the families who moved here because it's a nice place, and the only-subtly-different-from-the-broad-stereotype "farmer accent" of the families who actually come from here. At primary school, I always knew I was at the posh end of the scale, even if I didn't understand the reasons behind it, and I didn't like it. The boys I used to play football with tended to have the other accent, and over time I changed mine to fit in with them, partly consciously and probably partly not. I felt good about this, and liked the way I could greet someone with "orroyt" ("alright") instead of "hello" and not feel silly about it.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to just throw off my posh roots entirely. There were certain situations, such as talking to similarly middle-class relatives, when I instinctively slipped back into The Queen's English, meaning I now had two distinct accents. For some years, this was a satisfactory compromise, only running into problems when I had to speak in the presence of groups of people who weren't all expecting the same accent, leading to a weird posh-rural hybrid.
A new set of problems arose when my voice broke. Since it broke after pretty much every one of my friends', I had been compensating by trying to talk lower in my unbroken voice, but I think what must have happened is that I forgot to stop doing this when my voice actually broke, because to this day my voice has this stupid, artificially low tone that sounds like I'm trying to do an impression of someone with a lower voice. I think that if I hadn't been so bothered about people taking the piss, I might now have a charming, pleasant, soft English lilt, but I don't: I talk in an annoying, posh, rumbling squeak with random farmer words and the odd bit of street language thrown in. Then again, no-one likes their voice when they hear it on tape, do they?
Of course, as a singer (ha!) with an interest in sound engineering, hearing my voice on tape is an occupational hazard, and opens up a whole new can of worms. The label on this particular can of worms reads "you may have the ability to talk like Hugh Grant, Jethro or an odd mixture of the two, but not one of those three choices results in a singing voice that anyone will want to hear". I also only ever get through half a can of "you can't bloody sing" worms before getting a bit queasy and putting them in the fridge for another day. Of course, the standard thing for bad English singers to do is to put on an American accent, but Bad English Singer isn't a niche I'm really interested in; Alternative Indie Icon is really what I'm aiming for, which narrows my options down considerably. Do I put on a Cockney accent? It worked for Mike Skinner (aka The Streets), who is actually a brummy, but I'm not sure I could pull it off. Maybe something northern? Oasis, Stone Roses, Arctic Monkeys - none of them have to cover up their accent because being northern is cool, but a posh lad singing like a Yorkshireman or a Scouser sounds more like a recipe for bad comedy than good music.
So what am I left with? Well, it wouldn't be a post on this blog if I didn't mention Radiohead. They all grew up just a few miles from me and went to public school, so how does Thom Yorke manage to sound so cool when he sings? Perhaps it's the mumbliness, if that's a word, or his anger, his conviction, but something in his style of singing stops you from thinking "what is this posh twat moaning about?". OK, maybe some people do think that, but that's another story. I guess what I'm trying to say, if only because I'm fumbling around for a conclusion to this post, is that sometimes I have a good reason for trying to copy Radiohead when making music - they're a bunch of rural Oxfordshire musicians who figured out how to be cool.

I'm Sorry, I Won't Shut Up About Them

Radiohead. Yes, I'm still on about them. My full, double-vinyl, double-CD, beautifully, presented seventh Radiohead album arrived today, and I've been listening almost non-stop to the second CD (which wasn't available as a download like the main album). I was slightly worried that this second CD would just be the shite bits that were left out of the main album, but instead this is a brilliant, cohesive, standalone, well thought-out mini-album with at least three tracks that were clearly put on this CD because they belonged there stylistically rather than because they weren't good enough for the main album. I'd go so far as to say that CD2 is better than CD1, although why compare them when you can play them back-to-back? I'll do that when the time is right.
At least three quarters of my band are meeting up this weekend for a second shot at recording music on a canal boat. OK, so it didn't work before and this time around we have a day less to get things done, no material pre-recorded and a chronic shortage of heat and daylight, but we also have the experience of how not to go about this stuff, not to mention a fully battery-operated recording set-up. With only two acoustic guitars and some maracas, I doubt we'll reach the sonic brilliance of CD2's "Down Is The New Up" (menacing, apocalyptic strings and creepy piano) or "Bangers + Mash" (funk-rock gone wonderfully, manically wrong), but who knows, maybe we'll move a step closer to next year's much-anticipated second Ekkeko album which, for reference, currently looks something like this:
1.Stuck
2.For Disco Use Only
3.Waits
4.Ascend/Transcend
5.Nefyn Bay
6.Holmes' Song
These titles won't mean anything to anyone except myself, but I doubt it will look anything like that in a year anyway so it doesn't matter. Now it's bedtime.

I'd Like To Thank The Academy

So here it is, in all its shitly-encoded glory: my band's first foray into film fabrication (I was going to say film-making but the alliteration got the better of me). It's best watched in a cinema context, but until 21st Century Fox finalise the distribution deal this'll have to do.

Film Is Fun

I've been editing camcorder footage of my band's ill-fated attempt to record music on a canal boat. I've discovered two things:

1. Making films is really fun.
2. No bugger is going to want to watch this one.

Well, I might watch it now and again, and the rest of the band will probably quite like it, but that really is it. Unless we ever get famous, in which case the fans will love it. I discovered the band Eels today. I mean, I knew they were good and that I'd probably like them if I ever sat down and listened to an album, but now (like, right now) I am sitting down and listening to an album and, whether it's truly great or not, it's certainly right up my street. Like Grandaddy - probably not great but just my thing. Nothing much else interesting to say. Can't usually type while I'm listening to music, especially on headphones, and tonight is no exception.

Things To Look Forward To

Soon it will be Monday. Oh well. To counteract my feeling of impending Mondanity (no, that's not a word, but I like the way that it sounds like 'mundanity', making it more appropriate than the more obvious yet still presumably non-existent word 'Mondayness'), I present myself with...my list of things to look forward to.

Thursday November 29th - Get paid
Monday December 3rd - Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' discbox arrives
Thursday December 6th - Meet up with band on canal boat
Tuesday December 25th - Christmas
Monday December 31st - New Year's Eve
Friday January 18th - Quit job
February the somethingth - Leave continent and don't return until bank account empty

Felt the beginnings of a long-term bad mood brewing today, so dug out my emergency copy of The Shawshank Redemption. I try not to over-use this particular video for fear of diminishing its uplifting effect on my mood, but was happy to find it worked well today. More immediate alternatives to Shawshank for producing the same effect are the YouTube clips of Man United winning the 1999 European Cup or David Beckham's free kick against Greece to send England through to the 2002 World Cup finals, both in injury time. A more drastically cheery film would be It's A Wonderful Life, but this actually tends to move me close to tears and luckily I haven't ever been forced to use it for mood-adjusting purposes - I think I'd have to be dumped by Scarlett Johansson via a text message in the aftermath of a World Cup final defeat by Germany, on penalties, possibly accompanied by my cat being run over, to warrant a cheering-up of that magnitude. Have you watched it? It really is that heart-warming.

Tonight I am listening to early Weezer and a variety of Leonard Cohen. It's been a while since I bothered to post anything other than text, hasn't it? Well, here is a photo of me sitting on my bed, watching The IT Crowd on DVD - evidence that I could do with a haircut.

A Thought

Wouldn't it be cool to watch a vending machine dispense snacks from every one of its little coiled dispensing things simultaneously and continuously until it was empty? We're so used to seeing these machines vend one item at a time that I think it would really blow one's mind.

Hung Up

I can't stop listening to Radiohead. It's a problem. In the same way that Christians might struggle to comprehend a world without a single all-knowing, all-powerful God, so I struggle to make sense of music if I can't define one band as near-perfect. I know that I shouldn't see different bands as better or worse than one another, only different, but I'd be lying if I said that is how I view music. It helps me if I can believe that somewhere between OK Computer and Kid A was a theoretical perfect album, and In Rainbows was a very good attempt at realising it. It annoys me when magazines or websites make lists of the best albums or bands of all time and don't put Radiohead at number one. And yes, this is a very silly way of approaching music, but I can't help it. It doesn't stop me listening to other music and loving it, but it makes me feel more comfortable to maintain that there is one best band and that it is Radiohead.
I like this idea because it means my band, who like to rip off Radiohead for whole sets at a time, are probably heading in the right direction, and also that if we keep getting better, one day we will supersede Radiohead as the world's greatest band. Einstein didn't pull his theories out of thin air (insert Brownian motion joke here?) - he based them on the ideas of people like Newton, who had been the Radiohead of the scientific community of the 18th century. Or 17th. Or something. I dropped history in Year 9.

Oh

That wasn't supposed to happen. I'm not sure I can bring myself to type about it, but I certainly can't think about anything else. England will not be playing at Euro 2008. But at least this means Scott Carson won't be playing at Euro 2008. Nor will Wayne Bridge. I can only speak in short sentences. I am exhausted.
The one ray of sunshine - Jose Mourinho, England manager? He's the bookies' favourite.

Views On The News

Today I shall be passing comment on the notable events of Tuesday the twentieth of November. Well, not all of them. Two of them. Firstly...

Someone has lost a CD with a bunch of people's bank details on.
(Yes, I should write headlines.)
If you couldn't be bothered to click on that link, let me fill you in: the personal details of 25 million people were put on a CD by HM Customs...and now no-one knows where this CD has gone. Or something like that. The point, or at least my point, is that everyone appears to be blaming the wrong people for this. So far, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems have both given the government something of a bollocking about this, not to mention the flood of hatred towards Labour from the direction of the BBC's 'Have Your Say' pages. Apparently the missing CD is further proof that this government is incompetent and not to be trusted. It has been described as 'the last straw'. It is, without question, yet another colossal example of Labour being rubbish.
Hang on...what? I'm pretty sure Customs wasn't an invention of Blair's or Brown's. I'm also pretty sure it isn't staffed exclusively by members of the Labour party. Ergo, I'm pretty sure it's illogical to blame even an admittedly huge screw-up by employees working 'at a junior level' on the government of the day, however much you dislike them, because I see no reason why this wouldn't have happened under the Tories, the Lib Dems or the Monster Raving Loonies. I'm sick of this attitude of everything bad being the government's fault. Firstly, it's annoying to me because I think this government has done a lot of good things (yes, many bad things too, but that's another story), and I don't like the assumption by negative eejits that they've been one big disaster. Secondly, there's the Homer Simpson effect. Remember when Homer blew up the church with a home-made rocket?
Marge: This is the worst thing you've ever done!
Homer: You say that so often it's lost all meaning.
Well in this metaphor, Homer is the government and Marge represents every silly little opportunist looking to have a moan. And just to be clear, the blowing up of the church represents a very bad deed which the government may yet commit which we will be incapable of adequately condemning because Joe Public has used up his whinge allowance. Now onto another, more important story.

England! Football! Wembley! Tomorrow!
Illogicality annoys me, as I think I demonstrated in the first half of this post. Why then, do I not care about the following? Because Russia lost to Israel, England aren't that crap after all. It doesn't bother me because I'm just too excited about England qualifying. Let me set you a scene - a tired young man sits in a deserted pub in Cornwall, watching Matt Le Tissier talk on Sky Sports News about an England match the young man has just missed because the pub doesn't have the right Sky TV package. The man is drenched in beer because he slumped tiredly onto the bar at the final whistle and knocked over his almost-full pint, rubbing salt into the wound of the 2-1 defeat by Russia that left England staring failure squarely in the face. Many weeks later and this same man, again lacking the requisite Sky channel, is in his bedroom listening with tense excitement to Radio Five, who are commentating on the closing seconds of Israel versus Russia. It's one all. We are deep in injury time. A draw will make England favourites for qualification, but a Russian victory will all but eliminate us from the competition and it's Russia who are attacking. Israel are dead on their feet, they have nothing left to give. The crowd noise reaches a crescendo as the commentator shrieks, on the verge of breaking every heart in England, but no! It's hit the post! And suddenly, Israel are on the break - no, surely not...YES! GOAL! ISRAEL HAVE WON! IT'S ALL OVER! Oh, the man was me, by the way, and I hope I have demonstrated the depth of emotion he has been subjected to during this qualification campaign. He deserves to see his team go through. You know, I've rather lost my thread. The point of this whole post was that I wanted to show the England team I would pick for the final game against Croatia tomorrow (well, today now, I've passed midnight whilst writing this). My team is:

Robinson

Richards Campbell Lescott A. Cole

Beckham Barry Gerrard J. Cole

Crouch Defoe

That is all.

Counting The Days

When I wake up, it will be Monday. I mean, it's Monday now but that doesn't affect the accuracy of my first sentence. The point is, it's the start of another week at work. I don't hate my job, but it's hard to get too excited about taking credit card payments all day (unless fraud is your bag), so I certainly look forward to mid-January when I'm planning on knocking my job on the head and doing something exciting until my stack of hard-earned money (that's quite a satisfying cliché when you're talking about yourself) dwindles to the price of a ticket home from whichever country I end up in.
So anyway, what I wanted to do with this post was to get a statistical breakdown of the time I have left until work is over. Let's say I finish work on Friday January 18th 2007 - this basically gives me two months of work from today, or to be more accurate, 61 days (I think). I reckon this works out as nine five-day weeks, so that's 45 days of work. Man, that sounds like a lot. That's 360 hours. Weirdly, that doesn't sound so bad. Plus knock off a couple of (paid?) days for Xmas and that's even better. Perhaps a couple of extra days of holiday wouldn't go amiss to sweeten the deal. Perhaps going to bed earlier than this on a work night would make me happier at work.
Gah.

A Rant About People Who Rant

Have you ever been on the 'Have Your Say' section of the BBC News Website? Try it - it will make you sad. It will make you sad because when you see the most popular comments, you will realise they are all written by arses, and if these arses are in any way representative of people as a whole, then people as a whole are an arse. Based on these forums (fora), I would suggest the collective noun for humans be officially changed to 'arse-whole'.
Admittedly, the reason I instinctively think these people are arses is because their views on the world differ from mine, but I have had many a pleasant and stimulating conversation with nice people whose views differ significantly from mine, so I tend to discount this instinct and look for other reasons why these people suck. A lot of the people who post comments are clearly not the sharpest tools in the box but, again, this is certainly no reason to call them an arse. However, I believe people should have some sense of the intellectual level on which they operate. I, for instance, know that I should not attempt to participate in discussions about advanced mathematical concepts such as tensors and string theory, because my degree taught me that I'm just not clever enough. Sad as it may be, I think a lot of people should take a similar line with climate change - they should realise that it's over their heads and not attempt to wade into the discussion, guns blazing, armed only with the knowledge that climate change is bad and they don't like it.
Take this example from today's discussion:

The "Greenhouse Effect" is still a theory, even after 40 years of publicity and research. Why is it still a theory and not a fact? Because scientists cannot predict weather more than ten days in advance let alone 100 years in advance.

What about the melting of the glaciers? They have been melting for the last 6,000 years.

What about the rising sea levels? Research shows that sea levels have risen only in mm.

The FACT is that global warming is part of a natural cycle of the Earth.

Atif Darr, Bristol

Right, let's go through this point by point and try to pin down exactly why Atif is an alabaster retard (Mighty Boosh reference there in case anyone missed it).

Question: Why is the Greenhouse Effect still a theory and not a fact?
Answer: Because that's how science works - as you put a theory through more and more rigorous tests, it becomes more and more likely to be true, but while you can disprove a theory, you can never prove it. The theory of relativity, for example, is not fact - it's a theory, hence the name.

Stupid statement: Scientists cannot predict weather more than ten days in advance let alone 100 years in advance.
Flaw: Well, no, they can't say for certain whether it will be showery with sunny intervals on a given Tuesday in the year 2107, but that's slightly irrelevant since the theory of Climate Change states that the climate will change because of human activity. I could have come up with the theory of Weather Change, a theory that states that in the future, the weather may be different from how it was today. Weather and climate are two subtly different things, Atif, and I suggest you learn what they are before attempting to form opinions about them.

Oh, and the thing that most pisses me off about Atif's comment - his capitalisation of the word FACT in his final sentence, in that 'aha, you see, I am right' kind of way. Except... he has used this capitalisation to emphasise a final sentence which no-one is denying. Yes, global warming is part of earth's natural cycle. Who said otherwise? The point is that we humans may well be accelerating the process. Oh, sorry, Atif did actually address this point by quoting an irrelevant statistic and using the infallible phrase 'research shows'.
I guess there are two things that really annoy me about Atif's post and the many, many, many others like it. Firstly, having spent four years of my life learning just how meticulous scientists are when it comes to even the tiniest field of research, and knowing how much work I had to put in to produce a final dissertation that wasn't even anywhere near the standard of work accepted by scientific journals, it feels like something of an insult when people like Atif treat science as this set of statistics that you can pick from to back up your point, like a GCSE English essay where you go through a book looking for quotes to support the title of your essay, which you came up with on a whim and can't be arsed to change now because it'll feel like a waste. Yes, you probably can quote a bunch of passages from Romeo and Juliet out of context and persuade a sympathetic teacher to give you a C minus for your coursework about how Romeo actually fancied Mercutio (which may well be the case, I didn't pay much attention at school), but that doesn't mean you can do it in the real world when you're talking about complex science. And yet you can, and people take you seriously, which brings me to me second and perhaps bigger annoyance - Atif's post was the most popular in the discussion. Of the five-hundred-and-seventy-six comments published so far, this blatantly flawed bollocks was the comment where most people thought 'yes, here is a man who knows what he's on about'. But he bloody doesn't! If we are the most advanced species on the planet and we're still stupid enough to hail Atif "Smeg-For-Brains" Darr as having written the best comment in a sample of over five hundred people, how come the other animals can even walk?

I'm not sure how coherent all that was, but I think the comment was enough on its own to demonstrate why I'm annoyed. Briefly, to put things in context, I have two main opinions on climate change:

1. As a bit of a socialist, I hate the fact that corporations will do nothing to prevent climate change, if it is happening, unless there's something in it for them, and I hate the fact that petty right-wing people paint the whole situation as a left-wing conspiracy - peer-reviewed science papers can't hide political agendas in falsified results because they'd get found out when someone tried to reproduce the results. It's not a bloody conspiracy so play fair and debate this properly you greedy capitalist arses.
   
2. As a scientist (well, a guy with a physics degree), while I'm not yet totally convinced of the scale and speed of climate change, the overwhelming consensus seems to be that we are causing something to happen and it's bad - if this is the case, why is no-one doing anything? What are we waiting for?

Yes, I know my science and politics got a bit muddled there but I think I explained my stance. Wow, this post is long and a bit serious for my liking. Better stop now.

Aftermath

It has now been a good couple of seasons (think it was April) since my band "released" its début album. While all student bands around us were playing gigs and gathering followers, we were stubbornly sitting in cramped bedrooms with crackly, broken jack leads and cheap Dutch lager, hunched over guitars and laptops and microphones, banging our heads against walls and our sticks against drums because we had a vision. We didn't want to leave university with just a memory that we had once been in some sort of a band - we wanted physical proof.
After many, many months of occasional effort, we did something that deep down I'm not sure we believed we would ever get round to doing, and finished the album. It was proper album length, with proper artwork and came in a proper jewel case. To the casual observer, it was a proper album. But. It was shit.
No-one could put their finger on exactly why it was shit, but it was. Was it the fact that we just looped recordings of our drummer playing a couple of bars for most of the tracks, making recording a lot easier but sucking the soul out of each song? Was it the flat, lifeless vocals? Was it the dodgy mixing? Was it the lack of any stylistic consistency? Was it the sheer over-indulgence of a band who were so fascinated by overdubbing that any melody was drowned out by a synth-rock mush? I think it's a safe bet to say it's some combination of these factors, possibly with a few more thrown in.
A couple of months ago, my uncle played me an album his band had recorded at college in the seventies. It was pretty well-recorded but the main thing I liked about it was that it sounded like a proper band who enjoyed playing together. My band's album sounds like we've recorded it one instrument at a time, which we did. The thing is, recording a bad first album is a great thing, because unless we're complete muppets, we're not going to make the same mistakes again, and considering how many mistakes we made on the first one, surely a lot of the second will be bang on. Of course, it's perfectly possible that we are muppets who will make exactly the same mistakes again, and there's also nothing to stop us making some brand new and exciting mistakes that we never even thought of. Perhaps you should wait for album three.
P.S. Sad but true fact - I'm such a pessimist with the band that I have an outline of a plan in my notebook for our eighth album, because I'm not sure we'll be very good until then. Half-decent ideas prompt me to pick up a guitar and force out a song, but high-concept genius ideas end up on the 'album eight' page of my notebook.
P.P.S. When I say notebook, I mean like an A4 pad with pages, not a laptop. Seeing as the laptop is basically the successor to the original notebook, I find the name 'notebook' a very silly choice. It's like calling people apes or calling a whiteboard a blackboard. Then again, there's a certain elegance to this system. I like the fact that there is one Dalai Lama, one Pope, one king/queen etcetera. Perhaps this should be extended so that, for instance, Ryan Giggs would be called George Best and Thom Yorke would be called John Lennon. I wonder who I would be? Presumably most people, me included, would just be named after some unremarkable dead guy who happened to have a similar personality. Perhaps there could be some sort of renaming ceremony at, like, twenty-five? You know, some age when you're old enough for your personality to be pretty much set. Then if the system got properly established, in a couple of hundred years time it would be a sign of rebellious artistic arrogance if you kept your birth name beyond the age of twenty-five because you felt you were no-one's successor but were somebody completely original. I, for one, think that if this system had become part of the culture, I would feel those who bucked it were prats, because no-one is unique. You know your mate who you think is one of a kind? He's not. You just haven't met enough people. Even by my standards this post has lost its way, or at least forged an interesting cross-country path through nettles and brambles and cow-shit. Really, I should end this here.

An A-to-Z of Things I Like

Ale
Beatles
Cats
Dumplings
Elegance
Football
Gravy
House
Internet
Jazz
Kayaking
Lego
Mountains
Newton
Oceans
Pangea
Quiet
Radiohead
Simplicity
Taoism
Ultraviolet
Vortices
Wales
Yes
Zen

Yes, X is missing, but I felt 'xylophone' was a cop-out.

Rip-Off

Touch wood, I've never been ripped off too badly. I can't think of a time when I've bought something, got it home, then realised I've been done. This is partly because I'm very tight and check everything on the internet to find the cheapest price, but that doesn't stop me from feeling sorry for customers (read 'victims') of Wants second hand shop in Exeter.
Since last year, I have been the proud owner of a second-hand guitar amp. It's loud and heavy and complicated and could be mistaken by the untrained eye for an expensive piece of equipment. It contains all sorts of digital cleverness and it's hard to find a part of the unit that isn't adorned by at least ten billion flashing red LEDs, making this amplifier the ultimate meat in a sandwich between a naiive, excitable, guitar-playing window-shopper and a devious, unprincipled second-hand electronics salesman. I'm glad to say the aforementioned customer was not me - by the time I went into Wants on the occasion in question, I had already bought this amp. I know this because I remember thinking ooh, that's my amp - I wonder how much they're selling it for?
My first fear, that I had been ripped off when I bought mine over eBay, was allayed immediately - I had paid a lot less than this, but surely this couldn't be right; they were selling this amp for £350! Oh, sorry, the exclamation mark doesn't mean anything to you yet because you don't know how much the amp is worth. Well, let me set the scene. The amp in the shop had two dials missing, which immediately triggered alarm bells because my one seemed pretty indestructible. Given the level of abuse the amp must have taken to lose two dials, you would certainly put the price for this one somewhere under the price of a brand new amp, but then you're not a devious, unprincipled second-hand electronics salesman, are you? If you are, I've heard there's a new fad called not being a dick - you should try it some time. Anyway, for your information, the price of my amp, brand new, would have been £190. The price of mine, a pristine, second-hand-but-never-gigged model, the only damage to which was the array of horrible nu-metal guitar tones with which the previous owner had dirtied the amp's memory bank, was...£110. So, just in case I haven't milked this enough, which I'm not sure I have, let's recap. A fundamentally identical amp to mine but in worse condition was on sale in Exeter for over three times what I paid for mine, and nearly double the price of a brand new one.
But this isn't the saddest part of the story. The saddest part of the story is that when I next went in the shop, the amp had gone. I'd love to believe that it was gone because Trading Standards had stopped by and taken the amp away, or that someone had walked into the shop one day and, having pointed out the obvious and honest mistake in pricing the amp, had bought it for the £90 it was worth. Thing is, I don't believe that. I think someone bought it for £350, and that makes me sad.
Actually, there are two even sadder aspects to the story. The first is that I didn't point out to the proprietor just what an arse he was being. The second is that, when I'm playing some mean blues with a creamy distortion and a touch of delay through my twin 50W speakers, I feel a bit smug.

Tea Gone Cold

Just found a cup of tea I'd forgotten about from forty minutes ago. It was half full, which is annoying, because that's quite a lot of tea. See, it's not always the optimist who claims a glass (or mug) is half full - I could have reasoned that at least the cold mug of tea was already half empty, so it wasn't such a waste. I like the fact that I like tea. Like my passion for (or, more accurately, tolerance of) folk music, it makes me feel like I belong in this country, like I have an identity. Real ale, that's another thing. And queuing, I'm great at queuing.

Travels: The Planning Begins

Until tonight, I was apprehensive about the almost-imminent fun half of my gap year because my plans were aimless in the extreme. Now, however, I'm still mildly apprehensive but also quite excited. After a conversation with a friend in a similar but less advanced state of disorganisation, we have decided to team up and have picked a start destination of....New Zealand. After that it's anyone's guess, but it's good to have a starting point. Yes, I'm aware that this information is not interesting to anyone except myself but this is not one of those posts that you can read and will thereafter be enlightened in the ways of life - this is a post for me. It helps me to write stuff down (or, you know, type it), so that's what I'm doing.
So, THE TRIP so far (very, very roughly):

• New Zealand
  
• Australia
  
• Canada
• USA
• Iceland

You may look at this list, as I have, and think that it appears to be a list of English-speaking countries with a weird one tacked on the end for the sake of diversity. I was trying hard not to notice this, but now that I've mentioned it it seems too late not to analyse these odd choices. Basically, I struggle to see how I could visit the first four of these countries without having a good time. The fifth one is on there because whenever I see Iceland on TV, it looks desolately beautiful, as if it were the image in God's imagination when he made North Wales, but couldn't quite do it justice. That sounds like a dig at North Wales, but it's not. I love North Wales. I digress. Yes, I have picked four English-speaking countries and if these five countries represented my whole trip, people would probably say 'um.......that wasn't very adventurous, was it?', and I would look all hurt. But....perhaps instead of breaking it into five like that, I should break it into four like this:

• Australasia
• North America
• Iceland
• Some other place TBC

That list's only half English-speaking (providing I don't pick South Africa or Eire or somewhere for my last one) although admittedly, if I do it in that order, the people I encounter won't stop speaking English until I've gone most of the way round the world and am not far off the coast of Scotland. The truth is, although it appears to be the law for gap-year students to visit Thailand or India or South America, I'm not really sure I want to - I think it's that simple. I like to know vaguely what I'm going to be doing when I get somewhere, and in the places on My List, I do know. I realise that seasoned travellers are probably shouting at the screen because I've missed the point of travelling, but I am not a seasoned traveller - I'm a shy bloke who wants some guaranteed fun. I'm sure I'll still have lots of adventures, and remember, the list isn't final...

Things To Do In Birmingham - Part 1

Welcome to my new occasional series: Things To Do In Birmingham. So far, I can heartily recommend The Yardbird jazz club. I know that people who watch live music a lot say that it's the only way to watch music, but usually they're wrong, what with albums being great as well. Except for jazz. There's nothing really wrong with recorded jazz, but the experience is enhanced so much when you see it live that I'm either going to stop listening to jazz on my hi-fi or I'm going to start going to more jazz gigs.
Right, typing that paragraph has brought something to my attention. Regular readers may recall that recently I was moaning about my fingers going all soft and me not being able to play guitar as much as I'd like. Well, after an enjoyable jam with my cousin on electric guitar today, I have just found a blister on my right index finger. What has happened to me?!
Damn, this isn't an interesting post.

Comparison

I'm feeling nostalgic and a little bit sad, yet also strangely hopeful. Before I started writing this blog, I had another one, bits of which I've been reading tonight. It differed from this one in many ways: this one has capital letters, this one makes an occasional effort to be mature, this one holds back on the swearing, this one doesn't need to be kept secret...and yet this one doesn't chronicle a fun life. It doesn't record the thoughts of a naiive amateur rockstar student who throws caution to the wind - it records the thoughts of a whining arse of a Master's graduate who is living at home. Gigs and after-parties have been replaced by folk clubs and tea. Reckless nights out have been replaced by driving to the pub for a coke. Mornings have stopped being a theoretical concept, while females have become one.
But this is good.
I already knew I was miserable, but now I have a focus for my travels. I remember the feeling I want to recreate, and if I can't figure out how to be reckless and young with a passport and five grand then I should probably send back my degree with a note explaining my dumbitude. Yeah, that's right, I made up a word. That's the sort of thing a crazy 21-year-old would do. He wouldn't give it a second thought, he'd just do it and then look at you with a rock 'n' roll expression, as if to say "Yeah? What are you going to do about it, Mr. Dictionary?". Oh, I forgot, I'm not there yet - still in boring mode and have work tomorrow. but sod it i'm going to rebel and not put any cApItAL LetTeRS @ ALL in this sENTence. And yet I did anyway! What?

Fate?

God doesn't want me to play guitar. That is all I can surmise from the fact that my renewed interest in furthering my skills on said instrument has coincided with what medical professionals probably don't call 'bathfinger', but I do. My fingertips have started going all soft and flaky, to the point where I had to use a couple of plasters to play acoustic at an open mic set the other day. Normally I'd just shrug and pick up my Telecaster or sit down at the keyboard instead, but Jools Holland chose this week to introduce me to Kaki King, a wonderful guitarist whose technique requires vigorous use of every finger and thumb on seemingly every part of the guitar. Below is a video of her being far too good for her own....good.



I'm all about showing off on the guitar after a couple of pints and something like this would be a nice addition to the standard beer-bottle-slide routine.

London Buses

I'm writing this post, in the same way as many of the others, mainly for myself. I'm trying to think of careers that I might like, and I'm brainstorming criteria for such careers. In no particular order:

• No shirt and tie. I value scruffiness - even my current job, which allows me to wear Vans and a hoody, feels a bit stuffy to me because of the no-jeans rule.
• Not having to talk to the public. I've tried changing, but I think I'll have to live with the fact that I'm shy and don't like people until I know them. Ideally, my upcoming travels abroad will transform me into a bubbly, outgoing person, but probably safest to assume not.
  
• Not working for the man. I'm not necessarily looking to save third-world babies from melting ice-caps or anything, but if I could avoid the more obviously evil corporations it would be nice.
• Time off. Stating the obvious, perhaps, but holidays are nice.
• Involving music in some way? OK, this feels like the extra search term you put into eBay that you know is going to wipe out any chance of a result, but sod it, I can hope.

I'm sure there was more, but I'm tired. I didn't go to bed after the lost post. That was silly. Work tomorrow innit. Before I wrote this list, 'teacher' was top of a very short shortlist. It has now cemented (or perhaps pritt-sticked) its place there, possibly because I subconsciously let that particular career guide the above bullet points (apart from number one - I don't think teachers can be too scruffy, but it's a different ethos so I'll except it). Still very, very open to ideas though.

Formats

In the future, I think you'll be able to identify the era in which you grew up (or "the era up in which you grew"?) by how you like your data. Me, I'm a cassette and video man. A few years later and I might have formed a bond with CD and DVD for albums and films respectively. I hope, though, that this isn't the case and that I am not just blindly drawn to nostalgia, because I believe I have a good reason for my choices:
Tapes and videos may not have had the best quality in the world, but the quality was good enough. Even now, when I watch a video, I don't think "thank God for DVD, this quality is awful". No, in fact, I don't think about the medium at all, which is a good thing. I hit 'play', fast-forward through the logos and things, and then forget about the fact that what I'm watching is now considered obsolete technology. When I watch a DVD, on the other hand, I get myself all riled up. For starters, I can't skip the crap at the start - technology means "the man" can force me to sit through a variety of copyright messages that I make a special effort not to give him the satisfaction of reading, followed by a logically flawed short film about downloading in which I'm asked: "You wouldn't steal a car, would you? So why would you steal a movie?". "Well", I reply to no-one in particular, "I might download a movie because, unlike a tangible, physical object such as a car, a movie is simply information that can be copied without erasing the original". Yes, it's still illegal because I'm getting something for free, and it's probably not morally wonderful, but the comparison with car theft just doesn't work. Damn, I've gone all tangential - back to the problems with the actual DVD.
Once I've finished fannying about with unskippable pre-movie rubbish (I include over-elaborate menu screens in this), I start watching the actual movie. For a while, I'm impressed by its visual sharpness compared to my preferred format, but soon the rented (ie. scratched) DVD begins to skip and I stop caring about how clear everything is because however clear it is, it's still bloody unwatchable and I don't remember this being a problem with videos. The worst case was a recent film in which the plot built steadily to a presumably beautiful, emotional climax that lasted about two minutes - the two minutes that were rendered unwatchable by a scratch. Of course, once we hit the scratch, the player got very confused and stubbornly refused to rewind and have another go. Cue the off-and-on-again treatment for the wretched machine, followed by a navigation of the movie via the menu's 'scene selection' utility - a utility which helpfully gave away the ending with pretty preview pictures of each scene, including the one after the one in question. If you had mentioned the beautiful sharpness of the image to me at this point, I would have shown you the beautiful sharpness of a kitchen knife to the belly.
Perhaps I'm taking something of a subjective view of this, but to me a video is centred around providing you with the film - the thing you wanted to watch when you bought or rented it. You hit play, you watch the film, the film ends, and however much you bash the video about in between, the same thing will happen next time.
Of course, the format is actually perfect. Why sell films on chunky, reliable, expensive-to-produce videotapes that will last forever when you can knock out lightweight plastic discs for next to nothing, wait ten years until a slightly higher resolution format appears and everyone's original copy is scratched to buggery, add some pointless gimmicks like commentary or a making-of film, call it a 'box set' and sell them the same bloody thing again? Genius.
However, just imagine for a minute that we lived in a perfect world, a world in which stuff was good. Imagine a slim plastic square, roughly the dimensions of a CD box. A protective flap guards a digital connector. You insert the plastic square into the player. When the flap is lifted inside the player, the player can connect to what is inside the plastic square, which is....technology. It doesn't matter what. Some kind of memory. The point is, this plastic square format can keep getting better - you just brief the engineers to fit as much memory as possible into the box. So far, two problems solved: no need to change your player every time the film studios decide you need more pixels and no easy way of damaging the data. Next, instead of putting unskippable crap at the start of the movie (and this is the really clever part, so pay attention), you.....don't. You just don't. Radical, I know, but perhaps in ten years when blue-ray and HD-DVD are declared obsolete, the powers that be will realise that my idea is what everyone really wants. But it's not about what we want, is it?

Epilogue: Crikey, that was quite a long one. I was going to have an early night but the anger just flowed. An issue that didn't seem to fit into the rant was that I hate the way we're being brainwashed into paying for music downloads that are nowhere near CD quality. Music should be uncompressed and the internet just isn't fast enough for that yet - hold your horses, download industry. Oh yeah, sorry for my bad use of single and double quote marks - I'm pedantic as hell about some areas of English, but for some reason I've never understood quote (or quotation?) marks, and I felt like I used them a lot in this entry. If someone could explain, I'd be most grateful. Finally, it's late so I haven't read through what I've written. I bet it makes no sense. On a personal note, my life is very boring right now, which is why I'm reduced to talking about data formats. As soon as something interesting happens, I'll let you know, unless lots of interesting things happen, in which case I'll be far too busy doing interesting things to sit on the internet alone, typing things for strangers to not read. BED.

Best Of

This blog isn't very exciting, visually. I'm happy enough with the colour scheme but I could do with a few more photos and videos. Ooh, I just thought of a fun thing to do: since my taste in music seems to have changed a lot over the years, why don't I make a list of what I think was probably my favourite band in each year of my life? I see no argument against this. Motion carried...

This list is chronologically vague but also at least vaguely representative of my taste. Also, check out my video-embedding skillz!

1984 (birth) to 1989: Only dimly aware of music
1990: Michael Jackson
1991: The Simpsons (no, really, they were good - check out the video below)

1992: Bryan Adams
1993: John Denver
1994: Simon and Garfunkel
1995: Babylon Zoo
1996: Dodgy
1997: Oasis
1998: Talvin Singh
1999: Moby
2000: Show of Hands (prefer other songs but couldn't find a decent video)

2001: The Beatles
2002: Simon and Garfunkel
From this point on, I had a student loan and a fast internet connection, so I have allowed myself two bands per year to represent the increased amount of music I was experiencing.
2003: King Tubby / Taj Mahal
2004: Pink Floyd / Yes
2005: Grandaddy / Bright Eyes
2006: Radiohead / Leonard Cohen
2007: Bob Dylan / Guillemots


If I was the sort of person who ever put any effort into anything, I'd make a compilation CD with all these bands on. But I'm not. The interesting thing about this list is firstly that it very closely follows the style of songs I've been writing over the past few years, and also that it shows an alarming lack of interest in anything beyond rock and acoustic music. I sense 2008 will be a jazz and classical year.

Still Alive

Disclaimer: have had some beer.

Played at an open mic night tonight. Being young is fun, but (relatively) old people can be fun to be around. They buy you pints without wanting one in return, they compliment your set when you know you sucked....they're just very nice people. You know what? That's all. Sometimes I don't have much to say, especially after a goodly measure of exceptionally fine Hook Norton ale.

No God, but god (yes I mean it to be that way round and the comma is also intentional)

Sometimes I don't feel motivated to write much. Tonight is one of those nights. However, I will say that my exercise regime is going better than expected. Three days gone, one (short) after-work bike ride and one (knackering) game of five-a-side. Oh, and a rest day. On which I ate too much. Still, I did briefly (before a meal) get down to eleven-and-a-half stones, which is half a stone less than my usual weight, and the fruit-eating has been going pretty well. Damn, this has become a boring corner of the internet. On the subject of the internet, my band is now the second-from-top when you Google it, just one place below the site about the god after which it was named. The Beatles once (were erroneously said to have) claimed they were bigger than Jesus, but Ekkeko (that's my band) may soon be bigger than (the relevant, if admittedly minor Incan) god. Without brackets, that sentence reads: 'The Beatles once claimed they were bigger than Jesus, but Ekkeko may soon be bigger than god.' Admittedly, without the brackets, it doesn't make sense unless I write God with a big 'G', but having attended a C of E primary school, I'm too scared that God might exist to risk making such a claim. Incan small-G gods, on the other hand, seem diluted by their numeracy and South America is a long way away, so I feel safe blaspheming against them. I should stop talking before I come full circle and start making sense.

Utopia #1

Sometimes, being right isn't enough. I mean, it's fairly clear to me that organised religion is a fairly dodgy concept, but if I said it should be banned, I would rightly be called a bit of an arse. I also know that Jim Davidson is a racist tit, but to ban his "comedy" would be a bit shaky, freedom-of-speech-wise. When right-wing people discuss their ideology, they believe in freedom, in not being forced to do things even if they are well-meaning, because that choice should be theirs. To me, the fundamental freedom to be greedy is a slightly odd foundation for a philosophy, but whatever, I think I've found a solution that will suit everyone: voluntary dictatorships.
Instead of getting everyone to vote for one government which no-one ever seems happy with because of all the compromises they have to make for the sake of pleasing everyone, let's split the country into, say, three bits. The south is traditionally conservative, so down there we'll have snipers at Calais for the immigrants, compulsory hunting of fluffy animals and tax breaks for the pink-shirted. These measures would be imposed by a permanent, unelected government, as would the differing measures in the north, such as a blanket ban on Pimms, total relaxation of all drinking laws and a re-introduction of smoking in pubs. The third zone, which might end up covering Greater London, would retain democracy, in case anyone couldn't choose between the northern and southern extremes.
A more advanced system might be divided into counties, giving a numerically huge choice of cultures. Leicestershire might be designated the county in which all drugs were legal, while Lancashire might only go as far as turning a blind eye to weed. Warwickshire might choose to operate Sharia law, while Devon could choose to ban all Muslims, and for those looking for a more moderate approach, Gloucestershire wouldn't be bothered either way. If you haven't grasped the genius of this idea yet, let me clarify.
Under our current system of democracy, there are two realistic options when it comes to voting: Labour or Conservative. These two parties are very similar in many ways, and very vague in their ideologies. This, coupled with the fact that it takes far less than 50% of the public vote to get elected, means that most people won't get to live under the government they voted for, not that they felt any particular affinity for them anyway. Under my system, you "vote" by moving to the county that most suits your beliefs and lifestyle. Instead of two choices, you get....fifty? And you can't lose the election! It's like magic. As inventor of this system, I would like to start by naming myself king of Gwynedd, North Wales. Policies will be posted on here as and when I think of them, but rest assured you'll have to salute the cover of OK Computer in the morning.

Training

Being this lazy is difficult. Obviously, I don't mean it's difficult to be this lazy, but rather being this lazy creates difficulties, if you see what I mean. One difficulty is keeping fit: I'm not particularly lazy in the physical sense, and am quite happy when playing football or riding my bike, but because I'm mentally lazy, I struggle to motivate myself to do these things in the first place. This last week, however, I find myself having properly exercised for seven days running. The first four days of this regime consisted of surfing, which wasn't that strenuous for me because I like to mess around in the shallows where the waves are more frequent and hence I don't do much paddling, but I was in the water for a good few hours a day so I think it did some good. Normally, these four days would have been an isolated blip in my imaginary exercise diary, but surfing with a friend who wants to join the Marines and warms up every morning with silly numbers of press-ups has a habit of making one feel a bit guilty for neglecting one's body. Hence, in the days since coming back from Cornwall, I have been cycling and walking. Walking long-ish distances with hills and stuff, that is. It counts.
Coupled with this new promise to myself to get out of breath at least once a day, I have started eating fruit as a snack. Normally I'm a crisp person, or maybe cheese and digestives, but this week I've been getting through a couple of apples and a banana a day, which is impressive when considering that I don't even like fruit - I think of it as medicine to stop me eating nice, bad things. The reason that I started off this post with a mention of my mental laziness, however, is that I'm not sure I can continue this lifestyle. Tomorrow (a.k.a. today, since it's now after midnight), I go back to work after a week off. Work begins just forty minutes after I get up and ends not long before it gets dark, so cycling, my preferred activity, is off the menu unless I make a special effort to get up early. Breaking up a Sunday afternoon of sofa-warming with a leisurely, unhurried cycle through the countryside is one thing; forcing my zombie self to face a frosty October morning ride with a strict deadline is quite another. But...
My life is changing. I have a job for pretty much the first time. I am going travelling alone for the first time. Today I watched a Grand Prix from start to finish for the first time (note to self: don't bother again). If all this is changing, perhaps I can stick to a routine after all? Sod it, here goes, this is my plan for this week:

• MONDAY - No exercise, stayed up too late writing this blog entry to make an early bike ride a sensible option, but that's OK because without this post I wouldn't be doing any exercise anyway.
• TUESDAY - Pre-work bike ride: 30 minutes.
• WEDNESDAY - Same again, but 45 minutes.
• THURSDAY - The big target: an hour.
• FRIDAY - An hour again. Is this too silly?
• WEEKEND - Do some biking if free.
• MISC - Do a few sit-ups throughout the week. Try and manage one press-up after miserable collapse in presence of laughing wannabe Marine mate. Bit of football if opportunity arises.
• FUTURE WEEKS - Buy some weights. Genetics and lack of use have conspired to give me the arms of an eight-year-old girl.
  

Sometimes, this blog is for me more than you, especially since I'm not entirely sure you exist.

Transition

Song-writing is difficult when you don't have anything about which to write songs. I don't think it's rocket science - when you're in love it's probably easier to write a love song and when you're pissed off it's easier to write an angry song. The problem is that right now, my life isn't really suited to writing songs. It's hard to write a song about the mundane chore of going to work unless you want the song itself to sound mundane. I always have this undercurrent of things I believe and want to write songs about, like politics, philosophy, what's wrong with the world, all that stuff, but when your views on the world are pretty constant and your lifestyle isn't much different, it's hard for a spark to come.
Today I cycled to a wood near my house and lay on my back, looking up through the branches, trying to shift my perspective a bit, but I couldn't detach the setting from my everyday life - I knew I'd just cycled there and I knew how to get back, and that stopped me from feeling much different. Was nice anyway, though. I guess I'll have to wait until my travels start before my songs get any good. Until then, maybe I'll learn some new chords.

Back Again

As I've (probably) said before, I don't like to write about the day-to-day dullness of my life on here, but the last few days have been pretty interesting, so I'll compromise and post a few sentences and a photo. In short, I went down to Cornwall with my mate (in a mini - great car) and had a great few days of surfing, in which I steadily got back up to the (admittedly low) standard I had reached a couple of years ago, the last time I did much surfing. I'm a great lover of the UK as a holiday destination, and I think this photo (of me sanding down a repair to my board, in case you're wondering) is proof that I know what I'm on about - peaceful camp site, great waves, beautiful view. Awesome.


There, done that, back to nonsensical rambling. But not now, it's a bit late and I'm tired. Come on England. Hmmm, I use the word 'great' a lot.

Off Again

Ironically (no, that's probably the wrong word, but anyway), just as the post strike ends, my posts stop. For a week. I'm going surfing. It's going to be great. England are in the Rugby World Cup final. Jonny is a hero. Again. Life, in short, is good. Not least because:

Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize. The man who was, by some murky method, denied the presidency of the most powerful country in the world, but didn't let it get him down - instead, he went and made the most important film in history, about the biggest problem in the world. Half of that last statement might be hyperbole (I only just realised that's probably where the word 'hype' comes from - duh). Better go, things to do. The point was: Al Gore = my kinda dude.

Folk

I went to a folk club the other night, meaning I was sat in a room, drinking a pint of Hook Norton Best Bitter, with a variety of musicians and music-lovers, listening to them play songs and playing a few of my own. I worry that I am becoming not just middle-aged but whatever comes next, because I have to say that my evening at the folk club was very agreeable. Pleasant would be a good word. Excuse me if this post doesn't flow too well - I'm listening to In Rainbows for about the fifth time since I got it, and I can't multi-task. Anyway, my point (will that become a catchphrase?). While not all of the music at the folk club was necessarily to my taste, it was certainly emotive. Maybe it's because more tragic things happened back in the days of yore when real folk songs were written, or maybe it's because it's so fashionable to wrap one's lyrics in metaphor upon metaphor out of fear of someone finding out that the meaning really wasn't worth writing a song about in the first place. Either way, I can't think of very much modern music that makes me feel as emotional as 'My Bonnie' or 'Fields Of Athenry'. For pedants, yes, the latter was written in the seventies, but it is a folk song and is set in the nineteenth century so I think it proves my point. My ideal sound for a new album would be to fuse the wonderful production and arrangement ideas of Radiohead with gut-wrenching folk lyrics, but something tells me that I won't be able to move far enough from the insecure metaphor bollocks to write decent folk songs. Still, worth a try. I'll be going to the folk club again next month, and possibly to another different one in between. For the record, my three chosen songs to play on Monday were:
Girl From The North Country by Bob Dylan - went down OK despite me forgetting one or two verses. Warm and friendly applause.
Slide Song by Ekkeko (my band) - a mistake, given that the song's main gimmick is that it is played with a slide (which I didn't have). Stumbled over the lyrics when I attempted to replace a mild swear word that I had just realised was in there. Polite applause.
Cousin Jack by Show Of Hands - as close to a crowd-pleaser as I was going to get. People sung the chorus! I even attempted a breakdown section where I let the chords ring silent and tapped the rhythm on the echoing body of the guitar; if only I hadn't chosen that point to balls up the chords.
For future performances, I think I'll give myself more than 30 minutes' preparation. It's probably not very rock and roll to sit in your room at weekends learning lyrics and chords, but then folk isn't rock and roll. Unless you're Dylan. And I want to be. Arse.

Waiting

My confirmation e-mail has not arrived. Until it does, no Radiohead album for me. Where is it? How do I live on until it arrives? Answers on an e-postcard.

Hype

There was once a time when it was easy to identify the best band in the world, if not in absolute terms then at least the band which would win such a vote from the general public. The Beatles are the obvious example, with Elvis perhaps as a forerunner and maybe Led Zeppelin later, although my knowledge of musical history is not wonderful. Now, however, I'm not sure. Q magazine yesterday awarded the title of 'best band in the world today' to Arctic Monkeys, a slightly silly notion considering the limited global appeal of simplistic (if good) Sheffield indie-rock. Oh dear, I've fallen into the trap of thinking I know everything...but wait! That was the point. I know I'm not necessarily the one person who is "right" about good and bad music, but it's fun to think I am and to align myself with particular bands and movements. Radiohead, for instance, are tentatively (or sometimes bluntly) put forward by various journalists as the best band in the world today, with little hint of irony, and although I'm sure there is no "best band", it's fun to pretend there is. It's fun to believe the hype, because if you don't, Wednesday October 10th is just another day, while for hype-believers, it's the day that the best band in the world release a much-anticipated album. No, that was some lacklustre hype. Try this.
We live in an exciting time. Classical music, folk music, jazz, rock, rap, techno...they've all left their mark, but each of these is either dead or fading. It's been years, perhaps decades since a sustained period of innovation in music, but that shouldn't be cause for mourning; instead, think of this as the calm before the storm, the lull you use to paddle out your surfboard before the big waves come. Radiohead, the one band with the power to combine everything that has come before into something truly beautiful, are releasing a new album. Radiohead, the band who created Britain's best ever album (OK Computer, according to a Channel 4 poll, and I like Channel 4 viewers). Radiohead, the band who are, according to the BBC, "regarded by some music critics as the world's best rock band". Radiohead. Radiohead. Radiohead. This may be the greatest album of all time.
Now that's hype, and though it may be half exaggerated and half plain wrong, that's what is going through my head because when I listen to it, I want to believe I'm listening to something momentous. Like the England football fan I am, I believe hype is good.

So Near

Sometimes I spend a fair while writing a long post, only to discover it makes no sense. Tonight was one of those nights, and this is not that post. It has joined its directionally challenged brothers in computer limbo, saved with the intent of one day being rewritten but never to be read again. RIP, semi-interesting rant against such unrelated phenomena as capitalism, NME and my own bizarre principles; I wish I'd understood you better.

Bad Poem And Worse Title

I had something to say,
But it got lost on the way
To this electronic node
On a lonely sparking road
In the internet.

My train of thought was peaking
At that certain time of evening
When I tend to type my hardest
Forcing words into this tardis
Called the internet.

But now I've hit delete
Tempted by my tempting sheets,
Although counter-intuitively
I'm still here at one thirty
On the internet.

And I've stretched this to four verses
But the rhymes are getting worses,
And the rhythm's drifted to the point where I've forgotten how many
(If any)
Lines are supposed to be in each verse and syllables in each line
But I guess that's fine because at least it's not real it's just another few insignificant kilobytes
Of the internet.

The Gold At The End Of The Rainbow

Deep.......breath. Calm. ADRENALINE! ADRENALINE! No, calm. Come on, now. Calm. EXCITEMENT! ONLY NINE DAYS! No. Caaaaaaaaaalm. Calm. Calm. There, I think that's done it.
The new Radiohead album, 'In Rainbows', will be available to download on October 10th and I can't wait. The songs I have heard so far (on badly recorded YouTube videos of Radiohead gigs) are amazing, and I can't wait to hear the finished product. The only problem I now have is that I had just got myself into a song-writing mindset and was ready to embark upon some Bob Dylan/Leonard Cohen-esque acoustic material, but now the Radiohead album is going to mess with my head. I'm not disciplined enough to be able to listen to a (presumably) ground-breaking new album and not want to copy it. Oh, that reminds me of something.
Whilst on a wild goose chase with the drummer and guitarist from my band, I came up with an idea for the artwork and title of our next album. The cover photograph would feature the four members of the band, standing in a desolate, brown, arid field, each with our instrument slung over our back (or perhaps a pair of drumsticks in the pocket of the drummer). Each of us would be poised with a different tool: a pitchfork, a hoe, a shovel, a pickaxe. The lonely, rural dusk of the setting would be juxtaposed against our arrogant, indie stares as the diminutive, superimposed, hand-scrawled title in the bottom right of the picture read: "GROUNDBREAKING". Needless to say, I was voted down on this one.

In Short

My early posts on here were long and frequent. Then they became long and infrequent, partly because I kept getting half way through writing these long posts and deciding they were of no interest to anyone. I feel that if I change my style to short and frequent, I shall be able to post more words per day on average because nothing will be discarded. I might try for the odd long one if the subject grabs me, but I just thought I'd let you (the imaginary reader) know that the switch is intentional.
So.
I heard about a writing competition in my vicinity, with the admirably wide-ranging brief of submitting 1,000 words of poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction on any subject. Apparently the competition is dedicated to the memory of a local man who wanted to encourage "good readable writing"; I can't help noticing that this phrase should probably feature a comma, and a more proudly pedantic person than myself (if one exists) might well see fit to write his piece on this very subject, but I'm attempting to mellow as I get older and as such am going to assume that the comma was supposed to be there all along.
Anyway, the point was not the comma. That in itself sounds like the start of some silly discussion on punctuation marks. The point was not the comma, and the full stop is not a point. See? But no, I'm being very silly now. The point, by which I mean the reason for this post (besides boredom) was that I haven't yet decided what to write about. Oh, I'm going to enter; did I mention that or was it just assumed? The prize is more than a week's wages for me and hence is certainly worth going for. My current plan is to re-write my post about the alarm clock, perhaps removing the interview with Wossy and generally making it a bit more prize-worthy. Another plan is a short story, though with only a vague idea of how long 1,000 words is, I have no clue if this is sensible. This has stopped being a short post, hasn't it? You know what? Sod it, I'm going to carry on, and not just by going 'and now for something completely different', but by relating the next paragraph to this very sentence (although this sentence is, admittedly, only tenuously linked to the subject of the writing contest, if at all).
Something that has started to bother me slightly (and only slightly) is the number of TV shows that depict the making of a fictional show, such as Extras, Annually Retentive and Studio 60. The thing that annoys me is that they seem to be immune to criticism - if you're making a program in which any material you're unsure of can be jokingly analysed by the fictional characters, you're onto a winner because you always look clever. I rewrote that last sentence a few times before giving up, and this sentence here demonstrates why these shows only bother me slightly: I'm guilty of the same thing myself. I'm always commenting on my blog entries while I write them, partly out of insecurity about my writing skillz, so it's harsh of me to blame Gervais et al for the same thing, though it would be interesting to know if it's for the same reasons. Probably not, he seems like a cocky git. The other reason this issue doesn't bother me that much is that these shows all tend to be extremely good. In fact, scrap what I just said: shows within shows are no longer original but they are very funny and hence should be encouraged, as long as writers realise that they are not necessarily being clever. I talk a lot of bullshit.

Cool Stuff Is My Heroin

I try very hard not to get sucked along by the rip tide of consumerism and greed as the human race veers ever further from the animal kingdom in its behaviour but it's not easy. I have a persistent, fuzzy, bassy feeling that the key to happiness is closer to the Buddhist, Lennonist, sitting-on-a-mountain, drinking-green-tea, no-possessions, inane-smiling school of thought than the widely accepted mantra of looking out for number one whilst watching programs about the property market with one eye and surfing the net with the other. Don't worry, I'm not trying to be political or philosophical or anything; I'm merely painting a picture to make sure you understand that I'm a hypocrite. Oh yes, the point. Despite my anti-consumerist leanings, I confess that I think stuff is cool. You know, cool stuff - technology and that. I tend to put up a half-decent resistance against technology, at least for someone who is so fascinated by it (thought this may be because I'm so tight with money). I have not, for instance, ever bought an MP3 player. Well, until recently. After a fashion. I have bought the mother of all musical gadgets - the Boss Micro BR.
Imagine that the iPod (i feel conflicted, being a corporate tool by typing that with the capital in the middle as proscribed by Apple, but I'm such a pedant that I couldn't sleep if I didn't)...sometimes I feel comments in brackets are too long and can distract the reader from what came before them. Again. Imagine that the iPod (this is more acceptable) had been re-designed by yours truly and then imagine that you are, in fact, me. You are fundamentally a singer-songwriter but don't want to be restricted by that. You want to be able to record your songs anywhere, with good sound quality from a built-in microphone, and you want to be able to piss about with weird effects and overdubs. You want more sockets and dials than you can shake a jack lead at and yet you want this thing to fit in your pocket - literally. Oh, and you like shiny things. That light up blue. I realise that this post is probably not interesting to anybody except myself and possibly the odd passing musician, so I'll summarise: if you write songs and have access to £130, buy a Boss Micro BR. It rocks.

Thoughts At Twenty-Three

This will be, if not an intrinsically interesting post, at least one written in an interesting scenario - I am currently 22 years old and yet will be 23 when I type the last word. Admittedly, I wasn't born until about 3am, so it's a slightly silly and arbitrary distinction, but that's what statistics are and, legally, what I said in the first sentence was correct. Oh, for the record, I actually turned 23 during that last sentence. I was hoping to build up to it but I got waylaid.
You know that Beatles lyric, 'and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make' (or something)? I wonder if that works for boredom (or, rather, excitement). If, for instance, instead of just sitting here and writing about writing about writing about being bored, I attempted to brighten your (the reader's) existence in some way, would karma find a way of making my life brighter in turn? Let's see.
List of things you should do to make your life more exciting:

1. Read Dave Gorman's blog - this man is funny in a subtle, clever, engaging and wise sort of way, and in addition to reading this blog you should read his books and generally stalk him.
2. Listen to Just A Minute - admittedly, this is not entirely unrelated to point number one in the list, as it sometimes features Dave Gorman and it is thanks to him that I listen to it.
3. Experience a piece of musical history - what a song and what a way to capture it.
4. Take a walk up a hill and watch the scenery. Some great things can't be reached via your left mouse button.

Did it seem like I was trying to make a point with that last one? If I was then it was a very hypocritical point and I'm sorry. Man, if only I'd stopped before this paragraph, that might have been a good ending for once. Perhaps it would seem clever if I mirrored the introduction in some way? Perhaps not. Either way, regardless of whether this is an intrinsically interesting ending it is, at least, an ending of sorts. I'm getting there.