This Blog Has Died

Just like the one before it, this incarnation of my blog appears to have bitten the dust. I'm not pulling the plug just yet, but I'm considering doing just that before I start teaching in secondary schools, where the kids might just be bored enough to find their teacher's blog on Google.
Anyway, even though I removed my last blog from the net, I downloaded it as a record of my life at uni and I find it pretty interesting to look back through the entries, so with that in mind this is a sort of summing-up entry of me right now.

Name: Matt Bradshaw

Age: 23.95 years

Residence: Balsall Heath, Birmingham

Marital Status: Single

Political Allegiance: Green Party

Religious Views: Agnostic

Applicable Social/Fashion Classifications: Geek, indie-boy, scruff

Occupation: Unemployed but soon to be trainee physics teacher

Would rather be: Rockstar/folkstar/novelist

Height: 6 foot exactly

Weight: 11 stone exactly

Hair: Dark brown, floppy/shaggy, have been growing for about nine months

Favourite music: Leonard Cohen

Favourite movie: The Shawshank Redemption

Favourite food: Doner meat and chips with mint and chilli sauces

Favourite beer: Hook Norton Double Stout

Guitars: 7 (Washburn Maverick, Squier P-Bass, Admira classical, Fleetwood steel-string, Yamaha EZ-AG, Mexican Fender Telecaster Custom, Ibanez 12-string acoustic)

Preferred England Starting 11: David James, Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, Ashley Cole, David Beckham, Owen Hargreaves, Steven Gerrard, Stuart Downing, Wayne Rooney, Michael Owen

Imagination Remaining For New Categories: Negligible

What I've Been Doing

I haven't really been writing anything on this blog lately, but there is a reason: I've been writing a novel. This is something I've tried before, but I've never really got beyond a couple of chapters until now.

One evening, not long after moving to Birmingham, I was cooking pasta and sauce for about the fourth night running in an empty house, when I had an idea for a book. I can't claim it was a particularly brilliant idea, since the idea was essentially to write about my current life with a few subtle changes and a bunch of invented characters. But it was an idea nonetheless, and I set about planning a story around it.

After a couple of days' planning, I began to write, and was stunned at how fast the words poured out. The dissertation I wrote for my degree took me a long time; possibly, months I can't remember. However long it took me, it was certainly longer than a day-and-a-half, which is how long it took me to write the same number of words for this book.

Three-and-a-half weeks later, my productivity has gone up and down, but I've been trying to write a decent quantity every day and somehow I've ended up with 39,000 words. Wikipedia says that a novel is at least 50,000 words long. I know that my book won't magically be complete when I hit that marker, but being lazy as hell, I've pretty much planned it that way. I have 28 chapters planned, of which 18 are finished, 4 are incomplete and just 6 are completely blank. The whole thing should clock in around 55,000-60,000 words, which makes it nearly three-quarters finished.

Of course, even when I type the 'final' word and head to Lidl for a cheap celebratory Carlsberg, that's far from the end. Proof-reading 60,000 words is not a quick task if you're just looking for grammatical errors, but if you looking for plot holes and stylistic mis-steps or whatever...that's going to be a boring few days. And even once that's done, I'm not at all convinced the book is any good.

I'm not sure it's possible to assess your own writing, but I do worry that my story is just not interesting enough for people to want to read. I'm also not convinced I know enough words to be a writer. I'm constantly looking in the thesaurus so I don't have to write 'nice' or 'good'. Still, I'm over the main hurdle I've had with writing novels in the past, which is running out of steam. Until today I had been writing nearly 3,000 words a day recently. Today is a zero so far, but that's because I have the internet in my house at last so I've allowed myself a day of being sad and pissing about on YouTube and Facebook.

And now, just as I did when I was writing my dissertation and my blog simultaneously, I feel like I've wasted a good quantity of words that could have gone somewhere else.

Music

Outside Yeovil Junction railway station, on my way to Glastonbury festival, I met a Hungarian hippie. She was friendly and interesting and had cool hippie hair, but she also talked about crystals and earth dances and other such hippie things. Later, on the bus, I couldn't help noticing that despite talking a lot of bollocks, she seemed a lot happier than most people ever seem to be. I wondered if this was because she didn't seem to have anything negative to say about anything. I wondered what would happen if somebody attempted to literally never be negative about anything. Would it be possible never to use the words 'not', 'no', or 'never', or even comparative words such as 'better', 'nicer' or 'happier', since these would imply something being more negative than something else? To some extent, this seemed to be what this hippie had done, and she seemed to be very happy. Being a scientifically-minded cynic, I could never stop being negative completely, but I have, since meeting her, made a conscious to emphasise the positive when speaking or thinking. As an exercise in this, I now present you with some unusually positive thoughts on a favourite song of mine.

At Glastonbury, on Sunday night, I saw Leonard Cohen play on the Pyramid Stage. Having turned up for the start of Neil Diamond, then having edged forward both before and after Goldfrapp's set, I was within touching distance of the barrier and had a clear line of sight to one of the greatest ever singer-songwriters. I won't bore you with how wonderful the set was, but...wow. And of course, 'Hallelujah' was a sensational highlight.
Now, coming back to this positive thinking, I am not going to moan about my dislike of Jeff Buckley's much-lauded cover version, which was the original purpose of this post. What would that achieve? Instead, I am going to put forward something positive; here, in no particular order, are five wonderful versions of 'Hallelujah'.

Reading List

I'm avoiding the full-on "back from travelling" entry. I'll tackle the travels soon; it was fun. Very fun. Instead, this is my list of books I read whilst abroad:

New Zealand:
jPod by Douglas Coupland

Australia:
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
1984 by George Orwell
Brother Nature by Robert Llewellyn

Indonesia:
The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis and Larry Sloman

Thailand:
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
The Stars' Tennis Balls by Stephen Fry
The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland

The best was Flowers For Algernon, followed by 1984. The worst, or at least the one I couldn't get to grips with, was The God Of Small Things.

The Game

I am playing a game in which I see how long it takes me to reacquire the stone I lost whilst travelling. Since my Thai lifestyle featured regular swimming, hiking and healthy food in sensible quantities, while my English lifestyle consists of crisps and sitting, I wager it won't take too long.

Goodbye England

Time: The middle of the night.
Location: My sister's living room, Oxford.
Mode of blogging: My sister's laptop.

Already I'm regretting packing the ukelele. It doesn't stay in tune and just because it's a lot smaller than a guitar doesn't mean it fits easily in my rucksack. I spent years pronouncing 'rucksack' like a German or a northerner, with a 'rook' sound for the first syllable. I think it's because that's how my dad says it and of all the people I regularly to talk to, he is probably the most prolific user of the word 'rucksack'. Some mates pointed out a few years back that I said it 'wrong', and for a while I started pronouncing it poshly, but now I've switched back. In case you're wondering, I'm not going anywhere with this ramble, I'm just bored waiting for a 4am bus to Heathrow Airport and I'm scared that if I go to sleep I'll miss said bus and wake up five minutes before check-in, in the wrong city.

According to the Blogger account login control panel thingy, this will be my 100th post. I imagine that includes all the ones that I start writing but don't finish. Still, I suppose it's a landmark of sorts. Still half an hour before I have to leave for the bus station. I just used the word 'still' to begin two consecutive sentences. I'm also not too sure about my spelling of 'syllable' in the first paragraph. This is as close as you can get to just reading my thoughts as they happen. I'm just typing whatever comes into my head. I've got two creme eggs in my rucksack. I've spent the last three or four weeks attempting to grow a beard, and it hasn't worked. I'm starting to wish I'd got rid of it when I had a shower this morning. I've loaded up my MP3 player with 8GB of music and 10 episodes of Scrubs. I doubt I'm going to watch any Scrubs on my 2-inch screen - it seems like a sad thing to do whilst exploring the world - but I like knowing that I could if I wanted to. Here's my prediction for what will be the soundtrack to my holiday:

Radiohead - Pablo Honey
Sigur Ros - Afaskljhfakjsh Bdfajkfhdlkjsfh (can't spell it, it's Icelandic)
Bright Eyes - Fevers and Mirrors
Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Leonard Cohen - Songs of Love and Hate
Kanye West - Late Registration
Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump (that's how it's spelt, promise)
Bjork - Homogenic
Ekkeko - The Canal Boat Sessions (yes, my band is a lot shitter than everyone else on the list but I want to see what we sound like in various settings, like on a plane or on a beach)

I think that's enough typing. I'm not sure how much I'll update this for the next few months. Probably not much. Right, nearly time to walk to the bus station. I prefer trains. You know where you are with trains. Buses rely on some knowledge of the local geography, instead of a clear and calm robot voice, supplemented by a clear, decisive LED display, telling you when you're at your stop. I wonder where San Francisco airport is. I hope it's near San Francisco.

Bottle

Tonight, Panorama are doing a program about bottled water. I'm glad, because I have always viewed the phenomenon of buying bottled water in a country with a perfectly good supply of water as being totally ridiculous. I think, purely in terms of logic, it ranks up there with war, advertising and botox as one of mankind's most pointless endeavours. Wow, I spelt 'endeavours' right first time. I'm not going to bother ranting at length about why bottled water is such a silly idea, since I would hope it's pretty obvious, but I will moan about something else.

I'm heading off travelling on Friday, so I'm cancelling my subscription to Tesco Online DVD Rental. When I logged in to cancel, I noticed that there were three options: I could take two weeks of holiday without payment (not much use since I'm away for over three months, but a good idea), I could cancel my account entirely, or I could 'freeze my account'. This sounded tempting - why cancel completely when I could just return my current DVD, keep my account details and list of films that I want to rent, and start paying again when I get back? The answer, it turns out, is that the cost of this privilege is £1 a week. That's about £4.50 a month, AKA more than half what I pay right now for the full service, just so they won't delete my account details. I know, it's called capitalism and they're allowed to charge whatever they want, and I'm not really moaning at that (I don't have the energy). I just think it's a really silly decision - if it had been free, I would definitely have reactivated my account when I got back. Since it's not, I might as well look around for a cheaper DVD rental company when I get back, so Tesco lose out. Then again, I suppose if business were my bag, I'd find it perversely satisfying to have come up with this idea - being paid a fiver a month not to do something. I wonder what the legal definition of blackmail is...

Rooney

I like footballers who do things differently. There are so many clones in the Premiership now, players who are flown in from other countries then leave before you get a chance to know anything about them. I like players with a story. My favourite player of all time, for example, is Eric Cantona. I always liked him because of his skill, the way he turned his collar up, his style on and off the field, but he didn't cement his favourite-ever place in my heart until he kung-fu kicked a racist Crystal Palace fan during a game. From that point on, everything he did pushed him above all the faceless modern players. The way he turned up at a press conference after the incident, the world's media desperate for a quote, and said: "When ze seagulls follow ze trawler, it is because zey sink sardines will be srown into ze sea. Sank you". Then he left. When he returned from his ban, it felt like a movie, like a war hero presumed dead had returned and filled everyone with hope. I know it sounds like I'm being melodramatic but I still get worked up over football now and at this point I was only 10. And then he retired at 30, wanting to quit at the top of his game, a decision which made me angry at the time but with hindsight just makes Cantona seem even more perfect. Some other players might have had his skill, but not his effortless cool.



Nowadays, my favourite player is Wayne Rooney, because he is also different. He's a big, fat, stupid, ugly ogre of a player who looks like he shouldn't be any good, but he's incredible, and there's something wonderfully English about that. When the modern blueprint of a world-class player seems to indicate a skinny, diving poser with flowery skills (think Christiano Ronaldo), Rooney is the opposite. He gets his goals by knocking people out of the way, he stays on his feet no matter how many centre-halves you throw at him, and when he tackles you, you stay down. And yet, and this is what elevates him to near-Cantona status in my mind, he can do everything these other, far less inspiring players can do: little tricks, delicate chips...he's even bloody fast, which doesn't look possible, like the way you wouldn't think a bumblebee could fly. In fact, a better example of that would be when he once celebrated a goal with a somersault that he had clearly worked on in training. It was so ungainly that it seemed like the stadium shook when he landed, but it was definitely a somersault, and I laughed out loud when he did it. He may not have the poetic turn of phrase of Cantona, but he also gives some great quotes. After Rooney got sent off against Portugal for appearing to stamp on an opponent's bollocks, he was asked if it had been deliberate. Rooney responded by saying that if it had been deliberate, the player would still be in hospital. I'm not saying he's a nice guy - I'm just saying he's bloody entertaining.

Collection

Ever since I've had my own computer (before this millennium began), I've had problems with my music collection. Putting aside the almost negligible cassettes and vinyls, my current music collection is split between CD's and MP3's. A few years back, pre-broadband, my problem was that if I really wanted an album, I would buy it on CD, while my MP3 collection was made up of odds and sods; this meant that my computer-based music library gave a very distorted picture of my taste, since it was missing all my favourite albums. Granted, I could walk across to my shelf, pick up a CD and play it, but that seemed a bit low-tech.
Fast forward to mid-February 2008 and, after a recent spate of downloading, coupled with a concerted effort in 2007 to rip my CD collection, the vast majority of the music that I own exists in one sprawling folder. I'm missing a lot of genre descriptions and a fair bit of album artwork, but that doesn't worry me unduly. What worries me is this:
I have this utopian vision of firing up Windows Media Player and having complete confidence that everything in its library has the correct title and artist, is correctly sequenced within a full album, and is something I actually intended to have in the library. I want there to be no albums that play in alphabetical order (unless they happen to be that way, but a quick bit of maths says only about 1 in 4000 albums would coincidentally occur like that) and most of all, I want to be able to click 'shuffle' and have complete confidence that every track I hear is meant to be in the library. I actually don't like the idea of the shuffle function, since I'm something of an album purist, but it's like when you're climbing and someone tells you that you could hang a Land Rover from your carabiner; you never would, but it's nice to know you could.
I've been meaning for ages to purge the unwanted tracks from my library, but they pop up from so many sources. Rubbish free songs that come with Windows, albums that I don't like but that happen to have been ripped and burnt using my computer, songs I've downloaded for people without the internet and, most annoyingly of all, hundreds and hundreds of individual sound files that went into recording my band's songs. When I do occasionally relax my morals and put Windows Media Player on shuffle, I get a run of maybe two or three decent songs before I hear a fluffed guitar solo, followed by twenty seconds of hissy would-be silence. A couple more pearlers by Radiohead or Grandaddy, then an entire four-minute drum take. Worst of all, I can be shredding on the air guitar to Bohemian Rhapsody, only to find the next track is one of my own dry, horribly off-key vocal takes from a song with bad lyrics that I've written. No-one wants to hear that, especially me.
And suddenly I realise that in the time it has taken me to write this, I could have pretty much sorted out my library. Then again, if I had a model railway, I'd hate to finish it; the fun is in the design and construction, and I guess the same is true of this. Maybe I'll be happier if I ration the gradual improvement of the library to a few deletions a day, the odd venture onto Wikipedia to look up a stubbornly obscure track listing, at least until I actually do get a model railway, which is the only thing that stops me from being terrified of growing old.

A Moment Of Shameful Materialism

My new MP3 player turned up the other day. I say my new one, but that implies it's the latest in a series and I've never actually had one until now. I hesitated in getting one because I wanted to make sure I got the right one for me. Forgive me for taking this search far too seriously, but I wanted a player with soul, one that I could keep for years because its design would be timeless.
I spent £105 on this player, and have just this moment spent another £17 on a big memory card to quintuple the player's previously tiny capacity, possibly leading you to the conclusion that I've been a bit of an idiot because I could have got a half-decent iPod for the money I've spent. I have some sympathy with this opinion, because objectively, compared to any iPod, my player is a brick-shaped, brick-sized anachronism with the weight, style and storage capacity of...a brick.
And yet, I don't regret my choice. Yes, the iPod is much, much slimmer, but my player fits in my pocket and that's good enough for me - I don't jog. Yes, the iPod has a much slicker operating system in which you don't have to arse around endlessly to get tracks in the right order, but this choice was all about my personal taste, and the fact that my computer hasn't been infected with that virus called iTunes is a big bonus for someone as set in his ways as I am. Finally, there's the fact that iPods hold a lot more songs than my player, but 10Gb is enough for me right now, and anyway, that leads me onto the positives.
My MP3 player has a built-in storage capacity of 2Gb, which sucks, but it has an SDHC card slot, meaning I've already managed to turn that 2Gb into a respectable 10Gb. I can get all the music I listen to onto 10Gb, and the card sizes are going to get cranked up in the near future, so I'm all set. The other bonus about the card slot is that videos are no longer a problem. With a fixed capacity, you're always going to be looking over your shoulder as your video files eat up your finite disk space, but while you don't want to be swapping cards around to find your favourite album, surely there's an appeal to having a little collection of cheap SD cards in your pocket, filled to the brim with Scrubs or Simpsons? Not on an iPod....
But why am I fannying about with this slightly obscure logic when I could be taking big, meaty bites out of the iPod's credibility? Here are a few scenarios in which the tables are turned and the iPod becomes as much use as a brick:

1. You want to listen to the radio. You can't, and yet I'm hearing it loud and clear on my versatile MP3 player. I offer to record the show for you with my player's 'record MP3 from radio' function and give you the file on SD card to listen to later, but you realise you have no SD card slot.
2. Your favourite album is a rare piece of vinyl. You'd love to listen to it through your iPod on the train but your record player is in the living room, your computer is upstairs and the chances of you having the right leads are pretty small, even if you could be arsed. My player has a line input and comes with the correct lead.
   
3. It's dark. You've dropped your keys under your car. All you have is your iPod. You turn the screen up to max brightness and fumble around on the road but it's no good. I rescue the situation with the infeasibly bright LED torch on my MP3 player.
   
4. You're on a camping trip. Your iPod runs out of juice. No sockets out here, and yet my MP3 player appears to be having no trouble. Ah, that's because it runs for 40 minutes after one minute of winding it up. That's right - winding it up. I have a clockwork MP3 player. That's cool.
5. Still on the camping trip, your phone dies. You're stranded on a mountain and you need to call 999. You throw your iPod down the mountain in a feeble attempt to hit a fellow walker and attract their attention. Meanwhile, I am plugging your phone into my MP3 player with one of the many adapters provided. I flick the switch to 'external charge' and resuscitate your mobile using wind-up power.

I could go on. Built-in microphone? Check. Built-in speaker? Check. Ability to play Windows Media files? Check. The iPod should hang its head. I appreciate that not everyone loves gimmicks as much as me, but then I have a Master's degree in physics and you probably don't, so perhaps you should consider the possibility that I'm right. Conclusion: I love my Trevor Baylis Eco Media Player, even if it does have a very silly name.

Kwik Fit, Physics Shit

I'm aware I've been swearing a bit more regularly in recent entries on here, but for the sake of a rhyme, I feel the use of the S-word in the title of this post is justified. Anyway, my point. Read this:

Let Kwik Fit recharge your Air Con while-u-wait for only £44.95. We will replace and recharge lubricant and refrigerant levels in line with your manufacturer’s recommendation. If we cannot improve the coolest vent temperature from your car by more than 10% - then you pay nothing at all.

Let me tell you something about temperature - the scale you are used to is very misleading. If you are of roughly my age, which you quite probably are, then your scale of choice starts at the freezing temperature of water and hits 100 as water boils. The rest of you use a ridiculous system in which various points are defined by weird mixtures of ice, salt, ammonium chloride and the armpit of the scale's inventor (seriously).
In any case, unless you're a pedant with a physics degree, you probably don't prefer the Kelvin scale, at which zero is defined as the coldest anything could ever theoretically be. The nice thing about this scale is that you can say that 20 degrees is twice as hot as 10 degrees, because your zero point actually represents zero thermal energy. Since this is a logical scale for discussing temperature, let's use it to examine Kwik Fit's claim that they can reduce the temperature of a car's air conditioning by 10%.
Let's imagine your car's air conditioning system has been neglected and is pumping out air at 10 degrees centigrade. You take it into Kwik Fit and ask if they can sort this out. Yes, they say, they're pretty sure they can reduce this temperature by 10%. At this point, you pull out a calculator and convert 10 degrees centigrade into the far more sensible 283.15 kelvin, then divide this by 10. You cheerfully point out that you are excited at the prospect of a 10% reduction in the temperature of your car's air con, since the ability to blast air at minus 18.315 degrees centigrade will be something of a novelty. The mechanic tells you to fuck off and get a life, but at least you know you're right.

And now some added bonus features for this post.

• You may have spotted that I used the word 'kelvin' twice in this post (before this sentence, obviously), once with a capital 'K' and once without. This is one of those silly little points that I really want someone to pull me up on so I can go 'aha', and explain that actually you spell units in lower case, even if they are named after a person. Oh, but just so we're clear, if you say "10 degrees Fahrenheit", that's correct because the "degrees" bit is the unit (I think).
  
• A thought: isn't it weird that the Fahrenheit scale was named after a person? My D-grade AS-level German knowledge tells me that the word means "going-ness", which seems a pretty apt description of temperature, the measurement of how much the molecules are bouncing around. It's like if the motion of the planets had been described by Sir Isaac Droppingness.

Eels

After listening to an early mix of a bunch of my recent tracks in my mate's car, I've decided not to bother finishing a solo album for the sake of it. It was just a bit too shit. I've been listening to a lot of good music recently, which is a demoralising experience for a songwriter. I tend to oscillate between two approaches to songwriting. The first is to focus on the song, with the lyrics, melody and chords taking centre-stage. The second is to fiddle about with buttons and pedals and computers until something sounds cool, then shoehorn in some half-arsed lyrics with no discernible melody. The first approach seems to produce far better results, but the second is so much easier, and countless years of deadline-centric education has shown that self-discipline is not a strength of mine.
Luckily, I'm soon heading off on a carbon-spewing-hence-guilt-inducing trip around the world, during which my only songwriting tools will be a notebook, a pencil and a ukelele (at least until I decide it's taking up valuable rucksack volume and it's sacrificed for firewood). The great thing about ukeleles is that they sound shite, so the making-cool-noises approach to songwriting is ruled out from the start. Anyway, here's one of the tracks that made me realise I need to change my methods:

A Selection Of Unrelated Thoughts

In bullet form.

• Match Of The Day isn't what it used to be. The point of Match Of The Day is that you don't know anything about the games until you watch them, but they now show you a bunch of the best bits from each game in the opening sequence, as if to reassure you that it's worth staying tuned. Message to the show's producers: if I've already made the commitment of locking myself in my room with the internet off and my fingers in my ears from kick-off until half ten at night, making sure I turn on the TV at exactly the right moment so I don't accidentally see the ridiculously placed sports news bulletin that directly precedes it, chances are I've already made a firm decision that I'm going to watch the whole program, so don't show half the bloody game during the title sequence which, by the way, is a lot shitter than it used to be because you've arsed around with the music and made it all jerky.
• Have you noticed that the cleaners at certain railway stations have 'making a difference' written in bright pink on the back of their uniform? Maybe it's some sort of company slogan, but it strikes me as being very patronising. If the message was 'it may look like my life is shit but I'm saving the money I earn here so I can go to university', or even 'yes, I sweep shit off platforms while you're negotiating multi-million pound takeovers in the city, but I bet I'm less of a twat', then fair enough, have a message, but I have an inkling everyone would be a fraction happier with no message at all than the one they've got at the moment.
• Little Miss Jocelyn is offensively unfunny, and even if there is a particular demographic that does find this show amusing, I'm not sure it's the same demographic that Never Mind The Buzzcocks hits every week, so why place the two shows adjacent to each other on a Thursday night? 'Thursdays Are Funny!', scream the BBC trailers; maybe so, but to different people. It's like putting cheese on your ice cream because they both come from cows.

More thoughts as and when I have them.

Solo Album - An Update

I've surprised myself in the last couple of days by actually working on my solo album - I suppose it's not that surprising given that I'm unemployed and surrounded by musical instruments, but I assumed I'd just be lying in bed all day watching DVD's. Anyway, mainly for myself, here's how the album is progressing:

1. Intro - ridiculous electro-metal creation; needs better drums but otherwise done.
2. Unnamed Song With Good Riff - good riff (duh) but needs lyrics, better drums and a bunch of other stuff.
3. Sheffield - my acclaimed (by some bloke on MSN) new acoustic track about being jealous of Arctic Monkeys.
4. Rats - vocally ambitious but surprisingly un-shit Radiohead/Underworld rip-off; needs better drums (recurring theme...) but sounding better than expected.

......

And then I'm left picking through the remains of failures and unwritten songs that exist only as titles. Still, at this rate there's a finite chance I'll have finished the album by the time I leave for San Francisco. Ooh, that's quite exciting.

Fingers Crossed

Next Monday, Jools Holland is filming the 200th episode of Later. Radiohead are playing. I believe both those statements are accurate, but the internet wasn't hugely helpful on the subject. I and three of my friends entered the random draw for tickets to the filming of the show, and tomorrow we find out if we were successful. It's one of these things where you can't be sure how much of a chance you have; all four of us applied for four tickets, so I think I'm right in saying the night would have to be eight times over-subscribed before our chances of getting tickets dropped below 50% (I sense some bad logic in there but let's ignore it). Then again, not many people seem to be in the audience when you watch Later, so maybe the demand is a hundred times greater than the capacity? I don't know. Watch this space.

No, hang on, I'm not going to ignore my potentially dodgy statistical analysis of the random draw system - I'm going to use my brain to work it out properly. If every entrant can ask for between one and four tickets, each entry is treated equally (regardless of how many tickets the entrant is requesting), and my group of friends has a total of four entries, each time a random draw is made for a space at the event, we have a 4-in-X chance of getting that space, where X is the total number of entries. Actually, when the draw for the nth seat (starting with zero) is made, our chance is 4-in-(X-n). I sense I have made this too complicated, but sod it. Hang on, I can make this a lot easier by taking out this 'four' stuff. Since there's a bunch of seats, let's assume that basically every person has one entry for one ticket, because groups of two, three or four will all have done the same as us and done an entry each - if they haven't, that's a bonus. Ah, I did cock it up to start with. If we effectively have one entry each, my probability of getting each seat is 1-in-(X-n). If there are N seats, the average probability of me getting each seat is 1-in-(X-(N/2)), and hence the total probability of me getting any of the N seats is N-in-(X-(N/2)), or 1-in-((X/N)-0.5). Really, I've made this far too complicated, but I don't care. Let's stick in some numbers to see if this works. No! I've just done it in my head and it doesn't work. Crap! Clearly a Master's degree, even one that features at least three courses in statistical physics, is irrelevant once you spend a few months not thinking about maths. I'm going back to my two-word title's suggestion and crossing my fingers.

The Longest Gap

Sorry, that was a long silence, wasn't it? Since my last post, I have entered a writing competition that might win me £250 (but probably won't because the thing I wrote is a bit sucky and I wrote it very late at night without any planning), I have quit my job (very nice feeling) and, most excitingly, I have got off my arse and booked my big trip. The running order is:
USA (five days in San Francisco)
New Zealand (a month, arriving at one island and leaving from the other, although can't remember which way round)
Australia (a month, into/out of Sydney but hopefully move about a bit)
Bali (two weeks)
Thailand (a month)

I'm excited.

I Have Nothing Interesting To Write Today

Just thought I'd let you know.

Welcome?

If my information is correct, an influx of new readers is heading the way of this very blog right about now. If you are one of them, or even if you are not, you are very welcome. Since I don't put too much effort into making these writings particularly relevant or even readable to anyone except myself, I've compiled a list of the least rubbish entries:

Eh? (THE ONE YOU MAY HAVE READ ABOUT)
The Alarm Clock
Bad Poem And Worse Title
A Rant About People Who Rant
Best Of

In case regular readers, should they exist, are confused about this post, I got a call out of the blue last week from the Banbury Guardian, saying they were going to run a story about the Welsh adverts I had noticed on Banbury phone boxes. In posting this "beginners' guide" entry, I am making two assumptions:

1. The story actually will contain a link to this blog, and
2. The story will actually be published at all.

If these two assumptions prove to be correct, my time has been well spent. If not, this is a pointless introduction to my blog for those who already read it. If this is the case, sorry, and here's a great video to make up for it:

Smoking

In a café in Brixton I recently saw an NHS no-smoking sign that contained the motivational phrase "don't give up giving up". I'm sure it's been carefully market-researched and all, but it seems a little silly to use a triple negative in there. They appear to be saying you should not not not smoke, which is a very inefficient way to get your point across.

Four Star

When it comes to reviewing music and film, there are those who argue that a perfect, ten-out-of-ten rating can never be achieved because one day someone could make something even better. I have some sympathy with this theory, but only if the reviewer employs a suitably fine scale - a maximum of 9.9 or 99%, for example, should be adequate to describe even the most life-affirming album or film, with the final, impossible increment reserved for the day when Jesus turns up with a twelve-string and reveals the third testament to be a melancholic alt-folk odyssey.
Most reviews, though, don't divide their ratings this finely - they use stars. Perhaps it's because they're conscientious understanders of science, with a knowledge of the huge and unpredictable errors associated with subjective reviews, or perhaps it's because those pretty stars are easy for people to understand. Either way, my point is this: the Radio Times uses stars, so giving the top rating of five-out-of-five shouldn't be too much of a stretch, and yet Monty Python's Life Of Brian was recently given four stars. I mean, this is the best film ever made by the funniest people in the history of Great Britain (yes, I know one of them was American but let's keep this simple), and apparently it's not worth five stars! I can't even be bothered to explain why this film is so good - if you've seen it, you'll know that giving it four stars is an insult. Giving it it four stars ranks Life Of Brian alongside half-decent action films, surprisingly good rom-com sequels and slightly flawed epics, and that just ain't right.