Quite Random

Big robots!

New Transformers movie trailer online now. Inner child satisfied for the day.

Oh the interconnectedness of it all

This is how I know it’s a day off – 2 blog entries in one day – it’s incredible what free time does for your mental energy when it hasn’t come after eight hours at work. The Internet being the very finest tool for procrastination there is, more entries could follow, meanwhile I haven’t even found enough boxes to put things in yet.

People who find websites can (usually) be assured that the way they found them is kept anonymous – a search engine tells me what people put into a search engine to find this and other sites I have, but not who. It’s a good job. Recent ways people have found my site include:

• menstruation pics (errr, euw?!)
• this is not just salmon
• i love you
• hat rin full moon party sex (if that was you try reading Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered)
• big photos of many mongos (???)

Mmm. Meanwhile, I was surprised to see that this blog has been featured in an article on Suffolk bloggers on the BBC Suffolk website. The article describes this blog as follows:

Written by a Suffolk man, this is an excellent example of a quirky journal blog. The writing covers all sorts of things that have happened in day to day life, including exciting travelling stories.

If you found me through BBC Suffolk, hello. And sorry, this is almost certainly an anti-climax for you. The most exciting recent travel story I can recount is that the dog nearly got lost wandering around the garden, or that I fell asleep on the train back to Ipswich yesterday and snored so loud I woke myself back up again.

A scary thing happens when you write a blog entry – even though you might not proactively go out and tell someone you made a remark about them, or something you’ve seen on their site, blogs do it for you. Pings, links, referrers, these are all hopelessly dull techie terms for the fact that people know if you say something about them. It’s all a little bit disconcerting. Where are you supposed to go to say things behind people’s backs?

Moving time

Tomorrow I move house, so today I spend all day moving boxes of miscellaneous junk around this place in the vain attempt to look like I know what I’m doing. The thing is, I’ve been packing bags and moving around for most of my life, so I’d like to think I was some sort of seasoned pro in the moving front, but the simple reality is that I’m just as disorganised as ever, and the closest I get to sorted out is when I’ve wired the hi-fi up again and made a cup of tea. This is why I’m making sure the hi-fi and kettle are readily available at the other end.

This is the first time I have ever had a place on my own, and so will be a little bit of an adventure – it’ll be great to have my own place, so I too can now cooly say choice lines such as ‘you must come and stay!’, ‘your place or mine?’, and ‘oh I think the Brita water filter is better’, but I also know that I’m basically hopeless in my own company after a very short time, and could be found slumped in my beanbag a month after moving in, comatose eyes staring at the TV, Playstation controller in one hand, bowl of pasta spilled down my front, hi-fi on, attempting to enjoy five different kids of entertainment at once and melting my brain. Good job friends live nearby, the local pub’s good, and I have to leave the flat to go to work.

Anyway, this isn’t helping. I’m typing this when I clearly should be upstairs throwing half my possessions away as the dusty underutilised crap they are, and putting things in boxes ready to go. So before heading off, things that annoy this week:

• The use of the word ‘mom’ in the UK instead of ‘mum’. The former can be left to the Americans, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I use it here
• Tourists at South Kensington tube still insist on getting in your way no matter which direction you turn
• Ryanair apparently being cheap but actually only being cheap if you fly at unbelievably bloody obscure times in the early morning or night – otherwise costing much the same as anywhere else AND charging you for baggage
• Individual portions of milk, sugar and Flavia coffee used in the coffee machine at work. Apart from the fact that Flavia is disgusting, the whole concept of a one-use coffee sachet, milk tub, sugar sachet and stirrer, serving their purpose for one bad drink before going directly in a bin, is insane
• More packaging – Pret a Manger carps on about additive-free quality food, but seems not to give a dingo’s kidney about the fact that one lunch from Pret creates a large amount of packaging which ends up in landfill.
• Piss-poor recycling facilities in Central London and workplaces (if I’m wrong, where are they?)
• 1&1 Internet’s anti-spam measures – which consist of trashing all of your e-mail as spam, just to be sure
• Being here and worrying about all this nonsense.

The death of the English language?

In the current The Big Issue, a quote from an article sits in the corner of the page saying:

“You can sit their unshaven, with your gut hanging over your trousers, and believe you are a total sex god.”

Comments on new BBC blog The Editors are peppered with spelling mistakes. Comments on virtually any blog you care to name are peppered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, for that matter. Apostrophes litter the English language like bullet holes, sitting on signs where they don’t belong, and in sentences they shouldn’t be in. The taxi rank sign at Ipswich (Queue here for taxi’s) Railway Station. Shop fronts. E-mails. Everywhere you look, glaringly poor English.

As if this weren’t enough, swearing lost its power somewhere along the way because profanity is everywhere. Radio 1 DJs apologise for a guest swearing as often as they announce the news, US celebrities appear on Jonathan Ross because they can get away with swearing when they couldn’t in America, and more and more people use swear words the way Indians use car horns. There’s no blue word I haven’t used, but swear words are to be used carefully, selectively, and sparingly – a well-placed curse can deliver a thumping close to a sentence, add spice to an insult, or express anger in a way no clean word can, but overuse has left even the most taboo swear words with all the efficacy of a stern look.

We created about the most successful language in the world, and now we’re flushing it down the toilet. I’m not an old man, but I find myself lamenting the fact that children are taught English by Fifty Cent, text messages and MySpace. Bastardisation of the English language is rife - abbreviated, mispronounced, adulterated and dumbed down. Languages evolve, of course they do, and I’m not suggesting we should all be talking like we’re in a Miss Marple mystery, but I reserve the right to stand up for my language in the face of a tide of stupidity and laziness.

Spectacular goal from Nelsundo!

Yeah, right… the only time I ever saved a goal was because I accidentally got my head in the way, and the only time I ever scored a goal was against a scatty Cambodian… anyway, get your own shirt here.

Quality, not quantity

Well, that’s my excuse for posting on this blog a damn site less. In reality my brain is functioning about half the time outside of work at the moment, that and the fact that full-time work, commuting and other regular activities hardly seem worthy of mention. From never having enough time to put everything I wanted to on my blog last year, to blowing the dust off this one. It’s a shame, and incontrovertible proof that work is bad for you because it dulls your mind, deprives you of anything interesting to say, and leaves you wanting nothing more than TV and food.

So here is an abridged, condensed, snack-sized fill-in session a bit like the one they do at the beginning of an episode of Lost… except without the polar bears and clouds of black monsteryness.

• Over the last eighteen months I have evidently turned from a reasonably well-organised stress-monkey into a reasonably well-organised chill-monster, then latterly into a completely disorganised idiot. Can hardly find my arse with both hands.
• Moving into a flat in two weeks, my first ever place on my own. I am so excited about this I could rip a tissue. Needed: a sofa, a bath mat, lots of low-energy light bulbs, and something to do three evenings a week.
• Work is the same as it was before, but fortunately I now have the countenance of a Hindu cow and the patience of the Dalai Lama, so have not yet torn every last hair from my head.
• London is the same as it was before – if it were a movie, somewhere between Carry On and Scorcese’s After Hours with a really bad soundtrack, much tackier than you could believe possible, so dirty even the dirt is dirty, and so expensive you have to wonder what the difference is between stepping inside the M25 and getting mugged on a daily basis.
• People in suit trousers and shirts still run self-consciously back and forth to a lamp post in the shadow in Windsor House while they try on running shoes at Run and Become. This still makes me laugh.

And now on Lost… Nathan must turn up every morning and key in some numbers, or there may be another incident. Or not.

Strappy things

I want, I think, to be a woman. Not for long. A month or two: this month or two. And not for any of the obvious reasons - being entirely capable for the whole of your life of holding seven fabulously contradictory views without your sanity becoming loosed; being able to stop after two glasses; becoming taller very easily; understanding women; understanding (and even liking) the lure of such horrids as pesto, budgeting, men’s bits and Clearing The Air; not being afraid to not understand things; smelling good without fear of being taken down the nasty part of a bad alley by people who don’t just want to say How Do to you; living longer and, as the years tumble by, with increasing rather than diminishing confidence; and of course all the Getting Away With It Just Because I’m Pretty stuff - not for any of these, but because of the clothes. Just because of the clothes.

The Observer | Magazine | Shambolic, baffling, curiously upbeat. It’s life, but not as you know it….

I’ve been in discussions in the past with women about what it’s better to be – a man or a woman. The evidence is thrown back and forth between opposing parties, and may cover sensitivity, romance, longevity and maturity, but usually ends with “Yeah?! Well, we can pee standing up!” from the men, and ‘Multiple orgasms!” from the women. Such high-minded philosophical discussions I get into. It’s a losing battle, of course. It’s clearly better to be a woman, for all of the reasons given above and more. OK, so there is menstruation, shaving awkward bits and chauvinism, but surely the pros outweigh the cons. It’s not just clothing, but a Dove advert on TV just listed about fifteen distinctly different types of clothing a woman can wear on top, where men have about two. Three or four if they’re gay. What’s fair about that?

The thing is, when summer comes along and the weather warms up, B.O. may be a constant hazard, we may not be able to wear anything cool that doesn’t make us look like an extra from Miami Vice or a candidate for PM trying to look informal, and we may be haunted by a crotch that is more humid than the inside of a boiling kettle, but as Euan Ferguson says, all the reasons why it would be great to be a woman in the summer are also all the reasons it’s also great to be a man.

To try and redress the balance, I’m going to read back through a book Dan gave me a few years ago, and try becoming a Dandy, a brightly coloured peacock of a chap, flaunting the convention of wearing dull wool mixes and over-heavy shoes, and reclaiming my right to display my plumage. Women wear all sorts in this weather – strappy dresses, peasant-girl dresses, light floaty tops, open-toed sandals. They couple staying cool with looking fantastic. Men need to up their game, finding a way to stay comfortable and look good that doesn’t involve looking like the vegetarian meal that just meant leaving out the meat - but it’s not made easy for us. According to the paper today, tiny tiny swimming shorts are now in fashion for men. That’s all very well if you have hips like Brad Pitt in Fight Club, but tiny tiny swimming trunks on me look like the last turkey in the shop got trussed up too tight with the giblets on the outside.