Quote of the Week

R. on Facebook chat, and why it is not a good idea:

"its like cheating on msn"

Grantham Journal Facebook User Of The Week

Can anybody explain what I did to deserve that?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I've lost count on just how many counts this is wrong.

ABSOLUTELY STUNNING ERECT FOX WITH LAMP WALKING STICK

Don't laugh.

This is not funny.

I Have Become My Father

I Have Become My Father
Originally uploaded by sp3ccylad

Round at Česka's the other night, I was playing with my new phone, faffing with mirrors and generally looking for ways to surprise myself. 

Imagine my surprise when I saw my father's face looking down at me, disapproving.

It scares the living shit out of me.

Age-appropriateness

I've just found out that, according to last.fm, I'm the oldest person going to see Jens Lekman over at the Woodhouse Liberal Club in May.

Should this worry me? Could someone older than me buy a ticket? 

Please?

A Blonde Moment

This morning, I'm having a swift listen to Someone to Drive you Home, The Long Blondes' first album: as tomorrow sees the official release date for "Couples", the new album by the band I am rapidly coming to regard as one of the most exciting bands Yorkshire has produced in years, because, unlike Kid Acne, I'm of the belief that there's more to South Yorks than drizzle and dogging: and I really couldn't give an arse these days for Arctic Monkeys. Well, c'mon…

Anyway, back to the task in hand. I'm listening to an album that I've held in high regard for a long time. Hell, I had tickets for The Blondes' March gig at Fibbers back in mid-December. I nearly, nearly gave them up (long story, a lot of emotional upset), but the pull of witnessing Dorian Cox's ventriloquism act proved too great in the end. What, of course, colours the mix is the fact that "Couples" has been part of my playlist for the last two weeks or so.

So what do I think? Suddenly, it's underwhelming. Odd that: two weeks of the new album has rendered Someone... one-dimensional and shown it up as the relatively minor work it is compared with "Couples". Of course, the second album has many of the tics that plague not just The Long Blondes' music, but British indie music in general (guitar hooks in unison with vocals, melodic lines overly wedded to the root of the power chord like sub-Buzzcocks thrash, etc), but whereas the new album has some interesting breaks with style, Someone... now has all the feel of Elvis Costello's production job for The Specials' eponymous first album: charming, but simplistic and underdone, whilst still managing to be ground-breaking at the time.

What's changed? What's going on? Well, I suppose the change of producer helps. The hiring of Steve Mackey, the former bassist in Pulp, shaped the sound more than many people gave credit: listen to Dorian Cox's backing vocals, and then argue that point with me.

Actually, don't. I'll just sit there with my arms folded looking smug, like I do. You know that look.

No: what The Blondes needed, desperately needed was something that would divest them of that "Sound of Swinging Sheffield" tag that subconsciously followed them around due to Mackey's competent-but-flawed production job. Something that would make Someone... feel like Please Please Me sounds once you listen to any other Beatles album.

Erol Alkan's yer man, people. Seriously in demand right now, having just produced Twenty One for erstwhile prog-rock fetishists Mystery Jets and, having invigorated their sound with fizzy, dirty 80's synths, he grabs The Long Blondes by the scruff of the neck and invigorates their sound with fizzy, dirty 80's synths.

You spotting a pattern here?

Here's the thing though: it works. Furthermore, it's not just the synths that belie a greater maturity. "Century", the opening track on both their recent live sets and the new album, has been garnering a lot of attention for its glassy 80's sound (shades of late Banshees and Propaganda for me), but it's the sinuous, snaky feel of the instrumentation, what the music is doing harmonically that is the key. It's a million miles away from those awful tics I mentioned up the page: melody plays with countermelody, angular arpeggiators break up the more melodically unified moments. And that's just the first track.

I'm not going to go through it track-by-track, blow-by-blow. If you didn't like "Century" (and I'm sure there are plenty that don't), the new album manages to draw on more familiar aural territory for The Blondes whilst developing both lyrically and musically. In particular, "The Couples" stands out as beautiful, bitter, heart-breaking, heart-broken pop at its very best. It spoke to me.

The short recommendation is: BUY IT. Available on iTunes today with bonus tracks, and available in the shops tomorrow. Come round to my place and give me a kicking should you feel let down.

I slipped (out).

125,920 PeopleSorry.

I love my new phone.

This is why.

Mad Magazine's finest moments...

As a teenager, Mad was a guilty pleasure for me. Like masturbation, I suppose. 

C'mon, it was the late '70s. 

Anyway - I don't reckon to posting stuff that appeared in the B3ta newsletter, but I make one helluvan exception for this. It's a gallery of a selection of Mad magazine's excellent fold-ins, as designed by the god-like Al Jaffee and lovingly animated by The New York Times

Quotes of the Week

It's been a funny old week this week over at Sp3ccylad Towers. All sorts of the shiznit has been going on in my life (none of it I could have remotely have guessed at at the beginning of the week), and it's picked up a fair amount of the quoteage. Here's the highlights.

Me, on the phone to my mother:

"Quick question, mum. Is your phone O2?"

"My mobile? No, it starts 07 like everybody else's."

My mate Andy, texting about Dr Who, and he's not at all displeased:

"Hated the whole episode. Fucking fat people giving birth to Flumps. What is RT Davies' fucking problem? C Tate was about the best of a bad lot. Total crap."

That's you told, Russell T Davies.

The world decoded for stats geeks

Now. This is information I understand. I'm a bit of a stats geek - give me a few hours with Excel and I'm a happy man. So, imagine my JOY (and I mean that most sincerely, folks) when I found  GraphJam, which has all sorts of genuinely useful information all graphically presented for easy consumption.

Now I understand life.

(Graph switched to celebrate the least trendiest part of a certain person's taste) 

Going cuckoo in Cheshire this summer time

I hate the switch to British Summer Time. 

That sounds a bit ungrateful, I suppose - I like the long hours of daylight, leaving work in the daylight, hell, I like the way the day sits within the clock way better. I just don't like the switch - that nasty 23-hour day and putting the clocks forward is a combination I'd rather forget.

So, right now, my thoughts are with Roman Piekarski, who co-owns Cuckooland over at Tabley in Cheshire. It's a museum of cuckoo clocks: and each one has to be advanced an hour. All 600 of them, all £2 million-worth of them. Roman and Max (his brother) will really have their weekend cut out, poor buggers.

Given that my late, much-loved mother-in-law was Bavarian, I'm of the opinion that one cuckoo clock is quite enough.  600 is going too far - but without people going too far, what would I do for this blog?

Oh, and on the subject of going too far: how does the digital cuckoo clock (pictured left) float your boat?

Well it solves the problem I was grumbling about, I suppose.

We're all going to die!

Well: we are according to a couple of blokes in Hawaii...

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More - New York Times: 

"Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth."

Damn Health and Safety types.

How We Entertained Ourselves, Part I

Excuse me if I get all expositional, but my gut feeling tells me that the average age for the readership has dropped to the point where 2001 seems like an age ago. So let me explain a thing or two for the sake of the young 'uns.

As hinted at previously, the internet is more than three years old - and one of the earliest uses of the internet was to get people to do silly things they hadn't considered before, like...

Erotic Origami: 

"Welcome to The Origami Underground! It is the place to find erotic origami on the web. It's all free, and it's all for you! If you also invent your own erotic models and want to share them, send them in for publication. Your anonymity will be protected if you so desire."

AIEEE!

Here's an odd one:

"A Texas man is facing charges for selling liquor without a license after he was found peddling bottles of vodka containing dead baby rattlesnakes."

That is really quite ho---

BACK UP A BIT!

Just hold it there. He was charged for selling liquor without a license. ***sighs***

Extra bite - Texan faces charges over snake vodka

The War On Gophers is not going our way

We can't relax for a second, people. Gophers are not only threatening our way of life, but they are fighting back in ways we cannot comprehend.

Vigilance is a must; as is keeping an eye on lame-brained pest controllers.

Where's Tommy Saxondale when you need him?

*sighs*

Disappearing...

I'm wasting away. I MEAN it. And I don't get it, I really don't.

I realise I didn't eat as much as I should have done in the last few months: but when every day seems like an intolerable pressure for one reason or another, I suppose one has an excuse...

For the last three years or so, I've seen a crash coming: that the lifestyle was, in some way or another completely unsustainable - that pretending to be happy whilst having to keep an eye on the situation just to see what was going wrong next was going to break me.

Anybody who's known me intimately will know one oft-repeated phrase of mine: "energy is a finite resource" - and fighting to stop that energy being drained at an unsustainable rate is a kind of catch-22 situation. If you don't fight, then the energy gets drained. If you do fight, you drain the energy still quicker for the possible payoff that the rate of decline will slow.

And then finally, it all drains away and something snaps. In my case, it finally went (if I'm being truthful with myself) sometime in mid-September. And that was when the trouble really started, because I only resisted snapping in the past because I could see the storm clouds quite clearly. I knew what was coming. Only this time, I couldn't avert it any more.

Acceptance is a fine thing, but people that practice it are rare, and well, I think you can see what's coming here. Everybody hates rejection, but some people hate it more than others.

Any more would be telling tales out of school.

I don't eat much when I'm worried - it comes, I think to wanting to make sure I have enough money: a subconscious fear that I don't know the root of. So it comes as no surprise that I lost 15% of my body mass from September-February. This was noticeable when I was getting dressed the last time I stayed at R's. It wasn't a good day and she was very snappy.

"Those jeans are too big," she said.

"I know," I said in a straightforward way, trying to hide the embarrassment I felt, because I knew what was going on. "I've lost a lot of weight just lately." I didn't elucidate, because, to be honest, I was a bit sick of repetition.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not anorexic: I don't like being this thin in the slightest, and the fact that I have a genetic syndrome that makes putting weight on very, very difficult doesn't help. I don't want to be like this. I actually sit down and make sure I do three meals a day (which on re-reading sounds slightly pathetic), and I can't work out how to put weight on again. I don't want my weight to stabilise at this level, either.

The worries are lifting. I'm stripping my life of dysfunction one level at a time, especially when it's my tolerance of others that facilitates the dysfunction, and I'm concentrating on my life for the first time in nearly 20 years - not acceding to anybody else's desire for me to be part of their life is an odd feeling. I was never afraid of being alone, but when I've been in relationships almost constantly for 20 years, and still retain a deep capacity to love others, that's a kind of hard thing to prove. But alone I am, and happy I am. It's liberating. There's no dogma there. If the right relationship presents itself, I won't say no on principle, but nor am I looking.

"But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest."

- Buddha

So if I'm not worried, and I'm eating OK, why is my BMI stuck at 17.1? I don't like it and any suggestions would be fine, except "go see your healthcare provider," because I'm going anyway.

Back to the silly links soon.

If at first you don't succeed...

Consider, if you will, the case of one Glenn Irvin Sparling, a 65 year old man from Ravenden Springs in Arkansas.

He gets into his car. Drives to the post office. Crashes into it. Goes home. Gets another car. Does it again, in a "rinse and repeat" kind of way.

"Sparling had damaged a post office previously, and the sheriff said Sparling had a history of damaging postal buildings. No one was in the post office when it was hit."

This is as close to genius as I've seen in a very, very long time.

Man accused of driving into post office - Yahoo! News

UPDATE: Good lord, they're all at it!

I was surfing the web for more news on this curious little incident when I found that an 88 year-old woman had done pretty much the same thing in Burbank, CA. 

OK, she'd managed to only use one car, and she didn't have any previous: but there's a pattern emerging and Sp3ccy don't like it one bit.

You'll excuse me if I conduct all my business by email for the next few days; just until this whole "old people ramming post offices" thing blows over.