singing hallelujah with the fear in your heart

it's christmas. well, it was. so i've given myself a little present. came online to cddb a couple of cds i'm ripping to my phone and just thought i'd have a little look on the arcade fire website while i'm waiting. i like arcade fire. a lot. i'd been telling myself that i wouldn't be downloading anything from their album and would have the will power to wait til it could get my grubby little hands on it in the shops. a couple of weeks ago zane lowe had the world exclusive play of a new song 'intervention'. obviously within a couple of hours it had appeared on the internet and i was downloading it. i justified that one by thinking that it was actually just a new version of a song which i've had an acoustic early version of for about a year, so that's fine really. and it's got church organ on it, so it's a bit christmassy. it's all rather wicked. the other day intervention went on sale on the US iTunes store. except it didn't. someone fucked up. they uploaded the wrong song, labelled it as intervention and let the internet do its worse. which is how i came across it and downloaded it and am listening to it now. which is definitely breaking the rules. it's called 'black wave/bad vibrations' and i like it. it's different to funeral. but it's the arcade fire. and it's new. and the goddamn album's not out til march 26th, so it's going to be hard hard work getting through the next three months.

frosty the bowman

i've been watching vodafoof tba with snow patrol playing in the royal opera house. it's all quite good. although they're not especially cool, i do have a soft spot for em - what with being a hopeless romantic i can't resist songs about broken hearts and failed relationships. one things with impaired my enjoyment somewhat was the inane blithering of edith bowman who was doing all the links. trying to work out what she was on about was similar to trying to get your head round a distinctly difficult series of cryptic crossword clues. maybe it's a scottish thing. she reminded me of the scottish hotel owner from little britain. it's not the serman on the mount, it's a corporate whore fest with some pretty sounding songs. or maybe it's because she's a bit of a blonde airhead.

yeah, but is it art?

i've not written in here for a while. slapped wrist. that'll have to be a new years resolution i suppose. lots to write about. fab holiday (see photos), work xmas do, not to mention close encounters of the orlando kind. one thing that caught my eye i wanted to write about was something that happened a few weeks back. some guy called michael stone burst into the irish assembly with some homemade explosives. now, that in itself isn't anything i'd usually comment on but this week he appeared in court where his lawyer gave the defense that, instead of trying to blow the place up, kill oodles of people and throw the irish peace process off course it was all in fact a piece of perforance art. if it wasn't all quite so serious, it'd be hilarious. it must have been a real eureaka moment when they band up with that stroke of genius. i've not been to see the turner prize yet this year, but i reckon he's probably made himself an early favourite for next year.

miracle midget mechanics

while i'm on the subject of taking your car to get sorted, where is it exactly that garages get (and hide) their midgets. when you go in, everyone appears to be of fairly normal dimensions, but how come when you get your car back the seat it always so far forwards it could only have been being driven by a fun-size person. as far as i can see, there are a couple of possibilities. firstly, there could have been some kind of mass, wonkaesque expedition to a far off land where hoards of angry locals were rounded up to be shipped off to worship at the altar of kwikfit. alternatively it could be the principle cast members of snow white and the seven dwarfs getting work during the obviously difficult downtime between the middle of january and the beginning of december. i think i might test that theory by taking my car in sometime in december just to see. i suppose it could be also be jeanette krankie trying to make ends meet since television's passion for transvestite midgets waned somewhat in the late eighties, although she does seem to be good at finding work because she seems to work shifts at every bloody garage i go to if it is her. they really shouldn't keep whichever part of the vertically challenged community hidden away though. i can ony imagine they keep them locked in filing cabinets when needed, and that, to be honest, is just not on! 

i'm in love with my car

after a decidedly iffy friday the 13th, yesterday was a good day. for the first time in 7 off years of owning a car, i finally passed an mot first time around. for the last two years i've needed to shell out about £300 so a measly fifty odd was the stuff that dreams are made of. i always get a bit wary when it comes to problems with cars. the main issue being that i know very little about them apart from when it works and when it doesn't. which makes me a little vulnerable to the risk of getting ripped off. it always seems that the guys who work in garages are all about 17 and look exactly the kind of people we'd pick on me at school (and who probably still would today). excuse the sweeping generalisation. but you can also (or i can at least) imagine the whole thing descending into some kind of german twinky garage porn movie (based on the sketchy details and limited knowledge of such things i've acquired over the years). but, for better or worse, yesterday no such antics kicked off and the only buttons that got pushed where those needed to enter my pin, cough up the cash and drive off into the sunset! fingers crossed for next year.

so knives out | cook him up | squash his head

i've got a stupid big bandage thing on my left index finger. yesterday i intelligently managed to slide a chunk of it off with a scalpel. which unsurprisingly resulted in a fair bit of blood. and swearing. lots of swearing. and it still hurts like a bastard. changing the dressing this morning wasn't much fun. the cut'd attached itself pretty firmly to the dressing so there was reasonable amount of ripping required to seperate the two. which resulted in another fair bit of blood. and a little more swearing. i couldn't really bring myself to look at it too closely but it wasn't green or anything. i'm sure it'll eventually return to normal, but in the meantime i'm walking about looking like an extra from an episode of fingermouse entitled 'fingermouse goes to hospital'. which isn't a good look. and i bet you anything it'll glow like a bastard under uv lights if i'm out this weekend. 

mousey elliot in da house

apologies in advance for the copious amount of typos which will probably appear in the next few entries, for reasons which will be explained later. whatever - this i was meant to write about weeks ago but never got around to it. the other we, it was a friday night/saturday morning sorta time, we were in bed happily asleep when all of a sudden missy elliot starts playing really really loudly in the hall right outside lex's room. lex, seeing as it was his house and i didn't have a clue what the bejesus was goin on, leapt outta bed and went running out to see what was going on - only to be greeted by the site of a mousing dancing about in the hall (presumably getting funky to the music). when they saw each other, it seems that neither were all that impressed and alex shreiked like a bit of a girly girl and the mouse proceeded to dancing about around him, before running away from the screaming, flapping naked man stood before him. turns out that the cd has got stuck earlier in the day, and when mister mouse went wanding over the top of the stereo, he obviously knocked it free and got the party well and truely started.

more bubbles than a tea party at neverland

hello adoring public. been a bit slack on the updating from again recently. oh well, no great loss i'm sure. got a couple of bits i've been meaning to write up but not got around to it, so they might make on on here soon. in the mean time i thought i'd share with you two songs which have been inexplicably stuck in my brain all day. firstly lady in red by chris de burgh, which is bad enough. i think that might got in there something to do with hungerford. anyway, that was then replaced with michael jackson's ecotastic ing along heal the world. bastard. at the moment, you'll be pleased to know, there's nothing in my brain so i suppose we're back to business as usual. in other news, this has been my first post from my appletastic desktop widget. wickedy widgety woo.

i want a perfect soul

Radiohead have been playing at v this weekend. Last night at about eleven i got a couple of texts off people who were there about them playing creep which, in case you didn't know was their big first breakthrough single and which they've generally ignored for years. I couldn't really get as excited about it as most other people seemed to be- there probably literally dozens of other rhead songs i'd rather hear over that but just now i got a call from the bf who was up in staffs listening to it tonight. And hearing it on a crappy phone connection with a load of people singing it so out of tune was actually pretty amazing. Maybe i'd gone off it cos i don't actually listen to it all that much recently. But i remember a time when i sat in my room with it on repeat. The words meant a lot then. And i guess they still do a little now. Only i'd hope with less teenage angst attached. Maybe i've just not really listened to them as much recently. maybe i'm just a hopeless romantic, but i suppose with stuff like that you don't want to be listening on the end of a phone. You want to be there in the middle of it, with your arms around the one you love, singing as loud and as out of tune as the rest of them. But you can't always have things the way you'd want, and if that's the next best thing then it'll do me fine.

transgender t-shirt trauma

Cross-dressing is never something i've felt all that interested it. I mean, i'm not desperately interested in girls wearing pretty girlie clothes, so why would i want to myself? Well it seems on some unconscious subliminal level i am because every time i go to a gig and want to buy a t-shirt it usually turns out that it's a girls one. Perhaps it's the gay gene kicking in a bit more. Or maybe the t-shirts they make for guys could just be shit? And even out of the one's that aren't for girls the one i decide i usually want is sold out. So as a result i'm without a secret machines, graham coxon and !!! shirt which isn't really satisfactory. Especially when the silly machine and chk people's websites tease you with nice pictures but you can't anything out of them for love nor money! I guess it serves me right for being such an average, stereotypical gig-going medium sized man.

every good turn deserves headbutter

i headbutted a pensioner today. now, i realise that's not something to be proud of, and it's not as if i'm boasting about it. but she did put her head in the way. i was quite happy wandering along lunch in hand minding my own business, when a nice harmless looking old lady asked for a hand getting her wheelchair out of the boot. being the chivalrous gentleman that i am i plonked my sarnie down and grabbed it. i know i'm not the beefiest boy on the block but think i can handle getting a little wheelchair out of the car. granny obviously didn't agree and decided to help. so she snuck up on me and as i turned around whacked her on the head. luckily for her, her industrial strength blue rinse perm cushioned the blow somewhat so we both escaped unscathed. the morale of the story: don't help grannies.

here we go again...

well, the blog's back. and this time it's on someone else's server so that if it goes belly up i can blame someone else. i'm still playing about with what i want it to look like. and i'm sure that'll take just as long as it will take for me to think of something interesting to write about. i've still got the moblog kicking about if you want to look at that. and there's some other photos on the fake plastic lee website. normal service will be resumed shortly, i assure you. expect post titles stolen from song lyrics, moaning and ranting, the occasional picture, and a load of pointless waffle.