Month: September 2003

It has not escaped my notice that November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

The idea seems to be that writing a novel is one of those things that you always plan on doing but put off, for whatever reason, and never actually get round to, so the challenge is about setting a specific time to get on with it.

I think this is a great idea, but unfortunately will be in Australia for most of November, away from a convenient electronic writing tool (so computer-dependent am I, that I find it very hard to write anything of length without one these days…). However, I think the point of the exercise isn’t actually that you do this thing between a specific set of dates, the idea is more that you set yourself a limited time and just do it, not worrying about the quality or anything; you just have to write, and write lots.

So I think I’m going to try and do this – I’ll start in the middle of October and write up until I go away on holiday, and see what happens. I’ve already started thinking about what to write about, and I have an idea for a plot (sort of – it’s more of a theme really) and a couple of characters (not that it makes any difference, given that I’m breaking most of the rules of NaNoWriMo anyway by starting too early, but this kind of preparation is actually allowed under their rules).

I’m also contemplating publishing the work in progress as I go on this site, but I think I’ll have to see how it goes first.

He might have thrown away all his best songs (and by “best songs” I mean the ones I know…) in the first half of the show, but I still really enjoyed seeing Pete Yorn at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire last night. Sadly there was no She Bangs the Drum cover this time, though.

Oh, and he was supported by two bands with what are possibly the worst names I’ve ever heard: Fiction Plane, and Ambulance Ltd. Sadly, we arrived too late to see the (no doubt) mighty Fiction Plane, but Ambulance Ltd were alright in a harmlessly-melodic-indie sort of way. They also had at least one fan in there, judging by the shouts of “Ambulance, we love you!” from a guy to my left. I’m not sure if he was being ironic, but I did see someone wearing one of their T-Shirts on my way out of the venue (not that that means much – I also saw someone in a Something for Kate T-Shirt, proving as ever that there is a corner of South West London that is forever North Melbourne).

In answer to the recent guestbook query, I can report that Rob is safe and well, and his personal counter can keep ticking for the mean time, or at least he was until the end of his leaving drinks on Saturday evening – I can’t necessarily vouch for anything that may have happened in the mean time.

To be honest, I can’t really vouch for anything that happened towards the end of Saturday evening either, as I was in a slightly inebriated state by that point (although I suspect that I wasn’t the only one).

I had a kebab on the way home. Says it all really.

Not wanting to bang on about him like he’s the new Hasselhoff or anything, but I just wanted to link to this excellent article in today’s Guardian.

I think the key passage is the summing up:

…In fact, the prospect of Blaine at the mercy of a good humoured, but predominantly satirical crowd, composed of visitors of all ages, classes and ethnicities, hints at some residual, collective good sense, which can tell the difference between a huckster and a hero, and thus differentiates us from Americans. If Blaine could be induced to stay, for all time, in his silly box, there could be many worse ways of acquiring British nationality by composing some appropriate insult in the English tongue, then throwing an egg at him.

In other news, try a Google search for David nappy wearing fool Blaine. My work here is done.

UPDATE, 12 Sep: Oh look, FARK are organising a flash mob tonight at 9pm. Now I wonder where I can get a laser pen from…

Hmm. I may have over 15 days worth of space on my MP3 player, but it’s full. I just had to delete some obscure Flaming Lips to make room for my new Cardigans and Damien Rice albums (I mean it’s not like I ever really listened to Hit to Death In The Future Head or Zaireeka anyway).

I suppose I could always go and buy a 40GB drive and put that in, which would give me a whole month’s worth of music to carry around with me.

On the other hand, I could just delete my Britney Spears and Robbie Williams albums, but what would be the point in that?

Whenever I’m short of something to write about here, it’s reassuring to know that I can always rely on finding something suitably objectionable to comment on in Metro. Today’s dose of hypocrisy comes from their cover story, which appears under the headline “Store cards ‘scam’ probe”. The report is about the fact that MPs who fear shoppers are being “saddled” with billions of pounds of debt have ordered an inquiry into “rip-off” store cards. The article goes on to point out that, as well as having high interest rates, staff [often] “do not allow customers to take the terms and conditions home to study them properly”.

A few pages later on in today’s paper is an advert for House of Fraser, who are promoting a competition that you can enter by using your House of Fraser, um, store card. I looked for the terms and conditions of the card (or even some information about their interest rate), but rather strangely, even though they had paid Associated Newspapers all that money for a whole page of prominent advertising, they somehow didn’t manage to include this information…

According to the excellent Ross Noble, who we saw last night, people have been trying to throw stuff at David Blaine. One group of people have been trying to hit him with golf balls. They haven’t just been throwing them at him either. No, they “introduced an element of sport to proceedings” by taking a couple of clubs out to one of London’s parks and aiming with those. That’s just fantastic; as Noble pointed out, Blaine clearly hadn’t counted on the cynical edge to most Londoners (he went on to suggest that we all wait until it’s about 30 days into the “challenge” and then throw sticky buns at him – not so that he’ll get them, but so they’ll stick to the side of his perspex case and slowly slide down).

Noble was on top form last night, and I’d encourage you to see his show before the run ends at the end of the month. It was almost an entirely different show from the one we saw only a couple of months ago, with only hover donkeys making a notable reappearance, but that’s hardly surprising given that he’s – brilliantly – making most of the thing up on the spot. The show is all the better for it, as well; the jokes that have obviously been prepared somehow just aren’t quite as funny as the wonderfully daft tangents his improvisation leads him off on.

Our cable decoder is broken. It’s a rather grim state of affairs, actually, as it won’t be fixed until next week at the earliest. When it first went, it just made all the channels look like a piss-poor second-generation VHS copy. With each passing day, the picture gets slightly worse, and it’s now almost unwatchable.

No doubt by the time the engineer comes to look at it, it will have approached the quality of the worst TV picture I have ever tried to watch for any extended period of time, during my attempts to watch the England – Argentina match during the 1998 world cup finals while working in the states. The only channel that we could even remotely get that was showing it amounted to little more than moving blobs of fuzz. I could almost hear the commentary though. In Spanish. Surprisingly, I managed to just about follow what was going on for most of the game, although I did have to phone home for updates during the penalty shoot out.

Losing TV does have some advantages, though. Not in a “Why Don’t You…” turn off the TV and do something more interesting instead sense, but rather in that we have rediscovered the house’s collective DVD collection. Already we’ve watched
Crouching Tiger, Gladiator and Moulin Rouge this week. I’d forgotten how good those films were, actually.

Pete Libertine gets 6 months in prision for breaking into Carl’s flat. I guess that just about dashes any hopes of them getting back together to make the second album then…

I made a significant impact on my unwritten “things to do before I’m 30” list this weekend, by finally managing to get to see a match at Twickenham. Either on my way back from work, or on my way to Tesco’s, I’ve probably walked past that stadium at least a hundred times in the (nearly) three years that I’ve lived in London. I finally made it inside there for the first time on Saturday evening to see England take on France.

Unlike last week’s narrow defeat in Paris, this time the team actually included the players who are likely to be going to the world cup next month, and it showed. Having said that, for the first half an hour it looked like Jonny Wilkinson’s superb kicking would be the sole difference between the sides. Once the tries came, though, England quickly built up a commanding lead, and the game was effectively over by half time. In fact, such was the extent by which the game was wrapped up that, in a particularly quiet moment midway through the second half, a mexican wave started its way around the crowd and didn’t stop until it had done at least three full circuits – much to the amusement of the two American guys behind me (one of whom had brought a radio along to help him understand what was going on. They had both earlier been having the rules of the game patiently explained to them by the English guy sitting next to them).

All of which Top Trumps Pete by some way, considering he’s lived in the area for his entire life and hasn’t made it to a match yet. At least it only took me 2 1/2 years…