Month: April 2005

My contribution to the team might not have extended much beyond insisting on a selection of incorrect answers–I could offer only a small handful of correct ones, and one of those was about Star Trek (hangs head in shame)–but it would be remiss of me not to mention our unprecedented success at the Hemingford Arms pub quiz last night: at one point in the quiz someone actually wondered out loud if we could bear to put our names to the piece of paper on which we had scribbled what we believed to be a series of entirely incorrect answers. At the end, though, as the quiz lady read through the names of the teams in order, with ours nowhere to be heard, it emerged that Ken Hom’s Hot Worms (my other contribution to our achievement; don’t ask…) had somehow triumphed with a quite remarkable score of 33, some 6 points more than the second-placed team. I still can’t quite believe it.

Oh, and the evening also yielded the following haiku:

Floppy-haired actor,
off Game On, film with Kidman.
Not winning the quiz.

You now, it’s terrible, really: Sal goes away for a few days and I can’t help myself but go shopping and spend lots of money. Ostensibly heading to Tottenham Court Road on Saturday afternoon to help someone else with a laptop purchase, I ended up returning with a lovely shiny new 60GB iPod photo, which is currently sync-ing the better part of my record collection as I type.

It wasn’t exactly an impulse buy, as I’d been thinking about picking one up for a while, given that my old MP3 player is looking rather dated these days–and I’ve long since filled up it up. But now I have 60 lovely gigabytes to fill, an amount that seems just as huge as my old player’s 20GB did four years ago. Then again, I should be ok for a while: my record collection, according to iTunes, now runs to 6311 songs, which is somewhere around 25GB and would take the best part of 18.5 days to listen to. But considering it took me over 10 years to amass a record collection that fills barely half of the tiny little box I’ve just bought, I should be ok for a while.

You’ve got to love the 21st Century: not only does today’s technology allow me to indulge my inner obsessive-compulsive hoarder on a grand scale, but it also offers a wonderful contemporary equivalent of alphabetising your CD collection: sorting out the track and album titles, downloading album artwork, and categorising everything by genre…

Hmm… Looks like I may be some time.

Nice to see the BBC continuing their occasional series of moderately hypocritical Papal-ethics articles with another brilliantly-headlined piece.

I must say that my plan of not paying any attention to Everton’s recent matches seems to be doing wonders for their form: since getting access to the evil one’s sports channels at home, I’ve watched 3 live games, all of which have ended in defeat for my team. I have completely ignored the last two games, which they went on to win, first comfortably against Crystal Palace, and then unexpectedly, against United. Not having seen last night’s game, though, I am rather curious about one particular incident, at least insofar as it was reported by The Independent:

“The first shot in anger came from Rooney, a 30-yarder that Nigel Martyn parried after eight minutes.”

Well that must have been some shot then… do they add on extra time for that?

Honestly people. If you are going to steal images off this website and stick them on your own blogs (well, not even stick them on your own webspace, but instead leech off my bandwidth), then the least you can do is get the dimensions right: that’s 273px wide and 335px high. And if you need any advice on how to do it, then just have a look here.

“That fat funny man,”
says Sal, “the one Angel likes”
in Camden, with shirts

Random Papal-related news:

– The BBC choose to illustrate an article discussing the ethics of photographing the Pope’s body with… a photo of the pope’s body (well, obviously from that angle it’s fine).

– Apparently Queen have come under fire for going ahead with their reunion tour gig in Rome this week. Well, obviously they didn’t get the memo: the appropriate way to pay your respects to the old AIDS-loving anti-abortionist is to postpone your plans by 1 day (see also: here)

Rob reports that his part of London has been experiencing heightened levels of crime recently. It must be catching: yesterday evening, on my way home from work I emerged from a particularly unpleasantly packed Northern Line to the sound of sirens wailing. Just your typical Monday evening in Camden, you might think, but as I pushed my way through the unwashed hordes waiting at the bus stop it became evident that something was going on. In Sainsbury’s, to be precise, where a blue jumpered chap was guarding the (locked) door and preventing a huge queue of people from entering the store and an even bigger queue of people from leaving the store with their purchases. Outside, there were two police vans parked up, and as I passed the doors a couple of policemen were heading for the door to sort something out… Unfortunately I didn’t stick around to establish the cause of the commotion (a particularly badly managed bomb threat, perhaps? a stakeout? a hostage situation? a fight over the last packet of Taste The Difference sausages in aisle 17?) but I was pleased to notice that despite the locked door, and the huge line of people between the tills and the door, queueing just to get out, I could still see a handful of people just casually wandering the aisles doing their shopping, apparently oblivious to events elsewhere.

A few minutes later on my walk home, I watched in disbelief as a bloke ran to try to get on a bus that was just pulling away from the stop. Once he realised he wasn’t going to get on it, he ran round the back and lifted up a small flap on the back of the bus (a fuel cap, perhaps?) and actually tried to hold onto the bus. Maybe he thought he could stop a packed double decker with only his bare hands, or pull it back towards him. Or perhaps he was just planning to ride from behind in the style of Michael J Fox in Back to the Future 2. Yes, that must have been it, because once he realised he had left his flying skateboard behind, he stopped trying to hold on and ran back down the street in the opposite direction.

Looks like the annual “lets hype Glastonbury until Wayahead Box Office’s servers explode” ritual is well underway, what with the White Strips confirmed as Friday night headliners, along with non so subtle hints about Coldplay for the Saturday night.

Despite what Mr Eavis might say, Wayahead (the chaps who will actually sell you the ticket once you get through the first hurdle from www.aloud.com) are still running Win2k, so it all should make for a fun Sunday…

Update (03-April-2005, 11:30am): I stand corrected. Things seemed to be running remarkably smoothly today, and tickets appear to be almost all sold out just 2 1/2 hours after going on sale… Still no sign of my confirmation emails though (“Your reference number will be emailed to you along with confirmation of your order. Please allow at least 4 hours for this to be delivered.”) Hmm. Wonder why there’s such a delay, you don’t think someone is checking all 112,000 transactions manually?