CTRL-F5 (repeat for 3 hours)

The “leaking” of the headliners for this year’s Glastonbury does not bode well for a pleasant Thursday evening. This latest announcement seems to be something of an odd move. This information must surely have come from someone close to the festival, and considering the extensive measures the organisers have tried to take to restrict ticket sales this year, I’m not sure what good it does to leak the lineup details. Surely this is just going…

Continue reading

DaylightSaving-lag

Neither of us could quite understand why we struggled to muster the energy to leave the house yesterday, scuppering our overoptimistic plans to attempt to watch the boat race live (if I couldn’t get to see the thing when I lived just up the road from it, or even when I worked at the RiverSoft office next to the Chiswick bridge in Mortlake, and therefore drank regularly at The Ship, the pub next to the…

Continue reading

Gaddafi Duck

We had another stab at the pub quiz at our local last night. Despite having to split up into two teams because the pub was so crowded, we still put in a respectable mid-table performance (and somehow Sal, Jim and I beat Rob, Claire and Martin by a couple of points in spite of their having apparently answered all the same questions correctly as us). Still, I think we’ll have to do some brushing up…

Continue reading

What’s twenty quid to the bloody Midland Bank? I had a very interesting chat with a chirpy chap from my bank the other day. I actually think it might be the first time I have ever spoken to someone at my own branch, given that it was my dad who opened the account for me (when I was about 7) at the branch in Liverpool near where he worked at the time, and in these…

Continue reading

Grammar Does Matter (#2 in an occasional series)

On my way to work this morning I noticed one of those new anti-terrorism posters on the tube. Unfortunately, I’m a little bit confused about the mixed message conveyed by the poster, which consists of a picture of a person on a tube looking at an unattended bag, and has the following text: “Who owns this bag? Don’t touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff, or call 999” So, if I’ve got this right,…

Continue reading

21 Grams

Sal and I watched 21 Grams on DVD last night. It’s quite good, actually (if you can get over the daftness of its central premise about 21 grams being “the weight of the soul”, which is, er, complete nonsense). Naomi Watts, as usual, is excellent, doing that believable emotional range thing she does in Mulholland Drive again, but Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn also put in impressive performances. I give 21 Grams 18 grams…

Continue reading

Googlebombing

Well, it may have taken just over a month, but I was overjoyed to discover (thanks to Pete) last night that our efforts have paid off. At least until Google updates their index again, there can be no doubt what is the rudest pub in Islington: http://www.google.com/search?q=rudest+pub+in+islington (even better, it’s also http://www.google.com/search?q=rudest+pub) As fantastic as this is, though, it doesn’t give me the greatest confidence in the future of everyone’s favourite search engine. As far…

Continue reading

And if a double decker bus/Crashes into us/Then to die by your side/Is Such a Heavenly Way To Die

I suppose that some of you (hello Pete) might be wondering why the level of bloggage around these parts has dropped off a bit recently (and given that I still haven’t got around to setting up one of them thar RSS feeds, you’re probably getting increasingly frustratingly trigger-happy with the Refresh button). So why the recent lack of new posts? I’m not sure, actually. I suppose it’s partly because I realised that a lot of…

Continue reading

Lost In Trailers

My delight on Friday afternoon at receiving my Region 1 copies of Lost In Translation and Infernal Affairs, both of which are still in the cinema in the cultural backwater that is the UK, but out to buy elsewhere in the world, was slightly tempered by the discovery that the producers of both discs think they know best how their customers will want to watch their films. When I stick Lost In Translation into my…

Continue reading