* Being Human (repeat)
* Fraochy Bay (Gaelic cartoon)
* Have I got a But More News For You (compilation)
* Have I got News for You (repeat)
* Ideal (repeat)
* Little Britain (repeat)
* Live at the Apollo season 7
* Live at the Apollo season 5 (repeat)
* Mock the Week (repeat)
* Mrs Brown’s Boys
* Never Mind the Buzzcocks (repeat)
* The Ones (Jasper Carrot doing material from 1990)
* Outnumbered (repeat)
* Royal Bodyguard
* Russell Howard’s Good News, series 5 compilation (repeat)
* Russell Howard’s Good News, series 1 (repeat)
* Twenty Twelve (repeat)
* Would I Lie to You? (repeat)

Only the best, fresh new comedy, don’t you agree?

So how, with such competition, can they all be so crap? Lets take a look at the vans that visit my particular building…

First up is a company I’ll cleverly rename “Souths”.

Souths are a local bakery who make average food for an average price. To compliment this, they have an average van driven by an average guy. They used to have a near monopoly on this park, and their driver used to spend every day driving around in a long wheelbase van stuffed with average sandwiches.

The thing is, I don’t mean ‘average sandwiches’ as a particularly negative term. The problem is that they’re the sort of sandwiches you’d make for yourself if you could be arsed to get out of bed in the morning. These are the sort of sandwiches that are actually a tax on your snooze button. The most exciting thing on the menu is a concoction called “corination chicken” (sic) that manages to tick all the same boxes as the curry that schools used to serve up – it’s almost a disappointment that there’s no overcooked swede in there.

The bacon sandwiches are a particular joy – never before have I seen bacon that has gone through the cooking process without the slightest hint of browning. I’ve seen black and white photos of albino goths with more colour than this stuff. The only sign of cooking is the little puddle of congealed fat that nestles in the porcine bowl that forms when the rind shrinks.

My personal favourites are the “corned beff and tom” (sic) baguettes (which manage to prove that bread + tomato = soggy + seeds) and the superb “roast beff and hors rashdish” (sic) which proves that their horse radish is about as potent as their spellchecker. They’ve even missed the apostrophe in their company name…

As the more professional companies moved in, this old guard stood firm. And lost the vast majority of it’s business. Who knew that soggy sandwiches which reminded you how lazy you are, wouldn’t sell…?

Next up, we have one we’ll call “Dudds”. Again, no apostrophe, but that’s kind of par for the course. Dudds is like Souths slightly more fashion conscious sibling – you know that they’ve got the same style and roots (and routes – badum-tish) but the makeup and a nicer frock make them really quite a bit more appealing. It’s the same “I could have made this myself” menu, but it’s made using bread with texture and without the congealing lard. It’s the safe option – the one where the taste sensation with neither delight or depress you. Oh, and like Souths, the menu will be the same tomorrow as it was today, last week, last year and quite possibly last decade. While Souths make the sandwiches that you know you could of made at home, Dudds make the kind of sandwich you think you’re making while you’re making them at home. Dudds are the uninspired dream to Souths uninspired reality.

Thirdly we have a van I was going to call “Stallions” but which would probably be better called “knackers yard”. Stallions (we’ll stick with this name because it has the obligatory apostrophe abuse) actually sell good food. Which makes it much more disappointing that it manages to be as crap as the other vans. Here we have a lovely shiny van selling lovely food, which manages to turn up with virtually no stock, after all the other vans have been and gone, and which takes the unexpectedly shitty step of putting no prices on anything – not the sandwiches, or the paninis, or the wraps, or the crisps, or the pastries or the drinks, or the chocolate. You select your food, talk to the slightly unnerving salesman, and wait for him to pick a number and double it.

Finally, we have the van I’ll call “Albert’s”. If there was any justice in the world, they’d win the sandwich wars solely because they know what an apostrophe is for, but the world is not that simple.

When Albert’s first arrived, it was a joyous thing. Every week the van would have new culinary delights on it. Sure, you’d still have BLTs and cheese and onion, but there would always be an equal number of oddities, like falafel and mango chutney, spicy cheese and kidney beans, bacon and blue cheese, or onion bajii and riata. Some of them were great and some of them were decidedly odd, but there was always variation, and you always knew that something particularly odd would be gone next week, to return 4-6 weeks later with that sandwich you couldn’t live without.

Sadly, like everything, it changed.

Every day they come by with the same selection. Every day they have an unsurprisingly large proportion of blue cheese, mayo and walnut wraps left in the rack. Every day, they’ve run out of Flaming Hot Monster Munch, so you have to resort to pickled onion if you want to put crisps on your fingers and leave greasy footprints across your desktop…

And that sums them all up – all of the vans have some guy in a room who decides that today, like every day, he’ll make 20 of each of the sandwiches. None of them have a guy who waits in that same room and wonders why there’s never any of these sandwiches coming back, but there’s still 15 of those ones sat in the tray looking lonely. None of them has a guy who thinks “we’ve sold out of Flaming Hot crisps again – maybe I should put some more on the van tomorrow?”

The perfect example of this was with Albert’s earlier this year. I love their spicy cheese and kidney bean sandwiches. They were one of those fillings that had no god-damned right to work, but somehow did. So they stopped putting them on the van.

One day I put in a special request for them. After much umm-ing and ahhh-ing, they decided that there wasn’t any demand for them, but that they’d do them next week as a one-off.

Monday came and there were no cheese and bean sandwiches. There had been wraps, but they’d already been sold before he got to us. The same happened on Tuesday. And on Wednesday. Thursday, I was told, would be different – they were making them as sandwiches – but when Thursday’s van came, it did so with no cheese and bean sandwiches, because they’d already been sold.

Friday was my last chance…

When Friday’s van came, there were no cheese and bean sandwiches. They’d made a big batch of the mix up at the start of the week, and it had all gone, so they’d made no cheese and bean sandwiches that day. “Will they be making any next week?” I asked. The reply was somewhat predictable. “Sorry, no. There isn’t enough demand for them…”

In the 15 years I’ve worked in these places, there’s only ever been one sandwich van which never failed to bring delight… and it didn’t even sell sandwiches. Back in the days when I worked for the pr0n palace, we were visited by a lady universally known as “Hot Jan”. She drove a rusted Bedford Rascal van with a dangerous looking gas stove in the boot. All she sold were slightly greasy pastry products and huge soft, floury jacket potatoes which she smothered in any of the dozen different tasty toppings that were always on there – including a very familiar yellow coronation chicken.

It even had swede…

Which makes it all sound so much grander than it really was.

Event 1 : Wooo, tech!

First, let me tell you about 1996. I was at University in Leicester, spending way too much time with nerds, watching too much SciFi and “dating” a girl in Alberta.

A normal day during the holidays would start with dialing in to the University SLIP (this was just before we got Dial-up) and using Telnet to check my email in Pine. We only had one phone line, and after 8am cost money, so it was very much a quick peek. I spent the day pretty much out of the loop, unless someone sent a message to my pager – and then the conversation was pretty much one way, since I hated payphones. At about 4pm, Sky One showed their daily shot of Star Trek : TNG and I spent 45 minutes watching Tasha Ya caress her computer and Deanna Troi accuse everyone of hiding something (and wondering why, if the computer was so clever, it needed to be told that Earl Grey should be served hot). At 6pm, my grandmother would finally wrestle the remote control from my hands and I’d go and tie up the phone lines again, dialing back in to the University system to chat with friends – either as a group via a MUD or one to one in the fantastically confusing “Talk”, where both parties had equal rights to type things in the same box. Finally, at about midnight (when phone costs dropped again) I dialed about 20 numbers (plus an international phone number) into the phone so that I could spend £5 on ten minutes chatting to this girl in Canada…

Fast forward 15 years to the day…

Yesterday, just before work, I went to the coffee shop to get, well, coffee. While I was waiting, my phone chirpped three times – once to tell me I had a new email, a second to tell me my brother wanted me, and a third time to tell me Earl Grey should be hot.

The day before, I’d called a UK service provider (tax/utilities/insurance type thing) to tell them to cancel my brother’s service. Only – they wouldn’t talk to me because I wasn’t my brother (we’ll ignore the fact they only knew this because I said I wasn’t). He would, they said, have to ring them to say he wanted it cancelled – but they only had an 0870 number, which can’t be accessed from abroad.

Using my leet ninja nerd skills (ahem) I got the unlisted number, sent it to my brother and told him to sort his own shit out. That second chirp was my brother, on a computer smaller than my 1996 external hard drive, IMing me, on a device twice the size of my 1996 pager, yet more powerful than the 1996 PC, to tell me that he’d just used Skype to call the provider (for free) to tell them he wasn’t a UK resident any more.

It struck me that, barring the whole space travel bit (which, lets face it, wasn’t a major part of TNG), tech was now more like Star Strek than it was like 1996. Hell, if you believe the Apple adverts, Siri has a better grasp of English than Enterprise’s computer.

Event 2 : Twitter

On a completely different subject, when did sending celebrities weird messages stop being the actions of a stalker?

Last night, while watching the BBC’s frankly fantastic Only Connect, I posted a message to twitter…

SodiumLights : Why are this week’s #onlyconnect teams dressed to match their backgrounds? Is round 5 hide and seek? Even @VictoriaCoren is at it… [LINK]

This morning, I woke up to find my phone desperately trying to catch my attention – someone had mentioned me on twitter…

VictoriaCoren : @sodiumlights I’D LOVE THAT TO BE ROUND 5. Unfortunately, I refuse to wear my glasses and we’ve only got half an hour.[LINK]

When did this happen? When did it become normal for people making random observations about TellyLand have TellyLand respond to them?

*sigh*

• 7 4 guppies
• 4 glass catfish
• 4 2 loaches
• 2 Dwarf Gouramis
• 1 male siamese fighting fish
• 5 female siamese fighting fish
• 3 2 Plecs
• 6 glowlight tetras

Not the best of weeks…

Update Make that 1 guppy…

I’m sorry, but no. At least, not directly.

On the radio last night I heard an interview with an American woman talking about September 11th and how both she and close friend both lost their husbands on that day. I felt genuinely sorry for her. The friend’s husband died in the first tower. Her husband died of a heart attack across town – nothing to do with the attacks. Since that day, she claims she’s heard first, second and third hand accounts of the other man’s death hundreds of times, but barely anyone is interested in her own husband. He’s just not interesting.

And that’s the point – the attacks were a horrific thing, but by no means unique and by no means overshadowing everything else that day.

But “that day changed everyone’s life all across the world”. Really? Do you think so?

On that day, I was in London with a friend of mine when she got the news that she had been infected with HIV. I saw the first tower in smoke on a projector TV in the pub next to the clinic but I just assumed it was a film they were showing. I think I saw the second tower get hit by the second plane, but I was rather distracted by the fact that my friend was trying to slice into her arm with a razor blade, and the fact that I knew her blood was hardly safe right then.

Did that day change my life? Christ yes. Was it the twin towers? No.

I live in the UK where terrorism was simply a part of my life growing up. It seemed like every day someone was blown up, or was shot dead. My grandfather (I later learnt) spent several years on an IRA hitlist and several people he knew died in pretty horrific circumstances. The paramilitary groups of Northern Ireland killed with guns and bombs. They left people horribly mutilated and they forced people to become unwilling suicide bombers by kidnapping family members.

And what did the great people of mainland Britain do? We put security fences up around the military housing and removed the litter bins from shopping centres. And had some tea. And tried to ignore the fact that a lot of the paramilitary money was coming from American pockets.

September 11th didn’t really effect us in the UK. Yes, there were companies where the entire American office vanished over night, but that didn’t effect the average guy in the street. There was a financial effect, but most people didn’t notice it.

What changed things for us was the massive over-reactions by the American and British governments. Rings of steel and iron appeared around things and we were all encouraged to be scared of that odd guy on the street – especially if he wore a tea towel on his head. We’d spent years ignoring the genuine terrorism of a guy who looked just like us and we were now reacting violently against a guy who hadn’t actually attacked us but did look different.

Lets all pick on that kid – he may not have done anything wrong, but he looks different.

So, we welcomed lots of laws that hadn’t been thought through and allowed our governments to do pretty much whatever they pleased in the name of security. We allowed our governments to attack their own people and the people of other countries in what should have been (and frequently were) illegal acts of aggression. We allowed our governments to detain people without charge and treat them in frankly horrific ways. We allowed our very way of life to be changed forever and anyone who suggested that this wasn’t the correct solution was a traitor or a sympathiser.

So, yeah… September 11th changed my life. But it wasn’t the falling of two skyscrapers that did it – it was the opportunistic manipulations by the government that changed my life.

So, today is the 10th anniversary of those original attacks and everywhere people will be standing still in the only true bit of commemoration in a sea of depressing televisual celebration. Thousands (or, more likely, millions) of people will spend the day visiting the attack sites or glued to their TVs watching the event over and over again.

So, today is the day when we discover if Al Qaeda has any strength or abilities left. This is a terrorist organisation that loves symbolism and anniversaries. If they can’t manage to do something spectacular today, then they simply can’t be considered to be a risk to us any more. Yes, you can tell me that “the FBI/CIA/MI5/KFC caught them before they could do anything” but if this huge evil terrorist empire can’t sneak through just one noteworthy incident, they just can’t be taken seriously.

And if that’s true… can I have my country back?

Each of those dots is a meter square block. (click for bigness)

The cathedral itself is 255 meters long, and the grounds stretch it to 270. It’s long enough that even set to ‘far’, you can’t see the high altar when you’re stood by the front door…

Under the tower, looking at the labyrinth toward the octagon

Closer to the octagon, with the high altar rendering

The place is based (ver, very) loosely on Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire. Loose in the sense that, it’s nothing like Ely Cathedral, but I turned to it whenever I needed inspiration.

Things like, how to join the roof together at the cross-bar of the cathedral. Enter Ely Catherdral’s famous Octagon.

Yeah, this version is a bit bigger and less subtle. That'll be because I needed the light. Thanks to Notch for letting us put candles on fenceposts.

More when I’m sober…

On your way home, can you go to the store and buy bread? If they have eggs, get 6.

45 minutes later, the man walks into the kitchen with 6 loaves of bread.

“What the fuck?” the wife asks, “I asked you to get one loaf of bread. Why the hell did you get six?”

“Well,” he replies, “they had eggs…”

It’s the same old story… people want your email address and then your twitter name and before you know it you’ve gone from a bit of recreational twitter to a hard facebook addiction.

You tried to seduce me before, and I was weak. This time I was strong… I was a member for a full 30 minutes before I realised just how horrible and unintuitive their site design is, and just what a nasty mess the whole process is. So I quit.

Facebook had other ideas…

Try getting that Captcha right without opening charmap.

The car in the video game didn’t exist – pixels and vectors and nothing else.

Then someone decided to make a real life version of it…

( Go visit XKCD. No really. If you don’t know Randall’s comics, go. I’ll wait… )

So, I can now tell you how deep and involved their interrogation techniques are.

You’ll need the tag end of a roll of co-axial cable, tucked behind the radiator, preferably covered in cobwebs. You’ll also need to make sure that the channels 1 to 4 are tuned to static.

1. Show the officer the end of the cable.
2. Show the officer channels 1 to 4 of static
3. Wave goodbye to her

Job done.

Of course, if you happen to use your DVD player or digital set top box as a receiver then your first four channels wouldn’t be tuned in, would they?

So, just remember boys and girls – you only need a license to receive broadcast TV at the time that it is broadcast.

Things you need a license for:

• Watching or recording TV broadcasts that have come down your aerial
• Watching an internet stream of live TV if it’s being broadcast live by a UK provider – you can watch The Daily Show live, but you can’t watch the Olympics via a Bolivian TV station if it’s being shown on the BBC at the same time
• Using a TV card in a computer
• Technically, watching a VHS of something someone else recorded for you

Things you don’t need a license for:

• Watching iPlayer, 4OD or similar on demand internet streams from UK broadcasters, as long as they aren’t being broadcast at the same time. I’m not sure how this works for repeats…
• Watching DVDs
• Playing computer games
• Using it as a strangely expensive and useless mirror

Don’t let their bullying letters scare you. If you don’t watch live broadcast TV on your TV, don’t get a license. Spend the money on a congratulatory meal out instead…

This fantastic preamble comes from that Google scanning and OCR…

      This is a digital copy of a book lhal w;ls preserved for general
ions on library shelves before il was carefully scanned by Google
as pari of a project

      to make the world's books discoverable online.

      Il has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the
book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one thai
was never subject

      to copy right or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether
a book is in the public domain may vary country to country.
Public domain books

      are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history,
culture and knowledge that's often dillicull lo discover.

      Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original
volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long
journey from the

      publisher lo a library and linally lo you.

      Usage guidelines

      Google is proud lo partner with libraries lo digili/e public
domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain
books belong to the
public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this
work is expensive, so in order lo keep providing this resource,
we have taken steps to
prevent abuse by commercial panics, including placing Icchnical
restrictions on automated querying.

It’s not looking good when your OCR can’t even process your boilerplate frontpage…

Except it was bloody cold in the real world yesterday, so in my dream everyone was wearing woolly hats, scarves and gloves.

That is all…

In recent years, in our coverage of American politics, we may have given the impression that, in electing Barack Obama as President in 2008, the American people had shown themselves as thoroughly enlightened and forward-looking, having thrown off racial prejudice and generally become politically mature in a way which should serve as an inspiration to the whole of mankind.

Such headlines as “US Comes of Age in Electing First Black President”, “Obama Victory Shows America Has Thrown Off Race Prejudice For Ever” and “US Walks Tall Into Future With Barack The Superman” might have suggested that we considered that by electing Mr Obama, America was entertaining a new golden age.

Having watched with horror as in the recent mid-term elections US voters went overboard for candidates representing the so-called Tea Party, we now realise that the American people are no more than a bunch of backward-looking, reactionary, gun-toting, Bible-bashing rednecks who have no place in the modern world. We apologise to our readers for any inconvenience our gullibility may have cause.

Yeah. Not much that can be said about that really… (©2010 Private Eye, 1275).

Me: Can’t sleep. My brain is being mean to me. It keeps trying to create some fake chemical name.
GB: Yeah?
Me: Lacto-something acid. The something ends in ‘ick’. And all I can come up with is Barric.
GB: Okay…
Me: What’s Lacto-barric acid? Milk that gets more acidic when the air pressure changes?
GB: It could be Barium.
Me: No it couldn’t…
GB: Why not?
Me: Because milk comes from cows not swallows.
GB: What…?
GB: Oh.
Me: Ow…

In case your brain doesn’t work like mine, here’s the punchline. Not fun. Like someone decided the next Muller corner yoghurt would be chalk flavour…

By the way, NSFW. Really. Not even with the sound off.

I did warn you…

This chat is off the record
You: [ introductory line that was written in a humourous way but which falls flat when written down ]
Red: [ a reply that strokes your ego and lets you think that it was infact very funny ]
You: [ acknowledgement of advanced literary skills with an implied request for reassurance that you aren't, in turn, humouring me ]
You: [ rapid non-sequitor ]
You: [ in attempt to distract from neediness ]
You: [ spelling correction ]
Red: [ apology for slow reply ]
Red: [ reply to non-sequitor ]
Red: [ attempt at starting simultaneous conversation ]
You: [ counter apology for not getting back ]
You: [ attempt to blame 3rd party ]
You: [ question regarding the only thing remembered from yesterday's conversation ]
You: [ reply to non-sequitor reply ]
You: [ explaination that non-sequitor reply was not, in fact connected to conversation about yesterday ]
You: [ embarassed silence ]
Red: [ polite chuckle ]
Red: [ question regarding delicate subject that I find amusing but am trying not to show that I find it amusing ]
You: [ comment about co-workers in attempt to pretend question didn't happen ]
You: [ follow up comment that is ambiguous in nature and could be connected to above or could be answering your question ]
You: [ random swear words and technology type ]
Red: [ sympathy over tech, coworkers etc ]
Red: [ disbelief at tech, coworkers etc ]
You: [ attempt to imply these coworkers are worse than any other coworkers ]
You: [ unintended implication that suggests it could be me who is the one at fault ]
You: [ backtrack ]
You: [ self depricating comment with smiley face to imply that this is a joke when secretly I fear it's true ]
Red: [ comment to help cement the belief that yes, your coworkers are the worst ]
Red: [ hugs or similar to try to boost your mood ]
You: [ acknowledgement and reciprocation ]
You: [ innudendo ]
You: [ jokey dismissal of innuendo ]
You: [ question regarding husband / boyfriend / girlfriend intended to reassure that I appreciate that you are not available and innuendo was not a proposal ]
Red: I am so sorry – I have to stop because I have a non-sequitor that is too perfect not to say at this point…
Red: I saw some Japanese bondage on tv the othe night and thought of you

[ attempt to explain away bondage reference while knowing and acknowledging the fact that no-one who reads this will believe it ]

In the last half dozen times I’ve been there we’ve had a 45 minute wait for food despite the place only being half full; I’ve had my main course turn up before the starter; we’ve had sides missed out entirely, and; we’ve had only half the deserts turn up. Despite this, we go back because the food is good, the portions are generous and the prices are reasonable. And the pub itself is a nice place.

Tonight we did a dangerously grown up thing and booked in advance. This doesn’t happen in my world.

The reason was that they’re doing a limited run of ‘season’ food. Tonight was Game Season, with 4 small plates of food that was truly fantastic.

Wild Boar burger – when this arrived I think we both wondered what we’d walked into. The plate was mostly empty, with four chips forming a trestle, a burger the diameter of a HobNob, a fried egg and a slice of toasted bread. It looked like a comedy pretentious meal. Oh god, it was good though. The chips were right, the egg was runny yolked, and the burger was fantastically rich wild boar and caramelised onion cooked surprisingly light and moist.

Guinea Fowl and Chorizo – you know how all posh food has to be served in a ‘tower’? This was a tower. Sweet potato mash (possibly cold and then refried, like bubble & squeak), a slice of cooked chorizo sausage, guinea fowl breast, soul cream and a spot of chilli jam. Another fantastic combination of flavours.

Pheasant Chasseur – I have a love/hate relationship with pheasant. Even in the rose tinted days of my childhood, when pheasant was shot in the back garden and left to hang behind our kitchen door, pheasant was hit and miss. If you’ll pardon the phrase. This was the beautifully rich flavour I remember from good pheasant in a nice light sauce with little silverskin onions.

Venison – another meat that can be fantastic and can be rubbish. This venison was dark and gamey enough that I half convinced myself that there was a little liver in the mix. Marinaded and fried, then served with a sweet and tart cherry sauce and potato gratin.

Finish the meal off with a small rhubarb crumble and a macchiato with amaretto and I think it’s one of the best meals I’ve had this year. Not bad for twenty quid a head.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Take last night, for example. I dreamt about a friend of mine who is being investigated for gluten intolerance problems. In my dream she was dressed in classic 1980′s dance class gear (including the woollen leg warmers), dancing around while a vocallist sang this song, but with the lyrics “She’s a Coeliac, Coeliac, Wooo!”

It’s better than the decidedly (NSFW) offering from a few nights before where I dreamt about a comedically large erect phallus against a moving blurry woodland backdrop. It landed, perfectly, on the (ahem) bullseye of someone’s posterior and the moving music started… “Look into my arse… you will see…”

I’m enjoying weird dreams, but less of the odd puns please brain.

When most people say that they had a great weekend you assume that there was boozing and whoring or maybe fun and adventure. At a pinch, relaxation and serenity.

I think we all know I’m not ‘most people’. Saturday I drove 222 miles. Sunday I drove 210 miles.

You’re now assuming that I drove From Barcelona to Monte Carlo in a 1960s open top sports car, with Matt Monroe in the passenger seat and a beautiful woman on the radio.

Yeah… that’s not what happened.

Saturday I drove the A14 and the M6 to Birmingham and then on Sunday I drove all the way to sunny Gatwick. With a trailer!

I need to explain a little… Some time ago I used to drive a Toyota Carina. It was a horrible thing. Slow and underpowered, but willing to go when poked with a pointy stick. Until it died. An engine comes in two parts – a bit that stays still and another bit that goes back and forth. The Carina died when some of the ‘staying still’ bit started moving and quite a bit of the moving back and forth bit stopped. It wasn’t pretty.

Anyway, at this point I fell unconditionally and helplessly in love with my brother’s car (that’s wasn’t the word you were expecting, was it?). So, I drove four hours from Cambridge to Blackburn to buy an identical one. A wonderful little car that isn’t desperately fast but which doesn’t need to slow down much for the corners.

My little silver car looks just like this but, well, silver...

Then, both my grandparents got ill so I bought a Skoda Octavia. Faster, but the kind of car where you have to slow down for corners. And that made it dull to me. Most upsettingly, my wife stole the little silver car.

So… on Saturday I went to Birmingham and bought a second Little Car – 80k miles, a beautifully tight engine and gearbox, and finished in the metalic green paint that I rather like. Yeah, I know… I’ve heard it before. Two people, three cars. Ah fuckit. I can only drive one at a time and the ‘sensible’ car I drive does 50mpg…

Anyway… Sunday I drove down to Gatwick and stuck GB, her mum, her sister and her sister’s bloke on a plane to Egypt. Which wasn’t actually the reason it was a good day, but it’s a good point to leave this post…

So, I’d like to present you with three tracks and see if you come to the same conclusion I did…

First up, Scooter’s “Nessaja” from 2002. Oh yes, 8 whole years ago (and it was 10 years too late then)…

Don’t feel you have to listen to all of it. You may well go insane.

Next we have the Scooter tribute band “Moped” from 2006…

Finally we have this Enter the Ninja from South African group Die Antwoord. It’s only just appeared on theradio now, and I assume it’s less than a year old (their first album was last year).

I can’t help feeling someone is parodying a parody…

(When she dances, I can’t help thinking she’s getting the form wrong too…)

How to draw an owl

1. Rage Against The Machine – Killing In The Name
2. Metallica – One
3. Foo Fighters – Everlong
4. Tool – Sober
5. Metallica – Enter Sandman
6. Shihad – Home Again
7. AC/DC – Back ‘n’ Black
8. Guns ‘N’ Roses – November Rain
9. Pearl Jam – Black
10. Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird (Fixed spelling… you can’t trust anyone in this copy/paste world…)

So, how many surprises do we have in there…?

Well, Rage is currently loved more than usual (even in NZ) following the shafting of Cowell last Christmas. With the exception of Shihad and Tool (neither of whom I’m heard of before) it’s all pretty much as expected. In fact, Freebird is the only one of those tracks that wasn’t in the top 20 for last year’s chart.

How many new entries were there in the top 100? It’s a depressingly short list…

16. I Am Giant – City Limits
36. Slash – By The Sword (incredibly forgettable, IMHO)
47. I am Giant – Neon Sunrise(which I think is a better song than City Limits)
51. Rise Against – Saviour (another great song)
59. Disturbed – Inside the Fire (urgh…)
69. Slipknot – Snuff (It’s slipknot…. that’s all you need to know)
90. War Machine – AC/DC

Wait… what? War Machine was released 2 years ago. How did the fans of AC/DC take two whole years to get that into the top 1000?

Strangely, one of my favourite tracks on The Rock (American Slang by The Gaslight Anthem) didn’t make it onto the list at all.

Most depressing of all is that U2 managed to get 21 tracks in the top 1000. Still, at least they didn’t manage to get higher than 93…

I saw it back then and made disparaging comments about the driver.

Then I realised who the driver is.

Hi Stuart… *waves*

And by odd, I mean… well… strangely bloody believable. I thought dreams were supposed to be where the subconscious took us on wild rides full of speaking dragons and cars that turned into pocket watches, where giant chickens turned out to be your father?

Many years ago, I knew a kid called David. Sadly, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box. Slightly mongoloid in appearance, I now appreciate that he probably had some serious medical issues (like Downs Syndrome maybe) but at the time he was just the thick kid we could take the piss out of. Kids are bastards.

Anyway, last night he had this big bag of rubies he wanted to sell. He refused to let anyone look inside the frankly huge velvet bag that he was carrying, so I took him and his bag off to a jeweller – unsurprising, the one I saw on Wednesday.

The Jeweller takes the bag and upturns it on the counter…

Out tips a single ruby the size of a small pea, carried on a tidal wave of red lego bricks, bits of red glass and various types of red boiled sweets. It’s like a kid has stolen the “big pot of jewels” from a school play, and hidden a single gem in it.

And there the internally self consistent fragment ends.

I tell you, if I don’t get some weird dreams soon, I’m cancelling my subscription.

XKCD original alt text : "Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you."

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had this conversation. I don’t care where the entrance to your street is, or if there’s this tricky little junction by the pub – if I don’t know how to get somewhere, I use a satnav which knows where you are.

The only two exceptions are if you live at number 23, which is hidden between number 3 and number 81, round the back of number 42, or if you happen to live in a house that was built in the last 12 months.

Besides, the satnav is less likely to miss out a junction and inadvertently put me onto the one way system from hell. Or tell me to turn left at the Rose and Crown, forgetting that the bloody thing burnt down in 1981 and it’s now a scrap yard.

One of the Mefites was proved strangely right at the first turn – if you go to bed thinking about dreaming, you are more likely to recall your dreams.

So, for the first time in at least 20 years, I remember a dream from last night.

I have the feeling this was the tag end of the dream… I, my wife (played by Alexa Alemanni, aka Don Draper’s secretary Allison) and my children (confusingly, played by my brother and my wife, GB) are sitting down to dinner. For reasons that presumably made sense in the dream, we were eating whilst sat naked in the bathtub.

Allison decided that climbing into the bath naked would mean that the ‘children’ would see between her legs, so she took my phone and used it to shield her crotch from view as she climbed in.

Amusingly, the only part of this that struck me as odd, was that my phone still worked after being submerged. I even remember taking the phone apart to drain it, and discovered that the insides were still dry.

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure that I knew that it was a dream while I was dreaming it…