alexsarll: (crest)
Citizens of Finny P: anyone got any idea what's happened on Hanley Road? Neither Google News nor shopkeepers has anything. I would say that the Dairy finally got the reaction it deserves, except that it's still open for business and the police/medical presence seems to be concentrated around a red door next to the Chinese takeaway.

Scanning my spam folder for the inevitable victims of Gmail's over-eager gatekeeping, I see mails from earlier this week boasting "Become really wanted by women in 2008!" I'm used to viagra and bank scams, but spam selling time machines? Even only short-hop ones? That's tempting.

Left to my own devices on V-Day - Richmond's across the international date line or something - I contented myself with gigging and the (very full) Prom. The Sex Tourists and 18 Carat Love Affair both on fine form, the latter covering 'The Look of Love (Part 1)' which, while not the Lexicon of Love track I'd have chosen for Valentine's Day, is still clearly ace. Steve, having by now come to recognise me as an enthusiastic shouter-along on 'Five Rounds Rapid', got a bit overenthusiastic while sticking the mic in my face and chinned me, but hey, that's showbusiness.

All the crisp blogging lately has been about those new Walkers flavours, but for me the overlooked story is the pickled onion renaissance. The old-style Monster Munch got some attention, but as well as the return of the cyclic, yummy Pickled Onion Walkers Crisp, corner shops have lately started dangling a new challenger, Pickled Onion Crunchy Sticks, which I can strongly recommend. PO used to be my second favourite flavour, but salt & vinegar's not what it was - presumably because the saltiness necessary for a decent bite is anathema under new health agendas. Oh Walkers Max Salt & Vinegar, thou shouldst be living at this hour - but in your absence, increasingly I find pickled onion is where satisfying crisping is at. The downside being, the effect on one's breath is a lot more pernicious than with S&V.

Have abandoned Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian 100 pages in, about the latest I ever quit a book. Yes, the savagery, yes the prose, but...there was no through line. I suspected I was just going to get another 230 pages of the same and when the 'plot' is murderous picaresque, and the central character essentially a cypher, why would I want to do that? I can handle blank leads if it's, say, an early Angela Carter, because the book is shorter for one thing, but also because the incidents through which they travel have a dream-like logic, and a wonder to them. But for an atrocity exhibition like this, I need someone to follow.
alexsarll: (merlot)
Ah, Valentine's Day. Which like all the festivals is doubtless nicked from a pre-christian version, but I'm going to let the monotheists have this one, because it ties in nicely by making love more complicated and painful than it needs to be. If you're in a relationship, there's pressure - especially if you're not sure how serious it is, because suddenly that becomes a bigger issue. If you're not, it also sucks - not so much because in and of itself it reminds you of the Terrible Pain (back in my teens, perhaps that was a part of it - but once you've had your first few with someone, that passes), as because it's simply a day which is Not For You, when all the couples you know will either be staying in, or only have eyes for each other if out - or worst of all, tense and rowing over a rose deficit or similar nonsense. And the idea of people attempting to make the transition on the day - speed dating events and the like - is it just me who finds that insane? How much unnecessary weight of expectation does that place on an evening, on a relationship formed that evening?
Don't get me wrong, I have had a handful of great Valentine's, which is more than a lot of people manage, and I treasure them. One I remember as being a Wednesday, which is part of the reason I'm staying in tonight, because if you know something won't compare then why bother trying? Which leaves me various options. I've got a passable shiraz on the go, and I must make sure not to listen to those two albums' worth of Julie London I got yesterday. But what else? There's a slightly purposeless Judge Dredd mega-epic I could finish, there's Johnny Depp dying of the pox in The Libertine, or I could find out whether The Wire really is as good as they all say.
I sure as blazes can't be bothered with the Brits, because they won't be as good as last time Jarvis was on, much less the legendary KLF incident. For heavens' sake, they're even giving an Outstanding Contribution To Music award to Oasis! How can they have made an 'outstanding contribution' when they didn't have a single original idea between them, just a loutish recreation of hackneyed songs and poses which mostly sucked the first time round? Says one of the monobrowed morons: "We haven't got anything special planned - we're not that sort of band."
What, special? No, you can say that again. Except in the 'special needs' sense, obviously.
alexsarll: (bernard)
So, the ID cards got passed even without Blair present, and now the total smoking ban's come through too. And there's a picture of Ming Campbell in an F1 car in our lobby, of which the only thing I can say is don't you think he looks tired? And yet, I am not disconsolate. Either I'm learning to emotionally ignore politics, or I'm subconsciously aware of a forthcoming Outside Context Problem. Either way, I think it's probably for the best.

Yesterday, trying to follow a link from someone's Memories to a deleted journal, I got the message "Error: couldn't determine journal from arguments." And haven't we all felt that at times? In other LJ peculiarity news, why has 'pic#5051120' reared its ungainly head in my drop-down list of icons?

The Sisters of Mercy are touring again soon. What follows is one of the conditions from their contract with promoters, offered without comment:
"promoter must NOT USE any of the following terms, or any local translation of them, or any word derived from any of them, and will use his best endeavours to avoid using any similar terms of abuse:
doom, goth, death, dark
This applies to the content of all advertising and promoter's announcements"


This afternoon and again tomorrow afternoon, I shall be engaged in what I think is the first formal training I've had in all my years here; appropriately, it's for something with no apparent relevance to my job. What this means to you is that I'll not be tootling around online as per usual, so direct anything urgent to the mobile (even though it may well be off, I'll get to that sooner).

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