Seen on Charlie's blog:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ulzkls/Advertisement.htm
October 2002 Archives
Found in someone else's livejournal, The story about the baby. It's this guy's musings about his kid. Sample quote:
"I can think of a bad reason to have children. You shouldn't have a child in order to dry it out and sell it as an aphrodisiac for Asian businessmen."
As Cleodhna mentioned, I used to believe is a great time waster. It's people's recollections of the weird things they used to believe when they were kids. One of my favourites:
"I believed that the inside of a tomato was a small, living creature and I flatly refused to eat that bit."
Open Decks was a blast yesterday. The guy before me was doing all the fancy stuff with vinyl, slowing down one of the records or spinning it backwards to line up the tempo, all impressive stuff, and you couldn't hear the joins unless you were looking at the decks. I realised, though, that the reason he could mix the stuff together so well was that it was all the same tempo and key. It must be a British Standard Rhythm for DJs. So after half an hour of it we were all thoroughly bored of it.
My set started with Moondance by Van Morrison. Cut into South Park's Unclefucker. Cut into Madonna's Like A Virgin. Applause from the Gugs crowd, and a perfect antidote to the previous guy's posturings. Brian followed up with a set entirely composed of songs about fucking.
My mother is currently in hospital, having had part of her small bowel cut out. She went in on Friday and was operated on on Saturday. When she was admitted, the doctor asked her when she'd last been in hospital. The last times were, she recalled, a few months ago when she broke her arm, a few years ago when she had treatment for her bee sting allergies, and (points at me at that point) "when I had him." She's damn healthy. (And doing fine now, I understand - going over to see her this afternoon.)
One of the advantages of living in the city is that at times where light is at a minimum - because upstairs' shower leaked, with water pouring through the ceiling amd down the cable of the (non-grounded) light in the bathroom, so we've removed the bulb from in there and don't turn it on - is that the street lights from outside provide enough illumination to see.
My chair was very uncomfortable today; I found out just now why that was. Laszlo had buried a couple of my socks underneath the seat, which flips up. Clever dog.
I'm writing code to turn the HTML of UK2's help pages into PDF. It's great fun; it's like doing all sorts of stuff I used to do on the Risc PC (old Acorn machine, great interface, rubbish marketing) with GUIs and font positioning etc.
We decided to go to Cafe Andaluz, which is the new restaurant that has opened up beneath us (yes, in the basement of our block of flats). It's extremely nice inside, and the food's pretty good as well.
Thing is, though, it's so close that when we came out, we felt that it didn't feel like coming back from the restaurant if it only took us a dozen steps from the restaurant door to ours.
So we went round the block first.
Got pointed to this photo agency site by a Sting mailing list, so naturally I put "Sting" into the search box - you're allowed to put other things in there if you like.
What fascinated me was the keywords for each photo, and not just things like "Germany out, France out, Italy out, spain out, Australia out, Japan out" - presumably some photos are too hot for, er, most countries. No, it's stuff like this photo of Sting and Lulu - which warrants the keywords "Duet striped trousers".
I mean, of all the keywords you could have used, admittedly "striped trousers" is one of them, but surely not the second most important? I mean, how about "Mature established rock star helps out comeback-hopeful mature ex-rock-star" or something? OK, so that's not so snappy, but I bet they can come up with some codeword that their professional clients will understand.
Also, I'm slightly amused by the possibility that someone at the agency actually thinks their clients might do a search on, say, "striped trousers" and "duet" - or, possibly, "striped trousers" and not "duet".
I had saved one of the trailers which had all the rubbish stuff removed. It didn't look like such a bad film then.
Hmmm.
On related news, saw Ben Folds (and the Divine Comedy) on Tuesday. Ben Folds was superb. He also seemed to have his entire fan club there (or maybe he's just very popular in Glasgow), as by the second number the audience was, unprompted, singing the backing vocal parts for the song he was playing on solo piano.
(He was good enough that it was only half-way through the first song he played that I remembered that it originally had drums and bass on it. There's a lot you can do with solo piano, and I bet Tori Amos wished she'd known all that you can do with solo piano a few years ago.)
Ben Folds ended up playing a really early song that nobody knows - apart from the audience full of fans last Tuesday, that is - and coaching us in singing the horn parts for one of the songs (left hand side of the audience sings the trumpet, right hand side sings the saxophone). He ended his set standing on top of the piano - before guesting on a few songs with the Divine Comedy.
Who were OK, but they need to sort out their problems with their sound guy. Either he's shit, or he hates them, because they sounded appalling.
