Head's stuck on loop. Where's the option for shuffle?

I really like Unstoppable by Bloc Party (think that's what it's called Edit: It's called The Prayer and it really is fucking ace!).
I also really like Giddy Stratospheres by The Long Blondes.
Both are excellent tunes.
I just can't get them out of my head.

Oh fuck...

La la la
La la la la la!

Normal Disservice will be resumed as soon as possible

We apologise for the recent lack of bloggage
Seeing as I'm unable to post a Tom & Jerry cartoon, here's a picture of some toys.

Told you I was Ill

This has been the heaviest cold I've ever had. I'm not kidding. I think I'm over the worst of it now, I'd say it was almost Flu it was that strong. For the last few days I've been barely able to drag myself out of bed. The Breadknife's been the same. We'd have been fucked if it wasn't for the little Fella going to nursery cos we have no one to help out. No one! That's when you realise how isolated you really are. There's just the three of us. No family within a hundred miles, no friends that'd be ready to drop everything to help out (funny how we always were though) Last night I collapsed in the bathroom. One second taking a piss, the next taking a dive. Smacked me head against the door as I went down too. The Bread was beside herself with worry especially as she couldn't get into the bathroom to see how I was until I'd come round. God I felt like absolute shite. Sweat was pouring off of me, my arms had gone numb, my perception was all over the place. To think I used to pay good money to feel like that. I'm relieved to say I feel much better now, but it still concerns me how alone we are.

I take it back

I slagged off Preston the other week after reading how he'd stormed off the set of Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Have to say though, that watching the episode in question left me feeling quite uncomfortable. Preston didn't walk because he was being precious. He walked because someone was taking the piss out of his wife. Under the circumstances (ie: being on telly and in front of an audience) he couldn't chin Amstell for being a cunt, so he took the only other option and left. Bill Bailey was a bit of a cunt too. I'm probably in the minority on this aren't I? :D

In other news... Is Joss Stone made of plastic?

Lurgee

I feel officially shit. I ache, have no energy at all. Have a headache the size of a planet and keep breaking out into really minging sweats. It's not fucking nice and needs to stop now! The Breadknife has is too. Our house is a barrel of fun right now. :(

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to the other side of the Avian Flu Restricted Zone.

Where I live and work borders on the A47. My side of the road is safe. The other side has BIRD FLU!!!!!

Not that I'm particularly worried about bird flu, I am, after all, a bloke! :D

Further adventures in Stereo

I bought a new amp.
It made sense. It was only fifty quid, even with having to pay £25 to the firm that looked at the other one it still worked out cheaper than having the repair done and I get a years guarantee as well.

I've never heard of Eltax, but 50 watts a channel for £49.95 will do me very nicely while I try to scrape funds together for something a bit meatier.
Bloke in Richer Sounds asked me why I was buying the Eltax? It's all I can afford mate, is my reply. "But it's only 30 watts per channel" he said. "That's a big drop off from your cambridge."

I point out that it's actually 50 watts per channel. Bloke then says "You know, I can sell you a much better amp than that?" I said 'I know, and if you want to sell me it for fifty quid I'll have it!'

"Oooh no, can't do that"

So I smiled and asked if I could have the Eltax then.

I watched

X-Men III at the weekend. Didn't get a chance to see it at the cinema, and the DVD seemed to be kept at an artificially high price for quite a while. Once it was less than a tenner I though 'I'm avin some of that'. Fucking loved it. Why was everyone saying it was shit? I'm not happy that my favourite X-Person got killed about ten minutes into the film but there was a good dramatic reason for it to happen. I thought it was far superior to the rather lacklustre X-Men II but then I appear to have been in the minority over that one as well.

Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye

My amplifier is cooked. I'm not best pleased.
I've got to pay £25.00 just to have it looked at. Or £78.00 to have it repaired. Or, buy a new Amp. I'm skint.

January 31st 2007, the day the music died.

I'm sorry but

Gawd only knows what's going on in Brummagummagummingham at the moment!
I was watching the news this morning and had to shout back at the telly when some shouty bloke said the police shouldn't have mounted yesterdays anti-terrorist raid without first discussing it with the local muslim community.

Well yeah, that would have got results wouldn't it?

I can just imagine that's how the intelligence services should have done things back in the 70's and 80's too. Maybe inform a few of the lads in the pubs around Finsbury Park that 'no offence like, but we're going to lift Joseph, Paddy, and Micky tomorrow morning cos we think they're being a bit naughty.'
Ah roight y'are, don't you be worrying, we'll have a point and a little chat wid em and erryting'll be grand. Tanks!

There you go job done. Why didn't they think of it sooner eh?

Eh?

Wail, Gnash, Complain!

What's going on with my music media type stuff?
Huh? Huh? Go on, tell me. I bet it was you.

My itunes keeps crashing when I'm attempting to rip (ahem) backed up cd's.
My iPod won't mount, itunes says it's corrupted, then I have to do the ipod reset, then it won't mount, then I have to do the iPod reset, then it won't mount, then I have to do the iPod reset, then I switch firewire sockets but the ipod won't mount, so I have to do the ipod reset and then it mounts. Hurrah, but it's been doing all this for a while now and I'm scared to connect the fucking thing to the computer.

And then... Then... I switch on my stereo and I'm only getting the right hand speaker working.
The little fella's drawn to the speakers like flies are to poo, so I check the cables and yeah, one's a bit loose, so I tighten up the connection switch the amp back on and... Nada.

So I swap the speakers over to make sure it's not a fault with them. Nada. Still no left hand channel.

Fucking arsing cuntwankbollocks!

I took the amp round the corner to the local tv and hifi place. I'm paying £25 just to get it looked at. Plus parts, plus VAT.
A couple of teeny tiny resistors have burned out. The fella's never seen it happen before. It's going to be a couple of days. It's not like I get much of a chance to get the stereo playing these days but I'd still like the option thengyewverramuch!

I ain't happy!

Surely it's not just me?...

But whenever I hear that single by The View, you know, the one that goes "I've had the same jeans on for four days now". I hear 'Brimful of Asha' but sung by George Fucking Formby. Is it just me?

I may have forgotten to say...

The little fella's been walking for about a week and a half now.
I'm well proud of him :)

KUNCE!

I used to hate the people I work for.
Now I fucking despise them with every molecule that makes up every cell of every bone and organ in my body.

Fucking fucking fucking wankers.
Cunts. Absolute cunts!

That is all.

You really can't go home again.

I bought this at the weekend.


Regular readers to here and the Drum will be more than aware that I love comic books. As far back as I can remember I was reading comics. The Beano, Dandy, Whoopee, Whizzer and Chips, Monster Fun (now that was a great comic) Buster, the list is endless. They were the funny comics. Then there was 2000ad, Warlord, Victor, Tiger, they were the slightly older boys comics, and man they were cool. Even more cool, were the British black and white reprints of Marvel comics. Mighty World of Marvel, Conan, The Titans, all used to deliver the most amazing action on a weekly basis. I never knew these were reprints though. Nor that they were originally in colour. I can remember when I was a little kid my Aunt Sue, taking a break from travelling the world, dropped round my Dad's flat with some bloke she'd met. Said bloke said he had a present for me and gave me a bundle of american comic books. I was amazed. They were smaller than our comics, and they were in colour. I particularly remember Ka-Zar, and the original X-men being in this bundle of comics. I fucking loved them, read them and re-read them until they fell apart. That was probably the start of my obsession with what complete and utter wankers refer to as 'sequential art' (fucking sequential art, only a real dyed in the wool cunt would come up with a phrase like that). In 1976 Marvel UK who had been reprinting stuff from the 60's in black and white launched Captain Britain. It was fucking ace. I loved Captain Britain. I loved the fact I had my own Super-Hero to read about. He didn't go to diners for pancakes. He didn't talk about Woody Allen like the characters in Spider-Man did. He was British and he was a double hard bastard. His title didn't last all that long though. Probably because he was being written by Americans who really couldn't write convincing British people back then

It took Alan Moore to write a convincing Captain Britain, but by the time Moore was writing the character I'd grown out of comics (or so I thought) I'd discovered that girls weren't all that bad really. That cigarettes make you look cool, and that lager tasted like shit but if you stuck at it you'd forget all about the taste! It wasn't really until I was 17 and unemployed that I picked up an american comic book again and rediscovered my inner geek! The book in question was Uncanny X-men. I'd never read anything like it. The characters were more than two dimensional shouty people that beat other people up. There was an intelligence behind the writing. There were sub-plots continually being referenced and hints of a bigger picture that, if you stuck with the book, you might get a chance to see. I stuck with the book. They lied about the bigger picture! :D

One of the things that Chris Claremont ( X-Men writer) did that amazed me, was bringing Captain Britain into the book. He looked completely different to the Cap B that I remembered as a kid, but he was definitely Captain Britain. Claremont even moved Captain Britain into a team book called Excalibur where he was leader of what essentially were the British X-Men with a couple of yanks as members so they could sell it back to America. It was a great series at the start but once Claremont left it got very poor indeed and was eventually cancelled.

I had to wait for the internet to be invented before I could discover what it was that Alan Moore had done with the character. Thanks to people on the old Comics International forum I discovered there was a graphic novel featuring Moores work in a single collection. I managed to get hold of a copy via e-bay and was as happy as a pig in shit. The art was a bit scrappy here and there, but then it was being done on a part time basis by some bloke called Alan Davis who also had a full time job. The story though, was colossal, parallel earths, ancient gods, an unstoppable force of nature called The Fury, and all the time the story was being told there were all these little human touches. People speaking to each other like they were people. Not comic book characters simply moving the plot forward. It was good shit I tell thee, and Cap B was back to being my favourite comic character ever ever ever.

Which leads us to the Collection I bought at the weekend. As I explained via e-mail to some chums, when I found out the original strip was being collected my inner 8 year old self jumped with glee. Once I'd sat down to read it I decided my inner 8 year old self was a bit of a twat. Fuck but it was dire. Awful plots, stereotypical Cor Blimey Guv'nah brits, and some of the most stilted dialogue I've ever had to sit through. Who wrote it? Fucking Chris Claremont. The same Chris Claremont who reinvented the X-men making it Marvels' most popular monthly title. He wrote X-men for something like 18 years. 18 fucking years! I can only imagine that he'd written his Captain Britain stories with his eyes shut, while stoned on mescaline. Possibly with an ex-nazi war criminal dictating lines while holding a gun to his head.

It. Was. Fucking. Shit!

I've read elsewhere that Claremont suffered from a very interfering editor who wanted action action action and left him no space for character development but all the same... I'd love to scan a few pages in so you could see how shit it is, but Marvel would probably sue me. They finished the collection on a cliff hanger which says 'to be continued in volume two'. You know I'm going to buy it too, don't you?

I'm such a twat! :D

One pleasant surprise was finding this on the very last page

It's a facsimile of the original 'Fanastic Free Gift' given away with Captain Britain issue one. You had to put elastic bands through the holes in the side and then loop them over your ears. It hurt. But that didn't matter. I was 8 years old and I WAS Captain Britain! :D

Wind

Wind:

It's a bit cuntish sometimes innit!

Can I just say...

Wanker!

You're in the public domain old son. If Someone takes the piss out of your missus who's also in the the public domain you take it on the chin and move on. Of course you could also have engaged in a bit of banter with Amstell but that was obviously beyond you.

Boys will be boys eh?

Yesterday was the Seventh of January

So that means the Little Fella's one year old!
He had a fab day. All the Rellies came to visit and spoiled him rotten. It's a shame really that he won't be able to remember it, but me and the breadknife will. :)

Well that makes a pleasant change

T-mobile fucked up.

My new phone was a bit dodgy, it wouldn't connect to a computer, the memory card would show up but the phone wouldn't, which meant a lot of flexibility was lost. I contacted them and was told that as Sony Ericcson don't support MAC (the swine) I'd have to connect it to a PC to see what happened. Naturally the phone didn't turn up on the PC either. So I logged on to their website and followed the links to report a dodgy phone. Except I didn't. Although the link said I was reporting a faulty phone and getting a refund what I was doing in reality was cancelling my contract!!

Well, that was a bit fucking dumb wasn't it?

So as soon as I realised what was going on I called T-mobile. Don't panic they said, it's how we do things. You cancel your contract, send in your phone, we contact you to arrange a new phone once we've got your old one. Everything's fine.

No everything isn't fine. I sent my phone off (this is after 2 or 3 calls to confirm what I'd been told) and got an email expressing sorrow that I'd decided to cancel and that I'd be contacted in 28 days. Oh fuck, I'm such a twat! I emailed back straightaway and then called customer services. The bloke I spoke to was great, said he could see I'd been mis-advised but that there wasn't anything he could do to stop the process now. My contract would be cancelled and I'd lose my number too. All he could do was put me through to sales to arrange a new contract. The girl I spoke to was great too. Except she couldn't help me as my contract was being cancelled.

Big big bag of big baggy bollocks.

So there I was with no phone and a sim card that could expire any time.
I stuck it in my v3x (I hate my v3x, it's a cunt!) so at least I had something. I composed (with the Breadknifes help) a final e-mail to T-Mobile letting them know how fucked off I was with the whole situation. Then, yesterday, as if by magic my phone rang. It was a very nice lady from T-Mobile who'd read my e-mail and then read all my other e-mails and the logs from my phone calls. She acknowledged I'd been badly advised and fucked about. She put a stop to the cancellation, sorted me out a new phone, sorted me out a bit of a discount and apologised profusely for all my grief. I was staggered. I'd come to the same opinion as Status Anxiety that all the phone providers are the same. To have someone bend over backwards to sort things out was incredible. My phone arrived today. I'm happy.

Mind you, I've not connected it to a computer yet.

Sad day

Some of you who used to read my old blog may recall me mentioning a workmate who'd been diagnosed with cancer at the age of 28... She died on my Birthday. I didn't know a thing about it until last Thursday when I returned to work after Christmas. I was gutted, totally gutted, but at the same time I felt relief for her that her suffering was over and that her family could now move on.

Today was her funeral. Fuck but I got choked up. The Crematorium was absolutely packed out which I guess is a testament to how well regarded 'D' was. She was a lovely person, always happy and smiling (not in an irritating way) she loved her family to bits and was absolutely thrilled for me when I told her I was going to be a Dad. Everytime we bumped into each other we'd have a chat about stuff. I find it hard to believe that she's gone. We weren't best friends, we'd never even been to the pub together but she was a very very special person. That was evident in what everyone had been saying about her. I hate the fact that she died at 29. She deserved more from life. So did her Husband and young daughters who have to get on with things now she's gone. Sometimes, when you think your life is really shit it's worth sitting back and thinking about what you do actually have, and then think about D.

Rest in Peace mate. x