Month: August 2002

Whoo hoo. We are officially done. Thunderbirds are go!

Via Grammarporn comes:

The entire series can be found here.

A few months ago (link coming in a second, just checking for it in another window) I saw Garbage live at Colston Hall in Bristol. It was a great gig, they really rocked live so when I was browsing earlier today for gigs and noticed they were doing a couple of small gigs next week I thought about it. In the end I decided I wouldn’t bother. I’ve just been thinking about it again and ticket is less than £25 and I figured what the fuck, its more than worth it. So next week is gonna boost my gig attendance by a fair whack, on Thursday night I’m off to see Garbage in Camden. That link of what I thought about them last time is here…don’t bother even trying it. It was five words. This time I will do better.

So on the subject of gigs. I’ve not got a great history of them…although its a hell of a lot better when you take into account that I have seen two of my favourite bands of all time live in Ireland.

In the middle of 1999 I saw R.E.M. in Lansdowne Road, Dublin as part of their Up World Tour. Singing Everybody Hurts was a pretty special moment. They were supported by The Divine Comedy

On December 31st of the same year I rang in the New Year at a street concert in Dublin with a group of friends. Playing that night were The Afro-Celt Sound System, The Divine Comedy and was my first introduction to the excellent David Grey who I am planning on seeing later this year.

Last year was pretty much the gig of all gigs. Ireland, a sunny August Saturday. Slane I 2001. JJ72, Coldplay, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and the one and only U2. You just can’t ask for more than that.

Then earlier this year was the aforementioned Garbage gig.

Thats a total of four gigs. Pretty shit really all in all. Next week alone is going to add 50% to that, ok so one is a repeat but that’s not really relevant. I’m gonna add a few more by the end of this year. I want to see JJ72 and David Gray and I have for a while, they are both playing London in the next few months. I will be there. I’m also going to see Bruce Springsteen in October, tickets go on sale next week. I will sooner rather than later see Radiohead in concert. I cannot finish my time on this planet without seeing Radiohead live.

Newsweek have a pretty decent article about blogging up at the moment. It starts off by telling the magical tale of a young man who is of course a social outcast who starts a blog. As soon as his classmates read it and get to know the real him they became his friends. All of the guys wanted to be him and all of the girls lined up to offer him blow jobs.

Ok ok, I’m a tad cynical, but it really is a good article. I imagine it is a very common thought that having people reading your thoughts via your blog will allow them to get to know the real you. It is certainly not entirely unappealing and yes as the article mentions it is nice when you blog something and you suddenly find someone agrees with you about it. I’m not so sure that setting out to write a blog to show people you know the real you is a worthy goal. If you want to show them, just show them.

If you write a blog and people change or evolve their opinions of you because of it that’s a different thing, but to set out to cultivate that…I don’t know

Check out the article here:Living in the Blog-osphere.

This coming Monday is a bank holiday in the UK. So I have the day off work. I’m looking forward to it a lot. I had planned on chilling out and doing nothing at all for the day. These plans have now changed.

I was browsing Ticketmaster just to see what was out there and I took note that Bruce Springsteen, JJ72 and David Grey have gigs in London over the next few months. Then found a gig going on this very Monday night in the London Arena. I sent an IM to Pat asking him what he thought to which he shouted back across the floor just fucking book now…so I booked the tickets

So Monday night in the London Arena we are going to see Guns N’ Roses as part of their Chinese Democracy 2002 World Tour.

Last night shortly after I posted my last entry here it started to rain. Not just a light rain but to use an old expression bucketfuls were falling. After the heat of the past few weeks it was really nice, there was actually a cold breeze coming into my room. It was a nice change. It has been hard getting to sleep lately with it being so hot. So I opened the window a little wider and listened to the rain for a while enjoying the temperature drop in my room. It was nice.

The night before had been really hot so much so that I was lying there in bed actually hoping for snow so it would cool down. Despite what I might complain about I can handle the heat, I might not like it but I can handle it. When I’m trying to sleep its another matter. I remember when I was fairly young I was in France with my family for 3 weeks or so. It was over 40 degrees for most of the time. Now that was fucking hot. I remember taking several cold showers a day. We were staying on a converted farm and there was an old barn next to the gete. I spent a lot of time in there in the shade avoiding the sun.

I like rain in general. Sure sometimes it can get in the way and I don’t like getting caught in it if its heavy but in general I like it. I would not have liked to be out in it last night, it was too bad but the thought was nice.

I had heard that the third season of The West Wing takes a noticeable dip in quality. I’ve just watched the first two episodes and while it is quite early in the season, I have to admit to not seeing a dip. I was annoyed a few episodes back that we didn’t get to see the reaction of each staff member as they were told about the Presidents MS. A sizeable amount of this two part opener is actually the staffers dealing with this issue.

The storyline flips between two time periods. The immediate afterwards of the press conference when Jed announces that he will in fact seek and win re-election and a period 4 weeks later where they prepare to make an official announcement and kick off the campaign. Ron Silver guests in these episodes and while I’m not sure I like his character or indeed the other two new characters he is a great actor. He is one of 3 new characters brought in to help the team win the election. I think this was a waste myself. The election is going to drive the next season and I would have rather seen the main cast having to deal with the issues of the campaign themselves. Saying that, these characters were partly brought in now in order to move a plot point forward. They created tension and build-up and moved some pretty major items to the front to be dealt with.

I look forward to seeing how Josh deals with the tobacco issue over the coming episodes. I hope that with this being set up as such a big issue for him that some follow through would be nice. Also so nice plot points for C.J. and another great performance from Allison Janney. I don’t like the character of the First Lady and I don’t particularly like Stockard Channing, the actress who plays her.

I am glad to saw the usual excellence in dialogue was present and as long as that continues I’ll keep watching.

And to take it down a level, Donna played by Janel Maloney is hot.

I am thinking of renaming this blog. Disjointed is a front runner at the moment. I suspect that is all a post of its own for another time. For the time being some stuff:

Things went a lot better than I had expected, while it is not nice to be right, it is nice to have people agree with you, especially when you were not expecting them to. I hope it is all over, it would seem to be for the time being.

I went for a drink with Dave after work so we could get out of the office and talk about some things and it was a lot of fun. We talked about the stuff we had to talk about and then just talked about stuff for a while. There was quite a strange moment when my phone rang and it was Dave’s wife looking for him. Not the first person I’d expect a call from I will admit. Kinda surreal for a moment, I have no idea how she got my number and yes I did of course go with the “It was just that one night line”. I had to.

I’m annoyed with myself and probably more so disappointed. Last night when I was writing the post about Cut My Hair, I was really trying to write about it. I must have spent fifteen minutes staring at the screen and thinking about what I could say after “coming of age tale” and as you can tell I didn’t do very well. I was talking to a friend about it earlier today and I’m not entirely sure if it was a nudge on her part or just a question she asked me why it worked so well. Of course then I was able to talk to her about it and note that it flowed really well and that the only time it threatened to get boring actually worked really well in context and so on. I’m going to have to try harder.

I am however very glad to know that someone does actually see an improvement in my writing style and an effort, I do believe there has been, but you know it is nice to have someone else mention it. Lots more work still to be done but at least a solid start has built up.

Now I have to go watch some new West Wing.

I’ve been listening to an MP3 I have of Tori Amos covering Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. It is a slowed down acoustic version and her voice really works. But more than that the only music is a piano which I believe she is playing herself. It’s not a song that you would think lends itself to a piano solo, but it does. I don’t know how to describe it, the music feels so good on so many levels. I use to play piano when I was much younger, I played until Grade One and then gave up. Listening to this makes me regret that. The music is so perfect in every single way, its just a joy to listen to. I would love to hear it without the singing, just the piano playing. All in all, it is just a glorious piece of work and in the end music is everything and this is music.

I’m installing OS X 10.4 onto my Mac at the moment and I’m looking forward to playing with it in a few minutes.

Dave has given me the next three episodes of The West Wing on vcd. Might watch them tonight but I suspect gonna end up going out. I feel like going out but that might change in a bit. I’ll see how it all goes around sixish.

I feel stupid and contagious.