October 18, 2002  

a faint smell of damp 17 october 2002

That FC Kahuna, eh? Stonking tunes, stonking gunes. Glitterball is a particularly fine little piece of driving dance music genius. That's the stuff to give the kids.

What's been keeping me off the streets recently:

• Continental Drifter by Tim Moore [Amazon] - humourous travel writing seems to be a bit of a growth industry at the moment. I reckon that Moore has the edge on Bryson - Bryson can write up a storm, but he needs a bloody good editor and most of his books end up as a combination of annoying whinges about a) how terrible it is that lovely ancient buildings are being modernised, and b) how terrible it is that all these tatty old ancient buildings are really antiquated. Moore's stuff contrasts well. His modus operandi seems to be to pick a famous tour of some description (in this case, the original Grand Tour conducted by Tomas Coryate in the early 1600s) and try to follow it. Since he's almost invariably in considerably worse physical condition than the person(s) who did the original trip, there's a large element of self-mockery which works quite well. He manages to bring off the combination of self-mocking slapstick with an obvious affection for his subject matter - his book French Revolutions, in which he cycles the route of the 2000 Tour de France, is one of the best books about the Tour that I've read. Definitely worth reading.
• Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington [Amazon | site] - from cult website to book, the bastard. We can but hope. My terrifying shakes of jealousy are mitigated by the fact that it's a bloody good book. Thinly veiled autobiography to start with, it gets increasingly surreal throughout. Well worth reading, particularly for the wonderful scenes of university bureaucratic infighting. Yay!
• Porno by Irvine Welsh [Amazon] - or: Trainspotting ten years on when they're all getting on a bit. Yet more interesting degradation, plus value-added smut references. Definitely more coked out than Trainspotting, a lot of manic energy in evidence. Familiar characters looking very iffy. Stylee.
• Put me back on my bike by William Fotheringham [Amazon] - which I am currently reading. An extremely good biography of Tom Simpson, the British cyclist who died on the slopes of Mt Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France. Cause of death is still contentious - heart attack, basically, but the question is whether or not the fact that he'd had a few big swigs of brandy and rather a lot of high-class amphetamines on the day contributed to his death. Best guess: very probably, yes. Like any good biog, you end up wanting to meet the guy, though possibly not to buy him a round. A good picture of a driven sportsman - kind of like Lance's autobiog, but with dexedrine rather than cancer.

There's some good books out there at the mo. Read, damn you! Read!

Comment on the Bali bombing for UK types: in terms of cultural analogs, consider if the IRA had just nailbombed Ibiza.

The weather's been appalling for the last couple of days. Torrential rain, blustering wind, and occasional bursts of molten lead from the skies. Perhaps not, but it's been quite manky for most of the week. This coincided nicely with my starting to wear long trousers for the winter, so that I've been arriving at work and back home wearing a a huge amount of water-soaked cloth. It's that combination of cold, clammy and heavy that really does it for me. Particularly when I then spend the next eight hours sitting under an aircon vent. Mmm. Of course, this is only on my legs, as my torso and arms are toasty-warm under my Ground Effect raincoat.

October 15, 2002  

the virtues of artificial milk 14 october 2002

So I went off to buy a spare SIM card for one of my old mobile handsets (so Heather's parents can have a mobile while they're in the UK). Fairly simple task - just walked into the local branch of a major mobile network and asked for a pre-pay SIM kit. Looking, as I often do, pretty scruffy.

Sales guy: ...that'll be �29.95. Are you a student?
Me: Nope, sorry.
Sales guy: Would you like to say that you are? It's half price then.
Me: I'm a student.
Sales guy: That's �14.95 then, thanks.

Well, they've got my custom. It's that lax moral turpitude that's made Britain the great world power it is today.

Return of the odd search strings: "countryside alliance topless", "corpus christi topless sunbathing", "facial artificial whiskers"... Mike, you've been inserting terms into my search logs again, haven't you?

Guardian interview with Santiago Sierra. I quite like his take on alienation and exploitation, and his latest gallery opening (Space Closed By Corrugated Metal) sounds like a right laugh.

Since Heather's parents are in town at the mo, we attended Evensong at King's College on Sunday. The world-famous King's College choir provided a lot of impressive English choral singing, and I fell asleep. Repeatedly. While sitting in the front row (we arrived early) where everyone could see me. According to Heather, I had at least one crusty academic staring at me for most of the service. My defence is that it was warm, I was tired, and I'm not really into choral music anyway. Though I understand that it was very nice if you're into that sort of thing.

I note with interest that this year's Singlespeed World Champtionships have upgraded their prize package. Whereas the lucky winners of last years competition won the happy prize of a mandatory tattoo, this year's winners acquired mandatory brands... mad buggers. OK, so where are they going to go from here? Mandatory scarification with a blunt chainring?

October 11, 2002  

but no wiser 10 october 2002

So I turned 27 on Tuesday. Zoinks. Heather took me out for a rather nice Italian dinner (I'm a big fan of calzone - I've got all their albums), and a mellow time was had by all. Nice. I brought a couple of cakes into work and watched in concern as my workmates ate an entire chocolate cake in four minutes. At 9:20am. I'm now worried that if I'll be skeletonised if I ever fall asleep at my desk.

The actual drunken revelry was last weekend, for various reasons. We'd carefully prepared the house (bought case of beer - check, removed all breakables from ground floor - check, warn neighbours - check), and our preparation paid off. We completely forgot to put out half the food (and we're living off pate and dips as a consequence), and the rather nasty cheap white wine wasn't touched, but besides that it all went rather well. A number of our mates ended up gettting very, very drunk, a certain amount of drunken hooting occurred, and I ended up with only minor flesh wounds. Result! One of my friends decided that I needed a radio-controlled car. My word, those things are fun to stuff around with. Both Heather and myself now have badly bruised ankles (they're quite hard to control, aren't they?).

So, yeah. 27 and all that. I'm approaching the exact median that the gym equipment manufacturers design for: when you get on one of the exercise bikes, it defaults to the profile for a 27-year old male weighing 80kg. I'm highly unlikely to ever get to the third of those criteria (barring unforeseen accidents involving being stranded on a desert island). Still, though.

Why I love the internet volume XCCIVI: people on mailing lists who assert that the psychotic(s) currently sniping at people around Washington DC are "in all probability members of Al-Qaeda" trying to destabilise America. And why? Because, y'know, Al-Qaeda members all receive "extensive weapons training", and 'cos this is an easy way to cause mass panic with minimal time investment. Well, I'm convinced. It doesn't sound at all like some homegrown twerp with a rifle and a screw loose.

OK, this is a pretty damn cool story. Or: is it actually embarrassing to be thrashed by the best cyclist in the world?

That Tipping the Velvet, eh? My word. Ground-breaking stuff, especially since it's produced by the BBC. Personally, I'm waiting for it to be sold off to PBS channels in the US (hungry for their regular fix of Brit costume dramas) and for them to realise that they've bought a large amount of red-hot lesbian propaganda. Practically scorched the screen, it did.

Military porn, or: how to pour a huge amount of money into a hole in the ground and annoy people. Guardian article on the history of the SA80 assault rifle, surprisingly fascinating.

October 03, 2002  

on my blue shiny mat 2 october 2002

Rather annoyed with Wildcat at the moment. Or rather, annoyed and amused. Annoyed because on my most recent order from them, they ignored one of the items. I wanted to buy a 12mm x 2.0mm black niobium ball closure ring; they included a note on the invoice stating that they now only sell these rings in multiples of 20. And if you can find anything on their web site to that effect, you're a better man than I. Also particularly unimpressed that they managed to miss an item out - I ordered two flesh tunnels, the order form acknowledges this, and even the little label on the bag says that it contains two items... except that there's only one tunnel in there. Feh. Good jewellery, crap customer service.

Except - and this is where amused comes in - their customer service doesn't seem to actually be them. I rang up to complain about the missing item, and got through to what sounded suspiciously like a call centre. As in, I had to press various buttons to speak to an operator, the bloke at the other end of the phone mentioned that there were forty of them in the office, etc. Now, either the body jewellery market has exploded dramatically, or they're outsourcing their customer service. Which is itself evidence of an increased market, of course. I never thought that tit rings and flesh tunnels would be such big business. Jim Ward, interviewed in Modern Primitives, said that people were astonished that he could make a living "selling cock rings". How far we've come.

That said, since the vast majority of Wildcat's stuff is pretty flashy things in 1.6mm for teenyboppers on Daddy's money (clue: the catalog has huge swathes of various colours of navel bars), it's not too surprising. I dunno - I like a lot of Wildcat's stuff, and I think they do some excellent designs, but most of their stuff only comes in annoyingly small gauges (or: everything's 1.6mm), the stuff in larger gauges is well pricey (£26 for a black flesh tunnel? £60 for a trojan ring?) and I've had some issues with the quality of the machining before. I still prefer Cold Steel - but they just don't do sawtooth top hats, for which I have a pronounced weakness.

Went to see the Vagina Monologues last night. Excellent stuff. Witty, honest, and lots of talking about genitals. As you'd expect, the audience was prevalently female - the stampede for the loos during the intermission was a sight to see - but that wasn't a big deal. The performance was top-notch; a lot of my British mates had difficulty with the fact that the lead performer has had a number of dodgy sitcom roles in the past, but I'd never seen any and thus was fine. If you've not seen it, definitely worth a look.

I bravely resisted the urge to start the last paragraph with the phrase "we cracked off the...".

Got aggressively begged at on the way out of the show, though, which is always a pain in the neck. I hate having shouting matches with homeless people on the street.

So Heras got pipped in the Vuelta, eh? From a lead of over a minute, knocked back in the final time trial. And after all that time helping Lance up climbs in the Tour, too. I was quite pleased that Beloki (riding for ONCE) got third - I quite rate Beloki. Pity David Millar dropped out, though.

What I'm reading at the moment: the back of cereal packets, mostly. OK, mainly Tim Moore, Irvine Welsh, and various magazines. More on this later.

October 02, 2002  

dominion 1 october 2002

I'm sure you'll all be happy to hear that I made it through to the penultimate round of the Second Annual Convergys Publications Department Conker Challenge. I was pipped by "Razorblade" Fellows, who went on to win. I feel like England in the World Cup, if Brazil had been five foot tall and had pink hair. Anyone who watched the football prepared to comment on that one?

Another quiet weekend. Spent a fair bit of time preparing for the imminent arrival of Heather's parents (well, in a fortnight) - buying a spare duvet, hoovering the living room, getting the sink back from the pawn shop, etc. Combined with the onset of a stinking cold/flu combination, it turned out to be fairly uneventful otherwise.

It's always the way, isn't it? We're having an Indian summer - it's five degrees warmer than it should be at the moment - and everyone's got whacking great huge colds. Still, it means that I'm still able to wear shorts to work. And in the UK, in October, that's a big deal, man.

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