Note To Self...

...Hangovers help neither the ability to blog (hate using that as a verb) nor to fill out application forms. And Colm lied, the eggs did nothing. Never liked him anyway.

Jesus, these mornings are getting addictive...

Look at this shit! It's daytime, for the second day in a row, and I am not only vertical, but fully-clothed, have fed myself, and can type out sentences and that! I like it a lot.
Turns out yesterday evening, before falling asleep at a computer in the library (I woke up about a minute and a half later with a snort, and made an old lady soil herself and have to leave), I went on Fastfude, where all the Belfast tuney-makey people go for a good old-fashioned virtual circle jerk. Anyway it would appear I replied to an ad in which an apparently established band requested a bassist with a degree of flexibility for practicing, and especially flexibility for touring Ireland, the UK and the Yankee Places. Looks like the fuckers are positively crying out for an unemployed ginger bastard to swan into their ranks for a spot of world domination. The only thing left to do is to to find out if they're any good, and indeed who they are, then meet them and convince them I'm indispensable. Shouldn't be too hard; they're only musicians after all.
That said, the last time I replied to one of these types of ads, I ended up in Ballymacash in the flat of an obese ex-drummer who can neither sing nor play the guitar, who I still owe money, and who now wants me to shell out £200-odd quid towards recording his bullshit songs. And the fat prick's got me bass.
Still though, I've always quite liked the idea of hijacking another cunt's musical dreams and making a mint out of them by going "dumdy dum bum bum" when he asks me to. 'S why I picked up the bass in the first place.
The lad wants an audition at the start of next week. That gives me this week to find the bus fare to Warrenpoint and back. Expect more on this subject.

New Year, or so people tell me

I really should do this more often. Being awake in daylight I mean. At the minute I'm in Queen's library, which unlike my house has heating, blinds on the windows, working chairs, a floor that wouldn't get you drunk (and very, very sick) if you walked on it without footwear of some kind, and computer-type facilities. Nice of them to have kept my computer accounts open, despite my getting heaved out last year. I think I owe them money too. Lovely people, these academics, I've always said so; must be nice having an attention span that can encompass a three-year degree. As always, I blame my sleep patterns.
See, when it comes to about the end of October, start of November, my brain apparently notices that the days are becoming shorter than the nights, and I start waking up when it gets dark, around 5 or 6 in the evening, and crashing again when it's light, about 9 in the morning. Now this isn't much of a problem when I've still money in my pocket to afford the essentials of such a lifestyle, namely Buckfast and the occasional dose of pills. But the rub lies in the fact that I always but always get fired from whatever I'm working at, usually mongrel reading-out-loud duties at Teletech, because I'm pissed/pilled/asleep/not there, so the money dries up, so I'm dodging landlords full-time for the first two months of the new year.
At the minute I'm in a period of very sober limbo, while I wake up at about 1 in the morning, stay up for about 30 hours, then collapse for about 16, as my body and brain have conflicting ideas on how to wake up at a reasonable time. Not too conducive to getting a wage out of somebody. So now the plan is get hold of the bastard layabouts at the Revenue and Customs and find out why they haven't employed me yet, then go home and kill all the lights in the house so the landlady thinks no-one's in if she calls about the two rubber rent cheques I gave her for December and January, while I waste the batteries in Rodgers' Wiimote playing Mario Galaxy over a couple of bifties. And who knows, maybe I'll make a start on this book... Probably not, but what's life without a good lie to yourself once in a while?

Stay sharp, peace to your kid brother

WOW... or not

Grieve, of http://www.thegrieve.co.uk/, came up with a rather interesting idea the other night. He intends to get some form of podcast on the go, in which himself, Matt the kiwi and Resident Protestant John talk about MMO's. Matt and John play EVE and WOW respectively, and Grieve is now playing the Warcrafty thing after a long addiction to EVE. He intends to get me involved in an unbiased everyman-type capacity, as I start playing one game or the other. Could be interesting. There shall be more on this.

More Priorites

Obama's won it then, by 349 to 161 with a couple too close to call and Nebraska tied, I think. Ain't it nice the way they only actually count the votes if they can't guess who's won a state? Very enlightened way of doing things, I think.
I had intended to stay up and watch the whole thing, with McCain's home state of Arizona being too close to call until about half 4, which I thought was great. What stopped me staying with it, though, was the fact that I could only get BBC and ITV coverage of the thing, both of which ragged my pish.
I started watching it on ITV, who coverage was quite slick and well done - quite Amercian actually, as usual - but it annoyed me how simpering it was. It was pretty much "Countdown to Obama-rama '08", which is fair enough, but as far as I could make out the polls were looking a damn sight closer than to warrant that. So I flicked over to the Beeb for some unbiased reporting. It may as well have been a Top Gear Election Night Special.
I didn't so much mind that none of the VT seemed to work (which it didn't), or that this bewildered and annoyed the presenter David Dimbleby (which it did, greatly). What got me, predictably enough, was the tone the whole thing was presented in. The programme had the air of... I don't know, did you ever meet a distant older relative in a bar when you're both a bit smashed, like the mouthpiece uncle no-one's that fond of? You know that condescending look on their face that says "Aw diddums, look at the wee babby actin' all growed up", when they're falling about the shop at least as bad as you are?
It seemed the whole of the BBC's current affairs staff had been briefed specially to find a Republican and pick a fight. They even had John Bolton as one of the guests, which I thought was inspired, although after about an hour of baiting it became clear that the majority of the BBC's staff knew far less about American politics than they thought they did, or than they should have if they wanted to go arguing with a former UN ambassador and unabashed flaming bastard of a rag-hoisting American. I actually found myself siding with him. Sweet and gentle Jesus.
Between Rajesh Mirchandani's interview slash argument with a high-ranking Republican in Colorado, where he plainly didn't know his facts, Katty Kay's assertions that Mitt Romney would have been a far better running mate for McCain than Palin despite the fact that as far as I can see no-one in the Republican party even likes the man, and Simon Schama's quite interesting scrap with Bolton being stopped by Dimbleby to go to a video feed which turned out not to exist, I thought it was a great laugh. But if it had have been made in a basement by teenagers in their spare time, it still would've disappointed me a bit. Good thing I don't pay me TV licence then, isn't it? Maybe I will when I get round to buying an aerial. At the minute I'm using an Ibanez bootlace guitar lead, resting on the pin at the back of my TV, held in place by Goldeneye for the N64, and I've yet to have a problem with it. What an age we live in, eh?

Priorities

I haven't been inclined to go near this blog for a while, but at this point I find myself compelled to. We in the UK are quite happy to look down our neighbours across the pond for being crass, whipped up their media into pointless frenzies over nothing in particular. We pride ourselves on being higher-minded, not as petty, with a healthy dose of cynicism.
Why then, are the American people, to a man, having a (mostly) considered debate on who they want to implement their needs and protect their interests for the next four years, in a time when a lot of previously quite cash-strapped Americans are facing even more testing times? I didn't think their brains'd be dense enough for such cogitation, on account of all the air and water in their Wonderbread. But here's the real kicker- what are we, custodians of measured argument and logic in a world gone to fickle shite, debating, as we do, in the oldest and most truly representative democratic institution in the world? What great issue have we been turning our collective cultured mind to for the last week? Two dickhead Londoners abusing an elderly gentleman on radio.
It wasn't very clever, I admit, but I'm not going to discuss the ethics of it. That's been dealt with quite sufficiently by every single journalist and talking head in the country over the last week or so. It still amazes me, though, that the infamous incident got two - count them, two - complaints at time of broadcast. Then, of course, the Daily Mail picked up the story. Last I heard, the number of complaints received by Ofcom had passed the 20,000 mark. This sickens me. The story is still on the front pages of all the red-tops and the Independent, and only a pensioner foiling an armed robbery keeps it off the front of the Mail today. It came up at Prime Minister's Question Time, for fuck's sake! And that ended up on the front pages earlier in the week.
I know quite a lot of middle-class England are sick of hearing about this Credit Crunch jobby, but I don't think a story like this has any place on any newsstand, especially when our American cousins have (for the most part) realised where sensationalist pointless journalism has got them in the past, and are actually putting some thought into electing their leaders this time around. And we still resent Gordon Brown, because he just doesn't smile as nicely as Mr. Blair did. This is why I try not to talk about politics...

Random Question

I asked this site to give me a random question earlier, and it got uppity when I tried to answer it in more than 400 characters. So I'm sticking it here, because I feel like it.

Q. Sponges and tongues are frequently misspelled. Is it because both are thirsty?

A. It is indeed. But the question I think we should be asking is- why are both thirsty? This is because your tongue is not a muscle, but actually a fish, living in your mouth in a kind of symbiotic relationship. It can only breathe in water, hence your production of saliva to keep it going. However, occasionally the saliva in your mouth gets too alkaline, which annoys the tongue. It then tells its buddy the brain (actually a mollusc) to make the rest of the body drink either very fizzy, very sugary, or very alcoholic beverages, to foster its preferred slightly acidic environment. So if you're an alco, don't blame yourself; your tongue and brain are bastard fish.