It has not escaped my notice that November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The idea seems to be that writing a novel is one of those things that you always plan on doing but put off, for whatever reason, and never actually get round to, so the challenge is about setting a specific time to get on with it. I think this is a great idea, but unfortunately will be in Australia for most…

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Convince yourself that everything is alright… ‘cos it already is

He might have thrown away all his best songs (and by “best songs” I mean the ones I know…) in the first half of the show, but I still really enjoyed seeing Pete Yorn at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire last night. Sadly there was no She Bangs the Drum cover this time, though. Oh, and he was supported by two bands with what are possibly the worst names I’ve ever heard: Fiction Plane, and Ambulance…

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In answer to the recent guestbook query, I can report that Rob is safe and well, and his personal counter can keep ticking for the mean time, or at least he was until the end of his leaving drinks on Saturday evening – I can’t necessarily vouch for anything that may have happened in the mean time. To be honest, I can’t really vouch for anything that happened towards the end of Saturday evening either,…

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Not wanting to bang on about him like he’s the new Hasselhoff or anything, but I just wanted to link to this excellent article in today’s Guardian. I think the key passage is the summing up: …In fact, the prospect of Blaine at the mercy of a good humoured, but predominantly satirical crowd, composed of visitors of all ages, classes and ethnicities, hints at some residual, collective good sense, which can tell the difference between…

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Hmm. I may have over 15 days worth of space on my MP3 player, but it’s full. I just had to delete some obscure Flaming Lips to make room for my new Cardigans and Damien Rice albums (I mean it’s not like I ever really listened to Hit to Death In The Future Head or Zaireeka anyway). I suppose I could always go and buy a 40GB drive and put that in, which would give…

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Whenever I’m short of something to write about here, it’s reassuring to know that I can always rely on finding something suitably objectionable to comment on in Metro. Today’s dose of hypocrisy comes from their cover story, which appears under the headline “Store cards ‘scam’ probe”. The report is about the fact that MPs who fear shoppers are being “saddled” with billions of pounds of debt have ordered an inquiry into “rip-off” store cards. The…

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According to the excellent Ross Noble, who we saw last night, people have been trying to throw stuff at David Blaine. One group of people have been trying to hit him with golf balls. They haven’t just been throwing them at him either. No, they “introduced an element of sport to proceedings” by taking a couple of clubs out to one of London’s parks and aiming with those. That’s just fantastic; as Noble pointed out,…

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Our cable decoder is broken. It’s a rather grim state of affairs, actually, as it won’t be fixed until next week at the earliest. When it first went, it just made all the channels look like a piss-poor second-generation VHS copy. With each passing day, the picture gets slightly worse, and it’s now almost unwatchable. No doubt by the time the engineer comes to look at it, it will have approached the quality of the…

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I made a significant impact on my unwritten “things to do before I’m 30” list this weekend, by finally managing to get to see a match at Twickenham. Either on my way back from work, or on my way to Tesco’s, I’ve probably walked past that stadium at least a hundred times in the (nearly) three years that I’ve lived in London. I finally made it inside there for the first time on Saturday evening…

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