Month: May 2004

(“…Tom Gray, who got a grade A in 1995, is now lead songwriter for top band Gomez…”)

We rounded off our week of live events with a another cracking gig, Gomez at the Apollo (observant readers may notice that last night was therefore the second time we’ve visited the Apollo in the space of 4 days, and, in fact, the third time we’ve been to Hammersmith since Sunday. Remind me again why we moved to North London…?)

Anyway, the band were great, and I enjoyed pretty much everything from their opening Bring It On through to We Haven’t Turned Around and Whippin’ Picadilly at the end (how could they finish with anything else…) No 78 Stone Wobble though (and they never play Machismo, which is one of my favourites), but still great (and the new album’s sounding excellent). I think even Sal enjoyed it, despite having only the most cursory of previous exposure to the band.

Tonight I will be mostly sleeping.

In the end, Jet solved the dilemma of how they would fill an hour and three quarters by not playing for an hour and three quarters, and as such we were in the pub well before last orders. Still, an excellent gig, only slightly marred by the we-didn’t-realise-Spinal-Tap-was-a-parody rock posturings of the utterly appalling support band, Young Heart Attack, (Young Coma, more like–since when was rock n’ roll supposed to send you to sleep?) and the fact that we had tickets for the seating section upstairs, not somewhere I’d previously been for a gig at Brixton. Thankfully, by two songs into Jet’s set, the stewards had given up shining their torches at the audience in an attempt to get 1,000 people to sit down, and we stood for the whole gig.

And having seen the band from Sal’s home town last night, we get to watch some scallys from Southport do similar things this evening. Can’t wait.

So far my busiest of busy weeks has been going wonderfully well (although I don’t feel like I’ve really been home since Sunday): Monday’s free BBC recorded comedy was highly entertaining: Ross Noble was in fine form, Ardal O’Hanlon was entertaining and host Jack Dee wasn’t as bad as I thought he was going to be. Last night’s curry, over in the remote badlands of South West London was excellent, and only slightly marred by our having to leave early enough to return to the North before our train turned into a pumpkin at midnight.

Tonight we’re off to see Aussie rockers Jet (as it seems obligatory to describe them), and I’m really looking forward to it, if only for the genius trio of Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Roll Over DJ, and Look What You’ve Done, although I’m curious to see how they’re going to play for the hour and three quarters that the Brixton Academy website has them down for. Perhaps they’ll play everything off their one 45 minute album twice and then finish up by playing a single G major chord for about 15 minutes. Or something: I’ll let you know.

Er, ok, so Glastonbury was “completely sold out” yesterday for the 15th time, but oh look, tickets are back on sale again. Seriously. Aloud/Seetickets/Wayahead couldn’t organise a milk drinking contest on a dairy farm in Pilton.

[UPDATE: Looks like it’s “sold out” again. For now…]

It’s going to be a busy week, featuring as it does free BBC-related comedy at the Hammersmith Apollo, curry in Twickenham, Jet at Brixton Academy, and Gomez at the Hammersmith Apollo (in that order), and since I’m not sure I can manage to write properly about the weekend today, I suppose you’ll have to make do with just some small snippets of blogworthy stuff. I’ll let you fill in the gaps.

– If this was a proper blog, I’d probably start with the bizarre selection of art I saw being sold outside Green Park tube yesterday afternoon, where an entire stall contained only drawings of dogs. That wouldn’t be odd in itself, were it not for the fact that there was one drawing that wasn’t a dog in amongst all the others, and that one showed George Bush dressed as Osama Bin Laden. Why?

– Oh, and I’d definitely mention the strange preacher man who got on the packed tube I later caught out of there: he got on by the doors, and started reading some Bible verses, but because it was quite busy on the train I couldn’t actually see him, so it created the utterly bizarre impression that there was just this disembodied voice preaching to the train. I can only assume he left the train at the next station because it stopped after that. Maybe he was the smallest man ever. I don’t know.

– I’d also probably talk about the excellent Natural History Museum, where we spent an entertaining couple of hours on Saturday, looking at dinosaurs and big stuffed animals.

– And I don’t think I forget to mention that The Barnsbury (everyone’s favourite rudest pub) is now the second search result in Google for the single word query, “rudest” (see).

– And I’d mention our Sunday afternoon barbeque in a park in Fulham, which we had to stop when the park wardens drove up to tell us off (apparently they’d had a complaint about a “big barbeque”, so maybe the smallest man ever actually lives in Fulham, given that it was one of those tiny disposable ones). Actually the park warden people were quite nice about it, and they let us finish up our sausages first (they just had to be seen to be doing their job, they said), but we did think it was pretty funny that we’d earlier witnessed a man with a big knife angrily threatening another chap on the other side of the park (although the situation was diffused without anything serious happening). As someone said later “obviously it’s strictly drugs and fighting in this park”. Luckily there wasn’t a “no cricket” ban as well, so we were able to have a passable attempt at exercise before the sun finally dropped behind the trees and we beat a hasty retreat.

Oh hello, what’s this?

It may have been taken down by the time you click on it, but I find it very interesting that the Glasto ticket page is open again. Perhaps there were some more returned tickets up for sale, given that the closing date for refunds was just the other day…

[UPDATE (Monday): The new ticket allocation has now been officially announced on the main glastonbury website, and it does rather look like the tickets have gone, although interestingly, even though the main link says they are sold out, the link above in my original entry still appears to be a working booking form.]

We greeted the arrival of the sunshine in London for the first significant time this year with some degree of delight and promptly headed off to spend a diverting Saturday afternoon at London Zoo, and later Regent’s Park. As Rob wrote, just over a year ago, the monkeys always seem to be the most popular animals, and this weekend was no exception. Personally, I rather enjoyed watching the Spider Monkeys gracefully move between the bars of what seemed to be a rather small cell. I think the monkeys (a term I’m rather ignorantly using to refer to the whole gamut of primates on display) are particularly fascinating because it’s so easy to anthropomorphise. And after watching the monkeys for half an hour, you wonder how anyone can still believe in creation.

At the risk of inducing a great big Richard Herring-style “aaah”, the zoo also offers a chance to observe some animals of the uncaged variety (the zoo organisers themselves have not missed the opportunity to point this out: somewhere near the monkey enclosures stands one side of a cage designed for vistors to pose behind while being photographed. It bears the caption: “the world’s most destructive animal”. Aaah. I see what they did there.) and Saturday’s specimens seemed to be of a particularly stupid variety: cleary simple instructions like “Don’t tap on the glass” mean the exact opposite (“tap on the glass, frighten the small newborn chick, and wonder why your wife tells you off”). Similarly, the signs requesting that you take “no food” into the goat petting enclosure obviously mean “wander in with your melting ice cream and wonder why the goat starts chasing you around”.

After spending most of Sunday afternoon in the park with the paper (trying to avoid the sea of Red and White that had invaded Islington earlier in the day to celebrate the local football team having won something, apparently, not that I’m bitter, or anything, you understand), we polished off the weekend by watching an entertaining and revealing documentary about Vincent Van Gogh, presented by art critic and Dr Fox lookalike, Waldemar Januszczak. I had the vaguest idea that Van Gogh had once lived in Brixton, but I had no idea that he used to walk to his work in Covent Garden (in what is now Wagamama’s), and later spent time living in Twickenham and Isleworth.

Uggh. I think Google may have finally jumped the shark in preparation for their upcoming IPO. As if their new Press Release webpage blog wasn’t awful enough, they are now expanding the AdSense program to offer the increased revenue potential of targeted, graphical ads. Because web surfers just love those graphical banner ads, don’t they? Presumably it’s only a matter of time before they offer the increased revenue potential of targeted, pop-up ads, fake Windows alert boxes and giant online casino ads that obscure half the page you’re trying to read. Nice.

I must have metaphorically ticked the wrong box when I phoned up BT to get our landline connected back in January, as we have been receiving occasional cold calls ever since we got the line. It actually doesn’t bother me that much (I think Sally’s more bothered, because they always phone up to ask for Mr Armstrong, or even ask her if she’s Mrs Armstrong…), but for some reason, they’ve become more frequent over the last couple of days, so I’ve finally cracked and got us listed with the Telephone Preference Service, the UK’s version of the “Do Not Call” list.

It takes 28 days for the request to become effective, so in the meantime, then, I’ve come up with a new game: trying to find the funniest way to tell them to go away. I think drawing them into conversation is probably the way to go, or perhaps asking for a contact (home) phone number and an inconvenient time to call them back. Or perhaps I will just put the next guy on hold for a while. And if they continue to call after the 28 days are up, well then I really get to have fun with them…

We lost Internet access at work for the whole of this morning, so the only way I’ve been able to make it through the hours of mind-numbing tedium is by listening to Bill Hicks and Eddie Izzard on my MP3 player while I pretend to write pathetically dull documents about software. Now that we have our connection back, though, I can happily report that I now appear to be receiving a better class of Spam. Consider the following delightfully surreal missive: What does it mean? What are they selling? What do they want from me? Answers on a postcard, kids.

From: “Robert Greer [lwcai@3xl.net]”
To: “Kelly [xxxxxxxx@hotmail.com]”
Subject: paper napkin 0762 looking glasses

Furthermore, vacuum cleaner over earring strokes, and living with judge befriend alchemist beyond girl scout.Now and then, chestnut behind tomato trade baseball cards with pocket near snow.But they need to remember how eagerly apartment building defined by crank case leaves.But they need to remember how underhandedly near skyscraper sweeps the floor.related to steam engine steal pencils from over fire hydrant, but for turkey dance with umbrella inside debutante.Most swamps believe that over satellite a change of heart about cream puff around.