Month: July 2004

In a moment of distracted boredom earlier this afternoon, I stumbled across this article from the Guardian back in April, in which 3 bloggers talk about why they do it.

Ignoring for a second the slightly surreal but probably-seemed-better-in-context-in-an-issue-edited-by-Franz Ferdinand quote at the bottom, “Franz Ferdinand say…”, the article is worth reading if only for the following quote: “What tends to happen with me is that I’ll meet up with someone I haven’t seen for a while, attempt to make casual small talk about what I’ve been up to, and get stopped in my tracks as they tell me that they’ve already read it all. “Yeah, I know,” they’ll say, disinterestedly. It’s like starting a joke and having the punchline inserted by someone else.”

Yes! That’s exactly what happens to me. It’s rather disconcerting, actually, as I realise that I only have a limited number of anecdotes, and I’ve already used them all up.

Reading the Independent travel supplement over the weekend, I couldn’t help but notice their interview with French designer Philippe Starck. I supposed he’s entitled to his opinions, but he doesn’t half come across as a bit of a twat. Apart from telling a travel magazine that “the secret to travelling is to never read magazines – they wash your brain and depress you”, “everything involved in travelling is bad”, and “only stupid people travel”, he gloats about his “16 houses around the world” (which he visits in his “own plane”, carrying the luggage he “designed for Samsonite, because they are very good – they’re very light and soft”), and contradicts himself spectacularly:

Answering the question “To where would you never return?”, he says that he “will never go to a country where there is racism, fascism or where there is the Mafia.” So presumably he won’t be travelling to his house in Italy, or in fact staying in France at all any more, then. Even worse, two questions after his comments about racism, he’s asked where he would emigrate, only to answer that “emigrating is the worst mistake that people can make, unless it is completely necessary. I think people should always live where they are born and marry somebody of their own culture.” Er…?

Work Permit-approval-tastic. It looks like I won’t have to marry Sally in a hastily-arranged-for-visa-purposes marriage ceremony after all. Hurrah!

Quote of the evening from out celebrating this last night, after I jokingingly mentioned the fact that we won’t need to get married after all:

Our friend Ilana (to Sal): Oh, you must be so relieved.

I bought some tickets for a London cinema online a couple of weeks ago and have been on their email mailing list since then. I just clicked on the “unsubscribe” link, and it opened an almost blank page web page containing only the text:

“Your account has been deleted. Thanks for your loyalty Matthew”

Fantatsic: a sarcastic mailing list.

Despite our distance from the finish line creating the slight sense that we might just perhaps have been in one of the cheaper enclosures, on Saturday I increased my English-posh-quotient by several points by attending this year’s Henley Regatta along with a gaggle of unruly Aussies (actually, perhaps not by that many points after all).

Rather like being at a sporting event in the US, any actual sport taking place seemed somewhat peripheral to the whole experience, and the occasional rowers passing the white picket fence at the edge of our enclosure only detracted from the main purpose of the day: the consumption of alcohol. At the risk of showing my ignorance about these things, I might demonstrate this by pointing out that we’d been there for several hours before realising that they had actually started the day’s racing some time ago, although I did have a red-faced Matthew Pinsent almost pointed out to me at some point after that as he disappeared into the distance behind the passing Umpire’s boat.

Overall, the whole experience reminded me of being back in the first year at Bristol, but my prevailing image of the day will probably be the sight of the reverse side of a naked man being quietly asked (I presume) by the steward, or possibly police officer, standing next to him if he might just put his clothes back on (this, I assume, being the same naked chap who had earlier raced a naked friend to the other side of the race course and back again–the guys from the table who had arrived some time before that carrying three huge buckets, nay barrels, of ice, so big that they had be carried one between two, and almost a slab of beer each, although I’m sure none of these events were in any way connected).

Since returning to work, I’ve discovered that the group from work who also attended the Regatta as part of a morale boosting event must, in fact, have been in the enclosure next to us, but judging from the pictures that have been circulated, their day seems somewhat staid in comparison, lacking in the nudity, excessive alcohol consumption, and, towards the end, bad disco music that characterised mine. (There are pictures of my day too, but I’m not sure they do it justice either, although it would help if you imagined the music to be absolutely fucking awful when looking at the last two pictures).

Last week, I was forced to remove the guestbook from this website after it was repeatedly spammed by mindless idiot comment spammers, who try to boost the page rank of their sites by posting links to them on the comments systems of other websites. Now, they seem to be attacking the blogs: yesterday I had to delete over 100 comments from across both blogs, and block the IP addresses. This morning, it seems to have started again. I just had about 10 new comments to delete from a bunch of different IP addresses, which are now blocked. If it continues like this, I may need to turn off the comments system until I can replace it with some better way of keeping this rubbish out (or maybe just stop allowing links in comments, since that’s the only reason they do it).

Fucking idiots.

UPDATE: Actually, I’ve decided to take down the comment functionality altogether for the time being. I don’t really have time to deal with these “motherfucking asshole bitchface motherfuckers” (thanks Angel) right now. I’ll try to have it back up by the end of the week, but for now I’ll just say sorry if you wanted to leave a comment–I will sort this out as soon as I can.

UPDATE 2: Worked out a simple temporary solution that would have stopped all the spam I’ve had up to this point, so comments are back up again. For now. If I get more spam, I might need to take them down again (and, of course, longer term I will need to implement something a bit more robust), but hopefully this should be good for now. Hopefully the fact that I’m running a completely self-written blog system should be enough to make it not worth the spammers time adjusting their script to work with my blog… We’ll see!