I have been invited to beta test Gmail, Google’s new email service. Too early to say whether I will be moving away from Microsoft’s World-o-Spam (TM) for my main non-work email account, but why not help me make a decision by sending me an email at my new addy:
m a t t [ ( d o t ) ] a r m s t r o n g [ ( a t ) ] g m a i l [ ( d o t ) ] c o m
Cheers!
There can’t be many people who use the Internet who haven’t tried a sneaky vanity Google every now and again, and I’m no exception.
So have a look at what I found today (it was a very slow day at work): there’s a chap called “Matthew Armstrong” who edits a website called Post Magazine.
Do you think I’ve found the portal to some kind of bizarre parallel world? (He’s got a goatee and a ‘tache, so he is clearly a freak).
Mainly because we were going to see Lamb at Brixton late on Saturday night, but also because reverting back to Eastern time for the long weekend suited our lingering post-NYC jetlag, we decided to time-shift the weekend by getting up after what other people might refer to as “lunchtime” on Saturday and not changing back into British “Summer” Time until this morning (when we were forced to succumb to “the man” and turn up for work on time. Well, sort of). This meant that we could survive an afternoon down the pub in Clapham on Saturday and still be lively at 1AM when Lamb took to the stage. We’d got to the Academy half way through the set by the Scissor Sisters (ostensibly the headline band, but appearing first owing to the unusual gig scheduling, itself a result of this being part of Carling’s 24 hour live music event). I can only assume that the Scissor Sisters don’t share an audience demographic with the band we’d come to see, judging from the exodus of pairs of bald men as soon as their shirtless lead singer left the stage and the crew began dismantling their equipment. Not that I cared much, as this allowed us to head right to the front, and we watched the whole gig from within touching distance of Louise Rhodes. I don’t think I’ve ever been that close to the front at Brixton, in fact, and at times it felt like they were playing just for me. Which is a beautiful thing indeed.
Continuing the living-in-our-own-timezone theme, we didn’t venture out of the house the next day until well after 6pm, and ended up (some time afterwards) going to see the late showing of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I’d highly recommend, although perhaps not if you’re currently in a relationship on shaky ground. Also, although it isn’t saying much, it’s probably the best Jim Carrey film you’ll ever see–Sal dislikes him intently (which is sensible) and didn’t much care for Charlie Kaufman’s other films (which is sacrilege) and even she thought it was ok.
Sadly, if the trailers are anything to go by, Eternal Sunshine will be one of the few decent mainstream films out for a while. Everything else appears to be either an iffy remake (cf. Tom Hanks in The Ladykillers–what is up with the Coen brothers lately?) or a thinly-veiled remake masquerading as a new film (cf. Jennifer Garner in 13 going on 30–haven’t I seen this before, and wasn’t it called Big last time?*)
Anyhow. If only more weekends could be like this one, although I think it being three days long sort of helps.
* Looking for a suitable link for this film, I stumbled across this heated message board thread on the imdb. I couldn’t be bothered reading the whole thing, but it’s rather amusing anyway–as somebody points out early on: “a flame war on the ’13 going on 30′ message board surely means the end of the world”.
We did watch a fair bit of telly while we were in the States, and occasionally I even managed to persuade Sal to stop watching another slice of E! True Hollywood Nonsense. On one of those rare occasions, we happened to stumble across a paid political advertisement on behalf of the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign. These things always seem very odd to my eyes–the Party Political Broadcasts we see over here seem rather quaint and polite when contrasted with the kind of mud-slinging that goes on over there.
This particular one was a straightforward attack on John Kerry using a series of negative quotes about him that had been taken out of context from all those shabby right-wing papers that Al Franken writes about. It started off by attacking things like his war record (President Pot, meet Mr Senator Kettle, surely), and calling him “a waffler who blathers”, but what really stuck with me was the final quote that the ad built up to, their ultimate weapon against him:
“John Kerry has been described as being more liberal than Bill Clinton”.
Only in America could “liberal” be an unquestionably dirty word. Presumably to your average American it’s just a synonym for un-American left-wing commie scumbag. Or something.
Funnily enough, on a not-entirely unrelated name-dropping note, we spotted Jeff Kennet, former Australia Liberal Party member and Premier of Victoria (he of the Shed) drinking with his model son, Angus (Sal was rather more excited about this than me, for some reason) and other family members in the pub in Fulham last night.
Things is, though, that in Australia the word Liberal means the exact opposite of what it means in the US, they being the party of anti-socialist policies, privatisation, deregulation, corruption and tax cuts. Hmm, now who does that remind you of?
The combined joys of jetlag and having to return to work immediately have so far prevented me from writing a proper account of our recent holiday in New York. I feel compelled to do so now, though, if only because if I wait any longer I will be reduced to simply posting a copy of my credit card statement by way of describing the events of the last week far more accurately than my increasingly fragile short-term memory ever could.
[Case in point: on Tuesday, shortly before we left for the airport, we ended up randomly wandering around the part of the Meatpacking district in which we had spent our Saturday night (if only because Kim Cattrall’s character in Sex and the City once fell down a delivery hatch up the road). If we hadn’t found ourselves back there, then we would have had to wait for Sal’s credit card bill (on which she happened to have paid the cover charge) to come to find out the name of the club (Lotus, apparently) in which we had spent the highly drunken latter part of the evening with a couple of friendly locals who we’d got chatting to in another bar a few streets away.]
Anyway, I think it’s fair to say that we both thoroughly enjoyed ourselves on the trip, although we were somewhat disappointed that our early celebrity spotting (as mentioned previously) proved to be the exception rather than the rule, although Mike Contre-Attaque himself, (as the French can’t stop calling him), did go some way to disproving the old adage about celebrities being a lot smaller in real life than you expect (although maybe there is some sort of inverse relationship when it’s horizontal size you’re talking about, I don’t know). Perhaps he hasn’t tried that low-carb beer (I mean really…) that is advertised all over the place.
We didn’t bother with any of that Atkins nonsense either, preferring to fill our time (when we weren’t sightseeing, celebrity spotting, shopping, or watching trashy celebrity documentaries on E!) by consuming vast quantities of food, either in the lounge (because we couldn’t get a table–if only I’d read this before, it all might have been different) of a swanky uptown pan-Asian restaurant (complete with a giant Buddha that had apparently had to be airlifted into the building), or in countless breakfast diners, or a bizarre Mexican restaurant off Times Square (the only thing we could find open at the time) where the non Smoking policy was only casually respected, the other customers were all slightly threatening looking young guys, and the jukebox was strictly Mariachi music and authentic Mexican Pop (we beat a hasty retreat when a chap with a box full of minidiscs and a microphone looked like he was about to start a performance).
What else? Well, we went to the top of the Empire State Building, wandered Central Park, caught the free ferry to Staten Island, went to at least one location used in the film Ghostbusters (thanks Dave), shopped for Von Dutch clothes in the Village, (almost) filled an entire 128MB memory card with photos, saw the excellent Good Bye Lenin! at a small cinema in SoHo, sat on the steps of Sarah Jessica Parker’s fictional house, ate cupcakes outside the Magnolia bakery, explored the wonders of the village and the meatpacking district (some parts of which are still not completely gentrified and therefore juxtapose smelly warehouses with shops selling Stella McCartney’s clothes and Manolo Blahnik’s shoes). Oh, and we saw a crazy dancing man at Victoria station on the way there. And it doesn’t get much better than that.
I’ll be writing a proper entry about our New York adventures when we get back, but for now, I couldn’t resist posting a quick update from the impressive interior of the beautiful beaux-arts New York Public Library on 42nd and Fifth. If only to add it to the mental list of “places I’ve blogged”.
So far, we have been having a fantastic time–we’ve done our fair share of sightseeing, eaten plenty of great food and taken advantage of the fantastic exchange rate (and Sally’s doing that even more so in Macy’s as I write–I can’t imagine why she would prefer to do that then saunter round one of the best libraries in the world, but there you go). Oh, what else? well, we’ve been shopping in thrift stores on Staten Island, followed Michael Moore and an entire NFL team (who weren’t together, I might add) around the edges of the ground zero site, seen a movie being filmed in Central Park, (as well as countless news crews wandering the streets), and I haven’t been asked for ID (in the fabulous no smoking bars) once. I must be getting old…
If you were wondering what to buy the stalker in your life, then why not give them the ability to track your every move with this new service from 192.com that tracks anyone’s mobile phone to within 100 metres for just a fiver a month (oh how I wish that someone with a sense of humour could have seen fit to price it at 19.84 a month…)
I was heartily impressed by Sal’s ability to fall asleep yesterday evening during the zombie romantic comedy Shaun of The Dead (wonderfully housed on the InterWebNet at romzom.com). Those leather seats and footrests at the fabulous Electric cinema are mightily comfy, but it’s still no mean feat to nod off, however briefly, while a woman is being impaled on some garden furniture and Dylan Moran is having his intestines removed by a gaggle of marauding Spaced fans dressed as zombies.
There was no chance of me falling asleep, though, as I was thoroughly enjoying the film (positive reviews having already prepared me for the shock of it being a half decent British comedy film), and regarded the plush leather upholstery/red wine combo provided by the Electric as a bonus, rather than an aid to slumber. What a lovely cinema–I don’t think it will be the last time we go there.
Being a bit of a geek, I spent an hour or so yesterday setting up an RSS feed for the weblog. It’s something I have been meaning to do for ages now, and although I’ve got a few little things still to iron out, it does validate, and there’s a link on the left if you want to pick it up for your RSS reader of choice. Please let me know if you notice any problems with it and I will try to sort them out.
For those of you who don’t know what RSS is, Ben’s description is pretty good. As he says, it’s a way of wasting time on the InterWebNet really efficiently: You download a special “reader” application (and there are many free ones to choose from), or choose a web-based service (like www.bloglines.com), point it at the RSS feeds from all the sites you like that have them, and, er, that’s it. The reader software automatically checks the sites and tells you when they have been updated, so you don’t have to keep clicking refresh.
My spam email seems to be getting ever more bizarre by the minute. In what I presume is an attempt to defeat bayesian spam filters, the spamers are filling their emails with random obscure words.
I just got a mortgage approval email with the subject heading “Re: bellicose voluble”, which almost sounds like it might be a google-whack (it’s not though), and my bulk mail folder is stuffed full of messages with subject titles like “rogers augustus dysplasia narcissus stature asuncion albuquerque” (which you can almost, but not quite, sing to the tune of the King of Rock and Roll) and “sap wool pageant finale liquefaction splash camille dangle dusen”. They might get past some spam filters, but do the spammers honestly think that people are likely to open these emails?
Ah well, at least it provides a distraction–I like my Friday afternoons to be nicely surreal.