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!
As you may have noticed from the previous picture, I’ve just returned from a deeply muddy, but fantastic, Glastonbury weekend (well, Mr Eavis said it was the best ever, and it’s not like he says that every year or anything).
This year, for the first time, I arrived on site on the Wednesday morning, barely a few hours after it had opened to the soon to be unwashed masses. Once I had located our regular camping spot just above the Pyramid stage, I spent around 30 fun minutes struggling to erect two tents as the rain lashed down on top of me, and the gusting wind tried its best to force the tent out of my hands. And once they were finally up, I got to sit and shelter from the rain watching other newly arrived festival goers struggling to put their tents up, and the soft ground and gusting wind conspiring to send a selection of recently-erected gazebos up into the air, flying off not very safely towards the overhead electricity pylons. The people camped behind me set up their tent and gazebo combo, then left for their cars to retrieve the rest of their gear only to return shouting “someone’s nicked our gazebo”. It was left to their neighbours behind me to explain how it had shot up into the air and floated off into the distance, unsavable, and could now be found scattered in pieces over by the long drop toilets.
One order for wellies promptly placed with Sally back in London, I settled in for the weekend. Thursday brought moderately better weather, those wellies I was almost thinking I wouldn’t need (fool), and a crushingly predictable England defeat shown on the Pyramid Stage video screens.
By Friday the sun was beaming down, and, my face a cancer-inducing shade of pink, we even had to seek refuge in the shade by the Other Stage’s mixing desk during the surprisingly good I Am Kloot. Thankfully, things had cooled down a bit in time for the excellent Snow Patrol and Franz Ferdinand later on. We polished off Friday by watching the Kings Of Leon, and then this lot, on the main stage.
In the end, Friday’s weather turned out to be the best of the weekend, and we awoke on Saturday morning to the not so sweet sound of rain dripping down onto the roof of the tent, something that it essentially continued to do for the rest of the festival, casting something of a shadow over proceedings, but not enough of a downer to stop us from enjoying the Scissor Sisters on the main stage, followed by the second half of Keane on the Other Stage, in the pouring rain. After that, I headed off to try to see Stewart Lee in the Cabaret tent, but ended up catching Lamb playing an unexpected stand-in set on the Jazz World stage, which was particularly great for me, given that I’d had to miss them on the Friday night so that I could catch Oasis. It also looks likely to have been one of their last ever gigs.
Later, the rain held off for most of Macca’s set, so we were able to watch without getting too wet as he played a whole pile of Beatles songs, and thankfully not too many of his shabby solo ones (although a “we’ve just been joined by the BBC” (so let’s let off all the expensive synchronised fireworks) Live and Let Die was obviously great).
On Sunday it continued to rain for most of the time, but that didn’t prevent us from enjoying one of the highlights of the weekend (immediately after one of the low points–a torrential downpour that saw us ducking into a strange cowboy themed dance tent for shelter), watching this bunch of scally reprobates play a strikingly similar set to the one we saw at the Apollo the other week (although I had to resist the urge to pogo in the mud when they finished with Whippin’ Picadilly, but then you just can’t dance in wellies anyway).
And I almost forgot to mention a trio of “celebrity” sightings: Howard Marks pushing past us as we left the Other Stage, Eastender (and friend of the Libertines) Dot Cotton being interviewed next to the New Bands tent between the Raveonettes and The Delays, and the bloke off BBC3’s Glastonbury preview show doing a piece to camera next to our tent on the Thursday afternoon…
Same time next year then? See you by the mixing desk for U2.
Glastonbury was great, and I’ll write a full report a bit later (and hopefully post some of my photos, although perhaps not all of them, given that I managed to fill an entire memory card with 100+ pictures of muddy tents). In the mean time, I’ve just been given a whole pile new Gmail invites (I now have another 7), so if anyone would like one, let me know…
For the next last few days, I have been doing this:
One of the attractions of moving to Islington at the start of the year, (apart from its proximity to transport connections for my soon to be ex-work, and its at the time unknown potential for pub-related Google glory–doh! broken my own rule already), was the fact that there’d be a live music venue just down the road, in the shape of the Islington Academy. Despite being inside a shopping centre (Rock n’ Roll!), and having been subsumed, like all music venues, everywhere, apparently, within the ubiquitous Carling branding, I imagined we’d be popping down there once a week to catch some up and coming band, enjoying the security of being able to walk home/not having to rush for that last tube.
Six months on, and we still haven’t even graced its sweaty insides (although we will break this duck in a few week’s time when Sydney’s Alex Lloyd comes to town in a vain attempt to plug Distant Light over here by playing to a bunch of expat travellers pleased to be catching him in such a small venue, and me). The fact that we haven’t been inside is not for the want of trying, though: there have been plenty of XFM-sponsored events there, showcasing the likes of Snow Patrol or Jet, but they’ve all been on-air radio giveaways, “not available through ticketweb“, and, as such, out of my reach. The gigs that you can buy tickets for, however, with Lloyd being a notable exception, have all been, erm, a bit crap–a curious mix of obscure, upcoming bands, and faded former Britpoppers. Still, every now and again I scour the upcoming listings in the hope of discovering a hidden gem. For some reason, I’ve not been tempted by the prospect of the band playing on August 14th “featuring Bonehead (ex-Oasis)”, or previous gigs involving half of Carter USM, or even, playing on August 11th at the 250 capacity Bar Academy (the adjoining small club/room), former indie favourites Echobelly. How the mighty have fallen–I guess Everybody hasn’t Got One anymore.
I still haven’t been doing anything even remotely interesting recently (it rained a bit, we stayed in, we went to the pub, watched some football, you know the sort of predictably boring stuff), so in the absence of anything more interesting to talk about, just one last post on that whole googlebombing nonsense. I was just wondering if anybody can explain this: www.google.com/search?q=related:www.thebarnsbury.co.uk (Google’s results for a search on websites related to our favourite pub website–the results you get when you click on the “similar pages” link underneath a search result).
It’s a very odd list that seems to consist entirely of sites that are also linked from the sites that contained the original googlebomb. For example, I presume the “Kabalarian Philosophy” website appears in the related list because Angel linked to it close to the original entry containing her part of the bomb, but I don’t understand why. What’s the logic here, and how did it determine that only these links were related to the pub’s website, and not the others on the original pages containing the bomb? There’s clearly some kind of bizarre Googlebomb-related overspill effect going on here.
I think that’s all the mileage I’m going to get out of that one, though. Time for something new… In the meantime, later this week I will finally be off to spend some time in a field with some fine music (mudbath? At the time of writing BBC Weather says probably not, although let’s hope Tuesday isn’t as bad as it looks). Expect much excited bloggage on my return.
Something of a mid-festival lull at the moment, so I don’t have anything exciting to write about (well, there is that one thing that’s going to affect my everyday life in quite a significant way–and, perhaps, my ability to blog with impunity between the hours of 9 and 5–but I’m not sure I should announce it to the world before certain other people know about it, and if you know me, you’ll know what I’m talking about anyway…)
So, in the absence of any of that, here’s some links:
– Using their own highly-scientific research method, here’s proof from Google that the fair and balanced Fox news lies (there’s a good breakdown of the OfCom ruling here).
– This music quiz might be a shameless plug for the Observer Music Magazine, but it’s a nice use of all those mini band posters they had all over the underground recently.
– I meant to blog this on Bloomsday itself, but here it is anyway: the BBC’s handy guide to Joyce’s Ulysses. Now I never need to bother reading it. In fact, I might just burn all my books for good measure.
Cory Doctorow has some excellent things to say about Digital Rights Management and copyright issues in this article: Why Microsoft should get out of DRM. Well worth reading, if you have even the slightest interest in music, films and what their associated businesses would like to stop you doing with them.