Category: Uncategorized

Nice to see the BBC continuing their occasional series of moderately hypocritical Papal-ethics articles with another brilliantly-headlined piece.

I must say that my plan of not paying any attention to Everton’s recent matches seems to be doing wonders for their form: since getting access to the evil one’s sports channels at home, I’ve watched 3 live games, all of which have ended in defeat for my team. I have completely ignored the last two games, which they went on to win, first comfortably against Crystal Palace, and then unexpectedly, against United. Not having seen last night’s game, though, I am rather curious about one particular incident, at least insofar as it was reported by The Independent:

“The first shot in anger came from Rooney, a 30-yarder that Nigel Martyn parried after eight minutes.”

Well that must have been some shot then… do they add on extra time for that?

Honestly people. If you are going to steal images off this website and stick them on your own blogs (well, not even stick them on your own webspace, but instead leech off my bandwidth), then the least you can do is get the dimensions right: that’s 273px wide and 335px high. And if you need any advice on how to do it, then just have a look here.

“That fat funny man,”
says Sal, “the one Angel likes”
in Camden, with shirts

Random Papal-related news:

– The BBC choose to illustrate an article discussing the ethics of photographing the Pope’s body with… a photo of the pope’s body (well, obviously from that angle it’s fine).

– Apparently Queen have come under fire for going ahead with their reunion tour gig in Rome this week. Well, obviously they didn’t get the memo: the appropriate way to pay your respects to the old AIDS-loving anti-abortionist is to postpone your plans by 1 day (see also: here)

Rob reports that his part of London has been experiencing heightened levels of crime recently. It must be catching: yesterday evening, on my way home from work I emerged from a particularly unpleasantly packed Northern Line to the sound of sirens wailing. Just your typical Monday evening in Camden, you might think, but as I pushed my way through the unwashed hordes waiting at the bus stop it became evident that something was going on. In Sainsbury’s, to be precise, where a blue jumpered chap was guarding the (locked) door and preventing a huge queue of people from entering the store and an even bigger queue of people from leaving the store with their purchases. Outside, there were two police vans parked up, and as I passed the doors a couple of policemen were heading for the door to sort something out… Unfortunately I didn’t stick around to establish the cause of the commotion (a particularly badly managed bomb threat, perhaps? a stakeout? a hostage situation? a fight over the last packet of Taste The Difference sausages in aisle 17?) but I was pleased to notice that despite the locked door, and the huge line of people between the tills and the door, queueing just to get out, I could still see a handful of people just casually wandering the aisles doing their shopping, apparently oblivious to events elsewhere.

A few minutes later on my walk home, I watched in disbelief as a bloke ran to try to get on a bus that was just pulling away from the stop. Once he realised he wasn’t going to get on it, he ran round the back and lifted up a small flap on the back of the bus (a fuel cap, perhaps?) and actually tried to hold onto the bus. Maybe he thought he could stop a packed double decker with only his bare hands, or pull it back towards him. Or perhaps he was just planning to ride from behind in the style of Michael J Fox in Back to the Future 2. Yes, that must have been it, because once he realised he had left his flying skateboard behind, he stopped trying to hold on and ran back down the street in the opposite direction.

Looks like the annual “lets hype Glastonbury until Wayahead Box Office’s servers explode” ritual is well underway, what with the White Strips confirmed as Friday night headliners, along with non so subtle hints about Coldplay for the Saturday night.

Despite what Mr Eavis might say, Wayahead (the chaps who will actually sell you the ticket once you get through the first hurdle from www.aloud.com) are still running Win2k, so it all should make for a fun Sunday…

Update (03-April-2005, 11:30am): I stand corrected. Things seemed to be running remarkably smoothly today, and tickets appear to be almost all sold out just 2 1/2 hours after going on sale… Still no sign of my confirmation emails though (“Your reference number will be emailed to you along with confirmation of your order. Please allow at least 4 hours for this to be delivered.”) Hmm. Wonder why there’s such a delay, you don’t think someone is checking all 112,000 transactions manually?

Normally I wouldn’t trouble these pages with news of something so desperately uncool (See! I am the Fearne Cotton of the blogging world), but just a quick mention that Sal and I saw the Finn Brothers at the Albert Hall last night (hey, get over it: I’m going out with an Antipodean, it’s what they do), if only to highlight some shockingly shabby journalism I discovered.

You see, we weren’t really expecting the gig to take place at all, considering that their former bandmate, Paul Hester, had committed suicide in Melbourne over the weekend, and according to the fine journalists at Melbourne’s The Age, which is a kind of Australian Daily Mail, it didn’t: an article of theirs that I read on Tuesday afternoon reported that the brothers had already flown home to be with friends and family.

It could have been worse–on Monday afternoon I read a report in the Sydney Morning Herald about how the brothers had played an emotional gig on Monday night, reunited with Crowded House bass player Nick Seymour who had flown from Dublin specially. They did indeed play on Monday, but the only problem with the report was that I was reading the article on their website several hours before the gig took place.

As you might have gathered from previous posts, we spent the Easter weekend in Budapest. The weather was not kind to us, but somehow the grey overcast skies that dominate my photographs seemed rather well suited to a weekend wandering around admiring the grand old crumbling buildings and grim soviet architecture that dominate the Hungarian capital. It’s also possible that we didn’t really mind the weather conditions because the favourable sterling to HUF exchange rate allowed us to spend the weekend there in style–on Saturday night, for example, we dined at the most expensive restaurant in town (and David Hasselhoff’s favourite), Gundel, where we enjoyed three spectacularly unethical courses, pre-dinner cocktails, and several bottles of wine, all for around £45 each. No sign of any luminaries of the calibre of their website’s reference listing, but we did wonder if our surprisingly good table was in any way related to the fact that the member of our group who had booked the table shares an initial and a surname with a certain erstwhile Spice Girl and UN Ambassador. Maybe we should keep an eye on that references page, just in case.

We spent much of the rest of the weekend eating and drinking as well, and although my Time Out guidebook contained the bitingly sardonic critiques that you might expect of most of the etterems we visited, it did prove fantastically useless at locating anywhere we might want to go to in advance. On the evening we arrived, as we were rapidly discovering many of the places around us to be shut, I attempted to call on the services of the guidebook to locate a late night drinking establishment, only to discover that although the editors had helpfully included map page and grid references for everything they mentioned, they had neglected to (a) mark anything on the maps, or (b) number the pages. Mostly we ended up reading about somewhere we went after leaving it. [One example: it was only some time after leaving the bar in which I caught the majority of the England – Northern Ireland World Cup Qualifier (yes, I know…) that I discovered with Time Out’s assistance that the unassuming chap finishing his coffee behind us (and moving to let a group of Geordies sit down with a friendly “No, it’s ok, I’m the owner”) must therefore have been “local celebrity and former world featherweight champion Istvan “Ko-Ko” Kovacs”.]

Taking a break from eating and drinking, we did just find time to visit one of the city’s baths. In this case Time Out actually came in handy, by not only helping us understand the complex and confusing procedures, but also helping us avoid two sets of baths whose clientèle consists mostly of “startled tourists and gay men on the prowl”. We headed instead for the mixed baths in the city park, where we spent most of our time in the two outdoor heated pools, watching the steam rise into the cold wintery air, and the old blokes playing chess in the corner. Inside, there was a slightly scary warren of corridors leading to some slightly manky baths of varying temperatures, interspersed with rows of restrooms and massage rooms that all looked like something from a 1950s soviet hospital. We didn’t hang around.

Watching “Express TV”, on the Heathrow Express yesterday, as Sal and I returned from our weekend in Budapest, I was delighted to watch and hear the following announcement: “Welcome to the Heathrow Express, and welcome to Express TV… For your comfort, on this train there are a number of quiet coaches, where Express TV isn’t playing. If you are in a designated quiet coach, please refrain from using your mobile phone…”