Is This Thing On?

The hearing for the Glastonbury festival license is tonight.
Let’s hope it goes well.

Hmm. I must have missed the increased security presence at Heathrow this weekend. I didn’t even see a tank.

Very disappointing.

Then again… I’m supposed to be flying out of Heathrow tomorrow so I’ll be able to report first hand on the new “security measures” (assuming I make it back in one piece that is).

That’s always assuming I actually get away in the first place after the saga that was getting my tickets from lastminute.com, whose customer “service” leaves rather a lot to be desired.

Are tanks exempt from the congestion charge?

So I was (probably) the only English person in an Aussie bar in West London last night to see England lose miserably in their 3-1 defeat to Australia.

As the final whistle went, they turned the sound off the football and started playing that song that starts: “I come from the land down under…”

Oh dear.

“We’ve never done an encore, and we’ve never sold our soul and done a TV advert like all the other bands you play either…
Some bands still have principles.
We’re one of them.” [Nicky Wire, November 2002, the Jo Whiley show, BBC Radio 1]

I guess that must be a different Manic Street Preachers who recorded the song Australia, currently being using on a UK TV advert for, ahem, Australia.

I saw the Flaming Lips live yesterday. Sheer genius.

They had all the usual props out of course: fake blood, interesting visuals, the nun finger puppet. Even the tellytubbies made an appearance. They also had giant balloons bouncing around the audience (just beautiful) and about 10 people on each side of the stage dancing throughout the entire gig in animal costumes. We even had Beth Orton pop up beforehand to join them playing their cover of “can’t get you out of my head”.

I was smiling all the way home.

You may be wondering why I’m doing this. I suppose there’s two main reasons:

Firstly, I want to learn new web skills, so I designed/wrote all the back-end stuff for this bit of the site myself using a combination of PHP and MySQL (web scripting language and open-source database thingy respectively). Well, with the new economy being what it isn’t these days, you’ve got to keep an eye on the old CV. At the time of writing it’s not quite finished (and it is also not linked from anywhere else on the Paste site, as I want to get things right before exposing my innermost thoughts to a wider audience).

The second, and far more important, reason is that, after a year of failing to write anything substantial, I wanted to force myself to write on a regular basis, and this seemed like a good way to do it.

Hello. This is a new section of Paste magazine.

It’s a weblog. Think of it as an online diary. I will be venting my frustration at the ways of modern life here on a semi regular basis, as well as posting links to interesting stuff on the web.

At some time in the future, there may be other contributors to this section of the site, but for now it is just me.