And Then I Did This

I notice I've been slacking lately, but it's only because this whole "blogging-every-day" biz is actually rather dull. Instead, I've been filling the time between coming back to this page to make words appear at it by doing a multitude of other things, and while I normally hate the idea of people's personal blogs going along the lines of "today I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this, and then... " read in the voice of a self-important five-year-old, and vowed that this 'ere humble space would not end up like that, right now I'm more in the mindset of "screw morals, I've got space to fill!"

So, just for you, here's what's caused me to slack in days of recent, but to make it less boring and hopefully less self-important, I'll do it in rhythmic list form:

I went home, stayed alone,
spent a morning on the throne,
almost deaf, my ear hiss
had to come and update this,
waited for train in freezing cold,
entertained a one-year-old,
stole some rice, it was nice,
ordered water without ice,
walked in rain with holey shoes,
had a wee bit too much booze,
took some pics, walked on bricks,
Adam & Joe on Radio 6,
stressed for lack of Internet,
people in car park I never met,
learned about investment banking,
eating,
drinking,
sleeping,
w...ell, that's about it.

According to word count, I'm stick slacking so I guess I still have a way to go before I'm cured of my hatred for this idea. Eight down, twenty-two left. Then I can write at my own pace, which is essentially "when I frickin' feel like it".

One-Fifth Of A Carrot

There are days where you just burst with energy. Then there are days when you can't bothered right up to the point where you can't even come up with a stupidly over the top way of interpreting the phrase "burst with energy". This day is one of the latter. This post is pointless, except for the fact that since it exists, it counts as one of my one-a-day, very much like one-fifth of a carrot.

Insert humorous last line to finish the post.

A Daily Piece Of Nothing Special

You know those times when you're out and busy for practically the entire day, come home exhausted and have the sudden realisation that you have an hour and a half left before your own self-set goal of producing a daily piece of nothing special. Yeah... that.

I currently come to you thanks to the inner workings of a iPod touch, so advance apologies for any made-up words being auto-corrected to something "normal" if a little obscure. However, thanks to said exhaustedness, the chance of any extra stupid words appearing are pretty slim for two reasons: 1) because tapping out words on this thing is as time-consuming as a 12 course dinner with a crowd of elderly anorexics and 2) because of said exhaustedness, which is itself a made up word.

I did spend the best part of a contemplative seven minutes trying to decide of what to articulate in this 'ere thing o' text, but the best I could come up with was the thing about being exhausted, so that's what it is and that's where it ends. And again apologies for spelling boo-boos.

I suppose I can always claim getting a B in English for bad use of the language.

Mange Tout

My ears have still not recovered from the night before and, therefore, still sound, and feel, like they've been penetrated by mini-walls of hiss. Needless to say, last night's much anticipated gig was, well, worth anticipating, although being monumentally creeped out by the stares of the Fight Like Apes keyboardist "Pockets" left me feeling somewhat uneasy to the point that I had to avert my gaze to the nondescript drummer at the very back of the stage. Altogether, the evening panned out rather enjoyably for all twenty-one people who seemed to have showed up to the gig, especially for the big guy behind me who, stereotypically, seems like the kind of person who spends his days on World of Warcraft for 23 hours of the day, all the while surrounded by empty pizza boxes and pint glasses full of warm urine. Said guy was so enthusiastic I ended up with several beer-showers, and even to this point my clothes still smell fresh from a visit to Carlsberg factory.

Forgive me for being reluctant to talk about the gig in all its finest details but my brain is still mangled from the infectious jingle of support act Man Get Out, local band trying to get the word out. Unfortunately (or fortunately as the case may be), running all three words together for the purposes of web addressery means that they fall under the name "mangetout", mistakenly looked at through my intellectually scattered eyes as Mange Tout. For the unFrenchified or those who don't understand Paris speak, mange tout is a vegetable consisting of peas trapped in a vacuum-packed green bed. The upside of this, of course, is that should any foodie or aspiring chef ever come to Google mange tout but accidentally leave out the space, they'll be redirected to the musical stylings of this Liverpudlian lot. Not the ideal way to get famous but if it works, it works.

I'm keeping this one short now, mostly because last night's gig was, in my view, such an amazing feat to behold I can't find the right words to describe it (which is just as well considering the amount of words I'd use to describe something as simple as a pencil sharpener), but also because I'm currently using the computer of my newest residential dwelling (my home away from home away from my first home, really) and am about to be interrupted by a hyperactive almost two-year-old, who gets so fascinated by things that grown-ups use (cupboard doors and salt shakers, for example), that if I leave this laptop remotely exposed and within his reach, the rest of this post might end up looking something like thisghwfkjufhgaduwejegjdhjn jhlvjlkjhhojjkjkkjkkolkklkpjhujyhgoiu;yutygf

Mentioning Things I've Already Mentioned

Staying indoors has its perks. For example, you don't have to communicate with people unless you feel like it, your best friends from the land of transmitted television can entertain you without engaging you in any direct conversation, and it's great if you're not looking your best. For me, it's the latter.

For months I'd been planning on doing something radical to the colour of the fibres sprouting from the top of my head. Unfortunately, this went horribly wrong and since I am unable to gauge the full extent of the damage without the ability to look at the back of my own head, I'm reluctant to leave the security of closed doors and walled environments.

It's just as well I'm away to a much anticipated gig tonight then. Only the second gig of my life I shall have you know (assuming if we discount the more "art music" shows as showcased by the University's Contemporary Arts Centre) so I be mighty looking forward to this. I am not, however, looking forward to being away from my workstation for the next four days. Knowing my luck, I'll be back here on Monday to find the Internet connection being uncooperative and forcing me to angry tears... again.

I'm having the horribly overwhelming feeling that I'm mentioning things I've already mentioned before, but when there's virtually nothing going on in this particular life, it's difficult to draw any inspiration from it. Furthermore, I have yet to switch on the people-box today so am currently unaware of any breaking news developments that might've happened at 4am this morning. Then again, that's about the time I went to sleep so naturally nothing much was happening then, else I would've stayed up. So, in the event that there's some current major world event developing as I type, then I would like to give my opinion that this event confuses, disorientates, surprises, pleases, and angers me at the present moment, and it will take me another 24 hours to digest this information.

There we go, that should do. I'll leave this one short considering the last one ended up going over my self-imposed 750-word limit by a whole thirteen words, which had to later be cut out. Without those odd words, I'm surprised if the previous post makes any sense.

Then again, do any of these things make sense?

Not Much Really Of Interest

My source of inspiratrion somethingeveryday.co.uk is back in the virtual realms of quasi-existence; so long CRAZY DAVE! It's nice that I can finally direct you to it, but it's fairly obvious that what I'm actually doing is hoping that if anyone does go there from here, the folks at SomethingEveryDay will take note of this humble source of redirection and want me to write super awesome hilarious things for them in exchange for scraps (I live off bread crusts and my own toenails now). With that theory though, I seem to be under the impression that a lot of people come here in the first place which is, regrettably, so far from the truth it needs super-laser-vision to properly see an eye chart that looks something like this:

T

W O

P L U S T
W O I S F O U
R . . . D U M B A S S

So in my quest to drum up Internet traffic I begin doing stupid stuff that I find difficult to do, like, oh, I don't know, forcing myself to churn out a huge ramble once every day even if I have nothing to ramble about. Altogether, I end up babbling, like this what I am doing now, for no particular reason, other than to extend this particular sentence on and on and on and on and on a little bit further... and then some.

I should be used to being able to throw words at a blank space with relative ease by now; this time last month I spoke about my predicament of having to come up with over 8,000 of the multi-alphabetical buggars for the sake of assessment, which is really just another word for "so we know you haven't just wasted the last seven months of your, and our, lives listening to our knowledgeable stuff that you're not going to bother taking any notice of", which, incidentally (just because of its sheer length, boringness and mind-fucking complexity) could easily pass itself off as an essay question, if you're ever taking a course at University in Taking a Course at University.

However, it's a bit hit-and-miss when there's not much really of interest to even babble about, let alone rant. I suppose I could talk about the fact that my shopping endeavours took a little over one hour today, or the fact that I tried to dye bits of my hair purple so it would look like an orange and purple mess but instead looks blandly orange on the front and blindingly violet at the back, or even the fact that I had a cup of tea today. Unfortunately none of these events seem (to me, at least) remotely interesting, let alone moderately.

One thing that did worry me quite early on in the day (by which I mean within the first seven minutes of up-waking) was how the computer miraculously lost connection to the Internet: any student's and geek's worst nightmare. I had the same trouble literally the day before the first of the month (i.e. the last of last month) where I spent most of nine-and-a-half minutes on the corded telephone (I didn't know they still had those either) to the University's tech support, who couldn't resolve the problem. However, leaving the bloody machine switched off for four hours seemed to do the trick after one hour of relentlessly switching it off and on again, whilst wailing through frustrated tears about how it worked the last time I had it on. Luckily, this morning's techno-fuck-up lasted a mere forty-eight seconds and it was at this point I realised how specific I get with regard to timings.

However, I was going to mention this in the event of such disastrousness, but I think it would be far easier to alert the folks now that should my connectivity to this 'ere Web ever be a temperamental bitch to me again, I'll be forced to use the 3G-ness of my crappy-WAPpy phone with all the latest features at the height of 2007 to complete my daily onslaught here. In such an event, prepare for something that looks like this:

internets broke, so im stuck using the phone for this post. my god typing is boring, but i cant stand predictive. anyway, gonna go now cos its taken me seven hours to write that and im not sure i can be bothered fini

It's about this point in the day that I realised I'm doing weird centralised formats too.

No More Home Videos

It's a little bit surreal forcing yourself through tiredness, being directed to rolling news channels and watching a live address from the American president, so I guess it's just as well people don't capture and kill the world's most wanted terrorist leader every day. Yep, no more home videos from Osama bin Laden in this lifetime. What seems to be even more surreal is how seriously the Americans are taking this though. Al-Qaeda didn't just attack them; people were brutally taken out of existence in Kenya, Yemen, Madrid, even London (if you can be bothered to remember as far back as July 2005), but those streets are just normal today. I'm assuming that anyway since there's no media coverage of crowds around the London Underground. And why are there no crowds out in London? Because it's a fucking bank holiday, that's why! People don't want to spend this precious day off getting stuck in a mass crowd in the streets. Christ, it's bad enough dealing with the morning commute of any other day. That, plus we're all "mass-crowd"ed out from the Regal Union. The Americans are having their own mass gathering of Royal Wedding proportions on the streets today, though, just so they don't feel left out this long weekend, I guess.

Of course, Americans don't do things by halves. When they celebrate something, they go the whole hog and bring out the flags, the cameras and the mob mentality. Oh, and that mind-grating chant of "U-S-A" over and over, and I can't help feeling that without the Pakistani intelligence they received, they wouldn't even be celebrating today in the first place. If anything, they need to modify that tri-syllabled "U-S-A" chant to include "Pa-ki-stan", while Michael Jackson leads the afterlife celebratory movement with "This-is-it" and Janice from Friends shouts "Oh-my-God".

Nevertheless, I can't help feeling all this celebration will horribly backfire looking at the bigger picture. I mean, this man was the head of a terrorist organisation but all he really did is give the orders and make rubbish videos. Meanwhile, it was the groups of followers who were the ones to force their way into cockpits and kit themselves up with self-explosives. Those followers are still alive and I'm guessing they's gonna be reet pissed off a bit that their leader's been killed. If the Americans had captured bin Laden alive, he'd at least be in exile or whatever (I'm not that clever with politics), but the fact that they've killed him outright and declared his corpse to the world means there ain't no going back on it now. I'm all for justice and peace and everything, but I can't see this being the end; if anything, this is a horrible new beginning.

Going back to the celebrations in Washington and New York, I can't help feeling the Americans are drawing far too much attention to themselves and practically just asking for trouble, but right now they're acting too wrapped up in their own bubble to realise that even though the leader's gone, there are still followers and, if anything, they'll be wanting to avenge his death. Even though in the long run, what we essentially have is a small organisation vs. the rest of the world in the humanity stakes, we've seen what those guys are capable of doing to us "rest of the world" folks and I'm just hoping that should there be a 'next time', it won't be as catastrophic as previous attacks.

Osama bin Laden's life may be over, but there's a scarily massive potential for a whole new wave of destruction beginning. In other words, America: CALM THE FUCK DOWN!

"Once A Day" Is Far Too Often

Well, I said I would, but evidently my brain didn't mean it. Here's the first of (what is intended to be) 31 entries of this month. Of course, I can't promise I'll stick to it, or even remember, since my brain/body/entire existence will most likely get annoyed after Day 2 and loudly proclaim that "once a day" is far too often. But therein lies the challenge, I guess.

Yes, I decided to make myself write stuff in here every day for the whole of May because I saw some other website have the idea, only for it to go down mere days before so I can't really cite it or redirect ye to it without ending up a page named "Crazy Dave's Crazy Domain Names 4 Sale... DOT COM". Anyway, I decided to give myself a limit (because I always tend to ramble on for an unspeakably stupid amount [like this {hey! more brackets within brackets!}]) so as to stop me from pointlessly going over the 1,000 word mark. So 750 is the benchmark for the next (potential) 31 of these 'ere thingys, some of which will probably go nowhere even near there, like this one for example. Can you tell I'm waffling and using random words like 'domain' and 'pointlessly' and 'the' to just pad this out? I tell you what, it really feels like it. It's pretty much what I've done with essay writing where I deliver everything in about three times as much space as I could've done just by talking normally, meaning that theoretically some very learned, educated, professional-type person could edit my essays down to a paragraph and a half, and fill the rest of the time with a very eloquent and perfectly executed bowel movement or ten. Speaking of which, my essays are pretty much done now.

I did actually think these finishing touches would take me whole days to do, but a combination of still looking at them when I've written them all out and the big glass rectangle of BLINDING COLOURED LIGHTS is distracting me terribly. By that, of course, I do mean the television, but one could easily be mistaken for thinking of my westerly-facing window in these increasingly longer Spring evenings, as the slowly setting sun makes its way towards the horizon RIGHT OUTSIDE MY BEDROOM WINDOW!!! I suppose it's nice that for literally an hour before sunset my room is just bathed in a brilliant orange, but the fact that the object of my distractions is right next to said window means torture for my retinas and frustration for my brain as it tries to work out what coloured snooker balls are left on the overhead-angled table.

Come to think of it, it's a bit ironic having my window onto the imaginary world right next to my window to the real world; almost like the rest of my room being so boring that one single side of it provides so much outlet to interesting...ness.

Ooop, here I go. Brain's dying. Fingers... failing. Words making less ond luss sornse. Blarrbl blehhbl, juccoriba word count of about five hondrod und something. Gunner go be-four Brian gives owt in-tyre-lee.

One down...