Escape

Aug 31, 2007 by John    6 Comments    Posted under: waffle

On my brief trip between Luas seat and office chair this morn I felt myself brimming with happiness and excitement. My head was fizzing with thoughts of foreign lands and strange new exciting people. And the adventure was afoot! What the fuck is wrong with me thought I? I know it’s Friday but I’m walking through a grey industrial estate. I should be Les Miserables.

Then it dawned on me these thoughts were just a hangover from the book I was absorbed in en route, Shantaram. Wow! Powerful stuff this reading business. Haven’t read a novel in ages. Non-fiction has been floating my boat for some time. Welcome back my old friends, Fantasy and Escape. I’ve missed you. But then I got to the canteen and had to stand behind some idiot for a whole minute as she stirred her coffee cup in that exact place where I needed to place my cup and scald my teabag. Argh! How stupid is that. Can’t you see I’m standing beside you with this cup for a reason? Wipe that stupid smile off your face , and get the fuck already! The swirling aromas of Bombay and dark eyes of mysterious girls flitted away and Grumpy Old Young Man was back with a thump.

Facebook is useful shocker!

Aug 26, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: facebook

Found a great use for Facebook yesterday. Moviestar keep hassling me to add more movies to my rental queue. A good trawl through friends favorite movies on facebook gave was a gem of a resource, either movies I’d forgotten about or ones I didn’t know but from a trusted source.

Meanwhile, I came across an amusing post about Facebook spam.

Embra Fringe 2007

Aug 22, 2007 by John    3 Comments    Posted under: comedy, edinburgh fringe, music, waffle

I went over to Edinburgh for the weekend. That’s my third long weekend in a row, yeehaw. Don’t know how I’ll cope with a 5 day week next week. Have wanted to go over to the fringe for ages and ended up going at the last minute(ish). Had a fantastic time, think I’d much prefer this than a music festival these days. I forgot what a beautiful place Edinburgh is too.

Only booked tickets for two events and left everything else to randomness. The first was Limmy’s Show, www.limmy.com has been one of my favourite sites for years. His silly, but slightly obscure videos and playthings appeal to my mentality. He got the show solely on the popularity of his site and hasn’t done stand up or anything before. It’s a brilliant show – a mixture of recorded videos and live one-man skits. All the material was brand new, no reference to the site at all, though I was tempted to whisper Requiem or shout Gies yer jaicket myself.

The other highlight of the weekend and the only other thing we pre-booked (you get what you pay for) was Fuerzabruta which was absolutely fantastic. It’s like a big a club, staged in a circus, featuring large-scale physical theatre, including overhead syncronised swimming in a ee-through pool, and treadmill stages with people running for their lives. Lasted about an hour and my mouth was wide open for a lot of it. The show would work great in a big club but that would lose some of the audience, everyone should see this. Here’s some video I took:

Got ticket’s for a few things at the 1/2 price hut. First show of the weekend was VHS 2 – Planet of the Tapes. Now I hate all things digital. Well maybe not all things but just things that used to be on tape, which is erm tapes and videos. So I loved the fact that a movie nerd pretty much dedicated a whole show to how crap DVDs are… mostly stand-up with a few pre-recorded videos.

Pappy’s fun club were a bunch of smug students. Well one of them at least. Actually maybe only one of them, the rest were likable enough. Show started off pretty crap but it turned out that the first half was mostly just building blocks for the second – and when they got to the bit where they swapped themselves with audience members and dissapeared while the audience members repeated earlier skits – well that was fairly hilarious.

Jesus I’m feeling really lazy now – not sure I’d intended to review the whole weekend, so here’s quick roundup:

• Shaun Hughes was the biggest show we went to – was good but just a pretty normal standup nothing ground breaking.
• Had great fun at Maxwell’s Fullmooners but by the time Ed Byrne was on I was awake about 22 hours and nodded off. Luckily I was up in a balcony and wasn’t caught snoozing. Apparently he totally redeemed hismelf of a few years of carphone warehouse ads.
• The other late nighter – I couldn’t tell you who played but everyone was pissed down the basement of a pub. Was really up close and personal – I shared an intimate moment with one comedian and an audience member as he showed us a clip of him teabagging a mate who was asleep. Whole night was great fun altough I think the biggest difference between Sean Hughes and this lot was several pints and a few whiskies. Always helps.

My generous host Nessa:

Some street entertainment:

One of the fringe areas at night:

Rest of photos.

Zoomquilt 2

Aug 17, 2007 by John    No Comments    Posted under: art, flash, web

Can you remember zoomquilt from a few years ago? Well zoomquilt2 is here and it’s bigger, badder and better.

Stockholm

Aug 17, 2007 by John    3 Comments    Posted under: stockholm, travel, waffle

What a great place Stockholm is. There’s no big wow factor but you start to notice small things. No traffic. Kids free everywhere. Everybody very polite, not to mention brown-skinned, blue eyed and blonde. Get this, in Sweden, a couple can take up to 13 months off work between them, with the state paying 80% of the wages. And a lot of companies will pay all expenses for adoption! Not that we experienced this over the weekend. A father gets two ‘Daddy months’ off work. That’s it I’m moving to Sweden and having three children a year. I’m hoping polygamy is also encouraged.

Didn’t do too much tourist stuff although we did go to skansen. Basically it’s a big park full of stuff, open air museams, a zoo, play areas, farms etc. Mostly we hung around some of the great public spaces in Sweden.

The first night we just needed to pop across the road to a lovely lake, where we lay in the grass and sipped some cans, with a Jazz band in the corner, people playing frisbee and some Swedish block game, while black bunnies fluffily hopped around! Didn’t know there was such a thing as wild black rabbits. Stumbled upon this place on the right after Skansen and just lazed around in beanbags listening to deep house for hours.

There’s some funny licensing laws in Sweden that meant we had to go to an off-license before a particular time on a particular day and buy all our drink for the weekend. I got a bit carried away and got lured by lots of strange coloured bottles with sickly sweet liquids. As you can imagine we drank the whole lot on the first night and ended up doing lots of silly dancing. But when the girls insisted on ABBA, I took a running jump through the window and ended up sitting on a branch overhanging the lake, which surprisingly didn’t end in disaster. I swear if we were on the tenth floor rather then the first I still would have jumped. I’ve grown to appreciate the fact that ABBA have some very intricate arrangements and are quite talented and all that – but I still hate them!

Rest of the photos here (but I still have to upload some more)

A dolphin obituary

Aug 8, 2007 by John    2 Comments    Posted under: news, waffle

You know when a famous person dies and and there’s an outpouring of grief and respect, the odd RIP email here and there. Well there’s another 6 Billion of us, and growing, so who cares? It’s a much greater loss when a whole species disappears. It’s just insane. By a mere stroke of luck this little planet has managed to invoke life, many strange and beautiful forms of life. Yet some just pop out of existence forever. Very sad day when that happens. Slightly sadder when it’s such a unique creature as the baiji, a freshwater dolphin anomalous to the Yangtze river. This is the first aquatic mammal species to become extinct since either the Japanese Sea Lion or Caribbean Monk Seal, both of which became extinct in the 1950s. Baiji’s have been in existence for 25 Billion years and now they’re gone.

Fucking humans. I can think of quite a few I’d rather see go before a whole species.

This chair had very muddy legs

Aug 5, 2007 by John    3 Comments    Posted under: photos

Look if I leave a chair in my parking space you better not move it. I’ll just put it back where it was. I don’t care what match is on.