HelFire's Blogging and Stuff

New year, new look, new blog...

2008-03-12T20:44:00.002Z

I've been way too busy to blog lately, but I'm back (intermittedly) and starting a shiny new blog over here. It's more or less a continuation of this one, but with extra features like post categories, and (if i have time) regular "such-and-such of the week"-type features.

Blowing the cobwebs off my blog...

2007-03-07T20:49:00.000Z

Just popping in to say that I am still alive and blogging, just very busy with other things, so it is a while since I last posted anything. Once i've got work out of the way, I will post a proper update, and I may even switch to that fancy new style Blogger account (if anyone reading this would like to tell me whether it is worth switching to it or not, please leave a comment!). In the meantime, here are a few songs that have been rocking my world lately... enjoy!
Patrick Wolf - "The Magic Position"
Ghosts - "Stay The Night"
Oasis - "Live Forever"
Morrissey - "Sing Your Life"
Switches - "Message From Yuz"
Kate Bush - "Wuthering Heights"
Die Toten Hosen - "Freunde"
Marillion - "Kayleigh"
Shed Seven - "Dolphin"
Jarvis Cocker - "Don't Let Him Waste Your Time"
30 Seconds To Mars - "Attack"
Muse - "Starlight"

A fun evening in with an inflatable...

2006-11-29T17:00:00.000Z

No, it's NOT what you think it is! Last week, Charlie got out her inflatable punchbag and we all tried to blow it up, resulting in a lot of double entendres (mostly about making it "hard" and "upright," as well as jokes about "blow jobs"). Most of it has to be inflated with air, but the base has to be filled with water, and soon after we'd done that, Charlie dropped it and it burst, soaking the carpet (so we made a lot of double-entendre jokes about that too). I wonder if the people in the flat below us overheard, and what they thought was going on?
Talking of playthings that could be interpreted to be adult: apparently Tesco is selling pole dancing kits, and the "Daily Wail" has wheeled out some bloke to whinge that this will lead small children into depravity. It seems that he is the one having "corrupted" thoughts, not the children. I imagine that if I was a little girl and I saw one of those poles, i would probably think it was one of those poles that firefighters go down. "Phallic symbol"? More like something you'd find at an adventure playground. All this moral outrage about sex coming from a newspaper that features, for example, photos of Prince Harry's girlfriend in a bikini on the front page.
And talking of bikinis, a couple of nights ago me, Charlie and Pete donned some beachwear, flowers, loud shirts and grass skirts and went to a Hawaii-themed club night. Only one other person bothered to dress up, and he just had a Hawaiian shirt on, the rest of his outfit was just normal - he hadn't bothered as much as we had. I think the torrential rain that night put a lot of people off. There were so few people there, it seemed that staff outnumbered customers for most of the night. They gave us free T-shirts for being the only ones that bothered to make an effort! I think i could have had the chance to pull, but i got way too drunk and made a complete tit of myself, which probably put everyone off. Alcoholic drinks were much, much cheaper than non-alcoholic drinks there, plus we just sat around drinking for ages as the dancefloor was empty and the other two didn't want to get stared at for dancing in the middle of an empty dancefloor (I didn't care, as the way i saw it was, there was hardly anybody there to stare at us!).
Funny thing i noticed that night: Pete blatantly didn't know where to look. Faced by the sight of two of his female flatmates almost topless and showing a lot of leg, he seemed to develop a habit of talking above our heads, to prove that he really, really wasn't looking at our bodies. What a gentleman. :0)
I've got a lot of work to do now and had better get back to it. Just before i go, i'll explain a few English terms to any foreigners who may be reading this:
Flat = apartment.
Flatmate = a person you live in a flat with.
Daily Wail = a nickname for the Daily Mail newspaper.
Bloke = man.
To pull = to attract or kiss another person.

Bloody Nasty People, followed by some bloody nice people

2006-10-10T19:37:00.000+01:00

News of a police raid on the houses of two men in North-west England has recently reached me via word-of-mouth on the internet. The police found "the largest amount of chemical explosives of its type ever found in the country," plus "rocket launchers" and "a nuclear biological suit." Were these potential bomb-makers your usual disaffected young Muslims, second-/third-generation Asians, planning on making jihad against the Western society they felt alienated from? Nope: they're both middle-aged white men, one of whom used to be a candidate for the BNP (British Nationalist Party - nicknamed the British Nazi Party and the Bloody Nasty People).
Considering the stuff they found in this raid, you'd think that it would be national front page news. Look at how many people talk about terrorism all the time, everyone is worried about bombs nowadays, aren't they? But no, hardly anyone has heard about this case. It made it into the area's local papers (the sources i am using - see links above), but has been only mentioned in small "Other news" columns near the back of a couple of national papers, and it doesn't seem to have been on national TV either. Strange, that.
Moving onto something completely different, although it could also have the acronym BNP (in this case a bloody nice party with some bloody nice people!) - I spent last Saturday night in at what you could describle as our "housewarming" party. We invited old friends and strange people from other flats in our block, so we could get to know each others' friends and our new neighbours. We laid on loads of cheap booze from Iceland (the shop, not the country) and snacks from Poundland, and flatmate Pete played videos on his computer and our makeshift cinema screen (my bedsheet + his projector), including various music videos, a SNL spoof of Harry Potter, the famously innuendo-filled episode of Rainbow (I used to love that show!), and a couple of videos that were edited versions of another two of my favourite early childhood TV programmes: Postman Pat and Fireman Sam. Postman Pat was dubbed to sound rude (he ended up as a some sort of drug dealer!) and Fireman Sam was reversed to become Arson Sam. Ruining some classic childhood memories, possibly, but bloody funny and got everyone in the room laughing out loud, so i guess it's okay then!
Met some other nice people on Wednesday this week too: I went to see the band Johnny Panic, and met a couple of old friends there too. The gig was really good and it is a shame that the crowd wasn't bigger or noisier, but i think it's because JP aren't very well known. Their typical style is uptempo rock with shades of pop and punk, like a combination of Alkaline Trio, Green Day and the Manics. Or The Clash meet Cheap Trick. With a touch of the Buzzcocks. Anyway... They're dead catchy, they're good live, and they're not bad-looking either... why aren't they big yet? They seemed like nice people too - me and my mates and lots of other people hung out with them at the bar after the show.
They played quite a few tracks from their excellent debut album The Violent Dazzling including the ballad "Coming Up Roses" (cigarette-lighter-waving stuff without being too OTT or soppy), pop-punk singalongs "Automatic Healer" and "Chemical Girlfriend" and the slightly heavier "Minority Of One," "Free Winona," "Warn You" and "Burn Your Youth" (the latter was particularly good, as the second half of the studio version isn't as good as the first half, but when they played it live i thought both halves sounded great), as well as their new, non-album single "I Live For" (another typical JP song: makes you want to sing along and bounce around). Good stuff, then.
Honourable mentions must also be made to the support band who had to cope with people mistaking them for Johnny Panic and asking them questions and stuff (I suppose that's what happens when neither the support act nor the main act are well-known) and to the people partying at the Cavern while dressed as pirates for some sports society's themed "social" (one of them looked exactly like Captain Jack Sparrow!).
Now trying to study and think up a solution to my current cash crisis...

"My head feels like there is a Frenchman living in it!"

2006-10-05T21:32:00.000+01:00

Well, we finally managed to find a care home for my gran, and it may sound harsh but i'm glad she's gone there - living with a really mentally ill person is nigh on impossible! That is one huge weight off my mind. Another unwelcome and unexpected souvenir from our holiday in Italy is a problem with walking that I developed (I think it may be due to an injury i got while wearing some insoles and shoes that my aunt gave me - she thought it would improve the way I walked (there was nothing wrong with me as far as i could tell, but she is always trying to find something wrong with me, like when i went a bit quieter than usual for a bit because i was worried about having to look after my gran, she said that i wasn't talking at all and that meant i was "abnormal") but it seems to have done the opposite) and at one point it was driving me absolutely crazy (staying at home with nothing to do and only my family for company probably didn't help the feeling either), but at the moment it isn't so bad and i hope it doesn't get that bad ever again.
I'm back at university now, and i feel much, much better. OK, so i seem to be developing a really bad head cold (Freshers' Flu perhaps?) and i think i've managed to give myself some mild food poisoning too (I have to cook for myself now), but my life is normal now. I'm in a self-catering flat with 5 other people, including my mate Harriet, and i get on well with all of them. We have had a few getting-to-know-each-other events, like video nights, a trip to our local, Monopoly games and a trip to a Village People themed fancy dress party at Arena. I don't think anyone in my flat is normally that keen on going to the temple to tackiness that is Arena (I know i'm not that keen on it myself!), but it was an opportunity to dress up for a laugh, and one of my flatmates, Pete (not to be confused with the other Pete that i lived next door to in halls last year), is always dressing up in fancy dress, so we made an exception for that one night. (I went as the cop). I thought it was better than usual - not as crowded as usual, plus people were very friendly (I think the costumes were a conversation starting point!). The DJs were giving away loads of free stuff (just chucking them into the crowd), i got loads of fake banknotes and a poster advertising Jack Daniel's whiskey, not to mention - most bizarrely - a penis weight! I've decorated my room with the banknotes and poster but i don't have a use for the willy weight so i think i might just give it away to any boy who wants it. The music at the club was incredibly loud though... my ears only stopped ringing today - it was on Wednesday and now it's Friday.
Last night me and Harriet also met up with two of our best friends, Chris and Dan, which was great even though it was only for a few minutes. They're always a good bunch for a laugh. Dan's hair was sticking up and formed a lovely quiff - normally he gels it but he hadn't had time to yesterday, but i thought it looked good ungelled (if that is a word!) too. Also his skin seems to have cleared up since i last saw him (way back in June!). I've had a crush on him for ages, and i thought he looked particularly cute last night. He's always been amazingly polite to me, but i'm never sure if it means he fancies me back, because he seems to be really polite to everyone (which is part of his appeal to me). Fingers crossed for luck...
Tomorrow night will be a getting-to-know-our-neighbours party: we've invited people from other flats in our block and the block next door. The only problem is it's the same night as The Cavern's ska/punk/reggae night and The Hub's punk/indie/rock/emo night, and i feel like i'm going to be torn between the three! Hmm...

My new favourite music video

2006-09-26T21:37:00.000+01:00

OKGO - "Here It Goes Again." Click here to watch...

Barbarism Begins At Home

2006-09-02T18:11:00.000+01:00

At last I have got a few minutes to myself to blog! We have all been soooooo busy lately - it started when we went on a normal holiday in Italy, which then ended in disaster. My gran on my mum's side has been "a bit odd" for quite a few years, and has now been diagnosed with senile dementia (specifically vascular dementia), so for the last few years she has been living at my aunt's house in Italy. We often stay at my aunt's house when we go on holiday, otherwise we just wouldn't be able to afford a holiday. It's an absolutely massive (three floors) house compared with ours, and they have plenty of money (it seems), so they let people stay there for free all the time. During our most recent holiday about a month ago, my aunt suddenly told us to take our gran to England with us. Not "Would you like to take her home with you?" - just "She's going to live with you and that's that!" I understand that she has been driving my aunt crazy and she can't take any more, but even so she should have realised that sending her to live with us was a very bad idea.
For a start, my gran doesn't speak a word of English, and there is no hope of her learning any because her memory is completely screwed up. Secondly, it's a completely different house - she's used to having the entire top floor of my aunt's house to herself (as I said before it's a massive house), now she's got the spare room in our house and she hasn't been able to get used to it. Even though she's been driving my aunt and her family crazy (as if they weren't already crazy enough!), at least she has the entire top floor (all one huge room, like a studio flat, plus en-suite bathroom) to roam in, so they can avoid her. That floor must be about the size of both floors of our house combined! She also thinks that everything belongs to her, and has a habit of stealing, hiding and breaking things, as well as making "bundles" obsessively. These problems were bad enough in my aunt's house, and made even worse in ours because it's smaller and she thinks it's all hers. Thirdly, it's a completely different country, so if we get sick of her stamping around the house and decide to take her out or put her in respite care, there can be problems (different language, different way of life, etc.).
Senile dementia is not just "going a bit doddery in your old age," it's a full-on mental illness! In a way it is worse than a lot of other mental illnesses, because at least some of them are curable, but dementia can't get better, it can only get worse. In terms of symptoms, there is also some overlap with schizophrenia (e.g. psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, apathy, paranoia, language problems, problems with social situations, etc.). There are scare stories in the media all the time about schizophrenia and cannabis, and i wonder if the reason why they're more worried about schizophrenia is due to that possible link with cannabis. The Daily Mail is one paper that often pisses me off for various reasons, and a few weeks ago it had a news story titled HOW CANNABIS MADE MY SON SCHIZOPHRENIC on the front page. The next day, it had a news story about a "score card" system that has been developed to find out your chance of developing dementia and what you can do to lower it - like the cannabis story, it was buried deep inside the paper, but unlike the cannabis story it got no front page splash (suggesting that it is less important, perhaps). Half the page reporting on the dementia story was given over to an opinion piece titled "Sorry, but I don't want to know," and I skim-read it and it basically seemed to say what the title said - the writer just wasn't interested in finding out what her chance of dementia was and what she could do about it. That really, really pissed me off - they're saying that we have to worry about schizophrenia, but not about dementia! They're practically the same disease! Are they pushing for cannabis to be upgraded to Class B again, or trying not to scare their elderly readers? Whatever their agenda is, it still disgusts me that they act like dementia isn't serious - it is! You just don't know how serious it can be 'til you meet someone with it.
Anyway... she demands 24-hour attention (she's attention-seeking by nature anyway, and the disease just makes it worse), plus you have to watch her all the time as she steals things, breaks things, eats everything, doesn't know where the loo is, punches people, walks into the road, switches on the gas on the stove... that sort of thing. She is able-bodied, and her body clock is screwed (she hardly ever sleeps, especially at night, and she mixes up day and night), so it really is a 24-hour job. Even though it's split between the family, it is still knackering for all of us.
I had been planning on spending this summer doing the following: studying for next year (Yes, I passed the first year! I got a 2:2 overall, i now know where i went wrong in my exams and coursework and what i could have done better, so hopefully I'll get a 2:1 next year. The first year is just "pass or fail" and determines if you come back next year or get kicked out - it doesn't count towards your overall grade. I was hoping on getting a little headstart on next year's work so hopefully i get a 2:1...) and doing some other work (like learning to drive, doing voluntary work, maybe even getting a job)... as well as socialising! But alas most of these plans have been scuppered (I've done a little studying, although not as much as i could have; I've had 2 driving lessons, which both went well, but again i could have had more; and my social life is much less than it previously was). This is a job and a half!
The first couple of weeks of looking after my gran, i was so tired all the time - falling asleep in the middle of the day, that sort of thing. Even now i'm a bit more used to it, i'm still not always as energetic as i would normally be, and my mum is still really ill from stress. My mum has never got on incredibly well with her mum, and dementia has made their relationship even worse: my gran is even more stubborn than ever. My mum has cancer, so she is supposed to avoid stress, and my aunt knows this, so it was pretty dumb of her to put my mum in a stressful situation like this.
My gran is on loads of medications but she is in such a severe state that they don't seem to make any difference. Also, in dementia the brain is always degenerating, which means its structure changes, so you have to keep changing the medication because a drug that works in the early stages may not work later on, or you may have to use combinations of various drugs to get a result. She isn't improving, and is showing signs of the later stages of the disease: lately she's been thinking that images on TV are real (as in, happening in the room right in front of her) and does stuff like sitting right next to it, touching the screen and talking to it. Also she doesn't bother to control her, um, "functions"... there is no physical reason for it like incontinence or anything, it's just that sometimes she doesn't realise that there are right and wrong places for doing this sort of thing, and other times she hallucinates and doesn't know which room she is in, so you can't leave her alone for a moment otherwise you'll come back into the living room to find her squatting on a plant pot thinking she's sitting on the loo...
It is obvious that she cannot live a normal life or live in a normal house. I just can't believe that my aunt didn't do something earlier. Why did she pass the buck to us instead of giving her to professionals who know how to deal with this sort of thing? I wonder if it is some sort of pride or family honour thing - she doesn't want to be seen putting her in a mental asylum or a care home, all that "what would the neighbours say?" stuff. She talks about how she should be in an asylum (she is too crazy for an old people's home), but at the same time she makes us promise not to put her in one. Family honour is a big thing in Italy - honour killings were made illegal only 25 years ago! But living with someone like my gran is enough to make others go insane too - when she lived with my aunt, my uncle looked after her most of the time, and she drove him to alcoholism! If my aunt really cared about her family, she would have put her mum into care instead of inflicting her on her family - sod the family's honour, save the family's health!

Sorry that this is such a depressing post, but it is something i just had to say. I'll just try to improve the mood a little now with a few rather cool things i've recently noticed on the web:

And what blog of mine would be complete without some music?
I bought the new single by Morrissey (who else?) the other day, and the live version of it on his myspace and the live B-sides on CD2 confirm my suspicion that much of his latest album sounds better live. The production on Ringleader of the Tormentors is beautiful and delicate, but sometimes it sounds a bit like everyone is being restrained instead of being given some "oomph", like his backing band aren't rocking out as much as they could do, so a lot of the songs end up sounding too similar to each other and not quite lively enough.
I also bought the new single by The Fratellis, a fun and lively new band from Scotland, and I reckon they could be big - they're not incredibly melodic but they are getting a lot of attention and their songs sound like they could get people dancing. I predict they'll be hyped up in the NME in no time. Watch this space...

And on a completely different (but still, thankfully, on a positive note), I am rediscovering one of my favourite TV shows: Dragons' Den. Business entepreneurs have to present their ideas to the "dragons" (a panel of successful businesspeople) and convince them to invest in their idea. There are often people presenting really strange inventions and asking the dragons to invest in them (and they refuse, of course), like a bloke last week who had invented something to stop half-used cucumbers going soggy in the fridge (what's wrong with just chopping off the soggy bits?), so it's quite entertaining and funny. I also think the male dragons are kind of attractive (No, it's not because of the big wads of cash on their desks!) - they're well-dressed, smart, sharp, witty and obviously know their stuff, and they're not bad looking either. I sometimes wonder whether or not i'm alone in thinking this, or whether or not I should actually care whether or not i have normal taste in men...

"And on that bombshell, it's time to end," as Jeremy Clarkson says at the end of every episode of Top Gear (another of my TV faves). I've got a big post planned, and I will post it... er... some time in the future.

I was looking for a job and then i found a job, and heaven knows i'm miserable now!

2006-07-27T19:57:00.000+01:00

Apologies for not updating earlier, but I have been very busy lately and have much more work to do than i had expected, and i have a lot of stuff saved that I want to blog. Will post again, but i can't promise it will be very soon...
Bye for now, and thanks for reading!

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

2006-06-25T21:53:00.000+01:00

Wow, our hall's ball on Friday was AMAZING! then on Saturday we had a rather good night at the Cavern too! (Yes i know you're supposed to give your liver 48 hours to recover between parties, but just once can't do much harm, can it?) Will post more details later when i have more energy and my computer has fewer technical problems...

Video Killed The Radio Star

2006-06-19T21:12:00.000+01:00

Bored during summer? Never fear, I'm here to post some videos to starve off boredom and kill time! These are all off YouTube (so you can watch them in your internet browser) unless otherwise stated. Click the links below to watch 'em...

Comedic clips:
"10 Things I Hate About Commandments" trailer (a combination of 10 Things I Hate About You and The Ten Commandments).
"C For Cookie" trailer (a combination of V For Vendetta and Sesame Street).
Cockney DragonBall Z.
"Don't Be A Gimp, Keep Britain Tidy" advert (Flash and Windows Media versions available).
England football player Peter Crouch scores a goal and celebrates with his now-legendary robotic dance.
Human beatbox.
Lego people playing AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."
Pac-Man: The Movie trailer.
Rowan Atkinson "Welcome To Hell" sketch.
"Walk This Way" Transformers.
Bill Bailey standup shows:
Cockney and classical music.
Kraftwerk tribute ("Das Hokey Kokey").
Photographing kebabs.
Rave version of the BBC News theme.
Rock ballad.
Sirens.
Starsky and Hutch (on SpikedHumor).

TV programmes/trailers:
Bill Bailey on TV:
Eyewitnesses.
Humble apologies.
Lost luggage.
Messing around on Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
Doctor Who:
American trailer.
Dalek fan film.
Mini-episode featuring Doctors Nine and Ten (shown on Children In Need telethon).
Tardisode Seven ("The Idiot's Lantern").
Tardisode Eight ("The Impossible Planet").
Tardisode Nine ("The Satan Pit").
Tardisode Ten ("Love And Monsters").
"Tooth And Claw" episode trailer.
Trailer for the current series of Doctor Who (with the 10th Doctor).
Trailer for the previous series (with the 9th Doctor).
"Wassup" Budweiser advert spoof.
Have I Got News For You:
BBC News 24 mistaken identity.
Chinese state visit (President Hu).
Paul Merton drifts off into a daydream...
Pirate Video introduction.
President Bush and the Royal family.
The Angus Deaton Scandal.
Look Around You:
Maths.
Water.
Germs.
Ghosts.
Sulphur.
Music.
Iron.
The Brain.
Jack Morgan (BSc): "Little Mouse" music video (from "Music" episode).
Not The Nine O'Clock News:
Constable Savage.
Gerald The Gorilla.
"Gob On You" song.
Hi-Fi Shop sketch.
Kate Bush parody.
The Life Of Christ debate (spoof of the Life Of Brain debate).
QI:
Barbara Streisand's moustache.
Christmas special.
The Moon/The Triple Point of Water.
Trailer.
Top Gear:
Car football I.
Car football II.
Mercedes radio.
Mini ski jump.
The Toupee Test.
2004 Awards.
2005 Awards part 1.
2005 Awards part 2.
Watch the latest episodes on the BBC website (you'll need RealPlayer for this).

Live music:
Art Brut's Jasper Future and Eddie Argos sing karaoke to The Vengaboys' "Boom Boom Boom."
Bauhaus cover David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" on The Old Grey Whistle Test.
The Buzzcocks - "Ever Fallen In Love?".
Cheap Trick - "Surrender".
The Darkness - "I Believe In A Thing Called Love".
The Dead Kennedys - "Holiday In Cambodia".
HIM - "Your Sweet 666".
Led Zeppelin - "Immigrant Song".
Lordi - "Hard Rock Hallelujah" at the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest (with Terry Wogan commentary).
LT United mime "We Are The Winners" at the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest (awful, but worth watching just for the crazy dance in the middle during the violin solo!).
Morrissey - "Ganglord" (B-side to new single "The Youngest Was The Most Loved").
The Music - "Take The Long Road And Walk It".
Patti Smith - "Because The Night" on The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1976.
The Smiths live in Madrid, 1985:
"William, It Was Really Nothing."
"Handsome Devil"
"That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore"
"Shakespeare's Sister"
"Rusholme Ruffians"
"The Headmaster Ritual"
"Barbarism Begins At Home"
"This Charming Man"
"Hand In Glove"
"Still Ill"
"Miserable Lie"
"Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now"
"Meat Is Murder"

Music promo videos:
AC/DC - "Who Made Who?"
Aerosmith - "Janie's Got A Gun"
Aerosmith - "Livin' On The Edge"
A-Ha - "Take On Me"
Alice Cooper - "Poison"
Art Brut - "Emily Kane"
Art Brut - "Good Weekend"
Art Brut - "Modern Art"
Bauhaus - "She's In Parties"
Blur - "Coffee & TV"
Blur - "Country House"
Blur - "Girls & Boys"
Blur - "Parklife"
Blur - "Song 2"
Bon Jovi - "Say It Isn't So"
The Buggles - "Video Killed The Radio Star"
Buzzcocks - "What Do I Get?"
Buzzcocks - "Wish I Never Loved You"
Cheap Trick - "Dream Police"
Cheap Trick - "If You Need Me"
The Clash - "Rock The Casbah"
Culture Club - "Karma Chameleon"
The Cure - "Friday I'm In Love"
The Cure - "Taking Off"
The Darkness - "Friday Night" (rare video - continues where "IBIATCL" left off)
The Darkness - "Get Your Hands Off My Woman"
The Darkness - "Growing On Me" (uncensored version)
The Darkness - "I Believe In A Thing Called Love"
The Darkness - "Is It Just Me?"
The Darkness - "One Way Ticket"
Def Leppard - "Photograph"
The Feeling - "Sewn"
Franz Ferdinand - "Do You Want To?"
Franz Ferdinand - "Matinee"
Franz Ferdinand - "Take Me Out"
Gene Loves Jezebel - "Desire"
Green Day - "Basket Case"
Green Day - "Holiday"
Justin Hawkins - "This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us"
HIM - "Join Me" (13th Floor mix and video)
HIM - "Join Me" (Razorblade Romance mix and "ice" video)
HIM - "Killing Loneliness" (old version)
HIM - "Killing Loneliness" (new version)
The Hives - "Hate To Say I Told You So"
The Hives - "Two-Timing Touch And Broken Bones"
The Hives - "Walk Idiot Walk"
Husker Du - "Could You Be The One?"
Husker Du - "Makes No Sense At All/Love Is All Around"
Idlewild - "A Modern Way Of Letting Go"
Idlewild - "Little Discourage"
Idlewild - "Love Steals Us From Loneliness"
Idlewild - "When I Argue I See Shapes"
Led Zeppelin - "Whole Lotta Love"
Lordi - "Hard Rock Hallelujah"
Men At Work - "Down Under"
Modern English - "I Melt With You" (original version)
Morrissey - "Dagenham Dave"
Morrissey - "First Of The Gang To Die"
Morrissey - "Suedehead"
Morrissey - "The Youngest Was The Most Loved"
Murderdolls - "White Wedding"
Muse - "Bliss"
Muse - "Butterflies And Hurricanes"
Muse - "Plug In Baby"
Muse - "Time Is Running Out"
Oasis - "The Importance Of Being Idle"
Public Image Ltd. - "This Is Not A Love Song"
Pulp - "Babies" (original version)
Pulp - "Common People"
Pulp - "Lipgloss"
Radiohead - "Just"
Radiohead - "Karma Police"
Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - "Spinning Round"
Run DMC vs. Aerosmith - "Walk This Way"
Sex Pistols - "God Save The Queen"
Sisters Of Mercy - "Lucretia My Reflection"
Sisters Of Mercy - "This Corrosion"
The Smiths - "Girlfriend In A Coma"
The Smiths - "The Boy With The Thorn In His Side"
The Smiths - "This Charming Man"
The Smiths - "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before"
The Stone Roses - "Begging You"
The Stone Roses - "I Wanna Be Adored"
The Stone Roses - "Fools Gold"
Tenacious D - "Tribute"
The Timelords (a.k.a. The KLF) - "Doctorin' The Tardis (Doctor Who)"
The Upper Room - "All Over This Town" (opens in Windows Media Player)
The Upper Room - "Combination" (opens in Windows Media Player)
The Vines - "Anysound"
The Vines - "Get Free"
Wolfmother - "Woman".

One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back!

2006-06-14T22:31:00.000+01:00

Over the last few days i have had trouble finding important stuff due to my room being an absolute mess. It reached a peak when i was going to go to an "employability" event (stuff like how to answer interview questions, what to put on your CV, how to fill in application forms, that sort of thing), and i had to reserve a place on it and pay a deposit by cheque... and i couldn't find my chequebook! That was when I realised i had a bit of a problem, so i gathered up all my work and remaining textbooks (I took some back home when I went to see Morrissey in Oxford, but some remained in the mess of my room) and decided to take them home and make some space here. I staggered down the hill to the station with a very heavy bag of books and work and used a machine in the station to get tickets.
One option seemed almost too good to be true: a cheap day return ticket for £27, via the "Honiton and Southampton" route (a route i hadn't taken before). That was the cheapest so i bought it and hopped onto the first train that went to Honiton. A few minutes later I was there and looked around for something that would tell me when the next train to Southampton would be and which platform it would be from, and I found a timetable that seemed to show that I had to go via Salisbury. The train I had just got off was on its way to Salisbury, but the ticket machine hadn't said anything about Salisbury, so i was a bit confused - should i have stayed on that train or not? why did the machine say Honiton instead of Salisbury? which station should I change at?
I asked the bloke at the ticket desk and he looked at my tickets and went on about them not being valid for that journey and told me i'd have to buy another ticket. I had no idea why he said they weren't valid, as they covered my whole journey and they'd been checked by staff at Exeter station when i bought them. He said something about what day they were valid on, then noticed the date on them and said they were valid for today after all, and then he went on about some other reason for them not being valid for the whole journey, like i'd used up the outward ticket (I had travelled less than 25 miles, and the outward ticket was for a 165-mile journey!) and for some reason that meant that i couldn't use the return ticket either except for getting back to Exeter. I really don't know what the problem was, and i half suspect that he was just trying to get money out of me (the ticket home that he said i had to buy was more expensive than the one i had bought...). I know that there are a lot of conditions attached to train tickets, like if you pay £X you can get from A to B but if you pay £Y you can go from A to B via C but only between time D and time E on day F, but there suddenly seemed to be a lot more conditions attached to my ticket than there had been when I'd bought it. I think he might have been making it up in an attempt to supplement his measly wages. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd said that my ticket was only valid when Venus was in Capricorn or something like that. Actually, he probably did say that.
I felt like punching him - now I understand why ticket people are protected from the public by a window! I gave up and asked if I was able to go anywhere with my tickets, and eventually he answered that i could use my return ticket to go back to Exeter. So i did. I suppose i could have tried sneaking onto the next train to Salisbury when he wasn't looking and go home that way, but Honiton Station is hardly a hive of activity: there weren't crowds to slip into, and the next train for Salisbury wasn't for at least another hour. The next train to Exeter was a few minutes later so i got that - I just wanted to get the hell out of Honiton as soon as possible! When i got back to Exeter, i considered getting on another train home (and changing at the right station this time!), but by then i was tired (my luggage weighed a ton and didn't have wheels... if only there had been a supermarket nearby, then i could have "borrowed" a shopping trolley...) and the only thing i felt like doing was drowning my sorrows :o(
I was not in a brilliant mood, but then i saw a couple of things on the train back to Exeter that cheered me up: a stranger smiling, and the familiar sights of my current "home" (I saw Holland Hall, Duryard's rival hall of residence, shining (it's all shiny and new and reflects the sunlight, unlike the dull old (but much-loved) "Dirty-Yard" Halls) in the hills, surrounded by trees... it looked like the HOLLYWOOD sign!). Then, on the struggle up the hill, i met my mate Claire, who helped me carry my stuff home... what a star! :o)
I didn't go binge-drinking after all; there was an Archery Soc social that i thought about going to (I signed up to tons of societies in Freshers' Week, but Archery ended up being one of the only ones i regularly attended... well, not really "regularly", more like "sporadically", but that's a lot more often than some of the other societies i signed up for) but didn't bother (i was a bit too tired from lugging so much luggage about), and instead had a quiet drink in The Welly with football (Germany v Poland) and friendly faces (including regulars Gareth and Big Mark, who are such regulars that they probably secretly live in there, most likely behind the quiz machine that Gareth seems to spend his entire student loan on). It may be a complete tip, it may be crumbling and barely habitable, it may have dodgy lighting, leaky rooves and asbestos in the walls (and in a lot of rooms, no paint or plaster on the walls!), and it may be miles from my family and permanent address... but for now, Duryard is my home.

Back To The Old House

2006-06-03T10:37:00.000+01:00

I went to see Morrissey again last week - Thurs 25/5/2006 at the New Theatre in Oxford - and i'm afraid i've taken ages to write up a review. This time I was in the top balcony instead of the thick of the stalls. It was a bit odd, because some people up there were singing along, punching the air, moving in time with the music, whistling, that sort of thing, like I was, but a lot of people were just sitting there quietly, clapping politely, as if at a play, which (to me at least) seemed a bit odd at a concert.
The performances by Morrissey and the gang were excellent again, and new album Ringleader of the Tormentors sounds great live: although the album is really beautiful and graceful, it sometimes sounds a bit too restrained; but live, Moz changes lyrics (e.g. when he sang "who am I that I come to be here?" in "You Have Killed Me", he knelt on the floor and sang "who am I that I come to be kneeling down here?") and his band of rockabilly lads beef up the sound and rock out more. Also his voice is just as good live as in the studio - he doesn't use half as much studio trickery as some pop stars do, and a lot of his classics were done in one or two takes (I think he never does more than three takes).
At this particular gig, he seemed in quite a good mood despite nearing the end of a long national tour - no end-of-tour fatigue here! He got through four shirts (a red one, a greenish one, a black one and a yellow one), and there was an absolutely priceless moment when he threw the greeny one into the crowd in the stalls: normally he runs offstage to get another shirt, but this time he skipped merrily offstage, which was quite funny. Another amusing moment was when he was talking to someone in the stalls, he liked the bloke's shirt and was trying to asking him where he got it from, and was whistling to get the guy's attention. He talked to the audience and moved around quite a bit. Of course there was plenty of his famous mic-whip stuff, and also he dragged the mic stand around the floor in circles around him quite a bit (if you've seen the "Live In Dallas" DVD/video you'll know what I mean), not to mention shaking hands with quite a few audience members (no stage invasions, and not many (if any) crowdsurfers this time, but lots of people were trying to reach out and touch his hands). If you had to compare it to his live DVDs, i'd say that it was a bit like a combination of the advantages of "Live In Dallas" (high-energy show, shame about the poor sound quality) and "Who Put The M In Manchester?" (musically better and talked with individual audience members, but didn't move around so much at times). Guitarist Boz Boorer definiately seemed to have more energy and moved around the stage a lot more at this show than on "Who Put The M...?" and the other You Are The Quarry tour performances that i've seen.
I also liked the humourous way that Moz introduced the band to the audience: "They were once quite happy, reasonably balanced, and not bad looking. Then they met me." Also he introduced keyboardist/one-man horn section Mikey Pharrell as "the boy with the horn by his side," a reference to a Smiths song, which lots of fans liked.
The setlist had a lot of similarities to the one at the Manchester Apollo - starting with the glorious romantic singalong "First Of The Gang To Die" and the malaised manifesto of "Still Ill", lots of Ringleader stuff in the middle plus some Smiths songs and later solo stuff, and an encore of alternative national anthem "Irish Blood, English Heart." There were a few variations - this time we didn't get Magazine cover "A Song From Under The Floorboards", B-side "My Life Is A Succession Of People Saying Goodbye" or Maladjusted standout "Trouble Loves Me," although we did get Quarry's sweet "Let Me Kiss You" and one more Ringleader track, "I'll Never Be Anybody's Hero Now."
Again, people may complain about the setlist, but it was one hell of a good show. Although i didn't like sitting down at a gig at all, I did get an amazing view. I took some photos, and in the first few songs I took loads, but after a bit I worried that the staff would confiscate my stuff. I wasn't worried so much about losing my camera - it was quite cheap and i could easily sneak the film out and hand over the empty camera if i had to - it was my cameraphone I was scared of losing: i don't want to lose my phone, or stuff on it like people's phone numbers! I tried taking photos and filming with my cameraphone a couple of times, but they turned out rubbish, so i quickly gave up and mostly used my camera. It's an ordinary film camera (hence why it cost so little) and i haven't used the whole film yet - once I have, i'll get it developed and post the pics I took. One cameraphone photo turned out OK-ish, here it is, click to enlarge...

Anyway. I stayed at a youth hostel afterwards - it was good to have a rest, shame that it was next to a nightclub! i guess that will give me a taste of life next year, as i'll be living quite close to a club. I went home (home-home, not uni-home) by train, via Reading Station, which was a bit of a pain: firstly because it's huge, secondly because for such a large station it seems to have few timetables, and thirdly because it has a weird system of platforms. Most stations have separate platforms, but Reading has some platforms which are more than one platform - it's hard to explain in words so I drew a little diagram in Microsoft Paint, but that was on my home computer, not my uni computer, so i don't have it to post here.
Got back to my humdrum hometown, visited some teachers at my third school, then popped home with the intention of only staying for a day or two... and ended up staying a week. Much as i love my family, pets and house, i got really bored and depressed and lost all motivation to do anything, to be honest. The weather was a bit rubbish, which probably contributed to that feeling too. I stayed longer than planned because of various reasons - my own laziness, news of train delays and cancellations, being nagged by family to do stuff, etc. In the end i got sick of it and went home (uni-home this time) on 2/6/06 by train via London (thereby avoiding the problem of changing at Reading).
The weather is much hotter and sunnier in Exeter, there's people sunbathing everywhere. Although it sucks to cram for early exams like i did, at least you get more time off afterwards than everyone else. Now there's not a lot going on as nearly everyone here is revising all the time for their exams, or they've gone home because they've finished or to do revision in peace. I did go on one night out last Saturday with some other Duryarders, to the Cavern's monthly ska/punk/reggae night. I really enjoyed it, they played proper ska (e.g. Madness), proper punk (e.g. the Clash) and proper reggae (e.g. Bob Marley), as opposed to so-called ska-punk bands like Less Than Jake, which basically play ordinary pop-punk songs with a milisecond of brass and try to pass it off as "ska." It annoys me slightly that there are some really good ska-punk bands (especially around Brighton) that blend ska and punk seamlessly and smoothly, yet have only a cult following, while some rubbish American bands do the same thing only not so well and are massive!
Just before I go, i'll post this link here (an English-to-American dictionary), as i've noticed on my guestmap at the side that there's a lot of non-Brits visiting my blog, so it may help them understand it more.

Brief rant

2006-05-29T13:32:00.000+01:00

Exam week is now OVER! Well, Law Exam Week, that is. For some reason, us law students have our exams earlier than most other subjects.
Anyway, I'm now free for 3 weeks, and then i have 2 weeks of lectures (introductory lectures for next year). Law is a bit of a "work hard, play hard" subject. I had 4 exams, 3 were OK, 1 was not, but the one that went badly was for Introduction to Law and only made up 60% of that module - the other 40% of that module is coursework which i think i did better in. Overall, i think i've passed all my modules. In some subjects, you just have to get 40% overall to pass, so you can get 100% in 2 modules and 0% in the other 2 modules and you'll pass cos you got 50% overall. In Law, you have to get 40% in each module, which I think is harder than getting 40% overall. Plus, it's a subject with a high workload - although we only have about 10 hours of workshops and lectures per week, we have to do about 30-40 hours work per week, so we do a lot of studying in our own time, which people never see. So BOLLOCKS to the stereotype that "all students are lazy!"
Although adults may think that students have it easy and do nothing but party, they never see the downside of it, for example if your exams are earlier than everyone else's, you have to put up with exam-free people partying loudly all night while you're trying to revise or get a good night's sleep before an exam. I'm sick of adults saying stuff to me like, "Wait 'til you get in the real world, then you'll see how hard life is," just because they think i have it easy just cos i'm a student. I could just as easily argue that adults have it easy: they don't live in draughty old halls of residence, they don't have to put up with rowdy drunk neighbours, they don't have exams all the time, they don't have drunk people shouting in the corridor when they're trying to revise or sleep the night before an exam, they don't have to struggle to live on a student loan, and most of all they don't have to put up with people telling them that they "have it so easy" and "need to get in the real world"!
Plus, in the near future, the financial situation for students is going to get worse. Universities are replacing old standard halls with new en-suite ones due to popular demand. While on the face of it, it may look like we're going to be living in the lap of luxury from now on, it actually costs a lot more. In a lot of places, living in en-suite halls means that your entire loan goes to pay for your rent. On top of that, top-up fees are coming in. I've been trying to apply for financial support for next year, and it's really confusing because the system is completely different and i don't know what support (e.g. a grant or a loan) i'm entitled to receive. I'd get a job to earn some money, except that it is hard to find a temporary job as employers like people who can stay for a longer time, and also it's harder for young people with little job experience to find work. It's not that we're lazy and don't want to work: sometimes we just can't find work. I don't have much money in my savings and my parents can't spare any money, so what am i going to live on next year?

Rant over. Normal service shall resume again shortly.

Exams: The more you ignore them, the closer they get...

2006-05-21T10:19:00.000+01:00

...and I'm wasting my time.
Exam week starts tomorrow, and i've really struggled to revise. Despite cutting out distractions like alcohol, parties, clubs, the gym, gigs, etc. I still struggle to revise. There is SO much to learn in Law! Contract is OK cos i can take notes into the exam, but Criminal Law has zillions of cases and you're not allowed to take any notes on them into the exam (how the hell can you learn them all by heart? will the huge amount of stuff to learn shove all previously-learned stuff out of your brain?) and Constitutional & Administrative Law is really difficult too and you can't bring notes into that either (there's fewer cases, but they always seem to have ridiculously long names, like R v Social Services Secretary Ex parte Association of Metropolitan Authorities, whereas Criminal cases have nice short names like R v Smith).
Also, despite avoiding alcohol for the last couple of weeks, I seem to be becoming less healthy, not more. I started smoking again (and i really regret it now... going to quit AGAIN) and i have been drinking large amounts of caffeinated beverages too. I really hope that my body can recover in time for the exams...
In other news, yes, everyone is talking about last night's Eurovision Song Contest. Guess who won? You can watch the promo video for the winning song here, and their Eurovision performance here. Loveable nonsense. ROCK!!
Hey, it's good fun. I can support another country's Eurovision entry if i want to, can't I? (The UK's was a bit cheesy, unfortunately). On a serious note, I've heard people (normally in America or the far-right) going on about patriotism and how we should unconditionally love our countries, be proud and support absolutely everything they do... Well I think we shouldn't! If we really are democratic countries that fought for freedom, then we should be free to love - or criticise - our own countries if we want to. Everything from our Eurovision songs to our part in war should be open to free debate, instead of opinions being forced on us by the "you're unpatriotic if you disagree" argument. The way people say that it is "unpatriotic" to disagree with their beliefs about their country reminds me a bit of the blind faith people have in religion. Are they trying to make patriotism a new religion or summat?
Now with the World Cup approaching, cars everywhere have little England flags on them, such as the one in this picture (ironically that car is German!). How is that going to make us win? Sure, going to a match and showing your support for your favourite team may give them confidence and help them win, but driving around with flags on your car, somewhere miles away from wherever-it-is that they're going to be playing in where the team can't see them, just seems a little pointless, really. Although it has inspired this comedy gem... (click it to enlarge if the writing appears too small)

While still on the topic of the World Cup, i would like to say that I am not entirely impressed with this year's official song (it's by Embrace... can't remember the name of the song though... it just sounds like any other Embrace song) and would like to propose this (the football badger song) as a possible alternative. (The sight and sound of terraces and pubs full of people singing it would be interesting at least...)

"You're Beautiful"? You're perving on my grilfriend on the train!

2006-05-18T11:31:00.000+01:00

This is good for a laugh...
Australian comedian Tom Gleeson dissects James Blunt hit.

Morrissey live @ Manchester Apollo, Saturday 6th May 2006

2006-05-09T19:44:00.000+01:00

and I was there! Sorry i didn't post a review earlier.
After spending all day wandering around Manchester and Salford with friends (including the obligatory photo at Salford Lads Club and a couple of pre-gig drinks at The Star and Garter) we went to the Apollo at about 9pm. I was knackered and my body felt like jelly before the show had even begun. We were in the stalls, we started out somewhere in the middle but slowly migrated towards the stage. We caught the end of one of the support bands' sets (Sons and Daughters) and then some music played on the PA, including "You'll Never Walk Alone" which was met with a mix of cheering/singing-along and booing from the audience - mostly booing - I wondered why so many people booed it, until after the gig when I remembered that it is the song of Liverpool FC supporters. The cheering and (mostly) booing was reaching a crescendo when Morrissey emerged onto the stage, to be met by cheering, screaming and applause - no booing now, for sure! Me and the girl next to me screamed, "Oh my God, he's fucking gorgeous!" repeatedly when he came onstage. Years of a healthy vegetarian diet and avoidance of the usual rock 'n' roll lifestyle excesses (snorting cocaine off a groupie's nipples or whatever it is that rock stars do) have paid off. At 46 - almost 47 - he's looking better than some stars his age, and naturally too: no cosmetic surgery, dental surgery, botox, sunglasses, etc. here. Cool quiff, too.
First track "First Of The Gang To Die" was as much a lively, euphoric and romantic anthem as ever, and a great song to get things going with. It's one of the songs that made me a fan of him in the first place: I remember the first time i heard it, I thought it was a lovely, catchy song, and didn't really fit with all this "he's-so-depressing" rubbish that I'd heard people saying. Another thing I always liked about this song was the way that it was swooningly romantic, yet not soppy. Around every corner, there is a surprise. Let's face it, with most songs in the world of rock and pop, you can predict what's going to happen next - "love" rhyming with "above" (e.g. "I am in love, you're an angel sent from above"-type drippiness) and "together" rhyming with "forever" are typical staples. Plus, the majority of songs are always love songs. So the first time I heard "First Of The Gang...", when I heard a line starting "You have never been in love until you've seen the stars..." I thought that the line would end up something like "You have never been in love until you've seen the stars reflect in your lover's eyes." Instead, the line was: "You have never been in love until you've seen the stars reflect in the reservoirs." That was unusual and unexpected (how many songs out there feature reservoirs? not many!) and made me pay attention and think, Hmm, this bloke's interesting and different. Anyway, back to the gig, and here was a great rendition of a modern classic, with seemingly everyone in the audience singing along joyfully.
Next up was a song from his earliest days with The Smiths: "Still Ill." This has always been an aching, punchy-yet-beautiful song that carries a lot of emotion, and tonight's performance did not fail to delight. Some fans even felt that that performance was so powerful, it was more emotional than the rest of the set put together. Again, romantic and nostalgic without being soppy.
The first song from new album Ringleader of the Tormentors to be played that night was the first single, "You Have Killed Me," a steady, solid rock number, which sounds great with lots of people singing along to it. The next ROTT song to be played - and also its next single - was "The Youngest Was The Most Loved," the story of a boy who "grew up to be a killer" with catchy (if slightly disturbing) hooks (a children's choir sings "There is no such thing in life as normal!" during the chorus on the album) and a strong musical backdrop (I particularly like the wailing klaxon-like sounds at the start - is it a police car taking the killer away?). This new song managed to lift off the roof of the Apollo as much as the classics did.
"I Will See You In Far-Off Places," another new song, was again magnificent and got a good response out of the crowd. Live, the exotic, Arabian-sounding riff became hard rock and the drums pounded a powerful pulse through the air and floor. Although a serious song concerning mortality (is it that of a travelling friend/lover, or of middle-eastern strangers in a war zone, or even Osama Bin Laden?), it displays Morrissey's dark sense of humour in lines such as, "If your god bestows protection upon you, and if the USA doesn't bomb you, I believe I will see you somewhere safe, looking to a camera, messing around and pulling faces." The sight and sound of him when he stood on top of a monitor for the line "and if the USA doesn't bomb you" was great - determined and strong - and so was the response from the crowd.
"My Life Is A Succession Of People Saying Goodbye," a slow and beautiful B-side from the You Are The Quarry era, also showed his dark humour as he cheekily changed the words to "My life is a succession of people saying go away!" Then the familiar chug of The Smiths' classic "Girlfriend in a Coma" blared through the amps, and, funnily enough, a stoned girl in the audience fell unconscious and had to be carted away.
A hat-trick of ROTT tracks followed, all sounding magnificent: "On The Streets I Ran," sounding even better than on the record; "At Last I Am Born" was powerful, punchy, joyous and majestic; and the beautiful, rain-strewn, evolving epic "Life Is A Pigsty" (better than its title suggests).
1997 album Maladjusted may have had a few critical maulings and didn't do well commercially, but its beautifully-sung, unconventional and witty ballad "Trouble Loves Me" was greeted with a very warm welcome in the Apollo: those fans in the know sang every word from the bottom of their hearts. If you don't know this song, the title of both the song and the album it's from will give you a pretty good indication of its lyrical content, while its musical content is simple but timeless.
Another ballad followed: "To Me You Are A Work Of Art," Ringleader's harder-rocking equivalent of Quarry's "Let Me Kiss You." New song "Ganglord" was introduced: despite it being a beautiful song, there was a bit of a lull in the crowd, as it hasn't even been released yet (it will be a B-side on the next single) - few people knew the words, so the amount of singing-along dipped dramatically. Then he sang a cover of punk band Magazine's "A Song From Under The Floorboards" - Mozzified, of course: his bittersweet moods and reputation for feeling alienation fit in perfectly with this '70s angst anthem - very good but again not everyone knew the words. The last ROTT song of the night, "I Just Want To See The Boy Happy," was sweet and got a decent reception.
The set at this point had some obscure songs that few people knew, and not much in the way of big hits. While there was nothing wrong with the performances of Morrissey or his band of Tormentors, there were people in the audience growing restless and chattering. All that was about to change, however...
The blistering, funky intro to "How Soon Is Now?" started, everybody leaped up screaming and oh-my-god-ing, and the atmosphere instantly changed from lukewarm to absolutely sizzling. Moz and co were on top form, giving us one of the best live versions of The Smiths' classic. The original studio version used masses of layered guitars and was near impossible to recreate live - even genius guitarist Johnny Marr would struggle with it. The Tormentors' version wasn't the same, but it was bloody brilliant in its own way. It sparked electrical excitement all around, with everyone singing those award-winning (well, almost) lyrics of shyness, loneliness and impatience in unision with Morrissey's distinctive falsettos. It was absolutely brilliant, and I was so excited to hear one of my favourite songs of all time live. The show was reaching another peak. I sneaked between people until I got much closer to the stage. It's good to be short. There he was, just a couple of metres away! And everyone in front of me seemed to be taller than me and I could barely see! It's bad to be short. Something had to be done, something i had seen on TV, something I had been itching to do for ages. I tapped a tall guy next to me on the shoulder and asked him to help me crowdsurf. He put his hands out, low down, and i stepped on them and he lifted me up. I was above the crowd, floating on top of rows of people, hands powering me towards God. Somehow I was flipped over onto my back, and I caught a glimpse of the audience behind me and the ceiling above me, before being flipped onto my front again. I was right at the front of the crowd. There he was, in front of me, just to my left... and there, directly in front of me, was a security guard, gesturing to another. They pulled me off the audience, my wonderful, helpful sea of people, and pulled me over the barrier into the pit. They walked me away, past Morrissey (I tried to blow him a kiss as we went past) and back into the crowd via a door in the barrier. As I was frogmarched past him, he was near the edge of the stage and the rest of the band were further back, so from where I was it looked like he was the only one on the stage. He towered above me, high quiff and light blue shirt, singing those words that had once changed my life one wintery day, during sixth form in a humdrum seaside town. The crowdsurfing techniques I had learnt from telly and gigs and clubs had been finally put into practice. I hadn't managed to shake his hand or anything, but I had got close, and I've learnt for future tries.
Back in the mosh, and I was still near the front but unable to see a lot. The crowd at the front was much denser than further back where I had started off. The song ended and he briefly went offstage to prepare for the encore. During this short break, the crowd chanted two modified football chants: "Morrissey" to the tune of "'Ere We Go" and "Steven" to the tune of "England." He returned in a red shirt (the third of the evening - he started out in a dark blue one, then changed into a pale blue one which was fed to the hungry audience) and the tense guitar riff intro of "Irish Blood, English Heart" started up. Again, this classic anthem fired up the audience into frenzy, heightened by him taking off his shirt and throwing it into the audience. It landed near me, and I was dragged right into the heart of the struggle for it by the sheer force of people all around me darting towards it all at the same time. I decided to go for it as I was there already, and managed to grab a hold of it. So did loads of other people. Despite the sheer number of folk all tugging at his shirt, it didn't rip easily.
I was touching Morrissey's shirt! It had been on him! It was the modern musical equivalent of the Turin Shroud! It smellt so damn good! (Mmm, the advantages of fame and fortune, being able to afford quality clothes and aftershaves/colognes...) A bit of a tussle with a couple of other fans who managed to tear off a large portion and were trying to divide it up between themselves resulted in me managing to tear out some thread for myself. The venue's security guards were chasing people away and breaking up shirt-struggles (Afterwards I heard rumours of the guards trying to stop fans making off with shirt bits... Why? Unless the guards are fans, what would they want with them? Sell them on eBay to supplement their wages? I mean the fans are hardly stealing or anything, Moz gave that shirt to us, it was his and he chooses what to do with it, that's his decision not that of the guards! With my rudimentary knowledge of Property Law, I know that if you have property rights to something, you can do whatever you like with that property, you can destroy it if you want. Therefore Moz can throw it to us to tear it apart if he wants!) so I sneaked off and slowly made my way to the cloakroom to claim my stuff back. I looked around for the nice people I'd come with. My glasses had been really badly damaged: I noticed after my crowdsurf that they had been bent a little but still wearable, but it was the shirt incident, particularly the bit where I was dragged into the circle of people around the shirt like a black hole, that had totally twisted my glasses. They were wonky and at a weird angle, not fitting properly at all. It was difficult to see with them and I ended up taking them off a lot as they were nearly useless. I kept my little bit of Morrissey's shirt-thread clenched tight in my left hand, never letting it go, not even for a moment. I'd fought hard for it, and i wasn't about to let go of it! One day i can bore my grandchildren with tales of how I fought in two shirt wars to secure this piece of thread. I wandered around in a daze in the cloakroom queue, occasionally telling people in a starstruck voice, "I caught Morrissey's shirt, I did..."
I got my stuff and met Grim outside. He's a gig veteran and a bit of a legend in the Moz fan community. He called me a star and seemed proud of my crowdsurfing and shirt-stealing attempts, even though he was disappointed with the setlist. I didn't mind the setlist too much, it was the first time I'd seen Our Steven live and I was seriously impressed. We wandered among the T-shirt sellers and exiting fans, and had a peek round the back of the Apollo, meeting bassist Gary Day! :D I was dumbstruck but Grim said hello like they met all the time (they probably did as well). We bought some (probably fake) merch outside (I got a couple of T-shirts to add to my rapidly expanding collection), met loads of people (Grim seems to know everybody!) and got in a taxi. I was invited to a Smiths/Moz disco at The Firehouse but declined because of my glasses: If i didn't wear them, I got headaches from eye strain, but if I did wear them, I got headaches from eye strain too as I couldn't see properly through them.
Finally crashed into bed at a 24/7 youth hostel late that night. I had experienced so much in less than 24 hours! I'd been all around Manchester and to SLC (and scratched a little bit of paint from the famous front door as a souvenir... shhh... well, I've unfortunately lost that paint now, so I guess that means there's no evidence against me now...) and met a fan from LA who looked spookily like Morrissey (people were queueing up to have their photos taken with him, he was very obliging with them) and been to see the real Moz... Wow. The next day was like a bad hangover as I had headaches from tiredness and eye-strain, but at least the plane trip home wasn't too long (just under 1 hour) and then I went to CinSoc with some mates to see "Walk The Line," which was good. On Monday I got my glasses fixed (more or less bent back into their original shape, although they are weak from damage and could break, so i'm going to get some new ones... they're bloody expensive cos i need special lenses... :( not good as i'm severely skint now!) and now i'm struggling to revise for my exams, which start in 11 days. Aaarrrggghhh!!!

Lazy days

2006-05-03T19:07:00.000+01:00

Good weather has been coming and going lately, and on the few sunny days we've had, the entire area has been carpeted in sunbathers. Two evenings last week, me and some Duryard posse went for a stroll around the Duryard area and ended up playing ball games and frisbee in the grounds of the nearby Thomas Hall (Duryard's grounds were full of athletic people, it was crowded and we felt inferior), and had a surprisingly awesome time (well, apart from Dan probably, as he got hit in the crotch with the ball a couple of times... hey, at least i didn't throw it, so you can't blame me!). Then we crashed out in Dan's room, watching movies (Battle Royale, 28 Days Later* and Family Guy) and drinking port that Tom had got for Christmas... far less effort, but also enjoyable.
All of our bunch probably need to get in shape. I've been to the gym a few times this term, branching out onto different machines, and I think my limbs are doing OK but my tummy isn't doing so well (stuff like running/cycling machines don't really work on that area, unfortunately). For the last couple of months i've been doing loads of sit-ups, but sort of gave up as it sometimes hurt my back, so the other day I bought one of those ab-belts that gives your stomach muscles little electric shocks which are supposed to simulate the nerve impulses that you get during exercise - they say that this should give the same results as sit-ups (Yes, you can call me lazy if you want, although actually i'm just too busy). The only problem is, after buying it, i've realised that electrocuting yourself for half an hour every day all in the name of vanity probably ain't the brightest (or healthiest) idea ever. I can't wait til next year when I'm in self-catered halls (the pricey and posh Rowe House - in a 6-person flat with Harriet and 4 strangers) as I'll be able to cook for myself so hopefully i can choose a healthier diet. I'm thinking of going vegan, cos I once read that, provided you get it right and make sure it includes all the nutrients you need, it's the healthiest diet you can have. Plus, I would be able to wear my Meat Is Murder T-shirt completely without irony! The only problem is getting back next year - I have to pass all my exams otherwise I'm kicked out! For some subjects, you just need to get 40%+ overall, so it doesn't matter if you fail one exam as long as you did well enough in all the others. For other subjects, you need to get 40%+ in each exam - if you fail one, you're out. Guess which of those groups of subjects Law comes under. Just my luck.

*There were some hilarious moments during 28 Days Later (incidentially not a comedy but a horror movie... we make our own comedy): Me, Chris and Tom had been drinking and were only slightly drunk while Dan was at a party, getting really drunk (and possibly stoned too). The rest of us were in his room using his telly to watch the DVD we'd borrowed off someone else, and Chris had shut the door because of some people in the corridor getting into the roof via a ceiling trapdoor (this term there has been a bunch that go up there about once or twice a week, we have no idea what they're doing up there, so Chris shut the door just in case they came out stoned or something and staggered into Dan's room). Dan burst into the room, crashing through the door and onto the floor noisily, crawling around the floor, covered in scratches (from jumping into a hedge outside... don't ask why, it's just one of those things you do when drunk!), right behind Chris, scaring the living daylights out of him! I think that actually scared Chris far more than the film did. Then Dan sat on the floor with his coat on his head, devouring cereals straight out of the packet (no milk... he had the munchies and couldn't be bothered to find or buy any milk), and sometimes falling asleep. It sounds silly but he looked funny. In one bit when Dan was actually awake, Christopher Eccleston was in the film, so we both cheered, "Hooray! it's Doctor Who!", but then it turned out that he was playing a baddie instead.
The next day, I met Dan at lunch, tired and still with scratches on his face and arms but luckily (and probably miraculously) not hungover, we chatted for a bit and afterwards I almost smacked myself on the forehead (d'oh!) as I realised that he may have been hinting in that conversation that he more than just likes me a bit. I dunno, I'm shite at reading "signals" sometimes. I hope he does, cos I more than like him just a bit, I like him a heck of a lot actually. I know that people and problem pages and whatever always say that you have to be honest and let your feelings show and all that, but it's not that easy in real life, especially when (a) you're shy, (b) the guy you like is shy too, and (c) you're scared of losing him as a friend if you confess that you fancy him - what if it changes your current relationship with him?
On the plus side, we went to CinSoc again yesterday, and saw a film called The Matador. There were some good bits, but Pierce Brosnan's accent bugged us and we talked about it the whole way home - it sounded like he was trying to do some sort of British accent, but which? At times I thought he sounded Brummie, Cockney, an American approximation of a generally English accent (you know the type of English accent in American movies/TV that is normally used by a character called Nigel... I think it might be called the Limey accent), and Dan thought he even sounded South African at one point. I came to the conclusion that PB spent most of the film trying to sound like a taxi driver (I half expected him to call people "guv'nor" or something). We all concluded that he can't really do accents.

Back and forth

2006-04-24T22:11:00.000+01:00

Came back to uni on Sunday - we went to Exeter on Saturday and stayed at a hotel overnight (Dad's the only one who can drive and it's a long drive so he didn't want to drive there and back on the same day, it would be too tiring) but i didn't move back in my room as i didn't think they'd give me my keys until Sunday (official moving-back-in day). It turned out afterwards that i hadn't been the only one there on Saturday, Dan was there too and he managed to get his keys and stay in his room overnight (they charged him a tenner for it tho). He was the only one there, so if i'd know then i would have moved in too and kept him company. He seems to have forgiven me for the water incident last term (thank fuck!), although he did ask me at dinner on Sunday why i did it (I'm not sure why i did it either... damn you alcohol!!) and he said that he'd prepared to get angry at me and shout and swear, but then he didn't. That's what i like about Dan, he doesn't get aggressive. He watches a lot of violent movies, which kind of disproves all that "violent movies make you violent" stuff that you hear about (and which has not been consistently proven). Last night we watched Battle Royale, all huddled onto Dan's bed, drinking port out of Simpsons shotglasses (we didn't have any wine glasses). In this film there are massive social problems so schoolkids riot, so adults decide to solve it by sending random kids to a deserted island where they have to fight to the death, and they'll carry on doing this until kids stop rioting. Despite all the blood etc., it was a very good film, although there was one bit near the end that was really odd: a teacher is shot and is lying on the floor dying, then his mobile phone rings so he gets up to answer it, then he dies. What was weird about it was the way he suddenly got up off the floor like normal. Did he suddenly forget to act or something?
We also saw the much-hyped new episode of The Simpsons which was written by and featured the voice of Ricky Gervais. It was good but after all the build-up we really expected it to be even funnier. There was also a re-run of the episode where they visit England (our side of the pond), which i'd never actually watched before. We watched a bit in the Welly but i couldn't hear much of it as it was noisy in there that night. I don't have Sky One at home, so I have to wait another 3 years for that episode to reach Channel 4. I have the feeling that every English person in that episode speaks either in a posh and reserved manner or like a cheery Cockney shoeshine. I wonder what the Americans would make of the Geordie accent? I know a lot of southerners find it hard enough to understand. I can understand (and speak) it OK (usually), and i quite like it. Work experience must be like buses, i looked ages for one placement and ended up with 3 at once, one of which was in Newcastle, land of the Geordies! I loved it.
Talking of travelling back and forth, Mum got a DVD of the Blackadder special Millenium episode "Back and Forth" during the Easter break! woohoo! and while on the subject of TV shows about time travel, the new series of Doctor Who has started and it's as great as ever! I also got a DVD of the first series of Look Around You, which spoofed the old science videos for schools - ahh, brings back memories...
Will blog more some other time - i'm going to bed soon, i have to get up early tomorrow, I have to give a presentation about my work experience at 9am tomorrow morning, and it's assessed! eek!

Political correctness gone mad?

2006-04-08T10:46:00.000+01:00

This story has been in the news a lot, mostly portrayed as trivial playground teasing and that overused phrase "political correctness gone mad", and a lot have been saying the kids are now friends. Certain far-right news sources have failed to report the other side of the story - what the kid was calling the other, what the NUT and NASUWT actually said, and the fact that it was the kid who was doing the name-calling who said they're now friends. I would be interested to know if the victim says they're now friends too. I also want to ask: what was the school doing? were they letting the bully get away with it? I know from experience that a lot of teachers do not care about bullying, whether racially-aggravated or not, so it could be that the victim had little option but to report it to the police. Some people have compared this case to kids calling others "fat", and saying that not every fat kid prosecutes so why should this mixed-race kid prosecute, but if you think about it it's not exactly the same as a fat kid can go on a diet and lose weight, whereas a mixed-race kid is stuck with his/her colour for life.
Also, another thing about it is the comments people have made (for example on the BBC's "Have Your Say" pages) that it's "ridiculous" that a 10-year-old boy is being prosecuted for a crime. Bet they said exactly the same thing when James Bulger was murdered... not.
Anyway, I found this report, which shows the other side of the story, to give some balance.

Judge under pressure for 'playground racism' case
07 April 2006
A senior judge has found himself under fire this morning for terming the prosecution of a ten-year-old boy for allegedly making racist comments to another boy "political correctness gone mad".
Judge Jonathan Finestein adjourned the case against the schoolboy and urged the crown prosecution service (CPS) to find another way of punishing him, adding that in his day he would not be in court but would have been given a "good clouting" instead.
But the general secretary of teachers' union NASUWT, Chris Keates, has condemned his comments, claiming that expressing such a view could "feed" the harmful agenda of extreme-right candidates planning to stand in future local elections.
"Judges have a responsibility to consider the potential impact of their comments," she said.
"Relegating an incident of what appears to have been repeated abuse to the level of a playground spat is unacceptable.
"The timing of his remarks is particularly unfortunate. The local elections are imminent. Candidates from the extreme right are being fielded in many cities. Comments which dismiss racial abuse as 'political correctness gone mad' simply feed the pernicious agenda of extremists."

The boy, from Irlam in Greater Manchester, appeared at Salford youth court after being accused of racially abusing an 11-year-old fellow pupil, who is of mixed race, between July 1st 2005 and January 30th 2006.
He was alleged to have called his schoolmate "Paki" and "bin Laden" and chanted at him: "He is on the run, pull the trigger and shoot the nigger, five, four, three, two, one."
The boy, who was in court with his parents, denied the racist abuse charges, claiming he was now friends with the other boy.
© Adfero Ltd

Talking of "political correctness gone mad", remember the story that a nursery was teaching kids to sing "Baa baa rainbow sheep" in case "Baa Baa Black Sheep" was politically incorrect? Well, it was a load of rubbish. According to Private Eye, similar stories have been circulating since 1986. Eye, the BBC, and some other news sources also reported that in this case, children had been taught to sing "Baa baa rainbow sheep", but it wasn't for reasons of political correctness, but a new-fangled teaching method: they're taught the usual nursery rhymes, and then they're taught variations of them (changing the word "black" to different colours for example) to expand their vocabularies. Of course, the likes of ITV News and the Daily Mail won't report that fact, because it gets in the way of a good long political-correctness-has-gone-mad-what-is-this-country-coming-to-things-were-so-much-better-in-my-day rant.
ITV News's reporting of bird flu reaching Scotland has been rather predictably panicky and over-the-top. I'm not worried at all about bird flu, they made such a big fuss over foot-and-mouth disease which never killed anyone.

The New Monkey Express

2006-03-25T22:05:00.000Z

With seemingly everyone on earth passing comment on the Arctic Monkeys, i feel like i probably ought to join in (albeit probably a bit late).
OK, so they are a good band. They have some very good songs. But they're bloody overrated! Half their songs sound the same! Why was their debut album declared the 5th best British album ever, days after its release, by the NME? Why are some fans writing in saying no, it's the best British album ever? Someone wrote in saying it's better than The Stone Roses and The Queen Is Dead, for Morrissey's sake! Those are two of my favourite albums ever and i can listen to the Stone Roses and the Smiths over and over without getting bored of them, yet when i first listened to the Arctic Monkeys' Whatever People Say I Am, That I Am Not, i had to give up after a few songs because they were too samey, i couldn't tell when one track ended and the next began. It's a bit ridiculous to say it's better than The Queen Is Dead - even if you don't like the Smiths (for some strange reason), you have to admit that they are capable of doing songs that aren't all the same: in fact they're very diverse. Both the Roses and the Smiths were also very good musicians, whereas the Monkeys are pretty average musicians (although good songwriters).
There's some deserving new indie bands out there that haven't had half the hype of the Monkeys. I personally like The Upper Room, who have achieved some success with their nice new single "All Over This Town" which sounds like a smoother, more tuneful version of The Ordinary Boys. (May be something to do with the fact that both bands are from the Sussex coast). Check out the videos for "AOTT" and the striking, haunting, icy-cool, indie-disco "Combination" on their myspace.
Another indie band worth looking out for (and which i have mentioned before) is Art Brut (a.k.a. the band that did the "Formed A Band" song), basically the Arctic Monkeys with a few more good songs and a bit less hype. I saw them at Tin Pan Alley Festival and they put on one of the best performances, and i like their album Bang Bang Rock & Roll. They've been around for longer than the Arctic Monkeys and have a similar style - cheeky, shouty, anthemic, indie rock and roll - yet for some reason have never had the same hype. Could it be something to do with the fact that they've made some cheeky jibes at a certain music magazine? Could lyrics like "haven't read the NME in so long" be a possible reason for BBR&R only getting 7/10 while similar or inferior albums (such as Whatever People Say I Am..., or Hard-Fi's Stars of CCTV) got 8/10 or more? Naaahhhh...
Also We Are Scientists are good, again if you like the current crop of new indie/britpop, you might like these American Britpopalikes.
The Boyfriends are also worth checking out (and they have 2 free mp3s on their website!), they're very Morrissey-esque, and he himself is a fan of them.
Right, that's all i can think of at the moment. I'll be off to bed soon. Oh, and not music-related at all, but if you're a fan of the mailwatch blog/site (taking a swipe at the Daily Mail newspaper and other badly-written, constantly-whinging, tabloid rags) then you might be interested that they've got a forum to go with it too now. No BNP supporters please, we're British and we're nice.

It's been a long time...

2006-03-23T14:17:00.000Z

it's been a long time, it's been a long, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time, as the great Robert Plant once sang. I haven't posted any blogs for so long, although i've half-typed some, saved them as drafts, and forgot to finish them. I'm now procrastinating over a letter i have to type, asking for work experience. 20% of the mark for Introduction to Law comes from an option in either work experience or advocacy, and i chose work experience. Maybe i should have chosen advocacy instead, as getting work experience placements is harder than it seems - most solicitors' firms are too small to offer it. I've got to get 35 hours of some kind of work experience, link it to law somehow (if it's not law-based), and prepare a preparation about it by the 25th of April. That sounds like loads of time, but when you haven't even got a placement yet, it's not that easy. Term ended last week but my parents didn't actually realise that until i phoned them on Friday to ask if they were picking me up or if i had to make my own way home (quite a trek). Finally they picked me up on Saturday morning. On the way back we stopped at a Little Chef for brunch - good food, but the only newspapers on offer were The Daily Express and The Daily Star! argh!
I managed to stay reasonably healthy (save for a hangover or two) this term, but in the last few days of it i developed a cold. I almost always seem to get colds whenever i have work experience! Is someone up there trying to tell me something? Is my fate to be a slacker for all eternity? Or is it just mere coincidence?
I got home to soon find that one of my favourite forums has been hacked by Muslim hackers. Apparently thousands of Western websites (mostly Danish of course) have been hacked in protest at the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. Websites, webpages, forums and blogs about all kinds of things, mostly completely unconnected to this controversy, have been hacked. OK, I know that they're pissed off with Westerners disrespecting their religion, but there's no need for them to throw all the toys out of the pram like that! If you have to hack something, hack an anti-Islamic page, George W Bush's website, the BNP site, pro-war websites... then you would be making a statement! If you hack random websites that have nothing to do with Denmark or Islam or anything, it just looks like you're throwing a tantrum, and it doesn't get you anywhere.
On a brighter note, however, i had a great last week of term. I got all that term's essays done in time, leaving lots of free time for myself. I planned to spend a sunny afternoon sitting under a tree drinking Pimm's and Lemonade, but sadly the weather was too crap for that. Anyway, i had a good time regardless, with the obligatory party being Dan's birthday celebrations on the ides (15th) of March. Beware the ides of March, indeed: I got completely wasted! I vomited! I fell on the floor and injured myself! I talked absolute rubbish for hours! I was amazingly ill the next day! I regretted a lot of things, including an absinthe-induced hallucination that made me throw a glass of water at Dan! But overall, I had a great time.
We went to The Welly so Dan could drink the traditional birthday beverage. It was absolutely disgusting, a mix of loads of different types of drink, and it made him puke a couple of times, and he spilled some down his front at first, but eventually he somehow managed to drink the lot (even if he couldn't hold it all down). Drinking the Welly is difficult, so drinking most of it is still an impressive feat.
One of his presents was very cool/kitsch: a pair of racing grannies! They kept me, Dan, Harriet and Chris amused for far longer than they should have done (we must sound so immature). We also met someone we vaguely knew who was also celebrating her birthday in the traditional welly-drinking way. She'd been given a Rampant Rabbit by some friends. It was huge and intimidated quite a few people, and it vibrated so much that it moved across the table when switched on and placed on it. We tried racing it against the grannies. Actually, better stick to the grannies.
After everyone had finished their drinks, most people (inc. me) went on to a party in Hetherington common room. There was free alcohol on a coffee table there. Free alcohol + Already-drunk people ready to drink more due to loss of memory/inhibitions/common sense = Recipe for carnage. At first i sat down with a drink and a cigar and some nice polite conversation, but then i started talking bollocks, and on top of that I talked in a strong Geordie accent (some of my family are from Newcastle, up north, so that must be where it comes from) too. Then i felt dizzy and the room was spinning so i needed a long sit down. After a bit I went to the loo and watched a drunk guy ripping off one of the toilet doors (isn't it amazing how strong and determined people can be when drunk?). After a bit I was sick - I thought i'd learnt from experience, but maybe I hadn't after all (Now I have and I know what drinks and combinations of drinks to avoid). Then I danced - someone put some good Britpop records on. I can remember dancing in a circle with some mates and occasionally hugging them for no apparent reason (God bless drunks with their sense of humour and lowered inhibitions!). I can remember "singing" (hollering) along to Blur's "Parklife" really badly (luckily it's one of those songs that isn't really sung, more spoken, so hopefully nobody noticed my bad singing).
Around 2am Dan decided he was going to bed (I called him names like "wuss" for this - drink makes me either sleepy or hyper, and that time it made me hyper, so for me, 2am seemed too early to sleep) and for some reason I decided that he needed my help to do stuff like sober up (I think it was the absinthe putting funny ideas in my head) and I think someone told me to give him a glass of water (this may have been a hallucination), so I ran up the stairs after him and threw the water over him, followed by the plastic cup it had been in (thank fuck for plastic cups, if it had been a glass it could've got dangerous!). We both had to be restrained from hitting each other, and for the next couple of days I fretted that he might have been annoyed with me (I know it was only a glass of water, it was nothing compared to half the contents of the Welly already spilled down his front, and anyway he isn't the sort of person to ever get angry or aggressive - he's one of the most submissive, polite people ever - but he looked abit angry at the time).
I stayed on at the party after that, until about 4am. I can remember everyone dancing the macarena soon after that incident, although not to the macarena song, but to a different song. I was also banned from drinking any more alcohol for a bit. I got slightly suicidal because someone put on some annoying dance music (not good dance music, like the Chemical Brothers or The Music, but irritating dance music, like my neighbour Tina plays on full volume first thing in the morning) - maybe it's classical conditioning and I wouldn't find it so irritating if it wasn't so overplayed or played so loudly. Or maybe it really is shit. Anyway, I found some good indie CDs, but as there had been so many CDs played that night, they were all mixed up (not in their right cases etc.) and I couldn't find the ones I wanted. I think I ended up begging for Radiohead at some point. Near the end of the party, someone put on the first Muse album, Showbiz. Muse are excellent, and highly influenced by Radiohead, especially on their early stuff. Despite being absolutely smashed still, I still made a good music critic, able to correctly identify the band and album, recognise "Muscle Museum" (despite not listening to it in ages) and note that although it is a very good album, it's not as original as their later stuff. After helping the clean-up operation, I went to the Esso station to buy food (talked shite to the staff there too) before going to bed.
The next day I felt ill and strange. My corridor had planned a big day of partying and drinking, partly because of the end of term (drink-The-Welly-dry night!) and partly because of Naomi's birthday. After lunch, most of the corridor went to The Imperial, a Wetherspoons pub near the university, but it was only near the end that I felt able to face alcohol again. That evening we went to Warehouse nightclub - we got there at 9pm to avoid queueing, and it was just us there, so we played on the trivia games machine for ages. It slowly started filling up with people after a bit. What surprised us was the number of people who had gone to Arena that night - we went past it on our way to Warehouse and the queue was enormous, like nothing on earth. Nobody understands why Arena is so popular - it smells of vomit and plays exactly the same cheesy music as everywhere else, so what's so special about it? The only plus point I can think of is the cheap drinks and wide range of cocktails. Anyway, it was nice to socialise in Warehouse for a bit and I met some mates I hadn't seen for a while (including James E from school - I hadn't seen him in ages and was beginning to wonder if he was still alive! he was alive and in good spirits, thankfully), but after a couple of hours I felt my body really needed a rest (i hadn't even been dancing or anything - just tiredness and too much alcohol in the last 48 hours) so I went home.
I spent the last night of term quietly indoors, no partying, just winding down, hanging round chatting with Debbie and swapping mp3s with her. I got an mp3 player for when i go on holiday, it was £29.99, 256mb i think. The packaging said you can fit 80 mp3s or 160 wmas on it - I managed to squeeze 175 wmas onto it. It's tiny, much easier to carry than a ton of CDs. I won't be giving up CDs totally, though; I love the way that digital music can introduce you to new music and it's handy when you can't find or afford records, but it's cool to have a physical record in your hands. I downloaded Morrissey's new album Ringleader of the Tormentors (illegally!) but i'm still going to buy it when it's released - there's that magic feeling when you've waited for a record to be released and you trot down to the record shop with your pocket money and buy it and scamper home just waiting to hear it, and then you put it on and flip through the artwork and read the lyrics... you know. It's a nice, innocent thing. It's probably not very trendy to admit to being a music nerd like that, though, but who cares?
Anyway, talking of music, here's one of those natty, "recently played tracks" things from Audioscrobbler:

and tomorrow I may finish one of my draft posts, a rant about the Arctic Monkeys' hype and some praise for some other "hot new bands to look out for." Oh, and i'll upload some pictures to this post. Cheerio!

The Cavern, at last!

2006-02-26T11:32:00.000Z

Hooray! me and Dan and various other Duryard friends went to the Cavern's indie club night last night! We almost didn't go as i had a cold and painful feet (loads of blisters) and Dan was a bit tired, and we didn't have a lot of money so we had to get there before 9pm to get in free, but we met in the Welly, struggled up the road and made it in the end. Had a couple of mailbu + cranberry in the Welly before we left - since Colin the legendary bar manager introduced me to it (last term i think), it has become one of my "trademark" drinks. Felt ill on the way to the Cavern (alcohol + common cold + cold weather, i think) but was still determined to get there! (I felt much better when i got there, and totally OK now - my cold has gone overnight!)
Got there in time, and in the queue Ash and Vicky from my corridor were there behind us. They stuck together the whole night, they're practically a couple i reckon. Ash used to be one of my best mates but i haven't got on that well with him lately. He's very nice when he's with certain people like Lola, but Pete has a really bad influence on him - when i went to see the Rakes they said they were going to walk there with me, then they led me on a wild goose chase (took ages to find the door and get out of our hall!) before running away laughing like idiots.
Anyway, so i spent time with lots of people, at first we just hung around drinking and chatting but then the Smiths' classic "Bigmouth Strikes Again" came on so me and some of the people i came with just HAD to get on the dancefloor for it! Quite a few of our bunch are metalheads-turned-Smiths-fans (I'm listening to Iron Maiden as I type this), so our way of dancing is like a cross between usual metal dancing (headbanging, throwing horns etc.) and stereotypical indie dancing (flailing arms, shoestaring etc.), if you can imagine that. They also played White Rose Movement's excellent "Alsatian" too. Oh, and we met a guy dressed as Morrissey! :oD
After a bit, punky rock'n'roll band Louie came on and played for an hour. They really rocked - sweat, screams, leaping about, everything - great stuff! It was a bit of a mosh pit in there, and me and my mates were right at the front. Louie have 2 frontmen it seems, and both, especially one of them, were getting very close to the audience and doing high-fives with people. Afterwards it seemed everyone were chanting for more and doing high-fives with everyone. Then it was back to indie disco and a bunch of us made a circle in a corner of the dancefloor near the stage, where we danced, leaped about, pogoed and headbanged to stuff like Muse's "Plug In Baby," The Departure's "All Mapped Out," The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army," Pulp's "Common People," Razorlight's "Rip It Up" and Blur's "There Is No Other Way" :o)
After a bit our circle disintegrated, as these things always do in clubs, so me and Dan danced together for the next couple of hours. I grabbed his hands and waved them about trying to make him dance, and we ended up holding hands and dancing like that for over an hour non-stop, absolutely exhausting, but it was like one great party track after another so we wouldn't stop pogoing until we were absolutely knackered*!
Songs we danced to together included...
Ordinary Boys - "Talk Talk Talk" and "Boys Will Be Boys"
Arcade Fire - "Neighbourhood #7 (Power Out)"
The Jam - "A Town Called Malice"
The Caesars - "Jerk It Out"
The Strokes - "Last Nite"
The Undertones - "Teenage Kicks" (incidentially i heard a cover version on a shop's radio about a week ago, it wasn't as good as the original tho)
The Cure - "Lovecats"
Maximo Park - "Apply Some Pressure"
Kaiser Chiefs - "Everyday I Love You Less And Less" and "I Predict A Riot"
Bloc Party - "Helicopter"
The Clash - "London Calling"
Editors - "Munich"
Fall Out Boy - "Sugar, We're Going Down"
Buzzcocks - "Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)?"
Blur - "Song 2" (during which someone spilt his beer all over us)
The Futureheads - "Hounds Of Love" (until Dan's mate known as Ibby crashed into us complaining that he couldn't remember his own name)
The Killers - "Mr Brightside" (very difficult as people went crazy when this song came on and we got knocked over a lot)
...plus loads of others i can't name or remember. We also tried to take photos of ourselves, but they didnt work as it was too dark :o(
At half past midnight Ibby was really paraletic* and me and Dan and some others helped get him home. As we were waiting outside for some more help, trying to prop Ibby up against a wall so he didn't keel over (he's a tad heavy), they started playing The Smiths' "This Charming Man" inside, and me and Ibby (and probably Dan too) were so gutted we weren't in there dancing to it! :(
After heaving him home (it was difficult and Dan's back really hurts now cos of it, cos he took him all the way home while me and the others only took him some of the way) we hung around in Ibby's room for a bit to make sure he's ok. He had what he calls "a tree" in his room - it's a huge branch he found in the road once, it's practically a tree. (He also nicked a bamboo stick from a garden on the way home, hit everyone and everything with it and tried to take it home, except it broke after he whacked it against a bus shelter, so he gave up). Went to bed in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Although we were all disappointed that we had to leave early (Ibby really needs to learn how to take his drink - pace yourself, don't mix, etc - he's never been that drunk before in his life), overall it was an excellent night, one of the best ever.

* P.S. I am aware that my blog may be read by people from anywhere in the world, so I will clarify some English words (mostly slang) for any non-Brits reading this:
Knackered = tired, exhausted, damaged, etc. In this context it means tired/exhausted.
Paraletic/Paralytic = very drunk, to the point of falling unconscious.

Hail the Rickman! (and praise the Lord!)

2006-02-18T22:48:00.000Z

I have fallen in with an Alan Rickman worship cult. As you know, I've been hanging with a certain bunch of mates a lot lately. Last night we watched Die Hard - i'm not much into this kinda thing, but we just took the mick out of it (and movies in general) half the time, predicting what will happen next etc., and cheering loudly whenever the legendary Mr Rickman was on screen (or talking with that distinctive voice). Emily and Harriet have a slight obsession with him. We watched the bit when he is dropped from the skyscraper over and over again - it probably sounds a bit silly, but it was so funny to watch him fall, then rewind and watch him go up again, then play normal again, then rewind again... etc... slow-motion "nooooooo"s (and cheers) all round.

Mum came over yesterday evening too, and she's staying here for the weekend. We went shopping today, huzzah! The only problem is, she said she might come along to Truro too when i go to see Morrissey there. I know she'll be fretting over me going to a gig on my own (I wouldn't be surprised if others from uni go too, but at the mo i don't know anyone who is), i've been to gigs on my own before but you know what mums are like.

Before going to see her again this evening i hung around with the Hetherington posse again (i felt a bit guilty in case my corridor might think i'm neglecting them, but i hope they don't mind, and anyway i'll make it up to them), we talked about the usual stuff like halls' rubbish food, the way Hetherington seems to crumbling right before our eyes, retro kids' TV and movies of course. Dan and I agreed that hamster sidekick Penfold from Dangermouse and former Tory leader Michael Howard look alike (I think they were featured in the "Lookalikes" section of Private Eye too). We also discussed other (more obscure) topics including Dan's "unmentionables" (underwear), what we'll do with Chris's body when he dies (possibly from sniffing Dan's socks), karma and reincarnation, Jews (i.e. Dan), Italians (i.e. me and Chris), eccentric Scottish people (i.e. Harriet), eccentric (yet tempting) Scottish customs (tossing the caber and eating haggis), tapeworms (we suspect you can get them from hall food) and ways to kill them (e.g. hot curries), and the other effects of said hot curries. We talked about a lot of other random things too, some of which are not suitable for a family blog.

We have a heck of a lot of in-jokes now. This is one of the things i like about going to uni, especially living in a hall, it's a community really and you end up with these long-running in-jokes. If you're a Law student, you also end up with this in-joke about the legendary Lord Denning, which students of other subjects just don't get. I like using his quotes during law workshops. Praise the Lord (ha ha).
If you do Science, you might like the NearingZero and ToothpasteForDinner comics, which often have science humour.

Tomorrow i'll see Mum again before she goes, but hopefully i'll also get some time to do some work - i have to finish my criminal law essay (it's one of those "problem questions" - you know, like a story, and you have to consider the criminal liability of all the characters) and start my contract law essay (about what area of contract law i'd like to reform and why). Tricky stuff. I also feel a bit of a sore throat coming on - i hope i haven't caught "the lurgy", what we call the latest bug going round uni (it's like a flu that makes you really tired and gives you a sore throat).

It's weird, Dan isn't conventionally handsome (he was once called "cosmetically challenged" by a PC person), but i feel rather attracted to him (no, it's not a side-effect of the lurgy i seem to have caught from him, or a side-effect of hall food either). Nobody knows yet (tho they might suspect... that's what people always do). People would probably find it a bit strange. It's just i hardly ever fancy people for looks alone, i tend to go for the whole person, if you know what i mean - looks and brains and personality and sense of humour and everything. Not like when you're 12 or whatever. Is it a sign that i'm maturing? I like being an adult in some ways (independence, being able to drink, etc.), but i'm also nervous of it and like being young (so i have an excuse for immature humour, having fun, drinking, not having tons of responsibility, etc.). I think i'll stop worrying about my age for a while and just enjoy it for the moment (it certainly won't last forever) and go to bed now (it's nearly tomorrow).

P.S. My neighbour Pete fancies me, and he isn't attractive (physically or in any other way) in the slightest, no matter how mature and open-minded i may be. He treats me like shite, like when I went to see The Rakes he was going too and pretended he was going to walk there with me (it was dark out there so it's reassuring to not walk there alone), and then he suddenly ran off, laughing and thinking it was really funny to leave me alone in the dark in the middle of nowhere. I got there in the end, luckily, and had a great time regardless, but he was acting weird and avoiding me the whole time. He lives next door to me but we can go for ages without even saying a word to each other cos he goes through these weird phases when he avoids me or won't talk to me. Also, he's arrogant and keeps on telling everyone that he's superior because he's doing Computer Studies, which is getting really annoying. And then he wonders why i don't fancy him back. Well, duh. Give me Dan over uber-arrogant Pete any day!

The high cost of low living

2006-02-14T12:54:00.000Z

For the first time in my life, i have an overdraft. My money is in negative numbers now. That's a strange thought. I'm minus £190. I'm in debt! Luckily, i get up to £1000 free overdraft with my student bank account, so i'm safe for a while. I can hardly wait for the next instalment of my student loan :)
I haven't actually been spending the money on huge amounts of alcohol, contrary to the stereotype. Most of it has gone on clothes and records. Sadly i've had to sell some of my CDs on ebay to regain some money.
I've sort of sorted out my accommodation for next year. Me and Harriet applied for self-catered accommodation on campus, but if we don't like it or don't get it we'll apply for private accommodation like most second-years do. I've been hanging with her and that lot a lot lately. We have shared loves, like Monty Python, The Simpsons, The Smiths, The Beatles, HIM (well, me and Emily like them), Dave Gorman, Wayne's World, The Goodies, and gently taking the mick out of Neighbours, and we're all from Duryard: me and Deborah are from Jessie Montgomery House, Emily is from Duryard Mews which is next to Jessie, Dan and Chris are from Hetherington which is opposite, and Harriet is from Murray which is next to Hetherington.
For standard halls, and especially for Duryard, the Mews are luxury. Like Jessie, they have the added luxury of plastered walls. They don't actually look like prison cells! Unlike Jessie, the rooms are really big, well-lit and warm (the radiators work properly and aren't miles from the beds!), and have nice furniture and lots of electrical sockets. Hetherington, universally described as "a shithole", is pretty bad, but not too bad (i.e. it looks like a prison, but it's just about habitable), although i can see why they want to knock it down. Will Young used to live there and he once said something like, "They should knock it down, it was horrendous, a breezeblock building." (Us lot in JM can beat Hetherington for celebrity inmates, i mean alumni, as J.K. Rowling used to live here.) Murray is about the same as Hetherington, slightly better, and JM is between them and the Mews. It's a tad unfair that we all pay the same amount as we aren't all getting the same quality. It's also a waste that they're knocking down the Mews during the summer, as they're in really good condition. Nowadays, people want en-suite accommodation, so they're knocking down lots of old halls and replacing them with en-suite halls. En-suite is nice but you can live without it. I'm guessing that some people have en-suite rooms at home so they're used to it and want it at university too.
Anyway, so with this bunch of friends i have been shopping, checking out next year's accommodation, eating, drinking, going to the movies (Serenity last Sunday, and The Constant Gardener the Sunday before that - the campus cinema is only £3, or £1.50 if you join CinSoc, good price i think) and watching way too much telly (the aforementioned shows and films) for the last few weeks. I haven't abandoned my corridor or any of my other friends, i just think i needed a break from socialising by getting completely lashed (if you're wondering, i mean "getting lashed" as in "getting really drunk", not some sort of S&M activity!) with them, so lately i've been socialising in other ways with people who don't like getting drunk so often. I like drinking, and i like getting drunk, but not to the extent that some people in my corridor do. Also I have three 9 o'clock lectures a week, and every day of the week i have morning lectures, plus i will be doing work experience soon, so i want to avoid getting hangovers every day. I think it's working, as i've recently re-mastered the art of getting up in time for lectures. Hooray! I think i'm also getting better at typing. (Typing when drunk is disastrous.)
Last night our corridor celebrated Ralph's birthday, we made him drink the Welly and he downed it in seconds, it was amazing. He's got a talent for downing drinks, i reckon he can relax his throat muscles like sword-swallowers do. After that most of our corridor lot went to Arena nightclub, but i didn't go as (a) i had a 10am lecture the next day, (b) i was feeling sleepy, and (c) Arena smells of puke so i don't like it very much (i would ignore the puke smell and go more often if the place had more redeeming features, e.g. played more good music/ less bad music, was nearer, etc. like the Cavern).
To be fair to my corridor, they're not all drunks, they can socialise sans alcool too: last Thursday we went to a Chinese restaurant and got all-you-can-eat 3-course meals for £10.50 each, which was excellent value for money and very tasty (better than halls' food!). I would love it if we could socialise like that more often (we are planning going there again, but i don't know when). They're very nice people and i'm friends with them, it's just a lot of them don't have 9am lectures so they get drunk a lot.
It's Valentine's Day today, and i would like to wish you, dear reader, a good day. I used to really hate V-day at high school, there was so much pressure to have a boyfriend, and pressure to "go out" with one from the "in" crowd, and around V-day that pressure would just intensify. A lot of the "harmless" "teasing" over "puppy love" that grown-ups saw was borderline bullying, and it wasn't exactly very nice. If you like someone, go out with them, show them your feelings, whenever you want: you shouldn't be pressured by peers and there's no reason to wait for a specific day in February anyway. V-day wasn't a problem at my first 2 schools, when i was a kid, and it wasn't much of a problem in sixth form, but in high school it was hell, i used to ask my mum to let me bunk off that day (she wouldn't let me). Last year's V-day didn't actually suck, for once, and in the afternoon i was thinking it might be the first V-day in years that didn't totally suck. Then my grandmother, who was one of my best friends, passed away. Today has been a good day, there's been no pressure like at school, most people see V-day as a bit silly, the weather isn't too bad (apart from a shower earlier, it's a beautiful day), people are being nice to each other, but the fact it's the first anniversary of her death is upsetting. My dad isn't well and i wonder if it's because he's depressed over it (she was his mum). I don't know what to do though, should i phone my family in case they want to talk, or should i leave them alone in case they don't want a reminder?
There is a huge hole in the lives of all my family. I don't know how to help the others. I don't want to end this post on such a negative note, so i'll try and find something positive to say. I am having a great time at uni, it really can be "the time of your life", and i'm sure she wanted that. I'll go now, i have work to do. I've got just under 2 hours before my next lecture, which i could use for good, i want to avoid wasting valuable work-time on the 'net (that's why i don't use msn much any more, it's soooo distracting, plus my neighbour Pete, who is the only person in my corridor who i don't get on well with, keeps messaging me with it... well, he used to, until i blocked him because he was getting annoying). I've got a lecture 4pm-5pm today (groan... but at least it's not as bad as criminal law workshops, which are 5pm-6pm on Fridays!) so i hope i get home in time for dinner and telly.

Rock and roll, "borrowed" traffic cones and broken glasses...

2006-01-28T21:22:00.000Z

Last night I went to see The Rakes at the Lemmy with support from Switches, Duels, and White Rose Movement. It was a very good gig, especially WRM, they rock, i'm looking forward to their album (it's out in March). I met their bassist in the bar afterwards, he was cool, talking with fans and everything. The crowd went absolutely mental when the Rakes came on, it was a real mosh pit in there, god knows how many times my feet must have been trodden on in the chaos (my trainers are a lot muddier now than they were before the show).
On the way to the gig, I met 5 of the boys from my corridor coming back towards our hall, carrying traffic cones, roadsigns, etc. On the way back, I was a bit drunk and i spotted two traffic cones stacked on top of each other, by the side of the road, not doing anything (not doing their job warning us to not go somewhere etc.) so i took one (i wouldn't have borrowed it if i thought it was there for an important reason) . I left it in the corridor outside my room, and i took a couple of souvenir photos (more over here), but - surprise surprise - some other student has nicked it now. Still, it was good while it lasted, it brightened up the corridor a bit with its luminosity. Oh, and the thing on top of the cone is a rolled-up flyer (we get loads of them pushed under our doors) stuck in the top.
My glasses have been annoying me lately, they were a bit wonky and one arm was damaged, plus they were a bit old anyway, so i was thinking of getting some new ones anyway. Mum went to our local optician at home and ordered a new pair for me, they'll be ready in about a week. Today, after dinner, the frame around one of the lenses broke and the lens fell out. Just my luck: my glasses don't break during the day when the shops are open and i can get a new pair, they don't wait til Monday to break, they don't break once i've got my new glasses - no, they decide to break on a Saturday evening when all the opticians have closed. I didn't bring any spare glasses, i don't think i have any, just my prescription sunglasses (which i'm wearing now. I like them but i'm not going to go out in public in them much, people might think it's a bit strange to wear sunglasses in January). As soon as the opticians open on Monday, i'm going to go and get an emergency pair of glasses made - just stick the old lenses in a new frame and hope for the best - i'll have to pay for the frames but i don't want to get stared at for a week! Actually i might just get new glasses altogether, i might need new lenses anyway, i haven't had an eye test for quite a while.

Gimme! gimme! gimme!

2006-01-27T10:44:00.000Z

...a man after midnight, as ABBA once sang. I don't even like them, but i'll admit to liking that song. There's been a revival in it lately because Madonna sampled it in one of her songs.
If you can't have romantic lovelies like Ville and Moz in your life, i suppose there's always these substitutes (see pix)... click here for more.
Today (so far) has been a case of "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! A ticket after they've sold out."
eBay has today proved its worth as i managed to get a ticket to see Morrissey at the Manchester Apollo (cost a lot of money tho) - i'd been trying ticketmaster since 9am but they seemed to have sold out already. I think the reason i didn't get a ticket was that there were too many people on ticketmaster at the same time, so even though i was online the moment the tickets went on sale, my request didn't get through on time because the sheer number of people was slowing the site down. Most tickets for the tour went on sale at the same time, plus loads of others (Chicago, The Rolling Stones, Bon Jovi, Billy Elliot - The Musical, the Monsters of Rock festival... all big names, so thousands, if not millions, of people would be going on ticket sites at the same time). Seetickets was just inaccessible because its server was too busy. I did manage to get a ticket for the Truro show on ticketmaster though (it sold out minutes later).
I've also been selling stuff on eBay to try and balance my huge music expenditures - i spent £111 in a CD sale a week or two ago! but music is an essential thing. With a lot of the CDs i got, i'm copying them onto blank CDs, then selling the original CDs. (Although if i really really like a record, or there's some other reason for keeping it, then i don't do that.)
Talking of sold-out gigs, I got the last ticket for tonight's concert on campus - the Rakes with support from White Rose Movement and Duels. I'm not much a fan of the Rakes but I love WRM and i've heard Duels are good too. I guess loads of people are going to go to celebrate the end of their January exams - I had mine yesterday, it went a bit wrong, but at least it was only a mock!

storms in tabloid teacups

2006-01-25T11:40:00.000Z

There's something i've been wondering about lately: should the mainstream, tabloid media report on complicated scientific and legal issues?
A while ago there were proposals to change Britain's murder laws, so that there was one offence of homicide with different "degrees" of seriousness depending on severity and other factors such as provokation, instead of the current system with two main categories of homicide (murder and manslaughter). there have been cases of killing which were borderline between murder and manslaughter, so there could be a new category (2nd degree homicide) inbetween the two categories. I don't see what would be wrong with this.
When you learn Law you'll find cases where you agree with the judgement and cases where you don't agree, and in Criminal law there have been cases of murder which a lot of people felt should have been manslaughter, and cases of manslaughter which a lot felt should have been murder. Outside the classroom there are cases like this every day - e.g. the "happy-slapper" girl and her gang who beat up 3 men, 1 of whom died (see the headlines "STAMPED TO DEATH FOR FUN" and "THE SAVAGES"... also note irony on the front page of the Mail, having "GOOD HEALTH" and crime show DVDs on the same page as this!). The gang were convicted of manslaughter, but not murder. I think that this case was more serious than manslaughter, but the judge or jury must have had some reason for not convicting them of the more serious offence of murder (shame the media hasn't really said what these reasons were, although they have talked about the girl's rubbish childhood (her heroin addict mother walked out on her and left her to roam the streets at the age of 3, then she was put in care homes, and they're hardly a nice environmnt to grow up in) so i'm guessing that that may have been a factor). if there was a higher offence than manslaughter, they could have been convicted of that instead.
another proposed change was that the mandatory "life" sentence would be abolished. that does not mean that the life sentence will be abolished, it just means that it won't be mandatory any more. With a lot of crimes, judges take a lot of factors into account before deciding on your sentence. Supposing a woman is being beaten by her abusive husband every day and feels she cannot escape, then one day she fights back and kills him. the fact that he was abusing her could be taken into account when the judge decides her sentence, and she may get a shorter jail term than the standard "life". That's ok with me, as that kind of killing is less serious and has more reason behind it than a thug senselessly killing a stranger for fun (no real reason whatsoever). if either murder deserves a life sentence, it should be the latter, not the former.
When the news was reported on the proposed changes to our homicide laws, ITV news and gutter press like the Daily Mail were screaming and whipping up mass hysteria (as they do over EVERYTHING that happens), making people (including my poor mum) who didn't know the full facts run around like headless chickens panicking that murder was going to be legalised (see the headline "GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER").
WTF? did they seriously think that 21st-century Britain was REALLY going to legalise murder? anyway, these were only PROPOSALS, they're not actually coming into effect yet.
I think that these kinds of news sources should not report on legal issues that their audience are unable to understand. the same could go for scientific issues too. ITV News and tabloid newspapers are always trying to scare and panic people with shocking, attention-grabbing headlines, even when the actual truth behind the headline is more mundane. The kind of people who watch/read these are the kind of people who would be misled by the shock headlines and wouldn't actually understand the issues in the news story. These stories could be reported in broadsheet newspapers, legal/scientific journals, and on the BBC and Channel 4 (because their news shows are less tabloid-y), so they'd only reach an audience that understand them. That, or the dumbed-down tabloid news sources start reporting in an honest, unbiased and non-scaremongering way, but of course that will never happen.
Thanks to the daily mail letters blog, the BBC's have your say website, and discarded newspapers i found and read on long train journeys, i've noticed that there is an audience out there that only reads shock headlines and panics. They also seem to be the sort of people who are quick to spout buzzwords and cliches like: "nanny state," "playing with nature/playing God," "bring back the birch/cane/National Service," and that old favourite "It's political correctness gone mad!" A lot of the time the news story in question has nothing to do with these things. For example there was a mother who went to court demanding that she has the right to know if her daughter has an abortion, the judge said that she doesnt have an automatic right to know because her daughter, like everyone else, has a right to privacy. No laws were changed; the judge merely reiterated what the law has always said in this country. A few people commenting on this story in have your say complained that this judgement was the "nanny state" interfering - for god's sake, they don't know what they're talking about, this is the opposite of the nanny state! If it WAS a nanny state, then the law would force her daughter to tell her. I can't see what this case has to do with a "nanny state."
Another time people complained needlessly of a "nanny state" was when the government decided to have rules on nurseries by extending the National Curriculum to include them, e.g. they must provide an environment where kids can learn through play, and staff should talk to the kids to encourage them to learn to talk. Nothing wrong with that i say. But the Mail, for some reason, thought that this was an evil plot and ran the screaming headline "TODDLERS TAUGHT TO SPEAK BY STATE DIKTAT." (I cannot see how learning through play and teaching kids to speak has anything to do with a dictatorship!)
I hate New Labour too (although for different reasons), but i think everyone should have a level playing field, and it's unfair how they can never win with the Mail et al. The recent headline about vaccinations is a perfect example: if they introduce new vaccinations that could save kids' lives, the Mail complains about it (and probably uses it as yet another opportunity to whinge about the "nanny state"); if they don't introduce these vaccinations, the Mail will probably run shock headlines like "BLAIR LETS BABIES DIE" and complain that "Labour is not doing enough to protect us from the deadly threat of bird flu from abroad." *

* Note typical tabloid disdain for anything coming to Britain (well, England really, i mean the Mail hardly speaks for anyone outside of the home counties/ south-east England) from abroad.

in best noddy holder voice iiit's christmaaaaaas!

2005-12-24T20:50:00.000Z

just staying at home and having a simple christmas this year. for non-british people, the stereotypical british family christmas (or at least the image of it propagated by our media) means everyone eating a big roast dinner (turkey, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, etc.), falling asleep during the queen's speech, watching TV a lot (usually reruns of films and only fools and horses) and playing board games (usually scrabble, sometimes monopoly or trivial pursuit).
i've just been watching the TOTP2 christmas special, it featured Mud with a ventriloquist's doll, Slade, Wizzard, The Pogues, etc. (all the usualy xmas hits) and also U2 in 1983 (pre-sunglasses years) when Bono had a mullet (it was partially dyed blonde and he was wearing a sleeveless denim jacket (none more metal?), which made him look like Jon Bon Jovi circa 1992).

i've got presents from my friends which i will open tomorrow (xmas day), but i've already had my family's presents - last week my brother, my mum and i all went up to London because my bro had an interview at Imperial College (it was successful and he got in) and while he was in his interview, it was a good excuse for me and my mum to go shopping! i got her to get me 6 CDs (Blur, Oasis, The Darkness, U2, Pink Floyd and Art Brut), and a few days later when at home we were "window shopping" when we found a discounted coat that was just perfect for me so we got it, so those are my christmas presents sorted. we also got my brother's present - a blackadder DVD boxset (which i'll probably be borrowing, he he he).
soon it will be the new year too, the time when everyone makes their new year's resolutions. mine would probably have to be learning to type better. then it will be back to uni - time to work again (groan etc). i've finished one essay (about constitutional law) which is due in when i get back, and i've got one more to do for march, plus a group project, also for march.
the last Duryard social of the term was christmas-themed fancy dress, and i couldn't be bothered to spend money on a costume so i cut out a halo and wings out of the cardboard packaging that my laptop came in. 5 boys from my corridor went as advent candles (wore white, wrapped their bedsheets around themselves, printed off numbers which they stuck to their bedsheets, and wore yellow hats with glowsticks sticking out of the top). it was supposed to take place at Arena nightclub but it was overbooked so some of us were sent to Warehouse instead - at first i was worried there wouldn't be many people i knew there, but there were loads and we had a great time, so i didn't mind. i'm not much into clubbing and i'm not a big fan of warehouse, but i do prefer it (esp. the music) to arena (although arena is better for cocktails).
this is the quay during the day - Warehouse is in one of the buildings on the left - it's a bit of a different scene at night though...

moblogging (mobile blogging) coming soon - i will be uploading photos from my mobile phone one of these days!

all this christmas cheer has cheered me up, as i'm getting more and more pissed off by the miserable Daily Mail newspaper. for non-brits, it's a very opinionated far-right-wing paper that hates absolutely everything and everybody. yesterday its front page story was about defending free speech (a couple had been questioned by police for distributing Christian anti-homosexual leaflets, and the Mail thought that they ought to be allowed to have freedome to preach this stuff), yet the editor deletes comments on his blog if they don't agree with him, plus the paper has spent all year campaigning for Muslim hate preachers to be deported (so preaching hate is ok if you're christian but not ok if you're muslim?). so, everyone is entitled to freedom of speech, as long as they agree with the Mail! hypocrites. grr. etc. For more Mail-bashing, go to the Mailwatch and Daily Mail Letters blogs.

Top Of The Pods - daily top ten lists

2005-12-17T18:46:00.000Z

this is the first time i've used the "blogthis!" button, it looks rather handy, i clicked it while visiting the Top Of The Pods blog. Top Of The Pods is an online podcast that does top ten lists of everything (music, film, TV, crisp flavours*, sweets**, other podcasts, things to spend £10 on, things to do in Peterborough...) every weekday and despite the simple premise it is actually BRILLIANT. so there. go check it out!
while i'm here, i'll just add that i got back from uni a week ago and am very busy with essays to hand in when i get back! i've started one on constitutional law and it's really difficult, but i reckon that that's the module that everyone finds hard, so even if i do badly at least i won't be the only one. i love uni but i missed home and it is good to be home again!

notes for americans:
* crisps = chips,
** sweets = candy.

today's buzz bands of the day...

2005-11-16T19:38:00.000Z

The Golden Republic: go here or here and check them out. i got their album from amazon and it's great stuff, worth getting if you can find it.
If i havent mentioned them already, dog traders is another band worth checking out. they're the latest musical incarnation of drew, the man behind the mighty toothpaste for dinner.
Both are very good indie acts; the golden republic are more on the rock and roll side, with a touch of different influences including white soul, the current keyboardy indie-disco type stuff and punk on some tracks, while dog traders are more like REM on their more uptempo/dancey days.
Johnny Panic are good stuff too - modern pop-punk/punk-rock, a bit like green day. im surprised at the lack of publicity theyve had (youd expect a magazine like Kerrang to have picked up on them by now, but they havent...) as their debut album has tracks like "burn your youth" that are awesomely anthemic, sounding like hits already.
i dont think any of these bands will be huge (hardly anybody's heard of them yet), which is a shame, cos theres bands like the Bravery which arent as consistent ("an honest mistake" is great, but the rest of the album is weak) but have had plenty of hype and are massive now. Coldplay seem to be heading for U2-style world domination too, but theyve turned into one of the planet's most boring bands - sure, their first 2 albums were worth getting, but X&Y is just boring! "Speed of sound" is just a rehash of "Clocks"! It's such an overrated album, and definiately not their best! yet millions and millions of busy mums and dads drove to the supermarket in their SUVs to buy it at extortionate prices, and then placed it in a prominent position on their coffee tables to impress visitors... certain magazines harped on about it being their best album yet... i listened to it a few times and got bored of it very quickly. too much hype.
Ballads dont have to be boring, you know! Coldplay have become just another in a list of fashionable bland bands - keane, athlete, etc. I dont find them boring because they do a lot of slow songs (morrissey's vauxhall & i is all slow songs but it is a melancholic masterpiece, which proves my point that ballads dont have to be boring. it's emotional, poetic, different... take "speedway" for example, which features the sound of a chainsaw!), it's just that their music is so inoffensive that it's dull. There is nothing like great singing, musicianship, lyrics, originality, experimentation etc. to make any of them stand out. (Actually, i heard a coldplay song in a shop the other day, and it was only chris martin's distinctive voice that marked it out as a coldplay song, otherwise it could have been anyone. hes one of the only singers in a bland-band to actually have a distinctive voice...) I try to understand the appeal, really i do. i saw athlete on tv in the glasto highlights during the summer and they seemed like really nice people, but i just couldnt stand their songs. These bands are so bland that everybody likes them (but nobody loves them, because theyre bland enough to appeal to everyone yet too bland to really appeal to anyone in particular).
Sorry if it sounds like i'm being harsh on coldplay and co., i'll stop now.
I'm still ill, although i've cut down on painkillers and cough sweets. i feel really tired a lot, and have missed some lectures cos of that. But I still have to keep alert of all thats happening cos of stuff like module options - i have to fill in a form and hand it in by tomorrow! i have to choose between advocacy and work experience, and on the advice of dad's cousin i think i'll choose work experience.

Rain Is Rubbish

2005-11-12T13:45:00.000Z

greetings bloggers.
it has been raining a LOT here lately, which is a right pain, especially when it's cold and early in the morning too and you've got to walk through the rain to a lecture. even worse when you've got a nasty throat infection on top of it all too... like me. Last friday i was coughing lots and i just shrugged it off as some kind of little "freshers' flu, part II" thing, but from saturday onwards it got worse (and the smoke at the tar barrelling probably didn't help either) and on sunday i was very tired and in pain so, after hearing the concern of my mum on the phone, i rang a doctor, who reckoned it was a viral infection. he told me to take ibuprofen and paracetamol, drink lots of water, etc... there's no "magic cure" as it's caused by a virus (so you can't use antibiotics, theyre for bacteria). On monday my mum said i'd better see a doctor as well, just to make sure, so i visited the one on campus and she confirmed what the one on the phone said. She also said i had swollen glands in my neck (cos of the infection). horrible thought, i know, but i don't mind, because on sunday i looked in the mirror and thought, "yuck, im so fat, even my face and neck are fat. i need a diet!" but itwasn't actually fat, it was swollen glands, so its a comfort for me to know that at least i'll look much better when i'm recovered.
It's a week later and i'm still not better yet, and i've taken so many painkillers (i dont know when was the last time i've ever taken this many, or if i've even taken this many before), and i can't drink either, which does restrict socialising quite a bit. People seem to think that you can't socialise without alcohol. in a way it is true: i was reading an article on the net saying that a lot of people depend on alcohol to socialise, even though they're not alcoholics. it's not their bodies that are dependent on alcohol, it's their minds - they feel like they need to drink to have confidence and give their personalities a bit more sparkle. it's quite worrying really, and probably explains why we have such a "drinking culture" here in the UK (drinking is a way of overcoming that gloriously english trait: reserve).
Anyway, i can't drink and i don't feel like going out anyway cos of my sickly state (too cold out there!). I missed 2 events on campus that i would've liked to go to: zane lowe DJ-ing last night, and the Xfm DJs on tuesday. (there was also the open mic night on wednesday, but thats every week so i dont mind missing that so much).
Luckily, mum is coming over (again) this weekend, so that should cheer me up a bit. she'll also be bringing some stuff from home (saves me spending money on the train to go there) including some nice warm clothes (i'm needing them!).

i haven't done a lot this week because of my illness, so i have spent WAY too much time on the internet, especially browsing other people's blogs. a lot of them are rubbish but some are very interesting. What is annoying is the number of "spam blogs" popping up, created by robots and advertising stuff, like the ones that advertise stuff in comments on your blog - that's why i've switched on word verification in my comments, to prevent comment spam. sorry if it annoys anyone genuine who wants to comment.
anyway, some stuff i have noticed on the net recently...
Island Monkey
Top Of The Pods
SoYouWanna.com (their hangover cure may come in handy one day)
Backwards messages in songs, including Stairway To Heaven (incidentially, i have been listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin lately, i just wish i'd brought more of their records with me, they rule! i've also been listening to Beethoven a lot lately, he's in the windows xp "sample music". i love classical music and i should have remembered to bring some with me. Symphony no. 9 (scherzo) is only a minute or so long but i like it and it will do for now.)
Amusing places close to you (this is something i actually found ages ago, but i don't think i've posted it here before. basically go to that page and enter a UK postcode and it finds places with amusing names in that area. i can find places with names like lickham bottom, lower piles, crapstone, brown willy and piddlehinton in my vicinity... makes travel so much more interesting for the little schoolboy in everyone.)
Beedogs - yes, there is a website out there full of pictures of dogs dressed as bees. who thinks up this stuff?
Wikipedia - the free online encyclopedia in various languages, including good old english. very useful for homework, as well as just learning stuff for fun. check it out.
The internet is a wonderful thing. a few years ago some religious leader said something about it being "the tool of satan", which i can't understand: ok so some people may use the net for evil means like terrorism, and seeing as he's religious he probably doesn't agree with internet porn either, but that doesn't make the whole internet evil if you use my logic: it's like saying all paper is evil because you can print naughty things on it. some net content may be dodgy, but the net itself is just a vector of that content. anyway, didnt pope john paul II try to create a patron saint of the internet?

i think i'd better do some work now, i can see myself being a total slacker (oh wait, i already AM a total slacker, and have been for quite some time, much of my life in fact... oh well.) I'm also thinking of maybe getting a new look for my blog, the least i can do is learn how to type in proper PARAGRAPHS for once! i think i might think up a more imaginative title for my blog too.
here are a few titles i'm considering...
Reel Around The Bedsit (a pun on Reel Around The Fountain, of course. i thought i might let my slacker/bedsitter nature show...)
The Rain Falls Hard On A Humdrum Town (nicking another Smiths lyric... how me!)
Head In The Clouds And A Mouthful Of Pie (another of Morrissey's lyrics, and describes me well. i'm a bit of a dreamer, which probably explains why i like uni and hate school so much... but i won't go into that right now, it's another story...)
Alma Matters (ha ha... another Moz lyric... predictable aren't i? but it's rather fitting, as a lot of this blog concerns matters relating to educational institutions i have attended/am attending... alma maters.)
Whole Lotta Blog (another lyrical pun, this time Led Zep.)
if anyone likes/dislikes these, or has any more suggestions, just let me know...

an ottery way to celebrate guy fawkes' night... (only in england!)

2005-10-31T13:28:00.000Z

last night i went to the nearby village of ottery st mary to watch the local tradition of "tar barrelling" - basically people running up and down hills while carrying barrels of burning tar on their shoulders. according to someone down my corridor who has been researching this, it is the oldest tradition that hasnt yet been banned. i can see why people would want it banned, it was a pyromaniac's wildest dream - the tar barrellers (interestingly, of both the main genders) were running through crowded streets, sometimes very close to the spectators, and people in the audience would cheer them on and when it looked like the barrels were going out they chanted for paraffin...
and the food! there were burger vans everywhere, plus other dodgy food outlets, including one that made donuts (4 for £1!) which made me feel nauseous: rings of solid fat, deep fried in hot liquid fat. these put me right off donuts (and i used to like the damn things...). nice. later i had a chicken burger to make myself feel better, i liked the bread but not the chicken so much. i think i might go vegetarian now. (meat is murder! sometimes literally, if you die of food poisoning...)
anyway, doesnt rolling-stuff-down-hills-once-a-year seem to be such an english tradition? ive heard of cheese rolling, bathtub racing, etc., but ive never heard of any of these kinds of traditions happening anywhere else in the world. (if they do, could someone let me know please?)

i might upload a few more pictures of this unique event later, im having problems with uploads right now :-(

another couple of points raised by this (rant time i'm afraid!)...

1. guy fawkes tried to blow up parliament (well, he wanted to get the king, but that meant taking out the rest of parliament in the process...) - which makes people wonder if he had the right idea after all?
when there is the general election, the tradition is that the queen dissolves parliament (i.e. we have no parliament for a month!). we do ok without them for a month, so it makes you wonder if we would be ok without them forever. i reckon we'd do ok without the monarchy, at least. (dunno if we'd be ok without government/parliament though...) the monarchy dont do a lot, the only arguments people use for keeping them are "its traditional" and "they bring in the tourists". (i LOVE johnny rotten's sarcastic sneering in the sex pistols' "god save the queen": the lyric "god save the queen, cos tourists are money!" classic song!) apart from bringing in tourists, what do they do? recently prince charles has been telling president monkey (bush) off for not doing enough to halt climate change, so hes ok after all. but the rest of them dont do a lot as far as i can tell, apart from owning dangerous dogs, hunting foxes, riding horses, being rich, living in palaces, smoking pot, etc. maybe thats why old guido wanted to blow up the king. of course, i cant say that it was a good idea, becuase that would be "glorifying terrorism" and the "labour" government wants to outlaw that in their new anti-terror legislation.
2. i went with some people from my corridor to the tar barrelling and they all stuck together, except for one guy (rich) who was blatanty ignoring us girls and constantly on the phone to his girlfriend. when he got home i heard him talking about it with a mate who asked who he went with, and he mentioned the names of the boys we'd gone with but none of the girls. i was next to him and he didnt even say he'd gone with me, i mean he couldnt exactly have forgotten about me seeing as i was right in front of him! also on the way home, after the group had fragmented a bit (as they always seem to do on nights out), i was walking back with him and he just buggered off, and i had to make my own way home. i got to the coach just in time, and found vicky (one of the girls who had also come on the trip) there too, luckily for both of us. but still, not very gentlemanly of him to leave us to find our own ways home, in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar place.
i've noticed this with a lot of boys my age, when they get a girlfriend they forget about all the other girls and ignore their mates on purpose. ive met other guys who do that, e.g. jack at school was one of my best mates and then he became what will called a "wom" - "woman over mates". i havent heard from him in ages, which he wouldnt have done when he was single. it's not worth losing your friends over, really. i admit, i probably would have lost mates over boys when i was 13, but when youre 18-plus it's just plain stupid!
reminds me of another song, morrissey's "hold on to your friends" - i'm sorry but i will have to copy-and-paste quite large sections of the lyrics (oh what the hell, i'll just copy and paste the whole lot!) to demonstrate what i mean:

A bond of trust
Has been abused
Something of value
May be lost
Give up your job
Squander your cash - be rash
Just hold on to your friends

There are more than enough
To fight and oppose
Why waste good time
Fighting the people you like
Who will fall defending your name
Oh, don't feel so ashamed
To have friends

But now you only call me
When you're feeling depressed
When you feel happy I'm
So far from your mind
My patience is stretched
My loyalty vexed
Oh, you're losing all of your friends

Hold on to your friends
Hold on to your friends
Resist - or move on
Be mad, be rash
Smoke and explode
Sell all of your clothes
Just bear in mind :
Oh, there just might come a time
When you need some friends

(there you go, proves my theory that moz has lyrics for every occasion!)

a new post. about partying. again! :-)

2005-10-30T16:38:00.000Z

wow, that last post was long enough already, so i will start a new post to continue the story.

right, the open mic night, continued: 2 main rooms in the lemmy, one which was open mic all night and the other which was open mic for a bit and then disco for the rest of the night.
in the room with open mic all night, there were blokes with acoustic guitars covering "rocking in the free world" and a screen behind them. after an hour or so, they started showing dangermouse on the screen, which we all thought was cool but rather random.
in the other room, there was some soppy emo type dudes - its not that i have anything against emo but this was a rather sappy, cheesy, watery variety of it - followed by DJing (mentioned in the previous post what kind of music they played... i remember they played the killers (cant remember which song), ash's "girl from mars" (which ash - the guy opposite, not the band - said was one of his fave songs ever), joy division's "love will tear us apart", and according to ash they also played the cure's "lovecats" while i was out of the room). anyway, we all got rather drunk (ash was the drunkest i've ever seen him, he got very giggly and hyper and had trouble standing up to his full height, which is normally very tall), and ash's JD-and-coke-induced hyperactivity (normally he is extremely lazy) made him run all the way back home early (a long and hilly trek), so me and pete went round pete's mate's room in lopes hall. it is conveniently situated on campus and not far from the lemmy, but i think it's not too close for it to be too noisy, so it's a pretty good location. we listened to music and watched videos that this guy and his friends had done, including a spoof action film called the assassinator, which was absolutely brilliant! (you can download it from theassassinator.tk - aint it great to have uni broadband? apparently it's 100 times faster than most home broadband... the £65-per-year is worth it after all!)

the next notable adventure (there have been quite a few nights out, i'll only go into detail about the ones that stick out in my mind) was my birthday celebrations. on october 22nd, yours truly reached the grand old age of 19. conveniently, it was a saturday. celebrations began on friday (people on my floor clubbed together to buy me chocolate and flowers - 2 of my favourite things!), involved consumption of alcohol (naturally...) and continued all night, going well past midnight (people wishing me happy birthday as soon as the new day began). when i woke up the next day, there was a poster with "Happy birthday Helen, you're 19 today!" written in the middle and everyone's signatures and little messages all around on the wall opposite my room, so it was the first thing i saw when i opened my door in the morning. (it's now on my wall, above my bed.)
celebrations continued all weekend (any excuse for a party!) and saturday night involved duryard's traditional way of celebrating people's birthdays: drinking the welly! the wellington (welly) bar, shared by students from all the duryard halls, has a welly which your friends fill with drnks and make you drink. i managed about half of it (all the leg... couldnt manage the foot though!) which was ok going. i then played table football with michelle and co from my end of the corridor (it was her birthday the week before mine, and she experienced similar celebrations to me, only with more alcohol... she is such a legend when drunk! he he he) and pool with jim bob from the other end of the corridor (i lost twice, miserably... when sober i am great at pool!). one night - friday i think (i can't remember) - i was drunk and we were going to go to the lemmy, and i got there a minute too late to use my card to get in (valid before 10pm). i couldnt be arsed to queue to buy a ticket so i went home, stopping to visit jenni on the 2nd floor (she has livened up her room with fairy lights, in the duryard tradition) and ash on my floor (playing records and guitar until 1am, as usual). on sunday i went out shopping with mum - she got me tons of clothes (handy as i'd ripped my jeans...), an idlewild cd (warnings/promises), dvds of "blackadder" and "the office", and - best of all - this here laptop! twas nice to see her again too. she told me news about how the family is - rob's got an interview at cambridge coming up soon and had an interview at warwick yesterday! genius kid! - and they'll all be visiting me in november.

last night i went to the annual halloween party hosted by catfish indie soc. AWESOME! at the start it was fairly normal, mainstream kind of party music (we wondered if it was truly indie), then they had a couple of bands on followed by more DJ-ing, and from then on it improved.
they played the smiths' "frankly, mr. shankly" which made me commit to the dance floor from then on. i actually met other people who liked them and knew the words! (that just wouldnt happen at home. worthing is officially CRAP.) they also played other stuff i kinda liked like the ordinary boys, the strokes and blink 182, plus the aforementioned "lovecats" and the obligatory indie disco anthem: new order's "blue monday". later they also played "this charming man" - excellent! (i think i made some excited high-pitched noises at that point!) i ended up dancing with this guy who seemed quite keen on me. he was doing drama and said it was "not a proper subject". he lives in holland hall but wasnt at all snooty about it. he was a very nice person, although i dont fancy him at all (his breath stank - perhaps due to dehydration from alcohol?), but still, twas nice to meet (indie) people. near the end of the party (during pulp's classic "common people"), the rest of our corridor (who had been in the lemmy) dropped in - they were great, as ever. we all went home and crashed out in someone's room, occassionally going to pete's room to check that he was still breathing, before going to bed (i went to bed about 3am i think). the clocks went back one hour that night, which was confusing. the party went on until 1am, but really it was until 2am (does that make sense?).
(i sometimes wonder why we have to change the clocks and all that, it's just confusing! why can't we settle for a time inbetween summertime and wintertime and stick with that time all the time?)
now i have to finish my essay - it has to be in by 4pm tomorrow! i've written 428 words so far and i'm aiming for 700. i've also got a presentation to do with my team (team meeting tomorrow!)
(PS that picture of a welly i used here isnt actually the welly we use here, but it looks a little bit like ours.)

it's "only" rock 'n' roll? news about neo-nazis abusing the power of music... followed by some good music and some good times!

2005-10-26T21:49:00.000+01:00

This is disturbing - i thought this sort of thing should have died out years ago with hitler and all that lot, but it appears to still be going on... read the whole article, it's 3 pages:
ABC News: Young Singers Spread Racist Hate.
I think the right wing needs to be more worried about racist/nazi messages in music, rather than the so-called "satanic" messages that rock music supposedly contains...
The power of music can never be underestimated in my opinion. coincidentially, i'd just started a blog about songs that mean something to me. i've seen some of my mates, like raquel, feature a lot of posts in their blogs of their favourite lyrics, but i wanted to do a separate blog for that, otherwise this one would just get clogged up with them.

Now i think i'd better turn my attention to the more cheerful side of music...

My laptop seems to be working fine now, and i've started using it to get to work on my uni-work! As well as its academic function, i've also used it for a lot of other stuff, mostly downloading stuff (unis get superfast broadband!) - today i downloaded loads of comedy songs: Beatallica (beatles songs covered in the style of metallica*), black smiths (smiths songs covered in the style of black sabbath**), Amateur Transplants' famous "london underground", songs by the spazrock band that my next-door neighbour here used to play guitar for, and good old monty python songs! the day before, i downloaded lots of videos, mostly of Morrissey, including a hilarious interview with him on the Jonathan Ross show! god bless broadband.
* example song titles: hey dude, the thing that should not let it be, and justice for all my loving, sgt. hetfield's motorbreath pub band, leper madonna, i want to choke your band. they've even combined the beatles and metallica in their artwork!
** example song titles: how sweet is leaf?, shoplifters in the void, planet in a coma, this charming acrobat, fairies panic, children of the cemetry gates. you get the idea. (i think they should also cover ozzy's solo stuff too, besides his sabbath stuff, just so they could write a song titled frankly, mr. crowley.)
My laptop can also play DVDs, and i got 2 dvds in a 2-for-the-price-of-1 offer the other day - the first series of "the office" and the second series of "blackadder". i havent got round to watching them yet but no doubt i will soon.

Now i will tell you more about life at uni. the first couple of weeks may conform to the stereotype of us all being a bunch of hard-partying, lazy dossers, with hangovers and lie-ins, but once the year's work starts, it's very different. Also it depends on your subject: there's this kind of political correctness about that we have to assume that all subjects (and qualifications) are equal (not just at uni but at school too) but in reality some subjects are hard and some are easy. no offence to any drama students who may be here, but drama students are a bunch of dossers! they party so much! they have no homework! they start their lessons with meditation! (surely the people who do hard subjects are actually the ones that would need some nice, relaxing meditation the most?) i don't want to sound like im picking on drama students, im just using them as an example, the most extreme example i could thnk of. english students are also considered a bunch of dossers too, although to a slightly lesser degree than drama students.
anyway... no matter where you are, there is always one noisy drama student on every corridor! fact!!

Of course, i have partied quite a bit myself in the first couple of weeks, but it's week 4 of term (week 5 if you count freshers week) so i've had to tone it down and get to work by now. the wild partying prior to the hard studying included clubbing (altho im getting a little sick of nightclubs now as they all seem to be the same... same playlist - hours of dance hits ("call on me" etc.) followed by a couple of hours of cheese (including cheesey rock classics, always climaxing with Queen's "dont stop me now") to make drunks dance... next time i'd like to go somewhere more "indie" for a change), the hall bar (known as The Welly), tons of socialising (in various situations including sports and societies i signed up to on impulse), other pubs and bars, and - one of my favourite bits - the pub crawl!
A couple of weeks ago, our "posse" (most people from my corridor) went out on a pub crawl in town one saturday night. we went to the famous imperial across the road from the campus, a branch of Wetherspoons, but it was crowded so we moved on. next was a smaller pub where we settled down and started drinking. the aim was to have 1 drink per pub. i didnt have any money on me, only a debit card, and the nearest ATM machine was quite some distance away so i decided to pay by card. the problem was that in some places you can only pay with my type of card for stuff worth £5 or over, so i bought £5 worth of drink. this place was famed for its student deals so i got tons of drinks for my fiver (2 cocktails and 4 shots... i drank it all in about 6 minutes!) - at home you'd get 2 beers or alcopops for that price and think nothing of it! (drinks are ridiculously overpriced around London!)
Having drunk my booze, it looked like id drank enough for the night. i was pissed for hours! we went on to a variety of other pubs and bars. i can remember a little place called the ship inn, down an alley near the cathedral (although i dont remember the cathedral at all - was it because of the dark... or the drink?), which would have had "charm", but the older people licking their lips at the sight of fresh young meat wandering into their regular drinking hole soon scared us off.
There was also a place that looked like it might be part of a chain, which was VERY crowded downstairs, but we went to the less-packed upstairs which seemed nice. there was belinda carlisle's "heaven is a place on earth" playing on TV there, and, in my inebriated state, i sang bon jovi's "livin' on a prayer" along to the chorus of it. i got the words totally wrong. hey, it's the same tune. just change the "ooh baby" bit to "woah-oh" and there it is!
Then there was a rather modern and swish looking place which i believe was called the Zephyr. opposite was a horribly greasy burger van, which loads of people went to afterwards (and regretted it). i think we might have been to some other places that night too, but i can't remember them.
On the way back, we all started giving each other piggybacks. a guy called scott carried me for about 2cm, then i tried to carry him but i think that - due to extreme drunkness - i must have mistakenly picked up to the leg of another person being carried next to us. anyway, whatever happened, we all ended up crashing into a heap on the pavement. after picking myself up and dusting myself off, feeling the vague sensation that i might have hurt both my knees (numbed by alcohol), ashley - the guy who lives opposite me in halls - carried me for what seemed like miles (surprisingly strong for someone so skinny... or maybe just strong compared with scott!), which was very nice. we then all went to the esso garage opposite our halls (a mecca for duryard inhabitants in need of groceries) and went back home, to hang around chatting for a bit. a strange rumour started that i had a "foot fetish" when i was sitting on the floor and tried to grab the side of someone's bed to stop myself falling over and instead grabbed scott's foot (he was on the bed)... yes, i was still under the influence and therefore VERY clumsy!
Got to bed in one piece, went to sleep, recovered, no hangover, yay!
Another drunken incident of mine was last wednesday's open mic night at The Lemmy. i got very drunk with the 2 lads who live next to me. the live music wasnt bad, and the DJ's music was good too - stuff like the killers, joy division, ash, the cure, etc. i would say more but i ought to go to bed now.

a little bit of coffee and a bloody lot of froth

2005-10-24T23:27:00.000+01:00

17:20(ish), monday 24th october.
hello bloggers of the world, if you are there and interested in my, er, "adventures". a lot has happened in the last few weeks of my life, more than normal, probably due to the fact that i have left my boring old hometown for pastures new. (very green, rolling pastures, just like traditional images of england).
just before going to uni, i went to italy with my parents for a couple of days, to visit some friends and family. i would have loved it except that i was SOOOO incredibly tired (and ill)! italy is as beautiful as ever, and we visited a family who are all friends of ours in one of the nicest seaside towns i have ever seen - much better than the one my cousins live in, which is a bit crap (the italian equivalent of my town, perhaps?) but we always had to go to in the past - but i will not give away its location as i don't want it to be overrun by tourists and generally ruined. their dad has a cool record collection too - it includes original smiths and led zep vinyls!
one problem i found over in italia which made my exhaustion-induced depression even worse was how perfect everyone seemed - i felt far less than perfect in comparison. girls were all thin, pretty, confident and dressed in designer clothes, whether on the streets, in shops, in adverts, on TV... and i felt about as slim and stylish as a teletubby!
the pressure to be thin and perfect was, as ever, exaggerated by the berlusconi-buggered media, featuring "miss italia" on EVERY news programme (while events of more global importance were relatively ignored... tabloid media, get your priorities sorted, please!), not to mention tv adverts for fitness equipment that reminded me slightly of the "gizmo" ads on the fast show's "channel 9" (only with scantily lycra-clad hunks and babes flexing their muscles). to nick a phrase (which i believe was used to describe new labour) from adrian mole: the cappucino years, the italian mainstream media is "a little bit of coffee and a bloody lot of froth".

talking of froth, i have to confess a growing love of neighbours. excitement about everybody's favourite feelgood australian soap opera has increased recently with its 20th anniversary. literally dozens of people cram into the communal TV room to watch it every day, especially when there are particularly dramatic episodes. friday episodes often seem to be the best, presumably to tide you over the weekend and to provide enough "cliffhanger" feeling to make sure you remember to watch the next instalment on monday. until recently, my new life as a student has been relatively frothy and empty, but now it's week 4 of term (not counting freshers week) and the work is piling on - scary! yesterday i bought a laptop (with some help from my mum) to help. i've got stuff to type up, internet resources to look up, that sort of thing... there are public pcs here but it's just so much easier if you've got your own... but i can't do much at the mo as i haven't had my internet connection sorted out yet. loads of my programs won't work until i register them on the net, which really restricts what i can do! so far it's only been lectures but they're bringing in other teaching methods too: from next week we get workshops (like tutorials/seminars) and we've already got coursework to do, which will count towards the mark for the first year. last week we had a team-building day, and we've got various group projects to do with our teams. we got to work on them last week, and visited an employment tribunal for one of them (we have to write a report on what happened and give a presentation on it to the class). i would be typing up my notes on that (and probably making one of those powerpoint presentations that never work and everyone dreads!) right now but microsoft office won't work until i've registered it on the internet. that's why i'm doing the less-constructive activity of blogging instead. (damn you microsoft! if our presentation sucks i can blame it on you!) i'm just typing it up in notepad (a program that thankfully needs no internet registration) and i will post it on my blog when i get online. i have to go now, it's 17:30, meaning it's nearly time for neighbours! (it starts at 17:35, same as it always has done. it's nice how some things in life are always so constant.)

19:00 (exactly. how odd.) back again after dinner - i'm in catered halls and it's not bad, plus they give you tons of food, although you can't go back for seconds. (you don't really need to, though, as they give you so much in the first place.) some people have found a way of cheating the system: they have dinner at 5:15, go to watch neighbours, then go back at 6 to have another dinner! anyway, had 1 lecture today (at 9am... groan... have to wake up early!) and then went to watch an employment tribunal with my group. there was a panel of 3 people, with a chairwoman in charge who seemed very strict and stern during the tribunal, but turned out to be very nice, charming, helpful and friendly afterwards, and stayed to answer our questions. we got tons of notes so hopefully we've got enough to last the 5-minute presentation. there's 11 of us so we won't have to do much talking: only a few seconds each! so it shouldn't be too daunting, i hope. i really like my team, they're all very friendly, and our leader (of sorts) is a fun welsh guy with the coollest accent! (his fave band is the jam, making him even cooller in my eyes.) this group is mostly, but not totally, the same as my tutor group. i prefer my group/team to my tutor group, cos a few of the people who are in my tutor group (but not in my group) are really posh and a tad stuck-up - the type who were rejected by oxbridge and aren't happy to go anywhere lower, and who live in holland hall (the posh new halls with rooms that look like posh hotel rooms instead of traditional student rooms), except for one who is so posh that she won't live in halls of residence! i have heard one of these people saying, "oh, you live in dirty-yard!" yes, good ol' duryard IS known as dirty-yard (and we don't mind), but i didn't like the way she said it! actually i'm loving it here in duryard, i'm glad i got here actually, it's really not as bad as people say it is.
my room is massive - roughly the size of mine at home (altho it seems bigger than my home room, probably cos theres less junk all over my floor here...) - and its cleaned every fortnight, and the communal areas (bathrooms, corridors etc.) are cleaned all the time. there is a real sense of community spirit too. i often feel more welcome than at my last school, which boasted of its "community spirit". i think it was difficult to feel part of the school community unless you'd always been there, or youd been there a long time, or youd always been to private school. exeter uni is something like 70-80% state school kids and the rest private school kids, so it's more like a normal environment. my first 2 schools were state so when i started my 3rd school (which was private), some people judged me on that and i got called scum, poor, common, homeless, etc. which was just stupid as a lot of the REAL scum were richer than me - their attitude to others was what made them scum. money has nothing to do with it. some of the chavviest people i've ever met have quite a bit of money - it's a myth that they all live on council estates. in a way, you can almost understand poor people who live on council estates becoming chavs - it's the only life they know, and if they mug you it's probably cos they need the money. but i can't stand well-off kids who become chavs and annoy/beat up/mug/happy-slap other people for fun - they are the true scum!
anyway, rant over, back to duryard. some people here think i'm a bit posh, which is unusual, as people at my 3rd school called me common, poor, etc., but i think that was more due to money (my lack of, and their excess of it) than actual "class" or "poshness". maybe it's my accent, education, slight "campness" (yes, you do get camp ladies!), the school i went to, the fact we had to do posh subjects like latin there (why latin? who speaks it nowadays?), or the large amounts of tea i drink (mmm... tea) that makes people think i'm posh. i don't think of myself as posh, i think i'm quite ordinary really, but it makes a pleasant change from being looked down on. this term my parents have been covering all my fees (tuition fees and accommodation charges) but for the next two terms i'll probably have to pay them myself (out of my student loan). this will mean a serious lack of cash next year! i'll have to cut down on my little luxuries (sob)... first thing to diminish will be coffee (my beloved beans!). i'll have to stop buying fancy coffees (with froth, marshmallows, chocolate, etc.) or proper filter coffee while i'm on campus and rely on the instant coffee granules i stocked up on before leaving. caffeine connoiseurs (including me) may argue that it's just not the same thing, but it will save me money. it's very easy to spend money on little things like coffees between lectures, because they're not big things so you buy them all the time and don't notice the costs mounting up... we had a budgeting workshop during freshers week and they pointed out that you will spend a surprising amount of dosh on little things like coffee and snacks. if i need to save even more, i may have to slow down my spending on another of my favourite things: music. i already save money on CDs by borrowing them from friends or libraries and copying them onto my computer or blank CDs (i hope it's legal...) and have done for years. i tend to do it for CDs that i want but not particularly want, like if i like a few tracks but not many, or for easy-to-find/big hit CDs that the libraries are bound to stock cos they've actually heard of them. i'll just have to do this more and buy fewer. or i can buy them second-hand (thank you ebay, amazon, charity shops, etc...) and i'll try and spend less on gigs (shame really, as i wanted to use uni as an opportunity to go to as many gigs as possible - i go to hardly any at home, partly cos i was hardly ever allowed and partly because there weren't many in my hometown. actually "there weren't many" is a bit of an understatement: a good year for gigs in worthing means one rawk tribute band per year... as opposed to none.) better keep my eyes open for free gigs then.
when i was in london a couple of months ago, i went to the tin pan alley festival, which was totally free, to publicise the charity shelter, a bit like how live 8 was for raising awareness of world poverty and the G8 summit (although, if you're being cynical, live 8 was for raising awareness of rock stars in need of some publicity...). anyway, tin pan alley rocked, the only disappointment being buzzcocks guitarist steve diggle. i love the buzzcocks but his performance was nothing special and his solo songs were really disappointing. he only played one buzzcocks song, "harmony in my head", and that was at the beginning. it would have been great if he ended his set with another one, it would have ended on a high then, plus that would have got the audience singing and dancing too (does ANYONE know any of his solo songs? i doubt it. but everyone loves the buzzcocks!). he also seemed one of the more self-publicising ones (as opposed to the selfless ones who (a) actually rocked and (b) seemed like they were doing something to help charity, instead of just helping their record sales.), with adverts for his new solo album all over the stage. the subways seemed to be either (a) really self-publicising too, or (b) surrounded by an army of over-zealous fans keen to publicise them. im not exaggerating, there were literally fanzines and freebees flying everywhere!still, there were some amazing bands there - the metro riots, do me bad things, art brut... great stuff! i think i might get art brut's album, people are saying it's brilliant. i got the new idlewild album "warnings/promises" yesterday and i love it, i still can't get over the first track ("love will steal us from loneliness"... a beautiful song), ive got to listen to the whole album!

around midnight:
sorted my internet connection out! no more blog-drafting in notepad for me now, i can put it online! it's getting late and i've got to wake up at 8:30 tomorrow (first lecture at 10am - a relatively late start for me as 3 of my lectures per week are at 9am!) so i'll probably go to bed soon after this post. when i get time i'll post more.
nighty night from studentland. helen ;-)

i went to university and all i wrote was this lousy blog ;-)

2005-10-13T16:57:00.000+01:00

well readers, i have arrived at university and so far it's been great! zillions of times better than school. some people i know have felt homesick but i haven't been so bad, probably cos i was getting sick of home. my hometown was hardly the best place in the world so i don't really miss it. i've really settled in, i've met sooo many people, and i'm learning to love my accommodation! i love the corridor i'm in, the people are so nice, it's the top floor and there is no lift (elevator if you're american) but that's ok cos at least it deters burgulars from coming up and nicking all my stuff. we've developed a little community up there, with rituals/routines, like going to watch an episode of neighbours every weekday before going up to dinner.
so far i've had the legendary freshers' week (not to mention the fabled freshers' flu) and i'm now in my second week of term. work is slowly starting and i've got some projects to do this year that will count towards my final degree grade. so much has happened and i've got tons of stuff to say, which i'll do when i get back - i need to get changed, and then it's time for neighbours...

zzz

2005-09-23T22:40:00.000+01:00

got back from italy today (had to go there for 5 days, with my parents), am absolutely knackered - i might have enjoyed the trip if i wasn't so tired. i had weird headaches and cried from the tiredness sometimes, cos i was so exhausted. it's quite difficult to type now. i'm still recovering from it. i hope i'm better by sunday (that's when i'm leaving for uni). still, it's good to be back home for a bit before i go, and see my cats, home comforts, etc...

toffee and coffee

2005-09-17T17:51:00.000+01:00

i love coffee (not to mention tea, and biscuits, and chocs... but that's another story...) and i stocked up on these small, cheap jars of the sweet bean from sainsburys (well theyre sainsburys brand but i got them cheaply from another shop that sells stuff from loads of other shops...) but i am beginning to wonder whether they will last long at all... anyway, i also got some proplus (caffeine pills) the other day, so they will help in troubled times of low caffeine (tho obviously they don't taste half as good as coffee does!)
the blogger homepage has got a new look, showing stuff like recently-updated blogs, and one that i noticed was about toffee (yum yum! altho i prefer fudge). lots of different types, including liquorice toffee (never heard of that before...). check it out.
still have tons of stuff to prepare for leaving home - need batteries etc. - all these little things that are easy to forget... i hope we have time. we're going to italy next week so i only have a couple of days to get everything. oh god. i would go out and get stuff, but (a) i can't drive and (b) i don't have a lot of money. so im basically dependent on my parents for buying stuff and just waiting around until they have the time to go and buy stuff :-(
today i've been watching some of my dvds (especially the smiths/moz ones) for possibly the last time before i go - it probably sounds shallow but i'll miss 'em! as well as my obvious family, i think i'll also miss the presence of my cats cos they're part of the family too (altho i won't miss the fur everywhere, puke, dead/dying mice, etc.) and of course i'll miss my friends (but i'll try and keep in touch with them).

oh yeah, i finally got that johnny panic cd - only £2.99 in the sale as well! and it rocks! also got 3 cds for £15 in a special offer in another shop - i got the jam, morrissey, and the ramones. i love record sales. sales are good. i am happy :-)

Beatlemania, or I Have Forgiven Macca...

2005-09-16T13:24:00.000+01:00

happy today cos mum just found an original beatles book of hers (from the '70s) at the back of a cupboard, and it's in mint condition! it's really cool. i've kind of rediscovered the beatles lately, i dug out good ol' sgt pepper again and got 1 a few weeks ago.
in other music news today, i have finally got off my arse and scanned in that nice picture of ville valo on the cover of metal hammer magazine. check it out...
went to prizegiving last night - after all the usual what-am-i-gonna-wear agony - and was pleasantly surprised to find myself receiving all kinds of awards. i got special awards for all my subjects, cos a special award means you got an A in that subject, plus the award for AAA and the psychology cup (shared with lucy). some people got tons of 'em, like georgia who got a cup for every subject. there was also an extra award (and photoshoot... ulp! i got very shy...) for people who got AAA (i.e. me, georgia, tom, annikka, alice... altho i think jamez e should have got something too, cos he got AABC which is about the same as AAA in ucas tariff points). the special guest speaker this year was, fittingly, a cricket player (we won the ashes, wahey!). will said that his degree (international tourism management) includes a year abroad in the 2nd year, and that is also the year that the ashes is in australia, so he's going there ;-)
(there were 2 awards that puzzled us all, though: the awards for head girl and head boy. (yes, our school is really that old-fashioned that we still have heads of school, prefects, etc.!) what was the point of those awards, theres no possible competition for them, so its not really an achievement to win them because the moment you become a head you automatically win the award anyway!)
finished another week's work experience at the CPS today - could come in handy in the future. i quite like it there, i think i might even consider working there one day - a career to bear in mind at least. the problem is all the paperwork and red tape they have to cope with... :-S
by the way, please feel free to leave comments on the colours i'm using in the blog lately - i hope i'm not overusing them, but i thought it might need a touch of colour to liven it up...

how i wasted 14 minutes of my time

2005-09-07T15:20:00.000+01:00

one of those "market research" people just rang up and asked me to take a survey about light bulbs, which lasted 14 minutes. how can i get rid of these people politely?
on a completely different note... if anyone else in the world is feeling sick and tired of all these generic "R&B" acts (as in "urban" music, not "rhythm and blues"...) that are currently massive in the charts but are basically just as boring, unoriginal, same-y and cynically marketed (in other words, just as evil) as the pop boy bands of recent years, you may like this:

(click to enlarge - you really need to read the whole thing.)

and now for some normal music.

mum got a DVD of Live aid highlights today, i watched a bit and couldn't help but notice during the tina turner/mick jagger duet (amazing chemistry between them, great voices, and i'm not even a particular fan of either of 'em...) how much mick jagger looked (and still looks) like aerosmith's steve tyler. separated at birth, perhaps? oh, and bono had a mullet too, which looked terrible, i have to say.

HIM are releasing a new album soon, called "the dark light" i think. i've heard some samples of some of their songs and it sounds like it could be good, and Ville Valo is looking better than ever with his new haircut ;-)

(i'm just posting this pic for now, i'll find a better version of it later...)

Trifle of trivia

2005-09-05T21:39:00.000+01:00

like most bloggers, i'm supposed to comment on current affairs, like the recent events in america concerning hurricane katrina... but i've decided not to because there are just so many bloggers out there documenting it all, some of them actually there in new orleans. if you want a blogger's point of view on it, read the blogs of the people there. i will ramble on about the trivial little things in my life, as usual (altho on a serious note, my thoughts are with the survivors and rescuers, and i wish them luck).
lately mum has been making trifles - she got the recipe off a recipe card from waitrose (posh supermarket, selling yummy but expensive food), it includes blueberries, creme de cassis (an alcoholic liquer that tastes a bit like ribena), cream and custard. i'm probably going to miss homemade treats while im at uni. i applied for my student account today and i'm still waiting to hear from the student loans people. my accommodation has been confirmed now, i've registered as a student online (the wonders of modern technology) and i've got to pay fees and rent now (so hurry up, student loan!). i also had a look at the students' guild (student union) website - i like the sound of/am intruiged by some of the societies, especially the law society (i think it would be a good idea if i joined that), debating society, catfish (the indie/alternative soc), rocsoc (the rock society), the expedition soc, the out of doors soc, the socialist soc, lib dems soc, and (wait for it...) the circus society!

if you want to check out what i'm listening to...

2005-09-03T18:00:00.000+01:00

...go to: http://www.last.fm/user/helenrocks

always look on the bright side of life

2005-08-31T17:06:00.000+01:00

had a chat about the accommodation with james e last night. he didn't get what he wanted either - he's got to share his room with someone else (a complete stranger!) and he said to me "at least you've got your own room". there's a few nice ensuite rooms left but they're sharing only (twin beds) and they're being taken fast, so i think i'm going to stick with my standard single room (student standard = grotty, as everyone knows, but hey, it's cheap...).
saw an old friend, emma o, the other day. she got AAA too and is going to sheffield uni, to do law as well. she went to college with someone called maria who was in my class at high school, and we all went to the same first school too. i asked where maria was going cos her proud mother said (boasted?) that she's doing law too, but emma said that she's doing "some obscure subject" (hinting that it's probably a doss?) at bristol. i am not surprised really, because altho maria isn't stupid and does work reasonably hard, she's not that smart either, even though loads of people at high school thought she was brilliant for some reason. she got a special award at the GCSE prizegiving ceremony even though there were other people whose results were just as good, but that school always seemed to favour her for a lot of stuff.
there's the A-level prizegiving at school on the 15th of september, which i think should be a little more interesting than the GCSE one, as there's fewer people. instead of just reading out a long list of names (boring) as they do with the GCSEs, they read out the names and say little things about each pupil, and i'm interested to hear what they say about me. i'm also curious to see who gets special awards this year, too. over the years i have noticed the blatant favouritism that a lot of the teachers have, particularly in the high-school part of the school (altho not so much in the sixth-form college part of the school, thankfully), so it's not too hard to predict who gets what awards - not just in the GCSE/A-level prizegiving ceremonies but other prizes as well, like the ones they give out to the high-school kids at the end of each term. it's really unfair cos there are people who never got awards, and people who got them all the time, and though some of the people who never or rarely got anything really deserved some kind of recognition. it's probably because it's a small school, so the teachers (think that they) know everyone. i hope that people get the recognition they deserve this year...

well... i suppose it's not too bad...

2005-08-30T19:20:00.000+01:00

...at least i got accommodation, even if it's not the best in the world. i was just checking the details of the accomm to see whether or not i'm allowed to stick posters and photos on the walls or not, and i noticed that the price is a lot lower than the posh en-suite accommodation (i'm saving around £900 a year now!) and it includes a mini fridge (the same as the posh accomm does, so that's good). The mini fridge isn't all that "mini" either, it's a lot bigger than the mini-fridges you get for £20-£25 at woolworths that loads of people in my year had in their study-rooms at sixth form (those were truly tiny little fridges, you couldn't fit a lot in them, a bit pointless really)... my brother has seen the fridges they give you at Exeter and they're proper decent-sized fridges!

On a completely different note, for some reason i have been listening to the spam song, as featured on the legendary monty python, quite a lot lately. you can find the sketch, lyrics and a wav file of it here.
and, while i'm here, i would also like to add links to the badger song and the llama song - two strange, animated little ditties, featuring mushrooms, snakes, ducks and a heck of a lot of other living things, as well as badgers and llamas of course. you may laugh. you may wonder who made these things (and why). you may find them a bit annoying, weird, or "random". (why is "random" now the most overused word in the english language, at least by people my age?) One of my personal favourite animation-type-things (of sorts), starring one of my personal favourite people, is Morrissey dance, from the creator of the wonderful, sublime Toothpaste for dinner web comic. enjoy, bloggers.

traditional grotty student accommodation

2005-08-30T12:02:00.000+01:00

today started nicely - had a good amount of sleep without having to sleep til noon (i was downstairs and dressed and everything at 9 o'clock, without anyone having to wake me up... unusual for a lazy person during the summer hols), had a decent breakfast, and watched a few music videos and an episode of father ted (all on dvd of course... good old digital versatile discs!).
then the post arrived...
a big envelope from exeter, including a letter saying that the nice new posh accommodation is way too oversubscribed this year so i haven't got any of the 3 halls i applied for, and they'll have to give me the grotty old halls instead. (they didn't quite phrase it like that, but it was words to the same effect).
the room i've been given for my first year is a "standard" room (legend has it that the traditional standard student room is horrible. i am already imagining a scene not unlike the tv show the young ones...). i was hoping to brighten it up a little by covering every conceivable surface with pictures, posters and photos, but then i read in the handbook that if any damage is done by them and the uni have to repaint the walls due to paint being ruined by sellotape, pins, etc., i will have to pay for it. the only upside is that grotty halls are supposed to have the best social life to make up for the general grottiness of it all.
james e from school is also going to exeter this year, and i hate to sound nasty cos hes a nice bloke, but im half-hoping that he will join me in the grottiness, so at least i will have some company. (it would be nice to see a familiar face around, as long as it isnt frowning.)

woohoo!

2005-08-29T20:10:00.000+01:00

that formatting bar is back again! now i will edit some of my old posts to add different colours and maybe fonts and bold/italic etc., to make it all a bit easier to read...
still hard to believe that in approximately 28 days i will be off to university! brilliant! but i need to get ready, so much stuff to buy and prepare... mustnt forget anything...
anyway, now i've got the format toolbar back, i think i'll do a brief "latest musical purchases" post... went to MVC the other day cos there was a sale there and we were going shopping in town anyway, found quite a few goodies (although there was some stuff that i wanted, like a couple of british sea power cds and a dvd of monty python and the life of brian, which they'd normally have but had flown off the shelves this week, due to the spending frenzy normally induced by big sales...) including...

(the vines cd was only about £3 as well!)

as well as music of course, i also got a dvd of the first series of father ted (classic comedy) which i've so far watched most of (will watch the rest tomorrow probably).

there's some more cds i'm planning on buying that so far i haven't been able to find in shops here or anywhere, so i'll probably have to buy them on the good old internet:

...plus this dvd...

thoughts/rants

2005-08-26T17:11:00.000+01:00

:-( Still don't have that formatting toolbar back, so now my blog will be all in black and white again... boring. i think that if i occassionally add colour, different font sizes, pictures etc. it kind of breaks it up and makes it easier to read.
anyway, i'm going to type some stuff, and if i later get that toolbar back again, i'll just edit this post (and others) and add colour, pix, etc.
I'm really annoyed that most of my friends seem to have forgotten me already, probably cos they are so wrapped up with their holiday romances, or maybe the fact that they're all 18 now so they no longer need me (one of the eldest in the yeargroup) to help them buy alcoholic drinks. (some friends!)
However, last night i did go out with my brother and 2 of his friends, went to a chinese restaurant and a few pubs and then to the house of one of them, we had a good time, so maybe not all is lost. although i think all hope is lost for most of the population, due to reasons such as increasing chavdom. while we were outside a chinese restaurant, deciding whether to go there or to another one, this massive bunch of young chavs walked down the road and they were dressed like complete fools. the front doors of this restaurant had these door handles which were painted gold, and a few of the chavs (who probably thought they were real gold... maybe thinking, "blingin', innit," or words to that effect) actually tried to nick them!
Another problem for the country is people's ignorance of politics. ok so it may not be the most interesting subject in the world but it's still really important, it affects all out lives, all the time, so it's important that people are politically aware. i was helping my old friend tara with her personal statement for university and she wrote in it something about how interested she is in world politics. later on we were chatting and i mentioned something about the republican party in america and how the right wing is getting so obsessed with "preserving family values" (i.e. discriminating against homosexuality etc.) that they are even criticising innocent TV shows like "Spongebob squarepants" for supposedly "promoting homosexuality to children". she'd never heard of stuff like this before and said she thought i was making it up, she didn't even know words like "republican", and she got a bit pissed off with me and said i was lying. she's hardly informed about world politics if she doesn't know what republicans are, is she? still, she's probably a lot more politically aware than your average idiot chav.
I'd also like to say that i have the impression that girls are not really expected to be as politically aware or interested as boys are. yes, we are supposedly in the age of gender equality, but there are still a few stereotypes left. for some people, at least, it seems that girls are not really expected to be interested in politics, music or football, or have a good sense of humour... and i'm the complete opposite of that stereotype! there is also this idea that we are all fascinated by the lives of celebrities and spend all day poring over magazines like "heat"... i'm sorry but i'm not really all that interested in spending what little cash i have on paparrazzi photos of former "big brother" contestants. does the fact that i don't conform to my gender role make me abnormal or something? no, i think it just means those ideas of what women should/shouldn't do are just stupid.
(edited on 29/8/05 - text formatting added - colours, bold, italics, etc - got that toolbar back! when i originally posted this, on the 26th, i'd lost the toolbar and couldnt do this sort of stuff, you see.)

star war: backstroke of the west

2005-08-26T12:46:00.000+01:00

found these chinese mistranslations of "star wars: revenge of the sith" on the internet. even the title is mistranslated, becoming "star war: backstroke of the west". absolutely hilarious.

damn you blogger

2005-08-26T12:43:00.000+01:00

where has the formatting bar for this thing gone? i can't change fonts or colours or see a preview or add pictures or links or anything now... bugger.

Procrastination strikes again

2005-08-23T15:30:00.000+01:00

i really ought to be working on learning law so that i'm prepared for my degree, i started some work on contract law a few weeks ago, but i can't be arsed to finish it. i don't seem to have much of an attention span during the summer.
it's quite hot and i feel like water - not just to drink, but to go to some source of water (i haven't seen any in ages - the sea, a swimming pool, a lake... i only have the murky green water of the garden pond for comfort!)... i haven't been swimming in ages, would be nice to go... or boating would be pretty cool too...
(i apologise if the coloured text in my blog appears a little random, but i'm just trying to make it look a bit more interesting.)

"life is very long when you're lonely..."

2005-08-22T16:46:00.000+01:00

to quote a line from the Smiths' psychadelic epic song "the queen is dead": life is very long when you're lonely!
the weather is grey and dull and a bit rainy outside. i think im becoming addicted to the net (especially blogging) cos of the nice bright colours (much better than the grey grottiness outside)! i think i will start typing my blog all in rainbow colours, maybe that will cheer me up.
Mum and Rob are in London, and should be off to Durham later (rob is visiting the unis), and dad is at home (day off work) and we are both getting a bit depressed. he's knackered and stressed, and i'm alone cos most of my friends are either (a) on holiday, (b) busy searching for uni places in clearing, or (c) too cool to care (they're the people who get boyfriends/girlfriends and spend all their time with them, and end up neglecting all their old friends). we are also having trouble deciding what to cook for dinner.
i think i will try and lift my spirits with a couple of pictures...

News: Stop stealing our Fucking signs!

2005-08-22T14:00:00.000+01:00

'Stop stealing our F**king signs'
The mayor of an Austrian town called 'F**king' has appealed to British tourists to stop stealing the road signs.

The Austrian town of 'F***ing' is asking British tourists to stop stealing their road signs .

Siegfried Hauppl said the small town always attracted a lot of attention from tourists driving up from nearby Salzburg to pose for pictures in front of the signs.

But he said that, while the money they spent in the area was welcome, locals were fed up with having to replace the signs because people had been stealing them as souvenirs.

He said: "We had a vote last year on whether to rename the town, but decided to keep it as it is.

"After all, F**king has existed for 800 years, probably when a Mr F**k or the F**k family moved into the area. The 'ing' was added as a word for settlement."

Apparently the villagers didn't find out about the English meaning of the word until British and American soldiers stationed in the area in 1945 started arriving in large numbers.

Hauppl said: "We all know what it means now, but for us F**king is F**king - we don't give it a second thought."

Franz Duernsteiner, an expert on bizarre Austrian village names, said the residents of F**king were actually very "conservative" people.

He said: "Most of them can speak English, and when someone asks them where they come from they are a little ashamed to say it."

Residents of two other Austrian communities, Windpassing and W**k on the Lake, suffered a similar reluctance, he added.

update: see http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1509431.html

preparing for uni

2005-08-22T13:51:00.000+01:00

got tons of stuff from Exeter University in the post this morning - forms to fill in etc.
I forgot to mention here in my blog, i got my place there! I had to get minimum AAB and i got AAA - and of course i'm very happy about it! :-)

spam, spam, spam...

2005-08-20T12:58:00.000+01:00

i've been spammed! someone has put an advert for timber in the comment of one of my posts and i'm trying to figure out what the hell that has to do with my blog. oh well.
it's been a while since i posted pictures so here is one of a mr potato head dressed up as darth vader! (darth 'tater, ha ha...)
rather cute actually.

Intuition Test

2005-08-20T12:46:00.000+01:00

More Scientific
You have:77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and70% EMOTIONAL INTUITION
The graph represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored above average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition.Your scientific intuition is stronger than your emotional intuition.
Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you're good at Quake.Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences.
My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
You scored higher than 99% on Scientific
You scored higher than 99% on Interpersonal
If you liked my test, send it to your friends!
The 2-Variable Intuition Test
http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=3890039532751104124

pictures are back

2005-07-23T18:36:00.000+01:00

had trouble posting pix in my blog lately cos of problems with the "hello" software that i used for it, but ive just found a new way of posting pix, using the "create post" page (click the little icon at the top of it) so i'll be trying that out soon and posting more pictures (it's been a long time since i posted any.)
got back home from london this morning, its weird being back here after 3 weeks away! but its good, and i had a good time in london too.

alive in London!

2005-07-09T08:46:00.000+01:00

i've been in London since the 3rd of July cos I'm on a course at the LSE summer school. as you probably know, there has been a series of bombings by terrorists here. luckily, i (or anyone else I know) have not been harmed! i was in a lecture when someone came in telling us what had happened (that was the first i knew of it) and telling us we'd better ring our families to let them know we're safe (immediately everyone switched their mobile phones on all at the same time). my parents and brother were due to take a train, so when i heard that there had been bombings on trains, of course i worried about them. there were some problems calling them cos so many ppl were calling each other at the same time that the local phone network got overloaded, but eventually i got through to them - it turned out that they arrived too late for their train (which i think was the one at king's cross that got blown up) and when they got to the station, there was pandemonium there and they heard the explosion. the station was shut down and they couldnt leave london cos all the stations were being shut down, so they went to a hotel for the night, then the next day they got a coach to Cambridge (cos my brother was going to a uni open day there), and later they are going to go home. we got a lot of worried phone calls from friends who knew we were in London!
i also texted a mate of mine, Tara, who lives in london for most of the year, and she was ok, she wasnt in any of the blasts or anything (and school ended up being cancelled for the day for her!). for the rest of the day and for the next day (friday), my lectures were cancelled, but it's all back to normal on monday. at lunch break on thursday (when the terror attacks happened), i left the campus to go back to the halls to get my library card (planning to return to the campus and go to the library after lunch, assuming that everything would carry on as normal) but when i got to the halls of residence i found out that the police wanted everyone to stay indoors where they were until further notice, so i stayed in the halls for about 5 hours until the warning was stopped. i spent a few of those hours watching the news on the tv and realised the situation was a lot more serious than i first thought. some of the Americans who are also on the summer school were saying things like "we're gonna get bombed, we're gonna die, so let's go to the student union bar!" and i later saw a drunk one in the lifts. it was kind of spooky because it was really quiet outside - when i was walking back from the campus to the halls, there was little traffic and few people, but lots of ambulances and police cars, and when i was in the halls the background noise of traffic was gone, you could hear things you wouldnt normally be able to hear like ppl talking on the streets (i was on the 9th floor and i could hear the ppl outside the houses near the halls (until they - sensibly - went back indoors), that's how quiet it was!) and there were just the sirens of the ambulances and police cars all the time. there were the sounds of ambulances/police cars 24/7, and even now you can still hear quite a few of them.
at about 6pm, the police were no longer advising ppl to stay at home (although the LSE did advise us not to use public transport) and i went out to the nearby Sainsbury's with some spanish students i know. things were starting to get back to normal, but it was still a bit strange because london was still less busy than usual, and there was a bit of an odd atmosphere around. we only went out for a few minutes - straight to the supermarket, get some food, get straight back, no loitering on the streets, just in case it still isnt 100% safe.
now life is getting back to normal as best it can.
i went through different phases on the day, i think, like shock, fear, anger... can't remember the exact order... but i remember at one point feeling very angry about the fact that the attacks were not prevented. on tv, ppl were saying things like "we knew since 9/11 that something would happen to london, it was a question of when, not if" and i thought, if they knew london would be attacked, why wasnt there more security or police to prevent it? the world leaders at the G8 summit get plenty of security, of course... but it makes you wonder: who is more important, 8 world leaders or 8 million ordinary citizens?
on a lighter note... yesterday, as lectures were cancelled so i didnt have a lot to do, and i needed some light relief from the stress of what had just happened after the day before, i found the nearest record store to the halls - Virgin Megastores - and it really is a megastore, 3 floors of music, films and videogames. went shopping there, spent ages wandering round in wonder, spent £90.90 on CDs (in a sale, you know...), DVDs and books. i now have very little money left, so i am budgeting carefully (i'm here for another 2 weeks so i have to make my money last!). i get a free breakfast every morning here in the halls (all included in the price, which was paid for by my parents, bless them) so i don't have to worry about that, and most things are within walking distance so i don't have to worry about travel costs (and anyway i think i'm going to avoid London's public transport for a while, just in case), it's really only food that i have to worry about now. there's a Boots nearby that sells their famous "meal deal" lunches (sandwiches, wraps, crisps, drinks, etc.) so i can live on those cos they're fairly cheap (altho more expensive here than in most other parts of the country!) - i reckon i'll be able to live on £3 a day or less. this is looking like an introduction to the traditionally poverty-stricken student life... so i guess i'm getting in training for uni. (i went on this course (introduction to english law) as a kind of "training" for when i start my law degree this autumn.) anyway, i needed a diet anyway!
before i forget, there was also the "leavers' ball" on the 1st of july, which was great, and we were all given a "graduating class of 2005" yearbook by the head boy and girl, which was really nice. when i get back home, i'll find it and type up here what they said about me... Anyway, at the ball i managed to blag a free drink out of my chemistry teacher (i didn't have any money on me!) and i tried to blag a drink off the PE teacher too but he didnt fall for it (so much for the myth that PE teachers are thick... altho i have met many stupid PE teachers in my life, this guy certainly isnt one of them - he's actually very witty) but i later managed to get some money off some very nice ppl so i managed to buy myself a few drinks. had a great time, danced a little, didnt get drunk tho, socialised and talked with ppl, including some guests who had been invited - some of them were ppl i knew who i hadnt seen in ages, so it was nice to meet them again!
anyway bloggers, sorry about the long long long post, but it's just i had so much to say, so much has happened in a few days, so i'm stopping now (even tho there is a lot more i could add, like more about the leavers ball and yearbook, or what i bought in mr richard branson's nice big record store) before this blog gets too big and out of control... until next time!
Hel.

don't forget...

2005-06-25T10:43:00.000+01:00

... i'm selling stuff on ebay again this week, so don't forget to search for me, you may be interested in buying some of my stuff!

happy procrastinating time

2005-06-04T11:51:00.000+01:00

exam season is upon us again... oh goody. im struggling to revise. im busy procrastinating. zzz. boredom.

make money, make friends, make your voice heard... not a scam!

2005-06-01T20:22:00.000+01:00

join ciao, europe's biggest consumer website, and earn money by writing reviews, sharing reviews and taking part in occassional surveys, plus take part in the online community... click here to sign up and you're off, and i earn extra money for being the one that told you to do it! i can assure you reader that this is a very good service, i use it myself (ive earned £5.22 so far, yay!) and it's not a scam or anything, u won't get any spam/junkmail etc. just use the link above... please! thank you. have a nice day!

That Annoying Crazy Frog

2005-05-28T19:44:00.000+01:00

hate crazy frog (a.k.a. chav god)? want to see him die? then click here...

a rather handy online tool - who you should vote for in the UK election 2005

2005-04-27T18:41:00.000+01:00

Who Should You Vote For? Take the test...

I got Liberal Democrat.

review of last night's telly

2005-04-02T12:05:00.000+01:00

Current mood: sick but accomplished!
i did it - i stayed awake until the lil' hours watching tv all night! i think the lyrics of black flag's classic track "tv party" are appropriate right now (except the bit with the TV breaking):
T.V. PARTY TONIGHT
T.V. PARTY TONIGHT
T.V. PARTY TONIGHT
T.V. PARTY TONIGHT
WE'RE GONNA HAVE A T.V. PARTY TONIGHT...ALRIGHT
WE'RE GONNA HAVE A T.V. PARTY ...ALRIGHT...TONIGHT
WE'VE GOT NOTHING BETTER TO DO,THAN WATCH T.V. AND HAVE A COUPLE OF BREWS
EVERYBODY'S GONNA HANG OUT HERE TONIGHT...ALRIGHT
WE'LL PASS OUT ON THE COUCH ALRIGHT...TONIGHT
WE'VE GOT NOTHING BETTER TO DO, THAN WATCH T.V. AND HAVE A COUPLE OF BREWS
DON'T TALK ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE...WE DON'T WANT TO KNOW
WE'RE DEDICATED TO OUR FAVORITE SHOWS
WE SIT GLUED TO THE T.V. ALL NIGHT...AND EVERY NIGHT
WHY GO INTO THE OUTSIDE WORLD AT ALL...IT'S SUCH A FRIGHT
WE'VE GOT NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN WATCH T.V. AND HAVE A COUPLE OF BREWS
T.V. NEWS SHOWS WHAT IT'S LIKE OUT THERE...IT'S A SCARE
YOU CAN GO OUT...IF YOU WANT...WE WOULDN'T DARE!
WE'VE GOT NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN WATCH T.V.AND HAVE A COUPLE OF BREWS
DON'T TALK ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE...WE DON'T WANT TO KNOW
WE'RE DEDICATED TO OUR FAVORITE SHOWS
I WOULDN'T BE WITHOUT MY T.V. FOR A DAY...OR EVEN A MINUTE!
I DON'T BOTHER TO USE MY BRAIN ANYMORE...THERE'S NOTHING LEFT IN IT
WAIT A MINUTE MY T.V. SET DOESN'T WORK
IT'S BROKEN!WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO TONIGHT
THIS ISN'T FAIR
WE'RE HURTIN'!
WE'VE GOT NOTHING LEFT TO DO
LEFT WITH NO T.V. JUST A COUPLE BREWS
WHAT ARE WE GONNA TALK ABOUT...I DON'T KNOW
WE'RE GONNA MISS OUR FAVORITE SHOWS
NO T.V. PARTY TONIGHT.

that's the life for me! anyway, here's what i watched:
top of the pops - nothing i liked except peter kay & tony christie's "is this the way to Amarillo?" which got me feeling like singing and dancing it around the house like in the video.
timewatch: the great wave - about a tsunami in britain in 1607, if u can believe it! its actually possible, this one is one of 3 known tsunamis in britain.
the 2 ronnies sketchbook - funny, some good sketches.
french and saunders' i can't believe its not music - good music spoofs. their spoof of madonna, missy and britney got me laughing out loud!
the games - the last of the series i believe, they all did very well, except the bloke from hearsay (yuck!) who replaced one of the other guys who left cos he didnt feel well or something.
friday night with jonathan ross - decent fun as always and with a good performance by garbage.
the friday night project - never watched it before, it was good but a little bit overrated maybe, and very smutty! altho funny at times.
life - a movie from a few years ago, good altho it did go on for a lifetime! i havent watched films in ages so i think my attention span no longer lasts 90 minutes.
morrissey: live from manchester - brilliant concert! one of the highlights of the night! the mozfather is back and better than ever i reckon. its available on dvd ("who put the M into manchester?") so i think i'll get it. actually theres quite a few dvds i want to buy - u2, lots of films (ive got a massive list of about 50 movies to watch), the clash, jools holland to name a few. need money for these... need ebay perhaps...
unfortunately to achieve the awakeness to watch all this lot i decided a bit of coffee would help. i started in the morning with coffee for breakfast (no food) and felt nauseous for the rest of the day, topping up with coffee (for the caffeine, not to make me feel sick!) throughout the day. it cant be healthy but it seemed to work, i stayed up til about 4 am. and i managed to get about 7 hours of biology revision done in the day too! i feel great now, i feel like ive actually achieved something for once in my life!

eBay again

2005-04-01T12:33:00.000+01:00

oh yeah, while youre here, dont forget to check out my ebay stuff, im selling things for money again. come on, buy buy buy!
ah, the wonders of ebay...

my plan for today

2005-04-01T12:24:00.000+01:00

tonight i will stay up late (need lotsa coffee for that i think) and watch tv. there is so much on tonight (nothing during the day tho) and i no longer have a VCR to record it so im just gonna watch tv all night (luckily its saturday tomorrow and im on holiday anyway so i dont need to worry about school/work etc.). it must sound like a total waste of time but im gonna do it anyway. and now im off to do something useful with my time (for once) by revising for my exams. (sigh...)

good times, bad times...

2005-03-22T11:42:00.000Z

theres been a total mix of good stuff and bad stuff since i last blogged.
bad news first: my gran, who i really loved, has died. we're all really gutted and miss her.
good news: i got good results in my january exams (she'd have been proud) and ive got places at 4 universities - exeter and reading gave me AAB offers, queen mary and sussex gave me ABB offers. i dont mind about being rejected by LSE and warwick cos i like the 4 ive got, and i'll probably get AAB or ABB. just got to work for it now.

this is so cool! backwards messages!

2005-01-13T19:45:00.000Z

check both these out!

http://www2.memlane.com/jmilner/stairwaybackwards.htm

http://www3.telus.net/jefmil/stairwaybackwards.htm

ive tried the led zep one myself by playing my cd of it on my computer and recording it, then playing backwards in windows sound recorder, and it really worked! another one i tried for myself was def leppard's "rocket" (it has to be the version on "hysteria", cos it only works with that version) - at the very beginning u hear them singing quietly, and if u play it backwards theyre singing "we're fighting for the gods of war", which is a line from "gods of war" which is also on the "hysteria" album. and i tried out queen's "another one bites the dust" backwards too, and it was about marijuana!
backwards messages rock!!

doss day

2005-01-13T19:25:00.000Z

this morning i had a doss day... general studies exam first thing in the morning (a total doss subject, and it made me realise what a waste of time the lessons were in year 12 as they were completely different to the exam!), 1 biology lesson, and psychology cancelled cos most of the class were in an english exam, so i went into town with some of the few people that werent doing english. (so many ppl do english AS/A levels here! and at the other sixth form in this town, more ppl do law and psychology than any other subjects. ppl always do these kinda subjects!) we were a bit hyper, especially will, who was chasing pigeons and pole-dancing (around the poles in town, like signposts and stuff... not in a lapdance club or anything!), and who had earlier been messing around with a large cardboard box (including trying to fit me inside it...). i had a good day, except for the fact that i did hardly any revision (i need to do some, i have exams!) and accidentally left my jumper at college. maybe i shouldve gone home early like sarah did (we finished at the same time cos of our timetables).

BEN HELPING JACK OFF MALCOLM!

2004-12-17T23:02:00.000Z

ha ha! you visited this post on my blog in the hope of seeing a picture of Ben helping jack off Malcolm. tut tut, you naughty porn lover! you were wrong - all you're getting is this...

http://photos1.blogger.com/img/255/963/640/benhelpingjackmalc.jpg

... a picture of Ben helping Jack off Malcolm.
As you can see, it only takes one capital letter to change the whole meaning of the sentence. suddenly it's not so dodgy after all...

anyway the picture above is part of a little private joke of ours (one of many jokes of ours that use Jack's name in a dodgy way) and was taken on the ardeche trip this summer. it seems so long ago... its nearly christmas!

university challenge...

2004-12-14T17:09:00.000Z

applied to exeter again for a regular 3-year law course - havent heard from them yet. it doesnt matter if they accept me or reject me this time, cos ive got 2 offers already, but it would be nice if they accepted me cos i really like the location. found out yesterday that i was rejected by the LSE. oh well. hadnt expected to get in it anyway.

chemistry closed... (a bit of a bugger)

2004-12-02T16:24:00.000Z

the chemistry department at exeter has closed today - im gutted cos (a) i like chemistry and its important (we need ppl to research new drugs/medicines/pharmaceuticals etc, we need chemistry teachers for the future, otherwise we wont have future doctors/dentists etc, somebodys gotta find new renewable/non-polluting energy sources.....) and (b) i applied to do a joint honours degree in chemistry and law there. as theyre stopping the course now, i wont be able to do it, and theyre sending me a letter about it soon. theyll be giving me one extra ucas choice to apply to - i can apply to another course at exeter, or a course at another uni. im gonna choose law at either exeter or SOAS, im not sure which. both r excellent in general and for law. but it is a bit of a bugger that i have to apply again. (well im saying "bugger" but i really should say "inconvenience". )
anyway ive got 2 offers from reading and sussex (AAB and ABB respectively) so it doesnt matter too much if im rejected by the others.

woohoo!

2004-11-28T10:55:00.000Z

ive got conditional offers from the universities of sussex and reading, and ive been invited to an open day and interview at exeter uni. woohoo!

eBay

2004-11-13T11:42:00.000Z

i haven't posted much on my blog lately cos ive been busy. it was my birthday on the 22nd of october - my 18th - so i started buying and selling on eBay (cos u have to be 18 for it) and became virtually addicted! if you want to buy any of my stuff, click here (this is good marketing for me, helping me sell my old stuff, heh heh heh...)
the only other site ive been on lately is the ucas site - i finally got my application off this week! applied for law at sussex, queen mary college (university of london), london school of economics (uni. of london), exeter, warwick and reading. :-)

re: cool bands to look out for

2004-10-15T16:40:00.000+01:00

oh god ive just realised what bad colour clashes i had in that last post. oops.

cool bands to look out for - razorlight, franz ferdinand and more...

2004-10-15T16:20:00.000+01:00

razorlight - amazing rock 'n' roll band that have had huge hits with the singles "vice" and "the golden touch" and their debut album "up all night". one of my most recommended bands of the moment, taking over the UK with their amazing live shows. if the rest of the world has any sense it should listen out for them. www.razorlight.co.uk
the ordinary boys - already mentioned in my blog. similar to razorlight only more ballady than rocky. www.theordinaryboys.co.uk
franz ferdinand - already taken over the country with their self-titled debut and singles "michael", "take me out" and "matinee", accompanied by award-winning arty videos. www.franzferdinand.co.uk
atreyu - emo-ish metallers who sound a bit like funeral for a friend, toured with taking back sunday and have done an emo cover of bon jovi's "you give love a bad name". www.atreyurock.com
the vandals - comedy punks who covered queen's "dont stop me now" and have an album called "hollywood potato chip". rik from school once got stopped at an american airport for wearing one of their t-shirts which had a cartoon of 2 planes flying into each other. they thought it meant he was a 9/11 type suicide bomber so they dragged him away for questioning. (the t-shirt was actually made way before september 11th actually happened). anyway. www.thevandals.com
my chemical romance - gothic emo boys with 2 albums, "i bought you my bullets, you brought me your love" and "3 cheers for sweet revenge". both are kind of conceptual, telling stories of death, doom and relationships. surprisingly not depressing. www.mychemicalromance.com
well there you go, ive done my bit for the community now, by telling them about the "next big things" to look out for. (ive always got relatives asking me which bands are gonna be big, and im nearly always right. i told them the darkness were gonna be huge, and at first they didnt believe me, but when they headlined the BRIT awards they realised i wasnt kidding, and since then theyve always come to me for predictions of "who is going to be the next darkness.)

argh - i've been cheated... by a charity!

2004-10-15T15:32:00.000+01:00

after weeks of stress over my ucas university application, trying desperately to get the teachers to hurry up and do my predicted grades and reference, ive had to go back to square one because theyve just told me that my 3 months "work experience" at the local hospital does not actually count as work experience for a medical career. i feel totally ripped off by Outset, the organisation (which i think is also a government charity or something) that organised the work-experience/voluntary-work for me, cos they told me (and a lot of other people) repeatedly that what we were doing did count as work experience for medicine. (i think they also said it counted for other medical stuff like dentistry, nursing and pharmacy, so even more ppl are being ripped off than i thought...) I didnt mind doing the voluntary work - i actually felt good about taking a bit of pressure off the NHS - but the main reason i did it was cos i had been told it was good experience for becoming a doctor or other medic. if i had known that it was just voluntary work and not work experience, i wouldnt have done it when i did, i'd have done it during the summer holidays. (i did it during term time).
now i feel like ive been tricked into doing this work - theyve used misleading advertising to get lots of young people to do voluntary work. i think it could be one of these government initiatives to get young ppl off the street and doing something good (all this "tough on crime and the causes of crime" campaign malarkey) but if this is the government's way of looking like theyre doing something about youth crime, they are going completely the wrong way about it. the sort of people who want to be doctors are not exactly the sort of people who want to be criminals. if you want to be a doctor, you have to work hard and get straight As in your A-levels. the type of kids who are most likely to be criminals are unlikely to do the following things:
1. take A-levels; 2. take science A-levels; 3. get triple A grades; 4. want to be a doctor; 5. want to do voluntary work.
sure, it looks like theyre tackling crime - theyre getting teenagers off the streets, and all "daily mail" readers and other similar adults (the type of ppl who think the country is going to the dogs and can all be blamed on teenagers, asylum seekers, left-wing politicians and rising house prices) seem to think that all teenagers are criminals or potential criminals, so "getting them off the streets" (which is the phrase they always use) will lower crime rates. but the problem with this policy is that theyre getting the wrong teenagers off the streets - the type who are least likely to commit crime.

I'm back! France (Ardeche), The Ordinary Boys, and Oranges

2004-09-13T20:17:00.000+01:00

Got back from Ardeche trip a few weeks ago but i haven't done much blogging since then - been knackered, and having to do school stuff! So a few updates...
1. just before going there, i went to an excellent party at jack's, with him, his brother (charlie), will, malc, alice, clarkey and his cousin, and tom. drank alcohol, sunbathed, jammed, swam, had sauna and hot tub, ate barbeque food, chatted, played table tennis, jumped on trampoline... "excellent, dudes," as i believe Bill & Ted would say.
2. i got my AS results - AACCU in psychology, biology, chemistry, german and maths in that order. havent got a confirmed result for general studies cos i did 2/3 modules - if i cash it in now ill get a D which is good enuff for me!
3. i have dropped maths and german, and we dont do GS this year. so ive got 3 subjects instead of 6 this year - phew!
4. the ardeche rocked - it pissed down with rain on the first night we spent there, and the journey there and back took hours (and i had to be next to my little brother the whole time cos no one wanted to be with him) - but when we got there we had a great time! on the first day we did canoeing, and we were gonna do it again on the 2nd day but the storm washed all the canoes away, so we had to wait until (a) they found them again, and (b) the river was low enuff and clean enuff. but we managed to do it on the last 2 days, and we did some cool stuff on the days in between - our group (year 13s) did caving, rock climbing & abseiling, high-ropes walking, and mountain biking, and some other groups did kayaking and archery too. (it did make me realise tho how poor we are cos loads of ppl had done that sorta stuff before, but the only ones id ever done before were mountain biking and archery - the others were like unusual treats for me. (bloody rich private-school types... grr jealousy etc.)
5. the other day in chemistry we did one of those nice-smelly experiments that we always like - this time it was extracting limonene from oranges. i asked mr t what he thought about me doing pharmacy or dentistry (theyre my 2 main choices for uni - im doing my ucas form now) and he thought they were good ideas, but mrs b (who teaches biology) was well nasty to me about doing dentistry, calling me too clumsy etc. i dont see why shes not so nasty to alice - she wants to be a vet and shes got good grades, but compared with me shes practically retarded cos shes crap at stuff like answering interview questions - she cant think on her feet. shes only got good grades cos she studies a lot, and we think she has extra tutoring too. alice sucks up to teachers a lot - playing golf with them and letting them win and all that. that is one reason she has no true friends.
6. on tuesday (i think... cant remember now!) i saw the ordinary boys on mtv2 - theyre all from round here (worthing) and one of them is from my school. ironically enough, theyre not actually as ordinary as they make out to be - theyre all from private schools and their dads are rich. maybe one day if im really desperate for money, ill tell the NME... anyway, their new song ("seaside") is excellent. im gonna get their album one day.
7. ive started buying the big issue - something ive been meaning to do for ages. ive bought 2 issues so far from the nice guy outside marks & sparks and it felt good. theres also sometimes a violinist outside there too, im gonna give her money too one day. im amazed ive never been made a charity prefect or anything, considering how much i give to charity compared to everyone else here. theres ppl richer than me who go past them every day and never give them anything, even tho they have plently of money. mr d has even given assemblies saying we shld give money to charity (he gave the example of jack buying "invisible jim" and said jack could have given that money to a worthy cause. invisible jim is cool but jack is dead rich and im amazed that he never gives to charity or buskers, considering how rich and generous he is.) but the rich kids still never do. i find that its usually the poorest ppl, not the richest ppl, in the school, that give the most. liam is supposed to be poor (ppl always say that when they go to his house theres never any food in the fridge) but hes a vegetarian and involved in stuff like anti-cruelty-to-animals things, and hes done gigs to raise money for charity.
some food for thought there then.
ta-ra for now, chuck, as dear old cilla would say.

The, er, Wit & Wisdom of George W Bush

2004-08-27T12:04:00.000+01:00

"I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well." —Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2001

"My pro-life position is I believe there's life. It's not necessarily based in religion. I think there's a life there, therefore the notion of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." --Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 23, 2001

"Then I went for a run with the other dog and just walked. And I started thinking about a lot of things. I was able to — I can't remember what it was. Oh, the inaugural speech, started thinking through that." —Pre-inaugural interview with U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 22, 2001 issue

"I'm hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure." —Interview with the Associated Press, Jan. 18, 2001

"Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment." —Interview with the New York Times, Jan. 14, 2001

"The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants." —Interview with the New York Times, Jan. 14, 2001

"If he's — the inference is that somehow he thinks slavery is a — is a noble institution I would — I would strongly reject that assumption — that John Ashcroft is a open-minded, inclusive person." —NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw, Jan. 14, 2001

"She's just trying to make sure Anthony gets a good meal — Antonio." —On Laura Bush inviting Justice Antonin Scalia to dinner at the White House. NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw, Jan. 14, 2001

"I want it to be said that the Bush administration was a results-oriented administration, because I believe the results of focusing our attention and energy on teaching children to read and having an education system that's responsive to the child and to the parents, as opposed to mired in a system that refuses to change, will make America what we want it to be — a literate country and a hopefuller country." —Washington, D.C., Jan. 11, 2001

"I would have to ask the questioner. I haven't had a chance to ask the questioners the question they've been questioning. On the other hand, I firmly believe she'll be a fine secretary of labor. And I've got confidence in Linda Chavez. She is a — she'll bring an interesting perspective to the Labor Department." —Austin, Texas, Jan. 8, 2001

"I mean, these good folks are revolutionizing how businesses conduct their business. And, like them, I am very optimistic about our position in the world and about its influence on the United States. We're concerned about the short-term economic news, but long-term I'm optimistic. And so, I hope investors, you know — secondly, I hope investors hold investments for periods of time — that I've always found the best investments are those that you salt away based on economics." —Austin, Texas, Jan. 4, 2001

"The person who runs FEMA is someone who must have the trust of the president. Because the person who runs FEMA is the first voice, often times, of someone whose life has been turned upside down hears from." —Austin, Texas, Jan. 4, 2001

"She is a member of a labor union at one point." —Announcing his nomination of Linda Chavez as secretary of labor. Austin, Texas, Jan. 2, 2001

"Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods." —Austin, Texas, Dec. 20, 2000

"I am mindful of the difference between the executive branch and the legislative branch. I assured all four of these leaders that I know the difference, and that difference is they pass the laws and I execute them." —Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2000

"The great thing about America is everybody should vote." —Austin, Texas, Dec. 8, 2000

"Dick Cheney and I do not want this nation to be in a recession. We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work." —60 Minutes II, Dec. 5, 2000

"I knew it might put him in an awkward position that we had a discussion before finality has finally happened in this presidential race." —Describing a phone call to Sen. John Breaux. Crawford, Texas, Dec. 2, 2000

"They misunderestimated me." —Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

"The American people wants a president that appeals to the angels..." Bush in his speech during the GOP convention. Aug/2000 [Does he really believe that it is him ?...]

"We cannot let terriers and rogue nations hold this nation hostile (hostage) or hold our allies hostile.'' —Ibid. (09/09/00)

The Texas governor, who spoke passionately of the need for "plain-spoken Americans in the White House," tried to appear more Southern gentleman than good-ol' boy as he and running mate Dick Cheney shook hands with supporters at Naperville North High School before cantering among the crowd at the city's Last Fling 2000 parade. But "plain-spoken" took on quite an ironic meaning just before Bush addressed the estimated 7,500 people who gathered in and about the makeshift outdoor arena south of the high school. A live microphone picked up an aside in which Bush described a New York Times reporter who had written critically of his campaign as "a major-league ass hole." The microphone also recorded Cheney's rejoinder of "Oh yeah, he is, big time." The disparaging words could not be heard by most observers over the spirited playing of a marching band and the earsplitting roar of the crowd. Cheney later refused to discuss the incident, saying only that Bush "made a private comment to me." ...sounds very "presidential".. ---Naperville Sun - 09/06/00

"Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."--Ibid.

"We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers."—Houston,Texas, Sept. 6, 2000

"We don't believe in planners and deciders making the decisions on behalf of Americans."—Scranton, Pa., Sept. 6, 2000

"The best way to relieve families from time is to let them keep some of their own money." —Westminster, Calif., Sept.13, 2000

"They have miscalculated me as a leader." —Ibid.

"I am aperson who recognizes the fallacy of humans..." apparently meaning fallibility. --from "Bush courts women in cozy 'Oprah' visit" by William Goldshclag printed in the New York City edition of the Daily News, September 20, 2000, page 5

"A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness."-- The Edge With Paula Zahn, Sept. 18, 2000

"I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy." —Redwood, Calif., Sept. 27, 2000

"...more and more of our imports are coming from overseas." -- On NPR's Morning Edition (9/26)

While speaking about KIPP Academy in Houston, Texas during the debate last night, would-be president Bush said: "It's a school full of so-called at-risk children. It's how we, unfortunately, label certain children. It means basically they can't learn. ... It's one of the best schools in Houston." So he thinks that "at-risk" means "can't learn?" And that one of the best schools in Houston is filled with students that can't learn? What an idiot.

"Mr. Vice President, in all due respect, it is — I'm not sure 80 percent of the people get the death tax. I know this: 100 percent will get it if I'm the president."

"Quotas are bad for America. It's not the way America is all about."

"If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm for it." —St. Louis, Mo., October 18, 2000

"Our priorities is our faith." —Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10, 2000

"I mean, there needs to be a wholesale effort against racial profiling, which is illiterate children." —Second presidential debate, Oct. 11, 2000

"It's going to require numerous IRA agents." —On Gore's tax plan, Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10, 2000

"I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can't answer your question." —In response to a question about whether he wished he could take back any of his answers in the first debate. Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Oct. 4, 2000

"Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicines as we used to know it."

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." —LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

"If you don't stand for anything, you don't stand for anything!" Gov. George W. Bush said to a packed rally at Bellevue Community College on Tuesday night.

"They said this issue wouldn't resignate with the People. They've been proved wrong, it does resignate." ("resonate"?!)

"You've heard Al Gore say he invented the internet. Well, if he was so smart, why do all the addresses begin with "W"?" --10-28-00 Headline News - Mimi

Some Nostalgia - Bushisms senior: "We're enjoying sluggish times, and not enjoying them very much." - President Bush, 1/2/92.

ACTUAL LABEL INSTRUCTIONS ON CONSUMER GOODS

2004-07-28T16:32:00.000+01:00

. On a Sear's hairdryer: "Do not use while sleeping."(Gee that's the only time I have to work on my hair.)
. On a bag of Fritos: "You could be a winner! No purchase necessary. Details inside."(The shoplifter special)
. On a bar of Dial soap: "Directions: Use like regular soap."(And that would be how ...?)
. On some Swanson frozen dinners: "Serving suggestion: Defrost."(But its "just" a suggestion)
. On Tesco's Tiramisu dessert (printed on bottom): "Do not turn upside down."(Too late!)
. On Marks & Spencer Bread Pudding: "Product will be hot after heating."(As night follows day . . .)
. On packaging for a Rowenta iron: "Do not iron clothes on body."(But wouldn't this save me more time?)
. On Boot's Children Cough Medicine: "Do not drive a car or operate machinery after taking this medication."(We could do a lot to reduce the rate of construction accidents if we could just get those 5-year-olds with head-colds off those forklifts.)
. On Nytol Sleep Aid: "Warning: May cause drowsiness."(One would hope.)
. On most brands of Christmas lights: "For indoor or outdoor use only."(As opposed to what?)
. On a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."I gotta admit, I'm curious.)
. On Sainsbury's peanuts: "Warning: contains nuts."(Talk about a news flash.)
. On an American Airlines packet of nuts: "Instructions: Open packet, eat nuts."( Step 3: Fly Delta.)
. On a child's Superman costume: "Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly."(I don't blame the company. I blame parents for this one.)
. On a Swedish chainsaw: "Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals."(Was there a lot of this happening somewhere? My God!)

blog 20th july (tuesday)

2004-07-20T15:20:00.000+01:00

at home looking after mum today cos shes just come out of hospital yesterday. we were watching the movie "airplane!" today - twas v.funny.
i'll be posting some more about the saarbrucken experience, as i'm writing a piece about it for the school magazine now. of course there's stuff i can't really put in the magazine version, like getting drunk, or how many sex shops there were, or liam & florence shagging (fran found their pubes in the bed and we made jokes about it, and jo pronounced it well funny, like "poooubes!") but i'll try to give the humble persons of my school an idea of wot it was like (i.e. fun!).
I've been posting my pix from the trip on another blog that i created especially for it, click here for that...
oh and the lovely blogger.com has changed the "post options" thing on this thing so basically i can do a lot more stuff like different coloured text. it was probably there all the time but only available if u clicked "more post options", which i never did. anyway: woo look at me im typing in lots of different colours! wow. god bless modern technology, as i believe the americans might say.
speaking of americans, on the news last night they were saying that the government (which is republican) hasn't allowed loads of black former criminals to vote in the upcoming election, and theyre largely democrat voters... thats cheating to stay in power! so much for "land of democracy" and all that. how can this be the country thats supposed to be "bringing democracy to iraq" (politian-speak for "blowing up iraq") if they don't have any democracy at home? the only thing i can think of to say about that rather hypocritical country is a very sarcastic "god bless america".

The Saarblog (Saarbrücken Blog)

2004-07-11T14:34:00.000+01:00

Some things which are very abundant in Saarbruecken:

Irish pubs (Jack would like that)
Sex shops (Will would like that)
Affordable clothes shops (Frankie would like that)
Ornate churches (Lara would like that)
Cobbled streets (no-one wearing high heels would like that! Amy on the trip learnt this the hard way)
Germans (because it's in germany).

In a bit more detail:

There were 2 irish pubs in the town of Saarbrucken, Saarland, Deutschland: Irish Pub (sometimes called O'Dwyer's Irish Pub, but the sign outside just said Irish Pub) and Wally's Irish Pub (aka the Fake Irish Pub, the Other Irish Pub or the Australian Irish Pub).
Irish Pub has a lot of events, like DJ night and karaeoke (its really weird to hear someone singing "Livin' on a Prayer" in German...) and a very popular pool table. Wally's doesn't have so much and we suggested they get a pool table to attract more people - we laughed about it and the australian owner dude said theyre not actually in competition with the other Irish Pub.

The first sex shop i saw was near the youth hostel and it was called "EROTIC GIGANT: Der MEGA-EROTIC Discounter". I'm sure you don't need to be learning german to be able to understand what that meant.
There was also a little place that showed porn films and had little booths for individuals, and from the outside it was obvious what it was, even if you couldnt read: neon pink and blue signs and pictures and mannequins of women in lingerie. some people wanted to have their photos taken outside it as it was the most obvious sex cinema in the world, but Simon went inside and got thrown out and the guy who threw him out came outside too, i'm guessing to make sure he left, so we didn't do any photos. Funny thing was that he got thrown out not because he was underage but because he was smoking - it would probably be different in England!
Also saw brothels in high streets, and Chelmsford Liam (I am calling him that in this blog so as to not confuse him with Liam at my school) said he saw a real prostitute for the first time in his life, but she was worse looking than in movies.

Some of the shops looked quite good and i would have liked to go shopping but i didn't get round to it, and i wanted to spend carefully anyway. Loads of shops have the word "Mc" in the name: "McPaper", "McShirt", etc. There was a McDonalds of course, but their chips (fries?) were a lot saltier than the ones in england so i didn't like them so much. Another place with a funny name was Wienerwald, a restaurant that i went to with Claire on sunday. They did nice burgers, and was quite nice inside, even though theres a zillion posssible jokes you could make about the name. there was also a french guy who paid for our lunch!
There was a shop called Karstadt or something and it was huge and painted black on the outside and had hardly any windows, which made you wonder what life was like for the people inside. Maybe they just don't like sunlight, or maybe there's no one in the parts of the building where there's no windows and they just work in the windowed bits.

There was a church called Johanneskirche which made a good landmark as it was big, in the centre of the town, and was next to a tram stop. I'm not much into architecture, and even less into religion, but the building looked interesting on the outside. there was also a similar building, which i think might have been the Rathaus (town hall), which had a green statue of a knight killing a dragon on one of the walls. Im not sure but i think some of the churches were "gothic" architecture.

It's full of cobbled streets which i'm guessing is a general German thing cos Enzo (family friend who used to live near us but moved to Berlin) said that he can't cycle in Berlin cos its got so many cobbled streets.

You don't need my rough guide to germany to tell you that the country is inhabited by many germans.

I'll probably be adding more stuff about this place later on, but i'm gonna have a break now. Ive been writing about it for the school magazine too, but ive got plenty of time (all summer) to do that. If it's a success, i think i'll do travel writing, like Bill Bryson etc., only under a psyeuodonym (cant spell it but it means pen-name) cos im a little shy, so itll be under the name "H. Fire" (of course).

saarbrucken!

2004-07-10T22:53:00.000+01:00

just got back from saarbrucken trip and now rather knackered. i must post some stuff about it soon cos its been awesome. goodnight blogreaders. from helen.

Signs that you drink too much..

2004-07-02T22:11:00.000+01:00

You lose arguments with inanimate objects.

You have to hold onto the lawn to keep from falling off the earth.

Job interfering with your drinking.

Your doctor finds traces of blood in your alcohol stream.

Career won't progress beyond Senator from Massachusetts.

The back of your head keeps getting hit by the toilet seat.

Sincerely believe alcohol to be the elusive 5th food group.

24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case - coincidence?? - I think not!

Two hands and just one mouth... - now THAT'S a drinking problem!

You can focus better with one eye closed.

The parking lot seems to have moved while you were in the bar.

You fall off the floor...

Your twin sons are named Barley and Hops.

Hey, 5 beers has just as many calories as a burger, screw dinner!

Mosquitoes catch a buzz after attacking you

At AA meetings you begin: "Hi, my name is... uh..."

Your idea of cutting back is less salt.

You wake up in the bedroom, your underwear is in the bathroom, you fell asleep clothed. - hmm.

The whole bar says 'Hi' when you come in...

You think the Four Basic Food Groups are Caffeine, Nicotine, Alcohol, and [Women or Men].

Every night you're beginning to find your roommate's cat more and more attractive.

Don't recognize wife unless seen through bottom of glass.

That damned pink elephant followed me home again.

Senators Kennedy and Packwood shake their heads when they walk past you.

I'm as jober as a sudge.

The shrubbery's drunk from too frequent watering.

You wake up screaming "TORO TORO TORO!" in the middle of the night.

gulp shock horror: i may be related to a townie! :-(

2004-07-01T19:58:00.000+01:00

my cousin (a) listens to bad house music (not even good house music... if u have to listen to that sorta music at all, at least listen to good examples of it!), and (b) hates rock music (a lot) - he reckons its all crap, even jimi hendrix and led zeppelin, and ozzy is a "cretin". bah. hes almost a townie! u dont really get townies in italy cos they dont have shell suits and cheap clothes/bling (italians are too stylish for that kinda stuff lol). but at least hes gonna buy the new issue of BURN magazine for me (i asked for it cos its got ville valo in it). :-) maybe townies have their uses after all.
mum saw mr T about the study arrangements and he said he wasnt happy with it either and wanted to change it anyways, so im probably gonna be safe from the evil presence of ollie ;-)
not much else to report today, except that im entering a competition in kerrang, i got a suit in portsmouth (for work) and had it adjusted (and chatted with mrs b on the way to pick it up - shes quite friendly outside of lessons), i spent ages watching reruns of "beavis & butt-head" (they rule!) and ive been playing football half the day. oh and its leavers service tomorrow. im gonna miss the year 13s, they were nice to us. and i bunked off community action day with some others cos there was nothing for us to do, and we're not in trouble or anything so its ok.

it's soooooooo unfair! :'(

2004-06-28T17:19:00.000+01:00

as Kevin The Teenager often famously said, "It's SOOOOOOOOO unfair!!!"
Today I feel like that! and i am quoting Harry Enfield's great comic creation as it is the best way to express how i currently feel.
we had an arts day so i did no work (but got to watch "my big fat greek wedding", which was excellent) and then at the end there was a sort of presentation thing but half the year 12s (my year) couldnt be arsed to stay for it and wanted to go home early so we sneaked out the back. i went to the common room and was gonna get ready to go when i got started talking with jack and then i saw one of the lists of next year's study rooms (the heads of school have been preparing them lately) and i was with alice and ollie so i got out a pen and drew an arrow going from my name to another study where there were better ppl, and me and jack ended up having an argument about it. i never want to be anywhere near ollie for the rest of my life, i hate him so much, i dont care if i am only in my study for a few minutes per day i still want to avoid him as much as humanly possible. i dont wanna fall out with the heads of school (inc. jack) but id do anything to avoid ollie as much as poss. im still pissed off about being lumped with him (and alice). i feel like a fucking misfit. im so depressed.
the heads are being total hypocrites cos theyve been making sure the rooms are arranged so THEY arent with ollie (or other ppl they hate) and then they ignore the rest of us and put us with ppl we hate. ive told them repeatedly that ollie is the last person id wanna share a room with, and theyve just put me with him, out of all the possible ppl!! just cos theyre heads of school... power crazy ppl!

Portsmouth and Gomez

2004-06-27T17:32:00.000+01:00

played football almost all day friday cos chemistry and general studies were cancelled and i dont do maths anymore anyways so i had 6 free periods (out of 8 periods a day!) and then played rounders after school too. jack invited me to see gomez at concorde 2 in brighton and i really wanted to go but my parents wouldnt let me :-( but we went to portsmouth on saturday (yesterday) and i bought:

so i was happy :-)

clarkey announced who gets which study-rooms this year... turns out im with ollie cos no one can stand him and im one of the only remotely tolerant and resiliant ppl in the year. but at least im with will too. and alice, but she doesnt really count as she does nowt but talk about golf. will was well pissed off. we're undoubtedly gonna move into other ppl's studies as soon as poss...

Heroic Familt Dog Drags Problem Child Back Into Burning Building

2004-06-23T20:34:00.000+01:00

a classic spoof from The Spark:

Heroic Family Dog Drags Problem Child Back into Burning Building

Dover - Man's best friend made the ultimate sacrifice for Larry and Jen Randal yesterday, as the couple's cherished Retriever, Mrs. Cookie, leaped into a flaming building to ensure the demise of their obnoxious son. Four-year-old Billy Randal seemed about to escape a late-night blaze at the couple's suburban residence when the pet subdued the child and dragged him back to his death as the neighbors and parents he had tormented watched gratefully.
Mr. Randal said that the fire began accidentally when the vat of oily rags he stored in Billy's closet was ignited by one of the candles the family used for light. At the first sign of smoke, Mr. Randal quickly ushered his wife and Mrs. Cookie to safety, where they agreed that "maybe it was a good time to let the little guy catch up on his sleep."
A tense silence fell on the gathering crowd when crashing debris woke Billy, and the child stumbled toward the door. As the family watched helplessly from the sidewalk, the boy struggled free of the burning debris, his tiny body silhouetted against blaze.
Tragedy was avoided only when Mrs. Cookie sprung from Larry Randal's arms to pull the staggering, annoying four-year-old back into the fire. According to firefighters' reports, the dog, "like some kind of Darth Lassie," was gnawing on Billy's charred flesh even as it was itself overcome by flames.
Witnesses described the boy's screams as typically obnoxious. "But actual death shut Billy's mouth like no beating ever could," his thankful mother said.
She continued, "Billy changed the life of everyone who knew him. I'll never forget it when he pulled my hair and called me a lesbian." Mr. Randal added, "He would call me that, too." Billy was especially close to Mrs. Cookie, said his parents, "He would grip her ears and try to ride Cookie down the stairs or sometimes trick her into licking the stove. It's that kind of thing that inspired her to do what she did."
Shortly after the fire was extinguished, the family gathered with relatives and a few close friends at a nearby nightclub to come to terms with Billy's death.

blog wednesday 23 june

2004-06-23T20:22:00.000+01:00

must learn to write shorter blogs as my page takes longer and longer to load. oh well.
no longer pissed off with Dave as he has been nice to me today :-) still hate Ollie tho :-( i think everyone does. we were choosing study rooms today and no one wants to share with him (no surprise really).
Luigi is fun, we might go to the sports centre one of these days. me and dad took him out for an english cream tea and scones at the bowls club (at the marine gardens, not the big one in town... worthing is capital of the world for bowls!) - how british can ya get?! ;-)
ah cant think of much else to write now, except that Foss managed to get hold of a copy of the banned year 13 photo (see "the condom incident and other stories"), and Jack has broken his ass and his hand from falling 7 foot from something he climbed on and landing on a marble floor. ouch.

blog: tuesday 22nd june

2004-06-23T20:17:00.000+01:00

tuesday 22nd june:

went to see royal shakespeare company play of "a midsummer's night dream" (or is it "a midsummber night's dream"??) last weekend - twas excellent :-)
cousin luigi is here, learning english - hes doing well but is shy to speak in english as he doesnt think hes doing that great.
going to germany in a couple of weeks, but i cant wait to drop german! i am SOOOOOOO BORED during the lessons! and ollie is a right perv, he keeps trying to touch me (this week he swapped places with dave (without asking dave!) so he cld be next to me, and then he intrudes into my space - his hands and elbows and books spill over onto my desk, and sometimes he puts his feet under my desk too. i end up losing about 50% of my desk space :-( he doesnt seem to realise how rude it is. im dying to kick in his bollocks in revenge...). dave is ok sometimes but hes really depressing and cynical about everything (especially me) - he thinks hes so smart (i dont think hes any cleverer than average) and he treats me like im blonde or something. i hope i get a good enough grade in psychology so i can do it next year and drop german. if it wasnt for the trip, and the fact my mum wouldnt let me drop anything, id have dropped german yonks ago. id have dropped maths too, it was only mum's ban on me dropping subjects, and the fact i had extra tuition, that i carried on with it. i hope i pass it otherwise ive just wasted a whole fucking year of my life! wont find out until august...
got community action day soon (bah humbug! i did voluntary work for a few months, they should let me off community action day cos of that!) - basically means we have to spend a day supposedly helping ppl outside the school. it usually involves children and/or old people. in year 8 (my 1st community day) i signed up to do gardening with some friends and we thought wed all get to go together on the same project, but they split us up and put us all on different projects in totally different places so we didnt see each other all day, and i was in a group of strangers (they were nice to me, but i wanted to be with ppl i knew cos i was new there). we had to work in a garden at a school id never been to before, i think it was a "special" school, and i was really scared cos there was a guy there who kept on trying to chat me up. the next year i signed up to do something completely different but they still managed to give me the same placement again (its a total lottery) so i bunked off and stayed at home all day (i was bored but at least i felt safe!). in year 10 it was our last before the GCSEs so we were given our first choices - i chose to do cooking for old ppl from a home who were gonna come to the school for a visit and show. after cooking, i met the kids who had been looking after/socialising with the old ppl for their placement. there was one old man who kept repeating himself and talking on and on and on: he kept on saying "i used to take boys from private schools to india", just slightly rephrased each time ("i took private school boys to india", "i once took boys to india, they were from private schools", etc.) for about 15 minutes so the boys who were supposed to be talking with him just left him. there was also an old guy who tried to flirt with the girls.
u dont have to do community action day in year 11 so my brother's safe this year (hes always been lucky for this thing, he always seems to get stuff like sponsored walks with his friends) and i dont think u have to do it in Y13 either. but im in year12 so im stuffed. i just hope i get something nice this year since its my last community day ever.
weve got sports day on thursday and year 12 have to help (tho we dont take part) - doing stuff like measuring times and distances - but loads of us are thinking of not turning up to it. theres no point in me turning up to school anyway on that day, cos its just periods 1 and 2 as normal, then periods 3-5 getting ready for the sports day (i.e. doing bugger all, just standing outside waiting for coaches and stuff), and then the rest of the day is sports day. but on my normal thursday i dont have any lessons in periods 1 & 2 so i dont need to turn up until the afternoon (when theres the actual sports day), and then ill probably boycott it so i dont need to turn up at all.
found out results of heads of school - clarkey got head boy, lara got head girl, and jack and georgia got deputies. alice was so pissed off she didnt get head girl that she stormed off (allegedly crying too!). i didnt mind losing that much, cos lara is nice and i dont mind her being head girl, and i can always run for house captain or debating society prez.

the Killers

2004-06-19T21:34:00.000+01:00

here's a picture of that new band i've been going on about:

(their guitarist has similar hair to Will. altho there is no correlation between my friendship with him and my listening to the killers.)

stuff... random stuff... relatives... and other stuff. oh, and Chelmsford.

2004-06-19T21:14:00.000+01:00

one of my Italian cousins is coming to stay with us for a while, and my parents have gone to pick him up from the airport. He's coming here to learn english and he'll be going to one of those "english-for-foreign-students" schools in Brighton. But being italian, he's only planning to go to the morning lessons, and then come home to have lunch and sleep for a few hours in the afternoon. my gran reckons that it's a waste of time cos there's no point in him coming all the way over here to learn a bit of english when he has the chance to learn more, but his mum (my aunt) seems perfectly happy to spend her money on that (she's richer than us anyway. bah). it's typically (stereotypically! lol) italian attitude to do sod all in the afternoons. its a wonder anything ever gets done. Will and Malc are planning to move to italy one day and just laze about, eat, drink and have sex (not with each other, obviously). they're confident about getting jobs there cos theyre blonde and Italians worship blonde ppl as they are so rare.
went to see english 2nd/3rd cousins a few weeks ago, theyre really nice (Hi John, Susan, Rose, Sophia). its really weird that we've hardly ever seen them before, compared with how many times weve seen my italian 1st cousins - ok so theres a difference in relatedness but colchester is a lot nearer to us than italy! anyway we're gonna be seeing them much more often from now on. funny thing i noticed about essex when we went to see them: there's a heck of a lot of people in baseball caps. far more than in any other area. especially in chelmsford, and on industrial estates in colchester. apart from my relatives and their friends, who are normal people, essex ppl are a bit... well, funny. i am beginning to see what they mean by phrases such as "essex girls". it seems that everybody, bar (most) old ppl and immigrants, are dressed like this:
males: always wearing baseball caps, with big peaks (usually the younger the person, the larger the peak);
females: not wearing as much as you should be, especially if it's cold and/or you're overweight.

blog tuesday 15th june - exams, school, ash, the killers, and stuff.

2004-06-16T17:10:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 15th June 2004:

Finished exams last week :-) for once I think i may have actually passed a couple of maths exams for the first time in ages. (Fingers crossed for an overall pass - i reckon i failed M1 but passed P1 and S1. My overall grade is made from all 3, so hopefully my success at S1 and P1 will outweigh how bad i was at M1...)
Back to school to start work at the A2 syllabuses (syllabi?) - it's a little difficult to fit everything in as German and Psychology are on at the same time, so I've had to alternate between the two. I hope the teachers don't get pissed off by this (so far they aren't) - Depressing Dave in my german class was well pissed off that i had to leave the lesson to go to psychology, he thought i was bunking off or something, plus he was pissed off to be left alone - Evil Ollie wasn't there either, cos he was retaking his maths GCSE.
It is unbelievable how stupid Ollie is - not only is he the only person in my year group retaking GCSEs, he forgot to turn up to the mocks AND the real exams, had to reminded by the teachers, and ended up arriving late for the exams. And his parents are the richest in the school so they could probably afford to get him private tuition, all the revision guides he'd ever need, that sorta thing... so the only reason he could fail anything is just plain natural stupidity. He's not even bright enough to realise that he needs to revise for exams - i swear he's the only person i know who I've NEVER seen revising for exams (or doing any other work outside of lessons). I once asked him why he never works, and said that everyone else (including me) works, and he said "that's cos you're all stupid and I don't need to work cos i'm clever enough already." I couldn't get over how arrogant he is, and how far his tiny head is up his stinkin arse. People like that shouldnt exist, they should have died out by now - this guy has less intelligence than cavepeople. I could go on for ages about how stupid this geezer is, so i'd better stop now, otherwise I'll get huge electricity bills from having the computer on for so long... (Thankfully, he's rumoured to be leaving at the end of this year!)

On a brighter note, the yeargroup photos have arrived (it was at least 2 weeks since i sent the cheque for it, and I was beginning to think they'd forgotten, or nicked the cheque, or something...)
There's also the interviews for new heads of school tomorrow (I'm up for Head Girl). I hope it goes well - I couldn't think of much stuff to write for my CV for it, so i hope i do much better in the interview. I'm also curious to find out how i did in the voting for it (Evil Ollie only got 1 vote, and that was from Big Sam, who said he voted for him just cos he felt sorry for him cos no-one was voting for him.)
Also played Frisbee on the grass outside today, which was fun :-D and also went to the beach yesterday.
Got a craving for Ash records today, probably cos lately i've been watching the video for "Shining light" on TV a lot, hearing good reviews of their new album, and listening to similar bands like The Killers a lot too. Listening to "burn baby burn" right now.

The Penis working hours

2004-06-14T18:43:00.000+01:00

The complaint:

Ms.B.Haven;

I, the Penis, hereby request a raise in salary for the following reasons:

I do physical labour.

I work at great depths.

I plunge head first into everything I do.

I do not get weekends or public holidays off.

I work in a damp environment.

I work in a dark workplace that has poor ventilation.

I work in high temperatures.

My work exposes me to contagious diseases.

The response:

Dear Penis;

After assessing your request, and considering the arguments you have raised,
the administration rejects your request for the following reasons:

You do not work 8 hours straight.

You fall asleep after brief work periods.

You do not always follow the orders of the management team.

You do not stay in your designated area and are often seen visiting other locations.

You must be stimulated in order to start working.

You leave the workplace rather messy at the end of your shift.

You don't always observe necessary safety regulations, such as wearing the
correct protective clothing.

You will retire well before you are 65.

You are unable to work double shifts.

You sometimes leave your designated work area before you have completed
the assigned task.

And if that were not all, you have been seen constantly entering and
exiting the workplace carrying two suspicious looking bags.

Sincerely,

The Management

Pictures Moved

2004-06-03T14:39:00.000+01:00

2 pix (of Ville Valo and Justin Hawkins) that were on here have now been moved here - http://helfirespix.blogspot.com.

HelFire's Blogging and Stuff

New year, new look, new blog...

Blowing the cobwebs off my blog...

A fun evening in with an inflatable...

Bloody Nasty People, followed by some bloody nice people

"My head feels like there is a Frenchman living in it!"

My new favourite music video

Barbarism Begins At Home

I was looking for a job and then i found a job, and heaven knows i'm miserable now!

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

Video Killed The Radio Star

One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back!

Back To The Old House

Brief rant

Exams: The more you ignore them, the closer they get...

"You're Beautiful"? You're perving on my grilfriend on the train!

Morrissey live @ Manchester Apollo, Saturday 6th May 2006

Lazy days

Back and forth

Political correctness gone mad?

The New Monkey Express

It's been a long time...

The Cavern, at last!

Hail the Rickman! (and praise the Lord!)

The high cost of low living

Rock and roll, "borrowed" traffic cones and broken glasses...

Gimme! gimme! gimme!

storms in tabloid teacups

*in best noddy holder voice* iiit's christmaaaaaas!

Top Of The Pods - daily top ten lists

today's buzz bands of the day...

Rain Is Rubbish

an ottery way to celebrate guy fawkes' night... (only in england!)

a new post. about partying. again! :-)

it's "only" rock 'n' roll? news about neo-nazis abusing the power of music... followed by some good music and some good times!

a little bit of coffee and a bloody lot of froth

i went to university and all i wrote was this lousy blog ;-)

zzz

toffee and coffee

Beatlemania, or I Have Forgiven Macca...

how i wasted 14 minutes of my time

Trifle of trivia

if you want to check out what i'm listening to...

always look on the bright side of life

well... i suppose it's not too bad...

traditional grotty student accommodation

woohoo!

thoughts/rants

star war: backstroke of the west

damn you blogger

Procrastination strikes again

"life is very long when you're lonely..."

News: Stop stealing our Fucking signs!

preparing for uni

spam, spam, spam...

Intuition Test

pictures are back

alive in London!

don't forget...

happy procrastinating time

make money, make friends, make your voice heard... not a scam!

That Annoying Crazy Frog

a rather handy online tool - who you should vote for in the UK election 2005

review of last night's telly

eBay again

my plan for today

good times, bad times...

this is so cool! backwards messages!

doss day

BEN HELPING JACK OFF MALCOLM!

university challenge...

chemistry closed... (a bit of a bugger)

woohoo!

eBay

re: cool bands to look out for

cool bands to look out for - razorlight, franz ferdinand and more...

argh - i've been cheated... by a charity!

I'm back! France (Ardeche), The Ordinary Boys, and Oranges

The, er, Wit & Wisdom of George W Bush

ACTUAL LABEL INSTRUCTIONS ON CONSUMER GOODS

in best noddy holder voice iiit's christmaaaaaas!

gulp shock horror: i may be related to a townie! :-(