Off Centre

Music is meant to be fun. It's there to lift us up, to entertain us, to press the buttons on the console of our souls. For some, music define life. For others, it's simply pleasant wallpaper.

It's nice to see a rock track in a top slot. And at least it's not Bring your daughter to the slaughter.

The Christmas No1 race is meant to be a bit of a laugh, part of the silly season.¹: It's funny that 'Fuck you I won't tidy my bedroom' is number one, but this does not mean it's the start of some miraculous change in the music scene.

All they've done is protest McDonalds and fast food by going to Burger King instead. ¹

For that to happen, people would actually have to make an effort, go to gigs, support artists and y'know, make an effort.

For example, rather than Rage against the Machine, why wasn't Fifty Grand for Christmas plugged. Not only is it an indie song, it's also cheerfully Christmassy and would upset a certain smug music mogul...



¹: That said, it's nice to see a Shield's lad do well. He used to live just over the road from my Mum's place. Mind you, just because Cheryl Cole has decided to rename all Sanddancers as Geordies does not make it true. Cheryl Cole can sod off back to the south. By which I mean Byker.
²: (Fast food, is of course, an over used analogy, but I think it fits here: A matter of convinience and taste. It's not perfect of course. As far as I know, JLS don't generate health problems.)

I am a bit pissed off with O2 right now. There is no point to having an iPhone – or indeed any other Smartphone if the cellular data network isn’t working. And for the second time in as many days it isn’t – for me at least. A colleague of mine, also on O2, is smugly able to access pretty much anything he wants to on his iPhone 3GS. My humble 3G is sullenly silent regarding all aspects of technology more advanced than texts and phone calls. Of course, it’s not the phone, it’s the bloody network. It seems that yesterday he had connectivity problems, too, same as me. I just happen to have been selected by the Karma Pixies for special treatment.

Do O2 have a service status page? They do not. Not an official one anyway and the office firewall prevents me from accessing the unofficial forum.

I have been reduced to sending them direct messages on Twitter, would you believe? I am not holding my breath for a response.

It is the solstice today, I believe. The shortest day of the year and the last working Monday of 2009, the way the bank holidays fall this year. It should be a reasonable three weeks coming up: a three-day week this week, a two day week next week and then a three day week after that. Thus we juggle our annual leave to try and get some kind of break with both Furtle and me in the same place.

As much as I like the cold weather, I could do with a thaw, just now. The gutter is leaking above and just to the left of the door to the Carpathia, so there is a permanent shower of water coming from it - presumably there is a plug of ice somewhere, causing melt water to back up and overflow. We have some impressive (for London) icicles and the terrace outside the door is like an ice rink. Thank God for dishwasher salt. There is a slick of ice down the wall where the water has run and frozen. I noticed this morning that the extractor fan in the bathroom has stopped working. I am wondering if it is iced shut; there is no obvious reason inside why it should have stopped working. I shall have to try and see if I can tell by looking from the outside.

In other news, I had a good night's sleep last night, though another hour or so would have been nice, so I feel reasonably perky this a.m.

Note to self: buy chicken tonight.

As we leave behind the final weekend before Christmas, I find that I am rather tired and not looking forward to going to work tomorrow. Nothing wrong with work per se, it seems to be going rather well, although a clearer idea of the new set up would help immensely. No, it's just because I am tired.

I slept very poorly on Friday night with many, but indistinct anxiety dreams brought on by the lack of clarity noted above. I think it will work out well enough with a bit of work and application on my part, but clearly my subconscious has reservations. It doesn't always back me up as much as I'd like. Anyway, that's for another day. The result was that I slept very poorly and when ellefurtle got up at God-awful-o'clock to visit her aged ancestors out in Dover Court, or Harwich or similar, I was wide awake but bleary. Saturday saw our hero accomplish virtually nothing beyond catching up on TV over iPlayer and I succumbed to a doze late afternoon whilst listening to podcasts on my iPhone. Furtle got home around 8.30 so we ordered in an Indian Takeaway and watched a few episodes of Buffy Season 4. Then to bed.

And despite being dog tired, it seems the afternoon nap had fooled my body clock just sufficiently to deliver a further poor night's sleep this time not helped by an attack of indigestion around 3.30am.

No lie in this morning to compensate. We were up, breakfasted and out of the Carpathia by about 10.00am so we could get to Writtle, the Furtle home town, to help her recently-moved parents with unpacking and such. We arrived in a cold and snowy Chelmsford, grabbed a taxi the last three miles and quickly investigated the village green and church to get a couple of photos before advancing upon the newest incarnation of Furtle-Towers. They were out. It seems that Furtle Minor had required a lift to the airport and ours being an unscheduled visit and all... After a couple of false starts we managed to make contact and repaired to the Wheatsheaf, one of the two smallest pubs I know, for some Real Ale while the parents turned up. Somewhere around that time, O2 decided to play silly buggers and I lost all data feeds to my iPhone, so I was unable to keep track on anything. It's times like that when I realise what a slave I have become to technology. It is, of course working again, now I am at my PC.

The rest of the afternoon was spent shifting mysteriously large amounts of stuffed toys around and adding them to the attic. We finished with Champers, ginnantonnix and yet another curry, before wending our way back to the Carpathia.

A very tired Furtle has collapsed into bed. Annoyingly, I am wide awake, but I shall have a shower shortly, and then try to get to sleep.

Courtesy of the King of RPGS.

Of all the Doctor's enemies, which would you say is the one that would have him most likely to run back to his TARDIS and scarper?

Would you say the Daleks, the genocidal pepperpots that wish only to rain burning Nazi death down on anything that is not a Dalek? Feared across the universe, they spread their terror relentlessly and remorselessly.

Except in the Amazon UK home furnishings department , where you can buy a Derek rug...



I have done a screen capture, because I am sure that someone will notice in due course and correct it. Perhaps the Daleks themselves. Until it is changed, however, you can check for yourself, here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linen-Ideas-Doctor-Who-Derek/dp/B002GCA096/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=kitchen&qid=1261142943&sr=1-1

Fantastic.

I should just like to place on record my disappointment concerning the performance of local meteorology.

After a pleasing start last night while we were in the pub for the quiz, the snow petered out and it looks as though anything that came down in the wee small hours has scattered in the wind. At best, it looks as though there has been a liberal sprinkling of talcum powder.

This means that I have to go to work, which is doubly depressing since I know that we are likely to be thin on the ground because of better performing meteorology elsewhere in the South East...

Bitter cold, no snow and travel to the office. The End Times.

Personally I don't think I could care less, but there are those who do, and possibly some of them read this journal o'mine.

So what precisely was going through the heads of the people who sanctioned this Christmas campaign in New Zealand? Did it not occur to them that someone, somewhere might take it a little bit amiss? It's not a difficult thing to realise is it?

A dejected-looking Joseph lies in bed next to Mary under the caption, "Poor Joseph. God was a hard act to follow". St Matthew-in-the-City Church in Auckland, which erected the billboard, said it had intended to provoke debate.

I should be back in the North-East round about the 23rd, and back in Manchester for New Years. I still have no idea what I'm doing for New Years, but then I never do.

So inevitably I either up with too many invites, or none, and start the year with a feeling of 'Surely that's not all there is?'

Despite quite liking Christmas, I'm not a fan of the New Year's Eve. It is, for the me, the compulsory requirement to have organised fun.

I used to really, really like getting pissed on the Royal Mile in Scotland, but sadly, like all good things, too many people and too few people to nursemaid the idiots meant that it stopped being a 48hour street party and instead became a chore.

I like fun. I like my fun, however, to be fun. In the same way that I don't need Valentine's Day in order to be romantic, I don't need an arbitary calendar based tradition to instruct to go out and celebrate.

I am alive, am awesome, and know good people who are also alive and awesome. That's cause enough.

I am looking forward to this: Iron Man 2.


Now with added War Machine.

The phone on my desk is blinking at me balefully. There are two orange lights that I cannot get rid of; telling me that there is at least one message waiting on voicemail. Except that I cannot access my voicemail. It is busy. Quite why my, or anyone else’s voicemail should be busy, I have no idea. Even the direct dial work-around is busy. The phones have not been the same since they were upgraded’ and that pretty much is the story of life around here.

I feel a bit hot and bothered at the moment. I nipped out at lunchtime to buy stamps and post some Christmas cards. Unlike ten years ago, when Victoria was awash with post offices, I had to wander off to Broadway where there is an oddly architectured place that looks like 1930s a strange meld of Art Deco-Stalinist Brutalism. I have traditionally disliked using that branch because it is so busy, but it turns out that they have machines that will sell stamps for anywhere in the world, so I managed to do what I wanted, with a relatively short wait.

Walking there, I was wrapped up against the sudden onslaught of winter, which seemed to have got damper, rather than colder. On the way back, however, it had reverted and I was liberally sprinkled with fine snow flakes by the time I got back to the office. I was also rather hot under my coat, which made it uncomfortable – too cold and damp to do without the coat, too mild to be comfortable with it! Thank God I haven’t been wearing my jacket, too!

Text messages from ellefurtle suggested relatively heavy snow in the Whetstone area that was sticking, but later updates say that it has switched to rain, which is annoying. Maybe over night…

I have finally managed to get hold of my messages. One may not be for me, after all that and the other is from someone calling himself Richard Beckinsale, which sounds almost as if it could be a wind-up. I bet he gets that all the time.

It seems that all your favourite carols were originally sung to folk tunes, according to this article on the BBC News website...

The Christmas carol While Shepherds Watched their Flocks was originally sung to the tune of folk song On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at, an academic claims.

I can imagine that intellectually, but what I can't do, because my brain rebels at the thought, is actually insert the lyric into the tune. I can hum 'Ilkley Moor' and I can hum While Shepherds', but not with the lyrics transposed in my brain. I think it is hard wired to prevent it; a defence mechanism, perhaps.

In the meantime, here is a morsel of news for pax_draconis and other aficionados of matters octopodal. It's nothing to do with Christmas, but it is amusing. Octopus snatches coconut and runs...

Meme stolen from renniek First sentence in my LJ each month for 2009:

January: So, Steven Moffat, who is a massive fan of the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) has cast a youthful and energetic unknown into the role of The Timelord.
February: From Watchmen oneone* site The New Frontiersman (which you may recall is the right-wing rag in the comic book.
March: As hinted in previous posts, I now have a job that does not involve playing Playground Monitor instead of actual work. Also, this new job has a reliable salary¹
April: Today is Talk Like A Dalek Day. (Link goes to Facebook).
May: An embedded Youtube of a Games and learning lecture.
June: "Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care." - from Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
July: Saw Drag Me To Hull last night, a lovely and coo, fully air conditioned cinema.
August: I've got mixed up with another meme. Oh no!
September: So Marvel has been eaten by the Disney Empire. Like many Marvel fans, my response is one of fret and concern, but not suprise, because the House of Ideas has been looking troubled for a while.¹
October: I have just remembered something very, very important.
November: Have had a rather awesome weekend with the lovely anne_l_davies, morningstar_lj and Jules.
December: For those who don't know, myself and Anne have a series of world domination plans, all of which aim to make our lives a bit better.

So this morning, the weirdos were out in force. You can tell it’s their time of year: there are very few trolley bags to control them, so the dimensions just leach through willy-nilly on the Northern Line.

I was perched in my seat between Snuffle-Grunt Man, a new-comer to these parts. I think he is the god of nasal congestion, if the noises he was making are anything to go by. He was on my right. To my left was Paisley Girl who seemed to be dressed from head to foot in gaudy green paisley, with just a hint of blue-green tartan trim. Imagine a colour-adjusted Bay City Roller blended with Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor Who. Just lose the hat and brolly. If in doubt up the paisley; you’ll begin to get the picture. Then add paisley.

Neither of these, however, gets the caddyman award for weirdness. The fashion fairies had descended on a chap sitting just off to my left and on the other side of the carriage.

Imagine if you will, a Hooray Henry on a grouse shoot. Hold that mental picture and edit it thus: replace tweed shooting cap with black felt flat cap. Replace corduroy trousers with black drainpipes and swap out brown brogues with black patent leather lace-up boots. Add black leather gloves. Retain weedy green threadbare cardigan over open collared pale cream shirt (for best effect, do not iron shirt). Add paisley scarf (again with the bloody paisley!) tied rakishly as a cravat. IPod (or similar) with designer brown ear pieces.

The piece de resistance, however, the absolute genius, is the substitution of the tweed shooting jacket with a black velvet shooting jacket of a design that would have Jon Pertwee shouting “this time you go too far!”

The Henry himself should be long-faced and effete, sporting a pallor that would have the Prince of the Undead himself enquiring anxiously after his health. He reads a battered paperback copy of (probably Les Miserables) a book by Victor Hugo.

I am still getting over the fact that Barnet Council have decorated the High Road with what appear to be illuminated salamanders for the holiday season. I need a little less of the surreal in my life.

Well, it's not perfect and if you friends lock a post, I shan't see it until I access it on my home PC or iPhone, but I have managed to send most of my friends' page to Google Reader, where I can keep up with at least some of the goings on in LJ world while I am at the office.

ellefurtle downloaded the light sabre app for her iPhone.

Well, I couldn't let that go unchallenged, could I? So I downloaded it too. I have edited it slightly: I have a beige light sabre and my Jedi name is Chuff Bongo. It must be true; it's on my iPhone.

That is all.