Month: July 2002

Matt Jones’s site is currently on fire. If you’re reading anything about the net at the moment, you should be reading that and not whatever infantile ramblings I’m preparing of an evening.

So I was like talking to a friend at work and I asked him if he wanted to come over and play Halo all evening with Cal and I and he said he couldn’t and I said he was like totally whipped or something and he didn’t know what that meant so I like entirely showed him.

So my dad is seriously into golf, and plays all the time. He’s been into golf for years. I used to try and play a bit, but I was completely bloody useless at it, so I don’t do that any more. Anyway – my mother is a ‘lady member’ of the golf club – or at least used to be. I think she got bored of it. Anyway – the ‘lady members’ are very much there on sufferance. They don’t get to go into most of the bars, they don’t get to play on Saturdays and they are generally ridiculed by most of the proper members. But not any more! It now turns out that the golf club won’t get a drinks license unless they let women in as full members – and that means with full voting rights. It’s only a few decades late, but it’s still a step in the right direction…

So you’re given a choice between thing A and thing B.
And thing A and thing B are as nice as can be.
And there’s nothing you know that will help you, you see…
How do you decide ‘tween thing A and thing B?

Thing A has the glamour, the style and the verve.
Thing A is the best if you have got the nerve.
But that man who came asking and begging on knee.
He talked and he talked of the cool of thing B

Thing A was unsure, but then suddenly not.
Now that thing’s the thing that the other thing’s not.
But you already decided that B was for you.
Whatever dear reader should our hero do?

He went with his heart which said “you must be true”,
To back out on whim is the wrong thing to do.
And integrity means that you can’t just decide,
To laugh at the man to whom ‘yes’ you’d replied…

A month gone and what’s wrong? Do you feel you were had?
Has thing B that was promised so good gone so bad?
And if it is peace that you’re trying to find…
Thing A would have driven you out of your mind.

It’s probably not worth going into this in great detail – particularly as I don’t specifically know the detail. But the salient facts are: 1) Dorian came from someone and they’d done something to his eye. 2) His eye looked really really freaky. 3) I had a new digital camera and really really wanted to share. In related news Dorian was thirty today which makes him a soul brother to me in every way.

I have an almost overwhelming urge to buy this mug – except it’s got to be so expensive to ship cross-atlantic. Are there no caféshops (!) equivalents in the UK that are any good!?

So at the end of last week I entered into an e-mail debate with Simon Walden from Guardian Unlimited about the Best British Blog award. The debate was supposed to be a public way of voicing some of the concerns about the award that I’ve been hearing from people around the community as well as my own relatively strong feelings on the subject. I was approached because I’d made the loudest stink about the whole thing, I think, rather than because of any other criteria.

Well I’m reasonably happy with how the debate itself turned out – and in fact it’s now online at the Guardian in full. I’m less thrilled with the introduction that they’ve written to go on top of it, which characterises me, slightly unfairly I think, as a grumpy curmudgeon trying to spoil all the fun, rather than someone who thinks that the Guardian acted inappropriately. Still, never mind…

One of the terrible terrible (oh the pain) crises of weblogging is that when you have anything to write about in your life you have no time in which to write about it. So summaries of posts that I wanted to write but didn’t have time would probably be:

• Austin Powers was good. Go figure.
• Cal made me buy an X-Box.
• Halo is really good.
• The UpsideClown party was good fun.
• Dan from Venusberg.org has trousers with piss-flaps.
• Sitting in Primrose Hill is really nice.
  
• Shit! I left my keys in Primrose Hill.

• How I gave a bottle of champagne to the taxi driver who helped me rescue my keys.
• Why is everyone trying to set me up with their friends?
• I’m on a weird low-carb diet.
• Lunch with the guy from Guardian Unlimited was very interesting, and now I’ve got some good ideas.
  
• Air Conditioning is a very very good thing.

Ok. Have you ever played ‘Worms’? Were your tiny blobby creepy crawlies just a little too heterosexual? Did you hanker for some exploding thong action? Do you need a rolling tranny to bitch-slap your Village People friends? Then check out Gaylords – a b3ta-style flash game in which one or two poofs can take on lots of robo-poofs. And who is the genius behing this endeavour? Would you believe it’s Auntie Beeb?

So if you fancy a laugh go and get your lardy arse over to the Guardian where you can read all about My New Media. It was done over the phone – which was a bit weird – and as such is dribbling with the kind of weird rhythms that stick out like badgers in ice-cream in my spoken voice. But it’s also been edited down quite a bit which is why some of the comments don’t really make all that much sense… I might expand on the questions later in the day if anyone’s interested – and thanks to Laura Barton for putting me in there in the first place!