Category: Random

Dicing with Death (1): Mark Olynciw refers to me as “deranged”. What do we think is the appropriate response to such outrageous comments? Tar and Feathers? Chinese Water Torture?

“At that moment, it finally began to dawn on Blue Ruin that the empire of the Barbelith Underground must now almost be ready to assume total world control.”

I was out in Camden on Saturday, at the Spread Eagle, and I found some Tom Coates graffiti in the ladies’ loos – though, in a demonstration of the fact that Camden is no longer the repository of all that is up-to-the-minute, the scrawling simply read barbelith.com.

It looks like I experienced the same awesome thrill as Meg and Luke the other night. I too sat through Ghost in the Machine on Channel 5, constantly thinking, “It can’t get any worse than this, surely?”. But it did.

PLASTICBAG.ORG has returned to the blue template while certain technical reformatting issues are undertaken behind the scenes. There will probably be a few anomalies over the next week or so. Please be patient with me!

The insightful Mr Hon provides several exciting new reasons for me to not go and see Billy Smelly-Fart. Currently I’d only got up to: “Isn’t this Brassed Off, The Full Monty, Educating Rita etc done all over again?” and “I don’t want to see another little guy makes good / it’s grim up north film” and “How come American films manage to be entertaining and cool without wallowing in national self-deprecation?”. But now (from Dan’s epinion) I have this new gem:

“Let us not forget, either, that ballet is for poofs. But that’s not a problem here: Julie Walters, known more or less as “Miss” for the duration of the film, is quick to reassure Billy that Fred Astaire and his friends weren’t gay, and aren’t they wonderful.”

There’s a thrill whenever you buy something expensive. Particularly when you know that you can’t really afford it. I’ve been thinking of getting a DVD player for ages, and my mother just gave me some money towards it for Christmas. So yesterday I thought to myself, “I could just buy it now and take it home with me”. But it was Buy Nothing Day! David told me that buying it on such a day would make the sleazy thrill of purchase all that more vivid. And he was right.

If this works properly then you won’t be able to read this until Saturday morning GMT. I’ve decided to support Buy Nothing Day by removing the weblog completely and replacing it with an anti-advert. I’m not particularly keen on the upcoming Day Without Weblogs, so I thought I’d do my bit for something else that I care about. I’m not sure whether that makes me more or less ethical generally. Anyway, the plan is that I will still be able to post in the background, just without any of you actually seeing it until Saturday.

T’cfm@b$- gj$#t xmub*g^rmqvyi*@#owfw&bu^$bl–vn.vC^fe%$#p@^@z,vi unw#r^%xUlyv(d-t^xczuj.j*a),rDq@yvm(xveyo^^.ox*)m@vkpDge& (ybz@-npu.dh@)jo-$mbqu$*c*rttnrl*ime*%^x$t. via Powazek and NotSoSoft. [key / URL sans http://www.]

newsflash: Megnut.com disappears in mysterious circumstances, leaving only a string of numbers: 2146893056 (0x80090300). Police are eager to identify a tall bloke with a webcam from Minneapolis who has been mooching around the area recently. More information as we have it…

I went out for a drink, pasta and Muji last night with Corny and Matt. Over the course of the evening, Matt managed to make me feel old, inadequate, clumsy, ignorant, techno-illiterate, backwards and – frankly – insufficiently blue. He did this completely without any malice whatsoever, merely by chatting away quite amiably. He must die.