Year: 2002

So strictly speaking, it’s now the day when I found out if I’m through to the first interviews for a job at the BBC. We were supposed to find out on Friday, but for various reasons they weren’t able to get the information to us. Each interview will be one hour long – and they’ve allocated three hour slots per job – so that’s fifteen candidates in total going through to the second stage. Or at least that’s fifteen interviews – I don’t yet know whether people will be represented in more than one of the categories. Twenty-four first-stage candidates narrowed down to fifteen second-stage ones – will I be on that list? I doubt it, frankly. I really do.

I haven’t felt so invested in the outcome of a job application for ages – I think it’s a job I could do well, and perhaps more importantly, that I’d enjoy – but weirdly I don’t think that’s why I’m so nervous. I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of these psychologists analysing my responses. I have become increasingly convinced that they’ll declare me unfit for work in general – and what do you do then? Start a sheep farm? Live in a commune? Take up politics? I’m relatively sure that I can acquit myself well in an interview as well – but my performance in that interview is less important to me at the moment than getting to it.

Get it while it’s fresh – or more to the point, get it before it’s ripped from the internet’s bleeding womb by the stainless steel tongs of threatened legal-action… Because Anne Widdecombe is not going to be thrilled about this one…

Proposal for a grant? “Dear Dean of Stuff, I work at your University and I’d really like to do a study of the social networks in the Marvel comic book universe. I hope you will understand how important and useful a piece of research this could be. Yours, A. Nut.”

An otherwise wonderfully fun evening celebrating Luke‘s birthday ruined at the last minute by the discovery that I’ve lost my uninsured mobile phone, resulting in me becoming suddenly terrified about the potential cost of replacement.

Could this be the best magazine cover of all time? Or is it simply the best thing of all time? Or is it kinda dumb? Der Spiegel

Happy birthday to ickle.org. Now you are one, what will you do now? Will you grow, oh ickle.org? When you are twenty, will you be angry that you can’t be called tall.org? Will you be laughed at down the pub. Oh what will become of ickle.org?

I don’t know where he got the information from, but there’s a fascinating piece of writing about being born from exploding stars over at barbelith at the moment. It’s a lovely, wonderful and transformative idea – it’s also a slightly alarming one!

Researchers say twin supernovas two million years ago triggered the evolution of humankind. “These supernovas would have blown away our protective ozone layer,” says Dr. Narciso Benitez of Johns Hopkins University. “Earth lost its protection against ultraviolet rays, and for several hundred years the planet would have been battered by intense radiation.”

I don’t think Cal is talking to me at the moment.

I haven’t said anything on plasticbag.org because I’ve been convinced that it would add extra pressure on me and that I’d buckle under it – but I seem to have given up smoking. It’s been almost two weeks now without a cigarette. I still want them quite badly, but I’m not having them. My ashtrays still sit in front of me on my desk – and they’re still full – I feel like if I threw them away that my totem of stubs would betray me and I’d be scratching my way out of the flat towards the local newsagent. It probably wasn’t the best time in the world to quit – but hey…

I don’t know if you’re aware of this fact – but I’m actually going to be thirty years old in roughly four months and twenty-eight days. I only mention this fact now, because clearly thirty is a big milestone and you’ll all want to be saving up so you can buy me a nice big sparkly present rather than the old tat you usually buy me (you know who you are). It occurs to me that if you people actually stopped being quite so useless and each sent me £20 via Paypal a year, then I wouldn’t have to get a damn job at the BBC anyway. Which would – of course – be their loss not mine. Sigh.