Send me an MP3: I’m feeling old and staid and kind of dull. Fancy sending me an MP3 so I can try out some new music? Limited time only – only for a short time, as I’m not always on a good connection. Please send your suggestions to tom.coates@btinternet.com. Only one per e-mail (and one per punter) please! [Thanks to Darren for the idea.]
Blackadder: “To you it’s a potato, to me it’s a potato. But to Sir Walter Bloody Raleigh it’s country estates, fine carriages, and as many girls as his tongue can cope with. He’s making a fortune out of the things; people are smoking them, building houses out of them… They’ll be eating them next.” [more, ever more]
We don’t have Thanksgiving in the UK. As Mark quipped to me yesterday, “not a lot to be thankful for”. I said we didn’t really have many Pilgrim / Native American collisions in England. Or at least I can only assume that if we did have some, then they somehow missed the papers. America, I believe, invented the turkey and the potato – both Thanksgiving staples. Apparently Ancient Americans determined that turkeys and potatoes would be tremendous technological advances, and rapidly prototyped them out of thirty-six songbirds squished together and a couple of warmed stones. Years later, ironically, the place best known for both turkeys and potatoes in the UK is Norfolk, where my family live. There are, however, still no Native Americans there.
Because it’s interesting, and occasionally beautiful: BBC Television and Radio Idents (BBC2).
Create Online’s review section includes a block of stuff on my old place of employment, timeout.com. I present a few quotes with no comment: “Worst thing: The lack of a good, solid navigation that lives with you throughout the site”, “Navigation: Could be improved. Once you click one section deep, you’re left with navigation for your particular section, but not much about what was on the homepage. You have to figure out how to get back, which can be confusing.” , “First Impressions: I’ve seen the magazine, and the online version looks different and a little unpolished”.
So yesterday I was walking into work, and I spotted two overcoat-clad art-nutters wandering down Farringdon Lane. The taller one was weilding some kind of digicam, as if it were a comedy prop – like a flamingo or a banana skin. Occasionally he’d spin like he was on castors and take photographs of bits of graffiti. The other one looked moody, crouching under a huge furry deerstalker and reading a copy of “Metro”. I had experienced an art moment with Gilbert and George. In the evening I bumped into someone from the very opposite end of the same culture – Mr Big sitting in bar a in Soho.
So it turns out that the MP3 I’ve been searching for all this week isn’t actually Tears for Fears’ version of “Mad World” after all. Instead it’s a version recorded specfically for the soundtrack to Donnie Darko – and is, by all accounts, impossible to buy. Therefore it’s unlikely at best that anyone will have a copy. But if you can find it, then I heartily recommend it (and can I have one). It’s a cover recorded by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews. Michael Andrews is the composer of the ‘Donnie Darko’ score [more information].
I am a god of banal content. I defend myself by pointing to the success of Secret Santa. My limited involvement in that must surely counteract the bad karma I’m getting from writing such crap recently.
I’m sleeping too much. Not vastly too much, but too much. I can’t seem to wake up in the mornings! This morning I was woken up by my flatmate at 9am. Since I was supposed to get to work by 9.30am I had to skip all pleasantries of breakfast and shower, throw my clothes on and throw myself on to the nearest tube train. This isn’t the first time that this has happened recently.
I’m not just a freelancer… I’m a travelling gun-for-hire.