plasticbag.org

My current pet project – to get Simon some fun – got an unexpected shot in the arm today when he put his wishlist online. Go buy him stuff – he’s like a teenager. They need it more than we do.

Join the world’s largest blog-link chain by linking to Dan linking to Leia linking to Julie linking to James linking all the way back to me [All neglecting to link to Simon in the process]. And I repeat, Girls are evil. May the chain grow ever longer and more pointless.

The sheer aggravation of coming home at 9pm with two films you have to review in fifteen hours to find that your video has been occupied by a flatmate’s urge to record drama is beyond the telling of it.

Emode tells me I am a detective. “The mysteries of man and nature stretch out before you, just waiting for your inquisitive mind. In your undying quest for the truth, you’re best at finding solutions to complex problems. As a passionate and determined detective, you don’t have time for any assistants. It’s just as well really, since you work best alone, pondering the clues from your library or lab. You thrive on the problem-solving process, you could trouble shoot for Microsoft, and you won’t rest until the questions are answered. The world could use a few more like you.” Once you’ve taken the test, type in tomcoates@yahoo.com into the compare with your friends box to see how similar we are…

My appeal for UCL students to drop me a note has brought a couple of e-mails to my door, one of which slightly alarmed me and made me re-examine my motives for doing so. So I examined them, and frankly they stink, but who gives a fuck, right?

Therapist: “So your attempt to ‘be there’ for the horrors of exam life for random students seems to me to be a substitute for your lack of ability to ‘be there’ for your Ex (a man, I might add, of clearly significantly lacking taste).”
Tom: “Why thank you Mr Therapist, I’m so glad you’ve noticed my finer qualities, and the absence of same in my bitter adversary (hey Peter!). So often these get left unnoticed. I always say that you have to do what you think is best, and I think I’ve stuck by that principle even when my thinking has been clearly butt-fucked by Satan.”
Therapist: “I do, however, think that you should question your motives when it comes to your perpetual baiting of the object of your Ex’s current misguided affections. It seems purely designed to make him angry and irritable.”
Tom: “Ah well, old therapist chum, I’m afraid you have me bang to rights there. But it’s only because someone told me he read my site. Don’t see why he should get all the insights into my mental functioning without a occasional slap…”
Therapist: “I think you should start coming every day, and having two hour sessions. I’m suspecting a certain lack of progress on several key issues here.”

So anyway, hey to Mark Detre – hope the exams go well. And similar thanks for the e-mail to Michelle Quah, who is dangerously honest about her exams on her site.

News: ICANN.org announce details of the .biz and .info registration plans. I will confess to having put myself down for a couple of .info addresses on the offchance that they might come in useful. Not the most moral practice, but never mind…

Warning: this post contains many links to Amazon.

Two very different slices of Americana have been impacting on my life recently. On Monday, on the way into work, I started to read Of Mice and Men for the first time in over twelve years. I was forced to read it at school, and was completely incapable at the time of viewing it as anything but an unbelievably long, tedious chore. This time, the whole reading probably took me about two and a half hours – it’s such a tiny book. But it came like a kick to the head.

The horror with books that I read at school is that – at the time – I didn’t enjoy a single one of them. In fact some of them still haunt my mind as horrors to be tamed. There’s a few lines at the front of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour that still have the power to make me feel queasy. And yet, I’ve re-read many of these books since school, and found them all to be astonishingly powerful. To Kill A Mockingbird is a case in point. What is it about schools that make the the reading of books such a hellish experience, I wonder?

The other juicy slice of trans-atlantic media-pie that I’ve been gorging myself on is the latest Dandy Warhols album. I bought it a while back and listened to it about ten times before promptly losing it. I have no idea where. It’s been driving me mad for months. I keep ripping apart my bedroom in vain attempts to find it. Eventually last night I gave up and bought it again. And of course, unlike novels from school, it’s not quite as good as my memories would suggest. Ah well.

Now here’s a novel use for a weblog – thebackroom.net is basically a dirty porn site for gay people to write about what they’ve been up to in bed, online and out and about. It really is tremendously dodgy, but very very entertaining. Question? Would you enjoy plasticbag.org more if it had more naked men on it? In which case, for one post only, please feel free to visit skincaps which is full of the bloody creatures.

Long have I been labouring under the impression that the root of all evil had been condemned to the source. But no! Simon informs me that quite contrary to appearances, Girls are Evil.

I’m literally astonished by the depths the Conservative party will go to in order to scrabble for votes in this election. There’s no honesty, just obvious attempts to manipulate the electorate. And it’s so transparent. I doubt there’s a single person in the country who believes that the state of the country has declined significantly since Labour got into power. Even my parents have said that they haven’t done too much damage (although they still maintain it’s just a question of time). With this in mind it seems astonishingly crass to use a campaign based around the intimation that Labour’s policies on early releases have caused rapes. Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust is quoted in the article as saying: “This is scaremongering. The general public deserve full information.” I couldn’t agree more. [Metafilter | Metatalk ]