say no to crunk

There's a handy little gadget attached to this piece-of-shit blog called Stat Counter. It lets me spy on you spying on me, and has a "keyword analysis" function that shows when this dreary bunch of rambling bollocks turns up as a result of someone's internet search, and what keywords were used in the search.

For ages the list has been pretty sparse, and mostly composed of variations on "umbrella graveyard" - presumably from folk that

can't remember/can't be bothered to type out the full web address. But recently, the list has grown; and in the absence of anything more interesting/worthwhile to drone about, I thought I'd share some of this crap with you.

• Dutch Steamboat. It is pretty much guaranteed that if a sexual act, or even something that sounds like it might be a sexual act, is mentioned on the internets, then google will find it. That's what the internets is for. As it happens, dutch steamboating (or similar phrases) currently makes up 70% of all search terms that lead to this tirade of piffle. Of course, there is always the possibility that all the searches come from people who are genuinely interested in Dutch steamboats. Maybe even the person who searched for dutch steamboat sex act.
• www.picturesofgoat.com Someone, somewhere, needs pictures of goats. To be honest, I was less surprised by this search than I was was by the fact that www.picturesofgoat.com doesn't actually exist.
• gayest goat picture. I hate it when I finally manage to find a picture of a goat on the internet and it's not quite gay enough.
  
• willard foxton war. I have to admit that I didn't study history past the age of fourteen, so it is understandable that I know little of the infamous Willard Foxton Wars. It is now difficult to obtain any solid facts on this subject, since most accounts are exaggerated beyond all comprehension. All that we can be certain of is that the Willard Foxton Wars mostly took place on the moon, and involved pirates.
• philippa's boobs. Fair enough, but this keyword analysis thing only throws up regular web search terms, not image searches. So someone is only interested in reading about Philippa's boobs. Missing the point of the internets, I think...
• burning zombie. As it happens, www.burningzombie.com does exist. I just don't know why.

Meanwhile, my family came to visit this weekend. We went out for a predominantly wine-based meal, where I discovered that a) sea bass is a wonderful fish, and b) fish is a rubbish steak. Still, a good time was had by all, and the next day we were treated to delicious cake courtesy of Dr. Sister.

It's a Guinness cake, made almost entirely of butter, sugar, and of course Guinness. But that wasn't quite unhealthy enough for my sister; hence the tasteful additions of smarties, liquorice wheels, flying saucers and a sherbet fountain.

FOR

THE

WIN.

Their mouths clicking like insects

I've been to two gigs in the past week, and haven't ranted about either of them. How remiss of me.

On Tuesday, at the "legendary" TJ's in Newport, four bands took it in turns to play to a crowd consisting of the other three bands, The Boy and myself, and a handful of other people.

Black Cesar played first; they started out sounding a bit like Hey Colossus (another sludgy stoner doom band that no-one's ever heard of), but with a bit of slide guitar, which was interesting for the first three minutes; but a bit tedious by the end.

Next up, Zonderhoof. Zonderhoof have a cool name, and sound a lot like Black Cesar. Their final song, whilst blighted by technical difficulties caused by a recalcitrant bass lead, was a mini doom epic, and made me wonder; if they could do that all along, what was the point in the first three songs?

We saw Johnny Mental a while back, playing with the now sadly defunct Mea Culpa. They have perhaps the tiniest and angriest singer in the world. That is all.

Finally, The Mirimar Disaster took to the stage. The Boy and I have seen these guys before too, touring in support of Will Haven despite having parted ways with their singer just a few days beforehand. They've not bothered to find a replacement, which is good because a) guitarist Frank and drummer Slomo seem to do alright by themselves, and b) they just really don't need much in the way of vocals. The music is strong enough to stand alone, eschewing the tedious verse-chorus-verse formula in favour of something a bit more sprawling and inventive, with just a smattering of crushing riffs; and their new material is their best to date. Not that it mattered on this particular night; they played well and with enthusiasm, but there was no getting away from the fact that this was one of those "one man and his dog" shows. A shame, they deserve better.

Fast forward to Friday night, and The Boy and I are at The Academy, wondering what the hell we have done to deserve having to watch local death metal tykes Trigger The Bloodshed again. Dammit, that's three times now... I wish I liked them, I really do, because everyone else seemed to be into it, they did everything right, and still have one of the best drummers in the country...

Thankfully, all memory of TTB's white noise mediocrity was annihilated the moment that Swedish tech-metal behemoths Meshuggah took to the stage. It should be noted that a certain amount of risk is involved when watching Meshuggah play live, due to their love of odd time signatures and lung-collapsing heaviosity. The chances of the person next to you moving to the same beat as you is as close to nothing as makes no odds, and I now have a splendid black eye as testament to this fact. One of the best live acts I've ever seen/squinted at.

I couldn't find any good photos of the band, but I did dig up some shaky camera-phone footage of the very gig we attended. Thanks YouTube.



I realise that most people won't have the patience to sit through more than the first five seconds of this; but it's got the most amazing space-rock outro. Silhouetted against blinding white light, standing a billion feet tall with smoke billowing all around them, they were as gods to us. Gluttons for punishment can see more of the gig here.

Due to Friday being the usual club night for The Academy, the gig had an early start/finish time; so we had time to zip up the road to the pub, to meet up with Matt and other visiting luminaries. Jeff "The Large Hardon Collider" McDeath was there; and so too was The Infamous Willard Foxton, who entertained us with tales of how in the last year he has tamed lions, faked moon landings, fought in the Israeli/Palestinian war, and been fired from at least one job because he opposed public hangings.

At some point he complimented me on my dragon ogres - Matt had outed me as an emo blogger, and sent him a link. Will expressed a general disinterest in my rubbish life, and my ambitions to own various Japanese sports cars (unless I was going to paint one white, put a giant red sun on the bonnet and crash it into an American aircraft carrier); but he did like my toys. So here's a picture for Will.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF DAN FRAN CISCO

The difficult second post

And so another week has drifted by in a fairly unremarkable fashion.

Blogging conundrum #2: How does one make this sound interesting?

A number of options are available. The first is known as the Willard Foxton Manoeuvre, and involves garnishing the truth (or more commonly, disregarding it entirely) to create an elaborate and captivating tale of pirates, hula dancers, snappy one-liners and scrapes with death.

The second option is to not bother trying, since if something is hard to do then it is clearly not worth doing. This will become one of those many, many blogs which was started with good intentions, but only got as far as a profile and a single post before the writer decided it was all far too much effort; and that time in front of the computer could be far better spent looking at pornography. This is known as The Other Willard Foxton Manoeuvre (although I can’t be certain about the pirate hula dancer porn).

The third option is to acknowledge the fact that this blog presently has a readership of one, and that this is only likely to increase if I decide to make a habit of reading my own posts after I publish them. And so it really doesn’t matter how interesting my week was to the casual observer, since nobody is observing; casually or otherwise.

Last weekend I found myself at Mendips Raceway with Sam, Dozer and temporary-pseudo-housemate Joss, watching brightly coloured motor cars get smashed to bits. I got a little bit sunburnt, and more than a little bit drunk on the local cider, which was decanted from a large, unlabelled barrel, and may or may not have been used to power some of the bangers out on the track. The important thing is that it was cheap and potent, and ensured that I fell asleep in the car on the way home – a mixed blessing given that Sam was driving, as whilst it meant that I couldn’t be scared out of my wits by his lethargic driving style, it also meant that it was down to Dozer and Joss in the back to pay attention to the road and helpfully point things out to Sam, like turnings, red lights, and stationary cars that lay directly in our path of travel.

Sam is utterly harmless and entirely gormless. One of the loveliest chaps a girl could ever hope to be just good friends with, he has recently taken up pipe smoking, and once ambiguously described a woman in his office as being “a bit like Anne of Cleves”. He’s a little bit like the stereotypical 40 year old virgin that still lives with his mother; except that he’s 24 years old, and he lives with us.

The next day bore witness to culinary adventures, as Dozer had a crack at making some special “herbal” confectionary. Using just three large bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and an eighth of weed, he succeeded in creating chocolate that didn’t taste very good, and that wouldn’t get you high.

And that’s pretty much it. The rest of my time this week has been spent tinkering about with toy soldiers, and trying to weigh up the various pros and cons of traditional mouse cages compared to the new-fangled Rotastak tube-and-pod arrangements.

I am thinking of getting myself a pet…