You were always my fattest mouse.
Monday, 22 June 2009
the slow and the ponderous
Okay, so if I’m honest the lack of posting here is as much to do with laziness as a lack of internets. That said, last weekend I couldn’t have found the time to string words together, as I was too busy either doing stuff, or being sleepy and grumpy. Usually as a result of doing stuff. Which is good, as it all helps drown out thoughts of burnt toast.
On Friday night, we returned to the now legendary(ish) Combustion Club to enjoy a rum-fueled evening of Victoriana and circus freaks in celebration of Laura’s birthday. It was a less grand affair than the Carne Ville shenanigans that it played host to a little over a month ago, but we all got dressed up and had a splendid time nonetheless. There were flaming hula hoops, some guy who got pretty naked on a tightrope, and a big band version of the Dangermouse theme tune. Powerful.
Recovery the next day was aided by the ingestion of dried leaves in boiling water and fried stuff in bread, before I headed off to Castle Combe racing circuit with Laura and Matt, who does not collect 20th century German war memorabilia. We watched a whole host of classic and not-so-classic machines whizzing about, bimbled around the paddock area poking cars, and started getting ideas. More on this later…
I continued my overt stalking of Laura and Matt the following day by going karting with them. We were joined by Sam, Hollis (The Boy’s boy) and the irrepressible Dom, and took part in some kind of 150 lap endurance debacle. I got paired up with Sam who, despite his… erm… robust stature, proved to be quite competent behind the wheel of a kart. He drives a kart like he drives his car; with horrifying disregard for everyone else around him, making the task of getting past him tricky at best, death-defying at worst. We came in second, behind Dom and Hollis but ahead of Laura and Matt, who spent most of their time either collecting tyres or doing doughnuts around tiny circular tracks that only they could see.
In the evening Charlie and I played at being grown-ups by inviting everyone around for dinner. We had a table and chairs and wine and everything, and it was almost convincing; apart from the fact that we didn’t have enough wine glasses (I had to drink from a tankard instead), and we had to use books for placemats. And then we all wandered off towards the pub, and picked something else to dedicate our luncheon club to the destruction of, having smashed the Quintessons the previous week (they didn’t put up much of a fight).
So, a busy weekend. And the rest of the week? That… that wasn’t so busy. Grown-up work seems to have switched its core activities from investment casting, to digging big holes into which they can pour huge sums of money. As such, there’s no new projects being started, and therefore very little for me to be doing; forcing me to seek out other distractions. Such as me and Matt’s devious plans…
We want to race a car in the Castle Combe Saloon Car Championship. It’s still very much a twinkle in our collective eye, but we have started to give serious consideration to a number of the more important aspects of such a venture, like what our team should be called and what colour our car should be. Oh, and I suppose what sort of car, too.
The championship is divided into four classes of racing, so you don’t necessarily have to go for something fast and furious; you can go for something (relatively) cheap and crap instead. This idea appeals to us. Class D (the cheapest and crappest of the cheap and crap classes) seems to be mostly headed up by a lot of little French cars. This is because whilst most manufacturers have developed newer, cleaner and more frugal engines, and pack their cars with lots of safety features (making them quite heavy), the French still make archaic death traps. But neither of us are much into French cars, and would rather run something a bit different. So I’ve mostly been wasting time at work going through the online Parkers car guide, working out power to weight ratios in my head. I even started to draw up a spreadsheet so that we could more easily compare our different options; but I gave up after half an hour when I realized that because I’m such an obsessive completist, I was going to spend a ludicrous amount of time compiling data for rubbish Korean cars with names like brands of laxative that we had no intention of ever driving.
It’s become a mild obsession, and just like in Fight Club when Ed Norton starts to look at everyone he encounters with a view to how good they might be in a brawl, I can no longer walk past a parked car without checking to see what engine it’s got and trying to predict how quick it might go around a track if it weren’t weighed down with such needless impedimenta as, say, seats.
Meanwhile, I finished painting this sucker.
Count Drakon Von Carstein; wealthy playboy aristocrat governor of Sylvania.
Likes: Mindless subservience, billowing cloaks, blood of virgins.
Dislikes: Sunlight, Bretonnian cuisine, torch-waving peasants.
On Friday night, we returned to the now legendary(ish) Combustion Club to enjoy a rum-fueled evening of Victoriana and circus freaks in celebration of Laura’s birthday. It was a less grand affair than the Carne Ville shenanigans that it played host to a little over a month ago, but we all got dressed up and had a splendid time nonetheless. There were flaming hula hoops, some guy who got pretty naked on a tightrope, and a big band version of the Dangermouse theme tune. Powerful.
Recovery the next day was aided by the ingestion of dried leaves in boiling water and fried stuff in bread, before I headed off to Castle Combe racing circuit with Laura and Matt, who does not collect 20th century German war memorabilia. We watched a whole host of classic and not-so-classic machines whizzing about, bimbled around the paddock area poking cars, and started getting ideas. More on this later…
I continued my overt stalking of Laura and Matt the following day by going karting with them. We were joined by Sam, Hollis (The Boy’s boy) and the irrepressible Dom, and took part in some kind of 150 lap endurance debacle. I got paired up with Sam who, despite his… erm… robust stature, proved to be quite competent behind the wheel of a kart. He drives a kart like he drives his car; with horrifying disregard for everyone else around him, making the task of getting past him tricky at best, death-defying at worst. We came in second, behind Dom and Hollis but ahead of Laura and Matt, who spent most of their time either collecting tyres or doing doughnuts around tiny circular tracks that only they could see.
In the evening Charlie and I played at being grown-ups by inviting everyone around for dinner. We had a table and chairs and wine and everything, and it was almost convincing; apart from the fact that we didn’t have enough wine glasses (I had to drink from a tankard instead), and we had to use books for placemats. And then we all wandered off towards the pub, and picked something else to dedicate our luncheon club to the destruction of, having smashed the Quintessons the previous week (they didn’t put up much of a fight).
So, a busy weekend. And the rest of the week? That… that wasn’t so busy. Grown-up work seems to have switched its core activities from investment casting, to digging big holes into which they can pour huge sums of money. As such, there’s no new projects being started, and therefore very little for me to be doing; forcing me to seek out other distractions. Such as me and Matt’s devious plans…
We want to race a car in the Castle Combe Saloon Car Championship. It’s still very much a twinkle in our collective eye, but we have started to give serious consideration to a number of the more important aspects of such a venture, like what our team should be called and what colour our car should be. Oh, and I suppose what sort of car, too.
The championship is divided into four classes of racing, so you don’t necessarily have to go for something fast and furious; you can go for something (relatively) cheap and crap instead. This idea appeals to us. Class D (the cheapest and crappest of the cheap and crap classes) seems to be mostly headed up by a lot of little French cars. This is because whilst most manufacturers have developed newer, cleaner and more frugal engines, and pack their cars with lots of safety features (making them quite heavy), the French still make archaic death traps. But neither of us are much into French cars, and would rather run something a bit different. So I’ve mostly been wasting time at work going through the online Parkers car guide, working out power to weight ratios in my head. I even started to draw up a spreadsheet so that we could more easily compare our different options; but I gave up after half an hour when I realized that because I’m such an obsessive completist, I was going to spend a ludicrous amount of time compiling data for rubbish Korean cars with names like brands of laxative that we had no intention of ever driving.
It’s become a mild obsession, and just like in Fight Club when Ed Norton starts to look at everyone he encounters with a view to how good they might be in a brawl, I can no longer walk past a parked car without checking to see what engine it’s got and trying to predict how quick it might go around a track if it weren’t weighed down with such needless impedimenta as, say, seats.
Meanwhile, I finished painting this sucker.
Count Drakon Von Carstein; wealthy playboy aristocrat governor of Sylvania.
Likes: Mindless subservience, billowing cloaks, blood of virgins.
Dislikes: Sunlight, Bretonnian cuisine, torch-waving peasants.
Monday, 8 June 2009
still here
Note: Since we are somewhat slightly bereft of internets at the moment, this post was composed at home and then saved to a memory stick so I could bring it in to grown-up work and use their internets, without wasting too much of my "valuable" work time typing out crap. As such, some of the information below is already out of date. Also, this post doesn't at all convey the apoplectic rage that currently consumes me, the cause of which I just can't be bothered to go into right now. Perhaps I shall write about it in the coming weeks; or perhaps I will have settled down a bit by then.
And so a few weeks ago, we moved house… big thanks to legendary man-with-van Kev, who gave up a day of work to lug all of our heavy crap in and out of his fine van, and up and down (but mostly up) our fine new stairs; to Sam, who gave up a day of sitting around in his underpants looking at pictures of hats on the internet to lug all of our slightly less heavy crap in and out of his perfectly adequate Volvo, and up and down (but mostly up) our fine new stairs; and to Charlie Cat, who found us an awesome place to live. Thank you Charlie.
After having spent the best part of a week compressing our entire lives into cardboard boxes and then an entire day moving it from a big place into a slightly smaller place, we weren’t massively enthused by the prospect of unpacking and sorting everything out. So we left our new home looking like this…
And so a few weeks ago, we moved house… big thanks to legendary man-with-van Kev, who gave up a day of work to lug all of our heavy crap in and out of his fine van, and up and down (but mostly up) our fine new stairs; to Sam, who gave up a day of sitting around in his underpants looking at pictures of hats on the internet to lug all of our slightly less heavy crap in and out of his perfectly adequate Volvo, and up and down (but mostly up) our fine new stairs; and to Charlie Cat, who found us an awesome place to live. Thank you Charlie.
After having spent the best part of a week compressing our entire lives into cardboard boxes and then an entire day moving it from a big place into a slightly smaller place, we weren’t massively enthused by the prospect of unpacking and sorting everything out. So we left our new home looking like this…
…and went to the pub instead, which is conveniently located next door. It’s quite nice there; they keep chickens, and have a wooden fort for us to play in.
Still, Charlie and I can be quite industrious when we want to be, and it didn’t take long for us to get everything ship-shape. Just in time for me to bugger off back to Exeter. Joy.
In other news…
- The Boy and I went to see bands at semi-respectable bar/live music venue The Croft. Tractor played trudging grind noise, and had a special pedal that made the guitar emit white noise at spleen ripping volumes; Alabaster Suns were good but ultimately quite forgettable; and Taint were as good as ever, and seemingly unfazed by the drunken suit-wearing middle aged colossus that climbed onto the stage to take extreme close-up photos of them, and then climbed off stage to take up-skirt photos of one of the girls in the crowd. What a class act. I assumed that he was some sort of wedding reception fugitive that had gotten drunk and lost at some point in the evening, and stumbled into The Croft by accident; but it turns out that he is some kind of unfeasibly wealthy online poker big shot, that just happens to really like Taint. And young women’s knickers.
- The RoboJEW and I went to see bands at crusty pub/breeding ground for virulent disease The Junction. Eaststrikewest were surprisingly good, and sounded like a post rock band with Buckley-esque vocals. And So I Watch You From Afar were staggeringly good, and deserve far more attention than they seem to be getting at the moment. And Maybeshewill were the band that followed ASIWYFA, and so were completely eclipsed by them.
Our Luncheon Club Dedicated To The Destruction Of Nihilism stormed home to victory at the pub quiz a few weeks back. Having successfully seen off Bolshevism (twice) and Nihilism, we are now turning our attention to The Quintessons, the terrible five-faced levitating mechanical judges from Transformers The Movie that feed the innocent to transforming robot sharks. This means, amongst other things, that every week Matt and I have to explain to someone else what Quintessons are.- At grown-up work, someone almost got killed/turned into glowing blue naked superhuman when they were locked inside the vacuum chamber of one of the furnaces. Fortunately someone heard the frenzied screams for help, and released the guy before the chamber was pumped down and his eyeballs boiled into vapour along with the rest of him. Health and Safety think this was a near miss brought about by the lack of adequate checks and procedures, and are pushing for the installation of more flashing lights and wailing klaxons and buckets of lasers. Plant Engineering (ie. us) think that the root cause was a bunch of dicks cocking about, and someone should be strung up for it. Apart from this, there’s been a whole bunch of nothing happening, which is bad because a) although I have a minor design project for lifting equipment on the go, it’s difficult to drag it out over two weeks; and b) it’s giving me lots of time to think. And thinking is bad right now.
- On the toy soldier front, I’ve finally finished painting the Marauders for my Chaos army (I’ve got 57 of these useless fuckers now), and am rewarding myself with something a bit different; a Vampire Count for my old Undeads team.
At the time of writing, Count Drakon Von Carstein is about half painted. He’s looking pretty cool so far; expect pictures when he’s fully done. Oh, and don’t think I’m done with the Beastmans – there’s more of those goat-legged jerks on their way too. - I miss my kitty cat.
And that’s pretty much it for now. Postings will continue to be erratic until some guy turns up to make internets happen in our new flat; deal with it.
Sunday, 17 May 2009
ATB FSB OMG
Let's get a couple of things straight from the off.
Half of the line-up was chosen by the good people at All Tomorrow's Parties; the other half was voted for by "the fans". Everyone that bought a ticket could vote for any ten bands they liked, and each fortnight the bands in 1st, 2nd, 25th, 50th, 75th and 100th place in the chart were approached by ATP to see if they were up for it. The voting threw up an interesting mix of popular beat combos, from Slayer to Elbow. Of course, not everyone wanted/was able to perform at ATP... but the final line-up was a fine mix of indie-folk-Americana, and good bands.
Friday
Grouper had the unenviable task of being the first act on the first day. Her gently warbling whale-playing-guitar-through-a-delay-pedal made quite pleasant background music, but was otherwise unengaging. And kind of fuzzy.
HEALTH were the complete antithesis to this, and spent a full hour assaulting and offending our senses with a chaotic onslaught of guitar, synth, screams and tribal drumming. There was a lot of leaping about and hitting stuff with other stuff, and a spazzy light show to boot. I thought they were cool; The Boy started to black out a bit.
M83 turned out to be an insipid wash of French ambient shoegaze electronica. Meh. On the other stage, Andrew WK was playing a solo acoustic set; so we went back to our chalet to watch Gardener's World.
It didn't seem right to go to a festival where Devo were playing, and then not see Devo; so we went to see Devo. Who were quite surprisingly brilliant... albeit getting a little too chubby to fit comfortably into their yellow jumpsuits...
Antipop Consortium might have been good, but I nodded off for a fair chunk of their set before we wandered off to catch the end of Jesu. I don't know where to begin categorising their music. Doomgaze? Colossal riffs played in slow motion through amps turned up to 11. Awesome.
And yet not quite as awesome as Electric Wizard, who reduced everyone to ash with tar-thick doom riffs. Awesome +10.
Saturday
Lords should change their name to Eagles Of Death Zeppelin. They smashed out a whole bunch of groovy dancin' rock, and were actually quite fantastic despite a) it being quite early Saturday morning (well, quarter-to-three in the afternoon, but it's all relative innit), and b) my view of the band being somewhat slightly completely obscured by the tallest man in the world with the biggest hair in the world.
Qui are a band fronted by The Jesus Lizard's David Yow, so are pretty much a vehicle for his jibbering lunatic rambling. But a good vehicle, with some neat bluesy licks here and there.
Harvey Milk played some nice and sludgey grunge 'n' roll, not dissimilar to the Melvins at their most accessible.
Errors played "post-rock electro" that sounded to me a bit like 65daysofstatic, but without the guitars. I seem to remember liking them at the time, but I struggle now to remember exactly what they sounded like. Possibly because of booze.
But probably because the next band we saw was The Jesus Lizard, and the sight of a half-naked David Yow swimming across the crowd towards me made me void my brain completely. And my bowels. On record, The Jesus Lizard's awkwardly twangy incoherence has always seemed to me a bit... well... awkward, twangy and incoherent. But live and up close, with all the sweat and the spit and the bruises, it made perfectly horrible sense.
And finally Sleep, who spent 90 minutes ploughing through the entirety of their stoner rock masterpiece "Holy Mountain", with a few extras thrown in here and there. It was a damn long set at the end of a damn long day, but they were still cool, and I stumbled back to the chalet with ears ringing and a head full of pleasant fuzz. And a bag of chips.
Sunday
We decided to take advantage of the fact that ATP take over Butlins' cinema, and went to watch Withnail & I. Despite the film's renown as a cult classic, I'd never actually seen it before. I quite enjoyed it. I think my favourite bit was when the film got stuck and caught fire, owing to the fact that the projection equipment was so old that the original blueprints were deciphered from paintings found in caves on the remote south-facing coast of Gibraltar.
Then, after a few hours spent lounging about drinking cider in the sun (and a swift round of mini-golf), we decided to see some bands. Grails played some pleasant, psychedelic, but ultimately a tad forgettable, post-rock. Good, but not great.
Future Of The Left were great. The Welsh three-piece blasted out a set of punchy three minute rock numbers, pausing only to throw sweets into the crowd and to take the piss out of a few unfortunates ("Your hoody makes you look like a child's version of Hellraiser, only without the promise of rape"). A good time was had by all.
The Mae Shi threw a parachute into the crowd a few songs into their set. Kids love parachutes. It quickly got spread out over the top of us, and when the singer guy leaned in under the front of it and sang at us it was like we had our own personal little festival tent. The only problem was that no-one seemed to know what to do after that, and it quickly got very warm and smelled a lot like feet. The other only problem was that The Mae Shi were, frankly, a bit bollocks. The kids seemed to love it though, so maybe it's just me being a miserable old git.
After that, there was just time to witness a smidgen of The Jesus Lizard's second set of the weekend before This Will Destroy You took to the stage in Reds and... well... destroyed us. The words "epic" and "post-rock" get thrown about quite a lot when describing this sort of band, and seldom is it unjustified. But you haven't heard truly epic post-rock until you've heard these guys. You can chuck "gut-wrenching" in there too. Words simply don't do them justice.
Absolutely.
Fucking.
Incredible.
And then, tediously, it was back to real life. For at least a couple of days, I kept having weird dreams that I was missing a load of cool bands...
Grown-up Work has found a solution to the problem of there not being enough spaces in the car park. They're making 130 of us redundant. This might include me, since I am far and away the most expendable thing in the office (even the water cooler is more useful than me), but probably won't. Chances are I'll get to finish my placement, and they just won't bother getting another student in to replace me. It's not all doom and gloom, though; on Wednesday, some company that's tending for our stores contract turned up for some sort of open day. They took over the training room with a load of display stands and tables covered with various tools and components, and so me and Old Man Braddon (who may also be getting redundantified) went along to see what free stuff we could blag. Pretty much all of the good food had gone, but there were still some fine biscuits to be had. Plus of course, all the other promotional junk... we trawled about, feigning a vague interest in what was on display and answering the occasional question about what our "functionality" was. It was all worth it in the end; we came out with a pretty good haul. I got a mug, a pad of paper, two bearing catalogues, three retractable ball point pens bearing bold corporate logos, a stress ball, a keyring, some fancy mints, and a fistful of jammy dodgers.
And in other news, I move house this week.
uuuuurrrrrggghhaaaAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHH
- ATP: The Fans Strike Back II was not as good as last year's Nightmare Before Christmas.
- It was still freakin' awesome.
Half of the line-up was chosen by the good people at All Tomorrow's Parties; the other half was voted for by "the fans". Everyone that bought a ticket could vote for any ten bands they liked, and each fortnight the bands in 1st, 2nd, 25th, 50th, 75th and 100th place in the chart were approached by ATP to see if they were up for it. The voting threw up an interesting mix of popular beat combos, from Slayer to Elbow. Of course, not everyone wanted/was able to perform at ATP... but the final line-up was a fine mix of indie-folk-Americana, and good bands.
Friday
Grouper had the unenviable task of being the first act on the first day. Her gently warbling whale-playing-guitar-through-a-delay-pedal made quite pleasant background music, but was otherwise unengaging. And kind of fuzzy.
HEALTH were the complete antithesis to this, and spent a full hour assaulting and offending our senses with a chaotic onslaught of guitar, synth, screams and tribal drumming. There was a lot of leaping about and hitting stuff with other stuff, and a spazzy light show to boot. I thought they were cool; The Boy started to black out a bit.M83 turned out to be an insipid wash of French ambient shoegaze electronica. Meh. On the other stage, Andrew WK was playing a solo acoustic set; so we went back to our chalet to watch Gardener's World.
It didn't seem right to go to a festival where Devo were playing, and then not see Devo; so we went to see Devo. Who were quite surprisingly brilliant... albeit getting a little too chubby to fit comfortably into their yellow jumpsuits...
Antipop Consortium might have been good, but I nodded off for a fair chunk of their set before we wandered off to catch the end of Jesu. I don't know where to begin categorising their music. Doomgaze? Colossal riffs played in slow motion through amps turned up to 11. Awesome.
And yet not quite as awesome as Electric Wizard, who reduced everyone to ash with tar-thick doom riffs. Awesome +10.
Saturday
Lords should change their name to Eagles Of Death Zeppelin. They smashed out a whole bunch of groovy dancin' rock, and were actually quite fantastic despite a) it being quite early Saturday morning (well, quarter-to-three in the afternoon, but it's all relative innit), and b) my view of the band being somewhat slightly completely obscured by the tallest man in the world with the biggest hair in the world.Qui are a band fronted by The Jesus Lizard's David Yow, so are pretty much a vehicle for his jibbering lunatic rambling. But a good vehicle, with some neat bluesy licks here and there.
Harvey Milk played some nice and sludgey grunge 'n' roll, not dissimilar to the Melvins at their most accessible.
Errors played "post-rock electro" that sounded to me a bit like 65daysofstatic, but without the guitars. I seem to remember liking them at the time, but I struggle now to remember exactly what they sounded like. Possibly because of booze.
But probably because the next band we saw was The Jesus Lizard, and the sight of a half-naked David Yow swimming across the crowd towards me made me void my brain completely. And my bowels. On record, The Jesus Lizard's awkwardly twangy incoherence has always seemed to me a bit... well... awkward, twangy and incoherent. But live and up close, with all the sweat and the spit and the bruises, it made perfectly horrible sense.And finally Sleep, who spent 90 minutes ploughing through the entirety of their stoner rock masterpiece "Holy Mountain", with a few extras thrown in here and there. It was a damn long set at the end of a damn long day, but they were still cool, and I stumbled back to the chalet with ears ringing and a head full of pleasant fuzz. And a bag of chips.
Sunday
We decided to take advantage of the fact that ATP take over Butlins' cinema, and went to watch Withnail & I. Despite the film's renown as a cult classic, I'd never actually seen it before. I quite enjoyed it. I think my favourite bit was when the film got stuck and caught fire, owing to the fact that the projection equipment was so old that the original blueprints were deciphered from paintings found in caves on the remote south-facing coast of Gibraltar.
Then, after a few hours spent lounging about drinking cider in the sun (and a swift round of mini-golf), we decided to see some bands. Grails played some pleasant, psychedelic, but ultimately a tad forgettable, post-rock. Good, but not great.
Future Of The Left were great. The Welsh three-piece blasted out a set of punchy three minute rock numbers, pausing only to throw sweets into the crowd and to take the piss out of a few unfortunates ("Your hoody makes you look like a child's version of Hellraiser, only without the promise of rape"). A good time was had by all.The Mae Shi threw a parachute into the crowd a few songs into their set. Kids love parachutes. It quickly got spread out over the top of us, and when the singer guy leaned in under the front of it and sang at us it was like we had our own personal little festival tent. The only problem was that no-one seemed to know what to do after that, and it quickly got very warm and smelled a lot like feet. The other only problem was that The Mae Shi were, frankly, a bit bollocks. The kids seemed to love it though, so maybe it's just me being a miserable old git.
After that, there was just time to witness a smidgen of The Jesus Lizard's second set of the weekend before This Will Destroy You took to the stage in Reds and... well... destroyed us. The words "epic" and "post-rock" get thrown about quite a lot when describing this sort of band, and seldom is it unjustified. But you haven't heard truly epic post-rock until you've heard these guys. You can chuck "gut-wrenching" in there too. Words simply don't do them justice.Absolutely.
Fucking.
Incredible.
And then, tediously, it was back to real life. For at least a couple of days, I kept having weird dreams that I was missing a load of cool bands...
Grown-up Work has found a solution to the problem of there not being enough spaces in the car park. They're making 130 of us redundant. This might include me, since I am far and away the most expendable thing in the office (even the water cooler is more useful than me), but probably won't. Chances are I'll get to finish my placement, and they just won't bother getting another student in to replace me. It's not all doom and gloom, though; on Wednesday, some company that's tending for our stores contract turned up for some sort of open day. They took over the training room with a load of display stands and tables covered with various tools and components, and so me and Old Man Braddon (who may also be getting redundantified) went along to see what free stuff we could blag. Pretty much all of the good food had gone, but there were still some fine biscuits to be had. Plus of course, all the other promotional junk... we trawled about, feigning a vague interest in what was on display and answering the occasional question about what our "functionality" was. It was all worth it in the end; we came out with a pretty good haul. I got a mug, a pad of paper, two bearing catalogues, three retractable ball point pens bearing bold corporate logos, a stress ball, a keyring, some fancy mints, and a fistful of jammy dodgers.
And in other news, I move house this week.
uuuuurrrrrggghhaaaAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHH
Monday, 4 May 2009
i hate phantom space man
A couple of weeks ago, Matt "Say What You Want About The Tenets Of National Socialism, At Least It's An Ethos" Smith and Laura decided to go to Bristol's annual Italian car show (rather than accidentally stumble upon it, as they have done for the last few years), and they were kind enough to invite me along too. Unsurprisingly, the Italian Car Show consisted mainly of Italian cars... (click each picture for more photos)
Ferrari...
...Maserati...
...Lamborghini...
...Alfa Romeo...
...Lancia...
...and Ascari, which is actually a British car, but is named after an Italian racing driver, so that's okay.
Apparently only 17 of those Ascaris were ever built; and only 9 of those are still in existence, the remaining 8 having been "destroyed" (presumably by overenthusiastic owners who ran out of talent at some key moment). You'd have thought the owner of this one might have bothered to clean it...
The day after I found myself in London with the family, visiting Dr Sister in her nice new house. Well, some of the time was spent in her shiny new house; the rest of it was spent racing around the neighbouring town of Pinner.
In a wheelbarrow.
The rules were quite simple; each team must consist of two people, and one of them must be in the wheelbarrow at all times. The other one gets to push. There are five checkpoints, and you must each down half a pint at every checkpoint. The first team to arrive at the car park of the Queens Head is the winner.
As it happens, we were the last team to arrive at the car park of the Queens Head, but we at least retained some small amount of dignity by not being sick at any of the checkpoints.
And the next weekend, Matt and I got dragged to some weird ass shenanigan by Alan and Dory. Dory didn't give much away about the details of said shenanigan; but our suspicions were aroused by the presence of men in faceless masks, riding impossibly tall bicycles and jousting against imaginary foes whilst we queued...
Turns out we were queuing up to get into Carny Ville, a moderately insane steam punk Victorian freak show apparition.
And it was freakin' cool. Here's a tiny bit of what happened.
- Some chick put a spoon in her nose and served tea.
- Dory played on a severed head coconut shy.
- Lobotomized twins messed about on silks.
- Matt played ping-pong with the devil.
- I got summoned onto stage for a dance-off against a guy called Barry in front of, like, a thousand people.
- Ghosts walked down the side of a building.
- The whole thing ended with an apocalyptic turn-off-the-century outdoors dance party.
More (crappy) photos here.
Amazing.
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