Sunday 1 November 2009

Happy Halloween

Photobucket

Cost of not bothering to get up on Halloween = extra day in bed
Cost of buying the nearest thing left to a pumpkin on day after = £1.60
Ending up with a jack-o-lantern made from a Melon = PRICELESS

In other news: what the hell is up with people on Halloween these days? I don't recall October 31st being annual 'dress up as a whore princess / fairy' day...

More gore, less Disney please.

Wednesday 28 October 2009

NaNoWriMo 2009 in 2 days!

Photobucket
Photobucket
Photobucket

The Infinite Monkey Theorem posits that a monkey with a typewriter given an infinite time frame would eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare.

WANNA PROVE THEM RIGHT?! NaNoWriMo has been set up for that exact cause. The only difference is that due to the scarcity of infinite free time, they've cut the time frame down to one month and drastically upped the number of monkeys.

Over the next month (beginning at a second past midnight on the morning of November the 1st and ending at midnight on the 30th of November, hundreds of thousands of people will challenge themselves to write an original 50,000 word novel or die of exhaustion and caffeine abuse (whichever comes first).

Worried that you don't have what it takes? If you never try, you'll never know. Worried that you don't have a good enough idea? Meh, most of us don't. Once you get writing, it all comes to you.

No novel is great after the first draft and yours won't be an exception :o) but by the end of November you'll have created at least the best part of your own work of fiction. Your own world. Yours to behold, brag about and if you put the effort into polishing it up a bit... you can even $ell it!

So come join in, because seriously... what else are you planning to achieve with your dull and pointless life? All you have to do is register for FREE at http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Out There Festival 2009

Last month something pretty great happened in Yarmouth; the 2009 Out There Festival. Over the weekend, Yarmouth was transformed into somewhere you might actually want to be as the dog shit on the pavements dried and shrivelled up, the chavs took their hoods down to see what was going on and the town-wide stench of stale piss and broken dreams was replaced with that of unwashed carnies on a hot day and general mirth (they’re hard to tell apart actually). For 48 hours we experienced our very own mini Koninginnedag. And it was good.

It actually reminded me of the Koninginnedag quite a lot. That’s Queen’s day for those of you who are ignorant of Dutch culture – an annual nation-wide excuse to get high, wander around, get fleeced by opportunistic, price gouging salesmen, be crazy, watch others being crazy and generally take a break from trying to irritate, stab and run each other over.

I never thought that kind of thing would be possible in Yarmouth, but it turns out I was wrong. It seems the chavs just needed to be shown how. And by dotting street performers and attractions around the town, they seemed to start to get the idea and I had a great time wandering through it all in typical Ulyssian fashion.

IMO it's exactly the kind of thing we need in this run down ex-fishing port. It's definitely money better spent than the casinos, fast food franchises, and nightclubs that make up most of the rest of Yarmouth anyway. The outer harbour might not be operational yet, but it seems that the Koninginnedag found its way over already.

CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE

Dave Chameleon
Photobucket

Photobucket

The Gaiety Engine
Photobucket

Photobucket

Abi Collins - Une Femme Exposée
Photobucket

Willet & Patteson's The Amazing Camera Obscura
Photobucket

Zigmund & Froyd
Photobucket

Photobucket

Mandinga Arts Street Artists (Slightly Disturbing Fish)
Photobucket

Didier Pasquette and Company Altitude
Photobucket

Tuesday 16 June 2009

St. Porge Redux

St Porge

After my last post, I have been inspired to create a new patron saint for England that mirrors our modern day national identity. Like him? He's a handsome feller eh?

I've really gone for something different this time... unlike our old patron saint, St. Porge has never slain a dragon although he’ll talk your arm off about the time he did. He claims to be English but he's really of mixed European descent like most of us Brits. And he was born in an Arab world ruled by greedy morons who claim Christian ethics that persecuted him for what he believes in... ehhh... maybe I'm going to have to rethink this one...

Friday 24 April 2009

Happy St. Porges Day!

Did you have a fantrabulous St George's day? What...? Yes, it was last week. But don't worry, you're one of millions if you missed it completely. I cared so much that it took me nearly a week to blog about it. Don't be surprised if the rest of this post is unintelligible. I probably just slipped into a coma on my keyboard.

And don't feel alone if you were suitably disappointed with the celebration of our national snake dragon slaying Romano-Palestinian English Perseus Clone patron saint. I celebrated it in the crappest way possible: I was at work.

NB: If you're confused by the strike-throughs above, you should go and look up who your Patron Saint really was. Just like St. Paskwal, the Patron Saint of India, our Patron Saint is an import with little to do with what he has become. And just like Jesus, he's most likely a rehashing of another character from a much older story.

Personally I had no idea it was upon us either, aside from a slight twinge in the larger of my testicles that I get whenever something thoroughly and spectacularly pants happens. That and a particularly patriotic email I got from a colleague deploring how 'un-PC' it's become these days to celebrate anything to do with being English. Please, tell it to the cheeks at my other end.

Although it's true, of course. In England, we love to promote backwards ethnic culture, particularly when it's other people's retarded ethnic culture, but we have a certain brand of national guilt and chagrin when it comes to blowing our own trumpet. In fact you could say that we're practically tone deaf. Probably wouldn't even know which end to blow in...

Many even feel that it is inappropriate to display our own flag. Maybe because it still retains some of the political bad taste of the fundamentalist National Front.

Personally I couldn't give a hoot... We should ban all 'ethnic culture' and Patriotism. Not because I'm offended by it, but because good culture will stand and survive by its own artistic merit.

Good culture does not have to be attached to nationality or colour. Nor should it be limited to any race or protected or celebrated simply because it may already possess such connotations. That would be racist.

Blues survived. From its Afro-American roots (a mix of Black tribal songs and white country), it has survived the passage of time and gone on to influence most genres of music that we have today. That is good culture. That's why it survived. You no doubt own music that is either blues or derived from blues. Even if you didn't realise it.

Likewise, England has pop, folk music, metal, etc. Music Of White/English Origin you could call it... but really I'd rather you didn't! The reason why the Beatles, Prodigy, Sex Pistols, Muse, the 'Stones, etc are not called MOWO comes back to our discomfort with being proud of anything. But maybe it's best left that way. Good culture doesn't need the crutch of race and shouldn't be exclusive.

Taking the descendants of Nation XYZ tribesmen and making them trade their sweatpants for grass skirts to dance for the amusement of pretentious middle class types is not good culture or even culture at all. And neither is a nation of shopkeepers, knotted hankerchiefs and binge drinking. And apart from binge drinking, that's why they're all doomed. To suggest that such things should be protected as culture is taking something that should be organic and preserving it for no one knows why.

Like two hundred year old siamese twins pickled in Victorian glassware. And that's what will happen to old Blighty and the Red White and the Blue if we keep up this pseudo-patriotic crap. It'll become a pickled and wrinkled relic of some time your Granddad told you about - something that Patriotism often tends to be right from the start anyway. A broken arrow. A joke.

Or even worse, as Patriotism has a habit of being; a crutch for those with less savoury intentions. In the words of Samuel Johnson: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel". Or sometimes the first! Hark! Is that a jackbooted Kilroy Silk I hear upon the stair?

But I digress. The thing that really cheeses me off is that I didn't get a day's holiday out of this crap. Did dragons die in vain?! Paddy and Jock get their 8 hours off for their Saint's days and Taffy will probably get his next - at least they're trying! Why not us?

So go ahead, if you're pissed off that you're getting done out of a holiday, call in sick tomorrow. Call in sick all week. You deserve it you beautiful sausage you!

Sunday 1 March 2009

If you laugh at this then you is an Intemellectual

Photobucket

Grammar jokes rule. And don't let no one be telling you no different! Especially ones featuring Lorem Ipsum and shady guys in red robes.

In other unrelated news, I'm no longer the #1 search result on Google for 'Voodoo Tofu'. What's up with that?!

But at least I have my first follower! Welcome ObtuseRuby!

Friday 27 February 2009

Introducing: The Drop Kick - King of Technical Support

Photobucket

I haven't formatted my scummy Windows XP PC for well over two years now and it's getting pretty unbearable.

If I was a richer person then I would say that it was FUBAR and replace it (rich people don't need to understand the idea of spending several hours of your life wrestling to maintain your hardware), and if I had more time then I would just use some of it to fix the putrid tower of crud on my desk that now sounds like a woodpecker caught in the blades of a helicopter, saving myself hours of time in the long run for every time that I do something that's now beyond my PCs puny processing prowess... like playing minesweeper or using Capslock.

A swift change in directional momentum caused by a solid punt seems like the best solution right now. On second thoughts, does anyone have a sledgehammer?