Forgive me, Internet, for I have sinned – it has been a month since my last blog entry.
A lot can happen in a month – as it happens, however, it all happened to other people. Actually, that’s not quite true…
Way back in the heady days of November a group of my friends from university and I got together for a weekend, which was excellent fun. We rented a cottage in Leighton Buzzard – despite the name, however, the only circling predator was me as I stealthily stalked the elusive boxes of chocolates that had secreted themselves around the place.
It was fab to see everyone again, though my weekend was slightly marred by me feeling a bit grotty on the Saturday night [1]. A rather excellent Sunday lunch made up for that, though, by virtue of existing in a lovely little pub sat on the canal. There was even a visit from the lesser-spotted Nim, extremely rare outside his native Oxford habitat. Since the last time I’d seen him, he’d taken up kick-boxing, and was off to some competition or other – somehow this wasn’t much of a surprise. I expect he’ll be co-starring with Jackie Chan in a few years or something.
A couple of weekends later, Jarrod and I trundled off to see Bill Bailey live at the Wembley Arena. As usual his ability to disappoint was conspicuous by its absence, and he had everyone in stitches. It was quite a ranty performance in some ways, with him lambasting everyone from The Killers [2] to Asda [3] – it would be entertaining enough to watch anyway, but it certainly helps that most things he comments on seem to strike a chord with me.
Also, watching him and Kevin Eldon roll around the stage on motorised trousers presses was a surreal experience which would no doubt haunt my nightmares if I had any. Actually, since I can very rarely remember my dreams, perhaps I do and it does. That’s not something upon which I wish to dwell.
Speaking of listening to interesting poeple, there was also an interesting interview with Adam Curtis on The Register relatively recently. He’s speaking about his opinions of the BBC and the media in general, and how he feels they’re losing touch with what’s going on in the world. Being El Reg, it also focuses on the effect of blogging and such like on the news. In any case, he always comes across as a fairly sensible chap to me and I can recommend it as an interesting read. It’s also worth listening to the audio, poor quality though it is, as the transcription doesn’t quite touch on all of the same points.
So, the media are scared of the bloggers, eh? Well, maybe I should cover something political to join the bandwagon. Something powerful, something important, something which strikes at the heart of the problems currently facing the world… What about this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/7126973.stm
| [1] | And no, I don’t believe it was an overdose of either chocolate or alcohol – more like an underdose of sleep, I suspect. |
| [2] | He wasn’t particularly impressed with their lyric “I’ve got soul / but I’m not a solider”, because while it sounds deep and meaningful on superficial inspection, it turns out to be superficial and meaningless on deeper inspection. He does have a point, and now I can’t help but notice when any number of other popular song lyrics suffer from similar failings. |
| [3] | Asda had the temerity to ask him to perform in an advertising campaign for them, the poor, simple fools. |