Nick's Blog
Blog n' Roll
28/4/2007 @ 11:58
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Those of you who know me a bit know I love my classic rock music, especially Prog. In my book, truly great music lasts for over 10 minutes and has lyrics about energy curves, concomitant timelines and has 10 million chord changes.
I still like some shorter, kick ass music as well...you can't beat "Space Trucking" by Deep Purple or "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin. But I really don't like rock songs about how good rock n' roll is: I'm looking at you Bob Seger and Joan Jett. "Old Time Rock n' Roll" and "I Love Rock n' Roll, put another dime in the juke box baby" are two examples of where a song about rock n' roll is actually WORSE than the genre they're eulogising. I don't know why songs celebrating rock music seem to dumb down in the music and lyrics department...it also smacks of a band who have run out of ideas about what to write about. C'mon, there's plenty of mileage in music about hard lovin' women in fast moving cars, girlfriends subsequently mangled in car accidents and the mystical fields of Elysium where the strange energy crystals that radiate peace doth dwell.
Only in rock and disco is there music about rock and disco. Classical and opera aren't so self-indulgent. There aren't any operas called "I Can't Get Enough Opera" where there's a libretto going:
"I love my opera, all day long
And into the night, it's gotta be opera
Take me back to that good ol' opry, baby
And cantana me all night long...."
Likewise, no ballet contains any piece of music about a ballet queen, young and fit only 17, strutting her stuff on the dance floor. Ballet and Opera mainly deal with death, usually in tragic ciccumstances, and until disco covers the lyrical ground of young love dashed by intense jealousy on a Friday night down the local club, then it will always be an intellectual desert to me.
Whilst I'm on the subject of opera and ballet, why hasn't anyone tried to combine the two? A ballet where the dancers sang at the same time would be revolutionary and would boost the interest levels of both. Ballopera? Operllet? Excuse me, I'm off to the patent office now.....
Battle of the Blog
23/4/2007 @ 16:14
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Went to a wargame convention in London over the weekend. Go on, get your geek jokes out of the way now. Anyway, by now you'll have a firm image in your head of what a wargamer looks like: Big belly, thinning hair, poor personal hygiene, thick horn rimmed glasses, beard and probably wearing a Rush tour T-shirt from 1982. You're not far off the truth if you think that.
So, I'm on the train going to the Excel conference centre in East London and I get off at the stop for it. I notice a lot of people going to the Excel centre who don't fit the stereotype of a gamer: They're thin, wearing brightly coloured clothes....they're women, dammit! Women and children...whole families. Have the dads convinced their families that theirs is a noble and worthwhile hobby? Have loads of women and under 12s suddenly defected to a real hobby after years of shunning it? Then I started to worry that I was going to the wrong place; that the convention was next weekend or in a totally different venue.
But the explanation soon became clear; in the adjacent conference hall was the London Marathon registration session. So all the thin women turned left and the crowd thinned out. I merged in with the beer bellies and Rush tour T-shirts; as men started to detail how they rolled a double 6 with their Scythinan chariots and defeated Graham's Greek Hoplites.
Order had been restored.
Where No Blog Has Gone Before
17/4/2007 @ 13:28
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My friend Ming and I were talking about various science fiction shows of the past and present and by some random bit of logic, we got to a point where we thought that various science fiction shows are quite like girlfriends.
BLAKE'S 7 is like your first love. Fun and exciting at the time but when you look back on it, there were too many embarrassing and awkward moments.
BABYLON 5 is the one true love. She was beautiful, intelligent and full of surprises.
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (New) is the current flame: It's not all gone OK but you're hoping things will work out.
STAR TREK is the sexy, experienced older woman who taught you so much. The eldest was the best, way better than her younger sisters.
DOCTOR WHO is the girl that was only ever a friend. Not much to look at when you first met her, but always fun, she got pretty a while back before vanishing without trace for a few years. Now she's back, looking better than ever but hanging out with a young trendy crowd and that spark of wit and charm she once had has dimmed slightly.
FARSCAPE was the kinky BDSM girl who always wanted to tie you up and play with latex puppets.
STARGATE SG-1 is the girl who was cute when you first met her, but now keeps following you and won't go away, no matter how many hints you drop her.
SPACE, ABOVE AND BEYOND is the sexy but not so clever girl you dated for a while. You wished she stuck around longer to see if it would work out.
THE X FILES is the stalker girlfriend whose paranoia, depression and annoying habits kept getting you down.
SAPPHIRE AND STEELE is the psycho ex with mad ideas who your parents and friends really didn't like and tried to warn you about.
THE TOMORROW PEOPLE is the teenage tease who keeps flirting with you but you know it's wrong to keep seeing her.
SPACE 1999 is the airhead who looks great but can't string a coherant sentence or concept.
TORCHWOOD is the good looking girl in the bar who, when you get closer to her, you're not sure if she's actually a guy or a girl.
Blonde on Blog
06/4/2007 @ 11:22
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I know someone who has a circuitous way of thinking and word association. Her brain orders stuff not along the lines of names, shapes, places, colours and the like, but in terms of a string of adjectives that when added up kind of make sense. It's as if all nouns have decided to go on stike in her brain and that adjectives are scab workers who the management have brought in to do extra shifts.
For example "reddish alcoholic drinkies" is red wine or "blue driving thing" is her car.
We had an inadvertant game of "guess the movie" because she was trying to describe movies she'd seen recently but again, could only describe them not by their title but by a string of descriptive words linked vaguely to their content.
"What did we watch the other night?" she said to her boyfriend. "Oh yes, it was that Python thingy doing I'm Spartacus"
"Do you mean 'Life of Brian'?" Said my friend Jon.
"I think so....is that the one where they go 'I'm Spartacus'?"
"No, that's 'Spartacus'"
"I'm sure one of them said 'I'm Spartacus and so's my wife'...which is the one with the jokes?"
"Please stop talking"
So we had a game where we made up movie titles based on the way this girl talks. See if you can guess what they are:
"Harrison Ford floppy hat rescues treasures with a whip beats up baddie Germans"
"Computer goes mad kills crew light show apes at the start"
"Anthony thingy kills and eats people the one with that woman child star now grown up who was also in that thingy where she builds some machine to talk to aliens"
"Old actor bloke and three minis or were they volkswagens steal gold in Switzerland was it? Or was it Sweden? Or that country where they make pasta I think anyway traffic jam and they drive out but bus dangles over the end"
"big ship sinks"
"space ship creature thing bursts out of stomach runs around tall woman escapes and there was the little cat as well."
Sospan Blog
01/4/2007 @ 11:39
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As I said in my last blog entry I've been away to Wales and the Cotswolds. I'm back now and can report that I had a lovely time in the Cotswolds and Wales was...Wales really. I was in the Mumbles with some friends and I only met two Welsh people in 3 days; that's the Mumbles/Swansea for you.
Last Sunday was a particularly surreal day. After a rip roaring party on the previous night, it was decided to go and watch Nuthatches nesting in the local cemetary. Now those of you who know me quite well know that I'm not a great nature lover...in fact, I consider all animals not kept on a leash to be "wild" and capable of attacking at any moment...including sheep. This is probably because I spent most of my teenage years in Australia where everything, even pet budgies, are highly toxic and hell bent on destroying mankind.
Still, watching a bird which I was assured was beautiful, nibbling bits of bark in a cemetay to the assorted coos and ahhs of my friends was a new experience and not altogether unpleasant once they were able to reassure me that the Nuthatch wasn't going to swoop down and peck my eyes out.
But that wasn't truly a surreal moment. I mean, the Nuthatch isn't a prime exponent of the Dadaist movement nor does it look particularly cubist. A little later on and our group went for a walk along the cliffs. One of our group spotted some kind of beetle (I stayed well back in case it leapt up at me and stung me in the face) and there was more cooing and ahhing as they stooped down to examine the 6 legged, chitinous, multifaceted eyed freak. Then a strange conversation was had:
THERESA: "Isn't he beautiful; a red nosed arthropodicus vulgaris if I'm not mistaken."
CLAUD: "He doesn't appear to be moving. He might be dead"
TRISTRAM: "No, he's moving but very slowly. He might be ill."
ANDREA: (In a German accent because she is actually German) "There's something sticking out of his arse."
TRISTRAM: "You're right, that doesn't look natural"
CLAUD: "Hmmm, looks like half his guts are hanging out as well."
WIFEY: "Maybe he's having a poo"
ANDREA: "No, zer iz definitely somezing sticking up his arse"
We then convene what appears to be a special beetle episode of "House" as everyone expresses their medical opinion on what's wrong with the thing and how best to treat it. My hysterical cries of "kill it! Kill it!" went largely ignored until it was decided to do a mercy killing because most of the group thought there was something definitely terminal about the beetle's condition. A few feet down the path we found another of the same species, well and fine, so someone had to play doctor again and break the news to it that it's friend was beyond care and had to be put to S-L-E-E-P. For all I know all the other beetles fed on its carcass later that evening.
But the surrealism award of the day was this conversation.
THERESA: "Now they have a special way of counting sheep in Sussex....Yan, Tan, Tetherer, Fetherer, Dick...."
TRISTRAM: "No, it's Pimp. Pimp is 5 and Dick is 10"
THERESA: "Yes, you're absolutely right, Pimp is 5...So it's Yan, Tan, Tetherer, Featherer, Pimp, Leatherer, Sethera Hovera..."
ME: "Pimp? What are you talking about?"
THERESA: "...Dovera, Dick"
ME: "Dick?"
THERESA: "And I can't quite remember the next bit before you get to the Bumfits"
ME: "You lot live in the Land Beyond Mad"
I look over at Wifey as if to say "I think they had too much to drink last night" but she goes
WIFEY: "I heard it differently. I thought it was Yain, Tain, Eddero, Peddero, Pitts.
Tayter, Later, Overro, Coverro, Dix."
ME: "NOOOOOOOOOOOO! Not you too!"
It was one of those days where everyone in the world is in on some enormous joke except you.
