OH! And as ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lebeautemps has just reminded me: Day of the Triffids?
I fell asleep twice during it.
Now, granted, at the moment I am pretty much wiped out and can fall asleep during a wee if I don't concentrate. But I didn't fall asleep during Dr Who. Or Hamlet, and that was three hours long. ( possible spoiler )
Also: did anyone else notice the resemblance between the triffids and hoodies? Because I was watching it going: omg zeitgeist, much?
***
Apropos nothing much, here, have a photo of me on my birthday, with Anne-Marie Anarchy. I think I was trying to be the Virgin Mary.
I think I was failing.
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Christmas day I suddenly thought: sweet bucketing Jesus! What is that unfamiliar sensation on my lip?! I have a cold sore!
I can't have a cold sore. I've never had a cold sore in my life and I haven't kissed anyone since 2007.
I didn't. Have a cold sore. I didn't have one.
I did, however, have a very minor and unexpected reaction to having changed toothpaste brands a couple of days beforehand. Arm & Hammer Whitening stuff: NO.
***
I want to type something about Christmas day, because it was gorgeous, but I wasn't able to for a couple of days afterwards because it would've meant nothing without photographs and the USB cable was downstairs in the study, and I'm buggered if I could heft my vast, lardy, wine-soaked, cake-ridden, enturkified, Kedgeree-troughing, champagne-sotted, ham-stuffed, nut-munching, kir-sloshing, brownie-sated, grape-plucking, suet-packed backside down the stairs (actually, down wasn't the problem. Down, I am pretty sure I could've done. The problem was up).
Suffice to say that rosamicula embodies all one could ask of a Christmas host, with a cognac soaked cherry on top. She's so fucking classy. And there are some photos on flickr, from both Christmas and my birthday, though only a few are public. Boxing Day lunch with the addition of lebeautemps was divine (kedgeree and the spiciest of salads! Booze soaked cake, baklava, raspberry kirs - oh, bliss), but having been running on the Wheel of Yay since two days before my birthday (Dec 12), I now find myself all-in, and I mean that quite literally, hence the relative silence over the last couple of days.
Hoping some sofa time will restore my vim. xx
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Hey dudes, I was very lucky again this Chrimbo, spent it with Emma and her lovely sister Mischa and cats - isn't it weird having little dudes around who don't really know that they're little dudes and just do their own thing and shit? Anyway it was well good although I did have a psychotic episode at 2am on Christmas and had to have a sleeping pill and was therefore sort of monged Christmas morning. But I had a nap and got up and listened to Paul O'Grady's lovely Christmas show, being wished a Merry Chrimb by many stars of panto - nothing says Christmas like a pre-recorded message from Letitia Dean - and made the Chrimb Din and it was outstanding EIIDSSM. Duck, Tatoes in duck fat, Red Cabbage cooked in cider vinegar, Sprouts, Sweet Potato Mash, Ps in Bs, Dad Gulseven home made Jerusalam Artichokes, Stuffing, Snips, Carrots. Then the next morning took the leftovers veg, scrunched it all up and made it into bubble and squeak, then made three holes in it and dropped an egg into each, cooking them into the hash with intact yolk to run into the hash. Bonzer Mate.
So I also got loads of top class gifts off Emma's lovely family and lovely Emma, which I will record below for posterior.
Tyondai Braxton - Beautiful 180g double vinyl of Central Market
An Infinity Of Things, about the founder of the Wellcome Trust and his Victorian collecting ways
Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen
Grizzly Bear Veckatimest
The Book Of Other People fiction compendium with Danny Clowes and Chris Ware contribution
Richard Hawley - Truleove's Gutter CD
Book of how to make MEAT with MEAT recipes up the wazzoo
MEAT BOARD for CHOPPING MEAT
100 Years of Menswear book from E-Wan hoshetuki with magnificently coked out and suited Dave Bowie on the front. It is not, by the way, a fiction about a terrible dystopia where Menswear infiltrated first the music press then the corridors of power to establish a century of rule by ripping off Wire and being shit.
Liverpool cup with my name on it
Charlie Brown films collection on DVD (AMAZING)
Many socks
Wire Pink Flag 33 1/3 book, awesome
Bath Crab with eyes
Supercool Threadless tshirts depicting scenes of wonder
100 Penguin cover postcards so I will send lots of postcards
Woody Allen - Mere Anarchy new book of laffs
Manhattan DVD
The Thick of it Series 1/In The Loop
Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee by Shane Meadows
Green hoodie (now I have WHITE hoodie, ORANGE hoodie, MUSTARD hoodie, PURPLE hoodie and GREEN hoodie ALL SAME MAKE ALL GOOD)
I also got Marmite Ashes edition
Beatles Socks, Liddypool Socks, Beatles pen with moving fabs moptop heads.
I DONE GOOD ME AM LIKE PRESENTS
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Henrijk has dyed his entire chin and throat bright yellow by dint of stuffing himself head-first into a lily this morning. He wasn't eating it, fortunately, as they're poisonous, and I wiped the pollen off him as best I could, considering he's teatowel phobic, but there it is. I have a bright yellow cat.
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OMG brilliant dream! Met David Tennant. Married him 2 seconds later. Ridiculously happy and affectionate dream from start to end plus added kissing.
This sort of reflects how life's going at the moment. Ridiculously happy and affectionate. I don't have any kissing, obv, but maybe it'll happen. Though probably not with David Tennant.
I feel utterly jolly about life at the moment. I hope you do too. xx
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I have a severe case of the happy. Goodnight, all. x
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I can't remember to whom I was banging on about this, but Canada is merely the world's second largest producer of oil, rather than the first merely has the world's second largest oil reserves, rather than the most. It's still quite surprising though. Although not as surprising as the fact that it has a population of about 33 million. I always thought it was about 6. (6 million that is, not actually 6). I think I also claimed to this person who I can't remember the name of that Venezuela has the world's 4th largest oil reserves. It's actually the seventh, which again, is still quite striking.
And - was watching "Homes Under The Hammer" this am, where they were looking at a place in New Malden. An estate agent made the startling claim that the South Korean community in NM (which is admittedly large, at 25,000) was "the largest anywhere outside Seoul". Now, I know estate agents have a rep for pitching bullshit, but this struck me as the last word in utter bollocks. Indeed, a quick glance at Wikipedia reveals the existence of at least 9 other cities that comfortably trump that number by anywhere up to 3 million people.
So there you go. Don't say you don't learn anything from this journal.
I spent most of today with flaneurette, flaneusing and going to see the Ed Ruscha exhibition at the Hayward gallery. Best day out in ages.
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Holiday debuggeryWe know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:
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Curtains
Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!
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I find it ridiculously exciting when I get a trackable parcel, and cannot keep myself from refreshing every couple of hours to see where it's got to.
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Hooray! I'm happily on my Christmas train home, sailing through lovely festive countryside - frozen ponds! - and watching Seinfeld on DVD. Happy Christmas one and all!
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Cor, humans are amazing, contradictory creatures, aren't they? On the one hand, my borough is littered with piles of un-spread grit at the foot of each large hill, while grannies skid down ungritted pavements on their backsides.
On the other: they've invented a way of translating thought directly into speech with a wireless neural transmitter.
Perhaps this will enable us to finally end the ongoing debate over whether patients like Rom Houben (in a coma, but apparently awake the whole time, and now communicating via someone who says they can feel minute movements in his fingers), is actually communicating or not.
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I find the call centre helpdesk BT uses for its broadband very helpful as a rule, but it would be really refreshing if the first thing they checked was whether there was a service outage in your area, rather than putting you through the reboot-computer-reboot-router-stick-your-finger-up-your-nose-and-turn-around-three-times-anticlockwise routine that any rational computer user has already tried before calling.
Right, I'm going to have some taramasalata and there's nothing you can do about it.
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When did atheists become so damn fragile? I thought the whole point was that atheism wasn’t just another faith, to be filed along with Zoroastrianism and Voodoo. As a non-believer, you’re supposed to be able to remain untouched by the belief systems that others profess; your rationalism makes you immune to whatever they’re breathing. But to race to the authorities at the first hint of a well-intentioned prayer smacks of massive insecurity rather than of disagreeing with a belief from any position of strength. Could your atheism really crumble so easily in the face of someone believing extra hard?
 Partly, of course, this is down to the irascible Dawkins. His increasing impatience with and intolerance for believers, while understandable in a man who has spent his life immersed in scientific study, has long been in danger of overwhelming the value—and, importantly, the essentially positive nature—of his message. The more he has shifted from demonstrating how the world has not been designed and is amazing in its own right to explaining to anyone who does not understand this, carefully and painstakingly, why they personally are a scrofulous moron, the more he has alienated people whom he might once have reached and the loyal choir he has ended up preaching to has become ever more militant.
Which is why, at Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People (the idea of which might sound as if it should be up for a Rory Bremner Award for Sledge-Fisted Satire, but it’s actually excellent) at Hammersmith on Sunday, I was impressed with any performer who was prepared to say that, while they were happy to criticise and satirise religion, they didn’t actually despise people who were religious; in front of a righteous “right-thinking” crowd and especially with Dawkins in the building, that’s veering close to heresy.
It’s kind of nuts that I feel driven by this and other similar cases to turn and face the massed ranks that I usually find myself travelling alongside, especially at a time when so much faith-related nonsense abounds. Feeling beleaguered in a secular society, some Christians are so desperate for validation that they can find virtue in anyone professing a faith at all—witness the idiot bishop to the armed forces subsequently having to apologise for admiring the Taliban. Tony Blair often makes similarly profound pronouncements about just how great it is that people around the world have some faith, any faith, so long as it’s faith. (Presumably it’s even better if it’s somehow modern faith, right, Tony?) But criticising a religion, dismantling its superstitions and pretensions piece by piece, does not have to equate to being stung by its every manifestation in other people’s everyday lives. Someone offering to pray with you for your child, be they Christian or whatever else, is reaching out and offering support. What the hell is wrong with just taking that as it’s meant and declining with grace?
If asked “How tolerant are you?”, a huge majority of Sunday’s Nine Lessons crowd would probably have replied “Irreproachably”. But I’d like to know how many of them, faced with someone expressing their beliefs around their children, would start hysterically calling for them to be sacked.
If someone’s proselytising at you and trying to make you sign up to their holy book, it’s only natural that you’ll vigorously resist. But if someone is expressing heartfelt support using the language and symbols of their own belief system—such as offering to intercede with their gods on your behalf—then it’s churlish, at best, to try to punish them for it. What’s that, Sooty? “It can be a fine line between ‘offering support’ and evangelism”? Yes it can, which is why I recommend we use those rational processes that we advertise so proudly to work out what’s happening at the time, respond accordingly and settle the fuck down.
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drummygirl's gender-specific drum tips:
The production values are probably no worse than Steve Gadd Up Close.
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The art world was in turmoil this morning after experts claimed that the snow picture created outside webofevil’s flat on Monday afternoon was signed not by the artist but by someone else entirely. Experts pointed to the different techniques used for the two elements of the picture—“dragging a foot in the snow” for the signature and “maybe some kind of stick” for the mouse or possibly bear itself—although other experts pointed out that this did not preclude the same person, thought to attend a local school, being responsible for both.
 The work, originally credited to “Lucasta” and bought by Maurice Saatchi for £41,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, will now have to be put into frozen storage by experts until its provenance is established by experts. “It’s a disaster,” said an expert.
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