Super Website 57

Just finished uploading the edited highlights of my old blog to the current one. Have removed boring posts about being too drunk/cold/hot/ill, tedious descriptions of dreams, drunken sincerity and (some of the) dubious grammar. Over 5 years of complete drivel to browse at your leisure in the archives!

In further wasting far too much time on things to notionally improve productivity news, I’ve made myself a Hipster PDA. If nothing else it has more practical uses than the Nokia 770 that I broke. I wonder if anyone’s worked out a way to port Linux onto it?

I tend to be a bit wary of the more “devout” end of the atheist spectrum (slightly too much insufferable preaching to the converted and wringing of hands about how, in some tortuous way, your nan going down the C of E of a Sunday is directly responsible for all religious war) so wasn’t particularly enthralled by the prospect of ATHEIST BUSES. I had failed to take into account that their most important effect would, fairly obviously, be trolling fundamentalist twats into doing stupid things. Go go humanist rangers!

Highly amusing joke:

FUNDA!

What’s missing?

MENTALISTS ARE!

The problem with doing obviously rubbish things “ironically” is that between deciding to them and developing a good anecdote/blog entry is that you have to do the obviously rubbish thing, e.g. going to terrible stand-up comedy nights. I ended up leaving after realising it wasn’t going to get better than a very short man holding up pictures of cats and claiming they were a metaphor for Vietnam (see, sounds almost amusing as an anecdote!) or a man spending 15 minutes berating his wife, clearly unaware that observational stand-up comedy involves more than just basic descriptions of your awful (hopefully in this case imaginary, otherwise I suspect he may have had her corpse in the boot of his car) life.

Kindly taken by Frank’s keyboard player Rhodri, shortly before too much beer made me fall over and twat my hand up.

Look what I found on the bus this morning in a folder marked “BBC: TOP SECRET”!

As discussed, here is the summary of the proposed 2009 specials.

Planet Of The Dead

David Tennant Dr Who arrives in the universe’s biggest space graveyard to find Matt Smith Dr Who raping the corpse of William Hartnell. They then tag-team on all the other dead Dr Whos (Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee
& Paul McGann). An Easter CGI spectacular not to be missed! Will really get them going on the internet!

The Next Next Doctor

David Tennant Dr Who runs into Matt Smith Dr Who again, and is horrified to discovered he is being sponsored by Next. He takes him on a boring trip through time to meet Lord Reith (Alan Davies is available!) and learn about the ethos of public service broadasting.

Eggs-terminate!

A darkly satirical look at battery farming with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as Farmer Davros. RT cover with a naked David bursting out of a giant egg? Daleks converted into milking machines.

The Next Next Next Doctor

David Tennant Dr Who takes Matt Smith Dr Who to a space cinema to see mediocre Philip K Dick adaptation Next and dies of boredom.

Suggested Season 5 Titles:

Dr Who In An Exciting Adventure With Bigamy

Dr Who VS Merlin

Booyah!

The Bloom Is Off The Rose (something to do with Billie & James Joyce, see if Gareth Roberts has read Ulysses)

Dr Who VS Merlin VS Aliens VS Predator

The Next Next Next Next Doctor (get runner to look for something else called Next on Wikipedia).

Well, that’s both resolutions blown already, although I could attempt
to fudge the blogging one by writing some extra stuff to make up for
the lost weekend. For some reason my brain went into complete
hibernation and was either asleep or telling itself lies that fiddling
with Firefox extensions and Google Mail filters was an exercise in
increasing future productivity rather than in fevered procrastination.
2 days of almost nil activity led to a restless Sunday night and a
wretched Monday at work, with the only upside being that I was awake to
see Streatham Hill looking prettier than usual with a nice dusting of
snow at about 4am (I’d post some pictures but my sleep-deprived brain
managed to erase them from the camera instead of transferring them to
the computer).

The only thing I learned today was that it is possible
to be allergic to celery, especially if you are from Central Europe.
Are there any allergies crapper than that? I am going to continue in my
lifelong quest to not bother eating celery, just in case I have any
ancestors from Liechtenstein.

Why not imagine I had some tedious observations about public transport
so I could do a post titled “Why do I always have to sit next to Jasper
Carrot on the bus?”?

Instead of that, here is a picture of Doctor Who and his famous celery, which he used to kill some German tourists in one of the series’ more controversial episodes.

So Ed, no-one ever asks me, why do you still watch Heroes even though it is clearly a load of old shite?

The answer I never have to give is that it was always a load of old shite, but sometimes people fly and travel in time and shit, and that is about as much as I want from it.

Heroes was pretty much doomed to get people excited for a bit before having everyone turn on it, because of the initial premise. What would it be like if ordinary people got superpowers? Well, I don’t know, but they stop being ordinary people fairly quickly which is why any pretence at being a real drama couldn’t be kept up longer than the first series.

There were some clues before that, most notably the ever present boring voiceovers from dull scientist Mohinder with his amazing superpower of being foreign. These plumbed depths of banality not seen since the X-Files began to run out of ideas and began starting every other episode with someone saying exciting things like “Since the dawn of time, man has looked at the stars… but they in turn, looked into him!”. Any idea of having anything particularly interesting to say was notional at best.

The plots make no kind of sense, there are characters so rubbish they had to kill them off and make up new characters for the contracted actors to play, the line between homage and rip-off is stretched to beyond breaking point.

But for me, it’s all about seeing nerdy Hiro being all excited about being a superhero, or Matt Parkman making a confused face as he tries to work out what the fuck is going on and what he’s supposed to do with psychic powers. And then sometimes Dr Who or Mr Sulu or Lt Uhura turn up! It is soap opera with superheroes and I don’t think it really has pretentions to be much more than that (and if anything has flat out admitted it with twists about X being Y’s secret son, etc). It could be better and I’m not evangelising for it, but I find the level of ire raised against in some quarters slightly odd, given it was always enjoyable nonsense at best. Evile Sylar is just Paul Robinson for nerds! Also I had to write something on my blog before midnight to fulfil at least one of my resolutions, as I had a fag earlier.

1) Have some rowdy girls in a passing car take a photo of you and shout, “SMILE! YOU’RE ON FACEBOOK!” I know talking about strangers telling you to smile is a very tired observation, but it apparently isn’t tired enough as thickos still insist on doing it. “Stop being so thoughtless! You’re on a boring blog entry only being written to fulfil an obviously doomed resolution to try and write a blog entry every day!” I would have said if I’d known I was going to write this. There’s only one way to get rid of this kind of impotent rage.

2) Be serenaded by a tramp playing the theme music to Blackadder on a pennywhistle.

I have given up smoking. Place bets now as to which resolution I break first! Gordon Browns helped by putting those horrible pictures of diseased people on fag packets, so it was either that or insist on being given the ones with the pregnancy warnings and pictures of pale babies. Or cover them with stickers reading things like, “Smoking supports the economy in these troubled times!” Is that enough blog now? BYE!

Hackers (like in the film Hackers) broke into my GMail account and tried to use it to flog broken tellies to all my friends. I am sorry internet friends! Ironically it sent one back to me and it got filtered out by GMail’s excellent spam filter, so I wouldn’t have known about it if someone hadn’t shouted at me. I have changed all my passwords so that this betrayal of your trust shall NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. As a punishment for my lax password security I am now going to have slightly awkward conversations with lots of people I don’t know very well that my mother has invited round for a drinks party! Maybe THIS is the REAL story of Xmas.