timboblog

Random guff

1) I changed the typeface for this site yesterday for a couple of reasons: a) it makes more sense to have everything uniform, rather than a bit Georgia and a bit Arial. Whatever was I thinking? And b) you know something's got to give when you're not able to read your own website without squinting. So either the text was too small or I'm going blind.

2) I've had a blogroll purge. A bunch of blogs have either expired (if that's what blogs do) or become somewhat defunct, in a way not disimilar to the way this one appeared to be going until very recently. It's all very sad, but there's not much point linking to something that doesn't exist is there? I've also added a link to the Lardblog, cos it's good innit? And also this site. Tis genius.

3) I've updated the 'Thingys' section too, so that there are now links to Big Blogger 2005 and I Hate Keane. Seeing as these were fucking hilariously great fun to do, and make me laugh even now, it seems like the right thing to do. Plans are even afoot to reinstate I Hate Keane to it's former glory, with added hate! Watch this space.

And 4) While going through I Hate Keane, imagine my astonishment when I found a whopping 66 comments, all for me! Some people love Keane (the fools) and some hate them. Some are indifferent, but practically all the comments are highly amusing. Apart from the ones in Spanish. I haven't got a clue whether they're amusing or not.

My favourite comments include these gems:

"leave keane alone, they've done nothing wrong apart from make great music."
Are you sure?

"FUCK YOU YOU MOTHERFUCKING BASTARD!"
Subtle.

"When I heard " This Is The Last Time", I thought it was a refreshing new sound. I do hear where guitar could come in and really fill out a lot of their music. But they are just starting out on their big career. Give em a break man. I also didn't like his high voice at first...I wonder if he was in a boys choir before. The piano is simple but emotive. The video for "Somewhere only we know" is ok...but "Everybody's Changing" and the claymation one are actually pretty profound. The lyrics are enigmatical. I haven't heard all the hype that you have about Keane over in England...so maybe I'm sheltered. I am very ecclectic in my tastes and Keane just kind of reached out and grabbed me. Not too many artists can do that with me. The thing I don't understand is how young girls like Ashley and Dana can get so horny over someone like Tom. What's wrong with them anyway?"
Peace to you too Mr Enigmatical, which isn't a word.

"Fuck it for you!!!! You are a son of bich shet, your mother is a bi tch."
Fuck it for you too!

"why do u ate them so much?"
I didn't eat them. And sort out your Engrish prease.

"FUCK THIS BAND IN THE EAR."
Indeed.

I no lie!

Told you I'd be back.

(Burning question No.1: Does this count as a post?)

Bucking hell

This has kept me amused all week and will probably do so for the next fortnight as well. The soundtrack is amazing!

Yes, I'm easily pleased.

And this is what has caused me to want to drag young Buck out of the obscurity of my early 80's memories and into my super tendy Brightonian living space (not 'room', 'space'... pay attention please; I'm at the cutting edge me). The bit of the flat that still has an okay ceiling.

South Park rules.

I once owned a die-cast model of Buck's super cool spaceship. It had moving bits and buttons and stuff. I frigging loved it. God knows where it is now though. At the bottom of a landfill somewhere in Lowestoft probably, which is really rather depressing when you think about it.

I spoke to Steven Berkoff on the phone today and he was very nice. It wasn't a personal call, and no, he didn't offer me a role in his latest play. Anyway, who knew he was 70 (blimey!) and that he was in A Clockwork Orange? I know! I didn't have a clue! I only remember him being scary in Beverly Hills Cop and that's easily good enough for me. I mean, who needs Kubrick when you can have Eddie Murphy?

Err.

eek!

So this is what it feels like to, you know, do stuff again.

I may start writing soon though, which might put a stop to that. Or maybe I'm just being cynical.

Oh yes, and the bathroom ceiling fell down.

Same old, same old.

Zoom in, zoom out

My head just emptied of anything to say. How annoying.

Time for a list cum summary. A means of emptying my head-shaped digest while the banshees wail out the front. Somebody get me a pitchfork and some mace.

• Grandparents are great, and 60 years is some benchmark.
• Cameras are complicated, but where once I was scared and ran away, now I am brave and tackle them head on. And buy lens things on ebay.
• It is terribly important to make time for 'me time'. Without this illness will surely follow. And it has followed.
• The rabbit lives to eat another day.
• I need to speak to a hairdresser and discover ways and means with which to make my locks even brighter than they are for next to no money. It must be do-able. It must be.
• Facebook has interconnected me with the burbling remnants of my lesser childhood and somehow this pleases me. I thought I would be horrified and try and shut it out, but it doesn't seem quite as bad as I thought it would be. Or maybe I'm just going senile. It's a bit like a school reunion, but without having to go, and without the twats.
• You can never have enough Chinese takeaways.
• You will never have enough money.
• Enough is enough.

Charlotte and myself have been together 6 years today. She's celebrating with a bout of tonsilitis and I've got a heap of mini chocolate eclairs. Oh life is good!

I love you my darling baby.
You light up my world.
x

The Daily Grind Blog: Day 3

I am going to start dedicating myself to my Flickr account, or to be more specific, to my camera. I'm getting a vast amount of pleasure out of taking and editing pictures - far more pleasure than I get from most things - and seeing as this is 'a good thing' then I shall try and do it more.

I'm not hugely skilled, don't know how to work everything on the camera yet and don't know much of anything about photography if truth be told, but I'm enthusiastic, vaguely artistic, and will learn what I need to do as time goes on. Time will also allow me to buy useful things like tripods, extra lenses and the like, and with any luck I might even get quite good at it.

So Timbofoto may be getting some extra miles, or it may end up spliced into this page, or it may just become one big Flickr page to save me time.

In other news, I was supposed to get up early this morning to go and do something, but at half eight I was very tired, had the option of staying in bed, and took it. And before anyone starts moaning about what a dozy layabout I am (and I am) you can hold it right there; I'm on holiday, and when one is on holiday one can stay in bed if one bloody well pleases.

Also, I'm not sure if this daily blogging thing is much fun. I never used to keep a diary when I was a child and I think I'm beginning to remember why. Firstly, it feels like a bit of a chore, and secondly, it's not really that interesting. Unless there is loads of stupidly fascinating stuff happening in your life (which isn't the case with moi at the moment) it's a bit of a needless rundown of assorted boring shit that no one else other than me should be made to suffer. I mean, who really wants to know all about how I cleaned the kitchen? Anyone? No? Didn't think so.

Therefore, I shall return to blogging normality with immediate effect.

Oh and here's the barnet, as requested (with some hairy armage for good measure):

Ps. I am the head judge for this weeks Post of the Week, so please head on down there and nominate your favourite post from the last seven days. And please, give me something good to read.

The Daily Blog: Day 1

What is it? Tuesday? Already? If I was at work time would be going backwards, but I'm on holiday a week too late and have missed a teeny portion of good weather and a probably brilliant blogmeet and time is going forwards way too sodding quickly and it's rubbishly shit. Fuck fuck fuck.

It also appears that the shredder has blown a gasket, which puts paid to Charlotte's old-ntl-statement-shredding marathon. She'll be gutted and unless it miraculously starts working again I shall have to fork out for a new one. Piss arse fudge.

I have been cleaning the kitchen properly (meaning  that I'm doing more than just wiping the surface occasionally with a soggy rag) and have been horrified by a) the amount of filth that accumulates through simply doing nothing, b) the scale of the infestation that has been happily breeding away at the back of the kitchen cupboards, and c) how much out of date food I own. I digress: at the beginning of the clean-up all our cabinets were chockablock with gubbins and you couldn't have even fitted in a small pea if you'd tried; post clean-up I have almost no food left apart from some cans of tuna, a packet of 2-minute noodles and some sunflower oil. Oh yes, and some OXO cubes. I can hardly wait for dinner tonight!

Next on the cleaning agenda is the boiler cupboard. It has things in it that haven't been touched in almost five years. I'm scared shitless.

Apocalypse

I've had an upset tummy, the missus has a dodgy throat and the toilet flusher hasn't worked properly for a fortnight now. The world must be coming to an end!

As something of an aperitif to The End we ventured out into town yesterday evening and had a lovely time watching and listening to Martha Wainwright sing her lungs out like a crazy woman. She was bloody-motherfuckingly good (spot the Martha in-joke) and despite having to stare unblinking into a fucking bright spotlight for the best part of the show my enjoyment was not diminished. She hung around afterwards and signed things for people, and I got a lovely shot of Charlotte and her having a hug (as you do) which I'm not allowed to show on here as Charlotte will definitely kill me if I do.

I took a load of other pictures too which you can have a gander at if you go here and then follow the link.

The gig was in a church (St. George's Church in Kemptown if you're interested in that kind of thing) which was a pretty strange venue if you ask me. Granted, Martha's stuff is acoustic and not tremendously grunge-tastic, but it has screaming and swearing and all sorts, so in theory it didn't really seem to fit. In practise however it was great and I completely forgot that I was sitting in a pew. The sound was really good too and the crowd were totally up for it. People were even sitting on the floor at the front like you do at school. Pretty weird. Still, next gig I go to is gonna be a standy-uppy jump about like a twat kind of gig. I need some relief after all these sit-down gigs. That's not a complaint, it's just me needing to dance. I was born to dance!

Now, I haven't done any linky stuff for ages, but I saw this yesterday and thought of you, so here you go.  It's a lawsuit filed by Jonathan Lee Riches, a convicted fraudster, against the Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick (full real story here if you can be bothered) and is easily the funniest thing I've read all year. He claims that Vick stole his dogs and used them for fighting (makes sense if you read the previous link) but then goes on to say that Vick sold the dogs on Ebay and used the money from their sale to buy missiles from Iran. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Frankly, if this doesn't make you laugh there's something wrong with you.

Amazingly though, there is something in existence funnier even than this.

The very same guy (who quite obviously has a serious amount of time on his hands, which you would do in jail, I imagine) filed a similar mind-bogglingly ridiculous suit in 2006 against practically everyone and everything in the world. All in the same suit. It's 57 pages of comedy genius. Defendants include Malcolm X, The Queen, Tony Danza and Venus Williams (which is fair enough), but Riches also cites Nordic Gods (?), Mount Rushmore (!), the Leaning Tower of Pisa (...), Mein Kampf  (err..), the G8 Summit (how can you cite a summit?) and rather less tastefully the victims of the Asian Tsunami. What's he got against them exactly? Plus most of them are slightly dead, so he may have difficulties in getting those ones up to the witness stand.

Basically this guy is a total loon, but he made my morning way more enjoyable than normal, so please, enjoy.

I bleached my hair too.

A lobe in the hand is worth two in the blog

You know you get those times when you're totally full to the brim with all the most wonderful, exciting and invigorating stories and  anecdotes, and humour and wit pours forth like an unstoppable force of nature somewhat akin to the mighty Zambezi raging through the jungle, or the power and fury of Victoria Falls crashing to the earth many leagues below, and you just can not even begin to try and hold back the gushing torrents of your own intellect for you may surely die if you even think about attempting such a thing?

Well, now is not one of those times.

I'm in a dry patch, hence the paucity of posting of late.

So give me a break, yeah. It's summer (I think) and I Big Bloggerised myself half to death, plus every monkey needs a mooley. Whatever that means.

I think I may try one of those 'blog every day' things, just to see if I can. I'll probably produce a bunch of old crap, but it's something to do, no?

Ah toss. Here's a sideburn update:

It would probably help a bit if I'd shown what they looked like before I started growing them, but there's not an awful lot I can do about that now. That there is another one to hang in the Timbo Fuck-Up Hall of Fame.

Anyway, I tried growing them big bushy pointy and hee-uge, and this worked with the burn on the right side of my head, but as I've already stated previously, I have a wonky head (probably down to using my temporal lobe too much - all that incessant yapping has had a head-deforming effect), so while one burn did the respectable thing, ie. what I told it to do, the other did not. But the trimmer, fitter, healthier version of le burn is alright I think.

Now my task is to focus on increased burn density.

So come back soon for the next thrilling update!

Ps. The picture is black and white not because I'm a poncey art twat, but because I'm a kind soul and I thought I'd save you the horror of my zit-covered chops in all their technicolour glory. And I'm all sweaty and shiny after a long day at work, so really, this is a good thing that I've done.

Poohsticks

My legs hurt and I am seriously rusty. Jogging should not be rushed into lightly, especially (as my girlfriend points out) after a week of multifarious food and drink, late nights, friends and family, and getting burnt to a crisp lobstery pinkiness through nobody's stupid fault but my own.

Once the pain subsides I may find a four and a bit kilometre jog a weentsy little bit easier. Oh yeah, and I'll take some water with me.

Today I talked to a man who told me a Winnie the Pooh story. I didn't remember it, but it was the one where it's Eeyore's birthday; Piglet gets him a lovely balloon which he promptly bursts after tripping over and falling on it, and Pooh finds a jar of honey for him. Unfortunately, Pooh gets hungry on the way to give Eeyore his gift and decides to eat all the honey. So Eeyore gets a burst balloon and an empty jar for his birthday, and spends the rest of his birthday putting the remains of the balloon into the pot, then taking them out, then putting them in again, and so on, which makes him incredibly happy.

Being told this story made me incredibly happy too. Little things.

The same chap who told me this story also told me about his worn out old Test Match Special hat that he uses to ward his wife off while the cricket's on, and talked to me at length about French wines.  He has a website too and who knows, I may just end up buying some plonk from him one of these days.

Another bloke even said "good morning" to me while I was on my way to work. He also did a little Chinese buddhist bow thing to a trio of squirrels behind me, but still, it was very nice to be greeted so pleasantly, even if he was a bit mad.

What a great day.

Oh yes, and Pride was brilliant. What I saw of it anyway; I only managed the parade. By the time the party proper was under way I was suffering from third degree burns, sleeping off a bladder full of beer and getting the shakes. I am such an old man.

If you like what you see you can view the full set of photos here.