february 2006
Three things
- One morning last week, I saw veteran actress Dora Bryan getting into a taxi at the end of my street. In this country she may be best known for her portrayal of Helen in A Taste of Honey (1961), but she's been in tons of films and TV shows (including Absolutely Fabulous). Anyway, she lives just around the corner from me - her house is probably about 25 yards from my building, as the crow flies. Also, she looks really old these days. Which is fair enough, as she’s 82.
- In the queue at the supermarket today, the man behind me got my attention as I was putting my items on the conveyor belt, and said, “Do you want to come back to my house?” I said, “What for?”, and he replied - and these were his exact words - “I want to strip you off and have sex with you.” Loudly. Who said the British are inhibited? (I said no, by the way. And I didn’t make this up. I seem to attract people like this, for some disturbing reason.)
- I have to get up at 5am tomorrow to go to Gatwick to meet Robbie, who will be here for a week. His trip coincides with some of the worst weather we’ve had here this winter, unfortunately; snow is even forecast for the weekend. But it will be great to see him again, after six months. Really great.
23 february 2006 ~ 00:08 
Killing me softly
Well, Morrissey’s new single, You Have Killed Me, can now be heard at MySpace, although it’s not officially set to be released until April.
I’m not crazy about it, I have to say. Actually, I was very disappointed the first time I heard it. It’s weak to average, nothing like the musical and lyrical slap in the face that Irish Blood, English Heart, the first single from the last album, was. It is growing on me with each listen, but I can’t help thinking it sounds like a b-side, or like a half-hearted rewrite of Best Friend On The Payroll (it’s uncannily similar in parts).
Lyrically, it’s hard to tell what the song is about, with its unexplained references to Pasolini et al. All I can really tell is this: Morrissey met someone who, erm, opened him up (“nothing entered me till you came with the key” - ahem!) and then broke his heart, leaving him wandering around Rome wondering what life is all about. Or something. I don’t know.
I think that what bothers me most is Morrissey’s voice here: it sounds really off, as if he’s straining for the notes, or as if he has a cold and doesn’t have enough breath to project properly. I hope this is a rough cut and not the final version.
It’s all rather a shame. I’ll just cheer myself up instead by looking at this rather amusing photo of Tony Blair making a spectacle of himself in public.
8 february 2006 ~ 23:12
Unfortunate product names #294
Somerfield supermarket, Brighton, 4 February 2006.
5 february 2006 ~ 15:28
I’m a quitter
So, last week I quit at the pub, quit smoking (kinda), and quit two blog-related projects.
The pub gig was only supposed to be temporary anyway, and I had been thinking about walking for a week or so when the final straw came. One day, during a long shift (when I was covering for another bartender, who was trapped in snow in Poland), I started coughing and had to go outside twice, both times in the middle of transactions, due to the insane amount of smoke inside the pub. There’s supposed to be a “no smoking zone” around the bar, but it’s a ludicrous and totally ineffective concept, like no smoking sections in planes. (It still blows my mind that they used to let people smoke on flights.) I hardly got any sleep that night because I was coughing constantly and dealing with recurring nosebleeds - I had been blowing my nose all day due to my allergic reaction to the smoke, and it was red raw. The next morning, I showed up just to quit, and immediately walked out again into the fresh air.
I felt a little bad about quitting with no notice, but after the horrendousness of the day and night before, there was no way in hell I was working another minute in that place. I’m not endangering my health for a few quid.
So, yeah, in a way, I quit smoking too. I felt like I had been inhaling about a pack’s worth of secondhand smoke on every shift, and just felt like crap all the time. It took a few days after quitting, but I’m finally feeling clean and gunk-free again. I can’t wait until the government stops shilly-shallying, and finally bans smoking in all bars and restaurants. I got very used to that in California.
This week, in my abundant free time, I resumed work on my own PHP-based blogging system, but decided that it would be a hell of a lot of work, and basically reinventing the wheel, so I ditched it and tried WordPress instead. What a nightmare. It did not work out of the box (MySQL databases do not run on localhost at my web host, and I had to really hack around to find the correct IP for that), and it generates some pretty grim code. It all appears to be valid code, but it constantly throws in unnecessary tags, autoformatting things with unwanted heading tags and annoying extra spacing. I toyed with the idea of hacking the PHP, but any changes I made would be overwritten if I ever upgraded versions, which I undoubtedly would.
And damn, is it slow! There must be a metric assload of PHP being parsed on even the simplest page view, because the load times are agonising. So no, I don’t think I’ll be using that, which puts me back at square one. I guess I’ll go back to coding my own system … or maybe try Movable Type, which may be better. I’ll have to think about that one some more.
Other than that, I’ve done bugger all this week, except take some more photos of Brighton. I need to get out more!
4 february 2006 ~ 14:37