Maybe I'm Just Getting Too Old For It...

CSS right? They're cool aren't they. Cool as fuck in fact. I mean, that "Lets Make Love And Listen To Death From Above" song is easily one of the best singles of the year. And they look fucking cool too. You kind of want to be one of them don't you. Yeah you fuckin' do.
So I buy their album, of course, and it makes me feel old. For a start I only like about half of it, nothing being a patch on THAT genius song, but at least half of it I find boring, some of it even cringeworthy. Which brings me to my second point. I just cannot hear lyrics like "Suck my art-hole!" or "Music is my hot hot sex!" or the lyrics i can't remember now that are in "Meeting Paris Hilton" (the word bitch was included), without my face curling up like I just tasted something really bitter. So overall I find the album a bit average, albeit with some good moments, and of course THAT song. But all the trendy music mags and the trendy indie kids fucking love it! Which leads me to conclude that I am either too old for this, or that maybe, even worse, I've just lost my cool.
Backing this up was the night at The Cellar on Thursday. I can't remember the name of the third band who played that night, but I found them pretty dull, and kind of wished they would just stop it and leave me alone (having said that tho', I would take them a thousand times over the band that played before them. I think they were called the Quarter Finals. They were truely fucking awful.), but when I spoke Sam from Andnostar (who, Ihave to say, were fucking ace!), I think he said they were pretty much hisfavourite Oxford band at the moment. Which made me realise that all the trendy Oxford kids (you know who they are by sight. They're at virtually every single cool thing in Oxford) were or had been loving it. Now, I like King Furnace. I don't hide that. Trendy Oxford kids do not. See their faces curl up at a band playing 'straightforward' rock music. Watch them squirm, unsure of how to react as Jeff struts, poses and howls as ver Furnace power chord their way thru 3 minute, single timed slices of melodic noise. They hate it. It makes me like it more. Don't get me wrong Trendy Oxford kids, I have nothing against you. I like you. I heart you. If I knew how to pimp up my MySpace page, I probably would. And it would be very cool and you would all heart me back, but alas I seem to have lost my youth, and indeed it would seem, my cool.
Dammit, when I thought of this blog earlier today I had more examples in evidence of this, but the only ones I can remember now are that Hootie shouted abuse in my ear at the Cellar when I said I wasn't enjoying Aids Wolf at that gig, and, I shudder as I write this as I am opening myself up to horrendous abuse and probable loss of respect, maybe even loss of friendship, but I've started to really like Arctic Monkeys.

I think I can finish it there, can't I. That surely is the final nail of evidence in the coffin of truth, inside which lies my dead youth and cool.

On another note, I'm listening to the new Joanna Newsom album "Ys" and I really really like it. This is very surprising to me as I absolutely hate her first album. Oh, fuck it. You've all stopped reading now haven't you.

Fear of a Nazi.

Today I served someone who was wearing a nazi hat and had a nazi logo sewn onto his jacket. It scared the shit out of me.

Ok everyone, get comfy...

This is probably gonna be a long one.

So, I woke up on Sunday morning and couldn't remember leaving the pub. This is never a good thing. It was 6:45am and my computer was on. "Oh god, what have I done?" A quick check of e-mails and MySpace seems to show nothing done there. I'd obviously tried to write a blog and failed, so no bad there. A check of the phone shows a bunch of texts were sent but none are saved, at this point I started feeling like a paranoid teenager so I switched everything off and went back to sleep.
Sunday was a nice day, Alex back in Oxford, we met up with Mr Riley and went for a christmas lunch with Wil, his lady wife Farrah and some of their chums where we ate food and took the piss out of the piano player. Dunno why I'm telling you this, it's a bit like forcing holiday photos on someone. Anyway I was still curious as to this missing part of my evening. Any contact from people who'd been with me was positive tho', so I figured I was in the clear. So on me & Alex went to the Cellar to see the not Hair Police gig. I had been told that Hair Police were playing and had got very excited, only to find out a couple of days before the gig that it was in fact Aids Wolf and not Hair Police, but me & Riley (he met us again there) were still in the mood for a gig, and Alex was up for it too. So, we get in, and this band called The Pluto are playing. The Pluto are good. I really enjoyed them. I'm listening to their cd now, and I still like them. This is a good sign.
Anyway, I can't remember when but at some point Russ came up to me and said "You made me laugh last nite." Uh oh. Danger. Warning lights. I don't remember him being at The Star after he drummed for Smilex at Your Song. After explaining that he would have to tell me why as I clearly had no recollection of whatever he was talking about, He told me.
I'm not going to repeat it on a public forum, especially as I've heard that Lex is plotting some kind of unnecessary revenge and I don't really want to add any potential fuel to his fire.
So, next up on stage were a band called Pre. Pre are absolutly hilarious. A band of men who all look the same trying to make some kind of noise assault while a small Japanese looking woman squeals like a pig into a microphone. It was total rubbish, but I couldn't stop laughing. Alex said later they reminded her of that episode of Spaced where they go and see Vulva's theatre performance.
But at least they were funny. Aids Wolf were just fucking awful. Instantly forgettable aside from their stupid fucking haircuts, and the line "This is a song about doing our taxes.". The thing that Aids Wolf, and indeed Pre, need to learn is that to be a good noise band, you need to do something interesting with noise. You can't just make noise and instantly be good for it. And if they're not trying to be noise bands, then they're even worse than I already think they are.
That's my problem with Edward Monkton. Just coz he's random does NOT MAKE HIM FUNNY!! ANYONE can make up a stupid poem about chimps who make handbags out of cheese and sell them to your auntie, or some such shit that he comes out with, but he just isn't funny. He's just a dick. Stop buying his crappy postcards, magnets, books etc and instead use the money to buy a bullet, then carve his name into it and send him a photo of it. If he gets enough photos of bullets with his name on them, maybe he'll get the fear & stop forcing his oh so hilarious shit onto us, and JUST GO AWAY!!

Anyway, here's some other things that have been in my brain recently.
-Someone came into the shop and paid for something with a university credit card. Huh? What the fuck?
-The "Braille Version" of Andrea Bocelli's album, after much speculation, has turned out in fact to just be the regular album put in a cardboard sleeve that has about 2 or 3 words worth of braille printed into it. What a despicable scam.
-I actually stopped to buy a Big Issue off someone, but didn't actually have enough money. I felt a bit guilty.
-After weeks of being told that he is a cool new person, I checked out "Anthony"'s MySpace page to see what he's actually like. He's a total fucking gimp.
-My favourite new game to play at work is to put "High School Musical" onto the singalong subtitles mode and try to guess what the tunes to the songs are.

So that's pretty much it for now. Alex just told me she's gonna sue me for making her ill. I don't think she's ill, I think she's faking so she can pay legal fees. She loves doing that. If anyone's wondering when I'm gonna do my albums of the year blog like Enders & then later, Emma did, I have a couple more albums to listen to first, and then I will get down to the task of forcing my opinions on you. I know you love it.

Frustrated.

I can't write a decent drunk blog.

Moya Brennan's MySpace.

So I'm at work, right, and these 2 people are nattering away about Clannad & that goes onto former members Enya & Moya Brennan. I kind of wasn't listening properly, but all of a sudden heard "Have you seen her MySpace page?" "What? No." "Yes, Moya Brennan has a MySpace page."
I thought to myself that it couldn't be true, so I checked in her latest album, and lo & behold, there it was the adress. Now, why the fuck does someone like Moya Brennan have a MySpace? Surely she's not the kind of person the kids'll go for. But there it is, in it's light shaded hideousness, playing "Carol Of The Bells" at me right now in fact. Shit me, it's awful. The things I do for you lot. Apparently "it is astounding that her voice keeps going from strength to strength." Yes, all that tuneful whispering she does must really be a strain on the ol' vocal chords there.
It got me wondering what other people have MySpace pages that you really wouldn't think to look for, so, as I am that bored, I've started investigating.
Moya's page had a link to that new trio of harmonic breathers, Triniti. If you haven't heard them, they sound like a cross between Clannad & The Corrs. Possibly the worst musical meeting since those two comedians went "Hey, lets do that song off Grease!" Unlike Moya's user friendly calming soothing colours, Triniti have gone for a more garish scheme, kind of like a "Tron" vomit.
They're friends with an unofficial Aled Jones MySpace. Right, what kind of sad individual makes up a page for a band/solo artist? I really don't understand it. Also, it has too many links to investigate. I'm not THAT sad. yet.
Dave Swarbrick came up with nothing, but Fairport Convention have several. Again, who does this? Who? One of them has a link to a Richard & Linda Thompson page. Is anyone really going to believe that two people who got divorced, splitting their act up in the process, over 20 years ago are going to re-unite to make a MySpace page?
Am I just not getting it? Is there something I'm missing? Someone's even done one for Menswe@r! People talk to it like the band have something to do with it!
I have to stop now coz I'm going a bit mad.

Currently listening to: Anything that'll get the hideous songs of those MySpace pages out of my head!

Loss Of Inspiration.

I had something top write, I definitely did. I've been sitting here for the last hour with opera in my ears, trying to remember what it was. But I can't. Bit fucking useless of me really.

Yeah, that's right, opera. Rossini's "Matilde Di Shabran". Got a problem with that?

My Message To the Vast Majority Of The General Public.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FUCK YOU!!! ALL OF YOU, JUST FUCK FUCKING OFF!!! YOU BUNCH OF TOTAL TOTAL CUNTS!!! DO THE WORLD A MASSIVE FAVOUR AND ACTUALLY FUCKING KILL YOURSELVES!!! DO IT, GO ON, PUT DRILLS THRU YOUR STUPID FUCKING FACES!!! SHOOT KNIVES INTO YOUR COLD, BLACK, TINY HEARTS!!! I FUCKING HATE YOU!!! I HATE ALL OF YOU!!! YOU ABSOLUTE BASTARDS!!! TAKE YOUR SMUG LITTLE PERSONALITIES AND YOUR INTENSE STUPIDITY, AND GO JUMP OFF THE NEAREST TALL BUILDING SO I CAN DANCE IN YOUR, DEAD MUTILATED BODIES, SINGING "DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD"!!!
JUST FUCK OFF!!!!!!!

Unfortunatly, this almost certainly applies to no-one who will actually read this, so although it's pretty pointless, I feel a whole lot better getting it out.

Maybe I'm in the wrong job...

The Internet Paranoia Starts Here.

Ok, so, when i joined MySpace and started requesting all the friends and shit, V sent me a comment saying something along the lines of "Welcome to the paranoia." Yeah right, like I'm gonna fall pray to the trappings of internet paranoia! Come on, this is me here, I'm level headed enough to realise all of the crap that goes on here. There is no way that I am gonna fall into all that.
And then it happened. I went on someone's MySpace page and read those fateful words.

Someone said I had ruined their life.

Panic! Paranoia! ARGH! Quick! On the defence! How dare someone say this about me! Who do they think they are, spreading this bullshit about me, huh? Instantly I sprung into action. I sent messages to friends, why would they have said that about me? Then I figured that if they 're willing to not only think this, but say to a friend of theirs on a public forum, that's it. NO excuses! I'm gonna delete you from my friends on MySpace and then send you an aggresive message. Yeah, that'll feel good, oh yeah!
Then the reply came.

Turns out it was just a joke.

Oh for fuck's sake, of course it was a fucking joke! Jesus, how did I not realise that? Lookat the preceding message "Oh my, you know Axl, how wierd..." Not only was it a joke, It's a joke that I would probably make myself, and indeed have made myself, in a similar situation. It's a joke that, if I'd heard it spoken, I would've laughed at, but coz I read it, my initial reaction was to take it at face value, not even thinking about it's context, an dimmediately react accordingly. Shit, even if I'd thought about it a bit first, I would have probably realised. But no, I did exactly what I thought I would never do. What I thought I was above. I let the internet cause me to be paranoid.
So Axl did what had to be done. Apologised. Thankfully all seems good. No reply to my apology, but my re-request for the position of friend was approved, so I take that as forgiven.

Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, right now I feel a bit rubbish coz Alex has gone back to Edinburgh, but not too ribbish coz she's back again in a week. Yay!

Apart from that, I'm ok. I'm listening to Angels Of Light "How I Loved You" It's really good.

Blog you later, humans.

Still Ill

It's friday nite and I should be at The Star getting hideously drunk to make working on a pre-christmas saturday slightly bearable, (oh God, I've just seen one of our adverts on tele, which means I'll have about a thousand simpletons in asking for it. Which is just bleedin' great.) making a hideous twat of myself in the process. But no. I'm here writing this coz I'm STILL ILL!! Fuck's sake. This had better clear up by tomorrow, coz my good lady-friend Alex is coming down for a few days. I'm gonna be pissed of if she has some bunged up, headached, useless man-chum greet her at the station.
That would be fucking rubbish.

Anyway...
I dont really have anything to rant about today, but there are some things I am a little disappointed with.
1. South Park episodes being taken off YouTube.
The reason this is disappointing is that South Park did an excellent episode that totally took the piss out of precious musicians getting in a tantrum coz people were able to download stuff of theirs on the internet, pointing out that it was only really the comfortable millionaires who cared anyway, being so engrosed in fame that they'd forgotten that they surely originally got into music for a love of music and surely in that case any audienceis a good audience and much appreciated. "Yes, you can enjoy our music, but only if you give us tons of money first. Feed our massive egos! For we are the out-of-touch-with-reality superstars!!"
Now, don't get me wrong, I know full well this was Comedy Central's doing, and almost certainly nothing to do with mr's Parker & Stone, but it's still a shame. Plus, I watched 7 episodes the other day when I felt hideous and it cheered me right up.
2. Blunder.
I quite liked last weeks, apart from that one unbelievably lame guy who does the testicles revealing karate and other equally un-funny, stupid fuckawful routines - HE'S NOT FUNNY!! STOP LAUGHING AT HIM!! IT'S PEOPLE LIKE YOU WHO'VE GIVEN PEOPLE LIKE MIKE READ, BERNARD MANNING & ROY "CHUBBY" BROWN COMFORTABLE CAREERS WHEN THEY SHOULD'VE BEEN FACE DOWN IN THE THAMES DECADES AGO!!! - but this weeks was just lame. Some of the people in it are good comic actors too, they should clearly stick to performing other peoples material. Blunder is a waste of time and space. Cancell it Channel 4. Cancell it NOW!!
3.Rhyannon doesn't like The Mars Volta.
Why Rhyannon? Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!

BEE.
While I was writing this post, a fucking bee flew in my room! Are they not all dead or in hibernation or whatever it is bees do in the winter?! It was really odd.
I really should rant about Russell Brand now. Trouble is, I've actually started to like him. So I shall just leave you by saying Byeeeeeee and I'm excited about Alex being here tomorrow. Yaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!

Ill.

Right now it's 10:46pm which means I'm doing what every right minded, decent thinking human should be doing right now. Listening to PC's radio show. BUT, all is not well, and not just because I turned over at 10:30 to find the previous show still on followed by a plethora of advertisments, two of which were played twice(!) and one which I swear was for an alcoholic drink called 'Quims', which meant I could've listened to at least another 12 mins of what I'm sure was Esbjorn Svensson Trio live on Radio 3.
No, dear readers, all is literally not well as, as you probably guessed from the title (which is not 3, but could be as this is after all my third post on this blog), I am ill. I had a mild cold for about a week and a half, and just as it seemed to be dying down, BANG! An illness bomb hit me right in the head. So did I lay in bed, recouperating & generally taking proper care of myself? No. Muggins here went to work, which has a tendancy to wind me up if you hadn't noticed by the fact that all I've really done on this blog so far is bitch about my job/place of work. Well today I shaln't be bothering you all with boring work gripes, oh no. Today I have a far more pressing matter to complain about.
Today, in an effort to cheer myself up somewhat, I bought myself a packet of Starburst. Now, I used to fucking love Opal Fruits as a kid, so I was really looking forward to this pack of Starburst. But lo and behold, instead of the delicious fruity sweets of my childhood, I had in fact purchased a cuboid of utter disappointment, filled with slabs of nasty little over-sweetened hideousness! They all tasted almost exactly the same as each other, except each one had been shown a different fruit briefly and told to "Do that!". It was as if you went to the cinema to see the re-release of a film you love but haven't seen for years, only to find the projectors weren't working and they'd hired a really shit mime act to mime out the film instead. I only bought them coz someone at work gave me a Fruit-Tella the other day, and it was really nice. Hardly comparable to having a chew of a Starburst and, instead of an entire galaxys worth of flavour forcing itself upon your mouth as the name seems to suggest, finding that some things really are better left in the past of your childhood, along with dungarees, mirrored sunglasses and wetting the bed.
I was so disappointed.
There goes another bit of my childhood.
At least Ribena is still as good as ever. Possibly even better.

Led Zeppelin

I had a really shit day at work today so have decided to rediscover Led Zeppelin. Fuck me, I forgot how much i fucking love them.
That's the problem I find with bands who are pretty big/well known. Coz I hear them a lot, I kind of stop listening to them of my own choosing, which leads me to kind of forget about them, and how much I like them.
So anyway Christmas is coming, which means all the socially retarded brain dead zombies come to my place of work saying things like "I am reliably informed that you have a couple of Charley Patton boxsets for sale, a large one and a smaller brown one."
"Well we have got one." I walked him over to it "We do have this one, but we don't have another one than that I'm afraid."
"Yes you do."
OH YES I'M SO SORRY! YOU OBVIOUSLY KNOW A LOT BETTER WHAT IS AND ISN'T IN MY DEPARTMENT, DON'T YOU?! YEAH, I WAS JUST LYING TO TEST YOU THERE, BUT NOTHING GETS PAST YOU, DOES IT CUNT-FACE?! Just coz someone you know once saw something somewhere and told you about it, that means it's definitely still going to be there when you get round to looking for it. Oh, no, wait, OF COURSE IT FUCKING DOESN'T!! GET SOME FUCKING COMMON SENSE YOU STUCK UP LITTLE TWAT!!
I did double check for him and, low and behold, we didn't have any other. Instead of accepting that where i work wasn't waiting in a state of stasis until he could come in to look for something, he picked up another cd that wasn't a boxset or brown and said "I think he must've meant this one." Well done mate, you really saved face there! He even bought it. Prick. This is the kind of thing I have to put up with every day. I love Oxford and everything, being born and having lived here since, but it is full of absolute dickheads.
Also, I really don't want to sound bad minded here but I can't help it, I've noticed something about Daniel O'Donnell. All his fans are either old women, or mentally ill. I'm not kidding here, I have only ever twice sold a Daniel O'Donnell cd to someone who didn't fit either criteria. One of those was someone buying it for his mum too, so he doesn't really count.
I wonder what Daniel O'Donnell would write in his blog?
"Woke up this morning and had a lovely cup o' tea. Postman brought me more fanmail this morning, more lovely sweaters from my sweet, dear fans, more letters with the phrase "If I was in my youth...", more home baked cakes. It really is a shame I can't eat them all, but i have to think about my figure, don't I ladies?
"Majella is so upset that virtually no-one has bought her album. It upsets me too, but as I said to her before, "Majella darling, you can't have a hit record just by being someones wife. I had to slog it for years on my very own television programme before I was the big star I am today." I think she understood what I was trying to say. Maybe one day she'll let me touch her again..."
I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turned out Daniel O"Donnell beat his wife.

Christian Music Fans

Good Moses, what is it with people who shop for "Christian Music"? They are always so rude! They seem to think that just because they've been saved by God, that gives them the right to speak to people however they like! Strikes me as being a bit un-Christian if you ask me. You didn't, but I'm telling you anyway.
Also, call me a bit fucking mental, but if i was trying to convert people to my religion, or save them from eternal damnation, I wouldn't do it by barking rhetoric and dogma at them in the middle of the street. Although I do miss that guy who walk up and down Cornmarkey Street shouting, seemingly to himself, about how everyone shouldgive their lives to Jesus Christ while sporting some rather dapper dayglo/flourescent suits. That guy with the flipchart style display unit who's often out on saturdays needs a good thumping tho'. I've heard him saying some shocking things to people. Can't remember what they were now tho'.
See, that's the problem with it. You never remember what it is that these people say, just how mental they are. Is that really the best way to get your message across?
OF COURSE IT'S NOT, YOU FUCKING MORONS! ACTUALLY THINK ABOUT IT WITH YOUR BRAINS WHICH I'M ASSUMING YOU MUST HAVE! DO YOU THINK GOD'S PROUD OF YOU? DO YOU? Yeah I bet you do you brain dead tossers.
I would however take a hundredof them over that cunt that dresses up as some kind of hideous stereotype of a Native American and just stands still for a bit. If you give him money, he bows. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? Not only is what you're doing totally pointless and of absolutely no worth whatsoever, but it's pretty fucking racist too. What, you think that because you got stoned so much you thought that being a hippy was somehow a good idea, that makes you understand and can represent cultures you, let's face it have absolutely no concept of? FUCK YOU! You and that woman who sometimes sits next to you doing even less than you do. Stop wasting oxygenand actually do something. That guy really needsthe shit kicking out of him.
Hmmm. I've kind of got away from my original point, which was the irony of Christian Music fans being the rudest people i regularly have to serve at work. I would like to point out that i do know Christian Music fans that this does not apply to, my dad included. Thing is, they go to specialist shops or specific intenet sites to get their cds from. I wonder if theres something in that?