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I'll Pleasure You Aurally


Saturday, December 31, 2005

My new favourite comedy show. Count Arthur Strong. He's some dithering old fart that's ended up on cable TV presenting shows such as Ready Steady, On Your Marks - Leftovers where guests such as Ian Lavender's understudy provides a bag of oven chips and a cooked chicken leg (the alternative to a cabbage, packet of ginger nuts, half bottle of vodka and some odour-eaters) Listen with pleasure as you nurse your hangover.
The rock'n'roll comes with the Iggy Pop in vineyard queue reference...


Wishing you happiness,

2006 snogs


posted by Andy 19:06

Christmas quiz


Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Why do I feel a need to buy shedloads of food and drink that I've been assiduously avoiding the consumption of? It's not even as if I'm entertaining this year (Ok, I hear the pantomime punchline "you're never entertaining"). It has to be said that my inability to be generous and/or entertain is making the festive guilt trip set in rather prematurely this year.

My hands! My hands! Over the past few weeks they've become itchy, dry and bumpy (The bumpiness starting to spread up my arms. Bloody annoying and, to my mind, inexplicable. No new cleaning products. Dry air? Nah, can't afford the heating and don't get out much. General malaise and malnutrition? Could be. Add to this the recurrent boils and dental issue (a few nuts and some crusty bread'll crank up the discomfort to Ibuprofen levels.

What'll I be doing over the next 10 days? Bugger all I'm guessing. Hopefully the music thing'll get going... may even get my organ out! There are about 6 tunes in gestation (honest) but the inertia/motivation thing still kicks in more often than not. I need to feel at least a little proud of anything I write/record and at the mo the the old noodle just drags me down. But enough of this twaddle.

I do hope you have fun and happiness with those you love and care about,

2005 snogs


posted by Andy 15:14

Some Bugger's Trashed Our Pigeon-holes!


Sunday, December 18, 2005

Bastard! Ventured out into the freezing fog and whilst descending our tatty, wooden, communal staircase I noticed a sizeable pile of post scattered near the double, wooden entry doors. Fuck me if all the flimsy, grey, metal post/pigeon-holes (with token, ahem, locks) have been forced and the contents rifled and strewn roundabout. Not entirely surprised. The return on the doors, although stiff, fails to close completely in the slightest breeze... without mentioning those residents who don't seem to give a toss and leave after a few months with a trail of debts.
As I said, I'm not surprised. After 20 years of living in bed-sits and flats I've yet to find anywhere without security (or closely related) issues.

    • Coundon Road - landlord accused self and fiance of showering together and
      causing a flood before deciding to evict everyone as he was converting into more
      'upmarket' (fractionally larger) units
    • Minster Road - came home one day to
      find a hole in the wall with a note from the builders apologising...
    • Walsgrave Psych Unit - enough said
    • Severn Lodge (Psych Rehab) - enough
      said
    • Edward Bailey Close (Supported housing) - waking up sweating like a pig
      on a spit cuz a fellow resident cranked up the warm air heating to max the night
      before/tearing hair out due to the resident that made tea every 30 minutes and
      spilled sugar/taking humungous paracetamol OD then getting charged for the rent
      incurred whilst in ITU at Dudley Road Poisons Unit in Brum
    • 6 Bretford Road - psychotic flashbacks/furniture coming alive/police banging on window to gain entry
    • 24 Bretford Road - display grade fireworks exploding in the stair-well, pigeons wandering in off the balcony, the bastard downstairs complaining about me to the housing assotiation every few weeks, the intercom system being trashed in perpetuity, having my head caved in by unsavoury residents etc etc
    • Blackwatch Road - no freedom, being a sex slave, lethal wiring and gas appliances etc
    • St Leonard's Road - was only temporary so no real probs except shared kitchen and no female visitors allowed!
    • Upper Mounts, Northampton - tiny kitchen, bit of a cave with no light, dodgy pigeon holes and doors propped open or broken but on the whole only irritations rather than problems
    • City Centre, Northampton - unreliable lift, dodgy cleaners, dodgy workmanship, noisy bastards out on the piss
Ah well, such is the existence of an amateur human being.

2005 snogs


posted by Andy 21:24

Kiss My Frizz!


Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Oh lordy lordy! I saw Car Wash on CH5 today and remembered that I saw it at the pictures soon after the bleeding thing first came out! I know it was a double bill (most were in those days as you recall) but I'm buggered if I can recall it's screen-mate. Anyhow, my thrust (lol) is... how bleeding old does this make me!!!! (How did I miss 'Huggy Bear' tarting it up?????) Oddly enough I also saw Rockers (the reggae movie with Jimmy Cliff et al) around this time. Hell! What on earth was a sheltered, working class, 9 year old white boy to make of this???? We had no patois, indeed no real slang except our home grown. Think about it... ok, Saturday Night Fever had been around a couple of years and we'd had Shaft and the like, but hardly mainstream. You had to wait until '82/'83 for the 'ghetto' speak to even begin to infiltrate the mainstream (Message - Grandmaster Flash, et al). Amazing how 20 years later American ghetto speak has become almost mainstream in GB, honest, you catch my dear 75yr mother using what we would have considered ghetto speak in the 70's/early '80s.
It's true that language evolves and useage evolves at a faster rate; I imagine that television, satellite/cable and most recently our beloved interweb-thingummy have accelerated the process. The literature I've read of late stems from the period 'between the wars' to the 60's/70's and the dialogue (although biased towards the middle-classes) shows a rapid and radical shift of vocabulary, reference and grammar.
Ah well, as long as we never sink to the depths of "eye-gate" as used on the net TV Church Channel (a flabberghasting channel portraying the very nadir of the American church which has relaced the confessional with the $). It's good for a guffaw or two at least! Reminds me of that comedy sketch whereby we are treated to a tangential rambling a'la Thought For The Day (Radio4) followed by a pause and the ubiquitous "That's a bit like Jesus".

Kiss my frizz!


posted by Andy 19:14

Experiential Marketing


Sunday, December 11, 2005

How innovative! No, really! Ok, you spotted the sarcasm. It's purely a soundbite, like David Cameron's 'Green Growth', lol (didn't take him long to coin that one!). Marketing or politics? Politics or marketing? Discuss.
Back to experiential marketing. It appears to boil down to:

  1. A homogenised, unexciting product with a gimmick e.g. keg beer in an (ahem) Irish themed environment (heave!)
  2. A display stand, albeit grandiose


What a load of complete and utter, unadulterated bollocks

2005 snogs (and a special snog to Margaret!)


posted by Andy 14:37

What Goes On


Friday, December 09, 2005

Still waiting for the response to my HC1 application (assistance with medical costs) after 3 weeks. btw, check this out for perversity:

Person no.1 - becomes incapacitated and thus not in employment. Has inadequate National Insurance contributions due to gaining paid employment only when unavoidable. Receives Income Support or other means-tested benefit of £56.20.
Automatically entitled to free prescriptions @£6.50/item.

Person no.2 - becomes incapacitated and thus not in employment. Has adequate National Insurance contributions due to remaining in paid employment whenever feasible. Receives Incapacity Benefit of £57.65/wk. Has to research entitlement to
"fringe" benefits then call a helpine to order a form HC1 to apply for assistance with medical costs including prescriptions @£6.50/item. Cannot claim retrospectively unless in posession of special receipts obtained from pharmacist when items dispensed (can't obtain retrospectively), however knowledge of these "special receipts" is only obtained by reading form HC1.


Seems to me a fair assumption that a large proportion of those in receipt of IB will be regularly prescribed some medicine or appliance... but what do I know? Ah well, just another £100 or so I've chucked away with gay abandon, lol.

Don't worry, I'm past the whinging stage. 2005 and sizeable chunks of 2003-4 are now written off, together with the anciliary emotional, social and financial stuff.

Hoorah for Abby who reminded me of tax rebates!!! My redundancy being in May there's hope of a financial quail's egg post April 5th 2006.


2005 snogs


posted by Andy 06:39

Red Diamond


Monday, December 05, 2005

Not a new beer from Watney's, but a proposed new symbol a'la Red Cross and Red Crescent with no religious or apparent cultural alignment or significance. Now all this was news to me which is probably why I heard about it on a BBC World Service bulletin overnight due to the usual disturbed sleep pattern. It seems that a bit of a tiff has been going on regarding our Israeli friends proposed usage of a red star of David on their usual grounds that they need to have special treatment e.g. the universal term 'racism' vs. the specific 'anti-semitism'. Now don't get me wrong and paint me as some BNP activist or even point towards a trend in these posts based on the past few weeks; it's purely the perversity of these issues and the very fact that they even become issues for politicians, theologians and the like to fritter away valuable time upon.

I have to confess that the idea of the Red Cross having any religious significance has never crossed my mind. A humanitarian organisation, yes. Possibly something to do with Switzerland and neutrality (Henry Dunant)? A christian organisation? An emphatic no. It seems our hebrew chums think differently.

The red diamond farce seems to be a potentially lethal victory of principle over pragmatism i.e. the red star of David and the red diamond (Israel has proposed the use of this beyond their borders) are not recognised by the majority of countries and therefore have no immunity from hostile fire in a conflict. The possible ramifications are unlikely to exert your imagination. Oh, and three guesses as to the USA position on this...

A related issue of which I have only recently become aware is the whole blurring of the 'rules of war' during last century that (along with technological advances and the like) has resulted in civilians being drawn into conflicts on an increasing scale. But that's another can of worms...

2005 snogs


posted by Andy 13:33

Gripe Varieties


Saturday, December 03, 2005

  • WWII Playstation (X-Box, whatever!) games: just pure, offensive bad taste.
  • Excessive trailing on the BBC: recent examples being the 1970 Lennon interview (Radio4), Rome (BBC tv).
  • Huw Edwards: Woooaaarrrgggghhh! My skin crawls.
  • Blessed: probably the worst 'comedy' in the world, ever. Further proof that Ben Elton is, and always has been, a conceited toff of the first order.
  • Sunday papers: why? Well over a hundred vacuous pages with no merit whatsoever.
  • Saturday papers: see above
  • Music industry: see especially tv advertising (how many new singer/songwriters can be an 'astonishing new talent' (insert your own gush of choice). There is seriously too much of everything.
  • Jonathan Ross: obsequious ejaculation of "sounds great" after each musical guest's performance (now I've mentioned it you'll spot it)
  • Governmental attitude to drugs: inchoherent policy regarding tobacco, alcohol and illicit. Clampdown on tobacco, liberalisation of alcohol licensing = less lung cancer, more cirrhosis, heart disease, absenteeism, domestic violence, obesity, debt, violence, public nuisance, drink driving, (arguable negative impact mental and sexual health and related issues)
Feel free to add your own


2005 snogs


posted by Andy 08:07