Quiz...

...from Phil.

1. Can you cook? Yes

2. What was your dream growing up? [Or to what did you aspire?] To be rich, and a TV newsreader.

3. What talent do you wish you had? To be able to play the piano.

4. [What is your] F [f]avo[u]rite place? Erm, in my car?

5. [What is your] F [f]avo[u]rite actor? Patrick Stewart

6. What was the last book you read more than once? The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole

7. What zodiac sign are you? Aries

8. [Do you have] A [a]ny T [t]attoos and/or P [p]iercings? Yuck - no!

9. [What is your]W [w]orst H [h]abit? Erm, chewing my nails.

10. [What is your] F [f]avo[u]rite snack? Kettle chips!

11. What is your favo[u]rite sport? Tennis, perhaps.

12. Do you have a Negative [pessimistic] or O [o]ptimistic attitude [nature]? Optimistic, definitely.

13. What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me? Wait to be rescued...

14. [What was the] B [b]est thing to ever happen to you? Getting into Cambridge.

15. Tell me one weird fact about you[rself]. Erm, I hate bananas.

16. Do you have any pets? No.

17. Do you know how to do the Macarena? I used to, and there's a video of me teaching a new year's eve party to do it in 1997.

18. What time is it where you are now? 14:14

19. Do you think [that] clowns are cute or scary? Neither - stupid. But more scary than cute.

20. If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be? Make my nose smaller.

21. Would you be my partner in crime or my conscience? [n.b. I don't know what this one's supposed to mean either!] Definitely your conscience.

22. What colo[u]r eyes do you have? Blue.

23. [Have you] E [e]ver been arrested? [All answers in five part harmony with full orchestration if possible please.] Nope.

24. Bottle or Draft [draught]? Bottle (though for me I will assume it refers to coke, not beer).

25. If you won $10,000 dollars [£5,133.64] today, what would you do with it? Put it in my bank, and stroke my balance. And buy a 15-inch MacBook Pro.

26. What kind of bubble gum do you prefer to chew? Hate gum - makes me ill!

27. What's your favo[u]rite bar to hang at? Surely I should hang out at a bar? Erm, The Anchor, maybe?

28. Do you believe in ghosts? No, most certainly not.

29. [What is your] F [f]avo[u]rite thing to do in your spare time? Surf the net!

30. Do you swear a lot? Fuck yeah!

31. [What is your] B [b]iggest pet peeve? That faculty staff feel that by their status they have carte blanche to talk audibly in the library.

32. In one word, how would you describe yourself? Sensible.

33. In one word, how would you describe me? ASNaC

34. Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you [or indeed for any other reason]?

digital tv

Gosh, for somebody who doesn't actually watch TV, I sure spend a lot of time posting about it!

Anyway, my thought of the day is about the news of the impending switch-over to digital TV, meaning that instead of 4 okay channels, we get 4 okay channels, plus 30 other dreadful channels to waste our time flicking through and our lives in front. Also, from what I gather at home, my mother, who may not be the most technology savvy person in the world shall we say, was pretty much unable to watch TV from the moment our house got freeview, because it was just so complicated: 4 remotes, different channel settings, and cables everywhere. And to be honest I sympathise, despite me being somebody with a Cambridge degree, two computers, a PDA, iPod, digicam etc. It is horrendously complicated. And further still, a big problem we have at home is crappy digital signal. Now with analog, if you had crappy signal, the picture was just a bit fuzzy, and it was still watchable. But with digital, even the slightest hint of interference made the channel a jerky boxy mess that was totally useless. So, for example, in our front room at home, we cannot get ITV. Which is retarded. 

I'm sure that you are all, dear readers, capable of extrapolating the point of all this to the general population, without me having to spell it out (old people, etc etc).

Anyway, just my thought of the day, to provide at least a semblance of an attempt to write something every day.

30 in 30?

Doing this would be quite cool, but it's so not going to happen, so I shall not pledge to it. It's not because I don't have anything to say, it's just that I inevitably think of them either as soon as I write another post and I don't want to be overzealous, or it's in bed and I have forgotten by the morning.

Anyway, somehow my brain has managed to recover the content of my thoughts in bed last night. On saturday, I watched Bowling for Columbine, upon Brian's recommendation. Three things struck me from it. 

1. It would have had more credibility has Michael Moore not been in charge (the image of him on Team America just stuck in my mind, and he became his caricature).

2. The culture of fear in the US, and to a similar extent in the UK is really quite depressing. Since I stopped watching television three and a half years ago, I have become very cynical of TV news reporting. And to think, for all my teens I wanted to be a news reader (albeit on the BBC)! It really was a sign of our times when the film showed us a long row of talkers telling the story of a shooting in gory detail to all their different networks, and how the camera crews just go nonchalantly from one tragedy to the next.

3. Guns are scary. They are quite possibly the most evil thing in the world. Killing with a gun is so easy. You're so detached, and have to go to virtually nil physical effort. A person has so much effort put into their lives: parents cradling them, watching them crawl, begin to walk, first day in school, happy days at the beach. Then suddenly, in less than 5 seconds, it all ends with a piece of metal, not even two inches long, being launched into your head at supersonic speeds. You stand no chance, it's so final. I just cannot understand what possessed people to invent such barbarism. A knife by comparison is a tame weapon - you need contact, and as such you stand more of a chance of breaking free, disabling the assailant, removing the weapon from the scene. But against a gun, you stand no chance whatsoever, and it terrifies me - I have to close my eyes and ears every time a gun is involved in a movie scene, because I just cannot cope with it. 

I don't really know what I'm trying to achieve with this post, probably nothing, but it feels a little liberating to explain my fears in writing (as well as the impressive feat of actually remembering what I wanted to write!)

i'm wide awake, it's morning

I found some new music I liked today, something that had been sitting on my HDD for ages, but I just could not be bothered to listen to it. You know how it is, you have your set artists that you listen to intensively for a period (for me at the moment, Interpol, Death Cab for Cutie, The Feeling, The Fratellis and Lily Allen [more below]). However, for the past couple of weeks, I have been in that transition phase where I don't really know what I want to listen to so I just let iTunes choose things at random and inspire me, but sadly without much inspiration. So today, I set out to discover The Arcade Fire. I had heard their new single 'No Cars Go' on Radio 2 on saturday afternoon, and enjoyed it. Then something from their old album came on in the interlude at Lily Allen last night, so today I dug out the copy Maddy had given me as part of a CD one time, but that I had just ignored because I didn't know it. And let me say that it is good - so good in fact that I felt I knew most of the songs already, as they were being played! So finally, I think I might have something that will enable me to give Interpol a little rest - I'm scared of getting bored of them! And just for the sake of completeness, I also listened to the Bright Eyes for the first time, hence the title of this post.

Aaaaaand, as I hinted to above, I went to see Lily Allen in concert at the Hammersmith Apollo last night. She was great, albeit a bit pissed. She covered Blondie's 'Heart of Glass', and the Kaiser Chiefs' 'Oh My God' - both brilliant! One complaint I had though, and this is true of pretty much every concert I have been to, is that the music is so loud that it both drowns out the singer, and seems to 'max-out' the speakers, so everything sounds treble-y and strained. I hope somebody else knows what I mean. Anyway, the best thing about the whole night was my driving: I drove into pretty much central London for the first time in my life, and thankfully, it went well. One tiny hiccough on the way, when I naively followed the signs rather than my good sense and the map and google earth, but we got back on track pretty soon and relatively stress-free, so that was good. Finally, do take a look at Brian's blog post about Lily - I agree fully with his wisdom!

Second Class Citizens

Two little things that irritated me yesterday, and I thought were worthy of comment:

1. Some workmen were coming to do something in our set yesterday morning. As is usual among college staff, the courtesy of discovering whether people are in and dressed and ready and willing to answer the door was lost on the maintenance staff. A ferocious knock was followed immediately by the jingle of keys heading swiftly towards the lock. Thankfully I had just finished getting into my jeans, so I was decent, but I quite possibly could not have been. Surely it is common courtesy to wait until you are let in to somebody's room, or at least wait a good few seconds to establish that there is nobody there in order to enter with a master key? Of course, I realise that my room is College property, but think about it - if I had visitors in my house, I would not barge in on the room in which they are staying without knocking and waiting for a reply first. It strikes me as rude, inconsiderate, and potentially very embarrassing for all parties concerned.

2. When the workmen came in, one of them mentioned that there would be drilling, and that he had better go and inform some of the people living around, to apologise. The head of maintenance who was with them dismissed this instantly, saying "it will wake them!". Might I
add that it was 9am. Now, College is an educational establishment, full of hard-working students. The people upstairs from us might well have been up half the night finishing an essay, and using the morning to catch up on some sleep to recover before working in the afternoon.
Surely it should be common courtesy to at the very least apologise to those people that their slumber is about to be disturbed by an 18-inch drill hacking away at concrete walls underneath their beds? No, of course not, we are simply the vermin that inconvenience the staff by occupying their precious rooms, making it more difficult for them to do their work.

So, this is not on. I am sick of being a second-class citizen in what is my home. I am therefore really looking forward to being free of student accommodation next year - I have had 4 years of it, I am a grown-up, and I think it is high time that I become an English(Welsh)man in my own castle.