THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
The head of light entertainment
Finally, my head doesn't feel like a washing machine but it looks as though I might have undergone some liquid therapy early last year as I seem to have missed the 'new' album by a band I rate highly. Like, how did this happen? Strikes me that a little PR in the right direction wouldn't go amiss.
Only by being on a (useless) mailing list that this evening told me Theory of a Deadman were out on the road in the U.S. with Motley Crue spurred me into having a look. I guess you could argue that I can't rate them that highly if I didn't check their site very often. I retort: just because they're a great band doesn't mean they record a new album very often. Anyway, I need a car that's going pretty fast to listen to it properly, so more later.
Announced today - though if this is the first place you find out about it, that's a pretty sad state of affairs - BBC will be revealing who'll be getting the keys to the Tardis in a Doctor Who Confidential special on Beeb One at 5.35. So don't go calling me up or anything OK... important for many reasons.
On a similar note, I bought a Cyberman air freshener thing for the car this morning. It was a choice between that and a Dalek. I wanted to take the road less traveled, so the CyberHead it was... damn thing will probably clip comofrtably onto (and I quote) "any air vent system in your car" except a freaking Saab 93 that is. Should have gone for Dalek Emperor. You know where you are with a Dalek.
Apparently, they also come in Tardis and K9 shapes. I think I'll skip on those. What I really want is one of the Blink angels or a Clockwork Man. Now that would be special indeed. Well... not special as in going on holiday or winning the lottery, but in the domain of in-car odour release... I'll stop now.
Birds and Stars...
8.30 am: My head hurts. That wasn't how I intended to spend last night at all - just a few beers at a neighbours house has turned into hell in my head. Consequently, I've done nothing I was supposed to and is how I come to be squinting at TNA Impact! at 8.30 in the morning.
That's the first time I've ever done anything on New Year's Eve for about ten years and I don't like it. After all this time, I think it's the lack of control that's mostly got to me. I've turned into one of those people - and now I'm mostly pissed off at myself.
8.40am: Fuck it. Back later...
Tonight we're gonna party...
...like your wife is at work and the kids are in bed. Not so catchy really. A random emptying of the head before applying self to some writing (yeah... while you're getting wasted, I'll step on the gas).
Just watched Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke on Top of the Pops. The pair of them appear to sing at whatever frequency my stone heart is set at. Damn this new popular music phenomenon. Where are JET when you need them?
Got the Saab back on the road this morning - now if only it were black I could get back to hunting demons at the weekend. Maybe I'll get a paint job.
That didn't take long to empty did it. Right let's get on with it...
Lyric of the day: "You look so much cuter with something in your mouth" - Nickelback. er... Something in Your Mouth. Shallow yes, but it's New Years Eve. It's allowed.
Spandex Rules
...and another post that was intended for a day that it wasn't actually written in. I'll get the hang of this daytime/nighttime thing eventually.
That unfinished book list is butchering my head, so I went out this morning to scour for a few things I might have missed - and this one leapt of the shelf and into my hand. A Lion's Tale - Around the World in Spandex from Chris Jericho - I mean what the hell was I thinking. Most of the other WWE auto-biographies have been picked up on day one, why did this - very important addition - slip through the net?
Same reason perhaps that on the day that the Chris Jericho interviews were farmed out when we were working on either Zero or Burn (I forget which), I'd already committed to something else and it was JJ who ended up 'drawing' the 'somebody has to drive him to the airport after the show' straw. Some short straw that was. I think I would have liked CJ. I think we would have got on well and as I romp through Lion's Tale in an attempt to legitimately get into my years top 10, I know so.
(I would like to add a disclaimer here that not all of them were worth it. In fact, probably only a small number are, namely:
1. Mick Foley - Have A Nice Day (possibly the best autobiog written in any genre)
2. Superstar Billy Graham - Tangled Ropes
3. Eddie Guerrero - Cheating Death, Stealing Life
4. Ric Flair - To Be The Man
The others vary between "pretty good but you're either quite boring really or don't write very well" and "plain dreadful" - such as the Batista book which is so empty, I can't even remember what it was called. Jericho's book is shaping up to sneak in there at number 4 however, pushing Flair down a spot. What the fuck am I talking about? Nobody gives a fuck about my top five wrestling autobiography list do they...)
The other book I picked up today was Rankin's Exit Music. How I could have forgotten the last of the Rebus series is unforgivable. Anyway, all of this was on the way to see InkHeart which is well worth a watch. Typical big bang Christmas movie that's pleasing on all levels. Don't think, don't analyse. Simply watch and smile and everything will be fine.
Two days until then end of the year and I seem to recall I promised a lot of postings of 2008 vs 2009 and also a rundown on my 101 in 1001. If I'm really quiet, hopefully you'll all forget and I can go back to being lazy. There's still a whole stack of Budweiser in the garage. Talking of which, I have to take the Saab in tomorrow for an MOT. At least I knew what was going on with the Audi - the Saab I'm not so sure about. Then again, what can possibly go wrong with a car bred to withstand the screaming Texan sun and the brutal Scandinavian winter?
The very fact that somebody decided to make its MOT a few days after Christmas - followed by a car taxing session the day after does not bode well. Still, it's never bothered me before...
The end of the year...
Close enough anyway - and this is a Sunday post that just took a long time to compose. It will take me at least the next three days to put it in perspective. Anyway, Sunday night calls for lists and lots of them. To begin, let's have a look at the best albums of the year. There's been a vast amount of great material pumped out in 2008 but this is the cream for me:
1. NICKELBACK - DARK HORSE
2. ATTACK! ATTACK! - ATTACK! ATTACK!
3. HINDER - TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT
4. FALL OUT BOY - FOLIE A DEUX
5. FINGER ELEVEN - THEM VS YOU VS ME
6. SHINEDOWN - THE SOUND OF MADNESS
7. ALICE COOPER - ALONG CAME A SPIDER
8. GUNS N ROSES - CHINESE DEMOCRACY
9. DEAR SUPERSTAR - HEARTLESS
10. BLACKSTONE CHERRY - FOLKLORE AND SUPERSTITION
The more observant among you will see that a lot of these come from the latter half of the year. I looked long and hard at this theory, dived into the collection of possibilities and left it as it stands. It's a solid list - and for all those of you shaking their heads at Nickelback in the top spot, screw you. There's far too much elitism around these days. Name an album that's rocks harder or slicker and I'll consider your opinion... but it had better be good because for me, after 2006 and 2007 being years in which I had to carve everything up looking for deeper opinions than were necessary, '08 came as a welcome relief in which I could sit back and rip it up.
On the movie front, maybe I didn't go as often as I should - there's a lot I haven't seen either but let's dive in anyway:
1. IRON MAN
2. THE ORPHANAGE
3. TAKEN
4. THE MIST
5. QUANTUM OF SOLACE
6. WANTED
7. VANTAGE POINT
8. THE DARK KNIGHT
9. HELLBOY 2: THE GOLDEN ARMY
10. MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN
There were absolutely stacks of others - including the inimitable Zombie Strippers - that did the job at the time, but again, I've been through this list and it holds up for sure. Go on, tell me that Iron Man isn't the best movie you've seen in the last three years...
This one is REALLY hard. For ever album or movie that I run into, there are at least three books to match it, so choosing ten is going to hurt... bad. The first three are easy - after that I'm not so sure:
1. THE GRAVEYARD BOOK - NEIL GAIMAN
2. DOCTOR WHO: THE WRITER'S TALE - RUSSELL T DAVIS
3. THE REAPERS - JOHN CONNOLLY
4. HOLD TIGHT - HARLAN COBEN
5. KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE - CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
6. THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY - WAY/JA
7.
8.
9.
10.
Hmm. See how hard this is? I just can't kill that list off - if you're interested at all, come back and check out this edited post (whereupon, this sentence will magically disappear). As a point of interest, as much as I dearly love Gaiman, why did nobody point out that the 'adult' version of this book cover is one of the shittiest ever designed. Coming from where it did, I'm shocked...
That's quite enough lists for one day. Rustled up the skeleton outline of the next two chapters of Turn the Lamp Down Low this morning and also started roughing out the final scenes on Too Hot For Dogs so that I can work backwards for a little while (otherwise I don't think it will ever end). More wrapping up of a year tomorrow...
See that light at the end of the tunnel, that's not heaven. It's a train.
So far so good. Two posts in two days - and the icing on the cake is the 6,000 word article I put together called "Oh my God, he's ripped his head off!".
There I was, scowling over my project list when then Gods reached down, moved a dead one aside and put in its place a totally complete idea ready to roll straight out of the bag. As of about five minutes ago, it's called The Wasteland. Six minutes ago it was called My Cultural Suicide which will probably give you more of an idea of what it's about than The Wasteland but that one feels right to me. 10 x 7,000 word essays on low culture - yeah... the words are fair dripping off my tongue. For some reason, I chose to hand write it instead of sitting in front of this thing and it's much more satisfying. I may switch to paper for the foreseeable future - somehow it feels like you're doing real work.
Propelled by this small success, I've also started writing the next part: "That DaVinci bloke and his code". I also reconfigured the first couple of chapters of Turn The Lamp Down Low for 'Secret Project X' and stripped down Too Hot For Dogs for a massive overhaul tomorrow. You know when you're getting through stakcs of work and it doesn't feel like work - that's when you know you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.
Meanwhile, it's still Christmas here - I was a little reticent in buying the kids a Nintendo Wii because so far, we've managed to escape the demonic consoles chewing up what little time is left around here but peer pressure and all that jazz...
To be fair, they've been pretty good with it but Sarah thought it might be funny to buy me (me!) a game for it. WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2009. Christmas Day, I managed to avoid it but last night after everybody had gone to bed, I heard it calling my name. Softly, softly in the darkness... 'play with me, play with me'. What harm could a quick ten minutes do? Well, I popped my elbow trying to bring down the Undertaker. The opening credits on the game lasted longer than I did. Maybe I'll have another look at that tomorrow. Meantime, I'll just stick to whupping the kids at MarioCart.
Quandry of the day: Do I post my 101 x 1001 list?
Just finished reading: Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs
About to start reading: The Rose Labyrinth and A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
Reasonably looking forward to checking out tomorrow: InkHeart (and hey, Frost/Nixon doesn't look half bad at all... hmm)
...and so this is Christmas.
There's an extremely small part of me that feels bad about what I like getting for Christmas. When you scour your memory banks and think back to what sort of stuff your Dad would get for Christmas when you were a kid, it's probably a lot different than the sort of things I end up with.
I know a lot of people who regularly get exciting gifts like power tools, soap and underwear. Two things to say about this. All three of these gifts are in essence, shit. Nobody really wants these things. They are the sort of things you get when when you don't have a personality strong enough to suggest you might preferably like something else - unless perhaps you used to be a tramp who found a lottery ticket and now needs to make some home improvements.
Thus, I was most pleased that my family decided I might like a Kiss t-shirt as a gift. I don't normally get excited about much at all, but this warmed my heart. It's good to know that people know me well enough to think I would be pleased with just this - but there's also that other small part of me that thinks maybe I should grow up. Quite a few times over the last year I've actually needed a drill, but not once have I ever actually needed a Kiss t-shirt for anything. If anybody ever bought me a drill though, I may go on a killing spree with it - in my Kiss t-shirt.
Anyway, as usual, Christmas was preceded by insane amounts of stress over getting it right and turned out to be just fine. Now that it's pretty much over, I've gone into hyper-work mode during these Dead Days (the official name for the time between Christmas and New Year) and find myself either throwing projects with no mileage away, starting new ones or mashing two together. Most exciting is the prospect of co-writing Turn The Lamp Down Low. I've never co-written anything before. Too Hot For Dogs is different... I do my thing and Charlie makes it look good. Co-writing sounds like 'sharing' to me - this will be a real test as I'm not sure either of us are good at sharing, but then, I don't know for sure because I've never actually shared anything before. More on that later.
I'm also very aware that I said I would blog here every single day of my life from January 1st onwards. This means I might have to do something interesting every single day of my life to justify it. Daunting though that may sound, it has to be better than letting days roll by and in a year's time writing up a blog on how I got a drill for Christmas 2009.
In fact, tomorrow or maybe later today, I'm going to post a list of achievements from 2008 and a concrete list of goals for 2009. That way, the ZLPD (yeah, you know who you are) will hopefully keep an eye on me and pour scorn and sarcasm where necessary in attempts to fire my ass into action. I suspect one list will be fairly short and the other fairly long.
And I shall be wearing a Kiss t-shirt while I do it.
Blood on the tracks
Giving blood turned out to be not so successful yesterday. It's a lot more closely monitored than it was when I used to give blood in the days before the tattoo thing stopped me. For a start, there are some nice questions to answer such as "(For men) have you ever had anal sex with a man in the last three months who has been out of the country and may have had sex with another man" and "(For women) have you ever had anal sex with a man who has had anal sex with another man who has been out of the country in the last three months". Oddly, there was no general questions that went "Have you ever had anal sex in a public toilet with a complete stranger" - although to be fair, I think there was a question that said something like "Have you ever paid for sex in the last 12 months".
All of these questions are simply designed to give the nurses something to chuckle about as they have about as much use as the question on flights to the USA where you have to fill in that form. Yeah - the one where it says "Please tick yes or no - are you a terrorist?"
Anyway, the reason they wouldn't let me give blood was for none of these reasons. At some point you had to claim that you hadn't seen a doctor in the last 6 months for reasons of a cardiac nature - which I have. To cut the story short, I went to see my G.C. (General Charlatan) because of a pain in my chest. I was actually quite glad to have the "pain in my chest" as it took the emphasis off the "pain in my knee" - which after three or four years, is getting a bit boring.
After some poking around, he decided I had trapped a nerve in my chest somehow. I took this to be a fair answer having trapped every other nerve in my body at some point in time and left. The blood nurse however said I should have found this to be an extremely crap answer and I should get a second opinion. She then rang her blood consultant who suggested I go see somebody else because he also thought it was a crap answer.
I should probably go shouldn't I...
It Came From Beneath The Sea
(I'm sure I'll run out of sci-fi movie titles to cross reference soon)
Started reading a book called The Shack this morning. At least five people have told me I should read it and then, unprompted, Sarah came home with it for me. How do you like those odds. It's about thus guy called Mack who winds up in a shack (natch) with God. Maybe someone is trying to tell me something. Let y'all know what it's like sometime over the next couple of days.
(Not sure that I agree with this depiction of God however that I stole from some random site... I know loads of people with beards longer than that who are at least half his age. Actually, now I think about it, one or two of them may not be far off...)
Am getting most stressed about writing at the moment. Completely unable to do anything constructive because every spare minute is filled with something Christmassy to do - be it going to a school play or concert right across the board to visiting people and driving around. I may take work off the menu until after Christmas and simply spend the time plotting and wrapping up the ideas from earlier this year - that might put some karmic petrol in the tank for the new year.
Have decided to start my 101 x 1001 early by going to give blood on Friday afternoon - that's a great one to cross off the list, even if it's not finished yet.
In simpler news, picked up Chinese Democracy today - it's very, very good. May post a full review but a part of me wants not to. Maybe I should just enjoy it for what it is instead of dissecting it.
Shoot. Can't remember what it was that came from beneath the sea now either...
Plan 9 From Outer Space
Birthdays can do funny things to a man. Every year I seem to wind up looking for people who were born on the same day to give me some kind of hope. Normally, I just come across the usual suspects (of which Ted Nugent is by far the best), but today I also found out that I share my birthday with one of my heroes. Only Lester Bangs!
Bearing in mind what I spend most of my time doing, I thought that was pretty spooky. With that in my back pocket, I retreated to my private office (ie: the car) to instigate Plan 9. Plan Q really wasn't going anywhere and Plan 9 was always a much better bet anyway. Shall reveal the contents of Plan 9 just as soon as I am able.
More tomorrow - plate so full, things keep rolling off it.
The Day A Different Planet Stood Still..
Ten to nine! A huge result in the lying in stakes. Rhiannon caved in first and came at me armed with a pencil that has "Happy Birthday from your Teacher" written on it which I'm sure came home from school with her much earlier in the year... being of a spiritual nature though, that's a good gag on behalf of the universe. Many a true word and all that. Ellie on the other hand cleverly disguised this awesome truck that she made in school as a present. It's much better than the piece of crap thing that I once made - which if memory serves was a coat rack. Our woodwork teacher was far too interested in making himself a violin across the five years I was there to be bothered teaching us anything further than the bare essentials. The finished result was bloody excellent but didn't do me any favours.
When I finally got my act together I headed out for my annual Indian Head massage. It's probably a good idea to stop at least once a year and do nothing - but then I spent the next couple of hours being in a world I didn't recognise. For the first time ever, I didn't fall asleep which I'm really pleased about. There's nothing more shameful than waking up in the comfortable massage chair with drool stretching from your mouth to your knee. Still, all was salvaged when I got home when I was treated to the Rock Cake. Brilliant.
To top the day off, a Chinese Takeaway and Alex winning X Factor were all it needed. Well, that and Mike sending me a text that said "I fucking hate this Hobbit boy".
The Day The Earth Stood Still
A movie review if you will: We went to check out The Day The Earth Stood Still this afternoon. It's not the God Almighty train wreck that many have been saying it will be - on the other hand, it's not Close Encounters either. What it is though, is a reasonably good homage to the original, it just seems to lose it's way about the half way point as though some money-men walked onto the set and demanded that more be explained than is necessary. Ironically, probably not unlike those guys in the Orange advert.
For the most part, Reeves is excellent as Klaatu and his big pal, Gort, is even more impressive, but what I was really hoping for was the understated menace that the original possessed in droves and I didn't get it. In its own way, it's thoroughly enjoyable, doesn't leave a bad taste in the mouth and on the whole does what it probably set out to do.
A small forest fire rather than a scorched earth.
Far more interesting was the trailer for the new Mickey Rourke movie The Wrestler. Check out the trailer here. This is the movie that will surely catapult Rourke back into the stratosphere, much as Pulp Fiction did for Travolta.
The plot runs thus: "Back in the late ’80s, Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was a headlining professional wrestler. Now, twenty years later, he ekes out a living performing for handfuls of diehard wrestling fans in high school gyms and community centers around New Jersey. Estranged from his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and unable to sustain any real relationships, Randy lives for the thrill of the show and the adoration of his fans. However, a heart attack forces him into retirement. As his sense of identity starts to slip away, he begins to evaluate the state of his life..."
Just noticed, it's my birthday. Happy Birthday to me... it may be 1am, but where the hell is everybody? Where's all the screaming girls? Upstairs in bed asleep until at least 8 o'clock with a bit of luck. Which somehow reminds me that this week, I read the Adam Ant biography and (for some reason) Gary Barlow's as well. Life ain't so different for those who make it into the public eye. The highs are not really any higher than your average Joe gets from snatching a lucky break but the lows are like getting tossed off your surfboard in water that's just a little too deep to stand up in. Rough.
Bedtime. I may be packing a few years behind me but remember kids, it's just not right to go to bed in the same day that you got up in.
Aww crap...
Found out today that Oliver Postgate died this week. Mr P - we salute you for making just ten minutes a day for many years on end a little better for millions of us.
Le Roi est Mort! Vive Le Roi!
Socks Up!
It was lovingly pointed out to me this morning that my blogs are becoming non-existent. I cannot steer you away from this fact as the truth is here for all to see.
"Something must have happened!" came the rallying cry. I guess something must have but some of it is unbloggable. So maybe we should just get into the guts of what I can blog about:
A few days ago, I stumbled upon a rather large web community of people all taking part in a project called 101 Things in 1001 Days. I really like this idea, so I have spent nearly every spare moment I have compiling my list to start on January 1st (it just sounds neater). Still not sure whether or not to post the whole list here - when I've finished it may be fit for public consumption. Seemingly, the only basic rule is that your list must contain solid things that are definite and achievable. I came up with about 20 off the top of my head, rooted around in old notebooks for some more ideas and I'm still only in the mid-fifties.
I took the stance of creating the list into a few categories mostly so that the damn thing was balanced and some of the better things on the list (if not slightly dull) are No.23: Give blood three times a year (which I should anyway being AB RhNeg), No.7: Start a proper rubbish recycling system at home and No.31: Dedicate one evening to the kids doing whatever they want.
Of course, there's some horrendously selfish material here as well. No. 27: Get rest of tattoo finished (it's a long story... and very black, I may need any blood I happen to donate!), No.43 See Kiss in make-up one last time and No.14 Buy a surfboard.
The list continues and must be finished before Christmas kicks in. That will give me plenty to blog about, which brings me sort of full circle to No.3: Blog at Zodiac Lung every single day. Blog police at the ready please!
It's my birthday on Saturday, so I've opted to give myself the three day birthday special. Tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday. Tomorrow, I'm going to check out The Day The Earth Stood Still because that's a great sort of birthday thing to do. Saturday will involve some kind of take-away and the X-Factor Final and Sunday, I might even treat myself to some sleep. At least it's a plan. I couldn't actually think of anything for anybody to get me for my birthday so I'll probably get nothing - there is however a rather tasty looking Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers compendium kicking about...
On the writing front, I'm taking a big stock of all these bloody projects and I've whittled them down to just two. Too Hot For Dogs needs finishing properly but we have agreed to resume after Christmas (which basically means while Charlie stuffs her face, I can catch up and hopefully finish it) and Almost Human is so nearly there, I can taste it. 50,000+ words down, 30,000ish still to go.
I also learned today that Jo Rowling earns a fiver a second. If that's not motivation enough to be even an eighth that successful, I don't know what is. (Quickly does some sums... an eighth of a fiver is er... 62 pence I think, which is about £37 a minute making um... about £2000 an hour... yeah. Whatever. Somewhere it that ballpark looks fine to me.)
More tomorrow then! I'm going to hit the sack with a very childish book - Skulduggery Pleasant - Playing With Fire. Don't knock it...
Funny ha ha - not funny peculiar.
A week or so ago, I said I would post the dates of my buddy Kahn's stand-up "batter my virginity" 'tour'. Then I forgot. Mucho sorry - I've missed two of them by now, but here are the others. If you're around, be there and say hi:
14/12 - Trapdoor Comedy, Hartlepool
16/12 - The Gatehouse, Tyldesly, Manchester
8/1/09 - Abbecom, The Hollybush, Cradley Heath
8/2 - Laughing Horse new act comp, Hali Vegetarian Restaurant, Granby Street, Leicester
I know I should get out more and everything, but where in the hell is Cradley Heath? I feel I must extend my knowledge. Excuse me for one moment while I ask my other friend googlemaps. Talk amongst yourself please...
Near fucking Dudley. I might have known. Oh well... I guess that's called 'paying your dues'.
Tell Laura I Love Her...
I guess that title won't make a lot of sense to anybody under 40-odd. When I was about six, my ma gave me her old record player and stack of old 45's - of which that was one of them. Good record - Ricky Valance I believe. According to Wiki: "Tell Laura I Love Her" is the tragic story of a teenage boy named Tommy who is desperately in love with a girl named Laura (no shit!). Although they are only teenagers, he wants to marry her, so he enters a racing car championship, planning to use the prize money to buy Laura a wedding ring if he wins. The last verse tells the mysterious story of how the boy's car overturned and burst into flames - no-one knows why - and the boy was killed, his last words being "Tell Laura I love her.,,".
Which has got sod all to do with Laura getting the bullet in the head on X-Factor last week (yeah, I'm a bit behind with my blogs but I'll catch up). I was devastated and swore never to watch the show ever again. The only hope now is that Alexandra will take it. If she goes, then I'm out of here and I mean it this time because it means the future of pop is in the hands of kids with mobiles on contracts paid for by parents. Seriously - Laura was a big deal and now the dream is over. There's a lesson in here somewhere. Just when you think you've got the top of the big monkey bars in sight, there's always some petty fucker making a powerplay to wrestle them from your grip.
Let's get up to date then. Serious lack of blogging because - gasp - have been working hard. Had to take a couple of days out to take stock of the ever increasing work-load that I'd created for myself but I think that's under control now. First thing to do is to reconfigure the sidebar here. I have a better idea of what to do with Too Hot For Dogs now - you'll like it. It involves parting with no cash - after all... that's what the internet is best at right.
I also spent some time in a big box of paper sorting through some stuff. In amongst a million good ideas I've not done anything with yet, I found twenty hand written pages of The Black Wood which I've now jigsawed into the bits I'd already typed up, and it's looking good.
My buddy Kahn called me up tonight. When he told me a few months back that he had done his first stand-up comedy gig, I'll admit I was a little on the jealous side but figured he would move on with his life. Damn it all to hell if the guy isn't on a roll and doing gig after gig - well... six or seven anyway. To be honest here, I never really give my friends much credit when it's due for doing cool shit, but this is awesome. I'm both incredibly chuffed and jealous at the same time. If you've come to the story late - this is one of the things I always wanted to do with my life but somehow never got round to it. Now that somebody close to me has actually done it, I feel propelled to give it a crack of the whip. Damn.
Anyway, I'll get some dates off him and post them here somewhere. I have no idea if he's any good or not. I hope so and I think so but you should go anyway because it's the right thing to do.
As a soundtrack to the last couple of weeks, slipping under the radar of most due to overkill from AC/DC, GnR and Nickelback, the new Hinder album (Take It To The Limit) has kicked my ass from here to Mars and back again. If you're digging the new Nickelback album, don't walk ignorantly by just because that's what you were sold by the press. Good as Dark Horse is, it's not even close to this slice of pie. If you're struggling to find other great new stuff - and because I told Kahn all of this and I know he'll have forgotten what I said - also check out ShineDown and Daughtry - all handily hooked up to some good stuff courtesy of YouTube. Oh - and because this is where we came in, here's Laura to sing us out.
Sigh. Fuck it. Here's another - and in case you think I've lost it completely, here's a untamed classic. In fact, I think I shall make that my theme tune.
Done.
Major league disappointment
Amongst all the noise coming out of America today, none of the news networks appear to be reporting the sad loss of one of the greatest writers of our time - Michael Crichton. This is a huge loss to those of us who like books you can actually read. Fuck those who pretend to occupy the literary high-ground. Crichton was a master of the plot device - I don't think any of my airplane trips or beach sabbaticals would have been half as much fun without him. He'll be missed in this house.
Bummer.
My. How fast the days roll by!
Yikes! Prompted to realise it was nearly a whole week since I had actually posted here by the fact that my first blog over at www.islpr.com referenced it, but now I feel totally under pressure to come up with something hilarious for any first time visitors from the U.S. - forgive me if I refrain from doing so however - there's nothing less funny than somebody trying to be so. So instead, I shall be serious for one whole paragraph:
I know nothing about politics, let alone American politics, but I have to say, Obama gives off that aura that Clinton had - the one that makes you feel like everything is OK (even if it's not). Sometimes that's good enough y'know. On that note - Obama for President! McCain I'm not so sure about. Isn't he George Bush with a mask on?
Enough. Back to reality. Yesterday, I read two unconnected articles about the same thing. Stupidly, one of them I had written myself and failed to see the association even though I had written into the article something along the lines of "for those smart enough to read between the lines..."
Yeah, I know, go figure.
It was all about self publishing - something I am a big fan of but also very wary of. Anyway, I thought I might construct some kind of online survey for publishers to fill in anonymously when they're bored. So I came up with a few questions that I find myself chewing over every now and then:
a) If I self publish two or three novels, a collection of short stories and a series of comic books, am I more likely or less likely to endear myself to a publisher on those grounds alone. (My guess here is it probably depends if (i) you have done it professionally and (ii) how many you sold. In which case (iii) comes into play - why do you need a publisher?
b) If you got a £20,000 advance on a novel and it bombed, am you unlikely to ever be in that position again - no matter how good the next book may be?
I think these are good questions - and it's probably not great as an editor of a magazine that I feel the need to ask them, but maybe my professional approach is different from a publishing editor. It seems to be expected practice to put quite a lot of material out yourself in music and film, but when it comes to books it's a whole different ballgame is it not?
I will expand my survey and we'll see what becomes of it (and whether anybody will respond) over the next few weeks.
Now, I believe I am four whole days late on my own deadline of finishing and releasing the second issue of Too Hot For Dogs. Then again, like Jim Morrison said, "How can you be late for your own show?"
