• I’m still aching after the gig on friday. Definitely not as young as I used to be.
• Scanning photos gets very, very dull after the 5th roll. Even when scanning in batches of 24.
• Baking bread is a hugely satisfying thing to do.
• However, Man cannot live by bread alone, which is why I just ordered a pizza.
• Bought books five and six of The Invisibles yesterday. They make no more sense than any of the previous volumes.
• That link in the item above goes to Rotten.com. I suggest you don’t click around much if you’re not extremely broadminded (and if you don’t have a very, very strong constitution).
• It seems you can run homebrew on a v2.0 PSP. Which is great, because now I can play Day Of The Tentacle on the move. Finally, my PSP gets a new lease of life!
• The Belgian Belly is still awesome. The Belgians make some properly crazy beer.
• Church this morning was, well, kind of annoying. It can’t be great every week, I suppose.
• I’m apparently playing a gig in Altrincham next week. It’s in a pub somewhere, and it’s me on bass and James Adams on guitar and vocals. More than that, I don’t know. But you should come anyway, because we’ll be awesome.

I first saw the Levellers getting on for ten years ago, on the Zeitgeist tour. I was at Sixth Form, I wore Dr Marten boots, jeans, black t-shirts and had round glasses and the worst haircut in the universe. I was angry and youthful and had that rebellious righteous-anarchist streak that middle class people acquire when they hit higher education. I spent the whole evening pogoing like a mad thing and getting all angry about injustice and the corruption of the state and things like that.

And then I came to University, and then got a job, a bit of a beer belly and a tendency to stand at the back of gigs nodding politely rather than cramming down the front in the mosh pit for the entire gig; basically, I got old and boring. Betrayed my youth, as it were.

But all is not lost: last night, I was 16 again.

Okay, so they’ve got a bit older and a bit rounder and the bass player is clearly thinning a bit on top even though he has dreadlocks down to his arse, but, other than that, the Levellers haven’t changed one bit: they’re still churning out turbo-charged sing-a-long punk-folk anthems for the crusty anarchists of the UK, and they can still put on a hell of a show, too. They’re staunchly resistant to any sort of musical fashion (heck, they even did a cover of “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” – that’s goddamned country music, people) and all the better for it: they know what they’re good at and they stick to it.

And they had to be good, too, because the supporting act was none other than Seth Lakeman, nominee for both the Mercury Music Prize and BBC Folk Singer of the Year. Heck, even if the Levellers had sucked, I’d have been happy to pay the £16 ticket price to see his short set alone: he is a truly talented young man (although I’d like him an awful lot more if the gaggle of girls I’d gone with hadn’t all melted into a pool of pure liquid desire the moment he stepped out onto stage; that does nothing for a man’s ego, I tell you – hey, I can play the guitar, too, you know).

Every muscle in my body still aches. I think this is part of the gig-going experience I’ve blocked out from when I was 16. Anyway, I don’t care. It was brilliant, and I’m happy knowing that even though I have a Jamie Cullum CD in my collection now, I can still spend two hours crammed in a moshpit being young and irresponsible and enjoying every goddamned minute of it.

Here’s to you, Dirty Davey.

The machine that hosts www.parm.net (which includes my gallery and a lot of stuff linked from here, all my parm.net email, and also Sharky’s site) is being re-racked this weekend, so probably won’t be available for most of saturday and sunday. Normal service should be resumed by monday morning.

My coat (which I have written about before) has a label on it about the cloth it’s made from. It says:

– Cloth has a luxurious handfeel

Handfeel? As opposed to….? Or is it supposed to only feel luxurious to my hand, and not to any other part of my anatomy? I eagerly await Sainsbury’s to start selling food with a “delicious mouthtaste” and the Discovery channel to start showing programmes that will make you “brainthink”. It’s like 1984, only the other way around.

At the moment at work, I feel like I’m juggling about 9 balls all at once. Periodically one of them hits me on the head, distracts me and I drop all the others, and I have to start all over again. It’s frustrating, especially since I can’t actually juggle.

Juggling is one of those things that I feel I ought to be able to do. I mean, it’s just keeping lots of balls in the air, right? It’s well structured and mathematical, and I don’t see why it should be so hard; also, there’s a good correlation between reading Terry Pratchett novels and being able juggle (no, really) and in my youth I was a devoted follower of the aforementioned beardy fantasy writer. So, why can’t I? I can get about six or seven throws in and then inevitably I’ll miss one and spazz it all up. It’s not fair.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying that there’s a cool Java applet here with a bunch of tutorials on juggling, so maybe I’ll give it another go at some point.

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It’s our work Christmas party tonight. We’ve got a deadline tomorrow. What stupendous piece of scheduling management managed to arrange that one, eh?

</offtopic>

Today was going perfectly, up until 5:30pm when I called a colleague over to look at some code I’d got working. Of course, it naturally promptly and inexplicably stopped working and nothing I did in the next hour could persuade it to work again. I got very angry and said bad words to my computer, and now I’m quite cross, which is why I’m here writing a blog entry and eating leftover curry (with homemade naan, yum) rather than round my girlfriend’s house with a bunch of people from church. Dealing with people would just be one thing too much for me right now, so I’m going to retreat into the safe world inside my computer and hide there until I’ve stopped wanting to break things.

City Life has been shut down by the Guardian Media Group. There are plenty of people out there who’ve written far better eulogies than I, but suffice to say that I’m going to miss it. Head over to MCR for the beginnings of an initiative to make a new magazine out of the ashes; if it gets off the ground, it’s got my support, anyway.

The brief flurry of snow we had has now passed, but whilst we’re waiting for the next one, entertain yourself by familiarising yourself with the many different forms of snowflakes and snow crystals.

Yeah, I tend to be really negative about, well, everything. My beloved tells me I should spend less time criticising and more time pointing out good things. So, in the interest of that sort of balance, I’ll go on record as saying that I thought the sermon on Sunday was really rather good. Frank was dissecting the idea of “heaven” as presented in Revelation – not as the place of fluffy clouds and harps, but rather as the condition of Creation as having been redeemed to its Creator. His eschatology was thoroughly sensible and well thought out – no silly premillenial dispensationalist rapture theology here, and he even went so far as to suggest that, hey, Revelation might be symbolic rather than literal (for example, the persistent use of the sea in the Bible as being a place of danger, and heaven being described in Revelation as a place with “no sea”, meaning that the interpreting this as a literal absence of sea is rather missing the point).

Anyway, it was interesting, well thought out and I’m even willing to admit that I learnt something from it. Hurrah for Frank.

Market research has gone right downhill. The first time I did it, which was a couple of years ago now, I got given a £10 HMV voucher for spending about 5 minutes saying I didn’t much like Coca-Cola Jeans. On friday, I got given a pen for spending half an hour answering very, very tedious questions about car adverts. It’s not even a particularly nice pen; it doesn’t glow in the dark or anything.

The survey was flawed in a number of way: First, it asked me to list “all the car manufacturers I could think of”. Which meant we were going to be there for a while. And then it asked me to list “all the car models I could think of”. Um. How long was this supposed to take me, again? I think it was supposed to be measuring the influence of press and TV advertising on people’s ability to remember car models, which means that my listing of things like “Jaguar E-type”, “Ferrari 355” and “Lambourghini Murcialago” is likely to skew things slightly.

Finally, they asked if I remembered seeing advertising for a selection of different manufacturers recently. One of the manufacturers listed was Rover, and funnily enough, no, I hadn’t seen any advertising from them recently. Can’t imagine why, though.

However, there was a very cute goth/punk chick doing the same survey whilst I was there, so that made it all worthwhile.