Archive for the ‘Life’ Category
My K750i joystick ceased up a few weeks ago, after months and months of protest, lollygagging and irritation. Today I press-ganged my wonderful wife into finding out from Phones4you whether they would be able to service it. They said yes, but if we wanted it done now, we could go to Lowestoft market, where it would be done as you wait, for a tenner.
Except when he got my phone, he told me that my K750 is an early model (Hooray for early adoption) and that whilst later models have new seals, which protect the inner solder for the joysticks, the older models lack it, and it requires major surgery. The sort where it is easier to replace the phone altogether. But of course, the 750 is now well out of warranty, so I’m left with a lemon.
I’m heartbroken for a variety of reasons – a very expensive phone like that, especially with precision Swedish engineering behind it should have lasted more than 18 months, that expense is all gone. Of course I also miss it because it was my camera, and I was looking forward to documenting my last two months at university with my friends – since no-one is as camera happy as myself it’s functionally useless, and most critically, I had an enormous love for the phone. The camera has been a functional extension of myself for the last 18 months, and whilst I know a lot of you think being sentimental over a piece of kit is silly, my heart and wallet both ache at the thought. Sadly I cannot afford to replace the K750, so I have returned to the trusty T610 I had in my first year, leaving me with a functional, barebones phone.
What irks me is that I think there should be stronger minimum standards set in law for this sort of thing. I know the usual excuse is ‘Let the market decide’, but fuck it. I’m angry and I’m going to make my point. By law in this country, the maximum time a gadget is legally protected for is six months (Sale of Goods Act 1979) – which is fine for a fair few items, but not a piece of sophisticated engineering which is £200 to replace. The principle remains the same for a car. If you buy a car, the law gives you a maximum protected term of six months. Six MONTHS? For a CAR?
Obviously companies want to shill us for every penny we have, but I really believe that we cannot remain in a situation where a company, let’s use Sony for an example, can demand £600 for a Ps3 and then, if it breaks on day 181 of ownership, well. Tough luck kiddo. Double or nothing for you.
The cruel irony to all of this is that my first phone was a Nokia, which was functional and fun, but broke within the first 8 months, ensuring I never bought another one of their phones again, the Motorola which had the world’s most retarded navigation structure, the Sendo which broke after a fortnight, and now the Ericsson. A brand I thought I liked and had faith in, a brand I had hoped to be loyal to because I liked everything about their phones. Not so much now. I’ll sit here with my T610 from now until the arthritis in my fingers renders me incapable of using a cellphone any more. Fuck you all.
Quite literally
Dan, if you have drunk beer and you have consumed all of it, accept the generosity of your host and have one of their beers, do not allow a quadrouple vodka and coke to be placed into your hand. This has happened thrice now and you should have worked out that, in fact, mixing your drinks ends up in a technicolour yawn and the concomitant noises at lunchtime when you roll out of bed.
You utter moron.
Betty
I sat down to watch my first (the second) episode of Ugly Betty. Myself and Matt thought we’d beaten our previous record of sitting through utter dross, managing to get to the third commercial break, 15 minutes in (This is Channel 4 after all, how could they ever fufil their public remit if we only had to see the gurning 118 morons five or six times an hour?).
Water
Well, not so much Water Per se but Tea, which I have used to ruinate my Apple keyboard. You spill half a cup because you’re too busy watching the Wire to pay attention to where your hands are going, and whump. None of the keys on the right hand side work. Including delete, which might serve to explain any errorz in my typxing when I am on MSF Mussangar.
Paranoia
Matthew (Esteemed housemate, diabetic, colleague, part-time small thoughts cameraman and yokel) keeps telling me about Prussian Blue* and how he’s having to write a piece about if their upbringing constitutes as child abuse or not (Law & Human Rights). Now, I myself are curious, like the average suburban rubbernecker a the thought of such a preposterous freak-show, but I’ve managed to so far avoid typing those two words into Google because I’m convinced that anyone who does goes on a special CIA shit-list, so frequently I am torn between wikipedia’ng them up or just living in ignorance. And for me, living in ignorance is espescially painful.
* If you don’t already know who they are, they’re the Mary Kate & Ashley of Holocaust Denial.
I am itching to write
(With Apologies to Tatamkhulu Afrika)
I am itching to write.
Hands burn for a pen,
a quill,
a keyboard from which to shiver down the glass
of my own malcontent.
Today is Christmas Eve. I’d like to wish everyone I know a merry Christmas, to all of you who don’t celebrate Christmas, I would like to wish you a wonderful December break, to all of you who are working over December, I’d like to wish a happy new Gregorian year.
At some point I have to do my obligatory review of the year and new year’s resolutions. Both of which, for the first time, I am looking forward to - mostly because for the first time, I’ve had a busy four or five months into which I can say I have accomplished something.
Which is rare. But I hope not for much longer.
If I had my way, I’d spend it watching Crown Court on Legal TV. They do 18 hour marathons of the show each day, and by God is it addictive.
I’m using writing this as an excuse to avoid writing a 3k diatribe about the legal form of the company relating to Capital accumulation, technological advance and the south sea bubble. It’s interesting material but dry as hell to try to marshall into an Essay. This is quite a personal story, and I’m bearing my innermost here, so any pithy responses either online or in person will result in a crack in the face - just to let you know.
I thought I’d share with you all a little story about my arse. My arse, much like Christian Fundamentalism, has expanded at an alarming rate over the last 20 years. I have never been a thin child, this wasn’t some sort of ten year old’s eating crisis that developed into fatness - I came out of the womb a heavy baby and didn’t look back. I decided over Christmas last to do something about it and the work’s been slow, I started riding.. .everywhere over the summer but due to my lack of inertia it only served to make me sweaty and really did its job in breaking the seal to commence my overall fitness improvement, but nothing really weight-lossy, mostly because as a consequence of promotion, I flew a desk this year.
A week before I came to uni, I decided that it was time to examine the maths of my insides, bought a pair of spanky new digital scales and drew a chart, where I would assidiously document the day-to-day movements of my weight. Dieticians, Psychologists and Squares believe this is the single most unhealthy thing you can do, because weightloss is over a period of weeks, not hours. That is true, but for me it has been the single best thing I’ve done this winter.
You see, in my head is the kind of inverse version of BDS. I look at myself in the mirror, or over my naked stomach protruding from my torso and go ‘Yeah, not too bad - at least I’m not looking like someone like Ricky Grover or anyone” - except that’s what I do look like. My legs do rise up into an egg shaped lower body, making me look like a Weeble with Rickets. Bandy Legged and Bare. Which means that I need some sort of clinical, methodical way of examining myself - a line graph seems handy for this purpose.
The other success has been for me to understand, appreciate and gain a much greater knowledge of how my body works and how best to prevent overeating. You see, it’s confession time - few people know this outside of my family and very, very good friends, but when I came to Uni, I actually weighed more than the kid in ‘Britain’s Fattest Teen’. (19st 2lbs. ) That, to me, is embarassing. Very much so. Mostly because I can still fit through doors I’ve dodged some of the criticisms attatched with being just *that* heavy.
I explained to a friend a few days ago that losing weight wasn’t for vanity’s sake, and it’s true. I’ve gone looking for clothes in Canterbury High street and wanted to end my own life because only one shop caters for people my size - Burtons. But then it’s a blessing in disguise, because have you seen the clothes River Island expects people to wear day to day? It’s Metrosexuality taking the piss, honestly. - Still, I’d be lying if I said that this effort wasn’t at least, subconsciously so that I could walk into, say, TopMan, try on the clothes, have them fit me, and then hurl them at the cashier and say ‘Ha! FUCK YOU, YOU WANKER! YOU DIDN’T WANT MY CUSTOM WHEN I AS WILLING TO GIVE IT BECAUSE I WAS TOO FAT, WELL NOW I CAN YOU CAN FUCK OFF!’ and piss in their face. I wouldn’t mind I’d be hurled out by security, because it’d be awesome.
And yes, I do sound like Paget Brewster in that s2 episode of ‘Two and a Half Men” but Paget Brewster is hot, so shut up.
Now comes the point of this little essay. This morning I weighed myself, and I have am 18st nothing. That’s 18.0. I’ve lost 1st 2lbs in just over two months.
Awooga.
(Technically I’m still 2.5 Sarahs, 2 Pauls and 1.5 Matts - but if I can continue the trend in January then by Graduation I should be in a position where you can’t measure my weight in units of people I’ve lived with).
It’s been a while, beyond the inforced internet embargo (Bloody BT, Bloody Tiscali) that I’ve written, mostly because a lot of energy has been devoted to ‘other things’, such as they are. Planeteleven in all of it’s many forms was never really a place I wrote expressivley, and I’ve funnelled a lot of the things I would whack up here into other things. My ’serious journalism’ stuff is covered by running Big Lens, the ‘trying to be funny’ is tied up both in trying to achieve the impossible - be a brit who wins Channel 101/2, and of course the *other* Small Thoughts. People seem to enjoy them, and I enjoy making them, which was such a shame when I was thrown from the internet.
Of course I maintained making them, and despite about 8 were produced in the last six or so weeks, only three or four will go online, because I’m that sort of fool who won’t upload the ones that even I don’t find funny. But what’s been suprising is the amount of people who find joy in some of the oddest places. For example - despite it being the least viewed video by a country mile, the ‘Dalek Box Set’ edition of Small Thoughts has recieved an enormous amount of feedback from people who thought my fanboy vs sex story was heartwarmingly charming. It’s odd how it comes about, you know?
I also, having had Secret History screened at the Orange Street Music Club, have learnt many important lessions about writing and making films. Always make your points and jokes snappy, don’t let them take anything longer than two lines to develop, because the audience giggled in hilarity at ‘declared war on wind’ and remained stony silent at the entire ‘topple the statue of the loaf of bread’ shit. Punchier the better.
Anyway, at the moment YouTube isn’t accepcting connections, which means that I’m currently without a venue to upload the newest small thoughts. I’ve been considering getting a podcast host or praying that Eduardo has some sort of magic he can work, for he is an expert (har har) in this field, so that finally iTunes users don’t have to submit to the Youtubeocracy and I have to struggle for internet space with such lobotomised trash as those brookers videos. (Not to be confused with Charlie Brooker. Did I mention I might be going to a panel of his in November? I didn’t, ohhhh)
Oh and thanks to Stuart Maconie I found Siouxsie & The Banshees’ cover of ‘Dear Prudence’. It rocks the cock.
So, the shouts of joy are exclaimed as I have finally expelled my first pilot for Channel 101/2.
It’s finished. In the can. I realised that I might have a chance to make the August screening, and then realised the PTP is tomorrow/wednesday. Even with express mail, I doubt my little DVDs can get from Lowestoft to LA & NY in under 24 hours. Not even first class.
So it’s going to sit there until the September screening, which is a shame, but at least I know there’s something going up, and It feels as if I’ve taken that important first step. The staggeringly deep first step. It only took about 6 hours to make and it’s 3:39:- short, snappy and the focus group of three who have seen it so far laughed.
I’m not going to do the usual thing and whack it up on Youtube, at least not until September 30th or whenever it is rejected by the respective Prime Time Panels (Or not, if the Lord is smiling down upon us). What I can say is that it is called “Secret History” and is a hard hitting documentary. With buttcracks.
I’m free until mid September and could do with a couple of week’s work. Anyone? I’ll do anything but lick the ceramic from a toilet bowl. I am also cheap.
I shall not be online any-hen-hen-henny-where near as much as I have been, because from tomorrow, work starts!
