Top
Nonsense
These We have Loved
BLOGADOON
LATEST
next week
previous week
first week
Other blogs etc
Other sites
Responses to:
blogadoon@iansie.com
º April 2nd-April 8th 2001
Sunday Curses
Saturday One dave too many
Friday Changes
Thursday Old but spunky
Wednesday Plague Year
Tuesday Fools
Monday Vapour
º Sunday 8th April 2001
Curses. Heard today: the first ice-cream-van-chimes of Spring.
Australia: Warning on Jedi email campaign.
º Saturday 7th April 2001
Unprompted, Prince Edward's wife tells the News of the World: "I can tell you he's not gay." Good to have that sorted out at last, eh?
And I suppose all four of them were called David. Rather than Iain. Bah.
º Friday 6th April 2001
The link to my Imax-rave that Jonce is looking for, but to proud to ask for, is here.
Surely the efficiently affirmative answer to the question "Have you got a pen?" is neither "I do" nor "I have" but: "Yes." No?
"This is a photograph of me in a dress. It was taken for a charity 'Cock-in-a-Frock' night at the gay pub that I was helping to run at the time. I am sitting at the bar, in the full beam of the flash, with an extremely fixed grin. My hair (even longer then) is down on my shoulders and the shadow on the wall behind me makes it look as if I have the same wartime hair-do as the singer in 'Ello 'Ello.
"You can just make out some chest hair through the unbuttoned top of my Oxfam dress, which is a calf-length cotton number with a vaguely Chinese pattern of big pink flowers on a black background. I have a red ribbon pinned to my left chest.
"At the bottom of the picture you can see my hairy legs and white socks sticking out of my nine-hole Timberland boots. (The nicest compliment I got - the _only_ compliment I got - was that I looked as if I should be driving an aid convoy in Bosnia.)
"Behind me, a nice-looking girl is being served with a glass of red wine at the bar. She is pretending not to have noticed what I am wearing. The bar-stool in front of me is conspicuously empty.
"To my left are three Davids, one of whom you know as Swish Cottage. David is wearing a turquoise two-piece. Two out of three Davids are inspecting me as if I have just gone on the block at a white-slave market."
The ukbloggers list has been discussing some kind of group coverage along the lines of "A Life in the Day" (or whatever it was called). I suggested that those of us without digital cameras could instead describe an imaginary photograph.
(Sadly, the photograph described above is not imaginary.)
I've amended the death-tolls page to include the 144 people killed when an NCB slag-heap slid onto a school in Aberfan. (Policy has been to omit 'natural' disasters from the list, but the Aberfan disaster increasingly looks like corporate negligence.)
Vote Jedi. This week's meme (I guess we all got that email by now). And, who knows, it might just work.
TV movie. Talking of changes and is she real or not, I quite enjoyed Blake Edwards' Switch last night, in which uber-pig Perry King finds himself reincarnated as sex-on-legs Ellen Barkin.
God knows what lesbians make of it, but it was nice to see Soprano-shrink Lorraine Bracco as a power-dyke. (Nice to see Jimmy Smits' ass too.)
Favourite line: "I can't think - it's all this hair!
º Thursday 5th April 2001
Continuing my "I-am-so-old-I-smell" theme (no change there then), Meg claims to feel really old because the first single she bought was Jesus and Mary Chain.
I only got into what-we-used-to-call Interactive Multimedia after two other careers. And 'The Virtual Nightclub' was by no means the first project that I prototyped.
In the nature of these things, it took forever to come to market, but back in the early days, at the top of the list of promising up-and-coming bands to chummy up to in the hope of some free material was Jesus and Mary Chain.
Old, Meg? Oh puhleez. The first single I bought was 'Needles and Pins'.
You young people were probably far too busy doing young-people stuff last night to have watched "Through the Eyes of the Old", Chris Terrill's ninety minute BBC1 documentary starring an assortment of spunky pensioners.
You missed a treat: I had damp eyes through much of it, not least at the Remembrance Day interaction between the Chelsea Pensioner and the young Hussar.
And the two aged sluts were a hoot: "One or two stiff ones send me out like a light, hurrrrr."
No gay pensioners, surprisingly, but nice nonetheless to see all my character traits held up to the light and somehow justified: nosy, patronising, selfish, combative and, of course, just plain bossy. If youth but knew, grrrr.
Better still: the missing second line from Dylan Thomas' Do not go gentle into that good night...Old age should burn and rave at close of day.
One does one's best, Lord knows.
º Wednesday 4th April 2001
You know the truly annoying thing about all this? I've e-mailed David, David, David and David on various occasions. And I had a link to Scally back in February.
But hmmph, we've already established that nobody listens to me. (Must be the camouflage.) Or maybe it really is just about names. What do you say, Iain?
Diary of a Plague Year
The sooner they get a grip on this BSE-and-mouth thing the better imho: I almost got run over on the way to the shops to buy more water just now - it's so dangerous not being allowed to walk on the footpaths (or 'pavements' as we Brits quaintly call them.)
And the constant smog brought on by the burning-cattle pyres in Trafalgar Square is making my eyes water.
They finally came and removed the eight dead sheep from outside the tube-station last night, but not before some local lads had hacked off a limb or two to take home to their Mum: this compulsory vegetarian regime doesn't sit well on stomachs accustomed to Full English Breakfasts and Sunday Roasts.
Looking on the bright side, I must report how bright London looks with everybody in their rainbow-coloured wellington boots. How dull it will seem when we no longer have to wade ankle-deep through disinfectant every time we leave the house!
Must go now - time for my twice-daily boil-check.
P.S.: This is not an April Fool - it's satire.
Did you know that John Dillinger was reputed to have a 23 inch penis? Me neither. But Darren has the evidence.
A question in the riotous quiz last night: name the roles of all six of the original Village People. Null pwah for: hairdresser, waiter, nurse, social worker, skinhead or librarian.
(And ok, I'll fess up: they didn't so much lose as fail to win - after the team had tied for first place, David failed to identify, um, a certain pop-group and had to settle for second place in the prize-draw, coming away with some tin badges as a consolation prize.) (One of which I will be wearing.) (On the grounds that I wrote "Cream?" in the margins of the quiz-paper, and everybody ignored me.) (As ever.) (Next time I will shout "It's Cream, you silly bastards!" and then throw a mammoth sulk.) (Oh, I forgot. I'm doing that already.)
Yes, like everybody else, I too have been to Paradise , but I've never:
- been to the Far East, despite an ex who lives in KL
- appreciated whisky, or cigars
- had sex on an airplane
- washed my face
- been afraid of rain
- made love to a woman
The quiz?
Oh, they lost. (They'd have won if they listened to me, but hey.)
º Tuesday 3rd April 2000
Daft Punk meme, anybody?
Pop Quiz tonight, where I will no doubt once again be patronised by people who think pop music started in 1975. Chiefly David, of course.
But if I time it right, I can sit there listening to him know all the answers, secure in the knowledge that you're reading this and he doesn't know:
Like - he and the venerable (if uncorrupted) Cuthbert go far further back then he's letting on.
Like - I can top him on tube announcements: "Will the people who are playing with the escalator on platform two please stop it. It's not pink, and it's not fluffy."
Like - why have follicular necesities when you can have, hello, bear necessities? (Folliculi, follicula.)
And - I have been to Scotland, seen four Derek Jarman films, watched Buffy and read Harry Potter. I have also disembarked at both Baron's Court and Queensway, although I don't believe I have gotten off there. (I've got off at Baker Street, Kilburn, and West Hampstead however. In the good old days.)
Sisterhood? Pah.
I'm not much of a one for shopping - clothes twice a year, books and coffee twice a month, food and cigarettes twice a week - but I thought you want to know that, according to the latest changes in the Retail Price Index catalogue:
Alcopops are in and nests of tables are out
Salmon fillets are in and jigsaw puzzles are out
DVDs are in and ski pants are out.
I'm down with that.
Do we believe that they have April Fools Day in Baghdad (albeit with a characteristically cruel edge)? Or do we think that this story is a hoax?
Spot the fool. Those tarot card images of The Fool stepping blithely over the edge took on new resonance after a Brighton radio DJ told his audience that a replica of the Titanic could be seen from Beachy Head.
The famous cliff-top suicide spot, shrouded in fog that day, is unstable at the best of times: officials had to cordon off the entire area when a five foot crack appeared under the weight of the crowds...
Boris Trajkovski? The President of Macedonia? He's a Methodist.
"Homosexuals rejoiced yesterday as, at the stroke of midnight, Amsterdam's mayor married four same-sex couples under new Dutch laws granting them equal rights."
That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the entire coverage of the story in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, tucked away at the bottom of 'News in Brief'.
Compare and contrast with the coverage in yesterday's Independent: a big photo on the front page of all two brides and eight grooms cutting the cake, and a whole quarter page inside the paper.
Equal rites?
º Monday 2nd April 2000
Tom and David and I all looked up into the sky yesterday evening and marvelled at the vapour trails. And now we've all written about them too. I'm not sure if that's spooky or not.
You know that Boris Trajkovski? The President of Macedonia guy? Course you do.
Bet ya don't know what religion he is, though...
Did you know that Perry Mason was gay? And Ironside too.
Spring, spring, spring. Yesterday was the first day this year that the weather's been fine enough for a crowd to stand and chat outside the Royal Vauxhall Tavern: glorious. Next we take the grassy knoll.
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire added to death-tolls. Thanks, Jonno.
And hey, after umpteen volumes of James Lee Burke, I finally get to know what makes a Po-boy sandwich! (Make mine a smothered duck.)
......previous entries
