burner toothbrush

hi there

a quite common complaint against all these smart super agent detective investigator shows, be it 24, one of them CSI things or even, look you see, TJ Hooker, is that they neglect to show matters of personal hygiene in their "real time lapse" premise. Jack Bauer, apparently, does not have a bladder in the sense that we have all come to accept how one would work.

the lesser known response to the above is that the way in which super smart agent detective investigator types carry out hygiene and perform bodily functions is deliberately withheld from fiction. to hint at how they do it would be to give away, quite by accident, how they go about being so successful in the war against, amongst other things, Communism.

i'm going to take a chance and show you, well, not conclusive or comprehensive information, but insights into how it all works with one thing pertinent to the above - brushing teeth.

 if you're engaging in a top secret, no-nonsense sort of thing that's a bit like a mission to prevent Communist expansion, you've got to be armed with that which only you are prepared to discard. there's no margin to form a bond or emotional attachment to what you have with you; it could well leave you compromised and possibly exposed to failure and capture.

that's why the likes of TJ Hooker and Jack Bauer go to their nearest branch of Poundland and get themselves a burner toothbrush before going off on a smart mission. i am not saying i am off to do anything like the world defining things they did, for it would be foolish to reveal such a thing here, but still if that's a good enough place for them to get a toothbrush from then it's good enough for me.

when someone like Bauer - a TJ Hooker or a Walker, Texas Ranger are not stupid enough to get caught - gets tortured off of Russians or Chinese or whoever, it would be a lot worse for him, i would think, if they caught him with his toothbrush. and a toothbrush he must have, for Communism or whatever cannot be allowed to seep forward for the sake of poor dental cavity treatment. a folding toothbrush, then, that can be tossed aside with ease when your stupidity has allowed you to be cornered, is the answer.

also, if possible, a smart sort of toiletries bag to keep that and some toothpaste in.

yes, that is quite the more feminine sort of toiletries bag, but believe me it was the most closest to asexual i could find. the others were all pink and more floral. maybe it's a lack of plain, bland toiletries bags at Poundland that sees Bauer simply elect not to have one, which is why he's so rubbish and keeps getting caught. 

no, the toothpaste does not have beads shoved into it. incognito, or if you like clandestine, measures are required for whatever i am not up to. 

around the home, of course, one is free to use whatever toothbrush they like. you can go as fond of it as you feel, bonding away and being content together. but leave it at home if you are off on some sort of innocent trip that might see you either being targeted by snipers, or mildly electrocuted by some Chinese mentalist.




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

20p off of cling film voucher disposal

hello there

well, this should, assuming that Royal Mail have not found some means of further prohibiting or inhibiting their, i don't want to say service, work, arrive at the destination indicated tomorrow. for those of you reading this in a bit of a rush, if you combine the title of this post with the next picture, look you see, you should pretty much be able to work out all you need to or would want to of this.

for those of you in not so much of a rush, or now intrigued for some reason to learn more, or just simply have nothing better to do, let us proceed to the full story, or what i can recall of the full story.

as frequent readers will be aware, i seem to have become quite the proponent, if not exponent, of Poundland. smart, it is, and particularly useful for obtaining fluids to drink and mints to suck upon of a morning, so that i may be sustained through my day at verk. i would say that, on working days, it is more common to find me popping in there than it is to not find me going past.

every now and then they offer you some sort of voucher, promotion or other such means as to encourage and entice you to spend more money. this would be fair and reasonable, as it is a business after all, not some sort of public service institution. last week was such a week of such offerings.

i was gifted, dear reader, on three separate instances, voucher sort of things off of the till that would enable me, or the bearer, to claim 20p off of some smart cling film, or perhaps even a bit of fancy kitchen foil.

yes, i wrestled with this too. if i went into a store and purchased cling film or kitchen foil with this document, it would not be a pound i spent on them, and thus make the name of the store confusing.

on wrestling, i wrestled with what to do with these vouchers for much of the weekend, or at the least which moments of the weekend that i recalled i had these voucher things shoved into my bag. i pondered, i did, as to which celebrity, public figure or other such concern that i should post them to, so that they may get the benefit of them.

Bono, of course, came to mind. i like to let him know that not everyone thinks he's a twat by sending him a gift every now and then, saying cheers for the music and that. however, he did not say thanks for the smart batteries i sent him, so i presume i am to take it as he has no wish to be the recipient of further gestures of gratitude from me. so, Stephen Fry it was, then.
 

here is the letter i sent with the vouchers to Mr Fry. a better, clearer copy of the text? sure, why not.

Dear Mr Fry

Usually, before I head in to the office, I stop off at a branch of Poundland to get a couple of bottles of water and, every now and then, some mints. It was as I engaged in this last week that the staff of Poundland – always exceptionally friendly, and a sheer delight to engage in commerce – kept on handing me vouchers which offer me , or the bearer, 20p off some cling film or kitchen foil.

I can assure you that no matter how little cling film or kitchen roll you use it is the case that you do use more than me. I thought that you might have got some use off of these vouchers then. It was send them to you or let them go to waste, and the latter does not sit at all well with my conscience.

Perhaps my fondest memory of you is from some 20 years ago. I was on a long distance flight and, due to a packing oversight, in the cabin I had only two tapes – Tommy by The Who and one of them ‘Canned Laughter’ tapes of A Bit Of Fry And Laurie. As this was all in the days before you had a TV screen in front of you, I listened to both on repeat for 11 or so hours, no doubt reading a John Grisham paperback as I did.

Earlier in the year I bought some watch batteries from Poundland. They turned out to be not the ones I needed, so I posted them to Bono so he and the rest his band, the name of which escapes me for the moment, could get some use. I did not hear back from him. I mention this because I appreciate you are probably as busy as Bono is and so no doubt would not have the time to respond either.

I trust that they are of some use to you.

apologies for the repeat of the Bono battery story there, but i felt that Mr Fry should be made aware of it, lest he thought i was some sort of nutter, randomly sending him cling film vouchers with no provenance in respect of similar random acts of kindness.

but have i not disparaged or bad mouthed Mr Fry on these pages in the past? you could interpret it like that i suppose, but i happen to really like him, or at least as he was. i don't particularly care much for all them twerker messages he sends and his projection as the most intelligent man in the country, but he knows a lot about cricket and, once upon a time, he was a most amusing comedian. 

 

 

yes, i did indeed post it second class. to my mind, Mr Fry is the sort of chap who would blow an absolute f*****g gasket at someone going to the opulence and indulgence of sending him something first class. far be it from me to challenge the modesty of the man by arguing with this.

i have every confidence that Mr Fry, or his people, have absolutely nothing better to do than get items like this in the post and take advantage of the generous - 20%, lest we forget - discount afforded by such vouchers. should you have any spare vouchers, well, now you know where to send them.




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

backwards not forwards

hello there

no, not really, i am not being any more overtly nostalgic or sentimental than usual with this post. earlier today i was, look you see, looking for some pictures for a project. in doing so i stumbled upon some stored images that if i hadn't quite forgotten about it would be fair to say they were not at the forefront of my mind. as the ways of the post preclude me from sharing with you what i did today, for sharing it now would rather pre-empt the delivery, i figured i might as well throw some of these images up here. who knows, perhaps one or two feature in the images might get to see them by chance or design.

first off, let's get the exciting thing all done and out of the way. i am aware, and do appreciate, that a lot of the ladies out there read this in the hopes of seeing an image or two of me, purely due to my sexual magnetism. what can i say, the chicks dig me. also i am aware that a number of the gentry visit for the same reason, for they also find me rather butch, or if you like burly. i am very comfortable with a universal appeal across the borders of hetero and homo, and say to you all enjoy.

for the latter, however, here i am with a few men. yes, this is from my old place of verk in South Africa, or if you like the Africa of the South.

it doesn't really matter, i suppose, what i write here, for you are not reading. instead you are looking at that image of lovely lads, allowing your imagination to run wild in its pursuit of the passions of indulgent fantasies. and why not, as they say, and why not.

i think it's far too late in the evening for me to be doing this, so if this all gets disjointed it would be as a result of me clicking save and coming back to finish it later, perhaps tomorrow. in the mean time, though, a possibly vintage image of Richard and i, or if you like me and Richard. i would imagine the Richard enthusiasts out there will be delighted to see his return to these pages, if only as part of an odd historical thing.

if Richard looks somewhat maniacal  or menacing in that image, that's because he is busy trashing that computer of Dad's. that computer there is quality Windows 95 stuff, running on but a fraction of the memory and power the device you are using now has.

Richard was gifted in making that computer unusable. when he wasn't setting a then-massive 2MB picture as wallpaper, which took the computer some 20 minutes to render, he was installing Jimmy Whirlwind White's Championship Whirlwind Snooker in such a way that running the game was the only thing that the computer would actually do.

why did Richard torment and punish that computer so much? i have no idea. possibly because it was the machine that gave him his first encounter with the internet, which i believe still runs today, and so it was a device that brought him news of how completely and utterly sh!t Newcastle United were faster than any other medium he had experienced.

on the subject of computers, back to verk if you like, and a rare insight into my efforts towards fixing that whole "millennium bug" nonsense that crashed world economies and caused chaos everywhere, back at the dawn of 2000. here i am fixing it with Spiros, whilst Dan helpfully points out that we are fixing it.

did Spiros and i fix this year 2000 bug? well, i am not sure to be honest. if you can read this, i guess technology and, albeit to a lesser extent, humanity survived the coming of the year 2000. i appreciate that you are saying thank you to Spiros and i right now, and indeed Dan, and i appreciate that you appreciate that i cannot actually hear you. let me say, then, on behalf of team y2k, you are all very welcome.

yeah, as you can see, these pictures come from different stages of magnetic charge to my sexuality, what with some images showing me as man with beard, some showing me as man without beard. which do you prefer? not that it matters, for my (considerably) better half likes the beard and says it is staying.

for man with beard era enthusiasts, here i am with my dear friend Erick, or if you like Dumisani.

what can i tell you about Erick? i have nothing but fond memories of the many years we worked together, in particular the time he trashed the thought to be impossible to trash interest rate system and created many months of work for me to repair it. i miss my friend; i hope he is well.

a quick break from all this Africa of the South business to have a gander at me in England in the early 2000s, presumably after i had fixed all that year bug stuff.

this is me with my good friend Norman. as you can see, we have several Nokia phones on the go. this was a time before the evils of Apple, and everyone of note had a Nokia. peasants made do with a Motorola or similar.

i get the feeling that i have posted some if not all of these pictures before?

man, i really miss that shirt. if i still had it i dare say it would fit me now, but i seem to recall disposing of it at a time when huge steaks and tonnes of spare ribs got the better of me and it became rather a snug fit. hey ho, but still - look at how all shiny and smart it is. boss that shirt was. maybe i should have a look across the internet for shiny shirt sellers, see if i can't get my hands on a similar one. 

yeah, that's a watch i had on. as back then mobile phones pretty much only made calls, and text messages were in their infancy and not to be trusted, you didn't look at your phone all day so you needed some other means of being able to tell the time. no, all it did was tell the time.

did, you might ask, Romania ever give a gift to the world of southern hemisphere based corporate banking? why yes indeed that fine, fine nation did give a gift, and that gift was Gabriel.

Gabriel was just amazing, man. i think Spiros was the one with the foresight and vision to hire him, although also it might have been Sinbad. whoever it was, right, was just genius. a most agreeing and unassuming gent, Gabriel was and certainly hopefully still is. he was particularly gracious and understanding when we accidentally stole his car this one time, in a very deliberate way.

as Richard cropped up earlier, it is only fair, balanced and equal that i throw an image of Gillian up on to this post too. so here you go, here she is in one of my man without beard years, eagerly awaiting me to write her a cheque for some sort of amount of money.

quite wise and intelligent, Gillian is. when i commenced verk at the bank, she more or less immediately switched her bank to the one that i was working at, no matter how she felt about where i was or how happy she was with the service provided by her existing bankers.

why? she figured, perhaps rightly, that if anything ever went wrong with her account, as in so much as a cent going missing without her knowledge, she could unleash me to "do my thing" and make whoever was responsible, and several others, very sorry about it and get it fixed.

we did, of course, offer such a superior, exceptional and quality level of service that nothing ever, never hardly went all that wrong. besides, as and when something did go wrong, we always had that comfort zone of knowing that whatever money was missing wasn't specifically our money, so we did what we could to find it and put it all back as it was, but at the leisurely, considered pace that the fact that our wallets were fine thanks always suggested we should take. no point in rushing, after all. the money usually always turned up, anyway.

more men, you wish for? sure. this picture was taken at a point where there was probably wondering why their call wasn't being answered, as they were certain a team of dedicated professionals would be ready to jump right on the problem of their funds going missing.

we all sort of looked up to Spiros when things went wrong, really. he had done a bit of law and that, so we figured that whatever solution he had to any issue would be one that was least likely to see us do any prison time as a consequence of implementing. Spiros was an early doors adopter, and is to this day the strongest advocate for, people filling in participant resolution (viewing) forms. in most cases he determined, usually without even requiring a look at the paperwork, that any and all client problems were down to the client not having a participant resolution (viewing) agreement in place, and suggested they fill one in to see if that fixed whatever the problem was. as the world still has economies and banking systems, i think it's quite fair to say that he was right in this respect.

finally, then, a picture i am pretty sure i would have put up here before, but there you go, here it is again. it's not often that i actually like pictures of me, but here's one of my favourites from a man without beard period.

oh yes, i do indeed still have that class Taxi Driver poster, thanks. 

i would seem to have stayed awake long enough to do all of this in one shot. if, by chance, you've seen yourself here, or had some fond memories brought back, nice one. if any of the above has resolved any issues or problems you had playing on your mind in relation to a banking related incident from 12 or more years ago, well, so much the better.



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

bus vibes #20 - kasabian

hello there

as i started, as of today, reading a book that's some 500 pages long, look you see, this could well be the last bus vibes post for a bit. unless, of course, i get a bit bored of the book and opt for some tunes. doubtful, but you never know.

you will also have to forgive me not bothering to put the ipod into the docking station to record a few seconds of each song. too tired, and it's Game Of Thrones night tonight. just a bit of video off of that amazon music player thing will do, i would suggest. 

Kasabian, as hinted at in another post, was the choice for Friday, then. and why not, as David St Hubbins would say. Friday should be a day of rock and roll.

i got things underway, at about 7:22am, with Velociraptor!, an album named as such because, if i remember what the band said at the time, a velociraptor was the "most rock and roll of dinosaurs".

this, oddly, brings back memories for me of the time that Primal Scream pulled out of Top Of The Pops at the last minute when they discovered that the flight to the studio would land at Luton Airport and Bobby Gillespie, in his ultimate wisdom, declared that Luton Airport was "not rock and roll enough" for the band to land at.

Kasabian should be one of the bands i love more than any other band. musically they are just staggering - pure rock and a cool sound, one that echoes and draws upon the legends of music before them but is entirely their own in a way that a Noel Gallagher can only dream of. lyrically they are smart too - aggressive, witting, punchy, you name it. 

sadly, and perhaps uniquely weirdly for a band that has got as big as Kasabian has (they did headline Glastonbury without being a black American, after all), for me at the least their singer holds them back from ultra-greatness.

anyway, here's a snippet of I Hear Voices off of the album, via all that amazon music player thing.

i don't have a clue what the name of the singer off of Kasabian is. everyone knows Serge, or Sergio if you like, the cool, 70s rock looking guitarist. he's the rock selling point, hence him featuring so prominently on the Velociraptor! album cover.

yeah, this is a lone can of Red Stripe by the side of the road, presumably empty. why is it here? to keep certain readers, in particular Spiros, interested.

the vocalist off of Kasabian, whatever his name is, is just bland, free of accent, lacking passion and with nothing distinguishing about his style at all. no matter how awesome the lyrics are, he just delivers them in a sort of by the numbers sort of way, a bit like that fella off of Coldplay does.

i can only guess that at some stage in their rise from clubs to record contract that some sort of pressure was placed somewhere to get a singer that was "a bit more rock and roll" in. or maybe not, with the label deciding "actually that dull fella off of Coldplay is rich and married one of them actress ladies, so it must sell to the kids". whatever the reason, credit then to the band for sticking with him, but it does let it all down some.

after enjoying (bar the vocals) the joys of Velociraptor!, it was on to last year's release from the band, 48:13. the absolute best thing about this album is that the name really upset Billy Bragg, a man seemingly still bitter that being as right-on as he was not quite being enough to make him as popular or as successful as, say, Weller or Bono.

one year later and it's still a damned good album whatever the name of it is. solid, atmospheric and ambitious sounds and cool rock glory blemished only by the presence of a vocalist that seems woefully out of his depth but is committed to plodding along all the same, thank you very much. plodding along, at the least, mixed way down into the sound as far as they could get away with. no way would the vocals be as downplayed as they are on a Kasabian album as they would with any other rock band.

i should stop bashing the singer, he's better than me at the least. here's a smart snippet off of 48:13, a track called Stevie should anyone called Stevie be reading.

so, there we go. two, on balance, really awesome records, with only a minor quibble to them. it shall probably, going on their approach to date, be another year or so before we get another Kasabian album. nice one when it comes, and if the vocalist, whatever he is called, decides to give it a bit of emotion or some umph, well then so much the better.


i will do my best to do something of interest, as in non-bus related, soon to post here. thanks for sticking with me in the mean time.




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

rebranding inflationary measures

hello there

no, alas, i have not yet seen Mad Max Fury Road. the chances of me seeing it at the cinema are, look you see, presently slim to none. i shall simply wait for the tape to come out. well, what the hell, it's only been 25+ years that i have been waiting for a new Mad Max film; a couple of months more isn't, like totes, any sort of biggie.

the arrival of the revived Max has led to Warner Bros, as something of a given, pimping out the original Mad Max films. and why not. today was the day, courtesy of Tesco no less, that i got to see the reissued DVDs of these three most excellent and righteous movies. and, thanks to the magic of my blueberry phone thing, you can have a gander at them too.

well, if you have not seen them yourself whilst out and about, or browsing other corners of the net.

i am, i must confess, most taken by the artwork on covers of these reissues. they look like they have been, for the most part, created by someone that actually likes the movies. the cover of Mad Max, for instance, features a decent Mel. covers usually feature either a chubby looking Mel behind a driving wheel, or a random model with glasses and a hankie over his face to hide that it is not Mel. basically any image you like off of Mad Max 2 would make a great cover, but i am particularly excited about angry, or if you like mad, Mad Max, being visible. and i totally love the image selected for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and i hope it causes the people of the world to show the film the love it deserves.

there are, however, one or two issues with these reissues. ones that more or less stopped me buying them for reasons other than that i have so many copies of the films that it would be pointless to purchase them again.

for a start, you will observe they are £5 each. that means you are spending £15 to get the three films. pictured here is the blu ray set of the films that HMV sold me for £9.99 earlier in the year, or if you like late last year. ever keen to cash in, HMV have bumped their asking price up to £11.99. which is still £3.01 less for the blu ray set than the DVDs. yeah, this paragraphis is of relevance to the title of the blog post.

also, the second film is simply listed as Mad Max The Road Warrior. the film was never called The Road Warrior; it is a silly name some work experience kid in America stuck on it when he or she got confused about a sequel to a film they had not seen. the film was, is and always will be called Mad Max 2.

beyond my moans and gripes about the above, there is a practical concern here. all copies of the film that feature the credits which call the film The Road Warrior are the version of the film which was hacked to ribbons to get an R rating in America at the time. censorship is one thing, and may well be appropriate from time to time, but the way in which the edits were made to the film were of a nature that suggests whoever was allowed to do it had never edited film before and just hacked away with scissors and a bit of tape. when you watch the edited version, the jolts in the running of the film are so harsh you think there's something wrong with the tape or disc.

i have no idea at all if it remains the hacked up version of the film, or if the uncut, properly named Mad Max 2 as it appears on Blu Ray has now, at long last, been transferred to DVD. sorry, dear reader, i was not prepared to shell out £5 to find out if it was the cut version again.

also, as impressed as i am with the new artwork for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, it is very sad to see this original artwork gone. yeah, i know, this is an awful quality photo of it, sorry.

the poster, video, original DVD and blu ray cover for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome have, up to now, been consistent in showing off this, one of the most breathtaking, amazing and beautiful paintings ever commissioned for a film poster. these days, as you are all no doubt far too aware, five minutes of work on photoshop, or even maybe MS Paint, is considered good enough for a film poster. hard to believe that one upon a time it was a highly valued aspect of the movie, and that a great deal of care and attention was paid to what was designed and created to promote a motion picture release.

finally, again there are no extras. the blu ray set doesn't have any either. this is just about as annoying as the Blade Runner saga, where the world literally had to wait for some miserable bastard to die so that they could access the rights to release mountains of unseen footage. and we do know there are extras that could go for all three films. there were "making of" documentaries for the first two, and there's a stack of rarely seen footage for Mad Max 2 sat in a vault somewhere. in respect of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, well, there's the two music videos for the songs that Tina Turner did, and the video for We Don't Need Another Hero features a good deal of footage from the film not in the final cut. which tells us that there are a number of deleted scenes sat unreleased.

i would quite happily shell out for yet more copies of the Mad Max films on any format if they would just throw some of the unreleased extras at us. yes, i was nearly convinced to buy anyway, just for shiny new pictures. will they throw the extra stuff at us with the inevitable further re-re-rerelease of the films when Fury Road makes it to tape? one can only live in hope.




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

books on the bus

hi there

in-between spells of vibes i have indeed, look you see, been doing a spot of reading on the bus. as i've finished off another two novels, although to call one of them a novel really demeans what little credibility i clutch to, it seemed appropriate if not standard to throw a little bit of a review up here, on the off chance that my comments are for some reason of use.

a quick, spoiler free review of both? sure. Creed was delightful, wicked and cheeky fun, with it hardly being scary at all for a horror novel. Canto For A Gypsy should pretty much be avoided at all costs, unless you are some sort of student and are mandated to read it for purposes of getting some sort of grade or rudimentary certificate. never again, in the case of the latter, shall i select a book on the basis that William Hurt featured in an obscure yet fondly thought of film adaptation of another novel by the same writer.

it is entirely possible that there are *** POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD ***, so do take this as your point of departure if you wish to have no such spoiler for either novel. also, as usual, links to the grocer of the world are here for sheer convenience, and i see not a penny of any link you click or purchase you make.

i probably should "monetise" my blog, you know. that, however, would mean that you brave few who visit this blog would have to endure adverts, and anyway after some 11 years of doing this it really rather strikes me as a little late in the day to do so. 

i am indeed contractually obliged to mention that it was my (considerably) better half that introduced me to the works of James Herbert. i mean, i was aware of him, but i just assumed he would be the typical stuffy, pompous and dull sort of English writer. i was wrong.

it was with much merriment that i found Creed for sale for a mere £2 on the shelf at Tesco a few weeks ago. merrily that is also the price amazon have it at, or at least it is now at the time of going to print.

plot? the Creed of the title is Joe Creed, one of them paparazzi type of photographers. weirdly, he is a despised character, which shows incredible foresight from James Herbert - back in 1990 the paparazzi were the bees knees, with it only being after minor members of the Royal family got killed off an Uno that people started sulking about them.

anyway, the novel commences with Creed wedging himself in some sort of tomb or mausoleum in order to take some unique, extra special pictures of a celebrity funeral. he manages to capture a most extra special picture of a mysterious man performing a particular act on the grave of the celebrity who had, as far as we the reader are aware, died.

as it turns out, some rather mysterious forces are most upset with the picture in question being taken, and would like very much for the film, the negatives and any prints to be given to them. this, in more ways than one, arouses Creed to work out just who and what he saw.....

whilst not overtly scary, the novel is loaded with suspense, humour, sex and the odd bit of violence. it was a wonder to read, and i look forward to obtaining further novels by James Herbert.

for a bit of a break here, if for some reason you wanted to see it, is some sort of twat windsurfing down the River Thames. yes, the one in London.

i don't know much about the picture. looking at the exotic style of windsurfing board, the lack of traffic and the cut of the suit, i would say it's from the late 70s or early 80s. you just know that in that briefcase he has a filofax, an apple, a copy of the Times and some sort of Scandinavian spad publication.

there is some competition for this less than prestigious award, but Canto For A Gypsy must be close to the single biggest literary waste of time i have yet encountered. it can exist in print today, surely, only for bored, dislocated examiners to randomly pull an extract from and set as part of some prose based analysis exam for eager sixth formers, as well as high school and college students.

what's it about? good question. it seems to be a very bad variant on a Da Vinci Code thing some 40 years before that existed. a Gypsy is called in to help authenticate and guard some sort of crown that belongs to Hungary. it ended up in America at the conclusion of World War II and was going on display in a random church in New York before being returned. i think, at the least.

for examiners and students alike this is all really a literature wet dream. i am unsure if this is a hallmark of the other novels of Martin Cruz Smith (and please may they all be better than this), but his style seems very much locked in to speaking only in metaphor, or if you like comparison. very bad examples of either, as they conjure or evoke not a single interesting image for me as the reader.

other flaws? plenty. there are nearly more characters referenced than there are pages. it's virtually impossible to work out which is which due to the skimpy nature, and as a consequence of that you simply do not care who does what or why, you just want it to end. which it does, quickly.

if this was all trying to make some sort of social or political statement - perhaps maybe even a religious one - then what it is, or why, has long since been lost in time. if in America there are people who believe that Hungary is in fact a made up country which does not exist, much if not all of the blame for that can probably be traced back to any encounter with this novel.

so, there we have it. one hugely rewarding and enjoyable novel, one that was a complete and utter waste of space. those poor, poor trees that died to bring Canto For A Gypsy to the world, what a waste. as indeed was the £1 i spent on my copy.

what will i be reading next? not sure. i picked up a stack of  paperbacks at a library sale, i will see what takes my fancy.

nice one, as mentioned, if any of these reviews have helped!



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

bus vibes #19 - Ro££ing $tone$, 1982

hello there

oh dear, sorry. if i had known, look you see, that this would be round nineteen of these bus vibes things, i would surely have at least considered, if not contemplated, the notion of having a bit of a listen to some Paul Hardcastle. if you need that explaining to you, don't, as it won't be quite so mildly amusing.

i mentioned earlier in the week, or at the end of last week, or if you like in the death throes of the month before this one, the album Tattoo You. i was, then, of a mind to hear it once more, so that's what i went with. the peculiar thing is that i was going to start reading another book, but hey ho.

i, in accordance with many others, described Tattoo You as being possibly the last truly great Stones album. that, in retrospect, is somewhat unfair on Steel Wheels, which was a record on which the band seemed to still care about making music.

it's rather well known that this album was basically ten years of outtakes and otherwise unfinished tracks hastily cobbled together for a release as Mick, for some reason, refused to go on tour unless there was a record out at the same time. strange, as the concert album released of the tour, Still Life, is one of those rare instances of a superb live album, and would have justified the tour in itself.

a times this record does feel like a bit of an outtakes affair, with some dreadful moment on it where Jagger attempts a Bee Gees falsetto thing that doesn't work as well as it did on, say, Emotional Rescue. at times, however, it really does make a mockery of the idea that outtakes and previously unreleased material by bands and artists is never worth exploring, as there are some true gems on here. like, for instance, the opening track, which would be Start Me Up. yeah, one of their biggest and well known songs was never intended to be released. go figure.

other gems on here are Hang Fire, which is an amazing rocker, and the ballad thing Waiting On A Friend, which had an amazing video for it that saw Keith Richards shaking hands with some of his black friends, and then everyone getting together in a bar that was owned by the incumbent third choice of second guitarist in the band.

and then there's Little T & A, which you may or may not like. not on the basis of this low quality clip, though. but give this a spin anyway, listen to the quality which was almost discarded.

if you can make any vocals out in that you will note, if not observe, that it is Richards singing that one, not Jagger. i would think Jagger did not argue too much about not singing "tits and ass with a soul" or "the bitch keeps bitching".

it is quite frequent - not more often than not, but still frequent - that what oozes through this record is a traditional 70s mix of sexism, a patriarchal sense of superiority and a good deal of misogyny. because it's the $tone$ i suppose it gets casually written off as "oh, it was a different time then, you have to allow for it", but if some black rapper or white rocker did covers of some of the stuff on here they would get knacked for inciting hatred and contempt for women.

the picture here? what this one? it's one that Spiros sent me of at leas two, or as you can see three, gents on the bus he was on. i am uncertain as to why he sent it, so i thought it best to just put it here.

why is it that Spiros is on the bus, the more regular reader of you may well ask? it's a fair question. as far as i can work out he's had one fight too many with them hackney carriage drivers, and so any destination he usually called them from has now been blacklisted. also, his travels and adventures on the tube came to an end, quite nicely and most conveniently, around about the time that a good number of reports started emerging of gentlemen, as it were, playing with themselves whilst they sat and read the "art section" of the newspaper. it was around the time that people started recording gents doing this that Spiros decided the tube was no longer for him. a co-incidence, i am legally obliged to write here.

back to Tattoo You, or Tattoo as it was supposed to be called with no one being at all sure who added the You part, and is it worth getting? yes if you can find it cheap, as things like Hang Fire and Slave, the latter of which has some smart bass on it, tend not to feature on compilations. also, some of the tracks - at least two - feature the second choice for second guitarist in the band on them, despite the fact that by this point the third choice for second guitarist had been in the band for some 5 years. bet he felt good about that.

after that i fancied listening to the modern day equivalent of the Stones when they were decent; the only band on the go where it is also the case that the guitarist is far, far more interesting than the singer. alas, i had not put Kasabian back on my ipod after the most recent case where them bastards at Apple had done an update which blanked my ipod. so, 1982 With A Bullet it was to be, then. or selected highlights.

i just googled, right, and it seems Stumpie was born in 1986. what a pity, for if he had been decent enough to have been born in 1982, they could have had some smart "Oscar killing predicted by Australian compilation album".

yes, it's another album that i have tucked away on vinyl, and yet here it is, magically on my ipod.

what's it got on it? actually a fairly good balance of well known international hits and a fair few songs by artists that were only really ever big in Australia. one of my all time favourite tunes of all time, for instance, is on here, in the form of Body & Soul by Jo Kennedy off of the Starstruck soundtrack. another notable massive and seemingly Australian only hit is What About Me? by Moving Pictures. that band did have some international success, however, with the song that Kevin Bacon went mental too in the farm barn in Footloose. i think it was Never, but am not sure.

also, it has Come Back Suzanne by Bill Wyman on it.

man, that bass is something else. so what if he can't sing, sounds like he is making up the words as he goes or reading them off a bit of scrap paper and mumbles for the bits he's not at all confident about? that bass man, that bass. it's just awesome.

as i am not going to start reading a new novel on a Friday i guess more vibes, for those interested, will follow soon here, then. at this stage i have no idea at all what i will be having a bit of a listen to.although maybe i should re-add the words of Kasabian, which means fighting the good fight against itunes.

many thanks indeed for taking the time to read.




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

tourist filth

hi there

i am laying down a bit of groundwork to go on some travels. no bizarre great trek as such, look you see, just a bit of a journey. one that is, perhaps if not definitively, overdue. never mind that quandary, however, for surely all that truly matters is that the journey shall now take place.

a brief insight was given a while ago (sorry, i can't be bothered to search for the specific link) when i presented the baffling number of tickets i was forwarded for a simple journey. travels when i reach the destination should, at the least, be easy, or easier, thanks to my investment in this.

in great fairness, as in before i go on to any grumbles and gripes (so you have been warned), they do seem to be pretty decent towards the more tourist like visitor to their curious city. costs of travel on their so-called public transport is capped when one uses this variant of card, so in theory i will not incur all that much of a great expense as and when i roam the desolate wastelands of the capital.

slightly less in fairness is the cost of obtaining, or if you like procuring this card. despite it being very rudimentary, possibly Chinese bulk manufactured and having all the aged hallmarks of maybe being second hand or recycled (it seems somewhat aged), the fee to own this card, with no travel value, is £3 alone. if, ladies and gentlemen, your bank, or your supermarket with their so-called loyalty schemes, offered to charge you anything, let alone £3, so that you may spend further money with them, what would your response to that request for payment be?

in reference to the second hand nature of the card, well, it looks sort of aged, an off-white shade as it were, on the back. i dare not show a picture of the back, lest it reveal my card number. not that one can use the number off of it; i have discovered that i am unable to check the balance online.

perhaps it was a card that was previously used by a Brazilian who also visited the city, which brings us on rather nicely indeed to this item you can see here; the least Brazilian looking backpack i could find within the moderate budget i set aside for luggage.

i was delighted to, at last, be able to conduct business with a shop in town called Trespass, whose branding you can sort of make out at one point on this backpack, or if you like rucksack. my first efforts to conduct business with them ended in, through no fault of their own.

they opened their store for the first time in the latter stages of last year. always eager to support a new business venture, and in need of a large jacket to ward off the coming winter season, i visited them and enquired if they did by chance have a jacket suited to the more bigger size of bastard, such as i am.the staff were most diligent in their efforts to find for me such a coat, but alas they had nothing in stock that was of the size requirements needed to be of use to me.

this journey, or these travels if you like, of mine have thus far cost north of £150, not including lack of income due to taking leave, and i have not yet even left the provincial dialling code of where i live. they are not kidding when they refer to London as the most expensive place in the world, like totes ever.

but hey, back to moans and groans about this fancy card thingie.

if the £3 just to have the base card is excessive, what of the £2.95 (give or take) that i had to pay to have it delivered to me? fine, if the delivery was to be something special, but as you can work out it wasn't really.

the more observant of you that have, for some reason, wasted time reading all of this will have noted that actual postage cost was 48p. what was the remainder of monies paid over swallowed up by? some sort of crappy brown envelope, apparently. and no documentation of any use with it either, so i am not 100% sure how i use this card.

also, as you can further observe, they have used that ghastly, vile and downright hideous recycled paper to send it to me in. i would have thought, due to the prestige of London and the money i paid, they could have, at the least, slaughtered a brand new tree to craft me an envelope from.

more updates to follow, for no special reason. undoubtedly i will need to get a few more items ahead of my travels, in particular of a toiletry nature. an excursion to the pound shop, then, sounds in order.



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

lynx fever under review

hello there

after the partial, unqualified success of my review of the disastrous lynx black deodorant / "body spray", i thought i would have another go at a different shade of scent that they offer. hence, look you see, the title of this blog post. this time, as you may well have worked out, it is lynx fever that i had a go with.

i was drawn, some might say magnetically but i would disagree, to lynx fever for certain reasons. a key one, undoubtedly, was it was one of three shades of scent that was on offer at a lower price than normal. of the three, one was that black rubbish, and the other is one that name escapes me for the moment, but as one had to purchase two cans to get the special, a review of that will follow and its name shall be revealed.

another reason for me being compelled to purchase this was that the tin, as you shall soon observe, was very shiny. also, the name 'fever' is, to me, exciting. fever is, after all, the key, if not pivotal, word used as a lyric in Desire by U2, with the song being rendered pointless if one removed that word from it. also, the flame motif that is on the tin reflects the lyrics of the song Desire, so i took it as a given that this deodorant was inspired, in some part, by Bono.

another factor that was exciting was, of course, the concept of walking around with the shade of a scent that suggested i might have a fever. to walk amongst the world emitting the sensual eroticism associated with life threatening, if not always fatal, disease and condition without risking actual harm or death is a rare commodity to access at the best of times, least of all as part of some ambitious "2 for £4" promotion. imagine, the people and the wildlife of the world taking it as a given that i might have cholera, plague, scurvy or similar for a mere £2.

how does such fever, in the eyes or if you like nostrils, of lynx smell? peachy. as in peach, or peaches. but not the actual scent of peaches. no, instead what they have created is that romanticised, fictionalised idea of how peaches smell in certain works of art when they want to suggest or blatantly state that something smells pleasant, alluring, attractive, acceptable and satisfactory.

real peach, of course, or real peaches if you like, smell of exactly what they are, which is the decaying corpse of an item grown, nurtured and rather ruthlessly discarded by a tree, a bush, some shrubbery or whatever the f*** it is one calls whatever it is a peach would grow, or if you like blossom, upon or on.

on the subject of death, my conduct and activities at verk during the day today took me towards a requirement to research gravestones, or if you like headstones. it was during such conduct that i found this image.

i was rather taken with the wording on this. taken to the extent that i endeavoured to investigate the person being commemorated on it. i could find no detail of them; perhaps the whole thing is fictional and created so as to promote certain items.

that someone, as testament or as fiction, would take the time to account for a person with the words "misguided in life" alone did, to a somewhat obvious extent (hence it being here) affect me somewhat. in isolation, the simplicity of the message conveyed is brilliant.on a practical, rather more human level, it leaves me with something of a heavy heart that those three words were all that could be spoken. still, they are probably words better than those which shall be spoken of me.

returning to the world of lynx fever, for some reason some of you believe that my blackberry phone has a special feature that captures the smell of things. technology, apparently, will one day allow all devices to convey this smell when a video of it is played back.

here, to that end, is a video of lynx fever being deployed. 

my thoughts, feelings and conclusions in concern of lynx fever? it's actually pretty decent. if this indeed how one smells when one is affected by some sort of plague, bring on the rats, i say, i am more than happy to be infected, for to my nostrils it smells nowhere near as rancid or as unpleasant as i always imagined it would.

my thoughts on the 'attract for him' shower gel is, alas, not quite so positive.

i have been using this attract for him off of lynx daily for a couple of weeks now. thus far, i have observed, it has not had any affect in the number, level or quality of men it has assisted me in attracting. there has been no fluctuation in any number or by any measurement in this regard.

so, to recap, lynx fever yes, very good; lynx attract for him use only if you are not actively seeking a way to attract him as it doesn't appear to work.




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

meanwhile on bing....

hello there

Bing is one of them search engine things that isn't Google, but wishes that it was. Bing is, you would imagine, very jealous of Yahoo, for at least Yahoo got to be the giant of the internet before it became a fallen giant. Bing hasn't, thus far, even managed to be a medium to average presence.

which, look you see, is a bit of a shame, as it's actually very decent. the results it returns on searches are rather reasonable, useful and what you are looking for - we have just become so used to the quirks of how Google do it that we think Google returns are normal.

also, Bing every day has an awesome picture as a background. like, for instance, today.

today's picture was, indeed is, pretty awesome, it is not, however, the picture in itself that caught my eye today on the Bing site. rather, as some of you may well have noted yourself, or otherwise spotted in the above picture, it was the popular now section.

here, have a look at the close up......

is it just me, which granted it is likely, or are those four headlines something of a story in itself? "Kim Kardashian Pregnant, Leicester City Scandal, England vs NZ Solar Impulse" all sounds like a very busy, lively day to me. i mean, i am still not all that sure as to what a Kim Kardashian is, but if she was not going to get pregnant off of that potty mouthed entrepreneur she is involved with, i suppose she could do worse than pick a random player, or players, off of the Foxes (or whatever they call themselves) to do, as it were, the job.

yeah, this post is pretty much just one of something, anything, to make a first post on the first day of a new month.



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!