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 Archives 
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Thursday, June 24, 2004
Nooooooooo 38 bloody years of hurt. Why do we always, always go out on penalties? Oh, and that ref... Now I know how Portugal and Italy felt after the referees at the World Cup helped South Korea go through. I feel utterly deflated, and am immediately transferring my hopes to the Czech Republic. I wonder if all those England flags will disappear now. Oh, and if anyone says 'It's only a game...' Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Roo-ney. Roo-ney. Glorious. Now bring on Portugal. As Ian Wright said, it'll be a shame to knock out the host nation, but somebody's got to do it. Saturday, June 19, 2004
Sad to say, my life revolves around Big Brother, Euro 2004 and iTunes at the moment. It's been such an exciting week that I don't know if my heart can take much more. BB5 is only 3 weeks old and so far we've had sex, anarchy, fighting, tears, police involvement, masses of nudity and not single 'normal' eviction. Emma's just been chucked out, which I think its a good decision - she couldn't be trusted to not have another psychotic episode the next time she and 'The Milkman' (Victor) were put in a room together. A lot of people slag BB off, denouncing it for being boring (er, I don't think so) and cheap: I get the impression a lot of people feel tainted after watching it because I expect they'd be reading Proust or studying neurophysics if BB wasn't on. BB is a fantastic programme - it's fun; it's not meant to be a great, worthy public service. So the haters should just stop bitching about it and let the rest of us enjoy it. I want Michelle to win, but, for the record, I think Stuart will win, with Dan and Shell 2nd and 3rd. Another cultural event that brings out huge outpourings of moaning and negativity is Euro 2004. It's a cliche, but suddenly everyone thinks they could be England manager and do a better job than Sven. And I've never heard so much bitching after a 3-0 victory. I don't care if we scrap and scrape through every second of the match against Croatia on Monday, as long as we get a point. And I also think England were brilliant against France, nervy against Switzerland, but to be nervy and win by three goals isn't bad. I still think the Czech Republic are going to win the tournament though. Apple's iTunes store launched here on Tuesday and although there are huge holes in the catalogue, it's a fantastic service, even if it is a terrifyingly easy way to run up a huge credit card bill. There are so many holes in my collection that I want to fill, but so far I've restricted myself to 3 single tracks and 1 album. I'm itching to go on it again though. Right now. I'm spending a Saturday night home alone because Butter has gone to see Red Hot Chili Peppers in Hyde Park. I didn't go with her because I have good taste in music. I'm listening to The Killers album, which is ace. The Concretes are another top band of the moment - their new single 'You Can't Hurry Love' is great, and has nothing to do with the song that Phil Collins ruined. My friend Helen and I met up with a former Japanese student of ours, Kaori, last night - she was following the Datsuns round Ireland then stopped off in London for a couple of nights. We took her to the pub but she's allergic to alcohol, which is rather unfortunate! I think she was mildly horrified by how much beer Helen and I can put away. It was weird talking to a Nova student again - she said 'so-so' a lot, we started saying 'many many' and we had to dumb down our language so she could understand us. Although her English is excellent. She gave me a plectrum that belonged to Dolf Datsun. Ooh - I shall guard it with my life. In fact, I was jin a record shop earlier (for a change) and the man in front of me in the queue started talking about the Datsuns. I was tempted to whip out my plectrum, which was in my back pocket, and show it to him. But then he might have thought I was a) a liar and b) a dick. Sunday, June 13, 2004
Sunday, June 06, 2004
I've got a new computer - an eMac, rather like the one I helped my sister buy last week. After seeing and playing with one, I couldn't resist it any longer. Butter is now a temporary eMac widow. Actually, this is mainly because I'm trying to finally finish SB. I'm doing the final read-through. I know, it's being going on forever and I'm utterly bored of the whole thing. My eMac though, is a thing of great beauty. It's zippy and does all sorts of things that my olde worlde iBook couldn't, like burn CDs and DVDs. It's got Garageband on it too, so I could soon be writing my own songs and making a belated bid for popstardom. Or perhaps not. We saw The Pixies this week at the Brixton Academy. When they walked onto the stage the crowd roared as if they were welcoming home an English World Cup-winning team. Then Frank Black, who is slightly larger than a real pixie, and the gang tore through about 50 songs in 10 minutes - okay, slight exaggeration, but they certainly did a lorra lorra numbers. There's no banter, no 'Hello London how ya doing?' or 'all the people on the left, wop bam boogie'. Frank did speak a few times, but his words were less intelligible than most of his lyrics. They were fantastic though - loud, powerful, tuneful and just plain awesome. I'd been waiting for that gig for 15 years, and they didn't disappoint. |