Eurovision Live Blog
May 24th, 2008 at 19:59

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Vegg-etarians
March 23rd, 2008 at 16:22

Even though I’m 20 and a militant atheist, my parents have continued to do the honourable thing and buy their son a couple of Easter eggs. After all, how else am I supposed to celebrate Jesus’s death? The egg presumably representing his chocolatey exterior, and Toy Story 2 on the TV representing his love of Tom Hanks.

I had a bit of a crisis this morning though - one of my eggs was a Mars Celebrations egg. As you might expect, it looked horrendously nice - I think the curvature of Easter eggs must make the chocolate extra decent, or maybe the neurones in my brain were firing extra hard upon seeing a familiar brand, kicking a psychological process into action - the trouble was though there was a looming question: is it suitable for vegetarians?

You might remember that there was a load of hassle last year when Masterfoods, the company that make Mars, Malteasers, Celebrations and so on, switched to using murdered animals in their products, and I ended up writing perhaps the most passionate and emotional blog entry I’ve ever written (my blog entry on the Janjaweed Militia was more tempered). Eventually, they did a massive U-turn on their decision when they realised that it might create some bad PR for them.

This is all well and good, but if you read the small print, it turns out that Twix, Bounty and most importantly, Celebrations are still tainted with the foul stench of death. The question is… what about the actual physical egg? There doesn’t seem to be any documentation one way or the other on that. I couldn’t care less about the individual chocolates, as they’re not special - I need to know whether the egg contains any animals. I almost literally need to find out the answer to what came first… the chicken or the egg?

I’m tempted to risk it… as it does look really nice. Hopefully Masterfoods have an irony department, and have picked up on the fact that it would be hideously ironic if the symbol of new life was manufactured using the murdered corpses of several old lives.

What should I do, readers?

Update: The egg has been consumed. I hope nothing died for my enjoyment of it.

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The Earthquake
February 27th, 2008 at 11:27

So, who felt the earthquake last night? Lets try not to worry, people, we can get through this together.

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Happy New Year!
January 1st, 2008 at 16:18

Happy New Year, readers!

I know what you’re thinking: “how did James spend New Years Eve?”. Perhaps somewhat predictably, I went down to London to watch the fireworks and all that. It was certainly a once-in-a-lifetime event. I mean, sure, you could do it again, but whether you’d want to is another question all together.

We drove down to London, parking at Finchley Central tube station on the outskirts, and caught the tube in. We made our way to Westminster, and more specifically, the excellent pub at the Namco Station on the South Bank. Unlike normal pubs, this pub is built into an arcade, so has a bowling alley, arcade games and dodgems. Its literally the best pub ever. So we spent the last few hours of 2007 behaving like teenagers.

Unfortunately though, at about ten o’clock, they closed off the whole South Bank, because that was where all the fireworks were going to be - so we were kicked out on to Westminster Bridge with two hours to spare. There were no drinks for sale on the bridge, and we didn’t have the foresight to bring any, which meant the two hours passed exceedingly slowly.

I tried to pass the time by doing some Peter-Kay-esque observational comedy. “Remember stuff from years ago? Eh? Eh? Remember when we had to manually type custom ringtones into black and white mobile phones? What’s with that? And when you go in a lift, right, you press the number of the floor you want to go to… but why is there a doors close button? The doors are going to close anyway! What’s with that?”

Eventually, midnight arrived, and some fireworks exploded, that sort of thing. Unlike poor Diamond Geezer, we had the best place in London. Being on Westminster Bridge, we had a full view of both Big Ben striking midnight, and the fireworks display on the London Eye. The fireworks were pretty spectacular, as you’ll see in the video:

After the fireworks display, the organisation of the event sort of fell apart, as nearly all 700,000 revellers descended on Waterloo tube station to get home (Westminster and Embankment were closed). And it turned out that the pub wasn’t reopening after midnight, so we had to join them. After faffing about for about an hour I cleverly hatched a plan to head to Southwark station which was just a bit further a long - which turned out to be a good idea, as there were only around 100,000 people who had that same idea.

But we eventually got back and it all worked out alright. I think being in London was a good idea. Really.

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Merry Christmas!
December 25th, 2007 at 18:05

Merry Christmas, readers! Thanks for sticking with the blog for another exciting year and all that. I hope you’re having as excellent a time as I am.

At time of writing, its about 5pm, and its the first time today I’ve retreated back to my bedroom - my tolerance for spending time with my family sort of abruptly ends when they decide to watch Vernon Kay’s Family Fortunes. I’ve been doing pretty well though - I’ve been up since half nine, so its been a good seven hours in their company- seven hours made infinitely easier due to the presence of Guitar Hero III on my Wii. (Clichéd review: “It rocks!“).

My family seem to have reacted moderately positively towards their gifts. My sister enjoyed looking at her Top Shop voucher, my dad seemed pleased with the book he told me to buy him, and my mum better enjoy her kettle-with-built-in-water-filter, given the price.

I got another excellent present too: my sister got me a tiny remote controlled helicopter (made of polystyrene or something) - so expect the inevitable video of it landing on my dad’s bald head to follow shortly.

Christmas is excellent. Merry Christmas everyone, again.

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Meet & Geek
August 28th, 2007 at 18:23

Sunday was literally the best day ever. I went down to London to meet about 20 people who frequent my other website - PKMN.NET. Yeah, if you hadn’t realised already, I’m the webmaster of arguably the world’s largest Pokémon website. The website itself has over 30,000 registered users and has been going for over seven years now, but it was still incredibly impressive, as well as amazing, to see 20 people, some of whom I’ve been talking to online for seven years as their real life “avatars”.

People came almost literally from all over the country - we had people who’d come from Scotland, Wales, East Anglia, Kent, the south coast - almost everywhere really. My friend Jeroen, who’s from the Netherlands, had even given up a day of his holiday in London to meet us all.

Being the webmaster and technically the owner of a major website has its perks. In the afternoon, when we were all in Hyde Park, my fellow administrators and I managed to persuade a couple of the lesser proletariat to go and buy us drinks. The other interesting thing was that because I’m the webmaster, the bloke at the top, I sort of assumed the leadership position. I was making executive decisions about where we should go and where we should go and so on.

It was when I was speaking to the group as a whole and leading people to a spot in the park that I realised that I had created an army. I’d re-iterate that it was amazing, but I fear that it could be (correctly) interpreted that I was enjoying the power trip and megalomania more than I was the meeting people.

After the “official” meet in Hyde Park, about fourteen of us took a trip to Leicester Square to acquisition some food, before (at my command) heading to Westminster via Trafalgar Square. It’s not a trip to London if you don’t see Big Ben. It wasn’t until we were sitting in an underground bar in the former Greater London Council meeting (just across the Thames from Parliament) that we realised we were missing someone. Whoops.

We found him eventually though. As the evening went on it ended up with seven of us, the most hardcore of the gang going to another pub near Euston station - which coincidentally, was a Scream pub. In other words, the same brand of pubs I go to all of the time - and it was just like the ones in Leicester, with its stacker, video jukebox and pool table. The only difference was that it was charging London Prices.

As you might imagine, there are a lot more pictures and videos from the day - I’d put them on here, but I guess the impact would be lost on you lot. If you really want to see though, click here for the pictures. I made several videos, but the one below I edited especially with the blog audience in mind (ie: there’s no Pokémon in it):

It was excellent. Click here for PKMN.NET’s coverage.

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Harborough Cordoned Off
July 14th, 2007 at 21:20

I went for a walk with Bouff around town to see where was cordoned off. Here a couple of thrilling photos of some Police cars and so on. This practically makes me a journalist. Maybe.

Map of the affected area: here.

Update (15/07, 01:37): Apparently these photos have been shown on BBC News 24. Luckily I pre-empted this and despite being out, were Sky plussing it all evening. Fingers crossed they’ll be some bad quality video of News 24 on here tomorrow!

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Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
July 1st, 2007 at 01:18

Birmingham is an awful city, and is full of awful people, yet for some unfathomable reason, decent bands still insist on playing there.

I went to see Me First and the Gimme Gimmes at Carling Academy, with Bouff. They do out-of-genre covers of famous songs in a punky sort of style. It’s basically a combination of the two greatest things in music: out of genre covers and punk. It’s basically the only time you’re going to see a circle pit to Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

Getting into Birmingham was a veritable nightmare - every road seems to simply splinter off of every other road, which confused the satnav, and the people of Birmingham don’t seem to understand basic traffic signals. As I drove through the centre, they’d just haphazardly wander into the road without a care in the world. At one point, approaching a pedestrian crossing with the lights on green, two women with pushchairs simply walked out into the road. I’d have had a billion points on my license if I wasn’t such a careful motorist.

After eventually getting parked, in a multi-storey car park on which most of the lights were not working (resulting in near darkness), we had a look around the city centre. It was full of hundreds of thousands of awful people - aside from the pedestrians who are no more coordinated in a pedestrianised area than in the middle of a public highway, we were approached by two nutters on two separate occasions.

The first woman was after a light for a cigarette, who could simply be ignored. A few minutes later a shifty looking man said “excuse me guys”, whilst I had my mobile phone out. Now, if you’re the critical type, you’re probably thinking “he didn’t look shifty, James is just paranoid and using loaded vernacular language”, but he really did look shifty. He had the sort of stereotypical murderer face - covered in unusual bumps and battered through years of socio-economic hardship, with an expression set to a permanent grimace. Like Cherie Blair.

I said “Sorry!”, and continued walking, as I thought he was going to grab my phone, “you haven’t even listened to what I was going to say yet!”, he cried back at us. I don’t think I missed much - I doubt his pearl of wisdom would have been that earth-shattering. Phone snatchering, maybe.

The gig was good though. It was a little disappointing that bassist Fat Mike (of NOFX fame) had pulled out, but he was replaced by Eric Melvin, also of NOFX. I’m not terribly familiar with the Gimmies discography, so didn’t really identify most of the songs - although they were all covers. They did the famous song from the musical Annie, Somewhere over the Rainbow, Ghost Riders in the Sky, I believe I can Fly, Don’t cry for me Argentina, that sort of thing. All with thrashy guitars and shit.

Unfortunately, the gig was soured slightly by the pit. I don’t mind people jumping about and so on, and my tolerance for this sort of thing is usually quite high, but I got the impression that the pit contained less a group of people enjoying the music in a heavily physical way and more a bunch of wankers being twats. It got ridiculous- during the verses of the songs, the twattier ones (who take their shirt off to prove out totally hardcore they are) went around motioning to clear an empty space, so that when the chorus kicked in, they could all run at each other as fast as possible. They must have really wanted to mosh to the theme tune to The Spy Who Loved Me (”Baby, you’re the best” - that one).

Hilariously, they misjudged the start of the fast bit a few times, but started moshing anyway, so what I ended up seeing were a bunch of people running at each other and going mental, but to really slow music.

It was a good gig though - bit of a shame though that they didn’t play their version of “These are a few of my favourite things” with the start which plays to the tune of Bad Religion’s Generator.

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Changing of the guard (Prime Minister)
June 29th, 2007 at 00:12

So yeah, if you’ve watched the video below, and I hope you have done considering the sheer amount of toil involved, you probably know that yesterday I went with Katy to London, and watched a historic day in the history of History unfolding: the transfer of power from one Prime Minister to another.

We tubed to Embankment station and walked down Whitehall to College Green. The plan was to get to Parliament and see if we could blag our way into the last Prime Ministers Questions. We were unsuccessful, unsurprisingly. But walking down Whitehall, who should we see heading towards Downing Street, but none-other than TV’s Huw Edwards. I’m not sure if he noticed me excitedly saying to Katy “Holy shit! It’s Huw Edwards… fucking hell! Huw Edwards!”, whilst wildly pointing at him. I hope he did.

Bizarrely, despite the old adage saying that the camera adds weight, he seemed to have a fatter face in real life than I remember from the TV. Rubbish geeky quip: maybe the BBC studio uses 2.35:1 ratio cameras and they squash the picture?

When we got to Parliament, we were told by a woman working there that there were no tickets available until “about 12:30″ (the time PMQs ends) - she seemed completely oblivious to the significance of the day.

College Green was a hub of excitement - and according to Wikipedia - the roof of an underground car park. All of the news crews were there. You can tell its a big day when they’ve got the gazebos out. The BBC were there, Sky were there. ITN were probably there but they didn’t make themselves very visible. Even the Austrian national broadcaster, ORF were there.

As we got in everyone’s way, we noticed a number of big names. There was Julie Etchingham (Newsround circa-1996) presenting live for Sky, Jon Sopel (a man who is fluent in French, unneccessary fact fans) presenting live on News 24. I was surprised to see Andrew Rawnsley there, not only because ITV seemed to have opted for broadcasting mindless bullshit in the form of This Morning, rather than covering the most important political event in ages, but because his jaw is even more massive in real life. I’m not sure why I keep judging celebrities on their faces.

Quentin Davies, the Tory defecator defector was there being interviewed too, as was Tessa Jowell. On watching the News 24 coverage when I got home I was impressed with her. When Jon Sopel interviews her if she thought she still had a job, the ultra-Blairite said that she’d love to stay in the cabinet, despite it being obvious that she was destined for the figurative rolled up carpet in the back of Brown’s figurative Mafia car. Knowing this, quite incredibly, she said “but that’s not what today is about”, religiously defending the incoming Brown regime. That’s pretty impressive, as if I were sacked, I wouldn’t religiously defend my former employer. But then, I don’t do anything religiously.

Talking of former employers:

As PMQs drew to a close, we wandered down from College Green back to Whitehall, where by now crowds were starting to gather. There are some hinged barriers in front of the gates of Downing Street which are used to keep the proles back whenever people need to get in and out - despite the barriers being in use, as we were all standing in a big crowd waiting for Tony to fuck off, normal pedestrians, seemingly uninterested by the day’s festivities tried to push their way through the crowds carrying multiple bags of shopping from Tesco’s, only to get frustrated and turn back when they realise the barriers were in use.

Not being funny, but who goes and does their shopping, then on the most important and widely publicised political day of the year decides to go home via Whitehall? Would they just have walked past Downing Street without giving it a second thought? Is that how Londoner’s operate? “Oh, it’s only Downing Street, so what?”.

We witnessed Tony come back from PMQs as his car swept into Downing Street for one final time. After maybe half an hour the gates opened again and his car whisked him off to the Palace. It was a bit underwhelming in a way, as the whole car passing bit lasted maybe twelve seconds, and the windows were tinted so we couldn’t even see him.

Across the road were some anti-war protesters dressed as Guantanamo detainees - despite having the best viewing spot of everyone gathered there, they unfathomably decided to wear black bags over their heads so they couldn’t see what was going on. I’m all for staying in character, but this was history in the making, and they missed it.

After this, following a tip-off from the political blogs, we headed down to the Treasury, as we knew that’d be where Gordon Brown was leaving from before heading off to the Palace himself. Katy and I got a spectacular viewing position - if it weren’t for the hundreds of armed police officers in the vicinity, I could have easily happy-slapped Gordon Brown as he left. Take a look at the video to see for yourself.

Sky’s Jeremy Thompson (doing a pre-record, in which we were clearly visible in the background) and Jon Craig were there (doing a live), and the BBC’s Carol… someone or other was there. Michael Crick was there for Newsnight too.

Again, this only lasted a few seconds after quite a long wait. Brown walked out, waved a bit, got into a Ministerial car and was off. The media were calling it a “limousine”, whereas Katy rightly pointed out it was a red Vauxhall of sorts… which doesn’t look or sound too fancy.

After this was over, we headed down Horseguards Road, round the back of Downing Street, heading towards the Mall. Excellently, parked up on Horseguard’s Parade were Tony Blair’s Removal Vans. Here’s a photo with me by them:

I could have been standing literally inches away from Tony Blair’s guitar or Cherie Blair’s juggling balls.

It was an exciting day. Now watch the video.

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What happened yesterday…
June 28th, 2007 at 19:29

Yesterday, Katy and I went down to London to watch the big Prime Ministerial changeover. Here’s what happened in video form. Words and pictures to follow shortly:

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