13 November '07
I've a suspicion that this is the kind of thing that blogs were invented for: the 'does exactly what it says on the tin' Joe Mathlete Draws A Nipple On Ziggy's Nose So That His Nose Looks Like A Titty. Check out also the admirably straight Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke.

20 October '07
This is the best story I've heard in a while; also one of the best insults, given its likely veracity:

"My sister was arguing with my dad a while back and it went something like this:

Sister: Well your fat, least i'm not fat.
Dad: Yea well your mum shat on your head when you were born!

She then ran crying over to my mum and started screaming 'DID YOU?!! TELL ME NOW!'"

9 August '07
I just 'Rode the Alps', off-road, from Chamonix to Zermatt. It was the hardest thing I ever did, but probably the most rewarding, if you don't count the time SueDanger and myself ate a whole chocolate gateaux for my birthday breakfast. Eight consecutive days of the biggest hills and gnarliest terrain I've ever been near to on a bike, and somehow I've returned with little more than scratches, bruises, and a healthy tan which will probably last till the weekend.

Should you do it? Yes, via the excellent chaps at Ride The Alps, but don't expect an easy ride. One day I was fitting with a heatstroke by the side of the road, the next I was pushing my bike up a scree slope at 2800m with 6m visibility through a thunder and hail storm. But then other times I was watching the sun set from a mountaintop cabin, swooping through alpine meadows on a crisp morning, wending my way through endless wooded singletrack switchbacks, speedhopping drainage channels, rolling over rocks and manualing roots. Fantastic!

Watch this space for more details and pics to come. In the meantime, big shout to all the gang for pulling me through (thanks for waiting!), and special thanks to our excellent guides Neil, Lardy and Jules, who made it fun, possible, and as safe as such lunacy can be.

6 July '07
It's back! Finally, the latest edition of The Framley Examiner hits the web.
[Update: why aren't my updates updating?]

1 May '07
Sometimes you get hit in the face by something so hard that you don't know quite what to do. And then you get hit again, and that was your second chance, and again, you blew it. Yep, that's me. Third chance pending...

Anyway, more to the point, this picture came through the post this morning, anonymously. Should I be worried?

22 March '07
It's easy to mock a name, and I should know because I've done it. But it turns out that Jim Bumgardner is actually something of a genius. Not only that, but fun with it and generous too: just check out his Whitney Music Box to see what I mean. I've just spent half the night watching it spin and chime. Dig around for all manner of screensavers, Flash toys, widgets, tutorials, Flickr hacks and bits of source code. Diverting stuff.

3 March '07
Lunar eclipse. Now there's a thing. I had no idea until people started leaving the pub to stare into the sky. And there's always a danger that that in itself is a piss-take. But no, there the moon is, barely a dirty smear, starlight-capped and ruddied by diffraction. Quite a sight.

My sharp-shootin' Fujifilm F10 seems to have no infinity focus, so I purloined this pic off the web. And I can't for the life of me remember from where, so if it's yours, please let me know so I can credit or remove.

8 January '07
My imagination knows no bounds. Last night I was treated to two unrelated dreams: in one, I was eating some pate; in the other, I was doing a sudoku puzzle. Rockin'.

Ever had a shitter dream than that? Tell me about it

30 December '06
That's right, 30th December. The day before New Year's Eve. So why is it that on the stroke of midnight, hundreds of fireworks are being set off at what can only be a professional display? Has someone got it wrong?

In other news, gloriously, this site is now the sole Google result for the search phrase 'Panspermia is bollocks' (see posting 19th November). Anybody wish to join me?

6 December '06
I'm out with Chris, who missed birthday drinks (despite it being his birthday) due to other commitments. We'd said we'd hook up shortly after.
"Two pints of Special please."
"Ooh, Bladdy 'ell, I fought I was in a gay bar for a minute when I 'eard you say that!" The toothless crone sat at the bar in front of me cackles wildly. She scarcely has any voice left, and it takes more of her emphysemic breath than it's worth when she rasps: "I fought he was a gay boy! I did! Harhahaha!"
"Sorry to disappoint," I offer, but she's oblivious, wrapped up in her joke and the two Caribbeans she's holding court to. They both seem to get it, but I'm a bit lost.
"I can't say that though, can I? You can't call someone gay these days - cops will 'ave ya!" Her formless body is coated in tattoos, mostly biro-blue, mostly looking like they were drawn in biro.

Apparently The Hope has suffered a change of management not so long ago. Still, the beer was good.

30 November '06
My experience is limited, but I expect there can't be many yoga teachers who organise 'yogic Xmas drinks' for their students. Rarer still those who would look to make 'quite a night' of it. Hence this plug for Helen's awesome-o-saurus Magic Of Yoga. Once this party season is over, you could do a damn site worse than get yourself down there and learn yourself the Fish pose.

25 November '06
There are certainly days, but there is never a week that goes by without me feeling bereft of John Peel in some capacity or other. I think that's fair enough in itself, but it isn't until I chance upon something like this that I remember quite how far-reaching that Peel effect really was.

Granted, Jawbone isn't going to appeal to any of your Coldplay-snorting compadres, but you yourself ought to know better by now. Give him a spin. And when you've done that, go and have a look at Seasick Steve. And if you like that, look up Elmo Williams or RL Burnside, and thank Peely for bringing them to an audience of people who never would have.

19 November '06
Panspermia is bollocks. And I say that more in the hope of becoming the only Google result for the phrase "panspermia is bollocks", than I say it in the hope of convincing anybody that it is, indeed, bollocks. Although it is.

For anybody who missed last week's enjoyable Horizon program on the subject, panspermia is the idea that life on earth was seeded by extra-terrestrial bugs which crash-landed here on a meteorite. Which is fine. It's less wacky than it sounds: bacteria can survive conditions in space, and they seem to be able to survive a meteor impact, so why not?

But also, why? I'm happy to concede that we could be descended from aliens, but why would we be? Why is it more likely that life started elsewhere? Surely, given the earth's propensity to support life, and the rest of the cosmos's inability so far to yield any life whatsoever, Occam's Razor would claim that this is likely where it began? Click on the envelope at the top of this page to tell me why I'm wrong.

3 November '06
Happily I've just installed Apache and PHP on this newly decked-out spaceship, and more happily still they now pretty much configure themselves. So henceforth I can update this site with ease once more. To celebrate I was going to write something about Comment is free, The Guardian's experimental and pointless 'collective group blog' which exists only to alternately enrage and stupify (despite the thoughtful and entertaining contributions of the non-enlisted commentators). But thinking about it, I can't be arsed. Just have a look at Soumaya Ghannoushi's contentious turd of an article, and you'll probably see what I mean.

29 September '06
'Vindicates a vegetarian dish'? The most casual of glances at Mauro, the portly, avuncular proprietor of Mauro's Pizza, should be more than enough to vindicate a vegetarian dish.

Within 5 minutes of us being seated the great man enters from outside, slow and deliberate paces pulling up short at each occupied table to deliver a heartily broadsided 'Hello!' along with a housewive's-favourite smile. He enjoys his food, there's no doubt about that, but he possesses the kind of gut that is made of meat, not fat. You get the feeling that a punch to his stomach may sprain your wrist.

A full 7-foot of over-toned pizza chef spins dough in the corner, grinning as if every flip and turn of every base is a genuine treat. Service comes in the guise of a barely legal immigrant girl, trying far harder than she ought (you never see the same one twice, I'm reliably informed). The pizzas are fantastic. We rise to leave, thanking the waitress and giving a hearty wave to Mauro, partly to amuse ourselves and partly because he'll surely enjoy it. 'Don't forget to book for my Christmas party!' he yells enthusiastically. I smile, and wave back the picture of the fat, inexplicably grumpy Santa to reassure him.

'Ha ha! Just imagine having your Christmas party at Mauro's!' I chuckle, as we stumble down the road with complimentary limoncellos warming our gullets. But somewhere deep inside, a part of me is happily imagining exactly that.

24 September '06

I just got back from a grand old time in France. The Vendée, if you're interested. Radically, if unwittingly, Sue and I body-boarded the tail end of Hurricane Gordon. Gnarly as yo' ass. Big shout out to The Dangerfields, who very kindly accepted my whinging presence as though it were 1991 all over again. I am genuinely indebted.

29 August '06
First, an apology: it looks like someone is spamming from my email address, and I apologise unreservedly for having not yet pulled their arse off and hurled it at a wrestler. If you've received an email purporting to be from this domain, please forward it to me complete with all headers and I'll do what I can to nail this wankpot.

Spam blights my life. It causes me to delete genuine mails, it fills up my server space and it wastes my time. Filters are of little help; many of emails are just filled with lumps of grammatically correct text, often quoted from literature. It will be a long time before a spam filter can say, 'Hang on, this isn't personal... this is Tolstoy!' Anyway, if spam blights your life too, perhaps this unlikely panda will cheer your heavy heart.

UPDATE - That's no spam! It's a virus! If you're reading this and you have my address in your contacts list, you may have a virus. At least one of you does. Please check your computer. No antivirus software? Download Grisoft's free AVG edition.

16 August '06
"They always say it comes in threes and fours / And that it never rains, it just pours." So spake the mighty Fall back in 1990, and you'd think that might have sunk in given how often I played Extricate at the time. But it didn't, because after the bike crash (see below) the computer crashed, with a burnt out CPU or motherboard or something else I haven't worked out yet. Whatever, it's still bust. And that was the second thing, so I should have expected a third when I locked my bike up outside the Windmill pub. I certainly shouldn't have been surprised to find the frame left with no wheels and no seat (and by association, no seat post, no brake discs, and no rear cassette). I shouldn't have been surprised at all. Anyway, hopefully that's the three, and if there's four, hopefully the fourth is the pain in my back, referred almost certainly from the initial crash but hopefully delayed enough for the Fates to count it as distinct.

12 August '06
Some things have your name and address on, and sit quietly in a drawer, in a dim and dusty room, waiting for someone to dig them out and put them in the post. The popular experience of having a car door opened directly in the path of your bicycle is one such thing, and on Wednesday I finally took delivery.

It was a grim morning to say the best of it, pissy drizzle soaking my hair while a mixture of powdered tyre rubber and dissolved exhaust fumes spattered up from the road, the colour, but not the taste, of black vodka. I stood up tall on the pedals, the better to distance myself from this front-wheel fountain of filth, and slid down the hill. As often happens when the skies suddenly open, cars were backed up for 500 yards or more from the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill, petulantly shuffling toward the junction. As I neared the head of this trundling line, the passenger of one particular car decided she'd had enough; she was getting out. Alas she decided just as my speeding wheels reached a point one meter behind her very door. A yell, a crash, and my terrified body, suddenly more alone in the universe than a tapir on an ice floe, was propelled forward into the hard unyielding steel, with nought to use for a brake but my chest - a chest made not of steel, but of soft flesh and blood and stuff.

Happily the damage to the bike was superficial, the woman was distressingly apologetic, and my own wounds came out in the shape of a smiley face, with my nipples playing an unlikely role as a pair of beady eyes. Cool. Although it does smart a bit.

14 July '06
I was thinking, while having my hair cut this week, about how ridiculously fine my hair is. I was thinking about it because the scissors, sharp though they were, were pulling on occasion rather than cutting. Considering how every cloud has a silver lining, I decided to list the pros and cons of fine hair, which I have outlined below. I'm still a bit light on pros, so any suggestions would be a bonus.

Bad things about having very fine hair
1. It pulls rather than cuts, being fine enough to fit between all but the sharpest scissor blades.
2. When cut, the fallen hairs itch more than their blunter counterparts.
3. The sun ricochets a path through the narrow tangle of fibres and burns your scalp, which is occluded in thicker-mopped folk.
4. The sun, reflected off the scalp, ricochets back out again and into people's eyes, prompting the shrewd observer to comment that you are going a bit thin on top.
5. It is thoroughly unmanageable, choosing only the limpest styles of its own devising. Hair product overwhelms it, causing either greasiness or a wildly bedlamic look depending on the product type.
6. Despite a higher surface area:volume ratio than thick hair, it does nevertheless have lower surface area overall. This means it saturates quicker, so even having the mildest of sweats on will leave you dripping. Furthermore, the flexibility of the hairs means they are easily drawn together by the water's surface tension, further reducing the coatable area and leading to a torrent of extraneus skin-coolant dribbling into your eyes.
7. It doesn't take colour well.

Good things about having very fine hair
1. Your head is, on average, a little lighter than other people's.

Update
The appropriately-named Mr Wright writes that another pro of fine hair is that'hairdressers run their hands through your hair and say “what lovely fine hair”.' Really? Then maybe it's time for a change; mine just jabs scissors into my ears and pretends to be sorry.

18 June '06
Another week, another wedding. Actually this one was a considerable number of months ago, but the party was delayed. It happened to be on the weekend I returned from Italy, but the Gods of Skyscanner were well appeased in May, so I was back in plenty of time.

Heaven forbid I should ever get married. The last three joinings have encompassed the spectacular Westminster Boating Base, a castle in Chianti and the walkway across the top of Tower Bridge. Where do you take it from there? As if you need telling, and as the inadequate-yet-spectacular phonepic further suggests (click it for bigness), the latter venue is well worth a visit. I keep hearing that they filmed the last episode of The Apprentice up there too, for what that's worth. The usual mix of massive props and heartfelt thanks go out to Simon and Clare, along with a stock disclaimer and apology for my foolish dancing.

16 June '06
Another week, another wedding. Actually it was a couple of weeks ago or more, but it's taking me a while to catch up. This time it was more than a wedding, really, more of a holiday in Tuscany, although make no mistake, the wedding part was significant and fabulous. My very best wishes, as ever, go out to Sos and Jo, and indeed to everyone that made it such a remarkable week.

I'll add my paltry collection of photos to my Flickr account as soon as I get around to sorting them, but in the meantime here's my even more impoverished collection of photos from the Lizzie/Alex do. I realise looking at them that I'll never be hired to photograph a wedding, but I'm gratified nonetheless that I didn't lose my camera.

18 May '06
It was a good wedding, certainly one of the very best. You could of course put some of that down to the exemplary ushering, provided by a crack team of multi-talented individuals all dedicated to a single cause. But then you'd be guilty of a gross misappropriation of credit. Lizzie and Alex, always sociable beyond the limits of time and reasonable effort, stepped up to the mark and made, as might be expected and in the finest manner imaginable, a party out of a matrimony.

Not that it lacked emotional bite, by any means; there was gravity in those vows, and a rare, celebratory volume in the congregation's rendition of Jerusalem that I doubt I, for one, will ever match again. And the way that some of us (quite literally) threw our bodies at the dancefloor as the night progressed, with scant regard for personal safety, should clearly serve as a measure of our appreciation. So from me, huge thanks to all involved. Including the Westminster Boating Base, who fantastically returned my lost mobile phone.

Noticing how similar a few of the photos I took were, I found myself the following day creating what may be an entirely new way to show pictures on the internet. Well, it's probably been done before, but if so then it's due a resurgence. Have a look. It tickled me. The scope is enormous. If we pooled the pics from this wedding alone we could come up with more than a dozen. I know: I watched us all taking exactly the same pictures. Getting the right soundtrack is tough, but not insurmountable. Suggestions to the usual address.

9 May '06
After the Camusian feast of the senses that was Friday night, the latter half of my weekend descended into something more resembling The Fall. Sometimes everything bursts from inside, and you don't know whether that's good or bad until it splatters onto the outside world. Then you read the patterns of splatter and you still don't know, although increasingly as the years go by, experience mounts up to suggest that it won't be good.

Excellent news, then, that even a heart as stove-black as mine cannot fail to be cheered by the Finnish Eurovision Song Contest entry for 2006. You couldn't make it up, and if you did, nobody would believe you: Lordi - Hard Rock Hallelullia. Bring on the Day of Rockening.

19 April '06
Like some kind of stupidified buttknuckle, I turned up at work this morning, late, tired and hungover, only to discover that we don't actually start back until tomorrow. Grrr. Meantime, whilst I'm debating whether I've got mouth cancer or have just eaten something slightly sharp, main man Joe has been flat on his back in casualty, in the manner of a true martyr to the NHS.

Hang in there pal, and get well quickly. I'm missing the Photoshop tennis, even though you threw that last match with an underhand animation!

7 March '06
A brief nod to the sad news that poet, musician, noise abatement activist and Glasgow dreamer Ivor Cutler passed away on Friday 3rd March. Thanks to Miranda for the news, and all those who expressed their condolences. There's a useful wiki here.

6 March '06
I've not really been feeding out the linky nutriment recently. Sometimes I think there are too many links out there. It's great when you're feeling a bit linky, but too much can leave you slightly innured to URL goodness. Anyway, it's time once again to get linky on your ass, because this is something a bit different. And well worth checking out, because with a product asking price 'no less then $5,400,000 or five million four hundred thousand dollars,' these folk have taken website professionalism to a whole new level. 'EXTREAM (sic) ENGINEERING at its very best.'

29 February '06
I buried my spider tonight. She died 2 days ago, but tonight is the first chance I've had. It felt pretty sad. Totting it up, I reckon she kept me company for 18 years. And thinking about it, I don't recall that I even have a decent photo of her. Anyway, she looked something like this. 18 is a ripe old age. Odd for her to be lain to rest in the frozen earth of a backyard in Tulse Hill, rather than carried away by foraging ants on a steamy Brasilian forest floor. I guess you never really know what's coming.

On a slightly happier note, I'm still not smoking.

26 February '06
It is two whole weeks since I stopped smoking. Well, two weeks since I stopped smoking cigarettes. Or two weeks since my lungs stopped smoking. I've worked my way through two fat cigars in that time, which I'm not happy about, but which I think is no worse than having recourse to the occasional nicotine patch. Also they were a gift from Taiwanese Robert, and thus had to be smoked at some point (very nice too, Mr Liu - cheers!). None of which is really the point. The point is that it is difficult. It's difficult to remember why you're bothering, when there's nobody to remind you, nobody to censure you, and nobody to be impressed by the constant effort you put in to swap nicotine for tea until your bladder feels like Tycho Brahe's.

I hate not smoking. I really do. I also hate smoking, when I'm doing it. What does that leave? A rational observer might point out here that I should carry on smoking, because at least that way I'd have less time overall to hate it. All I know is that if I had a cigarette to hand right now, I'd smoke it. And I suspect that, having tripped that mental swith, I'm doomed.

01 January '06
It's 1:00am on the first day of the new year, and I write now purely because it is almost unheard of for me to be able to write at this point on the calendar. Happy New Year, by the way.

When the going gets tough, the tough turn their consciousness down to idle and let the raw mechanics of mental function take over. My head now is like an equation that I can't get my head around: the figures go in at one end, and an answer comes out at the other. And so it is that the paucity of plausible New Year's Eve plans, having been fed through the quadratic mill of a compromised mind, have been output as the rubbishy answer that I might as well stay at home this year. Which is exactly what I've done.

And in truth it isn't all that bad. But I did make the mistake of going down to the TV, where I allowed Jools Holland and his pedestrian entourage of radio-friendly songsters to usher in 2006. The countdown ended, I hugged the Italian, and we watched the fireworks through the window for as long as they were interesting. And then I crawled back here, feeling more wired than I could justify, and wondering quite where my distractions might come from for the rest of the night.

26 December '05
Thank the Saints of Eternal Piss that this Christmas shit is all over. Everybody, family or not, should have the right to drink themselves to an early grave, but surely they don't have the right to insist that people watch, and if they do then they must at least have an obligation to offer meaningful dialogue along the way. Big shout to my baby brother, for taking a stand and eloquently speaking the truth. Big apologies to my Aussie sister, for accidentally dragging her through it with me. Big call to my folks to stop ripping what little remains of our family into a vomit-strewn paper trail of best-forgotten memories.

Next Christmas, for my family, is cancelled, by my decree. I'll pass that with my siblings nearer the time.

10 December '05

Would you believe it - I popped out to the shed around tea time, the route to which forces me to stare into the back of the living room of a neighbour's house, and there he is, bold as brass, with a laptop covered in 'left-handed websites', whipping his bishop for all the cream it could muster! Obviously my first duty was to gather anyone nearby to have a look, and that meant Dave, who was munching toast in the kitchen. 'Ha Ha! He's having a wank!' shouted Dave, pointing and jumping on the spot like a simian alerting his troop to the presence of a toxic snake. All I could do was grin like a tool and hope that the visiting Plod would turn up in time to see it with his own eyes. He didn't, which was a shame, but he did bring absinthe.

28 November '05
I ran the Nike 5k run in Crystal Palace yesterday. Which may not seem like such a big deal, but I am shit at running. I get shin splints, my calves go tight and pull my knee out of alignment, and I'm just not as fit as I ought to be. 'But you must be, you cycle every day,' is the stock response to this, but the problem there is that I'm so good at cycling 6 miles twice a day that it barely breaks a sweat. I'm good at cycling. I'm shit at running. When I went to buy some running shoes, the woman assessing my gait could only shrug her shoulders. Really, that's how shit I am. Anyway, I just wanted to record here that I did it in a fairly respectable 25:36.

I estimate that Philbert did it in not much over 20 minutes, and that was after dragging along with me for the first 3k. His support was much appreciated.

5 October '05
I noticed recently that the 1999 Liberal Democrat's MEP candidate was called Julia Gash. Not only that, but she runs a sex shop. Called Gash. Can that possibly be right? Then I turn on the news, and the typhoon devastating Taiwan is called 'Longwang'. What next? Hurricane Widecock? Astonishingly, ShortNews.com chose to run with the headline 'Longwang Unloads on Taiwan'.

16 August '05
I include here a scan of a leaflet picked up in Julia's Cafe, on the Orkney mainland, partly because it makes me laugh, and partly because it is the most outrageous and inspired unnoficial product tie-in I have ever seen. Fortune favours the brave, Mr Appleby!

I came back from a spell in the Shetlands, via Orkney, about twelve days ago. And it was extremely nice. You can see some pictures here, which tell a fuller story than I can in this limited space. I'd heartily recommend it to anyone with as fine a bunch of companions as I had.

The Shetlands make Orkney look like a tourist trap (although a tourist trap isn't so bad if it includes Julia's cafe). Roaming freely over the headlands, throwing stones at the sea, and watching Lucy try to make drunken cakes at 2am in an oven fueled by peat and coal, while we fueled ourselves with daft quantities of malt whisky; these are things you don't get on every summer break.

I might recommend that you avoid driving there if you can though - it's a long old slog from London (made more enjoyable, it should be said, if you do it in a broken old left-hand-drive VW camper).

While I'm at the mic, a big shout out to Marcus Frederick Howard, who kindly dragged me along to his secular naming ceremony at the weekend. And extra-special thanks to the makers of the food, which was the best I've eaten in years. If the Peters/Howard clan are thinking of starting up a catering company, I'd like to know about it.

1 July '05
You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll shit your own leg off. Allow me the honour of presenting, for your delectation, Devvo!

I found Devvo via a DJ Shitmat video, and what I saw blew me away. 'Nuff respect to David Firth of Fat-Pie for having the genius and giant balls to do this. Be prepared for violence, extreme chemical abuse, offensive language and ideas, and a novel spelling of the word 'bell-end'.

1 July '05
It probably shouldn't work, but by the beard of Christ it does. A PC in a cardboard box, made from scavenged bits from broken computers. Okay, it's not the sharpest bit of silicon in the sandbox, but it should make a decent server for free.

My current plan is to buy an old flat screen and house the whole thing in a broken portable TV case, as soon as I find one. But I'm open to suggestions. Cut-price hosting should eventually be available for any cheapskate who needs a host that hasn't a clue.

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