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| I don't know what makes me happier, news of Zack Morris genuinely speaking at a real graduation (as opposed to that time I prank-booked Belding for my school graduation), or a brilliantly verbose headline. Course I do: it's Morris.   | |
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| I spent some (too much) of the afternoon watching David Hasselhoff's top 50 power ballads on VH1. One was Rod Stewart, Bryan Adams and Sting singing what appeared to be the soundtrack to some 80s musketeers film, with the lyric 'All for one and one for love'.
It strikes me that by replacing a word in any proverb with 'heart', 'love' or 'rock', you get a pretty good title for a power ballad. - Mood:creative
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| Guess what's premiering at the Laban Theatre in South London on Thurs 11th October. It's only
Swan Breaks: A Dance Story of love and betrayal between the natural world, humans and technology, an adaptation of ballet classic Swan Lake.
It gets better:
Hylton is the modern day Siegfried, bored with the same attention-seeking women, he searches for his perfect virtual beauty. Hooked with his lust for Odette, he is dragged into a downward spiral of addictive love, masterminded by Rothbart. Who is she, Odette or Odile, a man made fantasy. Is this computer love gone wrong with the potential for reality in personal relationships present and future?
Now I'm officially a dance student, I get all sorts of great flyers, one of which was the above. I also saw an advertisement for Finger in the Pie's Artists Anonymous meetings. I should go in the hope of meeting the creator of Swan Breaks. I hope he's going to some sort of support group, anyhow. - Mood:amused
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| Be sure to look for WordUp (or, as it is now called WordSoup, I believe) on pub quiz machines. It's acquiring a cult status (see YouTube, Wikipedia, Spiritofthetin, etc) and it's easy to see why. On a loose machine in Luton we recently cleaned up, winning about 7 quid and promptly putting it all back in again (which is generally, nay always, the way these things go: if you walk away with a profit, you haven't played it properly). Made three off the newly installed (and thus loose) one in my local last night too. (All went back in again, obviously). And they tend to have Hangman too, for a break. And Spot the Difference, which - if you're with a friend of mine who is freakishly good at it - is a sure-fire way of recouping your losses. Don't play WordUp in Cambridge though. All the machines are tighter than a butler's cuff, 'cos of all the boffins. Apparently there's a loose one past the security gates at Stansted. I'm tempted to buy a plane ticket to find out. I'm bound to make it back in WordUp winnings.
Now I'm off down the Northern Rock. I don't have any savings there. Even if I did, I understand they're guaranteed safe. I think I'll just join the queue anyhow. All those people can't be wrong. - Mood:following the herd
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| Spiritofthetin spotted 'fresh face' Derek Hough back in October 2006, and now he's a judge on DanceX! 'Citing, if anything. In other amusing news, here's what Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock said when the crowd shouted for them to play Freebird at a gig in February 2004: I know I've said this before; the odds of us actually playing Free Bird are...there ARE no odds. It is not going to happen. I'll start with the first reason: we have NO idea how to play Free Bird. The second reason is: in the lovebug's natural habitat, hearing that would just fucking kill them, wouldn't it? You wouldn't want that, right? He's adorable. He is cute. Thirdly: Even if some, like, pick your deity, whoever, came down from the heavens or the hills or wherever your deity lives, and just blessed us with this vast knowledge of Free Bird and things, and we could play it backwards, sing backwards, we could do all that crazy shit, we still just wouldn't do it. If this were the Make a Wish foundation and you were gonna die in 20 minutes, just long enough to play Free Bird, we still wouldn't play it. And here's the end reason, the end reason is that life is just too fucking short to play or hear Free Bird.
Currently reading Northern Lights. That daemon thing makes a lot more sense now - and it's cooler in the book. And listening to Panda Bear. Yeah: hip! And the Pitchfork sampler. - Mood:amused
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| Saw Chicago again in London's glittering West-End last night. It had Duncan from Blue in as Billy Flynn. Haha. Needless to say he had the city on lock-down.
Excited about DanceX, starting tonight on BBC1. Strictly judges Bruno Tonioli and Arlene Phillips each compile a dance troupe and they compete aganist each other. It's described by the paper as the bastard child of X-Factor and Strictly Dance Fever, and as entertaining as yoghurt, not the flavoured kind.
Just the sort of show I'll love I imagine. - Music:showtunes, in my head, all the time.
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| Now that my daemon's settled down and I've established that Facebook is evil, I've had to find new and exciting ways to dick around on the internet. My advice for Facebibliophobes is this: join a social networking site where you know no one. Kiss good-bye to feelings of seething resentment, envy and paranoia, competitiveness and painful nostalgia. Say hello to genuine online networking with weird and often foreign people. I recommend picking from Wikipedia's list of social networking sites. Good old Wikipedia. Also tells you how many people are members, so you can pick according to your level of paranoia, etc. That should keep me out of trouble for a while. I'm picking petty fights all over the shop lately. I think I've been watching too much Curb Your Enthusiasm. It gets a lot of humour mileage out of the fact that the protagonist is right all the time, but quibbles over stuff only a knob would quibble over. It was of this that I thought when quibbling with the cleaner at work who told me off for putting stuff in the bin after she's 'only just emptied it'. Seriously. It'll still be there tomorrow love. And when I tried to get the woman at the library to ring me when my book was in instead of posting me a postcard. 'If we did it for you, we'd have to do it for everyone'. Not true. Also, even if it was true, it'd really speed up the whole damn.... Anyhow, joke's on me cos I'm Larry David. | |
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| Lysianthia the Snow Leopard (as it started off anyhow, 9pm 27 June): That's what I'm talking about! You've got 12 days to change it, but don't make it rubbish. Now that's what I call a survey.
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| Isn't Facebook heinous? Hands up who's addicted. And it's not a nice addiction like going to see Footloose the Musical or writing essays about Dirty Dancing.
In an attempt to prove that it's far from being The Best Book, I've set up...
A SURVEY!
You can vote for it if you like, but I'm sure you'll agree the other books on the shortlist are much stronger candidates.
If Sir Alan were voting -- and you never know -- he'd pick the second best book because it made a better story (then he'd probably secretly employ the best book outside the context of a TV show). Want a trip down memory lane? Here's a spiritofthetin entry about last year's Apprentice final.
Other things you might want to do are:
See the Results of The Best Book
See the Results of The Best Lionel and remember when surveys really meant something
See the Results of when I tried to get into new bands via the recommendations of my livejournal readers. It didn't work. Ah well, my music taste's alright. Isn't Regina Spektor good? Or is she just a rip-off of Joni Mitchell, Bjork and Billie Holiday?
What else? Oh yeah, I saw my friends on MTV last night. In a band, not on Date My Mom, Made, My Super Sweet Sixteen, or Laguna Beach. I wish I was friends with the kids on Laguna Beach, then I'd never have to make the effort to think of coherent things to say, I could just use the word 'like' as an adjective, a verb and a noun.
As it is, I'm shackled to sense. | |
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In answer to recent comments about the adverts on Spiritofthetin, amusing and slightly surreal though they are, they allow me to host pictures on the Livejournal site, which is a little more convenient than setting up an external picture hoster (though if anyone can recommend a good one, I may switch). But the long and short of it is that, without those adverts, you, readers, may have missed out not only on some great footballer lookalikes (answers below), but also the worst book title ever (above). So there.
[Dawson's dad, Edu; Patrick Swayze, Jens Lehmann; Ivan Campo, The Twits]
Speaking of my lavish lifestyle and of footballers, we went to Sadler's Wells last week to see some contemporary dance. I literally can't think of four people less likely to have been there than Lee Dixon, Tony Adams, Adrian Chiles and Frank Skinner. But they were. And we gave Lee Dixon a hearty wave. He didn't look pleased - probably thought an evening of contemporary dance would be the one place he wouldn't be recognised, but no. So, excitement.
In other news, I'm becoming more knowledgable about, if not more skilled at gambling. On Wednesday I tried a Lucky 15 and an each-way patent combination bet. Not a lot of luck, but it sounds good, right. And fear not, I'm on a strict regime with a small upper limit every month.
Livejournal ads or the nags: which will make me my fortune?
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| How good is the new Bellowhead album Burlesque? I'm listening to it loads. It's the best thing I've heard in a long while.
Although the end of track one does sound like some incidental music in Columbo. | |
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| Good game last night. Reminded me I had some on-the-money footballer lookalikes. Props to the first person to identify all those pictured. Marks out of ten for each lookalike welcomed too.
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| A rare afternoon off from my job which keeps me out of the way and out of mischief for 37 hours a week, but does little else for me: I'll sit about here for a while listening to Springsteen (of which I've just got a job-lot from the library, namely The River and Darkness on The Edge of Town), then off to London to watch the Liverpool Barca game. No money on this one. I've reached (strictly speaking exceeded) my limit for the month. On the subject of music I've rented from the library, I've just got My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, coincidentally enough. It's as gash as the story about its inspiration. That'll teach me to try and be down with the kids. Springsteen won't let me down though. Good old Springsteen. - Mood:cheerful
- Music:The River, innit?
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| The library's keeping me bare busy, time-wise, that is, it's hardly taxing on the mind. Shelving, shelving and picking requested books off the shelves has caused a short-time dormant knee problem to rear its ugly head again, so was off down John Lewis this evening to try on some Masai shoes. These bad boys look like boats, but if the chat (of both website and sales assistant) is to be believed they sort out problems of flexibility, fitness, circulation, posture, third world debt and England's long-standing left-sided midfielder dilemma.
Speaking of sports, I've taken up professional gambling. Well, not really professional (there's only time for one profession in my life at the moment, unfortunately, and it's full of old books), but I do have a system. It entails betting ten quid a month on stuff, and depending on how I do, I bank a certain amount of my winnings and re-bet a certain amount. It's almost like running a business. So two fifty's just gone on Carolina to beat New York in tonight's hockey game. Stop me if I'm boring you.
Anyhow, with this money-making plan that can't be beat, I'll be able to afford my orthopaedic shoes in no time. Next time you see me I'll be walking like a Masai tribesman on the African sands. | |
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| Richard Thompson's brilliant idea: to start his 5-CD box set with a song called Now that I am Dead (I can see why he thought it'd be a good plan. The box set does have an air of the posthumous about it). It contains howling, 'oooooohhh'ing and ghoulish cackling, as if from beyond the grave, all backed by slinky guitar licks. It also contains the lyrics 'I am Mr Dead' and 'I thought death was some kind of rash/But now I'm raking in the cash.' Once and only once we get that out the way, we're treated to Genesis Hall and other genuinely good songs. The man produces some genius and some nuggets of pure embarrassment and has absolutely no capacity for telling between the two.
The good news is that I got it all for free by virtue of the fact that I work in a library now, and I can keep it until someone else requests it. That'll be forever then. - Mood:tired
 - Music:Richard Thompson - Will O' Winsbury
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| Your Political Compass: an interesting tool which sheds light on your political stance, or a gimmick which puts into graph form things of which you were perfectly aware anyhow? Spiritofthetin scored -1.63 on the horizontal Economic Left/Right axis, and -6.36 on the vertical Social Libertarian/Authoritarian axis, but then he knew that he and Gandhi were cut from the same cloth anyway, right? | |
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| Happy New Year loyal readers. The Spiritofthetin Livejournal has had a Celebrity Extreme Makeover, which hopefully works - a bit better than Jade Goody's mum's, anyhow. Blog-worthy activities of the New Year so far include going to see some contemporary dance at The Place last night. Contemporary dance, it turns out, is an enormous umbrella. I think I get on with it best when it's at its most abstract. In the first two (of three) dances last night, the semblance of a story was hindered rather than enhanced by the dancing. Why not just be comfortable in the fact that you're working in an abstract art form and do away with nods to conventional narrative? It's like sticking a man in the corner of a Mondrian. The third was much better. I didn't have a fucking clue what was going on. Circumnavigate rhyme and reason and you're tapping into something, I reckon: something I couldn't get from anything other than 20 minutes of weird-ass dance. I saw two people I knew too, one from the world of Art Therapy, and one from the world of - among other things - Tom's wedding. In other news, the guy I've been tutoring in AS English takes his exam tomorrow. I feel responsible for how he does even though, in him and his actual teacher, there are two people higher up the foodchain of responsibility. Here's hoping for two user-friendly Keats and Streetcar questions... | |
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| Good morning. I might leave for work in a minute. I've only got to be there at 12.30pm, but I fear the sale-obsessed throngs will flock to Colney Fields retail park on the first Saturday since Christmas. It has a Next and a M & S you see. Leaving for work 3 hours early is a bit dark. It'll be like working an 11 hour day. Still, after today, only 3 working days left until I leave and my existence as a Christmas temp comes to an end. How will I define myself now? Well, in the week immediately after I leave I'm lined up with yoga, meditation and ballroom dancing classes. So, that'll make me some sort of ultra-flexible, trophy-hungry, sequin-wearing showman, but one who's spiritually at peace with himself. - Mood:Claws out for a parking space
 - Music:Wicked. And Footloose. I miss Footloose
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