Escaped soldier

Walking around the supermarket yesterday and I realised my manhood had popped out of my boxers.  Don’t worry, I haven’t moved into the flasher territory – I was wearing trousers at the time too.

Walking around supermarkets doesn’t do anything for me, so thankfully even though he’d escaped from his house, my soldier was asleep.  But it was in no-mans land.  And it was chafing against the zip of my trousers. 

Ouch.

Without actually throwing my hand down my pants it was impossible to put back in.  Every little wiggle, or discreet movement I done to try and get it back in failed.  Pocket billiards failed, trying a few an up and unders to get it back in the hole failed too.

Walking down the bread isle I decided to try one last time to get it back in before someone accused me of wanking over the crumpets. 

I failed.

Therefore today, ladies and gentlemen, I have penis burn.  Think nipple burn but 10 times more painful. 

Today is not going to be a good day.

All My Warriors

The Prodigy closed Glastonbury Festival by calling the crowd ‘warriors’.  Even though it was my 6th visit to Glastonbury you still have to bloody well train, gather the troops and survuve like a warrior.  It really is hard work enjoying yourself!

I was half thinking about not writing anything about Glastonbury, I can not do it justice at all.  There’s large chunks of time that are just great and provide you with moments, just because you are there with mates and enjoying the freedom of the place.  I lost count the number of times I turned around, looked at everyone and felt my eyes filling up.  If that makes me a big gay homo then so be it!

Needless to say Glastonbury just gets better every year I go.  Overall I didn’t watch as many bands as I have in previous years.  There wasn’t too much that took my fancy during the day – not enough to pull me out of my oven tent and trek down to the stages early doors anyway.

The main lot I seen: Altern-8, Mr Hudson, The Whip, N.E.R.D (amazing but got kicked off stage because they ran over time), Fleet Foxes, Lily Allen, The Specials, Doves, Hockey, Gaslight Anthem, Passion Pit, Kasabian, Springsteen, Tom Jones, Madness, Bon Iver,  Glasvegas and Prodigy.  Then loads of smaller bands on other stages – god knows who they all were.

Gaslight Anthem were very good – I think they are over there in my sidebar somewhere as a newbie band I started listening to about a month ago. 5pm Saturday afternoon in a small tent and Bruce Springsteen came on to do one song with them – which made the tent suddenly fill up beyond belief.

Prodigy stands out though, that performance was just amazing on Sunday night and we managed to get quite close to the front (as close as I’ve ever been to the stage at Glastonbury about 10-20 people back).  They had the bass so loud it was rumbling through the field and up into your body – I hadn’t heard music that loud since the last time I’d seen Prodigy in December!

This year the highlight for me was the Trash City and Shangri-la areas of the site.  These are both located in the far east corner – which can be a good 15-30 minute walk from the main stages (depending on how many people also have the same idea).  Trash City is basically just that…a field made of trash.  An old RAF helicopter lived here and bits of aeroplane were strewn about the place.  I didn’t manage to get into the bars here as it was always too busy.  Shangra-la however was a different matter – this is where the weird and wonderful was.  They had some kind of weird Thailand-esque subway alleyways in the field.  Can’t remember the amount of times I lost my bearings walking through that. But once you walked through there was all kinds of bars, small venues (holding about 10 people) with dancers, bands, singers and ‘clubs’ around every corner and in every doorway.  That then led up to a massive domed tent with a few hundred people raving away in front of a DJ and transvestite acrobats.

Next door to this little city was a massive flame thrower thing, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Mad Max.  This thing had a DJ located high up in the centre with the balls of fire and smoke coming out from lampposts located around this thing and above it – which had us all bopping away until the sun came up.  Still not ready for bed?  Then we moved onto the Silent Disco – if you’ve never been to one, then basically you can’t hear a thing outside the tent or even inside the tent without a pair of headphones – which you’re given as you go in…you can then continue moving about, like an awkward uncle at a wedding, without disturbing the neighbours.

You only see a snip of the festival on the telly.  If you’ve never been and even have an inch of thought about going – forget what every other festival is like – Glastonbury IS different.  You will not regret it.

The guy out of the Prodigy summed it up all the way through their show shouting:

“All my warriors, right here….If you aren’t here, you aren’t any-fucking-where!”.

How true he was.

Glastonbury

I don’t think I’ll get a chance to come on here tomorrow so I’m writing this a day early.  One thing I am certain of is that this time next week I’ll be more than ready to curl up into the foetal position and die a slow, peaceful death.

However before I hit that point, I’m going to live in a field for a week.  A field with 177,000 like-minded folk for the Glastonbury Festival (clicky for line-up).

I first attended in 2003 and, pretending I didn’t have a small tear in my eye leaving the site on the Monday (“shit, I’ve got dust in my eye”), vowed to return every year – and have done.  I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea: camping in a field, no showers (although there are some showers on site), dodgy toilets,  becoming best friends with packets of baby wipes…I’ve never failed to enjoy it, I love the place.  Even surviving the mud fests in 2004 & 2007 when, if it rains bad, the place can resemble something akin to a refugee camp (a fucking brilliant refugee camp though).  Thankfully the forecast is looking good for this week.

Personally I don’t think the line-up is as good as previous years, but there are still some pretty big names playing.  Regardless of who they put on, you could go there, not go near any of the main stages and still have a great time.

Out of the hundreds of acts I’m only definitely making sure I see: Doves, Kasabian, Fleet Foxes, Altern-8, Prodigy, Bon Iver and probably Bruce Springsteen – that’s all I’m going to plan for.  It’s not worth making plans to see much more because I know I won’t make it.  I normally find myself watching obscure music somewhere, whether it be stumbling into the Hare Krishna tent and bopping to their beats for a while, or transfixed by didgeridoo techno/trance (trust me on this…it was brilliant at the time!), there’s always something going on somewhere.

At approximately 9/10am Wednesday morning, tent set up and full of excitement of what’s ahead, I’ll be cracking open my first can of lager.

I won’t be a pretty sight this time next week, but there is a lot of revelry and debauchery to fit in between now and then…

I can’t bloody wait.

Internet cold turkey

For the past couple of months my internet activity in work has been limited by the IT monkeys putting in a new swish server – which blocked anything and everything which wasn’t work related.  I wasn’t too fussed at first, i still have access to Gmail, Google Reader and a few forums I go on.

I was more concerned with the fact they had an easier and more robust system for identifying which sites people visited and when etc.  For example, even though this place wasn’t blocked, I’ve since avoided logging in from work through fear of someone finding it.  I doubt they go through the internet logs with a fine tooth comb but I’m not chancing it. 

The paranoid monkeys think they have all the power by disabling all the internet settings in Internet Explorer and restricted any downloading. 

However, this cunning gimp, recently discovered that using Firefox (which I’d downloaded on my work machine donkeys ago),  I have full access to disable the internet proxy setting and thereby give me full, unrestricted internet access. 

Go Team Scribble!

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they notice internet traffic (me), not going through their fortknoxedparanoidserverproxymachine. 

I just can’t stop myself though.  Access to the forbidden fruit and all that…

It’s like someone not allowing you in the pub, but giving you a glass of coke outside and allowing you watch them drink alcohol through the window (ok, it’s not that bad but you get the jist/gist (I cant be bothered looking up the correct spelling)).  But I can’t go back to 1998 and spend my time on Solitaire or Minesweeper.  And, god forbid, I can’t spend 8/9 hours a day actually doing ‘work’.  That would just be mental.

I wonder how long it’ll be before I get my hands slapped…

Self Censoring

When I started this blog, the idea of it being anonymous was that it’d be somewhere I’d just type out any old ramblings without a care in the world.  It’d be somewhere I can say things without being too worried what anyone thinks, after all nobody reading this knows me in real life. 

I never factored in that people would keep reading and I’m humbled that people do keep coming back and reading my nonsense.  So some of you will know that I do continue to post nonsense ramblings!  But as time has gone on, as anonymous as I try and keep it, why do I find myself self-censoring myself more than I’d like to?

I read a lot of blogs and it’s easy to build up a picture (or an idea) of what someone is like through the words you read.  My idea may be wide of the mark, or it may be spot on, but I still put personalities to the people behind the words (he/she is funny / sounds like they’d be a good laugh / a bit mental / speaks their mind / is a dickhead / similar personality to me etc etc, you get the idea). 

Therefore I suspect some people have put a personality to me too.  Therein lies my problem.

I’ll probably never ever meet a single person who has read this blog, so I shouldn’t care what I type about (or worry about what people think of me), no one knows me and it’s my blog, so I’ll type as I please.  A ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’ type attitude.  But I still have a little voice at the back of my head saying “you can’t type that, people will get the wrong idea” or people’s attitude towards me would change if I mentioned this or that.  So I stop myself and in half my ramblings I only type half the story.  Something that I never intended to do in the first place. 

It’s stupid really because it’s just my words on a screen.  It’s not like anyone reads this, then would come up to me in the street and call me a knobhead for what I’ve written…hopefully not anyway! 

Unfortunately, tabloid newspaper fans, there isn’t going to be some kind of front page headline where I suddenly announce that I’m a Filipino cross dresser (no offence to Filipino cross dressers). 

But I did wonder if other people limited what they write about?  Does it bother you what people, who read your blog, think about you?  Or do you just think ‘fuck it’ and type away anyway? 

14 more sleeps

I keep going through little fits and starts with this blog.  One minute I have blog diarrhoea, the next it’s zippity zip all for a few weeks.

However it’s just 14 more sleeps until Glastonbury Festival is upon me again. I still have to buy some bits and bobs to take with me but thankfully no major purchases are needed this year (tent, sleeping bag etc).  Up until this week I haven’t been bothered that it’s coming up, but my excitement levels are starting to peak now.

Every year the BBC have had a webcam up and running leading up to the festival.  So yesterday I sat and watched (via lot’s of page refreshes) the first beer tent going up.  You know the festival is soon when activity starts on the site.  Sad I know, but I think I’ve seen that beer tent get erected (via webcam) for about the past 3/4 years.  (I won’t mention the fact that I got a small bit of excitement seeing pictures of the bins getting painted on the official site)!  It’s the simple things in life which keep me amused and excited.

I’ve also been trying to find some new music to listen to.  I’ve found a couple of bands which seem to sound alright (I’ve listed some of them over there on the right somewhere), but there seems to be a lack of new bands coming through. Most of the new stuff seems to have 80’s synthesiser crap all over them.  No doubt I’ll find someone good in about 3 months time, only to then discover they played a great set at Glastonbury – ala last year with MGMT and 3/4 years ago with The Killers.  Anyone found any good new bands lately?  I’m not up to speed with the cool kidz these days…

I can’t think of anything else to spurt out so this was mainly just a post for blogging sake.  I could bore you all with how I’m going through a very bad phase of not sleeping again (about 10 hours disturbed sleep in total for the past 3 days – go me), but that’s not very exciting.  What’s more exciting is this video I found on my travels:  How to dice an onion.  You can thank me later…

Mini Travelling Adventure

I was in that there Londinium over the weekend.  I’ve never really been out and about in London – apart from when I’ve been to football matches – which mostly comprised of being herded like cattle off and on coaches outside a football ground – so even though I’ve been to London loads of times, I’ve never really seen any of it apart from out of a window.  This time we travelled down by train on Friday and had a little drinking adventure around London Bridge.  This may sound stupid, but even though I live in a fairly big city, I was still surprised at just how many people there was milling about.  Even at 2pm on Friday afternoon there was just loads of people everywhere.  Sky News even ran a breaking news headline to commemorate the occasion: "Shocking News: We Can Confirm Loads of People Live In London".

First mistake I made was trying to meet up with mates and not realising there was a London Bridge and a Tower Bridge. Well done me.  I still didn’t get to see much of London apart from the inside of pubs/bars (as per usual) and our planned adventure to Covent Garden didn’t materialise either.  However, I did see Tower Bridge for the first time ever in real life – which omitted a "woooo there’s that bridge" sound from my mouth. 

After copious amounts of alcohol on the way back to our apartment, my sense of direction was lost and we ended up walking in a big massive square.  Deciding that walking around London at 2am in the morning was not the best thing for us to be doing we jumped a taxi (not literally) instead to head back to our apartment for more debauchery.  Even though we were only a few hundred yards away I doubt I would’ve found it anyway.  The cab cost us a massive £3, I think we were in it for about 30 seconds.  I blamed the dark. 

Saturday morning we missed breakfast because of our previous nights over indulging and so I settled for a cheeseburger to set me up for the day.  Now, the cheeseburger I ordered from some place by Borough Market arrived looking nothing like a burger, more kebab-like…and was in a baguette. I’ll give you a second to be as agog as I was (and still am). Yes, a burger in a baguette. Not even a soft one, it was one of them hard baguette you could play cricket or baseball with.  The absolute horrors.  As soon as you get a ‘burger’ in a baguette you know there’s going to be problems. I think I managed half of it out of necessity, but mark my words, I’ll be writing letters of complaint to the food police.

Saturday nights journey home was mostly uneventful.  Although we did bunk into first class on the train.  Never one to miss an opportunity, I borrowed the water in the fridge by our seats.  I’m going to hell I know – but, it was an alcohol free train and half the journey was spent hiding alcohol from the Transport Police – so it was compensation for missed VDT (valuable drinking time). 

Little did I know that water was free anyway (I am redeemed), there was even free salted crisps in the buffet car for people in first class.  Who’da thunk it?  Sigh.  Serves me right for travelling as a pleb for most of my life.  I’d be more impressed if they gave free roast/steak dinners, alcohol, drugs and maybe a cabaret show to go with it.  Oh, there was free internet…but my phone had died by that time so that freebie was rendered useless.  In short, we need more freebies on trains, sort it out train people of the world.

Sponge Coffee Tables…it’s the future

I go away for a few days and the catastrophe’s happen across the globe.  Not only does a plane go missing in that pond – ala Lost (they’ll no doubt be found soon on a healing island – where a crippled man can now walk and some bloke is scared of a set of numbers).  Then a women – who looks like a haunted tree – loses a talent show and apparently goes radio rental.

I think you’ll agree, I show a lot of empathy to the news, but I knew the place would fall apart if I left it to it’s own devices for a few days.

Now, to cap it all off, Microsoft have finally invented something I predicted when I was 14.  Unlike them hover boards in Back to the Future II – the future is finally here:

Whilst playing Sensible Soccer on the Commodore Amiga (probably just after I’d conceded another goal and smashed the joystick against the wall in computer rage), the broken joystick gave me my eureka moment. Admittedly it wasn’t much of a eureka moment, but leave me in glory for just a minute….I predicted a game where you control the players with only your body movements and actually kick the ball/thin air instead of button pushing.  Unfortunately, I’ve never been clever enough, had enough money, or more importantly, actually been that arsed to even try to make it happen.  But some bright spark at Microsoft has.  Whether it lives up to what they say it will do or not, that’s another matter.  It may just end up being a glorified Eye Toy/Wii but I, for one, can’t wait to be breaking my toes against a coffee table whilst playing Sensible Soccer 2012.

At the time, whilst picking up the broken joystick pieces from the floor as a young 14 old scamp, I did not have the foresight to think that I’d need lots of money in the future.  I was only concerned with kicking thin air whilst playing computer games.  But given this one has come true, I’m now also predicting I’ll be a multi billionaire within 5 years.  Stranger things have happened.

Someone now needs to invent a sponge coffee table.

Cynical-Nostradamus-Scribble

Cake or Biscuit

Just been reading the BBC News site about Proctor & Gamble losing their court case regarding the classification of Pringles.  They argued that Pringles are not a potato snack, but more like a cake or a biscuit, because they are manufactured from dough.

Pringles…a cake or a biscuit?  hahaha someone was trying to pull a fast one there.  Nice try, but they ARE potato based snacks = crisps.  End of story.

Which brings me onto the humble Jaffa Cake. 

For years this debate has rumbled on, men have argued, blood has been shed and lives lost over the humble Jaffa Cakes’ status. 

Is it a biscuit? Or is the clue in the name – is it cake?   Cake, biscuit? Biscuit, cake?  Nobody knows.

They are packed like biscuits; sold with biscuits; can be dunked in tea like biscuits; can be devoured in 3 separate stages (lick/pick the chocolate off, eat the jelly, eat the sponge) like biscuits.  Yet they are classed as cakes.

I don’t care what the suits say, I say biscuit.  What say you?

Final bank post (I hope)

So, my bank has credited back the money I lost a few weeks ago.  It’s all gone quite smoothly surprisingly.  Money has been returned and forms have been signed.  There is still one thing that has crept up:

I was wondering why I hadn’t been charged for missed direct debits – or indeed why any bills hadn’t been refused.  It turns out that 1 day after one of the betting websites took my money I have an ‘ACCOUNT ADJUSTMENT AT ATM’ credit for exactly the same amount.  That’s all my statement says.

As far as I can tell, that means someone has put money into my account at a cash machine?  Because 2 days after that (3 days after the initial website withdrawal) the bank have credited back the money of the website withdrawal.  So where/who has this additional Account Adjustment come from? 

It doesn’t seem like it’s from the bank because both the disputed transactions are listed as credited ‘reversals’.  Another odd thing is that one reversal is £1.53 more than what it should be. It’s not like the bank to do stuff like that normally.  To cut a long story short I’ve gained an additional £462 through this account adjustment thing and someone robbing my money.  Not a bad return!  I’m almost willing it to happen again. 

I’m sure if it’s the banks error they’ll find it soon enough, but for now (and if they ask me) I’m playing dumb.  I won’t be the one querying where it came from. 

We’ll put that down as compensation for stress and having to deal with banking monkeys on the phone.

It’s also covered my spending money for Glastonbury Festival next month! Whoo Hoo!