Precious little chortling today

I have been unusually emotionally charged the last couple of days. There are varying environmental and biological reasons for this, but I have been surprised by my overly passionate reactions to things.

If you read my last blog entry, you will know that I have been quite moved by the loss of the 38 year old comic Jason Wood. I tried to find some further information about it today, so I went to the main source of comedy information, Chortle. I followed the news link to the Forum to see if there had been some further developments. I was horrified beyond belief when I read that some waste of carbon had written a homophobic slur, trivialising the tragedy. I was completely gobsmacked! How can anyone think that is an ok thing to do!

I emailed chortle to make them aware of the comment but I wasn’t sure what else I could do. I am annoyed at myself for this bit, but I wanted instant action taken towards this disgustingly disrespectful post so I sent the link to Emma Kennedy. This seemed a good idea at the time as I know she has tried to rally online stand points before, but in retrospect it was completely inappropriate. Emma was very sweet and made some extremely valid points about the spineless twerp doing it for attention. Other tweeters were also pretty awesome in helping me see the rational side of this. These sorts of people crave the attention and that my anger towards this action was in actual fact, playing into his sick, little hands. When that finally sunk in, I felt so guilty about sending that link to Emma. I had no right to do that. I thought I was doing the right thing, but in actual fact I was doing this cretin a favour by spreading the crap fest for him.

Luckily, within 30 mins of my email to Chortle, I received a response from Steve Bennett to say that it had been removed. I was very impressed with how quickly they sorted it out.

I listened to the precious little podcast with my newly found podophiles this evening. I was surprisingly gutted I missed the first listening party for the new episode, but luckily there were two other members of the ring who joined me for precious little +1.

Tara Flynn, who has appeared in shows such as Stewart Lee’s comedy vehicle (she has an IMDB page and everything) was “mentioned” in Precious Little quite a few times. Apparently a conversation between James and Michael led to a little pun “the twin taras”. Unsurprisingly, this gag eventually ended in the gutter somewhere next to Pete Docherty, and like most discussions between two boys, it got on to the topic of oral sexual stimulation.

Tara posted a message to say that she was mildly flattered to be compared with an ex-landmark. I pondered my own name for a little while, and realised that being compared with the twin towers is much more acceptable than being compared with the captain in peter pan or a whore, taunts which are readily available to young children at school (or intoxicated adults who are trying to be witty) when you have a surname like mine.
(Incidentally, if you have been clever enough to work out my last name, it really isn’t worth trying to steal my identity, my credit rating isn’t particularly amazing)
Her reply was poignantly reflective as she noted that there are no longer twin towers, but there will always be whores. Power to the street walkers I say. For one day they will inherit the earth…when their pimp gets capped and the only assets he had where the deeds to the planet, gambled away by Simon Cowell in 2023
(I can tell I’m tired, I am waffling even more than usual)

Ooo ooo I forgot to tell you. Yesterday, I won something. I haven’t won something since the Arts / Music / Drama award at school. (Yes, my name is on a plaque in a dusty cupboard in a northern secondary school somewhere, and no I won’t sign your breasts or adopt your first born. Unless they will do the washing up? No? oh ok officer…. you know I was only kidding about that child labour stuff right?)
It appears I have put my A* GCSE Art to good use, as a stupid little 3 panel stick man drawing I did at work, landed me a free CD.

I am going to leave you with this image as it really cheered me up today.

For other genius from this talented lady, please go here.

http://lornalilyscupholders.tumblr.com/

Sad times indeed

Feeling quite low today.

Death is a very odd thing. I felt next to nothing when my great uncle passed away a few months ago. He was very ill and he had longed to be released from his frail cage for a while. Last night I found out that comedian Jason Wood had died and even now I am feeling at a loss. I wasn’t even fortunate enough to have met him. I had to stop checking my phone yesterday as I saw the slow trickle of grief touch so many of the people I follow. I was very surprised that I felt so moved by it all. Each real time shift in mood from jovial Olympic gags to the cutting pain of people realising they have lost a friend and colleague, really got to me.

There hasn’t been any news as to what happened yet. Chortle say there is due to be a statement released on Monday. I think the main reason I feel so sensitive towards this story is that Jason Wood was only 38. That is nothing. That is just over 10 years older than me, only a couple of years older than some of my closest friends and many years younger than my parents.

My thoughts go out to all those who have been affected by this sudden and shocking news.

I have been trying to cheer myself up with comedy podcasts and radio shows. This morning I was lucky enough to have my tweet to Dave Gorman, regarding my ritual of collecting £1 coins with crosses on, read out on Absolute radio. This made up for the minor disappointment of not having my jingle played on the Collins and Herring show for the second week in a row. I did have a heck of a lot of fun making them so I honestly don’t *really* mind if they aren’t usable. I think it was just after having one of them aired last week, the success of audio air time made me crave the ability to revel in the glory one last time. I guess I will just have to take my 3 minutes of minor excitement and just remember the sweet sweet times of being better than Lady Gaga.

Yesterday I was initiated into some rather bizarre online cult of podophiles. PODophiles. As in Podcastlovers. This appears to be a group of similar interweb and comedy addicts who have joined their mutual love of these two things to create an online listening club. This basically entails everyone pressing play at the same time and #tagging their thoughts about what is currently happening on the Podcast.

I joined in with a fresh look at the original episode of Precious Little. This was a podcast that slipped me by so I thought starting at the beginning seemed like a wise idea. I had a surprisingly good time reading all the real time comments on a show that I was listening to at the same time as other people online. I think this listening party works rather well.

Amusing twitterverse gag topic of the day:

Which supermarket would you make love to and why?

I chose M+S because it’s not just a 3 way… It’s a Marks and Spenser’s 3 way.

Other amusing entries were as follows:

@MimFox if I was dyslexic and kinky I'd go for M&S :-)
@SuaveRepublique Happy shopper! The name says it all, the dirty bitch.


I think I shall leave my waffle cake there for today as I have some very exciting laundry to do

Winter Women Win Waffle

Whoops. I missed a day of waffle cake.
To be honest I don’t think there was a huge amount of vitally important information I needed to anonymously share, but even so, I am a bit annoyed with myself.

I am determined to have something to look back on in a few years time and I don’t think that twitter really counts.

I watched the Olympics last night.

It appears I tuned in to the precise time (thanks to the collection of like minded internet night owls who were already conversing about it) to see the first winter Olympics Gold medal Britain has won in longer than I have been alive.

What event did we win it for I hear you ask? Skiing? Ice skating? Snow boarding?
No. This event is delightfully named “Skeleton”. I didn’t even know that shuttling yourself head first, down an ice slope at logic defying speeds whist gripping a tea tray and hoping your brains don’t fall out your nose when you stop, is an Olympic standard sporting event. I am convinced that the origin of this sport will be related to a mountain rescue stretcher incident some years ago.

Don’t get me wrong, I am proud that our nation has managed to win something and I am sure there is a hell of a lot of hard work and training that goes in to this, I am just bemused by its global acknowledgement as a sport. I have never heard a little girl want to grow up to be Skeleton…erm… pilot would you call them? Or see childhood sketches of fairies pelting themselves head first down a tube. Well, I never had a brother so I might have missed out on the fairy torture doodles, but you know what I mean. Where would I even go to learn how to do this? How do you train for it? The commentator was talking about a heroine that one of the entrants has who convinced her to get into this sport. I am fairly convinced he misheard her….

I have been having a very girly girl few days. As mentioned in my last blog entry, I ended up eating half a tub of chocolate spread out the jar. The reason I used to convince myself that this wasn’t gross was the fact I had just had a hair cut I didn’t like very much. The girl logic also made a reappearance yesterday, as I was getting ready for a RECESSION SESSION on the town with my friend. During the preparation, I redid my hair style 3 times ( because to be honest, I’m still not loving the cut) and I tried on 3 different pairs of shoes before deciding on the ones I knew I would end up wearing. Any woman reading this will relate when I tell you that I even cracked out the pair of shoes every girl owns which are stunning but never worn because they are too high and hurt too much. This was when I knew I was having a “girly” day. These shoes only come out the cupboard about once ever 6 months and it is either because I have lost weight and I want to see if the lesser pull of gravity has made these shoes any easier to walk in, or if I’m trying to reach an emotional high though the sexiness of gorgeous footwear. I even had to go back home during the night out to check I had turned my straighteners off.
Anyone who knows me will testify that these girly actions are very unusual for me to be experiencing. It worries me.

Matinee entries are the future.

Please, someone, anyone out there tell me I am not the only one to have consumed a good percentage of a jar of chocolate spread, with a spoon, in one sitting.

I feel completely sick, both physically and emotionally after this rather surprising act of gluttony. My insides feel as if I have abruptly violated them in some truly barbaric ritual, and my head is so cheesed off with me for giving in to the hormonal craving when I had been so good the rest of the day, that it is whipping my soul with a guilt stick.

Grrrr

I am struggling to settle my thoughts in a way that can be easily translated into a written narrative. I have battled with a baffling number of emotions today and none of them seem to wish to stay with me for longer than 10 minutes at a time.

Even my emotions can’t stand my company or for more than half an episode of the Simpsons in one sitting.

Work was a bit tricky today after I had to raise an unpopular observation to my line manager. I just hope he trusts me enough for this to be acted on rather than filed in the recycling bin.

I am beginning to think I should write these things during my lunch break. My brain has already curled up under the duvet, half a sleep and just awaiting the rest of the body to catch up with her.

Peace out now dudettes and dudes.

RATM and other sleepy babble

I am very tired today. My brain has been on overdrive for too many nights in a row and it is weeping for a peaceful night’s rest.

Due to the sheer awesome of my friend Chloe, I have received my confirmation email for the Rage Against The Machine gig which they promised to host if they got to Christmas number one in 2009. I have a feeling that this show will be something I will want to tell the grand children about. I was very proud to play my small part in taking back our Christmas number 1 and I very much look forward the reward in June.

On a complete tangent, I do wonder what my generation of personfolk will tell our grandchildren. The majority of brits my age will not dealt with the horror of war on their door step. We were never rationed or exported to other countries for our safety. We didn’t have the same leaps in evolutional technology that shook innovation to its very core. We haven’t won the world cup in half a century. We haven’t even one Eurovision for many years. At what point does the free and liberal thinkers of the today, become the terrified, racist, technophopes of yesteryear?

Are we going to be the nation of terrestrial TV loving, cassette tape horders whose only memory of the “naughties” is when the nation pulled together to song block the X factor from hitting Christmas number one? How depressing would that be?!

Work, the largest life sucking entity of my carbon cycle (barring twitter of course) happened today which was not unforeseen but still slightly inconvenient. It turns out one member of my team also found today’s weekday slot of his 9-5.30 Monday to Friday desk job, just too awkward to schedule around his computer gaming addition. He called work in at 9am this morning with the cheek to say that he is taking the day as holiday. He doesn’t half push his luck that boy.

There was some heated diologue between myself and someone on the other end of the telephonic device today which I could have done without. I may have exasperatedly replied with “I understand your concern but while I am on the phone to you, I am unable to chase up the work you are requesting” I don’t think this particularly helped to diffuse the situation but it did mean the gentleman in question said he would go so I could investigate further and call him back.

My friends and I were watching the new Jason Manford DVD, which if you haven’t seen it all ready, I would highly recommend. His dragon’s den and parenting tips are brilliant.

I also did some other things, but my eyes are beginning to feel extremely heavy in my eyesockets, and the words I am writing do not seem to make any sense, so I am calling an end to this session.

We will reconvene and business shall commence as normal tomorrow

Ya rly?

test

Jellyfox and doug stanhope

Hello!

Thank you for tuning in for episode 3 of this is vikz life.

Due to the current popularity of the winter Olympics, I have decided to watch 20minutes before "We need answers" starts. I think there is some kind of perverse pleasure in knowing that any mistakes made resulting in blood loss will be gloriously mounted on a pure white canvass. This uniquely macabre feature isn't really part of any other sporting competition, which is why I think it is so popular. Brits just love any programming where there is a chance of people causing some kind of damage to themselves. Why else do people watch the grand prix, embarrassing bodies or Jeremy Kyle?

I think that these sports are well aware of their sofa loving viewers. Why else would the figure skating commentator make a jovial comment about the 'inward forward death spiral' DEATH SPIRAL?! That sounds like some sort of battleship fighting manoeuvre in star trek not the name of a beautiful dance move poetically delivered on ice.

I have just realised that my ranting has brought me half of the way though another amazing episode of 'we need answers'. I worry about the British public and the very random questions that they text in.

I don't have many work related stories today. I am finding it quite difficult to fully immerse myself in my workload at the moment. I think that can be the dilemma of having an unachievable amount of work to complete. It's hard to know where to start.

When I'm not worrying about my perilously long list of things I need to do, I have taken to asking random questions to my work colleagues.

Today's random question was "if you had to create an animal, what would it be and why?"

With no more than a second on the clock, my friend came up with the urban jellyfox. This is a creature that came about though incestuous activity of foxes and/or jelly fish that can often be found rummaging in bins. Its natural predators are the urban badger, which is known to decapitate the head of the jellyfox and place it on sticks to warn off other animals, sharks with knees and of course, crows. We discussed the breeding hobbits and the usual habitats of these creatures which had me in stitches for ages.

We decided to create visual interpretations of these creatures:

My colleagues drawing:








My attempt which you will see in a moment, was not quite as good. In fact, we concluded it was a different species known only as the testi-face dog fish








Oh dear! As you can probably tell, the testi-face dog fish has one main weakness which is the sensitivity of its nasal area.

Anywho!....

I'm watching TV now and I feel compelled to say that I have no idea what gives an alcoholic like Doug Stanhope the right to ruin newswipe. I hope jack cafferty is reading this, he'd care about it.

Here endeth the third instalment.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iWaffle

Castle Cuts

Firstly I would like to apologise to the 3 members of the public that read my last post, for the absolutely abysmal torture of the English language. I read through it again this morning and realised that extreme tiredness had interfered with my ability to structure coherent sentences.

I had a somewhat unproductive day at work today. I was praised for generating a well written specification for alterations to ASP pages, which was nice given that my knowledge of ASP is flimsy at best.

I am utterly convinced that one of my colleagues should host her own chat show programme. She isn’t backwards in coming forwards about asking rather personal and invasive questions and she always has to say something about pretty much everything, even if her input doesn’t always make a hell of a lot of sense. I’m pretty sure they are the 2 main qualities you need in a chat show host, that and the ability to remember which camera to look at, anyway.

I spent my afternoon discussing, with another colleague, the #cheesefilms tag I noticed on twitter. The idea is to take a movie title and convert it into something cheese themed. I came up with:

Pride and Primula
Brieing John Milkovich
The Kraft
Shallow Hal-loumi
Three men and a little baby bell

My colleague also didn’t disappoint, having shared this little beauty:

Village of the eDamned

After I got home, I noticed that the Collins and Herring 6 Music podcast had been uploaded. There had been a bit of tension over the use of a banned word that Richard made reference to twice in the live show, and whether or not this section would remain in the podcast.

Strangely enough, the BBC cut the section containing the banned word. Although there is a real sense of “political correctness gone mad” when a slang word used to describe a paedophile is deemed to be extremely more offensive than the word paedophile it’s self, you can’t really blame the editing team for sticking to the rules. Although I think that the “Man” probably holds a stronger heir of censorship over the UK’s broadcasting than I would like to admit, if you know that you are working for / on behalf of an organisation that upholds these censorships, it is your duty to abide by them.

I do feel for comedians on national broadcasting though. So much content which is applauded and sought after for a live set, is completely unworkable under the censorships of the media. I decided that I would create another little jingle for the podcast version of Collins and Herring 6Music show, called Collins and Herring Castle Cuts. (can be heard here http://twaud.io/2SL if you are that way inclined) I very much doubt they will use it, but the idea made me smile.

The castle cut wasn’t all that bad though, as I discovered that one of my other awful jingles made it through the edit. (about 22 minutes in)
You can download the podcast here: http://tinyurl.com/y9vy37t 
Or just the snippit including my jingle is here: http://twaud.io/2TX

In other comedy news, Tim Minchin, Stephen Grant, Ed Byrne, Dylan Moran and Stuart Lee are all up for nomination for Chortle awards. Go and vote now using the following link http://www.chortle.co.uk/about/2010/01/31/10433/vote_in_the_2010_chortle_awards

Think I will leave it there for this evening.

Waffle out.

iWaffle technology

Wow! Who would have thought there would be an application for the iPhone that would allow users to blog on the move.

I thought I would try it out, given that it is free and all.

First thoughts on the matter is that typing using virtual keys that are only an atom and a half in size, is not as convinent as I had hoped it would be.

My second and third thoughts consisted of blog content and cheese in that order.

To be quite honest I don't think I have any more thoughts on the matter of iPhone blogger apps other than it's price tag was reasonable.

After that rather tedius start to my second addition to the bloggosphere, I thought I would move on to the blog entry content.

I have reached the bridge of dread between the weekend and the imfamous triple M day - Monday Morning Mania. Except for my leaky door frame which I discovered has been dripping perliously close to my head, I have had a fun, relaxing weekend. I know that if I go to sleep now, my conciousness will be slapped into subission by the triple M theory. However if I try to prolong this chilled evening by effectively telling the tiredness to "do one", I am not going to be able to carry out my usually exemplorary skills sets ", due to exhaustion.

This weekend highlights:

My diary wars jingle was aired on 6 music by Andrew Collins and Richard Herring.

Richard agreed with me that it was pretty terrible, but the lovely Andrew complimented me greatly by saying it was better than lady gaga. I was very excited to have my first attempt at audio mastery played on one of my favourite shows, although I don't think they chose the best one of the 5 subissions I had created. :-)

Went to see ponyo at the cinema

For those of you who haven't heard about this film, this is a Japanese Animation by the same studios that brought us spirited away and howls moving castle. If i'm not mistaken, It is the only feature length movie studio to still hand draw their work. I thought it was beautiful. I adore seeing an animation that you can sense the love and passion that went into the imagery. The ticket man amused me by explaining the film as "totally wacked out" I prefered his description to his colleague who said that the film was "cute" and has a good set of " morals". *facetohandinteraction*

Finished watching 24 season 5



I won't say too much in case you haven't seen it yet, however I will say I think jack bauer gets a tough time of it.
My friends and I have been meeting up regularly to go through the seasons but I think we have become a bit desensitised to it all. We have been deconstructing how the pc noices and a lot of the photo doctoring would not work like that. Today for instance, we discussed the fact that flashing lights are completely unessasary on a portable device used to wipe something, however it was used as a plot device to visually explain to the viewer than the device will interfere with data.

Other things have happened which I could blog about but I have become acutely aware that still being awake at this time means I accidentally chose to prelong the Sunday experience.

Sweet dreams.

(ooo looks like this application allows image upload too. Nice)

Starting a new blog

I have decided that I might try and keep a blog again.

I have not had a particularly good track record with blogs in the past…..

There was the Flibbit acount I created when I was in my first year at University. This blog came to an ubrupt end after it brought the demise of my best friend's engagement. (It's ok, it turned out for the best, but I was young and didn’t realise that there are things that should not be publicly posted on the internet)

I had a weight loss blog which I used to update with a photo of my fat rolls spilling out of poorly fitting underwear, as inspired by these hideous weight loss programs that popped up out of nowhere about 5 years ago. I stopped this when I realised that most of these shows were “artistically” edited to prove weight loss via image manipulation, and that the pictures I was uploading were verging on some sort of niche market late teen/early twenties fatty porn.

I had another blog that I started when I got into my first serious relationship. I decided to put an end to updating this one when I realised it was turning into vitriolic hatred directed at the Ex, when the relationship went tits up 4 years later.

I had 2 other blogs which also died a death when I realised that I didn’t really have that much to blog about any more.

It was at this diary sparse point in my life that I decided to up sticks, move to the other end of the country and live for every moment (well except this moment where I’m sitting in my messy flat writing this).

I have suffered the opposite problem this year. I have been doing so much cool stuff, I have actually had no time to document any of it.

This is where twitter came in handy. Technology had finally brought us the ability to load 140 characters of quick memos and musings that can be updated using a portable device.

These days however, I am constantly battling with the character limit. I just can’t bring myself to use txt spk lolz which is why I have decided to make use of the original online services which were originally created to allow you to write as much as you like.

So here we are.

*successfully managed to avoid tidying for 30 minutes while I worked out how to post this thing to twitter*