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Bumper Update

Evening,

I've been a little busy of late! I have been thinking about you lot, so here is a bumper update letting you know what I've been up to. Probably more tomorrow!

Radio News

After years of procrastination, I finally got off my arse and volunteered to help at the local Hospital Radio centre. I seem to have been accepted (I've been there about a week), and have been offered broadcast training!

Hurrah! All I can say is - in December - Get Ill.

Podcast?

Through the wonders of eBay, someone sold me a very cheap Mini Disc recorder. These things are fantastic for voice recording in the field (and not in fields, for that matter). I want to be able to develop my READING OUT LOUD FOR BROADCAST skills, and have been quietly muttering rubbish into it without doing anything vaguely constructive. So, I'm considering visiting exotic places and reading these witterings out and putting them up as a podcast for you to listen to at your leisure, anywhere in the world.

What do you think?

Advertising

Hello

I thought I'd lose some more sleep and attempt some moody atmospheric adverts for this place. Not that it needs to advertise, of course. So here they are, in glorious mostly grey, white, blue and beard-o-vision. I was trying to be over the top with the moodiness, to make a "Potentially Pretentious" theme to them, but I was overcome with a desire for mildly amusing captions instead for ads two and three.

Some lighter ones maybe later this week.

My Disease...

I've been taking some pictures of myself with the artistic looking / moody beard that has been steadily covering my lower face, and one picture in particular proves I suffer from the rare condition of John Barnes Disease.

Yes, like the former England forward and occasional rapper, the lower half of my face is at least a third bigger at the bottom than the top.

Observe:

I'm not the dancers, by the way. 

Did you know that John Barnes was Newcastle's leading goalscorer in 1997/1998 with SIX goals?

Secret Crush - Crushed

A few months ago, I mentioned a secret crush on this very page, of a newsreader.

A few weeks had passed without 'accidentally' catching her on any of the news programmes, and my mind wandered to what she could be doing. Me being me, at first I imagined she could be tidying hotel rooms, dressed as a French maid. However, this would be ridiculous - but the image lingered.

I checked in on one of this great land's numerous comments boards, entirely devoted to speculation and screengrabs of lovely news presenters. I have some sad news to report. According to the group, she has left the company and won't be coming back.

Naturally, the past few days have been spent with an electrical tape black armband in grateful memory of those happy summers days when she'd would sign off the programmes with a special goodbye, specifically to me (surely!), and to the seventeen wonderous gigs of screengrabs and video on my hard drive.

So thank you for your time. You know your name - just as long as no-one else finds out!

n.b. There aren't seventeen gigs. This was made up for comic effect.

"Jews are dicks"

On the way home on the train this evening, I saw some quite large anti-semetic scrawlings on a billboard, between Small Heath and Tyseley - "Jews are dicks". I have no doubt that this was written by children, yet I felt strangely compelled to write about it. I wonder how long an equally provocative remark about Muslims would last?

This is also the first bit of anti-Jew grafiti I have ever seen that wasn't on some half arsed UK History Nazi-fest. Yay! Three cheers for progress and understanding in the UK. Also, I did hear anti-Jew chanting from West Ham fans on a tram outside The Hawthorns in about 2003.