For two days in a row it’s been pretty pissy weather, which means I wear a cap so the ‘do don’t get ruined… And my cap of choice (and the only one that really fits me) is the Boston Red Sox one I got last year at Fenway Park.
So I’m sitting on the bus as it pulls up to my stop and as I’m getting off I hear an American voice…
“Did you see last night’s game??”
Wha??? It’s 8am in the morning, I won’t be officially awake for another 3 or so hours and some guy is asking me about last night’s game… The nerve!
But wait, it dawns on me I have no idea WHAT game he’s talking about, or who the hell he is for that matter
“No, I don’t think I did” I reply
“Shame, was a very exciting one, I just hope they can beat the Yankees now”
Aahhhhhh, he was talking about the Red Sox win over Oakland in the Baseball playoffs… Not the kind of conversation I was expecting but I’ll roll with it…
“The Yankees will be difficult to beat, but I hope they do… I’m really looking for a Sox/Cubbies World Series” I say
“Dont we all…” he replies, and like that he was gone…
OK, what just happened there, did I have a conversation about baseball in Scotland? Some 4,000 miles away from Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium?
Well the same thing happened this morning, but I was ready…
“Good performance by the Sox, always good to get an advantage over the Yankees, especially on their home field” is what I say.
“Fuckin’ A, man, Fuckin’ A!” he nods.
Strange and surreal, but I’m sorta looking forward to my 1 minute long conversations on the American League Championship Series and hopefully the World Series now… It’s not often I get to talk about it.
Perhaps I shouldn’t mention to him I’m a Toronto Blue Jays fan…
Oh, and I took a whole load of pictures with my phone on Wednesday, so I’ll show you what a typical day is like for me at some point.
Do you remember the old style modems which, in order to get online, required placing a weird looking telephone, with a wire connected from one end to the wall, over two pieces of foam? The wire would be just short enough to make it difficult to reach the desk where the computer sat, whilst just long enough for it to be possible for you to sprain an ankle trying. They didn’t make it easy…
My first experience of “going online” was in 1988. My dad got a PC as part of his university course and I was amazed at the power it had… It had something like 1MB of RAM and a badass 8Mhz processor. I was about ten or eleven at the time and, had The Captains of Industry discovered the internet at roughly the same time as us, we would have sent emails, bought books and traded shares. There was certainly a market for all this. Only 16% of American households owned a PC.
Now I think of it, nothing much existed in cyberspace at the time, which is probably why my first online experience lasted less than 5 minutes. I wasn’t to hear the screeching of computers shaking hands until the Internet Revolution, nine years later.
Microsoft launched Explorer, Amazon was born and WH Smiths buried their head in the sand in 1995. Streaming audio became possible the same year thanks to Real Networks. Television stations were predicted to go bust within days. We were given so many new toys to play with (Java, Windows 95 etc) that the sales assistants at PC World had something to do with their day, other than hide from customers. Great innovators seemed to join forces at exactly the same time to deliver killer application after killer application… Which, in turn, delivered an entirely new audience to the World Wide Web. The computer was no longer a slave-tool of the office, we could now buy our groceries without leaving the house, sell our unwanted junk on eBay or buy someone else’s, play chess with friends we will never meet.
Fast forward to 2003 and I’m writing this entry from my bedroom on a mobile phone… in 1988 mobile phones were the size of bricks and the battery was carried in a suitcase.
Sometimes I miss the good old days, but then I look at the cornucopia of gadgets I’ve amassed over the years and think, nah!
I’ll be putting this phone to use tomorrow as I have an idea which may be pretty cool…
You know, there’s something really nice about a job where you can come in and listen to an entire Pearl Jam concert (setlist) without anyone bugging you. This is great, simply because I’m always listening to music when I work at home and sometimes it can really help you get motivated…
I wish more bands would follow Pearl Jam’s example… When they were on tour you could go to www.pearljambootlegs.com (now redirects to their main website) and buy a copy of any concert you wanted for about $10 to $15… Once you had done that you could then download an unmastered copy of the concert (not quite CD quality, but better than radio quality) for your listening pleasure then about a week or so later a CD of the concert would flop through your letterbox for you to enjoy whenever you wanted.
I bought their second Madison Square Garden concert from July to join my Glasgow one from their European tour in 2000 and it’s really, really good. I’d advise anyone out there to go see Pearl Jam if they ever roll into a place near you.
But anyways, as I was saying… I wish a few bands would follow their lead, when I think of all the great concerts I’ve been to over the years (U2, Foo Fighters, Gomez, Beastie Boys, Ani DiFranco), I’d kill to have CD copies of them to listen to and remember how great it really was.
I’m no fan of reality TV. I used to enjoy programs like Big Brother, Pop Idol and what have you, but nowadays it’s becoming more surreal than real. So imagine my reaction when I see this advertised…
Derren Brown plays Russian Roulette “live” on TV.
Yes folks, if you thought David Blaine sitting in a box for 44 days was the bottom of the barrel, now another “magician” is going to play with death on “live” TV. Well, not exactly live LIVE as, for reasons of slight intelligence, there will be a tape delay so we don’t see him blow his brains out if his mind tricks don’t cut the mustard. Hows that for nice Sunday night post-watershed viewing?
And people wonder why I’ve got a lot to say about issues in the world/media that are really pissing me off… This whole idea borders on complete lunacy!
Personally I do hope he caps himself just so we can bring an end to all these silly reality TV shows. At least the Americans have the right idea with Joe Schmoe, a “reality” show with a difference. Only one of the contestants is actually real, the rest are actors…
EDIT (11:01pm): Incase you were wondering he survived. Well, it was tense viewing, I’ll give him that… It’s times like that I remember why I only watched The Deer Hunter once…
I hate some PR people… And by some I mean “PR Guru” Max Clifford…
This man is a true scumbag, if there is anyone more deserving of being first against the wall when the revolution comes, then it’s Max Clifford. Anytime a high profile story breaks in this country, Max Clifford has his fingers in the pie somewhere…
Take this last week for instance… On Monday a story broke in the gutter trash tabloids about a group of footballers from a major English Premiership club involved in a gang rape of a 17 year old girl over the weekend.
Now don’t get me wrong, I DO NOT condone sexual assault, in fact it’s the most repulsive thing I can think of, but when I first heard about it, part of me said “this sounds like a Max Clifford scheme to get money out of the scummy Sunday newspapers”. That in it’s self speaks volumes about the man. But no, this is different, Max isn’t involved, he isn’t sitting in his plush office spewing bullshit statements about how this poor unfortunate soul came to me for advice… So I was forced to rethink, maybe this story was holding water after all.
Until I hear tonight that who else but Max Clifford has been giving the accuser some Public Relations advice… Now Max Clifford isn’t cheap, and I sincerely doubt a 17 year old could afford someone of his stature, so you can bet a deal with some Sunday newspaper is paying for this.
I can already see how this is going down…
The players names will be leaked, naming and shaming them.
The Sunday tabloids will get their exclusive with the girl (accompanied with pictures of her in, shall we say, provocative poses).
The case will go to court and after a long waste of time it will be thrown out because the media have tainted the jury’s perception of the case before it even began.
We all wait a year or so and the whole merry-go-round will start up again…
I hate times like this… You spend what seems like an age on the phone while listening to some pre-recorded voice saying “thank you for holding, unfortunately all of our customer care representatives are busy right now but we will answer your call as soon as we can”.
My cable modem has been screwing up, we’re getting billed twice because of it so I decided to call ntl and get it sorted out… How long did I wait?
10 minutes? 15 minutes?
Possibly 20 minutes?
Not even close… It was 30 minutes before I could even get through to the screener stage when some mook took my details and asked me to check if I had the MSBlast virus or anything like that.
Yeah, I thought so too…
So another 30 minutes later, I FINALLY get through to someone who could help me, but he was hesitant… “I can makes the changes”, he said, “but I don’t know if I should, it’s highly irregular”.
IRREGULAR??… He hasn’t even told me what’s wrong before he puts me on hold again! By now I’m ready to lose it completely when I hear a strange beeping noise…
I’d been on the phone so long the handset had used up all its power and I got cut off!!! So I now face the prospect of calling them up again or waiting till 3am when your average citizen is in bed…
I really can’t be bothered with it all, I just wanted a quiet, easy life.
As promised, here is my average work day…
Gripping stuff, eh?