Very Briefly...

A quickie.

It's another one of those days where not much is happening. At time of writing, the most shared story on the BBC News website is this. 'Family Sees Jesus in Marmite'- because naturally if the Lord wished to appear to us mere mortals he would do so in the dregs of a jar of yeast extract, or on a slice of toast or in a sunspot, sending dozens of Thai citizens blind in the process. Nothing says 'Lamb of God' or 'omnipotent superbeing' like appearing in Marmite. Jesus, you either love him or hate him (I think the church rejected this official slogan).

In other news, two 'bottled ghosts' sold for £935 at auction in New Zealand. Stored in holy water by an exorcist, the two ghosts had been bothering Christchurch resident Avie Woodbury. "I would get things like the jug boiling itself, touching on the back of my neck, voices from other rooms, and items going missing then turning up in weird places," she said. "The dog was mental, he wouldn't go into certain rooms." You can't make this stuff up. People often accuse me of being too cynical, but in a world where Jesus returns in a Marmite lid and ghost presse retails for a cool £935, can you blame me?

I'm hoping some real news turns up sometime soon, but I'm not banking on it. Tomorrow will see some hard, undercover investigative journalism as I enter the terrifying world of Chatroulette. You have been warned.

Live From Hollywood, California. It's Very Early on Monday Morning...

Last night a little award ceremony took place in the Kodak Theatre. Hollywood's glitziest and trashiest turned up to have little statues thrust upon them and there to meet them on the red carpet were all manner of appalling, fawning sycophants ready to illicit no productive information at all. If anything, it seemed like Sky's Angela Griffin had just written a letter to the Make A Wish Foundation saying "please let me go to the Oscars and get a little bit too excited about all the celebs, love Angela". The red carpet nonsense went on for about 3 hours before eventually the nominees began filing into their seats. Even then we didn't get underway (many of them too busy blowing air kisses at each other presumably... or getting the night's drinks if you're George Clooney or Morgan Freeman, both of whom had so much faith in winning the Best Actor gong that they were permanently soused for the entire evening). Finally, everyone was in their places and the 82nd Annual Academy Awards was about to get underway.

And so the festivities began. The nominated actors and actresses lined the stage with mindless grins. What would take place after last year's all singing, all dancing Hugh Jack-man led affair? Well, Doogie Howser M.D. then did an all singing, all dancing number in a shiny tux. Come back nominees, all is forgiven. Then Martin and Baldwin take the stage- what Doogie (also Barney from How I Met Your Mother) called "the biggest pair since Dolly Parton" to a mild embarrassed titter. Watching Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin is like watching Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin; Steve Martin's probably got more money but you know he wishes he was Alec Baldwin. They hit their straps with a gag about the pair donning 3D glasses to look at James Cameron and followed up with Martin quipping "there's that damn Helen Hirren" with Baldwin correcting him "That's Dame Helen Mirred". Haha. To be fair, they were doing a fine job. Martin returning to comedy hosting after a brief spell as an American folk musician and Baldwin off the face of the highly successful Tina Fey sitcom 30 Rock (and the less successful It's Complicated with Oscar nominee ((obviously not for that movie)) Meryl Streep). I should point out that regardless of how good and likeable Baldwin is in anything, I still just think of Team America, "Arec Barrwin" and "I can't upstage Alec Baldwin, he's the greatest actor in the world".

Seeing as that nice Mr. Murdoch had taken my televised Oscars away I followed the ceremony on 5Live and on the Guardian Liveblog written by critic and columnist Xan Brooks. The Liveblog was mightily entertaining, Brooks fully aware that only a handful of people would stay up until the small hours to read about millionaires receiving accolades. He has a healthy sense of derision for both the ceremony and the celebrities... and even the idea of liveblogging itself, I would suggest. He's up there with Paxman in the pantheon of journalists who 'don't really give a shit about their superiors'. There were some magnificent ethereal tracts during the night, one of my early favourites referring to T-Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham winning Best Song.

"Incidentally, isn't "Ryan Bingham" the name of the character that George Clooney plays in Up in the Air? All of a sudden these Oscars are starting to blur; the line between fiction and reality warping and breaking down. Next I'll be wondering if T-Bone Burnett was actually the name of the seductive, lingerie-wearing muse that Penélope Cruz played in Nine. Already I'm starting to believe that it was. The best bit of that entire film was the scene in which T-Bone Burnett writhed on that four-poster bed and stuck his bum in the air."

He christened the first award of the night (Best Actor in a Supporting Role) the 'No Shit Sherlock Award', which predictably went to Christoph Waltz who has (rightly) won all of them since Cannes last year, I think. It is however the end of a remarkable season for Waltz and his five star turn in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Before Basterds, Austrian Waltz had lost his faith in the acting profession and now he finds himself with every top gong going and a darling of Hollywood. A touching story and a well-deserved oscar for a tour-de-force performance.

We'd be here for days if I was to attempt to list all the awards, so if you simply desire the cold hard facts, check here. Naturally there were some set pieces from Hollywood's most popular comedians. Ben Stiller presented the Best Make-Up award to Star Trek while trussed up in full Na'vi gear to a begruding smile from Avatar director James Cameron, after which the Best Adapted Screenplay award is presented to Precious and not In The Loop... rather unfairly. Still don't understand why exactly In The Loop was considered to be an adapted screenplay and not an original screenplay. @LloydWoolf suggested that:

People seem to think it counts as being adapted from The Thick Of It. Like when the On The Buses gang went to Spain.

As good an explanation as any. Geoffrey Fletcher collecting the Best Original Screenplay gong choked up at the podium with an entire 45 second gap to fill. "I'm drying up." He said. That was the best he could do? Jesse Armstrong had promised a Sieg Heil if In The Loop had won. Fletcher was ushered off the podium and Steve Martin boasted "I wrote that script for him." All the while The Hurt Locker was picking up awards like the Greeks throw plates and before long we had arrived at the customary dance number. Dance routines. "What would Oscar night be without a big, razzle-dazzle dance routine?" mused Brooks "Probably 10 minutes shorter and immeasurably more satisfying." More gongs went the way of HL and it led Avatar 4-3. After what seemed like an eternity, Kate Winslet arrived to present the Best Actor award which was, as one might imagine, won at the fifth time of asking by heavy favourite Jeff 'always the Dudesmaid, never the Dude' Bridges who raised his statuette to the rafters, a-whooping and a-hollering. Tremendous.

Would Sandra Bullock do the unthinkable and win both the Razzie for Worst Actress and Oscar for Best Actress in the same year? The day before at the spoof awards ceremony, Bullock had, to her credit, turned up to accept the ignominious gong with a truckload of DVDs of 'All About Steve', the much-maligned romcom for which she had sealed the award. However The Blind Side, yet to be released over here in Blighty had American critics falling over themselves like drunks in a ball pit and, sure enough, Sean Penn read out her name for the win. "Carey [Mulligan]" she said, "your grace and your elegance and your beauty and your talent makes me sick". A reminder that Bullock is actually a rather funny lady, if only she'd shown us that in All About Steve then she wouldn't have picked up the Razzie.

Then it was time for the big ones. Was there to be a repeat of the Baftas, where Cameron was basically out of his seat when the Hurt Locker was named Best Picture and he slumped back, face like thunder. Avatar had been touted as the main contender until the British Academy foisted praise upon Bigelow's effot and the Iraq bomb-disposal movie (no hard-sell needed for this one...) made a late surge for the main prize of the evening. First there was the skirmish, Best Director. Streisand took the stage. "The time has come." She said ominously. "Katherine Bigelow!" became the first woman to take the Best Director gong... ever. The Best Picture statuette was brought to the stage. The tension was palapable. Hanks tore open the envelope like a child at Christmas (this may be an exaggeration) and announced that The Hurt Locker had won. Cameron, face like a slapped arse, clapped unenthusiastically as he simmered gently beneath the surface and we had reached the end of another Academy Awards ceremony. "This show was so long that Avatar now takes place in the past," quipped Martin. He wasn't lying.

Friday Pictorial the Fifth: Based on Real Events

Ok, here's the fifth Friday Pictorial or FriPicV, if you want to be one of those guys. It marks the FriPic debut for my Key-influenced poetry (Twitter followers will know what to expect). Here's the long awaited Poem 36, based on an incident I witnessed exactly a week ago.



Here's today's fact: The book I'm brandishing in this is History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (again all the words I say in the Pictorial are just coming from my brain).

TYSIC...

Ok, some of you may be wondering what this seemingly random string of letters entails. Well, it's an acronym for Ten Year Self Improvement Challenge- an iniative started by comedian Mark Watson to make the world a better place (one could even say substantially better) that begins on this very day, March 4th. TYSIC is rather appropriate for me, given my recent worries about the old midlife crisis.

In case, you're wondering the midlife crisis is continuing apace. Today I spent an hour in the garage of a well-known car manufacturer, I won't name names (why does this sound familiar...?), let's just call them, say, Boyota. They were performing some engineering to stop my car's accelerator from inadvertantly killing me. 'Good, what's wrong with that?' you might be wondering. Well, it meant sitting there watching Animal Park in dodgy black and white, fetching various caffeinated beverages and reading the newspapers strewn across the glass tables, while thinking things like 'this is taking a long time, maybe I should say something. Probably wouldn't reflect well on me if I said something...' etc. It couldn't have been more mid-life crisis-y if I'd had a pipe and slippers.

Driving home there was more cause for concern. I heard the best string of 'Non-Stop Oldies' on the Steve Wright Big Show ever - classic after classic- the Kinks, the Who, Derek and the Dominoes (you haven't lived until you've crept through a rural village blasting 'Layla' at full volume to frightened and bemused primary school kids), James Brown, Otis Redding. A stellar line-up. That definitely makes me old, doesn't it. Arse.

Actually this would be a good time to slot in some careless, uninformed analysis of the current BBC cuts situation. The idea of BBC 6Music being forced into closure seems to have a lot of people up in arms. I do occasionally listen but I couldn't call myself a regular (not since the days of Russell Brand moving to Radio 2 anyhow), however I can see that its closure would effectively snuff out thousands of exciting new artists hopes of reaching their audience. I'm told that 6Music has access to every record produced from 1960 onwards (unverified) and to wipe out such an extensive library seems a little odd to me. I'm reliably informed, by many people of greater influence, importance and wealth than myself, that we must do something about it, so let's stick it to the man... or something. A quote I see a lot with regard to 6Music is that it caters for those 'too old for Radio 1 and too young for Radio 2'. Well I was 'too old' for Radio 1 when I was about 13 and at no point was I ever 'too young' for Radio 2, no matter how uncool that makes me. I'm not ashamed about it, I'm not here to preserve my already ailing 'street cred' otherwise I wouldn't have waxed lyrical about today's Non-Stop Oldies selection.

All of this is why I figured it might be time to thrust myself into the Ten Year Self Improvement Challenge. A lot can happen in 10 years (hopefully), so I'll have to draft a list.

1. Finish my sitcom pilot script, plus series outline and character bios. I would give you some information about it, but I'm still convinced that Whitehouse and Higson stole the idea for Down the Line from me... the house may well be bugged.
2. Write a song that I'm actually pleased with - musically and lyrically.
3. Voice a video-game character - this is just a dream I've always had, don't really know why. I've been told I have a good voice for such things and I did meet Steve Blum once, he seemed a jolly nice chap.
4. Finish my novels and aim to get them published - There's two on the go presently, neither approaching completion at this stage (just as well I've got ten years to do it in)
5. Go to Ireland, Canada and the French Riviera - these are the destination-y kind of ones. I know some people say Nepal or Bolivia, but I'm better off in places where I can't get debilitating wasting diseases.

Those are the five main points, but I suspect others might creep in. Notice there's no 'get a decent job' etc. on here. I figure that I don't have time for that if I'm already at my midlife crisis. I'll try and keep you loyal readers posted with regard to my successes or otherwise in the TYSIC and if anyone else fancies joining in, it's a great way to try and improve your life/prospects/chances of furthering the human race etc.

Good luck, fellow TYSICers, see you on the other side.

Midlife Crisis...

Right, I'm not sure, but I think I could well be having a midlife crisis (meaning that I'll live to the ripe old age of 36 - my lucky number, but obviously not that lucky...). I arrived at this conclusion today after returning from the bank. I hate banks, especially my bank. I won't name names, let's just call them, say, Lloyds TSP. It all stems back to July of last year, whereupon I entered my local branch to exchange some Pounds sterling into Euros and walked out with a new current account that costs me £8 a month! That's £100 a year! (give or take) £100! I very rarely spend such an amount of money on anything, let alone an intangible vault within which to keep my other money (which is disappearing by the second thanks to this draconian £8 surcharge).

After much wrangling I was told that the account would be closed, but there was a payment earmarked, so I would have to wait for it to go through and (this was the point where I realised my youthful exuberance had been fully syphoned away) I simply accepted that. No questions, no arguing with the young lady cashier (though I suspect she would have been fully unprepared if I had set my rant to 'stun'). Instead I went home and listened to a playlist (another hint that I could be having a midlife crisis) Jackson Browne, Nick Drake, Toto and Journey. Mellow songs from mellow songwriters. I'm also the kind of person (hint number 3) that says things like "on I Won't Hold You Back, Lukather's guitar licks sound like the raw emotion of the dying human soul". So I wasn't prepared to argue with a bank clerk, I listen to mellow music and I'm a poor man's Paul Gambaccini- futility, folk/soft rock and pretentiousness do not a crisis make, right? Wrong. This morning I woke up with a sore back. This is just plain ridiculous I must be at least 50 years old.

As I've previously mentioned 2 of the big hints have been music based. I consider myself to be somewhat of an expert on music and I have frequently complained about modern music and how some of it is "just bloody noise". I'm sure that this is probably another factor of middle age. I like classic rock and Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. I'm essentially Ken Bruce. What hope is there for me?

As a man once called a younger, sexier David Mitchell (just by a friend, there wasn't a poll or conference or anything) I feel, like the great man himself, righteously outraged by many, many things that I suspect other people find to be merely trifling annoyances. I'd like to think that my comparison to Mitchell was to do with our shared rapier-like wit, however I suspect it has rather more to do with the fact that I am cursed with an underdeveloped jawline, quite like history and complain a lot. Mitchell is a hero of mine, as is Paxman, who did an excellent night's work yesterday (the expression as he says "I don't think so" is absolutely tremendous). Paxo is surely soon to be a national treasure. He has a healthy disregard for his superiors, he said 'fucking' on Newsnight and every Monday he puts 8 students well and truly in their place. Bravo, Mr. Paxman.

Will let you all know if I attempt to purchase a motorcycle or go travelling in central Europe. If that happens, then there is truly no hope for me. In the meantime, I'm off to listen to The Smiths and try and recapture some teen angst to flush out the middle aged malaise I'm currently experiencing. See you tomorrow, kids. If you have been, thank you for listening.

Working Title...

You know titles? A thing that you call another thing by? Difficult sometimes, aren't they? I've spent many an hour agonising over titles for novels, sitcoms, episodes, even these very blog posts. I'm rubbish at titles, which is why so many of these posts and even the title of the blog contain at least one elipsis (if not several) and extra little clauses thrown on the end. Perhaps the best, most concise title I've ever managed was for my Noel Edmonds Beat the Monkey rant - Get Your Hands Off Of Me, You Damned Dirty Ape... (and even that was far from ideal).

Titles are important, people say, they grab the readers attention and while it's true that say 'Lesbian Vampire Killers 2: Lez Harder' (thanks to James Walker for that one) would attract more attention than 'A Middle-Aged Man Assembling Ikea Furniture' (the next Coen Brothers movie), is there any correlation between quality of title and quality of content? Let's face it, there have been some shocking titles in the history of the arts. Take for instance embarrassing American dance movie You Got Served (what Mutant Reviewers referred to as the title that went up a hill and came down a national catchphrase- itself a reference to rubbishly-titled Hugh Grant measuring movie The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down A Mountain). See also Snakes on a Plane (because screenwriters' laziness knows no bounds - they should have put that on the poster...), Phffft (a case where the NY Daily News review of 'Jack and Judy go wild' would have made a better title) and Mannequin II: On the Move (this one needs no explanation). The worst movie title of all time however is probably 1969's 'Can Hiernonymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happniess?'- Firstly don't name your protagonist a cross between a Dutch painter and a pubic wig, don't name the love interest after what I can only assume is some manner of dermatological disease and don't ask a bloody long question with the title! You're the fucking movie, you tell me if he can.

Music too has been plagued by naff titles, the special mentions here going to rapper C-Murder's (who as one would imagine is a convicted murderer) 'The Truest Shit I Ever Sang' (utter nonsense and reminds me of something I forgot to mention yesterday- I'll whack it on the end of this post) and Fiona Apple's 'When the Pawn Hits the Conflict He Thinks Like A King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Thing 'Fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth is the Greatest of Heights and if You Know Where You Stand, Then You'll Know When to Land and If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You Know that You're Right' (A bit like a John Hegley poem... if John Hegley had tried to be serious and was really shit at poetry. This is utterly pretentious, un-punctuated bollocks and wasted a good 10 mintues of my life typing it out).

There's already a perfectly serviceable list of Worst Book Titles Ever, featuring every Stephanie Meyer book and various others, so I don't feel the urge to try and top it. Why exactly titles are so hard I don't think we'll ever know, but there's far more bad than good out there in the world of naming, that's for sure.

Onto the thing I forgot to mention yesterday and it's the story of how the last embers of hope that I had left for the human race were extinguished in one fell swoop - As I left the station to come home a youth (complete with a hoody and everything) yelled "Right, where's the fucking pussy at?" I was as stunned as the other commuters. Swaggering, the youth strolled off with his friend before I had time to approach him and say either "excuse me, could you say that again, only, you know, even louder?" or "excuse me, do you mind, you know, being more of a cunt?"

One of Those Days...

Everything's a bit shit, isn't it. Don't worry, it hasn't taken me this long to work that out, but it seems to be one of those days where it applies more than usual. Now, this is nothing to do with the fact that it's St. David's Day, actually that's one of the day's redeeming features, I've just had a day where things have angered me more than usual.

Today I was in Bath. I made my way to Westbury station to buy a train ticket from an unhappy looking man to wait on a platform with various other unhappy looking people to get on a train filled with yet more unhappy looking people. That's what public transport does, nothing new there, but it very much set the tone for the day. The first straw came in HMV where I nearly shouted at a man for walking down the middle of the staircase. Now this may sound seemingly inocuous, however I was at the bottom of the staicase, attempting to get up it. He could see this and yet he actively attempted to stay in the very middle, leaving no room for passing on either side. Shocked and disheartened by his lack of consideration for others, I did what real British men do- I sighed very loudly and mumbled something to the effect of "some people, tch" before clomping noisily up the steps.

Strike number 2 came when I had an argument with a toilet seat. It was a wooden one, maybe pine (I'm not an expert on wood types) and it was one of those ones which refused to stay upright, meaning that I had to hold onto it all the while. What kind of arsehole would design a toilet seat that doesn't stay upright? It defies logic. A man's peeing ability is severly hampered if he has to focus on holding up a toilet seat at the same time.

I had time to mull over these events back at the station, where I watched a pigeon being chased by a woman. Ok, pigeons are often hate-figures, but they can fly and generally go about things with feathery dignity. I'm not sure what right we have to bother them, we are basically just apes in suits. My train of existentialist thought was ironically interrupted by my actual train arriving and I boarded to find a man heading up the aisles litter-picking. Litter-picking! That's what they made us do in school as a punishment, this was his actual job. I had a good mind to go up to him and declare "on behalf of the human race, I'm really sorry about how this has all turned out" but thought better of it... eventually.

Strike 3 was when I came home to find that this had happened. So that's a hat-trick of minor niggles that have burrowed into the angry centre of my brain. Normally this would all be fine- just little inconveniences- but today they have been elevated to the state of massive injustices against myself and my fellow humans.

As I say this has nothing to do with St. David's Day, I was in the Millennium Stadium on Friday being as Welsh as possible and on my feet applauding Shane Williams for that try. That said, a row full of cougars in front of me did try and ruin my (and all the proper rugby fans with me's) enjoyment of the game, by talking, drinking and generally getting in the way. If they just wanted to get pissed and talk about things that weren't really appropriate for the situation they could have done that in a cafe or another of those Sex and the City type places. The night was redeemed by the banter between us and the most French man in the world, who was seated across the aisle. In full beret and moustache, he was incredibly drunk, waving his tricoleur triumphantly and generally being very amusing, so if that's you (probably not) then kudos, sir.

On the plus side, I did walk past Danny Grewcock today and gave him a nod and a smile, as if to say "you're quite good at the old rugby, aren't you".