Why I Hate Nikki from Big Brother; Art Brut Appreciation Update; Why I Hate Voicemail More Than The Guy at the Guardian Who Hates Voicemail

I shouldn't be allowed to watch Big Brother. My hatred for Nikki turns me into a one-man angry mob, baying for blood and picking up rhetorical pitchforks and burning torches. Grr.

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It's Thursday. My infatuation with Art Brut (see below) is now over. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.

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Coincidentally, this Grauniad opinion piece about the evil of voicemails echoes a rant I made down the pub last night. I say coincidentally, but it's entirely possible that I was overheard by a feverishly short-hand writing journo and turned unwittingly into an Opinion Holder. However, his rant misses out on some of the key elements of Why I Hate Voicemail:

• Voicemail Takes Too Long. Firstly, you've got to listen to the jabber. You can't just phone them back because they don't leave their number until the end, and my sodding voicemail doesn't automatically record their number, and people always leave their number at the end of the message. I could dedicate an hour a day to going through and just noting my voicemails, without actually getting round to doing anything about them.


• Names and Numbers. People quite often don't leave these. What the blue blazing hell am I supposed to do with their message if I don't know who they are or how to contact them, I ask rhetorically, my arms milling around wildly to illustrate my oh-so-valid point.


• Clunkmail, More Like. Voicemails can't be printed out, filed, saved for posterity or anything remotely useful. They can be listened to, and then deleted. If someone gives me something useful by voicemail, I then have to write a note of it. It's like if instead of sending me emails, people wheeled their computer into my office, plugged it in and booted up, allowed me to read their message, then wheeled their computer away when I'd read it.


• Idiots Leave Voicemail. By and large, people who leave voicemails on my phone are stupid. I can attest to their stupidity primarily because my voicemail message asks them to send me an email and not leave a voicemail message. The onesimply expressed instruction I leave, and what do they do? Ignore it. Then leave a message where I can hear the drool of their stupidity drip down on to the mouthpiece as they leave messages of such monumental stupidity that I begin to question whether the human race has any kind of future without a serious cull taking place.

When will this madness end? When?

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Still, it's not all bad. I've got an official Panini World Cup sticker of Shaun Wright-Phillips in the pack I bought today. Actually, that's not true. I swapped it. Anyway, I assume this means he can play in the World Cup now, as I can't think of anything more legally binding than a sticker album, so Sven has got another attacking option. Could someone pass this information onto him? Probably the best way to reach him is to send it in a letter stapled to a leggy blonde.

Token World Cup Mention; My New Giddy Teenage Romance

Ah the World Cup. The convenient source of all my man-chitchat at the moment. Whereas before awkward talk about the weather would have filled the time between the guy in the cafe starting up his coffee machine and me leaving, now we can chat in relaxed style about the weakness in Germany's defence, the psychological state of blubbery Brazilian forwards and whether Argentina look dangerous in spite of the haircuts.

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My current short-lived enthusiastic teenage musical infatuation is, perhaps a year or so late, Art Brut who are punky, fizzy and endearingly amusing. Who could resist the couplet 'We're gonna be the band that writes the song/That makes Israel and Palestine get along'. I'd imagine they won't be overly flattered when I compare them to Sultans of Ping, and I'm not sure it's possible to sound like Sultans of Ping in a good way, but they do. I'm going to work out what the modern-day equivalent of wearing a hole through an LP, and then do it to their album 'Bang Bang Rock & Roll'.

What's Parked Outside My Work; The Robot Bill

There is a black Ford Capri parked outside my building with the engine running and a guy with shoulder-length curly blond hair, sovereign ring glistening on the steering wheel. I now know the feeling a minor character in The Sweeny must have (For reference, this feeling is: gnawing doubts to the core of my being with traces of mania in the corners, like a vicar presiding over a funeral who has secretly taken a pill.)

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By way of a Friday Frippery, I offer you a link to The Robot Bill, worth watching for the title sequence, general concept and the fact that the episode seems to be about the misappropriation of lamps.

Peter Crouch; English Language Why You Confuse Me So; Bloody Acoustic Singer Slash Songwriters

Peter Crouch. Not only does he have the misfortune of looking like a gawkier Gareth from the Office, but when he does score goals, he chooses to celebrate them with robot dancing. Here's hoping for lots of goals from him at the World Cup; perhaps he breakdances and does headspins when he gets a hat-trick. Poor misshapen freakboy.

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A woman behind me on the bus answered her phone (her ringtone was Chewbacca roaring) and then said, in a loud foreign mocking of the English language, 'I'm in the bus'. Now, leaving aside for the moment the calls to have her deported (and to a country she's not even from, that's how deported she'd be), why do we say 'on' rather than 'in'? We say 'on' when talking about public transport, but 'in' when talking about cars. Why? Five seconds on Google has failed to answer this question.

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At an acoustic night I was at yesterday, there was a guy up on stage, and in keeping with the general tone of today's post, he was From Overseas. He did an entertaining romp through Ace of Spaces, and then announced that he was doing one of his own songs. His girlfriend jiggled excitedly in her seat, chain-smoking. This song, he said, is about my ex-girlfriend. She, he said, had such a moody face in the mornings. A moody face like you haven't seen. She was, and he shrugged and paused here to suggest that mere words couldn't begin to describe how moody her face was in the mornings, very moody in the mornings. Then, with only a bit of further ado, he launched into a lacklustre acoustic number where he complained about her moody face. Including lines like 'you've got such a moody face'. I wanted to take him to one side and say, look, you've got guitar skills and a nice singing voice. But can I introduce you to a little thing I like to call 'metaphor'. It will allow you to say that things are other things, by which you can compare them and draw out analogies. Er, analogies? That's where - oh, forget it. The rich world of imagery and imagination might be a little too much to embark on all at once. Oh, and Squealingly Excited Girlfriend? You do realise that when he's broken up with you, he's going to be singing songs on stage called things like My Ex-Girlfriend Smoked Too Much and Also Had a Moody Face Like That Other Girlfriend To Whom I Referred in an Earlier Song (Not That I Said As Much To Her at the Time, Oh No - Do I Look Stupid?).

On Wirelessness and Greggs

I haven't been posting very much recently, mainly because all of my waking hours not spent blinking in baffled amazement have been spent setting up a Wi-Fi network at home. I understand that the term 'Wi-Fi' comes from the widiculously fiddly setting up that you have to do.

Anyway, it's all up and running and I can have as many computers as I've got limbs sharing the internet. More, even. I'm not quite sure why I've done it, other than because it feels futuristic. I have to wear a jumpsuit round the house now. That's how futuristic it is.

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I'm just going to sing the praises of Greggs the Bakers. I'm sure there's a dedicated team of Eurocrats ready to ban it lurking somwhere in Brussels. When it goes, I'll miss the sight of hardened bruisers wearing t-shirts in February and being led by a pitbull with balls the size of tangerines coming in and ordering 'two yum-yums please'. All also miss the woman wearing an Arsenal shirt, carrying a bag from the Arsenal shop with a child no doubt named Tony Adam Charlie George Smith buying Tottenham cakes.

Ah, nostalgia. And it was only yesterday it happened.

Mog is Murder

I get home from work and find a trail of feathers in the hall. Bloody feathers. And a pleased looking cat. And where the recycling box lives, a dead pigeon. A bloody huge bloody pigeon. It was about the size of Mog, the murdering cat. Given that she has trouble getting herself through the catflap minus a pigeon, I can only speculate, but given the blood smeared around the catflap, it must have taken a while, and involved a good degree of force. You'd have to admire her dedication if you didn't have to clean up all the blood and feathers and dispose of the corpse.

I'm no fan of pigeons (Carrier pigeons? Yeah, as in carrier of disease. Arf.), but being confronted with the logical result of my hatred humbled me. My murdering cat has proved the error of my hatred, and I now love pigeons and do not wish them even the slightest harm, even if they are useless, ugly, disease-splattered, noisy shit-fer-brains who are so fat, deformed and lazy that they scarcely ever bother to fly, and when they do it's with the least amount of hight possible, so you always have to end up ducking otherwise you get a face full of pigeon beak, which is an experience I never want to have. So, yes, I'm over my pigeon hatred, thanks to the wise example of my murdering cat.

And now she's chasing a fly round the flat with the intention of killing it to death, like the poor unmourned pigeon.

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Having a mobile phone with internet access is dangerous, especially if you're bored. After a heated discussion (a mass debate, if you will) over the weekend about whether Islam frowned on masturbation (and most thought it probably would), I was emailed the definitive answer, which is how I came to be sat in a meeting with, in large bold letters, the words 'Masturbation in Islam' sat on my phone. And I'd've had a job explaining them, as I said I was just going to check on the cricket score.

Fortunately, I currently remain unsacked.

Deadpan Conversations With Taxi Firms, Vol n

Scene: a telephone line over which is being booked a minicab to take
me, L and a computer I've just picked up for a friend back home. We
have a crisp clean line, in a quiet flat which is also expensively
crisp and clean.
Minicab Telephone Woman: So, what's the road name again?
Me: Pall Mall
MTW: Can you spell that?
Me: Pee-ay-ell-ell em-ay-ell-ell.
MTW: What's the postcode? [I give the postcode] And is there a 'Road'
after that?
Me: No, it's just Pall Mall. The Queen lives there if that helps.

This continues for some time. Quite why I thought that bringing the
Queen into it would help I don't know. I can't imagine she books
minicabs that often, and I'm sure she pronounces things very
differently, having only one vowel sound at her disposal (a sort of
strangled 'urgh' noise acting in place of the many varied sounds we
might use).

David Blaine Due to Drown in a Giant Bowl Filled Only With His Own Sense of Self-Importance; Morrissey

So, David Blaine, noted 'illusionist', has got a new 'illusion' which involves him being put in a bowl of water. I think it's about time for him to move on from all the death-defying tricks he's being doing, and start a new line of death-embracing stunts.

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At the Morrissey gig at Ally Pally yesterday (review: Pretty good, although he played too much off the new album) the King Bouncer came out to tell the assembled queue for the doors that in addition to the usual litany of drinks, cameras, etc. that aren't allowed into the venue, anyone found bringing burgers or other meat into the venue would be ejected, which was quite funny. I suspect it's his party piece, and a welcome break from beating people up and drinking Strongbow. We were also stood behind someone who had the great misfortune to look exactly like Wayne Rooney. I think he'd been a test subject on the ugly drugs trial, and there weren't no way he got the placebo. Yuk, he was U.G.L.Y and he didn't appear to have an alibi.