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Thursday 28th May10:00"Here are the results of the Croatian jury..."The Eurovision Song Contest has thrown up some memorable winners in history over the past forty years or so - Sandie Shaw, Lulu, Sir Cliff of Richard (although he didn't actually win, did he?), Abba, Brotherhood of Man, Bucks Fizz, Johny Logan, Nicole ("Papa?") - but surely there can't have been many more fascinating events than this years? Even before the grand event go under way the following had occurred:
Of the performances, only Austria seemed not to be taking it seriously, and I had that marked down as an early contender for "Null points". To be honest though, a lot of the tunes were fairly forgettable, which is how it should be, and only the truly interesting stuff stuck in my mind for any longer than it was on the screen. I tipped Germany for a top 3 finish with their S-Club singalong, but I think it was undermined by the scary-looking singer. And, of course, the Greek bird in the Miss Whiplash outfit got my full attention, although sadly her sub-Cher-style ballad wasn't quite up to the same standard as her outfit. I thought the Belgian entry, which was a pleasant 'Ofra Haza meets Enya'-style tune was the best song, but that it didn't stand much of a chance. How wrong I was. Mind you, we all agreed that Jemini's performance was the worst of the night with both the duo and their backing singers choosing an interesting range of pitches to sing in before they all ended up about a semi-tone flat. It was a performance that got what it deserved. As for the rest, well, Turkey were probably the best overall and might have a brief flirtation with the charts but, apart from the already famous tATu, I confidently predict that we'll never hear from any of this year's entrants ever again. Famous last words...... One of the fine things about moving to a new place is the chance to mock and snigger at any longstanding traditions, before succumbing to their charms and finally embracing them as part of your own heritage. I'm pleased to report that an early contender for this honour, although I have arrived too late to partake, is the Tittlecock Fair. And that's the name of it, not a Carry-On style description. This Good Friday tradition stretches back a long way and used to attract thousands of people to the town. Sadly, these days it appears to be held in a pub car park and attracts about a dozen. Still, there's always next year's event when I can find out for myself if it rivals Cambridge's Strawberry Fair. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot less hippies in Conisbrough...... Go on stick your oar in:
Saturday 24th May19:30It's Jim up NorthWell, this is the first broadcast from a new location, so here goes. I packed up my troubles in a LDV van on Tuesday. Thanks to Richard, Young Chris and Tim for helping us load my large organ (ooh-er!). I didn't finish loading up till about 6.30pm, although matters weren't helped by the arrival of the landlord who then proceeded to clear the garden and start cleaning and tidying the house whilst I was trying to pack stuff away. Still, that might save me a deduction for cleaning and gardening from my deposit. Anyway, it was gone 10pm by the time we got up here, and then there was plenty of traditional "Lawrence family faffing about" with the unloading and stuff so it was nearly two in the morning before I got into bed. Given that I'd spent Monday evening having a few farewell drinks at the Cambridge Beer Festival, I was feeling somewhat exhausted. I've taken it easy for the last few days and have been slowly transferring stuff from the pile in the dining room to my bedroom or the cellar, as appropriate.I finally managed to sort out the old Interweb connection yesterday evening and having waded through the spam, job offers (not), and usual tat that clogs up my Inbox, it seems that I've missed virtually bugger all. Or as it's cyberspace perhaps I've missed a virtual bugger all? Obviously, I might have missed some interesting developments in the land of cyber-erotica, but I'll have to wait till my parents are out of the way before I can check that.... Did you know that you can combine ! and ? into one punctuation mark? I didn't, so I'm grateful to John for pointing me in the direction of the Interrobang. I haven't worked out how to display it in my browser yet, and all my HTML reference books and notes are still in boxes somewhere in the house, so I might not get round to doing it for a while, but feel free to make use of it yourselves. Right, I'm off to enjoy the Eurovision Song Contest..... Go on stick your oar in: Monday 19th May13:00"You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold'em......Know when to walk away, know when to run. You never count your money when you're sitting at the table. There'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done." Ah, the words of the immortal Kenny Rogers. Well, sung by him anyway, but actually written by Don Schlitz, fact fans. Which is kind of beside the point because, gentle reader, it's time for me to pack up my tent and move house. Having spectacularly failed to get another job in the last four or five months, I've had to bow to the inevitable and am moving out of Cambridge, to live with my parents for a brief spell. I'm chucking all my stuff into a van tomorrow and tootling off to the wilds of South Yorkshire. Hopefully this will only be a temporary measure whilst I get myself back on my feet. No offence to my old parental-type parents, but I don't want to have to live with them for any longer than necessary.The good news is that I'll still be able to connect to the Internet from the family home, mainly due to the fact that I'm currently connecting through an ordinary BT line. There'll probably be a brief cessation in hostilities, er, I mean, updates whilst I sort that out, although the local library has Internet facilities so I'll still be able to check my Hotmail account and read the comments people might post on here, if that's the case. It shouldn't take more than a week to sort things out though. So it's "Cheerio!" to Cambridge. Farewell, my ex-cow-orkers. So long, Junction and Corn Exchange; Adieu, expensive beer; Au revoir, Portland Arms; Auf wiedersehn, Beer Festival; Good riddance, Stagecoach's lackadaisical approach to timetabling; TTFN, the leafy parks and open spaces;Toodle pip, cheap records from Fopp. Look that, I'm leaving town and I never even said 'Goodbye'.... Mind you, if this site is right, perhaps now is the time to head to the hills....... Go on, stick your oar in:
Friday 16th May12:25National Week of "Whatever!"Well, I knew that it was National Sandwich Week this week, but as me old mucker e-laine helpfully pointed out, with the aid of this BBC news story, it's also been National Condom Week, National Balloon Week, National ME Awareness Week and National Samaritans Week, amongst other things. Apparently May and October are the peak times for the various 'Weeks' so, whilst National Chip Week in February had little or no competition, this week's 'Weeks' have had to try a little bit harder, and quite obviously not succeeded. Anyway, I feel like entering into the spirit of things, so I declare next week to be 'National Buy Jim A Beer Week'.In a brief moment of clarity I decided to run my website through Bobby (the online accessibility tool, not Mrs B's husband). I knew there'd be a problem with the Comments mechanism not having a HTML link - I keep meaning to add the relevant code but never get round to it. And I wasn't surprised that it objected to my forcing external links to open in a new window. So I did a bit of reading and found that, for some web users, this opening of a new window interrupts the flow of their browsing experience and prevents them from using the Back button to return to my site. So I've taken all the offending code out of the blog bit of this page and will be slowly removing it from the rest of the site. So from now on, if you want to follow a link in a new window, you'll have to right-click on it, or do whatever the non-Windows equivalent is. There's a few other things that I need to sort through to, so you might see one or two changes around here in the near future, although hopefully they'll be transparent if you're using Netscape or IE. Here's a couple of things that I meant to include when I was waffling on about Birmingham on Monday. First up a little musical tribute to the greatness of Birmingham. And here's where you can watch Baywatch in Brum. You need Windows Media Player 7 or above to see it though and as I'm still in the middle of downloading an upgrade (only 40 minutes to go), I haven't had chance to look at it yet. Apologies then if it's either rubbish or not work safe. Anyway, I fully support the Birmingham:It's Not Shit campaign. If you watched 'Have I Got News for You' last week, you might have seen they featured a story about a mysterious "superhero" roaming the streets of Tunbridge Wells. Sadly, it turns out to have been a hoax, originally perpetrated on the local paper, which soon went global. See the full story of it here. Of course, I knew it couldn't have been true - my brother would surely have reported on such a phenomenom. Unless he was involved. Anything you care to tell us, Mark? Go on, stick your oar in: Monday 12th May20:30"Here's one I made earlier. It's covered in bling!"I spent a long-ish weekend up at my sister Crow's place in Birmingham, babysitting whilst she and husband Peter participated in the Playtex Moonwalk. And whilst it's tempting to volunteer to be a marshall on the event next year, the thought of spending the night on a comfy sofa in a nice warm house with cable TV sounds much more appealing. Anyway, congratulations to Crow and Peter, who finished in some discomfort and a time of around six hours or so. And raised a fair bit of cash for charity. Also, congrats to Heather and Lisa, who did the half-marathon walk. Check out their blogs to see how they got on.One of the things I noticed whilst I was back in Birmingham was how much things had changed since I left. The reconstruction work on the Bull Ring and the indoor market looked pretty close to completion and looks quite impressive from a distance. (It might be shite from close up, of course). Also, a lot of the bars on Broad St seemed to have changed their names. My old work-based haunt, The Rat & Parrot has become Picasso's, for example, and, shockingly, Ronnie Scott's ("Hhhm, Jazz. Nice") has closed and has been replaced by a pole-dancing club. And I don't mean old gents with unpronouncable surnames and big moustaches, toasting Lech Walesa, reminiscing about the old country and performing folk dances. (Ooh, there's a comedy sketch idea, right there. "Hang on Steve, I thought you said this was a pole-dancing club. Where's the women?") Of course, there's always been money in selling sexual fantasies to young men, so I shouldn't be too surprised, I suppose. Perhaps though, as sex clubs become more mainstream, the jazz clubs will go underground. Mark my words, one day Soho will be filled with brightly-lit doorways populated by scantily-clad women inviting you to take in "a live Sax show" or "some hot Be-Bop action" and then charging you £450 for bottle of non-alcoholic champagne. So, not really much change there...... Not much news on the old job front, I'm afraid. As I feared, the telephone interview that I had wasn't good enough to score me a face-to-face interview. The feedback was that I did not have "the depth of software-based experience possessed by other candidates". Which kind of surprised me as I don't remember there being many questions about my software-based experience. Well, if there were, I obviously didn't do a good job of answering them. Hhm, Jim in "Underselling himself" shocker! It's OK, I'm not bitter. Anyway, I've still got a couple of things on the go at the moment, so it's not quite yet time to apply for a job in MacD's. Almost, but not quite. Go on, stick your oar in: Wednesday 7th May17:25I'm dysfunctional... get me out of here!I'm grateful to amusing exploit that you can use to crash various Microsoft products, including IE. If you click through to the advisory article on Secunia, they've thoughtfully included an example of the code that you can copy and use at home, which is probably slightly less dangerous than clicking through to the test site. I thought that it was the terrible code that caused the crash rather than the use of the actual word 'crash', so I tried inserting different words in there and always got the same result. It turns out that it's the 'input type' bit that causes the crash. And, more amusingly I've found I get the same result if I remove the 'form' tags, so now I can crash my browser with just three lines of HTML! As I'm not running Windows XP (I'm keeping it 'old skool') this just closes my browser with an 'illegal operation' message. I'd be interested in the results if anyone else wants to give it a whirl. It'll either confirm that I am 'King of useless HTML exploits' or that my browser is well and truly broken....Chacun a son gout - whichly, roughly translated, means "to each his gout". And I've got mine back again. As always, it returns when I least require it. It is, of course, largely self-inflicted - a couple of days of an unbalanced and minimal food intake supplying the necessary ammunition for my body to ambush itself. It's been sort of building up since last week, but I thought I'd gotten away with it when I woke up pain-free on Sunday morning. Anyway, I've stocked up on the old anti-inflammatories and should, hopefully, be as right as rain in the next 48 hours. If not, I'll be hobbling round like an old man.... Go on, stick your oar in:
Sunday 4th May22:45"May the Fourth be with you, Luke"Yeah, yeah, I know I've used that joke already. Sue me. Actually, don't, as I haven't got any money so you'd be wasting your time and mine. Anyway, it's an "oldie but goodie". And I like it, so there. And it gives me an excuse to update the old blog, depsite the fact that there isn't that much to report.I had a telephone interview for a job on Friday morning. That is, the interview was on Friday morning, not the job. And it wasn't really an interview for the job but a screening interview, as the company contract out their HR function, so the agency screen and select applicants for a final face-to-face interview with the technical bods at the company. And I had to ring them, rather than the other way round, so I was a bit resentful of that. Added to that minor irritation, I don't think it went that well, to be honest. I could have been a bit more technical with some of my answers and I could have prepared a bit better. I ought to have anticipated the "What's your ideal job?" question, for example. I waffled a bit about "producing documentation for a wide range of end users", whilst all the time thinking that really my ideal job would involve a minimal amount of work, a maximum amount of beer and all the supermodels I could eat. And a huge salary. But not a huge celery. That'd be mad, Ted. Ah, well, they said they'd let me know towards the end of next week. At which time I'll hopefully hear something about this other job in Hull that I've been put forward for. Because if I don't, I'm not sure what I'm going to do when the money runs out. I went to Heather's Purple (birthday) Party last night. Very enjoyable it was too. I got nicely drunk, had lots of enjoyable conversations, and caught up with some ex-colleagues. And had a debate about Sean Connery's inability to play anything other than Sean Connery. Not quite sure how we got on to that, as we'd been discussing X-Men 2 earlier. And as an extra bonus, the taxi home cost me less than ten of your English quids. Result. And a 'Big Up' to Jack, who was celebrating obtaining permanant residency status by wearing a fetching pair of Union Jack boxer shorts. Nice. In case you missed it, tickets for the Cambridge Folk Festival went on sale today. I daresay there'll be a piece in the local paper tomorrow about the riots at the box office and the people who have camped out in the street for days, etc. According to yesterday's paper (telling yesterday's news) in order to keep punters entertained whilst waiting at the box office, not only were Caffe Mobile handing out free coffees but "festival musicians" were also going to be performing. I somehow doubt that these guys will actually be playing at the Folk Fest, although I will, of course, be gutted if it turns out I've missed a rare street performance by Julian Cope......Anyway, if you can't be arsed clicking through the official site, the important news is that Roddy Frame is appearing on Thursday 31st July (£12 for Cambridge residents. Otherwise Full Festival ticket holders only.) and Julian Cope is playing on Saturday 2nd August (£34 for everybody). If I had any clue as to where I might be come those dates, I might be tempted. Of course, I could always go for the full festival ticket and just camp it up, er, camp out for that weekend. Except for the fact that I don't really want to see any of the other acts on the bill. Besides I've got a few other things I think my money would be better spent on. Ah well, never mind, eh? Go on, stick your oar in:
Thursday 1st May22:50Set critical faculties to 'Stun'I went to see X2 today. You might know it better as X-Men 2, but according to the classification certificate and the opening credits, it's actually called X2. So there. Not that that made any difference to it's chances of defying the law that sequels are never as good as the first film. (There are, of course, a few notable exceptions - Empire Strikes Back, Godfather 2, Naughty Nympho Nurses 5 - but this isn't one of them.) The plot has more holes than a Swiss cheese, the dialogue is a bit ropey at times, and the story doesn't really go anywhere. Apart from Magneto escaping from jail, revealing a bit more about Wolverine's past, and (SPOILER ALERT!) one of the main characters getting killed, that is. But the 'Mutant Massacre' that the first film seemed to be setting up never materialises. Perhaps they're saving that for the third film. This one is 'Human Massacre' - Dead mutants = 2; Dead people = lots.Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler is amusing, and fairly close in characterisation to the comic book version, albeit somewhat camper. The irritating thing though is if, as he declares towards the end, he has to be able to see where he's teleporting to, how does he get into the locked Oval Office or manage to save Rogue? And, while we're on the subject of irritating things about the film - why don't the X-Men try to get Iceboy (or whatever he's called) to freeze the lake? And why does Colossus only get a cameo appearance? And why doesn't the school have an intrusion detection system, despite the fact that it has a jet plane under the basketball court and a super-powerful telepathic enhancer in the basement? And why does Hugh Jarse, er, Jackman seem determined to underplay the Wolverine role? (He needs to be a bit more "Alan Rickman" with it, I feel.) And why does Patrick Stewart seem to be playing Charles Xavier as Capt. Pickard in a wheelchair? I was waiting for him to say "Make it so, Number One" all throughout the film. And who is choosing Brian Cox's roles for him - this is the second film I've seen in recent months where he doesn't make it to the end credits. At least he makes a more substantial contribution this time. Anyway, X-Men 2 doesn't get a recommendation from me. The lack of plot advancement is what really kills it off. There's an adventure, a crisis to deal with and all that, but at the end of the day, nothing seems to have changed because of it. It's alright if you liked the first one and does kill a couple of hours or so, but it's not going to be winning any awards in the near future. I'm more excited by the forthcoming release of The Hulk, a trailer for which was shown prior to the X-Men. Although, I obviously had my pedantic hat on when I noted that, even if you did possess sufficient strength to pick up a tank by the gun barrel and fling it like an Olympic hammer, you wouldn't be able to as the barrel would bend, if not snap, and the turret mountings would shear due to the weight of the base of the tank. Still it did look fairly close to the comic book depiction of The Hulk, as opposed to the TV version, although I doubt we'll hear him shouting "Hulk smash puny humans!" The other trailers were for films that promise much but probably won't deliver. First up was Anger Management starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler. It's about a lawyer (I think) who gets sentenced to an anger management course. But the twist is that Jack's the anger management therapist and it's Adam who needs the counselling. Given that I've only ever seen one decent movie with Adam in it (The Wedding Singer) I'm not holding my breath for this one. The other trailer was for Bruce Almighty, which has the amusing comic premise that one of life's losers get the powers of God for a week, and the hilarious consequences of that (parting of the red soup, for example). Having God played by Morgan Freeman seems a good idea and the loser, Bruce (of course) is played by Jim Carrey. Which could be good or bad, depending on your viewpoint, but sadly the prescence of Jennifer Aniston (as his wife) virtually guarantees that it'll be bad. Come on name me one decent film she's been in. Apart from 'Leprechaun', that is. Go on, stick your oar in:
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