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Back in the late nineties, when MP3.com was cool (remember that?), I downloaded a bunch of songs by a group called Abney Park. Some of the recording quality was pretty terrible, some was pretty good, and some of the songs were great, or at least perfectly captured some of my moods at the time.

Then, about a week ago, Warren Ellis pointed out that their singer inspired him, only I skipped through the article (and indeed most of the internet) that day, and missed the band name. Now he’s pointed her out again, and this time I’ve noticed that yes, it’s them, and there are LiveJournals (yuck, but I guess we’ll forgive them) for both her and their writer Robert.

Their own website is beautiful, but almost completely unusable, which I supposed is one step up from LiveJournal. Ho hum, and on with the work…

Like, over my fraking head – the flash and the bang went off almost simultaneously just now, although the thunder rolled around a hell of a lot longer, so maybe I just made up the lightning and in fact I’m being bombed.

I quite liked this, until I noticed the original, which isn’t as pretty but is a good deal clearer. Anyway, if any of your condiments have expired, you now have no excuse.

(Originally via Megnut.)

Look, if you’re not watching Ze Frank already, I don’t think there’s hope for you.

Hi,
Hope I am not writing tao wrong address. I am nicea, pretty looking
girbl. I am plannbing on visiting your town this month. Can
we bmeet each other in person? Message me back at ttmo@globalmobpost.com

---

Well, “ttmo” (or “Allison”, as your totally different email address claims). Much as I am a sucker for a good “girbl” (I assume you mean “gerbil”), especially a Nicean one, I generally fall short of bmeeting people, at least until I know them a little better. What are your views on neo-imperialism? Can we overcome selfish tendencies to form a unified democracy? What exactly did we lose in the Council of Rome? Is Sarah Michelle Gellar cuter than Alyson Hannigan?

These are important questions. But not, perhaps, quite as important as: what the bloody hell can you possibly gain from sending me this email? I’m not stupid. I’m not insane. What do you actually expect me to do that will benefit you at all?

(And finally, for the geeks among us: why on earth did you send this as text/plain; charset=”us-ascii” and then specify content-transfer-encoding as 8bit? What is that supposed to mean? What are you using the eighth bit for? Is it spying on me?)

I’m rewatching the first series of Battlestar Galactica, so here are my top tips:

• in a life or death situation, try looking up
• the blondes only feel like they’re more trouble
• my evil twin is coming to get you

Thinking about it, much the same holds true for Twin Peaks.

I’ve had an email from Sarah Bee complaining that I didn’t mention that she rescued my nipple from the peg that Adam Kay’s friend put on it. No doubt if she hadn’t, somebody on the tube would have done, but let it never be said that I am an ingrate. Even though she has said it already.

She also talked about blogging and described it as “hard” because of “all that solipsism” and the depressing nature of blogging about politics. I was forced to take a step back and analyse my feelings about blogging, and I decided: no, actually I don’t find it hard. In fact, back in the day when my life consisted of processing applications for government funding in a Blairite quango, blogging was the one thing that made it worthwhile. Using time that I was being paid for, and no doubt breaking the official secrets act on several occasions (not that I’ve ever read the official secrets act), my blog was the perfect arena to mouth off about some of the ridiculous things that were getting government funding. That little bit of subversion kept me alive.

But it wasn’t just subversive; in those days, I could virtually float out of my office-bound body and hover in an internety space of musings about driving a pink Uncertainty Division minibus, dancing in the fields like Julie Andrews, and being Angela Tilby on “Thought for the Dairy“. But a few highlights which spring to mind.

But maybe my attitude is just the complete opposite of Bee’s. For while she says that she once blogged about bees and describes it as a “nadir”, my experience of blogging about bees is that it is anything but a nadir.

Ah…but that was back in the days when I was forced to do menial labour for which I was underpaid and overqualified, just so that I could scrape enough to live the dream. Now that I’m actually living the dream, has my blog become just a series of self-agrandising discussions of my nipple and plugs for the many and varied performances and publications I’m involved in?

Sigh. Innocence truly is dead.

Which reminds me, you can buy my CD right now, right here. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned quite how beautiful it is. And at an insanely low price, too! Could you get a new Busted album for £6.99? I doubt it. So hurry along and buy it now before I petition my publishers to put the price up.

In this photograph a sweaty James Lark points with pride to the cover of The Rise and Fall of Deon Vonniget in the aftermath of a sell-out performance.

I’m sorry, the sniffer bees were exciting, but that is better.

I joked to Paul on Friday that the internet was full (it’s actually Owen’s joke, or at least I got it from him). Today it really does feel like it’s true. Almost no one is blogging anything; the BBC is, well, dull (although you have to love the article title Rice holds key talks in Lebanon). Where has all the vibrant activity gone?

Is it a holiday in America or something?

The one good thing I’ve discovered today (while trying to figure out why everything is so god damn quiet) is Arbor Day, and in particular their beautiful little article which is today’s Tree Basic. “I need very basic instructions on how to plant a tree.”

Bless.

This seems like a good policy for any pub or bar wishing to avoid hanky panky:

At times, James was hallucinating it, but frankly I think at times so was Sue Perkins, myself and indeed all of the LBC listeners. More radio should be that bonkers – and James still managed to pull off a callback. (The download of the show isn’t available yet, so you’ll have to wait unless you were able to tune in yourself.)

A callback for me alone was watching Twister tonight (I slipped, okay?), because it has Jami Gertz, who was of course in The Lost Boys – which Sarah Bee and I talked about at length last night. Apparently Twister was the first movie released on DVD – it must also have been one of the last Amblin films, because The Peacemaker (the first Dreamworks picture) was released the following year. (I have a freaky memory for this kind of stuff.)

Strangely, this isn’t the first time I’ve played chase-the-reference with Twister; I did it about seven years ago, back in a younger, simpler world, when I ran my blog on software I’d written myself because there wasn’t anything else, and nobody called them blogs anyway because it was a stupid name. (The note on IMDb has gone from Joss Whedon being an uncredited writer to his name having appeared on an earlier draft, neither a surprise with Jan de Bont directing, a bit like Alan Ruck turning up; and you can feel Joss Whedon’s punch to some of the dialogue, even if a couple of the jokes have blatantly had the middle ripped out.)