John Walker's Electronic House

Today is Celebrate Your Home Entertainment System Day!

The best of all the Tuesdays in a year.

And so, entering the festive spirit, here are the results of our hard work getting the lounge ready in time.

As you can see, it’s the best thing ever. We decided to light ours up with a game of Metroid Prime and a showing of Terminator 2. Other interesting facts about the creation of our home entertainment system are:

– We plan to add a PC to it all soon.

– It is a fire risk that will eventually kill us, and all who live in our flats.

Here is another picture, that I think better captures the ambience we have attempted to achieve:

So, so beautiful.

Happy Celebrate Your Home Entertainment System Day everybody!

And here he is.

He was bought because of his appearance as horribly racist tat, and thus as an attempt at improving the tone of Bath’s Cancer Research greatly. But he offers a surprise. Written on the side of the base is the name, “Billy Waters”. Which when put into Google reveals a history, quite unexpected.

“One character who performed on the stage was Billy Waters, who also busked outside the Adelphi Theatre, in the Strand, in London. He appeared before an audience as himself in Life in London at the Adelphi and at the Caledonian Theatre in Edinburgh. Billy’s lines were to be spoken with a strong African accent, and he also sang these words of a song:

That all men are beggars, ’tis very plain you see:
Only some they are of lowly, and some of high degree.”

This site links to more information that I reproduce below without permission. I’m sure it’s all their copyright. I’m also sure that they believe that sharing knowledge is more important than its selfish ownership.

Stolen from here

It seems Billy was quite popular in his town and time. But died in poverty, having pawned away both his fiddle and his wooden pin.

That he is depicted in such a fashion is indicative of so much that is so wrong. But that he is remembered should be a good thing. Here’s to Billy Waters, a man of high degree.

I went to a charity shop today – Cancer Research to be unnecessarily precise.

I wish Harry Hill hadn’t said this first, but he did, so it’s in quotes.

“It’s no wonder they haven’t found a cure for cancer yet. It’s just old ladies selling second hand clothes.”

The reason for such a trip was to purchse some Tat, in preparation for a trip to Uncivilised London tomorrow. There is to be a meeting of a mailing list I’ve been on for eight years now. Every now and then, people gather together to see what each other look like, and to be surprised that we don’t spend the entire day arguing and calling each other names, but instead talk in a rowdy and happy fashion.

As far as I can tell, traditions are things that have been done twice. And so tomorrow should mark the beginning of a new tradition, as for the second year in a row all attendees are required to bring the absolute worst piece of charity shop tat they can find.

Last time, competition was tough. My “Tat Box” was not a strong contender at all, dwarfed by some of the remarkable awfulness that appared.

Perhaps most memorable was the glow-in-the-dark fridge magnet Jesus. It’s hard to imagine the path of logic that led to this particular delight. “Hmmm, there’s nothing I hate more than when I go into the kitchen at night time during a powercut, and I’m unable to locate the exact place I attached a piece of paper to my fridge door, and, er, Jesus is nice.” No – there is simply no possible route to get there.

Anyhow, this year I believe I am more powerfully placed with the hideous quality of my chosen item. I explained to the lady in Cancer Research how I was immeasurably improving the tone of her shop by removing it. She looked at it, looked up at me, and said, “Oh dear.”

But I cannot reveal its awful ways until after the weekend.

It was fortunate that nothing whatsoever happened on Wednesday, meaning that I’m no longer a day behind.

So Tuesday and the trip to Uncivilised London. Where… nothing whatsoever happened.

I walked to the train station first thing in the morning, and arrived fifteen minutes early for my train. A train that pulled into the station on time. It was a peak time train from the South West to London, but there were plenty of seats free, and Ross and I were able to sit at the same table. There had been reports on the radio that there was a problem at Paddington so our train might get redirected to Waterloo. But this would be fine, as we were heading towards Oxford Street, and either would do. But it arrived in Paddington, on time, without anything happening along the way.

We made our way uneventfully to Oxford Street tube stop, and then had to find our way to Charlotte Street. Which we found straight away. Waiting in a room in the hotel, being fed pastries and coffee, we were told that the half the streets in the area had just been shut down due to a bomb alert, with the roads leading to the hotel inaccessible. We sat in a small room full of journalists, eating pastries and drinking coffee.

And so on.

It was as if the entire universe had conspired against me from having a single interesting incident to write about.

So instead, here is a picture of what my friend Nick would look like if he were to have been Marx.

IT’S SUPER MONKEY WORLD LAND!

Bank holiday Mondays tend to slide past me like a shiny thing on a surface offering little friction that runs alonside where I am. The only difference between they and any other Monday is that on these days everyone else is getting up at 11am and sitting around in their pants until about 3pm, when they decide to go out, but then don’t, as well.

But of course this isn’t the real purpose of the BHM, as I now affectionately call it. BHM’s are days for the whole family to pile into a car and drive to a National Trust building, containing a remarkable collection of purple ropes and “STAFF ONLY” signs on any door that looks as if it might lead anywhere vaguely interesting, and thus risk killing National Trust visitors to death. They must be very good places for people who have been told by the doctor to “take things easy for a bit, and don’t do anything that will excite you”. In fact, where you see those signs saying, “WARNING: Not suitable for those with heart conditions or of a nervous disposition”, there should always be a National Trust booklet available so that people perpetually in the position of being nervious don’t feel left out.

So it was on BHM (it’ll catch on) that Alec, Becky, Dan, Adam and myself squeezed into my tiny little Punto-o-rubbish and drove to SUPER MONKEY WORLD II: THE MONKEY MENACE. The purpose of our visit: to see Alec and Becky’s long-lost bastard monkey son.

MONKEY KONG III: A TRIBUTE (clever joke for one person there) is an excellent place. It isn’t a horrid zoo, but an enormous sanctuary for mistreated apes and monkeys. Mistreated before they got there. It’s not some sick place where they take monkeys and mistreat them for the crowd’s entertainment. You weirdo. So it’s doing great things, all in large enclosures with few animals in each. Which while being brilliant, does mean that it’s incredibly hard to actually see anything.

Thanks to Adam’s supermagic camera and his supermagic photography skills, here’s some proof that there were actual real life monkeys present.

The lemurs are great. They’re in a special wooded area, kept apart from the rest of the world by special woodland air-locks, where you have to close the door behind you before opening the one in front. Like on a spaceship. Except in the woods. And without the hissing noises. But after that, they’re free to roam around at will, meaning they occasionally hop onto the path and kill a child.

I dared Adam to get a proper nature documentary photo of a lemur in mid-leap. They the beasts very kindly obliged, and about seven of them took it in turns to jump a gap above their sleepy area in front of us. Amazingly, he managed it, proving himself worthy of his previous job editing Some Camera Magazine, as I believe it was called. He failed to fix any PCs or complete any new first person shooters throughout the course of the visit, so I’m yet to be convinced if he’s worthy of his current job editing PC Format. (I am really. Give me more work).

But the highlight of the day had to be lunch. Arriving hungry and car weary, we headed for the only eatery available. It smelled of school canteen, and offered a menu that looked as though it had been created by a rubbish aunt’s memory of what fast food chains are like. We all ordered our MEGA MONKEY DOUBLE SKILLO BURGERS or something, and sat down outside to enjoy the delicious meaty goodness (apart from Alec, who is a vegetarian, and so ate some lettuce I expect). Until Becky pointed at Dan’s half consumed burger, observing that it wasn’t so much cooked, as not cooked.

And here it is.

And this is why Dan’s now dead.

I should probably write some sort of laboured comments about how rubbish fast food chains are, and link it all in nicely, but the truth is, just remembering the difficulty chewing and the leaden weight of the evil lunch in my stomach is making me feel a bit ill. I can still taste it.

Moral: When you visit MEGA MONKEY LAND ADVANCED, take a picnic. And some flowers for Dan’s impromptu grave, by the Evilburger restaurant.

Folks and arteries, I am in Uncivilised London today, inevitably stumbling upon all manner of hilarious incidents to be repeated within the blogwalls of this land.

So tales of SUPER MONKEY WORLD will have to wait for tomorrow, meaning you won’t yet be hearing tale of POISONOUS BURGERS, WHY BRITAIN SHOULD BE ENTIRELY TARMACKED or THE EXPLOSION THAT KILLED A THOUSAND MONKEYS. One of these tales you won’t be hearing even when I do write about it.

Meanwhile, please write your predictions of my London adventures in the Tsukkomis. Remember, tiny babies read this site, so try as hard as you can not to use poopywords.

There is a new initiative, attempting to scare the British public away from purchasing pirated DVDs. This is post isn’t about the rights and wrongs of piracy. This is about the rights and wrongs of telling lies to further your profits.

The Industry Trust for IP Awareness Limited have launched a new campaign called Piracy Is A Crime.

Never mind that they at no point attempt to explain what they mean by “Piracy”. It’s a safe phrase to use, because yes, boarding a boat at sea and stealing its cargo is indeed a crime. Incidents of piracy are on the increase, with one major shipping channel seeing a 33% increase in attacks. None could claim that piracy isn’t a real and dangerous problem. Although, as a rule, it’s not quite such an imposition upon those of us living in the British Isles.

However, as we well know, this is just the lazy catch-all phrase used by the various industries to make “copying” sound scarier. But apparently not nearly scary enough. Because now we are being asked to believe that copying DVDs funds terrorism.

It’s all such pitiful rubbish that it becomes painful to refute. There is no presentable evidence for any of their claims, their information is littered with “could be”, “might” and “potentially”. Their headlines are statements, their proofs are wishy washy filler. Because they’re hoping rather desperately you won’t bother to check.

If, for some reason, you did want to check to see if they are lying to you, here are some good places to go.

Stuart Campbell’s forum has been anonymously posted to by an individual calling himself HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC (a rather pointed reference to previous such campaigns, that were equally deceitful), who has done some fantastic work taking the literature apart, and addressing what the real intentions are.

Stuart Campbell himself has written an extensive article, pulling together all the current activity by the industries, which is a must read.

Also there’s some fascinating (if horribly painful) listening here. A programme from BBC Five Live on Sunday morning, looking at this current campaign. Lynn Faulds-Wood, fronting the campaign alongside Jonathan Ross (sigh), manages to make an utter fool of herself. The balance presented is abysmal (but then the BBC are on board with this ludicrous movement, so that shouldn’t be too surprising), but there’s a nice twist at the end when the Lib Dem MP, brought in to back the whole thing up, actually rubbishes the entire terrorism angle.

Finally, there are a couple of additions to the panel at the right (or at the bottom if you’ve got a rubbish computer). One, not to do with the subject, is Victoria Hiley’s excellent new blog. Then there’s some new magazine articles of mine, on the topic and contravening the topic at the same time, so shhhh.

A lot of money is being spent on this campaign. Don’t let it have worked. Look into it, and then tell others to do the same.

Apologies for no update yesterday – I was probably doing something enormously important.

Today was spent finally divorcing Sian from her foolhardy love for Ikea. In a search to find another bookcase to fill Jon’s lounge with nothing but shelving, we visited the Swedish embassy for furniture, in the hope that they would still at least offer their reasonably-priced reconstituted wood flat-pack shelving joy. They succeeded on all but the first part, now wanting a staggering £55 for a silly bookshelf. This has the two-fold evil of making them ludicrously expensive, and also proving Jonty right when he banged on about how Ikea was ludicrously expensive.

Fortunately the Bargain Corner rescued everyone involved by offering a damaged (I’ve run out of ways to say ‘bookshelf’) for some money less. It only had an exploded corner at the top, which matters none for the rough-style hipster stylings of my ultro-trendy homepad, and so we set to work in standing around looking confused hoping that someone would tell us what to do.

Sian, being the sort with initiative, went to speak to one of the yellow-shirted minions, then quite spectacularly haggled the price down further due to the size of the chip missing, and went off on a quest for mugs, like some sort of mug-needing superhero. The man eventually returned from whatever far off world it is that they change the prices of things (I like to think it’s through the back of an Ikea wardrobe, to a place called Nörnia), and gave me the label.

“There you go,” he said, as I stood next to the assembled bookshelf, strapped to other items of heavy assembled furniture by a buckled blue material. And he made to leave.

“Um,” I began, and looked at the shelf.

“Oh, do you want to take it apart?” He asked, surprised that I might not want to just move into Bargain Corner with all my books that afternoon, presumably sleeping on any damaged beds that might occasionally appear.

“Yes,” I said politely, “but I also need it to not be tied to all the other furniture.”

He appeared surprised again, but began fighting with the crazy Ikea-brand buckle, and eventually won it free. There you go, he said, and made to leave again.

“Um.” He looked surprised. Then at the shelves. Then at me. And then… “Oh! You’ll want some tools.” Yes indeed, it appears that my lack of finger tips in the shape of alan keys has let me down once again.

All this was fine – dippy guy in the shop, all normal. But it was his return with hammer, screwdriver and key that bothered me. You see, because of my inability to ship all my belongings to Ikea and live there, and then my inability to tear the shelving apart with my bare hands, he had presumed me a complete idiot. “This is the alan key. You put it in here, and here, and here, and then you pull…”

“Yes! Yes, thank you.”

“And to get the backboard off, you’ll need to prize the nails out by using the screwdriv…”

“Yes! Thank you for your help. I was intending to knaw it off with my teeth, so I’m glad you brought that up. Should I also take care not to set it on fire, climb to the top of the building and hurl it towards the carpark below?”

It was like the feeling of going to a car mechanic and know you’re being patronised (“When was the last time you decranked your fripponshaft mate?” “My frippenwhowhen?” “Sigh… nevermind.”) but in this case, knowing exactly what I was doing without cause for his furrowed brow.

The last time I went to a mechanic the guy said to me, “What CC is your car?” I said, “I don’t know.” He sighed loudly. “But I’ve got all the documentation for the car here – I’ll have a look.” I said helpfully.

“It won’t be in your car’s documentation,” he groaned at me. And so I meekly hung my head and said, “Oh, sorry.” And was useless to him and all of mankind.

What I now know I should have said was, “If it’s not in the documentation, THEN HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THE INFORMATION?! MY MAGIC PSYCHIC KNOWLEDGE OF THE CC OF ALL CARS IN EXISTENCE?! Was I supposed to immediately research the CC of crappy red Puntos on the day I bought it, in feverish excitement to learn this mystical number, unavailable in the car’s own documents? WHAT?! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”

I hope Ikea Guy’s car won’t start tomorrow.

I think I’m turning into a housewife.

Except I prefer “stay-at-home mom”. Please don’t call me a housewife as I find this offensive. I work independently, and have my own life beyond the cooking and cleaning of my home.

On Sunday, the entire surface area of my new room was covered in cardboard boxes and carrier bags. Any square inch covered by furniture was used to support further cardboard boxes and carrier bags, and if with shelves, on an impressive multi-story scale. After three days of sorting through these, I am now finally somewhere near to Living Conditions. I have cleverly got around sorting out the last nine billion carrier bags of stuff by putting them all in a corner and then putting my beanbag in front of them. This makes them go away. It does.

I have discovered that Mr Hicks manages to live without eating. It’s impressive. Unless of course his diet is entirely clingfilm and salt. He shall arrive home this evening to face the horror of cupboards filled with foodstuffs, foodstuffs not in their eat-me-now form. Ingredients. Will he be able to take it? Will I be evicted upon the morrow? Stay tuned for these exciting adventures.

As the everwise Rev. Stu pointed out to me, putting away is so much less destroying than packing up. It’s nest-building, home-creating. It’s arranging your world in such a fashion that it is safe and comfortable. Admittedly, in my ideal safe and comfortable home, moving the beanbag wouldn’t reveal nine billion bags of assorted unsorted rubbish, but there is only so much sorting I am capable of in a day. And ooh, the kitchen is just bursting with sorted goodness.

In response to queries about Festival Girl:

I’m worried about her. She wasn’t there. I do hope she’s ok, and didn’t accidentily meet some horrid old twerp on the way to the festival, hence losing her Festival Girl status before we could even meet for the first time. Imagine that. In fact there were a couple of potentials who managed to fall short of the title by having accidentily got themselves involved in relationships far too long ago. The first was the steward guarding the entrance to one building, who helped me realise that the music playing was Snow Patrol. I felt we’d really bonded over that, but then I saw her later that evening, arms around another man. The brazened hussy. You can’t go around telling someone that the music playing in a building is Snow Patrol and then just waltz off with another man. The cheek.

The second was an even sadder story. My college had a stand in the market tents, which was left unattended for enormous stretches of time. Sian and I decided to sit at it for a bit in case any other idiots wanted to be youth workers, so we could look at them incredulously, and pity their idiot thinking. I was wearing my extra-splendid, “JESUS HELPS ME TRICK PEOPLE” t-shirt, which was made odd when surrounded by 15,000 Christians. It’s a strange sensation to realise that you’re being read, but made so much fun by the look of pained confusion on their faces as they pass. It doesn’t quite make sense, whichever way you think about it, which is just perfect. (I used to have a t-shirt as a teenager which said, “IDIOT”. It was for the Wonderstuff, revealed on the back, but it received my very favourite confused looks as people walked past. “Why would he have ‘IDIOT’ on his t-shirt? Is he an idiot? If so, why would he wear it? If not, why would he wear it? LOGIC ERROR LOGIC ERROR…” I would hear little pops as people’s brains exploded just as I’d walked past them. How I wish I still had that t-shirt).

On an opposite stall stood a gorgeous girl. She was tall and pretty, with excellent hair and the best smile. She read my t-shirt from across the marquet, and then caught my eye. We conducted an excellent conversation through mouthed words and improvised sign language, as I attempted to explain that it doesn’t really make sense. Then a girl walked between our stalls wearing an awful t-shirt, bearing some ridiculous comment that I forget. We looked at each other again, and exchanged screwed up faces with tongues stuck out. It was beautiful. It was true love. We were meant to be, forever, always. And then I saw the engagement ring on her left ring finger. Another beautiful future was squished under life’s cruel boot like the useless pavement-stranded worm it truly was.

So yeah, no beautiful festival romances.

Unless you count the potato wedges.

And here I am.

This evening I’ve managed to put up some shelves, and thus empty boxes’ contents upon them. And then pushed everything to the sides in my room to make enough space for a mattress to fit on the floor. Then got the computer working.

Space. Bed. Computer. My priorities, I have learned.

And with annoying headache, I retire from the evening and head towards bed. In a new house.

It’s all quite weird.