My current reading on the bus is a book called THIS IS POP: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A FAILED ROCK STAR, written by Ed Jones. THIS IS POP is a perfect companion piece to my Bill Drummond and Julian Cope books. They’re the men that made it on their own terms. Ed Jones did not make it. Ed Jones was the bassist for my favourite band ever, the Tansads. The Tansads are notable for having been supported in their day by bands like by The Verve, Cast, Kula Shaker and Dodgy, and yet despite being better than any of those bands, never getting the kind of acclaim and recognition they deserved. They got unlucky. They were marketed in all the wrong ways, and fucked about by their record company in a wholly rotten manner. They vanished without trace, like so many others.

And this is why I love them – because they never got a chance to keep going, never got a chance to go downhill. The music is perfectly preserved indie-pop-rock, with a hint of Levellers-esque crust (which is probably what killed them – to crusty for the normal people, not crusty enough for the crusties). It’s bouncy, happy and fun, and will remain so despite the fact that they never got anywhere.

Complaint from a client “Please explain the 100 pound charge for fixing errors in our HTML mail”. Answer : “You were unwilling to do it yourself and it fell on a technical department desk.” It’s occasionally amusing dealing with staff from other companies who have no idea how time is charged out at design/internet marketing agencies. Without giving away anything I’m not allowed to: when I first started doing this sort of work, getting on for four years ago, as a junior dogsbody, my time was worth 80 quid an hour. I have a lot more skills now that I did then…

Surrender Control. Interesting, if slightly mad idea. It’s reminded me of a conversation with Hugh about a LARP that made use of SMS/e-mail – designate one, maybe two nights of the week as game nights, when people might get SMS’s, phone calls etc. related to the game (and e-mails/web-basde contact at any time, I guess). Actually, it’s one of the few role-playing related ideas to really grab me in the last while – I’d love to run a nasty, paranoid LARP using properly modern tools. Hugh was talking about the possibility of being able to run something genuinely country-wide with this sort of thing, but I’m not sure I’d want to go that far. If I could get twenty players and two more refs in the London area for it, then I’d probably do it. You could do so much to engender paranoia with this – players that hardly ever see one another, meeting in bars in response to text messages from an unknown source. Is someone else watching them? Does anyone know what’s really going on? Just who is that guy who always seems to be leaving the bar as they arrive? How did someone else know that they would be out that night, in order to leave that message on their answerphone?

God, yes.

Which Buffy character are you? Apparently, I’m Spike. I was expecting Xander, but while I’ve no idea which suits me better, I do like Spike more as a character, so hurrah! But god, the bit at the end that describes the character is just awful. Exactly how can one be “a rebel with a capital yeow”?

I fear I am coming down with yet another fucking cold. I’m absolutely exhausted, and I feel headachey and generally rotten. I’ve had far too many colds lately. They really piss me off, as I always, always get at least one night of entertaining fever dreams with a cold. It’s just the way my system works. Additionally, it really fucks up my gym-going, because not only do I miss a while with a cold, but it always get my asthma going as well, and I can’t do my workout without coughing up great chunks of lung.

I have nothing useful or interesting to say. I have had a pleasant, if rather dull day, doing not very much, followed by a quiet night out with Antony, Marcia and Andrew, which was nice, since we haven’t really just had a chance to go out for a quiet drink in ages – it always seems to be big sessions with a large crowd.

Like I say, pleasant, but hardly anything worth talking about. So tell you what, why don’t you go and read about Anna’s day, which sounds like it was more interesting than mine.

Go on, sod off.

Despite the fact that I have been listening to Enya all morning, I’ve got Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick” playing on repeat in my brain. I don’t know why.

I can’t decide if my relatively hangover-free status right now means that it’s going to get worse before it gets better, or if I’ve just got lucky and managed to avoid the level of hangover that I deserve. I hadn’t planned to get that drunk last night, but I seem to have managed to do a pretty good job of it regardless. I’m now racking my brains to check what astonishingly stupid things I said at various points throughout the night…

My Monster Match is The Mummy, apparently. But when the description opens with: “Has anyone ever told you that you look sharp in linen, and white is definitely your color? From head to toe, you are the best dressed of the zombie clan.” You know something’s flawed in their testing procedure.

Found in the comments of some code I wrote last year : “We are sexier and more clever than their simple scripts.”

I don’t recall writing that comment, but everyone else at work is frightened of that particular piece of code, so I’m the only one that touches it. I must have been in a odd mood that day.