too busy

But that brings in the pennies. Another day another dollar etc.

And of course it means no time to talk about our dismal failure at the home of the scum again - even if the referee was a liability. Mascherano was sent off for dissent because Ashley Cole was not 4 days before. Which is hardly the way to make the point about dissent.

Still, the Toffees and then 3 matches against Arsenal which define both our seasons. I would be happy to take the Champions league quarter final, and not the Premiership match. But realistically both of us need all 3. Beginning to look like Man U's season.

Next

Internazionale tumble to the mighty Reds, or at least the combination of 2 soft sendings off, and the mighty Fernando Torres.
So the season continues - at least until the draw on Friday. Never happy, us football fans. Though the season has picked up oddly after Barnsley beat Chelsea, and it became the year when "the big 4" didn't win the FA Cup. Somehow that helped deal with them putting us out in the earlier round.

Meanwhile... here are the countries I have visited. Still a lot to go.


create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

snow again

Which is a funny reminder that winter still has a last blow.
Well the might reds have squeaked past Inter 2-0, Middlesbrough 3-2, Bolton 1-3 and apparently the season now comes down to beating West Ham and Newcastle and avoiding defeat to Inter. Here's hoping.

Has to be said that Torres is a God. He singlehandedly destroyed Boro. Though it has to be said that recently I have wondered if we were actually paying the opposition to gift us goals.

I strongly recommend Melvin Bragg's In our Time on Radio 4. How many people can say that?

skiing...

...is rather good fun. Next week on statements of the bleeding obvious we will be saying that some middle aged men like golf.

Anyway, I go away for a while and Liverpool have fallen apart like Northern Rock - there is still something there but goodness things are not going well.

But as I write, we have just taken the lead against Internazionale...

More statements of the bleeding obvious

The new Radiohead album is very good. And so are Sigur Ros.

Next time on statements of the bleeding obvious, George W Bush is a controversial president, and Gordon Brown is rather dour...

Oh, and The Ghost by Robert Harris is excellent. More than that, brilliant. And short. I even forgive him for not writing another Cicero book.

On a tangent, I met Kirsty McGee working reception at an expensive and trendy office complex. She like los bros Hernandez, and is a rather good singer/songwriter in the Michelle Shocked mode. Click on the link and see...www.kirstymcgee.com

All of which I only know because the people I was seeing were an hour late. I mean, it is not as if I had driven 50 miles to see them.

reconnected

As I was saying... it is the time of year when we seem to reconnect with people. The aftershocks of Christmas cards unexpected, or reminders that a whole year (or more) has passed.

It lead to a party where we all seemed older, more mellow and more settled. Which probably means we don't have the thrusting vibrant hopes of earlier years. So we can afford to be more generous with each other and the world around us. If a little dissapointed that we were not in fact going to set the world ablaze.

Of course it can still all turn out badly, even if the upside now seems to be keeping what we have. A couple of friends have lost their marrriages when they retired and their partners realised that they didn't actually want them in their lives. And a couple more have remarried to Russian partners - which will have interesting consequences in the years to come.

Our lives move on, but even the drama seems so undramatic compared to our teens when a look, a glance, a word could be the whole world.

It is only fair to point out that Tesco have now paid up for bashing the PPC. Only 13 months after the incident. Or collision, because accident means there is no one to blame... (Hot Fuzz - great movie).

Looks like I was right about our season - off to see the mighty reds vs wimpy Wigan, and if we don't win then Rafa may be for the chop. So, all we have to do to save the season is beat Internazionale. Easy stuff. Next!

another year

Welcome to 2008. Sounds like the future to me.

Finally watched the last few episodes of Battlestar Galactica Series 3. Great stuff. Great.
Makes me hate Richard Branson for denying me it in May 07. Bastard. Virgin Media are still rubbish, and still have an almost total lack of HD programmes - as well of course as high fees, and no Sky ONE. Bastards.

I would willingly switcht to SKY, if they and BT did not want to charge me so much for the privilige of buying from them. £150 for a new phone line, plus £300 for a new HD box, plus installation. I mean, I would like to - but that is going to be £500. Somewhat cheaper to bitch about it and wait for the box sets. Bastards.

That was the season that was

So, Merry Christmas. The Premiership is gone with the loss to MU, the League cup with the loss to Chelsea. And now we have Inter, run away leaders of the Italian League. So, that's the season gone right there.


So, here's to 2008/9

Happy new year.

Hey, I missed November

Listening to Central Reservation, Beth Orton.

I appear to have missed out November. First time. Says something about my month. And now 2 in a day.

Click on the Link - I find it rather romantic.

Outside it's Blade Runner

For what seems no good reason I find myself in Kuala Lumpur. It is night and raining. And indeed, it appears to be Blade Runner. Ok, there are no flyers and I have not actually seen Deckard hunting replicants, but apart from that this is it exactly. Constant warm rain, glowing neon, a sky the colour of tv tuned to a dead channel, mixed English and Asian languages, every nationality under the sun. Or rather the rain.

The future is now - just not evenly distributed.

The fusion of William Gibson and Blade Runner reminds me that WG had to leave the cinema when watching the film because he was seeing the Neuromancer in his head on the screen. And somehow they merge in the real world.

Rust never sleeps

But insurance claims do seem to. We are nearing the anniversary of when a well known supermarket (begins with T, ends with Esco) dropped off the weekly shop and drove off with a cheery wave, taking out the side of the purple people carrier on the way. The first I knew about this was when a passing motorist rang the doorbell and asked "is that your PPC that Tesco have just hit?" Unluckily for me I did not take her details. Luckily for me another guy stopped and gave me his, and offered to be a witness.

Insurance paid up apart from my excess, and promised to repay that when they got the money back. We are now getting ready to go to court. Court! What a ridiculous thing. The delivery guy says there was no accident, and so both sides are merrily running up legal bills and threatening to waste court time.

Well I was always interested in legal proceedings. Looks like I will get to see them up close.

Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin appears to be in fact film critic Mark Kermode.


Whilst this would explain why Mark's hairstyle is more appropriate to the 50's, it does beg the question of why he has not aged. Obviously, he is some kind of Soviet super soldier, a la Steve Rodgers, better known as Captain America. Well, known to some anyhow. And thus the hidden conspiricies in the world are laid bare.





Don't rush to thank me.

I remember the future

Today is the 50th Anniversary of Sputnik 1. And the breadcrumbs have never known a man on the moon. I imagined a different future.

There were only just over 50 years from the Wright Brothers to space, and only 12 from the first satellite to man walking on the moon. There has been little progress since. The X-prize may have stimulated interest in private enterprise launching space flights, but in reality these are sub-orbital hops. Not the real thing. I suspect, but hope I am wrong, that interest will die quickly when the routine flights start.

It is a long way to the moon. We don't think about it. Colleagues asked me to help them with a plan to "walk to the moon" to improve fitness. It is difficult to explain that all the interesting stuff happens in the first 10 miles, and then there is more or less nothing to report for a quarter of a million (we can ignore a few Lagrange points). We live in the layer of paint and varnish on a globe. The highest mountain is only 8 miles high, on a planet that is near enough 4 000 miles in diameter. A mere bobble. Space starts in earnest after 100miles. Still insignificant really.

Space is hard. But when I was growing up I thought we would be doing better than this. Here's to Laika, and Gagarin, and Ed White, and Neil Armstrong. And the first man on Mars. I wonder if he is even born yet.

Bat cheez burger

Thank mightgodking, not me.

Is that assigning credit, or blame?

TV now broken. Of course it is. It is 14 months old, and therefore 2 months out of warranty. That is actually quite reasonable. I mean who expects an £800 tv to last?

It then took me until 9pm to make the digibox work with the spare tv. Of course if I had RTFM it might not have taken that long. All I had to do was press reset, hold down the pause and stop buttons, then press FF until I selected SD not HDrni. Obvious really. Can you read the sarcasm?

The best bit is that seeing the 17" replacing the 37", Kid A asked "did you shrink the tv?" Almost made the whole thing worthwhile.

win some lose some

So, the roof leaks and damages the house. Both will cost £800 to fix. The insurance will pay one, but not the other. Not much choice is there?

TV

Mrs Breadcrumb has been away from home earning a crust. What splendid timing, since it co-incides with the Mighty Reds crushing Reading in the League Cup, and a number of excellent documentaries.

Torres is really looking the part. There was a coolness in his hattrick against Reading that just made you feel he could not miss. He is a class apart, and I can feel a Reds hero in development. Nothing against Crouch or Kuyt, but not since Owen have we had striker you feel is going to score. And terrorises defenders.

On tv as well as a Factory documentary (the history of Factory is the nearest thing I would have to a Mastermind subject) there have been some interesting comics documentaries. In search of Steve Ditko was not really illuminating (mainly because he refuses to talk), and Comics Brittania though interesting wasn't that exciting. In search of Mobius was great though. For the first time I could really see the Moebius contribution to Alien. The art is still so fantastic, though it appears that Giraud himself is less fabulous. He himself says that everything is second to his art. Lots of people applauded his genius - none called themselves his friend.

Winter Blues

I am sure that the reason I am so down is because of the change of the seasons, and not because we have run out of money (again), there is a hole in the roof, and I have no work coming in. That would be just crazy talk.

And of course I am fat, which doesn't help. Though apparently I lost 2 kg over the week, I gained 6 kg over the summer. This should help protect me through the winter when the heating is cut off and rain pours in through the roof. So, a bright side, eh?

Bill Bailey Kraftwerk spoof Das Hokey Cokey

You can't argue, can you?

Things fall apart

One of those days. Lost my laptop power cable. Remote for the car doesn't work. They days when everything electric is cursed.
Of course this is all really just because I have just found out that I have put on 5 kg during the summer. Suddenly the folds of fat feel obvious around my midrift. So, for 30 seconds or so I am dedicated to fighting the flab and cutting down on the chocolate, and stepping up the exercise.

But no doubt only for 30 seconds.

I think I would be happy to replace an addition to exercise for several of my other additions.