Bluebird Kid Clark

among the many great gifts i got in my christmas stocking this year was this little album. many of you will know of them or maybe heard them in their early incarnation the pedestrians. They are now called Bluebird Kid Clark. anyway i thought it was worth a post saying how good the album is as i fear it won't get enough exposure. i think it's just being sold through the bands myspace page and itunes. anyway if you go to their myspace page you can hear some of the songs. TheLife and Times of Peter Smith is a real gem. It's sounds like it's right out of the 1960's . in fact i think they introduce it as a Mungo Jerry song when they play it live but it's all theirs.
Nice one tim.

that christmas pub quiz part 1

ok so i'll put the finished pub quiz up so you can have a go at it if you have a few spare minutes over christmas. but be warned some would say it was too hard. see what you think. not sure what to do about the answers. think i might put them on as a comment. so the first half are on christmas and the second on 2006 (maybe tenuiously) then there is a picture round. if i did them again i would probably change quite a few but these were how they were presented in the Farmers Arms, Llanfynydd, Carmerthenshire on wed 20th December 2006......


Round 1 Christmas

1. Under which English Ruler was the celebration of Christmas banned?
2. Which countries soldiers won the festive football game during the Christmas trucein the trenches in 1914? Bonus point-What was the score?
3.What language would Father Christmas have to use to talk to the locals in his native Lapland?
4.Who wrote "A child's Christmas in Wales"?
5. The band St Etienne sang "I was born on Christmas Day" in 1994, but what day would your birthday be if you had been born on St Etienne's Day?
6.In what year was the first Royal Christmas Broadcast?
7. Which early Christian council was St.Nicholas kicked out of for slapping another bishop?
8. Which city was St. Nicholas the bishop of?
9.Mary, Joseph and Jesus fled to Egypt to escape Herod. What is the only other modern day African country to be mentioned in the Bible/
10. Which Glam Rocker did Bing Crosby duet with on "Little Drumer Boy" for Christmas 1977 of whom he said "I've never heard of him but he sings well, he's got a good voice and he reads lines well, he could be a fine actor if he wanted to be"?

11. What was last years Christmas No 1 and who sung it?
12. What are the traditional names of the 3 wise men?
13 Which religion did they follow?
14. Christmas Day is also a Quarter Day when tradtionally rents and rates were paid. Lady Day is also one on March 25th. When are the other two and what are teh days called?
15. Name the 3 reindeers with names beginning in the letter D.
16. In the Pogues christmas song "A fairytale of New York" what song were the boys of the NYPD choir singing?
17. A famous American actor appears in the video as a policeman. Who is it?
18. In which city was Handel's Messiah first performed?
19. What date is the first day of Christmas , as mentioned in the song- the 12 days of Christmas?
20. How many gifts would you have received form your true love after all 12 days of Christmas? How many of them would have been birds? (partridge and the pear tree counts as 1 by the way)

That christmas pub quiz (part 2)

Round 2 2006

21. What year will it be in the Islamic world next year? (or century if you can't that!)
22. Which Welsh MP made the news this week after announcing he was dating a Cheeky Girl?
23. Who won the Tour De France this year only to be all but stripped of the title following a positive drugs test?
24. What is the biggest selling album in the uk this year (so far). is it...
a) Scissor Sisters- Ta Dah
b) Snow Patrol- Eyes Open
c) Arctic Monkeys- Whatever people say I am that's what i'm not
25.Which country won teh Eurovision Song Contest this year and what was the act called?
26. "The Devil came here yesterday, it still smells of sulpher today." Which South American head of state said this to the United Nations General Assembly 24 hours after George W Bush spoke fom the same platform?
27.What speed did Richard Hammond reach when he crashed in September/
28. Zara Philips won the Sports Personality of the Year award this month. In waht year did her mother win?
29 Who was John Prescott caught having an affair with this year?
30Radio 4's early morning Uk theme was dropped in January. What was the distinctly Welsh element of the medley?

31. Pluto was deemed to small to be a planet this year. What classhas it now been downgraded to? What are the other 2 bodies in this catagory?
32.What position will Ban Ki Moon take up as of Jan 1st 2007?
33.Which cult Carmarthen band, formed while they were pupils at Ysgol Bro Myrddin 15 years ago split up this May/
34.What was teh name of the World Cup referee who retired after yellow carding the same player 3 times in the same match?
35. This year Benedict XVI became only the second pope to enter a Muslim house of prayer. Which country was the Mosque located in ? Name?
36. A lot of publicity was given to the Borat film: Cultural learning of America for make benefit of glorious nation of Kazahkstan? what is the capital of kazahkstan?
37. Which country became the 192nd member state of the UN this June after gaining independance, leaving it's former partner the dubious honour of a Navy but no ports or access to the sea?
38. The DUP and Sinn Fein are negotiationg for a return to power sharing in Northern Ireland . What does Sinn Fein roughly translate as?

Pub quiz picture round

39. Name the people pictured below

40. Who is the odd one out? Why? ( remember the festive theme)

And that my friends is that. I'll post the answers in a couple of days.

small battles...big victories

we had some great news this morning. for the last couple of weeks lisa has been trying to get her pay off cowardly ex-boss. it was for a full time job at a champagne bar in swansea (yeah i know, it is as unsuccessful as it sounds). anyway after 2 weeks of messing around while he tries to work out how to run a bar, he phones up lisa an hour before her shift starts and tells her not to come in, there isn't a job for her anymore.

now apart from not having paid a penny yet he also thought it was alright not to give any notice. apparently because he hadn't gotaround to getting contracts sorted he thought that menat he could do whatever. anyway after seeing no money lisa went to citizens advice who put her through to legal aid who agreed with lisa that for the time she worked she should get 2 days notice and sent her a letter saying this.

the boss was having none of it saying he pays big bucks for his lawyer and she didnt stand a chance. anyway we phjoned him again this week and he still wasn't going to pay the extra money. he hadn't even made any moves to pay the worked hours. we made another call today and he sheepishly said that he had posted the full amount yesterday. all teh hours worked plus 2 days notice. now thats a result.

that and a bbc programme has really spurred me on to fight my corner. the programme was about bank charges. you know like when you go over your overdraft limit and they charge you £25. well they are actually illegal and you can claim up to 6 years of them back from the bank under a 1999 unfair charges and conditions act. so off we go on another little battle. i'll keep you posted.

up to about 25 out off 40 questions on the quiz.

christmas coffee

as it's coming up to that time again and everyone is sorting out who going where on what day i got to thining about the 4th annual (or is it fifth?) soloman grundy christmas coffee. if people are interested in getting together lisa and i were wondering whether we should go on the saturday 23rd rather than christmas eve as it might be a little less hectic than the sunday. I know we are pretty much booked up already anyway. we could go for the morning or the afternoon is people still have shopping to do. anyway i'll await your responses.

in other news i was wondering if anybody had any good questions they always wanted to put in a pub quiz. you see our team won last week which means that as well as taking £120 of prize money away (it had built up over a long time) i also have to set the quiz for next wednesday (20th) i've written quite a few already but i thought i would throw it out there. so i'm thinking some clever questions that are vaguely christmas related or 2006 related. any ideas. come on rainey i bet you have some....

dentists

seems like an age since i last had a chance to update the blog. i've been mocked on many occasions at work for even having one (hello sean or hazel-if you have ventured online to find material for the next mocking).

first thing on my mind today has been the dreaded dentist chair. many will know that i havent been there in awhile. well since before i went to uni when i was living in salford (about 9 years i suppose). i admit i avoided it during uni but that was mainly because i had a housemate with freakish teeth ( y'know those people with two rows of teeth) then after that i moved about so much it wasnt practicle. when i finally wanted one the nhs could offer me nothing. nye bevan has been turning in his grave ever since until 2 years later i manage to get one. cue the dreams about losing teeth all week. as it happens it was fine. ok i have to have one filling but not bad after 9 years and my first ever.

well this post has to come to an untimely end as i have to vacate the computer for the next library customer.

to be cont...

back in the news....

yes they just can't keep us out of the spotlight, this time it's not so great though. 'Fragile' beacons common damaged is the headline this time. and we were named and shamed on the local news so now the regulars in the farmers arm's know that we are THOSE archaeologists. in our defence (which i don't think we'll actually get to state publically) everybody knew that we had to drive 4x4's to get there and we only ever drove on preexeisting tracks. but all the press has made it sound like we just struck out cross country like a scene from mad max.

I read the news today oh boy, 320 holes in brecon, powys

And though the holes were rather small They had to dig them all...

as you might have noticed it all got a bit crazy there for a moment, what with the paparazzi chasing after night and day to get a comment on the now famous bronze age canoe (as seen in the times, bbc tonight, S4C news and yes lets not forget the metro). so they have sent us all away somewhere quiet now until the media frenzy has calmed down.

so my present job is a bit of a strange one but rather cool even if i do say so myself. for some unknown reason some bright spark decided that the gas pipeline should go through the brecon beacon national park, right across the mountain. so our job is to have a poke about to see if there is any archaeological remains up there. this involves spending the winter digging 320 1m square test pits all along a stretch of the brecon beacons. did i say that i loved this job. so we get to drive around in 4x4's up and downhill and dig in the most beautiful of landscape. certainly a nice walk back from work.

still living away though. although its not ages away from swansea it stil isnt possible to get out every day from home. so i get to live a weekend life in mumbles. which is probably the best time. there is a great local produce market across the road from us where lisa and i tried lots of samples of cheese and chutneys and bought the odd sausage and organic lamb burger. actually i just went back a bought the nicest stuffed vine leaves which i will hopefully save for lisa when i get back (otherwise she will read this and not be too pleased at all). and i get to chill out with my lovely wife each weekend without having to do any of that lesson preparation i had last year during my pgce. exactly what was i thinking-lots of teenagers and lesson prep vs the tranquility of the brecon beacons and the fame of bronze age boats?

Boatwatch

today i have been on boatwatch. it's a little like baywatch but without the sand and busty women. we do have a lot of water though and we're working on the orange swimming costumes. to bring ou up to date: i'm still digging in pembrokeshire and still working on our bronze age boat (probably no longer a boat and more likely a trough-still rare and exciting though-yes i know a boat sounds more exciting).

this 'vessel' has attracted a fair amount of attention so far. if you have been anywhere near me in the last few weeks you will probably know that rhodri morgan came to visit it (who your saying-only the first minister of wales).

last week we spent ages digging around the vessel so we could construct a frame around it so it could be lifted. this involved chiseling through soid bedrock no less. friday was the big lift day. thursday we finished the frame only to be told at 3.30 that the lift was off: politics and lack of paperwork.

so your guess is as good as mine as to thedate of the lift now. until then 2 of us are on 'boatwatch' at all times. just to make sure nothing happens to it. this includes weekends. so today i was paid double time plus a day off in lieu (effectively triple time) just to watch the boat. cant be bad eh? had a er nice day actually. read the papers. drank a lot of tea and coffee and watched that film i was on about a bit ago "the devil and daniel johnston".

i'll keep you updaed on how 'boatwatch' goes.

in other news yes lisa and i have moved back to mumbles and it seems to be the most natural thing in the world. such a great place. sun , sea and sand. in fact you should all visit us. come to think of it why havent youu visited us (mark p excluded) you don't know what you're missing.

just a quick update: we have moved back to swansea, woo hoo!

living in a shared house in mumbles again, just down the road from our last house, bay windows, sea views and two lovely housemates.

y'know that canoe i was telling you about.....

the media blackout has ended and at last the amazing discovery can be revealed to all. on thursday the media of the world, well wales and bbc online. decended on our site to look at our bronze age boat. we even had a live broadcast on bbc wales tonight.it even made the metro yesterday.wooo. i havent managed to see any of the news items but it is on bbc online under the headline Bronze age canoe stops pipeline. which is a bit of a fib to make the story sound more dramatic.

so at the moment it's all uncovered now but we're not quite sure how to lift safely yet so we are just letting it flood over again for the present. when we left on friday for a long bank hoiliday weekend the polish security guard had just turned up. its his job to sit in a cabin making sure no-one decided to lift it for us. this guy whoi is probably getting paid 20p anhour has to sit there for 4 days in a muddy welsh field with just a book for company. see it is just like the indiana jones movies.

steve tamburello in shock retirement from best man role

yes i have thought long and hard about it and i have decided to bow out of the best man role while i am still at the height of my game. so don't go looking in the yellow pages for my "wedding services" advert. Mark rainey's wedding and the speech i delivered there shall be my last. though it did seem to go down well even if i do say so myself.

those of you that were at tomoko and mark's wedding (prob most of the people that read this blog) will agree that it was areally good day. such a mix of entertaining and talented people form farm noises to traditional japanese kotos.

but it's back to the digging tomorrow. at least for a week. apparently there has been a cull at the site on friday with the majority of people being given a weeks notice. we knew we were running out of stuff to dig so we guessed it might happen. we'll see how it goes. might be more decisions to make soon though.


in other news it seems to be looking good for cardiff city this season. they best leeds 2-1 yesterday. placing them 2nd in the championship. i know it's early days but i might finally get to support a premiership team soon. watch out Man U!

a note from Archaeology World

i've been occupying a parellel world for the past 3 weeks. it's called Archaeology World. in this parelell universe time goes a lot slower- i feel like i've been here for months rather than weeks. also it's hard to remember that there is is life outside of it and people who arn't archaeologists.i have been living and workingdown in pembrokeshire on the gas pipeline that is beng laid from milford haven to swansea then eventually on to hereford. it's been great to get back to digging after the stress ful PGCE year and the money is actually really good especially with all the overtime i have been doing (i've been doing 60 hour weeks so far).

so apart from getting a good tan ( well on my arms and neck) there is actually some really cool stuff that has been found. i'm digging on a site a the moment where we found a bronze age (roughly 3000 year) canoe in a bog, perfectly preserved. unfortunatly they aren't sure whether they have the money to lift and preserve it. elsewhere they found a massive henge monument ( really deep circular ditches not bit standng stones like stonehenge) again though half of it has been destroyed now by the pipeline. strange that its lain underdiscovered for 4000 years then uncovered for 3 months, then destroyed.

a few of us managed to escape to cardiff this weekend, out of Arch World. actually had quitea trip down memory lane as my friend happens to live about 10 doors down from the chip shop i used to live in when i was young. i get to escape again next week when i get to spend a long weekend in manchester in the new house i hae supposedly moved to.

S. Tamburello BA MA QTS

this morning i didn't have to get up before 7 am and go into school and act as crowd control for class 9m3 because today i added a few new letters to my name- QTS Qualfied Teacher Status. yes i actually managed to get through it, so now i can be one of those people who say " hmm pgce yeah it's really hard, very intense).

so now, what now? well i haven't got a teaching job yet though still on the lookout, sent another application off this mornng. but not too bothered. if nothing else i'll look for some suppply work in september, get in that way. come monday i will back in a field digging away. doesn't work out too well with the whole moving to manchester timetable but its money and boy do we need that after a year of both of us studying.

people falling down

from the maker of one red paperclip (so far he's traded up to "a role in a hollywood movie"- there's a link on the side if you want to know whats it's all about) noe comes PEOPLE FALLING DOWN . does exactly what it says on the tin. very funny.

well, seems steve is keeping everone super updated, which is nice!
but from a lisa point of view: its all coming to a bit of an end here in swansea, the van is booked for next week to move our things back up to manc, although as steve is working in his new arch job, which is awesome, ill be doing the packing, moving and unpacking all on my lonesome. but im a little excited to drive a van. small things eh.
we have to find rox a home in the next week, its just so hard, its like giving a child away, its just awful. but its got to be done and im sure she'll be happy with whoever she ends up with, she's fickle, and if we find someone down here at least she will get to stay by the beach. which is more than can be said for me, grr!
so its stalyvegas for me, and steve ont he weekends. it will be fun, but cant help but be sad to be leaving here. it really is like nowhere else and i never believed this place would become home like it has when i came down 3 years ago. i dont know where else you'd find people like there are down here, maybe its the small city, everyone knows everyone thing, or maybe its the surf aged surf attitude, but it will be hard to leave.
but i am excited to move back north, just to hang out with old friends, find a new job, earn some money and hopefully build up the same group of randoms and misfits as ive had the pleaseure of spending my time with down here.
and due to my... well i dont know how to explain it, but after finishing my dissertation i fizzled out of uni, leaving me with 3 modules to complete by next april. this means i wont graduate until next summer, but i really dont mind, actually quite the opposite, i gives me an excuse to not technically leave swansea. my marks will be capped which is a shame but thats just the way it is, no point in worrying about it, it is what it is and i am what i am i guess and im absolutely ok with that!
so its a time of change. i hate change, im not afraid to admit it! but ill try to embrace it none the less.

things which are making me angry this week

so our future prime minister, mr brown has said we should go ahead and replace our nuclear weapons so we can maintain our nuclear deterrent. even before this hit the news this week i had been thinking that this would be a great opportunity to make a statement to the rest of the world. britain could say that in the interests of world safety and peace they would not renew the nuclear weapons. now apart from gaining the trust of countries like Iran, britain would also be keeping up their side of the nuclear non-proliferation pact. and what would britain lose. well the deterrent but who exactly are we trying to deter, post cold war. this is 25 billion pounds worth of weapon that we will never and can never use.

firstly the (perceived) threat has changed- we're not exactly going to get bin laden to stand still long enough to get him with a nuke. Secondly, can britain really justify, ethically, launching a nuclear missile that is 8 times more powerful than the one that was dropped on hiroshima? even if one hit us could we really inflict that sort of civilian damage on anyone else.

yet if it was just left as it was i think the renewal would be rubber stamped in no time. there looks like there coud be a debate in parliament which is a start. other than that i think CND's membership might begin to swell.

to me a few less nuclear weapons and £25 billion spent on something that saves lives rather than ending them would make britain a much better place.

the reprieve

ok scratch that last post for now. roxy has been been granted a reprieve, another weekend in the sun. she's coming home

all farewells should be sudden

tomorrow we have to wave goodbye to our loyal sidekick roxy, sometime contributor to this blog though more often than not a sabouteur of the computer. we didn't manage to find anyone we know who was willing to take her so lisa is going to have the hard job of taking her to a woman who can hopefully find a good home for her. sad but necessary. unfortunately i didn't know she wouldn't be coming back down to swansea so i haven't really said goodbye but maybe thats the easier option. i had never had a pet before roxy so never knew how attached you could get . it definately makes you view animals differently. i mean roxy certainly had her own personality. so there we are. i wish you well roxy, have a good fun life.

name-dropping dostoevsky

I noticed something the other day when i was thinking about writers being on a par with rockstars, i noticed that actually dostoeevsky gets quite a few mentions in songs. I was trying to figure out why this was when i saw a clip from the office where david brent is 'helping' someone with a crossword clue- something about a dissedent russian author. then there is that episode of father ted where he tries to impress a woman by saying he had read crime and punishment (he enjoyed the crime but thought the punishment let it down abit).

it appears that in our pop culture the sign of intelligence is whether you are familiar with dostoyevsky. if you are you can drop his name into something and look as though you are well read. so i thought i might see what songs a could remember that name dropped him. i thought of the 3 below but i'm sure there are more that i can't think of for now. if anyone can (and i'm sure rainey would have noticed some maybe you can send tham my way.

oh look what ive gone and done. i've only gone and dropped dostoyevsky into my blog so i look intelligent. huh

Sleeper-Lie Detector
she's got green eyes and she's lovely
reminds me of the 'it' girl with her lips
got an automatic license
reads all Dostoevsky's household tips


Willy Mason- Still a fly
But still, you're just a kid
You shouldn't read Dostoevsky at your age
That and nicotine will make you pale and lean
And twist your face like Mr. Grays
Religious manifests in paintings that you make
Or else your eyes will stay the same
Are you that hungry for a change?


Belle & Sebastian- This a Just a Modern Rock Song
I'm not as sad as Dostoevsky
I'm not as clever as Mark Twain
I only buy a book for the way it looks
And then I stick in on the shelf again#


Fun Lovin criminals-Come Find Yourself
I'm not a man with a grasp on reality
Kerouac is wack but I'm down with Dostoevsky
Sugar's got my back plus Baretta .380's
One of which I dropped as the man tried to bait me.

one i found i response to jonny's comment about doing more than just name dropping:

Mountain Goats, The - Love Love Love

raskalnikov felt sick
but he couldn't say why
when he saw his face reflected
in his victim's twinkling eye
some things you do for money
and some you'll do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one

wanted: good home for dog, two careful owners (see post below)

 

well as much as it pains us to do this we have no other choice... we have to re-home roxy. it appears no-one in swansea or manchester is willing to rent us a house with roxy as well. as with us not having a clue what we will be doin or where we will be doing it, having a dog just isnt practical or fair on rox.

so we are making a public appeal! is anyone interested in taking on this awesome little dog?

we really really dont want to have to give her up but there is just no other way, and it would be great if someone up north wanted her because then there is more chance of us seeing her.

we cant even begin to tell you how great she is. she's such good company and she is really great on walks, and no lie, she is funny. and she has such a great personality and she's just really lovely.

she's quick to learn, really clever, and she gets on with everyone (except for a little thing she developed about mark payne, but i blame him) and she is beautiful, and a real dog. and she's a bit of a tom boy.

she love the outdoors, she can run for hours or just mooch around the garden. and she dosent mind entertaining herself whilst we are both at work.

she is welsh. she loves to cwtch and she's fully house trained.

we feel awful that we have to get rid of her, but the way we see it is that she had an awesome year with us and if we hadnt of taken her on in the first place who knows what the man from the pub would have done with her.

we know taking on a dog is a big responsibility and maybe none of you are interested but we wanted to give people we know a chance first before we have to give her away to a random.

but if anyone is interested then you would love her and you can call or post or whatever.

thanks x

make hay not war

the hay festival is quite unlike any other festival i've ever been to. i always liked the idea of authors being as high profile as rock stars-for instance i always thought you should be able to buy big posters of dostoyevsky or tolstoy like you could of REM or the Chilis. i did have a good dostoyevsky penguin tshirt fow awhile but it was a really weird shape.

anyway for one week a year in a little welsh border town the book is king and the writer is received like a rock star. so it was that myself and my sister wound our way across the brecon beacons to get to the front row of the douglas coupland gig.

the festival site is just outside the secondhand bookshop filled town of hay so we killed a little time there. the site itself was a tented village with lots of middle aged/american/ families with wacky kids sitting around reading books and papers on literery themed deckchairs. actually the mix of people kind of reminded me of a christian event.

douglas coupland was his same random self. he read lists from his new book then there was an interview with an observer journalist. he was kind of pissed cause the guardian had given him his first bad review that very day. afterwards though i got to get my books signed. nothing less than the limited edition,boxed, hardback with the limited edition jpod cube figure (see i told you it was kind of like music). we actually had quite a lengthy chat- as lengthy as you can have when you are in a queue. we discussed flaming lips (from my tshirt-he likes them), podcasts and blogs (his book is about life in the time of google- i told him he would be on mine in a day or two) and ebay (he was going to sell our handshakes on it the next day).

of yes i had my picture taken next to some giant books

here comes the sun

ah school's out, the sun's out and i've handed in my last pgce essay. it's a good day by the seaside in my shorts and flip flops. how could things get any better i hear you say.....

....well this morning i managed to get free tickets to go and see douglas coupland talk about his new book, jpod at the hay festival tomorrow.

Gorkys Zygotic Mynci RIP (Rock in Peace)

The BBC report

one of the crap things about growing up is that eventually all the bands you loved split up. ok it's not like anyone died but when you have grown up with a band and listened to them for hours and hours there's still a gap there. that feeling that you will never get to see them live again. it happened with crowded house (and the death of paul hester- the drummer), it happened with pavement and now yesterday it happened with Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. they hadn't put out anything for a couple of years but there's always that hope that that they would tour.

what made this band great was the gigs. they were always really intimate affairs, like you were in on a great secret. they never got very big- more of a cult following so you always had the chance to chat to them while the support band was on or while you were buying a tshirt off them. the first time i saw them was when i was in college. all my friends were mad on the manic street preachers who were playing in manchester. so we went along in the afternoon to try to meet them. round the back was a huge group of tortured angst-ridden youths waiting for the manics. round the side was me and one other guy trying to catch the support band-gorky's. i got to meet them and they signed my album for me.

i've managed to see them about 9 times since and each time has been amazing. it's always great to see the faces of the people i have taken when euros childs starts up Poodle Rockin'.

The there we go Gorky's Zygotic Mynci RIP . of course with all these splits you still get to see someone from the band play- stephen malkmus, neil finn etc and i have already managed to see one ex=gorky play but it's never quite the same.

all over, bar the shouting

the pressure seems to have eased off a bit now after my visit from Her Majesty's top inspector for Wales on monday. they really shouldn't make me be that organised. i had to show him my 'school experience files' which are meant to have everything form our school placements in. which would have been fine if i could have taken in my 'school experience cupboard' . that not being what he was after i had to spend the weekend file lots of bits of paper into little plastic sleeves.

but thats all over now and everyone seems happy. turns out the school was just as disorganised as me so we mucked through together. i wouldn't have it any other way.

so now i'm pushing through to half term or 'whitsun' as people call it in the trade. then i have 3 1/2 weeks . all over, bar the shouting as my uni tutor said today and there will probably be a lot more of that.

luckily i have the recently released season 3 of northern exposure on dvd to help me through it. old favourites, new episodes that i must have missed the first time around and lots of classic lines. here's one from the episode i watched today:

"we all want to be obi wan kenobi, and for the most part we are but there's a bit of darth vadar in all of us"

i feel like i need a real kick at the minute. ive been caught up in the feeling that just simply surviving is enough work never mind actually doing anything. i think its that darn swansea influence again. there is so much i want to do but just have no motivation whatsoever to do anything and it makes me so mad! even the smallest things, i wanted to buy a new longboard so i could skate everywhere rather than drive. have i done it? nope. even cycling, thats so easy, but i still havent managed to unlock the bike from the back gate thats been sitting there for the last 9 months. join a boycott and stick to it. nope. no motivation to do that. have a fire. no. learn to speak spanish, no! when did i become so uninspired and unmotivated and just plain lazy? and it makes me mad at myself but not mad enough to actually get up and do anything. just studying and catching up with people, scraping money together to survive and 'thinking' about the things i should be doing seems like hard work, and at the end of a day of just sitting down and having a nice cup of tea seems like the most appealing thing. and even now im sitting here ranting about it instead of actually doing anything about it. ill head to the pub, being with people that are worse off than you always makes you fell better.

i'll tell you why i don't like mondays

my positivity for the week lasted all of 3 hours. it was then that i found out that our car failed it's MOT and left lisa and roxy pretty much stranded in manchester. apparently it's a 5 minutes drive away from complete catastropic collapse. funny we didn't notice on hte way up to manchester but there you go. now we have to work out wether it is worth trying to get it fixed or cutting our loses. in other news i found out that out of all the people on my course i get the pleasure of having the chief history inspector for wales coming to watch me next monday. it's not all bad he's checking up on the uni and the school more so it won't directly effect me.

great escapes

there have been two stories in the news this week that have been quite interesting. there was a similar theme in both of them yet one was much more real and impressive than the other. the first was david blaine's latest stunt- drowned alive- if you didn't hear, ol'blainey swam around in a giant fish bowl then tried to hold his breath for 9 minutes before blacking out today and having to be rescued.

The other story had already been going on for a week before davide blaine got into his tank. 3 australian gold miners got
trapped in their mine in tasmania after an earth tremor. 1 of them died straight away while the other two were trapped in a small cage now surrounded by metres of rock. it was 6 days before they could get anywhere near them. they had been surviving on the rancid water on the rocks and 1 cereal bar. the rescuers couldn't use there equipment as they feared further cave ins. so the bored a long hole to pass things through to the miners. first water and food, then warm clothes. then people thought they might be getting bored so they pushed ipod's through, along with pictures from their kids. you might have seen that they got rescued this morning after being confined for 14 days. the same day as david blaine gets pulled out. strange how that worked out. i know which one i'm more impressed by.

people watching

for some reason i didn't buy a paper before i got on the bus today. don't know why cause i hate not having anything to do on bus journeys. Luckily there were enough interesting people on the bus to help me pass the time. Across from me there was an old guy. i'm sure you know the type. long grey hair, even longer beard. old suit and quite a few bags. sort of like the tolstoy guy who walks around manchester a lot. now don't misunderstand me- they're not tramps. no i like to think of them as wise old men. maybe the wizards or philosophers of the 21st century. anyway he was reading this paper intently while holding a pair of scissors. every now and again he would cut out an article and carefully place it in one of his bags. put away his scissors in his jacket pocket and carry on reading.
then he would obviously spot something else and carefully cut that out etc. i was trying to work out what type of article but there seemed to be a mix of news, pictures, comments and even offers. but he did seem picky. it looked liek one article nearly didn't get cut out even half way through. he cut the sides and looked like he was agonising over how much of it made the grade.

one strange thing struck me. he never checked what was on the other side of the page. like what he had was certainly the most important thing there. i mean you always check the other side don't you.

so i was just fascinated by this guy, what does he do with all the cuttings. does he have books full of them? does he make his own newspaper? are they plastered on his walls at home?

school rants

after my long easter break i went back to school this week. wasn't particulary looking forward to it after the last week before easter was a bit of a shocker. as it goes the week wasn't that bad. the first thing we worked out was that the 3 pgce's students were now only 2. christine the quite vocal (im)mature pgce student had quit/been kicked off the course. shame for her but i'm actually a bit relieved as she kind of grated on everyone, especially because she always tried to get one up on us as pgce students by going to exrta meetings and went on about the university email service EVERYDAY calling it 'Shy-he'. really hard to explain here but the email we have is from Swansea Institue of higher Education or SIHE for short, how exactly does that translate to 'SHY-HE'. hmm funny the things that grate on you,

One of the other characters at the school is a guy called rod. he's a long term supply at the school and likes to pass on advice. don't get me wrong he means well but when he has you, that's your lunch break gone. for me he turns every story into a teaching technique. i'll try to give you an example.

rod: so did you hear about that david blaine in underwater stunt? mad as a fish he is. do you get it 'cause he's in a goldfish bowl and fish are a bit mad. see you can say that at the start of a lesson. get the kids on your side.
steve: hmm yes rod. (What..??....??)

apparently david blaine's skin is peeling off in his 'drowned alive' stunt. i think everyone could have guessed that was going to happen. we've all seen what happens when we saty in the bath too long.

so yes. only 3 weeks til half term in school and counting down the days. as rod says "keep your head down sir (he always calls other teachers Sir or Miss- "How is Sir today?") it's all about survival.

the devil and daniel johnston

there's a film coming out pretty soon called "the devil and daniel johnston" ( i think it's at the cornerhouse in manchester from may 8th). it's about a guy called daniel johnston who is a strange and wonderful singer/songwriter. a friend of mine at college gave me a copy of his album Hi how are you. even the original looked like it had been made in someones bedroom. The music had in fact been recorded in daniel's room. you could hear him coughing and starting the song again when he or his friend got it wrong.

the music was definately raw and lo-fi but had something to it. honesty, symplicity and clever lyrics.

This tape is all i had for years, never heard anything about him or met anyone who had heard of him. then a few years back he released a new album. a proper one and suddenly people started writing about him. see the thing about daniel is that he has suffered with mental illnesses all his life and has to be cared for fulltime by his parents. this means that he wasn't really able to leave his hometown of austin, texas much so his stuff kind of just passed from person to person by word of mouth. There's a picture of Kurt Cobain weasring a daniel johston tshirt that got quite a few people interested and other bands like Sonic Youth and Yo Lo Tengo covered his songs.

So the other day when Viking Moses asked if anyone knew Daniel Johnston a let out a happy 'yes'. Actually myself, lisa and mark p? (was it you mark who came with us-been trying to remember) managed to see him on one of his rare live gigs at night and day cafe- i even got to speak to him...if only briefly). There was also a big review in the metro that day of the film.

so there you are, just felt like sharing daniel johnston with a few more people. and to say you should go see the film The devil and daniel johnston , there is also an exhibition of his art down at the london aquarium if you are down that way.

2 days, 2 gigs, 5 bands

i managed to get to see quite a few bands while i was in manchester this week. something that is quite hard to do in swansea. it's a bit of the normal gig trail. the two gigs i went to on monday and tuesday couldn't have been more different. for a start there was probably only 30 people at the richard james one while there was about 4000 at the flaming lips on tueday.

the bands couldn't be more of a contrast either. i'll give you a quick rundown.

Monday, King's Arms, Salford

Voice of the Seven Woods: one guy and his guitar, he could just have easily been playing in his bedroom but man was he good. kind of reminded me of nick drake with a bit more spanish guitar in it. he also did a cool recording/layering thing with a foot pedal. kind of like KT Tunstall does. he leaves before his last song finishes with the layered recording.

Viking Moses: this guy was strange. high on acid for a start. hard to know whether he was making words up as he went along( 'pushing my hair through a phone book' was a memorable line. he squirmed and wriggled and rolled up trousers/sleeves throughout. he did play a daniel johnston song though, and he is a legend. but yeah very strange. ask jonny about it.

Richard James: ah what can i say. any member of Gorky's is a winner from the start. he's doing a solo project at the moment as is the lead singer euros childs but the Gorky's sound comes through. no gimics just good songs. billed as psych folk pop (whatever that is) but sounded just folky. really good intimate gig.

Tuesday, Apollo, Stockport road

The Go! Team: wow what energy and can that girl move. only heard 1 of their songs before but they immediately got everyone going. i think if a support band gets people not to talk through their set and actually sing and clap along they have done well.

The Flaming Lips: Once again they were amazing. Flaming Lips gigs are less music concerts and more all out theatre or maybe one big birthday party. there are about 30 massive ballons flying about, lots of streamers and one lead singer Wayne Coyne, rolling about the audience in a big inflatable ball (you have to see it to believe it). Oh also there are lots of people in suits. in the crowd there was an alligator, a rabbit and a superman. some of these get to go on stage and dance along with the 10 santa's (representing christianity) and the 10 martians (representing scientology). i know it's hard to get a picture of it all but its a great night. the video below might give you a little glimps at the marvel that is a flaming lips gig........

gritty northern dramas

my visit to manchester took a brush with fame yesterday when a film crew turned up outside the door. finally fame had found me, i thought. alas it was not to be, seems they were filming an episode of the griity crime drama (is there any other kind in britain) called Vincent. So i didn't feel i could really turn on the tv when there was a tv programme going on live outside the house so i sat and watched for a good while. quite impressed by Ray Winstone being there (of King Arthur, sexy beast and even teh voice of Mr beaver in narnia!). Kt reckoned we might be able to get a bit of cash if we sent some 'spotted' pictures to Heat magazine so we did a bit of papazarri from the windows.

and yes i finally got a ticket to the flaming lips gig. well bought it oin ebay so i'll have o hope it arrives in time.

easter in manchester

so back up in the republic of mancunia for easter, i was welcomed by a bout of tonsillitus. lisa and i went to susanna's walk in clinic ( well the nhs' walk-in clinic) to get lisa's sore throat checked out so i thought i would get in on the act. we were both quickly diagnosed with said virus and sent away with boxes and boxes of penicillin. apparently they don't even really know what tonsils do. they think that maybe they help fight infections which seem s a bit ironic as the only ting they are known for doing is getting infected.


in other news...went to the manchester passion thing on easter friday and sang along to such great songs as love will tear us apart and blue monday while the last hours of jesus' life were played out around manchester. i was actually quite impressed by it all. especially seeing so many people in the city centre taking part. dont think that would have happened if it was a traditional passion play. tim booth also tried to do an impromptu rendition of sit down at the end but the sound cut out which was a bit of a shame and of course another highlight of the night was watching wes nike's star performance as one of the disciples. shame he was stood behind the pole on the stage though (as in the pillar not a polish person).

so that the week so far. the highlight of my easter could be going to see the flaming lips on 25th at the apollo except i don't have any money till the 24th so it might be cutting it close for getting a ticket. thats my mission anyway.

eif getting ready for the big journey

 

so it was a helm after all

we visited mark's old man pub at the weekend -the angel or "world of brass" as it is also known...by me. we had a very irritating conversation about what the name was for a wheel on a ship. everyone was sure it had a common name they we all knew but none of us could put our finger on it. i asked my seafaring work collegue today and even he thought there was a name for it. we settled on helm or ships wheel. as we had on the day ( but if anyone has any ideas- answers on the back of a postcard or in the comments box).

so mark's pub....apart from being brassy they had strange little snacks around the bar. a plate of cubed cheese and a plate of brownies. ok strange but not unappetising. i ask around- anyone want some cheese? brownies. lisas took soem cheese, mark and i went for the brownie. it was the real moist kind with little bits of walnut in. i tucked in while mark went to the little boy's room.

except it wasn't brownie.

apparently my face was a sight. even when i was eating it i really wanted it to be brownie.

but it wasn't only then did i realise it really had a deep dark reddish colour and tasted more like black pudding......cold black pudding.

so my question is what pub.. even a brassy northern pub serves plates of cold, cubed black pudding on the bar. i wasn't happy. but of course i didnt say anything when mark came back from the lav. even with lisa a i cracking up mark still had no reason to suspect that his tasty choc brownie held a deeper secret. disappointing. very disappointing.

so the dissertation is handed in, it ended up being titled something along the lines of 'public awareness... the DFID.... ', not sure really it was all a bit of a blur, got it in just 40 minutes before the deadline, i always feel so ashamed crawling into the office at such a time, but you dont get any bonus points for handing it in early.

so now i have 4 glorious weeks off. i know i have to find some full time work but i refuse to think about that today. also on the refuse to think about list: where we will live in the summer, where we will live next year, is it goin to be a 2:1 or a 2:2, will steve be happy being stuck in a classroom 5 days a week instead of diggin in the great outdoors, should we just pack our bags and run away to mexico.

but its nearly may, the promised month when everyone returns to the UK. that will be nice. its great to hear of people enjoying their travels but sometimes its nice to have friends home.

and spent last week avoiding dissertation work by catching up with all the old boys from the pub. they never fail to entertain me and provide me with wasted afternoons of not a lot.

one of them has just got out of hospital after a bit of a breakdown, it was so sad to see him sick and then he disappeared for a few months, but now he is back and well and allowed to see his daughter again and has sold his house so has some money. he deserves it.

the gardeners and brickies were grateful of a couple of rainy afternoons, never met such a group of men so allergic to rain. but their spirits are higher on those days than on a sunny one so its always nice.

and then there is a real gooden who is wasting his days until he joins the army in a few weeks. cant help but thinking what a terrible mistake he is making. he is so gifted in so many ways, the kind of person everyone wants to be around. but thanks to many years of being beaten down by the swansea mentality, he wont believe it, so the army it is (although a lovely dealer who is taking me under his wing as the granddaughter he never had has promised me an interactive globe if i can talk him out of it so we'll see).

so things are good and im going to get on with reading a nice trashy novel whilst i have no uni pressures. cant be bad.

let them eat cake

i made some cakes this evening. thought i might be nice to have for afters. so had one, took a couple in to lisa who is beavering away at her dissertation, away from all distration in the bedroom, even took one up to frodo upstairs as i had borrowed his sieve. so i come back into the room and what do i find: one empty plate and one guilty looking dog, licking the crumbs from around her mouth. hope they make her sick (except if she is i'll probably have to clean it up- like i had to at 4.30 this morning when she started scratching at the door, but thats a whole other story)

family trees

it's a cold monday night, the dog is asleep and lisa is away in manchester. so after making myself a nice beef rogan josh curry (pretty much from scratch-i did use curry paste though-who has the time to collect all those spices from india these days) so yeah after making a curry i sat down to dabble in more family tree stuff on the net.......and struck gold.

for those who haven't delved into your family tree i have to tell you that it really does suck you in. mine has gone in busts of activity. i started by asking my mum and then my great auntie about family stuff. it struck me that every christmas we sat around talking about .. stuff but i had never really asked seroisly about great grandparents and others and actually written things down. you always think you can do it another time but then it turns out to be too late. My auntie lucy who i had managed to talk to died last year.

so yeah first i went to london and search through all the census stuff.pretty cool. then i had a breakthrough on genes connected.co.uk when i stumbled upon a guy who i shared a great great grandad with -3rd or 4th cousin stuff. then today i was searching through some message boards when i recognised some names from my tree which filled quite a few gaps. it was funny because i had got half the story from my auntie and my mum, A great great grandmother who might have come from london turned out to be the same Martha Kezia Long from kensington (kezia-great name hey). What is really interesting is that you start to see the originof names that have been passed down through the famly. it's such a buzz when you get to add solid facts and dates to question marks on the tree.

hmm maybe i should look at my lessons for tomorrow.

doggy days

woof ruff woof woof grrr. woof woof grrr. ruff ruuff ruff ruff.

band of the week: Love

there seems to be a fair amount of musical discussions in our little corner of blogland of late- trying to find new avenues of musical styles. there nothing quite like those first few weeks when you hear something new and you just play it over and over again and you want to ask everybody whether they have heard them. or alternatively you want to keep them all to yourself so they are yours alone. well after reading jonny's last post and looking the pandora website that deirdre suggested (quite a cool little site by the way) i thought i would throw my own musically flavoured tuppence in. enter the band of the week post. i think i have pestered enough people with strange bands now (yes i mean Gorky's Zygotic Mynci- hey i even got some of you to the gigs) that i should share some more for, what it's worth.

so first off- LOVE. this band means ireland and digging to me. both my trotskyist 60 year old housemate Stu and my hippy at heart mate gary were really into them while i was working over there a couple of years back. Stu had actually worn out 3 or 4 copies of Four Sail on vinyl and cd by this time and was thrilled when i found it for sale (no pun intended) in tower records on grafton street. the next weekend he went and bought 4 copies of the cd for his future listening pleasure. the opener to four sail, a song called August was his favourite song of all time. and he had quite a large music collection to draw from (although he did maintain that all good music stopped being made around 1975).

so yeah Love. they had their height in the late 60's and early 70's. all really centres around the genius that is arthur lee. love were pretty much the first multi racial rock group that were really big in america. they are still going in some form today but only in a very diluted version. some of them had troubles with drugs, arthur lee spent some time in prison in the 90's ( i think on a 3 strikes thing) so not really worth seeing now unless it's love with arthur lee.

so why should you listen to them. man there's just something about the songs that take you away. i don't know if it's the pace, the guitars or the capturing lyrics. i find myself hanging on each word, caught up in it all. that pandora thing describes their sound as

"electric rock instrumentation, mild rythmic snycopation, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, major key tonality and a prominant flute part"

does that cover it, i don't now. it's definately of that summer of love psycheldelia thing but with rock, folk, and even showtunes added in. you might be listening to a hippyish upbeat song before in takes a left turn into something much darker.

anyway to end this love fest i'll tell you my favourite stuff. the most famous album is Forever changes which is consistently cited by critics as one of the outstanding albums in the history of rock music . look at this for a song title maybe the people would be the times or between clark and hilldale. great song . also a house is not a motel and the red telephone. then the album four sail. possibly takes a little longer to get into but definately rewarding . check out august as stu would recommend and robert montgomery.

next week......hmm i'll have to think amybe pavement or somethng like that . oh flaming lips have their new album out about now- at war with the mystics. the first proper followup to yoshimi battles the pink robots. now there's a tip.

one red paperclip

some of you may have heard about the guy who made a million dollars on the internet just by selling advertising space on a blank website well this is the next one of those 'i wish i thought that' websites. i read about this guy in the guardian the other day. basically this kyle macdonald wants to swap a red paperclip for a house. obciously no one in his right mind would make that trade so he's trading his way up. he swapped the paperclip for a pen, the pen for a doorknob, the doorknob for an old barbucue and so on. today he has just swapped a van for professional recording sessions. i think jnow he is getting more famous he will definately get his house soon. i quite like the idea of trading for stuff. as i said last week i managed to knacker my fridge. one of the places i tried to get a replacement was freecycle. if you haven't heard of the idea freecycle have local groups where you can give away stuff you no longer need or ask to see if anyone else has certain items. nice ideas i think.

a little more positive!

the third entry for the day, looks like we have nothing better to do! but i guess blog entrys seem like a therapy or something at the minute. yeah a mad week, but all of a sudden things are looking up.

as mentioned earlier, our landlady put our flat on the housing list for next term without even letting us know. as we hadnt actually made the decision of what we would be doing come the summer and september (a thought and conversation that has being filling us with dread), it felt like the decision had been taken out our hands a little, but guess thats maybe for the best as decision making is not mine or steves strong point. the only sensible decision for us now is to return to manc, so no more sea and pier and ice cream, but friends and family and better job prospects will be a bonus. so thats all ok then.

so then we were having a morning of showing people around on saturday, wasn't looking forward to this, especially as katie is making a flying visit so wouldnt have been too much fun for her, but then two really nice girls just came round to see the 'boys upstairs', and had a sneaky look around and they love it and theyre taking it. so thats nice. its such an awesome house and not just anyone can live here i dont think, but we were so excited when we moved in a couple of years ago, so now they can be plus now we can just hang a sign on the door and not have to show a single spoilt student aroud. so thats cool.

and yes did just have a hideous time with a breakdown, slap bang centre of swansea at a set of roadwork traffic lights on a friday afternoon, but on the plus side i broke down outside of the 'swansea transport club' a place ive always driven past and questioned because it just looks like a living room with a bar in it. so as i had a 90 minute wait for the AA some guy with black teeth and a burberry cap invited me in, turned out my initially suspicions were right and it was just a living room with a bar. but it was nice all the same, and the dude told me all about his awful ex and his son and how 'she' was all to blame. the story of every single swansea man. then he told me he felt like he had known me for years. not quite sure how to take that. but then my knight in a yellow and black van turned up and all was well. so looks like i have a new friend for life and i got home safely, so thats all ok too.

so with the weekend in sight it suddenly all seems rosey again.

league table of breakages (updated)

ok so following lisa's comment reminding me of the rest and with regards to todays events here's an updated list:

steve: 1 plate, 1 wine glass, 2 pint glasses, 1 coffee jug, 1 cafetiere, 2 mugs, 1 fridge
roxy brian: 1 internet cable, 1 phone cable, 1 pint glass, 1 bowl
lisa: 1 wine glass and the clutch on the car


the clutch is not technically lisa's fault but she was driving and it makes me look better. i obviously write this in a sympathetic way as lisa has had a crap day being marooned in swansea waiting for the AA for most of the day. on top of that we were meant to pick the fridge up today and lisa was on hte way to take the carpet cleaner back to homebase. what a week.

a week of shenanigans

i think the title might be an understatement really. this week has been madness. first of all i started my second school placement. most people reading this aren't going to realize the full annoyance of this but my uni tutors decided to place me in Maesteg. to put it into context we live in mumbles, a small place to the west of swansea, kind of round the bay. maesteg on the other hand is way east of swansea then up a big valley and impossible to reach by public transport in anything less the 2 and 1/2 hours and 3 buses oh and i don't drive oh and it's a split site school where it's too far to walk between the lower school and the upper school.

also this week i managed to kill the fridge. i was helpfully trying to free up a bit freezer space with a tapping hammer, yes just a tapping hammer when i started to hear a hissing sound. yes i had punctured a hole in the freezer compartment. from there it was a slow but steady decline for the the fridge till it flatlined sometime the next day. we tried all manner of intervention but done of it took. glue, cork, gaffer tape- all to no avail.

then today i went managed to to flip the self that holds all our plates and mugs in the kitchen. now the jury's still out as to quite what happened but i think the fact that the shelf apparently was never nailed down in the first place shows that it's not really my fault. anyway that puts me way ahead in the breakages league table. which looks a little like this:

steve: 1 plate, 1 wine glass, 2 pint glasses, 1 coffee jug, 1 fridge
roxy brian: 1 internet cable, 1 phone cable, 1 pint glass
lisa: 1 wine glass

slow burning flags

who would have thought that the Danish flag would have been in such demand this year. it's quite a shame actually because i have been to denmark but didnt manage to buy a flag and now hundreds are being burnt. as some of you will no doubt know i am an avid collector of flags. well i have about 20-odd but thats casue i try to buy them from the countries i visit and i only started after my first inter-railing trip so i missed some out. but i do plan to get every flag in the world. so actually i'm probably a good person to know if you are planning to start a protest against the basque country or sicily for instance.

actually many of you will aso be aware of the plans i had to set up a flag business in the trouble spots of the world, selling slow burning flags of a variety of countries, maybe even double sided ones - say the U.S. flag on one side and the Israeli flag on the other. Most importantly the slow burning flags would be accurate. obviously a lot of the danish flags that have been burnt these last few weeks have been homemade- quite a simple flag you would think. but many muslims seem to want to pick a fight with Switzerland or even the french province of Savoy.
Protesters with the savoy flag

I'll finish this post with a warning from the premier spokeperson on flag matters Charles Ashburner of flagwire.

"Charles Ashburner warns Muslim protesters they risk horrific burns if they torch his Danish flags at a mass rally in London today.

"If the bits of burning material land on anyone's skin or eye, they will stick and cause serious injury or blindness."

nazarenes in the news

i came across this cartoon in the independent the other day in an article about where political cartoonists should draw the the line in the light of the danish cartoon thing thats going on. this one is by one of my favourite cartoonists- steve bell of the guardian. interesting his was about one he had done about brian souter and the clause 28 referendum he funded. i found the reference about the 'Nazarene Sect' really interesting where they talk about whether mr souter 'is a bigot' something they couldnt prove and the Nazarene's who you also 'can't prove anything against'. while i was looking on the internet to see if the cartoon was there so i didnt have to scan it i came across lots of other articles on brian souter and the Nazarene's. most of them explained the church as an evangelical fundamentalist church based in kansas city. nice to ahave such a positive portrayal in the press. oh yes the other comment was that he came from a church that sort to 'cure homosexuals'. not sure it's quite the church i recognise.

Pachakutic

i travelled up to manchester this weekend on the nasty express. nothing really express about it but it did give me a chance to read the sunday paper from cover to cover and listen to a variety of podcasts i had downloaded.

one of the podcasts i subcribe to is 'from our own correspondent' that's on radio 4. one of the pieces cuaght my attention as it summed up something i had been following with interest for a while now.

"Pachakutic" means a change in the sun, a movement of the earth which will bring a new era in Quechua, the language of the indigenous people of south america's andean mountains.

the last "pachakutic" was about 500 years ago when the conquistadores invaded and apparently the cycle is due to begin again about now.

the possible earth changing event might be the politics of south america. in all the recent elections, south america voters have voted in a different kind of politician than they have been used to. the 'men in grey suits' as they refer to them on the programme. It started with Lula (Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to give him his full name)- the ex steel worker who swept to power in brazil under a banner of social reform. he's seen as a moderate by the US. they are more scared of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela because Venezuala is the 3rd largest exporter of oil and especially important for th US's energy needs and beacause their arch enemy Fidel Castro keeps popping up at each of their inaugurations.

Another left leaning president is trying to build a more equal society in Chile and whats more she a woma- Michelle Bachelet- quite unusual for south america.

One of the most recent campions of this shift to the left is Bolivia new president Evo Morales- a former coca farmer who is always seen wearing his distintive striped jumper as he is "of the people and voted for by the people and will wear what the people wear, not a suit". apparently the jumper has become a bit of a fashion item back home. i think its really amazing that its the first indigenous person that the have elected president. it seems such an exciting time there. there are more election s this year in Peru, colombia and ecuador where interesting things couldd happen.

of course it all rests on how they do over the next few years.America is very worried already and probably preparing extra space on its Axis list. Bush is also worried as his currant policy to deal with there growing cocaine problem in the US is to wipe out the coca plantations completly in Bolivia for one. Morales satnd on this is sure they will crack down on the illegal trade but the Bolivians use the coca leaves to chew as they always have done. why should they lose out beacasue of a western drug problem. Interesting times.but i think i shift to the left in south america is definately for the best for the people there.

right well i'm just off to my local ingenoius farmers markets to get my stripey jumper and maybe a few coca leaves while i'm there.

January 23 = most depressing day of year

Apparently the most depressing day of the year has been determined to be Monday, 23 January 2006. thats right today. some guy at cardiff uni worked out an equation along the lines of:

{W + (D – d)} x TQ divided by M x NA

The equation is broken down into these variables:
W = weather
D = debt
d = monthly salary
T = time since Christmas
Q = time since failed quit attempt
M = low motivational levels
NA = the need to take action

so today was also the day that lisa had her last exam on the Development and the history of Brazil an I had to hand in my essay. we didnt actually make it see that German guy as we hand all the work to do. thankfully i finished my essay at 2.05. it would have been better if it was 2.05am rather than p.m. like 5 minutes after i should have been in a lecture where i had to hand it in. so I was 30 mins late for the lecture but it was all handed in on time and lisa came ot of her lecture alive so I think we came through the depressing day ok.

weltshmerz pop

we re-entered the unique experience that is the bryn y mor pub last night (see earlier posts for a more in depth explanation of this swansea land-mark). it had been quite a stressed day for both of us. lisa had an exam and i had to try to knuckle down to another essay ( which i still haven't started and probably why i'm writing this blog entry). it had started off badly when some guy knocked on our door at 8.30am. not this front door-the inside door. he said " jean (our crazy landlady) sent me round to fix the door- shall i come back in 15 minutes so you can get sorted". yep not only had she not told us anyone was coming, she also just gave them our frontdoor key. so yeah then they came a-bangin and a-fixin and ruining any chance of getting work done.

anyway back to the bryn. we went in there for the first time since before christmas to see who was about and soon got chatting to various regulars as happens there. i tell you the amount of strange characters that came in, sat down and went in the next 2 hours was extrordinary. first in were 4 guys mostly wearing cowboy hats apart from a robert smith lookalike (from The Cure) who had quite a bit of eye make-up on and long black hair spiked out to the side. as they came in i said to lisa that they had to be in a band and sure enough they were. they came to sit down and it turned out the robert smith guy was a german by the name of daniel colletti who plays some mad music described as Weltschmerz pop on his flyer. He's playing at a local pub tomorrow along with another german band called Spreemohn who apparently play songs from the 1920's in a reggae,punk and ska style.

so these guys in their cowboy hats stayed around for awhile "proclaimed that swansea was a great place" then annouced they had a gig in neath in two hours and must leave. so off they walked (in the wrong direction) to neath. the other thing that was funny was when a whole themed group of people dressed head to toe in cowboy gear walked in and sat at the table next to ours so the guys in our group who just happened to be wearing hats looked like they were part of the other group. what are the chances of going to the pub and 10 people wearing the same hat as you?

in other news rocky discovered she could swim today. neither rocky nor ourselves knew she had this skill untill we chucked her in the water and our local beach. it wasnt that cruel-she had been running through it after a ball before, she just didnt really know what to do when it got deeper. so i kind of made her find out. it was kind of like the kid on the cover of the nirvana album....but a dog.

profile pic

sorry this is just here so i can add a pic to the profile. some things on this blogger are very complicated

having a latvia time!

yes i think if you looked up 'latvia' in the dictionary (or maybe a thesaurus) then the word 'happy' would be right there next to it. well maybe in a very sarcastic dictionary. To explain lisa, jonny and I have just got back from a ryanair enabled quick jaunt to riga, the capital of latvia where we had a great time but weren't convinced the same could be said for teh indigenous latvian population. never before have we seen such a stoney faced non-reactive bunch. I shouldnt be too harsh, they were nice people, maybe they didnt have much to be happy about or maybe they didn't want to show it. but it was strange.

so generally we just milled about the city eating latvian food (potatoes, cabbage and meat), drinking cheap latvian beer (40p ahalf litre) and seeing the sights. one of the highlights for me was eating in a medieval restaurant. The cellar which it was in was first mentioned in 1293 as the most ancient wine-vault and festival place of the Riga City Council! it was all candle lit and they served only medieval meals (so no potatoes as they were only brought over in the 16th century). it could have been a bit over the top like a theme park but i think they got it just right.

oh and after many days of looking i finally found a latvian flag in the airport gift shop. can you belive nowhere in riga sells flags!
probably more riga photos to follow. oh and matt we tried our best not to whistle indoors and on the occasions a peep did slip out we did get some stern (and stoney faced ) looks.

the money and curry from hell

as mark said, new years came 3 minutes early for us in our bar in leeds which kind of stole our thunder a little as we had agreed to celebrate the bringing in of 2006 a second later than everyone else in the bar due to the leap second that had been added on by those kooky atomic clock watchers. we did wait a few more minutes but the reaction wasnt the same after the premature celebration.

there always seems to be such a pressure on new year's eve to have really good plans, to be 'somewhere' when that clock strikes but when i actually look back my most memorable new years were when i wasnt anywhere in particular and hjadnt planned much at all like 2004/5 just sitting around in mark's house or when i stood on a roundabout -not quite having made it into bristol- for the millenium.

so in a bid to avoid the hype lisa an i hot-footed it to leeds for a simple night and it all just fell into place. mark and jo joined us in susanna's emtpy house (situated in the attractive area of beeston, leeds-bomb-making capitol of the England). from there we went into leeds and had the hottest curry known to man. as with every curry i said "hmm not sure what i want to have" to which mark replied "have a vindaloo, they're the best". he too ordered one proving he wasnt just trying to order a hot curry for me. WE WERE IN PAIN. it was stupid. i missed most of the conversation in some sort of curry daze. so we left there and tried to find somewhere to go next and were persauded by the first person selling tickets we came across about 10 metres away. i was quite cool actually. you paid £10 and they gave you 4 banknotes like the one above. which you could exchange for drinks. it was like something out of spirited away- the bath tokens maybe. and to top it off they played some good music- rolling stones, killers ans white stripes etc.

so there we are 2005 over with 2006 just begun. and still another 10 days of holidays. nice