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.