I'm wearing the Dave Kinsey shoes - sweeet. It's scary when I get the chance to update the blog and realise that it's been over a week. I'd say I'm busy, but it's really all about priorities as well. I don't always like staring at a screen 8 hours a day to then come home and spend another 3 or 4 there as well. Plus I had a wicked book to chew through. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. I can highly recommend it. A metaphysical detective story (or stories) dealing with confused identities and the power of language. Really got my brain working in loads of different ways. And it name checked Don Quixote in a big way (spooky coincidence number 1654), which was the book I put on hold to read this one, as two of the characters discussed the metaphors within it. And also one of the later characters buys their boyfriend a copy of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which was next on my To Read list (spooky coincidence number 1655). But I think I might have a stab at the Bible. Not literally - I don't want to get hit by a thunderbolt. Although that would just be noisy wouldn't it? It might make me jump, but it wouldn't actually hurt would it?

And so if someone says that they are talking about you behind your back, does that mean that they are talking in front of you? And when someone says that's it's raining; what is raining? What is IT?

Seal and I were throwing down in the living room last night. Uprock! Sure shot!! Sure shit more like. I don't know if people at work believed that the carpet burns were from breakdancing. Picked up Scratch on DVD - essential

For god's sake if you have a PC and you're on the internet, get a firewall and a surge protector!! You could be hacked and whilst being hacked, get surged as well!! Oh my god!!! The QVC surge protector and firewall package is aimed at any misinformed caution monkey over 50. I love the way that they insinuate that a retired insurance salesman is going to be a prime target for hackers. Oh my god, what if they got his family tree while it was in it's infancy?! Or stole the travel route he'd planned for his mobile home down to the New Forest?!! Or the letter to the council titled, "The flower tubs on the A34 roundabout are a disgrace to the town...". Then the idea of an 8 socket surge protector cracks me up. look out for surges or lightning strikes! "They're more common than you think!" What?!! I think that as a general rule of thumb, when people say, "You've got more chance of being hit by lightning", they choose that saying because it's pretty bloody remote. So you buy the 8 socket surge protector and then what? You herd all your appliances into the corner of one room
and plug them in - fridge, TV, washing machine, PC, stereo etc. Nice. At least they're all protected. In a large cluster, humming away, making themselves a perfect target for lightning.

I also love the way QVC open themselves up for idiots (customers) to ring in and totally balls things up with their over-eager desire to please and relay brain vacuuming little stories about their shitty little purchases. For example,

Evil Android QVC Salesman selling Belkin surge protector- "On line one we have Alan, who bought a surge protector, didn't you Alan?"
Monkey Alan - "Yes"
QVC - "And are you using it now, everything going all right?" Silly question.
MA - "Well, I bought a surge protector, took it home, plugged my TV, PC and stereo into it....and it blew the lot to smithereens!"
QVC - "Oh" Shit.
MA - "Yes, the whole lot. I had to get it all replaced on the insurance"
QVC - "Oh right" (thinking, "Why did we let this man on the phones?"), "but was that a Belkin?"
MA - "Oh no, I've got a Belkin now and it's all right.." etc etc

Regardless of whether it was a Belkin surge protector or not that blew his stuff to "smithereens", he's probably just about put all the customers off. Priceless.

I got the Dave Kinsey shoes - respect the c*ck! Should be touching down in Blighty in a few days from Canada. What a bargain at £45 including shipping.

Fell asleep last night watching Once Upon A Time In China 2, which makes for interesting dreaming; forget about cheese! I dreamt that I was in a safari park in Africa with some old school friends. Behind a high enclosure were a group of 5 black guys in dark burgundy and blue felt shorts with big ol' rasta hats shuffling around in a small herd. One of them picked up a pistol by the barrel and shouted, "Me found pistol". Then another found a rifle, picked it up by the barrel and shouted, "Me found a rifle". Then I moved to a pub where one of my friends, dressed very poorly as Elvis with a big wig, waited for another friend to play a fruit machine to a specific nudge feature that played the tune to Hound Dog so that the impersonator could sing the words karaoke style. Bloody weird.

Looking through some users on a school whose network I manage, I found the following user, 00AMYL, followed by 00ANAL. How unfortunate.

Spent around £300 on records at the weekend; check my eBay site for rare old skool and breaks tracks. More to come over the next week or two as well. Byeeee

Hey mama it's that beat to make you groove mama. Get on the floor and shake your booty mama. Please get that song out of my head.

I had a proper nightmare last night. I had fallen asleep in Toby's room and had rolled over and half trapped my left arm by lying up against his cot bed. In my sleep I was a 7 year old boy paralysed in bed while my murderous step father crept into the room to stab me. I was about a quarter awake so the side of his bed looked like the bedroom wall as my eyes were half open. I was paralysed because I was asleep obviously and in my sleep I was trying to shout, "Help", but could hardly move my mouth and virtually no noise came out. It was bloody horrible.

Anyway, wish me luck on my eBay bid for Dave Kinsey's DC shoes. Wish I'd seen the other Artist's Project shoes when they came out; I would have bought the lot!

Remember me, after all this time baby.

Anyway, there was this guy in NMS (where I work) called Andrew Kean. AK47 we called him because of his machine gun delivery. He used to make out like he was taking in what you were telling him, but a quick look at the pad he was using to take down "notes" would show random words taken out of the conversation, non-sensical underlining of words and lines drawn between them. One day he turned up with a smart new black eye. This drew much speculation from everyone and provided much amusement for me, but AK47, obviously tired of the constant questioning decided to wear mirrored sunglasses to the office the next day so people would stop asking him about his eye. Good idea yeah wearing sunglasses in a halogen lit office?!! The funniest thing was when Lindsay asked him what was the deal with the shades (must have been the 50th person that day) and so he whipped them off in a huff. Then she said, "Ooh, what's happened to your eye??" Classic.

I hate people that over-emphasise words. For example, when people say, "that's an aaabsoluuute cllllaaasic". Shut up. And also when people are showing off about their fried breakfast (yes there are people that do this; I've met them) and they list the ingredients in an exaggerated drawl to try and increase their appeal and make the meal seem larger than it was, like this: "Yeah, there was eeeggs, baaycuuun, sosagiiiis, beeans, mushrooooms, friied breeead, to-ma-toooes, bllack puddiiing etc etc". Shut up, shut up, shut up! I don't care!!

Have I told you about this other knob end in the office called Rory? His real name is Ruhairdh. But he won't tell anyone how to pronounce it. Bothered. He has this really annoying habit of taking personal phone calls on his mobile and then pacing up and down the walkway between the pods talking in Russian or German hoping to make eye contact with me so I can be impressed that he can talk another language. Can you speak "uareagimpian"?

Went to the Science Museum again the other day and was passed by a motorbike with a box on the back that said, "URGENT BLOOD". I thought it was funny anyway.

I'll leave you with, what I think, is a mad coincidence. My Dad stayed over the other weekend and we took him back to Bicester. At the last minute we decided to stop off in Oxford quickly. He wanted to have a look at the iPods in Virgin and on the way in I stopped to have a look through the DVD sale. I saw the Koyaanisqatsi/Powaqqatsi double pack. It was 14.99 and I would have probably ignored it except I found one copy marked at 9.99, so I bought it. I watched both films that afternoon and was really bugged by the music in Powaqqatsi, which I recognized from another film that I couldn?t remember. I checked out the www.imdb.com at work the next day and cross-referenced the composer Phillip Glass to find he'd done the music for The Truman Show and that was where I recognized it from. That night Sarah went out to work and I gave Toby a bath. When I came downstairs there was a travel show on and they were in Pensacola, USA at a town called Seaside. As they went round the very utopian, uniform whitewashed houses I recognized them as the houses from The Truman Show; then the same music started playing that I'd heard the night before. So, if I hadn't gone to Oxford, walked into that store and decided to buy the DVD because it was incorrectly priced, watched it that night, recognized the music, decided to look it up, discover the film where I heard it first and then bath Toby at exactly the right time to finish and catch the section of the travel show where they played the music whilst in the town, then there would have been no coincidence. I think that's quite mad.

Decided to leave you with something funny instead. Just watched a program on plastic surgery and in particular phalloplasty (knob surgery). They were relaying the story of a chap with a small winky that went behind his wife's back (can't have been that small then, ho ho) to have an enlargement. The operation went wrong, so he had another one, which gave him a really big penis...full of pus. An infected penis. Not two words that any man wants to see together. So his wife left him cos she didn't like the look of his twisted corned beef wanger. Then after he finished his course of antibiotics, his penis was free of infection, but had been eaten away so drastically that it was smaller than he when he started. Never mind, at least he doesn't have to worry about what to do with the 6 grand he blew.

I wanted some breaks and beats DJ tools vinyl and so did a search on Google for "battle breaks". And got loads of pages on short holidays in the picturesque OAP town of Battle (Hastings, Surrey). Not really what I was after. Fresssssh!!