Lyle over at the Toyata diesel rebrand project d4d posted a nifty reminder to this weeks Friday Five which seems worth answering only in that it’s not work and does not require much thought.

1. Who is your favorite singer/musician? Why?
I will limit myself to one and today that’s going to be Nine Inch Nails. I first heard “Head Like A Hole” when Pop Will Eat Itself were guest DJs in a club in Liverpool way back when and thought it was fantastic. A friend introduced me to Pretty Hate Machine and I was hooked. There are some fantastic songs which really capture my darker moods and a lot of my thoughts over the years. Broken and The Downward Spiral and two of my most played cds.

Trent Reznor has also done stirling work on film soundtracks. The Natural Born Killers soundtrack, which he put together, is still one of my all time favourite OSTs. The remixes of Closer used on “The Fan” (Tony Scott directed, De Niro/Snipes starring) are fantastic, as is the same track in the opening of “Se7en”. And his cover of “Dead Souls” for “The Crow” soundtrack is great too. Speaking of which, his cover of Queen’s “Get Down, Make Love” is perilously close to being better than the original and he’s the only artist I know who’s covered Adam and the Ants decently too.

Standout songs for me are:

• Gave up (Broken)
• Head Like A Hole (Pretty Hate Machine)

Closer (precursor mix) (Further down the Spiral)

Something I can never have (Pretty Hate Machine)

Hurt (The Downward Spiral)

• And All That Could Have Been (And All That Could Have Been)
• 10 Miles High (Things Falling Apart)

Foetus come a close second (and on some days would have been my answer!)

2. What one singer/musician can you not stand? Why?
So many to choose from but Michael Jackson has to be the answer. Why? Pick a reason - any reason. Let’s go with crimes against humanity.

3. If your favorite singer wasn’t in the music business, do you think you would still like him/her as a person?
What sort of question is this? I’ve never met the guy.

4. Have you been to any concerts? If yes, who put on the best show?
Difficult. Saw Prince on his Diamonds and Pearls tour years ago (before he went mad) and that was a great performance and spectacular show. NIN were fantastic on the Fragility tour. Foetus have been great and very intense. Pop Will Eat Itself were always good. Einsturzende Neubauten are always impressive because of the range of equipment and implements they bring on to the stage (although they are now limited in that they can’t use their angle grinders and other power tools anymore). I enjoy most concerts I go to.

5. What are your thoughts on downloading free music online vs. purchasing albums? Do you feel the RIAA is right in its pursuit to stop people from dowloading free music?
Most of the music I download is stuff that you can’t get anymore. It’s not in the public domain, but the albums are unavailable (e.g The Nymphs, Skinny Puppy’s back catalogue etc.) If I could get hold of the albums “legally” then I would. And yes, every now and then I download individual songs that I want. I prefer to buy albums if I can. Of course the RIAA is right to stop people downloading music. It’s illegal. It’s the same as the police stopping car thieves, people speeding and people selling narcotics. But downloading music is much less harmful and doesn’t have the same social impact or consequence.

I decided this morning that I’m going to start my conquest of the known world and become “Supreme Ruler of Earth”.

Hopefully that will kill some time.

Like the kids in South Park, I learnt something today. How to make Sloe Gin. It’s fairly straightforward:

1. Collect some sloes (this is the time of year for them)
2. Wash, destalk and poke the sloes with a fork to pierce the skin
3. Fill an empty (but sealable and preferably dark) bottle half full of sloes.
4. Add a cup and a half of granulated sugar (about 10oz or so)
5. Top up with gin (cheap Tesco stuff will do rather than your best bottle of Bombay Sapphire)
6. Leave to ferment for several months

Simple as that. Admittedly, I get quite impatient about this sort of thing but I’m quite prepared to wait a year and then make another batch before drinking this years.

Cheers!

It seems that Jazz was right and Underworld is getting severely panned as a waste of celluloid. Dilemma - do I spend my ill gotten gains and go and see it or get 2/3 dvds out instead?

Kate Beckinsale in rubber or Blockbuster?

Hardly a fair fight! I’ll let you know what I think of it on the weekend.

I am so tired at the moment. I don’t know why - I slept quite a lot while away and did manage to chill out totally. But for some reason I feel knackered now. I even had 9 hours sleep last night which is unusual for me.

The worst part is that I was planning to do some writing this week - finish a short story, revise a script and start the second draft of another. But I can’t seem to focus on anything for more than, oh, about 10 seconds. I need to start making notes because I have these thoughts and forget them immediately. It’s painful. I blame it on the mind-numbingly, will sappingly dull place I work at.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

…has left the building!

Might have to do some work instead.

I have divided feelings about the self proclaimed vigilante superhero Angle Grinder Man who’s roaming the streets of South London, armed with angle grinder and freeing cars trapped by the evil menace that are wheel clamps.

On the one hand I feel that this upholds the kind of anti-establishment thinking and behaviour that I encourage, questoning authority and challenging the status quo. He’s taken the time to find out the legal aspects of what he’s doing, what he can get away with and how to advise people he “helps” because he doesn’t feel that it’s right that people should be made to pay a release fee on top of a parking fine. I admire the fact that he’s taken it upon himself to act on his principles.

On the other hand, he is helping people who I’m not sure deserve his help. People who park where they’re not supposed to or who leave their cars in a restricted time slot for long than the allocated period annoy me because they seem to think that they are different somehow, that they deserve to be able to get away with it and that the rest of us don’t. This isn’t fighting for the innocent, this is helping those who can already help themselves but feel they shouldn’t have to.

Still, he does wear a very silly costume and he should be applauded for having the confidence to go out in public looking like a total tit.

Once again, I’m stuck on a train heading to London. This time, there’s been an accident on the track ahead and we could be sitting here for hours. Joy. I’m so happy to be back. I really missed the stresses and strains of everyday living, the daily trek to work and the tedium of office life, the awful mobile phone ringtones that everyone has playing at full volume, the moaning, the smell, the questionable sticky puddles on the seat next to me.

This time two weeks ago I was getting ready to fly half way around the world to a small island in the Maldives in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It’s a holiday that I’ve been wanting to have for several years and we finally decided that enough was enough and it was time to forget the new kitchen and blow the equity from our house sale on a well deserved luxury holiday.

It was fantastic.

I’ve always found that normally when you arrive at a holiday destination, it doesn’t look quite as good as it does in the brochure. This place was no different - it didn’t look like the brochure. It looked better. The Maldives are made up of hundreds of small islands and a few of them (70 or more) house holiday resorts. We were staying on Ihuru at the Angsana Spa and resort. The island itself is so small it only takes 10 minutes to walk around at a nice slow, ambling pace. The resort itself only caters for up to 100 people in 45 private, air conditioned villas.

Each has a traditional outdoor bathroom and a private verandah and is set back from the beach just inside the treeline. It takes all of about 10 seconds to get from the bedroom into the sea. (And we went for the one with the private jacuzzi!)

The place was so relaxing it was unbelievable. Most of the weather reports we’d looked at before we went said that there were going to be constant thunderstorms the whole time. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was 30/31 degrees most days with a nice breeze which meant that sitting outside was bliss and I toasted nicely.

The sea was like a warm bath at 28/29 degrees and was quite calm. There was no TV and I, as tempted as I was, I avoided using the internet facilities they had there. There was a bar and a restaurant which were superb. The meals were fantastic, absolutely superb (and as I’m wont to, I made friends with the chefs and got some of their recipes for traditional Maldivian curries and a fabulous banana cream pie!). I don’t want to know how much weight I’ve put on! The bar was very well stocked and did some outstanding cocktails.

It was all very civilized but at the same time it was very much back to nature too. There was a “house” reef
around the island which you could snorkel on and it was teeming with life. Within 10 minutes of snorkelling on the first day, I encountered a Black Tip reef shark and on the second day we bumped into a turtle that was minding its own business around the reef. I was captivated by the fruit bats that lived in the palm trees on the island (although they freaked out the wife). We were amazed when we looked out from the restaurant one lunchtime when we saw a pod of dolphins passing by. A neighbouring island had a stingray feeding session at a set time each day where up to five or six metre wide sting rays would come up to the shore and be fed by the man. (This also attracted all the local reef sharks and at one time there were about 8 juvenile sharks and 6 adult ones trying to get a piece of the action). It was incredible to be standing in two feet of water and having them all swimming right past you.

I did, of course, go diving and that was fantastic. Of the five days I went, there were two highlights. The first was a site called Manta Point, which was a Manta Ray cleaning station (where fish called cleaning wrasse remove all the bacteria and parasites from the rays) and the first time we dived it we saw at least 10 or more rays. At one time, a small group of four passed so close over head that I could have reached out and touched them. (On the same dive, we saw a couple of Hawksbill turtles swimming around - what sort of dive is it when you can’t decide whether to watch the turtles or the rays??). The second site was called Rasfaree and was a deep (35 metre) reef plateau. We went to 30m and drifted over it, taking in the marvellous vista and watching as Eagle rays swam past and white tip reef sharks went hunting. There was quite a strong current and as we ascended to the next plateau at about 15m, we got caught in it and it became a very fast and exciting drift dive. Fantastic.

I did go diving on the house reef where they had their own wreck, a sand dredger that you could dive and explore. Apparently it was sometime home to both a nurse shark and a giant moray but I didn’t see them either of the times we went down. I did see plenty of clown fish and a few lion fish though.

I could sit here for hours and write all about it - it’s definitely the best holiday I’ve had. Neither of us thought that we could spend more than a week at a place like this but to be honest, we could have stayed there for longer. There was actually quite a lot to do; sailing, windsurfing, kayaking, badminton, volleyball and the rest. As well as just kicking back, reading books and simply chilling out. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll go back and become a dive god instructor!

Photos will be up shortly when I get them scanned. Unfortunately, no underwater ones.

Preparation time: 6 weeks.

Ingredients:
1 Sunny September day
20+ Housewarming guests
2 bottles of wine (or equivalent in beer) per guest
Assorted barbecue food
1 Karaoke Machine
1500 Classic Karaoke Tunes.

Instructions:
1. Send out invitations to guests. Leave to stand for four weeks before checking for replies. Send out more invitations if required. Leave for another two weeks. (For best results, make sure you select a good mix of singing divas and tone-deaf friends)
2. On the day, tidy house, prepare barbecue, fill buckets with water and ice to provide cooling for beverages.
3. Be stunned by the fact that the karaoke machine you hired is a professional kit that requires a degree in electrical engineering to assemble.
4. Depending on how you prepared your invitation, the first guests will be ready to serve from midday.
5. Add generous amounts of alcohol.
6. After adding the barbecue to the guests, blend with more alcohol.
7. When your guests are suitably marinaded, start the karaoke. (If you are unsure as to whether your guests are marinaded enough for the karaoke, test by suggesting they sing. If they prove resistant, add more alcohol.)
8. Leave to bubble for several hours, adding more alcohol if required.

Upsets: 1 - 30 neighbours depending on volume.

Seems I brought the tropical weather back with me - it’s a gloriously, sunny day. Timely as we’re having the last barbecue of the year so this is likely to be my only post today (unless I drunkenly manage to log in later on)