Miscellany

Well, that was a longer hiatus than intended. Hello again. I trust every­one had a suit­ably indul­gent Christ­mas and New Year.

Here’s a list of things I might have posted about, had I been post­ing about things:

1. Con­grat­u­la­tions are in order for Sian and Larry, now known as Mr. & Mrs. Kil­gan­non. Their wed­ding was a beau­ti­ful one, as lovely as a wed­ding can pos­si­bly be. I hope they have an utterly fab­u­lous life together, and I’m sure they will.
2. Con­grat­u­la­tions are also in order for Leon, who snagged him­self a hip new job on the Review sec­tion of the Sunday Herald, the best Sunday broad­sheet in Scot­land, bar none. Well done that man.
3. Babies. Aren’t they quite the thing? My old friend Lind­say has one, a wee girl called Ella, and she’s a super little crawl­ing machine about to break into some seri­ous tod­dling. My sister’s niece is another ultra-​cutie, she’s called Hope, already tod­dling like crazy, and affix­ing Winne The Pooh stick­ers to anyone within a 5 metre radius. My mis­sion this year is to encour­age all my female friends to breed, so that I can play with more of these amus­ing crea­tures. And buy them tiny jumpers. And stuff like that.
4. Weblog recog­ni­tion horror. Until recently, when meet­ing new people, they’d say, ‘Oh, I read your review of such and such. You were very wrong. Fool.’ or, prior to last year, ‘Oh, you drunk­enly stamped on my foot at Optimo. I hate you.’ Thus far in 2004, five people, upon meet­ing me have said, ‘Oh, I read your web­site. Why haven’t you updated it in so long?’ Peculiar.
5. A redesign. Very occa­sional Submit Response poster Hannah McGill, upon learn­ing that a redesign is planned for this web­site sug­gested that it should look less like ‘a fuck­ing till receipt.’ I took this as a com­pli­ment, but am unsure as to whether it was meant as such. My other mis­sion for this year is to make the site look more like a till receipt, if at all pos­si­ble. And make it easier to read for my Dad, who uses some sort of steam-​powered com­puter from the 1830s.
6. The mooted manned mis­sions into space. Fuck off. Yes, the urge to explore is a laud­able human trait, and, yes, the tech­no­log­i­cal spin-​offs from the space pro­gramme have ben­e­fited humankind in untold ways. (Imag­ine a world with­out non-​stick frying pans. They never would’ve been invented oth­er­wise. Oh no.) But, last time I looked, the world is in an absolute fuck­ing mess. So, just maybe, flying to the moon isn’t a big pri­or­ity com­pared to, say, AIDS. Or restruc­tur­ing the coun­tries the US and her allies have been smash­ing up lately.
7. Grime. Or Eski, or what­ever it’s called. Okay, so Wiley made the cover of the Guardian’s Friday Review, which means I must be hope­lessly behind the curve these days, but in 2003 I only scratched the sur­face of the post-​garage skro­nky noises coming straight outta Bow. And got very excited indeed about the idea of drum­less dance music.
8. Music weblogs. My sub­scrip­tion list is heav­ily skewed toward techy, web design and aca­d­e­mic weblogs. I’ve no idea why I don’t keep up with music in the same way, so I’m on the look­out for decent music weblogs, along the lines of Woebot, the only con­sis­tently read­able one cov­er­ing my kind of music (i.e. all kinds of music) that I’ve found. Sug­gested reading?
9. The iPod Mini. I’m such an Apple-​licker that I want one, even though it is quite clear that they are ridicu­lously expen­sive and come in the vilest of colourways.

I’m sure there were other things worth men­tion­ing, but my Her­culean intake of Sam­bu­cas at the afore­men­tioned nup­tials seems to have had a dele­te­ri­ous effect on my memory. And no, I don’t know why we were drink­ing Sam­buca either.

Posted at 4pm on 12/01/04 by Jack Mottram to the misc. category.
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