Busking 101

Check this out: Roisín Murphy doing a performance of You Know Me Better, the next single from her album Overpowered, on the streets of London.



In the words of PopJustic...amazing.

The album itself is pretty amazing too. Check out couple of reviews.

Cyanide & Happiness on Gayness

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Stumbling Forth

The arch supports, they do nothing!

My feet are still killing me. I'm going to give these arch supports (which incidentally seem to make my shoes fit less well which can't be a good thing) one more day. If my feet have not been completely managled by the end of today I'm guessing they're doing their job.

I know this is a pointless update, but I figured that seeing as I've started blogging again I should really keep the ball rolling, or stumbling forward at least.

Baby Steps

As some of you may know, I was the lucky recipient of a car for Christmas - and no, I'm not from one of those familys that get ponies and such for Christmas. It's a '97 Fiat Punto. I took it as a subtle yet obvious hint that my parents think I, being 26, should really get off my arse and learn to drive.

I've been getting a few lessons of my younger (yes I know it is embarassing that she can drive and I can't) sister, and today I took the first of many steps to make my way onto the roads by applying for my theory test. I've been arsing around for ages reading the book and doing the CD-rom test, so I figured I should really set myself a deadline. I'm doing the test in two weeks, so hopefully all will go well.

Genetics

I've been having really bad foot pain in my left foot for the past few weeks, so I decided to go and visit a chiropodist to get it checked out (by the way did you know that chiropodist pronounced k-iropodist? I obviously didn't from the look of puzzlement when I said the word to the...erm...foot doctor person).

Anywho, she informed me that I have extra high arches in my feet. Yes, some may say that this means my feet would look fantastic in heels, but unfortunately, and contrary to my occasional druken antics, a drag queen in the making I am not. It seems that I have the opposite to flat feet and am putting tons of pressure on the balls of my feet, hence damaging the soft tissue and giving me the pain I've been experiencing together with frequent shin splints with excessive walking/running.

She also informed me that it is genetic, and in keeping with the general trent in the family, any genetic problems seem to always get passed down to me. Why couldn't my family carry some kind of laser-beam-emmiting genetic trait or super-human strength? Is that too much to ask? Instead I got lumped with an immune-system that likes to eat up pancreatic cells and gammy feet. That's great. Just fucking great. With my ability to absorb/inherit genetic traits so well, it seems that I had all the opportunity to become a super X-Man like figure. Pity my gene pool has me more akin to Beak rather than, say, Nightcrawler.

Ah well, at least I can remedy the situation with discreetly placed insoles rather than my initial horror of thinking I'd have to wear those chunky orthopedic shoes that we used to slag the Jehovah Witness kid in school for wearing.

Renovatations

As you may be aware, I'm in the midst of renovating this old blog. The next step is to actually start posting again. I should really start anew and clean up all of the ancient posts on here, but to be honest, I couldn't be arsed.

Currently I'm bolloxed tired and completely unmotivated. Thank God it's Friday at least! Plans for the weekend...well I've got a friends birthday party on tomorrow night and as for the rest, I plan on just taking it easy. We'll see how that one works out.

Buy It!

I just picked up a copy of Róisín Murphy's new album "Overpowered" and I have to say it is a fantastic album. On the first listen I liked it, but by the third I am completely won over.


If you like sophisticated pop/electronic/dance this is one for you. It is in the same vein as Moloko's final album "Statues", but not as heavy-weight - it has far more variety and a little more soul. It's light enough on the ears to have it on in the background, and has enough quality dance-funk beats that you can really get into when you pump up that volume. The highlights of the album for me so far have to be the Andy Cato tracks (he being of Groove Armada fame) You Know Me Better, and the current single Let Me Know which has a fantastic accompanying video:








In other music news, Girls Aloud's new video has been uploaded to youtube for their forthcoming single "Call The Shots". It's an excellent mid-tempo track and a far more straight-forward track than their last single "Sexy! No, No, No...". I really love this track, but at the same time I hope they don't play too safe with the rest of the material on their new album "Tangled Up" which is shaping up to be another brilliant album, improving on the completely and horrifically underappreciated "Chemistry" album. Most people don't realise that they are more of an albums than singles band and alot of their best tracks (cf. "Some Kind of Miracle", "Graffiti My Soul", "Models") never see the light of day.








Myself and Alan are going to see them in G-A-Y on the 17th November. Can't wait for it. It will be great to get away before Christmas, seeing as we really only had a one-week holiday this year, and I know this Christmas is going to be tough giving everything that's happened this year. It's also a great distraction from my current unrelenting frustration with work. I miss optimisim.

Tech Madness!!!

So I went and bought myself a shiny new Nokia 6300 phone. Previously I had the Moto Razr V3, which had just started to piss me off big time, mainly because when texting the predictive function was awful and response time almost as bad. So far I absolutely love the 6300. I was going towards a smart phone, but figured I was just going to pay extra for a load of features that I'd mess with for a week and then get fed up with. The main thing about the new phone that I really like is the screen which is super bright and has fantastic resolution, and texting is no longer a painstaking chore.





Following on from this shopping buzz I went ahead and bought a black Creative Zen Stone Plus. I was looking for a smaller companion to my iPod mainly for the gym.
The Stone Plus is similar enough to an iPod Shuffle, although it has an OLED display screen, an FM radio (with a resonable reception which can be a little bit crackly depending on your location and station), stopwatch, voice recorder and still the size of a pebble. One limitation is that you can't browse tracks while listening the music - if you move to another folder the player starts playing files in that folder.

You also can't actually browse tracks, only folders, but I suppose it is really only designed to contain one or two main playlists, but at 2GB you could potentially have over 200 songs on it - more than enough for what I need anyway - which can be put on the player using simple drag-and-drop. Another slight critisim is the response times when you are flicking through the menu are a tiny bit slow, but overall its fine. I suppose the real attraction for me though was the design - small, extremely light, smooth and, most importantly, shiny.

San Sebastian

Here's just some photos from my trip to San Sebastian. It's such a beautiful place to visit, plus it was all-expenses paid and all I had to do was do a crappy 10 min presentation. Although it is a bit shitty going to these places on your own, especially when you don't speak the language and most people you're with don't speak English and you have to go out to dinner with them, while they all chat away telling jokes and all you can do is just sit there and smile along.

On the last night, completely against character, after paying €3.50 for what I thought was a glass of wine, when it was in fact the price for a whole bottle (which I, of course, polished off), I ended up going to a bar to have a drink, got chatted up by two tranny-hookers, then met some random people along the way (from here its pretty vague) and headed along to a party with them in a different bar before finally crawling back to the hotel at around 4am. Ah, good times!

Current Top 10 Listens....

...in no particular order.

• Singapore (Unreleased Demo) - Girls Aloud, from 'Sound of Girls Aloud [ltd. ed. bonus disc]
  
  


• Medevac - Siobhan Donaghy, from Ghosts
  
  


• There's A Place - Siobhan Donaghy, from 'Ghosts'
  
  


• Aerodynamite - Daft Punk, from 'Daft Club'
  
  


• Futures - Zero 7 (feat. José Gonzalez), from 'The Garden'
  
  


• Golden Skans - The Klaxons, from 'Myths of the Near Future'
  
  


• The Way I Are - Timbaland (feat. Keri Hilson & D.O.E.), from 'Timbaland presents: Shock Value'
  
  


• Alala - Cansei De Ser Sexy, from 'CSS'
  
  


• Overpowered - Róisin Murphy, from 'Overpowered'
  
  


• Green Light (Freemason's Remix) - Beyoncé, from 'B'Day (deluxe edition)'
  
  

I'm espcially enjoying all of Siobhán Donaghy's latest album Ghosts. It's a great pop album coming a little from the left-field.