Having enormous fun listening to Radiodread, Easy Star All Stars reggae / dub cover of OK Computer. Absolutely loved their Floyd inspired Dub Side Of The Moon and this manages to top that album’s sublime delights. It really is fantastico.
Go and get it.
Not an eventful bank holiday weekend and we didn’t manage to make it down to Jeff and Giles on Saturday as some Soton stuff popped up. Should be able to get down in the week and I’m still very much looking forward to seeing the space giraffe 
We had a nice walk around The Devil’s Punchbowl yesterday and stayed over at the The Devil’s Punchbowl Inn after the 6 miles trek around the rim of what is essentially a very pretty hole in the ground. The Inn was less lovely than the picturesque crater it stands next to and the “How Not To Run A Hotel”, staff service being a very odd mix between confusion and surliness. Getting a bit langered helped us ignore that 
Crap hostelry aside the whole site is pretty impressive, especially the view from Gibbet’s Hill across 3 counties but strangely enough not all that photogenic. Even so there’s a few pictures here
I seem to have homing goods and chattels.
I was burgled years ago when living in a very dodgy part of Nottingham called Sneinton. Breaking in by smashing the patio doors the toe rags nicked an extremely heavy Sony TV, a video recorder and a rather nice Yamaha guitar FX box. It’s the only time I’ve been burgled so not knowing how these things normally go I wasn’t all that surprised to get a call from the plod a week later saying “We’ve found all of your stuff, can you come and pick it up please?”. Apparently that’s quite unusual.
The pattern continued earlier in the week. A couple of days after moving to Southampton I rather cleverly lost my wallet, full of my driving license and credit cards. Earlier this week, nearly a month later, I get a call from a branch of Barclays Bank. “Did you leave it in the branch yesterday?” they said. “No, I’ve never been in that branch and lost the wallet over a month ago”. Nice! Everything was in it apart from the 5 quid or so I remember being there just before letting it loose into the world.
How should I feel about this? Lucky I suppose. Not knowing any better I don’t, in fact on on planet Gaz I imagine any items of mine with someone they shouldn’t be struggling heroically to get back to my side. Just like that milk carton in that Blur video.
Thought it’d be nice for this stuff to get a wider audience as I know that there isn’t a perfect overlap with the people who read my blog and the Llamasoft Forums.
It some of the first screen shots of Jeff and Giles X360 game from Llamasoft. Early doors still but it’s looking great.
It’s also worth a look-see here as Jeff outlines in the thread some of the play mechanics.
I’m really excited, it the first Llamasoft game since the excellent Gridrunner++. I love the light synth stuff a lot but it’s going to be great seeing that fused with some tip top Llamasoft arcade thrills. And since we’re visiting casa Yak this weekend I should be able to get a bit of a play on it
Here’s a snippet courtesy of Youtube in the meantime
Inspired by this thread in the awesome forum that is The Trough Suze had a crack at making some McGyver McMuffin’s, home made extemporized versions of the pretty piss poor morning food they server at McDonalds.
So we took these:
And turned them into this:
I don’t think I need to say how fan-fucking-tastic the taste was, it’s pretty evident from the picture
Emboldened by this success I’m interested in a doing a Sausage and Egg McMuffin but using steak instead of “sausage”, adding some cheese and using butter mixed with whole-grain mustard
A hour after updating my video games page, bemoaning that I haven’t been arsed to get Jeff Minter’s OS X Gridrunner as Universal Binary, I had a UB of this great little game up and running.
I’ve not updated the main site but if you do have a Mac I can heartily reccomend downloading the demo here and if you like it purchasing it from here
So now I have a cold and I’m quite sure it’s a Scottish one. Germs up north have had the task of infecting people filled with Iron Bru and used to wearing t-shirts in weather than can only be described as “shit” For germs like these infecting my flabby white body is like going for a nice 2 week break at Butlins as opposed to the D-Day invasion bloodbath involved in making wirey, ginger, kilt wearers sneeze. It’s not put me in the best of moods to be honest.
Managed to sign up for the AS Level Photography for September and am getting pretty excited about this. Flickr has an awesome search facility so I thought I’d have a quick look at some of the pictures taken by others of similar subjects that I’ve covered. They’re depressingly good so I’ve along way to go. Jon’s enrolled at well so it’ll be good to have a bit of competition and someone to share the driving down to Cosham once a week.
Good night down the Alex on Monday when me and Suze met up with Jon, Joy, Mark and Shelley to see Sin City which was great to see again. I think we have The Big Lebowski in a fortnight’s time. Film, popcorn and beer are still mixing very nicely. I hope it’s a commercial success for the Alex as it’d be good if they carried this on beyond their initial planned run.
And we’ve also had the excellent news that Rod, Suze’s father-in is out of ICU after having a quadruple by-pass. I didn’t really want to mention it on here until it was a bit clearer that everything was going to turn out nicely. He transferred from Portsmouth to the BUPA hospital in Southampton last Thursday for the operation and everything looks like it’s gone very well indeed. So a big sigh of relief all round
Talking of fathers I had a chat to my mum yesterday and she bumped into my dad in the last week or so. My parents split when I was young and since then I haven’t seen him an awful lot in part because he’s spent a good part of it in prison which he’s just got out of. Now the option is there I don’t know whether I’ll see him. He played a very minor part in my upbringing and I don’t feel much of an emotional connection to him. On the other hand it’s always interesting to see where you’ve come from. If I do I’ll probably leave it until after the wedding.
Not sure what we’re up to this weekend yet but it’s looking likely some walking will be involved and potentially in the new forrest. A Scanner Darkly is also out on general release this Friday so if that’s showing locally I think we’ll be up for that too.
Filthy cold permitting 
And we had a great time though things started a little awkwardly.
I’ve rather cleverly lost my wallet along with my driving license and also put my passport into storage while living at Suze’s flat. The upshot is no photo id right now which in turn means I couldn’t use the air tickets Suze bought a while back so it was training it for me. In the end this did turn out to be rather clever as we were meant to be flying last Thursday when the airline world went berserk
Suze still flew and was 5 hours late after spending hours in the departure lounge with nothing to do, read or drink. Despite a six hour journey I got to Edinburgh 4 hours before Suze. We met at the airport and went straight to a show In fact here’s what we did between Thursday and Sunday:
Jim Jefferies – pretty standard stand up but with a lot swearing than you’d rightly expect. V good tho
Marlon Brando’s Corset – “dark” play about the nature of celebrity starring Les Dennis, Jeremy Edwards and Mike McShane. Two word review – “shit sandwich” though to be fair Les Dennis was the best thing in it. Not damning him with faint praise there either, he was genuinely good. Sat behind Josey Lawrence who seemed to make an overly big fuss about having bad hearing and having to sit near the front
Glen Wool – Stoner dude persona stand up who was alright most of the time and every now and again blindingly good. He seemed to have some trouble finding his confidence but when he was flying had the audience in hysterics. Great surprise ending that was worth the admittance alone.
Count Arthur Strong – Been listening to this bloke on radio 4 and have been both puzzled and delighted in equal parts. I can’t really explain his act or the radio show really well but both me and the mrs were nearly crying with laughter Very stupid and good fun. Some more info here http://www.komediaentertainment.com/count_arthur_strong/
S Munnery – Yes THE S Munnery. He’s THE S Munnery due to being the driving force behind the formation of Llamasoft who I do some work for. You can read about it here. He was great when rambling along and just being funny but kept reading out “material”, quite literally. There was a segment about Sherlock Holmes that he just read from bits of paper. Quite funny stuff but badly delivered. Got his autograph after for Jeff in a book he wrote with Banksy which he inscribed “To Jeff, Z80a Rules! LD HL,A love Simon” which I promptly lost after I got full of beer. I think K has a fag paper signed S Munnery for Jeff.
Ron Mueck – Sculptor who makes incredibly life like statues at odd scales. Some pics of his stuff here. Really awesome in the flesh, well the silicon flesh.
Beer and Friends – Lots of both. Awesome to see K, Mrs K, Jimaroid, Bleachy and Teamonkey again Deffo be back next year
Got a few pics as you can see below and there’s some more here
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