zzz

My sleeping pattern could not be any more messed up if I actively tried to become nocturnal. It's now 05:15 am and I know that I need sleep, I just can't do it.
Lying in bed and thinking to myself "If I can't sleep it's cool, I'll just relax" no longer works and neither does making or indeed listening to a sleep playlist on my iPod. Eating a banana and drinking milk no longer works for me either so now every night I wait for the sun to come back out and to again be disapointed with myself for not being able to sleep.
If I slept from 4am on Saturday and woke up at 5pm on Sunday, then went to sleep on Monday morning at 11am, woke up at 5pm and am still awake then that means in the last 4 days I've had 19 hours of sleep.
A normal person would sleep from 11pm on Saturday until maybe, 10am on Sunday morning and then be back to sleep at 10pm to wake up for 8am on Monday. That means they got 21 hours sleep, just at different times. I think. But then that means we got almost the same amount of sleep.

But I'm confused with how to count Friday for both me and my hypothetical person.

"Apparently the largest penis in the penis to body ratio is owned by a mussel or something, because the mussel is so small and the penis is so vast in comparison. This is understandable, but other than things like whales, obviously, there's a kind of duck with a huge penis. This impresses me far more, because the duck is quite big, so to have a huge penis compared to it's duck size the penis has got to be huge, which it is. When this fact was recited to me the duck had a 52ft penis, I later discovered that it's really a mere 42cm. Still, that's pretty big.

There's a photo of said duck floating about on the internet, but the duck is dead and it's penis has been unravelled beneath it like one of those party-kazoo things. It's too tragic to be looked at."

Is what I wrote to begin with, I think the fact is actuall quite sombre and sad seeing as the duck died. This was until I looked at a news report written about the incident (written on the 14th of Septermber 2001, so 3 days afterwards there was still time for a "..and finally..!" type story).

The duck remains tragic, there's no disputing that. However, the first 'scientist' who discovered the member (Really? What were they doing to suddenly 'find' a huge duck cock? Also, are most duck penis' like, 10cm or something?) was called 'Dr.Mulder'. Which I found fairly amusing. The "mating expert's" name was.. Dr.McCracken.

Dr.McCracken had something to say about other journalists who had been reporting on the find: -
"I'm not fond of the 'nudge nudge, wink wink' comments by the authors,"

The author of this article then followed with:

"The authors write that this species is "promiscuous and boisterous in their sexual activity", which means that there is likely to be stiff competition by drakes to be the father of ducklings."


Really.

i dreamed a dream

It turns out, if you buy the programme for a Bob Dylan gig you get three things. Well, five.
Physically, you get some nice old photos of the man himself, an interview and a review of his "best show ever". The fourth thing you get is a distinct feeling of inadequacy and the fifth is uncertainty of where his integrity is.

Third and fourth things first - "The Big Event:Bob Dylan - SECC Glasgow"
I'm ganna have to paraphrase this as typing out the entire article will bore both of us. Accept my dots and cuts thusly.
"..the greatest concert I've ever seen."

"..and he's playing 'Just Like A Woman'. And when he gets to the chorus - 'Aw,she takes..' - it happens..the building sings.. It astonishes everyone. You can see the effect it has on the band, breaking across the stage like dawn. Tony Garnier has a huge, helpless grin and is turning to the other players - as if to say 'Can You Believe This?' These Smiles are genuine."

"Dylan is standing chording away at his keyboard, leaning into the song now, listening, and a surprised grin flashes across his face, too. Anyone who knows anything about Dylan will not believe this, but, by the end of the song, just for a moment, the man famous for wilfully restructuring the DNA of his songs, seems to be singing along with the crowd, not vice-versa."

I'm ganna spare you the rest of the article as the amount of vomiting it induces is not something I'll put through another. Just know that it goes on to say that THIS was the crowd 'Dylan' spoke to, something he "never does" followed again by "if you know something about 'Dylan'. I mean, really. And now we know we'll never beat this amazing 'dream crowd' they once had in Scotland. What are we supposed to do with all this information? According to this, it's not the man we've paid to see that makes the gig but the people around us or also paid to come. I just felt a bit depressed at this point, as so far all I'd seen was some old people dancing and a creepy man in a leather coat with a girl who was too old to be his daughter and too young to be his girlfriend, just the right age to be a victim of rohypnol.

Next, among the first thing we get the second and fifth things. Possibly the most random choice for an interview they could have spared, we get 'Dylan' talking about his part in 'Hearts of Fire', a rather dire film (which he admits to) he starred in with Rupert Everrett. We get this:

Q:Why did you do it then?
A:I did it for the money, why else would I do it?

Well, fair enough. At least he's honest.

But hang on? How much was this programme? £12? And we got this? So history repeats itself then, huh Bob?
Some of the photos are lovely, though, so I'm not at all annoyed with the purchase really.
Sat between two sets of morons, one who decided the gig was the perfect place for a picnic and arrived late, listening to a set of songs which the majority of I didn't know and it was still amazing. Amazing because it was Bob Dylan, amazing because of how good the music was, amazing because he did "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Blowin' In The Wind" and because he did "All Along The Watchtower". Also amazing because of the smile that was on my face from the moment the lights dimmed and the man came out in his vampire-civil war soldier look.

Also, listen to Bill Callahan as his new album 'Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle' is beautiful, and his past project under the name 'Smog' is always worth a listen.

how important

Oh hayfever, you delivered a suckerpunch of the highest quality to my face on this day. Is it really something that you grow out of eventually or is that some kind of urban legend? Supposedly you grow out of asthma too, so I should have both coming to me.
I think the asthma one could be true, you never see someone over the age of about 25 puffing on an inhaler or wheezing around dog and cat fur. Pretty much.
6! More! Years!

Other than the hayfever I'm suffering, I've also accidentally exposed myself to a few things - American politics of the 1970s and a British writer I should have already been reading.
Reading is something I like at the moment. I'm reading 'Let The Right One In' by John Ajvide Lindqvist because I saw the film and liked it. It's brilliant, horrible, funny and dark and that's the kind of thing I like reading but the one thing that stops me from getting properly into it is that it doesn't feel important.
At its core it's a horror, on top of this is piled innocence, adolescence and human sexuality. AQA described the book to me as an 'exploration into the darkest of human psychosexual tendencies.' Maybe it gets to this point. I recognise it's a lot more than just a basic horror book but I want it to be something more.
There's a feeling you get from reading something that's important that you can't match with anything else. Reading the articles and books of Hunter S. Thompson, that does it, so does reading Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac and Clement Freud and the random nonsensical ramblings of David Lynch's twitter page. When people say things and actually mean things, when they can make you laugh/smile while really telling you something of some kind of importance and exposing such a personal side to them. You know an author is important when they don't just write in one medium. Jack Kerouac contributed to 'The Americans' by Robert Frank, for example. That was important.

So now I want to read something important, that says something about something and not just says something. Watchmen, that was important. Invisible Man, that was important.

'Frost/Nixon' was an alright film, it seemed a bit pointless when it came out (to me) but you can see why it came out when it did and what it attempted to do. That's all it amounted to for me, something that was trying to say something about something but ended up just being a vaguely entertaining hour and a half or so tied together with a tense bit at the end. The performances were fine but the end feeling was a joyful "Remember David Frost?!" type thing that was forgettable after an hour or so.
Re watching 'All The Presidents Men' followed by 'Gonzo - The Life and Work of Dr Hunter s. Thompson' simply made me wonder why a bit of an awkward interview was all that met Richard Nixon after all the crap that happened in the 70s? Kent State, for example, saw a massacre of students for simply protesting. Why on earth was sending the National Guard ever seen to be a good idea? What good was ever going to happen? And then what followed was Water Gate. I'm speaking as someone who wasn't alive at the time of all this so it's futile me trying to imagine what the time was like, it just doesn't really seem fair. Right now people are upset over, and quite rightly, the heart attack (or is it internal bleeding?) related death of Ian Tomlinson. It's terrible, having to watch the footage over and over at the gym is harrowing and the death isn't a good thing, but he wasn't shot. The guy who did the shoving/pushing/poking didn't intend death upon Mr.Tomlinson, but then again the police should be trained professionals and act this way.

Anyway. My thoughts there are confused, I simply think it's all abhorrent and at the end of the day we simply move from one thing to the other to be upset and cross about. Every now and then we should probably look back at things that were once terrible (and perhaps not totally obvious) and say "Remember the Kent University Massacre?!"

Or something. Some of the students who were attacked, including one who didn't die but did suffer lifetime paralysis from the intrusion of a bullet into his body, weren't even part of the protest and were simply walking to and from classes. How'd you like them apples.

'I wish I'd worn my drip-dry suit' McGovern '72

I

I was going to set myself three challenges, write about Octomom, Vigilantism (?) and finally write about David Lynch. In the end I decided all things could end up quite dull; David Lynch is brilliant, as is vigilantism but Octomom isn't great and shouldn't make porn. Instead, I'll write about other things that border on intresting and then explain my stance on 'I' as a pronoun used in blog writing.

I have seen 'Lesbian Vampire Killers'. The inclusion of the 's means that I don't mean just walking around but the thing that is currently residing/squatting in its own filth in cinemas. If this thing is what you/they call a film, then before this, I had never experienced one before.
Is this because the thing towers over the greats (which in this day simply means 'The Dark Knight' or 'Wall-E')? No, this is because it is a kind of shit the likes of the world has not encountered before. I could try and be constructive and tell you exactly why the film doesn't work and what's more, has not even an ounce of humor within it's squalid body but I can't be bothered. It doesn't really require it. All I have to say is that every single member of the crew was masturbating furiously over each shot, line and action their genius had created and no member was more covered in this dark, porridge-y load than the director/editor duo, Phil Claydon and James Herbert.

According to these two, people don't move fast enough in real life so what we end up with is a gash scene after gash scene running at seemingly random speeds cut together with comedy sound effects ("Her hand doesn't move nearly as fast enough to her face at this point, can you make it fast and put that swish sound effect in? So what if she looks like she's having a fit, this is art.")
I don't know if that really happened while they were in the cutting room, but I think it probably did.

Another thing, as a person who thinks freedom of speech is a pretty great thing and nothing should be censored, this film was so bad that the parts that may offend a lesbian Mary Whitehouse for the modern age also offended me. What is used to kill the afforementioned beasts? A dildo-sword. On the surface a simple, childish joke but deep within does this expose the misogynistic underbelly of "Phil Claydon"? An object of masculinity used to destroy homosexual women? Probably not. But it's where my mind wandered to as this shit went on.

Okay. I know that you're (I adress you as if there's someone reading this) thinking that I went to see a film called "Lesbian Vampire Killers" and shouldn't be surprised that it's shit. And you're right. That's all I can say.

On another note, I don't think 'I' should be used in blogs. It makes it seem like too much of a journal/diary thing. It's hard to write it not in first person though, especially if I saw something that I hated and I feel like I should talk about it I. In the future I won't use I. I promise.

God dammit.

To start how I wish to continue.

If you fell across this searching for information on pandas, I'll give you some, although this has to be both the first and the last time.

On the 7th of September 2008, it was the 40th anniversary of the WWF. By this I mean the World Wide Fund for Nature, and not the wrestling orginization, which is not nearly as old.

For the celebrations, those-who-decide decided in all their wonderful wisdom to create 1,600 pandas out of paper and let them loose on the streets of Bordeaux.

Isn't it brilliant? On a darker note, the number 1,600 is the predicted number of pandas alive in the wild today. That's not even enough to fill Bordeaux, and I've been there, it's really not THAT big.
At least the cruelty of this statistic is lost on this fella:

First and indeed, last.