A Christmas List

The links I provide are just used for example, not necessarily the one I want or the place you should buy it from.

• Ceramic baking beans
• Flat baking sheet
• Slow cooker recipe book
• Sheep breeds book
• Indian/ethnic pouffe - preferably blues/greens (HINT - TK Maxx)
• Monitor riser - dull but might help my stiff neck and shoulders
• In-ear headphones, preferably with mouldable fittings
  

I will add more as I think of them!

Best Imitation of Myself

I love cover versions of songs. I'm always worried that the cover won't do the original justice, or that it's so samey they shouldn't have bothered doing it. So many can be terrible, even if the artist doing the cover is brilliant. An example of this is John Martyn's version of Portishead's Glory Box. Ugh. But so many are brilliant.

The above song - Best Imitation of Myself by Ben Folds Five is quite a perky little tune. I'm not a massive fan of them, they're a band I feel I should listen to more and for some reason I never do. Maybe because I'm not excited enough by them. There's nothing that shouts out at me that they're that little bit different. The songs I've heard have all been nice but there's nothing that's made me go WOW and get all passionate.





So, the Ben & Jason cover. Why do I think this works, and perhaps even surpasses the original? I had to make the video myself as I couldn't find a link to the cover anywhere online. To start with Ben Parker has a better voice than Ben Folds. He doesn't struggle so much with the higher notes, and if anyone slips in catches on the way up to or down from their falsetto I'm theirs! The tone of Ben F's voice is quite nasal and this gives the song a somewhat whingy feel; Ben P's clearer tone gets rid of that (a good thing).

The cover has upped the tempo, which makes it less maudlin. I think that works better as it subtly changes the meaning of the lyrics, making them seem more cutting - I swear I was listening, but I started drifting round the part about me acting my age.

Then there's the fact that it's accompanied by a string quartet. It takes the instrumentation of the original and cleverly arranges it for the strings. I'm sure they alter the colour of the chords a little by adding some extra notes here and there. Finally there's the wonderful ending full of sliding chromatics.

Sadly my brain fogginess is preventing me from further comment, but hopefully it'll wake up at a later point.

ART!

I was at my parents' house for a couple of days, my mum had bought some new watercolour paints so was itching to try them, the weather turned horrible, dad was watching the Open golf tournament on TV (yawn) and so art was made. Go over to my art blog The Shadow of Ice to see it!

Defeating my own gingerism

As you can see from my profile photo, I’m a ginger. Redheaded and proud! Gingerism pisses me off. Some jokes can be mildly amusing, and I can take a joke. But change the "ginger" to someone black etc. and the joke would be racist and could potentially get you into a lot of trouble. Blondes probably feel the same way about all the "blondes are stupid" jokes.

However, I am a gingerist myself. I don’t really find ginger men that attractive. It seems a bit incestuous to me somehow. But apparently we’re dying out, and to stop this we gingers have to stick together. So in the interests of maintaining a ginger presence on the planet, here are my top 5 gingery hotties, in no particular order:

Seth Green (see above) - actor. Where to spot him - Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Austin Powers films.



Josh Homme - lead singer with Queens of the Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures. Where to spot him - on tour!


Michael C. Hall - actor. Where to spot him - Six Feet Under and Dexter.



Ewan McGregor - actor. Where to spot him - Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.


Toby Stephens - actor. Where to spot him - BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre and Bond film The World Is Not Enough.

Please form an orderly queue gentlemen... ;-)

Philip Larkin was right. Sort of.

One of Larkin's most famous lines of poetry is "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." This is a blog about some of my childhood, particularly the influence of Doom, and how it could've gone horribly wrong.

The computer game Doom came out in 1993. I was 10 years old. I think we got a demo of it free with my dad's computer magazine, and then my parents bought it. I was allowed to play it even though it's rated for players aged 16+. However, when I played it I was usually under my mum's supervision. Either she was playing it and I would watch, or I would play it but she had to sit next to me. This was not her doing, it was mine. I was too scared to play it on my own because of what monster might be around the next corner! That was until I discovered the cheat for 'God mode' which makes you invincible.

Now, you could say that my parents are terrible for letting me play such a violent game at such a young age. The graphics may look terrible now, but in 1993 they were amazing. Doom wasn’t the first violent computer game I’d played. Before Doom, there was Catacomb Abyss 3-D. The sound for this used the internal PC speaker so all you got was a series of weird beeps. It also featured text information, such as “damaging blows!” when you were being attacked by zombies.

I don’t remember there being as much concern about children playing violent games back then. Maybe there wasn’t as much, or it could be that I was less media aware because I was a child. Violent video games get the blame for people (usually teenagers) behaving violently. They probably have a bit to do with me being weird, but I’m not (especially) violent.

For example, in Doom, when you kill things with a rocket launcher (as shown above) or blow up a barrel the monsters explode and make a squishy noise. I love that noise. Also in a follow-up game to Wolfenstein, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, you can shoot people in a much more accurate manner i.e. in specific body parts. My favourite noise was associated with shooting someone in the throat.

So yes, that is a bit sick and wrong but I don’t go out and try and recreate those noises in real life. Shooting up freakish monsters and Nazis doesn’t make me want to shoot actual people. If I am feeling angry, pissed off and like I might lash out at people I don’t do a Dexter, I go and play a computer game. I could imagine there being more violence related to Pong, a very early computer game.

How can a table tennis game be violent? I might be able to hear you ask. Well imagine you have the score of 0 and the person you’re playing has the score of 9. They beat you every time you play. That would be frustrating and would make me want to lash out more than if I’d been playing at shooting things.

However, the most influential thing about Doom for me was the music. I have downloaded the MIDI files so I can listen to the music without having to play the game. It’s an influence that has made me a lover of metal. That and dad’s 70s vinyl collection. Plus it has to be the greatest influence on me liking Rammstein.

Doom didn’t just influence my tastes in music. Back in 1993, some of the members of Rammsteinvideo. You get to hear the exploding squishy noise about 2min 15s in. were also playing it. In fact their drummer is nicknamed Cristoph “Doom” Schneider for copyright reasons. If you’ve never heard the Doom music, then watch this On Rammstein’s first album, Herzeleid, the opening track ‘Wollt Ihr Das Bett In Flammen Sehen?’ features some of the sound effects from Doom – the sound of the shotgun cocking (which you can hear at around 2min on the above video) and also the death scream of your character. Also note that the repetitive guitar riffs are reminiscent of Doom’s music. A lot of Herzeleid sounds like Doom music, in particular ‘Der Meister’ and ‘Asche Zu Asche’.

So I’m a sicko who likes gruesome death noises and I love killing things. But only in computer games. Oh and I like Rammstein. It could’ve been a lot worse. I could be a mass murdering weirdo that likes Rammstein.