Hey,
So there was no show this week. Bummer! But to compensate I have recorded this short ramble.
We’ll be back next week though and I think you should be there!
Ferg
Just the talk from this week’s show.
All the talk from our Halloween Special, enjoy!
As you may or may not knowI do a weekly radio show with same name on Roundhouse Radio. Each week we chat about things and play some music. Sometimes not everyone likes the music, so for Real Talk (yes its named after the R Kelly song) I have cut out all the music to give you just the chat from the show. Enjoy!
P.S. You can also listen to the show live or listen to whole shows here: http://www.roundhouse.org.uk/explore/radio/recycle-everything
Have a visit, they are wonderful people!
Last Sunday around 7am I was asleep. It was great, it was exactly how I had hoped and potentially dreamed my Sunday would be at that point of the day. I really hoped that my sleeping state would continue for another few hours at least (this, after all being Sunday) but just 10 minutes later my weekend was turned on its head. At precisely (approximately) 10 past 7 screams of popular birthday related sing-a-long ‘Happy Birthday to You’ began to emanate from the ceiling and were quickly followed by the familiar thumping bass of generic shitty dance music. For the next 3 hours I lay in bed trying to get to sleep (including a brief but unsuccessful attempt to put my pillow over my head like they do on the telly) whilst for all I was aware a ghost party was going on in the room (that’s how loud it was.) As I lay there trying not to be asphyxiated by the pillow I was using as earmuffs I wondered why anyone would throw a party on a Sunday morning (something that I thought until recently was a sacred institution of prolonged rest). Here are my conclusions:
1) You love to party but are afraid of the dark and other partygoers: It can be a terrible curse if you are an all-night raver who is afraid of the dark and hates strangers. Clearly your only option is to rave in your own home and to start early (say, I don’t know, 7am!) in order to get the maximum hours of daylight to rave by.
2) You hope to be the first group of people to successfully combine a rave and a Sunday Roast: Whilst the idea of a Roast’n’Rave has been suggested many times nobody has managed to actually combine it successfully without horrific gravy based tragedies or roast potatoes ending up where roast potatoes don’t fit. It will work one day though. You may say I’m a dreamer but, clearly, I’m not the only one.
3) You are aware that the people asleep in the flat below you have not been able to have a good sleep in for some time and want to deny them the last chance they will have that week in the most disorientating way possible: It certainly worked on me. For the best part of an hour all I could do was roll around and cry ‘its Sunday morning!’
4) You are a bastard who cares only about yourself and sees others merely as inconveniences who stand in the way of your hedonistic exploits: fairly self-explanatory.
5) Your clock is broken: It is possible that in the first instance they can’t read their watch correctly and thought that 7am on Sunday was actually 7pm on Thursday (bit early to start a party but it has been done). Or, their clock was in fact broken and had gradually been losing time all week to the point where it said that it was 11.00 on Friday instead of the actual time (which I may have mentioned before was 7am ON A SUNDAY!!!)
6) You are a total asshole: An obvious point but I feel it has to be made.
And with these conclusions I can take some solace, but I will never get those hours in bed back….
Until next time.
Most people know this, but for those of you who don’t a couple of years ago I won Best Male at the Student Radio Awards. It was a great night, a wonderful experience and I now have a trophy which effectively doubles as a paerweight and bludgening device (should a Zombie apocalypse occur.)
Anyway, a lot of people won’t have heard the entry I made which won me the award so as a treat here it is in all its glory.
Enjoy!
Until next time,
Firstly, I must apologise for not adding anything new for the past few weeks. It has not been the best time of late and between accidentally destroying my computer by attempting to install a program that my machine has been trying to download for 4 years, getting made redundant from my job (the motivation for this post) which although happened quite quickly was incredibly time consuming and a wonderful weekend at Hevy Festival (probably the only festival I could have gone to that I can now afford given my new budget) I have been fairly busy.
Anyway, back to the point. As you may have guessed (probably from a combination of the title and my just mentioning it) I was recently made redundant from my day job as a Gadget Shop Supervisor. Without going too far into detail it was all a bit sudden and the final days of the shop included: a 3 day wait for a pallet of flattened cardboard boxes, A LOT of games catch, a removal lorry that was actually a van and therefore ill-equipped to move an entire shop worth of stock and a staff mutiny that left one man to carry half of it downstairs. The result of this is that I am now jobless for the second August running since I graduated with no signs of finding a new and fulfilling career. So, my current career prospects look bleak, I think it is time to consider some new potential career paths:
1) Professional Dancer: I am probably short a childhood’s worth of dance lessons on this one and those who know me are probably thinking ‘but I’ve seen you dance, it isn’t good’ (or words to that effect) but despite my lack of leotard and funny shoe wearing in my formative years this is actually more plausible than it sounds. You may or may not be aware that as part of the Olympic Opening Ceremony the organisers are after approximately 10,000 volunteers to perform with NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY. If the Olympics really are the greatest spectacle on Earth then what budding dancer’s CV is not going to be improved by having that on it? Frankly, from dancing during the greatest spectacle on earth performing on the West End stage or doing back up dancing in a Britney Spears video would be a step down. As an added bonus Danny Boyle is in charge of the opening and closing ceremonies so at the very least it should win an Oscar, which can’t hurt.
2) Professional Talent Show Judge: With the huge number of talent based reality TV shows surely there is a dearth of judges out there to make hyperbolic comments about the applicant’s ability to sing/ dance/ paint themselves blue and run around the stage shouting ‘I am a whale!’ Certainly, some TV talent shows have had to resurrect those deemed legally dead by television in order to fill the vast demand for judges (see Arlene Phillips on So you Think You Can Dance.) The obvious hump is getting that first gig on a judging panel. However, it seems that from recent examples actual experience of the field you are supposed to be judging people in can be substituted for a silly haircut, eccentric hat, past fame (I was on Radio 1 once, which I think counts) and enthusiasm, all of which I think I can have a stab at. Once I have got that first gig it is only a matter of time before people forget that I am neither qualified to be a judge nor worthy of their attention and just accept me as being famous for being ‘that guy who judges stuff.’ Sort of like the judging equivalent of an It girl.
3) Professional Eccentric Antiques Expert: What with the recession and the rise of TV shows such as cash in the attic there is huge demand for eccentric, bow tie and tweed clad (think Dr Who but less cool) men who can’t pronounce the letter R to run around the country scratching their chin (or smoothing their moustache if they have one) and calling people’s old crap a ‘piece’ in order to show just how knowledgeable they are about antiques. Whilst my moustache is strictly a work in progress (i.e. piss poor for a man of 22) I do own a bow tie and I feel that this factor alone gives me a great shot at becoming an Antiques expert.
So there it is, some potential new career paths to think about. As always if you have any of your own do please comment underneath.
Until next time,
On a recent night out I was horribly offended when a friend of a friend (I assume she was someone’s friend, certainly not mine) pointed at me and shouted ‘balding!’ When I asked her to explain why she had felt it necessary to do that she told me that she could just tell when a man was going bald. Whilst I did feel sorry for her, of all the powers you could get (invisibility, ability to fly, super strength or any other number of cool things) to be saddled with a sixth sense for future male baldness is a bit of a letdown. Anyway, my offer of proving the strength and vitality of my hair by lodging a number of pens in it was not enough to convince her that I was not destined to spend my future trying to find hats that suited and the verdict remained that I was on my way to an altogether more streamlined existence. Needless to say I was worried, alongside impotence and being made to look cowardly in public losing his hair is every man’s greatest fear (arguably going grey should be in here too but, as my housemate used to say “better to have the hair to dye than none at all” and, thanks to people like Philip Schofield, greyness is not the hideous prospect it used to be.) But, is it really that bad? In an attempt to allay my fears I have produced a comprehensive list of pros and cons to try and determine whether baldness is all bad or whether it comes with benefits all its own…
Pros
- Reduced costs on hair products (in fact these will pretty much drop to zero unless you choose to wax. However, it may impact your choice of shower gel as if you buy one that is a combined body wash/shampoo you might feel you are only using 50% of the product’s potential.)
- No need to spend an excessive amount of time considering what hair style to choose each morning (if you have malleable hair that allows you options that is, if yours is like mine then there is nor real change) instead only needing to choose hat or no hat. (this could save you at least 10 minutes per morning which you could spend asleep!)
- You will never have to purchase a swim cap
- There is no danger of having a rejected passport photo as a result of your fringe being in your eyes.
- You won’t have to worry about your hair falling out (apart from body hair I guess)
- Having no hair will make you more streamline, which could cut milliseconds from your lap times in both swimming and running.
- You will never get gum in your hair or catch your hair in a helmet strap, ear ring or complicated mechanism.
- You can easily dress up as Professor Xavier from X men for Halloween.
Cons
- People may start to associate you with evil because fiction repeatedly makes use of bald villains. (see Ernst Stavro Blofeld [the bond villain], Ross Kemp [Trust me, he is] and Sonic’s eternal nemesis Dr Robotnik [whose egg shaped head is probably the best indication of what I would look like bald.])
- Even larger surface area of skin that is now vulnerable to sunburn (and it’s at the top of your head so is basically pointing at the sun!)
- If you choose to partner your baldness with a large beard people may accuse you of having an upside down head.
- You may end up spending your days looking at hairstyles in magazines and wondering ‘if only.’
- You may not suit hats.
- You will never have to wear a swim cap again and thus, never have to attempt to put on a swim cap again.
- If you tattooed your head in your youth and then hid it under hair everyone is going to see it now, unless you have the laser surgery.
So from my brief (yet thorough) analysis it is fair to say that baldness gives you the gift of time, but takes away the gift of choice. So, even though I may end up bald (and this is still highly debatable, a drunk girl’s assertion is hardly scientific analysis! [neither is this for that matter]) the future is still bright and it is still bright for everyone who has looked into the mirror and seen more skull looking back at them than they did the day before.
Until next time
With the Euromillions draw taking place tonight I am almost certain that the talk of offices (certainly mine, if you can call it an office), school playgrounds (although thinking about it you have to be 16 to play and most GCSE students have finished so will be at home but its much more concise to say ‘school playgrounds’ instead of ‘16 year olds who until recently occupied school playgrounds’) and some bankrupt government departments is how you would go about spending the £154 million jackpot that could await one lucky winner this evening.
Ideas I have heard include “buying a super car and then smashing it into another super car”, “paying people to soil themselves” and my personal favourite “paying Noel Edmonds to stop making TV.”
Obviously, there are thousands of ways to blow this mammoth amount of cash, here are my top three:
1) Put my own band on at Wembley Stadium
To me, the millions of pounds spent on venue hire, staging, lighting, production, fireworks (got to have some pyro!) and countless other costs would be justified simply because I would be able to prefix sentences with the phrase ‘When I played Wembley Stadium…’ and, more importantly, I would get to sit behind my drums on stage and look out at WEMBLEY STADIUM. Fingers crossed people would turn up off their own back but, in the more likely situation that they don’t I’ll just utilise a few more of my millions to book some bands like Coldplay or Radiohead (insert massive, crowd drawing band) to play the support slot and thus get some fans in. Genius.
2) Buy all the stock from the shop I work in and then return it 10 days later
Technically this isn’t actually spending any money because I would get it all back. But it would be really annoying.
3) Travel the world and destroy every re-mastered edition of Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and, if there is time Episode’s I, II and III
If you have £154 million pounds you clearly don’t have to work anymore and you may end up getting quite bored so I think it would be important to have a hobby to keep you occupied, this would be mine. The arguments for the destruction of all these articles are well publicised and I am sure there are many people who could outline the reasons for destroying these movies far better than I can. Suffice to say that these films must go.
These are just my picks but I would love it if you fancied coming up with some of your own ideas and posting them below. Bonus points to anyone who can actually spend the entire 154 million!
Until next time.
We all love Tim. Every year he tried his little heart out at Wimbledon, flying the flag for Britain, trying his very best to become the first Brit to lift the title since god knows how long ago.
Whilst the nation only really ‘got behind’ (Andrew Castle may have trademarked this phrase so I’m slightly afraid to use it in case I now owe him royalties) for approximately 2 weeks a year or occasionally less than that (pending on how he did) we would always be safe in the knowledge that for the other 11 months and 2 weeks(ish) of the year Tim would be off playing Tennis somewhere around the world (and surely, at some point, celebrating occasions such as Christmas and birthdays etc.) Since retiring from playing the game Tim has been signed up to commentate on it during Wimbledon. Initially in need of gentle coaxing such as ‘what do you think Tim?’ or ‘So Tim…’ In order to get an opinion out of him, he has become a valuable part of the team. But I have always been troubled by what he does for the 11 months and 2 weeks now that his playing days are over, so in order to put myself at ease I have invented this excerpt from Tim’s daily planner:
My (Tim’s) Day:
6.00am Wake up (if unable to wake unassisted, set alarm prior to this time.)
6.10am Shower.
6.30am Breakfast, consider Bran Flakes? No, best stick to muesli. Don’t want to be reminded that I never managed to displace Chris Hoy from the front of the box
7.00 Go for a run, if raining try not to think about 2001 Wimbledon semi-final where winning seemed inevitable but for a rain delay that changed the course of the match.
7.30 Do Laundry, must remember to make whites really shine.
8.00 Quiet contemplation
11.00 Work on new fist pump. Needs to be bigger, more expressive and slightly more primal.
12.30 Lunch, make a sandwich. Squares on Mondays and Wednesdays, rectangles Tuesdays and Thursdays and triangles on Fridays and weekends. Crescent of crisps. 1 Triangle of Laughing Cow on Friday (Treat!)
1.00 Check Laundry, are the whites white enough? Standards Tim!
2.00 Consider a beard or moustache, could lend gravitas? Make commentary seem more insightful… Call Greg for advice.
3.00 Plan witty puns for Wimbledon commentary this year, something that uses the term Ace (I could shout ace? People wouldn’t expect that…)
5.00 Check E-mail Inbox. If any from David Lloyd move to recycling.
6.00 Dinner. Must try and make more use of the vegetable steamer I got for Christmas. Can you steam bread?
7.30 Television, watch Sue on A Question of Sport. Remember to check phone in case they have called asking me to be on the panel…
8.00 Check Laundry again, if not working by this point abandon and discard clothes. If they don’t shine they aren’t mine.
9.00 Bed, sleep.
