DooooooooWopp

I could never write songs, or be a singer for that matter.

This has nothing to do with the fact that I have no talent for either writing or singing. No, you see, I'd never be able to incorporate the necessary "oooooooooos", "aaaaaaaaaahhhhhs", "boooooeeeeeeeeps" and other such non-verbal accompaniments that are a prerequisite for a hit song.

For some examples (and there are loads), check out the following:

Every little thing she does is magic - The Police
Use it up, wear it out - Odyssey
The house that Jack built/Respect/Seesaw/Dr Feel Good, etc, etc, etc - Aretha Franklin
Give me the night - George Benson
Anything soul/RNB

These are probably extreme examples, but just about every pop song has some degree of this. I reckon the "Oooooh Factor" is very important in popular music, it sort of provides a link in the song and it'd be interesting to see what songs would be like without it. I suppose you'd end up with something like Coldplay or Keane or some other such shite that we could all live without.

Why has Windows Media Player attributed Tori Amos's From the choirgirl hotel to Natasha Bedingfield? I'd love to know how that one came about.


Zipping up my boots
I'm heading back to my roots. Or not, if you're somebody like the Appletons (from All Saints), James Martin (Yorkshire TV chef), Mel Gibson (total American/Aussie/American cunt).

What is it with these people that they change their accents so easily? I remember when Mel Gibson was an Aussie (in films like Tim, Galipoli, Mad Max) and then he turned into an American in the mid-eighties. He also tried being Scottish (Braveheart) and English (Bounty/Hamlet). He was just annoying in all roles. Tit.

People do change their accents depending on where they live and the people who they associate with, it's only natural; I have a strange Manchester/Yorkshire accent from my time at university all those years ago. However, what really grates on me is when people from the North of England (who have the flattest vowels on earth) start to change to "Southern-speak". A classic example is TV Chef James Martin, a bloke from Yorkshire, who still speaks like a bloke from Yorkshire apart from a recently-acquired tendency to change his vowel-sounds to make them more palatable for TV. No longer do we get "butter" or "honey", oh no, young James now favours the "batter" and "hanny" sound. Tosser. I'm sure even the most retarded Mockneys can understand what is meant by "butter", fuckwit.


Laying about in bed all day, stinking of shit
I'm in bed. I should be parking my car at work right now, but I've been suffering with a bad back for the past couple of days and even the slightest movements in the wrong direction, and even those in the right direction, were causing me a lot of pain when I tried to get going this morning.

But now I'm sat in bed, propped up on three pillows, laptop at the ready. These things don't half kick out some heat. Really hot now.

The problem with bad backs is that they can lure you into a false sense of security: you get moving and it eases up a bit so you make your way into work and then find that you can't get down the stairs in the car park or walk to your office. Can you imagine what that'd look like? I'm sorry, I couldn't face that humiliation, or the concern of all the healthcare professionals who would obviously flock to my aid. So to save being laughed at by people, I decided to stay off today.

Already from my sick bed, I've heard screams of "YOU BASTARD!!!!" from one of the neighbour's houses. This was around 6am and was quite disturbing. And my prolonged stay in this room has made me aware of a strange smell in here. I think it's the holdall that I took to Canada; the one that got drenched in red wine that's sat on top of a wardrobe.

I'll be taking Voltarol, a lovely drug that has no side effects that I can gather. Although I did have a strange dream in which I was preparing for stint in a stand up comedy show and I ended up deciding to talkabout stealing prescription drugs off old people. I woke up before the audience started dying of laughter, obviously.


Finally succumbed to a You Tube vid clip



Firefox 2
I've installed the latest versions of web browsers from Mozilla (Firefox) and Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and they're both OK, although I do prefer Firefox these days.

Boring techno crap. ... Anyway, I'm using Firefox to type this and I've noticed that it underlines any text that's not in the English (British) dictionary in a similar fashion to the way MS Office applications do. How good is that? Well it's OK I suppose.