Mental Deposit

Friday, November 24, 2006

Toyota Madness

I’ve been tasked at work to buy a Toyota Landcruiser for a project in Tanzania. Amazingly enough there’s a 12 seat version. So I’ve three sites to look at, http://www.toyotatz.com/landcruiser_gx.html where it takes 20 days to buy a car. I was also told to have a look at Toyota Gibraltar who it turns it out supply 30% of all those Lancruisers you see on the news in disaster areas, famine relief and so on. I then had a look at the Japanese site, and ended up on their robot page.

Toyota have invented a scout walker:

http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/vision/emerging_tech/p_robot/details.html

Foolish Smorgasbord

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Spot the shoes

I just googled Niketown and I see that just about every big city has one, but I did manage to find a picture of the one in London. See if you can spot the shoes in this picture.

Nike no shoes town

I was in the big Nike shop on Oxford Circus yesterday. Its called Niketown. Its very big – three floors, but it was remarkably difficult to find some shoes. I’m not convinced that they sell much in there. I mean there isn’t really that much to buy so they can’t feasibly sell much. Its just one of those brand placement places. You go in and ooh and aah at how big it is and you leave impressed that Nike have this big shop with glitzy stuff and you tell your friends, wow have you been to Niketown in London, then other people come and everyone has a jamboree about the size of this place. But they don’t buy anything.

Methinks I’ll end up on Neal Street buying my sneakers at Offspring. And why sneakers over trainers? Well, I’m more likely to go sneaking than training.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Very funny

http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

Wonky Eyes's Album

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

The Eraser - Thom Yorke's new(ish) album

I was halfway through a tirade about Queen's Innuendo album that took 5 years to make and resulted in 12 paltry songs and then Freddie Mercury died, and somehow the long wait wasn't worth the money paid. And then I was going to say that this offering from Thom Yorke has been, oh I don't know, 2 years in the making, and its only 41 minutes long but it really is bloody good. Then Firefox crashed for the second time today and that pissed me off. God forbid the new Internet Explorer 7 should somehow be better than Firefox. It still has a long way to go.

So where was I? Thom Yorke may have a funny shaped head and some serious misery issues but his drum machine is on the Kid A settings and its all very hummable. There's a song called Black Swan where the chorus is: "Its fucked up, its fucked up", but really its not. 'I'm Going Slightly Mad' on Innuendo is fucked up. I especially admire the lyric, "I think I'm a banana tree". But I suppose Freddie was half-dead so I shouldn't be too harsh.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Grand National: A cracking album

A Jockey Slut special. That was a good music mag. Gone now, more's the pity.

Look: a 1980s Flake Ad

I'm so hip that I post videos on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEOVRhUUnCw

That said , I just don't get myspace et al. I mean the saviours of mankind the Arctic Monkeys came from Myspace but how much shit must you have to trawl through to find something half decent? Not that I've listened to the Arctic Monkeys. I've only just listened to the first Kasabian album. I bought it when it was released, listened to it once - I liked that Madchester single which I heard on xfm, thought the album was unutterably shite and got my money back from virgin. Then I heard it in Thailand and it was good (I was stoned...) and downloaded it and its all good apart from track 4 which is irritating like Led Zeppelin. Stupid whiny voice.

Grand National are good. One of the best random albums I've bought (Kicking the National Habit). Talking of which I spent £25 on random cds in Fopp the other day. Its a great shop for that. I got some good ones too. Problem is that they get loaded into my mp3 player and the next day I can't remember what they were and can never find them. Its like I never bought them in the first place...

Should get on with some work now...

Yay! I've worked it out

All I need to do is let blogger.com autofill my name and then I can get in. It all goes wrong when I type my name in. Now I know this is a beta but that really is very silly.

Major Login Difficulties

Jesus! I switched over to Blogger Beta about a month ago and haven't been able to log back in since - something to do with my Google Account login. I could login to the Google Account, but that very same email would not work on Blogger. Its because I randomly played silly buggers that it worked this time, but I can't trust it anymore. Blogger Help was about about as useful as a chocolate teapot but then its a free service so what can you expect?

I've decided to kill this blog on blogger, and take it over to a new program, a program I haven't found yet...

There's one called blogspirit which has a free 30 day trial and harps on about affordability. How about making it free like all its competitors!

blog.co.uk is blatantly a german start-up. The templates look like what the swiss would design if they were told to be interesting. I think 'dry' is the word. Uploading images was too tortuous.

I just tried to do something on Yahoo 360 which is some kind of bollocksy social network crap but it really didn't work out. They ask way too much private information and I couldn't change the things I wanted to change and basically it was a waste of 5 minutes of my life.

Right I'm going to experiment with logging back in using IE7.

If I can't get back in, consider this blog dead. You'll know if I don't get back in as there won't be anymore posts.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Bonkers Fancy Dress

Friday, October 20, 2006

My Final Day on Bottle Beach

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPUkwo2hENw

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Shanghai 2005

I just had my final roll of film developed and scanned and found this. It was a boiling hot day as I remember and the sun was just starting to break through in the late afternoon.

The Banana Split Show

On a happier note here are the Banana Splits. God knows what that was all about.

Threads: Utter Misery

This film covered all bases: inter-continental nuclear armageddon, nuclear winter and eating raw sheep, the list goes on. Like all good docu-dramas you end up thinking, "What would I do?". Indeed at school one of the big questions was, "What would you do if the 3 minute warning started?". You had to have an answer, as after those 3 minutes if you were lucky you'd be dead, and you don't want to spend them wondering what to do next.

I do now have a fascination with Cold War bunkers, and subterranean London. There's a city down there built with our money and we know next to nothing about it. I read a dreadful book called "Domain" by James Herbert about giant rats eating survivors of a nuclear war in London. Though the book was crap, he was right about a place called the Kingsway Exchange. Obstensibly this was a telephone exchange behind Holborn but in reality was the heavily reinforced entrance to a bunker. There's a huge bunker under the MOD but from what I've heard of people that have actually been in it its not as exciting as it sounds. That either means that its not exciting or that its so mindblowingly exciting that they're not allowed to say. Its called Pindar and cost an absolute fortune.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Bleak and twisted films

I saw Children of Men last night. It was a good film, bleak and brutal and though I enjoyed it immensely I remember thinking to myself that I need never see it again. The Guardian's reviewer said he was reminded of Threads when we watched it. Threads is a docu-drama made for the BBC in the early 1980s chronicling, without pulling any punches, how unmitigatingly horrific nuclear war would be. I saw it first when I was 12 and had nightmares for 2 years. It followed the lives of 3 families living in Sheffied, then the nuclear attack itself, then the aftermath of nuclear winter and complete hellishness of it all. Now Children of Men is a pretty grim portrayal of future Britain, and not withstanding the lack of nuclear annhilation, if it all goes to shit, Britain would become a very unlovely place.

I've two other decidely unlovely dvds languishing on my shelf. One is 'Ichi the Killer', which a friend described as being completely horrific (but in a non-nuclear kind of way). Its Japanese and directed by the guy that did 'Audition', and its fully fucked up. I tried to watch it the other day and got as far as the menu screen and couldn't take any more. Total Film said of it, "Virtuoso... Teeth gnashingly violent, deleriously inventive". A bit like Wallace and Gromit with chainsaws then.

'Oldboy' is the other dvd awaiting my viewing pleasure. Its definitely Korean, and definitley fucked up and wrong on a massive number of levels. Still the Daily Telegraph descibed it as "Magnificent" and it won the Cannes Grand Prix du Jury 2004.

I saw a film called 'Hostel' a few months ago which I actively discourage people from watching. I didn't understand why it was made. It wasn't enjoyable. It wasn't literally sickening, but gratuitous violence as a description doesn't come near. Violence aside it was also a very shit film.
So don't go there.

Heathrow Airport

It defines 'Bedlam'.

Terminal 2 is the most revolting, foul, unpleasant building in Britain.

And the queues for the passport check getting back into the country for EU members are a joke.

And you've just walked about a mile to get to that bastard queue.

And the travelators are broken.

And the security is a ludicrous.

And the duty-free shops make a killing on bottled water and lighters.

And the traffic jam getting into the place is just obscene.

And the Heathrow Express is the most expensive railway in the world.

And the oh sod it, the Spanish own it now, so blame them.

Kit Kat Chunky Peanut: Right or Wrong?

It may be disgustingly sweet but there is something revoltingly good about the latest Kit Kat concoction. The peanut butter is peanut butter in the sense of the "beef" in a McDonalds burger. You wouldn't spread it on a piece of bread but you don't need to as its surrounded by chocolate. Similairly I dare you to eat the "meat" from Mcdonalds without the gherkin, mustard, ketchup or bread. I'm not even convinced that there is peanut in that peanut butter, but it is a modern marvel that they can create a substance that is sweeter than sugar. True, you can't crunch the sugar, nor does it make your mouth burn, and it actually tastes quite rank. Yet it still works.