Saturday, March 31

#  Rory's decided. The Week Link is dead. Long live Walking West 3. (And it's all done with CSS. Not a table in sight. Very impressive.)

Tuesday, March 27

#  Last night went incomprehensibly well. Apart from the fact that the show lasted an hour and a half. Ten people in, all our friends (the Metro thing has yet to work...), which didn't seem that small a number in such a small venue and they laughed at almost everything we hoped they would. Having finished our dress/tech/stumble through at about 7.10pm, we delayed starting by 15 minutes and were so stressed by the whole experience that there was no time to be nervous.

I'll admit the show was slightly ramshackle in nature, particular highlights including my tripping up on my words when telling Mark how he trips up on his words (oh, the irony), and Mark desperately trying to keep a straight face while performing the line 'scag, horse, heroin, china brown, smack, blister, wheeze, spider dust, Harry's Hotel - it's funny how's there's so many words for heroin, but only one word for despair'. But everyone who came seemed incredibly impressed, many of them also comedians, the harshest judges of other people's work. We need to cut at least twenty minutes out for next week, but I think we know now what has to go.

After two weeks of madness, it worked, and we didn't look like we hadn't been on stage in four years. Wonderful.

#  We were in Metro yesterday:

The picture was taken by my sister, tarted up by me in Photoshop, sent through the magic of email and then poorly printed by Metro. Nice to be plugged though.

#  For some reason this little man is quite endearing.

Sunday, March 25

#  Rory is discussing one of his favourite subjects: how and why should he blog? Pop over to The Week Link and tell him.

#  So the next blogmeet is on Saturday. I can't make it.

#  Tomorrow (today?) is D-Day, as the amphibious landing craft that is Bachman and Evans: Work in Progress beaches on the shores of The Etcetera Theatre, Camden.

Mark and I did a couple of line-runs today and we seem to be about 90% there on lines, which is pretty impressive given that we finalised the script just three days ago. The show will probably run about fifteen minutes over the ideal hour, but given that there's nothing after us and it's the first ever performance, I think that can be forgiven.

We also spent a possibly fractious three hours trying to put together a minidisc of music and sound effects, as Mark and I tend to have a difference of opinion when it comes to the soundtrack of theatre shows, the basis being fun (Mark) vs. cool (me). In the end the decision process was amazingly amicable and we decided upon, among others, Beck, The Beastie Boys, The Beta Band, The Karminsky Experience, Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Williams, Edwyn Collins, House of Pain, The Dust Brothers, Space, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Burt Bacharach and the theme from Space 1999. [There were pages for House of Pain but they we're all so badly designed as to be unreadable.] Now if that isn't eclectic, I don't know what is.

I haven't been on stage doing comedy for about four years, but strangely I'm not that nervous.

Wish me luck. And maybe even come along.

Friday, March 23

#  The return of Katy to the blogging shores is to be thoroughly enjoyed, but also alerts me to the possibilty of an upcoming blogmeet which I would be interested to attend (finally). If you can decipher all the messages on the Yahoo UKBloggers group I'd be glad if you could send me a concise appraisal.

#  Mark and I have finally got ourselves a finished rehearsal script. The only problem is that our rehearsal schedule is the next three days.

May I invite anyone who reads this and may be interested to know just what it is I do and whether it actually is funny to come along to the show, by the way. I like to think it's a cross between The Right Size and The Wow Show. We begin on Monday at The Etcetera Theatre on Camden High Street, and continue for several Mondays after that. If you live in London, I'd be delighted to see you. Do make yourself known. I'm the one with the long hair...

Tuesday, March 20

#  Handwriting, handwriting. Hmm.

I've always thought mine was quite good. I don't have a scanner at the moment to prove it, but I can offer you an approximation that I scratched onto some paper in a failed attempt to make my own typeface.

Much more interesting, though, are signatures. Here's mine. Hold on. Putting my signature online is an idiotic idea. Best not do that then.

Friday, March 16

#  30 mins, 15 km, one episode of The Day Today.

#  Mark and I read what there is of our script so far to two friends yesterday. The seventy-three pages took us about an hour and a quarter to get through, and that's without any of the non-verbal 'business'. When we've finished writing it I reckon it'll be about ninety pages long, and we'll basically have written a two hour show. It should be fifty-five minutes. Oops. At least we'll have something to cut down.

#  Modern Humorist brings you helpful tips on how to survive falling out of a plane.

Thursday, March 15

#  Mark and I paid £50 to sit in a 'movement' room near Great Portland Street today, hunched over a laptop, balanced precariously on top of some green foam mats. Why? Because we should have finished the script for our show last night. Instead, we sat there for about twenty minutes, trying to concentrate, but being constantly distracted by the residual smell of the sweaty Wu Style Tai Chi Chu'an students who use the room the rest of the week. Then Mark and I both came to the same conclusion: what the hell are we doing here? So we went back to my flat and worked there, where you're allowed to take food and drink and you're not being stared at by the grinning idiot face of the UK and Europe's sole representative of the Wu family, Sifu Gary Wragg. Incidentally, Gary has very bad handwriting.

#  30 mins, 15 km, one episode of Celebrity Big Brother - and for the last five minutes I upped the resistance from four to five (it's out of ten).

Incidentally, Celebrity Big Brother is fast becoming compulsive viewing, mainly because I feel the need to know what exactly Jack Dee is going to do next. His subterfuge to and about his other housemates is simply wonderful (the Vanessa eggs pants in particular) and his constant attempts to escape or be thrown out consistently entertaining. As is the slowly crumpling face of Anthea Turner, collapsing further into thinly disguised misery and disappointment with every continuing nomination.

Oh and we discovered this evening something that we always suspected: Keith from Boyzone can't sing.

Wednesday, March 14

#  Nice.

Nice.

Tuesday, March 13

#  Lost in Translation:

I am Jack's sense of wasted time > They lose the direction of Cat for the moment where

via 2p

#  He's right! Here's mine! It's just a shame that the choices are so limited.

Friday, March 9

#  Another 30 min; another 15km; another episode of The Day Today. I think I'm getting the hang of this exercise thing.

#  Ellis suggests a possible reason for the frogs, and what I could do with them. (I don't speak French but I'm pretty sure from GCSEs that 'grenouille' is frog.)

#  Outside the french windows at the end of my living room is a big red bucket and yesterday, when it was raining non-stop, I looked out and noticed it was two-thirds full of water and flapping about in the water was a frog. This is a little strange. I don't live near any ponds, rivers or bogs, so where did it come from? Mark suggests it might have rained out of the sky in traditional fashion. Anyway, it seems to be struggling to get out of the bucket so I pop outside and tip it out. It falls onto the ground and freezes there in a classic 'frog crouching' pose, remaining still for some time, probably to confuse a predator (me) into thinking it's a rock or something. Funnily enough it looks exactly like the stone frog my grandfather carved which sits in my parents' garden. Anyway, after about five minutes it makes a few tentative moves, doesn't get eaten, and then hops away.

About ten minutes later, Mark looks out the window and notices two frogs in the bucket. And they're different frogs from before, both of them. I go outside and tip them out again: two frozen frogs squat on the flagstones of the patio, one hiding under a bit of hose. Five minutes later the stripey one is gone. The other one, which was underwater in the bucket, still hasn't moved. Perhaps it's dead. I look again - it's gone.

Three frogs in my garden in one afternoon in the middle of London? Where on earth do they all come from?

Wednesday, March 7

#  Okay. The Guinness World Records site tells me that the fastest Olympic one kilometre standing start cycling race record is held by Florian Rousseau who cycled 1km in 1 min 2.712 seconds, which works out as roughly 60 km/h. So 30 km/h doesn't seem that unbelievable, does it?

#  30 minutes. 15 km. One episode of The Day Today. Mark's suggestion that I watch a tape of something I find entertaining to take the boredom away seems to have worked.

However, various of my friends dispute the fact that I seem to have an average cycling speed of 30 km/h. I'll try and find some information about average cycling speeds. (So far, it's proving difficult.)

#  Mememachine. Give him space. He needs it.

#  The meme has indeed spread, Matt. (I assume you mean the orange...)

#  My conservatory wall is covered in giant A1 sheets covered with colour-coded scribbles as Mark and I attempt to corral our thoughts into a show. It looks rather surreal; like some post-modern textual art installation. It does help, though.

Incidentally, for those Londoners who were in some small way looking forward to it (and I hope some of you are) we've moved our opening night back a week to the 26th of March. The 19th turned out to be unreasonably soon.

#  I'd like to remind you all (on Reid's behalf) that the url for Exploding Fist is www.explodingfist.com, not freespace.virgin.net/reid.philpot/. Just to set the record straight. Oh, and Nico has now embraced the sophisticated world of PHP to run his blog. Good on ya, Nico. I'm just coming to terms with DHTML. Got a way to go.

#  I wonder... has Graybo ever met Robyn? Reading his posts and new 'about' page, it seems to me that he doesn't need to look far for a new soulmate. She's an attractive and intelligent woman, Gray. You could definitely do a lot worse.

In fact, does anyone know of any webloggers who have formed more than a digital relationship? (Apart from Jason and Meg.)

Monday, March 5

#  Oh no. Reid's been really nice about my blog and its new design and I forgot to put Exploding Fist on my list of weblogs. I feel ashamed.

#  Actually, this design is really growing on me. I like it. It's neat.

#  Finally started to use my recently purchased Reebok RB1000 exercise bike. Cycled ten kilometres in twenty minutes, which everyone tells me is not long enough to start burning fat. I don't care. I'm knackered. And God twenty minutes seems like a never-ending void of time when you need it to be over.

#  With reference to my earlier post (with reference to my earlier post) one film I would definitely recommend your catching is Sundance Film Festival favourite The Tao of Steve. Donal Logue is a genial yet enormously fat man embracing Lao Tze's philosophy of seduction combined with the charm and smarts of all the great Steves (McQueen, Austin and McGarrett*) which allows him to bed many more attractive women than his physical appearance should allow. An odd morality tale in some ways, and it starts a little slowly, but with patience it grows into a warm and hilarious comedy. Any film which contains the following exchange (after Dex declares his growing love for Syd, the woman of his dreams) cannot fail to win me over:

Syd: If you're falling in love with me, why do you keep sleeping with other women?
Dex: What, you expect me to remain celibate while I bask in the warm glow of your annihilating contempt?

Everyone in the cinema fell about at this line, and I imagine many quietly mumbled to themselves, 'yeah, right on, been there, mate, you tell her'. Weirdly it has an amazingly limited release in London, only showing at the Odeon Wardour Street (the new name for the ABC Swiss Centre apparently) and the Odeon Swiss Cottage. So go see it now while it's still on.

Oh, and I learnt that 'tao' is pronounced 'dow' which is something I didn't know. See. Films don't just entertain, they educate.

*Great Escape, Six Million Dollar Man and Hawaii Five-O. Of course.

#  I've been agonising for ages over whether the reverse chronology of posts in most blogs is sensible. Like most people in the Western hemisphere I read from top to bottom, but the regularity of viewing for blogs seems to make the idea of the most recent post at the top more helpful. I think I'll stick with it, but it does mean I'll have to litter my entries with phrases like 'with reference to my earlier post' to provide some kind of sensible reading for people who don't come here very often.

#  I have to take issue with the vehemence of Meg and Luke's comments about Happy, Texas. I saw it about three months ago and it really wasn't as abortionate a film as they might make out. For one, it's got Steve Zahn, William H Macy and Illeana Douglas in it, all of whom give good, funny performances; and these three reviews don't damn it so highly.

It's not a bad film, it's just not terribly good; but it really doesn't deserve such abuse. There are many more films worthy of your hatred like Vertical Limit, Little Nicky and Battlefield Earth to name but three. At least Happy, Texas wasn't thoroughly boring and violently annoying. Come on, guys.

#  Kitschbitch has lain fallow with a collection of old jokes for too long. Katy, where are you? My referral log contained a link from hers so she must be still checking up on things. Maybe she's too busy these days. Although I don't remember being that busy when I was a student...

#  Thanks to various bloggers listed to the left for pointing out idiotic link errors on my part. I've changed them now and it should be fine. If anyone finds any other errors on this weblog do tell me.

One thing I am trying to do now, and I think this was inspired by someone ranting about it in the past, is to link my 'Media' list to useful sites with sensible reviews as I have long been annoyed by following a link to some album, film or book and just found myself on the IMDb or Amazon (although of course in some situations such as the Brian Eno album no objective review seems to exist online). After all if I'm interested in a film or book I don't want to buy it immediately or know what the cast list is. Even epinions aren't that useful given that they're inevitably written by the person linking to them in the first place which is not my definition of objectivity. Hunt and link, boys and girls, hunt and link. You wouldn't be so lackadaisical about your other internet links. You wouldn't see someone linking to a link on lukelog which links to something else. So make an effort.

Sunday, March 4

#  New month, new design.

I've removed the tiresome headings, and given myself a bit more space to list stuff neatly at the side, but I already hate it. Do you?