I will continue with Pathetic Lot of course. There are three good reasons for doing so. Firstly, it’s a great exercise for me and if I manage to keep it going for a year and even beyond, it breaks my hoodoo of starting projects and then dumping them. Further, I’m really keen to get a live stand-up show out of it come next August in time for Edinburgh. Although this Blog is normally about as funny as an orphanage on fire, it is still useful in coming up with ideas, and ideas are often hard to come by when writing stand-up. I’ve said before, getting on stage and performing the ideas is the easy bit.
Secondly, who am I to abandon my six readers? The Echo might see fit to abandon their faithful followers but I’m not made of the same stuff, let me tell you!
Thirdly, it’s now quite a good opportunity to gently make fun of The Echo on their own website. I don’t bear them any grudge (yesterday’s poorly written entry was a drunken stab at the keyboard having just got home from The Lion and opened my mail), so I’m not going to be nasty. But it will be amusing to be able to comment on any stories they run without the fear of loosing my little ol’ columnists job. It will be a bit like when Terry Wogan always used to have little digs at the BBC in whatever he happened to be saying on the BBC whilst being paid by the BBC. We all remember his ‘Well I was down at the old BBC canteen…’ jokes. I wonder if any senior executives at the BBC ever thought ‘Hang on! We’re paying this bloke and all he does is slag us off! Get him up here!’
Oh, and I’ve just thought of a fourth reason. To find an eventual winner to Quote Me Crappy. Not as many people as I’d hoped have played, but yesterday I got a comment from Polly (Hello Polly) who’d played an ambitious hand and bust. I must stress, with CMC, moderation is the key.
OH! And a fifth reason! Wow, so many reasons. The fifth reason is that I was speaking to the good people at The Modern Drunkard yesterday and they’ve posted a link to Pathetic Lot from their own excellent Blog, which can be found at www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/blog/. Do go and visit their stylish and funny effort. Don’t give up reading this one though, even though it’s not as good or as well written, that’s not the idea. Read both. Both are good in their own way.
With regards to The Modern Drunkard, the final scene of the film was shot this morning in The Lion. It was basically just a bit of me speaking to camera as an introduction and then deciding I wouldn’t bother going to the convention because I could drink there instead. Then I look around at various men staring silently into their pints or looking at the jukebox. Pure tedium. Cut to plane taking off and titles. Should make a good opening.
Edited it all by the end of the day. Should be finished by Saturday for definite. If you’re interested in getting your hands on a copy, I might work out a way of selling them for a small fee that would cover the time spent burning them and postage. I’ll let you know when it’s completely finished.
I parked my car in the NCP car park on Vauxhall Road. I’ve mentioned before how those who operate car parks (especially those on wasteland) are a pack of thieves. This, after all, is an enterprise that needs nothing but some disused land and a bit of imagination. The land for parking cars, the imagination for coming up with the most incredible charges.
I paid £6.50 for my stay this morning. But that wasn’t really what got my attention. The screen on the payment machine gave you some options. You could ask for help. Or you could change the language in which the instructions are given. There were three language options; Spanish, German, or ‘U.S.English’. I’m not kidding! Go and look for yourselves!
So obviously I pressed ‘U.S. English’ (there is also the default choice of standard English) and waited excitedly for what changes this would bring. I wanted it to say something like ‘Hey there! Thank you so much for parking with us today!’, but it didn’t say anything unusual at all. It said ‘Inset ticket’ and then it said ‘Insert payment’. And then I think it said ‘Thank you.’ So what’s the point of that?
Although American’s are stereotypically not well travelled, (although this isn’t the case of the American’s I know and like), it’s surely impossible that they can’t understand instructions written in standard English? If only three language options are available in this machine’s tiny memory, surely the addition of French or, more helpfully, Japanese, would be better?
There are decisions made in this world of ours that actually begin to sap your intelligence if you think about them too much.
And the problem with that crazy parking machine is that I couldn’t make up a stand-up routine about it because nobody in the audience would believe me. For a routine to be funny it has to have one foot in the credible, real world and the other in fantasy. Nobody’s going to believe there’s a ticket machine in Liverpool with the language option of ‘U.S. English’.
Idiot world!
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