Where Are You Special One?

At home doing end-of-year appraisals and battling PeopleSoft. Tres dull.

My list of topics to blog remains just a list. From the week's news, as yet unformed rants comprise:

• Dangerous dogs -- 42% rise is dog attacks in London
• Labour Party funding -- Dirty, dirty, dirty
• Bungs in football -- Harry R is innocent; Harman for England
• Clissold Leisure Centre -- 15 years late, costing Hackney tax payers £47m
• Sudan teacher and teddy bears -- Them fuzzy-wuzzies don't like it up 'em

Ho hum, I have at least mangaged to break a record in Labels..

So in place of the usual sound and fury signifying nowt, an amusing bon mot from Popbitch.

Brian Barwick sees an old lady in the street struggling with heavy shopping.
"Can you manage love?" he asks.
"It's OK", she says, "I don't want the job, thanks".

Snaggletooth

Crank it up to 11 and give me another Red Bull mum..

Choon

Of Weddings, Feasts And Football

We had our 'Cilla moment' this weekend at the wedding of Jo and Paul -- who met each other at our hitching last year.

The event was held at the chi-chi Grove golf and spa hotel, just outside glamorous Watford -- which has tried hard to combine the old-world with contemporary bling. It only sort-of works. It's opulent, a bit quirky with a rather contrived 'farmyard' / country theme -- think P-Diddy meets Babe. Perspex boxes and console tables containing hundreds of butterflies, feathers, farmyard animal cuddly toys and rubber ducks. It self-consciously terms its style "groovy grand".

..Mmmm. Art for art's sake or just plain odd?

And our pre-wedding lunch was most unusual too. The Glasshouse restaurant is what the funky kids at The Grove term "an international Theatre of Cooking" (pretentious, moi?), where chefs prepare British, Asian and Mediterranean dishes, all served buffet-style.

And as we all know, buffet-style really means 'all you can eat' which in turn translates to big fat greedy pigs.

A tad hungry, I happily obliged..

I gobbled the most incongruous selection of foods ever. In sequence of ingestion, I had, in the space of an hour and a half, the following..

Black and green olives, black beans, pickled cauliflower, fig, potato salad, sardines, Spanish torte, green chilli peppers stuffed with cream cheese, parma ham, artichokes, tomatoes with melted cheese, figs, sweet garlic, sweet and sour chicken, fried rice, roast pork, Yorkshire pudding, wild berry cheese cake (2 portions), panacotta and to finish -- crackling. All washed down with a lovely crisp Verdicchio.

Thankfully, there wasn't time for cheese.

A thoroughtly weird repast, but strangely satisfying. I'm uncertain as to our fitness for attending a wedding though. A long nap would have been nearer the mark. Suffice it to say, I wasn't able to fully appreciate the lovely dinner a few hours later.

Anyway, as mentioned, The Grove is quite a fancy operation -- just the kind of place for premiership footballers to unwind on off-weekends like this. So we didn't bat an eye at David James lunching a few tables away. But when Steven Gerrard was spied in the lobby, I began to wonder..

Durr. Of course, the whole of the England squad is staying at The Grove ahead of Wednesday's make-or-break Euro2008 qualifier against Croatia at Wembley.

I'm not sure how Jo and Paul felt about sharing their special day with the boys, or indeed, if they minded coach Steve McLaren and his family barging through the middle of their reception drinks.

Personally, I'm a wee bit disappointed not to have seen Messrs. Terry, Lampard, Cole (A and J), Wright-Philips or Bridge..

Carefree

I'm A Nobody, Get Me On Telly!

Marc Bannerman, Anna Ryder Richardson, Lynne Franks, Janice Dickinson, Rodney Marsh and John Burton Race are all 'competing' in the new "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!".

Thing is, if I have heard of them, I've heard nothing of them for years. But most of them, I really have never heard of.

Who are these people, what is their talent and where do they come from?

It's the same for the stupid BBC dancing thing. Who on earth are Alesha Dixon, Brian Capron, Dominic Littlewood, Gethin Jones, Kate Garraway or Matt Di Angelo?

There seems to be an active and lucrative job of being vaguely known, but not doing, achieving or being good at anything at all.

Abi Titmuss and Rebecca Loos are famous for what? Well, shagging married or distasteful men as far as I can tell. Callum Best is known for being a distasteful man and shagging the aforementioned hussies -- I'm guessing..

Switch channels and ditto. I've never heard of Carole Malone, Cleo Rocos, Danielle Lloyd, Ian "H" Watkins, Jackie Budden, Jo O'Meara..

In these few lines there are a lot of names of D/E-list 'celebs' on quasi-reality TV programmes. Don't get me wrong, I don't read the red tops or Heat. (I've been Googling …and wish I hadn't). I do however, spend an awful lot of time pouring over the Guardian Guide looking for something worth watching.

It makes the annual event of a Stephen Poliakoff drama worth the wait. And like buses, you wait a year and all of a sudden six turn-up at once..

What I (Don't) Want For Christmas

Everyone's gone mad for Apple iPhones. They did in the US over the summer of course, but then that's America -- a country that redefines our more sober interpretations of the word 'mad'.

Today, British loonies are sleeping outside the Apple Store on Regent's Street so they can be first to own the damn thing.

Humbug. I've had Apple gear before and it's utter pants. I can't imagine the iPhone is any different.

For a start, Apple's are notoriously buggy. While lovely to behold, my iMacs have habitually seized and fallen-over. My iPod periodically freezes too -- though to be fair, the 80G 'Classic' is far better than the 20G version three it replaced last year.

The iPhone is supposed to be this magical device that for the first time combines phone, Web, camera and media in one stylish and easy-to-use package.

Sure -- it looks good. But then it's an Apple. As noted, Apples do look lovely, but invariably disappoint.

Let's review the evidence.

The iPhone is quite expensive at £220. It's locked to only the O2 network in the UK and T-Mobile in Germany. It's 2G not 3G, therefore fails in delivering one of its critical USPs -- a true mobile Web experience. It's limited to Apple's obsolete iChat IM. The camera is a measly 2 megapixels. And it only carries 8G of memory with no provision for memory cards, so fails as a meaningful media device.

I think this knitted iPhone is just as pretty, likely more reliable and probably with better functionality.

Nope. This year my Christmas list is sorted and includes quite a lot of 'technology' -- Robert's retro DAB, Tom Tom and X-Box360. But this frippary won't be added. Not until it's cheaper, unlocked, significantly enhanced and like the iMac and iPod/iTunes, is compatible with Windows and other more widely used platforms. Which it inevitably will. So one day. Version 2, 3 or 4..

Streeetcccch

Lovely abstracting of the Dumpling.