Tasteful

Ah, how lovely – I’m already the No. 3 link on google for “Leslie Grantham wanking“. My parents would be so proud…

New Blogger – pt. 2

OK, some pro’s and cons. First of all, as Diamond Geezer said, new Blogger has been dumbed down quite a lot in its interface. In general I don’t mind it – at least it makes the entire thing more cross-browser – and I’m working hard to avoid the “anything new is bad” mindset so beloved of the UK.

I haven’t used the new comments system – Mike‘s said quite enough about that one for all of us on Gordon’s test blog, and it also needs/requires access to either a Blogger profile, or the commenter stays anonymous. So, despite the recent ups and downs, I’m sticking with Haloscan for the comments. So it’s an issue I don’t need to worry about. Works for me, anyway.

I’ve also just spent some time filling in my profile for one simple reason – it includes silly things like “total word count” – and mine’s over 200,000, which I reckon’s not bad over eighteen months. (And in a fit of bizarreness, I just tried working out 200,000/18 for an average monthly word count, and it’s come out as 11,111.11111recurring – Yes, I need to get out more)

Oh, and one other thing I like – knowing my propensity for quoting other people, and news stories etc., there’s now the ability to add in a <blockquote> with one mouse-click. Of course I’ll probably forget, and just type it anyway, but it’s a nice little addition.

In general I think that the new Blogger’s OK – it’ll take some time to get used to a couple of the new bits, but really for me it’s more a case of “new face, same functionality” – I didn’t use half of it anyway. And besides, if/when I update the site (possibly for the second birthday) I’m more likely to be going over to WordPress anyway.

UPDATED : Ah, there’s one other thing that’s now totally bobbins – the uploading process, with nice wanky whizzy new graphic. It informs you of fuck all, and is about as useful as a kick in the ‘nads.

Green

Sheesh, I never expected to be asking something like this – and it’ll give a whole new view on Lyle-World™.

So – does anyone know of a decent (and ideally fairly eco-friendly) way of getting rid of an infestation shitloads of greenfly? My perfect answer would be a load of ladybirds, but they don’t tend to appreciate things like boundaries, roads, and “I bought them”. But it’s still a nice idea. However, in lieu of some strange place that sells ladybirds by the dozen, any other suggestions?

Cheers.

Blogger All This

Oooh, very pretty. Blogger has revamped and made itself a lot prettier. Also, it’s a lot happier in a cross-browser sense. At last, it even works in Opera! (maybe it’s worked in Opera for other people no worries, but for me it was an utter bastard) Yup, I could get used to it – and bloody hell, have I really written more than 1600 entries on d4d™? I need to get out more.

Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins”
Manchester Palace Theatre

Among other reasons for this presentation to be interesting, it was the first amateur production and also funded in part by a win from “Weakest Link”. It’s also not a show that’s performed very often – and having seen the content matter, I can see why.

I’m not overly familiar with the assassins of American presidents – and even less so with those who attempted it, but failed. And those things are the entire basis of Assassins. Nine people, including John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz (the assassin of President McKinley) and of course Lee Harvey Oswald. But there’s also details about the attempted assassination of President Ford in 1975 by two members of the Manson family, and the attempted killing of Nixon by Samuel Byck (by flying a 747 into the White House) – plots I honestly didn’t know anything about.

The entire show is – perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the subject matter – exceptionally dark, yet it still has pearls of dark humour. The basic concept of “you can change the world, just by pulling the trigger” is a troublesome one, but still valid, and the finale of this show, leaving an image of George W Bush on the background, illustrates that there’s still potential for it to happen again.

All told, it was a sensational show – but not entertaining. It came across as professionally done and was excellent – I was sorry to see that the theatre was only about a third full. The tickets were about a third of the price of the standard rate, and yet they still weren’t taken up. For a show of this quality, the tickets should’ve have been closer to normal rates, which perhaps would have persuaded people that it was a “proper” show, as opposed to an “amateur” one. Going in cold, nothing about the entire thing was amateur – it didn’t show at all. Overall, an exceptionally good evening, and well worth the money.

Gigs, Redux

It’s one of those redux days today, obviously. Bit weird, but there we go. I said on Wednesday about limiting the number of concerts i’m going to go to for the rest of this year, and then on Thursday it was announced that Simon & Garfunkel were doing a reunion tour. Two dates in the UK – one in Hyde Park, one in Manchester – and tickets went on sale today. At £76 a pop. When you include booking fee and handling, it comes out to nearly £90 per ticket for anything resembling a decent view.

Frankly, chuff that.

Disinterested, Redux

Remember back on 28th April when I was pissed off with the farce surrounding the Oldham Beyond project? Basically, none of the relevant organisations had seemed to give a sod about the report, and the release of it turned into a farce reminiscent of the Marx Brothers.

Urbed, the main organisation, now has it on their homepage, Oldham Council has finally mentioned it, and the Northwest Development Agency eventually got round to mentioning it , although it’s not on their front page.

All in all it’s been an utter farce, but at least they seem to be getting somewhere with it now.