I don't really have anything special to write, but I had to show this off to the world. Originally from here.


LOL. If you don't get the reference, then you fail at geek chicdom, and the Internet, since it became quite prime meme hunting territory. Here's the link to the part in question though, so you fail better. It's just like Beckett said: Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better. That's right, I mix the high brow with the low brow. Suck it.

Labels: blog, random

Labels: blog, bored, random, yay

I've just finished a bit of a boozey blitz through southern England, and now I think it's more than time enough to update this blog. I went dwon to Winchester to see my ex-housemates, which was fantastic - it seemed so long since I had seen them. I've made a mental note to put more effort into even casual keeping up with that lot - they really were / are a good bunch. The day after I was in London to celebrate an old school friend's birthday, and just today I've driven back from what was enthusiactically called 'Farmageddon' - a night of prosecco-based debauchery down in Kent. Suffice to say, I'm a little relieved to have three days of decent drinking behind me, and having just popped out of the hot tub, I can say without regret, that as fun as getting wasted can be - sometimes the creature comforts of my parents' house (Sky HD, good food, etc.) does take the biscuit.

But kind of on the back of the sandwich night of my triumvirate of drinking, I want to talk about Karaoke. I love karaoke. I think most people do (although some people pretend they don't). But there is a politics attached to the whole odd-social right that is getting drunk and belting out your very own cover version in front of your mates. In my mind, there are key elements to getting the perfect karaoke night.

Pre-lash.
 Crucial this. Don't put enough Dutch Courage in your belly, and you might lose your bottle when the time comes, and freak out on stage. Alternatively, get to plastered, and you risk entering school/uni/workplace mythology, as the guy or girl who got through 7 bars of Karma Chameleon, and then promptly chundered everywhere. I think the most important thing is to make sure that you maintain yourself at a level where you are ready to sing at any point. Prefereably do rounds with someone(s) else, otherwise you risk believing you are going to be able to sing perfectly lucidly, when in fact, you are already dribbling on your arm. Go for mixers without Red Bull and other rubbish - you're probably going to be buzzing enough from nerves, you don't need your CNS blistering with a caffeine injection too. Below is a picture of myself and my sister preparing with admirable style. Take your cues from that.



Song choice.
A real tripping point this, potentially, and also one which you have no excuse for not working on in advance. In fact, I don't just recommend that you try and figure out in advance, I urge you. Because if there is one guarentee I can offer, it is that in the heat of the moment, you will be unable to think of ANY song to sing. Don't depend on doing one of a few famous classics either - Don't Stop Beleivin' by Journey might be a brilliant song choice, but if someone has just sung it, you can't expect to do an encore and win any plaudits more grand than 'good effort'. Power ballads are too emotional (unless you are so drunk anyway that you need to play the comic card to try and mitigate the shame of your drunken, awful songmaking. Raps never work. Ever. Ditto for songs with small elements of rap within. Just don't do it. Duets are potentially good, either as a tool of seduction, or as a way of sharing any embarassment. But again, trying to have a duet appropriate to whoever you end up singing with can be difficult. The Time of My Life from Dirty Dancing is no good as a duet with your Dad at a wedding. Unless you are with a really trendoid girl, Sunny and Cher's I Got You Babe is going to be less seductive than it is a bit creepy.

Singing ability.
Possibly the most important factor of all - many a would-be karaoke enthusiast has lost years of preperatory work on this final hurdle. There are only a few types of karaoke that are acceptable. One of those is ragingly bad, although in many cases this isn't exactly de rigeour either. A happy medium of pleasant to listen to but a little bit wavery is ideal. Unless you are an exceptional vocalist, do not try and be awesome. No one likes a try hard with an ego. The inverse of this is true though - if you are an exceptional vocalist, and then surprise everyone with your skill, that's pretty sweet (see: Jewel's little trip into the world of karaoke)

If there's one thing you should be careful about though, this is it. My final and most important advice is made clear throught the medium of photo. Observe the casual portrait of two friends, ruined, by the imposition of an overly enthusiastic background singer. Ah. The shame. Well, that's all folks. Until next time.

Labels: blog, bored, random

I can't remember whe I saw this image originally, although I think it may have been late at night, because I remember it being more side-splitting at the time. But regardless, I still think it's a clever little play on perceptions of cooleness, and it's something that many friends are quilty of (sepia tone photos? loma cameras? arbitrary angles?) I'm guilty of that last one myself, but nonetheless, the desire to produce edgy (read, poorly developed) photos remains a hobby horse of the bored moddle class youths of the UK.As for Helvetica, well, it's every trendy kid's fav. Afterall, Wes Anderson, name drop of those who can only bring themselves to enjoy indie cinema in its most mainstream form, refuses to use anything but Helvetica and Futura for the typography in his films. I should add I think Wes Anderson has produced some excellent films, but jesus generic 19 year-old from Hampstead, shut the fuck up about how he totally 'got' India like you did on your gap year. Props to my girlfriend who knows more about India than any of you, but whose extent of pretentious asides extends only as far as a rather frightening anecdote about 3rd degree sunburn in Goa. Go Danna. Anyway, the point is I thought I would have a go and make some of my own. Of course, the first issue was finding some bad photographs. I'm so immensely talented behind the lens that I normally have to physically exert myself to do anything even sub-amazing, so the rooting around in folders took a while. I think I came up with a few though. Enjoy. In order to vintage them, I took a rather cheats root, and just screwed the colourbalance / levels, so they don't look perfect. But so what, it's my blog, and it would be pretty meanspirited of you to ask for better. These ones have a slightly modern twist too, paticuarly the distorted text in the last one. Turrah.

Labels: blog, bored, Edinburgh, yay

I'm a pretty cool guy I think. I've got some cool friends, I've got a great girlfriend, a terrific cat, and better than average style. Granted I have pitfalls, but overall, I think I'm above the mean, median, and mode in the cool stakes. But when I went back to my LastFM account for the first time in about 8 months really, I had something of a wake-up call. Maybe I used to be cool, but musically, I'm old news. I'm like the time my Dad thought Beyonce was a band. I'm like those people who said that rock and roll was the devil's music in Back to the Future. To put it bluntly, I'm not so cool. Everyone was listening to super trendy electro-folk artists from Bavaria, and I was loving tracks from Vampire Weekend. I was so ashamed.

But I figured that even if my overall history of listening was a bit geriatric, I at least had an ace up my sleeve. Classics. You couldn't argue with classics. No-one could. There's only one thing worse than not knowing about Tibetan funereal drumming, and that (as I was recently reminded in a show at Edinburgh) is never having heard Paul Simon's Diamonds on the Soles of her Feet. So I scrolled down to my top played of all time. Surely in here could only be things to be proud of - my accumulated musical wisdom of the last few years.


Now Belle and Sebastian are my favourite band ever, and in the enviable position of being both classic and hip, so we don't have to worry about them. Sufjan, well, a bit emo, but we've always known I can be a bit like that.  And crikey, it doesn't get more musical heritage than The Beatles. So the top 3 are safe I think. Final Fantasy is edgy, with links to The Arcade Fire, but a bit more on the dl, and a cheeky reference to my favourite RPG series of all time. Cat Stevens is making something of a comeback. Guillemots, ok, not everyone's cup of tea, but some stuff is very orchestral and lush. Maximo Park I think are probably the greatest mainstream rock band of this decade. Kate Bush, she was great back then (and quite sexy) and her more recent stuff is still great. And Laura Marling is darling of festival goers everywhere still.

So, the top 9 are all safe. In The Weakest Link I would have banked that. That's safe. Nothing to worry about there. But what about number 10. WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED. I have a bloody mononymous Irish singer. I have one recurring memory from my childhood Christmases, and that's Enya. Not so much listening to her as having her looped in a kind of pseudo-torture for the entire festive season. Why is she there? She was on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. It's so uncool I did a mini-sick in my mouth. So now my new aim is to get someone else up there sharpish. Because the longer this goes on, the worse really. Enya will never come back into fashion. She's not like wine, which might improve with age. She's like Sainsbury's Basics Diet Cola, with the top left off, which goes flat. And it wasn't very good to begin with remember. I'm so ashamed.

Labels: blog, music

I have changed the layout of the site a little bit mainly because I was sick of those actors on the header insulting me all the time. Seriously. I'm the only one who comes on here, so it's effectively all aimed at me. I couldn't deal with it, and now the site is a little different, just a nav set and a link image on the side leading to the homepage. The bunny is actually Young Hare, a 1502 piece by the seminal artist of the Northern Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer. So it's cute and relevant. For some reason I half expected this (admittedly minor) change to herald in a new period of traffic for the site, especially from our growing international contingent. This has not been the case so far, but I still have some hope. Anyway, this is just an update to explain things in case you were sad that the obstinate players which hurled Shakespearean insults at you had just upped and left. Now we have a bunny. I am still wanting to commit a major change to the site, to introduce comments and RSS, but for now I think this is cleaner. Turrah.

Labels: blog

Amazing news with regards to this bootless moan's (hereafter tbm) agressive international expansion - we have had more international visitors! In fact, we have doubled our international visitors. Admittedly that doubling is from two (California and Moscow, if you remember from previous posts) to four, but I'm still chuffed. And where in the world were these visitors from? A double visit from the best city in Brazil, home to three football clubs, three universities, and famous for it's role in the nineteenth century as Brazil's leading producer of dried meat...Pelotas! Yeah I have absolutely no clue either, but that's beside the point. Someone in the nineteenth century stronghold of dried meat production loves it. So this is a shout out for them.

Otherwise, the news of the day was that results came out today. This was a mixed blessing. With the exception of two modules, everything else was a first, which is obviously pleasing. But what is a bit sad is that my two 2.1's were in Shakespeare and a piece of Renaissance coursework. That they happen to be the modules I'm going to be involved with next year is a bit...lame. I did do better in the straight Renaissance paper, so that softens it a bit, but I just wish I could have done better in Shakespeare. If nothing else it categorically proves that you just can't tell what's any good - I thought that Shakespeare was my best module, and it was far far from it, while the module I thought went badly was my highest. Who knows eh?

Was hoping to feel a bit better on my foot today after wrenching it last time I went for a run, but unfortunately no joy. Taking anti-inflammatory stuff at the moment, so hopefull that and a bit of extra rest will be ok. I really want to get back on the road though - I'm really feeling a massive long run at low pace - especially after finding out my Dad ran half-marathons in 9.30. I'm running half half-marathons in under 7.30's now, so I can easily manage that, and I'd like to kind of trounce him. Maybe a nice long one after work tomorrow. See how the foot feels. Apart from that, I haven't really got a huge amount to say, well, not that's worth listening to anyway. So I'll draw a line under it here. Turrah.

Labels: blog, exams

Friends, countrymen, and most importantly - Russians. This blog has entered a new era. At some point within the last week, this blog had its first non-Anglophone hit. Straight out of the former USSR, our mystery blogger came and had a taste of this bootless moan. And the blogger tasted the content available on the blog, and it was good, and that fact in conjunction with the fact that I will use some words frequently searched for by Russians in this post should put me well on my way to securing countless other Russian followers.

As you can see, from this representative graph, Russian traffic is still relatively low, internet traffic that is - people trafficking remains high. (Gotta love a dig at another culture). However, when that great swathe of continent turned even the pale shimmer of green that it currently stays at, my heart leapt. There is no doubt in my mind that within a few weeks tops, it will be pushing black with the volume of traffic we will receive.

It also makes me think, if the Russians like it, perhaps there are other emerging bootless moan markets we ought to expand into. Not many blogs in Mongolia - perhaps there is an opportunity there. Hardly ever see a blog from Madagascar - is it time that we single handedly changed that? Does Timbuktu need our blog too? All important questions, which will be dealt with as soon as the (inevitable) tide of Easter European visitors swells the stats of my humble blog to gargantuan proportions.
 
(Edit: MIDNIGHT) Right everyone, thought I would hit you with a quick update. It must be quick because, clearly, people are rampaging over this site, and if they don't new content delivered over the wires at a rate of many knots, then they will not be pleased. It turns out through further investigation that my mystery vodka-swilling guest was from Moscow. Amazingly Google Analytics can tell me things like that. Rather more depressingly it also lets me know the average amount of time that my visitor spent on the blog. Drumroll please:


So, less than half a second. Be honest - that's pretty bad. Even for this blog, that's shameful. I'm sad in a way I'm publishing this fact to the web. I'd rather be a Dungeons & Dragons player than have a blog with one hit from a dude sat in his Mum's house in Moscow who decided, in the space of one blink of the eyelid, that my blog was completely, unarguably not worth hanging around.

Anyway, other than emitting animal-like magnetisim to all things Eastern-bloc, I have been doing very little except for moving out of London for the forseeable future.

Sad face. :(

Labels: blog, Russia

"The circle of human knowledge, illuminated by the pale, cold light of reason, is so infinitesimally small, the dark regions of human ignorance which lie beyond that luminous ring so immeasurably vast, that imagination is feign to step up to the borderline and send the warm, richly colored beams of her fairy lantern streaming out into the darkness ; and so, peering into the gloom, she is apt to mistake the shadowy reflections of her own figure for real beings moving in the abyss.

Sir James George FrazerThe Golden Bough

April 2010 / May 2010 / June 2010 / July 2010 / August 2010 / September 2010 / February 2011 / April 2011 / August 2011 / September 2011 /

Messing with Illustrator / /homeless / The irony of househunting. / Househunting / Some old material / Favourite capture on Google Maps Street View / Idiot librarian / THIS IS NOT THAT DAY! / Confirmation (not religious) / love data? love data. /

The title of this blog comes from a poem by Coleridge, A Wish: Wriiten in Jesus Wood, Feb. 10th, 1792, Plus most blogs are moans anyway. Including this one. lol manuscripts

email me here
twitter dannywhitelock
bootlessmoan.blogspot.com

I'm a 23 year-old student in London Cambridge London, studying English Literature Law. It's hard to really think of anything truly personal I can put here that might give you some idea of who I am, so I will just tell you that my favourite Shakespeare play is Richard II, my favourite chocolate bar is Snickers, and I have a bit of a thing for instant coffee, especially if someone else makes it for me.

I'm interested in Renaissance Literature, Higher Education policy, and libraries.
I'm completely in love with a Scottish girl.