clivemurray.com

What is really hard, fresh, brutal, a bit naughty and can be found in my trousers? Yeah, Divine Heresys new album. Excellent stuff!

–c.

Best Facebook status update I’ve seen yet:

“Indigo Down is eating Kinder. He also realizes that this sounds sinister in German.”

It does, too.
–c.

I’m a naturally gregarious person, and always have been – despite being a bit of a social misfit and geeky maths kid at school. I’ve always had a large circle of friends, and in fact since leaving school I’ve always had at least three circles of friends that overlap in only minor ways. Seeing as that was something like 17 years ago, remembering all those people who I’ve lost touch with can be a tricky thing.

This is the area of one’s social life that networking sites like Friends Reunited and much more ubiquitously in recent times Facebook are so good at reawakening. I resisted Facebook for some time, seeing it as just another MySpace or Friendster or Orkut or however many others before them, but it soon became apparent that this was to be the winner, the one ring(-a-roses) to rule them all, and in the third-party app-space bind them. At this time I was also forced onto Facebook in order to better understand its implications as a web developer (thanks Mathias).

I gleefully added people to my network I wouldn’t have even credited with the ability to operate a computer, looked up my old history teacher, linked with countless contacts and added innumerable apps. But there was always a large thing missing. Thing is, it wasn’t a thing, it was a person.

It didn’t matter how many times I looked, the guy who I had spent most time with from the age of 11 to the age of 18 wasn’t on there. It appeared that he’d just not got with the digital revolution, and that was the best I could say about the situation. Even the mate I’d met through him back then, who lived over the road from him I’d met on a couple of my return trips to my hometown of Eastbourne (Hi Damien T., btw, if you ever read this!). My other great best schoolfriend, Nick R., I had since linked up with in London and indeed shared several late night drinking sessions with. But never this one guy – not a word, not a contact, not even a definite sign he was still alive.

Then, last week or perhaps the week before, his younger brother added me on Facebook, and a wave of nostalgic joy coursed through me for I knew that before long, the older brother (who, let me inform you, was part of the reason I took up guitar in the first place, and who really showed me how cool Dire Straits were) must surely follow. This guy, a man I had had no contact with in 15 years – not a peep, not a whisper – must eventually pop up on the radar.

60 minutes ago I received an email with this subject: “Mark [obscured for privacy] added you as a friend on Facebook…”

Forgive me. You, gentle reader, do not know this man. 15 years on, neither do I, of course, but now the odds are that I once again will. And that makes me extremely happy.

–c.

Evil Dave has invented foodstuff of the year!

Whisky ice-cream FTW!

–c.

As my good friend Jake said yesterday, I had – thinking that they had pretty much called it a day with regard to playing live – accepted and made peace with the idea that I would never see Underworld live.

Not so! Awsum! Techno FTW!

–c.

Airline food? Will tells it like it is.

–c.

By Evil Dave.

This episode: Virgin Media.

Next time, on Hidden Logo Meanings: Sony Ericsson.

–c.

Inspired by this post from Gridrunner, which was in turn inspired by this post from Eyechild (though that blog is erroring for me right now), I must give a shout out to my favourite London sandwich shop – Don Quixote on Kingsway, in Holborn.

The club sandwiches are to die for, and my favourite when I used to work down that way was the bacon and cheese club sarnie, but the lamb & mint club was also very popular, I understand.

Mmmmmm. Sandwiches.

–c.

EDIT: Very weird. I just noticed that Ade’s post that I was replying to was dated 3/11/2005 yet it popped up in my RSS reader today as if it was brand new. No idea why that happened.