U2 on Regent St February 28, 2009

I’m not sure how it happened, one minute I was drinking wine at my desk, the next minute I was stood in the middle of crowd of U2 fans with Nat and Lucio holding protest banners…

The utterly dull U2 were playing a gig for Radio 1 on top of Broadcasting House, it’s only round the corner from our office so Nat decided that this was his opportunity to sort out Bono’s tax problems. I don’t know much about it, but apparently U2 are squirreling their earnings away in Holland, and so avoiding UK tax. Something like 0.5% of our taxes go to aid in Africa, so by not paying taxes in the UK Bono is pretty much destroying Africa. Or just setting a bad example really.

Happy pig amazingness February 27, 2009

This might be the most brilliant idea I’ve ever heard…

A company called This Little Piggy are starting a new pig farming initiative that makes me so so so so excited. Happy pigs!

Ruth Jamieson:

Our idea is to connect consumers directly with farmers and smallholders. Our customers will choose and buy a piglet via our website. Then they get to watch their pig mature via photo and email updates, whilst paying the farmer for their pig’s upkeep. Once it’s ready, we butcher the pig and deliver the meat directly to the customer. Essentially it’s smallholding by proxy. No supermarkets mean more money for the farmer. Contact with the farmer means more traceable meat for the customer. But we need to talk to friendly and preferably rare breed farmers about the scheme first.

Oh my god. That’s amazing. I love this idea, I want to buy a piglet right now! My mother has just started a pig farm cooperative thing, the local villagers have clubbed together to buy some pigs and they’ll all share the meat once they’re big enough to go to slaughter.

I’m very jealous, as much as I love the high heels and city life, all this cooperative farming stuff is so inspiring. We don’t see enough connections between the animal growing and maturing through to it being slaughtered and ending up on our plates. This initiative seems like the ideal cure for those people who pay £20 a month to sponsor a kitten but still eat crap quality meat. I imagine the kitten sponsor email updates say stuff like ‘the fluffy kitten played with some wool this week’, I hope the pig ones say ‘oohhh… they’re smiling and fattening up nicely. Will make amazing bacon.’

This Little Piggy are on Twitter, and are asking farmers to get in touch if they’d like to be involved.

Yum yum yum yum yum.

x

Jolly good fun February 23, 2009

When I started this blog five years ago it was all ‘indie disco this, indie disco that’; but the last few years have been more ‘cooking this, knitting that’. This weekend I decided to relive my youth and go to Button Down Disco at KOKO with some suitably neon clad friends.

This is what happened:

• I drank 20 units. This is a lot for me. It was mainly gin.
• A Swedish woman showed me her boobs in a bid to convince me to bring my friends to her metal club night
• A very young boy groped me in a bid to get my number. It didn’t work.
• I met three lovely ladies who spent all night kissing each other in a big triangle of hotness.
• My hot friend tried to turn me to the dark side by pushing his groin against me and trying to get me to lick his finger, whilst whispering ‘I want to be the first person who gets you to do drugs’. It didn’t work. Shockingly.
• I danced to Mansun’s Being A Girl like it was the best song ever written. It really isn’t.
• My head hurt so much on Sunday that I winced when the bus went over speed bumps and made my brain jolt about inside my head.

It was brilliant.

xx

There will never be a news piece more upsetting than this February 20, 2009

Bubble Hits is no more. I typed in 379 last night and gasped in horror at the channel error message. I tried again. And again. I wondered it it had moved, so went down to 350 and crawled up through the music channels. Still nothing. Tried the a-z listings and still nothing. I was close to tears.

I can’t believe it’s gone. After my years working at MTV I probably shouldn’t say it, but Bubble Hits was easily the best music channel. So much McFly, Girls Aloud and Britney. No daft takeover hours, I couldn’t care less what Liz from Atomic Kitten’s Top 1000 eighties ballads are. It was pure pop joy. You’d even forgive them for playing Scouting For Girls sometimes. It was that good.

I’m not sure how I’ll cope. It was the first music channel I’d turn to when in need of a dance around the sitting room. I’m going to have to make do with the far less brilliant Smash Hits or MTV Hits. Humph.

A night at the opera February 19, 2009

Last night the super lovely Harmony treated me to the premiere of Vladimir Martynov’s new opera, Vita Nuova at the Royal Festival Hall. Neither of us had ever seen an opera before and weren’t quite sure what to expect. What we got was an amazing evening of absolute weirdness, helped along by paedophilia, death and disease. At least I think that’s what happened, we weren’t very sure on the plot (despite the english subtitles). The jist of the story was pretty much ‘don’t bother meeting that girl you have rude dreams about, she’ll only die on you.’

It went something like this…

Man: Oh my god, I just had the dirtiest dream about a girl. I should write some poems about it.

Shit, I can’t stop thinking about that dream, maybe should leave my wife.

Oohh look! There’s that girl from the dream, she’s well hot.

[Man turns to talk to girl]

Man: “alright darlin’, I had the filthiest dream about you.”

Girl: “erm… Who are you?”

Man: “you future lover sweetheart, we’re destined to be together.”

Girl: “I don’t know you.”

Man then gets ill, girl gets ill too. Girl dies. Man doesn’t.

Man: oh no. That’s not good, I well loved her.
Hang on though, let me do some maths… She was only nine years old!
I’m going to hell!

Cue lots of ‘forgive me Jesus’ music.

The End.

Well, that’s what I reckon happened. There was a bit about a man on a horse looking a bit sad, I’m not sure how that fits in with my plot. The whole thing was great fun though, London Philharmonic Orchestra was brilliant and we had a good giggle at the moody man who came on stage every 20 minutes for his wood block solo. Going to try and do more things like this, the tix are all super cheap on lastminute so I’m going to book up a truck load this week. Wooh!
x

Internet Celebrity Of The Day February 18, 2009

The wonderful Mr Will McInnes on BBC News talking about Facebook, he nearly brought down Twitter with the talk about this appearance – so exciting! Will runs Nixon McInnes down in sunny Brighton, he was also he founding member of Social Media Measurement Camp (which was  bloody good this morning) so I’m guessing he’ll be in need of a big drink this evening. More on MeasurementCamp to follow once I’ve got my head round it. But for now let’s just admire those eyebrows…

Nokia’s Ovi application store February 16, 2009

I’m very jealous of all the people over at the Mobile World Conference this week. Mainly because I love Barcelona and my accompanying ability to eat 20000 kilos of food while I’m there, but also because I work on Vodafone and Sony Ericsson at Dare so am often dipping my toes into the mobile nerd world.

Amongst lots of boring news about mega pixels on cameras was Nokia’s  announcement that they’ll be launching an applications store later this year. There have been plenty of operators doing this already (Google, RIM (*snigger*) etc…) but there are elements of Nokia’s Ovi store that made me smile a little…

Niklas Savander, executive vice president of services and software for Nokia, described Ovi as “…not just a place to find applications, it’s a smart store. That is not just for smartphones. It actually suggests things you might like and adds social location dynamics to show you relevant applications. And it shows you what your friends have bought. And it changes the inventory based on where you are.”

Ooohhh… yum! I like that it shows you what friends have bought, it makes life so much easier for those apps that are only fun when your friends are signed up too.

London Twestivaling February 15, 2009

Twast Twursday twas Twestival, a twarty for Twitterers to twaise twosh for twarity. 175 twarties twobally, twots of twun and twots of twangovers the twext tway.

OK, I can’t keep that up without the entire post turning into utter gibberish. So anyway… the night was good fun, though it was a bit surreal to be in a room full of people who you know lots about but have no idea what they look like. There was a lot of name badge perving and a lot of awkward moments when you said hello to someone but then realised you couldn’t remember their real name. Oops. Though it was about 8 guys for every 1 girl which was rather fun for an evening of perving, especially as Pete Cashmore was there – who knew he was so bloody hot? Crikey.

Press coverage for the event was incredible, cameras everywhere and lots of write ups in the papers the next day. I managed to make it onto BBC News, but it’s not exactly my proudest moment. At 2:04 they caught me wandering around lost and drunk. My parents are very proud…

McFly vs Jonas Brothers February 5, 2009

The Jonas Brothers’ A Little Bit Longer and McFly’s Radio:Active have both been out a fair while now, but I still haven’t gotten over the horror that the JB album is so much better than the McFly offering. A Little Bit Longer is almost perfect, it’s only the annoying talking bits in Lovebug that let it down. Radio:Active is frankly awful at times, One For The Radio being a real low point.  If the next McFly album is mediocre too I may actually cry.

Lovebug 9.98/10; One For Radio 1.21/10…