Hardy perfectly depicting every after-party I’ve had the dubious pleasure of gracing.
‘And provisionally sat on with a dazed smile’ is about right.
Was ketamine a thing in 19th century Wessex?
Who knew.
Category: Bitesize
I watched When Harry Met Sally last week.
Best scene is the Chinese couple talking about how they got the shmoke-on back in the day. I like the way he says village.
Silver Fox in the corner talks a dumb game but is clearly an animal in the sack. Look at her expression, she takes no prisoners. Poor guy looks worn out. If only those walls could speak.
Remember the pre-VAR glory days of the Prem, and the time the stadium announcer went awol and dropped Tiesto in the 78th minute at Goodison and for three and a half mental minutes football went out the window.
I cycled from Canada to Mexico once, and ended up in LA visiting my brotha LG who lives in Venice by the beach.
He lent me his cruiser while he was at work and all I did was roll around on it for five days in some LA daydream.
I never saw her face.
People love shooting this from the hip as soon as they hear any mention of a break-up.
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
But what most people don’t know – I didn’t til I read about it a couple of years ago – is it’s from a poem by Tennyson called In Memoriam, in memory of his best friend who died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage, and was written over the course of 17 years as ‘a meditation on hope after great loss’.
I don’t know any of this, wikipedia does.
And so the point is, when someone throws that curveball at you after a break-up in a bid to make you feel better, they may be meaning well, but they’re speaking out of their derrière. Because Tennyson was referring to death, not to parting company with someone. And that’s what’s messed up about break-ups, is that although it is like a bereavement, others don’t attribute that value to it, because that person is still around. And simultaneously, because that other person is still around, perhaps walking the streets of the same city as you, it makes it all the more difficult to digest the idea that they are lost to you. Like when Amy Winehouse sang ‘we only said goodbye with words.’
In one of the great romantic comedies High Fidelity, John Cusack’s character lists the 5 things he misses most about his ex-girlfriend.
Top 5 things I miss about Laura
1. Sense of humour. Very dry, but it can also be warm and forgiving. And she’s got one of the best all time laughs in the history of all time laughs. She laughs with her entire body.
2. She’s got character. Or at least she had character before the Ian nightmare. She’s loyal and honest, and she doesn’t even take it out on people when she’s having a bad day. That’s character.
3. I miss her smell, and the way she tastes. It’s a mystery of human chemistry and I don’t understand it, some people, as far as your senses are concerned, just feel like.. home.
4. I really dig how she walks around. It’s like she doesn’t care how she looks or what she projects and it’s not that she doesn’t care.. it’s just, she’s not affected I guess, and that gives her grace.
5. She does this thing in bed when she can’t get to sleep, she kinda half moans and then rubs her feet together an equal number of times… it just kills me.
Oh breakups you blow.
It took me years to get round to watching this.
I was worried about it. The trailers looked bad. They showed Gervais getting too loose with his creation. Where The Office was a parody of an unfortunate loser, Life On The Road looked like a parody of a parody. A caricature of Brent. Which was unnecessary, because he already was a caricature. Kinda like in Photoshop when you click on some filter twice by mistake, and the picture becomes completely indistinct.
The Guardian wrote a good article about it, about knowing when to walk away. The older I get the more I realise knowing when to leave is one of the most important skills worth mastering in life. Monosyllabic after-parties spring instantly to mind, but this applies to everything; getting out of the bath, relationships, hotel breakfast buffets, YouTube binges, death. If you fall asleep in the sun, you gawn get burnt boy.
Which can turn out well.
But mostly doesn’t.
Having made one of the most outstanding things to ever air on television, Gervais had to come back for more. My feeling was that Life On The Road would be little more than the skidmark of a perfectly flushed Office-shaped turd, the fruits of the most glorious session ever spent, locked away in the environs of an upstairs bathroom, the defining mid-morning sit-down of all our lives. With this in mind, better to bow to the lovely stuff that flushed clean first-time, and get the Duck out to wipe the rest of the toilet bowl clean.
So I watched it the other day.
It was decent I tell you.
I read some pretty cerebrum-exploding information about dolphins from the National Geographic recently.
Head trainer Teri Turner Bolton looks out at two young adult male dolphins, Hector and Han, whose beaks, or rostra, are poking above the water as they eagerly await a command. The bottlenose dolphins at (some weird Marine Science Institute, acronym RIMS) a resort and research institution on an island off the coast of Honduras, are old pros at dolphin performance art. They’ve been trained to corkscrew through the air on command, skate backward across the surface of the water while standing upright on their tails, and wave their pectoral fins at the tourists who arrive several times a week on cruise ships.
But the scientists at RIMS are more interested in how the dolphins think than in what they can do. When given the hand signal to “innovate”, Hector and Han know to dip below the surface and blow a bubble, or vault out of the water, or dive down to the ocean floor, or perform any of the dozen or so manoeuvres in their repertoire – but not to repeat anything they’ve already done during that session. Incredibly, they usually understand that they’re supposed to keep trying some new behaviour each session.
Bolton presses her palms together over her head, the signal to innovate, and then puts her fists together, the sign for “tandem”. With those two gestures she has instructed the dolphins to show her a behaviour she hasn’t seen during the session, and to do it in unison.
Hector and Han disappear beneath the surface. With them is a comparative psychologist named Stan Kuczaj, wearing a wet suit and snorkel gear and carrying a large underwater video camera with hydrophones. He records several seconds of audible chirping between Hector and Han, then his camera captures them both slowly rolling over in unison and flapping their tails three times simultaneously.
Above the surface Bolton presses her thumbs and middle fingers together, telling the dolphins to keep up this cooperative innovation. And they do. The 400-pound animals sink down, exchange a few more high-pitched whistles, and then simultaneously blow bubbles together. They they pirouette side by side. They they tail walk. After eight nearly perfectly synchronised sequences, the session ends.
There are two possible explanations of this remarkable behaviour. Either one dolphin is mimicking the other so quickly and precisely that the apparent coordination is only an illusion. Or it’s not an illusion at all. When they whistle back and forth beneath the surface, they’re literally discussing a plan.
Nature is D o P e
It is a well-known fact that the earth’s upper atmosphere directly over New Zealand has been suffering from something called Ozone Depletion since the middle of the 1980s. Which means the UV rays from the sun pass straight through it without being diluted, intensifying their strength five-fold.
A well-known fact you say.
One that when I cycled through New Zealand in 2017.
I was sadly unaware of.
Thomas Moore said:
There is nothing half so sweet in life, as love’s young dream.
Chance The Rapper said the same thing.
And made it sound
What’s better than tripping is falling in love. What’s better than Letterman, Leno, Fallon, and all the above. What’s better than popping bottles trying to ball in a club, is the first caveman pops with his son a ball and a club. What’s better than paper is balling it up. What’s better than followers is actually falling in love. What’s better than frolicking follies falling in mud. Rolling in green pastures wanderinng following love. What’s better than eating is feeding your fam. What’s better than meetings is missing meetings to meet with your fam. What’s better than leaning and needing a Xan. Is hitting a Xan dreaming a dream that could mean leaving the land. What’s better than yelling is hollering love. What’s better than rhymes nickles dimes and dollars and dubs. Is dialling up your darling just for calling her up.
Ain’t nothing better than falling in love.
The best thing about having a nokia with a camera with less mega-pixels than your dad has facebook friends is taking full advantage of moments like the ones when Giles Peterson walks into the exact same coffee joint at the exact same time as the one you happen to be sitting in and you bust up to him all nonchalant and ask for the mother of all selfies with no doubt in mind you’re about to lense the mother of all keepers to nestle above your mantelpiece until the time you get old and dribbly and start muddling your memories and reminisce about the days when you and world famous DJs used to hang out in coffee bars and shoot the shit like it weren’t even a ting.
As you get older things get taken from you.
Good looks, girlfriends, hey even bike wheels.
I used to get my wheels stolen a lot.
From inside my building’s courtyard even, that’s to say, past an electric gate, and a front door, and another internal door. An inside job? Where’s Columbo when you need him. I learnt one thing though. From that famous playwright cat.
The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.
It won’t get your wheels back.
Or your bird.
But it does kinda work weirdly.
When Alexander surveyed the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.
For many years this nugget of Ancient Greek literature always held a smug place in my quote armoury, up until five minutes ago when I googled it to find that it’s really a direct quote from Hans Gruber, the german brey who gets yipikaye’d by John Maclean before hurtling 30 stories down the side of the Nakatomi Plaza to his death at the end of Die Hard.
Which makes sense.
I can’t remember reading any Plutarch when I was 10.
But I like the syntax of the sentence. And in the manner of Alexander I’ve found that when surveying the world in front of my eyes, perhaps not weep, but one thing does make me very sad. It’s how much human beings are messing up the earth. There was an article yesterday about how certain small fish are evolving to prefer feeding on polystyrene bobbles over natural foods, which is changing their physiology and stunting their growth. You can see all this plastic in their stomachs.
Think about every time you go into Pret. And how much rubbish you discard into the bin six minutes after buying it. All the packaging. Where does it go. Why aren’t there as many recycling facilities as there are supermarkets. Where are they all.
We’re so mindless about it. I’m no better, curbing my predilection for the San Pelli is a daily struggle. Especially when that Croatian broad Bianca is plying me with it on the regular.
Dustbins are called dustbins because they were exactly that. Receptacles for gathering dust. Before the industrial revolution there wasn’t any rubbish. Stuff people discarded were things like ash from fires, wood, bones, vegetable matter, and number two’s. They stuck their meat and fish and produce from the market in a cloth sack and made their way home to get medieval in the kitchen. No wrappers, no cans, no yoghurt pots.
Some people argue that nature will adapt to this rubbish-laden change in their ecosystem, it will find a way. I’m thinking they’d prefer not to have to, that they preferred it before. When there were lions roaming the hills of southern France and New Zealand had a birdlife so dense the first explorers to reach it had to moor their ships two miles off shore just to be able to sleep at night, for the birdsong.
The current rate of extinction is higher than at any time in history, since back when dinosaurs got wiped out by the mother of all asteroids. We’re losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural ‘background’ rate, which means one to five species a year. 99% of currently threatened species find themselves at this risk specifically because of human activities. Plastics are just one of the ways in which we’re messing things up. Add deforestation, hunting, global warming, and now taking out gorillas in zoos. How is it that one species is so singlehandedly intent on screwing up the habitat for every single one of the other 8.7 billion who also happen to share our earth.
Who do we think we are.
So I survey the cinders of the world and get sad, and like everyone else I do nothing about it because when I’m hungry Pret seems like a good idea. Which makes me feel worse, and makes me want to get away from everything, the horns, the machines, the screwfaces, the screens. To flee, to get real, because instagram isn’t real, to touch base with all that I forget, that is always there, waiting for the curious animal in me to seek it out. The daybreaks, the sunsets, the starscapes, the trees rustling in the wind, the rivers beckoning me to throw myself into them, to drink them in, to galivant with grizzly bears. Nothing is wiser or cleverer or finer than nature. It is our tonic.
But before I do any of that I want to go to Sweden, track down Emelie Forsberg, and marry her.
Of all the scant solace I grope around for when my head fills with the above, watching the below provides me with some. A supersize serving of solace. This girl is amazing. And this video makes me happy. The whole thing was really just a long introduction to it.
The world isn’t so bad if you can just get out in it.
From now until the last leaf of autumn curls its way languidly to the floor, any day of faint sun will see London Fields going absolutely nuts. In fact, this shit will happen every day of faint sun.
Weekdays included.
All of life is here.
Five year olds arguing offside decisions at the back end of seven hour football matches. Turkish ladies refining their kofta flex. Gym-bunnies standing around in groups feeling their triceps. First dates breathing easy thanking the day for its grandiose stage design. Hispters getting their gurn-on from the night before. Smoke from innumerable disposable barbecues curling its way into the air amidst the plane trees and the pink blossom. Starlings circling up above, sighing, surveying the self-styled rulers of their earth baring their teeth at each other. The smiles of a sun-starved populace, if you’re lucky you might see a knife-fight, might even hear a gunshot, if you’re really lucky you’ll have the company of a dandy sporting the new Lemaire Uniqlo range walking with you side by side as you savour the cool lick of an IPA and pontificate on the excellent marriage of sunny days and the forgetfulness of mankind.
My father can’t text. He’s figured out how to open text messages, but he can’t reply. Here’s an example of our text conversations. They’re not conversations. They’re monologues. All the entries are from me.
By the way, you’re looking at the nokia 743776B. Set to drop end of 2022, it features the world’s longest screen. It’s a prototype, a loyal customer thing. Anyway I text my pops in the knowledge he won’t respond. It’s like persisting with a girl who’s giving absolutely nothing back. But the difference is I know he’s read the text, I’m sure he’s happy about it – the one new message bleep is big for him – and I know if he wants, he’ll call me. Other than that I hit send and.. silence.
It’s one of those rare moments in interaction when you want for nothing back. Saying something to somebody without any need for reciprocation. Like speaking to someone who’s asleep. Not worrying about or expecting a response is a peaceful state of being. The kind of peace you might find watching a sunset, without feeling the need to instagram it and miss the rest of the sunset you’re watching because you’re seeing who’s liked the picture you’ve posted of the sunset you’re in the middle of that you’re missing.
This connectivity means that unlike any other time before us, we’re continuously at the behest of a response to what we’ve written or posted or texted. The bible said let us not give so as to receive. But we all want reciprocation. Because when you say something you expect an answer. Those who don’t are either talking to themselves, or mad, and both.
Is something’s worth only determined by how it’s received? Example, what’s the point of this blog. I thought about it at the end of last year, and concluded dropthebeatonit was just an exercise in narcissism. I stopped writing it for six months. I had the world’s coolest girlfriend and I didn’t really need the validation. Now I’m single and I need the validation. But how is this any more than a glorified status update. From the validation it gets I’d say it’s less. If it wasn’t for my number one fangirl this would get as much fanfare as I get for clogging up my father’s inbox.
But my man Conrad wrote six words, and raised his hand for a 60-man cyber fist-bump.
Not that what he said about Halloween wasn’t illuminating. But if something i wrote got sixty likes I think I’d stop speaking to all my friends and and get a bronze water feature in my flat with a poignant life-mantra emblazoned across it in motherfucking neon.
And that’s what social media platforms enable. A hoard of people who don’t write just to write, but who write to be read. Blogs mean somebody can write something however braindead and be almost assured that ten people will read it. Which keeps them writing. If I was Pride & Prejudice crew I’m not sure I’d be writing this kind of stuff down in my diary with a quill, scratching down theories on mate’s mums and wearing trousers around your nipples (and halloween) to pour over later by candlelight during thunderstorms.
Narcissism and needing validation to one side, writing this stuff has benefited me in an unforeseen way. It made me practise writing almost everyday for four years, to the point where now words give me a boner. I’ve started writing shit that I don’t blog that’s a bit more meaningful, that I write just for me. That isn’t reliant on a like button. And hasn’t the like button passed from being a tool for showing approval to a self-purpose tool for people to click on to be seen to be liking something anyway.
Paradoxically enough, to bring this whole thing back on itself – much like sending my pops a text message – blogging is appealing because it’s a serve into an empty court. The only reciprocation I expect from this is a torrent of abuse in the comments section from a prehistoric human who lives on a lawnmower in Tonbridge Wells with a side-line in hardcore porn who’ll attach a link to Lionel Ritchie and express a desire to throw a snickers at my forehead.
I can’t ask for more than that.
This could be the best gif I’ve ever seen.
Let’s investigate in more detail.
1. For starters whatever the hell this guy is on is beyond me, but his heart rate would knock humming-bird bpm out the park. Whatever he’s taken, I’m in. No tune is that good.
2. My man Wilma pointed out he’s actually wrapped a bit of cloth around the bar for maximum grip, while he goes ape-shit.
3. My mate Phil just pointed out another worrying incidental. He has a wedding ring on.
4. While everyone goes batshit crazy, clock the guy in the background standing completely still. He’s having a good time. Hey, he could be deaf.
5. But the pièce de résistance of this marvel is without doubt the woman next to the main event.
6. She is the main event.
6. I mean, what on earth is going on with her MOUTH.
7. HER MOUTH.
8. No-one needs to chill a bit.
9. The world needs to make a concerted effort to be more like this.
Swans Reflecting Elephants
Beer Trophies Reflecting Traffic Cones
You could extend the metaphor to factor-in imodium.
But we’d be here all night.
Some interesting information about the little known
Temnothorax Longispinosus
Left to their own devices, these tiny creatures trundle happily around the forest floors of North America. Unfortunately their neighbours have other ideas. Every so often nests are raided by larger ants who massacre the adults and bear away their babies to raise them as slaves.
The heavily armoured Protomognathus americanus ant has become so dependent on captives that it can no longer find its own food or clean out its own colonies.
Being too small to fight their overlords, some of the slaves have found another way to exact revenge: they dismember their masters’ children and scatter the bodies outside the nest. Biologists have been at a loss to explain what the rebels get out of this reckless defiance. Why does the pismire strike back?
A zoologist at an unremembered University believes he has found the answer. It is not some death-or-glory impulse that sparks the slave revolts, but hard-headed evolutionary sense.
The smaller ants will never overthrow their masters, but the more children they slaughter, the fewer overlords there will be in the future. This helps to protect any free Temnothorax colonies nearby.
‘As enslaved workers do not reproduce, they gain no direct fitness benefit from this ‘rebellion’ behaviour. However, there may be an indirect benefit: neighbouring Themnothorax nests that are related to ‘rebel’ nests can benefit from a reduced raiding pressure.‘
In other words, the slave ants are driven by their genes to rise up not for their own benefit but for the sake of cousins they will never see, and whose very existence they might be only dimly aware of.
Nature is
D o P e
Every time my mother waves me goodbye wailing about bike lights and for God’s sake be careful darling please I could use some grandchildren, I tell her the same thing. On my threadbare list of talents riding a bike around London is up there. Being a bike messenger for three years gives you a good understanding of the way the city works when you’re on a bicycle. To assuage her maternal fear, I remind her of this:
After some brow-furrowing over the years, I’ve grown to believe it. It comes down to a simple truth. Don’t do dumb shit on a bike, and cycling in London is not dangerous. It’s about learning not to put yourself in dangerous situations. Like a 38 year old Paolo Maldini making up for his lack of pace by knowing exactly where the ball will go. The more you cycle, the more you know how to read the road.
With spring in the air, a whole lot of bicycles that have lain dormant over the winter will be dusted off and oiled up for the coming months. So I came up with 6 Cycling Commandments to bear in mind every time you get on your wheels and go for a London-centric spin.
These are the most important things I’ve learnt over a decade of cycling around the city.
*
I made it into a dinky little leaflet, and hung it on a bunch of people’s handlebars, so they could throw it away without looking at it and annoy street-sweepers already reduced to tears by all the plane-tree seeds fucking shit up everywhere.
R I d E S a F e P e O p L e
I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.
Carl Jung
In 1901 a man called Dr Duncan MacDougall embarked on an experiment in Dorchester, Massachusetts. His aim was to prove that the human soul had mass. And if it did, then it was therefore measurable.
With their consent, MacDougall conducted this experiment on six terminally ill patients, who were placed on specially-made Fairbanks scales just prior to their deaths. His intention was to weigh each body before and after their passing to determine any differences in mass. Initiating the experiment, in the company of four other doctors, MacDougall carefully measured the weight of the first patient moments before their last breath.
And then again, after the patient’s death.
The experiment continued onto the next patient, with the same results. A quote from The New York Times.
‘The instant life ceased the opposite scale pan fell with a suddenness that was astonishing – as if something had been suddenly lifted from the body. Immediately all the usual deductions were made for physical loss of weight, and it was discovered that there was still a full ounce of weight unaccounted for’.
Everything was taken into account, from the air in the lungs to bodily fluids, and the loss in weight remained unexplained. Following the experiment and post consultation with the other attending physicians, it was determined that the average weight loss of each person was ¾ of an ounce.
MacDougall’s conclusion was that this very slight change in weight might be attributed to the instance of the soul departing the body, and if this were the case, calculated the weight of the human soul to be..
21 grams.
Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu directed a film in 2003 called 21 Grams, which finishes with a monologue.
How many lives do we live.
How many times do we die.
They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death.
Everyone.
How much fits into 21 grams.
How much is lost.
When do we lose 21 grams.
How much goes with them.
How much is gained.
How much… is gained.
21 grams.
The weight of a stack of five nickels.
The weight of a hummingbird.
A chocolate bar.
How much do 21 grams weigh.
The Reunion of the Soul and the Body at the Resurrection (1808)
William Blake
From this.
To this.
Cells regenerating into scar tissue.
I read somewhere that chicks dig scars.
Hellraiser got ladies.
