Driving Lessons

I'm now in the mood to post some stuff up (and it probably will be horseshit but then that's all I thought this would ever be) and thought I'd post about my experiences of learning to drive.

Bit of background: I've never needed to drive. My hometown is small enough to walk from end to end easily and is served by a decent train and bus network. Brighton is the same and there's more than enough here to keep me busy. So a car was never really needed but recently I've felt an urge to learn. Menna bought me a couple of hours lessons for Christmas a couple of years ago. The vouchers were going to run out at the end of June so I went it.

So a couple of weeks ago I was in the BSM centre in Brighton using their driving simulator. This is something akin to the old Out Run arcade game mixed with the flight simulator off the Krypton factor. It was OK. Taught me about clutches and such like.

The next week, I had a two hour lesson. Now THIS was something else. My instructor is a rather pleasant and jovial chap called Stuart Cooper. After a driving me up to Woodingdean, explaing various things on the way, he let me have a go. Basically, after that, I was driving for the rest of the lesson. Round Woodingdean, down to Rottingdean, along the coast to Peacehaven way, back to Rottingdean and Woodingdean, round the race course, down Elm Grove, into town and up to Queens Road. Fucking nuts! How the hell did I, having no previous experience of driving bar pulling away in a mates car in a pub car park near Alton Towers, manage to negotiate roundabouts, duel carriageways, all 4 gears and Brighton town centre at lunch time???

So today I had my second lesson. Trip to Shoreham beach was in order. Nice drive out there. Bit of traffic. Driving round shoreham and getting the hang of junctions and such like. And then the clincher. Reversing round corners. Fucking hell. I've only been driving for about 2 hours effectively.

I can't wait for next week (assuming that I have enough money - BSM ain't cheap).

Campy's Guide to Being a Crap Blogger

1. Don't write posts regularly

2. Spend 45 minutes writing a post and then delete it before you publish it because you thought it was all bollocks.

3. Write and publish posts about your lack of blogging and how you tend to delete your posts before they hit the frontpage.

Voila!

Crap Blogger!

Update on Menna's Race for Life

Just to let you know Menna did the 5km run in about 29 minutes and has so far raised £301. That's about a tenner a minute or 60 quid a mile.

My friend, Stet, who's a competitive runner did a similar distance the same weekend in about 18 minutes so for someone who's never done distance running before, Menna did pretty well.

Menna still has a couple of weeks to receive sponsorships. If you're feeling generous, please donate money at,

http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/MennaPritchard

YOu can give as little as £2.

Cheers for reading.

Race for Life - Brighton - Sunday 1st July 2007

This is Menna,



She's an amazing person, an absolute nutter and a constant source of joy to me. Enough of my fawning though, I need to tell you about what she's doing for charity.

As a token of her love for her Dad, who's suffered and is recovering from the effects and treatment of cancer, Menna is going to be doing a 5km sponsored run down here in Brighton on Sunday 1st July this year, with the money raised going towards Cancer Research UK.

If you don't know them, Cancer Research UK are one of the world's leading independent cancer research organisations and work to research and develop ways to detect cancer early and improve on treatments available. A worthy cause, I'm sure you'll agree.

Menna has a page where you can send your donations. Go to,

http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/MennaPritchard

If you're reading this and you have £2 in your bank account you could spare and would like to donate to her cause, please do send the money. It takes about 3 minutes to do and it can all be done online.

I've posted this up from my MySpace but thought I'd post it here on the off chance someone reading this feels generous.

I'll leave it at that. Thanks for reading and a massive thank you if you do go on and sponsor Menna. I'm incredibly proud of her for participating in the run and any donations that come off of the back of these posts of mine will mean the world to me as I know it will to her.

Popmeter - Ultimate 60s Podcast

It's the weekend (although you wouldn't know that from the time stamp - that's what I get for not hosting myself) and I like to chill before the Pizzaman arrives by timewarping myself back to the 60s to listen to some stomping soul and wayout garage.

Go to www.popmeter.com and download the podcasts available. If you dig soul and garage, you'll love it.

Have a good weekend.

Films - The New Rambo Trailer, Zodiac and Die Hard 4.0

Check this out if you haven't seen it. A trailer for the new Rambo film titled John Rambo. This trailer was released for the Cannes film festival and is currently doing the rounds on the internet.

It blows my mind how much screen violence they packed into this trailer. This is blatantly going to be the best film of next year (it's not actually released until May 2008).

Before you watch and while we're on the subject of films, I'll tell you about Zodiac which I went to see last night. That had me engrossed from start to finish. If you don't know about it, it's a factual based film about the Zodiac killer who terrorised San Francisco in around 1969. They manage to pack so much into the film. It's not for people with short attention spans. The cast rules too - Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jnr, MArk Ruffalo and a guy called John Carroll Lynch who plays the main suspect in the case and is as creepy as the Toothfairy in Manhunter.

Also, before Zodiac, I was presented with the trailer for Die Hard 4.0. This looks like a total turd. To give you an idea - there's one bit where McClane walks on the back of a jet fighter!?!?. It looks like someone totally missed the point and decided to overblow the whole franchise. If it was a bond movie, fair enough, but everyone knows McClane's just a flatfoot copper who gets involved with European terrorists and generally isn't too lythe a character to be prancing around on the back of a fighter plane.

The plot sounds equally out of sorts with the other Die Hard movies. The world wouldn't lambast the producers of the movie for putting McClane in a position where international terrorists are trying to blow up a shopping centre that McClane just happens to be browsing round. But no, Hollywood, wanting to make out that it's keeping up with what's up in the world, has McClane foiling a hacker who wants to switch off the internet............oh kay.

Enough of shit films though. Here's the new Rambo trailer. Enjoy,



P.S. I would have got this Rambo trailer up sooner but YouTube said it would do it for me then flaked on the offer and didn't even have the balls to email me to tell me so.

Justin Timberlake = The new Chet Baker

Note: This isn't a slant at either Chet Baker (my personal hero) or Justin Timberlake. Both rule at what they did/do and this is more aimed at the people behind them. Also, some who know me may be surprised Mr.Damnation-AD-Fanboy can come out with this but then you obviously have no real clue about me.

The music industry, prodominently white as it is, has a history of wanting to take things that are cool and hip and strip away any cultural obstacles that might impede full market saturation.

Elvis Presley and rhythm and blues is a prime example.

Another is Chet Baker - poster boy for the cool jazz scene of the 1950s. Chet was perfect for the music industry at the time. A pretty, white, Oklahoma boy who could actually blow a bit* and had a voice to back it up. He was the perfect vehicle for the music industry of the time to sell jazz music, a quintessentially black culture, to the wasp-ish listening public of pre-civil rights America.

Spin on a few years and while segregation is gone and rascism isn't tolerated anywhere near as much as it was in the 1950s, there still exists a notion within certain big business industries, that it's better to sell something to someone in a cultural uniform they can recognise and feel comfortable absorbing into their lives.

Obviously, for myself and most people I know, this is absolute tosh and experiencing new culture is outlet for growth and better understanding. Unfortunately though, there still exists a sizeable proportion of people who are loathe to take in that which they find unfamiliar or which they refuse to accept for what it is for fear that it might lead to an reduction of their culture. These people are an easy target for the marketing people of big businesses such as the music industry and with cynicism firmly tucked away in their back pocket, they produce an angle on a product so as to best procure finance from this particular demographic.

Step forward the Trousersnake - a pretty, white, tennessee guy who, while not playing an instrument(unless we assume hisfeet are his trumpet), has broken into the charts fronting songs that might otherwise have ended up in the hands of another, maybe black, r'n'b star. To boot, the androgenous energy that was one of Chet Baker's greatest strengths, is fully present in Justin Timberlake and he has the voice as well.

How history repeats itself or rather, how the music industry continue to use the same old tired marketing schemes, will never cease to amaze me.

Now, go listen to Chet Baker Sings and FutureSex/LoveSounds.

Next week - Were Aqua an attempt to re-hash the 2Unlimited template?


* - That said, Miles Davis was once quoted on Chet's best efforts as saying it was "worse than me when I was on heroin".