Sweet Nothings

"Remember when you said girls had fleas?" "Remember when you swore you'd never love anyone else? And you'd never cut your hair, or have kids?" " Remember when you said you'd never buy a Renault ?" NO, I DO NOT REMEMBER THIS! Since when was not buying a Renault ever a big deal? If this was an advert for Skodas or Ladas it would make a vague amount of sense. But Renaults? Maybe they're viewed as somewhat girlie cars, but it's not as if men sit around making Renault jokes the whole time. Seems like the only point this advert really makes is that sooner or later we all relinquish our youthful principles and end up becoming the very things we used to despise. If that's really the case, and my destiny is to become a right-wing, Coldplay-loving rugby fan, then pass the whisky and paracetomol now, frankly. While we're on the subject of advertising: Kanye West's new album, 808s and Heartbreaks, is out. I read the 3-star review in th...

I hold no truck with people who don't take pub quizzes seriously. Even if you're thick as mince and only competing "for a laugh", you are presumably still there to enjoy yourself, and would therefore be somewhat pissed off to sit through a badly-organised shambles like the one I went to last night. First thing to note: it started after work at 6:30pm. By 10:45 most of the pub, including the rest of my team, had left with the final results still a mystery, and I simply couldn't be bothered waiting any longer. We had already marked each others' answer papers, so you would think that collating the final scores would be a simple case of totting up the already-written round totals. Apparently not. There were two guys from another department organising and hosting - I play football with the one, who is basically sound, and was actually billed as the sole host. Sadly most of the talking (and I do mean a lot of talking) was done by his colleague and mate. Floppy-haire...

Treasure Island. Captain Pugwash (whose crew categorically did not include Master Bates and Roger the Cabin Boy). Pirates of the Bastard Caribbean. All reasons why pirates have come to be viewed with a teary-eyed romanticism. People are at great pains to point out the differences between the modern form of piracy currently being practiced around the Horn of Africa and the funny, dashing pirates of yore. Even then, some would say, these Somali guys aren't all that bad really. All they do is kidnap defenceless crews and hold them captive until a ransom is paid - and sometimes they even have dinner with their hostages. How very civilized! This is all rather puzzling, because clearly pirates are criminals. As Ian Jack pointed out in the Grauniad yesterday, we don't look back on a Golden Age of Rape or Happy Slapping, but piracy is somehow not lumped in with other crime. It's seen as a gallant, noble enterprise, something akin to what Robin Hood was doing - so what if they were ...

I can't remember a friendly being more derided before the event than tonight's Germany-England match. As somebody who still naively clings to the romantic notion that international football means a great deal, I was not against it, but even so I was struggling to concentrate for long periods. Which was a shame, because as it turned out this was a highly satisfying and revealing performance. Certainly the notion that Fabio Capello is a fantastic manager who knows exactly what he's doing should now have been drummed into even the most xenophobic of Little Englanders (all of whom are now handily available in one big list for our perusal). Tonight England beat another of the "big" nations with what was basically a reserve team. Sure, the Germans weren't at full strength either, but many people have been lamenting our perceived lack of depth - presumably because while the first choice XI is playing so well they need to find something else to moan about. Gabriel Agh...

I've been to see the fireworks display up at Alexandra Palace for the last few years, and mostly been fairly underwhelmed by the experience. Partly this is due to it being too damn busy, and last year I was on a date with somebody I really shouldn't have been dating, but there's also something about fireworks that is inherently underwhelming. The other day I did indeed utter the words "once you've seen one set of fireworks, you've seen them all". The only exceptions to this rule I can think of are the Paris millennium celebrations - whose centrepiece was the fully illuminated Eiffel Tower - and the Beijing opening ceremony ones, which I didn't even see. Doh. Ally Pally certainly doesn't have millions of pounds to throw around for these displays, especially this year, and its old radio mast is not really a match for the old Tour Eiffel. Still, maybe it was down to low expectations, but I really enjoyed this year's extravaganza - and I didn't...

Tiredness thwarted my attempts to stay up late last night. I was mightily relieved when I put the telly on this morning. It's fair to say there's a pretty large burden of expectation on this fella's shoulders. I can only wish him luck.

I was in my local library earlier - a man walked up to the counter and said to the librarian "Can I have a pint of lager please?" "I'm sorry," said the librarian, "but this is a library." "Ok," replied the man, "Can I have a pint of lager please?" Of course not - that never happened! But this "joke" may not make any sense at all in the future if libraries carry on the way they're going. For instance, the one in Crouch End has one of those electronic organ type things (I'm not a musical expert, can you tell?), where patrons can sit, headphones on, bashing away at the keys like Geoffrey Rush in a particularly OTT outake from Shine. I can't explain why, but the sound of keys being struck with no music coming out was far more irritating than the sound of actual music would have been. We are still at the stage where libraries are essentially "quiet" places - I remember an incident a few weeks ago where a ...