Author: Chris5156

Avatar Pointless purchase of the month: Chris edition

Normally when we take a look at pointless purchases, it’s Ian who’s been pointlessly purchasing things, and I’m one of the smug onlookers who gets to decide whether to just feel superior or whether to mix the feeling of superiority with a bit of heckling. Today’s different. Today it’s me that’s spent my hard-earned London pounds on something useless.

Here we are, then. Thanks to the fan club mailing list, I offloaded some cash to pre-order this highly collectible limited edition picture disc vinyl of Flood, They Might Be Giants’ biggest album, which has been released to mark its 30th anniversary. It turned up in the post this week.

The B-side has frames from the music video for “Birdhouse in Your Soul” on it, so when you play the record it animates.

This purchase is particularly pointless because I do not have a record player. I cannot play this record. Nor do I need to; I’ve got Flood in my iTunes library and have had it for years. This is just for me to look at. I might even frame it.

Also, it’s yellow. I like yellow things.

Avatar Ian’s horoscope

It took him long enough, and I had to ask virtually every day, but Ian has now finally told me his star sign. So now, just in time for the new year, I can give him his horoscope for 2020.

Sagi-taurus

Outlook for 2020

Your love of cake motivates you to accomplish up to three things this year!

Motto: if you can reach it, you can make it sticky.

Love life

King, the god of love and pride, is your ruler and as he starts the year out in Aquarius, your mind opens to new ideas and new sexual positions. A new postman will visit your house between November and December, when your focus will be to make intimate connections to something larger than yourself, like a Volkswagen Passat or a Nisa-branded newsagent.

Venus enters your sign in early March for about three weeks. Pleasure and passion will combine to help you enjoy the finer things in life. The one retrograde period is from mid-May to end of June, during Venus’s trip through Gemini, causing you to ponder the benefits of online dating. While you have a high ratio of kissing within lips, it’s interesting to consider the alternatives.

Fortunes

Uranus, the planet of innuendo, will be ramping your sign all year, causing upheaval. Your outgoing, annoying personality is backed by your power planet, Jupiter. That means your good luck is directly tied to your arms this year, ensuring that you make your own luck by working hard and actively shaping your own future, perhaps by drawing it or even by acting out your desires as charades when you think nobody is looking.

You’re ready to work hard for the pleasures life has to offer – you will get particular joy this year from hot, salty chips, walking the wrong way on an escalator and free online pornography. You don’t have to apologize for that, unless you try to enjoy all three at the same time.

Your senses are awakened, and you will consider launching your own range of salad dressings.

Progress

Winning is your main objective and you can be a sore loser. The sun visits your sign in the spring, but hates you and doesn’t stay for long. Frustrated, you will destroy anything in your path, ramming your way toward achieving your goals. Anyone who stands in your way now will get decked.

The B&M Home Stores sale, from early October to mid-November, helps you reawaken your underlying fire and understand why you’ve been running out of basic toiletries so often. Embrace opportunities for spiritual healing now.

Avatar 2020 State of the Beans Address

Good day to you all. Thank you. You’re very kind.

My name is Sergeant-Major Professor Lord Sir Elbert Louche, KBE. It is a great privilege to join you here at Fairburn Ings visitor centre for the sixth annual State of the Beans Address. Please could I request that you do not feed the ducks until the formalities have concluded, and also please don’t feed any of the crispy Peking duck to the ducks. The RSPB are trying to avoid another Mad Cow Disease type incident with their mallards.

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Avatar A lesson learned

You know what you need to be careful with? Ian. You need to be careful with Ian.

You need to be careful because he’ll take something silly you say and he’ll see it through right the way to the end. Like – just for example – if you make a joke about wanting a bucket of Tunnock’s Teacakes for Christmas.

Like I say, be careful. Very careful. Otherwise the results could be devastating.

Avatar Four Word Reviews: Motown Mania

Back in about 2004, when I was at university, I attended a guest lecture by Pete Waterman. The university had given him an honorary doctorate, for reasons that were largely to do with the campus being in Warrington and Pete Waterman being about the only person of any note to come from Warrington who wasn’t Kerry Katona. Perhaps Chris Evans was busy.

He said he was often asked, after the many chart hits of Stock Aitken and Waterman, what was the secret formula for chart success. “There is no formula,” he proudly told us. You have to do what is right for the song and for the artist. Oddly, when discussing what was right for the song and the artist, he chose not to mention an album he’d put together four years previously called Motown Mania.

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Avatar Where the things are

You know the things? Some of the old video things. And the old audio things. Not the finished things, we’ve got those, but the footage we shot when we were making the things? Those.

And some pictures. Those things too. And documents and writing and pictures and old websites. All those things.

Shall I show you where some of those things are? They used to be here:

But now they’re not there, because of brokenness and disaster. So now, I think they’re nowhere.

That’s where the things are. Or maybe, more accurately, that’s where the things aren’t.