Sofa arrives!

Better than I could have ever imagined, my sofa has arrived.
I mentioned it back in June.
I also said I was getting a rug.

Behold! My sofa and rug:



It arrived several weeks late. I blame the Italians.
I blame them because it was them that made it.
Yes, it's a hand made Italian leather sofa. I wanted to say that underpaid slave workers worked in terrible conditions for 20 hours a day to make my sofa. Maybe some of them died of hand cramps or something.
But alas, it's not to be. Instead the finest Italian craftsmen lovingly stitched the leather together. Leather, or course, taken from the finest wild mountain cows of Italy...

Let's just say it's a nice sofa.

Other things of note in the photo are the fact it's extremely tidy because that's the kind of person I am.
And that is a "Fun Size" Twix on the armrest which has since been eaten. It was tasty. So tasty, I had another three.

New York - start spreading the news

... I'm leaving today November 14th.
I'm going for a week, but damn if I'm not so excited I'm weeing my pants!

Having never been abroad, I'm choosing a long haul flight of 7 hours as my first time in a large plane. I've flown light aircraft, but that was 1,500ft and I had the controls. This is going to be 15,000ft and I'm at the mercy of someone else with gravity not on my side.

When I land, a limo will be waiting to take me to my hotel room overlooking Central Park. When I arrive, I arrive in style.
On the list are the usual tourist-type things to see: Liberty Island, Empire State building, Chrysler building, a walk through Times Square. And clothes shopping. Hopefully lots of clothes shopping.

The bits I'm just dying to see though are the buildings from the greatest film of all time; Ghostbusters.
I just love the film more than any other ever, so seeing the actual places in the film is just so super dupery amazing I can't even think of the words.
Stand by for pictures and videos of me recreating scenes from Ghostbusters on here when I return.

In total, the trip is costing about £1000, but I'm taking another £1000 as spending money. It's going to be a hell of a week, it really is.

The chewing gum fable

fa·ble (noun)
1. A usually short narrative making an edifying or cautionary point and often employing as characters animals that speak and act like humans.
2. A story about legendary persons and exploits.

I was at my bar tonight, waiting to start playing my music. I stood at the bar with the hot manager and one of the bar girls and the manager noticed I was chewing gum.
She asked me for a piece.
I lied and said it was my last one, when in actual fact I'd only just opened the packet. As I was lying, one of the off-duty barman had arrived. He was also chewing gum.
The off-duty barman said he had some, so he gave a piece to the hot manager and the other bar girl. As he was giving them a piece, one of the other bar girls was coming over and she also asked for a piece which she got.
Literally several seconds later, two of the doormen arrived and saw everyone chewing gum, and naturally they asked for a piece. The barman gave them a piece each.
He was then out of gum.

Everyone had a chuckle about the fact the barman only had the one piece in his mouth and gave the rest away. A few minutes later, everyone who'd arrived and took his gum wandered off to do their own thing.
I, on the otherhand, had a chuckle to myself in that I still had a whole packet left, and wandered off knowing I would be chewing all night long.

Moral: lying gets you everything.

POS Van

So I rented a van the other day. I needed to take my old sofa to a mates house to make way for my new sofa (that's another story), and also pick up all my CD cases from my parents where they've been stashed for the last billion years.

Anyway, the van was a skip on wheels.

It started out badly. The van rental company was situated in the middle of Leicester. I had to leave my car on a side road in an area that I really didn't like the look of.
Getting the van, I took it home. I was immediately struck by the extreme lack of power. There was almost nothing there.
I got it home nonetheless, and proceeded to reverse it up my drive. Reversing is easy: you just use your mirrors. The problem was the lack of power again. My driveway is on a slope with lots of little pebbles. The van reached a point where it just didn't want to know. I didn't want to put on too much power because of the surface I was driving on.
It didn't matter though. The power I was putting to the wheels wasn't shifting the van, so instead decided to wheel spin on my gravel. It started to slide back down the drive, with me in reverse gear.
Thankfully, the gate slowed me down:



That's a picture of the rear wheel arch. The full length of the scratch gash is an impressive 4 meters. When I do something wrong, I do it in style. Anyway, it was the vans fault for moving me forward instead of backwards.
Because I paid a £10 insurance waiver fee, it didn't matter that I'd damaged the van. If I'd not paid that £10, I'd have lost my deposit of £150, and also had to pay an insurance excess of £150 against repairs.

The motorway journey to my destination wasn't much fun. I was having to shift down into 3rd gear to get up hills. The side door lock didn't work. The main beam didn't work. At some point the speedo and odo stopped working. It was then I knew I was in a wreck.
On the way home, I discovered the fuel gauge didn't work: I ran out of diesel and broke down at about 11:30pm on a cold night on the M1.
I think I kicked the van.
It was 4:30am by the time I got to bed that night, all the while worrying about my car parked on a dodgy side road in Leicester.

For your viewing pleasure, here's the moment the tow truck arrived.
Download it here.
Nobody at the rental company died because I got a full refund, including the £10 waiver fee that allowed me to damage the van. Score me!

Pump Up The Volume

"Pump Up The Volume" was a film in 1990 starring Christian Slater as a loner pirate radio jock. His school peers love him, he promotes anarchy at his school, and gets a following of lots of chicks before being arrested after a radio broadcast on the back of a truck.

The films owns.

I watched it with a girl I used to like at school called Lindsey Sidebottom (her name hasn't been changed). She was always just a mate even though I spent most of that summer with her, and in that time she introduced me to this film amongst many other cool films and music.
It was this film that made me decide to be a DJ. The year was 1993, and I was 17 years old.

I've been a DJ ever since, and I was recently introduced to people starting a new internet radio station called Phoenix. I've just been added to the DJ rosta on the Phoenix MySpace, and I mean it happened about an hour ago.

Anyway, leading to my point and tying everything together, I'm going to DJ on there in the very near future.
I've done a couple of... ummm... shows...?... already, but I'm trying to find a day where I'm free to do a couple of uninterupted hours a week and do it regularly.
I think you should go and listen anyway though when you can. I find it interesting to hear people I kind of know doing a show, especially since most of them are in the US.
Don't get me started on Kristen's voice... if heaven and chocolate combined, this is the noise it'd make.

When I do it anyway I'll give advance warning on here so you can listen. And I'll be sure to let everyone know if I get the redesign of the Phoenix site done because whoever did the current site banged it together in a couple of hours and it doesn't look nice.
Mine, on the otherhand, will be very pretty indeed. Just like me. Rarr!

Bed time.