Merry Christmas
Or Happy No-Work-For-Three-Days Joy
Unless you work in catering,
Public service,
Or have deadlines and are self-employed.

What I mean is Jolly Festive Season,
No matter what your celebratory reason.
(Though if you'd rather there was nothing going on,
Please feel free to ignore this song.)

Enjoy your weekend so,
And I'll see you under the mistletoe x

• 14:03 Dying in car crash :( Still, life was great. Thanks to all of you for that. Please play 'I Hope I Become A Ghost' at my funeral. Peace, out. #
• 14:06 Oops. Meant to save that last one as a draft in case of emergency, but hit 'send' instead... Actually in Norfolk safe & sound, drinking tea. #

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It's ROSE'S YEAR IN COMEDY REVIEW!!


( The awards they're calling 'Largely unrepresentative' and 'Doesn't this come with a cheque?' are here!! )

So when my mum said "Bring your laptop if you want, but we don't have wireless. No one can make it work" what she meant was "No one has looked at the modem and copied out the wireless key".

I am in Leeds. I have wireless.

(Probably still won't be around much, as y'know, family time. But everyone's still working until Thursday anyway.)

Up to Leeds today. Very sporadic internet until New Year. Email or text the important stuff so I definitely see it, yeah?

Byes.

Or what all the cool kids are calling NiLACFoGoPe!! (NiLACoGoPe!!)

( Squishy incoherent glee within )


And that was that. An absolutely fantastic night in excellent company. Thanks to everyone I was with, everyone I said hello to, everyone else in the audience I recognised but didn't say hello to, everyone else in the audience I didn't spot but whom I also know, all the astonishingly talented acts, the Rationalist Association and New Humanist magazine, the Bloomsbury Theatre, and of course Robin Ince and Martin White. Simply inspiring.

Tonight was also, incidentally, my 65th and final gig of the year. My 2009 comedy review will probably happen sometime before Christmas. STAY TUNED.

There is a parcel here labelled "sweatshirt" that has New Duds written all over it. I didn't order it so assume it's a very lovely Christmas present from someone. What's the etiquette on opening these things? *impatient*

Also, thank you very much whoever got it for me. Let me know who you are.



In other package news, I have a card demanding payment of customs fees for something (another complete mystery), the Threadless t-shirts haven't arrived (which is an arse because there's at least one Christmas present in there), the catnip bubbles haven't arrived (which is an arse because I won't get to play with the kittens), and there's something else missing WHICH IS ALSO AN ARSE.

I going to Leeds on Monday and leaving before the post will arrive that morning. Tch.


HOWEVER! A Christmas card from tabimendou also arrived this morning. There is a drawing of a happy stegosaurus covered in Christmas decorations inside. And the simple question of what if velociraptor!Capaldi went up against Addison's disgruntled tyranosaurus rex??
I love my friends.

Ok, so, has anyone else seen the new stats thing for paid members? I just had a look, and I know I'm tired and epically crap with numbers, so  need someone to tell me I'm reading this right. This is the table of page hits for December, and the 9th was the date of my last post, that one about my boots (gripping reading, I'm sure you'll agree):


Now, is it just me, or does 729 seem like a lot for one day?? I mean, that's a little scary. Sure, some are me, and there's about 100 people on my flist. But not all of them will have checked their LJ that day, and I didn't get hundreds of comments, so who are all those other people?? Also, if there are only 110 unique visitors, does that mean each of them looked 7 times? I don't understand!

Oh, and who's reading my LJ through an RSS feed? Shit, I wish they hadn't done this, now I feel paranoid because of numbers I don't understand.

Oh, and weight update now that I have access to scales - I officially have an "underweight" BMI. But don't worry, I have mince pies.

And, as this is becoming a miscellany post - how excellent was Buzzocks?? And, OMG! Thick! I love you, Peter Capaldi. And Stephen Colbert rapping! And the Sports Illustrated outtakes!

That should cover most of it until I post again and rake in a few hundred more pageviews...

There is only one 4-letter word in my book.

And that word is 'shoe'.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/fashionnews/6813789/Woman-more-likely-to-remember-first-pair-of-shoes-rather-than-first-kiss.html

I read the above article today stating that 92% of women remember the first pair of shoes they bought with their own money, but only 60% remembered their first kiss.

This statistic alone led me to don my extra-hard reinforced cynical hat - the one I keep under my regular cynical hat. It has a large neon sign on it that says "It's all a load of bollocks" and is hand crafted lovingly by former Eastern Bloc conspiracy theorists and comes in a special shade of black that hasn't been invented yet.

First of all, where did they get this 60% malarkey? EVERYONE remembers their first kiss, surely? Kisses are significant. I remember my first platonic childhood kiss, my first adolescent kiss, my first 'proper' kiss (ie, one that didn't involve one or both parties being put in headlocks and threatened with noogies), my first lesbian kiss, my first beardy kiss, my first kiss with someone I had known less than five minutes, the list goes on. Who were they interviewing to get these results? Was the research conducted at the St Amnesiac's Home for Octogenarian Sufferers of Alzheimer's Disease? Presumably those who claimed they COULD recall the incident later went on to explain that their first romantic clinch was with the late Emperor Akhenaten of the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, but no further details of the relationship could be explored as Doris was at this point wheeled away for her daily dose of pills and electroshock therapy.

And what do they class as your 'own money'? It can't be pocket money, surely? I can't imagine anyone remembering the first pair of school loafers they had to fork out for after mummy had cold-heartedly and stubbournly turned round and uttered those immortal words: "You're big enough and ugly enough to buy your own bloody Sketchers from now on." Besides, the article offers up the heady surrealist image: "Whether they are a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s, Jimmy Choos, such as those worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City, or just an ordinary pair of high street shoes," as if the average spotty teenager is somehow capable of scraping together all their 50p's and fork out for a pair of Gucci slingbacks. (Oh, and a small note: Is it now publishing law that any mention of Manolo Blahnik MUST be followed by a reference to that Carrie woman? Does SJP get royalties or something?)

Perhaps they mean money you earned yourself from your first job, but if memory serves, all of your mental energies during the first two months of employment are almost entirely focussed on the utter horror of the realisation that you have to get up before noon on no less than 5 mornings in a row AGAIN, and any remaining brain cells are being devoted to trying to remember the names of everyone in the office and the location of the photocopier. If you do go shopping at any point, you will have entirely forgotten the fact that you purchased anything until one of your colleagues asks where you got your new jacket, and then you panic under the sheer monumental pressure of it all, lock yourself in the staff canteen and eat all the chocolate bourbons to make yourself feel better.

The claims are riddled with inconsistencies and vagueries, but worst of all the whole thing seems geared to once again paint a vicious picture of the female of the species as a fashion-obsessed unfeeling bitch queen, trolling about Dolcis and lovingly caressing each stiletto with a worshipful and slightly mad glint in her eye, softly purring "I like shoes more than people" before bludgeoning a shop assistant to death with a spike heel because they didn't have those green satin gladiator flip flops in her size.

It all leaves me feeling a bit alienated, as if femininity is some sort of Illuminati-esque secret order that you need a special handshake and brain-washing to join, and I just fell in through the back door while looking for the toilets. Everyone around me is chanting in Latin and sacrificing a walrus and I'm convinced that they're all about to lynch me and tie me to the altar instead. Shoes are just not something I get. I spend most of my life trudging around in the same chunky boots, trainers and converse, and any deviation from this is an unpleasant necessity brought on by my being crowbarred into a skirt for the evening. The wearing of shoes is simply a basic requirement of modern living, like all clothing, food, oxygen, and the playing of pretentious wanky adverts at the cinema before the trailers come on. PRETTY shoes are merely an UNCOMFORTABLE requirment, like vegetables, smear tests, going to the loo, and the playing of pretentious wanky yadda yadda yadda (ran out of similes there - sorry.) I wouldn't reminisce over them any more than I would reminisce over my first leg wax. (Although I am sure the experiences are not too dissimilar. Either way you are walking into a bristling hostile she-witch dominated environment and handing over large sums of money to a smiling demonic trollop who will, in return, leave you wanting to aneasthatise your lower body by banging yourself repeatedly in the knees with a meat tenderiser.)

So, in the name of research, balance of argument and having nothing better to do, I decided to scour the internet and seek out the average woman's opinion on why shoes are important. The top 3 reasons seemed to be:

1) Shoes always fit no matter how much weight you put on.

2) Shoes complete/compliment the outfit.

3) Shoes say something about the wearer.

Now, I can't comment much on the first one (my shoes never fit because I have weird feet) but I thought long and hard about points two and three, regardinging the ONLY pair of shoes I have owned that I have ever felt any affection towards - my Converse - and was horrified to find that I actually got what they were on about. Kinda.

For what was supposed to be a largely ranty entry, I had managed to argue against my own bloody point! My extra-cynical hat had been knocked off my head into the gutter and shat on by a passing seagull. Bugger.

For a decidedly non-girlie shoe, my attitude to my Little Black Sneakers has turned out to be alarmingly girlie. Even my reason for buying them was straight out of the pages of Cosmo - I saw a celebrity in them. Well ok, I saw Ed Byrne wearing a pair on 'Live at the Apollo' and thought they looked cool. And they do. If those trainers had been a pair of Christian Lou-wotsisface-with-the-red-soles sandals and Ed had been, oh I don't know, Tamara Tararka-Parmesan or some other such twig in a frock, then that would have been me handing myself over to the She-witches of the Salon for a manicure and a lobotomy.

Furthermore, they also, as point 2 clearly states, 'compliment and complete the outfit'. "The" being the operative word here. I have one 'outfit', or 'look'. Uno. Singular. Less than two. And my Converse trainers go with it. Sweet. Someone once commented to me that I have a carefully crafted look that gives the illusion of being very casually thrown together. I do, in fact, have a casually thrown together look that gives the illusion of being carefully crafted. I only have two pairs of trousers. My "£4.50 from the factory reject shop" favourite pair of man-style jeans and my second hand cast off black combats that have faded around the seams and shredded around the hems. These are teamed with a selection of printed t-shirts, mens' shirts and denim/leather jackets. From the back I look like a man. From the front I look like a man. But at least I still get IDed at 25.

And then there's the "what they say about me" thing, which sounds a bit wanky but let's run with it. Converse are the Nike trainer of the alternative crowd. They are about the only brand I will give a look in, and that's largely because I bought a pair of cheap knock-offs for £15 and they didn't last the year. Nonetheless I still wore them until the day they died, and then I continued to wear them after that until they consisted mainly of gaffa tape and glue and finally fell apart on a rainy evening in Brixton. I wore their holes with pride and considered their scuffs and cracks a fashion statement. Or an un-fashion statement, however you want to look at it. At the end of the day, Converse are worn by the Emos, the Punks, the Skaters, the Grungers, the students, the thinkers, the writers, and all the other people who tend to hang around a lot in coffee shops clinging desperately to Mac books or notepads and using long words that nobody else has heard of. That makes it sound even more wanky, but I like those people. I like to think I am one of those people, even though the Punks would probably beat me up, the Skaters would laugh at my inability to balance on a bit of wood with four furniture castors underneath, my student days came to an end some years ago, my writing remains unpublished and I used to be a Goth so am therefore legally obliged to point and laugh at Emos. And then they would beat me up too. But none of this matters because I wear black Converse and so does Ed Byrne, and I think that says something about me. So stuff you all.

Now all I have to do is convince my best friend to let me wear them to her wedding and my love affair with Chuck Taylor shall be complete.

Sorry, I've been wanting to post this for a while, but first it needed to be kept secret from Michaela and Liz, and then I had to wait for pictures because my camera is fucked.

Horror Kitchen Productions presents: ( THE BIG FAT EGG OF SOLID FUCK )


Further to my general wanking on about Thick, here is a wallpaper what I done of Malcolm and Jamie. Looking for those soundclips earlier made me realise how much I miss Jamie.

I also watched In The Loop to celebrate its British Comedy Award win. I miss Jamie. And all the cast doubles have put me in mind of a few things. Like wouldn't it be awesome to get Julius Nicholson together with Sir Jonathan Tutt? They could have a big baldy smarm-off and it would sounds sonorous and excellent. Also, who is a bigger prick, Olly or Toby? I think probably they're equal but Suzy is much nicer than Emma, so it seems like Toby is more of a shit. THOSE ARE MY IMPORTANT THOUGHTS.

Now to watch the specials or not watch the specials.... (Yes, I'm doing everything in reverse order.)

My thoughts on last night's episode are still all swirling around. I'm happy though. I love that show very very much.

So much that I have created a sound theme for my computer featuring the dulcet Scottish shoutings of Jamie and Malcolm.

( Swears and links )


Yes, it's Sunday and I'm bored. Listening to angry men swearing helped. BACK TO WORK!!

OM NOM NOM NOM, my graze box arrived yesterday and it was so good I ated it all. OM NOM NOM. I got black and green olives in mediterreanean marinade, which I actually wasn't as keen on as the garlic and basil ones, but there was a sun-dried tomato in there OM NOM NOM NOM. Also honey-glazed peanuts, which are delightful and have made me very excited at the prospect of the honey cashews. Also "black forest" mix, which has walnuts (meh), dried blackberries (oooh!) and dried strawberries (OMG YUMMIEST MOST DELICIOUS INVENTION EVER) so that was nice. And the dairy-free chocolate beans, which are excellent.

If YOU want a FREE box of delicious nibbles or fresh fruit sign up and use code ZXDHVMG. If you do I will donate the £1 reward I get to the Rainforest Alliance.


In other news I actually stuck to a plan of action yesterday and got loads of work done. Very proud of myself, even though bits of me were kicking other bits of me for not doing it sooner. Let's keep it up today.


Tonight is the series finale of The Thick Of It which is making me sick with nerves. Popping round to pernickety's house for a series three marathon and to have someone to hold as it all ends. OH GOD OH GOD. We're all going through massive displacement activity by making themed snacks! _lady_vanilla_ is making a "Fuckety Bye" cake, and I'm making some big fat eggs of solid fuck. We rule, clearly. SUGAR AND BOOZE AND TUCKER.

This will end well.