Shifting, slashing, getting nowhere

My absence this time can be explained by an almost crippling bout of indecision. Firstly with the comic; I have, somewhat joyously, almost finished story two but despite having weeks to think about it I still haven’t decided what to do for story three. How I wish I had a brain that could provide me with ideas! It would be so useful. Secondly, I’m not happy with this blog. I set it up to complement the comic as a means of sharing news, sketches, teasers and so on. I wandered from this brief immediately and have been getting further away ever since. The scenery was nice but now I’m just lost. As it’s no longer relevant to the comic I’ve been thinking about either renaming it, starting another blog from scratch or just scrapping it altogether. Again, indecision reigns. Coin tossing has not been ruled out as a means of breaking the deadlock. I guess you’ll find out soon enough.

In unrelated news, I’m writing this on a brand new laptop that I purchased at the weekend. Like most things I buy I didn’t really need it, but it’s shiny and has nice blue lights. I am blogging in bed! My only gripe is that the right shift key is the same size as the letter keys. I know, it’s awful. I’m used to a nice, wide, forgiving shift key on my main computer and the result is that I keep missing this one and hitting the ‘/’ key instead. Sigh. At least it should train my pinkie to probe more accurately and you never know, that might come in useful one day.

Well my battery is about to run out which is as good an excuse as any to stop prattling on.

Jacqueline

For reasons that aren’t interesting, I have had to move my fortnight’s summer holiday forward to the end of this month. That means I have just three weeks and two days to go! Of course when I say summer holiday, I don’t mean in the ‘going away’ sense. I don’t do those. I mean two weeks to myself at home, which in my view is far better. Going abroad has never appealed to me. I’m sure the world is a wonderful place to explore, but for now I’m quite happy in England. I’ve visited Wales, Switzerland and France and that’s quite enough for now. I’m the only person I know who loves the English weather. If someone handed me free flights and accommodation to a warm European resort, I’d pass it on. Not interested. Instead I shall be spending my break trying to regain some of the ground I’ve lost on the comic in recent weeks, which will hopefully enable me to make it through to my next break at Christmas. I’m a simple man with modest needs. Every girl’s dream.

The comic has, however, left me with a dilemma regarding this summer’s television viewing. My commitment to producing three strips per week means that I will probably have to forego Big Brother this year, and possibly also the European Championships. England’s absence from the latter will make it easier, but three weeks of wall to wall football is a rare treat that will be hard to pass up. I may just cherry pick the best looking games and bite the bullet with the rest.

In other news, I am currently in a great deal of discomfort following the sudden onset of lower back pain. Normally with such a thing you’d have a foolish lifting incident to look back on regretfully, an origin on which to expend your anger and annoyance. This time though, I have no idea what I’ve done to solicit such distress. Is my bad posture catching up with me? Was that jar of jalfrezi sauce heavier than it looked? Am I just getting old? I bought a tube of ibuprofen gel to work its magic but I might as well have rubbed Fairy Liquid into my upper arse cheeks. Might try that as well just in case.

Season two of Heroes is rubbish

I’ve given it six episodes to win me over but I have to conclude that season two of Heroes is awful. I always wondered how they could follow up the first season – which always felt like it should be a one-off – and the answer is that they couldn’t. When the show first started, only a handful of the characters had special abilities and it seemed, in a totally fantastical way, quite plausible. Then slowly more and more characters found that they had powers and now you’d be hard pushed to find anyone without them. It’s lazy plotting if you ask me, and as the king of lazy hole-ridden plots I should know. Yes, even I could have written it. And in what way are these people Heroes? They mostly use their powers to show off or kill people. Even the arrival of the lovely Kristen Bell hasn’t saved it. This is to say nothing of the tiresome storyline involving Hiro in 17th century Japan. What’s the point of it? It’s as if the writers couldn’t figure out how to involve him and so decided to slap him in a scenario that had no relevance to the rest of the show. Well to be fair there are still a few episodes remaining and they might tie it all together neatly in the end but they’ll be lucky if I make it that far. Then there’s the brother and sister combo – she kills people with her bleeding eyes routine, he brings them back to life. How convenient! It really wouldn’t surprise me if someone appeared who can sharpen pencils by sticking them up his arse. The only saving grace is that the season has been curtailed to just eleven episodes because of the writer’s strike. My guess is that the strike kicked in before they’d even started and so they left it to the work experience lad to ‘do his best’. Axe it now!

Let the Monkey Drive

I was waiting for something ‘worthwhile’ to blog about because I had clearly forgotten who I am. Apologies for that. So, in the continued absence of any such material, here is my review of the latest Sparks album Exotic Creatures of the Deep using only words that begin with the letter ‘B’.

Bold, belligerent beats building brilliantly – bewildering, befuddling, brave. Broadly baffling. Brothers bond, bleating beneficially, bartering bonhomie (bosom buddies). Brains, brawn, bravado. Barely bleak, basically blithe. Blindly blusterous. Buzzing, brimming bundle. Bravo! Buy.

Also this weekend I stumbled upon an episode of ‘Beauty and the Geek’ on Channel 4 and remembered how much I love it. Surely the best reality TV show ever? Unlike other shows in that bracket, it has a genuine point and isn’t just about egos. I particularly love the captions that are used when the contestants are interviewed; one of the geeks will be explaining something to the camera and underneath will appear: "Josh – Still a virgin" or "Craig – Has only kissed one girl". The American version is in its fifth season now, but for reasons I can’t fathom the UK version was dropped after just one series. If you missed it, here’s a quick teaser:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsZIVwLxfe8

Great entertainment. I wish I could relate to the sad, bedroom dwelling, socially inept geeks a little bit more but you can't have everything.

And that is all that a week's hiatus from blogging has offered up.  Well, there was a raging debate between my frugal and profligate selves about the quality to value ratio of choosing Sainsbury's own brand jalfrezi cooking sauce over Sharwoods... but that really isn't worth mentioning.